Kieran's First Winter

The snow began on the third night and covered him by the fifth, and he did not move.

It fell on the broken ridge in slow soft flakes, white on gray, and settled on his shoulders and his hair and the backs of his hands where they lay open on his knees. He sat where he had knelt on the day the seam closed, at the edge of the great black scar where the Fortress had been, facing north. He had not eaten. He had drunk, twice, from a flask pressed into his hand by a soldier whose face he did not remember. He did not feel the cold, which was how he knew that something was wrong with him, in the part of his mind that was still keeping accounts.

Crane had found him on the second morning. The big man had stood a long time at his shoulder, saying nothing, and then gone away and come back with a cloak, and wrapped it round him as a man wraps a sleeping child. On the fourth morning he had come with a tent. On the sixth he had come with an army surgeon and a priest and a plate of hot food, and Kieran had looked at all three without interest and said, in a voice like a rusty hinge, "Take them away, Halvard."

"Majesty—"

"I'm waiting."

"For what?"

He had not answered. He did not know how to say that he was waiting for the sky to open, and that he thought, if he took his eyes off the place for even a moment, it might do so and close again before he could look.

…

The Hollow came back on the ninth night.

He had known it would. Some part of him had known since the moment he sat up in the ash, with his veins gone cold and his eyes gone black, and felt the Night take hold of his tongue and say Give it to me in a voice that was not his. It had been quiet since she left. He had thought, in his foolishness, that the quiet was peace. It had been only the stillness of a creature gathering itself to spring.

He was sitting in the dark, in the snow, with his back to the ring of fallen stones. He had been looking at the sky. And a voice in his head, soft and rueful and exactly familiar, said:

Kieran.

His heart stopped.

Kieran. Why are you sitting in the cold?

He turned his head. There was nobody there. There was only the long white night, and the stars, and the far-off lights of the army's camp on the plain, small and yellow as sparks. But the voice had been hers. It had been hers to the inflection, to the tiny hitch of breath before the last word, to the very tone of dry amused concern with which she had said it on a hundred winter evenings in the study of the Citadel, finding him asleep at his desk.

"Sol," he said.

Of course. Who else would it be?

He was on his feet before he knew it. He stumbled in the drift. His knees had set, and the snow came down his boot, and he caught himself on one hand and pushed himself up and looked wildly around the ridge. "Where are you? Where—"

Here.

"I can't see—"

I'm right here. Come to me. The voice was warm. It was so warm, so ordinary, so her. I've been waiting. Why did you let me go? Why did you let it take me? Come and get me. I'm in the dark.

He took a step.

He took another. His breath smoked white. In the snow beyond the scar, a hundred paces off, the air shimmered, and he saw, or thought he saw, a pale shape standing in it with its arms outstretched. A woman. A white gown. A mass of hair stirred by a wind that did not touch the snow.

Come, said the voice, tenderly.

And something in the very back of his skull, some last small cold sensible piece of Marenne's pupil, said, quite clearly: You are standing at the edge of the Ridge.

He looked down.

The ground fell away under his boots. He was at the lip of the great broken scarp, with his toes over the edge and a drop of two hundred feet below him into the dark. The snow he was standing on was a cornice. It was already breaking. He could hear the tiny crumbling sound of it giving way, and he stood there with his arms half out like a sleepwalker's, and the white woman in front of him smiled with his dead love's smile, and did not move.

Come, she said.

"No," whispered Kieran.

The smile slipped.

It was not a thing he saw. He felt it. The warmth went out of the voice and something else slid up through it, ancient and flat and patient, a chord of voices he knew. You wish to die, said the Hollow, in her tones, as gently as a nurse. You are tired. It is the only way. I am only helping.

"You're not her."

I am her voice. I am in your memory. I know every word she ever said to you. The pale woman tilted her head. I could say them all. For as long as you like. Forever.

He should have been sick with horror. He was, a little. But the greater part of him, to his shame, was drinking it in: the cadence, the timbre, the faint amused husk. He had not heard it in nine days. It was like water to a man dying of thirst, and he knew that it was poison, and he stood on the edge of the cliff and wanted it so badly that his whole body shook.

Come, she said, again.

His foot slid.

…

A hand closed on his collar and hauled.

He went over backwards in a spray of snow and landed hard on his spine, with the wind knocked out of him and a weight on his chest. Above him swam a broad bearded face, gray with fatigue, framed by a hood. "Damn you," said Halvard Crane, hoarsely. "Damn you to hell, Majesty. Damn you."

"Halvard."

"Nine days! Nine days I have stood in this snow like a fool!"

"I—"

"Be quiet." The Commander of the Black Guard hauled him upright by main force and held him there with both fists wound in his cloak. His eyes were red. His beard was rimed with ice. "Be quiet, and listen, because I'll say this once and then you may have me hanged. You have spent your life being told that you are a weapon. Your father told you. The Church told you. That—" he jerked his head toward the empty place where the Fortress had been, "thing told you. And I let it. God forgive me, I helped. I signed the orders. But I am damned if I'll stand by and watch you throw yourself off a cliff for a woman who told you to live."

Kieran stared at him.

"She said it," said Crane. "I was there. I heard her on the platform. She said 'I trust you.' She said 'Be small.' She wasn't speaking to a weapon. She was speaking to a man. So be one, you damned fool. Be a man who is alive when she comes back."

"She isn't coming back."

"You don't know that."

"It's three hundred to one, Halvard. If I live a hundred years she will not have been gone a week."

"Then you'll live a hundred years."

"The Hollow—"

"Then fight it."

"I can't!" It tore out of him, raw and high and cracked. "It has her voice! It has her laugh! It knows what she said to me in the dark, every word, and it says it back! How am I to fight that? How can I tell it to be silent, when it's the only—" He choked. "When it's all I have left of her?"

Crane stood very still. The snow fell on them both.

"Ah," he said at last, softly. "That's the way of it."

"Yes."

"Then it's cleverer than I feared."

"Yes."

The old soldier let go of his cloak. He stood for a long moment with his head bowed, and then, to Kieran's astonishment, he took the Emperor's face between his two big calloused hands, the way a man might take a boy's, and looked into his eyes. His own were wet.

"You will come down off this ridge," he said. "You will eat. You will sleep in a bed. You'll write your letters. You will find the Lady Kessa and say what you said you'd say. And when it speaks to you with her voice, you'll answer it the way she'd answer it, which is to say, with a very rude word."

A laugh cracked out of Kieran like a bone breaking.

It was a small, harsh, startled thing. It surprised them both. He put his hand over his mouth. And then he was laughing in earnest, bent double in the snow, with tears running into his beard, and Crane, to his own evident dismay, was laughing too, in great barking gulps, and for a moment on the black ridge in the dark the two of them stood clutching each other and howling like madmen.

That is not funny, said the voice, in her tones, flatly.

"Oh," gasped Kieran, "go to hell."

I am hell, little prince.

"Then give my regards to Valerian."

The voice went silent.

…

He did come down.

He ate. He slept, in a real bed, in a camp tent with a fire at its foot. He woke in the pale gray hour before dawn, and lay for a while with his eyes open listening to the soldiers outside, and found that he could think. He rose. He washed. He sat at a folding table with a pen, and wrote to the Ashborn, and to the Church, and to the thirty-one houses of the north, and to Kessa, in a hand that shook only a little.

It was the best day's work he did that winter.

The Hollow did not speak again for a long time. When it did, it was not in her voice, and it was not kind. It came in the small hours, on the nights he could not sleep, as a slow dull pressure at the back of his mind, and it said nothing at all. It simply waited. He learned to wait back. He learned to sit very still, with his hands in his lap, until the pressure passed, and to say to it, aloud, in the dark of the tent, the single word No.

It took him a month to say it without his voice cracking.

On the first morning that it did not crack, he walked out onto the plain below the Ridge, alone, in the thin gold light, and stood facing the north, where the Ice Range lay in a cloudless line along the sky. The snow had not yet melted. He looked at it for a long time. He thought of her laugh. He thought of the green door of a house that had never been built.

Then he turned, and in the clean cold air of the first spring dawn, he began to smile.

It was not a good smile. He knew that at once. He felt it spread across his face, wide and thin and fixed, like the smile of a skull. It had no humor in it. It had nothing in it at all. He tried to stop it, and found, with a creeping horror, that he could not.

Good, said the Hollow, very softly, from the depths of his skull. You have learned to laugh at last.

He stood on the plain with his face frozen in a rictus of joy, and began, helplessly, to laugh.