By the nineteenth day, they have started calling me the Bell-Ringer.
I do not hear it directly.
I hear it the way I hear everything on this road, in scraps, from the mouths of people who do not know they are speaking to the man in question.
A ferryman, over a bowl of barley: They say the bell-ringer opened up a whole tithe cart at Ōkuma, and every jar burst like an egg.
A woman in an inn yard, hanging washing: My cousin says the guards at Shirakawa put down their spears when they heard he was coming.
A boy on a mule, singing something with my name in it that is not my name.
It is not true.
Most of it.
I have freed six carts in nineteen days, which is not nothing, and it is not what they say.
At Ōkuma I did not burst anything.
I sat on the edge of a paddy for a night and a day and let two hundred and six spirits out of their jars one at a time, and I bled from the nose for a week, and I had to be helped to my feet by a man whose brother’s spirit I had just released.
It is not a legend.
It is only work.
But people need their legends, and I am learning not to argue.
They like you, says the voice, with some surprise.
“They like the story.”
Is there a difference?
I think about that for a mile.
“Not yet,” I say.
The room in my chest is smaller than it was.
I feel it every time I sit down with a jar.
The crack in the eastern wall has grown a long slow branch, and the black water has sunk another finger’s breadth, and the figure on the far shore, once small and shy, now stands very close, very quiet, with its hands folded.
It has not spoken of it.
I have not asked.
But I have begun to understand what Tenkai meant.
Every time I ring, the room gets smaller.
Every time I sit, the demon gets closer.
Nineteen days.
Six carts.
Two hundred and eighty-one spirits, by the count of the clerk’s charms in my pocket.
Eleven thousand, three hundred and six is a very long way off.
The road ends in a river.
It is a broad brown slow one, half a mile wide, spanned by a long wooden bridge on stone piers.
On the far bank, hazy in the evening light, I can see the beginnings of the capital’s outer country: a spread of tiled roofs, a temple pagoda, a line of tall cedars.
The white walls themselves are still a day beyond, over the horizon.
But this is the last great crossing.
Everything past it is the King’s.
The bridge is empty.
That is the first wrong thing.
I have crossed a dozen bridges on this road, and every one was thick with carts and porters and beggars.
This one is bare.
The boards are swept.
The railings are freshly painted, black lacquer, with a white crane at every post.
There are no toll guards at the near end, and no ferrymen along the bank, and no smoke from the villages on either side.
Shigen, says the voice.
“I know.”
It is very quiet.
“I know.”
It is the kind of quiet that costs money.
I stand at the foot of the bridge with my hand on my father’s hilt and I feel the whole country hold its breath.
Then, slowly, I walk out onto the boards.
The wind comes off the water, cold and smelling of river-mud.
My footsteps ring on the planks.
I count them.
Twenty.
Fifty.
A hundred and fifty.
The far bank grows no closer, and the sky goes from gold to bronze to a bruised gray-violet, and somewhere near the middle of the span I see it.
A table.
It is a small low lacquered table, black, with a folding stool on either side.
It is set squarely in the center of the bridge.
On it are two cups of pale green tea, steaming faintly, and a small iron kettle, and a plate of rice cakes cut into neat squares.
Beside the table, a little apart, two men in white robes kneel with their hands folded and their faces turned to the ground.
And on the far stool, a cup in his hands, sits a man.
He is not what I expected.
I do not know what I expected.
A giant, perhaps.
A face like a mask.
But he is a thin, upright, pleasant-looking man in middle age, with a long gentle face and gray at his temples and a small trim beard.
His robe is plain white silk, with a narrow black border.
His hands are clean and unadorned.
There is no sword on the table, no guard within thirty paces.
He is drinking tea, quietly, the way a man might at the end of a long day, and when he sees me, he sets the cup down and smiles.
“Shigen,” he says.
“Please.
Sit.”
I do not sit.
I stand at the edge of the lantern light with my sword wrapped on my back and my hands loose at my sides and I look at him.
My mouth has gone very dry.
I have imagined this moment, I think, every night since I was eleven.
I have imagined a hundred ways to kill him.
I have never once imagined that he would offer me a rice cake.
“You know my name,” I say.
“I have known it since the night you were born.” He lifts the plate slightly, an invitation.
“They are quite good.
From a shop near the palace.
I had them brought.”
“You killed my father.”
“Yes.”
“You killed my mother.”
He does not answer at once.
He turns his cup a quarter turn in its saucer.
The small movement is careful, deliberate, almost tender.
“I did not kill your mother,” he says.
“I want you to know that.
I have killed a great many people, and I will not pretend otherwise.
But Kinsie died of her own grief, in her own bed, with a child in her arms.
I did not touch her.”
I feel something cold begin to unfold behind my ribs.
“Sit down, boy.
I am not going to harm you.
I have come a long way to speak with you, and I am not a young man, and my knees are not what they were.”
I look at him for a long moment.
Then I take the stool.
It is absurd.
I know it is absurd.
But the whole bridge has the eerie hush of a stage, and I sense, with the part of me that is still Hanae’s foundling, that if I strike first I will lose something I cannot afford to lose.
So I sit.
I do not touch the tea.
The King smiles again.
It is a good smile.
Warm, a little sad.
I hate it at once.
“You look like him,” he says.
“Around the jaw.
I suppose everyone has told you.”
“Iwa did.”
“Iwa.” He nods slowly.
“Yes.
I was sorry to hear of her death.
She was the best captain I ever had.
I never forgave myself for what was done to her.”
“You gave the order.”
“I did.” No hesitation.
“It was the worst mistake of my reign.
It is the reason I have never given such an order again.” He lifts his eyes to mine.
They are gray, mild, and very tired.
“I know how it looks.
I know what you have heard.
I would like, if you will allow me, to tell you the whole of it.
And then you may do as you wish.”
I say nothing.
“Good.” He takes a sip of tea.
“It begins with a very old bargain.”
He tells it well.
He must have told it many times, to himself, in the long hours of the night.
He does not dress it up.
He does not beg.
He lays it out in order, quiet and clear, like a man setting out the pieces of a game.
The first king.
The first crane.
The bargain struck in a forgotten age between a frightened man and an enormous hunger, in which the line of the crown was bound to the crane for all time, in exchange for dominion over the land.
A good bargain, the King says, for the first ten generations.
Then the price began to rise.
“It does not want much at first,” he says.
“A small tithe.
A few dozen souls a year.
It is not cruel.
It is only hungry, and it has been hungry since before there were kings.” A pause.
“But it grows.
Every year it wants a little more.
My great-grandfather gave it a thousand.
My grandfather, four.
My father gave it nine thousand in a single year, and it was not satisfied.”
“So you cull the villages.”
“So I feed it.” He leans forward.
“Do you think I like it, boy?
Do you think I sit in my palace and rub my hands?
I have watched forty-one thousand of my own subjects go into that jar.
I have written the orders myself.
I have signed my name.
I will carry it until I die.” His voice does not shake.
It is only very level.
“But I have a great secret, and it is this: if I stop, it does not stop.
It turns.
It has been kept quiet by six hundred years of feeding, and if I starve it, it will not sleep.
It will hunt.
It will eat the court first.
Then the capital.
Then the provinces.
It will eat every village between here and the sea, and it will not leave a single soul to say what it was.”
The wind moves across the bridge.
The lanterns sway.
“You think I am the monster,” he says.
“I have thought so, too, on some nights.
But consider.
Forty-one thousand, or forty-one million.
I am not a good man.
I am only the man who was standing in the doorway when the door began to open.”
I do not answer.
I am cold all the way through.
Because he is telling the truth.
I can feel it.
I have sat with Hisui, and I have seen the crane, and I have felt that vast thing turn in its sleep.
There is no lie in his voice.
Only a heavy, patient, unbearable weariness.
“Then why come here?” I say.
My voice sounds odd.
“Why tell me?”
“Because of the silence.”
He sets his cup down.
“There was a woman, six centuries ago.
You have met her.
She discovered that a bearer, sitting alone in the deep dark, holding a single count, could quiet a demon by sheer stillness.
She did not kill it.
She could not.
But she could hold it.
And for as long as she held, it did not hunger.”
“Hisui.”
“Yes.
And I have read the old records, boy.
The ones the temple did not want anyone to read.” His gray eyes are very steady.
“The crane can be held.
It has been held before.
If one of the bearers sat in the deep place, in a vault beneath the palace, and held the count for as long as it took, the crane would sleep.
The tithes would stop.
The culls would end.
There would be no more jars.”
I stare at him.
“I have been looking for such a one for nineteen years,” he says softly.
“You do not understand what it was to hear that a ringer had come out of the temple.
A bearer, born of Shogen’s blood, who can hold the silence without the count.
I sent Kagemasa to fetch you alive.
Not to kill you.
To bring you to me.”
“You wanted me to sit in a cellar.”
“I wanted you to save a great many lives.”
“For how long?”
The King is silent.
“Forever, I suppose,” he says at last.
“Or until you died.
It is a heavy thing to ask.
I do not pretend otherwise.
But I would sit in it myself, if I could.
I cannot.
I am not a bearer.
I am only the vessel it was poured into.” A very small smile, bleak and self-mocking.
“The crane is in me, boy.
Not as yours is in you.
Deeper.
It has been in my blood since the day I was born.
It is the thing that looks out of my eyes when I say what I have to say.”
I think of the shape over Kuwabara.
The thousand voices.
We have been waiting.
“If I refuse?”
“Then the culls go on.” He does not raise his voice.
“And in a few years the crane grows tired of waiting, and I am no longer able to control it, and it eats us all.
I would rather it did not.
But I will not force you.
I did not force your father, and look how well that ended.”
“You killed him.”
“He asked me to.”
The words hang over the table like a falling axe.
I feel my hand close, without my permission, on the edge of the lacquered board.
“He came to me,” the King says.
He was half-mad by then.
He had been carrying that beast for twenty-nine years, and it had eaten most of what was human in him.
He knew it.
He sat in my tent, in the middle of my army, with a sword across his knees, and he said: I cannot hold it.
I cannot stop.
Kill me before I kill everyone.” His gray eyes are steady.
“I said no.
I tried to talk him out of it.
He would not listen.
So I offered him a duel.
His terms.
He was very particular about the house.”
“The house?”
“He wanted to die in his own bed.
Beside his wife.
He said he wished her to see it, so she would know it was not a betrayal.” The King’s voice is very soft.
“She was already ill.
The baby was coming.
Neither of them expected to survive the night.”
I do not know that I am standing until the stool falls behind me.
“You’re lying.”
“I am not.”
“You’re lying.”
“Ask the demon,” says the King, gently.
“It was there.”
Shigen, says the voice.
It is very quiet.
It has been quiet for a long time now, so quiet I had almost forgotten it was there.
Shigen.
“Don’t.”
I remember it.
I feel the world tilt.
I was in him.
In your father.
On that night.
It is very small, very frightened.
I did not know how to tell you.
I had forgotten I remembered, until now.
“Tell me.”
He did ask, it whispers.
He sat on the edge of the bed.
He held your mother’s hand.
He said, “Be quick.
She will not want to see it.” He said, “I am sorry.” A long pause.
He said it to me, too.
He said: “I am sorry, old friend.
It is not your fault.”
I cannot breathe.
And then the King came in.
And the blade— It stops.
I was very frightened.
I did not want to leave.
I did not want to go into the baby.
But the baby was so small, and so warm, and there was nowhere else.
It is crying, I realize.
A tiny, wrenching, soundless crying.
I am sorry.
I am so sorry.
I did not want to leave him.
I only wanted him not to be alone.
My eyes are streaming.
I do not know when it began.
Across the table, the King has not moved.
He watches me with a strange, grave, almost tender expression, like a man watching a wound he has long dreaded seeing opened.
“There is one more thing,” he says.
“I have kept it back, because I did not know if you would want it.
But I think, now, that you should have it.”
“What.”
“Your mother.” He reaches into his sleeve.
“She did die of grief.
But afterward, there was a spirit.
A very bright one.
A woman’s.
She had a voice.” He draws out a small white bell on a stick, twin to the one the Keeper carried at Nagare.
“I could not bear to leave her to wander.
I took her into the jar myself.
It was the first jar I ever filled with my own hands.”
The world narrows to a single point.
“She is in the crane,” the King says.
“Now.
She is one of the thousand.
But she is still herself, in some measure, as I think you will hear.”
He lifts the bell.
“Do not,” I say.
“You have a right.”
“Do not.”
He rings it.
It is a small clear chime.
I have heard it a dozen times.
But this time, in the aftermath, something answers.
It comes from the air over the bridge.
From the dark water.
From far away, to the east, and very close at the same time.
It begins as a hum, a faint layered murmur, like a hundred voices in a distant room, and then it separates, slowly, thread by thread, and one voice comes up out of the rest.
A woman’s voice.
Low, clear, and very tired.
It is singing.
I do not know the words.
They are in an old country dialect, so old that I only catch one in three.
But I know the tune.
I have never heard it before in my life, and I know it in my bones, the way I know my own name.
It is a lullaby.
It rocks.
It rises and falls like water over stones.
I don’t remember, Daigo said.
That is the shame of it.
I have forgotten every word.
I am on my knees on the boards.
I do not remember falling.
The song goes on.
It is not for me.
I can tell that.
It is not addressed to anyone.
It is only sung, softly, endlessly, into the dark inside the crane, the way a woman sings to a child in a cradle, hoping it will sleep.
Kinsie, says the voice, and there is a wild strange awe in it.
That is Kinsie.
That is the mother.
I knew that voice, I knew—
“Stop it,” I hear myself say.
The King lowers the bell.
The song fades.
“I am sorry,” he says.
“I did not do it to hurt you.
I did it so you would understand what it is you are being asked to protect.
And what it is you may be able to free.” His face is grave.
“She is in there, boy.
And so are ten thousand others.
If you sit in the cellar, and hold the silence, they will never come out.
But they will never be eaten, either.
They will only sleep.”
“You would leave her in there.”
“I would leave her safe.”
“For ever.”
“For as long as it takes,” says the King.
“That is all any of us can offer.”
I look at him.
I look at the thin gentle face, and the tired eyes, and the small white bell in his hand.
I think of the old woman at Nagare walking slowly across the yard to the steps.
I think of the fourth jar, and the sixth, and the little pale figure that laughed.
I think of a cradle song, sung endlessly into the dark.
And I understand, with a cold, clean, enormous clarity, that he is not lying.
Not about any of it.
Not the bargain, not the crane, not my father’s request.
He has told me the truth, all of it, and it is the worst thing anyone has ever done to me.
Because he is right.
And it does not matter.
“No,” I say.
The King closes his eyes.
“I thought you might,” he says.
Shigen, whispers the voice, as I rise.
Shigen, wait.
“I’m listening.”
He will kill you.
Not now.
But he will.
There is a way this ends, and I can feel it.
I have felt it since the cellar.
It is trembling.
May I?
Please.
Not to take.
I do not want to take.
I only want to help.
I stand on the boards with my hands open at my sides.
For nineteen years I have been afraid of this moment.
For nineteen years I have heard the horns, and felt the black lines creeping up my arms, and woken with the taste of copper in my mouth.
I have said a thousand names in the dark.
I have counted to four until my lungs bled.
And it is not asking to take.
It is asking to help.
I think of Hisui.
Sit with it.
Every time.
I think of my father, on the edge of a bed, saying I am sorry, old friend.
I close my eyes.
I go down into the room.
It is smaller than I remember.
The black water is a shallow pool.
The cracked wall is hanging in fragments.
But on the far shore, where the small horned figure has always waited, it is standing at the water’s edge now, hands cupped in front of it, and in its cupped hands, very carefully, it is holding something out.
It is a small bright thing.
A flame.
Warm.
I will not take, it says.
I will only carry.
You will hold the rein.
If you say stop, I will stop.
I promise.
You promise.
I have never lied to you.
A tiny, wavering thing.
I only ever wanted to be asked.
I wade out into the water.
It is warm around my ankles.
I take the flame from the cupped hands, and it does not burn.
Together, I say.
Together, it says.
I open my eyes.
It is nothing like the mountain.
On the mountain, it came like a flood, a rush of red, a sudden drowning heat.
This is a slow opening, like a door.
The warmth rises through me, not burning, not devouring, but filling, the way water fills a bowl.
I feel my heartbeat slow.
I feel my breath steady.
I am not afraid.
My hands go first.
The fingers lengthen.
The nails curve, black and hard.
The veins rise along my forearms like drawn ink, and this time I watch them go, and I do not flinch.
The pressure builds above my brows, two hot points, the soft wet cracking of bone, and I feel the horns come up through my skin like saplings through wet earth.
I feel the mask settle over my face, cool and smooth and right.
The world turns red.
Then, slowly, it turns back.
I can see everything.
I can see the grain of the wood in the table.
I can see every thread in the King’s white robe.
I can hear his heartbeat, slow and even, and the two attendants’ breath, shallow with terror, and the river sliding past below the bridge.
I can feel the strength in my legs, in my arms, in the whole enormous body, fifty men, a hundred, poured into a single frame.
There, says the voice, and it is not in my head.
It is in my mouth.
It is our mouth.
It is deep and quiet and glad.
There.
Was that so hard?
“No,” I say, and my voice is a dry vast rumble, like stone in a well.
“Not as hard as I thought.”
The King has risen.
He has not drawn a weapon.
He stands beside the overturned table with his hands loose at his sides, and his gentle face is very calm, and I see a strange soft light kindle in his gray eyes.
It is not fear.
It is relief.
“Ah,” he says.
“There you are.”
His attendants have already gone.
They have leapt over the rail into the dark water, and I hear the splash, and the frantic paddling.
The bridge is empty.
“Your father,” says the King, “never had the courtesy to ask permission.” He begins to unfasten the collar of his robe.
“It is a great mercy that you do.
I would hate to have to kill a beast.”
He draws the robe off his shoulders.
On the pale skin of his chest, over the heart, there is a brand.
Not a small one, like the shinobi’s.
It is enormous.
It spreads from collarbone to hip in a pattern of long white lines, like the veins of a feather, and it is moving.
“I am sorry about this,” the King says.
He opens his mouth, and the crane comes out.
It does not come as smoke.
It comes as bone.
White plates.
White spines.
A long curved neck unfolds from between his shoulder blades and lifts a crested skull high over his head, and two great thin wings spread from his back with a sound like wet paper.
The face goes last.
It is stripped away, smoothly, and the beak slides down over the place where a man’s mouth should be, long and cruel and pale.
The eyes are still his.
Gray.
Gentle.
Sad.
I am sorry, the King says, and it is the crane’s voice, layered, a thousand people speaking at once.
I do not wish to hurt you.
But I cannot stop it.
You understand.
“I understand.”
Yes.
A pause.
You are the first of them who ever has.
He moves.
I have never seen anything so fast.
The King does not lunge.
He does not swing.
One moment he is ten paces away, still as a heron, and the next the great pale beak is an inch from my throat, and I have not seen him cross the distance.
I twist.
I feel the wind of it.
I feel a cold line open along my collarbone, and black blood runs down my chest.
I hit him with my open hand.
It is enough to break a horse.
It lands full on the side of the bone-white ribcage, and the whole bridge shudders, and the King skids back three paces with a long grating shriek of plates.
He does not fall.
He rights himself, the wings snapping wide for balance, and the beak clacks once, thoughtfully, like a man testing a tooth.
Good, he says.
Good.
We fight.
I will not pretend I can describe it.
It is not a duel.
It is not a brawl.
It is two enormous things dancing on a strip of wood over a river, in the last of the dusk, and every step of it is a catastrophe.
The rail goes.
Then a pier.
I take him by the wing and throw him through a lantern post and he bounces off the far rail and comes back at me in a spray of splinters, beak first, and I catch it in both hands and feel it drive halfway through my palm.
Black blood, hot and thick.
I roar.
The demon roars with me.
We are so nearly one, in that moment, that I cannot tell which of us is which.
It is not taking.
It is giving.
It pours itself into my arms, my legs, the small bright center of my chest, and every stroke lands a little harder.
Every dodge is a little faster.
I am fighting like my father must have fought, a whirlwind of black claws and horns and rage, and for the first time in my life I am not afraid of what I am.
And the King is losing.
I see it.
I feel it.
He is faster than I am, precise, elegant, every motion a fold of a paper crane, but there is something in his movement that is wrong.
A sluggishness.
A hesitation.
Each time he strikes he pulls back a fraction, the way a man does when he does not want to finish a job.
He is holding back, says the voice.
Why?
I think— It is puzzled.
I think he wants to be stopped.
I hit him again.
He goes down on one knee.
The great white wings drag on the boards, and the beak lifts, and I see the gray eyes look up at me through the bone.
Now, says the King, very softly.
Do it now.
Before it wakes.
“Before what wakes?”
The rest of it.
I feel it then.
Under the bridge, under the river, under the earth.
A cold, deep, tremendous shifting.
Something enormous turning over.
Something has been sleeping in the King, all through this fight, and it is beginning to open its eyes.
Shigen, says the demon.
Shigen, ring.
Ring now.
I do.
I have never done it in this form.
It is not a whisper, this time.
It is a shout.
It comes out of the horned skull like a sun, a tremendous, soundless, ringing pressure, so vast that the air itself seems to crack.
The river flattens.
The bridge shakes on its piers.
Every lantern on the bank goes out at once.
The King screams.
It is a terrible sound.
Two sounds.
His own voice, a man’s, hoarse and human, and beneath it, the great layered cry of the crane.
He staggers.
His hands go to his skull.
The bone-white mask cracks across the brow, a long clean fissure, and light pours through it, cold and white and unbearable.
Now!
he cries.
Now, boy, now, before—
I take him by the throat.
I lift him.
The great wings beat helplessly.
I hold him over the edge of the bridge, over the black dark water, with one hand around his neck, and I look into the cracked mask and the mild gray eyes behind it.
“Tell me one thing.”
Anything.
“Would you have done it?
If I had said yes.
Would you have let me sit in the cellar?”
Yes.
“And the culls would have stopped?”
I do not know.
The gray eyes are wet.
I do not know if it would have held.
I am not a bearer.
I have only ever been a vessel.
But it was the only hope I had.
I look at him for a long moment.
Then, very softly, in the great deep voice of the two of us together, I say: “Then I’m sorry.”
I draw back my other hand.
Shigen, says the demon.
Shigen, stop.
I freeze.
Not because of him, it says quickly.
Look.
Look at the water.
I look down.
The river has changed.
The dark surface, so still a moment ago, is stirring.
Ripples are spreading outward from beneath the bridge, from directly below the King, in slow widening rings.
And in the center of the rings, rising up through the black water with the awful patience of a drowned corpse, something enormous and pale is opening its eyes.
The crane, the King whispers.
It is here.
It is not in me.
It was never only in me.
It is in the water, and the stone, and the blood of the house.
A gasp.
If you kill me, boy, it will not die.
It will come out.
I stare down at the white face rising through the black.
It is not a bird.
It is not anything.
It is a hole in the world shaped like a bird, a huge cold hunger with a beak the size of a house.
And in its hollow eyes, layered, tiny, endless, I see faces.
Thousands of them.
Every one is looking up at me.
And somewhere in the middle of them, very faint, a woman is singing.
I do not remember letting go of the King.
I remember the boards under my feet, and the roar in my ears, and the King crawling backward along the bridge with his broken mask trailing feathers.
I remember the great white thing rising out of the water, its neck unfolding like a flower, its beak parting with a sound like the tearing of the sky.
I remember the demon saying, very quickly, very clearly: Run.
I run.
Not toward the King.
Not toward the capital.
Back the way I came, along the ruined bridge, over the splintered boards, with the thing behind me growing and growing, filling the whole night with a light like frost.
I feel it reach for me.
I feel a wing brush my back, cold as the grave, and everything in me screams to turn and fight.
No, says the demon.
Not yet.
Not like this.
You cannot win.
Not yet.
I hit the near bank at full speed and do not stop.
I plow through the reeds.
I come out onto the road and run, and run, and run, into the dark, until the light behind me shrinks to a pale smear on the horizon and the great cold cry dwindles to a whisper.
I do not know how far I go.
Ten miles.
Twenty.
When I finally stop, I am in a ruined shrine on a hillside, and the horns have gone, and my hands are pale, and I am lying on my face in the cold dirt, and I am weeping like a child.
Dawn finds me sitting against the shrine wall with my father’s sword across my knees.
I do not know what time it is.
I do not know how long I have been here.
The hills are gray and quiet.
The mist lies in the hollows like milk.
Somewhere down the valley a bird is singing, a small ordinary one, and it seems the most miraculous sound I have ever heard.
There is a mark on my forehead.
I find it when I lift my hand to wipe my face.
On the left side, just above the brow, there is a small hard nub of bone, no bigger than a fingertip.
It is smooth and slightly warm.
When I press it, something shivers deep in my chest.
It will not go away, says the voice, apologetically.
“I know.”
It is a small one.
A pause.
I am sorry.
I did not know it would stay.
“It’s all right.”
You could hide it.
With a cloth.
“Yes.”
I sit for a while and look at the mist.
The voice is very quiet.
It has been quiet ever since the bridge, and I do not press it.
I know what it is doing.
It is doing what I have done a hundred times, on a hundred cold mornings.
It is holding itself together.
“You said something,” I say at last.
“On the bridge.
That you had remembered it.
My father’s last night.”
Yes.
“Was there anything else?
Anything you didn’t say?”
A long silence.
She sang, it says, softly.
Your mother.
In the bed.
Before the King came in.
She sang to the baby.
It was the last thing she did.
It hesitates.
I have been trying to remember the words.
I have never been able to.
But I remember the tune.
“Sing it.”
I cannot.
I have no voice of my own.
“Then hum it.”
There is a long stillness.
Then, very faintly, in the back of my skull, in the small quiet room that is still, for now, mine, I hear it begin.
A thread of sound.
A soft, rocking, wavering line, rising and falling like water over stones.
It is not a good voice.
It is a demon’s voice, rough and low, and it cracks on the high notes.
But it is the tune, and it goes on, and I put my head back against the cold wall of the shrine and close my eyes.
My mother is in the crane.
She has been in the crane for nineteen years.
She has been singing, endlessly, into the dark, to a child who never heard her.
I will get her out, I think.
Yes, says the demon.
Whatever it takes.
Yes.
Even if it means—
Yes.
Very gently.
I know.
I will sit with you.
I open my eyes.
The mist is lifting.
The eastern hills are turning pink, and beyond them, faint and far away, against the brightening sky, a line of white shows on the horizon.
Long and low and clean.
The walls.
I get to my feet.
I strap my father’s sword to my back.
I tear a strip from the hem of my tunic and tie it around my forehead, over the little hard nub of bone, and I look at the road.
Are you afraid?
asks the demon.
“Yes.”
Good, it says.
So am I.
We walk.
End of Chapter Ten