The Place Between

The first thing the Void taught her was that falling and flying were the same thing, if you did them long enough.

She had no way of knowing how long that was. The gold went on and on around her, thick as syrup and silent as a held breath, and the only sounds in it were the slow beat of Gron's wings and the deeper, vaster rhythm of Obsyra's, somewhere off to the left. There was no wind. There was no up. Once she thought she saw a star, and turned to watch it, and found that it was not a star but a seed of light drifting past, no bigger than a thumbnail, with a whole small spinning world inside. She reached for it. It slid between her fingers like a minnow and was gone.

Do not touch what passes, said Gron. His mind-voice was thin with effort. It will take something from you.

"What?"

Whatever you can spare least.

She drew her hand back and tucked it under her arm. It was very cold. She could not remember when it had become cold.

…

They came down on a shore.

She would not have called it that, afterwards. There was no sea. There was only a long curved edge where the gold thinned to gray, and the gray thickened to black, and beneath the black lay a plain of pale rock that glimmered faintly, as if it had been rubbed with ash. Gron touched it with an awkward stumbling thump and stood heaving, his wings half open and his head hanging. Obsyra settled beside him as softly as snow.

Solaia slid down from his back.

Her knees did not hold. She sat on the rock with a bump, and the cold of it came up through the thin ruin of her gown, and she put both hands on her belly and breathed. It was round now. Impossibly round. Under the torn silk, where this morning there had been a flatness she had not yet noticed to be anything else, there was a swell as hard and high as a drum, and beneath her palms, quite clearly, something turned over.

Hello, said a very small voice, in a very large place.

"Hello," she whispered.

Dark.

"I know."

Not cold. Dark. A pause, thoughtful. I like it. Is Papa here?

She shut her eyes.

There are questions that a woman can answer, she thought, and questions that she can only survive, and she had not imagined until now that the second kind could come to her out of her own body. "No, sweetheart," she said, in a voice that sounded almost steady. "Not yet."

Why?

"Because he's... he's very far away. And he's sick. And we had to go."

Will he come?

"I don't know."

The small presence considered this with unhurried solemnity. Then it said, with perfect confidence, I will tell him to, and subsided into a contented warmth, like a cat settling on a lap.

She sat very still and let the tears run down her face.

…

"Child."

The old dragon had folded herself down beside her. At this distance Solaia could see what the flight had cost. The silver rings in Obsyra's horns had gone dull. A long scoring ran down her flank where the edge of the seam had clawed her, and the wound was not bleeding but fading, the black scale going translucent around it like paper held to a flame. Her breath came slow and rasping.

"You're hurt."

I am old. A flicker of dry humor. It is not the same thing, though it does feel so. The great head dipped until one violet eye was level with her own. Listen to me, because I will not have the strength to say it twice. This place is not a country. It does not have a sun or a night. It is what is left between two worlds when one is a wound and the other is a scar. It does not hate you. It does not love you. It will simply take whatever you give it.

"Give it?"

Time. Memory. Names. The eye closed and opened. That is why the Hollowkin live as they do. They came here before you, and they stayed. You will meet them, soon. Do not be afraid. They are not what they look like.

"What do they look like?"

Like the end of something. A low sound, almost fond. They will look at you with no one behind their eyes, and you will think them dead. They are not. They are only tired.

"And Gron?"

The great scarlet dragon, a few paces away, had lain down on the pale rock with his chin on his forelegs. His eyes were shut. His sides rose and fell in great slow heaves, and there was a dullness on his hide that had not been there on the Ridge, a grayness creeping in at the edges of his scales like frost in the corners of a window.

He has taken the Void into him, said Obsyra quietly. Passing the seam with a rider's bond torn half through is a hard thing. He chose you with a heart that had already been broken once. It is not a wound that mends clean.

"Will he—"

He will live. A pause. He will not be red.

Solaia reached out and laid her palm on the hot, rough, beautiful side of him. Gron did not open his eyes, but the great chest hitched, once, and a tiny rumble ran up through her arm that she knew from a hundred nights in a Citadel stable. It meant I am here. I am an idiot. I would do it again.

"Thank you," she said. "Thank you. I'm sorry."

Mother, said Gron, drowsily, you should not be sorry for being loved.

…

She slept, or she did something like it.

There was no night to mark it, and no hunger to wake her. She lay curled on the pale rock with Obsyra's wing drawn over her like a tent of black leather, and the child within her turned and stretched and sang to itself in a thin, wordless, cheerful hum. She dreamed of a house on a cape. It had a green door and a window that faced the morning and a dog asleep on the step. She dreamed of walking up to it. She dreamed of reaching for the latch.

She woke with her hand outstretched in the dark, closed on nothing.

For a moment she did not know why that was terrible.

Then she knew, and lay quite still, listening to her own heart, and said his name in her head the way a woman counts the coins in a purse she fears has been stolen. Kieran. Kieran Aldren. Kieran Vael Aldren, Emperor of the Ice Kingdom, who cannot cook, who burns everything he touches, who tells terrible jokes and thinks no one notices that he is afraid.

It was all there.

She breathed out slowly. She had been given a warning, and she meant to take it. I will say it every time I wake, she thought. Every time. Like a prayer.

She took stock, because taking stock was what she had always done when the world went wrong. It was the one useful habit of a beggar's childhood, and it had outlived the beggar.

She had a torn white gown, ruined past mending. She had one ring on her left hand, the plain band Kieran had pressed into her palm in the spring, with its little hidden gift of quiet; she turned it, and it was warm. She had a cloth strapped to her wrist, rough gray linen stitched with the signs of the Ashborn, and she unwound it and found that Kessa's old spidery hand had added a line she had not noticed before. When you cannot find the road, sit down and let it find you. She had Osric's broken spectacles, which she had tucked into her bodice on the Ridge without remembering doing so, one lens cracked clean across. And in the hem of the gown, where Berylla had sewn it with her small stubborn stitches, there was a pouch of white ash that still held the faint heat of a hearth.

It was not much. It was a beggar's inventory, the same as ever.

And one more, said the child, drowsily, from within.

"One more," she agreed, and laid her hand on the drum of her belly. "The best thing I own."

Am I a thing?

"You're a person. A very small, very loud one."

I am not loud.

"You've been singing for a day."

That is not loud. That is talking. A thoughtful pause. Mama. Who is Osric?

She started. "Where did you hear that name?"

You think it very hard. When you hold the glass. The tiny voice was grave. He was kind. He is dead. He said I should not be touched. I do not mind. I think he is somewhere warm.

She sat with the cracked spectacles in her palm for a long moment and did not trust herself to speak. An old man in a tweed coat had died on a stair for the sake of this child, before it had a name, before she had known it existed. He had spent his last breath on a warning, and the warning had been right, and she had not been there to thank him. She folded the spectacles carefully into the cloth and put the bundle against her heart.

"He is," she said at last. "I'm sure he is."

Good. The small presence curled in on itself again, a warm weight like a sleeping cat. I will not let anything touch me. I promise.

"You do that."

She sat on in the dim, with her arms about her knees and her hair drifting in the windless air, and thought about the shape of the thing she had begun. She was a queen with no throne. She was a mother with no home. She had left a man she loved weeping in the ash because the thing inside him that was not him had wanted her child, and she had walked through a door in the sky to a country where a day was a year, and she had done it, she realised, without once asking whether it was the right thing to do. It had simply been the only door.

That is how all the real ones are, said Obsyra, who had been listening. Nobody chooses the road. We only choose whether to walk it well.

"I'm not good at that."

You are the best I have seen. A low pleased rumble. Your mother was better. But she had longer to practice.

Solaia laughed. It was a cracked, surprised, tearful sound, and it startled even her. For an instant the silence of the Void seemed to lean in and listen to it. Then the dragon's eyes went distant, the way a hound's do at a far-off sound, and she said, with the quiet of one who has felt the edge of something coming:

Little one. Be still. We are not alone.

The black above her had changed.

She sat up, and Obsyra's wing slid away, and she saw that the sky of the Void was not empty. It was crowded with light. Thousands of small gold seeds drifted through the dark like pollen, turning and drifting and catching on one another, and here and there, vast and far off, great folds of darkness moved among them, slow as continents. It was very beautiful. It was so beautiful that she did not at first notice the silence in it had become the silence of attention.

Something was watching her.

She felt it as one feels a draft on the back of the neck. She turned her head, slowly. Gron lay with his eyes closed. Obsyra's great head was lifted, and the violet gaze was fixed on a place beyond the edge of the rock, where the pale plain fell away into dark. The old dragon did not speak. A low vibration had begun in her chest, deep and steady, like the first note of a warning bell.

"What is it?"

Do not move.

The seeds of light had stopped drifting.

She saw it now, all of it, in a single clean flash. Every one of them hung motionless, turned toward her. Every pinprick of gold had become an eye. Out at the edge of the dark, where the pale rock gave onto nothing, a shape was rising: tall, narrow, and gray, no thicker than a reed, with its head bowed on a long neck and its arms hanging to its knees. It came up out of the dark without a sound. It did not walk. It simply grew, a stalk of paleness, nearer and nearer, until she could see the smooth blank oval where a face should have been.

There was a mouth in it.

It opened. It was very wide. And from somewhere in its depths, in a voice like wind in a dry reed, a single word came out, bent and borrowed and wrong, as if it had been learned from someone else's mouth a very long time ago and never understood.

"Sol-ai-a."

Her hand closed on the ring at her wrist, and the white fire woke.