Chapter 182: The Girl in the Fog

Ryuji opened the kitchen door himself.

He told Selene first. It was the rule now, and he kept it even for doors. "I’m going to look," he said, in the common tongue. She searched his face for a long moment, then nodded once and stood up with him, and neither of them said anything about whether she was coming.

The fog stood at the foot of the garden wall like a sheet hung out to dry.

It was white and heavy and perfectly still. It did not drift. It did not curl. It had the stiff, held quality of something that was working very hard to look like weather. And in the middle of it, where the star lilies stopped and the gray began, a girl stood barefoot on the wet grass.

She looked about seventeen. Her dress was the color of rain on stone. Her hair hung to her waist in long pale strands that moved a little, though there was no wind, and her eyes were so light they were almost no color at all. In her right hand she held a small old lantern with no flame in it.

She flickered, like a candle behind glass.

"I am sorry about the knock," she said. Her voice was thin and careful. "I have never knocked before. I did not know whether I was supposed to."

[System Log: Day 174, continued]

[A SIXTH CERTAINTY HAS ENTERED THE RECORD. SHE IS HOLDING A LANTERN WITH NO FLAME]

[I HAVE BEEN OBSERVING HER FOR FOUR THOUSAND YEARS. I MISTOOK HER FOR WEATHER. I APOLOGIZE TO NO ONE IN PARTICULAR]

Yui had followed them to the threshold. She sniffed once, delicately, and her whole face softened. "Wet stone," she said, in a small voice. "And old sheets. Like a hospital hallway where someone is waiting up." She looked at the girl. "She smells like a person who hasn’t slept in a long time."

"Four thousand years," said the girl. "I tried. It did not take."

"You’re Safe," Ryuji said.

"Yes." She tried to smile. It came out crooked. "I am sorry. It is a very silly name. I did not choose it."

"It’s a good name."

"It is a job."

Ash had come to the doorway, stiff-legged and very low, her tail bottle-brushed. "Child," she said, in a voice Ryuji had not heard her use, "you are not supposed to be able to walk."

"I know." The girl’s pale eyes went to the cat and filled. "I only came to say it. I felt them go to sleep. I felt it all the way down in the ground. I thought, I must make it stronger now." She swallowed. "I am going to close the fog. Properly. I wanted to tell you first, so you would not be frightened."

"Close it how?" Selene said.

Safe turned and looked at her.

She had not seemed to notice Selene before. Her gaze rested on the silver hair, the violet eyes, the scarf, and something crossed her face that was half awe and half terror, like a person seeing a very large bird land on a very small roof.

"You are the one who threw the dagger," she said, in a rush. "Every morning. I watched. I was so afraid you would not stop."

Selene stood very still.

"I could not speak," Safe said. "I am fog. I could only fall across the window and hope you would think it was cloud. But I tried. I hope you know I tried." Her voice shook. "And at night, I..."

"Night," Ryuji said.

"The men who came." The girl’s pale eyes dropped. "Every night. For months. They came across the March with knives, and I made the way very long. I put stones where there were no stones. I turned them around in a circle until the sun was nearly up." She wet her lips. "But I could not stop all of them. I could only slow them. And I saw you bleed. In the kitchen. I saw you stitch yourself up with a needle and a candle, and I could not even knock on the glass."

Ryuji had not known. He had wondered, for a few months, why the assassins always seemed to arrive just a little late. He had put it down to bad maps.

He felt the pulse in the thread under his collarbone before he heard her breath.

Selene’s face had gone white.

"You knew," she said, very quietly.

"I knew," said Safe.

"You watched him bleed."

"Yes."

"For months."

"Yes. I am so sorry."

"And I did not." Selene’s voice cracked. She did not turn toward Ryuji. She kept her eyes on the girl, and there was no anger in them, only a dreadful stricken stillness. "I slept in his bed. I ate his breakfast. I threw a dagger at his head every morning, and a fog on a hill knew he was bleeding and I did not."

"Selene..."

"Do not, please." She raised a hand, shaking. "I am not angry at her. I wish I were. It would be so much simpler." Her pulse had gone to ninety. "I am jealous. Of a cloud. Because she was there, and I was across the room hating him, and she did the thing I should have done."

The girl flinched. "I could not do it well."

"You did it for four thousand years."

"It was only a wall."

"It was a very good wall." Selene took a breath. When she spoke again her voice was low and rough and perfectly sincere. "Thank you. For slowing them. I would like to say that I am ashamed that it was you, and not me. And I would like to say it is also true that I am glad someone was there."

Safe’s pale eyes spilled over. She did not seem to know what to do with her hands.

"Both can be true," said Ryuji, gently.

"I am extremely tired," said Selene, "of that sentence."

"I know."

"It keeps being correct."

She reached back without looking and took his hand. Her fingers were cold. Seventy-two, he counted. Seventy.

They sat the girl at the kitchen table, in the end, because Keiko would not hear of anything else.

She came in like a ghost, shy and stiff, her bare feet leaving faint damp prints on the stone. The household stared. Marro pulled out a chair for her. Tetsu moved over to make room. Tabun, at the far end, sat very straight and looked at the girl with deep, solemn recognition, one small stranger regarding another across a long, strange table.

"Hello," said Tabun. "I was Sure."

"I know." Safe’s voice was barely audible. "I felt you go. You were the first. I thought the whole world had fallen."

"It had a little."

"I am glad you are small now."

"Me too."

Keiko put a bowl in front of her.

It was a plain bowl of rice and fish broth with a soft egg stirred in. It was the thing she made for sick people. She set it down with a spoon and a napkin and stood over it, arms folded, with the face of a woman who intended to be obeyed.

"Eat," she said in Japanese.

Safe looked at the bowl. "I do not know how."

"Nobody knows how. You do it anyway."

"I am fog."

"You are a child, and you are thin, and nobody has fed you." Keiko picked up the spoon, filled it, and held it out. "Open."

Ryuji saw the girl’s hands tremble. She did not take the spoon. She leaned forward, awkward and trembling, and let it touch her lips.

Her whole face changed.

It was only a spoon of broth. But something went through her, like a held breath leaving, and the pale hair that had stood stiff around her shoulders began to settle, strand by strand, into something that moved with ordinary weight. Outside, at the foot of the garden, the white wall wavered. A thin seam of sunlight slid through it. Somewhere in the Grey March a bird, startled, began to sing.

"It is warm," said Safe, in a whisper.

"It is soup."

"It is warm all the way down." She began to cry, silently, and Keiko, with a face like a thundercloud, put an arm around her and held the next spoonful ready.

Selene watched them. Her jaw was set and her eyes were bright.

"May I ask something?" she said, after a while. She spoke in the careful, formal Japanese she had been practicing, and Keiko, startled, looked up. "I would like to know what she wants. Not what she fears. What she wants."

Safe looked at the table.

"I want it to be quiet," she said. "I want no one to ever be hurt again. I want to keep everyone inside, where I can see them." She swallowed. "I have been so careful. I will not let anything in. Not the armies, not the hunger, not the cold. I will make the fog a wall, and no one will ever be taken."

"And us?" Ryuji said.

"You will be inside."

"Forever."

"Yes."

"We couldn’t leave."

"You would not want to." She said it so simply, and with such tender pleading, that Ryuji felt something cold slide under his ribs. "There would be nothing to fear. No assassins. No wars. I would keep every one of you safe."

The kitchen was silent.

"It sounds good," Ryuji said, quietly.

The girl looked up, astonished. Selene’s hand jerked in his.

"It does," he said. "It sounds really good. I’ve spent my whole life wanting somewhere nobody could get at me. I used to dream about it. A room with one door and no one on the other side." He drew a breath. "I know exactly why you want it, because I wanted it too. I’m telling you that, because I think you should hear it from somebody who knows."

"Then say yes," Safe whispered.

"I can’t."

"Why?"

"Because I got a second chair last week." He heard his own voice crack. "And my wife sat in it. And it’s in a different world. And I’d like to go and sit in the other one."

Safe stared at him, stricken.

"I want to be tempted," said Selene, in a low, wrecked voice, to no one, "and not to say yes. It is quite hard."

She was looking at the girl, not at him. And Ryuji saw, in the light of the kitchen window, what she had been trying not to show for the last ten minutes. She wanted it too. She wanted a place where nothing could hurt her family, and a hand that would hold every door shut, and she had waited four hundred years in the dark for a lock that did exactly this.

"I am afraid I am a coward," she said. "I am afraid I would say yes if you asked me tomorrow."

"You wouldn’t."

"I would consider it."

"That’s not the same thing."

"It is very close." She turned her face to him. "Tell me what to do."

"I’m not going to."

"I am asking."

"Then I’ll tell you what I’d do." He kept his voice quiet. "I’d ask her one question. The one you ask Tabun."

Selene blinked.

She turned to the girl. Her voice, when it came, was soft, almost gentle, and very steady.

"Are you safe?"

Safe opened her mouth to say yes.

Nothing came out.

Her pale eyes went wide. Her hands closed on the table. For a long moment the kitchen held its breath around her, and she sat with her lips parted, and Ryuji saw it pass across her face, one expression after another. The old reflex. The certainty she was made of. The slow dawning discovery that it had never once been true.

"No," she said, in a small cracked voice. "No. I am not. I am so tired. I have not slept in four thousand years. I am always afraid. I stand in the dark and I am so frightened that if I let go for one second, something will come." She pressed her hand to her mouth. "I thought if I could only make everyone else safe, it would stop. But it does not stop. It has never stopped."

"I know," Ryuji said.

"What do I do?"

"You don’t hold it alone."

"There is no one else."

"There are seven of us," said Tabun, quietly, from the end of the table. "I mean, there were seven. There’s six now, I think. But there are people. Lots. Who’ll hold the end of a rope."

"Armies?" said Safe, doubtfully.

"Maybe."

"They will use it."

"Maybe." Tabun’s small gray eyes were steady. "But I’m not sure. And neither are you."

The girl looked at him for a very long time. Then, slowly, she laughed. It was a startled, broken, silvery little sound, and it startled everyone.

"You have become very annoying," she said.

"I was told it suits me."

She wiped her face on her sleeve. Outside the window, the thick white wall gave a long, slow shudder and drew back another yard. The bird sang again. In the light, Ryuji saw the green of the March spread out below the garden, and far off to the east and west, very small, the two lines of banners.

Gold. And black.

Safe went rigid.

"No," she said. Her voice had changed. It was thin and cold and sharp as a pin. "No. Not that. I did not mean to let it show."

"Let what show?"

"The gold camp." She was on her feet, her fingers clawed in the cloth of her dress. "There is something in it. I have felt it for a week. It came out of the earth like a fever when the Architects slept." Her pale eyes went to Ash. "He is not hiding anymore. He thinks the floor is gone."

"Who?" said Ash.

"Right."

The cat’s ears went flat.

"He has been whispering in the Theron king’s ear for six days," said the girl. "In the shape of a gray-haired scholar. He is telling Berrin that the Dominion cannot be trusted. That the Kindled Accord was a mistake. That the Void King is dying and his heir is a brute." Her voice cracked. "That the war is not over. That it must be finished before the black banners march."

"He’s wrong," said Voldranis, sharply, from the doorway.

"He is not wrong," said Safe. "That is the terrible thing. He is not wrong about any of it. He is only right about people at their worst, and he has never been wrong about it yet."

The kitchen was silent.

Far away across the March, thin and brazen, a horn sounded.

It was a long clear note from the gold line, a call to muster. And almost at once, from the opposite horizon, another answered. Then a third, and a fourth, rolling up and down the hills like thunder.

"He has not waited," said Safe. She was shaking. "He is not going to wait. He is going to make them meet, in the middle of the Grey March, right in front of your house." She turned to Ryuji, and her eyes were enormous. "I can hold the fog and shut them out. Or I can drop it, and let them see each other, and let it begin."

"Or?" said Ryuji.

"Or you can find a third thing very quickly." She wiped her face, and her voice steadied. "I do not know what it is. But the gold line has just sent a rider. He is carrying a very large white flag. And he is coming to your front gate."