The Bow and the Bow String

Year 0, late evening. The Ember-Tree Reaches, Lythariel.

A woman knelt in ash that was still warm.

She was restringing a bow. The bow's string was silver wire braided with a thread of her own hair, and she was humming a song her mother had taught her and trying not to remember the words.

The ember-trees breathed around her at a rate that did not match anything's lungs. They had been breathing at this rate since the world stopped turning. The air smelled the way it always smelled in the Reaches, which was like cedar and old bread and the inside of a hand that had been closed for a long time. She had stopped noticing the smell after the second month.

The bow had been her father's. He had been dead since the Fall. She did not think about this with any particular weight. He was dead. The bow was here. The two facts had stopped speaking to each other.

She finished the splice. She tested the tension by drawing the string halfway and letting it down. The string sang once, low. She nodded. She did not say anything out loud. She had been alone long enough that her own voice had begun to sound like someone else's, and she had stopped using it for anything but the song.

Beside her, in a small leather satchel that had once carried hawking gloves, she kept her arrows. There were nineteen. There had been twenty-one when she had left the Faded Court. She counted them now, as she counted them every evening, by feel. Nineteen. The two she had used had not been retrieved. She had not gone back for them.

The light in the Reaches was the same light it had been all day, which was the same light it had been all of yesterday, which was the same light it had been three months ago when she had sat on the stones outside the eastern wing for the last time. The sun did not move in the Reaches. It had not moved in any region of Lythariel for a generation. The sky was the bruised blue-gold of late evening, locked. Children born after the Fracture grew up not knowing what dawn was. She had been twelve when the sun stopped. She remembered, and wished she didn't.

She unwrapped a small parcel of cold travel-bread and ate three bites, slowly, the way her mother had taught her to eat in winter when the supplies were thin: chew until it was almost liquid, swallow, wait, then chew again. The bread was hard. She had baked it in the Faded Court's kitchens before she had run, and three months in the leather pouch had not been kind to it, and she would have to make more soon. Or stop eating. The latter had begun to seem possible. Not as a choice. As an option that had drifted into the room and was being polite about waiting.

She wrapped the bread up again. She put it back in the pouch. She would eat the same three bites in the morning, if she was alive in the morning.

There was an ember-fruit at the base of the tree she had set her camp against. She picked it. The skin gave a little under her thumb, the way ripe ones did. She ate it whole. The fruit was bitter on the tongue and warm in the chest, the warmth spreading slowly under her ribs the way it did, and she held the warmth for a moment because the warmth was the only warmth that did not require firewood.

She confessed it to herself: she was not going to pray. She had known for two years that not-praying was not the same as not believing. She had known it clearly. It had not changed anything. This was the thing she kept having to say out loud to herself, the thing that did not get easier for the saying.

She ran her hand along the bow. The wood was old and dark. There was a small notch near the upper limb where her father had carved his initial when he was nineteen and had not yet learned that nineteen-year-olds should not carve their initials into bows that might one day be drawn against people they would not have wanted to draw against. She had asked him about the notch once, when she was eight. He had said: I made a mistake. The bow remembers. I do not want to make it remember more than it does. So I do not carve again.

She did not know what mistake he had meant. She had never asked. She was admitting, with her hand on the notch, that she had not asked because she had been afraid of the answer, and she could not ask now, and the afraid was still there, unchanged, after twelve years, which was the part she would not have been able to say when he was alive.

She held the bow across her knees. She pressed her palm flat against the notch. The wood was cool. She let her hand stay there for a long count, which was how she did most things now. Slowly. With a count. The count was a way of not letting the silence pull her down to where the silence wanted her to go.

She heard the ash-beast before she saw it.

The ember-trees changed their breathing first. The rhythm did not so much stop as become aware of itself, which was the trees' way. She had learned, over three months, to read the shift. It was the only warning the world gave.

She was on her feet without thinking about it. The bow was in her left hand. Her right hand was at the satchel of arrows, and her fingers had already counted out one before she had finished standing.

The ash-beast came around the base of the largest ember-tree, twelve paces from her camp.

It was smoke that held a shape. The shape was vaguely four-legged and vaguely large, but the shape was not the point. The point was the eyes. The eyes were like coals that had been left a long time on a hearth, and the coals had stopped putting out heat but had not stopped knowing they were coals. They watched her with the slow attention of a thing that had been alive for far longer than its body should have allowed.

She did not move. She knew, by now, that ash-beasts could see motion better than they could see still. She had stood like this with one for forty-one minutes once, the both of them not moving, and at the end the ash-beast had turned and gone away, although it had taken its time about the going.

This one was not turning.

She drew the bow.

The string came back smooth. The arrow seated itself in the notch. Her hand knew the draw. Her hand had known the draw for sixteen years. The draw was not the thing she had to think about.

The thing she had to think about was the regret.

The arrow was an Echo Arrow. The arrowheads she carried now had been her last gift from the smith of the Faded Court before the Court fell, and the smith had told her, the night he gave them, that the arrowheads had been blessed by the small shrine the Court kept for the old powers. He had not told her what the blessing was. She had found out the first time she had loosed one.

The blessing was confession.

When the arrow flew, the air between her hand and the target would bloom with a hologram, like smoke, but more solid. The hologram showed the deepest regret of the one who fired the arrow. Not a regret. The regret. The one underneath. The one she had spent every waking moment for sixteen years not looking at.

The hologram showed it. The hologram was not selective.

She had loosed only two arrows, in three months. She knew now which regret would bloom. The regret was always the same. The regret was settled. The regret was where she lived.

She breathed out. She held the bow.

She had been hoping, these three months, that the ash-beasts would give her a reason to loose. She admitted this. She was looking at it now, from the corner, the way she looked at all the things she didn't look at. She had told herself she'd come to be alone. She was admitting now that alone had not been the point. The Echo Arrows were a thing she couldn't do to herself. She'd needed something to make her do it.

She had thirteen heartbeats to decide.

She had not been chasing the ash-beasts. The ash-beasts had been finding her. She did not know why. She had a guess. She thought it was because she was the only thing in the Reaches that was still mourning out loud, and the ash-beasts could feel out-loud mourning the way other animals could feel salt. They came for it. She did not know what they did when they got it. The two she had killed had not given her time to find out.

She loosed.

The arrow flew. The hologram bloomed in the air between her hand and the ash-beast, the way it had bloomed both times before, and the bloom was the same as it had been both times before, because the regret did not change.

She was fifteen. The eastern wing of the Faded Court was burning. The fire was two rooms away from her brother's room, and her hand was on her brother's hand, and her mother had said take your brother and go, and her brother was scared. He was seven. He wanted to go back for the doll he had left in his bedroom. The doll was in the south corner. The fire was coming from the east. Lyra had ten seconds, maybe fewer.

She let go of his hand.

She told him: Follow me.

He turned the other way.

The side door was thirty seconds out. The wind was at her back. The wind closed the door behind her. The wind sounded the way wind sounded, that was all it had been; wind, an old door, a draft. She had not pulled the door shut. The wind had pulled it shut. The wind had been a wind. The door had been a door.

The hologram showed the door closing.

The ash-beast, twelve paces from her camp, saw the door close. The ash-beast's coal-eyes flickered the way coals flickered when a wind passed over them. The ash-beast was, for an instant, also watching her brother turn the other way.

Then the arrow struck.

The arrowhead found the place where the smoke was densest. The smoke folded in on itself. The hologram dissolved into ash that did not blacken cloth. The ash-beast came apart into a low pile of warm grey, smelling of cedar and old bread.

Lyra stood with the bow still in her left hand, the bowstring still trembling slightly. Her right hand was empty. The arrow she had loosed was buried among the ash.

She walked over. She knelt. She found the arrow by feel. She drew it out of the pile. The arrow was clean. The ash was already cooling.

She had told the bowyer once, when she was twelve and had not understood what she was looking at, that ash-beasts did not bleed. The bowyer had laughed. The bowyer had said: of course they do. They bleed memory. We just cannot see it.

She had not understood then. She thought she might be starting to.

There was something just below her left collarbone that she had begun to expect now, after the first two arrows. She unwrapped the front of her shirt. She did not look. She put her hand to the place. The new wound was there. A line, three fingers wide, where there had been no wound before. The line was warm and dry. It did not bleed. It would not bleed. By morning it would be a scar.

The first arrow she had loosed had given her a scar across her right palm, in the shape of a hand reaching out. She kept that scar covered with a glove now. She did not look at it more than she had to.

The second arrow had given her a scar around the base of her ribs on the left side, in the shape of a doorway. She had stopped noticing it.

This third scar would settle into whatever shape it settled into. She would notice it for a few days, and then it would join the others, and then her body would be a few centimeters more registered than it had been before. The Echo Arrows did this. Each shot took a fragment of the regret out of her interior and put it into her body, where it would stay. The Court's scribe had once told her, when she was sixteen and she had asked him what the old powers cost, that all power cost the body something. He had said: the question is whether the body would rather hold what the power asks for, or whether the power would rather hold the body to its older debts.

She had not understood then either.

She wrapped the front of her shirt up again. She turned away from the ash. The pile was already losing its warmth. Soon it would be cold ash, indistinguishable from any other ash in the Reaches. The ember-trees had begun their old breathing again. The forest was, if not at peace, at least back at its usual rate of unrest.

She walked back to her camp. The bow rested across her shoulders. She put the recovered arrow back in the satchel. Eighteen, then. Eighteen arrows now. She had stopped trying to ration. She had stopped counting forward to a day when she would need them. The forward had become a thing she did not look at, in the same way the side door of the eastern wing of the Faded Court was a thing she did not look at.

She was about to sit down. She was about to eat the second three bites of bread, although she had not earned them, although it was not yet morning. She was thinking about whether the warmth of the ember-fruit would carry her another four hours of waking, or whether she would have to start a fire.

That was when she saw the silver.

There was a small piece of polished silver embedded in the bark of the ember-tree she had set her camp against. The silver was no larger than a fingernail. It had not been there an hour ago. It had not been there in three months. She had run her hand along this tree's bark every evening. She had memorized the bark by feel. The silver had not been there.

She stepped close to it. She put her hand near it without touching. The silver was warm. That was the first thing. The second thing was that the silver was humming, at a frequency just above what her ears were quite picking up, but that her sternum was hearing as a small pressure.

She had heard nothing like this before. The Reaches did not produce silver. The trees did not produce metal. There was no human in the Reaches who could have placed silver in this tree's bark. There had not been a human, other than her, in any visible distance for the entire three months. The silver had appeared.

She put her finger to it.

The silver was warmer than she had expected. The hum, to her finger, became a small song. Not a melody. A cadence. As if the silver were trying to remember something it had not, in fact, ever known, and was trying anyway.

She pulled the silver loose from the bark. The bark held it for a moment, the way bark held things that had grown into it, which made no sense for a thing that had been there for less than an hour. The silver came free. It rested in her palm. It was, in her palm, the temperature of skin. It hummed the same low cadence to the bone in her thumb.

She held it for a minute. The minute was a long moment of perhaps eighty heartbeats. She didn't know what she was holding. She held it anyway. That was the honest version of what she was doing, and she had promised herself, three months ago, to say the honest version.

She put the silver in her front pocket, the small one over her heart. The pocket was empty. The silver fit. The hum continued, muffled, against her chest.

She sat down beside the camp. She took a slow breath. The ember-trees breathed with her. They did not match her rate; she did not match theirs. She had stopped trying to make them match. She breathed her own breath. The trees breathed their own breath. The two breaths overlapped without insisting on each other.

She thought, for the first time in a long time, about her mother.

Not about the night her mother had said take your brother and go. That memory she did not let herself near. She thought about an earlier night. An ordinary one. She did not remember which year. Her mother had been singing a lullaby, off-key, after dinner. Her mother had always sung off-key. It was one of the small constancies of the Faded Court that the queen of the Faded Court could not, in fact, hold a tune. Her father had loved this. He had said it made the lullaby real.

The lullaby had been a quiet thing. A few notes. A handful of words. Lyra had heard it every night for the first ten years of her life, and then on the bedside of her brother for five more years after she had grown out of needing it for herself, and then she had not heard it again.

She had been humming it, all along. Without the words. Without thinking. While she carved the strings, while she ate the bread, while she walked the Reaches. She had not been thinking about the words. She had been thinking about the hum.

The silver, in her pocket, was humming a cadence she did not quite know.

The cadence was almost a chord she remembered.

She tried.

She opened her mouth.

She had not used her voice for words in three months.

She hummed the first few notes of the lullaby, the way her mother had hummed it.

The silver, in her pocket, hummed the next few notes, a fraction late, like a partner finding the song.

She froze. She listened. The silver hummed on its own for a count of three, then went quiet.

She tried again. She hummed. The silver hummed back.

The third time, she did not hum. She tried to say the words. The first verse. She had not said the words in eight years. They came up from a place under her tongue that she had stopped opening.

Quiet now, the dark is kind, Quiet now, the night is yours, Hold the small bright in your mind, Hold what's gone behind the doors.

Her voice cracked on small bright. She did not stop. She made it through. The silver, in her pocket, hummed the cadence under the words, and the hum under the words made the words feel like they were coming from somewhere outside her own throat, although they were not.

The first verse ended. She closed her mouth. She did not say anything more.

She didn't know what the silver had answered. She didn't know if the answering was the silver's or her own. She was admitting that she didn't know, and she was keeping the silver anyway, and those two things were both true at once, which was the closest she had come to honesty in three months.

The silver was humming, in her pocket, against her heart, at a cadence that almost matched the lullaby. The ember-trees were breathing around her at their old rate. The bow rested across her shoulders. The arrows in the satchel were eighteen. Her body now had three scars where her interior used to have three regrets. The Reaches were quiet. She was, against all reason, still alive.

She thought, after a while: I will eat the bread in the morning.

She lay down with the bow across her chest. The ember-trees breathed. The silver, in her pocket, hummed itself eventually to sleep against her sternum.

She did not pray.

She hummed the lullaby once more, just the first verse, and then she let the verse trail off into nothing, and the nothing was not silence so much as the place silence rested.

The ember-trees went on breathing.

The Reaches were as they had been. The Reaches were always as they had been.

Somewhere, in a chamber she had never seen, a young man's chest had grown warm.

End Chapter 1.