Antlers.
I want to be clear about how wrong that was. Dogs with no faces, I’d got used to, the way you get used to a bad smell. But this was a stag. A big one, the kind they carve on inn signs, rubbed out the same way the dogs had been, grey all through, no eyes, and its antlers were white with frost right to the points.
It stepped through the gap in the stones and stood there, and the other five stood behind it. They were deer too, I saw now. Tall and thin, heads low, drawn in pencil and half rubbed away.
They didn’t make a sound. Of course they didn’t.
The lamp by my knee went out.
“Ilsa,” I said.
“Fire and light.”
“Yes.”
She cast the flame. It stood up in her palm, gold, and the stag turned its no-face towards it, and the flame didn’t lean. It just went, like somebody had blown on it. One breath. Gone. The gold sparks lifted off her hand and I took them before they’d finished rising.
“Light.”
She cast the glim. The deer flinched. The stag didn’t. It lowered its head, and the frost came off its antlers in a wave, I could see it, running out across the moss in a sheet, cracking the puddles white. Ilsa’s glim leaned, went blue, and died. White sparks. My left hand.
Both arms gone cold to the elbow. I slapped my hands together and the white fire came up between them like a sunrise.
I held it up.
The five deer stopped at the line of its light, the way the dogs had on the quay.
The stag walked through it.
It walked through the light like I’d held up a candle. The frost came with it. It was five paces off, then four, and its antlers were taller than the hollow tree.
I threw it.
The white fire hit it full in the chest. It should have gone up like paper. The dogs had. Instead it rippled, like a reflection when you drop a stone in it, and for a second I could see the stones through it, and then it pulled itself together and came on.
It was too big. Or too old. I don’t know. I just know white fire was the best thing I had, and I’d thrown it, and the stag had walked through that too.
“Again,” I said.
“Wick—”
“Again.”
She cast both. I grabbed both. I couldn’t feel my arms any more, so it didn’t even hurt, which should have told me something. White fire. I threw it at the nearest deer, because I couldn’t bear to waste it on the stag again, and the deer went up, curling, gone, no ash.
Four deer. One stag. Three paces.
“Again.”
“You’ve got nothing, I can see your—”
I reached anyway.
Here’s the rule, the way I’d learned it by then without ever once saying it out loud. Each arm takes two. The first catch goes cold to the elbow, the second to the shoulder, and then that arm’s done until it warms. I’d caught four times. Two a hand. Both arms gone to the shoulder, and there was no room. I knew there was no room. I reached into the gold sparks over Ilsa’s hand with an arm that had nothing left in it, and they came anyway, and the cold didn’t go up my arm.
It went into my chest.
Like a hand. A cold flat hand on my heart, pressing. I felt my heart go slow. I heard it, which you shouldn’t be able to. Thump. A long wait. Thump.
The ruins went white at the edges. Then in the middle.
I’d like to say I threw something. I didn’t. I went down on the moss like a dropped coat.
Here’s what I know about the next bit, which isn’t much.
Somebody had my collar. Small hands, strong, and claws through my shirt. I was going backwards across the ground on my shoulders with my heels dragging and my head bumping.
“Hole,” somebody was saying. “Hole, hole, hole. Ilsa. Hole.”
Fire going past above me, gold, Ilsa’s, thrown by Ilsa, and doing nothing at all. I saw the stag’s antlers go across the stars.
Then roots. Then dark. Then earth on my face and a smell of animal, and I was being dragged into the ground.
A badger hole. Under the biggest of the fallen stones, where its edge had sunk into the moss: old, wide enough for a badger, too narrow for anything with antlers. Skritch had found it on his first sniff round the camp and not said anything, because it was just a hole. Skritch finds things.
He got me into it backwards. Ilsa came in headfirst, fast, and I was lying on my back in the dark with Skritch’s whiskers on my face and Ilsa’s elbow in my stomach and I couldn’t feel anything from the shoulders down.
“Was there a badger?” said Ilsa, in a very small voice.
“Was,” said Skritch.
“What happened to—”
“Skritch asked nicely.”
Outside the hole, where the roots were, it went white.
The frost came down the hole. It came in over the roots like milk being poured, white and slow, along the earth floor towards Ilsa’s boots, and I heard it, the tiny crackling, like paper far away.
And at the mouth of the hole, blocking the stars, the antlers.
It couldn’t get in. It knew it couldn’t get in. It put its head down to the hole and waited. That was the worst bit. It just stood there and let the cold come down to us, an inch at a time.
Ilsa’s hand came up in the dark. I heard the word. The flame stood up, gold, and I saw her face in it, mud and no eyebrows and absolutely terrified, and I saw the flame lean towards the mouth of the hole, and go blue, and go out.
She tried again. Out.
“Wick.”
I couldn’t lift my hands. I tried. Nothing happened. “I can’t,” I said, and it came out like someone else saying it.
The frost touched Ilsa’s boot.
And Skritch started to sing.
One note. The Skitter note, the long low one. But it was just him. One otter, in a hole, in a coat, and his voice was high and it wobbled and it cracked, and it was nothing like the sound of a hundred Skitter on a quay. It was like someone trying to hold up a roof on their own.
The frost stopped.
Not went back. Stopped. An inch up Ilsa’s boot, with the white crackling at the edge of it, held.
Skritch’s note wobbled. The frost moved. He got it back. It stopped.
“Help,” he said, between breaths, not to anyone in particular. “Help.”
Ilsa doesn’t sing. I want that on record. Ilsa has a voice like a gate. But she opened her mouth and found something near his note and held it, flat and wrong and loud, and the two of them together were worse than either of them alone, and the frost didn’t move.
I couldn’t feel my mouth. I hummed anyway. It came out as a sort of buzz against the back of my teeth. I don’t know if it helped. I’m counting it.
We held it like that. I don’t know how long. Long enough that Skritch’s voice went to a thread and Ilsa’s went to a croak and the antlers at the mouth of the hole never moved once.
Then, somewhere above, boots.
Skritch’s note stopped dead. His nose went up. “Dry-folk,” he breathed. “Up there. Walking.”
Boots, going past above the stone. Not running. Walking, slow, the way you walk through a place you know. I thought masks. I thought Vosk. Then the frost moved an inch and Skritch found his note again, and there was no more room in me for thinking.
I don’t remember the antlers going. I remember the mouth of the hole going from black to grey.
And I remember Skritch stopping, finally, with a noise like a kettle running dry, and saying, “Morning,” and falling over sideways onto my chest, and I still couldn’t feel it.
I could feel it by the time the sun was properly up. That was the problem.
We came out of the hole on our knees. The camp was white. The moss, the tents, the shovel, the hollow tree, all furred over like midwinter, and hoofprints in it, round and round the camp in a ring, and one set that came up to the badger hole and stopped and went away. The sun was on it. It was melting. It looked like nothing had ever been there.
I looked at my hands.
White to the wrist. Both. Dead-fish white, like that first morning on the fish-shed roof, and when I put them in my armpits and waited for the pins and needles, the pins and needles didn’t come.
I tried rubbing them. I tried breathing on them. I held them against the hollow tree where the sun was warming the bark.
Nothing.
The two fingers that had been nothing since the river were still nothing. Now the rest had joined them. I could bend them. I could pick things up, if I watched myself do it. I just couldn’t feel the things.
Ilsa was watching me do all this. She hadn’t said a word since the hole. She’d got her bag, and sat on a stone, and watched.
“They’ll come back,” I said.
“Will they.”
“They always come back.”
“Your lips were blue, Wick.” Her voice was flat. “In the hole. I had my hand on your neck, because I couldn’t see if you were breathing, and your lips were blue, and you weren’t. Breathing. For a bit.”
I didn’t know that. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I didn’t do anything.
“You reached with both arms gone,” she said.
“It was coming.”
“I know it was coming. I was the one standing in front of it with nothing in my hands.” She stood up. “Every time. The river—”
“In the river I froze the river.”
“And couldn’t feel your arms! And said nothing! I rubbed your hands and you said they were fine and they weren’t, were they, because you’ve been holding that left one funny for two days, don’t think I haven’t—”
“They were fine—”
“Stop doing everything alone!”
It came out of her so loud the Thornwood went quiet. Quieter.
“You could have said,” she said. “In the hole. Before. Four words. ‘Ilsa, I’ve got nothing.’ And I’d have — I don’t know what I’d have done. Thrown things. Sung, apparently. Something. But you didn’t say, because you never say, because you’ve got it in your head that it’s you and a lamp and everyone else is just standing about.”
I was angry. I’ll be honest. I was cold and scared and I hadn’t slept and I’d lost, properly lost, for the first time, and she was right, and I was angry.
“What was I supposed to do? Let it have you?”
“Yes! Ask! Let Skritch sing, let me — you’re not the only one here, Wick. You keep forgetting there’s three of us.”
“Skritch sang because I couldn’t.”
“Skritch sang because he’s braver than you.”
That one went in.
I said the thing I’m not proud of. I said, “You can’t even keep a flame lit when they look at it.”
She didn’t say anything for a second. Then she said, “No. I can’t. That’s what you’re for,” and she picked up her bag and walked off between the stones.
Skritch had been sitting on the block above the hole through all of it, with his tail hanging down and his ear flat. He looked at her go. He looked at me.
“Skritch says no,” he said quietly. “To both. Skritch says both no.”
Then he jumped down and went after her.
I sat by the hollow tree for a while and looked at my hands and felt about as big as one of the fingers.
Here’s the thing. I’d been doing it on my own for fourteen months. Barrels, the post, the letter, the lantern.
She was right. I’d have told you that then, if you’d asked. I just wasn’t going to tell her.
I got up and went to find them.
They were thirty paces off, at the edge of the ruins, and they weren’t walking anywhere. Skritch was on all fours with his nose in the moss, and Ilsa was standing over him with her arms folded.
“Skritch found a thing,” said Skritch, without looking up.
“What thing?”
“Scratch.”
I came over. I didn’t look at Ilsa. She didn’t look at me. We looked at the moss, where Skritch had scraped it back with his claws, and under the moss was stone. Flat. Cut. A slab, set in the ground, with a ring in it. And on the slab, old and grey, a mark.
v
Down.
“It moves,” said Skritch. “Skritch pulled. It’s heavy. Skritch isn’t.”
It took the three of us. Ilsa on the ring, me on the edge with hands I couldn’t feel, Skritch pushing from the other side with his whole body. It came up an inch, and the smell that came out of the gap was old and dry and cold. Then it came up and over and fell back on the moss with a thump that went down into the ground and kept going.
Steps. Cut in the rock, going down into black. Narrow. Steep.
Ilsa made a glim without being asked and held it out over the hole, and we leaned in.
We couldn’t see the bottom. But twenty steps down, where the light just reached, the stair bent, and on the wall at the bend somebody had scratched something with the point of a knife.
Three crosses. In a row. And under them, a wave.
x x x
~
Danger. Danger. Danger. Here.
“Well,” said Ilsa, to the hole, not to me. “Now we know what three crosses means.”
“What?”
“It means he went down anyway.”