Chapter 100: Last Step

[Day 2 of 40. Night.]

The ship was warmer than the ice, but only barely, and only in the grudging manner of a grave sheltered from the wind.

They packed themselves into the hold, twenty-two candidates and fifteen soldiers and the smell of five frightened horses, and sat shoulder to shoulder on the tilted planks in the dark. The wood creaked constantly around them, and somewhere above, the wind hunted along the deck and found nothing.

Cassian Haskel and his three companions from House Haskel didn’t come down. They had taken the captain’s cabin at the top of the stern castle, the only room on the ship with a door that still shut. Every so often a thread of light showed through the cracks in the deck overhead, and with it came the faint, warm smell of something cooking.

Nobody said anything about it, or at least not yet.

Aren sat at the end of the hold with Freckles asleep against his shoulder, which he allowed because waking her would have been cruel, and because every three hundred heartbeats he let the Familiar take the edge off the cold around her before it could reach her.

Ivo came and sat down quietly beside him in the dark.

He didn’t speak at first. He sat with his blue-grey hands folded and his head tilted back against the hull, listening to something Aren couldn’t hear.

"Three laws broken," he said at last, "in two days."

"People were frightened," Aren offered carefully.

"People are always frightened." Ivo didn’t open his eyes. "Thirty years ago, they broke all three in the first three days, and eight years ago, when I came, exactly the same thing happened. I’ve read the old accounts from before that, the ones the Crown doesn’t show anyone." He fell silent briefly. "Every Breath, all three laws, in the first three days, every single time."

Aren felt the cold settle a little deeper into his bones.

"You think it wants them broken."

"I think it eats the ones who break them," Ivo answered softly. Ivo opened his eyes and looked at the dark planks overhead, toward the line of warm light from the captain’s cabin. "And I think it’s very good at choosing who will."

The breath came through before Aren could answer.

He felt it rise under the ship from the center of the lake, long and slow and enormous, and pass beneath them. The hull groaned loudly, and in the hold people gasped and pulled their furs tighter, and Freckles stirred against his shoulder without waking.

Then it was gone, and in its place came a sound Aren had never heard before.

It came from everywhere at once, from all around the ship and far out across the lake in every direction. It was a long, deep cracking, much slower than river ice breaking up in spring, the sound of something huge underneath stretching after a very long sleep.

The ship moved, not much, only a hand’s width. The whole hull shifted under them with a groan of old timber, tipped a little, and settled again. People cried out, and one of the horses screamed and kicked the planks.

"What was that?" someone shouted.

Ivo was already on his feet, his face gone grey in the darkness.

"It’s walking!"

They came up onto the deck into the dark, all of them, shoving and stumbling, and Aren saw it by the faint grey glow that came off the ice itself.

The soldiers were moving, all of them. Every frozen figure in the clear ice, as far as he could see in every direction, thousands upon thousands of them, had moved at once. They had taken one long, slow, running step toward the center of the lake, perfectly together, and the ice had cracked and shifted around them as they did it.

And the ice had shifted the ship.

It sat in the middle of their rows, and the long lines of soldiers were pushing past it on both sides, inside the ice, dragging it with them a hand’s width at a time toward the center.

"It’s moving us," the merchant girl whispered. She was holding the rail with both hands. "The ship. It’s moving us toward the center."

Toward the center. After the third bell.

Aren saw the same thought arrive on forty faces at once.

"Off!" Ivo roared. "Everyone off the ship, outward, away from the center! Run!"

Nobody needed to be told twice, and nobody hesitated.

They went over the rail on the outer side, all of them at once, dropping onto the ice and landing hard and scrambling up again, soldiers dragging candidates, candidates dragging each other. The horses were too terrified to be led, so Kaela’s sergeant cut their tethers and they bolted across the ice into the dark, screaming.

Aren went over the rail with Freckles on his back and her arms locked around his neck, and landed lightly in a crouch.

The ice was moving under his feet. The surface was still, but underneath it, just below his boots, the frozen soldiers were still taking that one step, slowly, all together, and the whole lake groaned with it. He looked down and saw a man’s face slide past beneath him, inches below the ice, eyes open, mouth open, running the other way.

’We’re running against them! Every step we take, they take one toward the center.’

He ran desperately.

Everyone ran, outward, away from the ship and the center, in a ragged, stumbling, sobbing line across the dark. The cracks opened around them as the soldiers moved, long black seams that breathed white mist, and twice Aren had to jump one with Freckles’s weight dragging at his neck. Behind him someone fell and didn’t get up, and someone else stopped to help, and he couldn’t look back to see who.

Then the ice opened right in front of him.

It split with a sharp crack, a black gap as wide as a doorway, and the front rank of runners went straight into it. Aren saw four soldiers’ helmets vanish, then a girl he didn’t know, then a boy from House Corvane, the bored one, who had lost his brother on the first night, his arms flung up as he dropped.

Aren threw himself flat at the edge of the crack and reached.

His hand closed on a wrist.

He had no idea whose. It was too dark. The weight on the other end was enormous, and the crack was pulling, the black water at the bottom pulling, the whole patient lake pulling, and he could feel Freckles clinging to his back and his own body sliding forward over the edge.

’Weight to zero, just his, just for one second!’

He thought it, and for one heartbeat, the boy in the crack weighed nothing at all.

In the same heartbeat, neither did Aren. He felt his body go light as ash, his hold on the ice gone, Freckles’s weight suddenly the only thing pinning him down, and in that one strange weightless second, he heaved.

The Corvane boy shot out of the crack and landed on the ice behind him, coughing violently.

Then the second ended, and Aren’s own weight came back all at once, and he was lying on his stomach at the edge of the crack with Freckles on his back and his heart hammering so hard he couldn’t breathe.

Somebody grabbed him by the collar and hauled him upright, and it was Sigrid Varken.

She didn’t say anything. She looked at him for one long moment in the dark, at the Corvane boy coughing on the ice, at the crack, and at the place where a fool with no strength had just pulled a grown boy out of a hole one-handed. Then she took Freckles off his back, swung her up onto her own, and turned.

"Run," she said. "And this time, fool, try to look as if it’s hard."

They ran until the cracking stopped.

It stopped all at once, exactly as the breathing stopped at dawn: one moment the whole lake was groaning and splitting and shifting, and the next there was only silence, and wind, and the sound of people falling to their knees on the ice and sobbing for breath.

Aren lay on his back and looked up blankly at the dark.

[Rank D: Marrow Tempering. 2% → 5%.]

[Reduce to Zero. Uses today: 1/2.]

’Three percent for running the wrong way across a frozen lake. If I live long enough, this lake is going to make me very strong.’

The count came at dawn. They had stopped somewhere out on the open ice, far from the ship, huddled together in rings of six exactly as Kaela had taught them, and when the grey light came, the voice spoke into every one of them at once: twenty-four.

"Twenty-four," they answered, all of them, instantly, in one hoarse voice, and nobody walked away.

[Sigrid Varken. Hostility: 41% → 33%.]

Aren sat up stiffly and looked around.

The soldiers in the ice had stopped. They stood frozen again, all of them, each one exactly one step closer to the center than they had been the night before. Far out across the lake, small and black in the dawn, the ship stood where the march had left it.

It was a long way off now, a great deal closer to the center than it had been, and somebody had lit a fire on its deck.

They walked back across the ice in the grey light, because there was nowhere else to go. Ivo walked at the front with his face set. Kaela rode beside him on the only horse they had managed to catch. Sigrid walked with Freckles still on her back, and the Corvane boy limped along beside Aren without a word, but every so often he looked at the fool’s hands and then quickly away.

As they came closer, Aren saw the fire.

It burned in a big iron brazier at the top of the gangway, where the ship’s side met the ice. Beside it stood the three companions from House Haskel, warm and rested and holding spears. And above them, at the rail of the stern castle, leaning on his elbows with a cup of something steaming in his hands, stood Cassian Haskel.

He hadn’t left the ship at all. He had stayed in his warm cabin all night, while the soldiers in the ice walked and the ship moved and twenty-two people ran for their lives in the dark, and he had come through without a scratch. He had never once set foot on the ice that night. The ship had carried him toward the center, and the lake had simply let him go, because he hadn’t walked a single step.

He smiled down at them with his dazzling white teeth.

"Good morning," he called pleasantly. "I do hope you all had a nice run!"

Nobody answered.

Haskel raised his cup lazily toward the brazier, the fire, the ship, the only shelter on the whole frozen lake.

"House Haskel has claimed this vessel," he declared, "under the old law of salvage. It’s ours now, and so is everything on it." He took a long, comfortable sip. "You’re all welcome to come aboard, naturally. I’m not a monster."

He paused, and his smile widened.

"But warmth," said Cassian Haskel, "costs."