Chapter 646: South

It took nine days to fly south, and by the fourth of them Isaac had become part of the furniture.

He had brought one case of clothes and one case of books, and he had unpacked the books into the Lark’s tiny cabin with a quiet, methodical determination that nobody felt able to stop. By the second evening there were books under the benches, books along the window ledge, and a small, neat stack of them on the folding table that Valerica had to move every time she wanted to write. He had arranged them by subject. When asked which subject, he said, "Things my mother wouldn’t tell me," and nobody asked again.

He wrote to his mother every night.

He did it at the folding table by lamplight, in his small cramped hand, with the ice falcon perched on the back of his chair watching every word. Isadora had said every week. Isaac had decided that every night was safer.

"Weather," he read aloud on the fifth evening, to nobody in particular. "Warmer. Unpleasantly so. Ashe says this is normal for most of the world. I don’t believe her."

"It is normal," said Ashe, from the floor.

"Food," Isaac went on, writing. "Valerica cooked. Isole says we’ll all live."

"I said you’d probably live," said Isole.

"Probably," Isaac amended, and kept writing.

He fitted in. That was the strange part. He had been away a year, and he had always been the stiffest of them, the one who stood a little apart at the edge of every room as if he were waiting to be told he was allowed in. But the Lark had no edges. There was nowhere to stand apart. By the third night he had given up trying, and slept sitting up against the wall beside Ashe with a book open on his chest, and in the morning Nyx had drawn a small, very accurate falcon on the back of his hand in ink, and he had not noticed until lunch.

He did notice the arrangement at night, eventually. Vane saw him notice it: the fourth night, when Isaac looked up from his letter at the far bench, where Nyx had fallen asleep on Vane’s chest and Valerica had fallen asleep against Vane’s shoulder and Isole was reading with her feet in Vane’s lap, and Ashe, beside Isaac on the floor, was snoring very gently against the wall.

Isaac looked at all of it for a long moment. Then he went a shade of pink that Vane had never seen on anyone born in the Glacial Palace.

"I see," he said.

"Do you," said Isole, without looking up from her book.

"Yes. No. I mean..." Isaac looked down at his letter. "I’m not putting that in the letter."

"Your mother knows," said Isole.

"How could my mother possibly..."

"She counted the rooms we slept in," said Isole, turning a page. "She had them heated. She had two of them heated, Isaac. For six people. One of them was Mara’s."

Isaac stared at her. Then he put his face in his hands, slowly, and stayed like that for some time.

"She’s going to say something," he said, through his fingers. "In her next letter. She’s going to say something, and she’s going to think it’s funny."

"Probably," said Isole kindly.

Mara spent most of the flight with the falcon.

It had decided, on the second day, that it preferred her to anyone else on board. Nobody knew why. It would sit on the end of her bench while she wrote in her ledger, turning its faceted head from her face to the page and back again, and every so often it would lean very carefully down and look at a particular line, as if it were reading. When she slept, it perched on the edge of Isole’s satchel beside her head, and the frost from its feet left small white prints on the leather.

"It likes you," said Sarai Vell, on the sixth day.

"It doesn’t like anything," said Mara. "It’s made of ice."

"Isadora’s falcons are made of her," said Isaac, from behind his book. "A little piece. That’s how she sees through them." He turned a page. "So technically, my mother likes you."

Mara considered this. Then she looked at the falcon, and the falcon looked at her, and she said, quite politely, "Hello," and went back to her ledger. The falcon settled its wings with what Vane could have sworn was satisfaction.

On the seventh night Valerica put down her pen, looked across the folding table at Isaac, and said, "Which one?"

He did not pretend not to understand. "Not yet."

"Your mother said she’d tell you which Palace to leave until last. I’m writing an itinerary for five Palaces, Isaac. I’d like to know which one might kill us."

"She said I should tell you when you need to know."

"I always need to know."

"That’s what she said you’d say." Isaac turned a page of his book without reading it. "She also said that if I told you early, you’d spend three weeks preparing for it and forget to prepare for anything else." He glanced up. "She likes you, you know. She said you were slightly frightening."

Valerica looked at him for a long moment. Then she picked up her pen again, looking faintly pleased.

They reached the south on the ninth day.

The coast changed first. The green went out of it, and then the brown, until the land below them was red and black and bare, cracked into long ravines, with smoke going up from places where there was nothing to burn. The air coming through the panes was hot and dry and smelled of sulphur. Isaac took off his fur coat for the first time since the Glacial Palace and sat staring at it in his lap as though he had never seen it before.

Beyond the coast, standing up out of a dark sea, was a mountain.

It was alone, a single great cone of black rock rising straight out of the water, so tall that its peak was lost in its own smoke. Red light glowed in cracks down its sides like veins. And built into it, all the way up, in terraces and towers and long black galleries cut straight into the stone, was a city. It glittered. Vane realized after a moment that the whole of it was made of glass: black volcanic glass, smooth and dark as oil, catching the red light from the mountain and throwing it back.

"The Cinder Palace," said Sarai Vell. "On the summit of Oruth. They say the mountain’s been burning since before the Empire." She glanced at Isaac. "You’ll want to drink a great deal of water."

Isaac looked at the mountain. Then he looked at his fur coat. Then he looked at Ashe, who was standing at the rail for the first time in nine days, with the hot wind in her hair and her horns catching the red light, looking up at the burning peak with an expression of pure, uncomplicated delight.

"I think I’m going to hate it here," Isaac said.

"I think I’m going to love it," said Ashe. "Look. It doesn’t move."

"It’s a volcano."

"It’s a very stable volcano," Ashe said, and grinned at him, and for once Isaac had nothing to say.