Chapter 859: The Grudge That Kept Him

"Somebody," Corvin said. "Who’s somebody?"

Nobody at the fire had an answer.

It was early morning. They had pulled every flat stone they could find into a circle at the foot of the Door, and the leaders of four peoples sat on them.

Big D had his book on his knee. The Emperor sat up straight, with Sevrand standing behind him. The Matriarch had a blanket around her shoulders, and Corvin sat with his stiff arm across his lap.

Lily was on the stone beside Almond. Kayla had made her eat first.

"Tell it again," Big D said to Hessa. "Slow."

Hessa put her hand over her eyes.

"Four of them," she said. "North, south, west and east. All of them miles out, all about the same distance from the Door. All lying down."

She was quiet for a moment. "The grass is high over every one. They’ve been there a long time. Longer than the Sunder."

"Since before Frosthold came through?" asked Corvin.

"I think so."

Corvin looked up at the great Door.

"So they were lying out there when I crossed," he said. "Waiting for me to come out and wander off."

"You didn’t wander off," said Almond. "You met John and stayed by Ainen’s fire."

"I didn’t like the look of the grass," said Corvin.

Big D tapped the book.

"The north one," he said. "Where?"

"Half a day up the road," Hessa said. "Between here and Greywatch. There’s a low hollow beside the road, off to the east. It’s in the bottom of that."

Rudra swore under his breath.

"We walked past that hollow," he said. "Every one of us. Going up and coming down. The whole road goes right by it."

"And it didn’t move," said Big D.

"It didn’t move," Hessa agreed.

The Emperor spoke for the first time.

"Then why is it there?"

Big D looked at him. "Because nobody’s walked past it alone."

That sat on the circle for a while. Every group that had gone up and down the north road had gone in a crowd. Frosthold in its thousands. The Regalon hunters. Emberfall. Duskspire with Corvin’s soldiers around it.

"They’re for the ones who split off," Lily said. "The ones who go their own way. Like Aurelia did."

The Emperor did not look away from her.

"Yes," he said. "Like we did."

Big D closed the book.

"The north one first," he said. "It’s on the road. Every kingdom still to come walks past it. I want it gone before the next one comes through."

"And after?" asked the Matriarch.

"After, we plant something on top of it."

The Emperor’s hand went to his coat.

Lily put her hand on Almond’s knee.

"Go," she said. "It’s half a day. Be back for supper."

"I’ll stay if you want."

"I want you to go and come back. Those are different." She did not smile, but her eyes did. "Kayla says I’m sitting by Ainen’s fire all day whether I like it or not."

"She is," said Kayla.

They left before noon.

Almond went, with Big D and Rudra and Hessa. Corvin brought a hundred of Frosthold. The Emperor brought two hundred Aurelian soldiers who had asked to come, and Sevrand walked at his shoulder. The Emperor carried his seed inside his coat.

They walked up the road the way they always had, in one long column. The day was warm and still. The grass moved a little in the wind.

They saw the hollow in the middle of the afternoon.

It lay to the right of the road, a wide shallow bowl in the ground. Green moss covered the bottom of it like a pond. A few small birds sat on the rim.

It looked like a nice place to sit.

"That’s it," Hessa said. "It’s the moss. All of it."

Almond looked harder. The moss covered the whole floor of the bowl, about a hundred paces across. It was soft and deep and green. In the middle, there was a darker patch, round, like a well with moss over its mouth.

"Don’t go in yet," Big D said.

They stopped on the road. The column spread out along the rim. Almond felt the warm afternoon on the back of his neck. He felt good. He felt better than he had in days.

He did not notice that until he saw the Aurelian soldier.

The man had stepped off the road. He was walking down the slope into the hollow, slowly, his hands loose at his sides. He looked like a man walking down to a river on a summer day. His face was calm.

"Hey," Rudra said. "You. Get back here."

The soldier did not hurry. He waved over his shoulder, easily. Then he kept walking.

Two more stepped off the road after him. Then five Frosthold men. Then a dozen more.

Nobody shouted. Nobody grabbed them. Almond watched them go, and some part of him thought he should be worried, and the rest of him could not see why. It was a pleasant afternoon. The moss looked soft.

The first soldier reached the dark patch in the middle.

He sat down on it.

The moss folded up around him like a closing hand. It made no sound at all. Then it lay flat again, green and smooth, and he was gone.

Almond knew he should feel something. He felt nothing.

"Huh," said one of the Aurelians beside him, mildly.

Big D was looking around at all of them.

"Nobody’s scared," he said.

His rasp was as flat as ever. But his hand had gone tight on the book.

"Look at your faces. Every one of you. A man just got eaten, and nobody’s scared." He turned to Almond. "That’s what it ends. That’s all it needs. It lies there and waits until you stop being afraid, and then you walk in."

"A Soother," Hessa said faintly. "Orla told me about them once. I thought it was a story to scare children."

Almond heard them both. He knew Big D was right. He could not make himself care.

More soldiers were walking down the slope. Twenty now. Thirty.

Helm.

True Heading.

"West," Rudra said. He turned his back on the hollow. "That way. Everybody behind me. West."

The walkers stopped. Their feet turned, and they came back up the slope and stood behind Rudra, facing away from the bowl. Their faces were still calm. But they did not go in.

Seven more had already reached the middle. The moss closed over each of them as softly as the first.

"I can’t hold the ones who don’t follow me," Rudra said. "It’s only a heading. Somebody has to kill it."

"With what?" asked Almond.

Even as he said it, he was walking. He had taken two steps down the slope before he noticed. The moss looked soft.

A hand caught the back of his collar.

It was Corvin’s bad hand. The pale, stiff fingers hooked in his collar and held on.

"No, you don’t," Corvin said.

Almond looked back at him.

Corvin’s face was not calm. It was the only face on the whole rim of the hollow that was not calm. His mouth was a hard line and his eyes were narrow, and he was looking down at the moss as if it had insulted his mother.

"You’re not scared either," Almond said.

"Course not," said Corvin. "I don’t need to be scared of it. I don’t like it."

He pulled Almond back up onto the road and let go.

"It tried to soften me up," Corvin said. "I felt it. Same as all of you. Nice afternoon, lovely moss, go and have a sit." He spat on the grass.

"I’ve been angry at John for longer than I can remember. I carried that grudge all the way down through a door. You think a patch of moss is going to talk me out of anything?"

Grudge.

Almond felt it go out of Corvin. It was hard and cold, like a stone in a fist.

Corvin walked down into the hollow.

He did not walk the way the soldiers had. He walked like a man going to complain about the rent. The moss stirred around his boots, and he stamped on it.

"I don’t like you," he told it. "I didn’t like you when I walked past you with eleven thousand of my people, and I don’t like you now. You ate five of the Emperor’s men and three of mine while I stood there and watched."

He kept walking. "I’m going to hold that against you."

The moss in the middle rose.

It came up slowly in a great soft green mound, and in the middle of it the dark round patch opened like a mouth. It was a well.

It went down into the ground farther than Almond could see. The air coming up out of it was warm and smelled of summer.

Corvin did not slow down.

Winter.

He did not have an orb. He had never made one. He put his bad hand flat on the moss at the edge of the mouth and pushed the raw imprint into it with everything he had.

Frost ran out of his fingers.

It went white across the moss in a ring. It went down into the well. It went through the soft green flesh of the thing like cold water through a sponge, and everywhere it went, the moss turned hard and pale.

The Soother shook. All around the hollow, the moss heaved up off the ground in folds, trying to close over him.

It froze as it rose. It stood up in stiff white waves, and stopped.

Corvin went down on one knee. His face had gone gray. The frost was climbing up his own arm now, back toward his shoulder, the way it had when his arm first froze.

"Big D," Almond said. He could hear his own voice. It was still calm. He hated that.

Big D was already walking down the slope.

He did not hurry either. He came to the edge of the frozen mouth and stood beside Corvin. Then he raised both fists over his head.

Endure.

He brought them down on the frozen rim of the well.

It broke like a frozen pond breaks. A crack ran across the whole white floor of the hollow, and then another, and the frozen Soother came apart in great stiff slabs of green and white.

The well at the middle caved in on itself and filled with broken ice.

The fear came back all at once.

Almond’s knees went weak under him. He sat down on the road. All along the rim, soldiers were sitting down, or being sick in the grass, or staring at the hollow with white faces.

One of the Aurelians was crying. A Frosthold man was saying the names of his three friends over and over.

Down in the hollow, Big D lifted Corvin up by the arm.

Corvin’s whole hand was white again, to the wrist. He held it against his chest.

"Little John’s going to laugh at me," he said.

"Probably," said Big D.

In the middle of the broken ice lay a lump of something soft and dark green. It was the size of a heart, and it was still warm. Big D picked it up and held it out.

"Yours," he said.

Corvin looked at it for a while. Then he took it in his good hand, and pushed.

Grudge.

The green lump folded in on itself and went hard and round. When Corvin opened his hand, he was holding an orb. It was the cold gray-blue of a winter sky.

[Power Orb created: Cold Shoulder]

[Quality: D]

[Nothing can soften what you hold against it. Those who stand behind you keep their guard.]

[Life Rank: F → D]

Corvin turned the orb over in his white fingers.

"Cold Shoulder," he said. "That’s about right."

The Emperor came down into the hollow as the sun went low.

Sevrand walked beside him. The Emperor stopped in the middle of the broken ice, over the place where the mouth had been. He took the white and gold seed out of his coat and looked at it for a long time.

"Eight men," he said. "Five of mine and three of yours, Corvin. They walked in here because nothing told them to be afraid." He knelt. "Let this be a place where something always does."

He pressed the seed down through the broken ice into the dark earth under it.

Light came up out of the ground.

It ran out from his hand in a wide ring, white and gold, and stones rose out of the earth along it. They were white like every other line.

But inside each one, a thread of gold light moved slowly, like a flag in no wind. The broken ice melted around them. A shoot came up beside the Emperor’s knee, pale gold, with one small leaf.

Every Aurelian on the rim of the hollow stood up.

Nobody had told them to. They stood up anyway, two hundred of them, and looked down at the stones.

"That is home," Sevrand said quietly.

The Emperor did not answer. He stayed on one knee beside the shoot.

Hessa had her hand over her eyes again. Almond saw her go stiff.

"The Door," she said. "It’s getting bright."

They all turned and looked south. They were too far away to see the Door. But they could see the light. It rose into the evening sky over the low hills, the color nobody had a name for. Someone was coming through.

"That’s quick," said Rudra.

"Who?" asked Corvin.

"I can’t tell yet. It’s only starting." Hessa’s hand pressed harder. Then she sucked in her breath. "Almond. The east one."

"What about it?"

"It got up," she said. "The moment the Door lit. It’s walking west, toward the Door." She lowered her hand. Her face was white. "And it’s fast. It isn’t anything like the others. It’ll be there before morning."