The Threshold of the Void

They climbed up the middle of the glacier, between the two processions, where no one climbed because the ice was broken into blue crevasses. Lianor went first, opening a path with threads of light that drove into the ice like stakes; Darian behind, his left arm held against his body, weaving shadow with his right so they couldn't be seen from the sides. When the gray of the Rift fell on them, they took each other's hands and wove violet, a little, just enough not to forget why they were climbing.

They reached the top at the same moment as the two processions.

At the foot of the Rift the glacier flattened into a white plain as wide as the square of the Heart, and in the middle, fifty paces away, the gray began. There was no edge. The ice simply ran out of color, shine and sound, and then it wasn't ice anymore: it was nothing. The Rift rose from there to the sky, open like a mouth, and out of it came a murmur of a thousand voices all speaking at once without hearing one another.

On the left, the Aurion spread out in a half-moon, lightjars raised. On the right, the Umbral, their tracking shadows stretched across the ice like leashed dogs. Between the two lines, Albano and Isolda each dismounted and stood still, a hundred paces apart, not looking at each other.

Then they both looked at once to the center of the plain, where Lianor and Darian stood hand in hand.

"Bring them," Albano said.

"Bring them," Isolda said.

No one moved.

Lianor saw it in their faces. In those of the Aurion guard, who had been at the trial, or had brothers who had been at the trial, or had heard a little girl shout from a bench that her name had been given back to her with a color that didn't exist. In those of the Hollows hunters, who looked at the violet strand on their heir's wrist and then looked at their Matriarch. No one moved. The lightjars trembled overhead. The tracking shadows lay still on the ice.

"He made the bridge happen," Lianor said aloud, to both sides. "And she kept quiet. And two weeks ago they came up here together to feed this thing so it would come down into the valley. And then each of them meant to throw it at the other's house. I'm not asking you to believe it. I'm asking you to look at who's standing here with whom."

Albano didn't answer. Neither did Isolda. They finally looked at each other, across a hundred paces of ice, and Lianor knew they were no longer talking about the heirs.

Isolda began walking toward the center. From under her cloak she took the obsidian knife, black and gleaming, and carried it on her open palm, blade down, like someone bringing a gift.

"Darian," she said. "Give me your hand. Just your hand. One cut, and you come home with me."

"No."

"It's my last offer, child."

"I know, Grandmother. That's why."

Isolda stopped ten paces away. And then Albano did what he had written in his white notebook.

He raised both arms and drew white light. All he had.

He didn't throw it at them. He threw it at the Rift. A column of white light, blinding, that crossed the plain and sank into the gray like red-hot iron into water. Lianor understood what he was trying before she heard him shout: he wanted to seize the Rift with his light, the way you seize a horse by the bridle, and drag it west, toward the cliffs, toward the Hollows.

"Albano!" Isolda screamed.

The Rift didn't let itself be led. It drank the light.

Lianor saw it with her own eyes: the white column entered the gray and disappeared, the way water disappears into sand. Albano drew more. The Rift drank more. The white light pouring from his hands began to change color, less white, grayer, and Albano pulled on it with his whole body, his face twisted, like a man who won't let go of a rope that is dragging him away.

And it dragged him away.

First his feet, sliding across the ice without his walking. Then his knees. Lianor took a step toward him without thinking, and Darian held her back by the hand. Albano was already at the edge, where the ice lost its color, and for an instant he turned and looked at her. There was no anger in his face. There was something Lianor would take years to be able to name.

"I only wanted it never to go out," he said.

Then the gray swallowed him, and his light with him, and out of the Rift came a sound Lianor had never heard: something like a sigh of satisfaction.

The plain shook.

The Rift opened wider, all at once, the way a mouth opens when it has just tasted something it likes. The gray advanced twenty paces in a heartbeat. And in the middle, Isolda, ten paces from them, was suddenly standing on colorless ice. The ground gave way under her feet.

Darian let go of Lianor and threw himself down.

It was so fast that Lianor only saw the end: Darian lying face down at the edge, his right arm stretched toward the gray, and in his hand, his grandmother's hand. The one with the obsidian. The knife slipped between them and fell into the Rift without a sound. Isolda hung over the nothing, and the nothing pulled at her, and Darian had nothing to hold on with but his sick arm.

Lianor.

She was already there. She threw herself on his back, seized his left arm, the gray one, the one he couldn't feel, and wove. He wove with her without looking at her. The violet came out of both of them and ran down Darian's arm to Isolda's hand, and from Isolda's hand to the rest of Isolda, and the Rift, for a moment, didn't know what to do with that color. It loosened. They pulled. Isolda came out of the gray the way a bucket comes up out of a well and fell onto the white ice on her back, her braid undone.

She lay looking at the sky. Then she looked at her grandson.

"Why?" she said. Her voice was broken. She suddenly seemed very old. "I was going to..."

"I know, Grandmother." Darian sat on the ice, panting. "Lianor's mother threw herself into the water for Nima. Somebody in this family had to measure up."

Isolda closed her eyes. And she said nothing more.

The Rift was still growing.

It could no longer be seen whole. It filled half the sky, and the gray ran down the glacier in slow rivers to both sides, toward the lightjars and toward the shadows, and the hollows began to come out of it. Hundreds. Thousands. Figures of gray air shaped like shepherds, children, old women, soldiers, each with a voice. The plain filled with lost voices calling to people who were no longer there.

Both lines fell back. Someone dropped a lightjar, which rolled across the ice. Someone shouted that they had to go down, that there was nothing to be done.

Lianor and Darian stood up, hand in hand, and wove violet against the first hollows. It worked: they filled with color for an instant and dissolved. But for every one that dissolved, ten came out. It was like putting out a fire with a glass of water. Lianor felt Darian tiring through the strand, and felt the gray climbing his arm to his shoulder.

"Not like this," she said. "From outside it doesn't reach."

"I can see that."

Lianor thought of the crypt. Of the carved letters that could only be seen in the violet. No forced bond closes the wound. Only the chosen one. It didn't say "throw it in." It didn't say "weave it from outside." It said close. And a wound isn't closed from far away. It's sewn from inside, stitch by stitch, the way her mother used to sew.

"We have to go in," she said.

Darian looked at her. Lianor felt through the strand that he had already thought of it, a while ago, and hadn't wanted to say it so as not to be the first.

Isolda raised herself on one elbow on the ice.

"If you go in, you don't come out," she said. "No one ever has. That's why the pacts were made. To throw others in."

Lianor turned to her.

"No one has ever gone in choosing to," she said.

She untied the amber ribbon from her left wrist, her mother's, and tied it around Darian's right, over the violet strand. He let her. Then he took her hand, the left one, the one that trembled. It didn't tremble anymore.

"Do you count or do I?" he asked.

"You count. You're better at it."

They walked toward the gray. One. Two. Three. Behind them, Lianor heard the Aurion lower their lightjars and the Umbral gather in their shadows, and a silence fall that wasn't the Rift's. Ten. Eleven. The ice lost its color under their boots. The voices of the hollows parted to let them through.

At the twentieth step, the world went out.