Adrian woke in his parents' bed, which was how he knew something was very wrong.
He had not slept in it since he was four and had the spotted fever. It was bigger than the loft and softer, and it smelled of his mother's lavender and his father's pipe smoke, and the grey light coming through the little window was morning light. He lay very still and looked at the ceiling beams and tried to remember how he had got there.
He remembered barley stubble. A scythe. Ash coming down like snow.
He turned his head.
There was a girl sitting on a stool beside the bed. She was small and thin, with a gap where her front teeth should be and a nest of tangled brown hair, and she was asleep sitting up, with her head fallen sideways against the wall and her mouth open. One of her hands was holding a fistful of the blanket over Adrian's chest, very tightly, even in sleep.
Adrian looked at her face, and loved her, and did not know who she was.
The blank place was still there. He could feel its edges. It was not like the missing word for "bucket," which had been a small, neat hole. This was larger. It had a shape. It was the shape of a whole person - a voice, a laugh, a way of stomping on the third rung of a ladder - and he could walk all the way around it in his mind and touch everything next to it, and not what was inside.
He must have made a sound, because the girl woke up.
She woke up all at once, the way their mother did. Her eyes flew open and found his, and for a moment her whole face went still with disbelief. Then it crumpled.
"You're awake," she said. "You're awake, you're awake, you stupid - Mother! MOTHER! He's awake!"
"Wait," said Adrian. His voice came out a croak. "Wait. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I don't-"
Something in his face stopped her. She leaned closer, with her fist still in the blanket, and looked at him hard.
"You don't know me," she whispered.
He couldn't answer. His eyes were stinging.
"It's me," the girl said fiercely. "It's Elsie. Elsie Vale. I'm your sister. You owe me a bed with curtains and a dog. You promised. In the meadow. You shook on it." Her chin was shaking. "You don't get to forget. You don't get to forget that."
Elsie.
It came back the way the word for bucket had come back - not slowly, but all at once, like a shutter thrown open. Elsie on the table swinging her legs. Elsie in their father's boots in the south meadow, wiping blood off his lip with her nightdress sleeve. Elsie scattered in the mud among the Michaelmas daisies with her mouth open and no breath left to scream.
Adrian made a sound he had never made before, and reached out, and pulled his little sister onto the bed, and held on to her so hard that she squeaked. And Elsie, who hated being hugged, who had stopped letting anyone hug her when she was five, put both her skinny arms around his neck and did not let go either.
When his mother came through the door, they were both crying, and neither of them would say why.
❖ ❖ ❖
He had slept for two days.
Mara told him this while she changed the bandages on his hands. She did it with the door shut, and Elsie sent out to fetch water, and she did not waste words.
"Jory carried you in. Hollis carried Elsie. By the time I got to the field, Jory had already shoveled every speck of that ash into the pit and poured pitch over it and set it alight." She unwound the linen from his left hand. "He told the whole village the wolf came back, and he shot it through the heart, and it ran into the barley and died, and he burned the body where it fell. Hollis says the same. Elsie says the same." Her mouth tightened. "Elsie says it so well I almost believe her."
"And me?"
"You chased it with your father's scythe, like a fool, to save your sister. And it knocked you down, and you hit your head." She peeled back the last of the linen. "And you've had a fever from the claw marks on your back. Which you have. Which is true."
She held his hand up to the grey light from the window, and they both looked at it.
The grey was still there. Not as bad as it had been in the field - he remembered, dimly, his hands going the color of old pewter - but there. A dull, dusty, ashy tinge under the skin of his fingers and the backs of both hands, like a bruise that had not decided what color to be. And through it, branching up from his fingertips, across his knuckles, over his wrists and nearly to his elbows, ran the lines.
They were very fine. Fine as hairs. Pale grey, a shade darker than the skin around them. They did not pulse, the way the lines on the wolf had pulsed. But when Adrian flexed his fingers, he saw them move with the skin, and he felt a faint, deep cold run up his arms, like water in a pipe.
"Grey veins," said his mother.
She said it very quietly. Adrian had heard those two words said in Harrowfield only in whispers - the way you'd say plague, or drowned.
"Is it the Abyss?" he asked. "Am I Hollowed?"
"No." His mother's voice was fierce. Then it faltered, for the first time he could ever remember. "I don't know. I don't think so. I've seen Hollowed. It doesn't look - the lines are the wrong color, and they go the wrong way. From the hands up, not from a wound." She laid his hand down on the blanket very gently, as if it might break. "But I don't know, Adrian. I don't know what this is."
Adrian looked at the fine grey lines on his arm. Then he closed his eyes and called the window.
It came at once. It had been waiting.
[Name: Adrian Vale]
[Age: 12]
[Trait: ████████]
[Profession: - ]
[Comprehension:]
[ - Scything (Tomas Vale): Complete]
[ - Scything (Adrian Vale): 14%]
[ - Tracking (Jory Keel): 31%]
[Dissonance: 44]
Forty-four. Down from fifty-eight. In two days.
Is this Hollowing? he thought. Is it the Abyss?
[No.]
Then what is it?
[It is the weight.]
[You stepped very far outside the rules, all at once.]
[The rules pressed back.]
[This is what that looks like, on a body.]
It looks like the Hollowed. Mother said. Everyone would think-
[Yes.]
[It looks exactly like it.]
[The Temple has had four hundred years to notice that.]
Adrian's eyes opened. His mother was watching him, very still, the way she had watched him in the barn with the lantern.
"It's talking to you," she said. It wasn't a question.
He nodded.
"What does it say?"
He hesitated. His mother had told him never to speak to it aloud. She had never told him not to speak about it. And her face, in the grey morning light, was so tired, and so frightened, and so carefully calm.
"It says it isn't the Abyss," Adrian said. "It says it's the weight of what I did. The rules pushing back." He swallowed. "It says it'll fade. If I rest. If I don't do it again."
"And will you?"
"Do it again?"
"Rest," said his mother.
Something that was not quite a laugh came out of Adrian. It hurt his back. "I don't think I can do anything else."
Mara looked at him for a long moment. Then she began winding fresh linen around his hand, very firmly, from fingertips to elbow, so that not an inch of grey showed.
"The High Examiner will be back tomorrow night," she said. "Or the day after. With the Inquisitor." She tied off the bandage. "So you will rest very hard, Adrian Vale. Harder than you have ever done anything in your life."
❖ ❖ ❖
Brother Fennick came that afternoon.
He came up the western lane slowly, leaning on a stick, and he carried something in his other hand that Adrian, looking out the bedroom window, could not make out at first. A small glass lamp, with a brass cap. A lit lamp, in the middle of the afternoon, carried carefully, like a cup too full.
"Mother," said Adrian.
Mara came to the window. Adrian felt her go still beside him.
"That's the vigil lamp," she said. "From the chapel altar."
Every chapel had one. Adrian had seen it every week of his life: a little flame in a glass by the altar that Fennick kept lit day and night, burning consecrated oil. It burned with a clear, pale, steady light. He had never thought about why a chapel needed a lamp that was never allowed to go out.
"What does it do?" he whispered.
His mother's hand found his shoulder.
"It turns," she said. "Near the Abyss."
Brother Fennick came through the gate. He came across the yard, slowly, past the mended sheepfold, and Adrian watched the little flame in the glass. It was clear and pale as he passed the woodpile. It was clear and pale at the well.
At the kitchen door, it flickered.
It shrank, suddenly, to a bead. And the color changed. The pale gold went thin, and grey, and then - for one moment, one heartbeat - the flame in Brother Fennick's hand burned a deep, dull, sullen blue-black, like a bruise.
Brother Fennick stopped on the doorstep.
He stood there for a long time, looking down at the lamp in his hand, with his white hair lifting a little in the wind. His back was to the window. Adrian could not see his face.
Then the old priest raised the lamp to his lips and blew it out.
He knocked on the door.
"Draft," Brother Fennick said to Mara, when she opened it. He held up the dead lamp. "Terrible draft on this lane. Came up to see the boy. May I sit? My knees are older than your house."
He sat in the kitchen for an hour. He drank mint tea. He talked about the harvest, and about Mira Coll's first letter to her mother, which had come that morning and said the Veyrholt dormitory was very clean and the food was very plain. He did not go into the bedroom. He did not ask to see Adrian's hands. When he left, he patted Mara's arm, and tucked the dead vigil lamp inside his robe, and said, very quietly, at the door, so quietly that Adrian in the next room barely heard it:
"I'll light it again when I'm back in the chapel. It'll burn clear there. It always has." A pause. "I'll need it to burn clear, Mara, when the Inquisitor asks to see it. She'll ask. They always ask."
❖ ❖ ❖
Rowan came in the middle of the night.
Adrian was awake. He had slept so long that sleep would not come anymore, and he lay in his parents' bed with his bandaged hands on the blanket and listened to his father snoring in the loft - Tomas had insisted on taking the loft, bad arm and bad knee and all, and Mara had let him, which meant things were very bad indeed - and he heard the soft scrape at the window.
He looked. A face was pressed against the glass. White surcoat. No steel cap.
Adrian got up, which took a long time, and opened the window, which took longer.
Rowan climbed through it the way he had at fourteen, when he'd been out late: one leg, then the other, silent, practiced. He was not in his boots. He had carried them. His hair was wet with dew. He crouched on the floor beside the bed and looked up at Adrian in the dark, breathing hard.
"You're all right," he whispered. "You're up. They said you were - Hollis said you hit your head-"
"I'm all right."
"I couldn't come. I wanted to come the first night. I asked Harl. He said no. He said my duty was at the chapel." Rowan's jaw was tight. "I asked again yesterday. He said no again. So I waited till Dace was asleep."
"Dace?"
Rowan was quiet for a moment.
"Squire Dace," he said. "From Westmarch. He's a year ahead of me." He rubbed his face. "Harl's had him on me since the harvest. Walking the same watches. Eating at the same table. Sitting next to me when I write my reports." His voice was very low and very bitter. "I didn't notice. Can you believe that? For two weeks. I thought he was being friendly."
Adrian thought of a small, neat list, in Mira Coll's handwriting, folded very small inside his boot.
Warm stockings. All my chalk. Tallow for boots. Charcoal and paper. Hairpins. Ribbons, blue. Old slate.
Watch Ro.
Mira had seen it. Standing at the end of the barley rows with her tally stick, counting everything, she had seen a squire from Westmarch watching Rowan Vale, and she had worked out what it meant before Rowan had, and she had not been able to say it out loud.
"How did you find out?" Adrian whispered.
"His report." Rowan's mouth twisted. "Harl left it on the table. I wasn't supposed to see. It had the swimming rock in it. You and me in the river, fighting. From the bell tower." He looked at the floor. "Dace wrote that it looked like a quarrel over a secret."
A cold feeling went through Adrian that had nothing to do with Dissonance.
"They don't trust you," he said.
"They don't trust me," Rowan agreed. "Because of you. Because I'm your brother." He looked up. "So I have to be very careful, Adrian. More careful than ever. Everything I write, they check. Every place I go, somebody sees. And if I lie - if they catch me in one lie - they'll strip me of the white and send me home. And then I won't be anywhere. I won't be in Harl's office. I won't know when they're coming. I won't be able to get word to you." His voice broke. "Do you understand? I have to be the most honest squire in the whole Grey Watch. For you."
"I understand," said Adrian.
"Good." Rowan let out a long breath. "Good. So. Now. Tell me you're all right, and I'll climb back out, and I'll write tomorrow that I heard you had a fever and a knock on the head, which is what the whole village says, and it'll be true."
He reached out, in the dark, to put his hand on Adrian's arm.
His fingers touched bandage. He stopped.
His hand moved down the arm, slowly, feeling. Wrist. Hand. Fingertips. All bandaged. All of it. And then the other arm, the same. Rowan's hand stopped moving.
"Your back was clawed," Rowan said slowly. "Hollis said. Your back. Not your hands."
Adrian said nothing.
"Adrian. Why are your hands bandaged?"
And there it was. The easy lie. Burns. Blisters from the scythe. Rope.
Adrian was so tired. He was so tired, and it was so dark, and his brother's hand was on his arm, and his brother had just told him that he had to be the most honest squire in the whole Grey Watch, for him.
Don't let me see anything.
"Don't look," Adrian whispered. "Rowan. Please. If you don't look, you won't have to write it."
For a long moment, neither of them moved.
Then Rowan's fingers found the knot at Adrian's wrist, and pulled it loose, and began - very slowly, very gently, as if he were unwinding a bandage from a wound on the field - to unwrap it.
Adrian did not stop him. He could have. He didn't.
The linen came away. There was a little moonlight, now, through the open window. Enough.
Rowan looked at his brother's grey hand. At the fine pale lines branching up from the fingertips, across the knuckles, over the wrist, up into the dark. He looked at it for a long, long time. His face did not move at all. It was the careful, empty squire's face, the one he had worn in the chapel at the Sounding.
Adrian watched him the way he had learned to watch - feet and back and breath - and saw no silver seam anywhere. He saw only his brother's shoulders, very slowly, beginning to shake.
"Say something," Adrian whispered.
Rowan did not say anything.
He wound the bandage back on. He did it perfectly, the way the Grey Watch taught, fingertips to elbow, and tied off the knot, and laid Adrian's hand down on the blanket. Then he picked up his boots, and stood, and went to the window, and put one leg through.
He stopped there. Half in, half out. His back to the room.
"I came through the window," Rowan said, in a voice like something scraped raw. "In the dark. You were asleep. I didn't want to wake you. I didn't see anything."
He climbed out and was gone.
❖ ❖ ❖
Adrian lay awake until dawn.
In the grey light, the window opened on its own, which it had not done since the field.
[Dissonance: 39]
[Your brother just told his first lie.]
Adrian closed his eyes.
I know.
[It will not be his last.]
[Men who lie for love become very good at it.]
[Or they break.]
Which will he do?
The grey window was quiet for a long time.
[Ask me again in a year.]