The Chronicle

Tobin had not slept properly since Vaelport, and he did not expect to start now.

Whenever he closed his eyes he saw the same few things, in the same order, like the pictures on a magic-lantern slide going round and round: a drawer in the Pellows’ cottage; a stair in a lighthouse; a grey gauntlet closing on a little brass lamp; a girl on a harbour wall with her face white and her fists clenched, saying I wish it had been you.

She was lying on the other side of the fire now. He could see the shape of her back. Between them, exactly between, a grey fox was curled in the ash with her nose on her paws and her spark glowing.

So he did not close his eyes. He looked at the door instead.

It was the only thing in that long room that he understood the shape of. Everything else — the tidy tools, the hundred dark lamps on their racks, the old woman who had looked at his hands as if she were reading them — was too large and too quiet, like a story he had no right to be in. But a door was a door. A door was a mechanism. And there had been a time, not very long ago, when Tobin Harrowgate could not walk past a mechanism without wanting to know how it worked.

He found, lying there, that he still wanted to. It was the first thing he had wanted in a long time. It surprised him so much that he sat up.

Cinder lifted her head and looked at him. He looked back at her. Then, very carefully, so as not to wake anyone, he got up, and took a stick of thornwood out of the fire with its end still glowing, and went down the long dark room on his bare feet, past the forges and the racks of empty lamps, to the far end.

Cinder watched him go. She did not follow. But she did not put her head down again, either.

The thornwood gave only a little red light, and it shook, because his hand did. Tobin held it close to the brass plate and looked.

A compass rose. Four long points and four short, cut deep and clean, with a tiny curl of flame at the top in place of the north. And in the middle, the hollow. Round and shallow and polished smooth, like the inside of a spoon.

He put his finger into it, and ran it round the edge. Then — without quite meaning to, the way his hands used to do things before he had told them to — he spread his thumb and forefinger across it, and measured.

Two inches and a quarter. A little less. And a notch at the top edge, very small, no wider than a fingernail, as if something with a hinge was meant to sit there.

Tobin stood very still.

He did not want to think the next thought. It was the sort of thing a boy thinks when he has been alone in the Greywaste too long, and sees patterns in everything, like faces in a fire. But his hand had already gone to his pocket, and closed round the thing that lived there; the thing he had carried every day since he was five years old, and had not been able to look at properly since the night he took the lamp out of a drawer.

He took it out. Small and brass and dented on one side, with a little hinge.

He held it up beside the hollow in the lock-plate. He did not need to measure. He knew the size of it the way he knew the size of his own palm.

“No,” he said aloud, very quietly, to nobody. “That’s — no. That’s not—“

He fitted the compass into the hollow.

It went in as if it had been poured there. The hinge sat in the little notch at the top. And there was a click — not loud, but deep, a click that seemed to come from a long way inside the iron, and then from further in, and then further, like a row of small doors opening one after another down a long passage.

If you have ever turned a key in a lock that has not been opened for a very long time, you will know that feeling: as if the lock had been waiting, and is glad.

Through the glass of the compass, the needle began to swing.

It went round once, slowly. Then faster. It spun like a top, so fast it was only a blur — and then, all at once, it stopped. It did not point north. It did not point east, or at the Mountain, or at anything Tobin could see. It stood straight up, quivering, towards the little carved flame at the top of the rose.

And the iron door, which had no handle and no hinges that he could see, sighed, and moved, and swung back into the dark.

The noise woke the room. It was not loud, but it was heavy — a great weight of iron shifting on stone after a very long time — and behind him Tobin heard the old clerk cry “The Guild! It’s the Guild!” and dive head-first under his blanket, and the cobbler say, “It’s a door, man. Doors don’t arrest people,” and the soft tock of a crutch.

He heard, too, a quicker sound: light feet, running. And then she was there beside him, a little way off, with her hair standing up from sleep and the lamp held out in her hand, and its gold light went past him into the doorway.

He did not look at her. He did not dare. He looked at the compass in the lock-plate, with its needle standing straight up.

“It’s a key,” he said.

He had not spoken ten words together since Vaelport, and he had not meant to speak to her at all; but the words were coming now, tumbling over one another the way they always used to when he was nervous, and he could not have stopped them if he had tried.

“It’s a key. It was always — no. It wasn’t always. It was an ordinary compass when Mother gave it to me, it pointed north, I took it apart once when I was eight and there wasn’t anything in it but a needle and a card. And then the night before we left Emberwick — you remember — he borrowed it. Overnight. He didn’t say why. And in the morning he gave it back and said it was tuned, and the needle pointed at the Mountain, and I thought that was what he meant. I thought that was all he’d done. I thought it was a — a sort of present. A trick.” He took a breath that shook. “But it wasn’t pointing at the Mountain. Not really. It was pointing at the way. And when it was time, it turned round and pointed here, and it fits, Wren, it fits, the hinge goes in the notch, you couldn’t make that by accident, you’d need the compass in your hand to cut it, you’d need—“

He stopped.

Because he had got there. He had got to the end of it, the way you get to the end of a sum and see what the answer is; and the answer was so large that for a moment he could not breathe round it.

Ash had made a key.

He had sat up all night in the Leaning Tower, a whole world ago, with a boy’s compass in his long old fingers, and made it into a key for a door on a hill that none of them had ever seen. And he had given it back, and said nothing — only tuned — and let the boy carry it. Across the Greywaste. Down a thousand black steps. Into Vaelport, and out of it.

He had known they would come here.

And he had known — Tobin’s knees went weak, and he put his hand flat on the cold iron to hold himself up — he had known that when they did, he would not be with them. Or why make a key at all? Why not simply bring them, and open the door himself?

A compass ought to know the way home.

It was Wren who said it. Not to him. To the doorway, in a small flat voice, as though she were reading the words off a wall. Tobin turned his head, and saw her face in the light of the lamp; and it was white, and it was wet, and it was the face of somebody who has just been handed something by a person who is not there to be thanked.

“He knew,” said Wren. “All that time. He knew.”

She put the lamp down on the stone floor at the threshold, carefully, so that its light fell through the door. She did not look at Tobin while she did it. Then she turned and went away up the long room, fast, past the Remnant sitting up in their blankets, and out of the far door into the dark; and Tobin heard her feet go away over the ash, and stop.

Cinder got up from the fire and trotted after her without a sound.

Tobin did not follow. He had no right to. He stood by the door with his hand on the iron, and the lamp she had left for him burned at his feet; and it seemed to him that it was the first thing she had given him since Vaelport, and that she had given it without a word, and that she had not had to.

The room behind the door was small and round and cut out of the rock of the Hill, like the inside of an egg. The air in it was dry and still, and — this was the strange thing — it was warm. Not warm like a fire. Warm like a stone wall at the end of a summer day, in the summers nobody in Gloamhaven could remember.

There was nothing in it but a stool, a plain table of dark wood, an ink-pot gone dry, a pen worn down to the quill. And a book.

It was very large, bound in leather that had once been brown and was now the colour of an old saddle, worn pale at the corners where hands had held it. There was no title on the front. There was only, pressed into the leather, the same small curl of flame that was carved on the lock-plate.

Tobin picked up the lamp from the threshold — gently, the way you pick up something that has been lent to you — and carried it in, and set it on the table. Then he stood looking at the book, and did not touch it.

“Go on, duck,” said a cracked voice behind him.

Sister Hale had come down the room on her crutch. Mira was at her elbow with her braids all over her face, and the cobbler and the clerk and the washerwoman behind, crowding in the doorway and not quite coming through. The old woman’s one bright eye went from the book to Tobin and back again.

“Go on,” she said. “You opened the door. You’ve the right. Read it to us.”

So Tobin opened the book.

The pages were thick and creamy and a little stiff. The writing was a clear hand, strong and unhurried — the hand of somebody who had never in his life written anything in a rush, or crossed anything out, or been afraid of being wrong. And at the top of the page there was a great capital letter, painted inside a little square; and as the lamplight touched it, the paint came up out of the grey the way Mira’s beads had done. Gold. A sun, round and gold and blazing, with the first word of the book curled inside it.

Mira made a small sound.

Tobin pushed his cracked spectacles up his nose with one scarred finger, and began to read.

“Before the first morning there was the Maker, and the Maker was glad.

“Let whoever reads this begin there, for everything else begins there. Before there was any land there was gladness, and the land was made out of it, the way a song is made out of breath. He made the hills to be stood upon, and the rivers to be listened to. He made the sea and was pleased with the noise of it. He made the creatures one by one, and laughed at some of them, and named them all. He made people last, and loved them best, and gave them hands to make things of their own.

“And when all was made, he lit the sun, and hung it over the world like a lamp over a table where the bread is set out, so that everyone might see to eat.

“The sun was gold. Remember that, whoever you are. It was gold, and it was warm, and it rose every morning over rich and poor alike, and no one ever paid a penny for it.”

Tobin stopped. Not because he could not go on, but because the room had gone so quiet.

The washerwoman was crying silently into her red hands. And Mira was sitting on the floor with her arms round her knees, staring at the painted sun, and her lips were moving. Tobin did not need to hear to know what she was saying. She was saying gold, over and over, like somebody learning a word by heart.

He turned the page.

“There was a king called Ardric, who had everything the sun could give, and wanted the one thing it could not. He did not want to die.

“So he climbed the Bright Mountain in the night, and there the Queen of the dark was waiting for him, for she knows the roads that frightened people walk. And she said to him, I can give you a crown that never fails and a life that never ends. And he said, What is the price? And she said, Only the sun.

“He paid it. The fire went out of the sun and into his crown, and the curse fell on everyone. Not on Ardric only. On the farmer in his field and the child in her cradle and the old man by his door, who had made no bargain and had never heard of the Queen. That is the way of her bargains: one man signs, and the whole world pays.”

Tobin’s voice faltered.

He knew about one man signing and other people paying. He had read his father’s letter to the Queen. And he had made a bargain of his own, on the stair of a lighthouse, with a man in grey, and somebody else had paid for it. For a moment he could not make the next word come.

“Go on, duck,” said Sister Hale, very gently. “I know. Go on anyway.”

He went on.

“Since that night many have tried to break the curse, and many more will try.

“They will make lamps, and the lamps will burn grey. They will make crowns, and the crowns will go cold on their heads. They will write treaties with the Queen, and she will keep each one exactly as long as it pleases her, and not one hour longer. And some day, I think, they will make a guild, and sell little fires at a price, and call it kindness.

“None of these will do it.

“For a thing that was stolen cannot be bought back. No one can buy back the sun. The fire must be given back, freely, by one who has it to give.

“And the curse that was bargained for cannot be bargained away. It must be carried. And it must be carried by one who owes it nothing.”

That was the end of the page.

Tobin did not turn it. He stood with his hand flat on the book, and the words went on sounding in the little warm room after he had stopped saying them, the way a bell goes on sounding after it has been struck.

They will make a guild. He thought of Prowle in his gold chain, and the tin Flame tokens sold in Soot Lane for pennies nobody had. They will write treaties. He thought of his father. It must be carried by one who owes it nothing.

He did not understand that last part. He found he was afraid to.

It was Sister Hale who moved first.

She put her crutch against the wall and came to the table, and Tobin stood back without being asked. The old woman lifted the great book in both knobbly hands — it was very heavy, and she was very small, and she would not let the cobbler help — and held it against her chest, the way you might hold a baby, or a loaf, or a letter you have waited for all your life.

She was weeping. Tears were running out of both her eyes, the blind one and the bright one, down into all the wrinkles of her face. And she was laughing, too, at the same time — the same great cracked laugh she had laughed among the tools — so that it was hard to tell which was which, and Tobin thought it did not matter.

“Seventy years,” she said. “Seventy years I’ve sung it in barns, duck. In cellars. In ditches, with the Guild’s men going by on the road. My mother sang it to me and her mother sang it to her, and we had it all in bits — a verse here and a verse there, and half of them wrong, I don’t doubt, and the tune wandering off like a goat.” She laughed again and wiped her face on her sleeve, book and all. “And all the time it was here. Written down. In his own—“ She stopped, and pressed her lips together, and did not finish. “We only ever had the songs,” she said. “We only ever had the songs.”

Then Mira put her hand very lightly on the edge of the book, and let the pages fall back one by one under her thumb. Page after page went by in that same clear, unhurried hand.

Then they changed.

Mira’s thumb stopped. Tobin, looking over her shoulder, saw it too.

Somewhere past the middle of the book, the clear strong hand came to an end, halfway down a page, as though the writer had set down his pen to answer a knock at the door and had not come back to pick it up. And below it, after a space, there was another hand. It was small and cramped and crooked, the letters jammed close together as if they were huddling for warmth; and it shook. Even in the lamplight, even upside down, you could see how it shook. In places the pen had dug so hard into the paper that it had nearly gone through.

“Somebody else wrote the end,” said Mira softly.

Sister Hale looked down at the page. All the laughter went quietly out of her face, and only the tears were left.

“Yes,” she said. “Somebody would have had to.” She closed the book, gently, over Mira’s hand. “Not tonight, duck. Not in bits, at the back of the night, with half of us asleep. That part wants everyone.”

She lifted her head and looked past Tobin, past the little round room, down the long dark workshop to the door at the far end.

Tobin turned.

The sky outside had gone from black to the colour of a dirty slate, the way it did in that country instead of dawn. And in the far doorway, against it, there was a small dark shape, with a long knitted scarf wound twice round its neck and a fox sitting at its feet.

She had not gone very far after all. She had been standing there, he thought, for a long time. Long enough to hear about the gold sun. Long enough to hear about the king who paid with everybody else’s light.

Long enough to hear the part about the one who owed it nothing.

She did not come in. But she did not go away.