Chapter 850: Everyone, Again

The weight came down on Corvin like a falling mountain.

He had felt it once before, on his own crossing. But then it had been his own people, and they had been carrying him back. This was twelve thousand strangers from an empire he had spent his whole life distrusting. And until a moment ago, they had all been on the back of one small old woman.

His knees hit the road of nothing. His frozen arm screamed in its sling. Every breath felt like lifting a stone.

Beside him, the Matriarch of Duskspire gasped. Her head came up. For the first time in what must have been hours, she straightened her back an inch.

"What did you do?" she whispered.

"I took some," Corvin said through his teeth. "That’s all. I took some."

"You can’t carry it."

"I know," said Corvin. "That’s why I brought help."

He twisted around on his knees.

Behind him, the chain of his people stretched back down the road toward the Door. Ivar was right behind him, holding the little gold lamp. Behind Ivar was a Frosthold soldier, and behind her another. The chain ran back and back, every one of them holding the belt of the one in front.

"Frosthold!" Corvin roared.

Crown.

It was not much. It was only his own voice. But it was the voice of their king, and every one of them heard it as their king.

"Say it! The word Big D told us about! Everyone!"

There was a moment of silence on the road.

Then Ivar said it, right behind him. His voice was shaking.

"Everyone."

The weight shifted. A little of it went off Corvin’s back, and onto the boy’s.

"Everyone," said the soldier behind Ivar.

"Everyone."

"Everyone."

It went back down the chain like a wave. Each one who said it took a little of the weight. When it reached the very end of the chain, right at the edge of the Door, the last soldier turned around and shouted it out through the black light. It went into the field of frosted grass where eleven thousand people of Frosthold were standing and watching.

Corvin could not see them. But he felt them hear it.

He felt eleven thousand voices, out there in the field, say one word.

The weight split, and split, and split again.

Corvin got to his feet.

It was still heavy. It was heavier than anything he had ever carried. But it was not on him anymore. It was on all of Frosthold, each one carrying a little, and spread that wide, it was something a man could stand up under.

He looked down at the Matriarch.

She was still on her knees. She had lifted her head all the way now, and she was staring at him with an expression he could not read.

"Why?" she asked. "Frosthold and Duskspire have never been friends. We have never been anything."

"I know," Corvin said.

"Then why?"

Corvin thought about it honestly.

"A month ago, I walked out of that Door into a field," he said. "There was nobody there. Some of my people forgot their own names and walked away into the grass and lay down, and I couldn’t stop them." His voice roughened. "Then a family I barely knew walked four days to find us. They didn’t have to. They just did."

He held out his good hand to her.

"So now I do it too," he said. "That’s all. That’s the whole reason."

But the people of Duskspire were still lying on the road.

Frosthold was carrying them now. That was why the Matriarch could lift her head. But the people themselves were still lying where they had fallen. They were still face down on the nothing, or curled on their sides. They had not said the word. In Duskspire, nobody carried anybody. They did not know how to start.

And at the edges of the road, some of them were still sliding.

Corvin saw a man slipping backward into the dark at the very edge. He was too far away to reach.

He saw John go.

John walked to the edge of the road and did not stop. He stepped right off it into the nothing beyond, where nobody could go. He walked out into the dark as if it were solid ground, and he caught the sliding man by the collar. Then he walked back with him and set him down on the road.

Then he went out again, and came back with a woman.

Then a child.

Corvin stared at him.

"John," he said. "Who in the world are you?"

"Later," John said. He was already walking off into the dark again. "Get them up. I can only carry so many."

The Wraith was still crouched beside the Matriarch.

She had not said anything since Corvin arrived. She was watching her empire lie on the road of nothing. She was watching Frosthold soldiers they had never spoken to carry them. She was watching a man walk off into the dark and bring her people back.

Her face was very pale.

"In Duskspire," she said quietly, "we’re taught that nobody owes anybody. That’s how you stay alive. You keep to your shadow, and you never let anyone else in it, and you never step into theirs."

"I know," Corvin said.

"I’ve lived by that my whole life. I became champion by it." She looked down at her own hands. "And now Frosthold is carrying us. Strangers. Because we wouldn’t carry each other."

She was quiet for a long moment.

Then she stood up.

"Everyone," said the Wraith of Duskspire.

It was very quiet when she said it. But every person of Duskspire on that road knew her voice. She was their champion. She was the one they had cheered in the stadium. She was the one who fought from shadow and never needed anyone.

A woman lying nearby lifted her head.

"Everyone," the woman whispered.

A man beside her pushed himself up on his elbows. "Everyone."

It went out across the road, slowly at first, and then faster. People lifted their heads off the nothing. People rolled over, and sat up, and said it to the person lying next to them. Some of them were crying. Some of them said it angrily, as though it were being dragged out of them. Some of them said it in a voice so small that it could barely be heard.

All of them said it.

The weight split again. And again. And again.

Corvin felt it go off Frosthold’s back and spread out across Duskspire, until all twenty-three thousand of them, Frosthold and Duskspire together, were carrying each other.

All around him, people began to stand up.

The black light changed.

It started at the front of the road, where the Matriarch was. It spread backward, the way dawn spreads across a sky. The black faded, and faded, and became the color nobody had a name for.

Corvin helped the Matriarch to her feet. She swayed. The Wraith caught her other arm.

"Can you walk?" Corvin asked.

The Matriarch looked down the road, at her people getting up all around her, and her face crumpled.

"Yes," she said. "Yes. I can walk now."

They walked.

Ivar went first, with his little gold lamp held up high, though they did not need it anymore. Behind him came Corvin and the Matriarch and the Wraith. Behind them came the chain of Frosthold soldiers, and behind them came the people of Duskspire, walking.

At the very back, a man in a plain coat walked out of the dark carrying a sleeping child in his arms. He set the child down gently at the end of the line, and took his place behind them.

They came out into the frosted field at sunset.

Thousands of Frosthold people were waiting. They ran forward with blankets and water and bread. Duskspire’s people came stumbling out of the light by the hundreds, gray and shaking and alive, and fell into strangers’ arms.

Corvin sat down on the frozen grass beside Ainen’s walled fire and did not get up for a long time.

The Matriarch sat beside him. The Wraith stood behind her.

Marcus would have known the number in an hour. Corvin did not have Marcus. It took the Wraith most of the night, walking through the crowds with a lamp, asking. When she came back, her face was gray.

"Nine thousand, four hundred and six," she said quietly. "Out of twelve thousand."

The Matriarch closed her eyes.

"The rest went back into the dark," the Wraith said. "Before anyone came. Before Frosthold." She swallowed. "Before we would carry each other."

Nobody said anything.

"I know every one of them," the Matriarch said at last. Her voice was very old. "Every name. I named them all to the gatekeeper. I carried them all, for as long as I could."

"Write them down," Corvin said. "All of them. There’s an old man in Brightwater who keeps names. He’ll want them. He’ll carry them for you."

The Matriarch looked at him.

"Why would a stranger carry the names of my dead?"

"Because that’s what he does," Corvin said. "He’s got room. He always says so."

Much later, when the fires had burned low, the Matriarch spoke again.

"There’s something I must tell someone," she said. "I don’t know who. The gatekeeper told me to."

Corvin looked up. John was sitting a little way off. He went still.

"When we reached the canyon," the Matriarch said slowly, "the door was open, just as everyone said. And the gatekeeper asked us what we would carry. But its voice was faint. Very faint. Like someone speaking through a wall." She frowned. "And the heart beneath us was beating very slowly."

"How slowly?" asked John.

The Matriarch looked at him.

"I counted," she said. "It was fifteen seconds between every beat."

John’s face did not change. But he stood up.

"What else did it say?" he asked.

"When we were walking into the light," the Matriarch said, "it spoke once more. Only to me. I didn’t understand it." She shook her head. "It said, Tell the host."

The fire crackled. Nobody spoke.

"I don’t know what it means," the Matriarch said.

"I do," said Corvin slowly. "It means the cook."

He looked at John. John was looking north, past the Door, toward a city five days away. A round man there had once fed a starving gatekeeper with his own hand, and set bowls out for it on the stone afterward.

"Something’s wrong on the other side of that Door," Corvin said. "Isn’t it?"

John was quiet for a long time.

"The gatekeeper is dying," he said.