A Hostile Encounter

The Twilight Enclave was an islet in the middle of the Albar, with nine stones in a circle and a willow nobody dared to prune. For a thousand years it had been the only place in the valley where an Aurion and an Umbral could talk without drawing steel. Lianor had always looked at it from the bank as a child, the way you look at a haunted house.

They crossed in a flat-bottomed boat as the afternoon fell. Albano sat in the bow, in white; Orestes, the captain of the guard, rowed without taking his eyes off the gray water, which now filled the whole channel. Lianor wore her mother's amber ribbon tied around her left wrist, under her sleeve, tight. The trembling was less when it was tight.

The Umbral boat arrived from the other side at the same moment, as if it had been rehearsed. First an old woman stepped out, tall, wrapped in a cloak the color of wet coal, her white hair in a braid that reached her waist: Isolda Umbral, Matriarch of the Hollows. Behind her, in one leap, without wetting his boots, came him.

Lianor recognized him at once. The young man from the river. By daylight he was taller than she had thought, lean and broad-shouldered, his black hair cut any old way, a small scar through one eyebrow. He was dressed in black from head to foot, like all his people, and he was looking at her with the same face as the night before: no surprise at all, as if he had known he would find her there.

"Darian Umbral," Isolda said, without looking at him. "My grandson. Heir of the Hollows."

"Lianor Aurion," Albano said. "Heir of the Heart."

No one shook hands. They sat on the stones, each house on its half of the circle, the willow between them like a border. For a while all they heard was the water, or the lack of it, because the Albar no longer made a sound. It was Isolda who spoke first.

"You lost the light for three heartbeats," she said. "We lost the shadow. In Ruesca there are already children who don't know their names. This morning I forgot my late husband's name, and I had been saying it aloud every night for forty years. I haven't come to talk about the bridge."

"Then let's talk about it," Lianor said.

She said it before she thought. Albano glanced at her sideways. Across the circle, Darian raised an eyebrow, the scarred one.

"My mother died on that bridge," Lianor went on. "She had a lightjar in her hands and a signed truce in her pocket. Your people killed her."

"My sister was twelve," Darian said. He didn't raise his voice. He had a dry accent, clipped words. "She was walking behind my mother with a candle, because she was afraid of the dark. An Umbral afraid of the dark, imagine that. Your light burned her in the middle of the bridge. Her name was Nima."

"You're lying."

"I was there, Aurion. Where were you?"

Lianor stood up. Orestes stood with her, hand on his sword hilt. Across the way, two of Isolda's men took a step. The willow moved without wind.

"Enough," Albano said.

He didn't shout. He never shouted. But a white light appeared in the middle of the circle, a single spark, and everyone went still. Albano waited for Lianor to sit down. Then he took from his robe a roll of old parchment, tied with a two-colored cord, gold and black, and unrolled it on the center stone.

"The Rift opened the first time when the house of weavers split in two," he said. "The Umbral have the same copy we do, Isolda. Read it yourself, if you don't trust my voice."

Isolda leaned over the parchment. She read with narrowed eyes, slowly, in the old tongue, and then translated:

"'Light and shadow bound by blood shall close the wound.'"

There was a long silence.

"Bound by blood," Darian repeated. "Bound how?"

"A pact," his grandmother said. "The oldest of all. A weaver of light and a weaver of shadow, both heirs, swear on the stone with open palms. From that moment they can't move away from each other. What one feels, the other notices. Together they can reach the Rift. Apart, the Rift eats them before they get there."

"No," said Lianor.

"No," said Darian, at the same time.

They looked at each other. It was the first time they had agreed on anything, and neither of them liked it.

"Then the valley dies," Isolda said. "Slowly, of forgetting. First the names, then the faces. In the end nobody will know there was a bridge, or a sister, or a mother. You won't either. If that seems better to you than shaking hands, say so now and we'll each go back to our own bank."

Lianor looked at Albano. He held her gaze without a word, and she knew he wasn't going to order her. He was going to let her decide alone, as he always did when something hurt. She thought of the girl with the hand mirror asking her mother who she was. She thought of the amber ribbon, which one day might forget whose it had been.

"How long does it last?" she asked.

"Until the wound is closed," Albano said.

Lianor turned to Darian. His jaw was clenched and his eyes were fixed on the parchment, as if he wanted to burn it with his stare.

"I'm not going to give you my hand because I like it," she told him.

"Good. I wasn't going to ask for it."

They did it when the sun touched the water.

Albano cut Lianor's right palm with a glass knife. Isolda cut Darian's with an obsidian one. It hurt just enough, and neither of them let it show. Then they were placed face to face over the center stone of the circle, the oldest one, with a hollow like a bowl worn into it by a thousand years of rain, and made to join hands over the hollow.

Darian's hand was cold. He had calluses at the base of his fingers, from oars or rope, and he squeezed just hard enough for their blood to drip into the stone together. Lianor expected to feel disgust. She felt the cold, and under the cold, something she couldn't name: a pulse that wasn't hers, slower, coming through her palm.

"Repeat after me," Isolda said.

They repeated. The words were ancient and they didn't fully understand them; they spoke of a day and a night, of a thread and its shadow. As they said them, the blood in the hollow began to move. It rose into the air in a thin thread, coiled around their joined wrists and changed color: neither gold nor black, but a deep violet, like the sky in the last minute of evening. The cord tightened. It burned and froze at the same time.

Then it came undone, and on each of their right wrists a mark remained: a thin bracelet drawn under the skin, two braided strands, one golden and one black.

"It's done," Albano said. For an instant his voice failed. "It's done."

Darian let go of Lianor's hand at once, as if it burned. She wiped her palm on her tunic and stepped away, one step, another, and then she heard it.

It wasn't a voice. It was closer than a voice, inside her head, with his dry Hollows accent, like a thought that had slipped in through the cut:

Her voice doesn't shake. Her hand does. Liar.

Lianor spun around. Darian was looking at her, and from his face she knew he had heard something too, because he had gone white.

"What did you say?" she asked him.

"Nothing. I didn't open my mouth."

"You said I'm a liar."

He took a moment to answer. Across the circle, Isolda and Albano were watching them without moving, with an expression Lianor couldn't read and that, much later, she would remember very well.

"I thought it," Darian said at last. "And you just thought I look like a kicked dog."

Lianor opened her mouth and closed it again. She had thought it. Two seconds ago.