The Burned Provinces

He had stopped counting the dead somewhere after the first million, and the Hollow had been kind enough to keep the tally for him.

It did so in the evenings, in the long quiet hour after the fires had burned down, when he sat on the hood of a captured carriage or the broken lip of a well and looked at what he had done. Four thousand and eleven, it would say, in a voice like warm oil, at Marrow Cross. Nine hundred in the granaries. Two thousand and six on the road to the coast, who ought not, strictly, to count, as they died of cold. It told him with perfect, tender accuracy. It told him their ages. It told him, sometimes, their names.

You asked, it would say, whenever he flinched. You wished to know.

He no longer flinched. That was the strange thing. Somewhere in the long gray centuries the capacity had simply worn away, like a stair that had been walked on too long. He sat on the carriage with his gloved hands loose between his knees and watched a village burn and felt, distantly, with a polite curiosity, a thing that might in another man have been grief.

It was the smoke that he noticed, mostly. How it rose. It went up in a straight pale column on windless days, and bent east on windy ones, and in the very cold, in the dead heart of winter, it lay along the ground in a low, sullen mist that hid the bodies until spring.

He had seen a great many columns of smoke.

…

The provinces had names, once.

Verre had kept them. The Inquisitor was long in his grave, a century dead, his bones in the Archive he had loved, but his ledger had survived him and the Emperor had it still: a thick, cracked, patient book, carried in a pocket of the black coat. He rarely read it. He knew the entries. Harrowmere, fallen in the second year. Tallis, in the sixth. The Lowlands, the whole southern shelf of them, in the nineteenth, when the dikes broke and the sea came in. He did not remember who had broken the dikes.

There was a year, he thought, somewhere past the two-hundredth, when he had stopped looking for the door and begun, simply, to look for the end.

It had not been a decision. It had been a slow slide. The wells he had called her name into had grown fewer, as the towns that held them burned, and the standing stones had cracked and fallen. The scholars he had questioned had died, and their sons had died, and nobody remembered what the Veil was. He had gone on asking. He had gone on asking after the asking made no sense. He had gone north, and south, and east, in a black coat that no longer wore out, on a horse that no longer tired, and the Hollow had ridden with him in the hollow of his chest like a second heart, and there had come a day when he looked about him at a ruined field and realized that the thing he was hunting was not a door.

It was an absolution.

He had thought: If I kill enough of them, perhaps it will be paid.

He knew that this made no sense. He had known it from the first. But the Debt of his blood had been paid, and the Gift of Night still lived in him, and a man who cannot die has a great deal of time in which to wonder what he is for.

…

They called him the Ash King, in the south.

He had learned that from a prisoner. A woman, a dyer by trade, with blue-stained hands and a broken arm, who had been dragged before him in a market town whose name he had already forgotten. She had been quite young. She had lifted her chin and looked at him with a bright fierce hate, and said, in a voice that rang off the stones of the square:

"They say you're the Ash King. They say you eat children."

"I do not," said Kieran.

"They say you can't die."

"That's true."

"Then why do you keep doing it?" She spat. "If you can't die, and you can't win, and you don't want anything, why do you keep doing it?"

He considered the question.

He considered it with real attention, standing in the cold bright morning with the smoke coming up behind him and the Black Guard drawn up at his back, a hundred armored men whose faces he no longer recognised. They were not Crane's. Crane's grandsons were dust. These were sons of sons, trained in his name, loyal to a legend, and they stood in perfect silence, awaiting the Emperor's word.

"I don't know," he said, at last.

The dyer stared at him.

"I used to be looking for something," he said slowly. "I think. I can't recall what. It was very important. I knew it for a long time, and then I knew it less, and then there was only the looking." He turned his hands over, looking at the palms. "I think it was a person. I think I loved her. Does that sound mad?"

"You're mad."

"Yes. I suppose so." He smiled the smile that had not left his face for four hundred years. "Take her away."

"What—"

"Let her go. Give her a horse. Let her tell them whatever she likes."

"My lord," said the captain of the Guard, uncertainly.

"I said let her go."

They let her go.

He stood in the square for a long time after, watching the dust of her horse drift away to the east. It was a very small thing. It was the first mercy he had shown in a century, and he did not know why he had done it, and when the Hollow said, in its warm and lazy voice, That was not necessary, he found that he had no answer.

…

He came to the burned village at dusk.

It lay in a shallow valley, along a river he had once, he thought, crossed on horseback, with a woman riding at his side. There was a stone bridge. There was a mill. There were the black bones of what had been forty houses, still smoking, and a church with its roof fallen in, and a long straggle of orchard whose trees had been cut down for firewood. He had not given the order. Someone had. He supposed it did not matter.

He rode through the main street at a walk.

Nothing stirred. The bodies lay where they had fallen, already beginning to lose their shapes. A dog lay dead in a doorway with its paws curled under its chin. The wind moved a scrap of cloth against a wall. He looked at it all, and he thought of nothing, and he rode on, and the horse's hooves rang on the cobbles in the great deserted quiet.

It was then that he heard it.

A sound, small and dry, from the rubble to his left. A scratching. A tiny scrape of stone on stone.

He reined in.

He did not know why. He had ridden past ten thousand such sounds: the settling of a beam, the scuffle of a rat. But something in the cadence of this one held him, and he sat very still on the great black horse and looked at the heap of fallen timber that had once been a house. A beam shifted. A small pale hand came out from under it, fingers splayed, caked with soot.

Then another hand. Then a head.

It was a child.

She could not have been more than four. She wriggled out from under the burned wood like a seedling pushing through snow, sooty from hair to heel, and sat up in the ashes with her legs stuck out in front of her and blinked. Her face was a mask of grime. She had lost a shoe. She looked about her, dazed and puzzled, as a child looks who has woken in an unfamiliar room, and then her eyes found the man on the horse and stopped.

For a long time they looked at each other.

Kill her, said the Hollow, idly. It is tidier.

He did not answer. He had stopped breathing. He sat quite motionless in the saddle with the reins slack in his hands and the smile fixed on his face, and he looked at the little girl in the ashes, and she looked back with huge dark unfrightened eyes, and something in his chest, in the cold dead place where the Hollow lay curled, began very slowly to turn over.

He thought: She does not know what I am.

He thought: She isn't afraid.

He thought: I used to be able to do something. I used to do something when I saw a child like that.

He tried to remember what it was.

It was there, he could feel it, at the very back of his mind, like a word on the tip of the tongue. It was bright, and warm, and it had a green door. It had a name. It had a woman in it, and a dog on the step, and a laughing man. He reached for it. The Hollow stirred, lazily, and the memory slid away like a fish into dark water.

It is no use, said the Hollow, kindly. You have forgotten. I have taken it. It is better so.

"Who," said the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom, in a voice he did not recognise, "am I?"

The child blinked.

Then, very slowly, she held up her small black hand to him.