In the old lineages of Nordmark, a sword is not hung up when the one who carried it dies. It is laid in water. They say the water needs time to get to know it.

From "Customs and Ways of Nordmark", the Déynáir library

Chapter 23

Beneath the Surface

The day after the attack was strange.

Not because of what had happened. Because of what didn't happen afterwards. No investigation. No questioning. No teachers gathering us together to explain what had gone on and who was behind it. Haltora didn't mention it in class. Edrin didn't mention it in the dining hall. It was as if the attack were a stone someone had thrown into water, and everyone was waiting for the ripples to fade instead of finding out who had thrown it.

Torin and the others went about with bandages and bruises and faces that had been closed by something they couldn't put into words. Sera wore her arm in a sling, and her eyes were different now, more awake, more on guard. She used to smile when she walked past me in the First-Year Room. Now she looked down. It is the kind of change that happens in people who have learnt that the world can hurt without warning, and it doesn't go away just because it stops hurting.

Retia didn't talk about it. Not about the attack. Not about the mark. Not about her father. She went to lessons, sat in her place, ate her food, and her face was closed and quiet and perfectly controlled, and only if you knew her well enough to see the things she didn't show could you tell that something was wrong. Her shoulders were up again. That millimetre. And her hands were never still. They held on to things, to the spines of books, to the rims of cups, to the cloth of her robe, always gripping something.

Ahra was restless in a different way. He talked more than usual, which was a lot, and he talked about nothing, about homework and food and the weather, and his words were a blanket he laid over the things he didn't want to talk about. Ahra told me later that he lay awake at night staring up at the ceiling, and that Lynx lay at his side and stared with him, and that the two of them were quiet together in the dark. I couldn't see him. But in our own room Nihil also lay awake in the other bed, and I could hear it in his breathing, which never quite became slow.

I went down to the river in the morning, as I always did. Alone. Retia didn't come that morning, and she said nothing about why, and I didn't ask. Some things don't need explaining. For her, the cold water had turned into her father's mark and her own blood on the cobbles, and it was hard to stand still in cold water when your body still remembered what it felt like to hold a man against a wall and watch your own life fall apart.

The cold in the water was harder in December. The ice along the edges was thick enough that my feet crunched through it when I stepped out, and the water beneath the ice was darker than it had been, as if it had drawn into itself. The river was ten metres wide now. Soon it would be narrower. But the middle would not freeze.

I stood in the cold water and breathed. Four. Hold. Six. And tried to find the still place, the place that lay beneath my thoughts. But it was harder now. My thoughts wouldn't keep still. They circled the same things: the mark in the man's hand. The light on the side of the mountain. Retia's hands shaking. Ahra's face, white. Sera's face, which didn't smile any more.

And beneath all the thoughts, deeper than them, the mountain was still pulsing. The slow, deep pulse that hadn't stopped calling to me since the night I touched the seal. It was always there now, faint but insistent, a vibration in my chest that said time was running out for something.

It was Ahra who heard it.

That same evening. He had gone down to the library alone to fetch a book, he said, and he was gone for two hours, and when he came back to the First-Year Room his face was the colour faces go when the blood draws away because the body needs it elsewhere.

"We need to talk," he said. Quietly. Without looking at any of the other students in the room. "Now. Not here."

We went. Up stairs, down corridors, through one of the secret passages we had mapped, one that led to a small room behind the back wall of the library. The room smelt of old books and dust and the dry, metallic smell Dherak has when it has seeped into stone over many years. Retia closed the door behind us. Alôpex sat down at my feet. Lynx pressed himself against Ahra's legs. Fulmen sat on a shelf, looking out into the dark.

Ahra stood in the middle of the room with his hands in his pockets, shaking.

"I wasn't in the library," he said. "I was in the passages. I was looking for Kalmin."

"Alone?" said Retia. Her voice was sharp.

"Yes." He looked down. "I know. I shouldn't have. But I couldn't help it. He's my brother, and he's hiding something, and I need to know what."

"What did you find?" I said.

Ahra took a breath. His hands came out of his pockets, and he rubbed them together, slowly, the movement you make when you are trying to warm fingers that are cold from more than the temperature.

"Kalmin was there. Down in the passage under the third floor, the one we found him in last time. And Arcanus was there too."

"Arcanus," said Retia.

"Yes. They were talking quietly. I couldn't hear everything. But I was lying behind a wall a bit further off, and sound carries in those passages, and I heard enough."

He looked at me. His eyes were big and frightened and full of something that looked like guilt.

"They were talking about the cave, Chris. The cave you found when you used Defluo on the test island. Arcanus said the seal had been weakened. That someone had been inside. And he said a name."

"What name?"

"Malum."

The word fell heavily in the small room. It was a word that had its own weight, its own temperature, and the air in the room felt colder when he said it, even though that was only imagination. Alôpex lifted her head from her paws, and her ears turned forward, and her body tensed the way bodies tense when they sense something dangerous. Lynx got up and growled low, and his yellow eyes were fixed on nothing, on something that wasn't in the room but that he could feel anyway.

"Malum," said Retia. Her hands, which had been lying in her lap, gripped the cloth of her trousers. "Who is Malum?"

"From the dream," I said. "From the round table." I looked at Ahra. "What else did Arcanus say?"

Ahra closed his eyes. His fingers stopped rubbing against each other and lay still.

"He said: 'The fresh footprints in the cave weren't the boy's. They were Malum's. He's been here. He's felt the seal under the mountain. And he's coming back.'"

Silence. The only sound was Lynx's low growl and the faint hum of old Dherak in the walls around us. The boy's. I hadn't told a single adult that I had been in the cave. They knew anyway.

"And then Kalmin said something," said Ahra. His voice was lower now, almost a whisper. "He said: 'The boy's mother has asked us to protect him. But we can't protect him from something that's already inside the walls.'"

The boy's mother. My mother.

I felt the words land in me, one by one, like stones being laid on top of each other. My mother had asked for me to be protected. My mother talked to Kalmin. To Arcanus. My mother wasn't just somewhere out there in the dark. She was connected to the people around me, she was pulling on threads I couldn't see, and she was keeping me alive from a distance I couldn't measure.

And Malum was inside the walls. Whatever that meant.

"There's more," said Ahra. He opened his eyes. "Arcanus said something about the Winter Solstice. That the seal is at its weakest on that day, because the Dherak in the ground is at its lowest. Just like the river is almost at its narrowest. Everything draws in. And that makes the seal vulnerable."

"The Winter Solstice is in nine days," said Retia.

"Yes."

We stood in the small room behind the library wall looking at each other. Three people and three animals in a room that smelt of old magic and old secrets.

"What do we do?" said Ahra.

Retia looked at me. I looked at her. Her blue eyes were hard and bright in the torchlight, and there was something in them that wasn't fear. It was decision.

"We talk to Edrin," said Retia. "It's time."

"No," I said.

They both looked at me.

"Not us," I said. "Me. I'll talk to Edrin. Alone."

Retia started to protest. Ahra started to protest. But I looked at them with a look that said this wasn't up for discussion, and they stopped.

I hadn't thought it all the way through until that moment. But the pieces had been lying in me for weeks, and now they settled against each other, one by one, like ice floes along the riverbank. Edrin, who had said that he had walked on the water too, the first time he came to Déynáir. The way he had said "Chris", like a name he had kept in his mouth for fifteen years without using it. And Surain, who had said "your father" with the same weight Edrin had had in his eyes that first day. The painting of the man with the narrow hands in the corridor outside his office, which smelt of the same thing as his room, candles and old parchment, and whose name I had never made myself read. And the door to his office. It had grown old under my hand, dark and cracked and worn, like the door to the vault in the bank, and he had seen it and said nothing. The stone wall was cold against my shoulder blades, and suddenly I was sure.

"He's my uncle," I said.

The silence that followed was a different kind of silence from the one before. Retia and Ahra looked at me.

"What?" said Ahra.

"Edrin is my uncle. My father's brother. That's why he looked at me with pain the first day. That's why he hid me in a care home by a fjord for thirteen years. That's why he can't look me in the eye without seeing his brother."

"How do you know?" said Retia. Her voice was quiet.

"Nobody has said it. I put it together myself. Haltora's face the first day, Edrin's pain, the way everyone reacts when they hear my name. And his door knows me. It grew old under my hand, like the door in the bank." I pushed myself off the wall I had been leaning against and stood straight and looked at them both. "My father was one of the Thirteen. Edrin is his brother. My mother is living in hiding somewhere, pulling on threads to keep me alive."

I felt the words in my mouth. They were heavy and quiet and true, and it was strange to say them, because I had carried them alone for weeks, and now they were out, and the room was carrying them instead of me.

"And I'm tired of other people keeping me alive," I said. "I'd like to do it myself."

Ahra looked at me with big eyes. Retia looked at me with the searching look she always looked with, the one that said she was weighing up whether what I said was true, and whether it was wise, and whether she trusted me enough to let me do it.

"Fine," she said at last. "You talk to him. But we'll wait outside."

"All right," I said.

And we went up through the passage, up through the dark corridors, past the creaking stair, and over to the windows on the top corridor. The mountain stood in the north against the stars, and the river was a thin, dark strip in the moonlight, and somewhere beneath it all something was waiting that was beginning to wake.

The Winter Solstice was in nine days. And I had a meeting with my uncle.