The marsh at night had its own sounds, which were not the sounds of a living place so much as the sounds of a living place very recently becoming something else.
The standing water had risen four inches since morning.
Adam had checked it twice against a stick he’d wedged in the track-side mud, and both times the water had come up higher on the stick, which meant the marsh was filling from somewhere upstream and the track was going to be impassable within a day.
The column had settled on a series of muddy hummocks above the water line for the night, which was the best available option and not a good one.
Fires were burning low — not for warmth, which the marsh air made difficult to sustain, but for the smoke.
Smoke against the marsh-fever spirits, which everyone in the column over forty seemed to believe in with a sincerity that was completely independent of whether it worked.
The burning herbs were something specific that Adam didn’t know the name of, dried stems from someone’s preserved household bundle, wrapped in cloth and set at the fire’s edge where the smoke went directly into the faces of the fevered children.
The ritual was performed in silence, by the mothers of the fevered children, with the specific kind of attention that wasn’t about results so much as about having done the thing that was done.
He watched it from twenty meters away, sitting against a hummock-tree with his knees up and his eyes on the smoke, and felt, briefly and without being able to stop it, the particular grief of watching people use the only tools they had.
Ciri had noticed his watching.
She was beside him, close enough that their shoulders were adjacent, not touching — they’d settled into a proximity that was tactical rather than social, the distance from which you could move together quickly, and had let it develop into something that had warmth at its edges by accident rather than design.
“The smoke doesn’t work,” she said.
“The smoke works for what it’s actually doing,” he said.
“Which isn’t spirits.”
She thought about this.
“Giving them something to do.”
“While the fever either breaks or doesn’t.
Yes.”
She was quiet for a moment.
Then: “Grandmother did something similar.
When someone died, she’d make you go through the rooms in order and close every window in the keep.
It was winter.
Nobody wanted to do it.”
He waited.
But really it was to give you twenty minutes of work before you had to sit with it.”
He didn’t say anything.
She hadn’t been talking to him so much as talking; the grief was still close to the surface and she was handling it the way she handled everything, with forward motion and competence, and occasionally by saying a thing out loud that didn’t need a response.
The marsh-bird went up in the distance, somewhere to the northeast, and came down again.
Adam watched the direction it had come from and then went back to looking at the fires.
He had been thinking about the causeway.
There was a dry causeway, in his memory, northeast of the current position — a raised stone path above the worst of the marsh, old enough to predate the current flooding, wide enough for single-file movement.
He had a sense of it the way he had a sense of most things he half-remembered: not a scene, not an actual moment he could picture, but the residue of knowing the general shape of the land and the direction of the passes.
The causeway existed.
He was fairly certain it existed.
He had not verified it in thirty-two days of being in this world, because he had been in a city rather than a marsh, and the Sight no longer had anything useful to say about the route north.
It was a memory of a memory.
It was the kind of thing that was dangerous to act on.
He thought about the column’s fever-rate, which had tripled in two days.
He thought about the rising water.
He thought about Cahir’s scouts watching the marsh-track’s edges, which meant anything moving on the track was visible.
A smaller group, faster, on a raised causeway — less visible, harder to follow.
He thought about the fever-ritual smoke and about doing the thing that was done.
“There’s a causeway,” he said.
“Northeast.
Raised stone, above the water.
Ciri looked at him.
“If.”
“Probably.”
“How probably.”
He held the question against what he actually knew and what he was filling in from wish and wound and the specific kind of optimism that came from being the person in the group who was supposed to have answers.
“Fairly,” he said.
“I’ll take a faster group through.”
“I’m coming,” she said.
Not asking.
He started to say no and stopped, because the argument against it was you’re the one I’m protecting and he couldn’t say that without explaining why, and the argument for it was that she was the best scout he had and had just demonstrated the difference between a stationary observer and a moving one and was, in this specific context, more useful than safe.
“You stay in the middle,” he said.
“Not the front.”
“Fine,” she said.
Which meant she was already planning to be at the front.
He gathered the twelve fastest people in the column — the ones with children who were feverish, the ones who were the most at risk from another two days in the marsh, the ones who had been loudest about the need for a shorter route — and explained the causeway plan, which was: there is a dry path northeast, we will test it in the morning, if it holds we all go through, if not we return.
He did not explain the if.
He did not explain that the if was doing significant structural work in that sentence.
Ciri, who was standing at his left, heard the if and did not call it out.
He was grateful for this, and aware that her discretion was strategic rather than generous, and that she was adding this to her account.
The marsh-bird that had gone up earlier had not come back down in the direction it had gone up.
He noted this and said nothing, because the column needed the morning, and the causeway probably existed, and probably was usually enough.
He sat against the hummock-tree and listened to the low fire and the ritual smoke and the sound of a marsh doing its slow ancient work of becoming more marsh, and let himself believe the causeway was real.
The water on his stick was half an inch higher by midnight.