Steps in the Dark

Riley counted the steps to the arches without meaning to. Eleven, and the broken stone near the edge, and four more.

Her hair had stayed wound round one of Laura’s arms the whole conversation. She drew it back now, lock by lock, and let it fall down her spine where it belonged. The household stood in its ragged line along the lip of the hollow, the blasted trees of the rim at their backs.

Dawn went straight to Erin and Marissa and got her arms round both of them at once.

“You made it,” Erin said, low, as if she hadn’t let herself count on it.

“We’re okay,” Dawn said into Erin’s shoulder. “All three of us. We’re okay.” Emi went to Sumiku, who folded two of her arms around her and kept the other two free, and Claire stood beside Norah with the notebook shut tight against her chest. Mildred stopped a pace back from all of it, hands folded, as if she had been asked to wait there and meant to do so until the hill fell down.

Riley let go of Myra’s hand. She hadn’t decided to. Her feet were already moving along the line, past Katherine, past Emily and the warm, loosening press of Emily’s calm, and she understood where they were taking her about two steps before she got there. It was better that way. Given a minute to think, she would have found a reason to wait, and there was no minute left to wait in.

JJ was down below. It sat in her like a compass needle, the one part of her that had held true all night: inside the Gentle Hearth, still, probably asleep. The sense gave her only there, down to the inch, and she had been checking it every few minutes since the Garden, as you touch a pocket to make sure the keys are still in it.

Chloe was at the end of the line in the oatmeal sweater, one fist closed round the loose thread at the hem. She saw Riley coming, and her face did the thing it always did, the quick worried softening, the start of a question.

“Hey,” Chloe said. “Are you—”

“Chlo. Listen to me.”

Chloe stopped. “Okay,” she said. “I’m here.”

Riley had a dozen ways in, and every one of them would have been true, and every one of them would have bought her another thirty seconds of not saying it. She was done buying.

“If it comes to it,” Riley said, “and I don’t come back from this hollow. I need you to raise JJ.”

Chloe went still.

“Not help with him.” Riley heard her own voice come out low and level, held carefully, like a cup filled to the brim. “Not share him around with whoever’s left. Raise him. Like he’s yours. The others can help, but I need it to be you.”

She had never said it before, to anyone. She’d thought it, as anyone with a child thinks it at three in the morning, and put it away every time before it could grow words. Now it had words, out on the hill in the cold, and every one of them was true.

“Yes, of course,” Chloe said at once, before Riley had finished, as if she’d had it ready a long time. Her eyes were wet. Then the rest of what Riley had said reached her, and Riley watched it land. Chloe’s face crumpled from the mouth up. Her fist came off the thread and pressed flat against her own breastbone, hard, as if something there needed holding in.

“Yes,” Chloe said again. “Of course yes. But you can’t—” Her breath caught and she pushed through it. “You’re talking about not coming back. You’re standing here talking about dying, Riley.”

“Yes,” Riley said. She watched it go into Chloe and saw how much it hurt, and she didn’t take it back, because she couldn’t, and because Chloe deserved better than a softer word that wasn’t true.

Chloe’s eyes had filled. She blinked and they spilled anyway, and she didn’t wipe them. “Is there— is there any way it doesn’t have to be you? Any way at all?”

Riley said nothing. She could feel the silence do its work. Chloe had lived with her long enough to know what a silence from Riley meant: that every true answer was one Chloe didn’t want, and Riley wouldn’t hand her a false one. Chloe read it in about a second. Her mouth pressed tight, and she nodded, small and jerky, and drew a breath that shook all the way down.

“Okay,” Chloe whispered. “Okay. I’m not going to ask you to promise me anything. I know you can’t. I know you’d just have to stand there.” She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, finally, and it did no good. “So I’m not asking. I just— I need you to know I don’t want to. I don’t want to do it without you. I want to do it with you. Both of them. Him and—” Her hand went low on her stomach, where nothing showed yet. “And Andrew. Growing up together, and both of us yelling at them to come in for dinner. That’s what I want.”

Riley’s throat closed. She knew which side of this was worse. She had stood on the other side of it once, with John, the one who stayed behind and had to go on making breakfast. She had never thought she would be the one doing the leaving, and she found she hated it more than she’d known she could hate anything.

“I know,” Riley said. It came out rough. “I want that too. I'm not saying it's a certainty. But I need—”

“Then come back.” Chloe looked at her earnestly. “I know. I know. I’m sorry. I won’t ask.” She dragged in another breath and steadied on it, and when she spoke again her voice had dropped into the soft, careful one she used for scared kids and for Riley at four in the morning. “If I have to, I will. You know I will. I’ll tell him about you every single day. Until he’s sick of hearing it.”

“Tell him true things,” Riley said.

“I’ll tell him you were brave.”

“Tell him I was scared.” Riley had to stop. She waited until she could do it properly. “Tell him I was scared out of my mind and I did it anyway, because you do this for family. That one’s true.”

Chloe’s face broke all over again. She dropped the hem entirely and took Riley’s face between both hands. Her palms were warm. Her thumbs rested on Riley’s cheekbones, very lightly, and she leaned in until their foreheads touched, and held on. She planted a kiss on Riley's lips, the salt of her tears on Riley's tongue, then pulled back slightly, eyes still streaming.

“Is that okay?” Chloe whispered. “Is that— is that what you needed?”

“That’s exactly what I needed,” Riley said, in a small voice, and it was.

They stood like that while the wind went through the bare arches. Up close Chloe smelled of the sweater and of salt, and under that of the warm, milky something that had been part of every night JJ was fussing and Riley had run dry of everything else. Chloe had fed him: at the bachelorette breakfast, and on the nights when there was nobody else awake. JJ knew the smell of her. He turned his head toward her voice across a room. It was the kind of reason that sounded small until you’d been up with a baby at four in the morning, and then it was the only reason in the world.

Chloe looked sad, and certain, and somehow not surprised at all. Riley noticed that in the part of her that always noticed things, and had no idea what to do with it.

Neither of them said anything else. It was not that they had run out of things to say, but that there was no more room to say them in, and they both knew it.

Chloe drew away. Her hands went back to the hem of the sweater and found the thread by feel, and closed on it, and she nodded once, as if something had been signed.

Riley turned and went back along the line. She dragged the heel of her hand across her eyes as she went and kept walking. Emily’s calm brushed over her again as she passed and slid off like warm water off cold skin, and Katherine turned her head to watch her go and put one hand out, briefly, against Riley’s arm. Riley let it rest there for a step. Then she was past them all.

Laura and Myra had moved a few steps out past the end of the household onto the bare edge of the hollow, and they were waiting for her. Even Sam, who would have followed Laura off a cliff, had stayed where she was put. All three of Laura stood close together. Myra had her cane in her hand and her tails drawn in tight, and her face lifted the second Riley came near. Myra would have felt the whole of it from twenty yards off.

“You asked her,” Myra said.

“I asked her.”

“And?”

“She said yes.” Riley’s throat did something. “To JJ. Before I’d even finished. Like she’d been waiting for me to.”

Myra reached out with her free hand and found Riley’s hand. “Good,” she said softly. “That’s good, Riley.”

For a moment none of them spoke about what came next. They all knew. It had been the plan since long before tonight, since before the wedding, and the lagoon had settled it, Laura shaking and the two of them refusing to let her carry it alone. Laura had refused it every time it came up, and they had kept it anyway. There was nothing left to plan. There was only the walk.

Riley found she wanted to say something first anyway.

“I keep thinking about Greg,” she said. It came out lower than she meant it. Myra’s head tilted. Laura went still, all three of her, and one of her looked down at the ash. “Whatever he was,” Riley said. “Whatever he wasn’t, to any of us. However if a shitty scumbag he was, I don’t—” She stopped, and started again, because she had to say it right or leave it. “I can’t make myself sorry about the one good thing that came out of him. Us. The three of us, finding each other, when none of us had any reason left to expect it.”

Myra let out a breath that was almost a laugh. “I can’t do that either,” she said. “Every time. Whatever else came with it.” Her hand tightened on Riley’s sleeve. “Every single time.”

Laura said nothing. Instead all three of her moved at once. One of her took Myra’s hand off Riley’s sleeve and held it, and another took Riley’s. Laura laid a hand flat over the back of each of theirs and pressed down, and held on as if this were the only answer worth giving. Riley held on back, and looked down at the knot of their hands in the gray light, Laura’s fingers wrapped against Myra’s fingers and her own, and for a second she could not have said whose was whose.

Laura didn’t let go. “Don’t,” Laura said. All three voices, low and close, so that the word came from everywhere around Riley at once. One of her had lifted her head. The other two kept their eyes on the knot of hands, as if looking up would make it harder. “Rye. Myra. Please. Don’t do this.”

Riley had known it was coming since the first time she and Myra laid the plan out and Laura said no to it, and every time since. She had half hoped Laura would let it go tonight, and known she wouldn’t.

“It’s mine,” Laura said. “The Edict was spent on me. Nobody spent anything on either of you. He came up that hill for me, and that’s the one thing tonight that’s simple.”

“Laura—” Myra began.

“No. Listen to me. Please.” Every one of Laura’s hands tightened at once. “Rye. I watched you just now. I watched you walk down that line and ask Chloe to raise your son.” Her voices cracked, all three in the same place. “You got him back. You got him back. Don’t make him lose you. Don’t make him grow up on stories.”

It went in under Riley’s ribs like a blade slid between them, clean and exact, because it was true. She had no answer for it that would have been a lie, so she gave it none yet.

Laura had already turned the nearest of her faces to Myra. “And you. You’ve spent so long making up for something I stopped holding against you weeks ago. You don’t owe me this. You don’t owe me anything. Neither of you does.” She went on, lower still, before either of them could speak, and for a second her voices nearly steadied on the word. “Andy is alive, you heard Emi. He stayed for a reason. If he’s found something, then none of this has to happen. And if he hasn’t—” She stopped. When she went on it was very quiet. “Then I’ve done this once already. I know the way down. You don’t.”

There was no promise in it. Riley listened for one and there wasn’t any. Laura never said I’ll be fine. She only said she knew the way.

Myra answered first. “You’re so scared,” Myra said gently. Her face was turned full on Laura, reading her the way only Myra could. “I can feel all of it, Laura. Every bit of you is lit up with it. Don’t stand there and sound calm at me when I can feel what’s underneath.” Her free hand found the nearest of Laura’s wrists, and held it. “I spent a long time taking things from you. Your friends. Your last night. I made sure you were on your own when it mattered most, and I’ve been trying to give it back ever since, a piece at a time, and it’s never been enough. I’ve made my peace with it never being enough.” Her voice didn’t waver. “This one I can give. And it isn’t about the debt. Not for me. It’s about you. I love you. You’re my sister, and I'm not letting you go now that I have found you.”

Laura made a sound that wasn’t a word.

“I asked Chloe because I’m doing it, L,” Riley said. “That’s why I could ask. That was the last thing I had to put down before I came out here. He’s taken care of.” She made herself say the rest, since it was true too. “And you’re right. About him. About all of it. I’m scared out of my mind, and I can tell you I’m not backing out.” Laura’s faces were wet now, all three. “It buys time, and I’ll take the time,” Riley said. “If Andy’s got something, I hope he gets here before it matters. But I’m not standing out here because of it, L.” She stopped. She would not tell Laura it was going to be fine, because she didn’t know that, and her mouth wouldn’t let her try. “If he hasn’t, then you don’t go down there on your own. Not this time. I sent you out to that bridge alone once, L. I’m not doing it twice.”

Laura shook her heads, all three. “He said no.” She said it as if it were the last thing left in her pockets. “In the Hall. Andy said no for both of you. ‘To neither of them, and both.’ You heard him.”

“I heard him,” Riley said. “He wouldn’t look at either of us when he said it. He looked at the floor so we couldn’t read anything off his face.” Her voice gentled, a little, because she loved him and this was the part that cost. “I think he knew, L. I think he said no because he couldn’t stand not to, and didn’t look at us because he knew we’d do it anyway. He doesn’t get to decide this for us. Neither do you.”

Myra’s thumb moved once over the inside of Laura’s wrist. “He’d do the same thing for you,” she said. “He did. He went straight at Nergal in the Hall, with nothing.”

For a long moment none of them moved. The wind came through the bare arches behind them and went on across the ring. Laura looked from Myra to Riley and back with all three faces, and none of her let go.

“I hate this,” Laura said at last.

“I know,” Riley said.

“We know,” said Myra.

“I love you. Both of you. I love you so much. I've always wanted sisters, and now I have you, and—” Laura’s voices had gone thin as paper. “And I need you to know I said no.”

“We know you said no,” Riley said. “You always say no. We love you anyway.”

Laura’s grip eased, though not into agreement. Riley knew agreement from her, and this was the slow giving of a woman who has pushed on a door with everything she has and felt it open anyway. One of her bowed her head until her forehead rested on the backs of their joined hands, and a breath shook through her from top to bottom. Another looked up at the throne across the ring, and Riley saw her jaw set.

Myra took her hand from Laura’s wrist and wiped her own face with the back of it, carefully, the way she did everything. Riley didn’t bother wiping hers.

Then Laura let go, and turned, and the three of them stepped out onto the ring.

Behind them Riley heard someone along the rise draw a breath and hold it. She didn’t turn to see who. She could feel the whole household at her back without looking, every one of them a fixed bright point in the dark, Chloe’s the brightest and closest, and she let them stay there, behind her, where she couldn’t see their faces.

All three of Laura moved in step, as she did when she wasn’t thinking about it. Myra’s cane came down on the ash beside her every other stride, hoping to lead Nergal into underestimating her. Riley walked on Laura’s far side and counted. The ground was dry and cracked under her shoes, with ash lying in the cracks like old snow. Fifteen steps to the outer ring. Thirty steps to the first arch, and after that she lost the number. Above the throne the ghosts went round in their slow, loose wheel, and the whispering that had been a murmur from the rise thickened as the three of them came in under it, a crowd in the next room, a crowd behind a door, always just short of words. The back of Riley’s neck went cold. She drew her hair up off her back and coiled it at her shoulders, ready.

On the far side of the throne Arabella stood very straight with one hand shut at her side, and Anna stood a step behind her with her arms wrapped round herself. Neither of them moved.

Nergal’s attention found them before they had covered half the distance. Riley felt it land. It came across the ring slow and unhurried and entirely certain of arriving, as everything about him seemed to, and it passed over Myra, and over Riley, and settled on Laura. All three of her. It stayed there, heavy as a hand on a shoulder, and Riley saw the nearest of Laura’s jaws set under it.

Myra spoke before he could. Riley felt her heart thundering in her chest. It all depended on this gamble, and if they were wrong about two offers stalling him...

“We’re here to offer ourselves in her place.” Myra kept her voice level, and it carried across the dead ground clear and flat and certain, the voice she used when she had already decided and was only letting you know. “Riley and me. Both of us. Freely, and knowing exactly what we’re giving. We know what it takes: someone with standing, who knows what’s given. We're her sisters by blood. That’s us. And it stands, whether you like it or not.”

Riley wanted no gap after that, not one breath’s worth for him to slide a doubt into about whether this was one offer or two people nodding along to the same line.

“Me too,” she said. “In her place. I know what it costs. I’m giving it anyway.”

Every word came out of her true. She felt each one go, and none of them caught.

Nergal’s face held, as no mortal face would have held. He looked from Myra to Riley, and back, and behind those flat stone-colored eyes Riley saw what looked a great deal like a man doing a sum he had already done once tonight and finding, the second time, that it came out different. One had become three. He had been ready for one.

He said nothing. He only went on looking between them, with the same unhurried attention he had turned on Laura in the Hall, when he counted her and came up with three. The wheel of the howling women turned overhead. The whispering rose a little and fell. Myra’s cane stayed planted, and Laura held as still as stone. Riley stood in the cold with her hair coiled on her shoulders and her offer out in the air where she could never take it back, and let the silence go on longer than she could stand, and then a little longer than that.

Deep down, JJ was exactly where she’d left him.

She held on to that, and waited.

Arabella had been counting since the rise. Not steps. She left those to Riley, whose lips had moved the whole way across the ring. Arabella counted other things: the distance from the three sisters to the foot of the throne, the number of the Thirteen above it, how long since Nergal had last moved his hands. Two offers, now. She had counted those as they were made, one and then the other a breath behind it, and felt the tally change in her as a scale changes when a second weight goes onto the same pan.

He had felt it too. His face had stayed as it was, and his great hands still lay along the arms of the throne, but his attention had stopped on Myra and Riley and stayed there, heavy and level. It was the same attention he had given Laura’s three bodies in the Dance Hall, the night he looked at them and said three, and it held for so long that Anna’s breath went shallow at Arabella’s shoulder.

When he answered at last, it was to accept neither of them, and to refuse neither.

“The Law does not know what to do with you.”

He said it without weight, the way a man remarks on weather that has nothing to do with him. His voice came across the dead ground worn and even. Arabella knew what he was bound to say. He wasn't the creditor, and had no power to judge, only to collect.

“One who has standing may lay a life down in hers. One. That is true.” He turned one hand palm upward on the arm of the throne, slowly, and left it there. “You are two, and you came in the same breath. Both blood. The same father runs in each of you, and in her. The one offer weighs what the other weighs, and the Law has no hand to choose between them with. So it must wait. Until one or both of you fall away, it lets me take neither of you in her place.”

Arabella watched the sentence land in all three of them. Riley’s chin came up a fraction. Myra’s cane held where it was. The nearest of Laura closed her eyes for the length of a breath and opened them again.

She had seen this danger the moment he spoke of standing in the Hall: that a willing sacrifice would hand him the cheaper life, lawfully, and he would take it and go. Here was its answer, and it was plain he had not planned for it. He never had. What women would do for one another was a sum he had never learned to carry.

“The reading holds,” Arabella said.

She said it low, to the three of them rather than to him, and kept every word of it exact. “Two offers, equal, freely made, by two who have standing. The Law will take neither while both stand. It is no trick of his. It is the Law’s own wall.”

All night she had watched for a gap in his warrant. She had watched him take her Hall apart, and after her warning keep, to the letter, off everything that was hers. She had watched him strip Erin’s growth from the arches and sit down in the middle of the bare stone to wait. For two hours she had stood on this ash and turned every word he said over in her hands, hunting for the place where collecting a debt shaded into something else. This was not yet that place. She would have given a great deal for it to be.

He kept his eyes on the sisters. When he spoke again his voice was exactly what it had been.

“You mistake what I came for.” His gaze moved, without hurry, from Myra to Riley and on to the three of Laura, and stopped there. “I did not come up out of the dark for a substitute. I came for the one on my tablet. Her. Whole. All three of her.” His thumb moved once against the stone. “One of her is the debt the Queen wrote down. Three of her is an appetite, and I have carried it since the hall with the glass roof, when I first counted her.”

He had used that word to Arabella’s face a couple of hours ago, in the wreckage of that same hall, as if passing her a pleasantry. He used it to them now in the same tone. Not too far, Emily focused on him intently.

“If the wall comes down my way, the Law hands her to me on its own terms, and nobody on this hill may lift a hand to stop it. If it stands through the night, I can wait.” A pause, measured to the grain. “I have waited longer than one night for less.”

Then he closed his hand.

It was a small movement, unhurried, the same gesture Arabella had watched brush Andy out of the Hall like crumbs off a table. Nothing flew from it. There was no light and no sound. The ground around the three sisters simply answered him.

Fog came first. It rose out of the cracks in the ash at their ankles, gray and low and thick as milk, and climbed. Arabella felt its cold from where she stood, the deep cold of a cellar where nothing has been warm in a very long time. Out of the fog itself something harder took shape, link by link: chain, and the curve of shackles, gray as the fog they came from and grave-cold against bare skin. They closed around wrists. They closed around throats. Laura’s and Myra’s and Riley’s, all at once.

The chains made no effort to pull the three of them down. They only shortened.

Laura went down first, all three of her together, onto the cracked ground with a single sound. Myra went down beside her, and the cane went out of her hand and rolled on the ash. Riley’s hair lashed up off her shoulders and caught the nearest chain, and Arabella saw it hold, for a heartbeat, two, before the fog thickened around the hair as well and bound it to the rest of her, and Riley went to her knees with it.

They knelt in a row in front of the throne, because that was how he liked to have things in front of him.

Arabella tallied it. A debtor held still while the debt was argued: collection, and the Law would read it so. Her hand stayed shut at her side, and she kept it from shaking.

Nergal turned his head, finally, toward the edge of the rise. The household had approached, a ragged line against the dark, and they had seen all of it. Sam had taken one step out onto the inner ring and stopped herself there. A thin line of gold fire ran along the edges of Sumiku’s half-open wings. Erin’s hands had closed into fists at her sides. A pace back from all of them, Mildred stood with her hands folded.

“Lay them down,” Nergal said. He gave it at the same even pitch as everything else, the same order in the same words Arabella had heard him give in a hall with a floor nobody had swept since. “Bind them, and hold them. Let none of them be ended.”

The Thirteen came down off their wheel. They came without hurry, down over the ring in their ranks, hair lifting in the wind that wasn’t there, and the whispering that had been a murmur in the next room swelled as they closed on one another and on the women at the edge, into a crowd, then a roar under the skin. Arabella heard it as she always did, a door’s thickness away. The women at the edge heard it with nothing between them and it but Emily’s calm, and that reached only so far.

“Don’t fight them,” Sam called, hoarse, as Sumiku’s fire flared. “Not yet. Hold—”

They went down as the three sisters had, one and then the next, and Arabella watched every one. Sam, who kept her hands at her sides, and whose jaw locked as a pair took her by both arms and folded her onto the ash. Sumiku, gold flaring along all of her and then guttering as two of them caught her wings. Norah, her legs swept from under her. Erin, rigid, her lips moving on words only she could hear. Katherine, who got one of them by the throat with her bare hand and held it, writhing, until three more came down on her at once and pressed her flat. Chloe, eyes squeezed shut, her fist still knotted in the hem of the sweater. Marissa, already reaching for whoever lay nearest before they pinned her arms. Liesa, whose arm stayed out toward Sam until two of them pulled it down. Eden, the long ripple of her body running out of her as they laid her down. Emily, ahead of everyone now, who went quietly, hair spilling over the ash, her calm vanished, her pale blue eyes fixed on Nergal intently. And Emi and Claire and Dawn, who had come up that path not half an hour before with something new in their faces: Emi with all six arms caught, the notebook falling from Claire’s grip to lie open on the ground, Dawn’s ears pinned flat to her skull.

They passed Mildred as if she were a post set in the ground. She stayed exactly where she was, hands folded, and watched.

Anna was the other one left standing.

No one had spoken of her either. She stood a step behind Arabella with her arms locked round herself and watched the women go down, every one, as the three sisters already had, and she blinked when Emi was brought down. Arabella felt her lean until her shoulder touched Arabella’s back. Arabella stayed where she was and let her.

Nergal turned back to the three in front of him. What he did to them next left no mark. Arabella would have seen one. She watched for it as she had watched for everything: a cut, a bruise, blood, anything she could point to and call physical harm. The pain came from nowhere on the body’s own map. All three of Laura jerked at once, and the chains held all three. Myra’s tails went rigid behind her. Riley’s mouth opened on silence.

Under the pain, he began to speak. He leaned forward on the throne to do it, and pitched it low, so low that it might have been meant for the three of them alone, or might have been meant to carry to every bound woman along the edge of the ash.

“Small,” he said. “So small. You were always small, all three of you. Listen how quiet it is up here. That is how much room you take up in the world. You will give up, eventually. I have all the time in the world.” He let a breath go by, as if he had all the time there was. “Whoever you tell yourselves is coming for you has already forgotten your faces. And what you offered here tonight is remembered by no one. Nothing given in this place ever is.”

He lingered on none of the three. Not yet. He named nothing that any one of them feared. Whatever each of them heard inside those words, and whatever it cost each of them to hold against it, he left them to find alone.

Arabella stood and counted it. It was cruelty. She had known it in him in another age, when he was a living man and wore another name. But every pang was aimed at the offers breaking, both of them, at the wall coming down his way. Pain to force a debtor’s hand was still collecting, even if cruel, and the Law would read it so. She turned it over twice, hunting for the place where his amusement ran past his errand and left him standing outside the Law’s cover. It was not enough. She had yet to find it.

So the Ring held its new shape. Three sisters, kneeling in chains that had been fog a moment before. Thirteen more women bound and silent at the edges of the same blasted ground, watching. Mildred standing among them, untouched. Anna at Arabella’s back. And Nergal above all of it, waiting on a stalemate he had not built and was perfectly willing to wait and break.

Arabella kept her hand closed over the old scar, and kept watching.