The Night He Chose

They read all that day, in turns, by the fire at the door of the workshop.

Tobin read first, because he read fastest, and then Mira, because she wanted to so badly that nobody could have stopped her. Mira read slowly, with her finger under the line and her lips moving, and when she came to a long word she stopped and took a run at it, like a pony at a ditch, and sometimes fell in. “Un-con-quer-able,” she said, and then, triumphantly, “unconquerable,” and the cobbler said “Well jumped, miss,” and Mira went pink to the ends of her braids.

Wren would not take a turn.

“I read like a cart with a square wheel,” she said, which was true, more or less. She did not say the other thing, which was that she would have had to take the book out of Tobin’s hands to do it. She sat on the threshold with her back against the doorpost, half in and half out, pretending to mend her boot with a bit of string, and listened to every word.

So the Remnant heard the Chronicle the way they had always heard the old stories: out loud, by a fire, in a voice that was not quite sure of itself.

And it was all there. That was what undid them. Every scrap they had carried in their songs for three hundred years was there in the clear strong hand, whole and plain. The man coming down the Mountain with a small brass lamp. The first door he knocked at — “Your lamp’s gone out,” read Tobin, “may I light it?” — and Sister Hale slapping her knee with a crack like a snapped stick and crying, “That’s in the song! That’s the second verse!” The blind who were touched and saw. The grey who were touched and flushed with colour, and remembered names they had forgotten for twenty years. Mira read that part herself, very slowly, and when she had finished it she put her fingers up to her own eyes for a moment, and nobody said anything.

There were funny parts, too, which none of them had expected. There was a woman in a town called Brackwater who would not let him light her lamp until he had wiped his boots, and made him wipe them twice. There was a goose. Sister Hale laughed at the goose until she had to be thumped on the back.

“Goose,” she said, wiping her eye. “Seventy years we’ve been singing goat. I knew it never scanned.”

And there was the Queen. She came into the story the way she always did, softly, from the edge. First she offered him a crown, like Ardric’s, and a city of his own, and a sun that would shine on him alone; and he said no. Then she offered to leave every city in peace, if he would only put out his lamp and go home. And he said no to that too.

“For I know what her peace is,” read Tobin, in a voice that had grown steadier as the day went on, as if reading aloud were a thing his throat was remembering how to do. “It is the peace of a room where the fire has gone out, and everyone has stopped shivering because they have stopped feeling the cold.”

Wren pulled the string tight on her boot and did not look up.

The pale sun went over. The farm-lads took turns at the brow of the Hill, and came back and said there was nothing moving out there but, once, a ragged line of grey birds that circled the Hill twice and went away. Cinder ate the end of the clerk’s loaf while he was listening to the goose, and was not sorry. And all the time the pile of read pages on the left of the book grew thicker, and the pile on the right grew thinner, and everybody knew where it was going, and nobody said so.

By the time the light went out of the sky, there was only a little of the clear strong hand left.

They built the fire up high before they went on. It seemed important, though nobody said why. The cobbler fetched more thornwood, and the washerwoman shook out the blankets, and the Remnant drew in close round the ring of stones, shoulder to shoulder, the way Wren supposed they had sat in a great many barns. Sister Hale sat on her bucket with her crutch across her knees. Mira sat on one side of the book, on the floor, and Tobin on the other.

Wren set the lamp on a flat stone beside the book, where the light would fall on the pages. Then she went back to her doorpost.

It was Tobin’s turn.

He read the last of the clear hand. It was only a few lines, about the road to the Hill, and the Hill itself, and the workshop at the top of it where he had made his lamps; and it ended in the middle of a page, in the middle of a sentence — “and tonight, if there is time, I mean to finish the” — and then nothing. A space. As if somebody had knocked at the door.

Tobin looked at the empty half-line for a long time. Then he looked, without meaning to, along the workshop to the long bench in the shadows, where a little brass lamp lay half-made among the tools, with no chimney on it and no flame. Wren saw him look. She looked too. She had slept two nights in that room, and had never once wondered why it had been left.

Tobin turned the page and began the other hand.

It was harder to read. The letters were small and cramped and crooked, and they leaned against one another like tired people, and the lines went downhill. He had to hold the page close to the lamp, and push his cracked spectacles up, and go slowly.

“I am not the one who should write this,” he read.

“The one who should is gone. But the others will not write it, and somebody must, and so it falls to me, who ran.

“This is the last night, as I saw it. I will not make it better than it was. I will not make myself better than I was.

“We came up the Hill in the evening, the few of us who were with him then, and he was glad to be home. He lit the forge, and set the kettle on it, and sat down at his bench and took up a lamp he was making, and worked at it while we talked.

“And while he worked he told us that she was coming. He said it quite plainly, between one tap of the hammer and the next, the way a man says it will rain. She was coming that night, with all her dark, and she knew where to find him.

“We begged him to go. The far side of the Hill was open. He could have been over the river by morning and away into the hills, and she would never have found him; he knew the roads better than anyone living. I want whoever reads this to know that. He could have gone.

“He did not go.

“One of us was not there that night. He had gone down the Hill at noon and had not come back, and we had wondered at it, a little, and then forgotten. I will write it plain, because it was plain.

“He was betrayed by the friend he loved best—“

Tobin stopped.

He did not stop the way you stop for breath. He stopped the way a clock stops: all at once, in the middle of a tick. His finger was still under the line. His mouth was still a little open on the next word. And the hand that was holding the edge of the page — the long thin ink-stained hand with the round shiny scar in the middle of the palm — had begun to shake, so that the page shook with it, and the lamplight went trembling across the cramped black letters.

He did not make a sound. That was the worst of it. He only sat there, with the fire on one side of his face and the dark on the other, looking at the words as though they had been written about him; and the silence round the fire went on, and on, and nobody moved.

Wren did not look at him. She had not looked at him once since Vaelport, and she did not now. But she did not need to. She could see the page shaking out of the corner of her eye, and she could hear him not breathing; and she could hear, very clearly, as if somebody had said it in her ear, her own voice on a harbour wall. You sold him. You sold Ash for a letter.

Something in her chest twisted up hard and tight, like a rag being wrung. She held on to her boot.

Then Mira leaned across.

She did not say anything. She put her hand over Tobin’s shaking hand on the page, quite lightly, and held it there a moment. Then she slid the great book gently out from under his fingers, and drew it across the floor to herself, into her own lap.

Tobin let it go. He put his hands down flat on his knees, palms down, so that nobody could see the scars, and looked at the fire.

Mira bent over the page. The cramped letters were too small and too crooked for her slow new eyes; Wren saw her try, and frown, and try again. Then she did a thing that nobody but Mira would have thought of. She shut her eyes. And she laid her fingertips on the page, very lightly, the way she used to lay them on the Story-Wall in the dark under the earth, and began to move them along the line.

“He pressed so hard,” she said softly, to no one. “You can feel every letter. He must have been holding the pen like a knife.” Her fingers went back to the beginning of the sentence. Her voice, when it came, was low and careful and quite steady.

“He was betrayed by the friend he loved best, for a promise of power. She had promised him a city of his own to rule, and a crown that would not fail, and that the dark would never touch him. And for that he told her the road up the Hill, and the hour, and that the Master would be all but alone, and that the rest of us would run.

“He was right about that.”

I am going to give you the rest of it the way Mira read it, without stopping, because that is how they heard it, round the fire on the Hill, with the dark outside the door.

“The Master knew. He knew before any of us. When the cold began to come up the Hill, and the flame in the forge lay down flat as if a wind were on it, he set down his hammer, and the lamp he was making, unfinished, and stood up.

“’Somebody has to carry it,’ he said.

“We did not understand him. So he said it again, more gently, the way you say a hard thing twice to a child. The curse could not be broken from outside, he said, by any lamp or any crown; and it could not be run from, for it was everywhere. It would have to be carried through. ‘The fire has to go through the dark,’ he said, ‘and out the other side. There is no road round. So I will carry it.’

“Then he took his own lamp down off its hook — the little brass one, that he had carried down from the Mountain — and he put it into my hands, and folded my fingers round it, and held them there with his own. His hands were very warm. And he said: ‘Keep it. It will not go out. Give it.’”

Wren’s hand went to her coat.

She did not mean it to. It went by itself, and pressed flat against her ribs, where the lamp had lain warm all the long road from the sea; only the lamp was not there, it was on the flat stone by the book, burning; and her hand stayed pressed there anyway, over nothing, as if it were holding something in. She could feel two old hands round hers, in a tunnel under Vaelport, folding her fingers shut. It was never mine. It’s never been anyone’s. Give it.

She had thought those were Ash’s words. She had carried them across the whole of the Burned Country thinking they were his. And they were — they were his. But somebody had said them first.

Mira’s fingers went on along the line.

“Then he went out of the door, and up on to the top of the Hill, where nothing grows. Alone. Without any light at all.

“And the dark came.

“It came up round him like a tide coming in over the sand. It was cold. It was all the cold there has ever been. I saw it from the door of the workshop, by the light of the lamp in my hands, and I could not move.

“He did not fight it. He did not run from it. He opened his arms to it, the way you open a door to somebody standing out in the rain; and it went into him. All of it. Ardric’s bargain, and every grey year since, and every cold thing there ever was or will be. He took it into himself, as a wick takes in oil. Nobody made him. He chose to carry it, so that the fire could go through the dark and out the other side.

“It covered him. And it put out his light.

“And we ran.”

Mira’s voice cracked, just there, on the short word. She stopped, and swallowed, and kept her eyes shut, and went on.

“I ran with his lamp in my two hands, down the far side of the Hill in the dark, and I did not look back, and I did not stop until I could not run any more. The others ran too. We went home, those of us who had homes, and shut our doors. We said: it is over. We said: we were fools to hope. We said: she was right; the grey is easier.

“It was dark on the first day.

“It was dark on the second day. I sat in my house with the shutters closed and the lamp in my lap. It burned no bigger than a coal under ash. I could not look at it, and I could not put it down.”

Wren made a sound. It was very small, and she turned it into a cough, and nobody looked at her.

No bigger than a coal under ash. She knew exactly how big that was. She had carried it in a boat under the fish-market, and down the long grey roads from the sea. She had sat with it in her lap and not been able to look at it, and not been able to put it down.

Mira’s fingers moved to the next line. There was only one.

“On the third morning, the fire woke.”

Mira opened her eyes.

She turned the page. It was blank. She turned the next. That was blank too: thick, creamy, empty paper, with nothing on it at all. She turned another, and another, faster, and then she lifted the whole back half of the book on her thumb and let it fall, page after page after page, and every one of them was blank, all the way to the end.

That was all. There was no more.

Nobody said anything.

The fire cracked, and settled. Out on the Hill the night wind went over the ash with a sound like somebody breathing out. The washerwoman had her face in her apron. The cobbler was sitting with his big hands hanging between his knees and his cap crushed in one of them. Sister Hale had not moved since the change of hand. She sat on her bucket with her crutch across her knees and her one bright eye shut, and her lips were moving, though no sound came out; and Wren thought she was not singing, but simply saying it over to herself, the last line, so as to have it by heart before she slept. On the third morning.

The lamp burned on the flat stone beside the empty pages. It did not flare. It did not do anything at all. It only stood up very straight and still, the way a candle does in a room where nobody is breathing.

And Wren looked at Tobin.

She had not meant to. She had not looked at him once — not on the slope with the pole in his hand, not by the iron door, not all that long day while his voice went on reading; not since the harbour wall at Vaelport, when she had said the worst thing she had ever said to anyone and watched it land. But she looked at him now, across the fire, before she could stop herself.

He was sitting where Mira had left him, with his scarred hands flat on his knees. He was not crying. He looked as though he had gone past the place where people cry and come out somewhere colder on the other side. The firelight lay along one side of his thin face and caught the crack in his spectacles. He was looking at the blank pages in Mira’s lap as though they were a door that had been shut on him.

He looked so much like someone who had run.

Wren looked at him for as long as it takes to draw one breath. Then she looked away, quickly, down at her boot, and the string, and the knot she had tied in it and could no longer see.

It was then that the roof creaked.

It was a small sound, high up in the dark over their heads, where the slates were: a scrape, and a shuffle, and a click of something hard on stone. Then another, further along. Then a great many, all at once, all down the length of the workshop roof — the sound of a crowd of something settling, and folding itself, and going still.

Cinder was on her feet. Every hair along her back stood up stiff. She did not growl. She stood stock-still in the middle of the firelight with her nose pointed up at the broken end of the roof, and the spark at the end of her tail burned small and hard and red.

Wren looked up.

Through the hole in the roof, against the dark sky, a row of shapes sat along the ridge. Ash-crows. Grey birds with grey beaks, packed close together, wing to wing, all down the line of the roof and out of sight. None of them made a sound. And the nearest one, right above the hole, had put its head on one side, and was looking down into the warm room with one pale eye: at the fire, and the old woman, and the children, and the book.

And at the little brass lamp, burning beside it.