35. Chapter 35 #2
I didn't know the answer. That was the problem I had to carry down into the dark with me, the thing no one could lift because no one knew, not Dev, not Daska, not the healer past the mountains if he was even real.
Whether I'd saved the people in front of me at the cost of everyone who would ever live.
Whether love, my particular stubborn helpless love that reached for the drowning thing in its arms every single time, was the best of me or the ruin of everything.
I might have killed the world to save a hundred people in it.
I might have done the unforgivable thing dressed as the only thing I knew how to do.
And here is what I found, at the very bottom, when I made myself look at that question without flinching, as Daska had taught me to look at a wound.
I found that I would do it again; even knowing what it might cost. Even with the whole grey weight of maybe-doomed-everyone pressing down on me in the dark, if you put me back on my knees in that churned earth with Megan pinned and the baby coming and the power straining to be let out, I would open my hands and spend it exactly the same way, every time, world without end.
Because a world you could only save by letting the woman in front of you die under a fallen house, by doing the sum that made her a number, was not a world I knew how to want to save.
Nathan would call that my weakness; he'd called it that already.
Down at the bottom of the dark, with everything stripped away but the truth, I finally understood it was the one part of me that had never once been broken.
That understanding didn't lift the question.
The question stayed open, exactly as heavy as before, because being at peace with a choice is a different thing from knowing it was right, and I might still have doomed us all.
But it changed how the weight sat. I stopped carrying it as a verdict against myself and started carrying it as a simple unknown, a thing not yet decided, a road whose end I couldn't see from here, and a thing not yet decided is a thing you have to stay alive to find out.
Maybe that was what turned me, in the end. Not the men's love, though that was the ground I turned on. The plain need to know how it came out.
I surfaced one last time before the chapter of that journey closed, and this window was different from all the others.
We'd stopped on a high shoulder of ground as the light was going, and Daska had propped me up against him so I half sat, half lay in the curve of his arm with the whole eastern world laid out in front of us, and for once I had the wits to see it.
The land fell away below us into blue evening distance and then rose again, and rose, and kept rising, into mountains vaster than anything I'd known could exist, white to their roots now with the winter that was coming down behind us, rank on rank of them marching off into the east until the last of them were only a paleness against the darkening sky.
Somewhere beyond them, Tau said, was the healer.
Somewhere beyond them was the only door left that might open onto my staying.
And as I looked at all that white enormous distance, something looked back.
I felt it before I understood it, as I'd felt the river call to the power in me a lifetime ago, as I'd felt the earthquake gathering in the ground before it broke.
Far out east, past the mountains, past the edge of anything I could see, something ancient stirred and reached, reached back toward me across all that distance, faint as a heartbeat heard through deep water.
It lay so enormously far off that the small spoiled remnant of power in my chest turned toward it like a compass needle, helpless, drawn.
The thing out there was sick. Whatever it was, I knew that much as you know the smell of a wound gone bad, as you know a thing is dying before anyone tells you.
It was vast beyond anything I had a scale for, and it was sick unto death, and had been sick for a long, long time.
Somewhere under the sickness it was calling, and the calling had been going out across the whole of the world for longer than there had been anyone to hear it.
It was calling me; I understood that with a certainty that had no business existing in a mind as far gone as mine.
The thing past the mountains had been calling me since before I fell through the stones, since before I was born, since before the drain and the dying world and the Council's desperate plan to load a chef full of borrowed magic and throw her back through time.
All of it, the rejection, the falling, the capture, the pride, the men, the earthquake, the spending, the slow grey sinking, all of it had only ever been the long road to this.
To the thing in the east that was reaching back for me now, faint across all that distance and terribly patient, waiting where it had always been waiting, at the broken root of everything.
I didn't have a name for it; I wouldn't have one for a long while yet.
But some part of me, the part that had always known things my mind refused to carry, understood that I'd found the end of the road at last, or that it had found me, and that whatever waited past those white mountains was the reason for the whole of it, the answer to a question I hadn't known my entire strange life had been asking.
There it is, I thought, with the last of the window closing around me and the dark rising up gently to take me back down. That's where we've been going all along, the whole of it, from the very first step.
Daska's arms tightened around me; behind us the snow was already falling on the road we'd climbed, closing the passes one by one, sealing the way home.
Ahead of us the mountains stood white against the failing light, enormous, and somewhere past them the healer waited, and past the healer the thing that had called me across twenty-five thousand years, sick at the root of the world, waited too.
I let the dark take me. This time, though, I went down reaching back toward the thing in the east that was reaching for me, and I did not let go of the thread of it.
Somewhere far above me a wolf was singing me down into the dark, a bear was carrying me east through the snow, a king was kneeling over the fire that would be there when I surfaced again.
And the last thought I had before the grey closed over was not that I was dying.
It was that we weren't there yet.