Chapter 83: Ash and Iron

The crack in the rock let him out onto the mountainside just as the sun went down.

He lay in the snow below the opening with his arm over his face, breathing carefully. At first every breath pulled at his side, then less, then hardly at all. He felt the broken ribs settle into place one after another, slowly, and when he finally sat up, the pain had faded from sharp to dull.

[Perfect Blood. Ribs: healed.]

’Twice as fast as anyone else, and it still took all afternoon. Remind me never to get hit by a Rank B again!’

He took off the mask and looked at it. Kaela’s blood had dried dark on the edge, where her fingers had pulled it off. He tucked it inside his shirt and climbed toward the ridge.

Roderick was in the hollow, sitting with his back against the rock and his knees pulled up, exactly where Aren had left him that morning. He didn’t get up when Aren came over the edge. He only looked at him slowly, from his boots to his face, counting the pieces.

"You’re alive."

"Yes, mostly."

"I saw the yard from up here," Roderick said in a very flat voice, "all of it."

Aren sat down across from him, and neither of them lit a fire.

"How many?"

"I stopped counting at three hundred." Roderick looked out at the valley, where lanterns burned on both walls, more than Aren had ever seen, and men moved between them in long slow lines, carrying things. "The ones who had the song in them don’t remember anything. I heard them shouting at each other afterward, both sides. Every one of them saw the other side strike first, and every one of them is right."

Aren had nothing to say to that.

"And the old priest, the Prince’s chaplain? They found him an hour ago in his chapel, sitting at his table with his hands folded." He paused. "His heart stopped, and there wasn’t a wound on him. The soldiers at the door were saying it was grief."

"It wasn’t grief."

"No, I didn’t think so either."

The Choir didn’t leave loose ends. A man who had smiled at the iron gate this morning was sitting dead in a stone room tonight, because he had failed and because he knew their names.

Aren thought of the grey-eyed priest stepping backward into the dark of the Rift, and of his soft voice saying that iron remembers, and so do we.

"Ghost," Roderick asked quietly, "what actually happened down there?"

So Aren told him everything: the chains across the Rift and the knocking from below, Kaela’s hand on the iron, the one bite, the nail in her fist, and the wheel in the crack. And at the very end, her hand on his mask.

Roderick didn’t say anything after that, not for a good while.

"She knows."

"She knows Ren is the thief. She doesn’t know who Ren really is."

"And she let you go."

"She told me to run." Aren looked down at the lanterns on the iron wall. "Tomorrow she starts looking, and she meant every word of it."

Roderick didn’t argue, because he had seen Kaela Voss’s face across the yard more than once.

"Then Ren of Aldermere died today in the yard, with three hundred other people," he said slowly. "Nobody will look for one more water boy."

"Exactly."

"So you can’t go back down to the camp."

"No, I can’t."

Roderick glanced at him and then away, and Aren knew he was thinking about Varro, because Aren was thinking about him too.

From the edge of the hollow he could see the King’s camp, where most of the tents were dark and only a few fires still burned. One of them was the cook fire behind the long tent, where he had held his ground against a stick in the dark every night for almost two weeks.

The old man was sitting beside it on an upturned crate, alone, with two bowls on the ground next to him. One of them was steaming.

He wasn’t eating. He sat perfectly still with his one hand on his knee and watched the path between the tents, the one that led to the woodpile, a man watching a door he fully expects to open.

Aren watched him back, and he didn’t go down.

He simply couldn’t, because if Ren came walking up that path tonight, alive after the yard, then Ren had a reason to be alive. And tomorrow, when the Imperial soldiers came asking who had been missing during the battle, the old man would have to choose between lying for him and telling the truth. Aren knew exactly which he would choose, because he had seen him stand between two soldiers with a butcher’s cleaver.

’I’m not asking him to do that for me. Not ever!’

So he sat on the cold rock and watched Edric Varro wait for a boy who wasn’t coming, until the second bowl stopped steaming. The old man picked it up, looked at it, and carefully poured it onto the fire. Then he went into his tent.

"Ghost."

"I know."

"You didn’t even say goodbye to him."

"I know," Aren repeated, and neither of them spoke after that.

They were packing when they heard the paws, light and quick on the frozen path below the hollow. Aren had his hand on the mask before he understood the sound, and then he let go of it.

Luna came over the edge of the rocks.

She didn’t hurry at all. She walked into the hollow as if she had been there before, which she had, and sat down on the cold stone in front of Aren, gazing steadily at his left side with her two moon eyes. She didn’t growl, but she whined once, very softly.

Under his ribs the Familiar stirred toward her, and then lay still again.

"She knows this place," Roderick murmured.

"She followed me here once, after the ford."

The dog stayed for twenty breaths, maybe thirty. Then she got up and went back down the path toward the King’s camp, toward the tent where a girl with silver hair would be lying awake tonight, thinking about a water boy who had screamed her name across a battlefield.

Tomorrow Vivienne would probably follow that dog up here. He was nearly sure of it. She would find the hollow and the flat stones where two people had slept, and nobody there at all, and she would know that Ren hadn’t died in the yard.

’Good, let her wonder! Wondering is much safer than knowing.’

He picked up his pack and slung it over his shoulder.

They left an hour before midnight, heading north and east, away from both camps.

Roderick went first, and Aren had never seen him like this. In the yard, in the tunnels and in the Abyss, Roderick had always moved as someone trying not to be noticed. Out here on the open mountain at night, he moved as someone who belonged. He found a path where there was no path, along the backs of ridges and down through gullies Aren would have walked straight past, and he stopped at things Aren couldn’t see and went around things Aren couldn’t hear.

"Smugglers," Roderick whispered once, touching a cairn of three stones in the dark. "This is their road. It’s a hundred years old, and nobody else can find it." He sounded almost pleased with himself. "I can feel where people have walked, even old walking, warm marks on the ground."

"And I can feel nails, so we are a very strange pair of thieves."

[Familiar of Nothing: Hunger 31%.]

It was cold, and it steadily got colder. By the time they reached the high pass, the wind had teeth, the snow was blowing sideways off the peaks, and the stars seemed close enough to touch.

They stopped in a crack in the rock just below the top to wait for the wind to drop, and that was where they heard the voices.