The Threshold of the Eastern Wing

Year 0, the first short month after the second month, late evening (Lythariel's perpetual twilight). The Ember-Tree Reaches and, for one slow hour, the threshold of the eastern wing of the Faded Court.

The fragment had been humming.

It had been humming for several weeks, by her count, and she counted by sleeps because there was no day in Lythariel to count by. She had slept perhaps thirty times since the morning she had picked the fragment from the bark of the ember-tree and slipped it into the pocket sewn against her ribs, and the fragment had hummed every dusk, if dusk was the word for the hour the bruised blue-gold of the sky deepened by a small fraction toward what would have been evening, in a world that had evenings. It had hummed for a still moment, perhaps three minutes by the rhythm of her own pulse, and then it had quieted, and she had been able to set down the bow and eat her three bites of cold travel-bread.

She had begun to think of the hum the way she thought of the breathing of the trees. Not as something a thing did. As something the place did. The Reaches breathed. The fragment hummed. She held still while the world held still around her, and then the hum stopped, and she went on.

This evening the hum was different.

She did not, at first, know how. She had been threading the small silver wire through the bow's lower limb, replacing a length that had begun to fray, and her hands had been doing the work the way her hands did most work now, which was without her thinking about it. The fragment had warmed against her ribs, and the warmth had become the slow pulse it became at this hour, and she had nodded, the way one nodded at a familiar thing, and then she had felt it.

It was not a hum.

It was a hum that was reaching for something.

She set the bow down on the cloth she kept for it. She put her palm flat over the pocket. The fragment was the same temperature it had always been, which was the temperature of a stone that had been held in a child's hand for too long. The fragment was no warmer. The hum was no louder. But the hum, this evening, had a direction, and the direction was not toward her.

She turned her head, slowly, in the direction the hum was reaching.

The direction was east.

The east was the direction she had not walked since the night she had walked away from the eastern wing of the Faded Court with twenty-one arrows in her satchel and the wing burning behind her. She had walked west. She had walked west for a long time. She had set up a camp in the Reaches at the place where the ember-trees stopped breathing in the rhythm she could hold, and she had stayed there, and the world had stayed there with her. The east, since then, had been the direction she did not look.

The hum did not care.

She sat for a long count. She counted to a hundred. The hum went on reaching east. It did not know it was reaching at her ribs. It only knew it was reaching.

She rolled the small cloth around the bow. She tied it. She put the satchel of arrows over her shoulder. She drew the bow down across her back. She placed her palm one more time over the pocket, as if to ask, and the fragment did not answer, because the fragment was not in the room with her any more. The fragment was already at the edge of the Reaches, ahead of her, reaching east, and her body was the slow vehicle that would carry it.

She walked.

The Reaches did not change as she walked. The light was the same. The trees breathed the same. Her feet found the same loose ash. There was no path. There had not been a path here for a generation. She knew the way the way one knew the direction of a candle in a room one had grown up in. The eastern edge of the Reaches was perhaps an hour's walk at her usual pace. She did not walk at her usual pace. She walked slowly, the way she did most things, and she counted as she walked, although she had stopped paying attention to the count by the third hundred.

The fragment hummed all the while.

She stopped twice. The first time she stopped because she had thought she heard something behind her, and she had turned, and there had been nothing, only the trees and the locked light. The second time she stopped because her chest had tightened in a way that had nothing to do with the walking. She had stood with one hand against the bark of an ember-tree and breathed until the tightness had loosened, and then she had walked on.

She did not pray during the walk. She did not, this evening, hum the song her mother had taught her. The fragment was doing the humming for both of them.

The Reaches ended.

It was not a sharp ending. The trees thinned, and then they thinned further, and then the ash gave way to what had once been a stone path and was now stone with ash growing in the seams, and then she was walking on stone, and the stone went on for a hundred paces, and the path led to a doorway in a wall that was not, technically, a doorway any more, because the doorway had no door, and the wall was no longer the wall of a building so much as the wall of a memory of a building. But it had been the threshold of the eastern wing once. It still was, in the way that a thing one has stopped using does not stop being the thing it was.

She stopped before the threshold.

She did not know how long she stood. Her own pulse, which she counted sometimes for company, slowed and then slowed again, and she gave up on it and let it do what it was going to do. The fragment, at her ribs, had stopped reaching. The fragment was here. The hum had become something that was no longer a hum, and she stood at the threshold and listened.

The hum had become a shape.

It was not a sound. It had been a sound for weeks, and now it was not. It was a shape the way a place a hand has been on a windowpane is a shape after the hand has gone, the slight warmth in the cold glass, the geometry of the absence. The shape was at her ribs and at the threshold both, and it was not in the air, and it was not in her chest, and it was in the space between her ribs and the stone of the threshold, where the fragment had been reaching this whole time, and now had reached.

The shape had no words.

The shape was grief that has finally arrived too late.

At the threshold, she admitted it to herself.

This was hers. This shape was hers. She had been carrying it for eight years, since the morning the wing had burned and she had been on the wrong side of the door, and the door had closed, and she had been on the side of the door that survived, and her brother had been on the side of the door that did not. She had carried it, and she had not said so, not once, not to anyone, and she was saying so now, here at the threshold, to no one but the shape itself: this is mine. This is what I have been carrying. She had walked west with it. She had set up a camp with it. She had eaten three bites of travel-bread with it. She had restrung a bow with it. She had loosed an Echo Arrow at an ash-beast with it and pulled the arrow back into her hand with it still inside her chest, and she had not, in any of those acts, let it go, and she had not, in any of those acts, said so.

The shape, this evening, was not hers.

The shape, this evening, belonged to whatever was reaching at the threshold from the other direction.

She did not, at first, understand. She put her hand against her ribs over the pocket, and the fragment was the same temperature it had always been, and the shape was not in the fragment, and the shape was not in the threshold, and the shape was in the small space between, and she stood there and let the shape hold her, the way she had not let any shape hold her in eight years.

The shape was the same shape she had been carrying.

It was not similar. It was the same. It was the same shape, with the same particular angle of late, the same particular weight of arriving too late and knowing it, the same particular smell of smoke and the same particular sound of a door closing, and she stood at the threshold of the eastern wing and recognized her own grief, exactly her own, in something else.

The something else was very large.

She could feel the size of it the way she could feel the size of the Reaches when she stood at the cliff-edge of the Sundering and looked out at the long bruised sky. The shape was not larger than her grief by being a different kind of grief. The shape was larger than her grief by being more of it. By being the same grief at a scale she could not measure. By being a grief that had been carrying itself for a very long time, longer than she had been alive, longer than her brother had been alive, longer than the wing had been a wing.

She thought, briefly, that she should be frightened.

She was not.

The shape was holding her with the same care she had been holding her own grief, which was the care of a thing that had nothing else to hold and had to hold this. The shape was not asking her for anything. The shape was not telling her anything. The shape was simply meeting her, the way two people meet at a threshold neither of them is going to cross, and stand in the doorway, and look at each other, and do not speak, and after a while go back the way they came.

She did not enter the wing.

She had thought, when she had felt the hum begin to reach, that she had been being called to enter. That had been her assumption. Her assumption had been wrong. The shape, at the threshold, was not asking her in. The shape, at the threshold, was with her at the threshold, as one with her as anything had been since the morning the door had closed, and the shape did not need her to enter, because the shape was not, in this particular evening, in the wing. The shape was here, with her, at the doorway. The shape was a thing that had come a long way to be at a doorway with her.

She did not say anything out loud.

She had no voice for what she would have said. She had stopped having a voice for things like this years ago, when she had stopped using her voice for anything but the song. She placed her hand against the stone of the threshold, where her hand had not been since the night she had walked out, and the stone was cool, and the shape was on her hand also, the way a warm body's heat is on a cold surface, and she stood like that for a long moment which she did not, this time, count.

After a time, the shape began to recede.

It did not leave. It only began to be smaller. The warmth of the fragment at her ribs softened. The hum, which had become a shape, became something less than a shape, became the warmth of a stone that had been held, became, finally, what it had been every dusk for weeks. The fragment had finished what it had come to do, and the something at the threshold had finished what it had come to do, and she stood at the doorway with her hand on the stone for a moment longer, and then she took her hand off the stone, and she turned, and she walked west.

She did not look back.

The walk back to the camp was longer than the walk out had been. The light had not changed. Her body was tired in a way that had nothing to do with walking. She stopped four times. The fourth time she sat down on the ash with the bow across her knees and breathed slowly until her chest stopped doing the small painful thing it had been doing since the threshold, and then she stood up, and she walked the rest of the way.

The camp was as she had left it. The cloth she had laid the bow on was still there. The travel-bread was in its pouch. The fragment, at her ribs, was no warmer than the rest of her.

She did not, that evening, set the bow back down.

She had been walking for some time when she had heard, at a distance behind her, the rhythm of the trees change.

She had not, at first, taken note. The trees changed their rhythm sometimes for reasons that had nothing to do with her. She had walked on. The change had stayed at the edge of her hearing the way a thing one has half-noticed stays at the edge of one's hearing, and after a while she had understood that the rhythm-change had been following her at a distance, and that the rhythm-change was an ash-beast, and that the ash-beast had been, for the first time in many sleeps, near her.

It had not been near her in weeks. They had not come near her in weeks. She had thought, in the way one thought slow vague thoughts about things one did not understand, that perhaps she was no longer the kind of figure they came for. Perhaps she had become small enough, by sitting in the Reaches and eating three bites of travel-bread and not asking anything, that the world had begun to overlook her. The thought had been a comfort. The thought, this evening, was wrong.

She turned.

The ash-beast was twenty paces back, on the path she had just walked. It had been keeping pace with her since the threshold. She had not, until she turned, known.

It was not the same one. She knew the way one knew. The eyes were a slightly different angle of cold. The shape was a little smaller. The smoke that held the shape held it differently, as if the shape had been held this way for less time than the other had been held, which meant this one was younger, which meant the world was making more of them, and there were going to be more.

She drew.

Her hand had remembered the draw before she had thought to draw. The string came back smooth. The arrow seated. The arrowhead was an Echo Arrow. She had, since the first one, made eighteen more, and her satchel had nineteen at the start of the walk and nineteen at the threshold and nineteen now. She had not used one in weeks. She did not, this evening, want to use one. But the want was not the point. The ash-beast was the point. She held the draw.

The ash-beast watched.

She let the breath out the way her father had taught her. On the long out, not the short. She loosed.

The hologram bloomed in the air between her and the ash-beast.

It was a door.

It was the door of the eastern wing. It was the door from the inside, and her hand was on the handle, and the hand was her hand at fifteen, and the door was closing because she was closing it, and the closing was deliberate, and on the other side of the door was a boy of seven, and the boy had her brother's face, and the boy was holding out a hand, and her hand at fifteen was shutting the door anyway, because the smoke had been at his side and not at hers, and the choice had been made before her hand had known it was a choice, and the door went all the way closed, and the small click of the latch was the loudest sound in the world.

The hologram held for a long pause.

The ash-beast saw it.

She watched the eyes change. The cold in them did not warm, but it did shift, the way a thing that has been certain becomes briefly less certain. The ash-beast had been seeing something it had not been seeing before. It had been seeing her shape, the shape it had come to take, the same shape the threshold had met her with this evening, and the seeing of the shape had cost it something it did not, perhaps, know it had until it was costing it.

The arrow struck.

The hologram dissolved into ash that was a little brighter than the ash on the ground. The ash-beast came apart slowly. The smoke that had held the shape no longer held the shape. The eyes, last to go, watched her until the very end, and at the very end she could not tell whether they had been watching with the cold of the ash-beast or the slow loose attention of a thing that had been watching her for a long time and was sorry it was no longer going to be able to.

The arrow came to rest in the ash.

She walked to it. She picked it up. The arrowhead was warm. The fragment, at her ribs, was warm. The two were the same temperature, and she stood for a still moment holding the arrow and feeling the fragment, and she did not, this time, know which of them was warming the other.

She walked back to the camp.

She set the bow down on the cloth. She put the arrow back in the satchel. She wrapped the bow.

She sat with her back against the trunk of the ember-tree she had set her camp against, and she ate three bites of cold travel-bread, slowly, the way her mother had taught her. The bread was hard. She chewed it until it was almost liquid. She swallowed. She waited. She chewed again.

She did not, that evening, hum the song.

The fragment hummed it for her.

The fragment hummed the first verse, the way it had hummed the first verse the night she had picked it from the bark, and then the fragment hummed past the first verse and into something she did not know the words for. She had not, in eight years, heard a second verse. Her mother had only ever sung the first.

The second verse was about a door.

It was about a door that had closed. It was about the small click of the latch. It was about the boy on the other side, and the wing, and the smoke, and the hand that had not been fast enough.

It was about a grief that had arrived too late.

The fragment hummed it, and she sat with her back against the trunk, and she did not weep, because she had stopped weeping eight years ago and had not yet started again, but she did, for the first time in a long time, listen.

She listened until the fragment stopped.

When the fragment stopped, the night, which was not night in Lythariel but only the slow deepening of the locked twilight, was quieter than it had been since the Fall. Her chest was the same chest. Her grief was the same grief. The shape at the threshold had gone where it had needed to go.

But she had been, this evening, met.

She had not been alone in the doorway.

She placed her hand over the pocket. The fragment was warm. It was the temperature of a stone that had been held in a child's hand for too long, and now was being held in hers, and she let her hand stay there for a long count, which was how she did most things now.

After a time, she slept.

She dreamed of a door.

The door, in the dream, was not the door of the eastern wing.

It was a door in a small wooden chamber she had never been in, and the chamber was full of light that was not the light of Lythariel, and the door was open, and there was a man at a window who was holding something small in his hand, and the something small was warm.

She did not see his face.

She did not need to.

The dream went on for a long time, the way dreams do when one has been alone for too long, and the dream was, for the first time in eight years, not a dream of the wing.

When she woke, the locked light was the same locked light. The fragment was the same temperature. The bow was where she had left it.

She did not, that morning, eat the three bites.

She ate four.