CHAPTER 41 #3
No doubt once you had been chained in the dark for long enough, you became afraid of daylight. Or perhaps of what those above would do if you tried to reach it.
“It’s safe,” she tried. Then she tried again in Latin, just in case, although she couldn’t imagine this haunted place had ever heard it. Down in the deep dark, something screamed.
Well, the devils could shriek all they liked.
He inclined his head, though. He had noticed that the Latin sounded different.
If he was Irish or Cornish, he would have no English.
They spoke older languages. Perhaps that was even what Hreod was—it certainly sounded ancient enough and wild enough—but if that was the case, then there was no way for her to speak to him.
For Christ’s sake, what had been the point of sending her down here?
Those people above must have known he wouldn’t understand anything she said.
“Does this sound any more familiar?” she tried in Greek.
Whether he understood Greek or not, he did seem to understand that she was trying to find a way to talk with him rather than at him.
He said something back. It was a language she didn’t know—it had a click in it—but it sounded maddeningly familiar somehow, like it was something she had overheard as a child, but it could have been anything.
A thousand languages elbowed each other around the markets and monasteries of Byzantium.
Very gently, she reached out and tugged his arm, then pointed upwards. The silver gauntlet shone. It was getting warm. It was hot in the mine.
He shook his head.
She opened her hands, hoping it read as Why not? in any language.
His eyes raked up and down her, and then snagged on her pack.
He held his hand out, with a flicker of a look at her, asking permission.
She gave it to him. He unbuckled it and looked through, then took out an apple.
He held it out in his palm for her to see.
She didn’t know what he wanted her to do.
“You—can have it if you want?”
He tilted his eyes down at it, and it turned to salt. Right there in his hand. It made a minuscule crackling noise. He closed his fist, and it shattered into salt chunks that pattered onto the floor.
She had heard of miracles before. Of course she had.
She heard about them all the time. She believed in them too.
But she had never seen one. In stories, saints fell down into jubilant prayer, but she couldn’t move.
All her joints were locked into place, and part of her mind informed her that if the world wasn’t going to work in the way everybody had agreed it did, then her bones wouldn’t be working too well either thank you; they were going to sit here until the world returned to its usual order.
He pointed again at the hole she had made. Go away.
An angel. They had chained an angel in the mine.
He said something. It was emphatic. She was certain it was Get out.
“No,” she said, and pulled the bolt from the closest manacle.
It fell off his arm. He looked down at it, then at her, and stayed still when she went around to his other side and opened the other manacle too.
“Why are you afraid? You could kill all of them.”
He looked tired, but when she took his arm and pulled to let him know she wanted him to follow her out, he let her.
Standing, he was tall. His hair fell to his waist, very dark against the white robe he wore.
He let her lead him out, and up, almost all the way.
When the daylight touched the path, though, he stopped and shook his head, as though he had been able to countenance the idea, but not the fact now that it was here.
“If they did this to you, I can take you away from them and you will never see them again,” she said. “Nor this place. You are . . . you do not belong buried underground.” She held her hand out.
He didn’t take it. He was standing back against the wall, out of the light. She could see he was about to run. He had been watching the uneven way she walked, judging rightly that she could go no faster than that.
She caught his arm before he could try. He pulled, but she got her boot behind his ankle and he went down with a slow bump, and then sighed from where he ended up on the ground.
She helped him up again, and this time, he didn’t run.
A little madly, she wondered if this what was what it boiled down to with Jacob too, and the one he had wrestled.
Had it really been a fight, or had he just towed something along and then given it a pull when it thought it didn’t want to be rescued?
“You can’t stay down there in the dark. You’ll go mad,” she said.
He seemed to see she wouldn’t change her mind.
The people from Hreodwater were waiting exactly where she had left them, clustered around the archway. They were singing. She didn’t understand the words, but she could tell that it was a hymn.
As he came into their view, he . . . changed.
The plain white he had been wearing shimmered into silver, brocade forming down his sleeves like frost, and through his hair, what looked like diamonds crystallised into being and forged themselves into a crown.
The Hreoda all turned away before he came out into the open.
They had their hands over their eyes. It was not what she had expected at all, not how anyone greeted a king or a priest, but it was clearly done with reverence, and the song never ceased, rising as high and holy as anything she had heard in the Hagia Sophia.
Snow was falling. Within a few minutes, the ground was white and frozen, and she stared around. What if she was wrong? What if he wasn’t an angel, what if he was some—ancient winter demon, the thing that people here used to make the turning of the seasons?
“They do not see what you see,” An El said, in perfect Greek, and she swung back to him.
“What?” she croaked.
He brushed his fingertips against his heart, the universal sign of apology. “You did not think I could speak to you, so I could not. But they know that I can.”
“I don’t . . . understand.”
“No,” he agreed, with the same unsayable weariness he had had when she bullied him out of the tower and above.
“But don’t be afraid.” He looked up into the snow, ice already frosting the crown, and the fog came down so heavily that she could barely see him.
“They see blinding light. It’s why they must turn away.
I stand here too long with them, and they would soon be blinded.
The fog helps, and the cold . . . is keeping you from burning any more. ”
“Any . . . more.”
There was sorrow written into his whole posture. “A few moments with me would have been enough. Even with silver armour, you were not made for this place. They sent you down there to die. You will die, soon. That was why I tried to make you leave. I’m so sorry, brave witch.”
“But I’m not burned. I feel . . .”
“Not that kind of burn.”
She watched him for a moment, halfway to amused. “All my life, physicians have told me what I cannot do. I don’t believe you are much different, sir. I’m made of better alloys than you might think.”
Wholly unexpectedly, he smiled. “Really? Well, that would be some fine witching indeed.” He studied her, but then his black eyes flicked out to the snow and fen, as if he had heard something.
After a few seconds, she did too.
Hoofbeats thundered on the ground. That horrible thump and chink of heavy armour.
Guttural French voices calling to each other.
She didn’t understand. It was somewhere between Latin and Norse, and the knights who spoke it were a terrible mixture of the most frightening sides of both too, Romans and Northmen, the discipline of one and the savagery of the other.
The old crack in her femur started to throb anew.
Someone must have told the garrison that something was happening here.
“We have to go,” she said. “They’ll burn this whole town. They’ve burned half of England.”
“Have they,” he said.
He looked into the fog, and she knew then that he could see through it as if it wasn’t there.
Snow eddied around him, coiling the ends of his hair.
“Yes, I see.” His eyes came back to her, and to the Hreoda, still singing, still covering their eyes, still facing away from him.
“Well, I will not hurt you any more than I already have, but there are other things to be done.”
“Other things?” she whispered, because the knights were close: they must almost have been at the edge of the shallow water between Hreodwater and the fen. Shallow enough for them to ride across.
He pointed through the fog.
Across the water, something was rising from the fen.
Towers, walls, battlements, rooftops that gleamed like diamond—God, it was salt—stairways swooping up the gantries from nothing, a titan edifice pouring peat and water from its angles as it powered upward fully formed, a miracle castle, greater than a castle: a citadel labyrinth.
Alarmed shouts in French pierced the fog.
Just visible through all the clouding whiteness, a great portcullis slammed shut. She felt the bang through the ground. It shook the rivets of the silver armour.
“They can ride there for as long as they believe they’re alive,” An El said, as if he had brushed aside a few spiders.
She wanted to say that she didn’t understand, but it was stranger than not understanding.
She could see that there was reason to this, some alchemy that had a system and a logic, but she couldn’t tell what it was, or how it was he was spinning the world into whatever matter he liked.
All the world was only atoms, water and air and fire and earth, all arranged in different configuration to make the illusions of different substances, so of course you could take them apart and remake them, but surely not like this . . .
And then—and then the great castle faded. The fen was only the fen, the fog rolled through the walls as if they had never been solid.
There were no more voices in French.