Day 3 / 100
The shore called Slick had been a cliff once.
The sea had taken it a slab at a time, patiently, over generations, until all that was left was a vast tilted staircase of black rock running down into the fog, each step as wide as a cart and glazed with a skin of wet. Mist hung over it in a low sheet, thin enough to see through and thick enough to blur the edges. The stones shone. Every one of them looked solid and none of them was.
"Here," said Wynne, and crouched at the lip of the first step with her palm flat on the rock, as if listening. "Fresh weed on the lower ones. See the green? Don't step on the green. Stay on the pale stone, the barnacled stone. It grips."
"I can't see green."
"Sorry. Dark, slick, shiny. Anything that looks like a seal's back." She stood, dusting her knees. "Count with me, and match my pace. Not faster. I know you want to go faster."
Ione did want to go faster. She had been awake for an hour before dawn with her hands knotted in her blanket, going over the last two days like a ledger that would not balance. The ridge. The hands that did not warm. The prints that came back fainter than they went out. She had added the column three times and always arrived at the same figure, which was a number she did not intend to look at until she had to.
"One," Wynne said, stepping down. "Two."
"Three," said Ione.
They went down the stair together.
* * *
It went well for the first hour.
Wynne chose the footing with an almost musical precision, a long step here, a hop there, a sudden swerve across a ledge that looked perfectly safe and turned out, when she prodded it with her boot, to be slime over a hollow. Ione matched her step for step, and the line between them hummed and swung. She began, absurdly, to enjoy it. It was the first time in five years that her body had been given a problem with a clear answer, and her feet, which had been dragging through the days like a pair of tired dogs, found a rhythm and held it.
At some point she noticed that her first step each time was a little quicker than the rest. She did not mean it. It was only that she was eager, and the eagerness lived in her ankles, so that she started each new stone a heartbeat before she should. Twice the line pulled gently and she corrected. Wynne said nothing about it. On the third time she said, over her shoulder, mild as milk, "You're leading with your hope, Miss Calder. It's a lovely quality. Terrible for footwork."
"Is that a rule?"
"It's an observation."
"I'll bear it in mind."
"Do." Then, softer: "It's not a bad thing to have."
Ione did not answer. She looked at the stone beneath her boot, and found a pale barnacled patch, and put her foot on it, and for a little while she did not think about anything at all.
The stair steepened. The mist thickened and thinned in slow breaths. Below them, out of sight, the sea made a sound like someone folding wet cloth, over and over, very far away. Ione's heart had settled into the pace of her feet. She was close enough to Wynne's back now to see the exact weave of her coat, the lines of oil where the leather had cracked at the shoulders, the loose ends of the plait where the hair was pale to the point of vanishing. She looked away from it. She watched her boots. She counted.
That was how she did not see the weed.
It was only a little, a tongue of dark wet flat against the pale rock, the same dull gray as the rest of it in the dead light. She put her left boot down on it with the whole of her weight. Her heel went out from under her as if the stone had been snatched away.
* * *
She did not scream. She would think of that afterward with a bitter kind of pride. There was no time. There was only the sensation of the sky tilting up and away, a hot, slow, awful lurch in her stomach, and the black rock rushing to meet her, wet and shining and quite indifferent.
The line snapped taut.
And a hand closed around her right wrist like a clamp.
It was a hard grip, sudden and total, the grip of someone who had been bracing for exactly this for three days. It stopped her halfway down. Her shoulder gave a hideous crack of protest and her boots scrabbled for purchase on the green and found none, and she hung there for a single, stretched breath, her whole weight on one arm, her fingers clawing at nothing.
Then the fog went blue.
Not the whole fog. Not at first. It was a thread: a single fine line of color, impossibly vivid, running down the length of the cord between her wrist and Wynne's. It was blue, a deep, bright, woad-dark blue, the color of a deep dip left too long in the vat, and she knew it the way a hand knows the shape of its own glove. She had not seen it in five years. It lay across the gray like a line of ink across a blank page.
Then it ran. It rushed outward from the point where Wynne's fingers closed on her skin, in a flood, spilling down her own arm and across the rock, and the rock was not black but a layered, shining blue-black shot with violet. It flooded up into the fog. The fog was a thousand shades of white and silver and pearl, so many that she could not hold them in her head at once. The sea, which she could not see, which she could only hear, slid up into her mind as a vast deep green going to slate at the edges. And at the end of the line, bent over the rock with her whole body braced, one arm locked, her face turned up and pale and astonished, was Wynne Harrowgate.
She was the color of something Ione had no word for.
Her hair was not pale. It was a deep warm red-gold, the shade of old brass, of maple in a low October sun, and it was escaping its plait in a thousand bright threads. Her eyes were hazel with a ring of green. Her coat was the dark brown of strong tea. And along her cheekbones ran the faintest dusting of freckles, a hundred small constellations in a soft honey-gold that had been invisible in every gray hour since the Salt Lamp.
Ione stared. She hung in the air at the end of an arm and stared at a face she had been looking at for three days without ever seeing it.
"Ione," said Wynne, through her teeth. "Foot. Left foot. Pale stone, two o'clock. *Now.*"
She found it. She did not know how. She heaved herself up and sideways onto the barnacled rock, and Wynne pulled, and then she was crouched on solid stone with her knee scraped through and her palm flat on the barnacles, wheezing, and Wynne's hand was still on her wrist.
The colors did not fade. They rang in her eyes, so loud and bright that she felt dizzy. It was too much. It was the sound of a hundred bells after five years of silence, and it came into her chest and lodged there like an enormous, hurting breath. The blue of the cord. The brass of the hair. The wet green-black glitter of the rock, a color so alive it hurt. She could hear her own heartbeat. She was shaking so hard her teeth knocked.
She closed her eyes.
It was not a decision. It was a flinch, as automatic as pulling her hand from a flame. Her lashes came down, and behind them the dark was suddenly full of color, floating and swirling, a thousand afterimages of the things she had just seen. She thought: *this is what it was like.* She thought: *Tamsin.* She thought, with a drop in her stomach so sudden she nearly sobbed, that she was seeing it, she was seeing it, and Tamsin was not here.
That was the thing. Not the joy. The joy came a half second behind, and the guilt got there first.
"Ione." Wynne's voice was very close and very quiet. "Ione, are you hurt?"
She tore her wrist out of the woman's grip.
* * *
The colors went like a candle snuffed.
The gray came down all at once, soft and total, and Ione found herself crouched on a flat gray rock in a flat gray fog with a gray hand held out toward her in the mist. For a moment the world was so empty that she could hear the sea.
Wynne had not moved. She was still bent forward, one arm outstretched, her palm open in the air where Ione's wrist had been. She did not reach again. She did not try to take hold. After a moment she let the hand fall to her knee, slowly, the way a person puts down something she has been handed and has no right to keep.
"Sorry," Wynne said. "I should have asked."
"No." Ione's voice came out raw. She swallowed. "No. You caught me. That's the job."
"All the same."
"Don't." She was on her feet now, though she did not remember rising, and her hands were shaking so hard she locked them behind her back. "I'm not hurt. My shoulder. It's fine. Let's go."
Wynne looked up at her. Her face was a tilted pale oval in the dead light, perfectly composed, with its brightness turned down to a low, steady glow, like a lamp left on in a room no one was using. Ione had the absurd urge to say her own name just to hear someone say it back. She said nothing.
"Fine," said Wynne, and stood. She was careful about it. She brushed off her knees, shook out her wrist, and glanced at Ione's scraped palm without remark. "Pale stones, then. Count with me. One."
"Two," said Ione.
She did not look at the rock where the color had been. She did not look at the woman's hair. She walked down the black stair behind her guide for the rest of that day with her hands clenched and her face shut, and when the line went taut she said "sorry" and when it went slack she said "sorry" again, and Wynne, to her eternal credit, said nothing about it at all.
* * *
Wynne counted the steps. It was a job, and it kept her.
The trouble was that her own numbers kept slipping. She had told Ione three days ago that the Pall liked a mind that wandered, and now, on the stairs of the Slick, in the dull afternoon, she felt her own mind wandering like a dog that had caught a scent.
It had been cold. That was the first thing. When the Calder girl's wrist had come into her hand, hot and quick and alive, a pulse hammering under the thin skin, Wynne had felt a rush of warmth go up her arm like a draft of something strong. It had been so sudden she had nearly dropped her grip. For one dizzy, bright second she had felt warm all the way through for the first time in two years. She had felt, absurdly, like a lit house.
Then it had gone, and it had taken more than the warmth with it.
She had felt the exact moment. A thin, clean, pulling sensation, as though a thread had been drawn out of the middle of her, carefully, by someone who knew where to find it. And after it, a lightness that was not quite lightness. Something in her had been lifted away, a tiny thing, no weight at all, and she had been left lighter and colder and more transparent by exactly its size.
She had known what it was. She had known for two years what it would feel like. She had not known it would feel like being thanked.
*It is not the girl's fault,* she told herself, counting. *She didn't ask for it. She doesn't know.* She said it as a litany, four times, five, until it had a smooth round shape in her mouth. Then she smiled, firmly, so the smile would be ready when Ione looked up.
Ione did not look up. She walked, and counted, and kept her eyes on the rock.
Wynne counted, too, and told herself she did not mind.
* * *
They stopped when the light went amber, as much of amber as the Pall allowed, a faint warm smear low in the white. Wynne found a shallow cave in the rock, built a fire, and handed Ione a tin of goose grease for her scraped palm without being asked. Ione took it without a word. They ate. They did not speak of the afternoon.
Afterward, with Ione sitting stiffly at the cave mouth with her blanket around her shoulders, Wynne slipped off to the back of the cave on the pretext of seeing to the packs and pushed back her left sleeve.
The ring had been there for a long time. A band around the wrist, about two fingers wide, where the Pall had first taken hold of her, where the skin had gone the color of old paper and the veins stood out in blue relief. For two years it had been exactly that wide. She had measured it against a thread, every month, as one measures a child against a doorframe.
In the dim light of a hand-sized flame she held the thread against her wrist, and the band of pale skin ran a clear half-finger past it.
She looked at that for some time.
Then she drew the sleeve down, and pinned the cuff at the wrist with a small brass pin, as she did each night, and went back to the fire with her face arranged. When Ione glanced up she said, brightly, "Tea?"
Ione looked at her for a long moment. Then she held out her cup.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Day 3 / 100
The shore called Slick had been a cliff once.
The sea had taken it a slab at a time, patiently, over generations, until all that was left was a vast tilted staircase of black rock running down into the fog, each step as wide as a cart and glazed with a skin of wet. Mist hung over it in a low sheet, thin enough to see through and thick enough to blur the edges. The stones shone. Every one of them looked solid and none of them was.
"Here," said Wynne, and crouched at the lip of the first step with her palm flat on the rock, as if listening. "Fresh weed on the lower ones. See the green? Don't step on the green. Stay on the pale stone, the barnacled stone. It grips."
"I can't see green."
"Sorry. Dark, slick, shiny. Anything that looks like a seal's back." She stood, dusting her knees. "Count with me, and match my pace. Not faster. I know you want to go faster."
Ione did want to go faster. She had been awake for an hour before dawn with her hands knotted in her blanket, going over the last two days like a ledger that would not balance. The ridge. The hands that did not warm. The prints that came back fainter than they went out. She had added the column three times and always arrived at the same figure, which was a number she did not intend to look at until she had to.
"One," Wynne said, stepping down. "Two."
"Three," said Ione.
They went down the stair together.
* * *
It went well for the first hour.
Wynne chose the footing with an almost musical precision, a long step here, a hop there, a sudden swerve across a ledge that looked perfectly safe and turned out, when she prodded it with her boot, to be slime over a hollow. Ione matched her step for step, and the line between them hummed and swung. She began, absurdly, to enjoy it. It was the first time in five years that her body had been given a problem with a clear answer, and her feet, which had been dragging through the days like a pair of tired dogs, found a rhythm and held it.
At some point she noticed that her first step each time was a little quicker than the rest. She did not mean it. It was only that she was eager, and the eagerness lived in her ankles, so that she started each new stone a heartbeat before she should. Twice the line pulled gently and she corrected. Wynne said nothing about it. On the third time she said, over her shoulder, mild as milk, "You're leading with your hope, Miss Calder. It's a lovely quality. Terrible for footwork."
"Is that a rule?"
"It's an observation."
"I'll bear it in mind."
"Do." Then, softer: "It's not a bad thing to have."
Ione did not answer. She looked at the stone beneath her boot, and found a pale barnacled patch, and put her foot on it, and for a little while she did not think about anything at all.
The stair steepened. The mist thickened and thinned in slow breaths. Below them, out of sight, the sea made a sound like someone folding wet cloth, over and over, very far away. Ione's heart had settled into the pace of her feet. She was close enough to Wynne's back now to see the exact weave of her coat, the lines of oil where the leather had cracked at the shoulders, the loose ends of the plait where the hair was pale to the point of vanishing. She looked away from it. She watched her boots. She counted.
That was how she did not see the weed.
It was only a little, a tongue of dark wet flat against the pale rock, the same dull gray as the rest of it in the dead light. She put her left boot down on it with the whole of her weight. Her heel went out from under her as if the stone had been snatched away.
* * *
She did not scream. She would think of that afterward with a bitter kind of pride. There was no time. There was only the sensation of the sky tilting up and away, a hot, slow, awful lurch in her stomach, and the black rock rushing to meet her, wet and shining and quite indifferent.
The line snapped taut.
And a hand closed around her right wrist like a clamp.
It was a hard grip, sudden and total, the grip of someone who had been bracing for exactly this for three days. It stopped her halfway down. Her shoulder gave a hideous crack of protest and her boots scrabbled for purchase on the green and found none, and she hung there for a single, stretched breath, her whole weight on one arm, her fingers clawing at nothing.
Then the fog went blue.
Not the whole fog. Not at first. It was a thread: a single fine line of color, impossibly vivid, running down the length of the cord between her wrist and Wynne's. It was blue, a deep, bright, woad-dark blue, the color of a deep dip left too long in the vat, and she knew it the way a hand knows the shape of its own glove. She had not seen it in five years. It lay across the gray like a line of ink across a blank page.
Then it ran. It rushed outward from the point where Wynne's fingers closed on her skin, in a flood, spilling down her own arm and across the rock, and the rock was not black but a layered, shining blue-black shot with violet. It flooded up into the fog. The fog was a thousand shades of white and silver and pearl, so many that she could not hold them in her head at once. The sea, which she could not see, which she could only hear, slid up into her mind as a vast deep green going to slate at the edges. And at the end of the line, bent over the rock with her whole body braced, one arm locked, her face turned up and pale and astonished, was Wynne Harrowgate.
She was the color of something Ione had no word for.
Her hair was not pale. It was a deep warm red-gold, the shade of old brass, of maple in a low October sun, and it was escaping its plait in a thousand bright threads. Her eyes were hazel with a ring of green. Her coat was the dark brown of strong tea. And along her cheekbones ran the faintest dusting of freckles, a hundred small constellations in a soft honey-gold that had been invisible in every gray hour since the Salt Lamp.
Ione stared. She hung in the air at the end of an arm and stared at a face she had been looking at for three days without ever seeing it.
"Ione," said Wynne, through her teeth. "Foot. Left foot. Pale stone, two o'clock. *Now.*"
She found it. She did not know how. She heaved herself up and sideways onto the barnacled rock, and Wynne pulled, and then she was crouched on solid stone with her knee scraped through and her palm flat on the barnacles, wheezing, and Wynne's hand was still on her wrist.
The colors did not fade. They rang in her eyes, so loud and bright that she felt dizzy. It was too much. It was the sound of a hundred bells after five years of silence, and it came into her chest and lodged there like an enormous, hurting breath. The blue of the cord. The brass of the hair. The wet green-black glitter of the rock, a color so alive it hurt. She could hear her own heartbeat. She was shaking so hard her teeth knocked.
She closed her eyes.
It was not a decision. It was a flinch, as automatic as pulling her hand from a flame. Her lashes came down, and behind them the dark was suddenly full of color, floating and swirling, a thousand afterimages of the things she had just seen. She thought: *this is what it was like.* She thought: *Tamsin.* She thought, with a drop in her stomach so sudden she nearly sobbed, that she was seeing it, she was seeing it, and Tamsin was not here.
That was the thing. Not the joy. The joy came a half second behind, and the guilt got there first.
"Ione." Wynne's voice was very close and very quiet. "Ione, are you hurt?"
She tore her wrist out of the woman's grip.
* * *
The colors went like a candle snuffed.
The gray came down all at once, soft and total, and Ione found herself crouched on a flat gray rock in a flat gray fog with a gray hand held out toward her in the mist. For a moment the world was so empty that she could hear the sea.
Wynne had not moved. She was still bent forward, one arm outstretched, her palm open in the air where Ione's wrist had been. She did not reach again. She did not try to take hold. After a moment she let the hand fall to her knee, slowly, the way a person puts down something she has been handed and has no right to keep.
"Sorry," Wynne said. "I should have asked."
"No." Ione's voice came out raw. She swallowed. "No. You caught me. That's the job."
"All the same."
"Don't." She was on her feet now, though she did not remember rising, and her hands were shaking so hard she locked them behind her back. "I'm not hurt. My shoulder. It's fine. Let's go."
Wynne looked up at her. Her face was a tilted pale oval in the dead light, perfectly composed, with its brightness turned down to a low, steady glow, like a lamp left on in a room no one was using. Ione had the absurd urge to say her own name just to hear someone say it back. She said nothing.
"Fine," said Wynne, and stood. She was careful about it. She brushed off her knees, shook out her wrist, and glanced at Ione's scraped palm without remark. "Pale stones, then. Count with me. One."
"Two," said Ione.
She did not look at the rock where the color had been. She did not look at the woman's hair. She walked down the black stair behind her guide for the rest of that day with her hands clenched and her face shut, and when the line went taut she said "sorry" and when it went slack she said "sorry" again, and Wynne, to her eternal credit, said nothing about it at all.
* * *
Wynne counted the steps. It was a job, and it kept her.
The trouble was that her own numbers kept slipping. She had told Ione three days ago that the Pall liked a mind that wandered, and now, on the stairs of the Slick, in the dull afternoon, she felt her own mind wandering like a dog that had caught a scent.
It had been cold. That was the first thing. When the Calder girl's wrist had come into her hand, hot and quick and alive, a pulse hammering under the thin skin, Wynne had felt a rush of warmth go up her arm like a draft of something strong. It had been so sudden she had nearly dropped her grip. For one dizzy, bright second she had felt warm all the way through for the first time in two years. She had felt, absurdly, like a lit house.
Then it had gone, and it had taken more than the warmth with it.
She had felt the exact moment. A thin, clean, pulling sensation, as though a thread had been drawn out of the middle of her, carefully, by someone who knew where to find it. And after it, a lightness that was not quite lightness. Something in her had been lifted away, a tiny thing, no weight at all, and she had been left lighter and colder and more transparent by exactly its size.
She had known what it was. She had known for two years what it would feel like. She had not known it would feel like being thanked.
*It is not the girl's fault,* she told herself, counting. *She didn't ask for it. She doesn't know.* She said it as a litany, four times, five, until it had a smooth round shape in her mouth. Then she smiled, firmly, so the smile would be ready when Ione looked up.
Ione did not look up. She walked, and counted, and kept her eyes on the rock.
Wynne counted, too, and told herself she did not mind.
* * *
They stopped when the light went amber, as much of amber as the Pall allowed, a faint warm smear low in the white. Wynne found a shallow cave in the rock, built a fire, and handed Ione a tin of goose grease for her scraped palm without being asked. Ione took it without a word. They ate. They did not speak of the afternoon.
Afterward, with Ione sitting stiffly at the cave mouth with her blanket around her shoulders, Wynne slipped off to the back of the cave on the pretext of seeing to the packs and pushed back her left sleeve.
The ring had been there for a long time. A band around the wrist, about two fingers wide, where the Pall had first taken hold of her, where the skin had gone the color of old paper and the veins stood out in blue relief. For two years it had been exactly that wide. She had measured it against a thread, every month, as one measures a child against a doorframe.
In the dim light of a hand-sized flame she held the thread against her wrist, and the band of pale skin ran a clear half-finger past it.
She looked at that for some time.
Then she drew the sleeve down, and pinned the cuff at the wrist with a small brass pin, as she did each night, and went back to the fire with her face arranged. When Ione glanced up she said, brightly, "Tea?"
Ione looked at her for a long moment. Then she held out her cup.
You've reached the end of this chapter