The Beacon on the Crag

That same morning, far to the west in Scarrow, Wren gave up on sleep before it was light and climbed to the wall.

Scarrow's wall was built of the same black stone as the crag, so that in the dark it was hard to tell where the rock ended and the work of hands began. A Stayer woman stood watch at the east corner with a bow across her back and a pot of coals at her feet. She looked at Wren, saw who it was, and looked away again. Gatefolk were allowed on the wall now, though nobody had said they were welcome there.

Wren leaned on the parapet and looked east.

Below the crag the river valley was full of mist, and beyond the mist the land rolled away in long brown folds, farm after empty farm, to the edge of the sky. On a clear day, Madoc had told her, you could see the Cloudwall from here as a thin white line along the edge of the world. This morning there was only cloud. Somewhere behind it were the mountains, and behind the mountains was Dall, where her grandmother was getting up in the cold and swearing at her hip.

And somewhere on the Stair, walking down, was the Chainman.

She heard the tap of a staff on the stair behind her and knew it without turning. Alder came up slowly, one step and then the next, with his wrenched arm held against his chest in its sling, looking like a heron that had been left out in the rain.

"You are up early," he said.

"I never went down."

"Nor did I. The Stayers keep their beds very close to the floor, and my knees object to the floor." He came to the parapet beside her and looked where she was looking. "There is nothing to see."

"I know."

The mist moved in the valley. A dog barked down in the town, and a woman shouted at it, and it stopped.

"How long," Wren said, "till he gets there?"

Alder took his time, as he always did when the answer was bad. "The scouts saw him on the Stair two evenings ago, climbing. If he crossed the summit yesterday, he will be in the valley of Dall tonight. Tomorrow at the latest. He does not stop to rest."

"And we can't send word."

"The Stayers' smokes do not cross the Cloudwall. And a rider, even a rider who knew the road, would need five days to the Stair." He paused. "I am sorry, Wren."

"Don't be sorry. Think." She turned to face him. "At the gorge. When I wrote the bridge. You were watching him."

"I was."

"What did he do?"

Alder frowned. He had the look he got when a question interested him more than he wanted it to. "He was coming down the ravine behind us, steadily, as he walks. You heard the chain. When you set the pen to the page, the chain stopped. And when he came over the rockfall, his face was turned to you, and only to you, until the bridge went down under him." He shifted his staff. "There is a line in the Wardens' lore. It is very old, and I have always taken it for poetry. The thing that is bound hears the keeper's hand as a bell is heard across water."

"So he hears it when I write."

"So I believe."

"Anywhere?"

"I do not know. I would guess that a small writing is a small bell, and a great one—" He stopped. He had seen where she was going. "Wren."

"If I write something big enough," she said, "he'll hear it across the mountains. And he'll turn round."

"He will turn toward the sound. Toward you. Toward the book."

"That's the idea."

"That is a summons, Wren." Alder had put on his lecturing voice. "The book asks more for a greater work. You know this now, better than I do. You have paid once. A writing loud enough to be heard across the Cloudwall would not be cheap."

"I know what it costs."

"I do not think you do. I do not think anyone does, until the bill arrives."

"She's seventy-nine," Wren said. "She's got one good hand and a bad hip and a gate. That's all she's got. A gate."

Alder looked at her, and did not argue. He looked east into the cloud, where there was nothing to see.

"What would you write?" he said at last.

Wren had the Waybook with her. She always had it now, in its satchel under her coat against her ribs, where she felt its corners when she breathed. She drew it out and opened it on the parapet, sheltering the page from the damp with her body.

She had found the page the night before by candle, while the others slept. It was a map of this valley, drawn small and neat: the river, a road coming down from the north, and the crag drawn as a knot of dark hatching with the word Scarrow beside it. On top of the crag was a tiny mark she knew from a hundred pages of the book, a little cup with a flame above it.

She put her finger on it. Then she pointed up.

Above the town, above the last roofs and the last terraces cut in the rock, the crag rose to a bare black summit. On the summit sat a shape against the paling sky, squat and round and very old. The Stayers called it the Old Cup, and children dared each other to touch it, and nobody had lit it since before the Frost.

"The beacon," Alder said.

"You can see a beacon a long way. That's what they're for."

"It will call him here."

"Here has walls," Wren said. "Dall has hedges."

"Here also has eleven hundred people who took us in yesterday because of a tune."

A new voice said, "Which is why she'll ask them first."

Iyene Sath had come up the far stair without either of them hearing her. She wore her riding coat buttoned to the throat and her sabre on her hip, and she looked as though she had slept eight hours and eaten a good breakfast. Wren had never once seen her look otherwise.

"I wasn't going to not ask," Wren said.

"Yes, you were. You were going to climb up there at dusk and write it and apologize afterward." Iyene looked up at the summit, measuring it. "It's a good plan. It's the only plan. And it hands the Walker to a town that doesn't owe us a crust. So you'll ask the war-chief, in front of her people, and you'll take the answer."

"And if the answer's no?"

"Then we'll have a problem," Iyene said, "and we'll have it politely." She turned to go down. "Morag holds council at the second bell. Wash your face."

The council met in Morag's fire-room, a long low cave black with a hundred years of peat smoke, with a fire burning in a pit in the floor. The Stayers sat on stone benches along the walls or squatted by the fire.

Morag Tull stood. She never sat, Madoc had said, except to eat or to die.

In the firelight her scar showed pale from temple to jaw and pulled her mouth crooked. Beside her on the bench sat her brother Ewan, the town's smith, a big man with spark-pocked forearms, a beard down to his chest and a laugh you could hear across the town. He wasn't laughing now. On her other side sat Old Senna, wrapped in blankets, with her fiddle case across her knees. The rest were elders and the captains of the wall, and Madoc stood at the back by the door with his arms folded.

The company stood in the middle, near the fire, where everyone could look at them.

Wren said it. She had worked out the words on the stair coming down, meaning to say it well, but when she opened her mouth they had gone, and she said it as it came.

"The Walker's going to my home. He'll be there tonight. My grandmother's there and she can't run. If I light your beacon with the book, he'll hear it, and he'll turn back. He'll come here instead." She stopped. "I want to light it. I'm asking."

The fire hissed. Morag said, "No."

She did not raise her voice. Wren felt the word land on her chest and push.

"He'll come here anyway," Wren said. "Sooner or later—"

"Later," Morag said. "Later is a thing we can use. We've lost four farms since midsummer. We've a wall to mend on the north side and half the peat cut and lying wet on the moor. Give me later and I'll use every day of it." She looked at Wren with eyes the color of the rock. "You'd call the Walker down on my town to save your own."

"Yes," Wren said.

Somebody on the bench muttered. Ewan let out a short breath through his beard that might have been surprise, or might have been the beginning of a laugh.

"At least she doesn't lie," he said.

"Hush, Ewan."

"I only said—"

"I heard what you said."

Iyene stepped forward half a pace. "War-chief. The Crown will remember—"

"The Crown," Morag said, "sealed a gate in my people's faces. I'll not hear what the Crown remembers." She did not look at Iyene. She kept her eyes on Wren. "The answer's no."

Madoc spoke from the door. "She's right."

Every head in the fire-room turned. Madoc unfolded his arms and came forward into the firelight, taller than anyone in the room but Bracken, and looking, just then, very young.

"The Walker came out of the Hall this summer," he said. "Nobody sent for him. He walked out, and the White came with him, and we lost the Brannock farm and Top Harrow and the two by the ford. He'll come for Scarrow. He'll come this winter or the next. Everyone here knows it." He jerked his head at the company. "Now there's a woman in the town who can write fire out of nothing, and an old man who can say a word and burn a hedge. Would you sooner meet him with them on the wall, or without?"

"I did not burn the hedge," Alder murmured. "I burned the dead in front of it."

Nobody laughed. "You're not asked," Morag said to her son.

"I'm on the wall. I'm asked every night."

"Not in this room."

"Then I'm asking myself." Madoc's face was dark. "I'll carry the pitch up the crag for her, if nobody else will."

Morag looked at him for a long while, and nothing moved in her face.

"You're off the gate watch," she said. "Give your band to Hew. You'll take the goats up to the high fold tomorrow, and you'll stay there till I send for you."

Madoc went white around the mouth, and around the walls people looked at the floor. Wren did not know what it meant to lose the gate watch in Scarrow, but she knew what a public whipping looked like, even without a whip.

"Morag," Ewan said. "He's the best shot we've got."

"Then the goats will be safe."

"Hells," Wren said. She said it loudly. She was angry now, and she was glad of it, because anger was easier than the other thing. "Hells take it. You want later? You'll get later. He'll come for you in a month instead of a week, and my grandmother's dead either way. That's what later buys. One old woman, dead in her own yard, so you can dry your peat."

The words came out harder than she meant them. She heard Dorrit, behind her, draw a sharp breath. Morag's scarred face showed nothing at all.

In the quiet, Old Senna began to laugh.

It was a thin, cracked, wheezing sound. Senna was older than Tansy by fifteen years, with a face folded up small and brown like a dried apple. Yesterday she had played the second half of the Reel with fingers that looked too crooked to hold a bow. She laughed now until she coughed, and Ewan patted her back, and she waved him off.

"Morag Tull," she said. "Your mother would have hit that girl."

"My mother hit everyone."

"She did. She was right to." Senna wiped her eyes with a corner of blanket. "Now listen. You all heard it yesterday. You danced to it. I've kept Rudge's Reel sixty years, and my teacher kept it before me, and hers before her, back and back to the gate. And we always sang that the first half went over the mountain." She pointed a crooked finger at Wren. "It came back. She brought it. The tune says she's kin."

"The tune's a tune," Morag said.

"The tune's a lineage. You said so yourself at the moot. I heard you." Senna's eyes were small and black and very bright. "Kin asks, kin answers. That's the old law and it's older than you. Her grandmother's our kin too, a long way off. Rudge's Reel says we're kin. Kin lights the fire."

The fire-room was silent. Morag stood in the middle of her people and looked at them, one face after another, and Wren saw what she saw. Half the room would not meet her eye, and some of the others were nodding very slightly, with their eyes on the fire.

Morag turned back to Wren. "At dusk," she said. "A beacon's for seeing." She lifted her chin at the captains on the benches. "When it's lit, every soul comes inside the walls. Every sheep we can catch, every child, every cart of peat. The fire-pits in the gate-court get filled tonight, and the pitch goes up on the wall." She looked at Madoc last. "And my son can carry it for her, since he's so keen. He's still off the gate."

She walked out, and the council broke up behind her into a dozen arguments at once.

Madoc stood where he was. Wren went to him.

"You didn't have to do that," she said.

"Nay." He looked down at her. The iron rings in his ears caught the firelight. "Don't thank me, Gatewife. I'd have done it for anyone with a good face."

"Is that how you talk to everyone who gets you sent to the goats?"

"It's the first time." He almost smiled. "I'll show you the beacon path. You'll want to see it in the light before you climb it in the dark."

The afternoon went slowly and too fast.

The whole town was moving. Carts came up the switchback road loaded with peat, and boys drove sheep in through the gate in bleating gray floods. Men forked dry heather into the long pits that ran along the inside of the gate-court wall, and women carried iron pots of pitch up the wall stairs on poles between them. Over it all the fire-horns sounded from the watch-towers, one long note and then two short ones, over and over, calling the outlying folk in.

The company had been given a long loft above the peat-store, with a low roof and a smell of earth. There Dorrit sat on her blanket and mended Pip's shirt with furious small stitches. She had not said much since the council, and for Dorrit that was a bad sign.

Wren sat across from her with the fiddle on her knee, holding it without playing.

"Say it," Wren said.

"Say what?"

"Whatever it is you're sewing into that poor boy's shirt."

Dorrit jabbed the needle through and pulled it tight. "I'm sewing, what'll it take this time? That's what I'm sewing. Over and over. Gods' teeth, Wren. The bridge took your mam's face. A bridge. What does a fire you can see from the mountains take? Your mam's whole self? Your name? Me?"

"It doesn't take people."

"You don't know what it takes. Nobody knows. Granna didn't know till she lost her mam's voice, and she didn't tell a soul for fifty years." Dorrit bit off the thread. "You're doing it anyway."

"Yes."

"I know you are. I'm not asking you not to." She threw the shirt down. "I'm just angry. Let me be angry. It's all I've got to do this afternoon."

Wren put the fiddle to her shoulder, because she did not know what else to do with her hands, and began to play the Old Reel. She let it run slowly, under her breath, and because she was thinking about Tansy, it was Tansy she saw.

It was the winter she was eight, the first winter after her mother died, with snow up to the windowsills and the kitchen dark by four. She remembered sitting on the settle by the fire with her mother's fiddle, which was too big for her, crying because her fingers would not do what the tune told them. Tansy had not tried to comfort her. She had sat down on the settle beside her, stiff and cross, and taken hold of her bow hand with her right hand, whole then, dry and hard as a root.

Like this. Don't strangle it. It's a bow, not a chicken.

Tansy could not play and never had. But she knew every note of the Old Reel, and she sang it in a thin, tuneless, furious mouth-music, diddle-um diddle-dee, and beat time on the hearthstones with her stick. Again. Again. No, again. All that winter, every night, while the snow came down. At last one night in February Wren had played it through from the start to the top of the phrase where it stopped, clean, without one mistake. She looked up, and Tansy was sitting with her eyes shut.

There, Tansy had said. Now it's yours. Don't let anyone take it off you.

Wren played it to the top of the phrase, in the loft over the peat-store, and stopped where it stopped.

Dorrit was watching her. "That's a good one," Dorrit said, more gently. "That's a good one to go out on."

"I'm not going anywhere. I'm going up a hill."

"I know." Dorrit reached over and took the fiddle out of her hands and laid it in its case. "Go and look at your hill, then. I'll come up at dusk. Somebody's got to be there to hit you if you faint."

The ladder rattled. Pip's head came up through the hatch, sandy hair full of peat dust.

"Mistress Dorrit. Sergeant says if you want your medicine roll carried up the rock, you're to come and tell him where you want it. And he says to tell you, and I'm quoting, the great heavy thing weighs more than a dead bishop."

"When's he ever carried a dead bishop?"

"I asked him that." Pip grinned, showing the gap in his teeth. "He said, not yet."

The beacon path started at the north end of the wall walk, where the wall ran up against the living rock of the crag and stopped.

Wren had seen it in the afternoon with Madoc. It was a stair cut into the side of the crag a step at a time, with an old iron rail pinned into the rock on the right. On the left there was nothing but the sheer fall to the valley floor. In daylight it was a hard climb. At dusk, with the valley going blue below and a cold wind coming off the moor, it was a climb you did with your eyes on your feet.

They went up in a line, with Madoc first, carrying a lantern, and Wren behind him with the book inside her coat and the ink bottle in her shirt to keep it warm. Then came Alder, refusing all help, and Iyene, and Dorrit, who swore at every step, and Pip. Bracken came last. He had carried Dorrit's medicine roll halfway up in the afternoon and back down again when she decided she didn't want it.

"If I fall off this," Dorrit said, somewhere behind, "I want it put on my stone that it was Wren's fault."

"It'll be a big stone," said Bracken.

"Are you calling me fat, Sergeant?"

"I'm calling it a long way down, Mistress Fallowmere."

The stair turned twice around the shoulder of the crag and came out on the summit.

It was a bare round top of black rock, wind-scoured, with patches of gray lichen in the cracks, and the whole world lay open around it. To the south the valley ran away toward low hills, and to the north lay the long dark line of the moor, with the King's Road somewhere past it. To the west, where the sun had gone down, the sky was the green of old glass. Under that sky, very far off, the land went pale. It was snow, a flat whiteness lying on the edge of the world, and the wind that came off it smelled of iron.

"The White," Madoc said. "It was a day's walk further off when I was a boy."

To the east, the way she wanted to look, there was only the dusk.

The beacon sat at the center of the summit, a cup carved from a single stone as wide as a hay-cart and as high as Wren's chest, set on a low round plinth. Its lip was worn smooth by wind. Around it ran a line of letters in the Survey script, with a carved border of little flames above them. Inside, the bowl held nothing but a skin of black rainwater and a few dead leaves blown up from the valley.

Pip leaned over the rim. "There's no wood."

"There doesn't need to be," Alder said.

"How can there be a fire with no wood?"

"Ask me afterward," said Alder, "and I will give you a very long answer."

Iyene walked around the cup once and looked at the sky. "Now," she said. "While there's enough light to write."

Wren knelt on the plinth and opened the book on the stone lip of the cup while Madoc held the lantern over her shoulder. The wind turned the pages, and she pinned them flat with her left hand and found the map of the valley: Scarrow, the crag, the little cup with the flame.

She took the ink bottle out of her shirt, warm from her skin, and uncorked it and dipped the pen. Her hand was steady, and that surprised her.

She thought of Tansy sitting on the bench at the gate. She thought of the lane, and the hedge, and the frost coming down it white, and she did not let herself think about anything else. She set the pen to the page beside the flame mark, and wrote.

The beacon on Scarrow Crag is lit.

The cold came into her hand at the first stroke. It went through her fingers and into her wrist and stopped there, as if her hand had been pushed into a snowbank and held. The ink ran out of the pen silver and shone on the old paper like a snail's track under the moon. She wrote on, and the silver darkened as she went, going to gray and then to black, and by the last letter it was black.

Under her knees the stone hummed, a low note too low to hear, felt in the teeth. The black water in the bowl shivered, then hissed and smoked and was gone in a breath of steam. Something in the heart of the stone cup made the sound of a great door thrown open in a gale.

And the fire came.

It burst from the empty stone with a roar that knocked Wren backward off the plinth. She landed hard on the rock with the book clutched to her chest, and the heat slapped her face. Above her the beacon was a column of flame, yellow at the root and white at the heart, taller than a house, taller than the shoulder of the crag. It streamed up into the dusk and tore at the wind and did not bend to it. Sparks went up in a river, with the noise of a forge-bellows as big as the sky.

The light fell on everything. It lit the whole summit gold, and the town below, every roof and terrace and wall and every upturned face. It threw the shadow of the crag out across the valley, a mile of black shadow pointing east.

Somebody was shouting. It was Pip, jumping up and down at the edge of the light. "That's sharp! Oh, that's sharp, that is!"

"They'll see that from the Stair," Iyene said. She stood with her hand shading her eyes, and her face in the firelight was fierce and young. "They'll see that from the Cloudwall."

"He'll feel it," Alder said. He had put his good hand on the carved lip of the cup to steady himself. "He will feel it before he sees it."

Then Wren felt the gap. It was like putting your foot down on a stair in the dark and finding no stair: a cold, smooth, empty place where a moment ago there had been something warm.

She knew what it was like now, for she had felt it once already in the junipers above the Kestrel Gorge. So she went looking, carefully, room by room.

Her mother's face was gone, but that was old; she knew that hole, and she did not stay in it. Tansy's face was there, small and sharp and fierce, the white hair, the eyes. Dorrit's was there. The bee-yard at Fallowmere, the hives, the lane, the gate, all there.

The Old Reel.

She hummed it under her breath there on the rock, with the fire roaring, and it came at once, every note: the climb and the turn and the gathering and the stop. Her fingers moved on the book's cover, finding the notes. It was all there.

Then who had taught it to her?

She reached for that, and there was nothing. She knew she had learned it, because everyone in Dall learned it, and somebody must have sat with her and made her play it until her fingers bled. She knew it had been Tansy as she knew her birthday. She could say the words: Granna taught me. But when she turned round to look at it, the winter, the room, the hands that had held hers, there was no room there and no winter. There was only a tune with no beginning, sitting in her head with no door into it, as if she had been born knowing it.

Dorrit was kneeling beside her. Wren had not seen her come.

"What did it take?" Dorrit said. Her voice was very low. "Tell me."

"The Reel."

"You just hummed the Reel. I heard you."

"I've got the tune." Wren looked at her. "I don't know who taught me it."

Dorrit's face changed. Wren watched it happen, with the firelight full on her, and saw her cousin open her mouth to say Granna did, and shut it again.

"She did, didn't she," Wren said. "Granna."

"Yes."

"When?"

"The winter after your mam." Dorrit swallowed. "By the fire. Every night. I used to put my fingers in my ears."

Wren nodded. She tried again, now that she knew where to look: the winter after, the fire. There was nothing. Dorrit might have been talking about a stranger.

"All right," she said. "All right. It's all right. I've still got the tune."

Dorrit put both arms round her and held on, and Wren let her. Over Dorrit's shoulder she could see the fire going up and up into the dark.

Below them, Scarrow had begun to sound its horns.

It was a different call from the afternoon's, one long note over and over from every tower on the wall. Wren got to her feet and went to the edge of the summit with Dorrit's hand in hers, and looked down.

The whole town was in the streets. People stood on the terraces and the roofs and the wall, and every face was turned up toward the crag, lit gold. Nobody was cheering. They stood and looked at the fire on their hill, the old dead fire their grandparents' grandparents had told them about, and they did not move.

On the wall above the gate a short square figure stood apart from the rest. It was Morag Tull. She looked up at the beacon a moment, then turned and lifted her arm and shouted something the wind took away, and the horns changed their call. Down on the switchback road the last carts whipped up toward the gate. The two great leaves of iron-bound timber swung in behind them, and Wren heard the bar go across, a long way down. In the gate-court, lit by the beacon, men were running with forks of heather and buckets of pitch to fill the long pits by the wall.

Madoc came and stood on her other side, with the lantern hanging forgotten in his hand. He looked down at his town, and at his mother on the wall, and then east into the dark, where the Cloudwall lay somewhere with the beacon's light on its face.

"Well, Gatewife," he said. "You've rung the bell."