Chapter 99: The Third Bell

[Day 2 of 40.]

"Three bells," Ivo said. "Dusk, dawn, and the one that matters."

He stood in the middle of what was left of the camp with twenty-nine candidates and fifteen soldiers gathered around him, and he drew in the snow with the butt of a spear: a rough circle for the lake, a dot for the center, a cross for where they stood.

"The first rang at dusk last night. The second at dawn. The third will ring at dusk tonight, and from the moment you hear it until the count is spoken in the morning, you do not take a single step toward the center, not one, not to save your friend, not to fetch your boot, not to piss." He looked around at them with his pale eyes. "Last time, a man forgot and took three steps after his hat. We only ever found the hat."

Nobody laughed, not even nervously.

"In daylight," Ivo went on, "you can walk where you like. And today, we walk there."

He pointed decisively with the spear, inward, toward the center.

Far out across the ice, small and dark in the grey morning light, something stood up out of the lake. At first Aren took it for a rock, until he made out the curve of a hull, the stump of a broken mast, and the long line of a deck tilted against the sky.

It was a ship, a big one, old and black, frozen into the ice up to its rails in the middle of a voyage that had never ended.

"Walls and a roof," Ivo said, "and wood that hasn’t been burned in three hundred years. If we’re inside it by the third bell, most of us will see the dawn." He paused. "If we’re not, a third of us won’t, again."

They set off quickly, within the hour.

There was nothing to pack, so they simply walked in a long, ragged line with the soldiers and the last six horses on the outside, and Ivo at the head with the fool two paces behind him, as always. It was perhaps two hundred paces, which on an ordinary day, on an ordinary road, would have taken an hour.

Here, it took all day.

The ice was clear in some places and white in others, smooth as glass and then suddenly ridged and broken where something underneath had shifted. Twice they had to go around wide cracks that breathed cold mist. Once a horse slipped, broke its leg, and had to be killed, and nobody went near the body afterward, in case anyone was tempted to warm their hands.

And under their feet, the whole way, the soldiers ran with them.

That was exactly what it felt like. At every step, Aren looked down and saw another frozen face, another arm flung forward, another body caught in the middle of the same desperate run, thousands of them now that they were out on the open lake, rows behind rows, all of them facing the center.

All of them facing the ship.

’Not the ship, they’re facing the center. The ship’s just in the way!’

He firmly told himself that several times.

Around midday, Kaela rode back along the line and stopped beside him.

"Fool."

"Captain!"

She held out her lance. "Carry this."

He looked at it, and then warily at her.

"Captain, I’m not permitted to touch weapons. It’s in the fool’s law. Mother Grell was very clear about it."

"It’s not a weapon, it’s a pole. This ice is going to break my horse’s legs and I need both hands on the reins. Carry the pole."

He took the pole obediently.

It was heavy, black iron from the tip to the butt, and it hummed against his palm the way everything iron hummed now, with Iron Sense awake under his skin. He could feel her in it: not her hand or her warmth, but the blood she had bound to it at Kharn, a thin hot thread running the whole length of the shaft.

He shouldered it awkwardly and walked on beside her horse, and for a few paces neither of them said anything.

’Different girl. Different country. Same job. I carry the weapon of a woman who hates me and I walk two paces behind her horse.’

He had done this once before, from a tower room to the edge of an arena, with a sword case on his shoulder and Vivienne Ashgrave walking ahead of him without looking back.

He wasn’t entirely sure why the thought made him want to laugh.

"You walked out there yesterday," Kaela said, without looking down at him, "to look at the ice when the dead boy took Dunstan."

"Fools are naturally curious, Captain."

"Nobody else went."

"Nobody else is a fool."

"Hm." She was quiet for a few paces. "And last night, your ring?"

"Bad jokes."

"You keep saying that." She finally looked down at him, and her eyes were very dark and very steady. "I’ve been listening to men lie to me since I was nine years old, fool. You’re good at it. You’re better than most of my officers. But you’re not as good as you think."

She held out her hand for the lance. He gave it back.

She rode on.

[Kaela Voss. Hostility: 100%.]

’Still the same number, but that’s not the same hundred percent as yesterday. I’m almost sure of it.’

The light started going at what felt like mid-afternoon.

It didn’t fade gently as light faded in the south. It simply drained out of the sky, quickly and evenly, and the cold came up to meet it. People started to hurry, and the line stretched thin.

The ship was close now, close enough to see the old carvings along its bow, worn smooth by three hundred years of ice: a ring of figures holding hands, and in the middle, a symbol Aren didn’t recognize, a plain round circle with nothing in it.

He looked at it longer than he meant to.

Then Ivo was shouting, and soldiers were dragging people up the slope of ice where the ship’s side met the lake, and over the rail onto the tilted deck, and the line was pouring aboard in a frightened, stumbling crowd.

Aren stopped at the rail and turned around to count.

Freckles, Priest-boy, the Corvane boy and the merchant girl came first, then Sigrid, with one hand on the merchant girl’s back, and then Haskel, warm and steaming, already striding up the deck toward the black doorway of the stern castle as though he owned it.

The Merrow group was last.

Three of them had fallen behind: a tall girl with a spear, the best they had left since their scarred champion quit the fragment hall, and two boys from her House, one of them limping badly. They were a hundred paces out. Maybe a little more.

The bell rang.

It wasn’t loud. It didn’t have to be. It came up through the ice and into Aren’s boots, deep and round and final, and every person on the deck of the ship went silent at once.

The third bell.

A hundred paces out, the Merrow girl stopped dead. So did the boys. They looked at the ship. They looked at each other.

"Stay there!" Ivo bellowed, and his voice cracked. "Stay where you are, don’t move! We’ll come for you at dawn!"

The girl looked down at the ice around her feet, at the soldiers in it.

Then she looked at the limping boy, who was shaking so hard Aren could see it from the rail, and whose lips were already turning grey.

He wouldn’t last the night out there. Everybody on the ship knew it. She knew it.

"It’s a hundred paces," she called back, her voice remarkably steady. "It’s only a hundred paces."

"Don’t!"

She put her arm around the limping boy, hauled him upright, and stepped forward.

For three steps, nothing happened.

On the fourth, her feet kept going.

Aren saw her realize it. She tried to stop, but her legs simply carried her on at the same steady pace, toward the ship, and then, as she reached the bottom of the slope where the side of the ship met the ice, they swerved. Without her. They took her past the ship instead of up to it, along its frozen hull and on toward the center of the lake, step after step, with the limping boy still under her arm and the other one stumbling beside them.

She screamed, dropped her spear and grabbed at the ice with her free hand as she passed, and her fingers slid off it.

Kaela was already moving. She tore a coil of rope off the shoulder of the nearest soldier and threw it, overhand, a long flat throw that dropped the loop neatly over the girl’s shoulders.

"Hold it!" Kaela shouted. "Hold on, girl!"

The girl grabbed it with both hands, and the rope went taut. Kaela braced her boots against the rail and leaned back, and the rope dragged her forward across the deck as if she weighed nothing at all.

Aren didn’t stop to think; he dropped down beside her and grabbed the rope behind her hands.

’Its grip to zero. Not mine, the lake’s. Anything!’

There was nothing to touch except the rope, so he simply held on.

For a few heartbeats, the two of them held the girl. He felt the pull at the other end, enormous and patient, not angry, not even trying very hard. Kaela’s breath hissed through her teeth, the deck boards groaned, and the rope stretched until it sang.

Down on the ice, the Merrow girl looked up at them, still walking, her arm around the boy, and something in her face changed.

She let go of the rope.

It whipped back up over the rail and the two of them fell in a heap on the tilted deck, Kaela half on top of him, the lance clattering away. By the time they had dragged themselves back to the rail, the three Merrow candidates were far out on the ice, walking calmly side by side toward the center, small and dark against the grey, and none of them was screaming anymore.

Then, gradually, the dusk took them.

[Law of the Hollow observed: Do not walk toward the center after the third bell.]

[Laws confirmed: 3/3.]

Kaela stayed on her knees at the rail, breathing hard, her hands bleeding where the rope had torn them, and she didn’t seem to notice.

"She let go," she whispered. "She could have held on, and she let go."

"She didn’t want to pull us down with her," Aren answered.

It came out in his own voice, not the fool’s, and he heard it a moment too late.

Kaela turned her head slowly and looked at him, intently.

He made himself scramble backward, slip on the tilted deck, and fall on his rear with his bell jingling, and a couple of the soldiers nearby let out a nervous laugh. When he looked up again, Kaela had picked up her lance and was walking away up the deck without a word.

That left twenty-six.

Aren sat on the cold boards and looked over the rail, down through the clear ice at the foot of the ship.

There was a soldier just below the surface there, a young one, with a spear in his hand and his mouth open in a shout that had never finished. He was facing the center, like all of them, frozen in place for centuries.

As Aren watched, very slowly, the frozen soldier turned his head and looked up at the ship.