The Language of Shadow and Light

The ice slide spat them out into a blue cave so vast that Lianor's light didn't reach the ceiling.

They lay on the floor for a while, breathless, listening to the echo of their own fall fade away down galleries they couldn't see. Above, far away, there was nothing to hear anymore. No lances, no voices, no Sylva. Lianor sat up and looked at her hands. She was still clutching the piece of charcoal in her left fist, so tightly that her palm had turned black.

"Sylva..." she began.

"Orestes won't touch her." Darian stood and brushed off the snow. "He's an old soldier. Old soldiers don't hit old women with goats. They hit the young ones who get away from them."

He didn't sound convinced. Lianor felt it through the mark. But she was grateful he said it.

They walked for hours through the belly of the glacier. The ice was every blue there is: clear as glass in the ceilings, dark as ink in the walls, and in places, when Lianor's light passed through it, you could see stones and branches trapped inside for a thousand years. Darian walked behind, weaving a thin shadow that erased their footprints and her light from anyone watching at a distance. The cold got into their teeth.

At nightfall, or what they decided was nightfall, they found a dry gallery with a rock floor, and Lianor lit a light to warm themselves. The light was warm, but it cooled as soon as she stopped weaving it. She had to hold it with both hands, and the left one started to shake.

"You won't last the night like that," Darian said.

"Do you have a better idea?"

"Yes. But you won't like it."

He sat down beside her. Not right against her: a hand's breadth away. He held his hand out under her light, without touching it, and wove shadow. Lianor expected her light to go out, as they taught in Aurion. It didn't. The shadow settled underneath like a bowl placed under running water, and the light stayed inside, still, not escaping. Not cooling.

"Light leaves," he said. "It always leaves, it wants to get everywhere. Shadow keeps. If you put them together, the light stays."

"Who taught you that?"

"Nobody. I just thought of it." He glanced at her. "See? You didn't like it."

A laugh escaped Lianor. It was a short, odd laugh that echoed off the ice, and she realized she hadn't laughed since before the oath. Since long before.

She was the one who saw the murals.

She had let her light rise a little higher, now that she didn't have to hold it, and the light reached the far wall of the gallery, and under the frost a color appeared. Lianor got up, went over, rubbed the frost with her sleeve. Underneath there was paint. Ochre, black, and a faded violet, the same shade that came from their hands when they crossed.

"Darian. Bring shadow. Put it behind my light."

He did it without asking, and with the light gathered in the bowl of shadow the whole wall lit up, from one end to the other.

It was a city. A single city, on both sides of a river, with glass domes on one bank and houses carved into rock on the other. In the middle, joining the two, a white bridge. On the bridge, in rows, were painted people in robes of two colors, half gold and half black, dancing in pairs. And from the hands of each pair the violet rose into the sky, which in the painting was neither day nor night.

"It's the bridge," Lianor said. Her voice had gone small. "The Weavers' Bridge. It was the center."

"They danced on it," Darian said.

"And we put up two gates."

They stood in front of the wall for a long time without speaking, their hands still weaving, her light in his shadow. Lianor didn't know at what moment her left hand stopped shaking. She only noticed that it wasn't.

"How long since you've slept?" he asked her later, by the light.

Lianor thought about lying. Then she thought there was no point lying to someone who felt her nerves through his wrist.

"Since the bridge," she said. "I sleep a little and wake up. I dream about the water. I get up and go out onto the terraces to wait for dawn."

"Nine years."

"Nine years."

Darian was quiet for a while.

"In the Hollows, when a child can't sleep, we put a hand over their eyes," he said. "With shadow. It's not real magic, grandmothers do it. But it works." He paused. "If you want. If not, never mind."

Lianor lay down on her back on the rock, Orestes's blanket over her, and closed her eyes.

"If anything happens to me, I'll kill you," she said.

"Seems fair."

She felt his hand a finger's width from her face, not touching it. And then the shadow, settling over her eyelids the way evening settles in summer: slowly, smelling of wet earth and washing on the line. There was no water in that darkness. There was no bridge. The last thing she heard was Darian counting under his breath, very slowly, the way you count for a child.

She slept four hours straight.

When she woke, she had Darian's black coat over the blanket and he was sitting against the mural wall, her light still cupped in a small shadow between his hands so it wouldn't go out. He had dark circles under his eyes. He hadn't slept. He had been holding the light all night.

"Morning, Aurion," he said.

"Lianor," she said. "My name is Lianor."

They talked while they ate the last of the cheese. About small things, for the first time. He told her he rowed on the Albar at night in a boat he had fixed up himself, that was why he had calluses, that was why he was at the river the night they met. That if he weren't an heir he'd be a ferryman, and take people from one bank to the other for a coin, and never ask anyone which house they belonged to. She told him that as a girl she had wanted to tend orchards, like Sylva, and that she still knew how to graft an apple tree.

"A ferryman and a gardener," he said. "Some prophecy."

"The best one I've heard all week."

They were very close. Lianor didn't know when they had come so close; they had started a hand's breadth apart and now there was nothing between their shoulders. From so close she saw that his eyes were gray, a light gray, not black as she had thought at the river. She saw the scar in his eyebrow up close. She felt, in her wrist, that his counting had stopped.

He raised his hand slowly, as if to brush the hair from her face.

And then the stone he carried against his chest spoke.

Not in his head. In the air, aloud, with a cold echo that bounced off the ice. Isolda Umbral's voice, as clear as if she were sitting with them by the light.

"Darian. I know you can hear me. Don't say anything, just listen."

He froze, his hand in midair. Lianor felt his blood go cold, and then hers, because she felt everything.

"The girl doesn't know what she carries on her wrist," the voice went on. "You didn't know either, and I ask your forgiveness for that. But now I'm telling you. When you reach the Rift, let go of her hand. You'll live."