The Balanced Dawn

Inside there was nothing, and then there was a valley.

It took Lianor a while to understand what she was seeing. It was the valley of the Albar, with its terraces and its cliffs, with the river and the bridge, but drawn in pencil: all gray, without shadow or shine, without a single sound, like a sketch someone had left half finished. There was no sky. There was no ground, or there was a ground that couldn't be felt under their boots. The only things with color in that whole place were the two of them: the violet strand on their wrists, the amber ribbon on Darian's, and the place where their hands touched.

"Keep counting," she said. Her voice made no echo.

"Twenty-one," he said. "Twenty-two."

They started walking. People walked through the gray valley. At first Lianor thought they were hollows, but no: in here they were whole. A shepherd with his crook. A woman hanging out washing. A boy running after a hoop. They were gray like everything else, but they had faces, and gestures, and they repeated what they were doing over and over, the way a memory repeats. They were what the valley had forgotten. It was all here.

"My grandfather's name," Darian said suddenly, looking at an old man laughing in the doorway of a cliff house. "There it is. His name was Tobías. I'd lost it and didn't know."

They followed the river toward the bridge. Lianor knew where they were going without anyone telling her.

On the bridge it was night. The only night there was in there.

Under the arch, on the gray water, there was a small flat-bottomed boat, and in the boat two women. One wore an amber ribbon in her brown hair. The other, a black braid and a Hollows cloak. They sat very close, sharing a blanket, laughing softly about something, the way two friends laugh who have been meeting in secret for years.

"That's my mother," Darian said. His voice had gone. "Mirena. That's my mother. I didn't know... I didn't know she knew her."

Lianor couldn't speak. Her mother was there. Her whole face, no blank pieces, with the freckles on her nose that Lianor had forgotten she had. Elvira Aurion was saying something to Mirena Umbral, quietly, and although there was no sound in there, Lianor read her lips, because that mouth had talked to her for ten years.

"Tomorrow we take down the gates."

Mirena laughed and nudged her with a shoulder. Then the two of them climbed the stairs from the bank, each to her own side of the bridge, and the night moved on the way a memory moves, in leaps. The processions. The Aurion lightjars on one side, the Hollows candles on the other. A black-haired girl with a candle, behind her mother, clutching her cloak.

And behind the Aurion procession, a man in white raising his arms.

Lianor didn't look away. She saw all of it: the white light, the blindness, the girl alone in the middle of the bridge with her candle. She saw her mother start to run. She didn't hesitate for a moment: she ran the way you run toward your own child, the lightjar held out in front of her, and put herself between the light and the girl. And when they fell into the water, together, Elvira was holding Nima in her arms.

Darian stood still, looking at his sister's face, which had turned toward the light at the last moment.

"Gray," he said. "They were gray."

"Like yours," said Lianor.

Then the Rift spoke to them.

It had no one's voice. It had everyone's at once, the shepherds, the children, Lianor's mother, Darian's grandfather, a thousand voices at last saying the same thing. It came from the whole gray valley, from the ground that couldn't be felt and the sky that wasn't there.

What do you bring?

Lianor understood the question before she thought it. The old ones had thrown pairs bound by blood in here, and the Rift had eaten them and lain still for thirty years, like a sated beast. That was what the others brought: food. But they hadn't come to feed it. They had come to close it. And a wound that closes asks for something too. It asks that its two edges stop being two.

"What we weave alone," she said aloud, and knew it was true as she said it. "That's what was separated. That's what opened it."

Darian looked at her. Through the strand came what he was thinking: that he would never again draw shadow from his hand for a child who couldn't sleep. Not without her. That she would never again draw amber to light a dome. Not without him. That from that moment on, everything they wove they would weave together or not at all.

"Sounds like a good deal to me," he said.

"You haven't thought about it."

"I've been thinking about it since the glacier cave." He squeezed her hand. "Shall we dance?"

They danced.

In the gray valley, on a floor that couldn't be felt, they danced the steps from the crypt. A step forward for him, a step back for her, a turn. Lianor gave her light. She didn't weave it: she gave it, all of it, the light she'd had since before she was born, her mother's amber, and felt it leave her hands the way water leaves open hands. Darian gave his shadow. And at every turn, where the two things crossed, the violet came out, and the violet no longer belonged to either of them. It belonged to both.

Every step stitched. Lianor could see it: wherever they passed, the gray valley filled with color. The terraces turned golden, the cliffs black, the river blue. The memories walking there turned toward them, surprised, like someone who hears their name called from far away, and started walking upward, toward a sky that was beginning to exist, violet, the last minute of evening. They were going home. To the minds of those who had lost them.

On the last turn, Lianor saw her mother on the bridge, whole, in color, with the amber ribbon in her hair. Elvira looked at her. She didn't say anything. There was no need. She smiled the way she used to smile when Lianor came back from playing with the ribbon lost, and then she went up with the others.

They woke on the white ice, at dawn.

Lianor opened her eyes and the first thing she saw was the sky. Blue, the pale blue of autumn mornings in the Peaks. And crossing it from side to side, where the Rift had been, a thin band of violet, like a well-healed scar, that the morning sun couldn't erase.

Darian was lying beside her. They were still holding hands. His left arm was bare, and the gray stain had disappeared: in its place was a violet mark, like an old burn, which he stared at with his mouth open.

"It hurts," he said. "My whole arm hurts. How wonderful."

Around them, the two lines had come apart. There were white cloaks and black cloaks sitting together on the ice, in no order, no weapons in their hands, looking at the sky. Someone was crying. Someone was repeating a name aloud, and then another, and another, like someone finding coins in a pocket they thought was empty. Isolda Umbral was on her knees, alone, her braid undone, and when she saw her grandson sit up, she bowed her head.

Lianor sat up. She opened her right hand and tried to draw a thread of light, just one, a small one.

Nothing came.

Darian tried with shadow. Nothing.

They looked at each other. Then they joined hands, and between their fingers, effortlessly, a violet thread came out, rose into the air and hung floating over the ice, warm and cool at the same time.

"Well," Darian said. "We'll have to go everywhere together."

A great many things happened afterward, and almost all of them took time.

Isolda told the truth about the bridge in front of both houses, at the Enclave, one rainy afternoon, and when she finished she took off her Matriarch's cloak and laid it on the center stone. No one picked it up. She lives in a small house in the Hollows with a window facing east, and Darian goes to see her on Thursdays. They don't always talk.

Orestes and an Umbral hunter named Bastián tore down the two gates of the Weavers' Bridge together with sledgehammers, one winter morning, and then went off to drink in a tavern on the Aurion bank and argued for hours about who had swung more blows.

In Ruesca there were geraniums again. Lianor went up in spring to give Tea back her wooden sheep, and the girl showed her that she had learned to say her name backward.

And in summer, Lianor climbed to the Ventisquero with a piece of charcoal and a goatskin and drew the sky for Sylva the way it had been left: the Peaks, the glacier, and above them a thin line of a color that couldn't be drawn in charcoal. Sylva nailed the skin to the wall, above all the others. She said it was the first one that didn't frighten her.

The bridge had been open for half a year when Lianor went down to the river one afternoon, alone, and walked along the bank to the cave where Darian kept the boat.

He was already waiting for her, sitting on the gunwale, oars crossed. She held out her open hand. In her palm were two coins.

"There's a bridge," he said. "Right there. New. No gates."

"I know. I want you to take me across."

Darian took the coins, put them away and offered her his hand to climb in. He rowed slowly to the middle of the river, under the white arch, and there he let go of the oars. Above them, on the bridge, there were people from both houses looking at the water, and on both banks, at the same time, evening was beginning to fall.

Lianor took his hands. They wove.

The violet rose from the boat, passed under the arch and opened over the river the way a handkerchief opens, and on both banks, for the first time in a thousand years, the sunset was the same color.

On the bow of the boat, freshly painted, in slightly crooked letters, there was a name at last: Nima.