THE BLIZZARD (II)

Day 28 of 100

She slept at last a little after midnight, and Rooke did not.

He sat with his back against the limestone and his knees drawn up and his coat over her. She lay on her side on the dry leaves with her cheek on her folded gloves, and the fire had sunk to a heap of red coals that lit the roof of the cave a dull rose. The storm went on. It had a voice by now, several voices: a long wail from the north, a deep note in the rock, a continuous hiss of snow driven across the mouth of the shelter like sand across a floor.

He had said he would try to hate her, and he had known it was a lie as it left his mouth.

Nothing you can tell me would make me hate you.

It had been a boy's speech. It was the kind of thing a man says in a cave, at one in the morning, with his heart in his mouth. He had never in his life made a promise he did not intend to keep, and he was dismayed to find that he intended to keep it.

She is lying to you, said the cold voice.

Yes.

She has told you so, to your face. She has a false name, a false hand, a false past. She has been inside the Wardens' own archive for three weeks. She is, by her own account, the worst sort of liar.

Yes.

And she is shaking in her sleep.

He looked down.

She was. A slow fine tremor ran through her shoulders and her breath came short, as of one who dreams of running. A strand of the cropped brown hair had fallen over her cheek. He wanted, with a want that went all the way down, to put it back.

He did not. He let the Sight come up instead.

…

He had never done it at such length, or with such a purpose.

It was a skill he'd had since the age of eleven, when the first soul had swum up out of the air at his father's table and he had cried out and been struck for it. It was nothing like seeing. It was a kind of listening with the eyes: a loosening, a softening, in which the solid world went thin and the other one came forward. The cave dissolved. The coals became a bloom of dull gold. Even the storm took color, a vast gray-violet surge beyond the rock.

And in the middle of it, curled on the leaves, Nell Fenwick.

He'd seen her light before. He'd called it a candle in a draft. But in the quiet, with the fire low and the whole world turned off, he saw how wrong the words had been.

It was not a candle. It was a half.

The shape of it was clear to him now, as clear as a sentence he had read many times and only now understood. A wing of pale blue-silver, rising from her shoulder in a curve, delicate as the vane of a feather. It reached, it bent, it ended in the air. And where the other wing should have been there was nothing. There was a clean line, running straight up through the center of her, as cleanly as a seam drawn with a rule: and on the far side of the line, nothing at all.

Cut, he thought. It has been cut.

He knew the look of it. He had seen it once before, in a dim lamplit room in Burlington, on a still gray figure in a bed, who knew his son and did not know himself. A thing taken out and sewn up smooth.

But this was not sewn. It was bleeding.

That was the horror of it. At the edge of the cut, the light was fraying. It trailed off into a drift of pale motes, like flour in a draft, rising and dissolving and gone. He watched them go. They went up from her in the red dark, one by one by one, as steadily as sand through a glass; and he understood, with the slow cold thud of a coffin lid, that he had been looking at it for three weeks and calling it a flaw.

She is losing it.

She is losing herself.

The golden thread still ran through the middle. It was brighter than ever. It seemed to him the one fixed thing in the whole shimmering ruin, a taut white wire from crown to heel; and he saw now that the thread did not end where the light ended. It went on.

It passed out of her at the cut, and through the rock, and into the storm.

…

He followed it with his eyes.

He should not have been able to. He knew that. The Sight had its limits, and the greatest was distance; to see a soul more than a few yards away, through stone, took a clarity that he had seen in no one else. But he had been watching this thread for twenty-eight days, and he had never been so sure of what he was doing.

It ran south and west. It ran down the slope of the hill, and out over the white fields, and across the river, a fine thin shining filament as straight as a plumb-line, humming with a note he could feel in his teeth. It ran over barns and fences, a roof, a steeple. It ran for thirteen miles.

It ended, at the far side of the dark, in a blaze.

He felt it before he saw it. A great clean tower of fire, steady in the heart of the storm, standing at the edge of the world like a lighthouse: silver and blue, with a core of coal-red. Complete. It did not waver. It did not lean. It filled the horizon, and pulled at the thread with a slow warm persistent force, like a hand drawing in a line.

Ashgrove.

He knew it as one knows a chord.

He sat in the cave with his head back against the rock, and the Sight ran out of him like water, and the fire was only a fire again, and the girl on the leaves was only a girl. His heart was thudding. The palms of his hands were wet.

They are one, thought Rooke.

He said it again, to be sure. They are one soul.

Not a family trait. Not a half-sister, or a cousin, or a by-blow of the same father. The same light. The same blue. The same shape, in half. One was a full circle, the other the same circle with a bite out of it; and the bite was the missing piece; and the piece was —

She is the other half of her.

He could not go on. The thing was too large. It stood in front of him like a mountain in a fog, whose outlines he could see but not its face. And somewhere in the middle of the fog, small and perfectly distinct, a single question put itself.

If one soul is in two places, which is the person?

…

He thought of the dais.

He did not want to. He sat in the red dark and tried to push it off, but it came anyway: the cold of the chapel, the torches, the long hush; and a girl, a tall girl in a white gown, with a plait down her back and a book clutched to her chest like a shield, who had walked up the aisle at the head of the line of Ascendants with her chin high and her hands shaking. He had been at the foot of the dais, as Warden of the Peace, to see the sigils woke. He had not been looking at anyone. He'd been looking at the Stone.

And then she had laid her hand on it.

He had seen the light go up in her like a flame in a lamp. He had seen the sigil wake: a three-armed star, silver-blue, bright as a coin. He had seen the crack. And he'd felt something lurch in his chest, quite hard, as when a horse stumbles on a stair.

I know you.

He'd felt it at once, with absolute certainty, and with no notion why. It was not the Sight. It was older. It was a thing in the marrow, the sort of recognition that comes to a man who hears a tune from his childhood across a crowded street.

I know you, and I have wronged you, and I have been waiting ten years to find out how.

And then the girl had turned and screamed, and there had been two of her.

He had spent four weeks telling himself that his heart's lurch on the dais had been shock. A tremor of the Sight. The ordinary strain on an officer at the sight of a Doppel in a crowd. He had written the report in a state of the most perfect self-control. He had gone to the library and looked at the red-clad girl in the blue dress, a model of recovery, a wonder, and he'd felt nothing, and had despised himself for feeling nothing, and had called the nothing professional.

And all that time he had been drawn, against his every wish, to the small gray clerk with her spectacles and her sums.

Nell.

It was not that he'd fallen in love with the wrong woman. It was that he'd fallen in love with the same one. Twice. In two bodies. The first time, in the chapel, in a second's blaze; the second, slowly, over thirty days of ink and tea.

The same soul. The same bright, stubborn, unbreakable thing.

What do I owe, he thought, to a woman who is in two places?

And what does she owe me?

…

He did not know how long he sat there.

The coals ticked. The wind dropped by degrees, fell to a moan, and then to a sigh. At some time before dawn the roar of the snow outside ceased altogether, and in the profound hush that followed he heard the mare breathing and the little hiss of the dying fire. It was very cold. He fed the coals with the last of the bracken. He tucked his coat tighter around the sleeping girl.

She stirred. She said something, indistinct, with her mouth against the leaves.

"What?" whispered Rooke.

"—Cal."

It was barely a breath. She had not woken. Her lashes lay on her cheek, and her hand was curled loosely on the leaves, very thin, very pale, with the firelight shining faintly through the bone.

He sat perfectly still.

It was the third time she had said it. He had counted. On the hill at Merrow. In the pit of the Bureau Annex. And now this, in her sleep, to nobody, in a voice as worn as a prayer.

Nobody has called me that in ten years.

He had said that to her once. He'd been sorry afterward. It was a name that belonged to a time before the Bureau, before the uniform, to a boy on a dock with a rope. A name his mother had called him across the water on a September evening. A name his father had said, once, at the very end, in a clear voice, for the first time in eleven years, and then never again.

Who are you, thought Rooke, that you know it?

He looked at the sleeping face. The bones of it, the fine straight line of the nose. The mouth, with the pencil-smudge of a bruise beneath it where she had bitten her lip in the night. He looked at it and saw, as he had seen it once before at a table, with a lurch like a missed stair, the other.

The same mouth.

She is Ashgrove. She is half of Ashgrove. She is the other half that went out the door.

He knew it. He knew it as he knew his name. And in the same breath, with the whole clarity of exhaustion, he knew that he was not going to say it aloud.

Not yet. Not until he had a reason that would stand the weight.

The Bureau's doctrine says the copy is the one that flickers and fails. The thin one. The one going out like a lamp.

By that doctrine, the woman asleep under my coat is the counterfeit.

He looked at the doctrine as he might look at a stranger's coat, and found that it did not fit him.

Because if I am right, he thought, then there is only one place in the world for the two of them, under the Act. And I will have been the man who brought them to it.

…

The dawn came up gray and quiet, and there was a sound of runners on snow.

He heard it a long way off, the high thin creak of a sledge, the jingle of harness, a man's voice calling. He rose stiffly. His joints ached. He stood at the mouth of the cave and looked out on a world gone entirely white: the fields buried to the fence-tops, the trees in clots, the sky a clear hard pearl in the east, with one star still alive over the ridge.

A big figure was coming across the drifts on a pair of broad snowshoes, with a lantern in one hand and a shotgun slung across his back. It was followed by a smaller, rounder one, floundering. Behind them, drawn by two plow-horses, came a sledge heaped with blankets.

"Captain!" bellowed Okafor.

"Here."

"Thank Christ." The big man came up the last slope in a series of heaving strides and stopped at the lip, red-faced, steaming, with ice in his mustache. He looked at Rooke. He looked past him into the cave, at the dead fire, the tethered mare, the blanket-wrapped shape asleep on the leaves under the Captain's own greatcoat.

He looked for a long moment.

It was Okafor's gift that he could say a great deal with his face and nothing at all with his mouth. He looked at the coat, and the gloves folded beside it, and the rock where two people had plainly sat very close together, and the space between the rock and the sleeper where a man had plainly sat apart. He looked at Rooke's face, which Rooke knew to be gray with sleeplessness and blotched at the eye. He said nothing.

"We were at the Crewes'," said Rooke. "The storm came up."

"Aye."

"We found shelter."

"Aye. Very good, sir."

"Nothing happened."

"I should hope not, sir," said Okafor gravely. "It's a poor night for it."

Behind him Pip made a small strangled sound and became engrossed in his snowshoe.

Rooke let out a breath that was nearly a laugh. He put his hand over his eyes and stood a moment so, swaying slightly, with the cold pouring in at the mouth of the cave and the first gold of the sun beginning to touch the topmost spars of the ridge. When he took it away, Okafor was standing close, and the Irishman's blunt kindly face was lowered, and his voice was quiet.

"Callum."

It was the first time in eight years he had used the name.

"You look like a man who's been carrying a very heavy thing," said Okafor. "I'll not ask what. But I'll ask this, once. In case it should be needful to know." He paused. "What d'you mean to do?"

Rooke looked at the sleeper.

The light had reached her. It lay in a long thin bar across her cheek, and she turned her face a little in her sleep, toward it, like a plant.

One of them is the Captain's clerk, he thought. One is a Fellow of the Academy. One is the other. I do not know which of them is real. I do not know which of them I love. I do not know whether it is the same thing.

And I have seventy-two days.

"Okafor," said Rooke, "if I am ever forced to choose between the two of them—" He stopped. His voice was quite level. "I won't."

The big man waited.

"I won't choose," said the Captain of the Wardens. "I'll find another way, or I'll go with them both."

Okafor's eyes, small and shrewd and very blue in the weathered face, rested on him for a long moment. Then he nodded, once, and clapped a hand on the Captain's shoulder, a great warm paw that nearly knocked him off his feet.

"That," said Okafor, "is the first honest thing you've said in a month."