The Perpetual Hearth of the North

The next morning, three heralds with a white flag rode up toward the barbican. Behind them, on foot, came the marshal, an old man with a white beard and the face of someone who hadn't slept. And behind the marshal, carried by four soldiers, came the litter with black curtains.

In the courtyard, swept clear of snow, everyone was waiting. Fadrique with his arm bandaged. Irene unable to breathe deeply. Tomás with the charters under his arm, just in case. Beatriz in front of him, very still.

"I've come to ask for a truce," said the marshal. "My pikemen haven't been paid in three months and this morning they burned their pikes in the camp. The southern guilds won't sell us powder. And in Burgos they're saying the Council knew nothing of this campaign." He paused for a long time, a man who has had to swallow a great deal. "They told me the north was a starving stronghold. No one told me you had a river."

"And the litter?" asked Beatriz.

The marshal stepped aside. The soldiers set the litter down and drew back the curtains.

Inside was an old man wrapped in furs, very thin, his hands stained with ink. He had the same dark amber eyes as Beatriz. He looked at the courtyard, looked at the windows, looked at his daughter.

"You've put on weight," said Don Beltrán de Vivar.

"And you've risen from the dead." Beatriz didn't move. "They wrote to me that you had died of fever in the tower of San Juan."

"I wrote it myself. I have good handwriting." The old man smiled faintly. "The three border families got me out of the tower in exchange for a war. I gave them a war. It isn't my fault they lost it."

"The marshal is handing you over," said Fadrique.

"The marshal is selling me. That's different." Beltrán looked at his nephew, at Íñigo, behind Irati, and for a moment something changed in his face. "The two of you stole two wars from me with two pieces of paper. I taught you to read, and this is how you repay me."

"You taught us to read," said Beatriz. "The rest we learned on our own."

The treaty was signed in the courtyard, on Tomás's mahogany lectern. The marshal stamped the arms seal and renounced, in the viceroy's name, the dues, the Arlanza customs and imposed governors in the northern marches. Then Fadrique signed, and then Irene, and then, because Irene asked it, they all signed: Tomás and Beatriz, Íñigo and Irati, Bruno and Brianda, Sira and Nuño, Nerea and Lope, Rodrigo and Leonor. Rodrigo signed with his hand and beneath, in small letters, added a line that only Leonor read.

On the last sheet, Nerea asked for one more name to be written. Tomás wrote it in his best hand, the hand of the knot of San Julián: Jarek, of the Gorge of Souls, who closed the pass of the Three Sisters.

Don Beltrán was taken to the stronghold's tower, to a cell with a window. Beatriz went up to see him that afternoon and stayed an hour. No one ever knew what they talked about. When she came down her eyes were dry and her jaw set, and she told Tomás that her father had asked for paper and ink, and that she had brought them.

"What for?"

"He says he's going to write his memoirs." Beatriz almost laughed. "I told him I'll correct them."

At nightfall, all Oakhaven climbed to the highest wall walk. In the center, on a granite pedestal bearing the names of those who fell in the ten days, Bruno had set a bronze brazier cast in the forge that same week. Ciro and his apprentices had filled it with juniper wood, pine resin and oil from the presses of Valdelobos.

Fadrique and Irene climbed the steps of the pedestal. He carried the steel and flint; she, a handful of tow soaked in oil. Irene remembered, without meaning to, the night she had crossed the viaduct of the Seven Eyes with a forged safe-conduct and a lie to tell. She thought that all of this had begun in that lie, and that she wouldn't trade it for any truth.

Fadrique struck the flint. The tow caught, Irene held it to the resin and a column of clean fire rose toward the sky and lit the snowy peaks orange.

"A fire isn't lit to last," Fadrique said quietly, for her alone. "It's lit so someone can see it from far away."

And from far away they saw it. One by one, along five leagues, the beacons of the villages of the Gorge began to answer, the lanterns of the barges on the Arlanza, the bonfires in the squares of Valdelobos. In the forest of the Mist, someone lit a torch at the top of a fir. And high above, on the glacier of the Three Sisters, where no one was left, the wind stirred the snow over the nameless spur and for a moment it seemed that something was burning there too.

Nerea watched it for a long time, Jarek's crossbow on her back. Lope said nothing. He put his arm around her shoulders and they stayed like that until the fire on the wall walk was the only light in the whole range.