CHAPTER 38 #2
They had to weave between close-spaced pillars of halite.
Every so often, it was possible to see which of them used to be someone who had visited Hreodwater.
Embedded into the salt, there were silver Hreod charms that hadn’t turned, a silver scarf, a jumper with the same purple-and-green Clan Teksa weave as Jericho’s.
That was worse than the ones who had just changed wholly.
Jericho had to turn sideways to slip between a tall pillar beside a little one.
The little one was still holding a Hreod doll, the ones they made of Saint Hildegard with silver cloth for armour and a long plait of deep black wool for her hair.
“It feels like being in love,” Avelyn said, because he had to say something that wasn’t, My God, how many people are we walking past? “The—way those things . . .”
“No, it doesn’t,” Jericho said, with fractures in his voice. They were among a group of waist-high salt shapes all huddled together. A school trip. “It’s like being in love with someone who won’t ever love you back. Adoration wasted. It’s awful.”
“Ah,” said Avelyn, who had never known any other kind of adoration.
They were out of the crowd of salt standing stones now, on the narrow path back towards Hreodwater and the customs house.
A beacon fire was burning on the roof there.
Someone had realized what was happening in time to light it, at least. Avelyn wondered if anyone had seen it in time, and if they had, what the Witan had ordered.
To evacuate, or to get everyone inside at An El?
Nothing moved but the flames.
“How are you doing?” Avelyn asked.
“I’m fine?”
“No, I mean you don’t like being outside.”
Jericho tilted a small smile at him. Usually he looked for much longer than Avelyn could stand, but he dropped his eyes fast this time, and let a fall of black curls hide them. “I’m fine,” he said again.
Avelyn stood on the edge of it for a moment, then took his hand. “I’m not angry,” he said.
“Really?”
“Really.” Avelyn kept Jericho’s hand, and Jericho leaned into him just enough to touch their heads together before he straightened again. “Thank you. For stopping me going towards the—God, I should have said that before. Thank you.”
“Oh, well, you know,” Jericho said miserably. “Always here to do things disturbing enough to shock you down to your soul.”
Avelyn almost said that the reason it had worked was that it was the opposite of disturbing. He couldn’t say that. “About before, in the mine, when I set your sleeve alight . . .”
“We don’t need to—”
“Yes, we do. Look . . . Christ says that no one reaches salvation but through him, but—for my money, you can be full of grace and goodness and never think that it’s from God, and that’s fine, because it makes no difference how you think of it.
Red is still the same even if you call it akai or rot or hong.
God is goodness and goodness is God, so—if you’re a good person, even if you think Catholicism is garbage, then fantastic, salvation is yours, you know God very well even if you don’t think so.
But I was scared, because . . . maybe I’m wrong, and maybe it’s all exactly as cruel and vengeful and petty as you think. ”
He saw Jericho turning that over, looking at it from different angles. “Why were you thinking about that?”
“Because I’ve never met anyone as good as you.
I just—want you to understand that when I say God, I don’t mean a king in the sky.
I mean goodness which is conscious. And when I said that rejecting God is the same as rejecting goodness, I did not mean you cannot be good if you reject the idea of some authoritarian tyrant on high, that’s stupid, of course it’s stupid.
I just mean you can’t be good if you reject the notion of goodness.
Does that . . . make any kind of sense?”
“Yes,” Jericho said.
“Are you lying?”
Jericho smiled. “Yes. Do you never think it’s all just a pile of very convoluted oddness some peculiar men wrote down once and everyone took too seriously?” He tilted his head.
“Do you ever look at quantum theory and think that?” Avelyn said back.
“Don’t . . . say ‘replicable results.’ You aren’t doing the quantum double-slit experiment every second Tuesday to make sure it’s still right.
You just trust the experts who get the results because they all agree after years of peer review.
So do I. So do mine. Just—the way that you see Einstein, and Lovelace, and Galileo?
That’s the way I see saints. They did things and discovered things that are important. And true.”
“Okay,” Jericho said.
“Okay?” Avelyn said, tentative.
“Okay,” Jericho told him again.
They were looking at the same painting, and Jericho thought it was nauseating, and Avelyn thought it was beautiful, that was obvious, but it was better than fighting.
They had reached the stables, and the horses were still there: looking puzzled about the light, and whether or not that might have any implications for their usual supply of apples, but whole, and still horses.
Jericho put his lamp on a fence post close to the standing stone that had once been Matthew, and helped Avelyn lift down tack and saddle two tall mares who were keen to investigate everyone’s pockets.
Jericho opened the paddock gate to let the rest of the herd out onto the fen, so that at least they would have plenty to eat out there in case nobody came to feed them.
The snow was falling thickly again, and the air zinged with salt.
A foal put one foot into a snowdrift, bewildered.
Some of the others cantered out into the dark, running for the sake of running.
As Avelyn and Jericho were fastening the last of the buckles on the saddles, a stag walked past. It was like the one from the mine, but this one was even taller.
Avelyn could have stood between its front legs and only just been able to stretch enough to brush the fur on its chest. Although it was a mighty thing, it made barely a sound as it paced over the salt-frosted grass.
Between its antlers, it had a salt crown.
Avelyn went still, and put his hand back for Jericho.
The calm golden eyes settled on them both for a moment, and then, a leviathan shadow in the night, the stag walked on.
Jericho was looking out across the fen. Avelyn did too.
There were lights.
As the breeze moved a bank of fog and salt light, he caught the silhouette of high battlements.
Watch your north.
He turned slowly all the way around. The town was behind them, salt-ruined and dark, but still there. The customs house. The stables. South, southeast, and . . . so, Hreodwater should have been due north up this path.
The path didn’t lead due north. It was veering northwest, towards the lights and the castle that shouldn’t have been there.
“We can’t go there,” he said. Stories crowded into his head.
The cursed knights who rode forever on the fen, not knowing they had died a thousand years ago; the children who went out into the snow to catch eels, and never came home; the witches who lost their minds and walked into a blizzard, knowing they wouldn’t walk out the other side.
The rare soul who befriended the King, and who he saw safely home, with a treasure trove of silver.
Behind them, the salt light was vicious. The insane joy was a pressure on the back of his head, and it was getting closer. Something was coming this way.
“We can’t stay,” Jericho said.
They both stepped up in the stirrups and guided the horses onto the path that did not go north.
Ahead of them, the lights of Caer Halen brightened.