Two Faces

Pretending it hurt turned out to be easier than Lianor had thought. All she had to do was remember the first day on the trail, the branding iron in her wrist, and grit her teeth.

She did it for the three days of the descent, on horseback, in front of Orestes. With every league that separated her from the Umbral hunters taking Darian west, she hunched in the saddle and clutched her arm. At night, in camp, she moaned a little, just enough. And inside, through the violet strand, she could hear Darian far away, farther and farther, calm, complaining that his hunters cooked worse than his grandmother.

Does it hurt? she asked him, without a voice.

Terribly. I'm a wreck. They've given me an extra blanket. And then, lower: Are you all right?

She hadn't known the chosen strand was good for that too: for talking. They had discovered it the first night, by accident, and hadn't stopped since.

Orestes said almost nothing to her on the way. He was a big, quiet man who had served her mother before he served Albano. On the second night he sat down beside her at the fire and gave her a strip of dried meat.

"The old woman's fine," he said. "She threw a cup at my head. I told my men there was nobody else in the hut."

Lianor looked at him. He didn't look at her.

"Thank you," she said.

"Don't thank me. I have orders." He stood up. "And the girl from Ruesca keeps telling everyone who passes that an Aurion and an Umbral gave her back her name with a color that doesn't exist. I thought you'd like to know."

Albano met her at the gate of the Citadel, in front of everyone. He embraced her. He smelled of wax and paper, as always, and for a moment Lianor was ten years old and all she wanted was to stay there.

"You're frozen," he said. "Does it hurt very much?"

"Very much."

"It'll pass." He took her hands in his and Lianor saw in his palms the white glow of his light, barely a spark, to warm her. "In three days it's the new moon. We'll all go to the Rift, both houses, and you'll close the wound. And then it will be over. I promise you."

Lianor looked at the white spark and thought of a bridge.

"He deceived me," she said, and her voice really did break, though for a different reason. "The Umbral. He made me believe things. About you."

Albano squeezed her hands.

"I know, child," he said. "I know. Rest."

That night, when the Citadel was asleep, Lianor went barefoot down the service stairs to the High Keeper's study.

She knew that room better than her own. She had learned to read the old tongue at that desk, copied a thousand pages at that lectern, knew which tile creaked and in which drawer Albano kept the honey sweets he gave her as a child when she cried for her mother. She also knew, because she had seen it once without his knowing, that behind the third shelf there was a hollow.

The hollow was there. Inside was a bundle of letters tied with a black cord and a notebook with white covers.

She read the letters by the light of an amber thread so thin it could barely be seen. They were written in black ink, in a long, slanting hand she didn't know, and all were signed with a single initial: I.

The oldest was nine years old. It said: "Your white light and my silence. Let neither of us ever forget it. The wound has grown more than in a century. Now we have what we needed."

Lianor read it three times. On the third she had to sit down on the floor.

The newest was from two weeks before the oath. "We'll go up together on the night of the waning moon. We'll give it enough to come down into the valley so that no one can say no. Then, the prophecy. The two heirs bound. The Rift sated for thirty years. You in your Heart and I in my Hollows, and no one will ever call us to account for anything again."

Under the letters was the parchment. Not the one with the two-colored cord they had read at the Enclave: a draft, with the same sentence in the old tongue in Albano's neat hand, "light and shadow bound by blood shall close the wound," and after it, crossed out with a single clean stroke, three more words. "With their lives."

Lianor felt, far away in the west, Darian's heart stop for an instant. Not because of her. Because of something he was reading.

What have you found? she asked him.

Wait. You first.

She opened the white notebook. It was Albano's diary. The last pages were from that same week, and the handwriting was quicker than in the letters, as if he had written them in a hurry, or afraid.

"Isolda thinks we will divide the valley. She doesn't understand what the Rift is. When the heirs fall, it will stay open and tame, like a dog that has eaten, and a white light will be enough to give it direction. The cliffs are a day's walk from the glacier. The Hollows will not see another winter, and no one in the Heart will miss the shadow."

Lianor closed the notebook. Both her hands were shaking.

Darian. He wants to turn the Rift on your house.

The answer took a while. When it came, it came with a bitter laugh she felt in her wrist like a burn.

What a coincidence, he said.

In the Hollows, Darian had used his grandfather's tunnels.

He had known them since he was a boy: narrow passages dug by the first Umbral, running through the inside of the cliff like veins and coming out in places where no one looked. One of them ended behind the mirror in Isolda's chambers. His grandfather had shown it to him one afternoon, laughing, "for when everything else fails."

Isolda had received him with red eyes. She had begged his forgiveness for the stone, for the pact, for not telling him sooner. She had sworn she had an obsidian knife that could cut a blood bond at the last moment, at the edge of the Rift, and that with it she would save him. She had kissed his forehead the way she did when he was small. Darian had pretended to be in pain, pretended to believe her, and waited for her to fall asleep.

Behind the mirror, in an ebony chest, was the knife. And under the knife, a sheet written in his grandmother's long, slanting hand, unsigned, a list of things to do, like someone noting what to buy at the market.

"Cut Darian's bond. Let only the Aurion fall. With the Rift open and the shadow on my side, push it east. Glass goes dark easily. The Heart will be in darkness before Albano understands what has happened."

Darian folded the sheet and put it away. He sat down on the cold floor of the tunnel, in the dark, and counted to a hundred, and then to two hundred, and it didn't pass.

Each of them wants to use the Rift against the other's house, he told Lianor through the strand. And both of them want us dead.

Not both, she answered. She wants to save you.

At your expense. That's not the same as saving me.

Lianor was putting the letters back in the hollow of the shelf when a white light came on behind her.

She didn't turn around. She didn't need to. She had known that light since she was ten.

"You were always the cleverest of my pupils," Albano said from the doorway. He spoke softly, tiredly, as if he had been waiting a long time for this moment. "That's why I wept so much when I chose you."

Lianor turned. He stood in the doorway in his nightshirt, the light floating over his palm. He was looking at the white notebook in her hands. Then he lowered his eyes to her wrist, where her sleeve had ridden up, and saw the strand. Not gold and black. Violet.

Albano's face went blank.

"So you've chosen it," he said.