Chapter 81. She Handed Over the Hearth Because She Knew Her Own Hands Could Not Hold It

Chapter 81: 81. She Handed Over the Hearth Because She Knew Her Own Hands Could Not Hold It

We reached Hearthfang in the middle of the afternoon.

I’ll spare you the walk... It was long and cold and miserable, and nobody talked.

Magnara carried the worst of the wounded on her back in shifts. Velora walked at the head of the column with her sword in her hand and her eyes fixed ahead.

But Elsbeth... she walked alone.

The keep, when we saw it, looked like something that had been chewed.

The gate was gone, and the outer wall had a gap in it big enough to drive a wagon through.

The towers had cracks running up their sides, and smoke curled from a dozen places, thin and gray, drifting into the pale sky.

In the courtyard, patches of ice still lay where Elsbeth’s frost had fallen, glittering like broken glass, and everywhere were scorch marks and scattered armor and the dark stains of things I didn’t want to look at closely.

About sixty of the Hearth Guard had survived.

They stood in two ragged lines along the path, in torn gray tabards, bruised and bloody and silent.

As Elsbeth walked past them, each one of them in turn put her fist over her heart.

Nobody said a word.

A few of them were weeping, openly, without shame.

Elsbeth didn’t look at any of them. She walked straight through the gate with her back like a rod, and I saw her hands... hanging at her sides, trembling once and going still.

The Hearth was cold.

It stood at the center of the great hall, a huge round stone fireplace, wide enough to roast an ox, with a chimney that vanished into the shadowed ceiling.

I’d seen it blazing on my first night in the keep, the red light dancing over the faces of the Warmother’s council.

Now... it was black. A heap of gray ash lay in the grate, and a thin, bitter smell of old smoke hung in the air.

"It has not been out in four hundred years," Bryn said, very quietly, at my elbow. "Not once... Not through a siege, or a famine, or a winter that killed half the clan."

Elsbeth stopped in front of it.

She stood there for a long time, perfectly still. I thought about her mother, on the wall, on her knees.

’Do not let them take the hearth.’ I thought about the way she’d said it, calm and clear, with the last bit of herself she had left.

Elsbeth knelt and began to gather kindling.

She did it with great care, laying each stick in a neat little pyramid, tucking dry moss underneath. And her hands were shaking.

She reached for a flint, and it slipped out of her fingers.

She tried again. It clicked against the steel and showered a few weak sparks that died in the air.

She tried a third time. And I can see the sparks scattered but went out instantly.

"Your hands are too cold," Magnara said, quietly.

"I know."

She tried again, and her fingers jerked, and the flint went spinning away across the floor. She stared after it.

Her shoulders began to tremble, and I took a step forward without thinking, but Magnara put out a hand and stopped me.

She shook her head very slightly. Then, without a word, she walked to the hearth, pulled a small flint-box from her belt, and set it down on the stones beside Elsbeth’s knee.

Elsbeth looked at it. She picked it up.

The spark caught on the first try.

A tiny orange flame crawled along the moss, bit into a twig, and spread. It grew slowly, uncertainly, crackling in the cold air, until a small, steady fire glowed in the center of that vast black hearth.

The red light touched Elsbeth’s face.

She didn’t move... She just knelt there, watching it burn, and I saw a tear slide down her cheek and drop into the ashes.

After a long time, she rose.

"Bryn," she said.

"Yes, Elsbeth?"

"You will keep the Hearth."

Bryn went very still. "I... what...?"

"You are a steward of Hearthfang until I return." Elsbeth’s voice was quiet and perfectly level. "The fire must not go out..."

"Not for any reason." She turned and looked at her. "I cannot hold it, but you... can."

Bryn dropped to her knees on the stone. Her face crumpled.

She pressed a fist against her mouth and nodded again, and a sob tore out of her.

Elsbeth rested her hand briefly on top of her head. It was the closest thing to an embrace that I’d ever seen her give anyone.

...

The hawk arrived at dusk.

It came out of the southeast, fast and low, and landed on a battered post at the edge of the courtyard with a ruffle of feathers.

The pouch on its leg held a single scrap of paper, folded small. Magnara unfolded it and read it by torchlight, and the lines of her face went flat.

"From the guards at the cave," she said.

Nobody breathed.

"I will read it as it was written." She cleared her throat. "Five of the sixteen Hollowed broke on the fifth day, before the moon."

"They became beasts... We put them down."

"Eleven woke on their own when the light came and the crystals shattered."

"All five of the gold-bound lived... Their stones cracked."

"They are awake and weeping... They do not understand where their Master has gone."

She lowered the paper.

I heard a sound behind me. I turned and saw Eira standing a few steps away, with her hand pressed to her mouth.

Her face had gone gray. Sigrun put an arm around her shoulders, and Eira sagged against her, and I watched her knees give out.

I didn’t say anything... I stood there with a slip of paper in my mind, and the words "five of the sixteen" were going around and around like a stone in a bucket.

Eleven alive... Five are... dead and put down by the ones who had guarded them.

I’d knelt in the snow and held out my hand to every one of them, and I hadn’t reached them in time.

’You reached eight,’ Bryn had told me. ’That is eight more than anyone else.’

It didn’t feel like a number worth being proud of.

The Moon Shrine had changed.

I want to describe it properly, because I know I’ll never see it again.

When I’d last stood in that round white hall, it had been a place of pale glass and glowing water, quiet and beautiful and a little sad. But now... it was something else entirely.

At the center, where Millie had hung in the air, stood a pillar.

It rose out of the floor like a frozen fountain, a column of translucent white stone, thick as a house, soaring up through the dome and out into the sky.

It glowed from within with a soft, milky radiance, like a candle behind a sheet of ice... Its surface was covered, from the base to as high as I could see, in tiny glowing symbols, ranks and ranks of them, packed as tight as the writing on a page.

The Moon Font at its foot had frozen solid.

The water, once so clear, had set into a block of perfect, flawless ice, and I could see the faint shapes of petals frozen into it, swirling slowly in the light.

The great mirror had shattered, and its fragments lay embedded in the floor like silver stars.

It was lovely... It was one of the loveliest things I’ve ever seen.

And it was killing everything in the room.

Sylvara had warned us at the door. Any living thing that stood too long in the light of the pillar would be drained, she said.

Its warmth, its strength, and its life... She’d seen it happen to a guard who’d gone in on the first night.

The woman had come out with her skin peeling off in sheets, as if she’d been burned, and her hair gone white.

She was alive... barely.

"Ten paces," Sylvara said. "No more... And only for a few minutes."

I looked past her.

At the foot of the pillar, in the shadow of the frozen pool, a small, plain figure lay curled on her side in a white robe, with her brown hair spilling over the stones.

Nobody had gone in to bring her out.

"I’ll do it," I said.

"Leon," Sylvara said sharply. "No..."

"She’s been lying there for two days."

"If you go in there, you will..."