The Remnant

The curlew was wrong.

Mira heard it first, of course. She heard most things first. It came out of the dark on the left of the road, two notes, rising — coo-lee — and it was very nearly a curlew. But a curlew does not breathe in before it calls. And this one did.

She stopped walking. The others, strung out behind her along the road in the dark, bumped gently into each other and stopped too.

“What is it?” whispered Jessamy. “Is it them?”

Them meant the Guild hunters. The band had seen them that afternoon: six men on horses on the high road, with two long grey dogs and the Lamp Guild’s gilded lamp stitched on their coats, looking at the hedges. So they had walked by night. And now here was a curlew that breathed.

“No,” said Mira slowly, with her head on one side. “Not them. They would have horses.”

The curlew called again, nearer. And then, low down in the field beside the road, a light opened.

It was a shuttered lantern, opened the width of a finger, so that one thin yellow blade of light lay across the wet grass and went out again. Then another opened, further along the hedge. Then a third.

“Vaelport folk?” said a voice from behind the first one. It was a man’s voice, slow and deep and hoarse, and the man behind it smelt — Mira could smell him from the road — of hay and sheep and pipe-smoke. “You’ll be the Vaelport lot. There’s Guild hunters on the high road with dogs, and they’ll be down this way inside the hour. Come with us, if you like. Quiet, now. Mind the ditch.”

Nobody moved. Old Abner put himself, creaking, in front of his handcart.

“And what’ll it cost?” he said. “Come on. What d’you want for it?”

There was a pause in the dark. Then the man laughed — a short, surprised, not unkind laugh, as though somebody had asked him the price of rain.

“Nothing, grandad,” he said. “We don’t do it for anything. Mind the ditch, I said. It’s deep at this end.”

Abner did not move. He had lived all his life in a city where the light was free and the price was everything, and he was not going to unlearn that on a dark road.

So Mira listened: to the voices along the hedge, and their breathing, and to the thing underneath, which she had never been able to explain to anybody who was not a Delver — the shape a person makes in the dark, which does not lie, because it does not know how.

“It is all right,” she said. “They mean it.” And she took Jessamy’s arm in one hand and Abner’s sleeve in the other and stepped down off the road towards the light, and minded the ditch, which was deep at that end, exactly as he had said.

The barn stood in the hollow of three fields, smelling enormously of hay. The men took the band up a ladder into the loft; and there, where you would have expected a few bales and a cat, there was a wall of hay stacked to the rafters. The deep-voiced farmer put his shoulder to one bale at the bottom, and it swung inward like a door. It was a door, built of bales round a wooden frame; and behind it was a long, low, hidden room under the slope of the roof, with straw on the floor and sacks to sit on.

“In you go,” said the man. “Mind your heads.”

They went in, all twenty-three of them, and the goat; and the hay door swung shut behind them, and the lanterns were opened all the way. And Mira, blinking in the light, saw that they were not alone.

There were people already there, twenty or so, on the sacks along the walls: a broad red-armed washerwoman who smelt of soap, a cobbler in his leather apron, a dry little man in a frayed black coat and spectacles who had been a clerk to the Guild for forty years, a farmer’s wife, and a boy with a sling in his belt who kept getting up to put his eye to a crack in the boards. They looked tired, and poor, and cold, the way everybody in Gloamhaven looked. But underneath that they looked like people who had a secret, and it was a good one.

Nobody asked the Vaelport folk any questions. The washerwoman went round with milk and oatcakes hard as roof-slates. Abner looked at his oatcake for a long time, as if he expected it to bite him. Then he ate it.

At midnight they sang.

The washerwoman began it, humming under her breath. Then the cobbler took it up, and the dry little clerk in a thin, true, surprising tenor, and then the whole hidden room, very low, with their heads bent close so that the sound would not carry past the hay:

Knock at the door when the lamp burns low,
Knock at the door in the cold;
He’ll light it for nothing, and on he’ll go,
For the Flame was never sold.

Rich man, poor man, kind and cruel,
Every door on the street;
He never once asked who deserved it,
He never once asked to eat.

Mira sat very still with the baby in her lap.

She knew that story. Wren had told it to her in the Deeps, scowling, as if she did not want to be caught believing it. And here were twenty strangers in a hay-loft, singing it at midnight as if it were the most precious thing they owned.

The song ended. In the hush after it, somebody far down the ladder laughed.

It was a great, cracked, cackling laugh, like a hen that has laid an egg and wants everybody to know. Then came a slow, uneven rhythm, step and thud and step, up the ladder.

“Now then,” said a voice. “Now then, ducks. You started without me.”

The hay door swung open, and in came Sister Hale.

She was the smallest grown-up Mira had ever seen, brown and wrinkled all over like a walnut, with a crutch of black wood worn shiny at the top and a great many skirts. One of her eyes was milky-white and saw nothing. The other was black and bright and quick as a blackbird’s, and it went round the whole room in one sweep and took in everything — the Vaelport folk, and the goat, and Abner’s handcart, and Mira — and crinkled up at the corners as if all of it pleased her very much.

“Sister,” said the washerwoman, getting up. “You never walked from the mill in this wet.”

“I did, duck, and it didn’t kill me. Sit down.” Sister Hale lowered herself onto a bale with a great many creaks and beamed round at them all. “Well! Vaelport folk. Out of that dreadful white town at last, with your own faces on.” She looked at each of them in turn, as if she were counting them and was glad of every one. “There now. You’re with us. We’ll see you on your road.”

“Why?” said Abner abruptly. His voice cracked. “Why would you?”

Sister Hale looked at him with her one bright eye for a long moment.

“Because somebody once did it for us, duck,” she said. “And it would be a poor sort of thank-you to keep it to ourselves.”

Mira, without meaning to, clicked her tongue.

It was only a small sound, tk — but the old woman’s head came round at once, sharp as a bird’s.

“Who did that? Who’s clicking like a beetle in a teacup?”

“I am,” said Mira. “I’m sorry. I do it when I am listening. It is how we see, where I come from.”

Sister Hale looked at her. Then she put out one small brown hand, like a root, and beckoned; and Mira got up, and gave Robin back to Jessamy, and went and sat on the straw at the old woman’s feet.

“Where you come from,” said Sister Hale softly. “And where’s that, duck?”

“Under the Greywaste,” said Mira. “In the Deeps. I am a Delver.”

There was a silence in the loft. Mira heard the washerwoman draw in her breath.

“A Delver,” said Sister Hale. “Out of the old deep places. Well, I never.” She took Mira’s chin in her hand, very gently, and turned her face to the lantern, and looked into her eyes. “But you can see, duck. You’re looking at me. I can tell.”

“I could not, before,” said Mira. “And then there was a ferryman on a river, and he put his thumbs on my eyes, and—“ She stopped. It was too big to tell quickly. “And now I can.”

Sister Hale did not say anything at all. But she let go of Mira’s chin; and then she turned to the room, and her old cracked face was lit up from the inside as if somebody had opened a shutter in it.

“Ducks,” she said. “Sing her the Deep Song.”

They sang it softer than the first. It had a different tune — older, slower, going down and down like steps cut in stone.

Down he went where the deep folk dwell,
In the dark beneath the stone,
And he did not stumble, and he did not fall,
For he walked as one who’d known.

He laid his hands on the children’s eyes,
And he told them a thing untold:
There’s a light that’s coming, you’ll see it yet —
And the stone was warm, not cold.

Mira could not breathe.

The song went through her and down into the place under her ribs where she kept the things she was surest of. He did not click and he did not stumble, said the Story-Wall, under her fingertips, in the little round room in Deepholm where she had sat alone for six years. He walked as one who knows the way. He laid his hands on the eyes of the children, and said: Here is a thing you have never heard of.

She had read those words with her fingers ten thousand times, and been laughed at for it, and then pitied for it, which was worse. And all those years, up here in barns and cellars and hay-lofts, among people who had never heard of Deepholm, somebody had been singing the very same thing.

The same man. The same hands. The same promise.

It was not two stories. It had never been two stories. It was one.

She did not know she was crying until Sister Hale’s hand came down on her braided head and stayed there. It was not the sort of crying she had done in Vaelport, for Ash. It came up out of somewhere much deeper than that, and it was warm, and she could not stop it, and she did not want to.

“I knew,” she said. Her voice came out in pieces. “I always — they told me it was a story to frighten children. And I knew. And I thought I was the only one in the world.”

“Oh, duck,” said Sister Hale. “Oh, my duck. Nobody’s ever the only one. That’s the first thing he’d want you to know.” She stroked the braids, and the beads clicked softly under her fingers. “There’s only ever been the one story. It’s just that it’s been told in a great many places, by people who didn’t know about each other. And it’s been kept, all this while, by people who were told to stop.”

Afterwards, when the crying had stopped and Mira had wiped her face on her sleeve and been given a second oatcake for her trouble, they said the Psalm.

Mira knew it. She had heard Tobin say it on the Black Stair, with the whole of Deepholm holding a rope behind him, his voice cracking on every other word, and she had learned it the way you learn a stair by climbing it. So when the old woman began it in her cracked, strong voice — not singing, only saying — Mira said it with her:

“Though I walk through the gloaming, I will fear no dark, for the Flame is with me. It goes before me on the road; it keeps the watch while I am sleeping. The night is long, but it is not for ever. My light was lit by another’s hand, and no dark can take it from me. So I will walk in the Flame’s keeping, all my days, until morning comes.”

She stopped there, because that was where it ended.

But the others did not stop. They went straight on, all together, in a murmur so low it was hardly more than breath:

“There is a hill where the dark came down, and the ground is warm there still. The dark took him, but it could not keep him; it closed over him like water, and the fire went through. So I will keep my lamp trimmed in the long night, for the hand that lit it is not cold.”

Mira sat up very straight.

It could not keep him. Something in the words caught at her, the way a burr catches on wool. She had heard something like it before — somewhere deep down, in stone, under her fingers — and for a moment she almost had it. And the dark shall not keep us. The Wall-song, the Waking Song, the one line that was left of it. Then the murmur ended, and the hay-loft was quiet, and the thought slipped away from her like a fish.

“I never heard that part,” she said. “The hill. Old Ash never said it.”

Sister Hale’s one bright eye turned to her.

“Old Ash?” she said. “Old Ash of Emberwick? The one who wouldn’t charge?”

Mira nodded. And then, because the old woman was waiting, she told her. Not all of it. But the long road, and the mine under Vaelport, and the forge-door, and the dark coming down.

Sister Hale did not interrupt. When it was done she sat for a long while with both hands folded on the top of her crutch.

“Oh, duck,” she said at last, very quietly. “We heard of him, you know. Even out here. Thirty years back, word came down the roads of a Master Lamplighter in a northern city, thrown out of the Guild for lighting lamps for nothing. I told every duck I knew. I said, There, you see? There’s still one.” She wiped her good eye with the back of her hand. “There’s still one. And now there’s not.”

“There is the lamp,” said Mira. “Wren has it. And the fox.” She swallowed. “And we were told to go to the Hill. I don’t know why. A fisherman told me. I am going there.”

The loft went still.

“Cinder Hill?” whispered the farmer’s wife. “Oh, no, love. Not there. It’s past the Burned Country. It’s the Queen’s own ground. There’s grey soldiers all round it. Nobody goes there. It’s the place where he—“ She stopped.

“Where he died,” said Mira.

And Sister Hale laughed.

It was not an unkind laugh. It was a great, cracked, delighted cackle, and it made the farmer’s wife jump, and woke Robin, and set the goat bleating.

“Died,” she said. “Is that what they told you? Oh, duck. It isn’t where he died.” She leaned forward on her crutch until her walnut face was close to Mira’s, and her one black eye was shining. “It’s where the morning began.”

The lookout boy whistled.

It was the curlew whistle — two notes, rising — and it was short and sharp, and the whole loft moved before it had finished. The lanterns were shuttered. The washerwoman had a hatch open in the floor at the far end that Mira had not known was there, and a rope going down through it into the dark. And outside, close now, very close, there came the deep baying of a dog, and then another, and the jingle of harness, and a man’s voice shouting:

“Open in the name of the Lamp Guild! We know you’re in there, you cranks! Open up!”

Light blazed through the cracks in the boards — hard, yellow, oily lantern-light, a great deal of it.

“Out the back,” said the deep-voiced farmer, quite calmly. “Down the rope and along the ditch. Ten by ten. Tom takes the first lot to the mill, Agnes takes the next to the wood. Don’t run till you’re out of the light. Go.”

They went down the rope in tens, the Remnant handing the Vaelport folk from one to another as if they had done it all their lives; and Mira understood that they had. Jessamy went, with Robin bundled against her. Abner went, without his handcart; and at the hatch he looked back at Mira, as though there was something he wanted to say, and went down without saying it.

Somebody was hammering on the barn door below. Wood splintered.

A small brown hand closed on Mira’s wrist like a root.

“You’re with me, duck,” said Sister Hale. “We’re not going to the mill. We’re going east.” Her eye glittered in the dark. “I know the way. You can see in the dark. Between us we’ll make one whole person.”

They went down the rope last. Mira went first, so that she could take the crutch; and Sister Hale came down after her, hand under hand, skirts and all, laughing silently the whole way.

At the bottom there was mud and a ditch and the dark. Behind them the barn was full of shouting and light. The dogs had found the hay door and were baying at it. Mira shut her eyes.

Tk.

Ditch. Hedge. A gap in the hedge, low down, on the right. Beyond it, open ground, and a long slope, rising. Nothing on the slope. Nothing breathing.

“This way,” she whispered. “Hold my shoulder.”

I wish you could have seen them: a girl with her eyes shut and her tongue clicking, and an old half-blind woman with one hand on her shoulder and a crutch in the other, going up a black field in the rain, away from the dogs; and the old woman laughing under her breath the whole way, as if it were the best night she had had in years.

At the top of the slope they looked back. The barn was small and far off, ringed with yellow light. Nobody was coming after them.

“Ha!” said Sister Hale, breathless and triumphant. “They’ll find a goat and a handcart. Serve them right. The rest of our lot will come on after us, the ones that can — they know where I’m bound.” She turned round, leaning on her crutch, to face the other way, where the land ran on into darkness. “Now. East, duck. Two days to the edge of the Burned Country, if my leg holds. And there’s one more thing I meant to tell you, before those great lumps came banging on the door.”

“What?”

“Word came over the fields tonight,” said Sister Hale, “from a farm out by the coast hills. Hesketh’s farm. The youngest girl there had the grey-fever, bad — nine days without a word. And last night a stranger came in out of the rain. A girl. Cropped black hair, and a tongue like a knife, and a long knitted scarf wound twice round her neck.” The bright eye glinted. “And a little light in her coat, that she gave to the child for nothing. And the child sat up and asked for bread.”

Mira’s heart turned over.

“Wren,” she said. “That’s Wren.” And then, a moment later, because it had only just reached her: “A long scarf? Twice round?”

“So they say.”

Mira stood on the hilltop in the rain and thought about a long, lumpy, knitted scarf that smelt of ink and machine-oil, and a boy sitting alone on the end of a dock. And in the middle of the wet and the dark and the dogs, she began to smile.

“Which way did she go?” she said.

Sister Hale pointed with her crutch, straight out into the dark.

“Same way as us, duck,” she said. “Same way as everybody, in the end.”