Chapter 97: Zero

[Day 1 of 40.]

The wall didn’t stop at the shore.

For the first hour after it rose, everyone believed it would. It stood around the lake in every direction, white and solid and silent, and the fifty candidates huddled together on the ice in the last grey light and waited for it to do something. Then the wind came, all at once, from every side, and the wall began to move inward.

It wasn’t fast, only relentless: a slow white edge creeping across the ice that swallowed everything it touched, and behind it there was nothing at all, not the mountains, not the sky, not the shore. When it reached the first frozen soldiers near the edge of the lake, they vanished one by one, silently and completely.

"Together!" Ivo Varken’s voice cut through the wind. "Everyone together, now! Do not let it separate you!"

People ran, and somebody fell and was dragged roughly up by the collar. Kaela’s soldiers rode in a wide ring around the candidates, herding them inward, the horses screaming and sliding on the ice.

Then the white reached them, and the world shrank to the length of an arm.

Aren couldn’t see his own feet. He could hear the wind and the bell on his cap and, somewhere close by, Freckles crying his name, or the name he went by now, over and over.

"Fool! Fool!"

He found her purely by the sound and grabbed her wrist.

"Here, hold my belt! Don’t let go for anything."

She grabbed it so hard he felt her knuckles through his coat.

The cold came with the white.

It wasn’t the cold of the road, or even the cold of the fragment hall, but the cold of a place that had never once been warm. It came straight through his furs and his skin into the meat of his arms. Somewhere nearby a horse went down heavily and didn’t get up.

And under his ribs, the Familiar of Nothing opened its eyes.

He felt it wake, quietly and completely. It didn’t pull at him. It simply turned toward the cold, all of it, the whole white endless storm of it, and he understood with perfect clarity what it was feeling.

It was hungry, and somebody had just laid out a banquet.

’Not here, not in front of everyone. Small bites!’

He let it have a little, just the cold inside his own coat, and inside Freckles’s coat where she pressed against his back. He felt it drink, quick and greedy, and the air in that small space went from killing cold to merely terrible.

Freckles gradually stopped shaking quite so hard.

"You’re warm," she mumbled into his back, surprised.

"Fools have very thick blood."

"That’s not true."

"It’s true for this fool."

It took most of an hour for Ivo and Kaela’s soldiers to drag everyone into one place. When the white thinned enough for Aren to see three paces in front of him, the fifty, or what was left of the fifty, were packed together in a rough circle on the ice, with the soldiers’ horses on the outside as a windbreak and the soldiers themselves kneeling between them.

Ivo counted heads, walking slowly around the circle with his blue-grey hand on each shoulder, and the number he reached was forty-seven.

Three candidates hadn’t come in out of the white, and neither had one of the soldiers and four horses.

Nobody said anything about it, because nobody had to. The wind said it for them, howling triumphantly across the ice beyond the circle.

Kaela stood in the middle of the circle with snow crusted in her hair, giving short orders to her sergeant in a low voice: horses inside the ring, blankets doubled, nobody sleeps alone, nobody sleeps longer than an hour without being woken. Her face was white with cold and perfectly calm.

Once, she looked across the circle at the fool, at his hand still on Freckles’s shoulder, and then she looked away.

The first of them died just after dark.

He was a big, quiet boy from House Merrow who had come in last out of the white, and he simply sat down on the ice next to his friends, closed his eyes, and didn’t open them again. His friends shook him and slapped his face, and then, eventually, they stopped.

Ivo came and knelt beside the body. He looked at it silently, then stood up and turned to face the circle.

"He’s gone. Leave him where he is. Don’t take his furs, don’t move him far, and whatever you do," his pale eyes went slowly around the circle, "don’t forget the first stone."

Most of them nodded. Some of them were too cold to nod.

Cassian Haskel was not one of those.

He sat on the far side of the circle with his three companions from House Haskel and a few others who had drifted toward him, just as people had in the fragment hall, and the air around him shimmered. He wasn’t cold, and he didn’t look as though he had ever been cold in his life. Little curls of steam rose off his gloves, and the snow didn’t settle on his shoulders.

The boys around him were shivering, though. Haskel’s warmth only reached so far, and he had made it very clear in the fragment hall that he didn’t share.

One of them, a thin, sharp-faced boy called Dunstan, was looking at the dead Merrow boy’s furs.

"He doesn’t need them anymore," he pointed out.

"Ivo said not to touch him," somebody muttered.

"Ivo said a lot of things." Dunstan’s teeth were chattering. "Ivo isn’t the one freezing to death."

Haskel watched him with a lazy, interested smile, exactly as he had watched the fool trip over his own feet at Patrons’ Night.

"He’s right, you know," Haskel said. "Furs are furs." He held up one hand, and the air above his palm rippled with heat. "And if you’re going to take them anyway, you might as well warm them up first. I’d hate for you to put on cold furs, Dunstan."

Aren saw it coming a second before it happened.

’No, don’t! Somebody stop him!’

He was on the wrong side of the circle, with Freckles holding his belt and forty frozen people between him and Haskel, and a fool who shoved his way through a crowd shouting about rules was a fool that everyone would remember.

He hesitated for one heartbeat, and that was all it took.

Haskel reached down and laid his glowing hand flat on the dead boy’s chest.

The furs caught first, with a soft, eager sound, and then the coat beneath them. The smell of burning hair and wool spread across the circle, and people turned, and somebody shouted, and Dunstan, already reaching for the furs with both hands, laughed in relief as the heat hit his face.

"There," Haskel said. "Isn’t that better?"

The dead boy sat up.

He did it slowly and stiffly, with flames running up his arms and across his shoulders and into his hair. His eyes opened, and they weren’t burning; they were clear and calm and very pale blue, the same color as the ice beneath him.

Dunstan stopped laughing instantly.

The dead boy turned his head and looked at him, then reached out with one burning hand, quite gently, and took Dunstan by the wrist.

Dunstan screamed. He pulled back with all his strength, and he couldn’t break the grip. Nobody could have. The dead boy stood up, still holding him, and began to walk.

He walked out of the circle, between two of the horses, which screamed and shied away from him. He walked toward the center of the lake, with flames streaming off him into the storm, and he pulled Dunstan along behind him effortlessly. Dunstan dug his heels into the ice and screamed and grabbed at the snow, and it made no difference at all.

Two of Kaela’s soldiers ran after them, and Kaela’s voice cracked sharply across the circle.

"Stop! Hold! Nobody follows him!"

The soldiers stopped at once.

At the edge of the light, twenty paces out, the dead boy stopped too. The ice in front of him opened silently. He stepped down into it, still burning, still holding Dunstan by the wrist, and the ice closed over both of them.

The fire went out, and nobody moved. The wind had dropped, and in the sudden quiet they could hear the ice settling, a soft, deep creak that went on and on and then stopped.

Aren was the first to walk out there.

He didn’t decide to; his legs simply did it, Freckles’s hand sliding off his belt, and he went across twenty paces of ice to the place where they had gone down, and looked.

The ice was perfectly clear and perfectly smooth again.

Under it, just below the surface, stood two new figures, in among the old ones. A big boy in burned furs, with his face calm and his eyes open. And beside him, holding his wrist, a thin, sharp-faced boy frozen in the middle of running, toward the center of the lake, with his mouth wide open.

’Furs are furs.’

[Law of the Hollow observed: Do not burn the dead.]

[Laws confirmed: 1/3.]

Behind him, he heard Haskel laugh, a short laugh, a little too loud, and it didn’t sound comfortable at all.

"Well," Haskel said to nobody in particular, "that’s one way to learn."

Nobody laughed with him.

Aren went back to the circle and sat down beside Freckles, and she grabbed his belt again without a word. Across the circle, Kaela was looking at him. Not at the fool. At him, at whatever had made him the only one to walk out there.

Then, from very far away, from the middle of the lake, a bell rang.

It was a deep, round, unhurried sound, much too big for any bell he had ever heard, and it came through the ice as much as through the air, so that he felt it in the soles of his boots and in the knife in his boot and in his teeth. Every head in the circle turned toward it, and even the horses froze.

It rang once, and then it stopped.

Ivo Varken had risen to his feet. In the dim light his face had gone the same color as his hands.

"That’s the first bell," he told them. "When the third one rings, nobody moves toward the center, not for anything."

He sat down again heavily.

Aren looked down at the ice between his boots, which he had carefully stopped himself from doing since the wall rose.

There was a soldier directly beneath him, as there was beneath everyone. A grown man in old armor, frozen mid-stride, one arm flung forward, his face turned up toward the surface.

Toward Aren.

His eyes were open. That wasn’t new. All their eyes were open.

But they hadn’t been looking at him when he sat down.