Chapter 92: Fifty

After nine beats of silence, his heart thudded once, weakly, and the fragment drank that too.

’Think! You’re not dead yet, so think!’

Through the cold, he remembered a frozen night on the north side of the mountain, a wolf made of ice, a grey pelt, and a line of ink in a book that wasn’t really a book.

He closed his eyes and searched inside himself until he found the pages.

They turned slowly in the dark, stiff with cold. There were two lines about Kaela Voss, and under them, newer, written on the road:

Rimewolf, the cold of.

It was the thing that had let a wolf live in the snow, the thing that had made its fur grow frost instead of freezing. It had been eaten and written down, and what is written down can be taken out again, once.

He took it out.

[Ledger entry withdrawn: Rimewolf, the cold of.][This entry cannot be withdrawn again.]

It went into him like a breath of winter air into a hot room, only the other way around. He felt it reach his skin first, then his blood, and then the place behind his ribs where his heart was fighting.

And all at once the cold stopped being an enemy.

It didn’t get any warmer. It was still cold, deadly cold, and the fragment was still drinking. But his body suddenly knew something it hadn’t known a moment ago, something the wolf had always known and the frost knew too: how to give up a little heat and keep the rest, how to let the cold in without fighting it, how to wait.

His fingers went from grey to white, and then, slowly, feeling crept back into them, warm and stinging.

[Cold adaptation (borrowed). Duration: approximately one hour.]

’Thank you, wolf. Sorry about the whole eating thing.’

One hour was all he had. He looked carefully around the hall, and counted sixty-one candidates still left.

This was the part he had planned on the stair coming down. He had to be inside when the doors opened, one of the fifty, but he couldn’t possibly be the strongest of the fifty. He could not be the one sitting up straight at the end with living fingers, in a room where Sigrid Varken, who had been born for the cold, was still pale and motionless.

Nobody in this Empire knew what he was. That was his only armor, and so far nobody had seen through it. He was a fool from a travelling troupe, entered for a joke. If that fool outlasted a Rimeguard heir in front of the Crown Prince, every person on that gallery would start asking what he really was.

And one of them already had.

He didn’t need to look up at the gallery. He could feel her eyes on him as clearly as he could feel the fragment drinking.

So he let himself slide down the wall, slowly, his head lolling and one arm falling into his lap. He let his breath come shallow and ragged, the breath of someone at the very end, and let his head tip sideways against the stone, so that anyone looking down would see a fool who had stopped juggling, stopped moving, and clearly wasn’t going to last much longer.

’Dying fool, very convincing. I’ve had a lot of practice lately!’

Fifty-eight were left, then fifty-five, then fifty-four.

Across the room, a big boy from House Corvane stood up, swayed, and fell flat on his face, and the soldiers came for him. That made fifty-three.

The girl from House Merrow, the one with the spear and the scar, walked to the hatch with her head high and her lips blue, and let herself out.

Fifty-two remained, and then fifty-one.

Aren lay against the wall with his eyes half closed and counted the breaths of the boy beside him, who was shaking so hard that his teeth rattled.

’Come on, get up, you want to go home. Your mother’s waiting for you, so go home!’

The boy stood up shakily. He took two steps toward the doors, and then a third.

Fifty.

Somewhere above the gallery, a bell rang once, very loudly.

The great doors at the top of the stair swung open, and warm air came down the steps like a hand.

Nobody cheered, because nobody had the strength. The fifty got up off the black floor the way old men get up, one piece at a time, and started toward the stair. Haskel went first, glowing faintly and looking at nobody, and then Sigrid, slowly, with her face set. Aren came last, leaning on the wall and stumbling, one hand pressed to his ribs, a fool who had made it by luck and nothing else.

Somewhere on the gallery, someone shouted, "Varken’s joke got lucky!" and a few people laughed.

’Yes, lucky! Remember that word and keep using it, please.’

Sigrid had stopped at the foot of the stair, and she waited until he stumbled level with her. She didn’t offer her arm.

"You’re not dying," she said, very low.

"I’m a fool, my lady, and we’re terribly hard to kill, like cockroaches."

"Cockroaches don’t fake their breathing." She turned coldly away. "My house has its reasons, apparently. I intend to find out what they are."

He was three steps past her when he felt it.

It wasn’t the Familiar this time, but something outside him, in the middle of the room behind him, turning.

Iron Sense caught it first: every bar of the cage suddenly humming against the edge of his mind. Then the Familiar rose under his ribs like a dog hearing its name.

He kept walking, because he couldn’t possibly stop. But he could hear the gallery going quiet around him, a silence spreading from one bench to the next, and he heard the soldiers at the doors stop talking.

He looked back over his shoulder.

In its iron cage, the fragment of the stone that does not fall had turned in the air.

It turned slowly and smoothly, as steady as a compass needle. Its smooth face, which had pointed at the far wall since before any of them were born, was pointing now at the fool. And as he took another step toward the stair, it turned to follow him.

’No, no, no! Don’t you dare.’

On the gallery, Ivo Varken was on his feet.

And beside the Crown Prince’s chair, Kaela Voss had taken her hands from behind her back and laid them on the iron rail. She wasn’t looking at the fragment anymore.

She was looking at him.