The Summons

She wrote the letter eleven times, and burned ten of them.

She did it at the small desk in the room they had given her, high in the old volcano, under a window that looked out over the plateau. A single candle burned beside her. A heap of gray paper lay at her elbow, and a pen, and a pot of black ink that the Ashborn made from soot and pine-resin and a little of their own blood. It smelled of iron. Outside, the night was clear and hard, and the stars lay thick over the snow like salt on a black cloth.

Dear Kieran, said the first.

She read it over. She crumpled it.

To the Emperor, said the second, and that was worse.

The third said, I am coming, and she held it a long time over the flame, and watched it curl. The fourth began with an apology and ended with an accusation. The fifth, she found, she had written in the old tongue without thinking, in the flowing hand of the Sky, and it was beautiful and cold as a dirge, and it said nothing at all. The sixth was one line. The seventh was a page and a half. The eighth she wrote in a rage and put into the fire before the ink was dry.

By the tenth she had stopped crying. That was something.

She sat with her hands in her lap and her eyes on the candle and tried to think what she would say to a man she had loved and left, a man who had killed nine million people in her name.

I do not know him, she thought.

I know him better than anyone alive.

Both of these are true.

She picked up the pen.

…

"You're going to tell him to come."

She had not heard the door. She turned, with her heart in her throat, and found Veyran in the doorway in his nightshirt, a lanky shape with tousled hair, rubbing one eye with his wrist. He had grown another inch since the Return. His wings were folded tight against his back. He looked, in the candlelight, about nine and about nine hundred, and she ached.

"You should be asleep."

"I tried." He came in. He climbed onto the window seat with his knees under his chin, and looked at the pile of ash in the grate. "That's a lot of letters."

"I'm not good at them."

"What are you writing?"

"I'm trying to say that I'm back."

"Is that all?"

"It's enough."

"No, it isn't." He frowned. "You can't just say 'I'm back.' He'll think it's a trick."

"Why would he?"

"Because he's had nine hundred years of people lying to him." It came out with the flat certainty of a child who has been taught by dragons. "You said so. You said that the Hollow used your voice. He'll hear it and think it's that."

She stared at him.

It was true. She had not thought of it. She sat there with the pen in her fingers, and the candle spat, and a cold dismay crept through her as she saw how it must be. A man alone in the dark, for nine centuries, with a voice in his skull that wore her face. A man who had banned her name because he could not bear to hear it. What would he make of a letter?

"Oh," she said, softly. "Oh, Kieran."

"You have to tell him something only you know."

"Yes."

"Something the Hollow can't copy."

"Yes." She laid down the pen. "But it knows everything I ever said to him. That's the trouble. Everything in his memory. It can say it all."

"Then say something that isn't in his memory."

She looked at him.

He was gazing at her with his father's eyes, gray and level, and with the faint bright pleased look he wore when he had solved a riddle. "Something he doesn't know," said Veyran. "Something that happened after he stopped being there."

"Like what?"

"Like me."

…

She sat for a long time in silence.

The candle burned. The window rattled in a draft. Down in the sleeping hold, a dog barked once and was still. She thought of all the things she might say. I am sorry. I forgive you. I have not forgiven you. I have a son. She thought of the words rising up from the Void, in the long nights of the Hollow Sky, all the unspoken sentences she had rehearsed to the dark.

She dipped the pen.

She wrote for a long time. She did not cross anything out. When it was done, she read it over once, slowly, her lips moving, and then she held it out to the boy.

"Is it right?"

He took it. He read it, solemnly, with a finger under the line, as she had taught him. His mouth moved. When he reached the end, he was silent, and then he looked up at her, and his eyes were wet.

"It's good, Mama."

"You're sure?"

"I'd come."

She took the page back. She folded it once, and again, and held it between her palms. Then she rose and went to the grate, where a few red coals still glowed in the ash, and knelt on the hearth with the paper in her cupped hands.

"Is it going to hurt?" said Veyran.

"No."

"What do you do?"

"I give it to the fire." She breathed out. "And the fire carries it."

"How?"

"By name," said Solaia. "Hold my hand."

He crossed the room in three steps and knelt beside her, and took her hand in both of his. She could feel the pulse in his wrist, quick and strong. She closed her eyes, and drew the White Fire up from the depths of her chest, gently, slowly, in a thin golden thread, and it ran down her arm and out through her fingers into the paper. She whispered the Names of the Door. She whispered the Seven Words of Welcome. And at the last, in the old tongue, in a voice scarcely louder than breath, she whispered a name she had thought she would never speak again.

"Kieran Vael Aldren."

The paper took fire.

…

It did not burn as paper burns. It did not blacken or curl. It burst into flame all at once, a gold-white flower that unfolded in her hands, and the light of it filled the room. The candle guttered. Shadows leaped up the walls. She felt the heat on her face, soft as a breath, and under her palms the paper was dissolving, line by line, word by word, into small bright flecks of light.

They rose.

They lifted from her hands like fireflies. They spiralled up toward the ceiling, and hung there a moment, a cloud of drifting sparks, each one a letter, each one a tiny gleaming syllable. Veyran gasped. She heard her own heart. The sparks turned, all together, as a flock of birds turns, and flowed toward the window.

The glass was shut.

They passed through it as if it were water.

She ran to the casement and threw it open. The cold hit her like a slap. Out in the dark, over the white plateau, over the black line of the wall and the long road south, the sparks were streaming away in a thin shining river, high and fast and straight, a ribbon of gold against the stars. She watched them go. They dwindled to a thread. They dwindled to a point. And then, impossibly far, at the very edge of the world, the point flared once, white and bright, and went out.

"It got there," whispered Veyran.

"Yes."

"How do you know?"

"I felt it land."

She leaned on the sill, trembling. The wind blew her hair back from her face. She could feel it, the faint echo of a landing: a warm small pulse in the dark, a long way south. She could feel a man's breath catch. She could feel a horse stumble. And along the thin line that bound them, the line she had pulled on in the Void for nine hundred years, she felt something move that had not moved since the day she left.

It was a laugh.

It was low, and hoarse, and cracked with disuse, and so full of astonishment and grief that her eyes stung. She put a hand to her mouth. The echo died away. She waited. She waited a long time, with her heart beating hard, but nothing more came.

"What did the letter say?" Veyran asked at last.

"You read it."

"I mean, what's it going to say to him?"

She turned from the window.

"It's going to say what I said," she told him. "Exactly. Word for word."

"Even the last part?"

"Even the last part."

"That's brave."

"It's not brave." She tried to smile. "It's only true."

…

On a black road in the dark, a hundred and ten leagues south, the Emperor of Ash drew rein.

He had been riding for three days. He had slept, in snatches, in ditches and the lee of stone walls. The black stallion was lathered to the withers, and he himself had not eaten since the Hall. His mouth was full of the taste of old blood. He had been riding through a country he did not know, at a pace that would have killed a lesser horse, with Valerian whispering in his ear and the bell ringing in the bones of his skull, and he had thought, at the end of the third night, that he might not have the strength to go on.

Then a light came down out of the north.

It came as a thread of gold against the stars. It dipped. It wavered. It circled the stallion's head once, like a curious bird, and the horse snorted and shied and stood trembling. And then the thread broke into a hundred separate sparks, and each of them spoke, softly, in a voice like a held breath, in a woman's voice, in the voice he had been hearing in his dreams for nine hundred years.

It said what she had written.

He did not move. He sat in the saddle, with the reins slack, and heard it through to the end. The sparks drifted, one by one, onto his gloved hands, his shoulders, his face. They were warm. They left no mark. They faded as they touched him, like snowflakes on a hearth.

Well? said Valerian, sharply, from the ring. Is it she? Or is it a trick?

Kieran did not answer.

He sat there. The wind blew over the dark moor, and a long way off a night-bird called. He opened his mouth, and found that he had no voice. He tried again. And what came out of him, in the end, was a sound he had not made in nine hundred years. It was a laugh, hoarse, rusty, helpless, shaking his whole body, tears running down his cheeks and into the corners of his mouth.

"She has a son," said the Black Emperor.

What?

"She has a son." He was laughing so hard he could scarcely speak. "She says— she says he has my eyes. She says he's ten. She says— oh, God, Valerian— she says he can't cook, either."

It is a trap.

"It isn't."

You cannot possibly—

"It isn't," said Kieran, and wiped his face, and laughed again, and picked up the reins. "Because the Hollow would never have thought to say that. It's far too stupid. She wrote it. She wrote every word."

He turned the stallion's head to the north.

"Ride," he whispered. "Ride. Please. Please."