CHAPTER 14 #2
He looked into the dawn. Fenland sunrises were glorious, and he had never seen any like them anywhere else.
This one was sprawling mauve and orange right across the eastern sky, enamel-bright in the stillness of the Flood, as though it wasn’t water which didn’t look like water now but a sheet of polished bronze.
The snow was falling from the strangely shaped clouds, settling among the reeds, so undisturbed that even on individual leaves it was sitting an inch thick.
The cold made everything feel razor-sharp, every frozen line of every spider’s web vivid, every fold of the lily pads, every feather on the swans sailing north.
Further onto the fen, there was a fog bank, hiding the road to the Outside, tinted gold by the sun and violet by the wisps of salt light that hung in the air even that far from the mine. And in the fog . . .
In the fog, there were lights. High up, like there was a tall building out there; except there wasn’t. The closest lights should have been the halogens at the railway station, but that was three miles away. They should have been bright dots toward the horizon.
“Oh,” Avelyn breathed.
He had seen it once before, when he was small. He had convinced himself, looking over the memory as an adult, that it had just been a shape in the fog, but—it wasn’t.
It was a castle. It had not been there yesterday.
His heart tried to leap and sink at the same time. The result was a dizzy roll, half joy, half dread. He was about to cry; the burn was starting in his eyes. It was real. All these years, and he had honestly thought . . .
Of course it wasn’t real. It was a mirage. That was all.
Redspear let her breath out in a weary cloud. “Can’t let anyone cross. The town won’t be there. They might even get stuck.” She glanced across at him. “Might even come across the knights.”
“What’s she saying?” a man asked Avelyn. “We’ve got to get back: the overnight car park ticket runs out at nine, and the wardens are animals!”
Redspear looked annoyingly amused at the translation problem she’d just given him.
“She said . . .” Avelyn felt like someone had just asked him to explain quantum mechanics. Actually, that would have been much easier, because at least then he could have said, Honestly, I know all this about dead cats and boxes sounds mad, but you can look it up.
Well, they’d sent him here to translate. It wasn’t as though anyone was going to do it better, even if he made a nuclear disaster mess of it.
“Right, everyone, thanks for waiting,” he said, loud enough to carry.
He had no experience of talking to angry mobs, but if you could hold the interest of twenty demonic fifteen-year-olds who truly did not want to learn Latin, then probably it was no trouble.
“As you all know, Hreoda have their own faith and their own beliefs, and they take those beliefs seriously.”
Fortunately, everyone went quiet.
“If you look out into the fog over there, you’ll see some lights, high up. I don’t know what they are, or if they’re some kind of illusion—”
They aren’t, said Hreodwater Avelyn from by his fire deep inside. He was burning crucifixes to keep it going.
Shut the fuck up.
“—but here, people believe that those are the lights of a place called Caer Halen. It’s the palace of the Salt King—the god of the fen, and the mine.”
Tourists and clergy were peering into the fog.
“The Hreod belief is that close to Yule, if there’s snow, it is not our snow.
It comes here from the world of the Salt King.
Caer Halen is at the border of that world.
The ferryman thinks that if she takes you across now, and you were to follow the path .
. . you wouldn’t come out in the town. You’d be lost in another world, and you might even come to harm from some of the people in it. ”
It had come out sounding less mad than he had thought, because if you put anything in a straight line you could almost make it sound reasonable, but he could feel he was still in a dangerous twilight zone where someone could throw a shoe at him and say, That’s fucking ridiculous.
Hreodwater Avelyn laughed a low laugh.
He ignored it.
“I know that means you’ll be stuck here for another day and night, and I know it sounds crazy, but no one here will let you cross when the lights are on the fen.
If you try, you’ll be in real trouble. Hreodwater is not part of England: it has its own laws, and the Wolkvos Clan—that’s the police here—can and will put you in a cell if they want.
There’s also corporal punishment: if you’re violent, you’ll be flogged.
So, if you wouldn’t mind waiting in the warm up at the inn, the Witan will make sure you all have accommodation overnight, either up here in the town, or down at An El.
I’m sorry, everyone. This is just what Hreodwater is.
Any parking charges, any expenses you incur because of this, I’ll get you the address to send everything to. Keep your receipts.”
“But we’ve got to be back by tonight,” someone said. “We’ve left our little girl with my sister, she won’t know what’s happened—”
“It’s Tuesday, I’ve got to be at work later,” someone else said indignantly. “I’m supposed to be at the hairdresser at six tonight—”
“If the ferry won’t take us, can’t we just rent a boat and—”
Behind them, Avelyn could already see Wolkvos people deploying along the jetty, putting themselves between everyone else and the eel boats.
“The only way you’ll get across is to swim,” Avelyn said over everyone. “They’re not going to let you use the boats. You have to understand, they believe they’re stopping you walking into a place you won’t be able to find your way back from.”
He wished he could look up what those lights really were.
When he’d lived here, he’d had no idea what the internet was, and if you wanted to find something out, you had to ask someone.
But now . . . he felt cut off, like he never had as a child.
If he could just get three miles over the fen, there was a whole world of information, and probably there would be interesting articles about illusions and mirages, but standing here, all he could think was that the lights really did look like torches on high walls, and that he really could see the ghost of a portcullis gate.
“It’s just a bloody mirage,” an angry man snapped. “For fuck’s sake, this is mad. Why are you listening to a bunch of hippie morons and a professional kiddie-fiddler?” He waved at Avelyn. “If I have to swim over, then fine, I will. I have a job interview in the morning.”
The man jumped straight in with a splash whose waves rippled out violently enough to lap over the edge of the swans’ nest further along the shore.
The swans hissed, indignant. There were yells from the humans too.
There was ice among the sea lavender, and it was still a three-mile walk on the other side.
“Tell him to get back,” Redspear said to Avelyn.
Avelyn tipped his head, because he didn’t think the man was being unreasonable.
If it were him, he wouldn’t have listened to a Catholic priest and assorted Hreoda either.
He wanted the man to get across to the other side, stamp into town, and live angrily ever after.
“I don’t think he’ll die of cold. He’s quite big. ”
“No. Look,” she said, pointing to a bank of reeds.
On the far shore, hazy in the fog but silhouetted clearly enough by the sunrise, someone else was watching the man in the water.
There was a rider on a horse, face hidden by a helmet, cloak heavy across the shoulders.
When the horse breathed, the vapour cloud caught the fading sun and glowed.
Whoever it was, was holding a crossbow, and sighting down the bolt.
“Is that someone from the Wolkvos dressed up?” Avelyn asked.
The look on Redspear’s face was enough to show that it wasn’t.
“For the King’s sake—hey!” she yelled at the man. “Get out of the water! Come back, now!”
The man just had time to stick his middle finger up at her before the knight fired, and a bolt with wicked black feathers slammed into his ribs.
He collapsed backward with a shocked whoop, but there was already a dark stain in the water, and even from the shore, Avelyn could hear the wheeze from the wound as the man tried to breathe.
People surged to the edge of the jetty, then jolted to stop as they all wondered what the range was.
Avelyn hung in one of those uncanny, without-time moments when he realized that he knew more than everyone else.
He had grown up hunting on the marsh, and he had only ever used a longbow,13 because crossbows were, frankly, garbage.
The only reason people liked them was that a mechanism held the bowstring in place, not you, so you could aim for much longer without getting tired.
But even someone skilled would only coax two shots per minute from the things, because reloading them was complicated, and the knight wasn’t reloading yet.
In fact, it would be hard to do that at all on horseback.
The ones Avelyn had seen, you needed to rest them on the ground to ratchet the string back.
Which meant there was time.
Do it just do it just do it just do it—
Before he could overthink it, he dropped the satchel of samples and his coat at Redspear’s feet, told her not to let anyone touch them, and dove into the water.