Gemma lied to him for the first time on the island of the old chapel, and he let her.
"Are you hurt?" he had asked, when she was sitting up and had stopped shaking and had drunk half a cup of Broko's terrible broth.
"No."
"Anything strange? Your hands, your eyes. Anything you can't feel."
"I'm fine, Aros."
She said it to the cup. She said it too fast. And then she smiled at him, a small, careful smile, the kind you give a stranger who has asked if you need help with your bags. In a year of roads and barns and cold camps he had seen her angry, frightened, sulking, grieving, laughing so hard she couldn't stand. He had never once seen her be polite to him.
He didn't push. His head was pounding where the flat of the blessed sword had caught him, and every breath pulled at the cut along his ribs, and he didn't trust himself to push gently. So he nodded, and let her lie, and filed it away with the other things he didn't like about this morning.
There were a great many of them.
They finished the crossing in daylight.
There was no point hiding anymore. Whatever was left of Lukas's people had gone north in the night, dragging their captain with them, and anyone within ten miles of the marsh had seen the light. So they walked the last stretch of the causeway in the open, single file, the mule picking its way along the stones behind Broko, and nobody talked.
The reeds on either side of them lay flat. Not broken: flattened, combed down into the water in great smooth curves, ring after ring, as if something enormous had pressed a palm onto the marsh and lifted it again. The water between the rings was so still it held the sky like glass.
They passed one of the Hollows half a mile from the island.
It lay face down at the edge of the stones, one arm trailing in the water. Broko stopped. For a moment Aros thought he would walk past it. Then he crouched and turned it over.
It was a woman. Forty, perhaps. Heavy-set, with work-thickened hands and a mole on her chin and a faded blue scarf still knotted at her throat. Her eyes were open. They were only eyes now, brown and cloudy and ordinary. Whatever had been shining behind them was gone.
"She looks like somebody's mother," Diana said quietly.
"That what yours looked like?" said Broko, without looking up.
It wasn't one of his jokes. It had the shape of one, but nothing underneath it. Diana flinched as if he'd slapped her, and somewhere behind Aros, Gemma made a small sound, hardly more than a breath.
Broko didn't apologize.
"She was somebody's mother," he said. He didn't get up. "Or somebody's sister. Somebody's something. They all were. That's what they make them out of." He reached out and closed the woman's eyes with two fingers, carefully, as if he had known her. Then he stood and wiped his hand on his coat, over and over, long after it was clean.
Aros watched him and said nothing. He knew that look. He had seen it on men the morning after their first real battle, when the fear has gone and something worse has come to take its place.
It broke on the far shore.
The causeway ended in a long slope of mud and sedge that climbed toward firmer ground and a line of crooked willows. They had just reached the top, and Diana had just said, with real relief in her voice, "Well, that's the worst of it," when Broko turned around.
"No," he said. "I don't think it is."
He wasn't looking at Diana. He was looking at Gemma.
"I want to know what that was," he said. "Last night. The light."
"Keep walking," said Aros.
"I'm not talking to you." Broko didn't even glance at him. "I'm talking to her."
Gemma had stopped. Her boots were sinking slowly into the mud. "I don't know what it was."
"That's not an answer." Broko's voice was rising, and there was something in it Aros hadn't heard before, something old and raw that had nothing to do with this morning. "I spent nine years under the customs house in Calad. I carried the keys for the men who used that light. I've seen what it looks like when it comes out of a blessed sword and goes into a person. I've watched it go into a person." He took a step toward her. "Last night it came out of you. Same color. Same sound. You think I didn't notice?"
"Broko," Diana said.
"Don't Broko me." He was breathing hard. "Twelve people. Somebody's mother. She killed them in the time it takes to sneeze, and she didn't even know she was doing it. That's what they all say, isn't it? I didn't mean to. That's what the Light always says, right before..."
He didn't finish.
Candriela had him by the collar. Aros hadn't seen her move, and he had been watching for it; one moment she had been standing at the back with the mule, and the next she was beside Broko with her fist knotted in his coat, and she lifted him. Not far. Just enough that his heels came off the mud and he had to hold onto her wrist with both hands to keep from choking.
Her face didn't change at all.
"It is not their Light," she said. Her voice was very quiet, and very even, and it carried to every one of them. "It is a wound, not a gift. You don't know the difference. I do." She brought his face a little closer to hers. "If you open your mouth to her like that again, I will close it for you."
She let go. Broko dropped into the mud on his backside with a wet, ugly sound, and sat there.
Nobody moved. The mule shifted its feet and blew.
Then Candriela turned and walked back to the animal and picked up its halter as if nothing had happened, and after a long, long moment Broko got up, slowly, and wiped the mud off his hands, and didn't look at Gemma again.
Aros found that his own hand had gone to the small of his back.
In ten years he had seen a great many people lose their tempers. He had seen exactly one person put the fear of death into Broko without drawing a weapon, and it was a woman who had said perhaps thirty words to any of them since Skariz. He looked at her back, and at the long sword strapped across it, and thought, not for the first time, that he didn't know nearly enough about her.
"We keep moving," he said.
No one argued.
Candriela fell into step beside him an hour later, while the others were strung out ahead along a cart track between the willows.
She didn't speak at once. Aros didn't make her. They walked together for a while in silence, two tall people with long strides, and he found it less uncomfortable than he'd expected.
"My sister had a name for it," Candriela said finally. "What she did last night."
Aros waited.
"The Peak." She said it carefully, like a word in a foreign language. "When it isn't rings anymore. When the whole chorus comes through at once and you can't stop it, you can only hold on until it's over. My sister did it twice that I saw. Both times she was the strongest thing for a mile in any direction." Her jaw tightened. "Both times it took something."
"Took what?"
"Whatever was nearest. That's how she explained it. As if the chorus has to make room in you, and it doesn't ask what it's moving out." She looked at Gemma, walking up ahead beside Diana with her head down. "The first time, my sister lost the name of the dog we'd had as children. She laughed about it. The second time she lost the day our father died. She didn't laugh about that."
Aros said nothing. His hand had closed, without his meaning it to, around the broken stub of his old knife in his coat pocket. He'd fished it out of the shallows that morning. He didn't know why he'd kept it.
"Ask her what it took," Candriela said. "She won't tell you if you don't."
She lengthened her stride and left him there.
He didn't ask. Not straight away.
He was thinking about the island, and about a blade that should have broken and hadn't. He'd done that trick against a blessed sword once before, in a burning corridor in Sbelto, and the sword had snapped like a dry branch and the man holding it had looked down at the stump in disbelief. Last night it hadn't worked. Either Lukas's steel was something new, or Aros had gotten old enough that he'd started remembering things the way he wanted them to be. He wasn't sure which answer he liked less.
And he was thinking about the moment after. Lying in the water with blood in his eye and the sword coming down, and knowing, with a kind of tired clarity, that he was going to die in the shallows below a ruined chapel for no reason at all. And then the light.
He had spent a year telling himself he was the one keeping her alive.
Last night she had been the one keeping him alive, and it had cost her something, and she was lying to him about what.
Gemma dropped back to walk beside him in the middle of the afternoon. He thought she'd done it on purpose, and when she spoke he was sure of it.
"Aros," she said. "Did you ever go to Seborn? Before?"
He glanced at her. "Before the fire?"
"Yes."
"No. Never."
"Not even once? To buy something. To pass through."
"I'd never heard of it until I saw the smoke." He was watching her face now. "Why?"
"No reason." She was looking at the ground. "I just thought... if you'd seen the bakery. If you'd seen my mother, even once. You could tell me what she..."
She stopped.
She stopped the way people stop at the edge of a drop, all at once, with their weight still leaning forward. And Aros understood. He understood exactly, as you understand a wound from how someone holds their arm.
He didn't say anything clever. He didn't say anything at all for a few steps. Then he reached out, awkward, and put his hand on the back of her neck, the way he had done when she was smaller and had woken screaming in strange barns, and he left it there while they walked.
She let him.
"You remember the bread," he said at last. Not a question.
"Yes."
"Her voice?"
"Yes."
"Then you've still got most of her." It sounded thin even as he said it. He said it anyway. "Hold onto the rest. Tight."
Gemma nodded. She didn't cry. That was the part that frightened him.
He found his moment to say the other thing near dusk, when the track had climbed onto a low ridge and the others were far enough ahead.
"Listen to me," he said. "When we get to Bondrea, if it goes wrong, you can't hesitate."
"Wrong how?"
"If they turn on us." He kept his voice low. "Broko. Diana. Even her." He tipped his head toward Candriela, walking alone at the front. "After last night, every one of them knows what you're worth to the Priesthood. People do strange things when they're frightened. You need to be ready."
Gemma stared at him. "Ready for what?"
He met her eyes, because he owed her that much. "To do what you did last night. To them, if you have to."
The color went out of her face. For a moment he thought she would hit him.
"No," she said.
"Gemma..."
"No. Broko was scared. That's all. He was scared, and he'd just turned over somebody's mother, and he said a stupid thing." Her voice shook, but her eyes didn't move off his. "Candriela stood up for me. Diana held my hand all the way across the marsh. They're not going to turn on us. And if you think I'm going to practice killing my friends just in case, then you don't know me as well as you think."
He opened his mouth, and found he had nothing to say into it.
"There are no good people, Gemma," he said finally. It was something he had believed for ten years, and it came out tired. "Only the ones trying not to be the worst."
"Fine," she said. "Then I'll try."
She walked off ahead to join Diana. Aros stood on the ridge and watched her go and felt, absurdly, as if he had lost a second fight in as many days.
A few minutes later he saw Broko drop back, without a word, and fall into step on Gemma's other side. Broko didn't look at her. He dug in his pocket for a while and came out with a dried apple, slightly crushed, and held it out sideways without turning his head. After a moment Gemma took it.
Neither of them said anything. Neither of them needed to.
They came over the last rise as the sun went down, and there was Bondrea.
It sprawled along the shore below them, a city built on top of older cities: houses stacked on drowned houses, piers reaching into the sea like the ribs of something that had died on the beach, cranes leaning over the harbor against a sky gone the color of a bruise. Smoke rose from a thousand chimneys. Lanterns were coming on along the waterfront, one by one. It was bigger than Calad. It was louder than Calad, even from here: a low, constant roar of carts and bells and voices and the sea.
And through the middle of it ran a river.
It came down out of the hills to the north and cut the city in half on its way to the harbor, broad and slow and crossed by a dozen bridges, and it was shining.
Not with the sunset. The sunset was behind them. The river was shining from underneath, a faint, steady, pale blue-white glow that moved under the surface of the water the way light had moved under the skin of Lukas's sword. It ran the length of the city. It lit the undersides of the bridges. Here and there along the banks, Aros could see small pale shapes floating belly-up in the glow, and people on the bridges walking past them without looking down.
Broko let out a long breath through his teeth. "Well," he said. "There it is. Home sweet hell."
Nobody laughed.
Aros looked at Gemma. She was standing very straight at the top of the rise with Diana's folded map clutched in one hand and the dried apple forgotten in the other, staring down at the river, and her face had gone white to the lips.
"She's in there," Gemma whispered. "The woman from the sword. They've put her in the river."