The Escape

Orestes took off her shackles with a small glass key that hung around his neck. As they opened, the rings released all at once the light they had drunk from Lianor in two days, and the cell filled with amber as if dawn had broken inside it. The captain squinted and didn't complain.

In the next cell, Darian was waiting on his feet, the cords of shadow still on his wrists. Lianor laid her hands on them and wove a fine thread of light, carefully, and the cords came apart the way mist comes apart when the sun comes out. He rubbed his wrists. They looked at each other, and for a second neither of them knew what to do with their hands, now that they could use them. Then he hugged her, brief and hard, and let her go.

"Later," he said.

"Later," she said.

Orestes had looked away, like a well-mannered soldier.

"There's a passage under the Citadel," he said. "Older than the Citadel. Your mother and I found it twenty years ago, chasing a lightjar thief. It goes under the river. I don't know where it comes out."

"I do," Darian said. "On the other side. In my grandfather's tunnels."

Orestes nodded as if it didn't surprise him. He walked ahead of them down the corridor with the unlit lantern. When they reached the end of the cellar, a stone wall that looked like any other, he pushed a slab with his shoulder and the slab swung on itself. Behind it, it smelled of water and old earth.

He stopped at the entrance without crossing.

"I need to tell you something first," he told Lianor. "In case I don't see you again."

She waited.

"I was on the bridge that night. Behind your mother, with the guard." He spoke slowly, looking at the slab. "The white light didn't come from the Umbral side. It came from behind us. From where the Keeper was walking. I knew it at once, because it hit the back of my neck before it hit my eyes. And I said nothing for nine years, because he was my lord, and because I thought it was an accident, and because I'm a coward."

"Orestes..."

"Let me finish." He looked up. "Your mother didn't fall off the bridge. She ran. When the white light came down on the Umbral, she ran toward them, toward the middle, toward a little girl carrying a candle. She stood in front of the girl with her lightjar, to shield her. There wasn't time. The two of them fell into the water together."

Lianor couldn't say anything. Beside her, she felt Darian stop breathing.

"Nima," he said.

"I didn't know her name," Orestes said. "I'm sorry."

Then he gave them the lantern, gave Lianor a clumsy pat on the shoulder, the way he used to when she fell in the courtyard as a child, and turned back up the stairs.

"I'll tell them you knocked me out," he said without turning around. "Give me a believable bruise, if you have time. You don't. Run."

The passage sloped down for a long while and then leveled out. The walls were carved with the same design they had seen in the glacier caves: couples dancing, gold and black, violet rising from their hands. Above their heads, through the rock, there was a dull murmur, and it took Lianor a while to understand that it was the river. They were crossing under the Albar. Under the bridge.

Neither of them spoke for a good stretch. Lianor felt through the strand what he felt, and she didn't know how much of what she felt was her own: an enormous old grief, and under the grief something that was very like relief.

"All my life I've hated your mother," Darian said at last, still walking. "All of it. I had a face for her. I made it up, with the ribbon in her hair. I blamed her for everything: Nima, my mother, my grandmother never laughing."

"And I hated your people."

"And she threw herself into the water for my sister."

Lianor took his hand. They walked on like that, hand in hand, until the floor began to rise and the air grew colder and smelled of shadow, of washing on the line, of the Hollows.

They came out through a trapdoor into a cave by the water, on the Umbral bank. The boat was there: small, flat-bottomed, painted black, with one new oar and one old one. Darian ran his hand along the gunwale the way you run your hand along a horse's back.

"Meet my boat," he said. "She has no name. I never gave her one in case I got caught."

He rowed all night, upriver, north.

Lianor offered to take turns and he refused, and she didn't insist, because she could feel through the strand that rowing was good for him, that every stroke put something in order inside him. She sat in the stern with Orestes's blanket and a small light in her hand to see the rocks. The river ran gray and silent, and the boat climbed against it silently too, and on both sides the banks were dark: no lightjars in the Heart, no veil over the Hollows. As if both houses had run out of breath at once.

"When this is over," Lianor said, "I want you to take me across. For a coin. Like you said."

"I'll charge you two. You're an heir."

"I don't know if I am anymore."

Darian didn't answer right away. He took three long strokes.

"Neither do I," he said. "I don't care. I'll charge you two anyway."

Sometime before dawn, Lianor fell asleep in the stern, without anyone putting a hand over her eyes, rocked by the oars. The last thing she noticed was that he had stopped counting.

They reached Ruesca with the first light.

The village was gray again. Grayer than the first time: now there was no red geranium in the window, no sheep in the meadow, no old man with a crook. The houses stood open and empty. On the fountain in the square, someone had left a wooden sheep.

Lianor picked it up. It was Tea's. She put it in her pack without saying anything.

From the top of the village you could see the whole glacier, and what they saw stopped them dead.

Two processions were climbing the ice. One on the left, along the moraine: white cloaks, horses, lightjars lit in a row, like a pilgrimage. The other on the right, up the scree: figures in black on foot, and in front of them, across the ground, shadows moving on their own, tracking. They were climbing at the same time, toward the same place, each on its own side, half a league of ice between them, not looking at each other. They weren't together anymore. They were racing to see who got there first.

"They've realized," Darian said. "Neither of them trusts the other anymore."

"Neither of them is going to wait for us," Lianor said. "If the heirs don't arrive, they'll find something else to throw in."

Above the two processions, the Rift was no longer a seam. It was a mouth open in the sky, as wide as the glacier, and the gray came down from it in slow cascades, the way fog comes down a ravine.

Darian took a step and suddenly doubled over with a groan, clutching his left forearm. Lianor felt it in hers at the same moment. She pushed up his sleeve. The gray stain from the first trial, the one they had stopped together in the cave, had begun to spread again. It was eating his elbow.

"It's calling us," he said through his teeth. "I can feel it."

And Lianor heard it too. Not in her head, not in the strand. In the wind coming down off the glacier, soft, with the drawn-out "sweetheart" and the little laugh at the end.

"Come, sweetheart. Everything you lost is here."