A CRACK IN THE ASH

We camped that night at the shepherd's hut, in the foothills, because I could not bear to ride any farther.

I said it was the horses. I said they were tired. Hawk, who was a kind man and a poor liar, agreed gravely that they were. Josie put on a pot of beans. Nimbus disappeared into the dusk on one of his private expeditions, and returned an hour later, bloody to the whiskers, with a dead rabbit, which he laid at my feet with an air of grave ceremony and then ate himself.

We sat round the fire in the dooryard. No one spoke much. The sun went down behind the mountain, and the sky turned the color of a peach, and then a plum, and the first stars came out, hard and white. The air smelled of juniper smoke and hot iron. A cricket was singing in the grass.

I ate nothing. I held a tin cup between my palms, and watched the flames.

I felt perfectly well.

That was the odd thing. I had expected a collapse, some sort of storm. I had not slept in two days. I had gone through the Awakening, and a battle, and a killing. I had stood in a white road and unmade a man. I should have been wrung out. But I sat by the fire with my hands wrapped round a cup of tea, and I felt calm and clear and lightly, brilliantly empty, like a bell that has stopped ringing.

It was very peaceful.

It lasted until Josie, who had been watching me sidelong for an hour, put down her spoon and said, in an unsteady voice: "Tam, you can say something if you want."

"I'm all right."

"I know."

"I'm only tired."

"I know." She sniffed. "I just thought—I thought you might want to say something. About him. About... you know." She waved a hand. "I wouldn't mind."

"There's nothing to say."

"Oh."

"He's gone." I turned the cup in my hands. "It's done. I'm quite all right, Josie. Truly. I feel nothing at all."

She looked at me. Her round freckled face puckered, as if she were about to argue. Then she looked at Hawk, and Hawk shook his head, very slightly. She sighed, and picked up her spoon.

I drank the tea.

It was a mistake. It was strong and hot and sweet with sugar, the way Josie made it, and the first swallow brought up something I had not known was there. A smell, a taste, an association. Tea in a cold kitchen, years ago, in a house on the Redwater. A big rough hand pushing a mug across a table. A voice saying, in the plain, gruff, tender accent of the Frontier: Drink up, Tam. It'll put hair on your chest.

My hand shook.

I put down the cup. I stood up.

"I'm going for a walk," I said.

…

I did not get far.

I walked out of the firelight, across the dooryard, through a gap in a dry-stone wall, and up a stony slope behind the hut. It was dark. A thin moon had risen, sharp as a sickle. I climbed to the top of a boulder, as I had climbed to the tops of boulders as a child, and sat down with my arms round my knees.

Below me, the fire glowed. I could see the hut, a low square shape, and the little circle of figures round the flames. I could hear a faint murmur of voices. A mule shifted in the corral. Above and behind me, vast, black, enormous, the mountain rose against the stars.

I looked at it.

I had been inside it. I had been struck by the sky. I had become something that the world had not made in sixty years. I had killed my oldest friend's child, and my oldest enemy's. I was the strongest woman in the Republic. I was, in every measurable sense, finished.

I put my face on my knees, and began to cry.

It was not graceful. It did not come in a single clean sob. It came the way a river comes after a long drought, with a terrible slowness, and then all at once. It tore out of me. My shoulders shook. My chest heaved. I made a sound I did not recognize, a raw, ugly, strangled thing, like an animal in a trap. I pressed my fist against my mouth. It did no good.

I wept for the girl in the white dress. I wept for the girl on the sand. I wept for the girl in the Menagerie box, who had been loved by nobody and had loved everybody, and had trusted. I wept for a man in a leather apron, with a screwdriver behind his ear. I wept for a woman I had never met, who had looked at a baby and said, remember her name. I wept for Hale, on his wall. For the Wraith in the Mist. For forty-three people in a cellar. For a stranger with a pocket-glass.

I wept for the boy in the road, who had said thank you.

I did not weep for Alden. It was not for him. It was for all of it, the whole vast, obscene, patient apparatus of loss, everything that had been taken and everything that I had done. It poured out of me. It went on and on. I thought that it would never stop.

I do not know how long it lasted.

…

When it was over I was lying on my side on the boulder, with my knees drawn up, and my face in the crook of my arm. I was hollow, scraped, trembling. My throat was raw. My eyes burned. The moon had moved a hand's breadth.

Someone was sitting beside me.

I did not look. I knew who it was by the weight of him on the stone, and the faint smell of woodsmoke and iron. He did not touch me. He sat with his knees drawn up, his hands loosely clasped, and his eyes on the dark. He had been there, I thought, for some time. He had not said a word.

I lay there, with my face hidden.

"I'm sorry," I said at last. It came out a croak.

"For what?"

"I was loud."

"You were not."

"I made a spectacle."

"There was no one to see it but me." His voice was quiet. "And I have seen a great deal worse."

I almost laughed. It hurt.

After a while I sat up. I wiped my face on my sleeve, which only made it worse, and hugged my knees. My breath still came unevenly. I did not look at him. I looked at the lights of the hut.

"I told you I felt nothing," I said.

"You did."

"It was a lie."

"I know."

"I didn't know it was a lie. I truly thought—" I shook my head. "I thought it had been burned out. The hollow. I thought there was nothing left."

"There is always something left."

"I know that now."

He was silent.

I said slowly, "I used to think that trusting people was weakness. That's what I told myself, after the Menagerie. That was the whole lesson. I trusted, and I died. Therefore trust is a flaw, a hole in the armor. I went about for two years with my armor on, and I thought I was strong."

"And now?"

"And now I think—" I stopped. I swallowed. My voice was shaking. "I think that trusting the wrong person was the weakness. Not trust itself. I think I had it backward. It's not that I loved too easily. It's that I loved carelessly. I never looked. I never counted. I gave everything, and never asked what it was for."

"Yes."

"Is that true?"

"I think it is."

"I think—" I drew a breath. "I think it's the only thing I've learned."

He turned his head.

In the dim light I could see the lines of his face, hard and grave and weathered, the gray eyes bright. He looked at me as he always did, directly, without flinching, as though I were a thing worth looking at. He did not smile.

"Tamsin," said Declan.

"What?"

"You have just trusted one person correctly."

I stared.

"Not the boy," he said gently. "Not the Dean. Not the cat, though she has earned it. You have trusted a man you met in chains, in the dark, in a cell, who might have been a monster. You examined the lock. You made your terms. You said, I will remove one chain, and no more, and you waited to see what I would do." The corner of his mouth lifted. "And I did nothing. Because I had promised. And you looked at me, and you saw it, and you trusted me anyway."

My throat closed.

"That is not weakness," he said. "That is the thing the Sovereigns were made of. They did not trust blindly. They trusted accurately. They looked, and counted, and chose." He paused. "You chose well."

I did not know what to say.

I put my head on his shoulder.

…

We went back to the fire at midnight.

The others had gone to bed. Hawk and Josie slept under a blanket by the wall of the hut, back to back, snoring. The embers glowed red in the dooryard. Nimbus lay on the roof, a pale curled shape against the stars, one silver eye open.

I did not go to my bedroll.

There was a rough bunk in the corner of the shepherd's shed, a plank platform spread with sheepskins, that Declan had claimed as his own. I stood in the door and looked at it. I looked at him. He was standing by the wall with his arms at his sides, in the dark, quite still, and I knew without being told that he would not move unless I did.

"I don't want to be alone," I said.

"Then you shall not be."

"I don't mean—" I bit my lip. "I don't know what I mean."

"I know."

"I only want—"

"Tamsin." He crossed the floor in three strides. He took my face between his hands, and tilted it up, and looked at me for a long moment. His eyes were steady and kind. "I will lie down on that bed. You will lie down beside me. We will sleep. That is all. If it becomes anything else, it will be because you have chosen it, and not before." A faint smile. "Does that suit?"

I nodded. I could not speak.

We lay down on the sheepskins, in our clothes, under a single blanket. The plank was hard. The shed smelled of wool and tallow and dust. He lay on his back, with one arm stretched out, and I fitted myself against his side, with my head on his shoulder and my hand on his chest. I could feel his heart. It was slow, and steady, and strong, like a drum in a distant room.

I closed my eyes.

I thought I would not sleep. I thought the day would come back, in pieces: the road, the ash, the white sky. But there was only the warmth of him, the weight of his arm, the rise and fall of his breath. A great quiet settled on me. It was not the quiet of the hollow place. It was a fuller one, a ripe, warm, drowsing stillness, like the hush of a house at night, when the whole family is home.

I slept.

It was the first real sleep I had had in two lives.

…

I woke to sunlight and the smell of coffee.

Josie was sitting on an upturned crate by the door, with a mug in each hand and an expression of exquisite carefulness. She held out one. I took it.

"I didn't see anything," she said, in a whisper.

"Thank you."

"I didn't see anything. I was asleep. I have been asleep all night." She was bright pink. "Hawk was asleep too. He sleeps like the dead. It's a known fact."

I could feel my cheeks warm. I took a long swallow of coffee.

On the bunk behind me, the blankets stirred. A long arm reached out and drew me gently back, and I let it. Declan was awake. He had not opened his eyes. His face, in the gray light, was oddly young, and the scar on his cheek was white against the tan.

"Is she looking?" he murmured into my hair.

"She says she isn't."

"A diplomat." His lips moved against my neck. "I shall make her Secretary of State."

"Declan!" hissed Josie, scarlet, and fled the shed.

I laughed. I laughed until the coffee spilled.

…

The news came at noon.

It came by a boy on a lathered horse, who rode up the track from the south in a cloud of dust and flung himself from the saddle at our feet. He was fifteen, thin, wide-eyed, in a livery of plain gray. I knew the badge on his collar. It was a small bronze oak-leaf, crossed with a quill.

Calloway Arcane Academy.

"For Miss Reeve," he panted. "From the Dean. She said I was to put it in your hand and no one else's."

I took it. It was a small envelope of cream paper, sealed with a plain blot of gray wax. I broke the seal. A single sheet. A handwriting I would have known anywhere: square, upright, severe.

Miss Reeve—

The Chancellor has declared a State of Emergency. As of this morning he commands the Marshal Corps, the Guard, and the Relay. He has summoned the Senate to an extraordinary session at noon on the fifteenth. The capital will be sealed. The gates will be closed. The roads are under watch.

I understand that it is you he intends to meet.

I have kept the keys of the Academy for twenty-two years. There is a postern in the north wall, behind the old kitchens, that has not been guarded since my predecessor's day. It opens on the cloister, and the cloister on the Great Hall, and the Great Hall on the Senate by the Founders' Stair. I shall unlock it at midnight on the fourteenth.

I do this against every instinct for self-preservation I possess. I do it because I have seen a girl stand on a dais and read page forty to the Senate of Houses, and I have been ashamed of my own silence ever since.

Do not let me regret it.

—M. Holloway