Chapter 40: Hollowmere

Hollowmere isn't a town. It's a lot of houses on stilts at the edge of a lake, all leaning on each other like drunks, with ladders going up to their doors and boats pulled up underneath them for the winter.

And the lake is frozen.

I've seen ice. I've seen the creek at home go hard enough to walk on. I hadn't seen anything like this. It went out from the stilt-houses flat and white and grey, with snow drifted across it in long ridges like waves that had stopped, and it went on, and on, until it went into a fog. There was no far shore. There was just the ice, and then the fog, and the fog was the colour of the ice, so you couldn't see where one stopped and the other started.

Out on it, about a quarter mile from the houses, there were little dark huts on runners, and smoke coming up from them. Ice-fishers. They cut holes and sat over them in the huts and fished through the floor.

It made me think of home. Of a hole in a floor, and somebody sitting over it.

* * *

The fisher-folk didn't like us.

They didn't dislike us. They just didn't want us there. They came out on their ladders when we came along the shore, men and women in sealskin and fur, with faces cured brown by the wind, and they watched us, and they didn't come down. They looked at Wrenna, steaming in the snow. They looked at Gristle. They looked at the painted black carriage. And they looked out at the fog on the ice, every one of them, the way people look at a door they don't want to open.

There was a long hall at the end of the shore, on bigger stilts than the rest, where the fishers met. An old woman came down the ladder from it when we got close. She was small and bent and very old, in a sealskin coat that came down to her boots, and she had a pipe like Mag's, and the same look about the eyes.

"Going over," she said. It wasn't a question.

"To the Saltfens," I said. "Yes."

She spat on the snow.

"Nobody goes over," she said. "Not to her. Not in a hundred years. Not since my grandmother's time." She looked at me, hard, up and down. "Why you?"

"She asked."

The old woman's pipe stopped halfway to her mouth.

"Asked," she said.

I took Morwen's letter out of my coat, the little salt-stained roll of paper the heron had brought, and showed it to her. She didn't take it. She just looked at the writing, that fine sharp brown hand, and something went over her face. Something old.

"Her hand," she said. "I've seen it once. On a paper in the hall, from before I was born. Telling us when the ice would break." She looked up at me. "She doesn't ask people. Not ever."

"She asked me," I said. "I'm Tobin Marsh."

"Marsh," said the old woman. She said it slowly. Then she turned round and went back up her ladder without another word, and we stood in the snow and wondered if that was the end of it.

It wasn't. She came back down with a key on a string, for the fisher-hall, and said we could have it for the night, five silver for the five of us, and the steaming one would have to sleep underneath.

I paid her. She bit one of the coins, the way Dad used to, and put them in her coat.

She came back again after dark, when we'd lit the fire in the hall, and sat by it with her pipe without being asked, and looked at me across it for a long time.

"There was a Marsh came over before," she said at last. "Once. Before my time. My grandmother saw him. A young man, big, with a chopper on his back, like that one." She nodded at Gristle. "He walked out on the ice in the middle of winter, on his own, and didn't come back for a month. Everybody said he'd drowned. Then one morning in spring he walked back across, just before the ice broke, thin as a rake, and asked for a hot meal, and went home east and nobody ever saw him again." She drew on her pipe. "My grandmother said he was the politest man she ever met. Said thank you for the soup four times."

I didn't say anything.

"Bloody Marshes," said the old woman, quite fondly, and tapped the ash out of her pipe into the fire. "Always polite. Always going over."

She went back up her ladder. Hesper had her ledger out, and was writing it down, very fast.

"Great-great-grandfather," she said, without looking up. "The ninety-year lock. It has to be."

"Dad's letter said she came to him."

"Your father's letter," said Hesper, "was written by a man who never left the farm for more than a day. He'd only know what he was told." She underlined something twice. "I don't think anybody in your family has ever told the whole of anything."

* * *

The trouble was Wrenna.

I'd known it would be. I'd been worrying about it for two hundred miles. Wrenna couldn't go more than a mile or two from Gristle. Gristle was going across the ice. And Wrenna, wherever she put her feet, melted things.

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She stood at the edge of the lake that evening and looked out at it. She put one foot on the ice, very carefully. It steamed. Then it hissed. Then there was a soft crack, and a little pool of black water opened under her heel, and she took her foot back fast.

"I'll go through," she said. "Halfway across. Into the lake." She looked at me. "I don't think I'd like that. I don't think I'd come back up."

"You kept the ribbon cool," said Hesper. "And Rose's doll. And my hands, in the reed hut."

"For a little while. A doll's not a lake." Wrenna's cracks had gone dark, just thinking about it. "It takes everything. Holding still like that. It's like holding your breath. I can't hold my breath all the way across that."

Nobody said anything.

Then Lys said, slowly, "The coat."

We all looked at her.

"Haddie's coat," said Lys. "The rat hide. It's the hide of a thing that lived next to the fire under the world. Haddie said it turned a sword. Tobin wore it through the Saltfens wind for three weeks and never felt cold." She looked at Wrenna. "What if she doesn't touch the ice at all?"

* * *

So that's how we crossed Hollowmere.

At dusk, when the Countess was up, all of us together. Lys and Hesper on foot, leading the horses, because the old woman said horses had gone over the ice before and come back, as long as they were led and not ridden. Pellam had stayed at the fisher-hall with the carriage. He said he would wait, as long as it took, and I believed him. The Countess walked out in front, in the dark, testing the ice with her heel the way she had on the river.

And I carried Wrenna on my back.

She climbed up like a child getting a piggyback, with her long legs round my middle and her arms round my neck, and I could feel the heat of her straight through Haddie's coat, like carrying a stove. But it didn't get through to me. Not much. The rat hide took it. The squares slid against each other and creaked, and got hot, and stayed hot, and my boots on the ice stayed cold.

The ice under my feet steamed a little, as I walked. Not much. Just a faint white breath, coming up round my boots with every step.

"Am I heavy?" said Wrenna, in my ear.

"No."

"You'd say that anyway."

"I would," I said. "But you're not."

She went quiet, which for Wrenna was a long way to go. Then she put her chin on my shoulder, and hummed something. I didn't know what it was. It was low and slow and strange, like wind in a chimney. After a while I realised it was the tune the drovers sang the Level One song to. The one about the sheep. She'd got the notes all in the wrong order, but it was that.

"Where'd you learn that?" I said.

"The inn," said Wrenna. "Through the window. It's the best song I've ever heard." She hummed some more. "It's about you."

"It's about a sheep, originally."

"It's about you now," said Wrenna firmly.

* * *

About halfway, something came up under the ice.

The Countess stopped first. Up ahead, a pale shape in the dark, she put her hand up flat, and we all stopped, and in the silence you could hear the ice ticking, the way a cooling stove ticks.

Then something knocked.

Not three times, slow. Once, hard, from underneath. Right under the Countess's feet. The ice jumped. A crack went out from the place, white in the dark, running towards us across the snow with a sound like a door slamming in an empty house.

"Shit," said Lys, very quietly, and took a tighter grip on her mare's bridle.

Under it, through the ice, there was a light.

Dirty yellow. Moving. A long shape behind it, longer than a boat, sliding along under the ice like a pike under a pond. And in the front of it, where its head would be, the yellow light. A crystal. In a collar.

"Kell," said Lys, under her breath.

The shape went past under us. Slowly. I could feel it in my feet through the ice, the push of the water. Then it turned, a long way off, and came back.

It was going to knock again. Right under us. Right where we were all standing, with the horses and the princess and the auditor and Wrenna on my back, in the middle of a lake, at night.

I didn't think about it. You don't, with a cow about to kick a calf.

I stamped.

Twice. Hard. The way Dad did, on the barn boards.

It's not a lock. Hollowmere isn't a hole under a barn. But the ice rang, under my boots, like a bell, the same as the black glass at home had rung. And the sound went down. Down through the ice into the black water, and out across the lake in every direction.

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

The yellow light under the ice stopped.

Then it went out.

Not dimmed. Out. Like somebody had pinched a candle. The long shape behind it hung there in the black water for a moment, very still. Then it turned, slowly, and went away, down, into the dark under the ice, and we didn't see it again.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

"How," said Hesper at last, in a very small voice, "did you know that would work?"

"I didn't," I said. "I just didn't know what else to do."

On my back, Wrenna laughed in my ear, low and delighted.

"Stamp stamp," she said. "Every time."

* * *

We came off the ice at dawn.

The fog lifted all at once, the way fog does on water, and there was land in front of us. Not a shore. A flat white country of salt, going away to the horizon, crusted and cracked into long plates like old paving. Pools of grey water in between, frozen at the edges. Reeds. And a long way off, in the middle of all that white, a single tall house on stilts, grey and crooked, with smoke coming out of its chimney.

On a post at the edge of the ice, right in front of us, there was a heron.

It was big and grey and very still. It looked at me with one yellow eye. It didn't fly away. Every other bird in Aldmere flew away from me. It just stood on one leg on the post and looked at me, the way Duchess looks at me when I'm late for the milking.

Then a voice said, from behind it, "You're late."

I hadn't seen her. Nobody had seen her. She was just there, all at once, standing on the salt beside the heron's post as if she'd been there all night, which she probably had.

She was small. That was the first thing. Smaller than Pip. She was very old and very straight, with a small, sharp, deeply lined face and white hair that went down past her knees, loose, blowing in the wind off the ice. She was barefoot on the salt. She had on a grey dress that looked like it had been grey for a hundred years, and a shawl made of feathers. Heron feathers.

Her eyes were the palest blue I've ever seen. Almost white. Like the ice.

She looked at me. Then at Gristle on my back. Then at Wrenna, who had gone very still and very quiet on my shoulders, with her arms tight round my neck.

"You're bigger than your grandfather," said the Witch of Hollowmere. "And slower. And you've brought a vampire, which I didn't ask for, and a princess, which I didn't ask for either." She looked at Hesper. "But you brought the one who counts. Good. I'll need her."

She held out one small brown hand.

"Is that my bottle?" she said. "In your pack. I can smell it from here. Give it here, Marsh. It's been a long winter, and I've already had one visitor this month that I didn't care for." Her pale eyes went to the east, over the ice, the way we'd come. "He had a wyvern. And a box. And very bad manners."

I took the bottle out of my pack and put it in her hand.

"It's from Mag Penhallow," I said. "Of Thornfell. Who wrote you the letter. She says thank you for coming the first two times."

The Witch held the bottle and didn't move. Then she looked up at me, and something went across that old lined face that I didn't expect at all.

"Nobody's ever said thank you," said Morwen. "Not in three hundred years." She tucked the bottle under her arm. "Come in, then. All of you. Even the dead one." She turned and started walking away across the salt, barefoot, without turning round. "And bring the steaming girl. She and I will have a great deal to talk about later."