Chapter 20 #2
“Hold, you great fool!” he roars at me, and the cold pours into him where it was pouring into my doubt. “She chose! Now you choose! Don’t you let her stand out there having chosen while the man she picked falls to pieces over getting to keep her! HOLD!”
And it’s Ordun’s voice, an old wronged soldier choosing to stand in the breach for two people he decided to love three weeks ago, that mends the seam in me.
Because that’s the answer, isn’t it. It’s been the answer the entire time, and I was too busy being a wall to see it.
The fault in me was never that I couldn’t hold.
I can hold. I’ve held all my life. The fault was that I believed I had to hold alone, that being chosen was a thing a useful man didn’t get, that the wall stands by itself and owes nobody and is owed nothing back.
And here’s an old orc throwing his own dying body into my fault-line so I don’t have to hold it by myself, here’s a whole town with their hands on the anchor I couldn’t hold alone, here’s a woman out at the seam who chose me out loud in front of a god, and the god found the one place I never learned to hold and it turns out the only way to hold that place is to let someone hold it with you.
The being-held is the thing that lets me hold.
Ordun in the breach, the town on the joint, Carys on the note.
I am not the wall. I was never supposed to be the wall.
I’m one man in a line of them, and a line holds what no wall ever could.
I get my hands back on the joint. I stop trying to be the wall. I let the town hold me, and Ordun hold the seam, and Carys hold the note, and I stop faltering, and the anchor stops trembling, and it holds, all of it, together, which is how it was only ever going to hold.
But Ordun’s in the breach when it holds, and a god’s whole owed fury is pouring through him, and a hundred years of soldiering can only take so much cold.
He goes down.
He goes down slow. That’s the mercy and the horror of it both, that it isn’t quick.
He holds the seam until he feels my hands come back sure onto the joint, until he knows it’s mine again, until he’s certain the thing he threw himself into won’t reopen the second he lets go, an old soldier holding a line until relief arrives and not one instant longer than he has to and not one instant less.
And then, once it’s mine, once I’ve got it, he lets the weight slide off him and he folds down into the high bloom at the foot of the anchor, slow, boneless, like I’ve seen strong men fold when the thing that was holding them upright finally stops.
The cold’s all through him. I can see it.
His eyes have gone to that terrible not-there grey I’ve watched take children and never once wanted to see take him, and there’s frost in his beard that won’t melt in the summer night, and his hand, his two-fingered hand, the one he poured a hundred years of mead with, the one he jabbed at me the first day and gripped my wrist with hard enough to bruise, has gone white to the wrist and still.
The innkeeper’s screaming his name and dragging him back from the breach by his collar.
The clanswoman’s on her knees in the bloom with her hands pressed flat to his chest, saying something low and urgent in the old tongue.
And the working’s holding, the anchor’s blazing, the valley’s saved in the same breath, and none of it, none of it matters to me as much as the grey stillness of the old orc in the grass, Ordun, who declared there would be a wedding and meant to drink at it, who spent a hundred years surviving a war he should have died in only to throw the whole of it into my one weak seam for two people he decided to love three weeks ago.
“Ordun—” I can’t leave the joint. If I leave the joint we lose everything he just bought.
I hold the anchor with everything I’ve got and I watch the innkeeper drag the old orc back from the breach, watch the clanswoman press her hands to his chest, watch a warm brave stubborn old soldier lie grey and still in the high bloom, and I hold the joint, and I can’t go to him, and it’s the worst thing I’ve ever had to not do.
And then the tear in the world flares white, and the green light gathers, and the grudge-envoy, denied and dying and enraged, makes its last reach, not for the town, not for the tithe, but for the one thing it decided it wanted and was told it couldn’t keep.
It reaches for Carys, and this time it doesn’t offer. It takes.
And I see it coming and I can’t stop it.
That’s the horror I’ll carry the rest of my life, the half-second where I see the green light gather and aim and I know exactly what it means to do and know I’m too far and too late and holding the one joint I can’t let go of.
Because she’s too far out. Past the anchor, past the ring, past all the warded holding ground, out at the seam where she had to kneel to sing, alone, the one of us who had to stand beyond the wall to do her part of the work.
The working holds the valley. The anchor blazes.
Forty hands hold the joint. And none of it reaches her, because she’s outside all of it, she was always outside all of it, the bee-girl alone at the edge of the green with her whole self thrown open, and the god reaches past everything we built straight for the one soul standing where nothing could guard her.
The green light closes around her like a fist. I see her whole small shape lift off the ground in a column of green-gold light, her arms flung wide, her flyaway hair lifting, her mouth open on a word I can’t hear over the roar of the working, and the tear in the world yawns wide behind her to pull her through.
“CARYS!”
I let go of the joint. I don’t decide to. Every promise I made, the face and not the wall, the trust, the holding, all of it goes, because she’s being pulled into a god and I am a man made entirely of the need to not let that happen, and I let go of the anchor and I run.
The town’s hands catch the joint where I left it.
The dairyman, the candle-seller, the smith, forty pairs of hands closing on the anchor where mine were, because someone always holds the thing when you can’t, because that was the whole lesson, and they hold it, they hold my valley for me while I run for the one thing in it I can’t live without.
I’m already gone. Tearing across the high bloom toward the column of green-gold light with her rising in it, her small shape lifting, her arms flung wide, and I have never moved so fast in my life, not in the war, not from anything, and it still feels slow, it feels like running in a dream where the ground pulls at your feet, because she’s going up and away and the tear is opening to swallow her and I am not going to reach her in time, I can see that I’m not, and I run anyway.
And I get there. Barely. I leap the last of it and I get one hand around her ankle, one hand, her whole weight that used to be nothing at all, that I lifted a hundred times like she was made of feathers, gone impossible now, gone anchor-heavy against the pull of a god that means to have her, and I hold.
I hold like I’ve held every failing thing my whole life, knowing exactly how it breaks and holding anyway.
The light hauls her up. The tear hauls her in.
My one hand’s locked around her ankle and my feet are furrowing the bloom and my whole body’s stretched out straining between the earth and a god, and I am not, I am NOT, going to be the wall that failed her.
Not this one. Not her. I’d let go of the whole world before I let go of her ankle.
I told her once I’d grieve her rather than cage her, and I meant it, but this isn’t the green offering her a cage, this is the green stealing her out of her own chosen life, and there’s no promise I ever made that says I have to let a thief take her, so I hold, and I roar up into the light the only thing I’ve got left.
“I’ve got you,” I roar up into the light, though I don’t know if she can hear me. “I’ve got you, I’m not letting go, you choose, Carys, you hear me, YOU CHOOSE—”
And the light takes her, and the tear closes, and my hand closes on nothing, and she’s gone.