CHAPTER 52
Caer Halen
It was snowing. Avelyn had never been in snow without seeing it before, but it was good: it was a blizzard of cold white noise. He couldn’t tell when or where the next tiny frozen touch was going to be. If he tilted his head back, he could see that there was light out here—sunlight, not salt.
“Can you see at all?” Jericho said, and he was Jericho.
The kind man who found himself defeated by snails wasn’t a lie.
He put something around Avelyn’s shoulders, heavy and warm: a cloak lined with fur.
They had come out onto the castle battlements, and the wind was cutting.
It always was over the flat land here, with no mountains to soften it.
After the heat of the salt light in the cave, it was shocking, but good.
He turned his head back the way they had come.
The short corridor had led straight from the King’s chamber, only a few steps, even though it had taken hours to walk there in the first place.
“A little bit. Is it daylight?”
“Dawn.”
Avelyn turned properly to face him. He could feel where he was; there was no more roiling ball of blinding exaltation, but Jericho felt like he always had, like waking on Yule morning.
It was as distinct a feeling as north. He could have navigated by it.
But he could also make out the place where Jericho was standing in front of him, a slim patch of shadow. “What’s it like out here?”
He knew that if he could still see, he would see angels on the fen, maybe thousands of them seething towards the castle.
He could feel them close by, the furious exaltation, and hear them singing—there was an army out there, and more were coming all the time, soaring overhead and landing in blasts of salt.
Here and there, just, he could see the flashes.
Jericho touched his throat to angle his head up, and maybe to shock him out of listening to any of that. “It’s lovely,” he said.
Avelyn brushed Jericho’s knuckles, not sure that he should, or that Jericho wanted him to. He wished he could see him, just to have something more of him to read than his voice. A kiss didn’t mean that he had permission for anything else.
“There’s nothing else here. There’s just us.”
Jericho was shielding him from the wind, and suddenly Avelyn was fiercely glad he was small enough for that.
Maybe from staring into the nuclear furnace of the salt light before, maybe from not sleeping for he had no idea how long now, the nerve down his skull and the nape of his neck hurt in the comfortable way things only hurt when you have time to feel them.
Jericho must have noticed, because he slipped his fingertips under Avelyn’s hair and pressed them into the ache.
He was wonderfully cold. Against the shadow shape of him, there were glimmers, constellations of salt light: there must have been beads in his hair, or something worked into his clothes.
“There’s so much snow. It’s beautiful. The road just looks like a white ribbon.
The horses are playing in it. It looks how it did when I first came here. ”
It was good to know the horses were all right. “When was that?”
“A long time ago. When there were mammoths. This was all ice then. There was a great glacier that reached almost to here, all the way from the north. The people here followed the herds. They didn’t hunt them, they just knew that mammoths were good at finding pastureland.
” Avelyn could hear that he was smiling.
“After a while, if the mammoths saw wolves, one of them would come back here to fetch the hunters. Everyone got a wolfskin blanket, and the mammoths were happy.”
Avelyn smiled too. He liked the idea of an official diplomatic alliance with some mammoths. “I saw mammoths before. Inside the castle, when . . . there was a part that went outside. You have a whole world in there.”
Jericho laughed a little bit. It sounded like a choir laughing. “Not me. There are other witches than human ones, and other things to make their worlds from the light. The matriarchs of the herds knew of me long before the hunter clans.”
Now, there was magic. Avelyn let his head rest forward against Jericho’s chest, daydreaming of mammoths and their witches. Jericho made the quietest surprised sound.
“Can you see Hreodwater from here?” Avelyn asked.
Jericho turned his shoulders to look, or at least, the shadow-figure of him moved, and a ripple of something that might have been silver-black cloth coiling in the wind. “Yes. And there are lights.”
“Really?” Avelyn said, because even though he was concentrating his whole soul on believing what Jericho was telling him now, there was no escaping the oh-look-convenient-stairs snowball fight.
What was truly happening in Hreodwater? Was it just a ruin of salt?
The angels were raging. Was Jericho looking at tumbled salt blocks that nobody would even recognise as buildings as the fenland wind tore the grains apart, and dissolved them into the Flood?
“Really,” Jericho said. His voice came softer and lower. “And the sun is rising. The Flood is all purple and gold.” He laughed a little bit. “There’s an eel owl on the ferry jetty.”
“And there’s just us here,” Avelyn said again, thinking of how the fen looked when it was empty in the winter—vast, eerie, unbroken, except for the pennants of Caer Halen snapping in the mist that never quite faded. It hadn’t changed since Saint Hildegard had come here. “And—perhaps some mammoths.”
Jericho was holding him by his ribs under the heavy cloak now. “It’s just us,” he promised. He kissed the top of Avelyn’s head, and Avelyn had never felt so safe. “And perhaps some mammoths.”