Chapter 648: Heavy

The room they gave Ashe that night had a window cut straight through the mountain, and through it she could see the sea, black and flat and very far below, with the red glow of Oruth lying across it like a road.

She could not sleep. She had not expected to.

Fear she understood. She had been afraid before plenty of fights, and fear was simple: it lived in the stomach and the hands, and it went away the moment the first blow landed. Whatever this was sat higher up, under her breastbone, and it had been sitting there for most of a year, quietly, without asking permission.

Still only a Low Expert.

Bastien Oro had not meant anything by it. He had said it the way you might say the weather was warm. That was what made it stick.

Valerica came first, with the file.

She always came with a file. She sat down on the end of the bed in the heat, perfectly composed, with a single sheet of paper in her lap covered in her neat small writing, and read it out in the voice she used for the important things.

"Iskra Dain. Twenty-six. High Expert. Champion of Oruth for four years, unbeaten in the Kiln. Her Authority is called Kiln Heart, grade S. She works heat the way the smiths here work glass: she doesn’t throw fire, she tempers things. Her own body, her blade, the air around her. Whatever she touches gets harder the longer she touches it." Valerica looked up. "She’s not reckless. She waits. She lets you hit her until you’re tired, and every blow you land makes her harder to hit again."

"How did you find all that out?"

"I asked the boy with the bucket," said Valerica. "He has very strong opinions about everyone on this mountain. He’ll be a Steward one day." She folded the paper. "By the rules, you should win. Inside the same tier, an EX beats an S. Everyone knows that."

"I know."

"I know you know." Valerica was quiet for a moment. "I’m telling you because I don’t think that’s what you’re worried about."

Ashe looked out at the red road on the sea and did not answer.

Valerica did not push. That was the thing about Valerica, the thing almost nobody understood: she knew when to stop. She simply leaned over, kissed Ashe once on the temple, briskly, the way she might have initialed a document, and went out. At the door she paused.

"For the record," she said, without turning round, "I’ve bet the boy with the bucket a week of his chores that you win. Don’t embarrass me."

Then she was gone.

Nyx came second, without knocking, and lay down across the foot of the bed as if she owned it.

"Isaac’s sleeping in a bath," she reported. "Full of cold water. With all his clothes on. He’s asked the Palace for more ice and they keep sending it up in buckets, and it keeps melting, and every time he wakes up he’s in warm water and he says something in Glacial that I’m fairly sure is a curse." She stared at the ceiling. "It’s the best thing I’ve seen all year."

Ashe laughed despite herself. Down the hall, as if on cue, there was a faint splash and a single, heartfelt word in a language she did not speak.

"You’re thinking very loudly," Nyx said, after a while. "I’m not reading you. I promised I wouldn’t. But you’re thinking so loudly I can hear it through the floor." She turned her head. "It’s the rank, isn’t it."

Ashe said nothing.

"He’s a Master," Nyx said. "I’m Peak. Valerica and Isole are about to cross, I can feel it in both of them. And you’ve been standing still since the compound." She said it simply, without any pity at all, which was the only way Ashe could have stood to hear it. "And you’re the strongest of us. Everyone knows it. That’s why it bothers you."

"I’m not the strongest."

"You’re the heaviest," said Nyx. "It’s the same thing, in a fight." She closed her eyes. "Go to sleep. Or don’t. But stop thinking so loudly. Some of us are trying to rest on your feet."

Isole came third, to check her over, and did it without a word. She ran her hands along Ashe’s arms and shoulders and spine the way she always did before a fight, both halves of Samsara moving under her palms, light and dark together. When she was done, she sat back.

"You’re in perfect condition," she said. "Annoyingly so." She hesitated. "Your channels are full. Very full. Fuller than I’ve ever felt them." She looked at Ashe with her mismatched eyes, green and red. "You know that, don’t you?"

"No."

"Then I’m telling you," Isole said. "It isn’t that you can’t move. It’s that you haven’t found where to put it yet."

Mara came last.

She did not come in. She stood in the doorway in her nightshirt, with her ledger under her arm and the ice falcon on her shoulder, and looked at Ashe sitting on the bed in the red light.

"Are you scared?" she asked.

Ashe thought about lying. She had never once lied to Mara. She did not intend to start.

"Yes," she said.

Mara nodded slowly, as if this confirmed something.

"Good," she said. "Brynn says scared people check their knots." Then she went away down the hall, and the falcon’s frost-prints went with her on the hot stone, and faded.

Vane found her on the gallery outside an hour before dawn, standing at the edge with her hands on the warm black rail.

He did not say anything. He simply stood beside her, close enough that their shoulders touched, and looked out at the sea with her.

"My father," Ashe said eventually, "told me I’d never make friends. He said I was too heavy. That I’d crush anyone who got close." She kept her eyes on the water. "I’ve been thinking about it all night. I don’t know why. I haven’t thought about it in years."

"Because Bastien called you still."

"Maybe." She was quiet. "Everyone in that room tonight leaned on me. Did you notice? Valerica, and Nyx, and Isole. Even Mara, standing in the door. They all leaned on me a little." She turned her head and looked at him. "And I didn’t crush any of them."

"No."

"So he was wrong."

"He was wrong," Vane agreed.

Ashe looked back out at the sea for a long moment. The first grey of dawn was coming up behind the mountain. Somewhere far below, in the black glass halls, she could hear the forges beginning to roar.

"Then I’d like to find out," she said, "what heavy is for."