The Glacier Cartographer

Darian buried the white lightjar in the snow at the back of the cave and covered it with shadow.

He did it without asking, while Lianor was still staring at the pack as if it might bite her. He took the jar out with two fingers, pushed it deep into a snowdrift at the entrance and spread his hand over it. The shadow came down like a sheet. The white pulse went out.

"Shadow hides things," he said. "It's the first thing a child learns in the Hollows. If it's just a lamp, tomorrow we dig it up and I'll apologize. If it's something else, let it look at snow."

"You don't know it's something else."

"And you don't know it isn't."

Lianor didn't argue. She sat by the fire and watched the embers until they turned black. That night she didn't sleep either. She felt that Darian didn't, and that now and then he took his grandmother's black stone out of his shirt, looked at it for a while in the glow of the embers and put it away again.

At dawn he unfolded the map Isolda had given him. It was an old hide, older than the two of them put together, with the Peaks drawn in brown ink and the Rift marked with a fresh cross. Darian ran his finger along the edge of the glacier and stopped at a small cross, almost worn away, with a letter beside it.

"That's my grandfather's handwriting," he said. "He made his esses like that, with a tail. He died when I was eight. He used to show me the old tunnels of the Hollows and tell me that one day he'd take me to see the madwoman of the glacier."

"What madwoman?"

"An Aurion. One who lived alone on the ice and drew maps. I thought it was a story to make me behave."

They found her by mid-morning, in a stone hut built against the moraine, with smoke coming out of a hole in the roof and a goat tied to the door. The woman who opened it was perhaps sixty. She wore an Aurion tunic so patched that the white was only a memory, and her fingers were black with charcoal up to the knuckles. She looked at Lianor. She looked at Darian. She looked at their wrists.

"They've tied you," she said.

It wasn't a question. She stepped aside to let them in.

There was no room for anything else inside. The walls were covered with goatskins nailed one over another, and on each skin was a charcoal drawing of the same place: the glacier, the Peaks, and in the sky, a line. On the first skins, the lowest, yellowed ones, the line was a fine scratch. On the higher ones it was a thick seam. On the last, this week's, it was the Rift they had seen the day before.

"Thirty years," the woman said. "One every moon. My name is Sylva. I was from the Heart, like you, girl. I wove green light, the light of the orchards. They threw me out for loving an Umbral."

She said it the way you'd say it was raining. Then she set three cups of warm goat's milk on the table and sat down.

"His name was Ismael. He died of fever in this very cot twenty winters ago. Neither house came to bury him." She drank. "What have they told you about the Rift?"

They told her. The prophecy, the pact, the parchment with the two-colored cord. Sylva listened without interrupting, nodding now and then, and when they finished she got up, went to the wall and pointed at the lowest skins.

"Before there were Aurion and Umbral there was a single house," she said. "The Weavers of Twilight. They wove both things at once, light and shadow, because they didn't know the two could be separated. One day they fought over who was in charge, and the house split in two, and out of the place where it split came this." She touched the line in the sky. "The Rift is the wound of that fight. And it feeds on the same thing that opened it."

"On separation," Darian said.

"On you hurting each other. Look."

She pointed from skin to skin. Here, the winter the Umbral closed the salt pass: the line a little thicker. Here, the summer the mills were burned: thicker still. And here, nine years ago, a skin unlike all the others, where the charcoal had been pressed so hard it had split the leather. The line had doubled in a single moon.

"The night of the bridge," Lianor said.

"The night of the bridge. It had never grown so much. Not before, not since."

"Until last week," Sylva said.

She went to the last skin. At the foot of the Rift, on the ice, there were two dots: one drawn in chalk, white, the other in hard-pressed charcoal, black.

"Seven nights ago two people came up the glacier," she said. "One carried white light. The other, shadow. They stayed at the foot of the Rift until dawn, together, without fighting. And the next day the Rift had grown as it hadn't grown in nine years, and the gray began to come down into the valley."

Nobody said anything. Lianor felt, through the mark, that Darian's nerve had gone still, no counting, the way it does when there's nothing left to count.

"But the prophecy," she said. "If the Rift closes with the pact..."

"Your prophecy is a bad copy, girl." Sylva sat down again, slowly. "Ismael taught me the old Umbral one, the one that was sung before anyone wrote it down. It doesn't say 'bound by blood.' It says no forced bond closes the wound. That only the chosen one closes it."

"Then the pact is useless," Darian said.

"It's useful for something else." Sylva looked at them both, with a sorrow she didn't bother to hide. "A forced bond doesn't close the Rift. But it sates it. If you throw a weaver of light and a weaver of shadow bound by blood into the Rift, it swallows them both and stays quiet for thirty years, like a beast that has eaten. That's what the old ones said. That's why those pacts stopped being made centuries ago."

Lianor looked at her wrist. The two strands, gold and black, were still there, fine as silk thread.

"They've tied you together to feed it to you," Sylva said.

They saw it at the same time, from the window: a column of white light, straight, rising from the foot of the glacier to the clouds. It came from the cave where they had slept. From the snow where Darian had buried the lightjar.

"The shadow didn't hold," he said, pale. "It burned right through."

"Or someone called it from far away," Sylva said.

And below, on the moraine trail, the riders appeared. Twelve horses, white cloaks, lances. In front, bareheaded, his gray beard in the wind, Lianor recognized Orestes.

Sylva was already moving. She shoved the cot aside and beneath it was a wooden trapdoor, and beneath the trapdoor, ice: a blue crevasse that sloped down into the heart of the glacier like a slide.

"Ismael used it to get down to the caves," she said. "At the bottom there are murals. And beneath the murals, the crypt of the ones who danced. The real prophecy is there, carved in the stone. If you want to know whether I'm lying to you, go and read it."

"Come with us," Lianor said.

"I'm old and I make noise. And somebody has to keep them busy." Sylva pressed a piece of charcoal into Lianor's hand. "If you close it, draw me what the sky looks like."

Outside, a man's voice shouted Lianor's name, and then something else, louder: "By order of the High Keeper!"

Darian sat on the edge of the trapdoor and held out his hand. Lianor took it. They let themselves drop together down the ice, into the blue, while above them someone began to pound on Sylva's door with the shaft of a lance.