GOLD AND GREEN

She did not choose, because she had never in her life been any good at arithmetic that treated people as numbers.

She stood in the shelter of the gallery arch with Lila clutched against her side and the golden rain hissing on the stair behind her, and she listened to the Chancellor's voice die away into the pipes, and she understood with sudden crystal clarity what he was. He was a man who could only count. He had spent his whole life weighing one life against another, ten against a hundred, a child against a city, and he had grown so used to the scale that he had forgotten there was any other way to stand in a room. It had never occurred to him that a person might simply decline to be weighed.

"I will not do it," said Tamsin aloud.

"Do what, my dear?" It was Granny, small and gray and shaking, with her stick planted before her.

"I will not choose. He wants me to say that one of them must be sacrificed for the other, the Rootkin in the cells or the people in the Cathedral, and he is quite right that the Well will burst if I free the one, and equally right that it will go on murdering if I free the other. He has made it so that every road leads through someone's death." She drew a deep breath, and the smell of sulfur and smoke bit her throat. "But the Well is not a machine, Granny. It is a river. It is only a river that has been made to forget what it is. And I do not think that anyone has ever asked it to remember."

The old woman looked at her for a long moment.

"Your mother used to talk like that," she said at last, in an odd, thick voice. "When she was little. She said that the creek was sad because nobody had asked it how it was."

"Then perhaps she was right." Tamsin turned to the people around her, to the hundreds of faces lit green and gold by the glow of the pit, the miners and the washerwomen, the white-haired Bayou men, the freed sleepers in their rags. "Listen to me. All of you. We are going up. We are going to climb out of this place into the Cathedral, and we are going to stand in the middle of it, in front of the Well, and we are going to sing to it. Not to the Chancellor. Not to the Founders. To the water. And I need every one of you to sing as you have never sung before."

"You want us to go up there?" said the red-haired miner. His face was streaked with soot and tears. "Into all of that?"

"Into all of it, and as quickly as we can."

For a moment she thought they would not follow. She saw the fear on their faces, a hundred thousand years of it, the flinch of people who have been told since birth that to be seen is to die. Then Lila let go of her hand, stepped out of the arch into the golden rain, and began to climb the stair.

…

They came out of the crypt in a long ragged line, and the Cathedral was on fire.

She had not known what to expect. She had braced herself for the beauty of it, the soaring pillars and the colored windows, the ranks of silken Gilded. What she saw was a ruin. The nave floor had split from end to end in a jagged black crack, and from it, and from every joint between the flagstones, there poured a thick sulfurous flood of burning yellow that ran along the aisles and between the pews and set the wood alight. Chandeliers lay smashed in heaps of crystal. The great east window had burst, and daylight poured through the hole in a column of gray dust. The vault had fallen in a heap near the choir. Smoke hung in layers under the roof. And in the center of it all, where the altar had stood, a vast round hole gaped in the floor like a mouth, and out of it, with a deep, slow, wild boiling, rose a column of liquid light.

It was the Sunwell, risen to the surface.

She stood for an instant at the head of the crypt stair, with the roots of her song still green about her wrists, and the sight of it struck her silent. The pit had thrown up the whole body of its fire into the nave. The surface seethed in a ring of molten yellow forty feet across, heaving and bubbling, spitting great gouts of flame at the vault, and the heat that came off it was like the opening of a furnace. Around it the people of the Gilded cowered against the walls, in their furs and their jewels, huddled under pews and behind pillars with their arms about each other and their faces turned away. A bishop was praying in a high wavering voice. A lady in a diamond tiara was sobbing against a statue's knees.

And on the far side of the pit, at the rim, with a gold sword fallen from his hand, stood Soren.

…

Their eyes met across the fire.

It was only a moment. She saw his face in the glare, black-smeared and bleeding, his coat torn, one arm hanging stiffly at his side, and she saw it change as he recognized her. She saw the whole gaunt, battered, exhausted length of him go suddenly alive, like a candle flame leaping when a window is opened, and the shout that burst from him was swallowed by the roar of the Well. She did not hear it. She did not need to. She laughed aloud, and the sound was half a sob, and she thought, I knew he would be alive. I knew it.

"Lila, take Jonah's hand, and Granny's!" she shouted over the din. "All of you, form a ring around the pit and keep the circle tight!"

The Rootkin spread out. They fanned from the crypt stair around the edge of the pit in a vast ragged crescent, men and women and children holding hands, their faces lit from beneath by the hot yellow glow. The heat blistered the skin of their cheeks, and still they came. Dorian led the way with Jonah on one side and a Bayou grandmother on the other. Granny Odell set her stick against her hip and took a miner's hand in each of hers. The Hollows people closed in on the left, and the Bayou people on the right, and at the center, at the very brink of the boiling pool, with the fire roaring up before her face, Tamsin knelt and laid both palms on the cracked stone of the rim.

Please, she thought. Please be listening.

She closed her eyes, and sang.

…

It began as a thread.

It began as the thinnest, frailest strand of green, a hair of light that ran out from her palms into the stone and down. She had done this before. She had rooted the Glasshouse, and the nursery, and the dying child in the infirmary, and every time it had been a matter of finding the one thread among the many and following it to its end. But this time she did not follow. She let go. She opened her hands, and her mind, and every door within her, and let the thread go where it would, down through the foundations of the Cathedral, down through the black glass of the Cistern, down into the old roaring heart of the Sunwell.

And it found the river.

She felt it as a great cold shock, like plunging into the sea. The Silverwater lay beneath the city in its ancient bed, a dark vein of water six miles long, wound about the roots of the cliffs, and the Well was the knot in it, the place where the blood had been poured and the water had turned. She felt the poison. She felt the gray salt of three hundred years lying in the silt like a sickness, and the white filaments of gilt threaded through every pebble, and the slow, vast, sullen anger of a river that has been forced to carry a lie. And she felt past it, and beyond it, up and up the dark stream, toward the headwaters, to a spring ringed with willows in a green valley where a young man in a velvet coat had once knelt with a sack in his hands.

I see you, she sang, without words. I see you, and I know what they did to you, and I have come to ask how you are.

The river did not answer. It was too old, and too hurt. But something in the great dark body of it stirred, a slow turning, like a sleeper who has heard his name.

"Sing with me, all of you, and sing it now!" she cried aloud, in the brief pause between the phrases.

The ring of people took up the song.

…

It rolled around the rim of the pit like a wave, with the full-throated, many-voiced, ragged power of a congregation that has been silent for centuries. She heard Granny's cracked old contralto. She heard Dorian, bellowing the tune in a tuneless baritone, utterly happy. She heard the Bayou singers, who gave it a wild rolling lilt that she had never heard, and the Hollows men, who sang it as they sang their hymns, low and grave and strong. And above them all, clear and pure as a silver bell, Lila's voice rose. The child had climbed on the stone beside Tamsin and stood with her palms flung out and her head thrown back and her green eyes blazing, and the song poured out of her like light from a lamp.

The green answered.

It sprang up from the cracks of the floor, from the splits in the stone, from the very dust of the fallen vault, in a great wild surge of living growth. Roots as thick as a man's arm thrust up through the nave and spread across the flagstones. They wound about the pillars and climbed them in spirals. They crept over the pews, and where they touched the burning yellow flood, the flames hissed and died. Ivy poured down the walls. White flowers burst from the cracks of the broken windows. The vast carved stone of the Cathedral of the Founders, which had stood for three hundred years as a monument to a lie, began to bloom.

Now, she thought. Now, all of you. Follow it down.

And she let the song go out along the river.

…

She felt it spread. It was like watching frost flower on a window in reverse, a bright green web of life, running out from her hands. It went south, down the course of the Silverwater, beneath the cliffs, past the Old Quarter, under the bridges and the wharves. It spread to the Calder weir where the gray salt had first been seen in 1789, and the water there flickered, and a clear thread unspooled. She felt Ash Row. The whole population of the Ward had come out to the fence, forty thousand strong, and was singing, just as Granny's runners had told them to sing at the third bell, and she felt the standpipe in the alley run suddenly clean. She felt Marrow Creek. She felt the narrow bright stream that Lila had begun there running broader, and the hawthorns shaking in the wind, and old men on their porches who had never lifted their heads straightening up with astonishment in their faces.

She felt the Bayou, a thousand miles to the south, where the great slow water crept among the cypresses and the ancient black church at the bend of the river was packed to the rafters with people on their knees, singing in the French of their grandmothers. She felt the Frost Coast, and the Prairie, and the far grain-pale rivers of the west. They were all of them linked to one another by the water, as the roots of a forest are linked by the earth, and she touched them one by one, and one by one they woke.

And all of them were singing.

It is too much, she thought. It is more than I can carry.

For she was the center of it. She was the single tight knot at which the whole great net of song and water was drawn. The weight of it came down upon her, the weight of a continent, the weight of ten thousand voices and three hundred years, and she felt her bones creak under it. The nosebleed came, warm and sudden. Her heart stuttered. The song was growing, and she was too small to hold it, and she saw with a dreadful lucid certainty that it would not be enough. She had the river, and she had the people, but she had no spark. The Well was a furnace, and the singing was a wind, and a wind alone could not put out a fire. It needed something to start the change, a seed, a drop, one pure unpoisoned thing to carry the green down into the heart of the water and make it turn.

Plant it where the water's sick.

She opened her eyes. In front of her the Sunwell boiled, roaring, flinging up gouts of poison gold. She lifted her right hand off the stone, and looked at the wrist.

…

It was Dorian who had given her the knife, in the passage, with a sort of shamefaced apology, "in case you need to cut a rope." She drew it from her belt. The blade was short and thin and bright. She turned her left wrist upward, where the blue veins ran under the skin, and set the edge against it, and did not give herself time to think.

The cut was quick and clean.

Blood welled out, dark red, and ran down her palm and her fingers in a bright thread. It was warm. She held her arm out over the rim of the pit, at arm's length, over the roaring, burning pool, and watched it fall.

The first drop struck the surface of the Well with a hiss.

It did not vanish. It lay on the yellow fire like a bead of oil on water, perfectly round, perfectly red. And then it flamed. It went up all at once in a pillar of vivid emerald light, a clean cold green fire, as bright as the first leaf of spring, and the green ran out across the surface of the Well in a spreading ring, like a stone dropped in a pond. Where it touched, the yellow darkened, and clouded, and curdled. The roar of the pit stuttered. The great mass of boiling fire faltered in its rising.

"Tamsin, you must stop!" she heard someone scream. "You are killing yourself!"

She did not stop. She could not. The blood ran down her arm in a steady stream, and drop by drop the green fire grew, and the strength went out of her with it, in long slow tides. She felt her knees go. She felt the cold come creeping up her arms and into her chest, and the black edges of the world begin to close. Her lungs would not fill. Every breath was thinner than the last, and the song that she had been holding with all her will frayed in her throat and began to break apart.

I cannot stop now, she thought, because it is only half turned.

But her hand was growing too heavy to hold out. It shook and then drooped, and the blood slowed to a trickle, and the green flame sank, and the yellow rose again beneath it with a hungry roar.

I cannot hold it any longer, thought Tamsin. I am so sorry that I could not do more.

…

A hand closed on her shoulder.

It was warm. It was warm and strong and rough, and it had a callus along the thumb that she knew. It did not pull her back from the edge. It did not try to stop her. It only rested there, solid, a weight at her back, and a voice said in her ear, low and steady and utterly unafraid, "I am here."

"Soren, is that really you?" she whispered. "It is too hot, and I am not enough."

"You are more than enough. You are the only one who ever was." He knelt behind her on the cracked stone, in the roaring heat, with his arm round her waist and his bare palm on her shoulder, and his breath was against her ear. "But I think that you are not meant to do it alone. Tell me what to do."

She laughed, a thin cracked ghost of a laugh. "You said that on a roof once."

"And you told me to stand up and fight with you. I am standing, so tell me what you need."

"The gold," said Tamsin. Her voice was almost gone. "The gold was always ours. It was only stolen. It was the green with a gilding on it, and it knew what it was, once. If you give it to me, not as a weapon, but as an anchor, to hold the balance, so that I do not burn out..."

She did not finish. He did not need her to.

The light poured out of him.

It came from the hand on her shoulder, a clean steady flood of gold, without a trace of the hard poisonous yellow of the Well. It was the light of ballrooms and winter mornings, of candlelit libraries and a child's first laugh, the warm fine gold of the Gilded in its true nature, and it went into her like the sun coming through a window. She felt it settle in her bones. She felt it meet the green in her blood, and mingle, and not conquer, but wind itself round the green as the tendril of a vine winds round a trellis, so that each held the other up. Her heart steadied. The cold withdrew. The black edges of the world drew back, and she drew a breath, and it was deep.

Oh, she thought, this is what it was meant to be.

…

The two lights met in the Well.

She poured her blood into the heart of the pit, and he poured his gold, and between them, in the middle of the boiling fire, a shape took form. It was a pillar of light, green wound with gold, gold wound with green, spiraling upward in a double helix that rose to the broken vault and burst through the hole in the roof into the gray winter sky. And it sang. The whole column hummed with the Rooting Song, high and pure, and above it, in the clear small space between the notes, she heard another voice, a woman's, low and warm and true, humming the lullaby.

"Mama is singing to us," said Lila, in a whisper that carried to the farthest wall.

Soren's breath caught against her ear.

"I hear her," he said hoarsely. "Tamsin, I can hear her."

Down by the creek where the green things grow, sang the voice from the water, and it was not sad anymore. The water runs clear, and the willows bow low.

The Sunwell burst.

It did not explode as she had feared. It broke like a wave on a shore, a vast soft shattering, and the burning yellow fire went up into the air in a million glittering drops, and the drops were clear. They were water. They were pure, cold, sweet, shining water, and they fell on the Cathedral like a spring rain. They fell on the roots and the ivy and the white flowers. They fell on the faces of the Gilded, who lifted their heads in amazement and held out their hands. They fell on the scorched floor, and the fires went out in long hissing sighs, and the stone drank them in. The water sank into the cracks. It poured down the walls. It ran along the foundations of the Cathedral in thousands of tiny bright streams, finding the old conduits, the pipes and the culverts and the buried channels, and swept away beneath the streets of Highmark toward the river, singing.

…

She was lying on the stone.

She did not know how she had come there. Her head was in his lap, and his arm was beneath her shoulders, and the clean rain was falling on her face, cool and fresh, the best thing she had ever felt. The Cathedral was silent. The roaring had stopped. She could hear water running somewhere, and the soft breathing of two thousand people, and a child laughing in a high clear voice that was Lila's. Her wrist had been bound with a strip of torn silk. She did not remember that either. The sky above the broken roof was a washed and shining blue.

Soren was bending over her. His face was wet. She could not tell whether it was rain.

"Tell me the truth," she said. It was hard to speak. Her lips would not shape the words. "Is it clean?"

"It is clean, love." His voice broke. He pressed his cheek to her hair, and she felt him shaking. "It is perfectly clean, and it is going to stay that way."

She smiled, and wished to tell him that she was glad, that she had always known, that she would like to go home now and sleep for a hundred years. But the black edges of the world had come creeping back, soft and warm as a blanket, and she found that she was very tired. Her eyelids were heavy. She let them fall.

"Tamsin, can you hear me?" said Soren sharply. "Please look at me."

She heard his voice, a long way off. She felt his hand on her face, and then on her throat, searching. She felt the pulse beneath his fingers, faint and fluttering and thin as a thread, and she heard him say her name again, and again, and then nothing at all.