Chương 94: What Doesn't Grow

Keth set his brother down the way you set down something you are afraid of breaking further, though there was no further left for Elian to break into. He straightened Elian's ruined arm along his side out of some reflex that had nothing to do with reason, tucked the collar of a coat that no longer had shoulders shaped enough to properly wear it, and stood. His knees did not want to hold him. He made them hold him anyway.

The field around him had gone the color of nothing — not white, not gray, some color between the two that the falling snow kept trying and failing to fully commit to. It fell slow now, unhurried, the kind of snow that belonged to ordinary winters, to ordinary nights, to a world that had not, an hour ago, watched something the size of a hillside die screaming under nine miles of frost. It did not seem to know the difference.

It settled over broken wings and broken men with the same patient indifference, filling in edges, softening what should never again be soft. The silence had a weight to it that Keth had never once, in a year and a half of learning what silence could mean, properly felt before. Lira's silence had always been a tool, shaped, deliberate, something built to be used and then released. This silence built itself.

It came from the absence of every single thing that should have still been making noise here — no birds, because the birds had gone quiet hours ago and simply never come back. No wind, because whatever Ashcroft had done to the air in her final minutes had stripped it of the will to move.

No voices, though Keth understood, distantly, that there were still voices somewhere behind him, soldiers gathered at the crater's ragged edge, murmuring low enough that the murmur itself felt like an apology for daring to exist in a place like this. None of them followed him in. He understood why, without needing to turn and check their faces for the reason. He had felt his own face, sometime in the last hour, stop being a boy's face. He did not know what it had become instead.

He only knew that whatever it was, it kept people at the edges of things now, the way certain weather keeps people indoors. He walked forward anyway, because the alternative was standing still, and standing still left too much room for the things waiting behind his ribs to finally catch up to him.

The first grief found him thirty feet in, unbidden, dragged up by nothing more than the sight of a torn scrap of gray field-coat half-buried in drifted snow, and it was not, at first, a grief that belonged to anyone whose name he could immediately place. He crouched beside it anyway.

Some habit of counting, of accounting, of never once letting a death pass entirely unwitnessed, a habit he had learned from Lira before he'd even understood he was learning it, and Lira was not here to teach him anything else tonight, Lira was somewhere behind walls he couldn't see with ice where a hand and a leg used to be, and the thought of her arrived with such sudden, total weight that Keth had to put one palm flat against the frozen ground just to keep from folding over entirely.

She lost a hand and a leg for this. The sentence sat in his chest, plain and enormous. She fought Warden with nothing left inside her but her own body, and then she fought this thing with everything a body could give and it still wasn't enough to keep the parts of her she started the night with.

He thought of her ice-limbs catching torchlight as they carried her away — pale, faintly luminescent, more elegant than anything a wound had any right to become — and understood that he did not yet know whether to call that mercy or simply a different, quieter kind of cruelty, one that would take years to properly measure. And Voss isn't here. That thought arrived close behind the first, colder, sharper at its edges.

Voss is behind a desk somewhere, filing whatever reports get filed after something like tonight, because they took the wall away from him a long time ago and gave him paper instead, and paper doesn't bleed for anyone, and paper couldn't have stood here and made any of this different even if they'd let him try. He remembered, with a clarity that hurt more than it should have, a cabinet Voss had once described and never built...

the smell of fresh-cut wood the old man had said he liked better than the idea of a sword, a whole life he'd wanted and been denied by a breach that took his father the same way tonight's breach had taken everyone Keth had left. He wanted, with a want so large it felt like its own separate wound, to walk back through however many miles of frozen dark separated him from that desk and put his head down on it and let someone else, for once, be the wall.

There was no one left standing close enough to be that for him tonight.

He found the second grief without meaning to look for it at all — a discarded practice-worn spear, snapped at the haft, half-swallowed already by drifted snow, and something in the specific angle of its break dragged a laugh out of him that had no humor left inside it whatsoever. Five feet, he thought, and the thought arrived in a voice that was not quite his own, warm and loose and gone. She said five feet. That's the same thing. It is not the same thing at all.

He stood over the broken spear a long moment, his chest working around something that would not quite become either a sob or a breath, caught somewhere painful in between the two. Aurelian had thrown himself in front of a falling spear without a single second spent weighing whether it was worth it.

He had done it the way he did everything that actually mattered — instantly, completely, no performance left in it, all the loose jokes and easy grins finally stripped down to the one true thing that had always lived underneath them. Carry on without me. Somebody's gotta keep making the bad jokes.

Keth's hand found his own mouth without his deciding to send it there, pressing hard against lips that had gone numb with cold and grief in equal measure, and he understood, standing in a dead field holding back a sound that wanted very badly to become a scream, that he had not properly said goodbye. There had been no time. There was never any time, on this field, for anything as small and necessary as goodbye.

He looked down at his own trembling hand, the ordinary left one, and thought, distant and strange: This is the hand that used to hold his sleeve when he was scared. This is the hand that isn't the one that changed. He did not look, yet, at the other one.

The third grief did not need an object to find him at all. It simply arrived, the way weather arrives, the moment his eyes fell on a smear of red frozen mid-spray across a stretch of untouched white a little further on, because red against white had once, a lifetime ago, meant something entirely different to him. Turns red, run. Turns green, you're already infected and running won't help.

He heard it in her voice, freckled and grinning, a vial held up to torchlight that no longer existed anywhere in this field or this world, and something in his chest gave the particular lurch that meant a memory had arrived faster than the will to stop it. Talia had taught him that test on his very first patrol, warm glass against his palm, a rite of passage disguised as a joke.

She had died long before any of this — a smaller field, a smaller horror, rot-spores in water she drank before he could stop her — and he had carried the shape of her ever since the way you carry a scar you've mostly stopped noticing, until something reaches in and finds the old, dead nerve of it anyway. He looked down at his own right arm.

It sat wrong against his side, pale in a way skin was not supposed to be pale, a faint reddish undercurrent threading beneath the surface like something pulsing there that had no business pulsing at all, and Keth understood, with a clarity that curdled his stomach, that if Talia were somehow still alive to test it — vial held to the light, one careful drop — there would be no color at all that properly described what waited underneath.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation. You taught me how to find the rot before it found me, he thought, and the thought did not stay whole as he thought it, it looped instead, folded back on itself, decayed at its own edges the way everything on this field had learned tonight to decay.

You taught me how to find it and now I am it, I am the thing the test was built to warn you about, I am the green that means running won't help, and there's no vial in the world small enough to hold what's sitting inside me now. He kept walking. There was nothing else, anymore, that his body knew how to do.

He found Ashcroft near the corpse's shoulder, and everything in him simply stopped for a while. She was not recognizable as herself, not in any way a stranger could have used to identify her, and Keth stood over what remained and understood that he was, perhaps, the only person left on this whole ruined field who could still put a name to what was lying there.

The ice-crown she had worn like something she'd never once asked to be looked at in had shattered into her own flesh, embedded, fused, the cold that made her had turned, in her last moment, into the thing that finally, fully unmade her. One arm was simply gone. Half of what had once been a face that could go dry and amused in the space of a single sentence was gone too, and what remained held no expression Keth could read, no final message left behind in it at all....

just ruin, patient and complete, already half-buried under the same soft, indifferent snow that had buried everything else here. Dramatic entrances get soldiers killed, he heard her say, three days and a lifetime ago, at a garrison gate full of soldiers too dazzled to properly listen. I find quiet ones considerably more efficient. Not enough of it, she'd said, later, looking at twenty survivors standing behind a Sergeant-Major's shoulder. Not this time.

They're yours now, she'd said, last of all, kneeling in blood-soaked snow with her own hands shaking from an effort she'd never once let anyone see cost her anything. I don't intend to let this field take one more thing from either of us without making it pay considerably more than it already has. She had kept that promise.

Keth understood, standing over her ruined shape, exactly how much it had cost her to keep it, and something in his chest cracked further, quiet and total, no tears left inside him yet to properly mark the cracking. Just a dull, endless ache where a woman used to be — a woman he had spoken to perhaps a dozen times, who had called him considerate without meaning to compliment him, who had made freezing a house-sized predator solid look, the very first time he watched her do it, like nothing at all.

You said thirty seconds. You never once told anyone what buying it was going to cost you. He knelt beside her a long moment, his knees sinking into snow already soaking through to skin he could no longer properly feel, and did not know what a person was supposed to say to someone who had died making sure he got to be angry about it instead of dead alongside her. He said nothing. There was nothing small enough left inside him to say.

He found the fetus a short distance beyond her, curled small and pale in a shallow depression the explosion had carved from frozen ground, and for one long, suspended moment his whole ruined body simply forgot how to do anything at all except stare. It did not look monstrous. That, more than anything else tonight, was the unbearable part of it.

It curled the way anything small and new curls against a world too large and too cold for it, translucent skin showing the faint, slow pulse of something working inside it that had no earthly right to be working at all, no larger than a newborn, utterly, obscenely peaceful. Ash-Sign. He understood it the way he'd understood the finger, the way he understood a great many things now without ever being told them — knowledge simply arriving, unbidden, uninvited, the way grief had learned tonight to arrive.

He thought, distant and strange, of a word carved into old, brittle paper that he had only half understood a lifetime ago, in a folio held open by a man who used to build furniture; thought that the missing half of that word did not feel quite so missing anymore, that something in him now understood it the way you understand your own name, without ever once having chosen to learn it. He did not let himself finish the thought. There was a colder one already rising to take its place. It gets to start over.

The words arrived plain, flat, entirely without confusion this time. It gets to be small and new and get another chance, curled up warm in the middle of everything it destroyed, and Aurelian doesn't get that. Talia doesn't get that. Elian is rotting in the snow behind me and doesn't get that. Ashcroft is lying twenty feet away in pieces she paid with her own hands and doesn't get that. And this thing — this thing gets to just begin. Again. Like tonight never happened to it at all.

Something old and buried stirred beneath that thought, a memory he had not touched in a year and a half — a seed, warm from a stranger's pocket, pressed into his palm outside a market stall by a woman with one clouded eye. Plant it. See if it grows. It hadn't grown. It had become a fungus instead, gray and wrong, something Voss had made him dig up and burn before it could finish becoming whatever it had been trying to become.

Some things aren't supposed to get to grow, Keth thought, and the rage that rose behind the thought arrived clean now, and total, no confusion left inside it at all — the first thing he had felt tonight, since the crying stopped, that belonged entirely and unmistakably to him.

He reached for the barrier the way he had reached for it a hundred times tonight, the old wordless certainty rising fast and sure in his chest — not this, not another beginning while everyone I loved only got endings — and felt, for the very first time in a year and a half of a body that had always, unfailingly, answered that particular call, nothing at all come back to meet it. He tried again.

The shape of the effort was the same, muscle-deep, worn smooth by month after month of a training yard, a testing yard, a battlefield that had asked this exact thing of him a hundred separate times tonight already. Nothing rose to answer it. No shimmer. No shape. Just his own hand held out over frozen ground, empty, useless, and a silence inside his own chest that matched, horribly, precisely, the silence lying over the whole wide field around him. Again.

He tried a third time, then a fourth, each attempt met by the same flat, total nothing where something had always, unfailingly, been — and somewhere around the fifth failed reaching, a cold that had nothing to do with the weather began spreading slow through his chest, because he understood, with the specific horror of a person discovering a wound they had not yet noticed taking, exactly what he was reaching toward. It's not thin. It's not tired. It's gone.

He pressed his own trembling palm flat against his sternum, searching for the shape of something that had lived there since a training yard, since a beast attack, since a boy had once decided, without deciding to, that someone he loved would not be harmed while he still stood breathing. I can feel where it should be. There's nothing there. I'm back where I started. I'm nothing again. Ash-Sign. Fifteen years old in an orphanage refectory with a kitchen knife and nothing behind me at all.

The dead tissue felt nothing. The old words rose in him unbidden, the ones he'd worn like a second scar for a year and a half, touching his own face without meaning to. The living tissue around it felt everything. Except tonight, reaching for the one thing that had always, always answered, he found only a second numbness sitting where the first one used to end. Not dead tissue this time. Just absence.

A whole shard of himself, carved cleanly out and replaced with something he had not yet begun to properly understand. His right arm hung heavy at his side, pale, threaded through with something dark and reddish that pulsed, faint and wrong, in time with his own hammering heart. He looked at it a long moment. Then he knelt.

He told himself, in the single clear breath before his hand moved, that he only meant to look closer. To understand the shape of the thing he was about to be asked to deal with, before the surviving soldiers finally worked up whatever courage it would take to ask him to. His fingers found the small, curled shape's skin before the rest of him had finished deciding anything at all.

I'm sorry, he thought, and did not know, even as he thought it, whether the apology belonged to the pale, pulsing thing beneath his palm or to everyone else the night had already taken, or to himself, kneeling here in the ruin of an entire life he no longer recognized as his own. The gray began exactly where his skin met its skin, and it did not spread the way gray was supposed to spread.

It spread the way a held breath finally, fully lets go — all at once, and then further, and then further again, flesh sloughing soft and wet beneath his palm in slow, deliberate waves that mirrored, with a precision that made something in Keth's stomach turn entirely over, the exact way the gray had once climbed his own brother's fingers and wrist and jaw in the churned red snow not an hour behind him. This is what happened to him. The thought did not arrive whole.

It arrived the way everything arrived to him now, looping back on itself, decaying at its own edges even as he thought it, an image folding into a memory folding into the same image again. This is what he became, lying there, and I couldn't stop it, and now I'm the one doing it, on purpose, with my own hand, to something that never asked to be born into a field like this one. The small shape did not scream.

It did not seem capable of screaming, not yet, not this new into whatever brief, borrowed life it had barely begun to hold. It simply came apart beneath his palm, quietly, entirely, its faint translucent pulse stuttering once, twice, and then simply, mercifully, ceasing to continue at all. In seconds, nothing remained beneath Keth's hand but dark, formless mush, steaming faintly against the cold, already beginning to freeze at its edges the way everything else on this field had learned, tonight, to freeze.

He knelt there a long time afterward, staring at his own hand, at what it had just done without his fully understanding how he had asked it to, and felt none of the satisfaction the rage had promised him only minutes ago. What he felt instead arrived slower, uglier, and considerably harder to look at directly. A flicker, small and shameful, of something that had wanted this.

That had reached for this ending the way his old self used to reach for a barrier — instinctively, completely, glad, for one brief and terrible second, to finally have somewhere to put everything the night had poured into him. He hated that flicker more than he had hated anything else tonight, more than the field, more than the frozen dark, more than whatever vast and ancient thing had died screaming under nine miles of ice to make room for the small, undeserving thing he'd just unmade with his bare hand.

It never got a chance to be anything at all, he thought, and the guilt of that thought sat heavier in his chest than any of the grief had. It didn't choose what it was born from. Neither did I. And I still did that to it, and some part of me wanted to. He did not have an answer for what that meant about him now. He only had the mush cooling beneath his palm, and the wide, indifferent quiet of a field that did not care, onight or ever, whether a boy knelt in the middle of it trying to work out what he'd just become.

The snow kept falling, soft and endless, settling white over a dead god's wings, over a woman who had bought two separate strangers thirty seconds apiece with everything she had, over a small unmarked patch of ground already vanishing beneath fresh frost. Someone approached him eventually. He heard the boots before he registered them as belonging to anyone real — slow, careful, the particular unhurried caution of a person crossing ground they did not trust and approaching a boy they trusted even less.

"Vane's asset." A woman's voice, young, unsteady, a Tally officer by the cut of her coat, though Keth did not turn to check.

"The Reckoner sent me to see if you—if you needed—" She did not finish the sentence. He heard her stop a few feet short of him instead, heard her breath catch on whatever she'd found in his face when she'd finally gotten close enough to see it properly.

"You're bleeding," she said, softer now, and he heard her shift closer, heard the small, human instinct in her, the same one that had made a stranger once press a hand to Aurelian's shoulder without a word two ranks over in a line that no longer existed. She reached out. He felt the air change before he felt her fingers, the warmth of an ungloved hand moving toward the shoulder of his ruined coat, meaning nothing more than comfort, meaning nothing more than you are not entirely alone out here.

Keth flinched away from it before he had fully decided to. He caught the shape of her face in the corner of his vision as he moved — confusion first, and then, following close behind it, the same careful, frightened understanding he'd already seen on every soldier gathered at the crater's edge. Not fear of him, exactly. Fear of what his own hand, resting so close to hers a half-second ago, might have done if it had chosen, even by accident, to answer. She did not try again.

She stood a careful distance back instead, and said nothing further, and Keth knelt alone in the settling snow with his ruined arm cradled against his chest, understanding, with a clarity colder than anything the night had yet managed to teach him, that whatever comfort still existed anywhere in this world, he could no longer safely let it reach him. End Of Chapter Ninety Four