Scarred Hands

The last hour of the night is the coldest. Anyone who has sat up with somebody ill will tell you so. It is the hour when the fire is lowest and the clock seems to have stopped, and you begin to believe, though you know better, that the morning has forgotten to come.

Wren had been sitting up with somebody ill for a very long time.

The Knights still stood round the edge of the lamp’s light, and every time she got up, they closed. Every time she sat down, they waited, the way the cold waits outside a window. A few yards beyond them Tobin lay on his back in the ash, with Ash’s pole where it had fallen and Cinder along his chest. The spark at the end of her tail was so small that twice in the night Wren had thought it was out.

His hair was the colour of the ash it lay in. There was a little grey frost on the cracked lens of his spectacles. Only his lips had any colour left, and that was hardly any.

“Tobin,” she said. Her voice came out cracked. She had shouted most of it away in the night. “Tobin. You great lump. Wake up.”

He did not wake up.

In her pocket the singing-stone hummed its long low note, the note that meant cold.

The Queen had not gone to bed. Now and then, from her grey chair at the mouth of the tent, she looked at the boy in the ash, and her lovely silver face was full of sorrow, as though she were watching a sad play and wished it could have ended differently.

“It will not be long now,” she said gently. “You should rest, little sweep. It is a dreadful thing to watch, I know.”

“Then let him go,” said Wren.

“But he gave himself, child.” The Queen’s voice was soft and terribly reasonable. “Nobody made him. He walked in here on his own two feet and offered. You heard him. I would not dream of refusing a gift so freely given.” She smiled a little. “Isn’t that what your old lamplighter used to say? Give it?”

Wren did not answer. If she had opened her mouth, she would have been sick.

“He has been so unhappy, poor boy,” said the Queen. “In a little while he will not be unhappy. He will not be anything at all.” She turned her dark eyes on the lamp. “Of course, you need only breathe out. One breath, and he can have his colour back. I am not unkind. I would let him go home.”

Wren looked down at the lamp.

She did not believe her. She had not been sure, earlier, with the mirror in front of her and her mother’s voice coming out of it. But she had watched the Queen’s face all night as the colour went out of Tobin’s hair — the small, quiet, pleased look on it, like a cat’s — and she knew the Queen would never let anybody go home.

Only, knowing it did not help. Tobin did not wake. And the lamp, though it burned, could not reach him.

Wren bent her head over it, so that the Queen could not see her face.

“Ash,” she whispered. “What do I do?”

The lamp had never once answered. But she knew what he would have done: something quietly — held a door, or walked into the dark first — and said afterwards that it was nothing.

“I can’t,” she told the lamp. “They won’t let me through. I can’t do anything.”

And then the flame, which had leaned east since the dead middle of the night, began to lean harder.

It had leaned east all the way across the Scarecrow Farms and over the Burned Country. Now it leaned harder than it ever had, so hard that the flame lay almost flat against the glass, pointing away from the Queen’s tent, out over the plain of ash towards the place where the sky was getting light.

Wren turned her head and looked.

The morning was coming. It came the way it always came in Gloamhaven, thin and grey, a paler grey along the bottom of the sky, like the line of light under a door. The Burned Country lay below the Hill, flat and dim and endless. Nothing moved on it. Nothing ever did.

Something moved on it.

Far off, at the bottom of the sky, where the grey was palest, there was a man walking.

He was very small, and the pale sun was coming up behind him, so that he was a dark shape against it, no bigger than one of Ash’s paper puppets. He was walking towards the Hill. He was not hurrying. He walked the way people walk who have come a long way and know exactly where they are going.

Cinder lifted her head.

Her ears went up, and her nose, and she looked out over the ash towards the walking man. Her whole small body went still — not the stillness of a frightened fox, but of a fox that has heard, a long way off, a voice it knows.

Then Cinder was up and gone.

She went off Tobin’s chest in one bound and straight through the ring of Knights, between their grey legs, and down the slope of the Hill faster than Wren had ever seen her go, with her ears flat and her tail straight out behind her. And the spark at the end of her tail, which had been hardly anything for weeks, blazed. It went up like a torch. It streamed out behind her, so that she went down Cinder Hill like a little comet, a long gold streak across the grey ash; and Wren could hear her yelping as she went — not a fighting sound, but a high, glad, silly, puppyish sound, the sound a dog makes when somebody it loves comes home.

She reached him at the foot of the Hill and threw herself at him.

He bent and caught her up in both arms, the whole wriggling, yelping, blazing armful of her, and she licked his face and climbed onto his shoulder and nearly fell off the other side; and across the whole width of the Queen’s silent camp, Wren heard him laugh.

It was a short laugh, not loud: the laugh of somebody who has been licked on the ear by a fox and does not mind. But every Hollow Knight on the Hill turned its head towards it at once, the way grass turns in a wind.

He put Cinder down. And then he began to walk up the Hill.

I have to tell you what he looked like, and I find that I cannot do it very well. This is not because he was too splendid to describe. It is because he was not splendid at all.

He was a man, not especially tall and not especially broad. He wore a plain brown coat that had been travelled in a good deal, and mended boots, and there was dust on him to the knees. His face was brown and weathered, with a short beard going grey and lines at the corners of his eyes that came from laughing. He carried nothing. No lamp, no staff, no sword. His hands were empty at his sides.

That was all. If you had passed him on the road you might not have looked at him twice — unless he had looked at you first. Then, I think, you would have remembered it all your life.

But nobody was looking at him, just at first. They were looking at the ground.

Because where he walked, the colour came back.

It came up out of the ash behind his heels, the way water comes up into a footprint on a beach. Where he lifted his foot the ground was not grey. It was dark and rich and brown, the brown of new earth turned with a spade — and as Wren watched, in the very first footprint, a little thread of green came up and unrolled itself and stood there, trembling, in the cold dawn air.

Then the next footprint, and the next. Behind him came a path of colour, brown and green and the warm red of the rock beneath, widening as it came, the way light widens across a floor when somebody opens a shutter.

And the ground was warm. Wren felt it come up the slope towards her, under her knees, like a hearthstone. They say the ground there is still warm. She had heard that once, in a tower, by the light of a little lamp behind a sheet.

He came to the edge of the Queen’s camp, and he did not stop.

The Hollow Knights fell back.

They did not shriek, the way the Hollows shrieked in Soot Lane. They simply went back from him as he came on, the way shadows go back from somebody walking into a room with a candle. He did not look at them. He did not lift a hand. Wherever he walked there was no room for them, and so they were not there. The ring of grey armour round Wren opened like a door. Some of the Knights sat down suddenly in the ash, like men who have been walking in their sleep and woken in a strange place. On the tent-poles the ash-crows went up all together in a grey clatter of wings, and flew away west, crying, and did not come back.

The braziers that burned with no heat went out, one after another, as he passed them: not blown out, but simply finished, as though somebody had told them they could stop.

And the lamp in Wren’s hands blazed.

She had seen it blaze at the top of the Beacon, and at the foot of the Black Stair. She had never seen it do this. The flame went up inside its cracked chimney, gold and white and gold again, so bright that it filled the whole Hill; and it was not leaning any more, it was reaching. It reached towards the man coming up through the camp the way a flower in a window turns towards the sun, with its whole self, as though it had been growing that way all its life and had only just found out why.

And the colour flooded. It ran out across the Hill from the lamp and from the man together, and met in the middle. The tents went the creamy, stained colour of old canvas. The ash went brown and black and rust-red. The stones of the workshop above them, grey for three hundred years, were suddenly a warm grey-gold, like a cat’s back in sunshine. The ribbon on Wren’s wrist went red — red as a coal, red as a berry, redder than she had ever seen it — and Tobin’s scarf round her own neck, which had never in all the grey been any colour she could have named, turned out to be striped. Green and blue. Green and blue, all the way down.

She had been wearing it for weeks and never known.

The Queen stood up.

She was tall and slender and silver from head to foot, and she looked at the man coming up the Hill.

Beside her, on its stand, the dark mirror cracked.

Nobody touched it. It cracked of its own accord, with a small sharp sound like ice on a pond, one long crack from the top of the oval to the bottom; and whatever had been moving in it stopped moving, and it was only a piece of black glass with a crack in it.

The Queen did not look at it. She was looking at him.

She looked at him once. Only once. Wren saw her face as she did it, and I am not going to tell you what was in it, because Wren never would, not even to Mira, not even years afterwards. I will only say this. In all the time Wren had known that voice — in the dark at Emberwick, in the bottom of the boat at Vaelport, in the grey tent — it had never once been raised. It had never needed to be.

The Queen screamed.

It was a long, thin, terrible sound, like wind in a broken flue, and it was not a word. While it was still going on she turned in a whirl of silver and fled — away from the morning, out across the Burned Country towards the west, where the last of the night still lay low along the edge of the sky. She seemed to pour rather than run. The night took her in, and the scream went on a long time after Wren could no longer see her, smaller and smaller, until at last it stopped.

The Hill was very quiet.

Only one man in the camp had not fallen back.

Captain Varrick stood alone in the trodden ash in front of the empty tent, in his grey armour and grey cloak, with his sword drawn. He did not lift it as the man came up. He only stood, and stared.

He was staring at the man’s hands.

Wren looked, and saw what he saw.

They hung empty at his sides, brown and broad, working hands. And on the back of each there was a scar, round and deep and old, puckered at the edges, the shape a burn makes when something very hot has been held against the skin for a very long time. When he turned one hand a little, Wren saw the same scar on the palm. On both hands. As if, a long time ago, something had gone right through them.

He was not a beggar this time, nor a ferryman, nor a voice in a chimney. It was the Lampwright himself, come up out of the Burned Country in the morning; and he had scars on his hands.

Varrick looked at the scarred hands. Then, slowly, as if somebody else were moving his arm for him, he turned up his own right hand and looked at his palm, where the old pale mark of the Lamplighters’ oath-flame ran across it.

He looked at it for a long time.

The man said nothing to him. He only looked at Varrick, a few steps off, and his face was not angry. It was the look Old Ash used to have when he said lad, only more so — as if all the sorrow in Ash’s lad had been poured into one cup, and the cup were full to the brim and not spilling.

Varrick’s sword fell out of his hand. It dropped into the ash with a soft thump and lay there.

And then Captain Varrick turned and ran.

He ran like a boy, clumsily, stumbling in the ash with his grey cloak tangling round his legs, and he did not look back. Down the slope he went and away across the plain, and the Hollow Knights went after him, drifting and stumbling, until the Queen’s camp was empty but for its tents, and its dead braziers, and a sword lying in the ash.

Wren did not see them go. She was already running.

There was nothing between her and Tobin now but a few yards of ash. She ran across it with the lamp blazing in her hands and dropped on her knees beside him.

The colour had come back to everything on the hilltop, and not to him. He lay in the middle of it like a drawing in pencil on a painted page.

“Tobin,” said Wren. “Tobin. Tobin.” She held the lamp out over him, close, as close as she dared. “Here. It’s for you. You don’t have to do anything. Please.”

The lamp blazed. It blazed till her eyes watered. But it leaned away from Tobin, over her shoulder, towards somebody behind her; and Tobin did not move.

Then the somebody behind her knelt down in the ash.

He knelt on the other side of Tobin, and Wren did not look up at him. She could not. She saw a brown hand come down into the circle of the lamplight — a working hand, with a round old scar across the back of it — and lay itself, very gently, on Tobin’s grey head.

It lay there, warm, the way a hand lies on the head of a child who is asleep and is not to be woken.

“Tobin,” said the man.

That was all he said. Only the name. He said it the way you say the name of somebody who has been lost a long time and has just this minute been found.

Nothing happened.

Then something did.

It began at the top, in Tobin’s hair, under the man’s hand: a faint warmth coming up into the grey, like the first light of a fire in a cold room. It was gold — the untidy, ordinary, sticking-up-at-the-back gold of Tobin’s hair, coming back strand by strand under the scarred brown fingers, slowly, as if it were being poured. It came down over his forehead and into his eyebrows, which were fair and ridiculous and always looked surprised. It came into his face — the grey went out of his cheeks the way frost goes off a window when the sun gets to it — and pink came after. It came down his neck, and down his arms, all the way to his hands; and his hands, lying in the ash, were pink and ink-stained and ordinary, and in each palm was the round scar the size of the bottom of a little brass lamp.

The frost went off his spectacles.

Tobin breathed in — a long breath that caught in the middle, the way a breath catches when you have been under water a long time.

He opened his eyes.

He looked up — not at Wren; past her — at the man kneeling over him with one hand on his head. He looked for a long moment, blinking, the way you look at something very bright. His lips moved, and no sound came out of them.

Wren found that she was crying. She had not noticed starting. Tears were running down her face and dripping off her chin onto Tobin’s shirt, and she did not care who saw, and she did not wipe them away.

Cinder came trotting back up the slope, her tail blazing like a torch, and sat down beside the man as if she had always sat there, and looked from one of them to the other with her tongue out.

The man looked at her.

“Yes,” he said. “Well done. You’ve been very good. You can stop sitting on people now.” Cinder sneezed, a great shower of gold sparks, all over his sleeve. He brushed them off and did not seem to mind. “Mostly,” he said.

Then he took his hand from Tobin’s head, and sat back on his heels, and looked across Tobin at Wren.

He had kind eyes.

That was the first thing she noticed, and afterwards it was the thing she remembered best. Not the colour of them. Only that they were kind, deep-set, with lines at the corners from laughing; and that they looked at her — at her cropped hair and her ash-black face and her red, wet, furious eyes — as if she were somebody worth looking at.

Something tugged at her memory, hard, the way a fish tugs on a line. A smell of bread. A canal wall. A crate.

“Wren,” he said.

Nobody had said her name like that since a tower on a wall, and a pot of dreadful tea.

She opened her mouth. Nothing came out of it.

The man smiled. It began in his eyes and ended up somewhere in his beard; and he looked from her to Tobin, who was trying to sit up and could not quite manage it, and back again.

“You two look half starved,” he said. “Hungry?”