The Gate had always been veined with gold.

Hanseol had known it for three hundred years, the way a man knows the pattern in the grain of his own table. The great arch of ice rose out of the floor of the Gate Hall in a single pale span, forty feet high, clear as glass and cold as the bottom of the sea, and through it, fine as hair, ran threads of faint light. They branched and rejoined and branched again, a delicate net of gold lacing the whole structure from footing to keystone. The old texts called them the veins of the seal. They did not change. They did not flicker. They were the grain of the thing, and a man could no more fear them than he could fear the lines in his own palm.

This morning, in the gray hour before dawn, he stood before the arch with a lantern he did not need, and looked at one place on its left flank where the grain had broken.

It was a very small break. If he had not spent three centuries memorizing every thread, he would never have seen it. A single vein, about a hand's length above the floor, no longer ran straight. At one point it split, a dark line cutting across it, as fine as a scratch on a mirror, and along both edges of the dark line the gold bled and glowed, brighter than anything else in the arch, like a wound just opened.

A seam.

Hanseol did not move. He did not breathe. The lantern shook in his hand and he set it down on the floor, carefully, because he did not trust the hand.

Nine, said a voice in the back of his mind, a voice he had not allowed himself to hear for three hundred years. It was low and impatient and faintly amused, a voice that scolded him over his shoulder, always half laughing. Nine, Hanseol. If it ever cracks, you count them. Promise me. Nine, and no more.

He pressed the heel of his hand to his eyes until colors burst behind the lids.

"No," he whispered. "Not now. Not yet."

But it was there. He lowered his hand and looked again, and it had not gone away. A seam, thin and bright, at the height of a kneeling man's chest. And when he held his bare palm an inch from the arch, he felt the Gate's hum change, as if something, very deep inside, had drawn a breath through a closed throat.

He did not want to remember. He remembered anyway, because the seam would not let him do otherwise.

It had been a night like this one, bitterly clear, with the snow lying blue under a hard white moon. He could not have said what year. There had been lanterns, dozens of them, hung from every post along the path, so bright that the whole slope seemed to float. The ground had trembled. The air had been full of a sound like the sky tearing very slowly. And somebody had been laughing, a bright, rude, unrepentant laugh, as if the end of the world were a dare she had decided to take, her hair coming loose from its ribbon, a lantern swinging from her hand. He had reached for her. He remembered the reaching. He remembered the stretch of his own fingers, and the distance, which had not been very large, and which he had never been able to cross.

He did not remember what came after. He had arranged things so that he would not.

He made himself think. It was the only thing that had ever kept him upright.

The Gate had held for three hundred and eleven years. It had not cracked in the first winter, or the hundredth, or the day his hair turned white at the temples and went black again on its own. It cracked now. Something had changed, and he could name it to the hour. The mountain had trembled at dawn four days ago, and by noon a stranger had walked up through the storm, his hands full of blossoms. Since then, there had been a mouthful of soup he had not eaten, a wrist he had held, a flower he had not frozen. There had been the roof.

It was the roof. He knew it the way a man knows which tooth aches. He had stood at the far end of the courtyard and watched Seoha cling to the ridge with the roaring water pouring past him, flushed and terrified and shining, and something had broken in him that had not broken in three hundred years. He had felt his own cold crack, a clean, bright fracture straight through the center. He had thrown out a hand and frozen the waterfall to keep the boy from drowning in it, and his hand had been shaking. And then Seoha, in the snow, with petals in his hair, had said the one thing that Hanseol could not forgive himself for hearing.

They called my hands a curse.

The seam burned in the arch like a dropped coal. The cause was not the boy. The cause was him. Every time the ice in him shattered, in anger or fear or whatever other name he refused to give it, the seal shattered with it. And there were only nine places where it could break.

He knelt in front of the arch for a long time.

When at last he rose, the first thin light had begun to creep through the high windows of the hall, and there was a resolve in him as sharp and cold as any blade. He would stop it. He would not let the ice break again. He would put the boy somewhere safe, and keep his own hands at his sides, and let the cold close over him like a lid.

He went out into the morning to find Seoha, and to make him stop.

He found him in the kitchen.

The young man had his back to the door and a pot in his hands. A fire he had no business lighting was crackling in the great stove, and the whole room smelled faintly of cedar and boiling barley. He was humming. It was not a tune. It was a vague, content, tuneless thing, the kind of noise a person makes without knowing, with a swaying little step in time to it, one sock sliding on the warm stone. A small green shoot curled up from a crack in the floor beside him, and he had apparently decided to ignore it. Sunlight fell through the window onto his hair.

Hanseol stood in the doorway for two full breaths, unnoticed.

It would have been easy, then, to be gentle. It would have been easy to say, I am afraid, I am hurting something, I need your help. He had no practice at it. Fear came out of him the only way it ever had, as cold.

"You will stop," he said.

Seoha jumped. The pot slopped. He turned, eyes wide, and saw Hanseol's face, and the hum died in his throat. "Stop what?"

"Everything. The stove. The halls. The walls. Whatever you did to the roof." He heard the words leave him, level and hard, and could not take them back. "You will not use your power in this house again. You will not go into the courtyard. You will stay in your room, or here, and you will keep your hands in your sleeves, and when the pass opens, you will leave."

"I was only making breakfast."

"With a fire you lit by hand."

"With a flint! I used a flint. The stove is, you can ask the stove, it's perfectly ordinary now, it's"

"Do not argue."

The silence that came after was thick. Seoha's mouth thinned. He set the pot down very gently on the stove and wiped his hands on the cloak, and when he spoke again his voice had gone quiet and careful, the voice of someone speaking to a dog that might bite. "May I ask why?"

Hanseol could not tell him. He could not say: the Gate is cracking, and every time I feel anything near you it cracks a little more. He did not have the words. He did not have any words at all, except the ones that came, hard and cold and uncontrollable, from a place much lower.

"Because everything warm that I have ever touched has died."

He had not meant to say it. It fell out into the kitchen like a stone dropped from a great height, and the sound of it hung there, and he felt the blood drain out of his face, if he had any blood left to drain.

Seoha stared at him.

For a moment, something moved in the dark eyes, quickly, a flash of understanding, as though a door had opened on a room he had not known was there. Then it closed. His chin lifted a fraction.

"I see," he said. "Then I'll try not to be warm."

He picked up his cloak from the back of the chair, and he walked out of the kitchen, past Hanseol, so close that the sleeve of the gray wool brushed his own. He did not slam the door. He did not need to. The silence he left behind was worse.

Hanseol stood in the kitchen, alone, with the pot steaming on the stove and a green shoot growing out of the floor by his foot. He looked down at it. It quivered, very slightly, toward his boot.

He was a fool. He knew that. He did not move.

He did not go after him that day. He told himself it was because he had work, and he did the work. It was a strange thing, how heavy the old routines had become overnight. The cairns seemed taller. The iron poles bit his palm through his sleeve. He swept the long floor of the Gate Hall from one end to the other, as he did every week, and caught himself stopping at the same place three times, listening for a footstep that did not come, before he understood that the sound he wanted was only the small, ordinary noise of someone else being alive in the building. He had been without it for three hundred years. It had taken five days to teach him he could miss it. He walked the lines. He swept the Gate Hall. He sat for hours with his palm against the cold flank of the arch, feeling the new seam throb under his hand like an infected tooth. At noon, he passed the east wing and heard nothing. At midafternoon, nothing. At dusk, when the bell in the hall tolled the hour of the evening meal, and no smell of cooking rose from the kitchen, he stood in the courtyard with his hands in his sleeves, and the silence of the shrine pressed against his ears like water.

The boy had not eaten. He was sure of it. There was no sound of a pot, no creak of a chair, none of the little noises that had begun, against his will, to furnish the empty rooms. There was only the cold, and the dark, and the faint, steady ticking of the old beams contracting around a house with no one in it.

At last he went to look.

He did not tell himself why. He walked the long, swept corridor of the east wing, past the doors of the empty guest rooms, and at the third door, the one he had opened with a thought five nights ago, he stopped. It was ajar. Inside, the meadow was still there, a handsbreadth of grass, a drift of white flowers. The bed was empty. A single boot lay on its side near the hearth.

He found him in the hall.

Seoha was lying on the floor against the wall, curled on his side, in the middle of the swept path, as though he had set out for somewhere and not made it. The gray cloak was bunched around him. His hair had fallen across his face. He was shaking, huge, rattling shudders that went through his whole body, and his lips were blue.

For a moment Hanseol did not understand. Then he did, all at once, with a horror that went through him like a spike. The warmth. The boy had warmed the walls, the stove, the halls, and every degree he gave away he had taken out of himself. And then he had been told to stop, and had gone to ground in the coldest part of the house, and no one had come.

He crossed the hall in three steps and fell to his knees.

His hands came up of their own accord. They stopped inches from Seoha's shoulder, shaking, bare, white with frost. If he touched him now, skin to skin, the cold in his hands would do what it did to everything. It would finish him.

"Seoha," he said.

It was the first time he had said the name aloud. It came out cracked and strange, like a word in a language he had half forgotten. The young man did not stir.

Hanseol sat back on his heels, and made his decision.

He did not run for help, because there was no one. He did not try to lift him. He got up, and went into the nearest room, and came back with every quilt and blanket he could find, a great, dusty, mildewed heap of them, and spread them over the shaking form, one after another, using only the very tips of his sleeves. When the last was in place, he took the lantern that hung on its hook by the wall and lit it, and hung it on the ceiling beam. It made a small, warm circle of light.

It was not enough. He could see that. The boy was still shuddering. The cold in the hall had settled into the floor and the walls, and it came, he realized with a shock, from him. He had been walking these halls for three centuries, and it had soaked into the very boards. His own presence was freezing the air.

So he did the thing that he had not done in three hundred years. He drew the cold back.

It was not a thing he knew how to do. It was an act of will, like clenching a muscle he had never learned he had. He sat down in the corner of the hall, a full six paces from the heap of quilts, with his spine against the wall, and shut his eyes. He imagined the frost in his veins, a great silent tide, and he reached for it and pulled. Inward. Away from the walls. Away from the floor. Away from the pile of blankets and the single small shape beneath it. He drew it into his chest and held it there, like a man holding his breath underwater, until the veins at his temples hammered and his whole body locked, and frost rimed the inside of his lungs.

It hurt. It hurt more than anything had hurt him in three centuries. But slowly, painfully, the air in the hall began to change. The walls ticked. The floor, that old floor, which had not been warm since the day the Gate was sealed, relaxed under him by a degree, and then another. The lantern's glow spread, and held.

He sat there for what might have been an hour, shaking, with his jaw set and his eyes shut, holding it all in.

At some point, he heard a rustle.

He opened his eyes. Seoha had turned over under the quilts. His face was still pale, but the blue had gone out of his lips, and he was looking at Hanseol through half-lidded eyes, dark, hazy, only just awake. He looked very young.

"You came back," he said. His voice was a thread.

Hanseol's whole body was cramped with the effort of holding the cold in. He could barely form the words. "I never left."

It was the wrong thing to say. It was far too true. It hung in the lantern light between them, like something he had dropped and could not pick up, and he saw the exact moment when Seoha understood what he had said, and what it meant, and did not ask. The dark eyes softened. The corner of the pale mouth lifted, a tiny, wobbling curve.

"All right," said Seoha. And he closed his eyes again, and let out a long breath, and slept.

Hanseol stayed where he was. He stayed through the long hours of the night, motionless, with the cold packed into his chest and his sleeves drawn down over his hands, watching the small shape under the blankets rise and fall. Once, toward dawn, one hand slipped out from under the quilts and lay palm up on the boards, fingers curled, a tiny sprout of green curling around the wrist. He did not touch it. He looked at it until the lantern guttered.

Once, in the deepest part of the night, the sleeper murmured something and turned, and the cloak fell open at the collar, and a small leather pouch slid out onto the boards, tied shut with a cord gone dark with handling. It rolled to a stop a little short of the lantern light. Hanseol looked at it for a long time. He could hear, faintly, the dry whisper of something inside, small hard things that shifted when the pouch settled. Seeds. A boy who had been driven from his home, with a fever that raised whole gardens out of dead floors, had carried a bag of seeds up a mountain and never once planted one. He tried to imagine what that cost, to carry the thing you were made for and not use it, and found that he did not have to imagine very hard. He did not touch the pouch. He only drew the cloak back over it with the end of his sleeve, and sat down again, and went on holding the cold.

When the first gray light came through the high window, he got up, stiff and chilled, and went back to the Gate Hall alone.

The seam was waiting for him. He knelt before it, and counted, and the number was one.

One. He said it to himself, silently, over and over, as though by naming it he could shrink it back to nothing. One of nine. Eight to go. A voice that he had not allowed himself to hear in three hundred years whispered, somewhere in the back of his skull, with a note of tired and terrible fondness, that he had never been any good at keeping promises he had made to the dead.

He pressed his forehead against the cold of the arch, and for a long time, he did not move.