A Hundred Paces

They set out north at dawn without going back to their homes. The elders had decided it: the sooner they reached the Rift, the fewer names would be lost along the way. Orestes gave Lianor a leather pack with bread, cheese and a blanket. Albano put a small lightjar in her hand, the size of an egg, full of his white light.

"In case yours gets tired," he said, and closed her fingers around the glass.

On the other side of the willow, Isolda gave Darian a smooth black stone without a word, and he tucked it inside his shirt like someone keeping a letter he has no intention of reading.

All that first morning they didn't speak. They walked the shepherds' path, which climbed through chestnut trees toward the Veiled Peaks, each on their own side of the trail, as far from the other as they could get. Lianor in front. Darian behind. At first twenty paces apart, then forty, then sixty. She didn't turn around. She knew he was there because of a strange thing she felt in her right wrist, a gentle tug, like a thread tied to something that moves.

At ninety paces the tug became a sting. At a hundred, a burn.

Lianor stopped and clutched her wrist. The mark of the two strands glowed under her skin, gold and black, hot as a branding iron. She turned. Darian was standing in the middle of the trail, very far away, his right hand pressed to his chest and the look of someone who refused to give her the satisfaction.

"Come closer," she shouted.

"You come closer."

"I'm in front."

"Then stop."

Lianor took one step forward, out of pure spite. The pain shot up her arm to her shoulder and buckled her knees. Far away she heard Darian swear in the Hollows tongue, and she felt, because now she could feel it, that the same thing had happened to him. The two of them sat in the dirt, each at their end of the path, panting, wrists in their laps.

In the end it was he who got up and walked toward her. When he was fifty paces away, the pain went out completely. He dropped onto a rock across from her.

"A hundred," he said. "I counted. A hundred paces, and after that, knives."

"You counted."

"I count when I'm nervous." He shrugged. "Steps, stones, things. My mother taught me. There. Now you know. You'd have felt it through the wrist anyway."

Lianor didn't answer. It was true that she felt it: under the burn, a taut nerve that wasn't hers, slowly loosening.

"We need rules," she said.

"Rules."

"No listening to what the other one thinks on purpose."

"And how do you do that on purpose, Aurion?"

"I don't know. That's why it's a rule."

He looked at her for a moment, and for the first time she thought half a smile got away from him.

They reached Ruesca on the second afternoon.

Lianor had been there as a child, with her mother, for the shepherds' oath. She remembered a village of red roofs, geraniums in every window, dogs barking at the carts. Now the roofs were the color of stone and the geraniums the color of paper. The sheep grazed in the meadow without a bleat. In the doorways people sat looking at the street, still, as if waiting for someone to tell them what to do next.

An old man with a crook saw them pass and said:

"Good afternoon, may it rain."

Ten paces later he said it again. And again, when they were almost around the corner.

At the fountain in the square, a girl of about seven sat on the rim of the basin with a wooden sheep in her lap. An older woman knelt in front of her, holding her hands.

"Tea," she was saying. "Tea, my love. Tea."

The girl looked at her politely, without recognizing her, the way you look at a stranger who speaks to you at the market.

Lianor went over without thinking. The grandmother looked up, saw the white Aurion tunic and then, behind it, Darian's black, and didn't know which of them to ask for help. Lianor knelt beside the girl.

"I'm going to try something," she told the woman. "It doesn't hurt."

She drew a thread of her own light, amber, and brought it slowly to the girl's forehead, the way her mother used to with fever patients. The thread touched the skin. For an instant it shone. Then it turned gray, curled up like a burnt leaf and vanished.

She tried again. And again. The third time, her left hand was shaking so badly the thread snapped before it got there.

"Let me," Darian said.

He crouched on the other side of the girl and opened his hand. Lianor had never seen shadow woven up close. She expected something black, cold, ugly. What came out of Darian's palm was like the shade of a tree in August: cool, still, smelling of wet earth. It wrapped around Tea's head the way you wrap an arm around a child. The girl yawned. Her eyes half closed. But when she opened them she still didn't know who she was.

"Your shadow puts her to sleep," Lianor said, angrier than she meant to be. "It doesn't heal her."

"Shadow keeps what's there." Darian didn't move his hand. "But there's nothing left in there to keep."

"Then something has to be left."

She drew another amber thread, desperate, and threw it toward the girl just as Darian's shadow wrapped around her again. Light and shadow touched above Tea's hair.

The mark on Lianor's wrist burned like the first day. She heard Darian catch his breath. And between their two hands, where amber and shadow had crossed, a color appeared that neither of them knew how to weave: a soft violet, the last hour of evening, neither light nor dark and like both. The violet settled over the girl like a handkerchief.

Tea's cheeks flushed.

She blinked. She looked at the woman holding her hands and wrinkled her nose.

"Grandma, my name's Tea," she said, as if it were the woman who had forgotten. "Is there any bread?"

The grandmother burst into tears. In the window across the square, one of the paper geraniums turned red. Just one. And the old man with the crook, still in his doorway, said something different for the first time in two days:

"Well, look at that. The sun's come out."

Lianor and Darian stood up at the same time and took a step back, each to their own side, as if the girl were hot to the touch. They looked at their hands. Then they looked at each other.

"That can't happen," she said quietly. "Light and shadow don't mix. They cancel each other out. Every child in Aurion knows that."

"And in the Hollows," he said. "And it just happened."

That night they slept in Tea's grandmother's hayloft, ten paces of hay between them. Lianor didn't sleep. She stared at the beams and listened to Darian breathing, because he wasn't sleeping either, and felt in her wrist his taut nerve, his whispered counting. Two hundred and eleven. Two hundred and twelve.

"We're not telling them," he said in the dark. "About the violet. Not yet."

"Telling who?"

"Anyone. Your Keeper. My grandmother."

Lianor thought of the white lightjar in her pack. She thought she had no reason to keep anything from Albano, and that even so she didn't want to tell him.

"Not yet," she repeated.

At noon the next day they reached the edge of the Ventisquero, the glacier that came down between the Peaks like a white tongue, and saw the Rift up close.

It was a seam in the air, as tall as ten towers, above the ice. It had no edges, no color, no depth. It was as if someone had cut a piece out of the world with scissors and nobody had dared to look at what was behind it. Gray fell from it, slowly, the way ink falls through water: it crept down the glacier, spread across the rocks, ate the blue of the ice.

Lianor couldn't look away. Darian took hold of her arm without a word, and she felt him counting again.

Then something came out of the Rift.

It had the shape of a person. It walked like a person, across the ice, leaving no footprints. But it was nothing: it was a hollow in the shape of a woman, a patch of gray air through which you could see the glacier behind it, blurred. It came closer, slowly, to twenty paces, and stopped.

And it spoke in her mother's voice.

"Lianor, sweetheart, where have you left the ribbon?"