"We're free," Cinder said.
His voice broke on the word. I want you to sit with that as long as I had to. I had heard that voice stay level while it ordered my mother's death. I had heard it make pleasant conversation over a blade at Denna's throat, heard it amused, heard it bored, heard it be twelve winters of my nightmares without once losing its footing. And it broke, on free, like any man's voice breaks, like a boy's.
He turned to the others, and they came together in the ruin of that place, and they embraced.
There was a desperate tenderness in it that they did not deserve. That is not a performer's flourish. I mean it plainly. Cities had crumbled at their touch. Whole languages had died to keep their secret. My troupe had burned to nothing on a whim of theirs between one town and the next, my father's hands stilled, my mother's songs put out. And there they stood at the top of the broken world, holding each other like survivors pulled one by one from a flood, shaking, some of them weeping, if the things they had instead of tears can be called weeping. Three thousand years is long enough to make anything pitiable. I have not forgiven the world for teaching me that.
Around us the mountain wore its new scars. Several of the standing stones had been toppled. Pulled down, clawed down, as ivy pulls down chimneys, by things that had poured from the door and kept pouring. Where Haliax had fallen, the stone was stained darker than the night around it, and even the creatures went around that place. Beneath the trilithon the black curtain still stood open, and the tide still came, shapes flowing out and up the crater's slopes and over its rim, out into a world that had spent three thousand years forgetting to lock its oldest door.
Denna was on her feet beside me, unsteady, her mouth still bloodied from the three notes. My hands made themselves into fists without consulting me, the left one whole, then, for one more hour. I ask you to remember my left hand whole, holding a fist it had no way to spend.
Because what was I, against the weight of their years? One man, swordless, twice-stabbed, shaking. One man with a pierced right palm and a name nobody would remember and no Name that could touch them. I had thrown Cinder's stolen sound at him once already and watched it land like a child's snowball. One man was nothing.
And then, out of the deep shelves where everything I have ever heard is kept whether I want it or not, a dry voice drifted up. A campfire in the Eld, years gone. Rain on wool, and mercenary patience, and Marten, plain, weathered, unkillable Marten, telling me with a tracker's certainty what he thought of my University sneer.
Call them the proper way, and they will come.
I had laughed at him. Not aloud, I had that much manner, but he had seen it anyway, as he saw everything, and he had not argued, because men like Marten do not argue about weather. They just carry the oilcloth.
I had spent my whole life putting my faith in the University. In sympathy and sygaldry and cold bright logic, in the belief that the world is a lock and the mind a key. But the Arcanum was two thousand miles away and a thousand years too young. And I stood on a mountain where the stones remembered being persuaded, beside a door that had just opened for three notes and a dead man's hope, on a night when the world had gone thin as the skin of a drum. If ever the old contracts still had force, it was here. It was now. Things were listening.
So I stepped forward, and drew the thin mountain air down to the bottom of my lungs, and I prayed.
I will tell it to you as I remember it, which is to say imperfectly, because I did not compose it. It composed me. It came up through me like the box-name, from below memory, from a barefoot boy in Tarbean sitting among broken men while Trapis told the only story he knew.
"Great Tehlu," I said, "who made the world and stayed to watch it. Whose wings were a roof before roofs were. Be a roof over me now."
The Chandrian went on with their reunion, oblivious. My voice sounded small even to me, one thread of warmth on all that cold stone.
"Tehlu, who looked on the world's sorrow and did not turn away. Who came down into the dirt of it and was born a child of your own making, and walked among us, and knew hunger and cold and all our small ruin."
Nothing. But the words were climbing now, as flame climbs dry wood, each one finding its footing on the last, and I found I could not have stopped saying them if I had wanted to.
"Tehlu, whom the fire was given and could not keep. Who came out of the burning unkilled. These are the fire's oldest friends. Watch over me."
Cinder's head turned. Slightly. As a man's head turns at his own name spoken two rooms away.
"Tehlu, who chased the swallower of cities through six cities and out the other side of each, and caught him in the seventh, and bound him to the iron wheel. These walked with him. Watch over me."
They were all turning now. The embrace was ending, arm by arm, and slate-grey eyes and black eyes and eyes I have not told you about were finding me across the broken circle, and every word tore out of me sharper than the last, and I did not stop.
"Tehlu, whose eyes see what is, and not what seems. Look at these. Look at them. TEHLU." My voice went up off the mountain whole, past the rings of stone, past all my training, a shout with nothing performed in it at all. "IT IS DARK, AND THEY ARE HERE, AND I AM ASKING THE PROPER WAY. WATCH OVER ME."
Silence, for the length of one held breath. Somewhere below the world's rim, thunder that had not been there before cleared its throat.
"Kill him," Cinder said.
His voice cut through what was left of the revelry, flat as a man ordering wood split, and they came. Stercus and Usnea closed from either side, fast, far too fast for things that looked as they did, while the others fanned wide along the ridge to pinch shut the only way off the plateau. I called the wind. No begging now, no ceremony. By that night the wind knew my name better than I knew it myself, and it knew my straits, and it came like a called dog that has decided the fight is also its own. It caught them both mid-stride. Stercus went up off his feet, all that boulder-weight suddenly a leaf's, and Usnea tumbled the width of the circle across bare stone, grey wrappings snapping, and neither of them cried out, and somehow that was worse.
But the others kept spreading. Four more, patient, wide, and the wind cannot be everywhere, and I had perhaps three more callings left in my body before it stopped answering to anything.
Then light split the world in half.
The first bolt fell like a judgment. I do not reach for that word loosely. I have seen lightning all my life, loved it, called its little cousins down copper wire in Kilvin's shop. This was not weather. It was bright as the birth of stars, bright enough that for one blinded moment the Chandrian were nothing at all but shadows painted flat against a sheet of white fire. Six stains on the light, in the shapes of people, as they must always have looked to anything that saw truly.
A second bolt carved the plateau open, and the crack of it was a word I could not hold, and fire spilled out along the wound in the rock. Across the circle Iax's creatures shrieked, the first sound I had heard most of them make, and recoiled from the light, and then turned on its source with the blind boiling fury of things that have only ever known the dark and have just discovered there is something else.
Then the angels came down.
Eight of them. I counted without meaning to. Some part of me will count things on my deathbed. Eight figures descending through their own light, wreathed in flame as the rest of us are wreathed in air, and their wings. I had always taken the wings for a priest's flourish, paint on a church wall. Their wings blotted out the stars in great moving swaths, and each of them carried a sword that burned without fuel and without end, and looking at those swords made my stomach clench like a fist, and looking away was not among the things the world was offering.
Trapis, in his cellar, with his cracked voice and his basin. Every word true. I have never decided what to do about that. I am telling you this story instead.
They did not descend like rescue. Understand that. They descended like the other half of the storm, and the mountaintop became a war. Angel-fire and old horrors, wings and joints and screaming air, stone melting along bright lines, the whole high bowl of the world ringing like a struck bell. Their war-songs had no words in them. Only fury, pitched like music, which is a thing I wish I did not know.
"Time to go." Denna's hand closed on my wrist, and her whisper had more sense in it than everything I had done that night.
We ran.
We ran as prey runs, with one single mind between us, toward the ridge, toward anywhere that was not here. Behind us creatures older than names howled at the stars they had been promised. Behind us the mountain shook itself like a wet dog. I had Denna's hand and she had mine and the ground was strewn with fallen stone and none of it mattered, we were going to the edge and over and down, we were going to live in the little way that had always been enough before. Cinder stood in front of us.
There was no crossing. One heartbeat the way was clear. The next he occupied it, unhurried, having moved through the space between in some fashion that space, I feel strongly, should not permit. His nose and mouth still ran black-red where the night's ruin had marked him. It improved him. It made him look at last like what he was.
"You thought you could slip away?" He stalked forward with his grey blade loose in his hand, black eyes gleaming with the pleasure I knew best in all the world, the oldest pleasure I could remember being aimed at me. "Foolish rabbits."
I threw the wind at him. Everything I had left. No fine work, no craft, a flat wall of air with my whole remaining life behind it, a blow that would have sent a horse tumbling. Cinder planted his sword in the mountain's skin and leaned into the gale like a man leaning on a fence, coat snapping straight out behind him, and waited for my strength to end, and it ended.
Then he moved again, that terrible way of his.
But not at me.
At Denna.
I do not remember choosing. There was no choosing in it. I have looked. I threw myself across his line as you throw a hand over a candle, and Cinder sidestepped without effort, caught my arm as I passed, and redirected me. That is the true and humiliating word, he redirected me, as a man turns a horse by its own momentum. I stumbled past him, and pivoted, and his blade had already come and gone.
It was so clean I did not feel it.
That is the truth about the finest edges. They charge nothing at the door. I felt the pull of the stroke, no more, a tug like a branch catching my sleeve. Then heat across the back of my left hand. Then I heard—heard, before any pain at all—the small sounds of three of my fingers striking the stone at my feet.
You will have seen my left hand, these three days. You have been courteous enough not to ask.
There.
Pain arrived a moment later, but it never got a fair hearing, because something else arrived first. It cracked open in the center of my chest, white-hot, wordless, older than the University and older than Tarbean and old as a burning wagon. And the scream that should have come out of me went the other way instead, inward and down, and became something with weight. I crashed into him before his blade could rise again. My shoulder took him in the ribs with every pound I owned, and I felt his balance break, actually break, for the first time in the whole history of the two of us, and his sword went spinning away across the rock, and we went down together in the ruin like brothers.
What happened then was not fighting. I have trained with the best killers in the world, and none of what they taught me was anywhere in it. My right fist, still wearing Alenta's hole through the palm of it, and I felt every knuckle's worth, found his face, and his nose gave under it with a wet crunch. I hit him again. My ruined left hand tangled itself in his white hair, screaming its new scream, and I drove the back of his skull against the base of a standing stone. Once. Twice. I was reaching for his eyes with my thumbs when his hands closed on my wrists.
And his strength was not human. It had never been human. It was simply that he had let me spend myself, as you let a child exhaust its tantrum, and now the lesson resumed. He threw me aside like bedding and came down on top of me. He hammered his fists into my face, methodical, unhurried, and blood filled my mouth faster than I could spit it, and something in my jaw went loose from its moorings, and through the ringing I could hear my own breathing turn wet and wrong.
Then he stopped.
One hand pinned my shoulder to the rock, and he waited. He was waiting, I understood dimly, for my eyes to come back, for the red to clear. He wanted me present. He wanted me to see.
And when my sight steadied, he smiled. The same smile. The one from the fire-ringed dark when I was eleven, the one he had worn among the bodies of everyone who loved me, unchanged, unweathered, kept all these years like a blade in oil.
So I gave him my ruined hand.
I raised what was left of it and drove it into that smile. Not a blow, there was no blow left in me. I ground the raw stumps of my fingers across his eyes, my blood into his sight, and he recoiled with a sound I had never heard him make, clawing at his face, blinded for one bare breath. I tried to roll free. His other hand found my throat and slammed me flat, and he snarled—snarled, wordless, the polish gone at last—but behind him, through the red haze and the angel-light, I could see Denna. Low to the ground. Circling wide, along the stones, quiet as everything she had ever kept from me.
Cinder found his sword where it had fallen. He rose, planted one boot on my chest, pinning me to the mountain, and the grey blade went up high against the burning sky, and I looked at it, because I was not going to spend my last moment looking at him.
Then he froze.
Behind him stood Denna. Breathing hard. Swaying. Her hand still wrapped tight around the handle of the knife she had driven into the side of his neck. A knife I had never once known she carried, which tells you, in one small terrible stroke, how much of her I never knew.
"Pity," Cinder said. His voice was conversational, unhurried, with a hand-span of steel standing in his spine. "You would have made a fine apprentice."
And he drove his sword backward.
He did not turn. He did not look. The blade went back under his arm with the same clean economy as everything else he had ever done, and it went into her, and Denna made a small sound. Small, folded, private, a sound I will be hearing when every other sound I have ever loved is gone.
What came out of me then had no words in it. It was not the wind's name. I want that understood, because it matters more than anything else I know about Names. I did not call. I had nothing left to call with. The wind came anyway. It rose off the whole face of the mountain at once and answered what my voice could not, erupting across the plateau in a gale that tore Cinder off me and off his feet and sent him tumbling like a rag over the broken stone. The wind and I had been master and servant, and then debtor and creditor, and that night, over her, we became something else that I have never found the word for, in any language, and I have looked in them all.
I was beside her before I knew I had moved.
"Help me up," Denna whispered.
Her hands were pressed over her stomach, and her blood came up dark between her fingers, and she said help me up. Not save me, not hold me, nothing that admitted anything. I obeyed without thought, because obeying her was the oldest habit I had. I got my arm around her and pulled her to her feet, and closing my ruined hand on her arm sent white fire from wrist to shoulder and I would not sell that pain for anything I own. We stumbled toward the ridge together, her weight coming and going against me, my blood and hers mixing on the ancient stone, going into the mountain with all the rest that mountain has been given.
And yet I turned. At the edge, at the last, with everything in the world telling me to run, I turned. I don't know why. I have never known why I turn. It is the one constant of my whole foolish life. Show me a thing behind me that will hurt to see, and I will turn.
Cinder stood in the wreck of the circle, and as I watched, he drew Denna's knife out of his own neck with no more concern than a man removing a splinter from his thumb. He looked at it briefly, a critic's look, almost approving, and tossed it aside. And his eyes came up and found mine across the ruin, and there was no rage in them at all. There was appetite, and there was patience, and I knew then, as you know winter is coming, that he would never stop. That there was no distance and no ocean and no year that would close this. The first errand of his first night under a free sky would be us.
But I was still looking at him when the cracks in me opened wide.
I have told you about the cracks. The fog under Renere took its pieces of me and left its doors ajar, and the drug and the days had been working at the hinges since. The world thinned. And I saw Cinder as he truly was. Not his face. All the way down, as I had seen the box, as seeing happens in the place underneath sleep. I saw a young man in Murella, in a city whose name is not in any book I ever found, and he was, I set this down because it is true, not because I can bear it, he was thought virtuous. I saw the small betrayals come, one and one and one, each with its good reason, each laying its thin coat of blood on his hands like lacquer, until the night he stood under his own people's silver tree with fire in his hands. I saw that first burning open a door in him that never afterward would fully close. And I saw the centuries pour through the gap. Torment on torment, year past year past year, the slow patient work of turning a man into an instrument of what once was done to him.
I saw all of it. I understood him entire, as I had understood Lanre an hour before, and pity stood in me right beside everything else, and I want you to know that I saw the whole of it and cursed him anyway. With full knowledge. With open eyes. Whatever that makes me, I signed it.
I lifted my ruined hand. My blood ran from the stumps in a thin line down my wrist, down onto the mountain, and the mountain took it, and I spoke.
"By my own blood, I bind you. By your own name, let you be accursed."
And then I said his name. Not the little sound I had shouted in Renere, the stolen syllables that had bounced off him like a beggar's curse. In Renere I had a word overheard. Now I had seen him, down the years, through the lacquer, to the root, and the long name at the root of what Cinder was rose up in me whole, and I turned it against its owner like a blade reversed in the hand, and the mountain shuddered to hear it said.
"This is my doom upon you. Your own name will turn against you. You and all who follow you will know no peace. This is my doom upon you!"
Cinder's face changed then, and I watched it happen, and I will not pretend it was no satisfaction. Amusement went first. Rage took its place, and under the rage, rising through it like a stain coming up through paint, was something I had waited twelve years to see on that face and had stopped believing existed.
Fear.
He lunged toward us. And light fell out of the sky. One of Tehlu's angels came down upon him, all wings and wrath and a sword like a piece of the sun, and the place where they met stopped being anything my eyes agreed to report.
Denna tugged my arm. Her voice had already begun its going-away.
"Let's go."