I came up on Brookhaven from the northwest at the end of one long day, on a gray gelding who had opinions about hills.
Bracken had been sold to me as steady. He was steady the way Kade had been patient, thoroughly, and entirely on his own terms. He walked the good ground without being asked and stopped dead at anything that smelled wrong, which had cost me half a morning at a ford and saved me a foreleg at a slumped bank, so I’d stopped arguing before the morning was out and let him do the thinking about where his feet went.
Fifty miles. That was the number I’d been refusing to hold in my head since the day I limped through the Ashward Gate, and it’d taken me until the second hour on the road to say it out loud.
“Fifty miles.”
Yes.
“Five weeks I've been in that town. Eating his stew. Arguing about a gate brace.”
Yes.
“You could disagree with me somewhere in there.”
You aren’t wrong. You’re only being unkind about it, and I have no use for that. A pause, and the mark went warm under the rein. A man with a shattered hand and a hole in his leg doesn’t ride fifty miles to look at a grave. A man with a healed hand and no excuses left does. You’re that one now. That’s why you’re on the road.
The road east had been ordinary, which is the part nobody warns you about. I’d braced for omens and got hedgerows: bean fields coming up in bands, a man mending a gate who lifted two fingers as I passed, a girl driving four geese with a switch and a great deal of unnecessary shouting. Twice I passed carts going the other way, toward Marchgate, loaded with the same turnips and timber that carts had carried past Brookhaven every market day of my life.
The world hadn’t stopped. I’d known that since the morning after, when Marchgate had gone on arguing about a brace while I stood in the yard with everyone I loved still in the ground. Knowing it and riding through it were different sizes of the same fact.
Astarra was restless the whole way, and I hadn’t yet worked out what to do with it. Since the mountain she’d wanted things, wind, first, on the day I crawled out; hedge blossom outside Marchgate that she made me stop in the road for; a full minute of Nessa's tuning in a market square, held like a woman holding her breath underwater. Six hundred years behind a door and what she’d come out wanting was weather.
By late afternoon the country began to tell me where I was.
I knew the shape of the land before I knew the road. The long shallow rise with the thorn hedge that everyone called the Shoulder and nobody could tell you why. The stand of alders where the ditch ran wrong. My chest did the recognising before my head caught up, the way a hand finds a latch in the dark, and I had to stop Bracken and sit for a moment because I hadn’t expected the ground itself to know me.
Then we came over the Shoulder, and I saw it.
I’d prepared for ruin. I’d built it carefully over five weeks on a Marchgate mattress: broken roofs, a fallen wall, the shrine bell lying in mud with its rope still on it. Something a man could walk into and pick through and come out of carrying one object.
There was no ruin.
There was a hole.
The land simply stopped.
Where Brookhaven had been there was an absence about a half-mile across, roughly round, with edges that hadn’t weathered into slopes the way a quarry does. They’d broken and stayed broken. Grass grew to within thirty paces of the rim and then went the color of old straw, and then stopped growing at all, and the last twenty paces to the edge were bare pale dirt in a ring, clean as something swept.
Nothing flew over it. I sat on the Shoulder for a long time watching for that and the sky above the hole stayed empty while rooks worked the fields behind me, and once a hawk came down the line of the hedge, tilted, and went around.
Bracken wouldn’t go closer than the yellow grass. I didn’t make him. I tied him to a thorn at the top of the rise where he could see me and kept my hand on his neck a while, which was for me and not for him, and walked the rest.
The bare ring crunched. Not gravel. The dirt itself had gone dry and fine and crusted, like the skin on a burn.
Twelve paces from the edge the air changed temperature. Not cold. Cool the way a cellar is cool in high summer, and it came up out of the ground and moved past me and didn’t smell of anything at all, which was worse than a stink would’ve been. Everything I’d ever put my nose into that had died smelled of something.
Then I reached the rim and looked down and understood what I’d actually come to see.
Perhaps a hundred feet of it was ordinary. Torn earth, root ends, a seam of clay, a course of dressed stone somebody's grandfather had laid. A cartwheel jutted from the wall with its rim still bright. Three courses of whitewashed fieldstone hung in the dirt with mortar between them, and I looked at that whitewash for a while and made myself stop.
Below the hundred feet, the dark began.
It wasn’t shadow. I want to be exact about this, because I’ve gone over it many times since and every easy word for it’s wrong. The sun was three hours up and behind me. Light went down past the whitewashed stone and reached a level and didn’t go further and didn’t stop, either. It went in and wasn’t returned. There was no line where it happened. It was like watching water find a place it could soak into.
I put my hand out over the edge without deciding to, the way you do at a cliff, and the mark in my left palm woke up hard enough to shut my fingers.
Not that.
“I wasn't going to.”
You were leaning.
I stepped back one pace, which took more of me than it should have, and sat down in the swept dirt about six feet from the rim with my arms across my knees.
Below, very faint and very far, something moved a long way down. Not a sound. A pressure, once, the way a shut door in another room moves the air in yours.
“Astarra.”
Yes.
“Is that yours?”
No. A pause I’d learned to distrust. It’s because of me.
I gave that its own minute and then got up and went looking, because I’d ridden fifty miles and sitting on a rim wasn’t searching.
I worked the edge sunwise, and the edge told me the shape of a town I could still walk in my sleep.
The well-square went first, or near enough, the rim cut through where the north road had run, and I stood at a place where the ground fell away and worked out that the stone basin and the crank and the steps I’d sat on to watch Dalla put a boy's knee back together were straight down and to the left. The road I’d carried two buckets along, complaining, on the last ordinary morning of my life, ended in air about where the mile marker should’ve been.
The mile marker was gone. I looked for it for longer than was sensible. Waist-high, lichened, its carved distance worn smooth by generations of hands and one very determined cooper's daughter who had bowed to me from beside it while her brother chased a wooden bird. It’d stood outside the last cottage. The last cottage was air now, and so was it.
Hale Cottage had been west. I didn’t go west. I told myself I was working the edge in order and knew perfectly well I was doing no such thing.
I found four things in the whole morning.
A cooking pot, upside down in the yellow grass a hundred paces out, dented and sound. It’d gone up and out when the ground went down and had lain there through five weeks of weather, gone dull and speckled where the rain had got at it, and I turned it over twice trying to know whose it was and couldn’t, and left it where it lay because taking it’d have been the same as admitting I’d rather have any pot than no pot.
A fence post with two pale boards braced against it, standing perfectly upright in a field that no longer led anywhere.
A dog. Living, thin, wary, working the far hedge for mice. It wouldn’t come in and it didn’t run, and it watched me the whole time I was on that side of the hole, and when I put half my bread down on a flat stone and walked twenty paces off it came and took the bread and went back to the hedge and watched me some more. I’ve thought about that dog more than I expected to.
And the boundary posts.
They were east, past where the grazing yards had been, and they were still standing, all of them, in their scattered line, old gray pillars weathered smooth in places by rain and hands. They’d been set outside the town by people who understood that a town is a thing with an edge and the edge is worth marking. Whatever had eaten Brookhaven had come up to them and hadn’t touched them.
I stood between two posts on the exact ground where Kade had said don't announce your nerves and I’d said something about admiring the leather, and there was nothing there at all, and no way to be sure I was standing in the right place.
Then I did the thing I’d ridden all that way to do, and did badly.
“Sera!”
The east field took it and gave nothing back. I did it again anyway, and then Bram, and then Lysa, and then Dalla and Perin and Marta, and by the last of them my voice had gone somewhere I didn’t like and I stopped.
Nobody answers a shout five weeks late. I’d known that on the Shoulder. I’d known it a month ago in Marchgate, when Pell stood by the postern and said no person to bring back and refused, decently, to make it into a sentence I could break against.
The point hadn’t been to be answered. The point had been that no one had said the names out loud in this place, and somebody should have, and there was nobody left to do it but me.
I took out the strip of red wool.
I’d cut it off my mother's shawl in the falling road with the ground going out from under both of us, and had carried it out of a mountain and through a spider's nest and into a fortress that had been shut for six hundred years, and had never once been able to say why. It was frayed to nothing at one end. It smelled of my pack.
I tied it to the eastmost boundary post at about the height of a man's chest, in a knot Maren would’ve called adequate, and stepped back and looked at it.
A rag on a stone in an empty field. It marked nothing, protected nothing, and would be gone in a season.
It was the only grave marker Brookhaven was going to get, and I’d put it up, and the doing of it took a weight off me that I hadn’t been able to shift with money, or work, or a sword, or three separate people telling me kindly that I’d done everything I could.
The west rim was the last of it, and I’d been walking the long way round to reach it all morning.
Hale Cottage had stood about forty feet out from where the ground now ended. I found the line of it by the garden wall, three courses of dry-laid stone running out of the grass, going straight toward the edge, and stopping. On the far side of that stopping there was nothing at all until the shale.
I sat down with my boots at the break.
“I never told you I was glad to be home.”
My voice came out ordinary. That was the surprise of it. I’d expected something to happen in my throat and nothing did.
“I meant to, the night before. You were doing the plates and I got as far as thinking it and decided the words were too big for the kitchen. Then I kissed your hand instead and you told me to go and wash, you fool.” The wind came up out of the hole and went past me. “That was the last of it. That was the whole of what I managed.”
Somewhere down there she was under a wall, in a red shawl I’d cut a piece off, and whatever I’d loosened when I opened that door was pressing against the dark above her.
“Your bread was better than the baker's,” I said. “Everybody knew. He knew.”
The rim gave me nothing back, which was correct. I hadn’t come here to be answered. I’d come because there had been nobody to say it to for five weeks and the saying had gone bad inside me like anything else kept too long.
Then I put my hand flat on the swept dirt, because Kade was down there too.
Not west. Further in and further down, in a broken passage with a slab across his ribs and one hand short of a sword I’d taken off him and then snapped in half on a spider the size of a barn. I’d knelt in that passage and told him you got me this far and left him for the stone, because there had been no other choice and I’d still felt like a thief walking away.
I had nothing to give him. That was the thing. Every man I’d lost, I had something of, a strip of wool, a fortune, a scar, a talent I didn’t have before. From Kade I’d taken a sword and broken it, and there wasn’t so much as a hilt left to lay on the ground.
What I had was the last order he ever gave me, and I’d never carried it out.
“Report after sunrise,” I said. “You said that at the gate. I never came.”
I straightened up where I sat, which was ridiculous, and did it anyway.
“I broke formation at the orchard and Oren died. You told me he did and you wouldn't tell me it was mine, and I’ve carried it either way. I got out from under the town. I found you. I took your blade without asking and I used it badly and it broke, and I’m sorry about that, and I’d do it again. There’s a demon in my hand. I made that bargain on my own feet with my eyes open and I’d make it again as well.” The wind turned over in the hole. “I’ve killed a queen. I’ve held a doorway. I stood where a sergeant put me for a whole morning and didn’t move, and she said good, and I thought about you the entire time.”
The words ran out.
“That's the report,” I said. “It's five weeks late and it's the best I can do.”
Nothing came up out of the ground. Old Kade would’ve looked at the road over my shoulder the whole time I was talking and then said something about my feet.
That left Sera.
I’d been putting her at the end all morning, and had known I was doing it, and had done it anyway.
Everyone else, I’d watched. Maren went under a wall in front of me. Kade fell past a broken slab and I found what was left. Dalla was on a table shouting at people to keep walking and then she wasn’t anywhere. Lysa turned back for one more person, and a wagon came between us, and that was the last frame of her I own.
Sera I never saw at all.
The road split and threw us onto different slopes and her fingers came out of mine, and then she was a small figure on a garden path with one hand up, driving people out, and then the dust closed and I fell. That’s the entire account. Five weeks of turning it over hasn’t added a single thing to it.
Which meant I could stand on this rim for the rest of my life and never be finished.
“You asked me a question,” I said.
The east field went on being an east field.
“By the millrace. You said do you want me to yourself, and I said both, perhaps, like a coward with a clever mouth, and you told me to give you a real answer by supper.” I had to stop for a moment. “The answer was yes. It was yes when you asked it. It was yes for about four years before you asked it, and I didn’t say so because saying so would’ve made it a thing I could lose, and I thought I was being careful.”
I let that sit out on the grass where it belonged.
“There. Five weeks late. To a field.”
And then the harder part, which I hadn’t planned and which arrived anyway, the way the true things do.
Nobody would ever bring me a body. There was no ground to dig and no list to be crossed off and no rider coming up the road with a name. If I wanted her buried, I was going to have to do it myself, here, with nothing, and if I didn’t do it, I’d spend the next twenty years turning over every hooded figure in every market between here and the coast.
I knew men like that. Brookhaven had kept one, an old carter who had lost a son to the river and went down to the ford every spring to look, and everybody was kind to him about it, and he hadn’t had a life in thirty years. He’d had a vigil.
I didn’t have thirty years to give.
“I'm going to say you're dead,” I said. “Not because I know. Because I don't, and I can't carry the other thing, and one of us has to put it down.”
It felt like a betrayal. I want that written down somewhere, even if the only place is my own head. It wasn’t peace and it wasn’t acceptance. It was a man deciding, on insufficient evidence, to stop looking, and dressing it up in a word like buried so he could sleep.
“If I'm wrong,” I said, “come and find me. I'll take whatever's coming.”
The wind out of the hole moved past my back and went on toward the fields, and something a long way down turned over once, and didn’t do it again.
Edrin.
“I know.”
You don’t. Move back from the edge.
I moved back from the edge.
I came back round to the eastern posts because the rag was there and it was the only thing in the county with my name on it, and I ate the rest of the bread sitting against the stone with the hole in front of me.
“Tell me why you were down there.”
You haven’t asked before.
“I've asked what you wanted, and what you could do, and whether you could lie. I never asked why there was a door.” I turned the last crust over. “I'm asking now because I'm looking at what came out of the hole you were in, and it's sitting on top of everyone I knew.”
The mark went warm. Not the sharp heat of a warning. Something slower, and it stayed.
Ask the smaller question first. You’ll believe the answer better.
“Fine. What was the place?”
A cage with more than one animal in it.
The bread stopped halfway to my mouth.
You saw the bridge, she said. You saw pillars going down past the reach of your light, and bridges crossing the middle at four heights, most of them broken. You thought the whole of it was built to hold me.
“It was.”
My platform was. There are others below mine. The pressure behind my thoughts shifted, the way she did when she was choosing among true things. I wasn’t the only one they took. I wasn’t even the first. They built one working large enough to hold a command, and they set us in it at different depths, and then they were very proud of themselves and went away and died of old age.
I looked at the dark sitting in the bottom of my town.
“How many?”
Fewer than a dozen. More than two.
“That's not an answer.”
It’s the answer I have. I could feel weight and heat through a floor. I couldn’t take a census.
“And they're still down there.”
Still bound. A pause with something in it I hadn’t heard from her before. Not still anyone.
“Meaning what?”
Six hundred years is a long while to be a mind with nothing to be a mind about. The pressure behind my thoughts went flat and careful. They were commanders. They had names, and grievances, and plans that would’ve interested you a great deal. That’s what went, not the strength. The strength is what they are; it doesn’t drain. What drained was everything in them that could’ve been argued with.
“So there's nothing down there but power.”
There’s appetite with a general's strength behind it and nothing at all behind the eyes. Yes.
I put the bread down. I’d stopped wanting it some time ago and only just noticed.
“Then what's coming up the hole?”
Leakage. Not intent. Something moved through the bond with an edge on it. The bands were one working. Break the innermost ring and every ring outward of it loses tension. Not so far as opening. Far as weeping. A thing that large can’t go bad quietly. You aren’t looking at a siege. You’re looking at a wound going septic.
“And you kept yours. Your mind.”
Yes.
“How?”
She took so long that I thought I'd found the wall early.
I decided, in the first century, that I’d rather be bored than be nothing. So I made a discipline of it. I counted what moved in the tunnels. Every crossing, every feeding, every death, for six hundred years, in the dark, on purpose. A pause. That’s the whole of my accomplishment. I wouldn’t recommend it and I won’t be doing it again.
I thought about her stopping me in the road outside Marchgate to look at hedge blossom, and had to sit with that for a moment.
“You knew that would happen.”
I knew the working would suffer when I left it. I didn’t know how much, or how fast, or that a town would already be lying on top of it. A pause. I’d have told you at the door if you’d asked at the door. You had a wounded leg, a dead teacher, and a thing on the bridge coming for you, and you asked me four questions and they were all good ones. That wasn’t among them.
“Would I’ve said no?”
No.
“Then why does it matter that I didn't ask?”
Because you’d like to be a man who asked, she said, and you aren’t, yet, and pretending otherwise will get someone killed.
I sat with that. Out on the field the dog had come nearer and lain down in the grass with its nose on its paws, keeping the distance it’d decided on.
“The town was already down before I opened anything.”
Yes. I didn’t do that and neither did you.
“But the dark's mine.”
The dark is a consequence of the door opening. You opened it. I asked you to. The warmth didn’t retreat. You may hold that however you need to. I won’t help you make it lighter.
“That's very nearly kind.”
It isn’t meant to be.
Which was, from her, close enough.
“Then the other question. Why you? What were you, that they built the inner bands?”
The silence that came then was a different one. I’d learned to tell them apart on the road, the quiet when Elowen came into a room, the quiet around a chapel bell, the quiet that meant she was enjoying something and didn’t want to be asked about it. This was none of those. This was a door being held shut from the other side by someone with their shoulder against it.
Not today.
“Astarra.”
Not because it’s dangerous to you. Because it’s long, and you’re sitting against a stone in the place where your mother is buried, and you’ve had a bad morning, and I’m not going to spend it on myself. The warmth pulsed once. Ask me on the road. We’ll have a great deal of road.
I found I didn’t want to fight her for it, and wasn’t sure whether that made me tired or kind or simply managed.
“One piece, then. Any piece.”
She was silent long past the point where I thought she'd refused.
There’s a carving on every pillar on that bridge. A crowned woman kneeling inside a ring. Soldiers holding the ring shut, and no faces on them.
“I saw it. I thought it was you.”
It is. Something went through the bond that I couldn’t put a name to and didn’t try. It’s also them. That’s the piece. Whoever cut that stone thought both halves were worth showing, and then took the trouble to leave the soldiers without faces. Sit with that one for a while. I’ve had six hundred years and I’m not finished.
The cool air came up out of the hole and went past us both.
“That's a worse answer than no answer.”
Yes, she said, and I couldn’t swear to it, but I think she was pleased.
The light started going long across the field, and I’d promised a specific piece of road to a woman who would hold me to it.
I made one more circuit of the rim before I left. Not searching. I’d stopped searching somewhere around the cooking pot. Walking it, the way you walk a room you’re handing back.
The place where the market had been. The place where I’d stood with gravy on my thumb and watched Sera decide something about me across a basket of spring onions, and had been nineteen and stupid and entirely happy and hadn’t known either of the last two. The dip in the ground where the mill road had started down. The orchard, which was still there, the trees, at least, on the far side, gone over to their own devices and covered in small hard fruit that no one was going to pick.
I didn’t go back to the eastern rim to look down again. I thought about it and didn’t.
Bracken had eaten a considerable amount of thorn hedge and was extremely pleased with himself. He came off the rise willingly, which he hadn’t done coming up, and I let him set the pace on the road west of the Shoulder until the hole was behind the rise and out of sight, and I made myself not turn around, and then a mile on I turned around anyway. From there it was only a place where the sky came down lower than it should.
The dog followed us for about half a mile, keeping to the hedge, and then didn’t.
“I'll come back,” I said, out loud, to a field.
To do what?
It wasn’t a cruel question. That was the trouble with her; the questions were never cruel, they were only unfurnished, and you had to bring your own chair.
“I don't know yet. Something about the dark. It's going to get bigger, isn't it.”
Yes.
“How long?”
I don’t know. Longer than a season. Shorter than a life.
“And nobody in Marchgate has any idea.”
Nobody in Valecourt either, I’d think. They’re busy building a machine that gathers power out of the air, fifty miles west of a place where a great deal of power has begun coming out of the ground.
I rode on for a while with that.
There it was, the thing that had been standing just off to the side of every conversation since Ironfast, waiting to be looked at directly. Pellan and his chalk circles and his glass bead. Celene's five years of Crown money. A yard full of scholars in Marchgate learning to pull power out of the world, and one day's ride southeast of them, an unwatched hole with power coming out of it in quantities nobody had measured, in a place with no name left on any roster and nobody alive to report it.
Somebody was going to find it. Not this year. Probably not next.
I’d ridden out here to look for the dead and had gone and found a problem instead, which was, I suspected, going to turn out to be the shape of the rest of my life.
“You could have mentioned that part at the rim.”
You were saying goodbye. It’d have kept.
“It nearly didn't.”
It nearly did.
The road bent north around the bean fields and picked up the ruts of the old quarry track, and a day and a half ahead of me it’d run into the east road, and standing at that junction would be a storm in fitted leather, a healer who outranked everyone including the Crown, and a thin suspicious man who would want to know exactly where I’d put my feet for three days.
I’d have to tell them something about the dark. Not all of it. Jak would want the ground and Elowen would want the risk and Isolde would want to go and stand on the rim herself, and there was a version of that conversation that ended with the four of us turning around, and a version that ended with the Crown knowing, and I didn’t yet know which of those was worse.
That was two days off. I had a horse who thought about where his feet went, a purse that was frankly obscene, a demon who had promised me a great deal of road, and one clean fact I hadn’t had when I rode out.
Nothing was left in Brookhaven. I’d gone and looked, myself, with my own eyes, and no one would ever again be able to tell me a story about it that I had to decide whether to believe.
It wasn’t comfort. It was better than comfort. It was the floor.
I put my heels to Bracken and rode north to meet them.