The Burned Country

The grass stopped all at once, as if somebody had drawn a line.

Wren came over the top of the last grey hill in the middle of the morning, and there it was below her: the end of the grass, and then nothing. It was ash: grey ash, soft and fine as flour, lying over the whole land as far as she could see, in long low swells like a sea that had been asleep for three hundred years. There were no trees, no walls, no birds. There was not one single growing thing.

“Well,” said Wren at last. “That’s cheerful.”

She said it to the lamp, which lay inside her coat against her ribs, under the end of the long knitted scarf. Ever since the farm, and the little girl with the grey face, it had burned a little higher and a little steadier, and leaned east a little harder.

“I suppose you want to go across that,” she said.

The lamp, being a lamp, said nothing.

“You’d have walked straight into it on your two poles without even looking,” said Wren, “and I’d have had to come after you.” She swallowed. “Rot. Come on, then.”

She went down off the grass and stepped out onto the ash.

Her boot went in to the ankle, and the ash puffed up round it and settled again, slowly, the way snow settles. And it was warm. Not hot — not like walking on a hearth — but warm, the way a bed is warm when somebody has just got out of it. Wren felt the warmth come up through her worn-out boot-sole into her cold toes, and something in her stomach turned over.

She remembered a voice in a tower, and shadows on a sheet. Nothing grows on it now. They say the ground there is still warm.

“That’s the Hill,” she told the lamp. “He said the Hill. Not all of this.”

But she was not sure, and the lamp did not tell her.

The first stone was standing by itself in the middle of the ash about a mile out, like somebody waiting at a corner.

It was not much taller than Wren, and the years had worn it smooth at the edges, like a bar of soap that has been used a long time. On the side that faced west, back the way she had come, there was a carving: a small flame, the shape of a teardrop standing on its point, cut deep into the stone.

Or there had been. Somebody had taken a chisel to it.

They had done it badly, in a hurry, so that the flame was half gone and the stone round it was scarred with little white bites. But the bottom of the flame was still there, and if you ran your finger round it, as Wren did without thinking, you could feel how it had gone.

“Guild,” said Wren. She did not know how she knew. But she knew that kind of work. It was the work of people who were paid to make a thing stop meaning what it meant, and could not be bothered to do it properly. “Wouldn’t you know. Come all the way out here with a hammer, just to spoil a picture nobody looks at.”

She stood up and looked east. And there, a long way off, small as a tooth on the grey, was another stone.

There was another beyond that one, and another beyond that. They went away across the ash in a line, not quite straight, the way a road goes that has been walked by feet rather than measured out by men with chains. Every one of them had its flame cut into the western side; and some had been chipped away to nothing, and some had been only scratched at, and one — she stopped a long time at that one — had been left quite whole, as if whoever came with the chisel had stood in front of it and could not, in the end, make his hand do it.

She did not know whose road it was. She told herself she did not know.

But she walked beside the stones all morning, and when she came to each one she put her hand on the flame, or on the place where the flame had been. She did not know why she did that, either.

The crows found her a little after noon.

There were three of them, grey — not black, like proper crows, but the dead grey of the ash itself — and they came flapping out of nowhere and landed on the next stone ahead, all in a row, and looked at her.

“Shoo,” said Wren.

The crows looked at her.

She picked up a clod of grey stuff and threw it, and it burst in a puff of ash against the stone, and the crows lifted off with a few lazy flaps and came down again on the stone behind her. They did not caw. Crows in Soot Lane were always making rude remarks to each other from the chimney-pots. These ones made no sound at all. They only sat, and watched, with little round eyes like beads of wet slate.

Wren did not like it. She walked on faster, and did not look back, and every time she did look back they were there, three grey lumps on a grey stone, turning their heads to follow her.

She saw the first patrol from the top of a long swell of ash, an hour after the crows came, and went down flat on her face so fast that she got a mouthful of the stuff.

It was a line of men, walking slowly across the ash in front of her, a hundred paces apart, so that the last of them was only a grey speck. They wore grey armour and carried grey spears. They did not talk, or look at one another, or swing their arms as men do when they walk. They only went forward, step after step, at exactly the same pace, as if somebody somewhere were turning a handle.

Wren knew what they were. Hollow Knights: men who had been men once, before the Queen hollowed them out and filled them with her orders instead.

And in her pocket, the singing-stone began to hum.

It was very faint. A low, thin note, like a wet finger going round the rim of a glass. But in that enormous silence it sounded to Wren as loud as a bell in a tower — and she clapped her hand over her pocket so hard it hurt.

Not now, she thought at it. Not now, you daft thing. Shut up.

The stone did not shut up. It could not; it had been cut to hear the cold and say so. Wren thought fast.

She dragged the end of Tobin’s scarf round and wound it over the stone in her pocket, once, twice, three times, and held the bundle in her fist. The hum went small and muffled. She could not hear it any more. But she could feel it — buzzing faintly against the inside of her fingers, like a bee shut up in a glove.

“Good,” she whispered. “That’s better. Now you tell me, and nobody else.”

She looked at the scarf wound round her fist. It was the first useful thing that scarf had ever done. It was the first useful thing he had ever —

She stopped thinking that, quickly, the way you take your hand off a hot pan.

When the line had gone by, she lifted her head an inch and looked further out. And her heart sank right down into her boots.

There was another line beyond the first, and another beyond that, walking the other way, and away off to the north more grey figures stood at even spaces, like posts in a fence. They went up and down and across the plain in slow crossing lines, like the threads in a piece of cloth, so that there was hardly a place on all that grey sea where you could stand for long without one of them passing.

“She knows,” said Wren under her breath. “She knows somebody’s coming. She’s waiting for them.”

She did not say waiting for me. But she thought it.

I should tell you that there is no proper way to sneak across a desert. There is nothing to hide behind and nothing to climb. Anybody with any sense would have turned round and gone back.

But Wren was a sweep from Soot Lane, and a thief, and she had spent her whole life getting into places where she was not wanted and out again before anybody noticed. And lying there in the ash, she began, very slowly and carefully, to think like one.

Rule one, she thought. Look like what’s there.

Nobody in Crookback Market ever caught the best pickpockets. That was because the best pickpockets did not look like pickpockets. They looked like a bit of the crowd. And this crowd was grey.

She scooped up the warm ash and rubbed it into her face, her neck, the backs of her hands, and through her cropped black hair until it was the colour of an old woman’s. She rolled in it, coat and all, until she was grey from head to foot, like something left out in a fire. It got up her nose and made her eyes stream. She did not sneeze. She had learned not to sneeze in chimneys before she was six.

Then she looked down at her left wrist.

The ribbon was red. Not bright — she had the lamp well hidden — but red all the same, a deep dark red like the inside of a rose; the only coloured thing in the whole Burned Country. If anything was going to give her away, it would be that. She pulled her sleeve down over it and tucked the end into her cuff. She tucked the lamp deeper into her coat, under the scarf, and fastened the coat to her chin. It lay against her ribs, warm and patient.

“You keep small,” she told it. “Just for a bit. I’m not asking you to go out. Just keep small.”

Rule two, she thought. Move when they move.

The wind was coming from the east, from the direction she wanted to go. Every few minutes it gusted, and when it gusted the ash lifted off the tops of the swells and blew across the plain in long low drifting veils, the way chimney-smoke blows across rooftops on a windy day. While a veil was blowing you could not see a hundred paces through it. Then it settled, and you could see for miles.

Wren counted. The gusts came every forty breaths, or fifty, and lasted about twenty.

She waited for the next one, and when the ash lifted, she went.

She did not run. Rule three: never run where you can be seen running. She went low and quick inside the blowing grey, and when she felt the wind begin to drop she went down flat wherever she was, a grey lump on grey ash, and let it settle on her. Then she waited, counting, for the next.

It was horribly slow. Her eyes were sore and her mouth was dry as a chimney-brush. Once a line of Knights went by not two hundred paces away while she lay in the open, and she could feel the cold of them through the ground. They did not turn their heads.

And then she noticed something.

The Knights did not walk in straight lines. Not quite. Every so often, a Knight would bend his path — just a little, a few paces to one side — and then go back to his line again, the way you step round a puddle.

But there were no puddles. There was nothing out there at all.

Wren watched the next Knight go by, and the place where he stepped aside, and then she wriggled forward on her belly, very slowly, and put her bare hand down flat on the ash where he had not walked.

It was warm. Much warmer than the ash round about, warm as a hearth-brick at bedtime.

She lay there with her hand on it, and slowly — like the sun coming up, if the sun in Gloamhaven had been worth watching — she began to grin.

“They don’t like it,” she breathed. “They don’t like the warm.”

Of course they didn’t. They were all cold inside. They would walk over warm ground if they were made to, she supposed; but they did not want to, any more than you would put your bare foot in a bath that was too hot, and so they stepped round it without thinking.

And once she knew to look for it, she could see the warm places everywhere. The ash lay a little differently on them: smoother, and a shade paler, and if you looked very hard the air above them shimmered faintly, the way air shimmers above a road in summer. They lay scattered across the plain like stepping-stones across a river. And they went east. Not in a line, but more or less: a long, broken, wandering path of warm places, running among the memorial stones, all the way towards the Hill.

“Oh, you clever thing,” said Wren — and she did not know, quite, whom she was saying it to.

After that it went quicker. She went from warm place to warm place, inside the blowing ash, lying flat in the warmth when the wind dropped; and the Knights went up and down around her like weavers at a loom, and stepped round her hiding-places without a glance, and did not see her.

She had nearly done it when the gusts stopped.

The wind simply died. One moment it was gusting and drifting as it had all afternoon; the next the ash lay still, and the air went clear and hard, and Wren was lying in the open on a warm patch beside one of the old stones, with the next warm place a long twenty paces ahead across plain cold ash, and nothing whatever to hide in.

And a Knight was coming.

He was not on his line. Perhaps the crows had told him something. But he had left it, and he was coming across the ash straight towards her stone, step and step and step, and he was coming on the cold side, where there was nothing to make him step aside.

Wren lay as flat as a dropped coat.

The stone in her fist was buzzing like a hive. The cold came ahead of him over the ash, and her breath began to smoke, and she stopped breathing so that it would not. She felt frost come on her eyelashes. Inside her coat, against her ribs, the lamp gave a little anxious flicker of warmth, the way your heart does when you are frightened.

Keep small, she begged it. Please. Please keep small.

The Knight’s boots stopped on the other side of the stone.

She could see them under the edge of it: grey iron, with grey ash on them. She could hear nothing at all. Hollow Knights do not breathe, or not so that you would notice. He stood there, and she lay there, and the stone between them had a flame carved into its face that somebody had tried to chip away and had not quite managed.

Very slowly, a grey hand came round the edge of the stone and rested on the top of it.

Wren did not move. She thought of all the hundred times she had stood quite still in a crowd with somebody else’s purse up her sleeve while the watchman looked straight at her. And she thought of the oldest rule of all, the one every thief in Crookback Market learns before they learn to walk.

Make them look at your other hand.

Beside her right hand, half-buried in the ash, there was a lump of black clinker the size of a walnut. She closed her fingers round it. She did not lift her arm — that would have been movement, and movement is what gets seen. She only flicked her wrist, low and sideways, the way she had once flicked a stolen button across a whole market square into the canal.

The clinker sailed out over the ash, a long way, and came down far off to the left — clack! — against the side of another stone.

In all that silence it was like a door slamming.

The grey hand lifted from the top of the stone. The boots turned. And not only this Knight’s: all across the plain, Wren saw from the corner of her eye, the grey figures had stopped where they stood, and turned their heads together, slowly, all the same way, like weathercocks in one wind. Towards the sound.

Wren went.

She went across those twenty paces of cold ash on her belly like a lizard over a wall, and rolled into the warm place beyond, and lay still. And when at last she dared to lift her eyes, the Knight was walking away from her, towards the far stone, step and step and step; and the wind, as though it had only been waiting to see what she would do, began very softly to blow again.

The sun was going down when she came to the ridge.

It was a long, low rise of ash, higher than the others, and on the far side of it there were no more patrols; or none that she could see. She climbed it on her hands and knees, the last few yards, and lay at the top with her chin on her grey arms, and looked.

The plain went on below her, dim and grey in the dusk. And out of the middle of it, a few miles off, rose a hill.

It was round and black and bare, like the top of a great bald head pushing up out of the ash, and it was quite alone, with nothing near it. Nothing grew on it. Nothing moved on it. And at its very top, small and dark against the last grey light of the evening, there was a building: long and low, of stone, with half its roof fallen in, and a single broken chimney standing up at one end like a finger raised for silence.

Wren knew what it was. She had known since the first warm step.

She lay on the ridge and looked at Cinder Hill, where the dark had come up like a tide in an old man’s story, and the hair stood up on the back of her neck.

And against her ribs, inside her coat, the lamp was warm.

Not the small steady warmth of the road, like a cup somebody has forgotten to drink. It was warm the way it had been in her garret in Soot Lane, on the very first night of all: warm all the way through, warm as a hand laid flat against her heart. She had not felt it like that for weeks. She had almost forgotten that it could be.

She put her own hand over it, through the coat, and held it there.

“All right,” she whispered. “All right. I’m coming.”

She was so busy looking at the Hill that she did not look behind her. If she had, she would have seen, on the last of the old stones at the bottom of the ridge, a single grey crow, sitting quite still in the dusk with its head on one side, watching her go.

I wish she had looked. But she did not; and the crow, after a while, lifted off the stone without a sound and flew away low over the ash into the gathering dark, quickly, like somebody who has news to carry and knows who wants it.