There was a tension to the darkness. A feeling like a held breath, like a narrowed eye. A waiting, watching and impatient and still as a startled hare. A silence, but one that begged for an end.
Scal was not good at filling a silence. He never had been. Words came slow to his lips, slow as falling snow, and they were so easy to swallow. He was a man made of silences, made of all the words that he had never said. And so the quiet dark wrapped around him, familiar and foreign both. An old cloak, a favorite, that no longer fit as it had. A tune, so close to one he knew, but with notes that jarred like nails. He was a man used to silences, but this one fit poorly.
Silence, too, walked at his side. Vatri, wrapped tight in her yellow robe, was as quiet as when she searched for meaning in a fire. Eyes fixed, unblinking, waiting to hear the Parents speak. But she could not read the darkness like a fire. The Parents would not speak their voices into the Long Night. Still, though, her silence held. Her eyes held, looking anywhere but at Scal. He did not know how to ask her to speak, how to ask her to fill their silence.
Between them the makeshift torch. Not a torch at all, but a sword that burned with soundless fire when Scal’s hand touched it. It gave them a pool of light in the darkness, making the dark grass sea dance with shadows. The tall grass that brushed against the burning sword came away unburned. Untouched, by the quiet fire. The sword filled the space between Scal and Vatri, filled it with enough light that it could hide the shadows between them. That it could hide how deep that chasm ran, and how wide.
Scal thought, again, of reaching across that space. He had thought it often in their walking. Of reaching out to touch her arm, her shoulder, her face seamed by old scars and new worries.
But the sword was in his hand, and there was the light. The sword changed when he held it—grew flames from the touch of one hand, and ice from the other. Powers she had given him, though she said she simply worked the will of the Parents. He was the man she had made him. The sword burned, when he touched it. He did not know if she would burn, too.
His hand stayed on the sword. Tight, and unfeeling.
She had not reached across the space either.
The edge of the light from his sword touched against something taller than the grass. Sudden, a thing that did not belong. Scal shifted his grip, angled the sword, ready to strike. Vatri faltered, stumbled, and unthinking Scal reached with his other hand to pull her behind him. The tall thing did not move. Scal stepped forward, feet sure upon the ground, and still the other did not move.
“Tree,” Vatri breathed behind him. Her fingers touched his arm, a calming gesture. “It’s a tree.” A breathy laugh escaped her, as surprising a sound as any. Her fingers were warm through the thin fabric of his shirt.
“It is a tree,” he agreed. Said the words, useless as they were, so the silence would not swallow them back down.
Vatri laughed again, still softly, as though scared the world would shatter like the silence if she were too loud. “Like children spooking at shadows . . .” She shook her head, shook the laughter away. “We’re close to Fiatera, then. Once the moon comes up, we might be able to see Mount Raturo, see how much we’ll have to adjust our path. Here . . .” Her fingers pulled at his arm, pulled him forward closer to the tree. It was a small one, but the light from his sword showed taller trees behind it, and many of them, stretching away into the darkness. The edge of the Forest Voro, that stretched along the southern border of Fiatera.
Vatri’s fingers slipped from his arm. She looked at Scal, and he could not tell if the space between them was smaller or larger. She said, “We should stay outside the trees until moonrise. It will be harder to tell where we’re going otherwise. We . . .” She blinked. Looked away, and he could not tell whether she was looking to something else or looking away from him. “It’s been too long since we had a proper rest.”
“Yes,” Scal said. Voice like a croak. Hoping she would keep talking. He did not know how to keep a silence at bay. Of all the things that made him, he was a fighter, but silence was not a thing that he could fight.
She was facing away, and he could not see whether her eyes were on the distance or on him. “I’ll . . . gather some wood.” The sentence started a question, ended harder. A statement. A sureness. “A fire will be fine. There’s no one else around to see it.”
Scal kept his lips closed. Kept his silence. He did not want to argue, not now that they were speaking. Did not want to tell her that if they had come this far, there was no reason others could not have come as far in as much time. Did not want to say that there could be black-robed priests moving through the Long Night behind them, hidden in the darkness, hidden in the pool of black that stretched beyond the sword’s glow. Did not want to scare away her certainty or her words. Instead, he said, “I will help.”
Under the sparse cover of the young trees, they stayed close together. It was not wise to part, in the darkness lit only by stars. There was no knowing what danger lay beyond, and so they stayed close, the space between them like a chain, a bar. Never farther apart, never closer together. A turning wheel.
His one arm that was not holding the sword could still carry more than Vatri’s two, and so she piled sticks into his arm. Deadfall, where her roving hands found it, but there was not much. She jumped into the air, fingers wrapping around a half-dead branch, and for a moment she hung there. Arms stretched and feet swaying, and there was a small and childlike joy on her face. He stood far from her, distant, separate. Her joy was not a thing he could share. The branch snapped, and her feet thumped to the ground. She put the branch in his arm, and though she had to step closer to do it, the space between them felt no smaller. The silence had burst free, and it filled the circling, turning space.
“You are so calm,” he said. The words came before he could think of not saying them.
Vatri paused, bent in two as she poked through a pile of brush. Her still hands resumed, plucking at branches, and her voice was light: “Why shouldn’t I be?”
“This is not right.” Scal waved with the sword, the flaming sword that should not have been, at the unending dark around them. Her back was to him, but he thought, still, that she would see. “The world has gone wrong.”
“It has.” Vatri straightened. Put her small branches into the pile in Scal’s arm. Her eyes slid away from his.
Scal could not think of the right words to ask the question that shivered through him. He might have let the silence take hold again. Let it fill the space between them until they were nothing but two strangers. Divided by the sole piece of light in the dark world. But the thought of it made him ache. “You are so calm,” he said again. The closest he could come to asking, How?
She walked past him, back to where the trees shrank to tall grass. He followed. There was nothing else for him to do.
He dropped his armful of sticks and branches, and it made a mighty crashing, cracking sound that set birds screeching somewhere not so far off. He remembered a night—a short night, but just as dark—when Vatri’s shouting had woken birds, and Scal had laughed until his belly hurt. It had been a life ago. He had been a different man then, and there was no laughter in him now.
How many rebirths since then? One, surely. Waking in Aardanel, beneath the glow of the everflame, where the shadows of all the other lives had seemed small. But Aardanel had burned, and he had gone south again. Was that a new life? The wandering, the waiting. He had stepped unburned from the great bonfire Vatri had built—that, surely, was an ending and a beginning. But he felt no different from the man who had woken before the everflame. No different, truly, from the boy who had seen the everflame for the first time. Felt its slow warmth reaching to the tips of his fingers. Flames as warm as the voice of the red-robed priest. He had not come so far from that boy. Lost, alone for all that another body stood nearby, cold for all that fire licked near his skin. Seven lives, or one?
“Scal,” Vatri said. “The fire.”
He knelt, set aside the sword so that its fire-glow died. Only the stars to guide him, and the pads of his fingers. He arranged the twigs and the sticks and the branches, and a few careful strikes of his flint set a spark alive among the twigs. He fed it, let it grow strong enough to chase back the darkness. He looked across the tops of the flickering flames, to where they shone in Vatri’s wide eyes.
There was the look in her face. The searching look, the listening look. Waiting for the flames to speak, or her gods. She had never told him how it worked, but he knew better than to interrupt her. And so he sat in silence, watching the flames, too, and ignoring the twisting in his stomach that was half hunger and half fear. Clinging to the pop of wood, the hiss of fire.
“I’m calm,” she said, hardly louder than the fire’s sound, but still it might have startled him if he had not been listening for her voice, “because this isn’t the end. Not yet.”
Scal thought of all the black-robed preachers, the sea of them gathered around the hill where the Twins would rise. Shifting and writhing like a swarm of flies on a corpse, their number beyond counting. “You think we can fight them.”
He could not tell if her eyes were on him, of if they were only on the flames. “I think we don’t have a choice.” She almost smiled. “And that makes things simple, doesn’t it?”
Scal looked to the sword that lay at his side, that would line with fire or with ice if he touched it. He did not let his fingers near it. “I am only one man.”
“You’re not alone. We’re together in this, Scal.”
“We are only two.”
The fire-sounds filled the night again. It was not a large fire, nothing like the one that Vatri had built for him to walk into, nothing like the flames that had licked at the belly of the sky. But it was a fire, in a world where the sun had died. Anyone walking through the Long Night would see the flames. Perhaps no one would see, no one would come. Perhaps it would draw fellow travelers, grateful for the light and the warmth, grateful to stack their numbers against the night. Perhaps it would draw in the black-robed preachers, the endless sea of them, with their anger and their triumph and their hatred of the light. He knew he should turn from the fire, let his eyes soak in the darkness so that he could see any moving shadows. See any threats before it was too late. But he could not look away from the flames. Could not look away from the woman beyond them.
“You don’t see it, do you?” Vatri’s voice was still soft, and the screen of flame between them made her moving lips seem to dance.
He had tried so often, when they had traveled together, to see the things she saw within the flames. It had never worked. He was not touched by the gods. He was not chosen. He did not know, sometimes, if he believed there was anything to be seen within the fire. “No,” he said. “I do not.”
“Look,” she whispered. “Look.”
For her, he tried. Staring into the fire as it blackened the wood he had fed to it. Bark curling away, the strong wood beneath cracking and fracturing, spreading open a dozen mouths of fire. A line of smoke twisting into the air, lit by the flames below. Almost like a dancer. He had seen a woman dance at a festival once, beauty and grace, and it had hurt that nameless place in his chest to watch her. The flames reached, always reaching, always hungry. They would eat the world, given half a chance.
“I see nothing.”
The flames twitched toward him with Vatri’s sigh. She rose, not as graceful as that long-ago dancer, but nearly. When she sat beside him, it stirred that same nameless place. Without the fire between them, with her arm almost touching his, he did not know how small the space was between them. Smaller, surely. Her head only reached his shoulder, but her eyes were wide and clear when she looked up to him, and the flames did not reflect in them at all.
“Are you cold?” she asked.
“I am not.” The blood ran warm in his veins, his own flesh a shelter against the cold of the North. “Never.”
“Am I cold?” She held her hand toward him, her fingers near his knee, but he hardly saw it for her eyes. Wide and bright as the slow-waning moon, clear and lovely. The dancing light and the shadows it cast played across her face, and they melted away the damage a different fire had done. Smoothed away the old scars and the warped ridges of flesh, made her soft. She was so close. Nothing between them, nothing at all. “Scal?”
He reached for her hand, held her fingers gentle in his. They were warm as summer, and the skin of her palm was smooth, untouched by that old fire. “No,” he said. She was warm. She was life.
“Do you see?” Her voice rose with excitement, fingers tightening in his. Her other hand rose to clutch his. There was a touch of fire in her eyes, the flames creeping in from the edges.
He saw her. Fire or no, he saw her. But with the flames in her eyes, he did not think she saw him. “No,” he said. Regret, for the things he could not see, and the ones he could.
She sighed again, heavier this time, and dropped their clasped hands to his knee. Did not let go, but her fingers were looser. Her eyes slid away, looked to the fire, flame-bright, before she looked down at their joined hands. She ran her thumb across his knuckles, and he could not see her eyes. “It’s warm, Scal. It shouldn’t be, but it is. The sun’s fire warms us all, and with the sun gone, it should be worse than winter. But it’s not! It’s no colder than before they took away the sun.” Thumb over his knuckles, smooth skin trailing back and forth over the roughness of his hands. “Do you understand what that means?”
Scal did not want to think. There was so much, too much, and he did not know how to handle any of it. Better, surely, not to think. To be led again, to follow. To not have to think, or to hurt. “No,” he said, staring at her thumb drawing shallow circles.
“It’s still there. The sun. It’s not gone, not at all, and that means they’ve done something else to it. It means they’re not nearly as powerful as they want us to think. It means we can fight them.”
Too much. Always, too much.
In another life, or perhaps it was still the same one, he had asked Vatri to shape him. To make him whole, to make him a better man. A good man. He had asked, and she had done what she could. He had asked, though. “Yes,” he said, squeezing her fingers, looking up to meet her soft smile and her flame-touched eyes. It was easier. “We can fight them.”