Together, Almost

The footsteps came up the Hill a little after the pale sun did.

Wren heard them long before she saw anything. She was sitting by the cold forge with the lamp in her lap, trying to remember a dream and not managing it; and through the broken end of the roof came the small sounds that do not belong on an empty hill. A stone turning over. A cough, quickly stifled. The soft tock of a stick set down on hard ground, and then another, slow and regular, like a clock in no hurry.

More than one person. More than two.

She pushed the lamp inside her coat and went up the end wall of the workshop the way she had gone up a hundred chimney-breasts in Soot Lane: knees, elbows, fingertips, a toe in a crack where the mortar had fallen out. In a moment she was lying flat along a roof-beam in the shadows, with a long iron poker in her fist that she had taken off its hook on the way past. It was the first thing she had stolen in weeks, and she was rather pleased with it.

But Hollow Knights do not cough. And they do not, so far as Wren had ever heard, walk with a stick.

The footsteps stopped at the doorway. Somebody whispered, “Is this it? Oh, my word.” Somebody else said, “Hush.” And then there came a sound that Wren had not heard for so long that for a moment she did not know what it was: a small, sharp, clever little sound, like a twig snapped between two fingers.

Tk.

Wren lay on the beam and could not breathe.

Tk, it went again; and a voice she knew better than her own, careful and precise and a little bit pleased with itself, said into the dim:

“There is somebody on the roof-beam. On the left. About so big. Lying very still, the way people do when they think it makes them invisible.” A pause. “It doesn’t.”

The poker fell out of Wren’s hand and clanged on the floor.

I cannot tell you properly what the next few minutes were like, because neither girl could ever tell it straight afterwards. Wren said she climbed down. Mira said she fell off. Both agreed that somebody shrieked, and that it was not Mira; and that after that there was a great deal of holding on, and crying, and laughing in the middle of the crying, which comes out sounding like hiccups and is not at all dignified.

Mira was thinner, and her boots were held together with string. But it was her, holding Wren’s face in both hands and looking at it — hard and on purpose, the way she still looked at everything, as if she might never be allowed to again.

“Your voice,” she said, “is so much smaller than it was. What have you been doing to it?”

“Nothing,” said Wren. “Walking. Rot. I don’t know.” And then, because it was Mira: “Not talking to anyone, mostly.”

“Well, stop,” said Mira. “It doesn’t suit you.” She took Wren’s left wrist and turned it to the light. “Oh. It’s grey. I’d forgotten it went grey without the lamp. I’ve been thinking of it red for weeks.”

So Wren took the lamp out of her coat and held it up between them. The little flame stood up out of the brass, gold and steady — bigger than it had been in the boat at Vaelport, though still no bigger than a thumb — and the ribbon at her wrist went red at once, and the brown of Mira’s skin came up warm out of the dust, and the beads in her braids turned, one by one, green and yellow and a deep blue that Wren had once been told was called indigo.

“Red,” said Mira. “Yes. There it is.” Then her face crumpled, and she said, “Oh, Wren. I knew you were ahead of us. I knew. And I was frightened all the way here anyway,” and they had to start the whole business again from the beginning.

It was while they were doing this that the clock-in-no-hurry came through the door.

It was a crutch of black wood with sheepskin tied round the top, and leaning on it was the smallest old woman Wren had ever seen, with a face creased in every direction at once. One of her eyes looked at nothing. The other looked at everything — the forges, the beams, the two girls on the floor, and the lamp.

When it reached the lamp, it stopped.

“Well,” said the old woman. Her voice was cracked, and much bigger than she was. “Well, well. Oh, my ducks.”

Behind her came the others, crowding in and then stopping short, the way you stop on the threshold of a room where somebody is asleep: a cobbler with enormous hands, a thin anxious old man in a clerk’s black coat gone green at the seams, a washerwoman with red forearms, two farm-lads not much older than Tobin, a farmer with a sleepy child on his back, and a few more behind them in the doorway — a dozen in all. Every one of them was staring at the little brass lamp in Wren’s hand as though it were the sun come down to sit on the floor.

“This is Sister Hale,” said Mira, wiping her face with the heel of her hand. “And these are the Remnant — some of them. They caught us up on the road, in ones and twos. I’ll tell you all of it. It’s a lot.”

“I know who this is, duck,” said Sister Hale. “I’ve heard of nothing else since the coast hills.” She stumped across on her crutch, and Wren, who had never liked being looked at, found herself standing quite still to be looked at, the way you stand for a doctor.

The old woman did not touch the lamp, or ask to hold it. She looked at it a long time with her one bright eye; then she looked at Wren, and her face went soft.

“You’re the sweep,” she said. “And you carried it all this way on your own.” She patted Wren’s cheek with a hand as knobbly as a root, twice, quite hard. “And your old man. Mira’s told me all of it, on the road.” She was quiet a moment. “I’d have liked to shake his hand, duck. I’d have liked that more than I can say.”

Wren could not say anything at all. So she held the lamp higher, so that the Remnant could see where they were.

They saw. The cobbler took off his cap. The old clerk sat down rather suddenly on an upturned bucket and polished his spectacles and said “Oh dear,” several times. For in the lamp’s light the workshop came up out of the grey: the cold forges, the scarred bench, the tools each on its own peg, and the racks, shelf after shelf, of little brass lamps with no flames, waiting.

Sister Hale stood in the middle of it and laughed — the laugh of somebody who has been told a piece of news so good it will take her the rest of her life to finish hearing it. Then she wiped her one good eye.

“He kept his tools tidy,” she said. “Would you look at that. I always thought he would.”

The Remnant made themselves at home the way people do who have slept in a great many barns.

They did not touch the forges. The cobbler started towards the biggest with an armful of thornwood, and Sister Hale said, “Not that one, duck,” quite gently, and he stopped, and looked at it, and nodded, and built his fire on the floor instead, in a ring of stones by the door. Then he struck at his tinder-box for a long time and nothing caught; the ash got into everything, the clerk said. In the end Wren knelt and held the lamp to the thornwood. She did not think about it. Somewhere on the road, between the Heskeths’ cold hearth and this one, it had stopped being a thing you had to decide.

The fire went up gold and crackling, and the washerwoman said “Oh,” and held out her red hands to it; and the lamp in Wren’s fingers was not one bit the smaller.

She showed Sister Hale the iron door.

It stood at the far end of the workshop, set deep into the stone of the Hill itself, as if the long room had been built in front of it to keep it company. No handle. No keyhole. Only, at about the height of Wren’s chin, a round plate of brass set flush with the iron, engraved with a compass rose — four long points and four short, and a little curl of flame at the top where north should be. In the middle of the rose was a shallow round hollow, polished smooth.

“I’ve tried everything,” said Wren, rubbing her shoulder, which still hurt. “I picked at that hole with a nail for an hour. It doesn’t even rattle. It’s not locked, it’s just — shut. Like it’s thinking about something else.”

Sister Hale ran her old fingers round the edge of the brass, slowly, the way Mira read the Story-Wall.

“I don’t know it,” she said, and sounded surprised and not altogether displeased. “All my life I’ve had the songs, duck, and there’s not a door in any of them. Workshop, yes. Tools on the wall, yes. But not this.” She rapped the iron with her knuckle, and it gave back no sound at all. “Well. It’ll open when it means to, I expect. Most things do.”

“That’s not how doors work,” said Wren.

“Isn’t it?” said Sister Hale, and grinned, and Wren saw that she had about four teeth. “You’re twelve, duck. You’ve plenty of time to find out.”

It was exactly the sort of thing Ash would have said. Wren went and sat down by the fire quickly, and took the lamp into her lap, and did not say anything to it at all.

Tobin came at dusk.

Cinder came first. Wren was in the doorway, watching the light go out of the Burned Country — the long plain below the Hill going from pale grey to dark grey to no colour at all, with the old waystones standing about on it like people who have forgotten why they came — when something small and quick came streaking up the black slope with its tail held high.

“Cinder!”

She was on her knees in the ash, and the fox was in her arms, all fur and bones and cold nose, licking her chin and her ear. The spark at the end of her tail was brighter than Wren had seen it since the mine, and when it came near the lamp inside Wren’s coat it flared up like a coal when you blow on it.

“Where’ve you been, you great lump? I thought you’d gone off and—“

Cinder wriggled free. She did not run off. She sat down in the ash just out of reach, very upright, and looked back down the slope, the way she sat when she was waiting for someone and did not intend to be hurried.

Somebody was coming up the Hill.

He came very slowly, a step at a time, the way a person climbs who has walked a long way on not enough food and has stopped expecting to arrive anywhere. He had no coat. His shirt was grey with ash and torn at one shoulder. His fair hair had grown long and filthy and hung in his eyes, and one lens of his spectacles was cracked right across, so that the last of the light caught in it in a bright white line.

He was leaning on a pole.

It was a long pole of dark wood, with a grip of faded blue cloth worn shiny by an old man’s hand, and a brass hook at the top for lifting the little doors of Ring-lamps. Wren knew it the way she would have known her own hand. The last time she had seen it, it had been lying on a stone floor at the foot of a forge-door, at the bottom of a dark tunnel under Vaelport, where an old man in a blue coat had let it fall so that he could hold the door shut with his back. She had heard the tunnel come down on it.

All the blood went out of her face. She felt it go, cold, like water out of a basin.

Tobin had stopped below the door. He had seen her see the pole.

“It was on the road,” he said. His voice was hoarse and very quiet. There was no actually in it, and no technically, and none of the hundred things he would once have rushed to explain. “Lying across the road. At the edge of the Greywaste. I don’t know how.” He stopped. “I don’t know how,” he said again.

Wren did not answer. She did not look at him. She looked at the pole a moment longer, as though if she looked hard enough it would turn back into something else. Then she turned round and went back into the workshop, past the fire and the Remnant and Sister Hale on her bucket, all the way down the long room to the iron door; and sat down there with her back to everybody, and put her face on her knees.

Her hand had gone up, without her noticing, to the long knitted scarf wound twice round her neck. It smelt of ink and machine-oil. She held on to it. She did not take it off.

It was Mira who went out to him. She went straight down the slope and put her arms round him, pole and ash and all; and Tobin stood stiff as a post for a long moment, as if he did not know whether he was allowed. Then something in his thin shoulders gave way, and he put his head down on top of hers.

“You are very dirty,” said Mira into his shirt, “and very thin, and you smell like a bonfire somebody has been sick on. I am so glad you are here.”

“Mira,” said Tobin. Just that, as if it were the only word he had left.

The Remnant took him in without a single question. They had been taking grey, starving people off the roads most of their lives, and they had found that questions could wait and soup could not. The cobbler took off his own jacket and put it round Tobin’s shoulders, where it hung like a tent. Somebody put a cup into his hands. And Sister Hale leaned forward on her crutch and looked at him a long time with her one black eye — at his cracked spectacles, and the pole lying in the ash beside him, and then at his hands, which held the cup carefully, because of the scars: a round shiny mark in the middle of each palm, the size and shape of the bottom of a little brass lamp.

She did not say anything. But her old face was very thoughtful.

Wren, at the far end of the room, heard it all without looking. She heard the cobbler say there now, lad. She heard Tobin say “Thank you,” three times, very quietly, to three different people, and nothing else. And she heard him not come anywhere near her, which was worse.

Mira tried. I will say that for her. She tried harder than anyone could have asked.

She carried two bowls of the cobbler’s soup down the long room, and put one in Wren’s hands, and sat down with the other. “Come and eat it by the fire. Your nose is blue. I know what blue is now, Wren. You can’t fool me with blue.”

“Then I’ll have a blue nose.”

Mira went back up the room. Wren heard her voice drop low by the fire, talking to someone; and after a while she came back.

“He says he is sorry.”

Wren said nothing.

“Actually, that is all he said. The rest I could hear him not saying. It’s very loud, the things he isn’t saying. It’s like sitting next to a waterfall.” Mira’s voice went small. “He walked here all on his own, Wren, the same as you. He thought he deserved whatever happened to him.”

“Good,” said Wren.

She did not know she was going to say it until it was out. It came out hard and flat, like a stone dropped on a step. It was not true, and she knew it as soon as it was in the air; but it was out now, and she would not have taken it back for anything.

Mira stood up. Her face had gone very still.

“You are both,” she said, “being stupid in exactly the same shape. If I put you side by side you would fit together like two halves of a broken plate.” Her voice wobbled. “I have only just got you back. I don’t want you back in pieces.”

She went away up the room, and sat down hard by the fire, and the washerwoman said oh, my love, and put an arm round her.

Sister Hale had watched the whole thing from her bucket, with her chin on her crutch. She had watched Mira go down the room and come back, and go down and come back. She had watched Tobin turn his cup round and round in his scarred hands and not drink from it. She had watched the small hunched shape by the iron door with its hand on a long knitted scarf.

She said nothing at all. Not yet. She only hummed a little under her breath, a tune Wren did not know, and went on watching, the way an old woman watches a pot that she knows will boil sooner or later, if she leaves it on the fire.

They slept where they were, because there was nowhere else.

The Remnant rolled themselves in their blankets round the fire, close together, as people do who are used to cold barns. And at last, when the fire had sunk to red, Wren came up the long room very quietly, because her feet had gone dead, and lay down on the far side of the fire from Tobin, as far from him as the warmth would let her, with her back to him and the lamp against her chest. She did not look. She knew where he was the way you know where a stove is in a dark room.

Then there was a click of claws on stone, and a soft weight settled in the ash between them.

It was Cinder. She had spent the evening going round the fire stealing crusts, and sneezing one bright, annoyed spark at the cobbler’s boots when he trod on her tail. Now she had finished. She turned round three times in the exact middle of the space between Wren’s back and Tobin’s, and lay down with her nose on her paws.

Wren shifted away from the fox’s tail. Cinder shifted too, and lay down again, still exactly in the middle. Wren shifted back. So did Cinder.

“Oh, rot you,” whispered Wren, and gave up.

So the fox lay there all night between the two of them, touching neither, with her tail-spark glowing in the dark like a small red coal; and every time Wren opened her eyes, which was often, it was the first thing she saw.

It was very late when she noticed the other thing. Everybody else was breathing slow. She opened her eyes once more and saw Cinder’s spark, as usual; and past it, over the fox’s grey back, two small pale glints in the dark where no lights ought to be.

It was the last of the firelight in a pair of spectacles. One lens whole, and one cracked across.

Tobin was not asleep. He was lying on his side with his head propped on his arm. And he was not looking at the fire, or at Cinder, or at her.

He was looking past all of them, down the long dark room, at the iron door.