Silas
It came from the top of the path.
From the garden.
A cold, hard, brilliant blue light, so sudden and so bright that Kaelen threw his arm over his eyes.
It poured down over the long grass and the flat stones and the riverbank and the small boat bobbing in the black water, and it threw all their shadows out long and thin across the river, and it hummed.
Gemstone lamps.
Three of them, held high on poles.
And in the middle of the light, at the top of the path, by the apple tree, stood a slim pale boy in a gray cadet’s uniform with a white collar, with his hands in his pockets.
“Oh, there you are,” said Silas Kross pleasantly.
“We went to the house, but nobody was home.
Then I thought, a teacher, a widow, a little boat in the shed—” He tilted his head at the boat.
“Well.
It’s what I would have done.”
Behind him, in the blue light, there were six soldiers in Inquisitor gray.
And behind them, a tall slim figure in a plain dark coat, with silver wings of hair, standing very still under the apple tree, watching.
Valerius did not say anything.
He did not need to.
Maren Vane moved first.
She jumped.
She went down the bank and into the river, up to her waist in the black water, and grabbed the boat with both hands and shoved, out from the bank, into the current.
“Corin!
Hold on to her!
Don’t let go!
Don’t—”
The current took the boat.
It swung out from the bank, turning slowly, and the fast black water under the willows caught it and pulled it, and for one moment Kaelen thought it was going to work.
It was going to go.
Down the river, round the bend, into the dark, away—
There was a rope on the boat’s bow.
Kaelen had been holding it.
He had let go when the light came.
It trailed out behind the boat now, along the surface of the water, a thin pale line in the blue light.
Silas Kross walked down the path, not hurrying, and crouched on the bank, and picked it up.
He pulled.
The boat stopped.
It swung round in the current, slowly, and bumped against the bank again, and stopped.
Corin sat in the middle of it with Elara in his lap.
He did not cry out.
He held his sister and stared up at the slim pale boy on the bank with his careful dark eyes, and his face was perfectly white.
“No,” said Maren Vane.
She was still in the water.
She waded back toward the bank, toward Silas, with the river pulling at her skirt.
The kitchen knife was in her hand.
The blue light flashed on its blade.
Silas did not get up.
He did not even let go of the rope.
He just looked at her, with his small interested sweetshop smile, and said, “Oh, please do.”
Kaelen moved.
He did not think.
He threw himself down the bank, between them, and his feet went out from under him in the mud and he fell into the water on his side, and came up spitting, and grabbed Maren Vane’s wrist, the one with the knife, and held it.
“Don’t,” he gasped.
“Don’t.
He’ll—”
She looked at him.
Her face was wet with river water, or tears, or both.
And Kaelen saw, at that moment, that she knew.
She had known since the doorway.
She had known the boat would not work.
She had known, perhaps, since the moment the black carriages came over the bridge.
She let go of the knife.
It slid out of her fingers and was gone in the black water.
Then she pulled her wrist out of Kaelen’s hand, and waded past him, to the boat, and put her two wet hands on either side of her son’s white face.
“Corin,” she said.
“Look at me.”
He looked at her.
“Read the list,” she said.
“Do you hear me?
Whatever happens.
Wherever they take you.
If you forget, read the list.”
“I won’t forget,” said Corin.
“I know you won’t.” She kissed his forehead.
Then she bent down and kissed Elara, asleep in her blanket, on her small round cheek, beside the thumb in her mouth.
“I know you won’t, my loves.
But if you do.
Read it.”
A hand came down on her shoulder.
Silas Kross had stood up.
He had come down the bank, light-footed, without getting his boots wet, and he was standing behind Maren Vane in the shallows, with one pale hand resting on her shoulder, almost tenderly.
In his other hand, he held a knife.
A short, thin, beautiful knife, its blade made of something black and glassy, its edge glowing a faint cold silver.
“This won’t hurt,” he said.
“Well.
Not much.”
He laid the flat of the black blade against the side of her neck.
Maren Vane did not scream.
She drew in one sharp breath.
Her eyes went wide.
And Kaelen, standing waist-deep in the river beside her, saw the silver edge of the knife flare bright, and saw something go out of her face.
It went out the way a lamp goes out when you turn the wick down.
Not all at once.
Slowly.
From the edges inward.
The fierceness went first.
Then the fear.
Then the love.
Kaelen watched it go, watched her looking at her son in the boat, and saw the moment when she was looking at a stranger’s child, a small dark-haired boy she did not know, sitting in a boat in the middle of the night, and wondering, politely and a little puzzled, what he was doing there.
Silas took the knife away.
Maren Vane stood in the river.
She looked down at the water around her waist.
She looked at her wet hands.
She looked up at the blue lamps, and the soldiers, and the slim boy smiling beside her, and she smiled back, a small, vague, gentle smile.
“Oh dear,” she said.
“I seem to have got myself very wet.”
In the boat, Corin made a sound.
Just one.
It was not a word.
It was the sound of something breaking.
Two Wagons
Afterward, Kaelen could not remember getting out of the river.
He remembered only standing on the bank in the blue light, soaked to the chest and shaking, with two soldiers holding his arms.
He remembered Maren Vane being led gently up the path by a soldier, past the apple tree, still smiling her vague polite smile, saying, “Thank you, you’re very kind, I don’t know how I came to be out so late.”
He remembered the soldiers lifting the children out of the boat.
Corin did not fight.
That was the worst of it.
He did not kick or scream or bite.
He sat in the boat holding his sister until a soldier lifted Elara out of his arms, blanket and all, and then he climbed out by himself and stood on the bank, very straight, with his small leather satchel held against his chest in both arms.
He was staring up the path after his mother.
He did not take his eyes off her until she was gone into the dark beyond the lamps.
Elara woke up.
She woke all at once, the way small children do, in the arms of a stranger in gray, in the cold blue light, with the river roaring behind her.
She looked around.
She looked for her mother.
She looked for her brother.
She found him, standing on the bank, and she held out both arms to him over the soldier’s shoulder.
“Cor!”
Corin moved toward her.
A soldier put a hand on his shoulder and held him still.
“Cor!
Cor, I want Mother!
Cor!”
And then Valerius was there.
He came down the path from under the apple tree, unhurried, in his plain dark coat, and he took Elara out of the soldier’s arms himself.
He held her the way a father holds a child, easily, with one arm under her and her head on his shoulder.
He stroked her short braids.
“Hush,” he said softly.
“Hush, little one.
Nobody is going to hurt you.
You’re going to come and live in a beautiful house, with a garden on the roof, and a room of your own, and all the books you could ever want.
And you’ll never be sad again.
I promise.”
Elara stared at him.
She had stopped crying.
She was too surprised to cry.
She looked into his calm gray eyes, and something in her small face went still and puzzled, as if she were trying very hard to understand a word in a language she did not speak.
Valerius smiled at her.
Then he turned and walked up the path, carrying her, into the dark, toward the square, where Kaelen could now hear the creak of wheels and the stamp of horses.
Elara’s face looked back over his shoulder.
Her eyes found her brother on the bank.
She did not call out again.
She just looked at him, all the way up the path, until the dark took her.
Corin watched her go.
His arms were so tight around his satchel that his knuckles had gone white.
“Bring the soldier,” said a voice from the top of the path.
Calm, and warm, and already far away.
“And the boy.
Both to Master Hale’s wagon.”
Dunmore
They were halfway up the path when Sergeant Dunmore came down it.
He was out of breath, with his gray coat thrown on over his nightshirt and his boots unlaced, and his walnut face was gray in the blue light.
He stopped in front of the two soldiers holding Kaelen and looked at Kaelen for a long, long time.
“You stupid boy,” he said quietly.
“You stupid, stupid boy.”
Kaelen did not say anything.
Dunmore looked past him, at the river.
At the boat, still bumping against the bank.
At the slim pale figure of Silas Kross, who was crouched on the bank fishing the kitchen knife out of the shallows with a stick, for fun.
“He’s mine,” said Dunmore to the two soldiers.
“My section.
I’ll take him.”
“Inquisitor-General said Master Hale’s wagon, Sergeant.”
“And I’m saying I’ll take him there myself.” Dunmore’s voice did not rise, but something in it made the two younger men let go.
He took Kaelen by the collar of his wet coat, roughly, and pulled him on up the path.
And as they passed the apple tree, out of the light of the lamps, he bent his head close to Kaelen’s ear and said, so softly that it was barely a breath:
“Reed’s in the kitchen.
They haven’t seen him.
I told him to get back in his blanket and keep his mouth shut and his eyes closed until morning.” A pause.
“You’re not on the list for the ridge, boy.
Neither am I.
Neither’s Reed, now, I’d wager.
You understand me?”
Kaelen understood him.
“Why aren’t you on it?” he whispered.
Dunmore laughed.
A short, dry sound, like a stick breaking.
“Because I’ve been doing this for forty years,” he said, “and I’ve started asking questions.
And a man who asks questions is a man who might remember things.” He let go of Kaelen’s collar.
“Walk.
Don’t make them carry you.”
The Harvester’s Wagon
Linus Hale’s wagon stood at the edge of the square, under the outermost branches of the great oak.
It was not one of the barred gray prison wagons.
It was smaller, a covered wagon of dark varnished wood with a curved roof and a little door at the back with three wooden steps, like a peddler’s caravan or a traveling doctor’s cart.
A lamp burned inside.
Not blue.
An ordinary oil lamp, yellow and warm.
Its light came out through the half-open door and lay on the cobbles.
Beyond the oak, in the dark, the twelve gray wagons were moving out, empty, toward the ridge road.
Kaelen heard the creak and rumble of iron wheels on cobbles.
The snort of oxen.
And from somewhere ahead of them, the sound of one small child crying behind wooden walls.
Not loudly.
Not anymore.
Just a thin, tired, endless sound, like wind in a chimney.
The other black Bank wagons were already gone.
He saw the last of them leaving the square at the far end, across the bridge, toward the hill road.
A long low shape with silver letters on its side, swaying, its lamp swinging.
Two soldiers rode on its back step as guards, boys from the Third Company.
One of them was big and broad for his age, with a drum slung on his back, and he was looking back at the village as if he wanted to remember it.
He thought of a small girl with short braids and a gap in her teeth looking into a pair of rain-gray eyes.
Then it was gone into the pines.
Dunmore pushed him up the three wooden steps and through the little door.
The inside of the wagon was like a cupboard, or a ship’s cabin.
Narrow and low, with a curved ceiling of pale wood.
Shelves ran along both walls, from floor to ceiling, and they were full of jars.
Hundreds of them.
Glass jars of every size, from tiny ones no bigger than a thumb to big ones as large as a man’s head, all with brass lids, all neatly labeled in small brown handwriting.
Most of them were empty.
Some were not.
In some, there was a faint blue-white mist, turning slowly, like smoke trapped in glass.
At the far end of the wagon there was a narrow bed, and a small table fixed to the wall, and a stool.
The lamp hung from a hook over the table.
Corin was sitting on the bed.
He was sitting very straight on the edge of it, with his boots side by side on the floor and his satchel on his knees, holding it with both hands.
His face was white and still.
His eyes went straight to Kaelen when he came in, and stayed there.
Linus Hale was sitting on the stool beside him, with his elbows on his knees and his round spectacles in his hand, rubbing his eyes with his finger and thumb.
He looked up when Kaelen came in.
He looked very tired, and very old.
And on the little table, unwrapping a sweet, sat Silas Kross.
“Oh good,” said Silas.
“The hero.
The Inquisitor-General says you’re to watch, Private.
So you learn.” He popped the sweet into his mouth.
“I think that’s a lovely idea, don’t you, Master Hale?”
Hale did not answer.
He put his spectacles back on.
“The Inquisitor-General’s order,” he said, in his dry, tired voice, “was for me to empty the boy.
Carefully.
Not you.”
“But I asked.
And he said I could watch.”
“Then watch,” said Hale.
“From the door.
Over there.” He pointed with one blue-stained finger.
“If you touch that boy before I’m finished, Kross, I’ll put your name in my report.
Every word.
And you know how much the Inquisitor-General likes his brights.”
For a moment, something cold and flat came into Silas’s pale face.
Then it was gone, and he was smiling again.
He slid off the table and strolled to the door and leaned there, beside Kaelen, with his hands in his pockets.
“Fine,” he said lightly.
“I don’t mind.
I’ll get the next one.”
Remember It for Me
Linus Hale turned to the boy on the bed.
“Corin,” he said.
“That’s your name, isn’t it?
Corin Vane.”
Corin looked at him.
He did not answer.
“I’m going to have to take some things away from you,” said Hale.
He said it plainly, without any honey on it, the way a good doctor tells you he has to set a broken bone.
“Things you remember.
Your mother.
Your sister.
This valley.
I’m sorry.
I don’t want to.
But I have to, because if I don’t, the boy by the door will do it instead, and he will not be careful, and he will enjoy it.” He paused.
“It won’t hurt.
It will feel like falling asleep.
When you wake up, you won’t be sad, because you won’t know what you’ve lost.”
“I’ll know,” said Corin.
Hale looked at him.
“I’ll know,” said Corin again.
His voice was very small and very steady.
“I wrote it down.
Mother said you can’t take things that are written down.
Only things in your head.”
He opened the satchel on his knees.
He took out a folded piece of soft gray paper, and unfolded it, and held it out to Hale with both hands.
THINGS I KNOW.
Linus Hale took the paper.
He looked at it for a long time.
Kaelen watched his face, and saw it move, the way it had moved in the schoolhouse when he first looked down at the boy.
Something old and deep and hurting, under the tired.
“She’s right,” said Hale quietly.
“Your mother.
I can’t take this.” He folded the paper.
“But they can.
Somebody will find it, and read it, and burn it.
Or tear it up.
And then there’ll be nothing.”
He looked at the folded paper in his hand.
Then, very quickly, so quickly that Kaelen almost did not see it, he slid it inside his long leather coat.
Into an inside pocket, over his heart.
And buttoned it.
At the door, Silas Kross was looking at the jars on the shelves, bored, humming.
Corin had seen.
His dark eyes went to Hale’s coat, and then to Hale’s face, and something passed between them.
Kaelen did not know what.
Then the boy looked past Hale.
At Kaelen, standing wet and shaking by the door.
“Kaelen,” he said.
Kaelen’s throat closed.
“Will you remember it for me?” said Corin.
“In case they find the paper.
My name.
And where I live.
And Elara.” He swallowed.
“Just those.
You don’t have to remember all of it.
Just—Corin Vane.
Last house before the water.
And my sister is Elara.
She’s four.
She has a hole in her teeth.”
“Yes,” said Kaelen.
It came out in pieces.
“Yes.
I’ll remember.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
Corin nodded.
He looked satisfied, the way he had looked when he wrote (Kaelen said) on his list, so he would know who told him.
As if a thing had been put in its proper place.
Then he lay down on the narrow bed, on his back, with his boots still on and his empty satchel on his chest, and folded his hands on top of it, and looked up at the curved wooden ceiling.
“I’m ready,” he said.
Linus Hale opened the long thin wooden case that he had carried from his carriage.
Inside, on dark blue velvet, lay a slim silver rod with a spiral pattern carved along its tip, and near its base a single word, worn almost too smooth to read.
He took it out.
His blue-stained fingers were shaking.
He touched the tip of the rod to the middle of Corin’s forehead, very lightly.
The boy’s eyes stayed open.
They looked up at the ceiling.
And slowly, very slowly, a faint blue-white mist began to rise from his skin, like breath on a cold morning.
It curled up around the silver rod.
It drifted.
It was so faint Kaelen could hardly see it in the yellow lamplight.
A thread.
A wisp.
Then more.
Then a slow, steady stream, pale and shining, flowing up out of the boy and into the rod and through it, into a glass jar that Hale held in his other hand.
Kaelen stood by the door and watched it go.
He could not see what was in it.
But he knew.
A river with a pool in it, and willows, and dragonflies.
A trout in a boy’s two hands, let go.
A kitchen with red tiles and a long white table and the smell of bread.
A list on a wall.
A man who knew all the kings, sitting by the water, not knowing his son.
A mother’s hands on his face.
Read the list.
A small girl with short braids, laughing, with a gap in her teeth.
Corin’s eyes were still open.
Kaelen watched them change.
Watched the careful, measuring, cat-in-the-doorway look slowly fade out of them, the way it had faded out of his mother’s in the river.
The fear went.
The grief went.
The love went.
What was left was very calm and very empty, like a window with nothing behind it.
At the door, Silas Kross had stopped humming.
He was watching with his pale eyes very bright and his lips a little parted.
The stream of mist grew thinner.
Thinner.
A thread.
A wisp.
Linus Hale took the rod away.
He sat back on his stool and screwed the brass lid onto the jar, slowly, with hands that would not stop shaking.
Then he took a pen from his pocket and wrote on the jar’s paper label, in small brown handwriting.
Kaelen read it upside down.
C.V.
Oakhaven.
Bright.
And below it, very small: Sealed.
Do not burn.
On the bed, the boy blinked.
He looked at the ceiling.
He looked at the lamp.
He turned his head and looked at Linus Hale, and then past him, at the young soldier standing wet and white-faced by the door.
He looked at Kaelen for a long moment.
Politely.
A little puzzled.
The way you look at a stranger on a coach.
“Who are you?” said the boy.
Before Dawn
The harvester’s wagon left the square an hour before first light.
Kaelen watched it go.
They had put him out of it as soon as the jar was sealed.
Silas Kross had walked him down the three wooden steps with a hand on his elbow, light and friendly, like a host showing a guest to the door, and at the bottom he had leaned close and said, “You’ll be staying here, Private.
In the village.
The Inquisitor-General thought you’d like to keep an eye on it for us.” And he had smiled, and gone back up the steps, and shut the little door.
Now the wagon rolled away across the cobbles, under the great oak, with its yellow lamp swinging behind its small back window.
Kaelen could see the boy through the glass.
Sitting on the narrow bed beside Linus Hale, very straight, with his empty satchel on his knees.
Looking out of the window at nothing.
At the dark.
He did not wave.
The wagon crossed the bridge, and turned onto the hill road, and climbed into the black pines, and the swinging yellow light went smaller and smaller between the trees, and then it was gone.
Kaelen stood under the oak.
He did not know how long.
Somewhere above him in the dark, the little wooden birds knocked together in the wind.
Tock.
Tock.
Tock.
Then a hand touched his arm, and it was Tobin.
The Ones Left Behind
There were eleven of them, in the end.
They gathered in the square in the gray light before the dawn, slowly, one by one, coming out of the houses where they had been billeted, pulling on their coats, rubbing their eyes.
They had woken to find their companies gone.
Marched out in the night, up the hill road to the ridge, without a word, without a bugle.
Their kit gone with them.
Their pikes.
Their officers.
Eleven soldiers in gray coats, left behind in an empty village.
Sergeant Dunmore was there, with his coat buttoned now and his boots laced, standing by the well with his arms folded.
Tobin.
The young soldier from the bridge who might have been called Fenn.
Two brothers from the Lower Docks called Hollow, big and slow and silent.
A thin, sickly older man called Harrow who coughed all the time.
A girl soldier called Bettany, the only woman in the company, with a long scar across her chin.
And four others Kaelen knew only by face.
They stood around the well and looked at each other.
“Sergeant,” said Fenn.
His voice was high and thin.
“Sergeant, where is everybody?”
“On the ridge,” said Dunmore.
“Why didn’t they wake us?”
Dunmore looked at him.
Then he looked at all of them, one by one, with his old walnut face.
“Because they didn’t want us,” he said.
“Every one of us asked a question we shouldn’t have.
Or looked at something we shouldn’t have looked at.
Or helped someone they didn’t want helped.” He nodded at Kaelen without looking at him.
“I asked the captain what the engines were for.
Harrow there wrote a letter home about the wagons.
Bettany gave her bread to a girl in the registration line.
The Hollow boys got drunk with the miller and sang a rebel song.” He spread his hands.
“So here we are.
The ones who might remember.”
Nobody said anything.
In the gray light, the village was utterly silent.
No smoke rose from the chimneys.
No dogs barked.
The windows were dark.
But not empty.
Kaelen could feel it.
They were all still in there, behind those dark windows.
The Millers.
The Orchards.
The Coopers.
The old man with the shaking hands.
The miller and his freckled boy.
The mothers.
Sitting in their kitchens in the dark, with their doors bolted and their carved boards saying WE REMEMBER, waiting for the morning.
And Maren Vane.
Somewhere.
Smiling at the water.
“What do we do?” said Bettany.
Dunmore did not answer.
He was looking past them.
Past the oak, past the bridge, past the dark river and the dark fields, to the far end of the valley, where the hills rose up steep and black against a sky that was just beginning to go pale.
There were lights on those hills.
The Free Valleys
At first Kaelen thought they were stars.
Low ones.
Hundreds of them.
Small and yellow and flickering, scattered along the tops of the far hills from one end to the other, like a necklace someone had dropped across the dark.
Then they began to move.
They came down the hills.
Slowly.
All together.
A long, wide, ragged line of small yellow lights, flowing down out of the black pines onto the pale slopes of grass.
Torches.
Lanterns.
Thousands of them.
And as the sky grew lighter, Kaelen began to see the people carrying them.
They were not an army.
Not the way the Ministry meant an army.
They did not march in rows.
They did not wear coats of one color.
They came down the hills in clumps and crowds, in twos and threes and fifties, the way people come out of a church on a holiday.
Men and women.
Old and young.
Some on horses.
Most on foot.
They carried pikes, and pitchforks, and scythes, and axes, and long hunting bows, and some of them carried nothing at all.
Some of them were mages.
Kaelen could tell.
Here and there along the line, someone held up a hand, and light came out of it, white or gold or green, a little ball of it, floating over their heads to show the way.
They had banners.
Not many.
A few.
Long strips of cloth on poles, white and green and brown, and on every one of them, painted in big plain letters, Kaelen could read the same two words.
WE REMEMBER.
“Six thousand,” said Dunmore quietly.
“Scouts were right.”
They watched them come.
The eleven soldiers in the square.
Nobody moved.
Nobody raised a pike.
Nobody had a pike to raise.
And behind them, in the village, the doors began to open.
Kaelen heard them.
A bolt sliding back.
Then another.
Then a door creaking on old iron hinges.
He turned and saw the old man with the shaking hands standing in the doorway of the house with the painted kettle, looking out at the far hills with the lights coming down them.
His face was wet.
He was smiling.
Then another door opened.
And another.
All around the square.
All down the lanes.
People came out of their houses in the gray dawn, in their nightclothes, in their coats, with blankets around their shoulders, and stood in their doorways and in their little gardens and in the lane, looking at the hills.
Nobody looked at the eleven soldiers by the well.
It was as if they were not there.
The miller came out with his freckled boy on his shoulders.
The boy was pointing at the hills and shouting something, high and excited.
A woman with a baby in her arms was weeping and laughing at the same time.
Someone began to ring the bell in the schoolhouse.
Wildly.
Clang, clang, clang, clang, out over the valley, out toward the hills, and from the hills, very faint and far, Kaelen heard an answering sound.
A roar.
Six thousand voices, cheering.
They thought they had been saved.
Kaelen turned and looked at the ridge.
The Engines Wake
The sun was coming up behind it.
The ridge stood black against a sky of pale gold and rose, high and bare and long, running the whole length of the western side of the valley.
Along its top, Kaelen could see the column.
Three hundred gray coats, minus eleven, standing in long straight rows, small as toy soldiers.
And the black carriages.
And the twelve gray wagons with their barred doors, standing empty in a line along the road.
Waiting to be filled.
And the three tall wooden towers, with the great crystals on top of them.
The crystals were glowing.
They had been faint all night.
Three small points of cold blue, like distant stars.
Now they were brighter.
Much brighter.
As Kaelen watched, they went from pale blue to deep blue to a hard, brilliant, electric blue that made his eyes water, and he heard them begin to hum.
It was a low sound.
Lower than anything he had ever heard.
He did not hear it with his ears.
He heard it in his teeth, and in his chest, and in the cobbles under his boots.
It went down into the ground and came up again through the soles of his feet.
The water in the well beside him began to shiver.
Tiny rings spread out across its dark surface, one inside another, over and over.
Above him, in the great oak, the little wooden birds had begun to spin.
“Sergeant,” said Tobin.
His voice was very quiet.
“Sergeant, what happens now?”
Dunmore was watching the crystals.
His old face was gray.
“Now they wait,” he said, “until the rebels are all down on the valley floor.
Until nobody can run back over the hills.
And then they let it go.”
“Let what go?”
Dunmore did not answer.
On the far side of the valley, the long ragged line of lights had reached the bottom of the hills.
They were in the fields now.
Coming across the green, wet, shining grass, through the wildflowers, toward the river and the village, singing.
Kaelen could hear the song now.
He did not know the words.
But he knew the tune.
Every child in Vaelen knew it.
It was the song about the fisherman who caught the moon in his net and had to let it go.
And on the ridge, the three crystals flared.