Chapter 35: Midwinter Lock

The warm wind came in the middle of the morning.

We'd been packing to go. The ponies were loaded, a long way off from me, and Brakka's lot were kicking out the fire, and Miss Quill was sitting on the fallen gate with the widow's account book on her knee, copying out the last page into her own ledger in case anything happened to it. The Countess had gone into the barn at first light, into the dark under the hayloft, where the sun couldn't get at her, and was sleeping, or doing whatever she did instead of sleeping, wrapped in her cloak behind a stack of rotten hay.

Wrenna felt it first.

She'd been sitting on the barn roof watching the sky. All at once she stood up, on the ridge of the slates, and turned her face to the south, and sniffed.

"Tobin," she said. "What's that?"

Then I felt it too. On my face. Warm. A long soft breath of warm air coming up the valley from the south, like the wind off a hot oven when you open the door. It was so strange, in the middle of winter, in snow up to your shins, that for a moment I didn't know what it was.

"Widow's breath," said Brakka, coming up beside me. She was frowning at the sky. "On the Steppe we have it. Once a winter, a warm wind out of the south. A day, two days. Then the cold again." She looked at the snow, which was already going grey and soft at the edges. "Very bad for ice."

Everybody turned and looked at the barn at the same moment.

* * *

It went fast. I'll say that for it.

The snow on the barn roof slid off in one long sheet and hit the ground with a thump. Water started running off the eaves. The track went to slush under our feet. And from inside the barn, from under the floor, there came a sound I'd only ever heard once, through the boards at home, the winter I was nineteen.

A long, low groan. Like a ship's timbers taking a wave.

Then the chains started to sing.

I ran. Into the barn, through the slush, with Gristle off my back. The Countess was on her feet in the shadow of the hayloft with her eyes wide. Miss Quill was in the doorway behind me with the ledger still in her hand.

The black glass in the barn floor was sweating. Water beading on it, running down the cracks, the way frost runs off a window when you light the fire. And as I watched, a crystal at one of the chain crossings flickered and went grey. Then the one beside it. The chain between them went slack and dropped onto the glass with a clank.

The crack under it opened. A finger's width. A hand.

Through it, in the dark underneath, something looked up at me.

It was an eye. Just one. The size of a cartwheel, and gold, the deep slow gold of the pretty rocks, of Wrenna's eyes, and it looked up at me through the crack in the glass the way a man looks through a keyhole. It didn't blink.

Then it pushed.

* * *

The whole floor of the barn heaved. Three more chains snapped, all at once, with a crack like a bullwhip, and whipped across the barn and took a stall door clean off its post. The crack went from a hand's width to an arm's length. Something rose out of it. Long and white and thin, drifting. A screamy one. Then another. Then the iron filings of a fence-chewer swarm, pouring up through the crack and spreading across the floor like spilled water.

And under them, behind them, filling the crack from below, something huge and dark and patient, pressing up, the way the plank at home had bowed for a month before it went.

I went out onto the glass.

I didn't think about it. I stood on the black glass in the middle of the chains with Gristle in my hand, right over the crack, with the eye looking up at me between my boots, and I stamped. Twice. Hard. The way Dad did. The way I'd done after every big rat since I was ten.

It rang. Not like ours had. Duller. Like a cracked bell. But it rang, and I felt it go down through my feet into the dark, and the pressing stopped. Not for long. For a breath, maybe two. Like something big pausing to listen.

Still here, I thought at it. Still here. Somebody's still here.

Then it started pushing again.

* * *

I don't know how long we held it. Brakka reckoned it was most of an hour. It felt like all day.

The screamy ones came up through the crack and I cut them down as they came. The fence-chewers spread across the floor and up the walls, and Brakka's lot went after them with fire, torches off the dead campfire, sweeping them back into the corners. Grosh lost two fingers to a swarm. He looked at his hand, quite calmly. "Fuck," he said. "I write with those." Then he wrapped it in his sleeve and didn't stop. Brakka stood in the barn door with her axe and roared at anything that tried to get out past her, and nothing did.

I stayed on the glass. Every time it pushed, I stamped. Every time I stamped, it paused. And every time it paused, a bit less long.

This is a copy made without the author's permission from where the story is published; reading the official chapter supports the writer.

Wrenna came in through the barn wall.

Not the door. The wall. She'd been on the roof, and she came straight down through the slates and the rafters in a shower of wet slate and rotten wood, and landed on the far side of the crack from me on her hands and knees. She put her face right down to the crack in the glass, to the gold eye looking up, and she shouted into it. Not in our tongue. In something else, deep and grinding, like stones under a river. The eye went narrow. The pushing stopped. Wrenna went on shouting, and I didn't know a word of it, and I didn't need to. I've heard Mag tell a fox exactly what she thinks of it.

The eye drew back an inch. Then it came forward again, slowly, and pushed. Wrenna sat back on her heels with the cracks in her blazing.

"It knows me," she said. "It doesn't care. It's bigger than me." She bared her teeth. "Bugger."

Then a screamy one got past me.

It came up through the crack behind me, while I was turned the other way, and drifted fast across the barn floor, low, towards the door. Towards Miss Quill, who'd come in from the doorway to count the chains and was on her knees by the wall with the ledger, writing. She didn't see it.

I couldn't get there. I was on the glass, and if I stepped off it, the eye underneath would push and nobody would be there to stamp.

"HESPER!"

She looked up. She saw it. Her face went white and still. And her legs went, the way everybody's do, and she knelt there with the ledger in her hands and couldn't move, and it reached for her face with its long pale hands.

The Countess came out from under the hayloft.

Into the light. Into the warm wet daylight coming in through the open barn doors, the first sun in a week. I saw it hit her. I saw her skin start to smoke, her face and her hands, like paper held near a candle. She didn't stop. She went across the barn floor in the sun like a black bird, so fast I barely saw her move, and put herself between Miss Quill and the screamy one, and took hold of it with her bare smoking hands and tore it in half.

Then she pulled Miss Quill back into the shadow under the hayloft by the collar, both of them, and fell down there in the dark against the stacked hay, and lay there with her hands held up in front of her face, black and blistered, shaking.

"Countess!" said Miss Quill. "Oh, gods. Oh, your hands."

"They'll mend," said the Countess, through her teeth. "Write down what you were going to write down. It's important. It must be important. You were writing it while the world was ending."

* * *

It was. It was Miss Quill who saw it.

She came out from under the hayloft a minute later, white as milk, with the Countess's blood on her coat and the ledger in her hands, and she shouted at me across the barn over the noise.

"They're batteries! Tobin! The crystals are batteries! They're going flat, that's all it is! The warm's draining them faster! They need more power!" She was holding her satchel up. "The core! The Thornmaw core! From Thornfell! You gave it to me! I've had it in my satchel for three weeks!"

She ran. Out onto the glass, beside me. She shouldn't have. I'd have stopped her if I could have moved. She got her satchel open and took it out, the big dark red core from the walking haystack, as big as both my fists, warm, with its slow light moving inside like a tide. She knelt down at the centre of the cage of chains, where they all crossed at once, where there was an empty iron clamp much bigger than all the others, an empty one, as if somebody had meant to put something there once and never had.

"Put it in!" she said. "Here! Tobin, it's too heavy, I can't..."

I knelt down beside her and took it out of her hands and pushed it down into the big clamp at the centre of the chains, and pushed, and it went in with a crunch, and the clamp closed on it.

The core lit up.

All the way. Bright, so bright I had to put my arm over my eyes. Red light, like a sunrise, running out along every chain in the cage at once. Every dead crystal it touched flickered and came back on, yellow, then gold, then red. The slack chains drew tight with a sound like a hundred harp strings being tuned at once. The black glass under our knees went cold, cold as the barn floor at home, so cold my knees ached through my trousers.

Under the glass, the gold eye blinked. Once.

It drew back. Slowly. Down into the dark. Away.

And the crack in the glass, the arm's length crack, began to close. Not all the way. It slowed, and narrowed, and stopped about a finger's width, with frost growing along its edges.

I stamped. Twice. For luck.

The barn rang. Clear, this time. Like ours.

* * *

The warm wind went in the night. By morning the frost was back, hard and white, and the slush on the track had frozen into ruts like iron.

The Strand muzzle was still glowing red at its centre when we left. Miss Quill had sat beside it half the night with the ledger, watching it, counting.

"It'll hold," she said, when I came to get her. "Till the thaw. Not after. It's still a muzzle. Not a lock. But the Thornmaw core will power it till spring." She looked at me. "That was four thousand crowns."

"That's what they're for," I said. "You said. Light. Heat. A hospital in winter." I looked at the barn. "A muzzle on a dog, when you need one."

She didn't say anything. She put her hand in mine for a moment, cold and inky, and squeezed, and let go.

The Countess had spent the night in the hayloft, in the dark. Her hands were wrapped in strips of Miss Quill's petticoat. They were healing. Slowly. She came down at dusk and walked home with us through the night with her bandaged hands held in front of her, and every so often Miss Quill dropped back to walk beside her and fuss, and the Countess let her.

* * *

We got home two days later, in the dark.

Duchess was standing at the home paddock fence, and she looked at me as I came up the track as if I'd been gone a year and it was entirely my fault. Lys was waiting at the gate with a lamp. She'd seen us coming from the kitchen window. She looked at all of us, Grosh with his hand bound up, the Countess with both of hers, Miss Quill white with tiredness, me with the cleaver on my back and slush to the knees. And she didn't ask anything. She held out a small roll of paper.

"This came," she said. "Yesterday. A heron. A big grey heron. It landed on the barn roof and wouldn't leave. Wrenna sat up there with it for an hour and they stared at each other. It wouldn't give me the paper off its leg till I said your name."

I unrolled it. Small paper, very thin, salt-stained. Written in a fine sharp hand, in ink that had gone brown, like old blood.

Marsh. Your woman wrote. I don't come when I'm called, as a rule. I'm making an exception.

The cold won't hold. You know that by now. The sickle woman's key is in a tower man's box, and there are five more like it. Find them. I can't turn what isn't there.

Bring the cleaver. Bring the rift-girl, she'll want to come. Bring whoever can count.

Come before the ice breaks on Hollowmere.

M.

I read it twice. Then I gave it to Miss Quill. She read it and gave it to Lys. Lys read it and gave it to the Countess, who held it in her bandaged fingers and read it and laughed, very softly, in the dark.

"That's her," said the Countess. "That's exactly her. Rude, brief, and expecting to be obeyed."

Up on the barn roof, Wrenna was standing on the ridge, glowing against the stars.

"She means me!" she called down. "The rift-girl! She means me! I'm invited!"

I looked at the letter, and then at the barn, and then at the long dark line of the Greywild going away to the south and west.

Six keys in a box, and a woman three hundred years old, at the far end of the kingdom, before the ice broke.

"Right," I said. "Saltfens, then."