Act I — The Crossing

Page 5 — Uuaellaen Holds the Line

It was the priest who held us. My blood brother. I have called him the one who holds the line for longer than I will say, and the name is true.

In the white, the world was trying to scatter us. It did it the way wind scatters a handful of salt — each grain whole, and each grain alone, and the handful no longer a handful. It had been doing it since the circle. We were six grains.

His ward was what the white could not do. The white did not break it. The white went around it. I have held wards before, and I have never held one that worked that way. A ward you hold either holds or it fails, and you feel which. His was simply there, low and even, the wall of thin light with the hum in it, and the white came at it, all the time, not once but all the time, the way water comes at a bank, and the white went around it, and the six of us were inside it, and we stayed six.

The ward cost him.

I saw the cost. It was not his hands. His hands were flat on the floor of the white — always flat, the fingers a little spread — and the white went thin where his palms were. It was not his face, either. His face, through the light, was the face of a man reading a letter he has read before: not fear, not anger, neither of those, nothing I could name. The cost was his color. I have seen a man's color go. I saw it go once, in the old world, in a man I will not name, in a place I will not name, because the naming is what I owe him. The ward took the color of my blood brother, and the taking was slow, and I saw all of it, and I did not reach for it.

I will tell you why I did not reach for it.

While the ward held, the ogre did not raise his shield. He stood where the ward put him, hands folded over the grip, and the standing was finished in him. He had already decided. The white came at the ward, and the ward held, and the ogre's hands did not move, and his hands not moving was the whole of his part in it. I understood, watching him: the deciding was his brother's to make alone, and a man who casts in the middle of his brother's ward is a man who has not decided whether the ward is enough.

I did not cast.

I held the shape of the story, and in the shape there was a word — the word that would have made the ward mine, the word I have known since I was old enough to know that I knew it. I have never said it. I did not say it now. I held it in my mouth, unsaid. The ward was his. The keeping was his. I was the sixth inside it, and I let it be his.

When the ground came, the ward finished.

The white had no floor. We had been falling in it, and the falling had a direction, and the direction was down, and down was not a place. Then down became a place. The ground of the new world came up through the white, all at once, without a border, without an edge where the white ended and the ground began. It came the way a sentence comes — all of it at once, and you cannot point at the first word. And the ground was sand. The wrong ground, all of it at once, and without apology, and the white went thin over it, and the thinning was the last of the white I would see.

The ward finished when the ground came.

It did not break. A ward is a word, and a word has an end. It was spoken, and it held, and the hold ended, and the ending was the last of him I saw. The light went low, and the hum went with it, out of the white, out of us. A voice leaves a room like that; you feel the room after. His hands were flat, and the hands were still flat when the light was gone, and then the ground was where he had been.

The ground did not keep his shape.

I will not write what I did then. I will write what the ground did. The ground came up through the white, and it did not keep his shape. It kept the rest of us in the white — Rumzuck still with his hands on the grip, Wreckreate still counting, Smackage with his palm flat on nothing yet, Zahlia with her face still up, and me with my hands still open. And where the sixth had been there was the ground, and the ground was even, and the ground did not keep his shape. I looked at the ground where he had been. I looked at it for a time I will not count. The five of us were in the white, and the white was going thin over the ground, and the ground was coming, and the falling had not stopped.

I did not say the number. I had it in my mouth, and I would say it where the fire was, because a number said in the white is a number the white can spend, and I had not come this far to spend it.

The ground was coming up, and the white was going thin, and the five of us were in it, and the falling had not stopped. The six of us had been in the white, and the five of us were in the white, and the ground was the place the white was going to give us. I kept the place where the sixth had been. I did not count it out. The keeping was the first thing the new world would not take from me.