Face to Face

The Plain of Ash lay forty miles south of the wall, and nothing had grown on it for nine hundred years.

It had been a battlefield once. The Ashborn told the story with a kind of grim relish: how in the third year of the Empire, when the Emperor was still hunting, he had come north with an army and met a coalition of the old Houses on this very ground. There had been no ritual, no parley, no honorable engagement. There had been a day of white fire, and a night of silence. By morning the Houses had been ash. It had blown over the plain in a pale drift, and settled, and hardened, and the earth beneath had gone sterile as a hearthstone. A century later, a lone tree had tried to root there. It had stood for a season, gray and leafless, like a hand lifted to the sky, and died.

Now it stood still, a petrified thing, in the middle of the flat white waste.

She saw it from a long way off.

She came on foot. She had insisted. Teodra had argued, and the Council had argued, and old Ferren had wrung his hands and murmured about precedent, but in the end there had been nothing for it. She would go alone, down the long road from the Hold, across the frozen moor, and walk the last mile on her own two feet. Obsyra would wait at the edge of the plain with the boy. The Ashborn host, three thousand strong, would hold the ridge behind. And if the Emperor came with an army, they would see it long before he reached her.

He did not come with an army.

She saw that, too, from a distance. A single dark speck on the southern horizon, small and slow, moving across the white. A rider. One rider, on a black horse, with a cloak that streamed behind him like smoke.

Her heart gave one great hard knock and then seemed to stop.

…

She had thought about this moment for nine hundred years.

She had thought about it in the dark of the Void, when she did not know his name. She had thought about it on the shore, with the boy in her arms. She had imagined a hundred ways it might go. In some of them she struck him. In some she wept. In one, which she had not been able to stop herself from rehearsing, she walked straight up to him and said, in a clear cold voice, You are late, and turned on her heel and walked away.

None of them had prepared her for the sheer ordinary smallness of him.

He stopped a hundred yards off.

The black stallion stood with its head low, blowing, its sides heaving. The man in the saddle did not move. He was a tall figure in a long coat, hatless, his dark hair blowing across his face in the wind. Even from that distance she saw the white streak in it. She saw the gloved hand on the pommel. She saw him look at her, and she saw his whole body go still, in the way of an animal that has smelled something it has been hunting for a lifetime and cannot believe is real.

Then he dismounted.

He did it badly. His foot caught in the stirrup. He stumbled, and caught himself on the saddle, and stood there for a moment with his forehead against the horse's neck. His shoulders shook. When he straightened, he let the reins fall, and the stallion, wise beast, stood where it was.

He began to walk.

She watched him come.

She did not move. She could not have. She stood on the pale ground with her hands at her sides and the wind in her hair, and each step he took was a hundred years. He was thin. That was the first thing she saw. He had always been lean, but now he was gaunt, drawn, his cheekbones standing out like blades. His coat hung from his shoulders as from a hanger. His eyes were sunken in dark pits. And the face around them, the long jaw and the straight stubborn brow and the mouth she knew like the back of her hand, was unlined, unmarked, as young as the day she had left.

It was the most terrible thing she had ever seen.

He stopped ten paces away.

…

For a long time neither of them spoke.

The wind blew over the plain. The ash stirred in small spirals, and settled. Somewhere very far off a bird was crying. She heard her own breath, shallow and fast, and his, and the creak of the black leather of his gloves as he opened and closed one hand.

She had forgotten how tall he was.

She had forgotten the way he held himself: that slight forward stoop of the head, as of a man who spends his life listening for footsteps behind him. She had forgotten the small scar at the corner of his eye. She had forgotten the exact shade of his hair, the black of a raven's wing, and the single streak of white like a fold in cloth. She drank him in with her eyes, helplessly, greedily, as one drinks after a fever.

And in the back of her mind, quite clearly, a voice said: This is the man who burned nine million.

And another, quieter, said: This is the man who tore up his father's last page to keep you.

She had no idea which to believe.

"Sol," said Kieran.

His voice cracked on it. It was thin, rough, shaky with disuse, the voice of a man who has not said a thing aloud in a very long time. He tried again.

"Sol."

She could not answer.

"I..." He stopped. He wet his lips. The gloved hand rose, and fell. "I had a speech."

Despite herself, she felt her mouth twitch.

"It was very good," said Kieran. His eyes were bright and wild. "I wrote it on the way. I had a whole structure. I had an apology, and a, a, a defense, and a section on the, the mitigating circumstances, and a, a concluding..." He stopped. He gave a choked, terrible laugh. "It's gone. I can't remember a word. I've been rehearsing it in my head for nine hundred years and now it's gone."

"Kieran."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't."

"I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, Sol." The words were pouring out of him, helpless, hoarse. "I broke every promise I made. I lied to you. I said nothing when you asked. I put you in the chains, and I... and the people, I, I killed so many... it wasn't you, it was never you, I swear it, but I... I did it in your name. I made them say it. I made a monument of..."

"Stop."

He stopped.

She had not raised her voice. She had not moved. But something in the way she said it, flat and quiet and cold, made him fall silent, as a man falls silent at the sound of his own name in a courtroom. He stood trembling, with his hands open, his face stripped bare.

"Please don't say it all at once," she said. "I can't hold it."

"I'm sorry."

"I know you are."

"I'll do whatever you—"

"I know." She drew a breath. It hurt. "Kieran. Look at me."

He looked.

"Do you know who I am?"

It was a strange question. She had not planned it. But it came out of her whole and clear, from some deep place she had not known was open, and she saw it land. His lips parted. A kind of dazed, trembling wonder came over his face.

"You're Solaia," he said slowly. "You're Solaia Vraelyra. You're twenty-four, and a beggar, and a queen. You're the woman who burns the soup." His voice shook. "You say 'Wench' to me when you're fond and 'Your Majesty' when you're angry. You hum in the kitchen. You cry at weddings, and say it's the smoke. You forgave me for a lie I told you in the spring, and I never once deserved it."

She closed her eyes.

"You said 'Be small.' You said 'I trust you.' You said 'I'm choosing you, don't forget it.'" The wind caught his coat. "I didn't. I swear. I had a book. I wrote it down, in the first year. I wrote everything. And when the Night took it, I read the book, and when the book began to fade I... I held on with my bare hands."

"Kieran."

"I never forgot. Not once. Not in nine hundred years."

She opened her eyes.

He was crying. He was not hiding it. He stood in the center of the Plain of Ash with his face wet and his hands hanging at his sides, a tall gaunt man in a black coat, and he looked at her, and in his gray eyes there was neither plea nor defense. There was only the plain, naked, unbearable fact of being seen.

And she found, to her enormous surprise, that she was not angry.

Not yet. It would come, perhaps. It would come, very likely, in the long nights, with the weight of nine million graves on her chest. But at that moment, in the cold sun, with the wind in her hair, she felt only the thing she had felt on the Ridge, when she knelt by his body: a great and weary tenderness. She felt it spread through her, warm as tea.

"You're thin," she said.

He blinked.

"You never eat. I can tell." She crossed her arms, hard, to keep them from reaching. "You look dreadful, Kieran. You look like a corpse that someone dressed for a funeral."

He stared at her. And then, helplessly, he began to laugh.

It was the laugh from the letter, hoarse and cracked and wet, and it shook him to his knees. He went down on the white ground, quite suddenly, with his gloved hands over his face, and laughed and laughed and could not stop. She stood above him, and her own mouth was shaking, and the tears ran down her cheeks and into her collar. The wind took the sound of it and carried it away over the plain.

"Don't," she said. "Don't. You'll make me do it, too."

"I can't—"

"Get up."

"I'm trying—"

"Get up."

He got up. He swayed. He wiped his face on his sleeve, and looked at her, and the laughter drained out of him as water drains from sand. The gray eyes went still.

"You're still beautiful," he said.

She said nothing.

"You haven't changed. Not a day." His voice was very low. "I thought I'd forgotten. I thought I'd made you up, in the end, out of grief. But you're exactly... You're exactly the same."

"You haven't, either."

"No." The ghost of a smile touched his mouth. "That's the trouble. I look just as I did. And I have not been well for a long time." He took off his glove, one finger at a time, and held out his hand, bare, palm up, into the cold air between them. It was thin, and pale, and lined with black veins, and it shook. "You're still beautiful, Sol. I'm not."

She looked at the hand.

On the smallest finger, dull and gray in the sunlight, there was a silver ring. And as she watched, it began, very faintly, to glow.