Some months earlier. The day after Hibari's visit to the oldest part of the forest.
Hibari lasted until noon.
She would want that on the record. Kaede had said before dinner, yet Hibari held out a full half-day longer than anyone would have bet, circling high over the Ironspine with her mouth clamped shut, the news fizzing inside her like a shaken bottle. She did three loops of the highest peak. She chased a stormtalon eagle for an hour, purely for the exercise. She curled up on a cloud and told herself, very firmly, that she was a happy cloud, and happy clouds keep quiet.
Then she remembered the way the man had tipped the little puppet's head to the light. No, I think. It needs a second coat. She made a small, helpless sound, then turned south, toward the smoke.
The Cinderwaste had no weather. It had only heat, ash, and a red sky that never quite became night. Hibari came down through it with her feathers ruffled against the sting. She landed on the broken battlements of Asterfall, where the old castle sat black and crooked on its hill like a rotten tooth, with lava creeping slowly through the cracks of the courtyard below.
Kagari was in the courtyard, fighting a drake.
It was not a serious fight, by Kagari's standards. The drake was only the size of a wagon. Kagari was punching it in the face with a bare fist, laughing, her red hair standing up around her head like a crown of fire. The drake roared, spitting flame at her, and she let it wash over her shoulders like warm water.
"Hibari!" she shouted, without stopping. "You came to fight!"
"I came to talk."
"Same thing!" Kagari hit the drake so hard that it sat down. It looked at her reproachfully. She patted its snout; it slunk off into the smoke. Then she bounded up the broken stairs to the battlements two at a time, beaming, smelling of sulfur. "Talk, then. Fast. I've got a volcano warming up."
Hibari told her.
She told it badly, the way she told every good story: out of order, with too many hands. The ferns. The skeleton. The roots. The goblins. The carved fox with the curled tail. The doll, the puppet, the man talking to the doll and stopping himself from answering. The stonehide bear. The poison.
Kagari listened with her mouth open.
"Level nine," she said, when Hibari got to the bear. "He killed a stonehide at level nine?"
"With berries."
Kagari threw back her head and laughed until a section of the battlement cracked off into the courtyard. "Oh, I like him," she said. "I like him. A clerk! A soft little clerk who poisons bears!" She grabbed Hibari by both shoulders. Her hands were hot as stove-lids. "Bring him here. I'll toughen him up. Two weeks with me, he'll be punching drakes."
"He'd be ash, Kagari. He's level fourteen."
"So I'll be gentle." Kagari considered. "Gentler." She let go, her bright face turning thoughtful in a way it rarely did. "Kaede's been looking after him? Kaede?"
"For a year."
"Huh." Kagari looked north, as if she could see the forest through two hundred miles of ash and mountain. "She didn't even look after us like that, when we were new."
There was something in her voice that Hibari had not expected. It was not quite jealousy. It was closer to wonder.
"Is he handsome?" Kagari asked suddenly.
"Kind of plane? He's forty-four. He has a bad knee."
"So, no." Kagari grinned. "Better. Handsome ones never last. Go on, tell the others, I know you're going to. Tell Hyouka I'm coming for my sleeve."
The Hush was the opposite of everything.
Where the Cinderwaste roared, the Hush swallowed. Hibari flew north for two days, then came down onto snow so white it hurt, under a sky so pale it was hardly there. When she landed, the sound of her own wings simply stopped, as if someone had put a hand over them. Nothing moved. Nothing rotted. The air was so cold and clear that she could see a hundred miles, with nothing in any of them.
She found Hyouka in the village.
It was a small village, the kind every road in the world passes through: a dozen houses of timber and stone, a well, a church with a squat bell tower. In the square, there was a festival. Lanterns hung strung between the rooftops. Long tables sat loaded with bread and cakes. A fiddler stood on a barrel with his bow lifted. Children chased each other through the crowd. A girl in a red scarf was caught in the middle of a laugh, her head thrown back.
All of it was ice.
Every person, every lantern, every cake. Every drop of spilled beer, caught in midair. Every snowflake that had been falling at the moment it happened, hanging motionless above the square like a held breath. It had been that way for four hundred years. Hibari had seen it before. It still made her want to cry.
Hyouka sat on the edge of the frozen well, very small, very pale, in a white dress that did not move because there was no wind. She looked up when Hibari landed. She did not say anything. She never did.
"Hello," said Hibari, much more quietly than she had said it to Kagari.
Hyouka inclined her head.
Hibari told her. She told it slowly this time, in order, because the Hush made you slow, because Hyouka listened the way the snow listened: completely, without a sound. When she got to the part about the doll, Hyouka's pale eyes moved, very slightly, to the girl in the red scarf.
The girl was holding a rag doll in one hand. It had been a cheap doll, even four hundred years ago: a twist of cloth with button eyes and a stitched mouth. Its head was coming loose at the neck. Someone had started to mend it. The needle and thread still hung from the seam, caught in the ice.
Hibari had never noticed that before.
When she finished, Hyouka was quiet for a very long time. Then she reached out, touching the frozen thread on the rag doll's neck with one white fingertip.
"Good," said Hyouka.
It was the first word Hibari had heard her say in sixty years. Hibari flew south with it pressed to her chest like something precious. She never told anyone that part, ever.
Shizuku would not come up out of the sea, so Hibari had to go down.
She hated it. She held her breath and dropped into the gray Kessarian water above the place where the old city lay. She kicked down through the cold until the light turned green, then blue, then black, until the drowned towers of Ys-Merrow rose out of the dark around her, hung with weed, pale with barnacles. Somewhere below, a choir was singing. It was beautiful. It made all the hair on the back of her neck stand up.
Shizuku met her in the bell tower of the drowned cathedral. She sat in the empty frame where the bell had been, her long silver tail coiled around a beam, her hair floating around her head like smoke. She was smiling. She was always smiling.
"You're holding your breath," she said. Her voice came clear through the water. "How sweet. You know you don't have to."
Hibari did know. She was a Great Witch; drowning was not one of the things that could happen to her anymore. She held her breath anyway, on principle, then told Shizuku the whole story in a furious stream of bubbles.
Shizuku laughed. It rang off the drowned stones like a dropped silver spoon. Somewhere below them, the choir faltered for a moment, then went on.
"Oh, Kaede," said Shizuku fondly. "Kaede, Kaede, Kaede. A year of tidying up after a man who talks to his dolls." She flicked her tail. "She's in love."
Hibari let out the rest of her breath in astonishment. "She is not?! He's a Human!"
"I didn't say with him." Shizuku's smile went wide, sly, a little sad. "She's in love with being needed. She hasn't been needed by anything that could talk back in a thousand years." She tilted her head. "Isn't that the funniest thing you've ever heard?"
Hibari opened her mouth to say yes. Then she thought about it, and closed it again.
She hated it when Shizuku did that.
The Glass Marsh glittered for miles.
It was a swamp of broken glass: dunes of it, banks of it, ridges of it, green, brown, and clear, half-sunk in water that steamed faintly and smelled of copper and vinegar. Shard herons stalked the shallows on their long glass legs. Glass toads croaked from the reeds. In the middle of it all stood a house made entirely of greenhouses, one stacked on top of another in a teetering tower, their panes fogged and dripping, their insides full of shapes that moved.
"I'm working," she said. She was tall, pale, very beautiful in a way that was faintly wrong, like a statue sculpted from someone's description of a woman rather than from a woman. Her skin had a glassy sheen in certain lights. Her eyes were the color of weak tea. Something in the jar was wriggling.
"It's about dolls," said Hibari.
Ranka let her in.
She listened to the whole story with her chin on her hand, her strange tea-colored eyes very bright. She interrupted constantly. What kind of joints? How did he string them? Hide? Hide strips? Through the wood, or around it? What wood? How old was the doll he brought? What was it made of? Porcelain? What's porcelain? Is it like bisque? Hibari did not know the answers to any of it. That did not stop Ranka from asking every question.
"A man," said Ranka at last, sitting back. "A man who makes figures. With his hands. Who talks to them." She drummed her long glassy fingers on the bench. "Where did he come from?"
"Kaede says he fell out of nowhere."
"Nobody falls out of nowhere. Everything comes from somewhere." Ranka's eyes narrowed. "What's his intelligence?"
"I don't know his stats, Ranka. I've never even spoken to him."
"Find out." Ranka stood, pacing between the dripping tables, her robe hissing on the glass. "A man with no class at all survives a year in the Forbidden Woods. He poisons a stonehide. He carves faces that hold expressions. He thinks to make a decoy out of a puppet, a trap out of a deadfall, with no one to teach him." She stopped. "That's not luck. That's a mind. I want to see it. I want to see how it works." Her voice dropped. "I want to see how he works."
"You want to cut him open," said Hibari flatly.
"Only a little."
"Kaede would bury you in a root so deep you'd come out the other side of the world."
Ranka considered this.
"Then I'll ask nicely," she said, turning back to her jar. "Tell Kaede I said hello. Tell her I'd like to borrow her man."
Hibari did not tell Kaede that.
Tsubaki already knew.
Of course she did. Hibari found her on the Field of Banners at dusk, sitting on an overturned war-drum in the middle of a sea of tattered flags. A hundred dead soldiers stood in rows around her like a garden of iron. One of them was very tall, in a rusted breastplate, a notched sword at his side. He stood a little apart from the others, the way he always did.
"Ser Aldren told you," said Hibari, deflating.
"Ser Aldren tells me everything," said Tsubaki. "Including that he was turned from his road four times by a root, which has never happened in a hundred and forty years." She looked at Hibari over the edge of her black veil, dry, tired. "I asked Kaede about it myself, months ago. You're late."
"I'm never late."
"You're late to this."
Hibari sat down on a broken shield beside her. It was very quiet on the Field. The banners moved a little in the evening wind; the soldiers did not. Somewhere far off, a crow called.
"What do you think of him?" Hibari asked.
Tsubaki was quiet for a long time.
"I think he's going to die," she said finally. "I thought so the day Aldren saw him. I still think so. A level-fourteen man, alone, with a doll. The world eats people like that. It doesn't even notice." She looked out over her rows of dead. "I've buried a great many men who were braver than him. Cleverer. Better armed."
"But?"
"But he's still alive." Tsubaki's voice was very dry. "So far, he keeps making me wrong." She paused. "I don't like being wrong. It's been a long time since anybody managed it."
She said nothing else. But when Hibari stood to go, Tsubaki spoke without turning her head:
"If he ever comes near the Field, tell me first. I'll keep the dead off his road."
Hibari stared at her. Tsubaki did not explain.
Mayoi was asleep.
Mayoi was always asleep, or nearly. Hibari found her in the Drowsing Sands, curled up in the hollow of a dune like a cat, her small hands tucked under her cheek, her pale hair spread across the sand. The dunes around her moved slowly when Hibari was not looking at them, then stopped when she was. It was very unsettling.
"Mayoi," said Hibari. "Mayoi. Wake up. I have news."
Mayoi did not wake up. But she smiled in her sleep, murmuring very clearly, as though she were answering a question:
"The thread."
Hibari sat down in the sand. "You said that last time. Somebody's going to need a lot of thread." She hugged her knees. "Is it him? Is it the man in Kaede's woods?"
Mayoi stirred. Her eyelids fluttered, but did not open.
"He mends them," she whispered. "The broken ones. He's so careful." Her small brow furrowed, the way a child's does in a bad dream. "Someone should be careful with him, too."
"Mayoi?"
"The one who mends the dolls," said Mayoi, very softly, "will be mended into one."
Then she rolled over with a sigh, deeply asleep again. No amount of shaking would wake her.
Hibari sat in the moving sand for a long time after that. She did not know what it meant. Nobody ever knew what Mayoi meant, until afterward. But the hair on the back of her neck would not lie down. For the first time on the whole long trip, she did not feel like telling anyone anything.
She told Yoruka anyway.
The Lantern Spire did not stand anywhere. It simply was, when you needed it to be: a tower of pale stone that went up past the clouds, down past the roots of the world. Every inch of its inner walls was hung with lanterns. Thousands upon thousands of them, small ones, large ones, iron, brass, paper, glass. Each burned with a single small flame. Each flame was a witch, somewhere in the world, alive.
Yoruka sat at a desk at the bottom of the tower with a very large book open in front of her, a pen in her hand. She did not look up when Hibari landed.
"Walpurgis isn't for months," she said. "Whatever it is, Hibari, put it in a letter."
"It's about a man."
"Then it isn't my concern." Yoruka turned a page. She was the oldest of them, though she did not look it: a slight, plain, tidy woman with ink on her fingers, gray in her braid, a face that had stopped being surprised by anything a very long time ago. "Men don't get lanterns."
"Kaede's been protecting him. For a year."
Yoruka's pen stopped.
She listened to the rest of it without a word. She did not interrupt. She did not ask questions. When Hibari got to the part about Mayoi, the thread and the mending, she set her pen down entirely, folding her inky hands on the book.
"In her sleep."
"She's always asleep." Yoruka looked up, for the first time, at the walls of her tower: at the endless lanterns, burning by the thousands, rising into the dark. Her face did not change. But something in her eyes went very still, very far away.
"Men don't become witches," she said quietly. It did not sound as if she were talking to Hibari. "It doesn't happen. I would know."
"Then what did Mayoi mean?"
"I don't know." Yoruka picked up her pen again. Her hand was perfectly steady. "I suppose we'll find out. We generally do." She dipped the nib, returning to her writing, and did not look up again. "Thank you, Hibari. Go tell Ibara, if you must. Then go home."
Hibari went. But as she rose up through the tower, through all those thousands of small steady flames, she looked back once. Yoruka had stopped writing again. She sat quite still with her pen in her hand, looking at an empty iron hook on the wall where no lantern hung.
Ibara was at a party.
Ibara was always at a party. This one was in the palace at Thornvale, a great stone hall full of banners, candles, and three hundred human nobles in their best silks, celebrating some victory or other over the Empire. Hibari came in through a high window as a small, unremarkable gray bird. She dropped behind a pillar, then came out the other side as a small, unremarkable gray woman with her tag tucked well away where no one would read it. She had done this at a hundred parties. Nobody ever looked twice at the guest by the pillar.
She was starving. She had flown across half the continent in two weeks, eating nothing but the occasional fish. The long tables against the walls were loaded with food. Roast swans glazed in honey. Pyramids of pears. Little golden pastries, shining with butter, filled with cream, topped with candied violets.
Hibari ate four of the pastries before she had even looked for Ibara.
They were the best thing she had ever tasted. She ate a fifth with her eyes closed, standing by the pillar, and only opened them when a voice like warm honey spoke right beside her ear:
"Hibari, darling! You came!"
Ibara was radiant. She was always radiant. She wore white and gold, her pale hair piled on her head, a circlet of tiny golden wheat-ears on her brow. Above her head, for every noble in the hall to read, floated the words that had made her famous:
Bright Witch Lv. 52 Saint of the Harvest
She kissed Hibari on both cheeks. She smelled of warm bread.
"You've found my little tarts!" she said, delighted, looking at the crumbs on Hibari's fingers. "Aren't they lovely? I made them myself. Every dish on these tables." She leaned close, still smiling, lowering her voice to a sweet, confiding murmur. "From what was left in the Duke's cellar after the rats got into it. You'd never know, would you? Not from the taste."
Hibari stopped chewing.
Ibara's food could not hurt a Great Witch. Hibari knew that. Everyone knew it. Her body was far too strong for anything in that pastry to do her any harm at all.
That was not the same thing as not knowing what was in it.
"Was there something you wanted to tell me, darling?" said Ibara, beaming. "You look positively bursting. Is it gossip? Oh, tell me it's gossip..."
Hibari swallowed. It took a great deal of effort.
"I've forgotten," she said faintly. "I'm so sorry. I have to go."
"Already? But you've only just..."
Hibari was already gone, out through the high window in a gust that blew out forty candles, sending a pyramid of pears rolling across the floor. She made it as far as the castle's outer wall before she was sick over the battlements, at great length, into the moat.
She did not go back. She never did tell Ibara about the man in Kaede's woods. By the time she felt well enough to think about it again, she had decided, on reflection, that some news was better kept away from some people.
She was not entirely sure why. But she trusted the feeling.
Some months later, in the oldest part of the forest.
Kaede watched him go.
She had not meant to. The night before, when the goblin with the crooked ear came trotting back to her in the dark with its eyes wide, its whole small body shaking, she had told herself she would not look. He was a grown man. He had walked out of her woods on his own two feet, with dwarves, the way people do. It was the most ordinary thing in the world.
She looked anyway.
The pool of rainwater in the hollow of the stump showed her the caravan, strung out along the mountain road: wagons creaking, ponies blowing, dwarves singing their dreadful song about Hilde. In the middle of them, beside a broad gray-bearded dwarf with gears in her braid, walked a thin, tall, ragged man in a black coat with one sleeve, a doll strapped to his back.
He was laughing at something the dwarf had said. Kaede had never heard him laugh like that. Not once, in a year and a half. Not at the goblins, not at the puppet, not at the doll. It was a small, surprised, rusty laugh, as though he had found it in a pocket he had forgotten he had.
She watched until the caravan turned a shoulder of the mountain and was gone.
Then she sat for a long time beside the stump, her tea going cold, while the forest moved quietly around her.
It was a strange feeling. She did not have a name for it. She had made orcs, once, when the world was young, then sent them off to war. She had made goblins out of her own people, then watched them shrink and sicken, generation by generation, until they were small, green, and dim, loving her without knowing what she was. She had seen a great many things leave her woods. Most of them never came back, and she had not minded. Things left. That was what things did.
But she had never before watched something leave because it was ready to.
She found she was glad. She also found that she would very much have liked him to look back.
That night, she walked through the trees, the way she did not often walk anymore, all the long miles to the clearing by the creek. The house was dark. The fire was out. The door stood a little open, as he had left it, as if he had only stepped out to check a snare.
She went in.
It was very tidy. She had not expected that. The round table was wiped clean. The two stools were pushed in beneath it, side by side. The bed of boughs and hide in the corner was smoothed flat. On the shelf above the cold hearth sat a little house, a dollhouse, two feet high, with a steep roof, a leather door, and a tiny window with a shutter that opened and closed. Through the window she could see a tiny round table, two tiny stools, a tiny lantern, and a loaf of bread no bigger than a grain of barley.
The little wooden marionette was gone from its doorway. He had taken it with him.
She stood looking at the dollhouse for a long time.
Outside, in the dark at the edge of the clearing, something rustled. Kaede turned. A pair of small yellow eyes looked back at her from under the ferns: the goblin with the crooked ear, who had followed her all the way from the deep woods without being asked. It crept to the doorstep, stopped, then sat down on the step, in the place where it had sat on so many mornings, looking into the empty house.
It made the rising click. Where are you?
Nobody answered.
Kaede went to sit on the step beside it. The goblin leaned against her side, very small and warm, the way they had leaned against her when they were her people, a thousand years ago, before she ruined them. She put her arm around it.
"He'll come back," she said.
She did not know if it was true. The goblin did not understand a word. But it made the warm, low purr of contentment, pressing closer. After a while it fell asleep against her.
Kaede sat on the doorstep of the empty house until the sun came up. In the morning, before she left, she did something she had not done for anyone in a very long time. She put her hand flat on the earth of the clearing, asking the roots to keep the house. To hold the walls up through the winters, the roof on through the storms, the door shut against the rain. To keep it exactly as he had left it.
Just in case.
Chapter 18: The Weather System