Into the White

It took three days to get out of the gate, and Wren hated every hour of them.

She had wanted to go that morning, from the wall, with the haze still lying over the snow where Dorrit had gone into it. She had gone down the gate stair with the Waybook in her coat and her sling in her pocket, and got as far as the broken outer gate before Iyene caught up with her.

"With what?" Iyene had said. "In what boots? Carrying what food? You'll be dead in the snow by the second night, and then he'll have your cousin and the book both, and nobody left to bring either of them anywhere."

"I don't care."

"Yes, you do. You're just too angry to know it." Iyene had looked at her with her gray eyes, not unkindly. "Three days. Morag's people know the White. We go equipped, or we don't go."

So Wren had waited, and hated Iyene for being right, and every night she lay in the loft beside Dorrit's empty blanket and did not sleep.

The Stayers had burned Ewan Tull on the second day, on a pyre on the crag summit under the beacon. Madoc had lit it, and Morag had stood between Brin and Hal, holding their hands and looking at nothing.

Now it was the morning of the third day, gray and cold, and they were at the gate.

Morag had given them everything: snowshoes of bent ash and rawhide, heavy furs that stank of smoke, and iron pins for their cloaks and iron rings for their fingers, hammered to size the night before. There were pitch torches, dried mutton and oatcake, and a sack of charcoal, for there would be no wood where they were going. It was all piled on Barrow, who stood by the gate with his long ears back.

Merritt stood at the gate with her crossbow, on her own feet. Iyene shook her hand without a word, and turned away. "Sandover. The mule."

Madoc came down the street with his bow on his back and his quiver full, and snowshoes tied to his pack. Wren saw Morag see him from the wall. She came down the gate stair slowly, with the white burn on her wrist wrapped in linen, and stood in the street in front of her son.

"No," she said.

"Aye," said Madoc.

"Your uncle's three days dead."

"Aye. And the thing that burned him's walking to the Hall with a Gatewife's cousin in his arms." Madoc's face was hard. "I lit the fire that brought him. I'll see it out."

"Scarrow needs you on the wall."

"Scarrow's got a wall. She's got nobody."

Morag looked at him. Everyone at the gate had gone quiet, and the Stayers on the wall walk were watching, and the children, and the old people in the doorways.

"If you go through that gate," Morag said, "you go as Gatefolk."

Madoc took a breath. Wren saw it go into him and stay there.

"Then I go as Gatefolk," he said.

Morag turned her back on him and walked up the gate stair without another word. At the top she stopped with her back to the street, and did not look round.

Madoc stood looking up at her back. Then he hitched his pack higher and walked past Wren and through the gate without looking at anyone.

"Well," said Bracken. It was the first thing he had said in a day. "That's cheerful."

Alder rode Barrow for the first day, because Iyene forbade him to walk, and sat on top of the load with his knees nearly round his ears, gray-faced and dignified. Pip led the mule down the switchback road, and the company walked out across the valley toward the White.

By noon of the first day they were in snow, and by evening they were in the White.

The land went up in a long slow rise from the river, and the snow deepened as it rose, until at the top of the rise the brown world ended. In front of them there was nothing but white ground going away flat to a white sky, with no line between them. The cold came off it and hit Wren in the face, and every breath she took hurt her teeth.

"Snowshoes," said Madoc.

He knelt in the snow and bound the ash frames to their boots one after another, with quick hard pulls of the rawhide. Then he stood up and walked away from them across the top of the snow as easily as if it were a floor.

"Lift your feet," he said over his shoulder. "Don't drag them. Walk wide, like you've wet yourself. Nay, wider."

Pip took three steps, caught one snowshoe on the other, and fell on his face.

He got up white from head to foot, took four steps, and fell again. By the fifth time Bracken had begun to laugh, a short deep sound that Wren had not heard since the gate stair. Pip lay on his back in the snow and grinned up at the sky.

"Walking on top of the snow," he said. "Soon as I can do it, I'm never walking any other way."

Madoc taught them everything else as they went, in short blunt sentences. Keep your face covered. Keep your hands in your armpits when they're not working. Don't sweat, because the sweat will freeze on you, and then you'll freeze. Eat when you're not hungry. He gave each of them a strip of leather with two slits cut in it, to tie over their eyes against the glare.

"Or you'll go snow-blind," he said. "And then you can't see, and then you die."

"Everything out here ends and then you die," said Pip.

"Aye," said Madoc. "Now you're learning."

Wren kept the ink bottle in her shirt against her skin and the Waybook in its oilcloth inside her furs, and every hour she felt for the bottle with her hand. If the ink froze, the book was just a book.

And they had a road, because the Chainman had left one for them.

His trail ran away in front of them across the snow, west and a little north, straight as a rule. It was a path of hard gray-blue frost a pace wide, glassy and sunk a little where his weight had pressed it. The wind blew snow across it, and the snow would not lie. They followed it mile after mile, and Wren tried not to think about what it had carried.

Iyene walked at the front with Madoc, her compass in her hand. "He's walking the old road," she said on the second evening. "It's under us somewhere. Six feet down." She pointed to a short square post with a rounded top that stood up out of the snow off to the left of the trail, with a mark cut in its face.

"Survey milestone," Iyene said. "We're on it."

At night Madoc showed them how to dig into a drift and roof the pit with snowshoes and furs. They lay in it together, with Barrow across the mouth of it to keep out the wind. It was warmer than Wren would have believed. They lay in the dark in a heap of furs, smelling each other, and did not sleep.

Wren lay awake and thought about Dorrit, in that arm, in this cold. She thought about the voices she had overheard in the turret, and the words the old way, which she had told to Dorrit and nobody else. Now Dorrit was gone, and it was Wren's alone to carry, and Iyene lay three feet from her in the dark, breathing slow and even.

When she could not stand it, she thought about her mother.

She did not have her mother's face anymore, because the bridge had taken that, but she had other things. She had her mother's brown quick hands shelling peas into a bowl on the back step, and the smell of her, which was bread and bees. And she had her mother's voice, singing, for Linnet Fallowmere had sung all the time, at everything, badly and happily. Her favorite was a silly old song called "Low Down in the Barley", about a girl who hid in a field from a boy and then was cross when he didn't find her.

Low down, low down, low down in the barley, oh, where will he look for me.

Wren lay in the snow pit and heard her mother sing it, high and a shade under the note, cracking on the word barley every time and then laughing at itself. It was the most alive thing she had left of her mother. She held it in the dark like a coal in her two hands, and at last she slept.

The dead woke on the third day, out of the drifts where they had stood buried to the waist, and it took arrows and iron and fire to put them down. Iyene came back from it with a frost-mark on the back of her bad left hand, and told Madoc to lead on before anything else heard.

The lake was on the fourth day.

It lay across their way in a long gray sheet, flat and smooth and a mile or more wide, with low white hills on either side. The frost trail went straight out across it toward the far shore, a darker line on the gray.

Madoc stopped at the edge. He crouched and laid his palm on the ice, and listened to it.

"We go round," he said.

Iyene had her map out. "Round's a day. Maybe more."

"Aye. We go round."

"He walked straight across it."

"He froze it as he went. He froze it hard. That line there, his path, that'll hold a cart. The rest of it—" Madoc shook his head. "It's the end of September. It's cold, but it's not deep winter yet, not even out here. There's springs in these lakes. You get places where the water moves under. It looks the same on top, but it's thin as a pie-crust."

"Then we stay on his path," Iyene said. "It'll hold a cart, you said. One at a time. A long way apart."

Madoc looked at her, and at the lake. "On his path," he said. "Not one step off it. And a long way apart."

"How do you know all that?" Pip said. "About springs."

"Ice-fishing." Madoc stood up and dusted the snow off his knee. "Every winter on the Scarrow tarns. You cut a hole and drop a line, and the char come up to the light like they've been waiting for you. My uncle Ewan pulled one out of Black Tarn as long as my arm, and never let anyone forget it." He looked out at the gray ice. "You learn to listen. The ice tells you where it's thin, if you've the ears."

"Do they ever shut up about fish, Stayers?" Pip said.

"Nay," said Madoc. "Not once."

They went out onto the ice. The frost trail under Wren's snowshoes was hard as stone, and on either side of it, a pace away, the lake ice lay dark and smooth. She could see down into it, through cracks and bubbles, into black. The ice boomed very deep and far off under her feet. Once a long singing crack ran away across the lake like a harp-string breaking, and every one of them stopped dead, and nothing happened.

Madoc went first, then Iyene and Wren, then Pip leading Barrow, and Alder and Bracken last. Madoc talked as he walked, low and steady, about the char and the tarns and how to keep a fire on the ice without melting yourself a hole. Wren found it helped.

They were more than halfway across when Barrow slipped.

She heard a scrape behind her, and a clatter of hooves, and Pip's voice: "Whoa, whoa, easy, you daft—" She turned round.

Barrow's near hind hoof had gone off the edge of the frost trail, and his back legs had slid out sideways onto the gray lake ice. He was scrambling, and the load on his back swung and dragged him further over.

Pip hauled on the lead rope, leaning back on it with all his weight, and Barrow got one hoof back on the trail, and then the other, and was up on the path, trembling.

And Pip, leaning back on the rope, took one step backward off the trail.

The ice broke under him with a sound like a slammed door.

He went through straight, all at once, with the snowshoes on his feet and his arms flung up, and the lead rope jerked out of his hand. Wren saw his face with its mouth open, and then the black water closed over it and he was gone.

"Pip!"

Iyene screamed it, and Wren had never heard her scream. She was running back down the trail past Wren toward the hole.

"Stay on the path!" Madoc roared. "Stay on the—Bracken!"

Bracken was already flat on his belly on the frost trail by the edge of the hole. He reached out over the black water with the boar-spear and swept the shaft through the water under the ice.

"Sergeant—"

"I've got him." Bracken's arms bunched. "I've got his coat. I've got—pull, somebody, grab my legs and pull."

Madoc had him by the ankles, and Iyene had Madoc by the belt, and Wren grabbed Iyene. They pulled. The edge of the hole broke again, and Bracken slid forward to the chest and swore, and Madoc dug in and heaved until something broke the black water on the end of the spear-shaft.

Pip was hooked by the collar of his coat on the spear's crossbar. He came up out of the hole gray and streaming and limp, and they dragged him across the ice onto the trail, and Iyene fell on her knees beside him.

He was not breathing. His face was blue-white and his lips were blue, and his hair was already freezing to his forehead in stiff points. His eyes were half open and saw nothing, and water ran out of his mouth.

Iyene turned him on his side and hit him hard on the back until water came out, and turned him back and put her ear to his mouth, and hit him again.

"Pip," she said. "Pip. Sandover. Wake up. That's an order. Pip." She hit him again. Then she knelt there on the ice with her hands on his chest, and did nothing, and Wren saw her face, and looked away.

Alder came slowly down the trail on his snowshoes, with his staff, and knelt stiffly on the other side of Pip and looked at him.

"Stand away," he said. "Please, Iyene. Stand away from him."

Iyene did not move. Bracken took her by the shoulders, very gently, and lifted her back.

Alder put his hand on Pip's forehead and spoke Waking. The air round them went cold.

Pip's body jerked. He dragged in a breath with a great tearing rattle, and choked, and rolled over and was sick on the ice, water and oatcake, and lay there gasping and coughing. His eyes were open, and they saw. He lifted his head and looked round at the ring of faces over him, and his teeth began to chatter so hard Wren could hear them.

"C-c-cold," he said.

Iyene made a sound. She pulled him up off the ice into her arms, wet and freezing as he was, and held his head against her shoulder with her eyes shut.

Alder had sat down on the trail, bent over his staff with his head bowed, grayer than Wren had seen him even after the gate at Scarrow. His hands shook.

"Thanks, Grandad," Pip said, through his chattering teeth, into Iyene's shoulder.

Alder opened one eye. "You called me that at Scarrow, when you thought I was dying," he said. "And behind my back since the Stair. I am old, Master Sandover. I am not deaf."

They had to get Pip warm, and there was nothing to burn.

Bracken carried him to the far shore. There they stripped him and rolled him in all the dry furs they had, and Iyene got into the furs with him, and they burned the last of the charcoal. It was not enough, and Pip's lips stayed blue. He stopped shivering, which Madoc said was bad, and then started again, which Madoc said was better.

They slept that night on the shore in a heap round him. In the morning there was no fuel left at all, so they put Pip on Barrow, bundled in furs, and walked on, and in the afternoon the blizzard came.

Madoc smelled it first. He stopped on the frost trail with his head up, sniffing, and Wren saw that the sky in the north had gone the color of a bruise.

"Snow," he said. "Big. Soon."

"How soon?"

"An hour. Less."

"Shelter?"

Madoc looked round at the flat white land. "Dig in," he said. "Dig in and pray."

"Not with the boy like that," Iyene said. "He'll be dead by morning in a snow pit. So will the Warden." She turned to Wren. "The book."

Wren had it out already. She knelt in the snow with her back to the wind and opened it on her knees, turning the stiff pages with fingers that would hardly bend. There was the King's Road running west-northwest across a blank page, with the little marks of the milestones and a long wavering shape that was the lake.

Beyond the lake, a little tower was drawn beside the road, a square with a pointed roof. Beside it was a name Wren had read at the kitchen table at Fallowmere in August, a lifetime ago: Coldharbour.

"Survey waystation," Iyene said, crouching at her shoulder. "Stone. A hearth. A place to sleep."

"How far?"

Iyene looked back at the milestone they had passed, and at the map. "Not far. A mile. Two. It'll be sealed. They sealed them all when they left."

The first snow came sideways on the wind, and then the world went white. One moment Wren could see Madoc a few yards ahead, and Barrow, and the long gray line of the frost trail. The next there was no ground and no sky, only the white roaring, and the snow driving into her face so hard it hurt.

"Rope!" Madoc was shouting, somewhere. "Rope up! Everybody on the rope!"

They roped up, Madoc at the front, then Iyene and Wren, then Barrow with Pip tied on him, then Alder and Bracken. Wren could not see Iyene in front of her, only the rope going into the white. She walked with her head down and her eyes shut, one hand on the rope and the frost trail hard under her feet.

She did not know how long it was. Her face went numb, and then her hands, and then her feet, and she stopped feeling the cold. She knew that was bad, because Madoc had said so, but she could not remember why.

The rope stopped, and she walked into Iyene's back. Iyene turned and put her mouth by Wren's ear and shouted, "Madoc's seen something!"

"What?"

"A shape. Left of the trail. Off the road. He saw it in a gap and then it went."

They went left off the trail into the deep snow, floundering, and Barrow screamed. Bracken got behind the mule and shoved him through the drifts with his shoulder, swearing at him steadily, and Barrow came.

And then there was a wall in front of Wren's face, gray rough stone. She put her hand on it and tipped her head back, and could not see the top.

"Tower!" Madoc was shouting. "It's the tower! Find the door!"

They felt their way round it on the rope, digging with their hands through drifts heaped higher than Wren's head against the wall.

Bracken found the door, deep in a drift on the south side, and they all clawed the snow away from it. It was a great slab of gray stone in a frame of iron, with no handle or lock or keyhole, only a round iron boss in the middle. On the boss was a mark Wren knew, the Survey's mark that was stamped inside the cover of the Waybook.

Bracken ran at it with his whole weight and bounced off, and fell in the snow.

"It's sealed," Iyene shouted. "I told you. It's sealed."

Wren was already on her knees with the book out of her furs, holding the pages flat with her forearm against the tearing wind. She found the page, the road and the lake and the little square tower, though she could hardly see it, and the snow drove into the book and melted on the old paper.

She dug the ink from inside her shirt. It was warm, the only warm thing in the world. Her fingers would not work, so she got the cork out with her teeth. She got the pen out of the spine of the book and dropped it, and found it again in the snow by feel, and dipped it.

Bracken knelt beside her and put his great body between her and the wind, and Madoc knelt on the other side.

Wren put the pen to the page beside the tower, and wrote.

The door of Coldharbour stands open and its hearth is laid.

She had thought her hand could not get any colder, but it did. The keeper's cold came into it, deeper and sharper than the cold of the White, and went into her wrist and stopped there, and she wrote on. The ink ran out of the pen silver and shone on the wet page even in the white roar of the storm. As she wrote the last words the silver went gray, and then black.

Behind her the stone groaned, deeper than the wind, in the ground under her knees. Then came a grinding of stone on stone, and the shriek of iron moving that had not moved in three hundred years. Wren turned her head. The great gray slab of the door was swinging slowly inward, pushing the snow before it, and it stopped, open.

Inside was a dry, still dark, out of the wind.

Madoc went in first with a torch lit from the last coal, and then he shouted, and Wren got up and stumbled in after him.

It was a round stone room, dry and swept, with a stone stair going up round the wall. On the far side was a great hearth, and in it, laid ready as if someone had done it that morning, was a fire. There was kindling dry as bone with split logs stacked over it, and beside it a basket of logs and a box of dry moss.

Madoc put the torch to it. The kindling flared up yellow and crackling, the logs caught, and the room filled with light and the smell of wood smoke.

They brought Pip in and laid him by the fire, and Alder, and Barrow, who stood steaming by the door and shook himself all over them. Bracken shut the door. It swung on its iron hinges as easily as a gate, and the roar of the storm dropped to a moan.

Wren sat down on the floor by the fire.

She felt the gap then. She had been waiting for it, and she knew now what it would be like, the cold smooth place where something had been. So she went looking, in the warm, with the fire on her face.

The bee-yard. The lane. The Old Reel, with no beginning. Tansy's face. Dorrit's.

Her mother's hands, shelling peas. They were there.

She reached for the song. Low down, low down, low down in the barley...

She had the words and the tune, and she hummed it to the fire. But when she listened for the voice that had always sung it in her head, high and cracked and laughing, there was nothing there. There was only her own voice, humming in a stone room in the snow. Her mother had sung that song ten thousand times, and Wren could no longer hear one of them.

She sat with her knees drawn up and looked at the fire, too tired to cry. She felt Madoc sit down beside her, not touching her, and stay there.

Across the hearth Pip was asleep with his head on Iyene's knee, and Iyene sat against the wall, awake. Alder lay wrapped in his brown cloak with his eyes shut. The fire cracked and spat, and outside the wind went round and round the tower.

Bracken sat on the hearthstone with his spear across his knees and his furs still on, looking into the fire.

"She talks too much, Dor does," Bracken said, to no one. "It's too quiet."