Chapter 22
Madoc
My hand closes on nothing.
I had her. That’s what I can’t get past, kneeling there in the wreck of the high bloom with my hand still shut around the shape of her ankle that isn’t there.
I had her. One hand, the whole of her weight, and the pull of a god against me, and I’ve held loads that would crush a wagon, I’ve braced strains that brought down siege-walls, and I could not hold one small beekeeper against the thing that wanted her, my hand opened, the light took her, and she was gone between one breath and the next like she’d never been in my yard at all.
I kneel in the high bloom with the smell of her still on my palm, smoke and wax and clover, and for a while I am not a builder or a soldier or a man.
I’m just the empty shape where a woman was a breath ago, a hole in the world exactly her size.
I don’t know how long I kneel there. The bloom’s still up, green-gold and terrible over the meadow.
The town’s still ringed at the anchor, holding the joint I abandoned, and it held, because someone always holds the thing when you can’t, and the valley’s saved, the tithe’s mending, the working did its work. We won.
We won and she’s gone, and I would burn the whole saved valley to the black ground this instant to have her back, and I mean that, God forgive me, I mean it with the whole of what’s left of me.
I don’t care about the tithe. I don’t care about the town.
I don’t care about a single thing under the bloom except the empty air my hand’s still reaching into, and I would trade all of it, the valley and the peace and every soul in Thistledown, for the weight of her back on my palm.
That’s not a thing a good man’s supposed to feel.
I feel it anyway. I’ve spent five years being useful to everyone and owing nothing to anyone, and it turns out that underneath the useful man there was only ever this, a man who’d let the world drown for one woman, and I never knew it until the world took her.
Then Ordun makes a sound, and it’s the sound that gets me up off my knees.
He’s alive. That’s the first mercy in the whole ruined night.
The innkeeper and the clanswoman have got him laid out in the bloom, and he’s grey and there’s frost still in his beard that won’t melt and his two-fingered hand’s gone white to the wrist and stays white, cold-killed, dead flesh on a living man, and his breath comes shallow and slow and each one costs him.
But he’s alive. A hundred years of soldiering took the whole weight of a god through his own body to buy me the breath I wasted faltering, and it near killed him, and it maimed the hand he poured mead with, and he’s alive, and when I get down beside him his good hand finds my sleeve and grips.
He looks bad. I’ve knelt beside enough men after enough hard things to know the look of one whose body’s deciding whether to stay, and Ordun’s got it, the grey gone all the way into his lips, the breath too shallow, the cold that won’t leave him.
The clanswoman’s hands are pressed to his chest and her mouth’s moving in the old tongue and I don’t know if it’s medicine or prayer or just company, and the innkeeper’s got his head in her lap and tears running plain down her face, and I understand, kneeling there, that I might lose him too.
That the night might take both of them, the woman into the green and the old orc into the ground, and leave me a saved valley and two graves.
And I’ve only known him three weeks, this loud old maimed soldier, and he threw the whole of himself into my fault-line, and the thought of losing him lands nearly as heavy as the thought of losing her, which tells me something about what she did to me, the bee-girl, before the green ever took her.
She taught me to have people to lose. Three weeks ago I had none.
Now I’ve got a town, and an old orc dying in the grass, and a woman in a god, and the whole terrible weight of having things worth grieving, and I would not trade one ounce of it back for all the safe walled years behind me.
“Did she,” he rasps. “The girl. Did it.”
“She’s gone.” My voice isn’t mine. “It took her. Into the green. She refused it and it took her anyway, and I let go of the joint and I ran and I got one hand on her and it wasn’t enough, it took her, Ordun, she’s gone.”
The old orc’s eyes, grey and dimmed, find mine.
“Then you’re a fool,” he says, “if you’re kneeling here mourning her while there’s a green full of god not a hundred yards off with your woman in it.
I didn’t burn my own hand off holding your fault-line so you could kneel in a meadow being sad.
Get up. Go get her.” His grip tightens, the last of his strength in it.
“You held. At the end. You stopped being the wall alone and you held with all of us, and it saved the valley, and it wasn’t enough to save her, and now you go do the other thing.
The harder thing. You don’t build her a wall.
You go into the green and you choose her back.
That’s a different craft than holding, boy, and it’s the one you’ve been afraid of your whole life, and it’s the only one left that’ll do.
” His eyes slide shut. “Now let me rest. I’ve a wedding to be well enough to drink at.
Don’t you dare make it a funeral instead. ”
I look down at him a long moment, this old orc who threw a hundred years of hard living into my one weak seam because I faltered, whose pouring hand is dead white in the grass now for my sake, and I don’t have words to give him, so I take his good hand in both of mine and I grip it, hard, the grip of a man saying a thing he can’t say, and he grips back weak and sure, and that’s the whole of it, the whole conversation, two old soldiers who don’t say the rest of it.
He bought me this with his own body. He faltered for nothing and I faltered for everything and he covered my weakness with his living hand and lost it doing so, and the only way I can thank him is to not waste it, to get up off my knees and go do the harder thing, the choosing, the thing that isn’t a wall.
He’s right that I’ve been afraid of it my whole life.
A wall you build once and it stands and it owes nobody and nobody owes it.
A choosing you have to make out loud, at risk, with your whole self bare, knowing it can be refused, and I have spent forty years making sure I never had to stand that unguarded in front of anyone.
And now the only thing that’ll save her is exactly that, and an old orc’s dead hand is the price already paid to give me the chance to try.
I leave him with the innkeeper, and I stand up in the bloom, and I don’t know how to do the thing he’s told me to do.
That’s the terror of it, standing there.
Every hard thing I’ve ever faced in my life, I’ve faced with a tool in my hand and a trade in my head.
A wall to build. A strain to brace. A joint to cut.
A thing to hold. Give me a load and I know exactly how to stand under it; that’s all of what I am, the man who knows how a thing fails and builds so it won’t.
But there’s no load here. There’s no joint to cut, no brace to drive, no wall to raise between her and the dark, because she’s not on this side of the dark anymore, she’s inside it, and you cannot build a structure that reaches into a god.
I stand in the high bloom with my scarred useless hands hanging at my sides, hands that have never once in forty years not known what to do with a problem, and they don’t know what to do with this one, and I have never felt so helpless in my life, not in the war, not walking away from it, not any of the five silent years.
The one time it matters more than my own life, the trade that’s been the making of me has nothing to offer, and I stand there, the man who built the anchor, the man the whole watching town is looking to, having no idea at all how to save the one thing that ever mattered.
And that’s exactly when the answer comes, and it isn’t a tool, and that’s the point of it.
And the Keeper comes.
She comes soft and gold and dreadfully thin, spent near to nothing, the sympathetic one, the sad one, and she’s guttering like a lamp with the oil near gone.
I know her, even now, even wrung down to almost nothing.
This is the one Carys met the first night, the gold grieving voice that told her the debt was owed and said it like it grieved to say it.
The one who taught her the working’s shape.
The one who warned her, over and over, that grieved the two of us from the start in whatever way a thing made of the deep green grieves.
She’s been on our side since before we knew there were sides, the one kindness in a wronged and furious god, and she’s poured most of what she is into holding the tear steady while the working closed, so that the valley could be saved, and it’s cost her, I can see it’s cost her nearly everything, and she’s spending the last of it now to come to me.
A man learns, in a war, what a person looks like when they’ve given past what they had and are running on the dregs.
She has that look, if a thing of gold light can have a look.
She’s dying, and she’s used her dying to come tell me something, and I go very still and I listen.