A Night in the Snow

The Ashborn gave them a hut at the edge of the village, and left them alone in it with the door shut and the wind howling over the roof.

It was a small round dwelling, built of fitted turf and bone, with a smoke-hole at the top and a fire-pit in the center. Someone had laid a bed of furs along the far wall, thick as a haystack, and put a clay lamp beside it. A pot of barley stew bubbled over the coals. Nobody had said who had prepared these things, and nobody had needed to. Crane had been taken off to another hut by a delegation of gruff old men with a flask. Gron lay outside, a vast warm shape against the wall, and she could feel through the turf the slow contented rise and fall of his sleeping breath.

She sat by the fire with her knees drawn up and a bowl in her hands, and watched Kieran not eat.

He sat across from her, cross-legged on the packed earth, his cloak around his shoulders. The stew steamed beside him. He had taken one spoonful and set the spoon down, and now he sat gazing at the fire with an expression she had learned to dread, the flat blankness of a man doing arithmetic on something he did not want to be true.

"Say it," she said.

"Say what?"

"Whatever it is. You've been holding it for an hour."

His mouth moved, in something that was not a smile. "I was thinking about the mines."

"The mines."

"The black iron. My great-grandfather's shafts, in the north face." He rubbed his temple. "I am trying to remember how many men died in them. The records say that the ore is unusually hard to work. Unusually dangerous. Cave-ins, rock-falls, gas. Four hundred in the last decade alone." He paused. "I thought: the earth is stubborn. I thought: men die."

"Kieran."

"It was a bone, Solaia. We were mining a bone. And the walls were screaming, and I called it a gas." He laughed, very softly. "I paid the widows a pension. I thought it generous."

She put her bowl down.

"What do you want me to say?"

"Nothing. Anything." He shut his eyes. "I want you to be furious. It would be easier. I want you to hit me with a stick."

"I did that already."

"It was not nearly enough."

"Then what would be?"

He did not answer. She watched the firelight move on his face, the hollows of the cheeks, the long throat. He looked, she thought, like a man standing in front of a wall of ice, wondering whether to walk into it.

She stood up. She crossed the hut and sat down beside him, close enough that their knees touched, and took the cold hand that lay in his lap and held it between both of hers.

"I'm not going to be furious tonight," she said.

"Why not?"

"Because I don't remember what you did. I only know what you've done to me. You chained me to a dragon. You locked me in a cage. And then you took the cage apart with your own hands, and you sat on the floor of a banquet hall and let me see the worst thing about you." She turned his palm up. "I can't hate you for the Debt, Kieran. I don't know what the Debt is. I'm only angry about the things I can reach."

"That is a very small list."

"It's a long one, actually. I'll show you in the morning."

A breath of laughter escaped him. His fingers closed around hers.

"I am afraid," he said.

It was said so plainly that for a moment she did not understand. She looked up. His eyes were open, and directed not at her but at the floor between their knees, and his voice had no armor in it at all.

"I have been afraid since the day I carried you out of the fire. I told myself it was the Church. I told myself it was the Hollow, or the council, or Orloff. But it has only ever been one thing." He swallowed. "I am afraid of the day you remember."

"Why?"

"Because you will look at me, and know. And you will not need anyone to tell you what I am."

"And what are you?"

"The man who opened the gates."

"You didn't open any gates."

"My blood did."

"Your blood is blood." She said it so fiercely that he flinched. "It's not a verdict. I don't care whose face you have. I care who sat with me through the night when I thought I was going to die in that tower, and who kept coming back to the door."

"I was keeping watch on a weapon."

"You were keeping watch on me."

He made a small, helpless, miserable sound. And then he put his forehead down against her shoulder, quite suddenly, and she felt the long shudder run through him from his scalp to his heels, the way a horse shivers when it comes in out of the cold.

She wrapped her arms around his head and held on.

…

They did not talk after that.

There was no need. She got him out of his boots, and he let her. She took off his cloak and his chain and set them aside. She loosened his collar and unlaced her own boots and drew him down onto the furs, where the lamp made a small gold circle on the earth and the wind sang in the smoke-hole. He lay on his back with one arm over his eyes. She lay beside him and put her head on his chest, and listened.

His heart was slow. It was steady, now, and strong. It had been neither of those things in the tower. Under her ear, beneath the thin linen, she could feel it come and go, and between its beats she could feel the other one, the great one, the heart of the mountain, a mile away and four hundred feet down: thum. The two of them beat together for a time. Then, slowly, so slowly she could not have said when, they beat in time.

"Sol," he murmured. He did not seem to know that he had said it.

"Mm."

"Tell me something."

"What?"

"Anything. A story. A lie." His hand found her hair. "I do not think I have slept a whole night since I was twenty. I would like to try. I do not know how."

She thought for a moment.

Then she began, in a low voice, the only story she had. She told him about the wagon. About the knife she had found in the mud, and the bandit who had come for her bread, and how she had known, with a cold and perfect clarity, where to put the blade. She told him about the first night in the gold bedchamber, and how she had counted the exits. She told him about a baker in a town she could not name, who had thrown her a stale loaf once, in a hungry winter, and then looked away, as if he had not done it.

"I have been trying to remember his name," she said, "for a year. I think it began with an M."

"Marek."

"You don't know that."

"No." He was smiling. She could hear it. "But I like him already."

She talked, and the fire sank, and his breathing slowed. At some point his hand stopped moving in her hair, and lay quite still against her scalp. She lifted her head. He was asleep.

It was a plain, unremarkable sleep. His mouth was a little open. A line of firelight lay across his cheek. There was nothing about him of the Emperor, nothing of the tower, nothing of the black coat or the black chain. He looked, in the dim, like a boy of seventeen who had been sent into a very large house to do a very hard thing, and had finally been allowed to put down the lamp.

He's not afraid, she thought. Not now. And a strange, sharp tenderness went through her that was so unlike anything in her memory that she had to put her hand over her mouth.

She lay for a long time, listening to him breathe.

…

It was the middle of the night when she woke.

She did not know what had woken her. The fire was ash. The lamp had burned itself out. Outside, the wind had died to a long whisper, and through the smoke-hole above her a single star burned, enormous and white. Kieran lay beside her on his side, with one arm thrown across her waist, sound asleep.

And in her chest, a heart was beating.

She lay quite still.

It was not her own. She knew her own heart, now; she had spent a year learning its rhythms. This one was slower. It was deeper. It beat at the very center of her, under the breastbone, where the pale warmth lived, and it was not an echo of the mountain's pulse, nor a reflection of the man's. It had its own cadence, a small, bright, stubborn flutter that did not belong to the world.

Thum. Thum. Thum.

She put a hand flat on her breastbone.

It stopped.

And from a long way off, through the turf and the bone and the frozen earth, from the dark chamber behind the great black door, the mountain answered, once, very faintly, like a mother answering a child's cry in the night.

She did not sleep again.