Chapter 175: Winter

"Five seats," said Maru, through Nai. "The boat sails with eleven. Six of them are mine, and Iri makes seven. That leaves you four."

"Four," I said.

"Five if somebody is small."

Everybody at the fire looked at Tao Tao.

"I am not small," said Tao Tao, "I am compact," and that was the first argument, and it lasted about a week.

— • —

It was Xue Ningzhi who made it make sense, which she does when everybody else has started shouting.

"Stop asking who wants to go," she said. "Everybody wants to go. Ask what you can do in Teru." She put her board down. "Not here. There. Where nobody has ever heard of a single one of us."

"I hold the floor," said Bai Qing.

"Here you do. Here, a hundred million people believe you can hold a floor, so you can." Xue Ningzhi did not soften it. "In Teru you're a tall woman with a sword. Same as he's a short man with a coat." She looked round the fire. "Every single power in this family is local. Every one. We spent fourteen years getting famous on purpose so the world could hold itself up. And we're going somewhere none of it reaches."

Nobody said anything for a moment.

"So it's craft," said Mu Chen slowly. "Not fame. What you can do with your hands when nobody's watching."

"Yes."

"Then I'm going," said Mu Chen. "Sitting with grief is a craft. It doesn't care who I am. It never did."

"Nai's going," I said. "It's her song."

"Obviously," said Nai.

"Yun Shu's going."

"I'm going," said Yun Shu, "because reading the shape of a gap doesn't need anybody to believe in me. It needs a gap. They've got a thousand years of gaps."

"And you," said Xue Ningzhi to me.

"I can't do anything over there."

"No," she agreed. "That's why Maru wants you. Somebody has to stand there being nobody and keep saying it's true." She picked her board back up. "That's four."

— • —

Tao Tao did not speak for two days.

Then on the third night she came and found me at the pot, the way she does when it's the two of us awake.

"I'm not going," she said.

"I know. You've decided."

"I hate that you know that." She sat. "I've gone everywhere you've gone. Since the alley. Since the first day. I followed you to the tournament when nobody believed in you but me." Her chin was going. "And I'm not going to Teru."

"Why not?"

"Because somebody has to keep the reading going," she said. "And Sedgewater's twenty-five once a year. And my eleven towns. And—" She stopped. "And because when you lot get there and stand on the shore being nobody, somebody here has got to keep a hundred million people saying your name. So it's still yours when you come back." She wiped her face with the heel of her hand. "That's a craft too. It's the oldest one I've got. I was doing it before any of you."

I didn't say anything.

"Don't say anything," said Tao Tao. "If you say anything nice I'll go, and then everything here falls over, and it'll be your fault."

So I didn't. I gave her some soup instead, and she ate it, and said it was terrible, and it was.

— • —

There was one thing left to do before spring, and the Scroll asked to do it.

"Talent," it said, one night in the first snow. "May I publish one more legend before you go?"

"About what?"

"It asked to see winter," said the Scroll. "At the harvest. Everybody heard it ask. I would like it to have winter before you leave, because I do not know when you will be back to take it."

I said yes. The Scroll asked twice more anyway.

[DING.] On the first deep snow, the dark under the world will come up to see winter. It saw a harvest. It liked the honey. It would like to know whether snow is cold. Reach: everyone. Belief: climbing.

Belief went to ninety-one percent in nine days, which Xue Ningzhi said was the fastest a legend had ever climbed and which she read out in a voice like a woman who has stopped being surprised and started being moved.

— • —

It came up in the fens on a grey afternoon with the snow coming down heavy and soft, and I was waiting on the bank with two cups of something hot.

Song stood in the snow in its grey shawl and looked up.

"Oh," it said.

"That's snow."

"I know what snow is." It held out a hand, old and thin, and a flake landed on it and went to water. It stared at its palm. "I've held all of it. I've never had it land on me."

"Is it cold?"

"Yes." It sounded delighted. "It's very cold. It's the coldest thing that's ever touched me and I was the cold under the world for ten thousand ages." It closed its hand. "Why does it go away?"

"It melts. You're warm."

Song looked at me with enormous suspicion. "I'm not warm."

"You are now. You've got a body. Bodies are warm."

It thought about that for a long time, standing in the snow with its hand closed.

"Nobody told me that," it said.

— • —

We walked along the bank for an hour. It wanted to see everything. Reeds with ice on them. A frozen puddle, which it stepped on, and which cracked, and which it then insisted on stepping on four more times. A heron standing on one leg in the shallows, which it watched for about ten minutes without saying anything.

Then some children from Reedmoor found us, and one of them threw a snowball, and it hit Song in the middle of the back.

Song turned round very slowly.

The child — a boy of about seven — went white. I saw Song see him go white. I saw it remember the only thing it had ever been afraid of.

And then Song bent down, very stiffly, the way the very old bend, and scooped up a handful of snow in its thin hands, and looked at it, and looked at the boy.

"Is this what you do?" it said.

The boy stared.

"With the snow," said Song. "Is this the thing?"

"...Yeah," said the boy.

Song threw it. Badly. It went about four feet and fell apart in the air. The boy laughed so hard he fell over.

By the end of the afternoon there were nine children and a very old person in a grey shawl having the worst snowball fight in the history of the fens, and I sat on a log with two cold cups and did not intervene, and I will remember it as long as I remember anything.

— • —

At dusk, with the children gone home, I told it where I was going.

I hadn't meant to. I'd meant to keep it a nice day. But it asked what I would do in spring, the way it asks about the harvest, and I'm not able to lie to it.

"There's a land at the end of the half-song," I said. "East. Forty days by sea. They call it Teru."

Song went very still.

"They have a grey," I said. "A fog. It comes off the sea in winter and takes names in the night. It's been doing it for a thousand years. They've never been able to get a single one back, because nobody there believes they can. We're going to try and help them."

Song did not say anything for so long that I thought the cold had got to it.

"Lin Bo," it said finally. "Where is it? Exactly?"

"East. Past the last island. Nine days to where our song breaks, and then the rest of the way."

And the dark under the world sat down in the snow, the way a very old person sits down when their legs have stopped holding them.

"I know that shore," it said. "I've been taking from it."

— • —

I sat down next to it. The snow was wet through my coat.

"Tell me."

"When I opened my hands," said Song, "you were all there. You'd built a shore. Eleven hundred million people standing on it. I felt you catch it, all of it, the whole ocean." It stared at the dark water. "But the ocean goes further than your shore. It goes all the way to the edges. And at the far edge — the east edge — nobody was standing. Nobody caught it. There was no shore there that I could feel."

"So you didn't let go."

"I didn't know I hadn't." Its voice cracked, the way old voices do. "You don't, you see. When your whole body's been one hand for ten thousand ages, and you open it, you don't notice the one finger that stays closed. It's numb. You can't feel it." It looked at its own thin hand. "I've been holding that edge this whole time. Fourteen years. Out of habit. And when you hold something that long, you keep — " It stopped.

"You keep forgetting."

"I keep forgetting," said Song. "The way I always did. To make it lighter. At the one edge of the world where nobody ever came down to tell me I could stop." It put its hand over its face. "That's their grey. That's me. A numb hand at the far end of the sea, still doing the thing I was for, and I never knew there was anybody there to hurt."

I did not have anything to say.

"Can you stop?" I said, eventually.

"Not by myself." It took its hand away. "If I let go of that edge now, with nobody standing on it — it drowns them. All of them. That's what letting go is, when there's no shore. I can't open the hand until somebody over there is ready to catch it." It turned to me, and its grey eyes were wet. "Will you tell them? When you get there. Tell them I didn't know. Tell them I'm sorry. Tell them I'll let go the moment they can hold it."

"I'll tell them."

"And Lin Bo." It took my hand in its cold one. "Build them a shore. That's all they need. The same as you built. I'll be on the other side of it, waiting."