The Coward’s Offer

All that day, Tobin could see the light.

From where he lay in the drift of ash under the workshop wall, the whole camp was spread out below him on the plain like a grey map: rows of grey tents, grey knights standing between them, pale braziers that did not smoke. Nothing moved down there except the crows. And at the near edge of it, inside a little ring of grey figures, there was one small speck of gold.

It was hardly anything. A pin-head. But Tobin watched it all day long, the way you watch the one lit window in a dark street when you are outside in the cold.

He did not move. Cinder lay pressed against his ribs and did not move either.

You could go, he kept thinking. You could get up and go down there.

And then: And do what?

He had nothing. No sword; he had never been able to hold one properly, which his father had found more shameful than anything else about him. No plan. He had Ash’s pole, and a cobbler’s borrowed jacket, and two round scars on the palms of his hands.

Of all that Mira had read last night, after he could not go on, one line would not leave him alone, because it made no sense to him: that the Lampwright had chosen to let the dark take him so that the fire could go through the dark and out the other side.

Chose, thought Tobin. He chose it.

He thought of Ash, in the mine at Vaelport, with his back to the forge-door. Ash had chosen too. He had held the door, so that the rest of them could get out, and the dark had come down between. And the last thing he had said was Give it.

Give what? Tobin had wanted to shout, then, and ever since. I haven’t got anything. I sold the only thing I ever had that was worth giving. I sold it and I sold him with it.

The pale sun went over. The speck of gold sat in its ring of grey.

Once, in the afternoon, the voice came. It did not bother being kind. It only said, softly, close to his ear, as if it were telling him something he already knew: Stay where you are, Tobin. You’re good at it.

He put his face down in the ash.

And it was then, lying there with his eyes shut and his mouth full of grey dust, that he understood something — not all at once, but slowly, the way you understand a machine by turning it over in your hands.

He had nothing to give. That was true. No lamp, no sword, no letter, no father. But there was one thing left that nobody had taken from him, because nobody had wanted it.

There was him.

His hands began to shake. They shook so hard that the ash on his fingers trembled off in little drifts. He knew that shaking. It was the shaking of the strongroom stair in Emberwick, sixty-one steps down, when his night-lamp had gone out and the black had closed over him like water.

“I can’t,” he whispered into the ash. “I can’t. You know I can’t.”

He did not know whom he was saying it to. He had said something like it once before, on the strongroom stair. If you’re there — whoever lit the first lamp — I can’t do this. Please.

Nobody answered. Nobody had answered then, either. But he had gone down the stair.

Below him, in the gloaming, the speck of gold began to move.

It went slowly in among the tents, towards the great grey one at the foot of the Hill, and in at the door; and the door-flap fell, and the light was gone.

He dug Ash’s pole out of the ash and stood up, unsteadily, the way he had stood up on the end of the fish-dock in Vaelport. Cinder stood up too, and shook herself, and looked up at him. Her spark was very small and very bright.

“Yes,” said Tobin. His voice was hardly there. “I know. I know. Come on.”

He walked down Cinder Hill into the Queen’s camp in the last grey light of the day, with no weapon, holding an old man’s pole in both his scarred hands, and shaking from head to foot.

I want you to understand that he was not brave — not with his chin up and his eyes flashing. His teeth were chattering. Twice he stumbled in the deep ash. He was more frightened than he had ever been in his life, and he had been frightened for most of it.

But he did not stop walking. That was the only difference. And sometimes, I think, that is all bravery is.

The knights at the edge of the camp turned their grey faces towards him as he came. He waited for them to close in. They did not. They stood aside and let him through, the way a door is held open for someone who is expected; and the next pair did the same, and the next, all the way through the camp, a long silent corridor of grey.

She knows, thought Tobin. She knew I’d come. Of course she did.

He walked on anyway.

Varrick was standing by the door of the great tent. He watched Tobin come all the way up the last of the corridor, and his grey eyes went from the boy’s white face, to the scarred hands, to the old brass-hooked pole that he must have known as well as he knew his own name. Something moved in his face. It was there and gone so fast that Tobin was never sure afterwards whether he had seen it.

“You,” said Varrick.

Tobin could not answer. His jaw was shaking too much.

Varrick looked at him a moment longer. Then — without a word, without even a smile — he reached out and drew back the flap of the tent, and stood aside to let him in.

The tent was cold, and grey, and full of a song.

Tobin saw it all at once, the way you see a room by lightning. A pale brazier. A grey carpet. A tall woman made of frost, standing very still. A great black mirror at the back of the tent, with a warm room in it, and a fire, and a woman with dark hair holding out her arms and singing — Morning comes, morning comes — in a voice that made his chest ache, though he had never heard it before.

And in front of the mirror, Wren.

She was standing with her back to him. She had the lamp in both her hands, raised up to her face, and her head was bent over it, so close that the light was all over her chin and her mouth. Her shoulders were drawn up high and stiff. She was holding her breath. He could see it in the line of her back. And the little flame had bowed right over towards her lips, small and gold and leaning, the way a sleepy dog leans when someone it loves comes into the room.

“Wren,” said Tobin.

It was hardly a word. It came out of him cracked and hoarse and much too small. But she heard it.

She turned her head.

And the breath she had drawn — the great, deep, aching breath that she had been holding at the very edge of the flame — came out of her all at once. But it did not go onto the lamp. She had turned her face away, towards the door; and it went out of her into the cold grey air of the tent as a sob, and a word, and the word was his name.

The little flame stood up straight again, steady and gold, and burned.

They stared at each other.

“You,” said Wren. Her face was wet and white. “You — what are you — you were in the ash, I saw you—“

“Tobin Harrowgate,” said the Queen.

She said it as though he were a present she had been hoping for. She turned to him, tall and grey and lovely, and smiled with real delight, and her dark eyes looked him over from his ash-grey hair to his broken boots. “I did wonder,” she said. “I confess I did wonder whether you would. How very kind of you to come. Are you cold? Of course you are. Come in.”

Tobin came in. He did not know how. His legs did it.

He stood in the middle of the grey carpet, holding Ash’s pole in front of him with both hands, not like a weapon, only like something to hold on to. He looked at the Queen. He tried to say the thing he had come to say, and his voice would not work. He swallowed. He tried again.

“Take me,” he said.

The Queen raised her silver eyebrows a little.

“I’m—“ His voice cracked. He pushed his cracked spectacles up his nose with a shaking finger and went on. “I’m the traitor. Not her. It was me. I took the lamp. I sold it. I sold — I sold him. And this morning I lay in the ash and watched you take her and I didn’t—“ He stopped. He made himself go on. “She’s done nothing. She’s never done anything except carry it. So let her go. Let her go, and take me instead.”

The tent was very quiet. In the mirror, the woman with the dark hair sang, and the dark shall not keep us, and stopped, and began again.

“Tobin, no—“ said Wren.

The Queen laughed.

It was a soft, warm, wondering laugh, and it was full of pleasure. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, my dear. One Harrowgate after another. Your father came to me with a lamp, you know. And now his son comes to me with himself.” She looked at him for a long, tender moment, with her head a little on one side. “I accept.”

“No!” said Wren. “No, you can’t — he’s not — Tobin, you great lump, what are you doing—“

“The girl may go,” said the Queen, quite pleasantly, without looking at her. “Wherever she likes. With whatever she likes. Nobody will stop her.” Then she did look at Wren, for a moment; and her smile was very kind indeed. “And if, at any time tonight, you should decide that you want him back, little sweep — well. You know what it costs. It hasn’t changed.”

They took him outside.

It was nearly dark. The pale braziers burned in a ring round the open ash in front of the great tent, with a light the colour of skimmed milk. The knights did not drag him. They did not have to. He walked out into the middle of the ring by himself, and stood there, holding Ash’s pole.

And the knights closed round him.

They did not strike him. They put their hands on him. That was all. Grey hands, on his shoulders, on his arms, on the back of his neck, the way you might lay your hands on a horse to quiet it. And where they touched, the colour began to go.

It was very quiet. That was the worst of it. It did not look as if it hurt. It looked like a fire being let go out.

It began in his hair. Tobin’s hair had always been fair and untidy, sticking up in tufts like hay. Now, from the roots outwards, it went the colour of ash; not white, like an old man’s, but grey, flat and dull, the way grass goes under frost. Then his face. The pink went out of his cheeks, and he was grey, and his spectacles misted over with cold and did not clear. Then his hands, round the pole: the ink-stains on his fingers faded and were gone, and the two round scars on his palms, which had been red and angry for weeks, went pale, and paler, and grey.

He did not run. He did not even try to pull away. He stood there in the middle of the ring with his eyes open and his shoulders shaking, and let them.

Out in the Greywaste, Tobin had walked among Hollows, and they had drifted past him and left him alone, because there had been nothing left in him worth taking. There was something now. Wren could see it going.

“Stop it!” she screamed.

“Stop it! Tobin! Run, you idiot! Run! You great stupid lump, what are you standing there for? Come back! Come back here!”

She ran at the ring of knights with the lamp held out in front of her. Not to strike them; she did not think of that. Only to get to him. Only to put the light where he was.

The knights did not turn round. They only stood, shoulder to grey shoulder, an unbroken wall of cold, with their backs to her and their hands on him; and she could not get past. She tried to squeeze between two of them, and a grey arm moved, and she was pushed back into the ash. She got up and tried again.

A hand closed on her collar.

It was a grey gauntlet. Varrick’s. He did not pull her away hard. He only held her, at arm’s length from the ring, so that she could see, and could not reach.

“You can’t help him that way,” he said. His voice sounded odd. “Not by fighting.”

“Let go of me!”

But he did not let go. He held her, and he watched Tobin, and his other hand had gone to his own right palm and was pressing it, hard, the way you press a wound.

The lamp in Wren’s hands was leaning out towards the ring as far as a flame can lean, trying, straining. In its little circle the ash at her feet was brown. Tobin was standing a few yards beyond it, in the grey.

“Tobin,” said Wren. Her voice broke. “Tobin, please. Come back. Come back, and I’ll — I’ll never say another word, I’ll never be horrible to you again, I swear, I’ll—“

And that was when she found out that she was crying.

Not the way she had cried in the bottom of the boat at Vaelport, for Ash. She was crying for him. For Tobin Harrowgate, with his elbows and his long words and his stupid broken spectacles. For the boy who had crept down sixty-one steps in the dark to carry a lamp back to a sweep who had thrown it away. For the boy who had walked into the Queen’s own camp, with nothing, to stand where she was standing.

On the harbour wall at Vaelport she had said to him, I wish it had been you.

It was him, now. It was him in Ash’s place. And Wren Ashby found that she had never in all her life wished anything less.

“I didn’t mean it,” she said. She was not shouting now. She did not think he could hear her. “On the wall. I didn’t mean it. I never meant it. Do you hear me? I didn’t mean it.”

Inside the ring, Tobin turned his head.

It was very slow. His face was almost all grey now, grey as the ash, and his eyes behind the misted spectacles had gone dim and far away, like windows in an empty house. But he turned his head until he found her, and the lamp in her hands; and his lips moved. They were the only colour left in him.

His voice was hardly there at all. It was thin and faint and colourless, the voice of somebody speaking from the bottom of a well. But she heard it.

“Don’t,” said Tobin. “Wren. Don’t. Not for me.” He took a breath that seemed to cost him everything. “Keep it lit.”

Behind her, at the door of the great tent, the Queen was standing, tall and grey and patient, watching. She did not say anything. She did not need to. In the tent behind her, very faintly, the song went on: Morning comes, morning comes…

Wren looked down at the lamp in her hands. It would be so easy. One breath. That was all it cost.

She held it tighter, against her chest, and did not breathe on it.

Night came down over the Burned Country, black and starless.

Some time in it, the knights stepped back from Tobin, and he sank down into the ash, slowly, the way a candle-flame sinks when the wick is spent, and lay there on his back with Ash’s pole beside him where it had fallen out of his hand.

Varrick let go of Wren’s collar without a word, and walked away into the dark.

Wren went for Tobin at once. She got three steps. Then the knights were round her — not touching her, not touching the lamp, only standing, a ring of grey armour just outside the edge of its light — and when she tried to push through them they closed, and she fell back into the ash on her knees.

“You may go wherever you like, little sweep,” said the Queen from the door of her tent. “I did say so. Only not there.”

They had brought a low grey chair out for her, and she sat in it at the mouth of the tent with her hands folded, and the dark mirror on its stand beside her, still singing very softly to itself. She did not seem to need to sleep.

So Wren knelt where she had fallen, a few yards from him, and could not get any nearer.

Cinder was nearer. Nobody stopped a fox. She had climbed up onto Tobin’s chest and lay along him with her chin tucked under his jaw, the whole small warm weight of her, the way she had lain on him on the fish-dock at Vaelport so that he could not get up and could not go to sleep. Her spark was a tiny red point, like a pin-prick of fire in tinder.

For a while Tobin talked. Not to anybody. His voice was thin and grey and wandering, and Wren had to hold her breath to hear it: something about beads, and copper wires, and a bright one moving down Soot Lane where there oughtn’t to be any lamp at all. The Orrery, she realised. He was talking about the Orrery in his attic, a whole world away. Then, near midnight, he stopped talking, and only breathed.

Wren held the lamp out towards him, as far as her arms would reach.

It did not reach. The little gold circle fell short of him by a yard of grey ash. But she did not put it down. She knelt there all night, I am told, with her arms aching and her eyes stinging, holding it out the way you hold out a cup to someone who is too ill to take it. Once she sang to him, very low, the only song she knew — Morning comes, morning comes, and the dark shall not keep us — and stopped where it always stopped, and could not go on.

And sometime in the deepest part of the night, when the dark was thickest and the cold was worst and even the ash-crows had stopped shuffling on their poles, the little flame in her hands did a strange thing.

It leaned.

Not towards Tobin. Not towards her. It leaned away from both of them — slowly, steadily, as if something were drawing it — out over the dark plain, towards the east, where there was nothing at all to see; where, if there was ever going to be a morning again, the morning would come from.