Chapter 183: The Unreachable

(Elizabeth Aurelius POV)

It came the length of my corridor without hurry, dragging its broken leg, and the walls I had made stood on either side of it and did nothing at all.

I was still holding them up. I had nothing left to make them do.

Then my hand slid on the flagstones, and the structure let go of me.

It didn’t fall all at once. Stone never does. The walls I had shaped thinnest sagged first, and the overhangs cracked along their roots. Behind the creature, the corridor came down in a slow grey roar of dust.

Stone came down across its back. It didn’t shake it off. It walked out from under the stone and kept coming.

Some of what I had made stayed up. Walls stood crooked all around me with nothing holding them now but their own weight. Above the ruin of the corridor, a shelf of cracked stone leaned out over nothing and didn’t fall.

A shard had cut my forehead when the walls came down. Blood ran warm into my left eye. I blinked it away, and more came.

I got my back against the parapet and pushed myself up it until I was standing, more or less. My legs did what I asked, which surprised me. My left arm hung at my side like something I had borrowed and couldn’t return.

There was nowhere to go. Behind me was the parapet, and behind that, the lip of the ridge and a steep broken slope I would not have survived with two good arms.

The creature stopped a few paces away.

Its weight went back.

I knew what came next. Knowing was all I could do with it.

The forelimb unfolded, bending in its three wrong places, and reached for the centre of my chest.

This time I was still there when it arrived.

The limb settled across me, the whole length of it, and leaned.

It only meant to hold me still. I was nearly sure of that. But it was longer than a horse and heavier than it looked, and a body like that cannot hold anything gently.

The weight pressed me back into the parapet. The parapet held. My ribs didn’t.

I felt them go, low on my left side, one and then another. I heard it more from the inside than the outside.

After that, I couldn’t breathe properly. Every breath I took stopped halfway, on something sharp, and went no further.

Its head hung over my chest, close enough that I could have touched it if I’d had a hand to spare. This close, the pale lines under its hide were never still. They branched and moved and branched again, like frost growing across a window.

I could hear it breathing, slow and even. I could feel each breath through the limb, and through my broken ribs.

It was waiting for something. I didn’t know what. It held so still that I didn’t think it knew either.

Beside us, the last wall I had raised against the parapet shifted.

It had been leaning since the structure let go of me, with nothing holding it up but its own weight and the old stone it was built into. Now the creature’s weight was on that stone too. I felt the parapet shudder against my back.

Above us, the wall started to fall.

The creature didn’t look up. As far as I could tell, it never looked at anything but my chest.

Most of the wall came down across its back. The rest hit the flagstones beside me, hard enough to sting my face with grit.

The limb came off me as the stone struck. The creature folded sideways under the weight and dragged itself a few paces clear along the parapet, with broken stone sliding off its hide.

Its head never left my chest. It stood among the rubble, gathering itself, and I knew it would try again. I knew that much about it now.

I slid down the parapet until I was sitting on the flagstones. There was no longer any reason to stand.

I took stock, in order, because that is what I do.

My shoulder was still bleeding. It had been bleeding since the first minute, and the whole left side of me was dark and heavy with it. My left arm might as well have belonged to someone else.

Two ribs at least, perhaps more, and every breath a negotiation. My channels burned from my palms to my shoulders, and when I reached for my core, there was nothing there to reach.

My hands had gone cold. I was thirsty, suddenly and absurdly, as though I had walked all day in the sun.

I have read the field surgeons’ manuals in my father’s library as well as the bestiaries. I know what cold hands and that kind of thirst mean in someone who has been bleeding as long as I had.

I did not have very long.

I turned my head, because it was the only part of me that moved without asking for anything in return.

Through a gap in my fallen walls, I could see back along the ridge.

Nearer, at the seam, my guard stood with his palm flat against nothing, looking straight through me.

Further off, the old patrol path ran along the crest in the afternoon light. Halfway to the gate, beside the low wall, two figures stood perfectly still, with their guards close around them.

One of them stood beside something white on the grey stones.

Even from here, I knew that pillow.

They were holding, exactly as the long call had told them to. They didn’t know it was me.

When you don’t know what has found one of your people, you keep the rest where they are, so that it doesn’t find them too.

If I had been on the gate, I would have given the same order. I would have been right to.

Somewhere beyond the fold in the ridge, James was standing next to a pile of rocks, because I had asked him to.

I was entirely alone. I had arranged it myself, very carefully, one reasonable decision at a time.

***

(Alash Vortex POV)

Before the whistle, I had been trying to start the same sentence since we stopped at the wall.

Dream Haven lay along the top of the stones, and I lay along the top of Dream Haven with my eyes closed, because it is easier to rehearse anything important lying down.

It kept the wind out of my ears and let through anything I might actually want to hear, which was the arrangement I preferred with most of the world.

I had watched the others go on with one eye open: Elizabeth up the steps to the platform, and James and Sophie down the lower path toward the cairn until the fold of the ridge took them. Then I had closed the eye.

Daphne stood beside the wall, facing back along the ridge toward the gate. She had chosen the side with a view of it without appearing to choose anything. Given a choice of seats, she always takes the one that can see the door.

She didn’t ask, and she didn’t leave. She had been waiting since the stair two nights ago, and across a table last night. She could clearly go on waiting as long as it took me, which was exactly why I couldn’t let it take any longer.

So I sat up, because some things ought to be said sitting up.

Daphne turned her head from the gate and looked at me. She didn’t know what was coming. She knew that it was now.

"Since Merrow’s..." I said.

The whistle came across the ridge from behind her.

One long call.

Dream Haven let it through, which told me what kind of sound it was before my head did.

Daphne had turned toward it before it finished. It came from the far end of the ridge, from the lookout or somewhere past it, one note held and held.

From the gate, another long call answered it. On the wall above the gate, a small figure that could only be Renn lowered his hand and was gone from the battlement.

"Hold," said the nearer of our guards.

He had been twenty paces off a moment ago. He wasn’t now. Neither was the other one.

I held.

Two nights ago, in a room full of chairs, I had told Renn I would stay where I was put. He had been talking about the signing chamber, and I had said it badly, but I had meant it more widely than that.

The hold didn’t come with an exception for people who would rather not.

I got down off the wall and stood beside it, since holding position lying down seemed against the spirit of the thing.

From here, the lookout was a square of old stone at the end of the ridge, too far off for faces. A man was standing at the top of the steps, very still. I couldn’t see anyone else up there.

That told me nothing. Elizabeth had gone up with a map to check a sightline, and she was exactly the kind of person who would walk down the lower path toward the cairn to check it from the other end.

James and Sophie were behind the fold, where nobody could see them at all, at the far end of that same path. The call could have come for any of them, and I had never minded not knowing before.

A guard came down the path from the lookout end at a dead run, with his head down. He went past the wall without slowing and was gone along the ridge toward the gate before anyone could ask him anything.

Our guards watched him go. Afterward they stood half a step closer to us, and didn’t say why.

Daphne hadn’t moved at all. She stood with her face toward the lookout.

I could have finished the sentence. We weren’t going anywhere. I didn’t, because she was watching that end of the ridge with all of herself, and when I told her, I wanted her listening with all of herself too.

If you are keeping count, and Penelope would be, that was the fourth time.

Then the System spoke.

[A vessel is in danger.]

It said it flat and quiet, in the middle of my head, in exactly the voice it had used last night to tell me my letter had gone.

’Which?’

[The one you have not bonded.]

There are five of us. Sophie and James I had bonded on purpose, James to his cost. Daphne had happened by some accident neither of us chose, which was the thing I had been trying to tell her.

The fifth had gone on up to the lookout with a map.

’Where?’

[I cannot determine that.]

It didn’t need to. The long call had come from the lookout, and Elizabeth had gone to the lookout.

I was moving before I had decided to.

"It’s Elizabeth," I said.

Daphne turned from the ridge and looked at me. "How do you know?"

There was a true answer to that. It was the one thing I had never told anyone, and I had been halfway into telling her a different true thing when the whistle went.

"Trust me," I said.

I have heard people say that all my life, and it has never once been followed by anything good.

Daphne looked at me for a single breath. I had seen her take longer to choose a chair.

"Yes," she said.

That was all it took her, one word, and I had been trying to give her the truth since Merrow’s without managing a whole sentence.

"My lord. Hold." The nearer guard stepped in front of me with his arms out.

He didn’t put his hands on me. I was Lord Vortex and he was a soldier with a career, and in the half second he spent deciding whether he was allowed to, I went under his arm.

Behind me, the other one caught Daphne by the arm.

"Lady Spinster, you can’t..."

Daphne looked at his forearm. Her fingers curled a little at her side.

His hand opened. His arm dropped as though someone had hung a bucket of sand from the wrist, and he stood there holding it, staring at her.

She let the weight go the moment his grip broke. He wasn’t hurt. She was already past him.

She blinked once, hard, as she came. I had seen her do that in Merrow’s courtyard, a little while before her wrists started to shake.

I left Dream Haven on the wall. I didn’t think about it until much later.

Then we ran.

I am not built for running. I have spent a great deal of effort, over a great deal of time, making sure of it.

The path ran along the crest toward the lookout, uneven and worn into a groove, with dry grass whipping at my legs. Daphne ran half a step ahead of me and didn’t look back once.

Behind us, both guards came after us. Neither of them tried to stop us again. Once your charges are running toward trouble, the only thing left is to be there when they arrive.

We passed the fork below the lookout. The lower path dropped away along the inner side of the ridge toward the cairn, and it was empty. Somewhere behind the fold, James and Sophie were holding, because nobody had told them anything either.

Daphne took the steps two at a time. I took them one at a time, very fast.

The guard at the top of them turned as we came up. I saw his face, and wished I hadn’t.

He was older than ours, and grey to the lips. He had one palm pressed flat against the empty air in front of him, as though he were trying to hold shut a door that wasn’t there.

"My lord." His voice cracked on it. "Stay back. Her Highness was here. She was standing right there, at the parapet, and then she wasn’t, and there’s..."

He pushed against the air, and the air didn’t move.

"There’s a wall," he said. "We can’t get through it. We can’t hear her."

Our guards arrived at my back and said nothing.

Daphne didn’t look at me. She had stopped a step short of the empty air, with her face turned toward the platform, and she had gone very still.

"Blood," she said.

"How fresh?"

"Fresh." She frowned, which Daphne almost never does. "It’s wrong. Like through water."

"How much?"

"Can’t tell."

She had said those two words to me before, about blood. She had never sounded like that saying them.

I looked at the platform. It was empty: old flagstones in the afternoon light, and a low parapet against the sky.

I put my hand out beside the guard’s.

His stopped against the air. Mine didn’t. It went on through, and at the wrist, it was gone.

The guard stared at the end of my arm. So did I, for half a breath.

I didn’t stop to wonder why. I would have plenty of time for that later, most of it at three in the morning. I stepped through after my hand.

The wind stopped.

The light stayed the same, and so did the sky. Ahead of me, the lookout was gone.

Where it had been, there was broken stone. Walls stood crooked at every angle, with nothing holding them up that I could see. Others had come down and lay in grey heaps, still settling.

Grooves had been cut through the rock where water had run. The stone was scorched black in streaks. Dust hung in the air, and above all of it a shelf of cracked stone leaned out over nothing and didn’t fall.

It smelled of hot rock, and of blood.

Elizabeth was against what was left of the parapet.

She was sitting in the dust with her back to the stone. Her left arm lay in her lap at an angle that told me it wasn’t going to do anything she asked of it. The whole left side of her was dark.

Blood had run from her hairline into her eye and down her cheek. She hadn’t wiped it away, because her other hand was flat on the flagstones, holding her up.

She was looking at me.

I had known her for most of a year. I had seen her furious and amused and bored and, once, very briefly, embarrassed. I had never seen her look at anyone without arranging her face first.

She wasn’t arranging anything now.

Daphne came through beside me. She stopped on my left, the side she had taken in Merrow’s courtyard, and her hands were already rising.

A few paces past Elizabeth, along the parapet, something long and low stood among the broken stone.

It was longer than a horse and close to the ground, with more joints than it needed. Its hide was dark and wet-looking, like slate after rain, and thin pale lines moved underneath it like cracks in lit ice.

One of its forelegs hung wrong, with a bend in it that none of the others had. On anything else I would have called it broken. It was standing on it anyway.

The other forelimb was half unfolded in the air, reaching for the centre of Elizabeth’s chest as if nothing else on that ridge existed.

It stopped there.

The long head came round, away from her.

It turned to the centre of my chest, and I felt it arrive there, under my breastbone, a pressure with nothing behind it.

Then it turned to Daphne.

Then back to Elizabeth, and to me again, and to Daphne, from one of us to the next, and it did not settle on any of us.