The First Trial

Lianor didn't move.

She knew it wasn't her mother. She knew it with her head, with the part of her that had studied the old books and heard Albano talk about what the Rift ate. But the voice was her mother's: the same way of drawing out "sweetheart," the same little laugh at the end, as if the question about the ribbon were an old joke between the two of them. Nobody else in the world asked her about the ribbon. Nobody else knew that as a girl she lost it every week.

"It's on my wrist," she heard herself say.

"Lianor," Darian said behind her. "Don't answer it."

The woman-shaped hollow took a step. Behind it, out of the gray seam in the sky, two more came. Then five. Then Lianor stopped counting. They came down across the ice without footprints, all shaped like people, all made of gray air, and each spoke in a different voice: a man calling someone to supper, a child singing a ring-game song, an old woman repeating the price of eggs. Lost voices. Voices of people someone, somewhere in the valley, had already forgotten.

"Come here, sweetheart," said her mother's voice. "It's cold."

Lianor took a step toward it.

A hand grabbed her hood and yanked her back so hard she fell flat on the snow. Darian stepped over her, planted himself between Lianor and the hollow and spread both arms. Shadow poured out of him the way water pours from a dam: a dark wall, cool, that rose from the ice and closed in front of the hollows.

The hollows walked through it as if it weren't there.

The first one touched Darian on the left forearm. It wasn't a blow. It was a brush, almost a caress, and where it brushed him the black sleeve turned gray, and under the sleeve, the skin. Darian let out a choked cry and fell to his knees.

Lianor felt the touch on her own arm, through the mark. It wasn't pain. It was worse: a cold that didn't burn, a place where suddenly there was nothing. And with the cold came something from Darian, a panic that wasn't about the arm. It was about something else. A face. A black-haired girl with a gap between her front teeth, holding a candle, being erased from inside him the way chalk is erased by rain.

Nima.

Lianor got up.

She didn't think about the rules, or her mother, or the hand that shook. She reached her left hand toward Darian, still on his knees, and her right toward the hollows, and drew light, all she had, amber. And she shouted at him, without a voice, inside, through the cut on her palm:

Now. Give me the shadow. Now.

He heard her. She knew because his hand found hers without looking, blindly, and gripped it. Shadow came from Darian's fingers and light from Lianor's, and this time it wasn't an accident: they looked for each other. They braided in the air like the two strands of the bracelet, gold and black, and out of the crossing came the violet. Much more than in Ruesca. A whole wave of last sunset that rose from the ice and rolled toward the Rift.

Where the violet touched the hollows, the hollows filled. For an instant they had color: a blue apron, a cap, a child's red shoes. For an instant they were someone. Then they came apart in the air, without a sound, the way breath fades from a window. And the voices fell silent one by one, but not all at once: each of them finished its sentence. The man finished calling everyone to supper. The child finished the song.

The woman-shaped hollow was the last. It stood still while the violet climbed its legs, its waist, its chest, and for a second, less, Lianor saw brown hair and an amber ribbon tying it back.

"There it is," said her mother's voice, pleased. "There it was."

And it was gone.

They found shelter at nightfall in a low cave at the foot of the glacier, where the shepherds stored firewood for the winter. Lianor lit the fire with a thread of light because Darian's left hand wouldn't answer him. He held it in his lap, sleeve pushed up, and looked at the gray stain on his forearm as if it belonged to someone else.

"I can't feel it," he said. "Not cold, not heat. Like it's made of wood."

"Let me see."

"It's nothing."

"Darian."

It was the first time she had said his name. He noticed, because he looked at her. Then he held out his arm.

The stain was the size of an open hand, the color of ash, with blurred edges, like an old burn. Lianor laid her fingers on it. It wasn't cold. It wasn't anything. She tried an amber thread and the thread went out when it touched it. She asked him to put his shadow over it, and the shadow just sat there, unable to go in.

"Together," she said.

They did it slowly, unhurried this time, both hands over the wounded arm. The violet came out weaker, candlelight, and settled on the stain. It didn't erase it. But the edges grew sharper, and the stain stopped spreading, and in the middle of Darian's palm, where before there had been nothing, a twinge appeared.

"It hurts," he said, and laughed, tired. "It hurts. What a relief."

They ate Orestes's bread without talking. The fire crackled. Outside, the glacier creaked now and then, like an old house.

"I saw her," Lianor said at last. "Your sister. When they touched you. She was being erased and I saw her. Black hair. A gap in her front teeth. A candle."

Darian didn't answer right away. He threw a branch on the fire.

"Now I can't see her eyes," he said. "I used to. They were gray, I think. Or not. I don't know. I had her whole face this morning and now there's a blank piece in it."

"I'm sorry."

"You didn't do anything." He said it without rancor, then glanced at her sideways. "This time."

Lianor hugged her knees.

"Tell me," she said. "About the bridge. Your version."

He told her. It was the night of the autumn truce. The two houses were to meet in the middle of the bridge to sign the sharing of the Albar's water. His mother walked in front, with the Matriarch; Nima behind, with her candle, because she was afraid of the dark and they had humored her. From the Aurion side came the procession with lightjars. And when they were ten paces away, someone from Aurion raised a white light, huge, blinding, and released it on them. Nima was in the middle.

"My grandmother saw it," he said. "She says it was your mother. That she recognized her by the ribbon in her hair. That your mother raised the white light and threw it at us."

Lianor felt a cold that didn't come from outside.

"I was told it was you," she said. "That a shadow came from your side and put out all the lightjars at once, and in the dark someone pushed my mother over the parapet. That when the light came back she was already in the water."

"Nobody put out your jars. The white light put them out. It blinds you for a while."

"My mother couldn't have thrown that light."

"My grandmother saw her."

"Darian." Lianor turned to him, and her voice shook, not her hand. "My mother wove amber. All her life. It's the color of my house, it's the one she taught me. She didn't know how to weave white light. No one in my family does. White light is very hard, it takes forty years of practice to draw it, and in Aurion there's only..."

She stopped.

Darian waited. Lianor felt, through the mark, his nerve tightening, the counting starting.

"The only white light in the whole valley is Albano's," she said.

She said it quietly, as if someone might hear them. And then, against the wall of the cave, inside her leather pack, something began to glow through the leather. A white light, cold, the size of an egg, pulsing slowly, like an eye opening.