The second waystation had a roof, which was why they stopped there, and that was why the men were waiting in it.
Brakka went in first under the broken lintel, and Oswin after her with the handcart, and Wick was just inside the door when a shape came off the wall above him and a hand like a shovel closed over his mouth, and a voice by his ear said, hoarse and flat, “The small one. Alive. Get the small one.”
There were six of them. They came down off the wall all at once, and they did not go for Brakka, or the cart, or the chest with the company’s whole fortune in it. They went for him. Two had him, one at his mouth and one at his legs, and a third was running up with a sack held open in both hands, an actual sack, and Wick’s mind went completely white and empty.
He did nothing. For the space of a breath he hung in their hands like a landed fish and did nothing at all, and of everything that happened in the waystation it was the part he remembered longest.
Then the rhyme started up in his head, because it always did, and he counted to it. Six lights. The hand over his mouth. Six doors. He bit it.
The man roared and the hand came off, and Wick got Aldo’s fish knife out and did not stab anybody with it, because he had never stabbed anybody and did not know how, but he swung it, and the man with his legs let go to get out of the way, and Wick hit the floor and rolled.
The waystation had gone mad. Brakka was bellowing. A man with a boar-spear was trying to hold her off the way you hold off a bear, and two more had Oswin’s handcart tipped over and Oswin under it, and nobody, nobody, was trying to take anything. It was not a robbery. It was a snatch.
Ilsa came through the door at a dead run with a knife in each hand. She went past the spear-man as if he were furniture, and the man Wick had bitten turned to meet her and she went under his arm and put her shoulder into his stomach and he folded over her like a blanket. She came up with his own knife in her other hand and kicked him in the knee and he went down.
“Up, Saltings boy!”
He got up. The sack-man was coming back for him, big and bearded, at a lumbering run with the sack held wide. Ilsa turned and threw.
He saw her snap it. She put everything into the throw, her whole body in one line from heel to fingertip, and the knife went from her hand so fast it was a streak, and it hit the sack-man in the shoulder and spun him half round. And the air where she had thrown it was full. It was like standing in a doorway in a gale. His hair lifted. It was not cold at all, it was moving, a rush, a shove, like the wind off the Sound on a running tide, and there was the thread, grey-white, thin as a hair, running from the air to his fingers.
He grabbed it.
The sack-man had his feet under him and was coming on with the knife still in his shoulder and his hand reaching, and Wick, with no idea at all what he was doing, threw both hands out at him and pushed.
The air went solid. It hit the man in the chest like a door kicked open and threw him backwards into the wall, where he struck with a sound like a dropped sack of meal and slid down and lay still. Wick’s hair settled. His fingers were white and ached and he was still on his feet, which seemed, at that moment, like the most remarkable thing that had ever happened to anyone.
“Oh,” said Oswin, from under the cart, “hold on — this is the moment—”
He had got one arm out. In the hand was a copper egg the size of a fist, wound round with wire, with a stub of fuse in the top. He struck a sulphur-stick on the flagstones, lit the fuse, and rolled the egg across the floor with a wild shout of “THUNDERCLAP—”
It rolled toward the spear-man. Everybody looked at it. It stopped. The fuse burned down to the copper with a small sad hiss, and there was a pause, and then it went fup, and a single ring of blue smoke rose from it and drifted off toward the roof, and that was all.
“Technically,” said Oswin into the silence, “and I want to stress technically—”
Brakka hit the spear-man.
That was the end of it, really. The spear-man went out through the door and did not come back. The two who had been on Oswin, and the one who had held Wick’s legs, took one look at Brakka turning round with Auntie and ran for the gap in the back wall. The one Wick had put in the wall lay where he was. The bitten one was on his back with Ilsa’s boot on his throat and his own knife at his eye.
“Hello,” Ilsa said. “Let’s have a talk.”
His name, he said, was Burl. He was not keen to say more, and then Brakka held him off the floor by the front of his jerkin and asked, in a reasonable voice, whether he had ever seen what happened to a man’s shoulders when a Varr got bored, and he said a great deal more quite quickly.
“A woman paid us. In Saltmire. Twenty marks down and a hundred on delivery. The boy only. Bring him to the Crossing and there’d be a man.” He was sweating. “She had hot hands. Hot, like a stove. Foreign, bronze-looking. Kept her hood up—”
“Ashborn,” said Brakka, in a voice of deep satisfaction, and looked at Wick. “Well, well. Especially the boy. I did wonder.”
Ilsa was crouched by Burl’s feet, looking at his boots.
“Those are Tidewatch,” she said.
They were: black, hobnailed, with the double-stitched seam up the back that nobody but the Watch’s own cobbler sewed.
“Stolen, probably,” said Ilsa, and stood up. “Half the Wharves is wearing something stolen off the Watch. Doesn’t mean anything.” She wiped the knife on her trousers. “Still.”
Brakka tied Burl to the hearth-post with his own belt and a length of cart-rope, and sat Oswin by him with a flash-egg and instructions, and they ate cold and slept badly. The man Wick had thrown at the wall crawled out through the gap before anyone thought to check on him.
Burl was gone too, in the morning. The rope was cut, cleanly, from behind. Oswin swore by all his pockets he had only closed his eyes for a moment, and Wick believed him, because the ground at the back of the waystation told the rest.
Hoofprints. Four horses at least. They had come in the night from the heath side, stood a while by the wall, and gone away again fast, back toward the Old Road ahead of them. Toward Coldwater.
“They came back for him,” Wick said. “His own lot. Cut him loose and rode on.”
“Rode ahead,” said Ilsa, beside him. “That’s what I don’t like.”
“To the Crossing. He said there’d be a man.”
“He said what he was told to say.” But she frowned at the tracks with the scar pulled tight through her eyebrow, and she did not tell him to walk.
Coldwater Crossing was a ferry and a hut and a bell on a post, and a river.
The Marrow was broad and brown and slow here, with a chain stretched across it on tall iron posts for the ferry to run on. The ferry was a flat wooden barge with a rail, big enough for a cart and six people if they liked each other. The ferry-woman sat on the step of her hut with a pipe in her teeth and a crossbow across her knees, and she did not get up.
“No,” she said, before Brakka had opened her mouth.
“We’ve not asked yet.”
“You want to cross. No.” She was a square weather-beaten woman of fifty with grey plaits. “The water’s wrong.”
“Wrong how?” said Oswin.
“Wrong like no fish. Wrong like three nights running I’ve had frost on the ferry rail when there’s been none on the grass.” She jabbed the pipe-stem at the river. “I know when my river’s gone sick. There’s a thing in it. I’ve seen the wake of it at dusk, long as the barge. You can have the ferry and welcome, Varr, but you’ll pole her across yourselves and I’ll be in my hut with the door shut.”
“Riders come through this morning?” Ilsa said. “Four or five.”
The ferry-woman’s eyes slid to her and away. “Nobody crosses when I say no.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“It’s what I’m answering.”
Brakka looked at the sun, an hour off the hills. Wick could see her weighing it: a night by a sick river, with riders ahead and things that came up through drains behind, against twenty minutes on a barge.
“We pole,” she said. “Now, while there’s light. Oswin, the cart on first. Seven, bow. Ilsa, stern. Sprat, you stand in the middle and hold the rail and don’t do anything.”
“I wasn’t going to—”
“You weren’t going to last night either.”
The river was wider than it looked.
From the middle of the barge, with Brakka and Ilsa heaving on the poles, it was a great brown plain of moving water with the dusk coming down purple and cold, and the far bank no closer than it had been. Oswin sat on the cart with Pip in his cupped hands and said, “I don’t like boats. I want it on record. I’m a Pell, I’m supposed to like boats, and I don’t,” and Seven stood at the bow and shed a leaf into the river.
The leaf did not float away. It stopped, a yard from the hull, and spun once, and a ring of frost formed round it on the water and held it.
Seven looked down at it.
“Brakka,” it said.
The river rose.
It came up alongside the barge in one long sliding heave, a back as long as the ferry and as thick as a barrel, grey, smoking at the edges the way the dogs had smoked, with a line of fin along it like rotted teeth. It made no sound at all. Wick saw its eye go past at the height of the rail, a wet slate disc as big as his head with nothing in it, and the cold came off it like a door opening onto winter, and then it rolled, and the barge tipped.
Everything slid. The cart went across the deck with Oswin on it and hit the rail and the rail held, just. The eel’s tail came up out of the water on the far side, a grey column, and simply swept Brakka over the rail in a burst of brown spray, and she was gone under, and the barge came back level with a crash that put Wick on his knees.
“Rope!” Ilsa screamed.
Seven had it. It threw the coil, not fast but exactly, to where Brakka’s head had come up, tusks bared, blowing like a whale, forty feet off and going downstream. She got an arm through it. Ilsa and Seven hauled. Wick hauled, with the rope burning through his white hands, and Brakka was coming in against the current, and the eel turned.
The long grey back curved in the water like a drawn bow, and the wake it made was a line of frost, and it was going for Brakka: the warm thing in the river, the loud thing.
“Oswin!” Ilsa yelled. “Light! Draw it off!”
Oswin was on his feet on the cart with Pip in his hand. He looked at the moth. He looked at the river. His frill was flat as paper, and he said, “Oh, Pip, I’m sorry,” and wound the key three savage turns, and the glow-cell in the moth’s thorax went from sleepy green to a hard bright white, and he threw it.
Pip flew. Twenty breaths, no more. It went out across the dark water in a wobbling line, burning like a dropped star, away from Brakka and the barge, and the eel’s head came round. The whole grey length of it turned off its line and went after the moth, not fast, hungrily, the water freezing in a skin behind it.
Brakka hit the hull. She got one arm over the rail herself, and then the other, and came over it in a cascade of brown water with nobody’s help, and lay on the deck like a landed whale, gasping, with frost in her hair, and said, “Never. Again.”
Far down the river, Pip’s light wobbled, dipped, and went out. The spring had run down. The eel’s wake stopped, and turned, and came back.
“It will come under us,” Seven said. “I can cast Rime at it. It will not care. Cold does not hurt a cold thing.” Seven turned its head and looked at Wick, standing on the heaving deck with the rope still round his hands. It smelled of wet earth. “But the river is Tide, little flame. All of it. Do you feel it?”
He had not. He did now.
It had been there the whole time, under the fear: the damp sheen on everything, the sound in his ears like a shell held close, low and vast and everywhere, the whole river’s slow weight going by under the boards. Tide-wake, and not from any weaver; from the water itself. It made his teeth ache.
“I don’t know how to—”
“You do not need to know. You need to hold it. Now.”
Seven raised both hands toward the water and snapped.
It was a crack like a tree splitting in a hard frost, and the air over the river went white with glitter, not a drift but a blizzard, and Seven staggered and caught the rail and three dozen leaves came off it at once.
Two threads. Blue-white from Seven, the Rime. And the other, grey-green, thick as a rope, running up out of the river itself into his hands.
He took them both and held them, and the eel came up under the barge.
The deck lifted under his feet and he went down on one knee and did not let go, and he had no form for this, no word, no shape, nothing but the river and the cold and the one thought left in his head, which was stop. So he thought it. Stop. Stop. STOP.
The Marrow stopped.
It did not slow. It stopped, with a sound like the whole world cracking its knuckles, a hundred yards of brown river going from water to ice in the space of a breath, bank to bank, with the barge in the middle of it and the eel under the barge. Spray froze in the air and fell as hail. The chain groaned on its posts. The river lay white and still under the first stars, and nothing moved anywhere: not the water, not the reeds, not the thing beneath the hull.
Then Wick’s hands stopped being hands.
He had been cold before. He had not been this. It was in his chest, his spine, the backs of his eyes, a cold so total that there was no room in him for anything else. He was a bucket with the bottom out. He found he was lying on the deck and could not remember lying down, and far above him Seven’s face swam, copper and gold and grim.
“Slack,” it said. “Under everything we have. Ilsa—”
“I’ve got him.”
“Do not let him sleep.”
He did not sleep. They lay on the barge in the middle of the frozen Marrow under every blanket and cloak the company owned, with Ilsa on one side of him and Brakka’s wet enormous warmth on the other, and the eel moved.
Under the ice. All night. He felt it through the boards: a long slow grinding heave, a pause, a heave, as it tried to turn and could not. Once, toward midnight, a crack went across the river like a mast snapping, and everyone sat up, and the ice held. Oswin cried for a while, quietly, for Pip, and then said, “Right,” and stopped. Brakka did not sing. Ilsa held one of Wick’s white hands in both of hers inside the blankets, not gently, as if she were holding a rope, and when he tried to thank her she said, “Shut up, I’m keeping it from dropping off,” and he knew that was not why.
Seven stood at the bow all night with its face to the ice, and in the small hours Wick lifted his head and saw what it was looking at.
Round the hull, over the dark shape under it, the ice was grey, and frost had grown on the grey in ferns, fine and dense and beautiful, the way Seven’s had on the roof. But Seven had not made these. They were growing on their own, out from the thing under the ice, in long slow fingers across the frozen river.
Toward the barge. Toward him.
“Seven,” he whispered.
“I see it.”
“Is it—”
“It noticed you.” The Lumen did not turn round. “You went slack, little flame, and you had taken a river. It is only an eel. But it is the Murk in an eel, and the Murk has a long memory, and now it has a taste.” The ferns crept another inch. “Go back under the blankets. It cannot reach you tonight. The ice is yours.”
They hacked out at dawn with Auntie and the boat-hook, and poled the last fifty yards through grinding slush. Halfway, Oswin gave a cry and leaned so far over the rail that Ilsa grabbed his coat: there on the ice, frozen in a skin of it like a fly in amber, was a brass-and-tin moth with one wing bent back on itself. Oswin chipped it out and held it to his chest all the rest of the way, and nobody said anything about the state of his face.
When Brakka’s boot hit mud she turned and looked back, and so did everyone. The Marrow was moving again. Where the barge had been there was a hole, black, with white edges, and the river slid into it and came out the other side, and there was nothing in it that anyone could see.
“Well,” said Brakka. “That’s a thing nobody’s done before.”
Wick’s hands were still white. He put them in his armpits and turned his back on the river and looked instead at where they were going.
Beyond the rise ahead the land was dark green and black, a wall of old forest filling the horizon with the blue line of the Ironbacks above it. The Thornwood. Even from here, it looked like something that was waiting.
And at its edge, small and grey against the black, a single thread of smoke was going up into the morning sky. Too much for a hearth. It rose thick and leaned over in the wind, the way smoke does when something that is not meant to burn is burning.
“That’s Greystep,” said Ilsa, beside him.
Brakka picked up Auntie and started walking.