Dark Clouds Gathering

The storm had gone out to sea an hour ago and taken everything loose on the hill with it.

There was no vine on the arches now, no gray husk of wisteria, no flattened grass round everyone’s feet, no moss in the joints of the stone, and nothing had rotted, because there was nothing left to even rot. The ground was scorched to a pale dust nearer to ash than to soil. The nearest of the trees round the rim had been caught in it too, their leaves stripped and their bark burned black on the side toward the ring, but they stood, and green still showed low on the far side of every trunk, and behind them the woods stood wet and dark and alive.

Three hours. That was all it had been since the Hall. It felt longer to everyone on the hill but one.

The throne stood where he had raised it, in the middle of the ring, the color of old bone. Nergal sat in it exactly as he had first sat, his great hands along the flat arms, his robes fallen round his feet, his ashen face turned a little toward the rise where a lantern path came up out of the woods. In two hours he had moved perhaps three times, and each time only to settle deeper.

Above him, the Howling Ones kept their own ring.

There were thirteen of them now. They hung over the throne and around it, loose and uneven, at the height of the arches and a little higher, and they kept moving. They turned, and drifted, and came back round, a pair at a time, the way they’d gone round Anna in the Hall. Their hair lifted in a wind that wasn’t blowing. So did the rags they wore. Every face among them had set in the same two shapes, pain and rage, and held there, as if the faces had been cast that way and the women poured in after. From somewhere among them came a whispering, low and constant, like voices in the next room with the door shut. It never quite came through as words.

Anna had watched them since they came back down the hollow, one pair and then another, re-formed and returned to him from wherever they had been beaten down. The lantern path below the ring, where the others would have to come if they came, had stopped holding her. She kept her face tipped up instead, her arms wrapped round herself in the blue dress, the lapis at her throat gone dull in the gray light.

Twice already she’d tried calling them down. She had done it quietly, the first time, with her hands open at her sides so that nothing in her could be read as a threat. Ninbanda. Then, when the name fell away into the whispering, the second face she had known before she knew the rest. Ninki. Both of them went on drifting. Ninki’s head came round toward her once, slow, and swept past her as it would have swept past a stone. Whatever was left of the women who had answered to those names was too far down tonight, under too much pain and too much rage, to hear anyone at all. Even her.

She’d let it rest after that, and once she had stopped calling, the memory came anyway.

Dilmun. A night Challenge, early in that first season, before any of them understood what kind of man they had been given to. As part of it, the women had been roped in their pairs and sent out across the reed flats in the dark with no torch, to find the far bank by feel. Pitch black. Anna and Alla were roped wrist to wrist. Halfway over, Alla went into the water to the waist, and the mud took her foot and held it, and she began to panic in the particular silent way she always had, rigid, breathing through her teeth. Anna pulled and got nowhere. She could hear her sister and feel her and see nothing at all.

Then another hand came out of the dark and took Alla’s free one.

Whoever it was simply held on, and pulled when Anna pulled, and began to hum—low, under her breath, some tune for working in a field—so that the two of them would have something to walk toward. She hummed them out of the mud and all the way across. When the torches came up on the far bank, the hand was already gone, back to its own pair and its own rope. Anna had meant to find out which of them it had been. There had always seemed to be another day to ask.

She looked up at the shapes going round above the throne, every face pulled into the same two expressions, and understood that she would never be able to tell now.

Her eyes stung, suddenly and badly. She blinked hard against it. One tear got away from her anyway and ran down beside her nose, and she let it go, and turned her head aside toward the dark of the path until she had her breath back.

Somewhere below it, the household would be climbing. Emi would be with them. She found she wanted Emi anywhere else on the island.

Arabella saw it, and let it pass without a word. She had stood since they arrived. She kept her place a few paces from the throne on the cracked ground, between the man in it and Anna, where she had put herself two hours ago, and her right hand stayed closed at her side. The old scar across that palm had opened in the Hall. She’d allowed it. It had stopped bleeding some while back, and she had kept the hand shut ever since.

She let Anna have the tear to herself. On that hill it was the only thing she had to give her.

Then she broke the silence herself, rather than leave it sitting there. It was a measured question, and she had been saving it. Since the Hall she’d been reading him the way she had once read a whole island of contestants from a balcony, and she had been reading him for one thing in particular. Under the robes and the tablet and all that long carrying there had been a man once. A Master called Abi-Eshu—young, and hungry, and cruel in the offhand way of a man nobody had ever told no. She had watched that man through an entire season. She’d watched him laugh at the reed flats from a dry platform while his women went out into the dark. She wanted to know how much of him was still in there under the ash, and she still had no firm answer.

The man she had known could not wait out a meal. In Dilmun he had sent for things before they could have been brought and struck the servants who brought them late, and he’d ended one date night early, beating Salura into unconsciousness, because the moon was slow to rise, he couldn't take her due to her transformation until then, and he was bored. This one had sat on a stone chair for two hours with his hands folded and asked for nothing. That was not patience, exactly, but something older that had grown over the place where patience ought to be. She had yet to learn whether the other thing was still underneath it.

“Does the waiting cost you anything?” Arabella asked. “Or is that a question only the living have any use for?”

Nergal kept his eyes on the rise.

“I’ve waited longer than you’ve had years under whatever you call yourself now, Geshtinanna.” His voice was easy and low, and it carried across the bare ring without any effort at all. “For things a good deal less certain than this one. Not a day of it ever cost me a thing.”

Arabella weighed it. It was an honest answer; he had no reason to lie to her about waiting. It was the answer of the thing in the chair. But he had answered her, and he had used the name he’d known her by, and he had gone out of his way to count the years. The dead she had carried through her seasons kept no count of anything. Maybe that was the old man in there, keeping his ledger out of habit. Maybe it was only the tablet talking.

Anna kept her eyes on the Howling Ones. When she spoke, her voice was flat, and it was aimed at him.

“You sound almost fond of it.”

He let that stand. He settled his weight a little deeper into the sandstone, as if she’d said something reasonable and he was glad someone had.

“There’s a pleasure in it,” Nergal said. “Watching a thing finish exactly the way it was always going to. That doesn’t come often. Most things wander off before they’re done.” He lifted one hand from the arm of the throne and laid it down again, palm flat. “The two of you are welcome to find that tedious. I don’t.”

Arabella watched the hand lie there on the stone. It was still. It had been still all night. Once, in Dilmun, it had drummed on the arm of this same chair until the whole hall went quiet to listen to it, as if the drumming were the only clock anyone was allowed to keep.

Neither of them answered him. The Howling Ones went on round above his head. Past the last of the arches, the lantern path lay dark and empty where it came up out of the woods over the rim of the hollow, and what little wind there had been had died, and the only things moving anywhere in the clearing were the women in the air.

After a while the moon went in again, and the gray light went with it, and the ring was lit only by the faint pallor of the women overhead.

Arabella noticed it before Anna did. It was too small to point to. His face stayed as it was, heavy and unhurried, the flat stone of the eyes turned toward the rise. His hands stayed on the arms of the throne. But the stillness in him had changed its grain. A moment before, it had been the stillness of a man sitting; now it was the stillness of a man listening, and she knew the difference the way she knew a sleeping animal from one lying flat in the grass. She had seen exactly this in Dilmun, on the nights a new pair was brought up the steps to him. He had gone quiet like this then, too, a breath before he looked round.

Above the throne, one pair of the Thirteen checked in its drifting. The two of them hung side by side with their ruined faces turned down toward the rise, as if something had tugged at a thread tied to both of them at once. Then they went on round with the others.

Arabella kept her own face exactly as it was, and waited. He let her wait only a little.

“She’s coming up,” Nergal said.

Anna’s head came round from the Thirteen. It was the first time in an hour she’d looked anywhere else.

“The one on my tablet.” He said it plainly. There was little relish in it yet, only the satisfaction of a sum coming out right. “Two of mine got their hands on her down in that garden of yours. One to each wrist. A mark like that stays on a woman after the hands have gone.” He moved one finger on the arm of the throne, a small tap, as a man touches a place on a map. “She’s on the hill. Below the rise, still. I’ll know the moment she’s close enough to see.”

Arabella gave him her silence.

She had watched the Garden. She had said she would watch every step and every hand laid on the girl, and she’d kept to it; she had seen the pair come down on Laura Cooper and seen the grip close on one wrist and then the other, and she had known what that meant to the Fourteen, who could find a marked woman anywhere afterward. She’d let herself believe it ended with them. He had just told her it ran on past them, up the same thread, into his own hands. She filed that away beside everything else she had learned of him tonight.

It was the same silence she had given him since the Hall, exact and controlled and empty of anything he could use. The news reached as far as her eyes and stopped there. Her right hand stayed closed at her side, over the old scar, and she kept her eyes on the rise where he’d turned his, as if the two of them were only waiting on the same guest.

He glanced at her once, sidelong, with something like interest. Then he let it go and turned his eyes back to the rise.

It was Anna who spoke. She had come a step nearer Arabella’s shoulder while he talked. She had wiped the wet from her face with the back of her wrist, and all that was left of it was a little redness under one eye.

“Are you going to tell us who’s coming with her?” Her voice was short and flat. “She won’t be walking up here alone. You know she won’t.”

“I don’t much care who’s carrying the lanterns.” Nergal said it mildly, the way he might have remarked on the weather. “Only who’s being carried. The rest of them sort themselves out however they sort themselves out. They generally do. I’ve had whole cities come up behind one woman before now, and gone home again with the one.”

Arabella could have named every one of the others for him. She’d watched them in the Hollow Garden with the Law’s eye on them, sixteen women holding a line in what was left of their wedding finery against things that walked through swords—Sam at the front with the blade, Sumiku with her blessed naginata, Erin with her hands in the turf, Myra calling out where each shadow would open before it opened. They had held. She kept every name of theirs behind her teeth. He could learn them on the hill, one at a time.

Anna looked at him a long moment. Then she said the name Arabella had kept out of her own mouth all night.

“And Andy?” Anna asked it with little hope of an answer, and asked it anyway, because somebody had to say it aloud on this hill. “Have you given him any thought at all? The man you threw out of the Hall?”

For the first time since the question about waiting, Nergal turned his head. He turned it toward Anna, slowly, and looked at her with a mild and patient interest, as if she had asked him to recall what he had eaten on some particular day a long time ago.

“The boy,” he said.

Arabella’s hand stayed closed.

“He came at me with everything he had,” Nergal said. “All of it, in one swing. I felt it land. I’ll give him that much—I felt it.” He opened one hand on the arm of the throne, palm up, and looked at it, and closed it again. “I do not know what kind of being he is, but he’s nearly as strong as a god. And yet I stayed exactly where I was standing. Then I put him somewhere past finding, and I’ve spared him no thought since. I’ve no plans to start now.” He turned his face back to the rise. “He was never on my tablet. There was never any debt of his to settle. He was only a boy standing in front of one.”

I felt it. Arabella turned that over. The thing in the chair had said it twice. It had wanted her to hear it. Whether that was the old king’s vanity, or only the collector being thorough about a blow he’d logged, she could not yet have said.

It was not grief that came into Anna’s face then, but something harder, the look she had worn in this same ring when she told him they had names. Her mouth had gone tight. She turned her face from him and looked down at the cracked ground by her own feet, the way she had looked at the ground in front of this throne when it came up out of the dirt. Arabella felt her lean, very slightly, until their shoulders touched. Neither of them moved away.

The Thirteen went round. The whispering rose a little, and fell.

“What interests me,” Nergal said, after a time, “was never the boy.”

He said it to the dark below the ring, almost to himself. His voice had dropped, and there was something in it now that had been missing all night—less the flat accounting of the tablet than a kind of warmth, the warmth of a man at a table when the dish he has been waiting on is finally carried in.

“It’s the woman coming down that path. However many of her she’s decided to bring this time.” He let the words sit. “I stood in that Hall tonight and counted her—three—and I’ve had the taste of it in my mouth ever since. One of her is a debt. I told you that. Three of her—” He stopped, and breathed out through his nose, slow and long, and left the rest of it where it was. “I mean to enjoy finding out what she’s brought up here to bargain with.”

Arabella knew that voice—or she thought she did. It had been a long time. In Dilmun it had come across a feast in exactly that register, low, pleased with itself, just before he asked for something nobody was allowed to refuse him. She’d heard it once tonight already, in the Hall, over a photograph. Maybe it was the man. Maybe the thing wearing him had only learned the tune.

She said nothing to any of it. She stood on the cracked ground in her Host’s dress with her closed hand at her side, between the throne and Anna, where she had stood for two hours. Her face gave away exactly as much as it had given away in the Hall. She kept her breathing even and her eyes on the rise.

Beside her, Anna let out a breath that shook a little at the end, then straightened off her shoulder and turned back to the Thirteen, and to the dark path beyond them, and folded her arms tight across herself again, and went on watching.

Nergal settled. He sat back into the sandstone and let his hands lie along the arms of the throne, and some part of his attention had already gone out of the ring and down the hill, toward whatever the mark was telling him. For a man waiting on a debt, he looked content. The pale light of the women going round above him slid across his bald head and the folds of his robes and away again, and came back, and slid away, over and over. They had been made to circle him. He sat there and let them.

Arabella stood and watched the lantern path, with her hand shut over the old scar. It had opened in the Hall, at the instant Andy was thrown, and she’d let it bleed. She had kept the hand closed ever since. Nobody on the hill had asked her why.

The path stayed dark a little longer.

---

Erin came up the last of the lantern path alone, a few strides ahead of the others, the way she’d asked to.

She knew this stretch in the dark, with the woods closing over it on both sides and still dripping. She knew where the ground went soft after rain, and it had gone soft tonight; her feet slid in it twice and she let them. She knew the root that came up across the path three turns from the top, and stepped over it without looking down. The lanterns along the last hundred yards, strung through the branches to welcome guests to this secluded glade, had gone out, every one, glass whole and wicks cold, all the way up to the rise. Behind her she could hear the others climbing—Sam’s boots, the whisper of Sumiku’s wings held close, Norah’s heels finding the stones—and farther back, the rest of them, a long low scuff of feet coming up through the dark.

She’d walked up here more mornings than she could count, with seedlings in a crate and dirt under her nails. She had always liked this last bit best. The path turned, and rose, and then you came out of the last of the trees and over the lip of the hollow, and the first two arches were right there, heavy with purple, the whole ring opening behind them like somebody holding a door.

She came up to the rise and stopped.

She had known since the Garden what she would find here. She’d felt it happen, on her knees in the Hollow Garden’s turf with the Fourteen coming at the line: something enormous dying a long way off, all at once, and her body folding over it before her mind had any idea what it was. She’d heard it afterward, in the ruin of the Dance Hall, by Mildred kneeling in the plaster. The wisteria is dead, on every arch. The grass is dead, to the edge of the stones and past it. She had carried that up the hill. She’d thought she knew its weight.

Mildred had told her it was gone. She had left out what gone looked like.

The wisteria was not dead on the arches. It was not on the arches at all. No black, no curl, no gray husk hanging where a flower had been—only stone, bare stone, the pale uprights and the heavy spans standing in their ring exactly as they must have stood before anyone ever planted a thing against them. The jasmine had gone the same way. The moss had gone out of every joint. Where the grass had grown thick and soft enough to lie down in, the ground had been blasted down past dirt to a fine, cracked, ash-colored crust, and it ran away from her feet to the far arches without a stalk or a root standing up out of it anywhere.

On either side of her the trees along the rim stood blasted, stripped of leaf and burned black down the side that faced the ring, and still alive, in agony. Behind them the woods stood as it always had.

She’d planted half of what had been here. She had talked to it in the mornings.

Her knees went loose. She locked them. Her hands, which had been fists all the way up the hill, opened on their own and hung at her sides, and she found she was breathing through her mouth in short pulls, as if the air on the rise had gone thin.

Out in the middle of it, across all that bare ground, stood a pale square seat with a man in it. A woman stood near him in a dark dress, very straight—Arabella, it could only be Arabella—and a little behind her another, in blue. Above the three of them, high and restless in the gray, shapes went round and round in a loose ring of their own, the color of breath on a cold window. The howling women. Even from here she could see their hair move.

Erin looked at all of it and couldn’t make herself look away.

Sam reached her first. Erin heard her come up the last stretch with Sumiku and Norah, heard the three of them stop when she stopped. The Watchtower would already be ringing with her distress. Sam would have felt it go through her from twenty yards down the path, clean and hard. Erin knew that, and it made no difference, and Sam didn’t wait on it. She’d watched Erin carry this once already tonight, secondhand, from a Mildred’s mouth. She came the last few steps without being asked and put her arms around her.

Erin let her.

Sam held on hard. She stood there on the rise with her chin on Erin’s bare green shoulder, looking out over the same dead ground, and Erin felt her breath catch against her neck, and catch again, and knew Sam was seeing it too: every afternoon the two friends and Liesa had spent up here, every lazy lunch on the grass, the morning Sam had fallen asleep under the arches with her boots on and woken with jasmine in her hair. Sam was grieving it with her, not for her. Her arms said so. They shook a little.

“We’re going to make him pay for this,” Sam said, low, into her hair. It came out certain and quiet and even, the way Sam said things she had already decided. “You hear me? Every inch of it. I swear to God, Erin. He pays.”

Erin stayed in it as long as she needed to.

That turned out to be less time than she expected. When she stepped back, Sam let her go at once and kept one hand on her arm.

Erin looked out at the ring again. Her eyes were dry. She was a little surprised by that. “I’m going to make him wish he’d never seen me,” she said.

She said it low and level. There was nobody near enough to threaten. It was more that she had just finished deciding it, standing there, and needed to hear how it sounded out loud. It sounded fine.

She looked down. The edge of the dead ground began a step in front of her feet, pale and cracked and dry as a plate. Every morning she had ever come up here she had crouched right about there and put her hand flat in the grass, as you put a hand on a dog’s back when you come in the door, to say hello. Her fingers moved at her side now as if they remembered. She kept them where they were. She had no idea what she would feel if she touched it—whether it would feel anything back, dead as it was, or whether it would be only dirt—and she found she wasn’t ready to know yet. Not with him sitting there watching the path.

Norah came up level with the two of them. She’d kept a step back while Sam held on. She was nowhere near as close to Erin as Sam was, and she had never once pretended to be; the two of them had spent most of the first round trying to beat each other at things. But they’d stood in the same line in the Garden tonight.

“Same,” Norah said. She said it quietly, with none of the edge she usually kept on everything. Her hand rested on one of the crystal sticks at her hip and stayed there. “Whatever it takes up there. I’m in it with you. All the way in.” Her jaw worked. “And for the record, I liked it up here. I never told you that. The flowers were ridiculous and it was always damp and I liked it.”

Erin almost laughed. It caught in her chest and stayed there, and it helped anyway.

Sumiku had come round on Erin’s other side without a sound, the long blade upright at her shoulder and her wings folded close. She looked out over the ring for a long moment before she spoke, all four hands still.

“When he is gone,” Sumiku said, “this one will help you build it again.” She said it slowly, the way she said everything she meant. “Not as he has left it. Not even as it was. As it was meant to be. A sanctuary.” Her tail shifted once in the dust. “There is time for that. Afterward. This one will carry the stone.”

There was heat coming off her. Erin could feel it along her arm, faint and steady, as if someone had opened an oven door a little way down the hill. A thin line of light had come up along the edges of Sumiku’s wings, gold going to red.

Erin looked at her, and nodded, because the only answer to that was yes, and her throat wasn’t up to yes.

Norah was looking past the three of them, out across the blasted ground to the seat in the middle and the man in it. “He hasn’t looked this way,” She said quietly. “Not once. Not even a turn of the head.” She watched him a moment longer. “Small mercy. Might be the only one we get tonight.”

“You said an audience would make him careless,” Sam said.

“I said I hoped.” Norah kept her eyes on him. “I’d rather find out now than later whether I was right.”

Sam’s head turned a little, back toward the dark of the path behind them. Her eyes went unfocused for a second, the way they did now whenever she was checking the map in her head that Laura had given her tonight.

“Laura’s right behind us,” she said. “Myra and Riley with her. The rest are a minute back.”

Erin nodded. She stayed where she was, at the very edge of the rise, with the blasted ground a step in front of her feet, and waited for them to come.

Out over the ring the ghosts went round and round. From the rim they made no sound she could hear at all. That was worse, somehow. In the Garden, at least, you had known where they were by the whispering.

Laura, Myra and Riley came up over the rise together.

They slowed before anyone told them to. Erin watched it happen from the edge: all three of Laura checking at once as they topped the path, in the same half-step, and Riley and Myra checking a breath behind her. Riley’s hair, which had hung loose down her back the whole climb, drew in close around her shoulders. Myra’s feet stopped on the stone. None of the three said anything.

They took it in the way Erin had—the bare stone, the blasted ground, the little knot of Erin and Sam and Sumiku and Norah standing at the edge of it, the pale shapes going round and round over the middle of the ring—and beyond all of it, unmoving on his raised stone seat, the man they’d come up the hill to answer.

Laura’s three faces went very still. Two of her looked out at the throne and stayed there. One of her looked at Erin, and then down at the dead ground at Erin’s feet. Whatever Laura had been holding ready for the throne went out of her face. Then that one of her left the line. She crossed the few steps to Erin without hurrying, and she did not look at the throne once. She put both arms around Erin and drew her in, slow and close and careful, until Erin’s face was against her shoulder.

“Hey,” Laura said, one voice, very low. “Hey. I’ve got you.” Her breath shook. “I’m so sorry, Erin. It was yours, and it was so beautiful.” Her arms tightened.

Laura held on like someone who had decided in advance that she would not be the first to let go, and her cheek was against Erin’s hair, and something in Erin’s jaw that had been locked since the Dance Hall gave a little and let her breathe out, once, unsteadily, against Laura’s shoulder.

She let her. It lasted perhaps five breaths. When Laura stepped back her hands stayed on Erin’s arms a moment longer, and her eyes were bright and her mouth was steady, and then she went back to the other two of her, and the three of her faced the throne as one woman, as if none of her had moved at all.

Out of all of them, Laura was the one who had to walk out there first. That had been the plan since the Garden. Laura and her sisters out in front, keeping him talking, keeping his eyes on them, while Erin and Sam and Sumiku and Norah waited for the second he reached too far. Erin had agreed to it down on the grass without a second thought. From the edge of the rise it was a long way to that chair. Laura’s arms were still warm across her back, and Erin found she was having second thoughts now.

Myra had turned her face straight toward the throne. Erin had lived beside her long enough to know what it looked like when Myra found something in the dark that everyone else had to squint at, and this was that, only much worse. Her head came up and fixed on the middle of the ring as if a string had been pulled taut. All three of her tails went stiff behind her, then slowly flattened. Her free hand found the front of the shirt she'd changed into from her Inventory, like most of the others, and closed there. She stood reading whatever was coming off him across all that distance, and her face had gone the color of the ash under their feet. Riley had seen it too. A lock of her hair slid down off her shoulder and curled once around Myra’s wrist, lightly, and stayed.

Riley’s hand found one of Laura’s without either of them looking for it. Erin saw the fingers lace, and hold.

The rear six came up last. They came over the rise in a loose bunch and slowed as the others had slowed, and the ring spread out in front of them, and one by one they stopped. Emily came first, gold-and-pink hair all the way down past her hips and her hands folded in front of her, and her calm came in ahead of her the way it always did—an ease that settled over the edge of the rise like warmth off a stone at evening and pressed gently at everyone’s shoulders. It pressed at Erin’s too. She let it, this time, a little. Emily was looking out at the throne with her head tipped, measuring something, and her face stayed soft and her hands stayed folded, and Erin remembered that out of all of them it was Emily who would have to go closest to him in the end, and hold her calm on him like a hand, and keep it there.

Katherine came beside Emily, bare as ever, and walked straight on toward the edge until Emily’s hand on her arm stopped her. She stood looking up at the ghosts with her jaw set and her hands open at her sides, the same hands that had taken one of them by the throat in the Garden and held on.

Chloe came behind them in the oatmeal sweater, one fist closed around the loose thread at its hem, not pulling it. She looked at the ring, and then at Erin, and her mouth crumpled.

“Oh, Erin,” Chloe said. It was barely a whisper. “Oh, it was so pretty up here.”

“I know,” Erin said.

Eden picked her way up the last of the soft path in her heels, slow and careful, the long fall of her hair swinging. When she came level with the others and saw the ring, her whole body gave one long, slow roll from the hips up, and anyone looking at her would have known exactly what it meant, as clearly as if she had said it: I’m so sorry. I’m here.

Chloe was squinting past everybody now, out toward the middle. “Is that Anna? Next to her?”

“It’s her,” Emily said softly. “She’s standing. That’s something.”

Liesa went straight to Sam. She looked at Sam before she looked at the ring, and read her in one glance: the wet eyes, the set mouth, the arm Sam had only just taken back from around Erin. Then she came round Norah without a word and put her arm across Sam’s shoulders.

“I’m fine,” Sam said, before Liesa could ask. “I’m fine. It was Erin’s. I’m just—it was hers, you know? I used to nap up here.”

“I know,” Liesa said. “Was there. You snore.” She kept her arm where it was.

Sam let her. She waved off anything more with one hand. No hug, no fuss, not with him sitting right there. The arm stayed.

Marissa came in last, from behind. Her arm went around Erin’s waist before she could possibly have thought about it, the same as it had in the plaster of the Dance Hall two hours ago, and held on. Erin felt the whole side of Marissa settle against her, warm and soft and certain, and felt her own breathing start to come slower under it without her doing a thing. Marissa’s head rested lightly against her shoulder.

Down in the Hall, with the plaster under their feet, it had been Marissa’s arm that told Erin she was shaking. Now she checked, and her hands were steady. Something in her had gone very quiet since the rise, quiet and cold and level, the kind of quiet that settles on a field after the frost has been and gone. Marissa’s warmth lay along the outside of it and stayed there, and that was all right. What Erin needed from Marissa was not comfort, which Laura had already given her and which had gone in where it was needed. It was company.

Erin let it stay.

She stood at the edge of the rise with Marissa’s arm around her and looked at all of them. Sam, with Liesa’s arm across her shoulders. Sumiku, burning faintly gold along the edges of her wings. Norah with her hands on her sticks. Laura in three places at once, Riley holding one of her hands and Myra rigid at another’s shoulder. Emily and Katherine. Chloe with her fist in her sweater. Eden, gone still at last. Nearly the whole household, gathered at the edge of the blasted ground in the dark.

Nearly.

Emi was missing, and Claire, and Dawn. The three of them had gone through the Forest’s door after Andy, with Mildred, who had met them in the Garden, to show them the way, and there had been no word of them since. Sam had just told her where everyone on the hill was, and left those three out. Erin had noticed. She’d decided not to ask.

She looked out across the ring at the far arches, and the throne, and the two women standing near it, and the slow pale wheel of the Fourteen turning overhead. She thought about the second she and Sam and Sumiku and Norah were waiting for, and how far it would be to run.

All of it was across her ground. Whatever happened when that second came, she was going to have to put her feet down on it, on the ash and the cracks and the place where the grass had been, and go. She’d walked every inch of this hill in the dark for weeks and taken it on faith that the ground was glad of her. She wondered now. She had kept her hand off it so far.

Beside her, Marissa shifted her weight and tightened her arm, and on Erin’s other side Sam let out a long breath and set her shoulders, and farther along the edge somebody’s boot scraped on stone and went still. Nobody was talking anymore. Thirteen of them, the whole household but the three who had gone after Andy, standing in a ragged line at the lip of the rise with the woods at their backs, and the only sound in the clearing the wind starting up again, faintly, in the bare arches.

---

In all the time they stood there, not a single figure at the center of the Ring of Fate had so much as turned to look their way.

To Myra, he was the brightest thing in her whole field of feeling, and he was wrong. Every other light on the hill had some color in it somewhere, and some warmth, even the frightened ones, even the angry ones. His was cold all through. It sat out in the middle of the ring on its raised seat like a lamp burning something other than oil, white and cold and steady, and the ground around it came to her dead too, dead all the way down, a flat gray blank that took the color of whatever feeling stood nearest and kept none of it.

She’d felt him in the Hall. She’d thought she knew what he was.

This close, with the whole household at her back, her sense of him had sharpened the way it always did in a crowd, and there was more. Under the white, running through it like a current under ice, a color moved: a thin pale gold swirling softly into a dull, dark red, and out again. It was held down hard. It was held so carefully that she had to go quiet inside herself to find it at all. It was waiting. It leaned forward. It tasted like the moment before a meal, when the plate has been set down and the fork lifted, and the man holding it has decided to make himself wait one breath longer because the waiting is part of the pleasure.

Anticipation. Hunger. Both at once, kept on a short leash.

Myra’s stomach turned over.

Above him, the ghosts went round, and they hurt. Even from here they hurt, a dull throb behind her eyes that never let up: pain and rage and grief that belonged to no living person, a livid purple and a furnace red and a dull drowned gray swirling into one another so tightly that no one color would come free of the rest. She could place every one of them, turning in their slow wheel. Near him, closer than any of them, two more lights: one a hard dark steel-blue, held so rigid it barely flickered, clenched round one small bright point of amber and keeping it close, and one smaller, a dusky blue bruised dark all through with a grief so old it had gone soft at the edges.

Arabella. Anna. She would have known either of them anywhere.

Behind her the household burned in every color she had names for. Erin’s had gone a cold, clear green, level as water over stone, with a thread of dark grief-blue turning slowly through it and a thin line of white fury that never quite came to the surface; and along one edge, a soft rose that had not been there when they came over the rise, still settling in. Sam’s was a hard knot of ember-red with Liesa’s soft copper warmth wound round the outside of it. Laura—all three of Laura, one light in three places—was a deep, steady indigo fear, old and settled, with the silver of the soulbond threaded through it the way it always was, thin tonight, and still there, and over the top of it all the same soft rose Erin was wearing, turned toward Erin. Riley’s hand was in one of Laura’s, and Riley’s light had gone a fierce deep coral, drawn tight around both of them.

Then Sam’s light turned away from the ring, sharp, toward the dark path behind them, and flared up all at once, ember-red burning through to white-gold, in a rush of relief so bright and so painful that Myra felt it in her teeth. Sam made a small sound. Myra heard Liesa say her name.

Myra turned too. Four lights were coming up the last of the lantern path. Three of them she knew before she had fairly reached for them: a warm, dreamy gold and azure that could only be Emi; a quick, anxious blue wound tight around one fixed point, which had always been Claire; and a clear apricot glow shot through with worried gray that was Dawn to the life. They were tired, all three, and the tiredness had washed every color in them paler. And under it all three were carrying a new color that sat strangely among their own, one Myra had yet to find a name for.

The fourth light led them, blazing. It walked a pace ahead of the others without hesitating once, straight up the soft path in the dark and over the root near the top and on toward the household, as if it had walked this hill a thousand times. It was Mildred. Myra knew that before anything else about it. It had that shape.

But Mildreds, to her, were static.

They always had been. Every Mildred she had ever stood near came through to her sense as a gray hiss of nothing, a scrambled blank where a person should have been, and under the hiss, if she pushed, a pressure so old and so compressed that she’d learned to stop pushing. Mildred came through otherwise now. She came through layered, and in color, which none of the others ever had: a deep lamp-amber, and a steady green-gold under it, and through both a soft rose that felt a great deal like fondness, all three turning slowly into one another and turned outward, plain, as if there were more of her than there had been once and it had all settled into place.

And under the strangeness of that, once Myra was paying attention, something else was unmistakable.

She’d felt it before. Mildred had put a folded note into her hands once, for Riley, and that was all she had said. Myra had stood holding the paper and feeling, for the first and only time, no hiss in her at all. She had come through warm, a deep amber, devoted almost, like a woman bringing flowers to a grave she visits every week. Then she’d gone. The note had said I promise you’ll get more hours this time, and Riley hadn’t slept that night.

It was the same one. The same signature exactly.

Emi, Claire and Dawn found the sisters at almost the same instant Laura found them, and for a handful of steps there was room for nothing but relief. It came off both sides at once, quiet and urgent. Dawn got to Riley first and wrapped her up, ears pressed flat, and held on.

“You’re here,” Dawn said into her hair. “You’re all here. Okay. Okay.”

“We’re here,” Riley said. “Where did you go? Where have you been?”

“Long story,” Dawn said, and held on harder.

Claire went straight to Erin. One look at the ring and one at Erin’s face, and she didn’t need to be told what had happened. She wrapped both arms round her, and the cold green of Erin’s light shivered and eased, as if Claire’s presence had at last loosened something in it.

Emi reached one of Laura and put all six of her arms around her, and all at once, standing on that dead ground, the air around them went warm. Warm, and sweet, and it smelled of cut grass and a summer afternoon, as if somebody had opened a door on a garden that wasn’t there. Laura made a sound into Emi’s shoulder that was not quite a laugh.

Over Dawn’s head, Riley was looking at Mildred.

Myra felt her do it. The coral of Riley’s light went still, a pale puzzled gray moving through it, the way it did when a word she knew turned up spelled wrong. This was Mildred, who had led the three of them out of the Garden hours ago, and Riley would have known her there. Something about her had changed, and Riley was hunting for what and coming up short. Mildred only stood a pace back with her hands folded, and looked at Riley with that plain, settled warmth, and smiled at her. An ordinary smile. Kind.

Riley’s brows drew together. She said nothing.

Neither did Myra. There was no time for it.

It was Laura who stepped back first. All three of her let go of whoever was holding her at once.

Nobody had yet said why Andy wasn’t with them. Myra felt the question sitting in Laura’s indigo like a stone in a shoe. Laura kept it there and only looked at Emi.

Emi said it plainly. “We found him.” Her voice was soft, and it didn’t shake at all. “He’s alive. He’s not hurt. And he isn’t coming yet.” She held Laura’s eyes—the nearest pair of them. “Nothing stopped him, Laura. He could have come through with us. The door was right there. He stayed because of something you told him once. He chose to stay for it.”

Alive. The word went through the three of them at once, and Myra felt it land in each: Riley’s coral jumping to gold so hard it stung, Laura’s indigo dropping out from under itself for one dizzy instant and then catching, and her own chest going tight and hot. Not joy, not yet, but the kind of ache that comes back into a hand held too long in snow. She’d kept herself from hoping for that word since the Hall. Only now did she understand she had been bracing for its opposite every step of the hill.

Then the rest of what Emi had said caught up with the first of it. Myra reached, before she could stop herself, and felt the colors in Laura go blank.

It was a strange thing to feel in her. Laura’s indigo held steady underneath, and the silver held with it, but over the top of both a pale, restless yellow went out in every direction at once, searching, a hand patting down every pocket for something it was sure it had put there. It came up empty. It went round again, and came up empty again. Myra felt a small, fresh fear start up under the old one, a thin cold blue swirling into the indigo, the fear of a woman who has lost something she was given to keep.

“I told him a lot of things, Emi,” Laura said. All three voices together, very quiet. “I tell him everything. Which—”

“Something blue,” Dawn said.

She said it gently, the way she would have handed someone a thing they’d dropped. Her ears had come up a little. “That’s what he told us, Laura. He said you told him once. If he was ever lost, and there was a door he had to cross, he wasn’t supposed to cross it. He was supposed to look for something blue, on the way to a place called the palace.” She swallowed. “And there was a door. Emi made one, right there, back to the Forest. And he was about to go through it with us, and then he stopped. He saw something out in the ruins. Something blue.”

That did it. Myra felt it happen all at once. Laura’s searching attention stopped going round and dropped straight down onto one place and held there, and the whole of her light changed color around it: surprise first, sharp and white, then a deep, slow blue-green coming up underneath it like water filling a footprint. All three of Laura let out a breath together, as if something had been knocked loose in her that had been lodged there a long time.

“The kitchen,” Laura said.

She said it to nobody. Her attention had gone somewhere else entirely—a long way back, to a kitchen table and a plate of eggs going cold.

“it was the evening of the day when I accidentally ended up in the Haunted Castle.” One of her hands came up and made a small cracking motion in the air, and stopped, and fell. “Nimue gave me two things to pass on to him, and she wouldn’t tell me what either of them meant. That one was the strange one. If he was ever lost, and there was a door he had to cross, he shouldn’t. Something blue, on the way to the palace. I told him at the table, halfway through the eggs.” Her voices had gone thin. “I said I’d try to remember it exactly, and I did. I thought they were warnings.”

Riley was staring at her. “You never told us that,” Riley said. It came out low and startled, plain fact and unsharpened.

“It was for him,” Laura said. “Nimue said so. I didn’t know what it meant, and neither did he. I told him it would make sense later. They always do. We put it away with everything else that didn’t make sense yet and went to bed.”

Myra stood with her cane planted and let it go through her. Her tails had drawn in close around her legs, all three, as if the wind off the ring had turned colder.

A warning, handed down from a Host who would explain none of it, to Laura, who had passed it on word for word, to Andy, who had carried it around all this time with no idea what it was for. And tonight, somewhere down in the dark under all of this, he’d stood with a door open in front of him and the people he loved holding it, and he had turned away from it for a light he had no name for. She tried to imagine the size of that, and could only get partway round it before it slipped from her.

Beside her, Riley’s hair had come loose from around Myra’s wrist and gone to Laura instead, one long lock of it curling round the nearest of Laura’s arms, the way it wrapped round JJ when he was cold. Riley didn’t seem to have noticed she’d done it.

Claire had flipped the notebook to a fresh page. She wrote fast, pressing hard, her ears flat to her skull and her tail wrapped tight round her own ankle, and then she turned the page around and held it up where all three of the sisters could read it. Myra read it the way she read anything now, the ink glowing faintly in whatever color Claire had been feeling as she wrote it.

He said it himself. His words, not ours. He said he didn’t think it was him putting it off. He said he thought it was another way through. Maybe the only one.

Claire underlined something, then turned the page back, wrote one more line under it, and turned it round again.

He said he doesn’t KNOW that. He thinks it.

For a long moment they all stood quiet. Down the path the wind had started up again, faint, in the bare arches. Myra found her voice first. She’d been holding the question since Dawn said palace, turning it over, and it had only gotten heavier.

“Laura.” She kept it careful. She could feel how thin Laura’s light had stretched, and she was afraid of being the thing that tore it. “Do you actually understand what any of it means? Any of it.”

“No,” Laura said. “I never have. Not since the day Nimue said it to me. I still don’t.” She looked down at Claire’s page again, at the underlined word, and her light shifted again, slowly, a cloud moving off something. “But I understand why he stayed.”

Myra waited. So did everyone. Emi had drawn her six arms in close around herself, as if she were cold, and Mildred stood exactly where she’d stopped.

“It isn’t mine,” Laura said. “The reason. I don't know what it means. I passed something on that I didn’t understand, and he’s the one who looked at it tonight and decided what it was for.” Her voices steadied as she went. “He isn’t lost down there. He isn’t just waiting for somebody to come and find him. He’s doing it on purpose. He thinks it’ll help more than coming back to us would have. That’s his. I trust him. That’s all his.”

Riley’s hand tightened on Laura’s, on the side nearest her, hard enough that Myra felt it in Riley’s coral like a fist closing.

For a while the three sisters stood quiet. It was not relief, exactly. But it was the first thing all night that hadn’t cost them something to hear.

Myra felt it in all three of them at once: a small, stubborn warmth, a thin new gold swirling softly into all that indigo and coral, set down in the middle of the fear like a coal someone had carried up the hill in a cupped hand.

“Maybe he actually has something,” Myra said quietly.

“Then we take it.” Riley’s voice was low and sweet and sure all the way through. “Whatever it turns out to be worth. We take it.”

Laura looked around, where the household stood waiting in a ragged line against the dark. Sam would have felt Emi, Claire and Dawn come back onto the hill—Watchtower would have told her the second they were close—and she’d stayed where she was anyway, holding the line where she’d decided to hold it. Erin’s cold green stood beside hers, waiting. Behind them the rest of the household was a long uneven row of colors, fear and grief and anger and love swirling softly into one another.

Laura looked at Emi, and Emi looked back at her, and some question passed between them and was answered without a word; Emi’s light settled, and she nodded, once. Claire closed the notebook. Dawn wiped her face. Mildred, a pace back from all of them, stood with her hands folded and her warm, her warm, layered amber and green-gold turned toward them, and said nothing, and Myra had the strangest sense that she had known all along how this conversation would go and had simply come to stand beside it.

Myra turned her face back toward the middle of the ring, toward the cold white lamp of him burning on its seat, and felt the dull red of the hunger under it lean, a little, in their direction. In a minute she and Riley would walk out there together and say what they’d agreed to say, and she had only the thinnest guess what he would do with it.