The Council keeps a register of thirty-seven crossings. At each of them stands a monument from ancient times, a dolmen, a mound or a rampart, for the places are older than the barrier. The keepers at the small crossings are seldom replaced. At one of them, the keeper has never been replaced.

The Council's Register of Crossings, introduction

Chapter 24

Anger

The Winter Solstice holiday began on a Friday.

The dining hall was half empty that morning. Students walked about with packed luggage and Amícûs in their arms and faces already turned towards home. Ahra had packed the evening before, carefully and slowly, while I sat on his bed in the room he shared with Will and watched, and Lynx sat on top of his trunk looking down at him with the patience cats have for people who are doing things beneath them.

"Come home with us," he said. "My mother's already made up your bed. And my grandmother wants to meet you."

"Not this time," I said.

He looked at me. His scent of warm bark and honey was close and worried. "Chris. You can't stay here on your own for fourteen days."

"I won't be on my own. Retia's staying too."

It was true. Retia had said no to going home. Not because she didn't want to see her mother and Cajis. Because she didn't want to walk through the streets of Tés Aváir knowing that her father was out there somewhere, watching. "I need some distance," she had said, and her voice had been flat and firm, and none of us had asked any further.

Ahra looked from me to Retia and back. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"Be careful," he said. That was all he said. He didn't need to say more.

He left. Maka left with him. Will and Marcus left. Sera left, with her arm still in a sling and a smile that had slowly begun to come back, not the same smile as before, a narrower smile, one that knew more. Kael left with a nod to me at the door, the same gesture as always, but this time his eyes held mine a second longer. Jorin left with soil under his nails and a pot plant under his arm that he wouldn't leave behind.

Dario left. Vessa left. Nihil had packed in silence on his side of the room that same morning and said goodbye to me with a nod. Now he left, but slowly, and he stopped in the doorway of the dining hall and looked back. The ermine's white snout poked out of his robe sleeve, sniffing the air. His eyes found me, and there was something in them that said he knew something was wrong, and that he would have asked if he had been the type who asked.

When the last student had gone, the castle was quiet.

I waited until Saturday.

Not because I needed time to prepare. Because my body knew that this was something you couldn't take back, and it wanted one more night with the life that came before. One more night with the fire and Alôpex and the quiet First-Year Room and the illusion that everything was normal.

Retia sat on the windowsill reading. She hadn't asked what I was planning. She knew. She knew because she was Retia, and Retia always knew what people had decided, even if they hadn't said it yet.

"Tomorrow," she said, without looking up from her book.

"Yes."

"Do you want me to come?"

"No."

She nodded. Turned a page. Her fingers were calm. "I'll wait here."

On Saturday morning I went up to the Headmaster's office.

The corridors were empty. My footsteps echoed off the stone floor, and the echoes were too big, too hollow, too much for one person. It was strange to walk through a castle that was normally full of voices and footsteps and laughter and was now just stone and silence. The torches burned as they always did, bluish and still, but they lit up nothing, because there was nothing to light.

Alôpex walked at my side. Her claws ticked faintly against the stone. Her breathing was slow and calm, and it was the only thing keeping mine calm.

The corridor ended at an ordinary oak door. I stood still. Took a breath.

"Chris," said Alôpex. "You don't have to do it today."

"Yes," I said. "I do."

I put my hand on the door. The wood went dark under my fingers. It cracked and grew old and worn, as if a hundred hands had held on to it, just as it had the day after the island, and the hinges turned to bronze. Then the door opened by itself.

I didn't knock.

"Come in," said a voice from inside.

Edrin's office was the same as last time, but different in the empty school. The maps on the shelves were the same, rolls of parchment showing places that no longer existed. The candles were the same. The cat sat on his shoulder with its red eyes, looking at me before Edrin did. Its name was Nix, Maka had once said.

And his scent hit me. Candles and old parchment and what lay beneath: the smell of a room someone has just left, the warmth of a body that isn't there any more. My father's brother's scent. My uncle's scent. And it hit me harder now, because I knew what it meant, and it meant loss, and it meant fifteen years, and it meant all the things he had never said.

The room felt bigger in the empty school. Emptier. Quieter. Edrin sat behind his desk with a steaming cup of tea and a face that said he had been waiting.

"Chris," he said. "Sit down."

I didn't sit down.

"You're my uncle," I said.

The silence that followed was the kind of silence that has its own temperature. It was cold. Nix's tail stopped moving. Edrin's hand, which had been resting around his teacup, tightened on it, and his knuckles went white.

"Who told you that?" His voice was calm. Controlled. The ice under the surface.

"Nobody. Nobody needed to. Everyone who looks at me and sees my father. Everyone who hears my name and holds their breath." I stood in front of his desk and felt my heart hammering, but my voice was steady. The cold water had taught me that. To stand still in something that hurts. "You knew who I was when I walked on the water. You knew when you told me to keep my head down. You knew when you looked at me with pain in your face and shut the door behind me and let me get lost in your castle."

Edrin looked at me. His blue eyes, which I was suddenly sure my father had had, held mine.

"Yes," he said.

Just that. Yes. Not an explanation. Not an apology. A yes so bare and so quiet that it was worse than a lie.

"You put me in a care home by a fjord," I said. "For thirteen years. With adults who changed according to the shift rota, and a woman in the kitchen who made porridge and said nothing. With a surname no computer would remember. With a blank wall and an empty family tree and not one single person in the whole world who told me who I was."

"To protect you," said Edrin.

"To protect me." I could feel it now. The thing that had been lying still inside me for weeks, for months, for fifteen years. The thing that had lain beneath the meditation and beneath the cold water and beneath all the control I had built up stone by stone. It was stirring. It was rising. And it was hot. "Everyone protects me. You. Haltora. Surain, who only told me half. Arcanus. Kalmin. My mother, who sends feathers instead of..." I stopped. My voice was about to crack, and I didn't want that, not now, not in front of him. I took a breath. "Instead of just coming. All of you have decided that Chris Godrand can't handle the truth, and not one of you has..." I lost the thread. It was there, it was right there, and it slipped away from me like something wet you are trying to hold on to. "Not one of you has asked me. About anything. Ever."

"You were a child..."

"I'm fifteen. And I've walked on water and fought assassins and felt something living under a mountain and felt my mother cry in my dreams, and you call me a child?"

Edrin stood up. Slowly. His chair scraped against the stone floor. Nix jumped down from his shoulder and landed without a sound on the desk and looked from him to me and back.

"Your father asked me to," said Edrin. His voice was still calm, but it wasn't ice-cold any more. There was something under it now, something that was shaking. "Before he died." He stopped. His gaze went to the window, and his eyes saw something that wasn't in the room. "It was raining that night. And there was a smell of burnt earth, and his hands were cold when he held mine, and the last thing he said to me was: 'Hide him. Hide him so well that not even Kôilé can find him. And don't give him the truth until he's strong enough to carry it.'"

"Kôilé," I said. The name was strange in my mouth. I held it there for a moment. "My mother?"

Edrin nodded. Just once. His thumb slid slowly over the rim of the teacup, back and forth.

"But she knows where I am," I said. "She's asked Kalmin and Arcanus to protect me. Ahra heard them say so."

Edrin looked up from the window. His thumb stopped. And for the first time in all the time I had known him, he looked surprised.

"I didn't know that," he said.

He had hidden me from her all those years, and she had found me anyway. I could see in his face that he didn't know how.

I knew. The raven on the windowsill. The feathers. The key in the envelope, worn smooth on the shaft, as if someone had held it in their hand for many years. I didn't say it. It was mine now.

And Kalmin. "Kalmin exchanged my ticket at the last moment, and I have no notion why," Ahra had said at the end of the bathing jetty at Løverodde, with his teeth chattering and a coat sewn for another time. I had thought it was luck. That the only one sitting there freezing on the jetty that evening happened to be a boy who was going the same way as me. It wasn't. Someone had made sure he was sitting there. The first friend I had ever had, and she had asked for him.

I didn't know whether that made him any less mine. It stuck in my throat like something swallowed too fast.

"Why would he hide me from her?" I said.

Edrin drew a breath. "The one who can find you can lead others to you," he said. "That was what he was afraid of. Not her."

My father's words. My father's last wish.

"And when is that?" I said. "When am I strong enough?"

Edrin looked at me. His face was open now, more open than I had ever seen it, and there was a pain in it so deep that it had no face of its own, it was simply there, in his eyes and his mouth and the way his hands lay on the desk with the fingers spread, as if he were trying to hold on to something that had already slipped away.

"I don't know," he said. "I've never known. And I've lain awake every night for fifteen years asking myself whether it was today."

It was the most honest thing anyone had ever said to me. And it wasn't enough.

"Who killed my father?" I said.

Silence.

"Who is Malum?"

Silence.

"What's under the mountain?"

Silence.

"Where is my mother?"

Edrin closed his eyes. His hands lay flat on the desk, and they were trembling faintly, and Nix went over to him and pressed its head against his wrist, and he touched the cat with his fingertips, slowly, the gesture you make when you are trying to find something to hold on to.

"Go, Chris," he said.

"No."

"Go. Please."

And that was the word that did it. Please. Not an order. Not a refusal. A plea. My uncle, who had hidden me my whole life and carried the guilt of it every night, was asking me to go, because he couldn't give me what I was asking for, and he knew it, and the pain in his voice was real, and it was the worst pain of all: the pain of someone who loves you and can't help you.

I went.

The door closed behind me. It was ordinary oak again. And I stood in the empty corridor of the silent castle and felt everything fall apart.

Not with a bang. With a silence.

The anger that had carried me up the stairs and in through the door and through the whole conversation, the anger that was hot and righteous and controlled, vanished. Not slowly. All at once. And where it had been, there was nothing.

I went down the stairs. My legs were moving, but they didn't belong to me. My hands hung at my sides, but they weren't my hands. Alôpex walked at my side and said nothing, and that was right, because there was nothing to say.

I went up to the room and over to my bed. Lay down. Pulled the blanket up. Closed my eyes.

And then I stayed there.

The next three days didn't really exist.

I know that sounds dramatic. It wasn't dramatic. It was the opposite of dramatic. It was flatness. A grey, quiet, even flatness that settled over everything, over my thoughts and my feelings and my body, and took away everything that had colour and left everything that was grey.

I didn't get up. Not the first day. The light in the window above my bed changed from grey to white to grey again without it meaning anything. Nihil's bed stood made on the other side of the room, pulled tight the way he always made it, and I looked at it for hours without thinking of anything. On the second day I heard footsteps in the corridor outside, far away, someone walking past, and the sound registered in my brain and vanished again without leaving anything behind. Like stones thrown into water too deep to make ripples.

On the third day I got up for a drink of water. The floor was cold under my bare feet. The mirror over the washbasin showed a face I knew but didn't recognise, paler than it should have been, with eyes that were open but weren't really looking at anything. I went back to bed and lay down and looked at the ceiling. The beams crossed each other in patterns I had seen a hundred times, and they still meant nothing.

Not a deliberate nothing. Just emptiness. An emptiness too big to have edges.

Alôpex lay at my neck the whole time. Her body was warm, and her heart was beating, and she said nothing, and that was the right thing. There was nothing to say. There was nothing to do. There was just this, the grey flatness, and me in the middle of it, and nothing moving.

Retia knocked on the first day. I didn't answer. She knocked again. I didn't answer. The third time she didn't knock. She just opened the door and came in.

She said nothing. She sat down on the floor beside my bed with her back against the bedframe and her legs stretched out in front of her and Fulmen in her lap. And she sat there. For an hour. Maybe two. Without saying a word. Without asking what was wrong. Without trying to make it better.

Just there.

Her scent of salt wind and wild roses mingled with the smell of clean sheets and Alôpex's fur and the still air in the room, where Nihil's bed stood untouched, and it was a scent that said another person was present, and that this person demanded nothing of me and could stay sitting there for as long as it took.

She came again the second day. And the third. Each time she sat down in the same place and said nothing and sat there.

On the third evening she reached her hand out towards my shoulder. And stopped. Her fingers hung in the air a centimetre from the blanket, and they were trembling faintly, a trembling that says someone doesn't know whether what they are about to do is the right thing. Retia, who always knew what to do, who never hesitated, who never showed uncertainty. Her fingers were trembling.

Then she laid them down. Light and warm through the blanket, and they lay there without moving, and it was the simplest gesture in the world, and it was enough for something inside me to stir by a millimetre. Not much. Just enough for me to know that it was still there.

"Chris," said Alôpex in my head that night. Her voice was soft and warm and patient.

"Yes."

"It hurts."

"Yes."

"It won't stop hurting."

"No."

"But you won't stop existing either."

I took a breath. A deep one. The first real breath in three days. It felt like drinking water after being thirsty for a long time: simple and necessary and almost painfully good.

"No," I said. "I won't."

On the fourth day I got up.

I don't know why. Not really. My legs swung out over the edge of the bed by themselves, and my feet found the cold floor, and my body stood up before my head had decided anything. It was my body that decided. My body that was tired of lying still. My body that remembered what it meant to move, even though my head hadn't caught up yet.

I stood in the middle of the room between my bed and Nihil's untouched one and felt my own legs under me, and they were weak, and my head was light, and the world tilted a little, but I was standing.

And then I knew. Not because it was over. Not because I was ready. But because something was waiting, somewhere under the mountain, somewhere in my dreams, and it didn't matter whether I was ready or not, because it wasn't waiting for me.

I went down to the river. It was early morning, and the sky was grey and low, and the air was the coldest it had been all winter. The river was narrow now, seven or eight metres, and the ice along the edges was thick, and the water in the middle was dark and slow.

I pulled my clothes off. Stood in the cold morning air with bare skin and steaming breath. And stepped out into the water.

The cold was brutal. Worse than ever. It cut through me with a force that was physical, a force that took hold of my muscles and my bones and my heart and said: feel me. And I felt it. I let it come. I breathed. Four. Hold. Six. And slowly, slowly, the cold began to change. Not disappear. Change. From pain to presence. From something I was fighting against to something I was in.

And as I stood there in the ice-cold water, with my feet on the stony bottom and my body shaking and my heart hammering, I felt something. Not from outside. From inside. Something that had been shaken loose by the three days of flatness, something that had been stuck and was now free, and it wasn't anger and it wasn't grief and it wasn't fear. It was resolve.

Quiet. Cold. Clear.

I knew what I had to do. Not because anyone had told me. Because I had lain still for three days listening to nothing, and in the nothing the answer had been there all along.

The mountain. The Winter Solstice. The seal that would be at its weakest that night. And what was waiting beneath it.

I walked up out of the river. The cold left my body in waves of warmth that flowed through me, and my skin burned and prickled and lived, and I stood on the bank in the morning light and breathed, and every breath was clear and sharp and new.

Retia was standing on the bank, looking at me. She had a cup of tea in her hands, and the steam rose into the cold air.

"You're up," she said.

"Yes."

"Are you all right?"

"No." I pulled my jumper over my head and felt the cloth against my wet skin. "But I'm here. And there's something we have to do."

She handed me the tea. I took it. The cup was warm in my cold hands, and the smell of camomile and honey in the steam reminded me of Sera, of my first week, of tea and kindness and a place that wanted me.

"Tell me," said Retia.

And I did.