Chapter 229: Cairns

They had not gone two hundred paces when Daniel stopped.

He was watching the old man. Rishin walked bent behind Vina with his hand pressed to his chest. Every few steps he stopped and stood, breathing, until she tugged him on again.

"Hob," said Daniel.

The aurochs came up beside him. Daniel put his hand on the great plated neck and looked at Rishin.

"Senior," he said. "Get on."

Rishin looked at the aurochs. Then at Daniel.

"I can walk."

"You can walk slowly. We have a long way to go." Daniel did not move his hand from Hob’s neck. "He will carry you. You can still be behind her. She will walk in front of him."

The old man did not argue.

On the rim, he would have refused a hand up a single step. Logan watched Link and Daniel lift Rishin onto Hob’s broad back between the plates. The old man sat there bent over his closed hand, with the two stones pressed to his chest.

Hob did not seem to notice the weight. He swung his great head round once to look at his rider. Then he looked at Daniel, and blew out through his nose.

Vina caught the old man’s free hand where it hung down by the aurochs’s shoulder. She stood in front of Hob and looked up at Rishin.

"Is this all right?" she asked. "For the promise?"

"I am behind you," said Rishin. "That is all it asks."

Vina nodded. She turned round and walked on along the path with her arm stretched up behind her and his hand in hers. Hob came after her at a slow, careful walk.

Edda walked a little apart from her father on that path. Logan noticed it without thinking about it. She had done the same since the Whiteout, as though there were words for Bram she had not yet decided to say.

The cairns grew larger as they went.

Near the Spindle they had been small piles, knee high and scattered loosely across the dust. Farther out, they stood taller than a man, and closer together. The paths between them narrowed and wound.

Logan stopped beside one and looked at it.

The stones in it were all different. Some were as big as a fist. Some were pebbles. One near the top was as large as a cart wheel.

They were piled together without any order, the way stones pile up at the foot of a cliff.

’Every one of these was carried,’ he thought. ’Every one of them was set down.’

There was a stone on the path beside the cairn, small and grey, lying by itself in the dust. Logan bent to pick it up.

His hand closed on it. It came up off the ground as light as a dry leaf.

He set it on the cairn with the others. He wondered whose it had been, and whether they had ever looked back for it.

The woman at the third crossing of paths was sitting on a cairn.

She was old and brown and wiry, and she sat cross-legged on the top of a pile of stones with a stick across her knees. She watched them come along the path toward her.

When she saw Hob with the old man on his back, she raised her eyebrows.

"Heavy one," she said.

"He is," said Daniel.

The woman looked at Garen next. He was walking with his stone held against his chest in both arms, red-faced and sweating, a little behind the others. Isolde walked beside him without looking at him.

"And that one," said the woman. She looked at Isolde. "Yours?"

Isolde did not answer.

The woman nodded anyway.

Her name was Odile, and she kept the crossing.

"Somebody has to," she said. "People set stones down here all the time. Somebody has to put them on the cairns, or the paths fill up."

"Do they come back?" asked Alice. "The ones who set them down?"

"Why would they? They are light." Odile tapped her stick on the stones under her. "They go on to the end. To the Last Cairn."

"And the ones who do not set them down?"

Odile looked at Rishin on the aurochs’s back.

"Some of them sit," she said. "Out among the far cairns. They get heavier and heavier until they cannot get up. And then the Keeper finds them."

"The Keeper," said Logan.

"It walks the far cairns. It likes the heavy ones." She looked back at Garen, and then at Isolde. "I would put that down before you get there, girl, if I were you."

They camped in the shelter of a cairn as tall as a house.

Garen sat down with his back against it and the stone in his lap. He had carried it all waking. His arms were shaking. His face was grey under the red.

Isolde sat a little way off with Alice.

Logan watched her look at her husband and look away again. He saw her hands twist together in her lap.

He did not say anything. It was not his to say.

He looked across at the old man sitting against Hob’s side instead. Rishin’s eyes were shut, but his fist stayed tight. ’You know what is at the bottom,’ he thought. ’You have always known.’ He pushed the thought away before it could go any further.

Garen did, in the end.

"Isolde."

She looked up.

"Come here, dear. Please. I cannot come to you. I have a rock in my lap."

Isolde stayed where she was. Then she got up and came and sat down in front of him, close, with the stone between them.

Garen looked at her over it.

"I did not ask you," he said.

Isolde waited.

"I told you what I was going to do, and I told you not to look, and I did not ask. I did not give you a choice. You had to stand there and do what I said."

He looked down at the stone. "I would do it again. You know I would. But I should have asked you first. I am sorry I did not."

Isolde looked at him. Then she put her hand out and laid it on the stone.

Logan saw it shrink.

It did not go. It shrank, the way ice shrinks in a warm hand. When Isolde took her hand away, the stone in Garen’s lap was the size of a fist.

"That is all of it I can do," she said. Her eyes were wet. "I am still angry. I am trying."

"I know, dear." Garen let his head rest against the cairn. "That is a great deal lighter."

Logan lay awake after the others slept.

He thought about Odile’s face when she looked at Rishin. He thought about the far cairns, and the Keeper, and the heavy ones who sat down and did not get up.

He looked across the camp at Hob.

The aurochs had lain down in the dust with his legs folded under him. The old man was asleep against his side, with Vina asleep against his. His hand was still closed round the two stones.

Even in his sleep, he did not open it.

[ Time remaining: 318 days ]