The Pale Mist

The first they knew of it was that the baker's wife could not remember her husband's name.

She stood in the door of the bakery in the town of Hallowmere, with flour on her forearms and a loaf in each hand, and looked at the man at the counter, and said pleasantly, "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I can't recall what I'm to call you." He laughed. He thought it a joke. It was thirty years since they had married, and he had been calling her my dove since the day of the wedding. He said, "Maris, you daft thing." And she smiled at him, and nodded, and went on setting out the bread.

She did not remember who Maris was, either.

By nightfall the whole town had it. It crept in through the streets like fog off the river, a faint pale shimmer at the ends of the lanes. It was not wet. It did not chill. It lay on the cobbles as light lies on water, and where a man stepped into it, he stopped, and stood quite still, and a quiet look came over his face. When he stepped out of it again, he had forgotten something.

It might be a name. It might be a street. It might be the road home.

By the end of the week Hallowmere was empty. By the end of the month the mist had crossed the river. And by the time the Emperor of the Ice Kingdom heard of it, a full year after the first reports, it lay across half the southern provinces in a vast slow tide, drifting north at the pace of a walking man, and the people it touched had begun to wander out of their houses in their night-clothes and stand in the fields, with their faces turned up, and smile.

…

He rode south to see it for himself.

The Guard begged him not to. His captain, a lean dark woman named Corvin who had been Pip's granddaughter and who had her ancestor's way of looking at him as though he were a particularly stubborn horse, went so far as to stand in the gate of the Citadel with her arms crossed. "It takes the mind, Majesty."

"It can't take mine."

"You can't know that."

"I know a little more of the Void than most." He pulled on his gloves. "Stay here. Hold the walls. If I do not return in a month, burn the south."

"And if you do?"

"Then I shall have a great deal to tell you."

She stepped aside. She did not like it. But she was an Aldren servant to the marrow of her bones, and in four generations the household had never learned to argue with him twice.

He rode alone, for eleven days.

The mist met him on the twelfth. He came over a low rise in the dawn, in a thin gray rain, and saw it lying in the valley below him like a drift of fallen cloud. It was larger than he had imagined. It filled the whole basin, from ridge to ridge, a smooth, shining, silent sea. Here and there, through the pale, he saw the tips of church spires, the crowns of orchards, the dark shape of a bridge. Nothing moved.

He dismounted. He left the horse on the ridge, tied to a thorn, and walked down.

It closed over his head like warm water.

…

He had expected cold. It was not cold. It was an absence of cold, an absence of everything; a gentle, deadening, pearly softness that pressed on his eyes and his ears and filled his mouth like wool. The sound of his own boots on the road grew thin and far away. The light dimmed. A voice began to speak in the back of his mind, a soft, sweet, familiar voice, and it said:

Rest.

"No."

You are so tired.

"I know."

Put it down. Put down the grief, the guilt, the long cold years. Put down the name. The voice was so reasonable. So kind. It does not help you. It only hurts. Let it go, and be at peace.

"What name?"

You know.

He stopped.

He stood in the road, in the shining dark, and looked at his hands. They were pale, and long-fingered, and there was a silver ring on one of them that he did not remember putting on. He frowned at it. The ring was cold. It seemed to be the only cold thing in the world.

Put it down, said the mist.

He tried.

For a moment, a single wavering instant, he almost did. He felt it start to go: the shape of a face, the sound of a laugh, the little particular warmth of a hand on his waist. It slid out of him like a slipped knot, and a vast soft peace came down in its place. He smiled. It was the first real smile in nine hundred years.

Then the ring bit into his finger, hard as a tooth.

Fool, said Valerian, in his head, very distinctly. Do you think I will let you go so easily? Stand up, boy. Stand up!

He staggered.

It was an astonishing thing. He had not heard that voice since the Cathedral; it had lain dormant in the ring, in the metal, in the long grey drift of his blood. And now it spoke, cold and sharp and furious, from the very place where he had thought himself most alone. He was too startled to be afraid.

"You," he said aloud. "I thought you were—"

I am where I have always been. A thin, dry, lordly voice. I made a bargain with the Night. I cannot be killed any more than you. And I will not allow some sentimental drifting vapor to take from me the one thing I have left.

"What is that?"

You, said Valerian. You are my last remaining instrument. Hold on to your pain, Majesty. It is the only thing that is keeping us both alive.

It was the oddest alliance he had ever known. He walked on. The mist moved about him in great slow swirls. He passed a woman in a nightgown standing in a field, with her arms outstretched, smiling at the sky. He passed two soldiers in the livery of the Guard, sitting side by side on a milestone with their helmets in their laps, looking at each other with gentle bewilderment. A child was playing with a hoop in the center of a village square, round and round, round and round, with no idea what the toy was for.

He did not stop. He could not have helped any of them. He could only walk, and keep her face in his mind, and hold, as Valerian said, to his pain.

…

He came, at last, to the heart of it.

It was a field. It had been a wheat field, once. The crop stood in the mist, pale and bowed, untended, and in the middle of it was a ring of standing stones. He knew them. He had come here in the fifth year of the Hunt and called her name down a well. The well was still there, in the center of the ring, its stone lip worn smooth. But it was not a well now. Its mouth had opened. A column of pale light rose from it, wide as a house, up into the shining vault of the mist, and in the column something was moving.

He went forward.

They were coming out of it. He saw them as he drew near: tall gray shapes, thin as reeds, with their heads bowed on long necks. They rose from the light one by one and stepped over the lip of the well, and drifted away into the fields. They had no faces. They had soft pale ovals where the faces should be, and the mist clung to them like breath.

The Hollowkin, said Valerian, in his head, with a trace of distaste. My leavings. Yes. I recall.

"They're hers."

They are mine.

"No." He did not know how he knew it. "They're not anyone's. They're the ones you threw away."

How sentimental.

He walked to the well.

There was no wind. The pillar of light hummed softly, like a struck glass. The Hollowkin drifted around him, silent, unhurried, and not one of them looked at him. He stood on the lip of the stone and looked down. The shaft was deep. It went down and down, into a luminous grey nothing, and he thought he saw, at the very bottom, far away, a ripple, as of something moving through water.

He knelt.

"Sol," he said.

His voice cracked. The mist swallowed it. He said it again, louder, with all the force of nine hundred years.

"Sol!"

The pillar of light flickered.

For a moment nothing happened. The Hollowkin paused, one by one, in the grass. Then, very faintly, from a great distance, from the depths of the shaft, there came a sound.

It was not a voice. It was the memory of one. It was a breath, a ripple, a sigh in the stone. It was no louder than a heartbeat. But it came up out of the well like a flower out of snow, and it rose through the mist, and it said, in a small and wondering whisper, so soft that he had to hold his own breath to hear it:

Kieran?

He could not move.

Kieran. A pause, a breath, a silence of such enormous distance that the word seemed to cross a whole sea of years. Is that you? I can't see. It's very dark. There's a... there's a boy. He's...

"Sol!"

He says you're here. The voice was a thread. It was fading. He says you don't like honey. He says...

"Sol, I'm here! I'm right here! Tell me where! Tell me how to come!"

I don't... I don't know. She was crying. He could hear it, even through the silence, the thin high gulp of a woman who has not wept in a very long time. I'm sorry. I can't hold it. It's slipping. I've forgotten your... I've...

"Sol!"

Kieran. Barely. Kieran. Kieran. Kieran.

And then, as if a hand had passed over a lamp, it was gone.

The pillar of light dimmed. The mist rolled in. Around him, in the grass, the Hollowkin began to move again, one after another, drifting off into the white. He knelt on the lip of the well with his hands braced on the stone and his head bowed over the empty shaft, and the silver ring on his finger throbbed, and throbbed, and throbbed.

Interesting, said Valerian, very softly.

He didn't answer. He could not. He was weeping, in a way he had not wept since the Ridge, soundlessly, helplessly, his whole body shaking. And the mist closed over him, and the grass whispered, and a hundred tall gray figures, passing on either side, turned their blank faces briefly toward the sound of his grief, and bowed their heads.