The Thaw

For the space of three breaths, nothing happened.

The name shone in the keystone. The Chainman stood a few yards from the lectern with his hand held out and his face lifted to the arch. Wren stood at the lectern with the pen in her fingers and a cold hollow in her where something had been. At the door Madoc and Pip had stopped fighting, and the faded in front of them had stopped too, every one of them, with their heads turned toward the silver light.

Then the chain broke. It went at the shoulder first, a link splitting with a crack like green ash snapped over a knee, and the chain slid, and the next link split, and the next. They went all down his body in a running clatter, faster and faster, and the pieces fell off him into the frost and rang on the stone. He had worn it since before the Frost, and it came off him in the time it takes to drop a handful of coins.

He screamed. It was a man's scream, high and raw, and the Frost came out of him with it.

It poured off him white, out of his mouth and his chest and his hands. It was snow and wind and a cold so deep that Wren's eyes watered and the water froze on her lashes before it could fall. It hit her and knocked her off her feet. She went down in a heap behind the lectern with the Waybook clutched against her chest, and the wind came screaming over the top of the black stone.

She couldn't see. The Roll Chamber was gone, and there was only roaring white with shapes flying past inside it: shards of frost off the walls, arrows, a broken lamp, a scrap of someone's coat. The cold went through her clothes as if she had nothing on and made every breath a knife. She pressed her face into her sleeve and breathed through the wool, and the wool froze to her mouth.

Somewhere Dorrit was shouting Bracken's name. Somewhere Pip was shouting for Madoc.

The wind dropped for a breath and the white thinned, and she saw them. It had rolled Dorrit and Bracken across the floor to the foot of the wall on Wren's left. Dorrit lay flat across him with her arms round his head and his bandaged arm pinned under her. Over by the door, Madoc had one arm hooked through the bronze ring of the frozen door-leaf and the other round Pip's waist. Pip's feet were off the ground, blowing out sideways toward the corridor while Madoc roared at him.

Between the lectern and the arch, at the heart of the white, a shape knelt with its arms wrapped round its body. The storm was pouring out of its chest and its mouth, and it was getting smaller.

Then the white closed again.

Iyene was right, Wren thought. Hells. She was right all along. It's coming back, and it's going over the mountains to Dall, and it's my doing.

She got her head up and made herself look.

The storm stood in the heart of the Roll Chamber, a whirling white pillar as wide as a threshing floor, pushing out toward the walls. Where it touched them, the names vanished under ice. It reached the door, and the faded there went white and hard and fell over. The cold came back off the walls and hit her again, and she felt her fingers going, and her feet.

But it was not growing. She saw that as she lay there, and didn't at first believe it. The pillar roared and whirled, but its edges were thinning, and the snow at its rim came down wet on her face and ran. The dry killing cold of the White had a wetness in it now, the rawness of a March gale off the hill. It was a storm, and it would still kill every one of them in this room, but it was a storm that could end.

Something moved in the white near her, and a hand came out of it and got her by the collar. It was Alder, on his knees beside the lectern, his hair and his eyebrows solid white. He had his staff in his other hand and was using it to haul himself up, hand over hand, as Wren had seen old Cob haul himself up a gatepost after a fall. He got to one knee, and then to his feet, and the wind nearly took him off them.

He said something to her. She saw his lips move and heard nothing but the storm.

Then he turned his back on her and faced the white pillar, and lifted his staff, and spoke his Word into it, and the chamber went cold and bright.

The storm hung for a moment, shuddering, and began to turn.

It turned on itself like water going down a drain, slow at first and then faster, a great wheel of white filling the chamber from wall to wall. Wren felt it pull at her. The snow on the floor lifted and went spinning into it, with the shards and the arrows and the broken lamp. The wheel turned faster and drew in tighter, and it rose off the floor, up past the tiers of names and up the curve of the walls toward the dome, and the dome was glass.

The glass went up and out all at once, with a noise like every window in Dall breaking on the same night. Wren flung her arms over her head, but nothing came down; the storm took the shards up with it. It went through the empty ribs of the dome, a white pillar roaring into the black sky over Cael Meddan, and the stars went out behind it.

Then the roaring was above them, and then far above them, and then it was gone.

Wren lay on her back on the wet stone and looked up.

The dome was bare stone ribs against the sky, and the sky was full of cloud, low and heavy, lit from somewhere with a strange gray light. The storm had gone up into it and spread out and was only cloud now, rolling away over the city with no more white in it than the clouds over Dall. Everything was quiet. She could hear her heart, and someone crying, and someone else swearing in a low steady voice, and the drip of melting frost.

Alder lay beside her where he had fallen. His face was gray, and he was shaking all over, his teeth chattering so hard she could hear them, and his eyes were open.

"Alder."

"Wind," he said. "That was Wind." He shut his eyes. "I had rather hoped to see the sea with it. One sees so little of the sea in the College."

"Are you hurt?"

"I am an old man and I have been knocked down by the White Winter. Everything is hurt." He opened his eyes again. "Is it gone?"

"I think so."

"Then help me up, and we shall find out. Gently. I have been knocked down enough for one night."

She got her arm under his shoulders, her hands numb and clumsy. Before she could lift him, something touched her face.

It was a drop of water. It fell out of the sky through the empty dome and hit her on the cheek, and it was warm.

Another fell on her hand, and another hit the stone beside her with a small flat sound. Then there were a dozen, and then a hundred, and then the rain came down.

It came straight down out of the dark through the ribs of the dome, heavy and warm as bathwater. It fell on the frost on the floor, and the frost went to slush. It fell on the walls, and the ice on the names cracked and slid and came down in sheets, and the names came out from under it black and wet and shining. It fell on Wren's upturned face and ran into her eyes and her mouth, and it tasted of nothing, of rain, of summer.

Alder began to laugh. He lay in the slush with the rain on his face and laughed, and he was crying too; she could see it even in the rain.

"It's only weather," he said. "It's only weather now."

Then he was looking past her, up at the arch. The name was there in the keystone, through the falling water. The storm had scoured the walls and the floor and blown the dome out of its frame, and it hadn't touched those words. They had gone from silver to black, wet and shining in the same ink as the thousands on the walls, and from where she lay they looked as if they had always been there.

Against the side wall, Dorrit sat up out of a drift of slush. Under her, Bracken lay on his back with his eyes shut and the rain falling on his face.

"Bracken," she said. "Bracken, you great ox. Bracken." She took his face between her hands and shook it.

He opened his eyes. "Is it raining," he said, "or am I dead?"

"It's raining."

"Pity." He shut his eyes again. "Hurts less, dead. So they say."

"Who says?"

"Dead men. Never met one who complained." His good hand came up and found her wrist and held it. "You lay on me."

"You were blowing away."

"I weigh eighteen stone, Dor."

"Seventeen and a half," Dorrit said. "Now." And she put her forehead down on his chest and sobbed.

At the door, Madoc was shouting. "They're down! Keeper, they're all down!"

He came across the room at a run, splashing, his hair plastered to his head and blood on his knife hand that wasn't his own. Behind him in the doorway the faded lay in heaps, the girl with the ribbons and the woman in the fur-trimmed gown and all the rest, and they had stopped being anything but dead. The rain came in on them through the broken dome and washed the last of the frost off their faces.

"All down the stair," Madoc said. "All down the corridor, as far as the light goes. I went and looked. They've lain down. They're only bodies now, the lot of them."

"The city," Pip said.

He was halfway up the gallery stair that ran round the inside of the chamber, with Iyene's sabre stuck through his belt. He had climbed to where one of the high windows had lost its glass, and he was hanging half out of it into the night.

"Pip, get down from there," Dorrit said, from somewhere.

"Come and look! Come on!" His voice cracked. "It's all running. The roofs are coming off, the snow's coming off them in lumps, there's water in all the streets. They're lying down. All the ones in the streets. The ones that were standing. They're just lying down in the rain, all over, everywhere, as far as I can—it's the whole city. That's sharp. That's so sharp. Sir, look—"

He stopped. He hung there in the window with the rain on him and didn't turn round.

Nobody told him to come down after that.

Wren left Alder sitting against the lectern, holding his staff upright like a mast, and got to her feet. Her legs shook, and she stood a moment with one hand on the lectern's edge until they stopped.

Iyene lay at the foot of the lectern where Bracken had laid her. The rain had washed the frost off her. Her hair was dark with water, and her face was only tired, a lean tired face with a scar through one eyebrow, and the rain ran off it into the collar of her coat. Wren bent and pulled the torn coat closed across the white marks on her chest, because it was all she could think of to do. Then she turned to look for the Chainman.

He was kneeling a few yards off in a pool of water.

He wasn't tall any more. He was a young man, thin as a rake, kneeling in meltwater up to his thighs with the rain running off him and his dark hair, too long, stuck to his neck. He wore the shirt and breeches of a Survey chainman, soaked through and stained with rust. The chain lay all round him in the water, broken into single links, and more rust ran off his hands where it had been.

He was looking at his hands. He turned them over and looked at the backs and at the palms, and at the calluses on the fingertips of the left one.

Then he looked up, and Wren saw his face.

It was an ordinary face, thin and young, with a long jaw and a wide mouth, a nose that had been broken once and set a little crooked, and brown eyes. You might see a face like it behind a bar, or in a hayfield, or at a harvest supper with a fiddle under its chin. She knew she would never forget it.

He had a way of tilting his head a little to one side when he looked. Wren did it too; she had been told so all her life, and she knew it the moment she saw it.

"Who are you?" he said.

It was the same young hoarse voice. But it was a person's voice now, with a question in it and an accent she had never heard, soft in the vowels.

Wren opened her mouth to tell him, and there was nothing there.

She knew who she was. She knew she was a keeper, and a Fallowmere, and that she kept bees and played the fiddle and had a grandmother in Dall with a bad hip and a worse temper. She went to put her name at the front of it, where it had gone at the front of every answer to that question since she could talk, and her hand closed on cold air.

"I don't know," she said.

He looked at her, puzzled, with the rain running down his face.

"Wren," Dorrit said.

She had come up beside them, soaked, with blood all down her front, holding her hands a little out from her sides as if she didn't want to touch anything with them. She knelt down in the water next to Will Rudge and looked at him.

"Her name's Wren," she said. "Wren Fallowmere."

"Wren," he said. He tried it. He looked at Wren while he said it, and she heard it, and she knew it was meant for her, as she knew the name of the next tune in a set. "Wren."

Then he looked at Dorrit, and something came into his face that was almost a smile.

"You," he said. "You talked."

"I did," Dorrit said. Her voice wobbled. "I talked your ear off. All the way across the White."

"You didn't stop."

"No. I never do. You ask anyone."

"Bread," Will Rudge said. He said it carefully, one word at a time, as she must have taught him. "Fire. Bee."

Dorrit laughed, and it came out wrong, half a sob. She put her bloody hand over her mouth and nodded.

"Is it raining?" he said. He looked up at the broken dome, and the rain fell on his face, and he shut his eyes against it. "It never rains in the Hall. Master Vance won't have it. There's a roof." He opened his eyes and looked round at the water and the rusted links lying in it, and a worried look came over his face. "Where's my chain? I'm to carry the chain at first light. They'll dock me for it, if it's lost. It's Survey property." He frowned, trying to remember. "There was a to-do at the Lamp last night. I played till they threw me out. Master Wystan was there, the Keeper, the young one, dancing with the Tanner girl. Couldn't dance for toffee. Stood on her feet all through my reel and paid for my beer after, when I knocked it over." He looked round, as though he expected to see Wystan in the doorway. "Is he here? He'll tell them about the chain. He's good for that, Wystan. He's a good lad."

Alder, sitting against the lectern, turned his face away.

"You don't have to carry it any more," Wren said.

"Don't I?"

"No. Nobody does."

He thought about that. "Good," he said. "It's heavy." Then he looked at her again, straight at her, and his face was a young man's face that had just remembered something, and was afraid.

"My girl," he said. "Anwen. She's only little. Did she live?"

"She lived," Wren said. "She kept bees."

He looked at her, and then he smiled.

It was a wide smile that went all over his face and made him look younger than nineteen. It was the smile of a man who has been told the harvest's in, or the baby's come, or the tune went well. He nodded, as if she'd told him something he had been fairly sure of all along and was glad to hear, and settled back in the water, kneeling, and closed his eyes.

"Wren," Madoc said.

He was standing behind her in the water, with her fiddle case in his hands.

He had carried it since Scarrow, on his back across the White and through the drains, into the Roll Chamber and through the fight at the door. He had never once complained of it, though it was awkward and knocked against his quiver. He'd said a Stayer never left a fiddle behind, and she had thought he was teasing her.

He held it out. The case was wet, with a long gouge in the leather where something had caught it, but the clasps held.

"Play it for him," Madoc said. His voice was rough. "All of it. Both halves. He's never once heard it done, has he? Not since he made it."

She took it and opened it with her numb fingers. The fiddle lay inside, dark and dry, with the old glued crack in its back. She lifted it out and set it under her chin, and her chin knew where to go.

Will Rudge knelt in the water with his eyes closed and the rain on his face, breathing slowly. As she watched, the rain ran down his cheek and she could see the stone floor through it. His hands, resting on his knees, had gone clear at the fingertips, like ice in a warm room.

She put the bow on the strings and played the Old Reel.

She didn't remember learning it; that was one of the things the book had taken, the kitchen fire and Tansy's stick beating time on the hearth. But her hands had never forgotten. They went into it without her, bright and quick, through the climbing first phrase and the strange turn in the middle that tripped dancers who didn't know it. The sound went up round the walls and came back off all those thousands of wet shining names.

Will Rudge's eyes opened. He didn't look at her but at the air in front of him, and his lips moved, and his right foot moved in the water, a small tap, in time.

She came to the top of the first half, where the tune had always stopped in Dall. It hung there at the top of a phrase and waited for the rest of itself.

She played on into the second half.

Old Senna had taught it to her in the moot hall at Scarrow with the whole town listening. It came round from the top of the phrase and fell, and turned, and came home, the other half of the same breath.

Will Rudge was smiling again. His whole body was clear now, clear as water, with the rain falling through it. She could see the rusted links on the floor through his knees and the far wall of names through his chest. His foot was still keeping time.

Behind her she heard someone moving. Bracken had got himself up on his good elbow in the slush by the wall, with Dorrit's arm round him, and he was watching, and Alder had pulled himself upright on his staff. The rain came down on all of them and on the fiddle, and she didn't care about the fiddle.

She played it to the end, the last phrase brought round to the close, and the close was his, and nobody in Dall had heard it since the Frost.

When she lifted the bow, there was nobody kneeling in the water.

There was the pool on the stone floor, spreading a little, with the rain falling into it and the old iron links lying in it, red with rust. The rain made rings on the water, and the rings ran out and touched the links and came back.

After a while Wren knelt down in the water, put her hand into the pool, and found one of the links. It was rough with rust and heavier than it looked, a single oval of old iron as long as her finger, and warm from the rain. She closed her hand on it and stood up.

Dorrit was crying. Madoc had his hand over his eyes. Across the chamber, on the gallery stair, Pip had turned round in the window and was sitting on the sill with his arms round his knees, watching.

Wren stood with the fiddle and bow in one hand and the link in the other. The rain came down through the broken dome onto the Roll, onto the walls of names and the name in the keystone, and onto Iyene lying by the lectern with her face washed clean. It was warm, and it smelled of wet stone.

She turned to Dorrit.

"Tell me again," she said. "What's my name?"