A smith in Tés Aváir never writes the customer's name in the order book. He writes the colour of the blood. In the guild's books from the last three hundred years it says gold, gold, gold, and on a few pages a word that has been scraped out.

The order books of the Smiths' Guild, examined by the Council's auditors

Chapter 6

Idolon

Surain's Animal Shop was noisy and warm and smelt of something that was a mixture of wet fur and hay and something sweetish I couldn't place.

When we came in through the door I was met by a wall of sound. Screeches and yapping and twittering and a deep, rumbling snore from something large at the back of the shop. Cages and aquariums and glass cases stood along every wall from floor to ceiling, and everything was moving. In the nearest cage sat a little golden-brown monkey no bigger than my forearm, looking at me with eyes that were too clever for their own good. Its tail was longer than its body and hung down from the branch it was sitting on like a rope.

The counter was at the back of the shop, but there was nobody behind it. Retia went straight towards a back door.

"Surain's always out there," she said.

The back door opened from the inside before we reached it, and a man came out with a boy and a woman.

The boy was my age. He had brown hair and a face so pale it could never have seen the sun properly. In his arms he carried a small animal that looked like a leopard cub, and the animal lay still against his chest as if it were asleep, but one of its eyes was open and watching.

The woman paid at the counter. The boy walked towards the door.

And just as he passed me, I caught his scent. Burnt wood. Something bitter, like ash that is still warm. And under it, buried deep, something sweet and sad that reminded me of flowers laid on a grave.

He looked up.

I have seen a lot of looks in my life. Looks that don't care, looks that are curious, looks that are afraid. Hanne's look, which was warm, but always with something behind it that she didn't say. Frederik Holmsted's look, which was arrogant but empty.

This look was something else entirely.

There was hatred in it. There was loneliness. There was something that resembled revenge, not against me, but against everything and everyone, as if the world had done something to him that he would never forgive. And under it all, deep down behind everything else, there was a grief so big that it almost disappeared behind the anger.

I knew that grief. I had it myself. It sat in me in that place behind the ribs where you keep the things you never say out loud, the place that either grows bigger over the years or shrinks, depending on whether you find someone to share it with. His grief was turned outwards, towards the world, towards everything that had made him what he was. Mine was turned inwards, towards myself, towards the place in me that still believed it was my fault nobody had come to fetch me. And the difference between those two directions was everything.

He walked out of the shop without a word. The bell above the door rang after him.

I stood still for a moment. Retia touched my arm. Her fingers were light and brief, just a pressure that said: here, now, me.

"Chris. Come on."

I shook off the look and followed her.

The man who had come out with them was older than I had expected. Not old, but worn. His face had lines that didn't come from age but from something else, something that lay deeper, and his eyes were the calmest eyes I had ever seen. He wore a plain brown robe with no pattern, and he moved with a slow care, as if every step cost him something. As he walked past me I caught his scent. Wet earth and animal fur and something metallic and old, like coins that have lain in a cellar for a hundred years. And under it all, faint and almost gone, the smell of a fire that went out long ago but was never cleared away.

"You'll be wanting an Amícûs," he said. It wasn't a question. His hands hung at his sides, still, and his gaze went from Retia to Ahra to me and back again with a slow thoroughness that said he was weighing us up.

"Yes," said Retia. She stood with her arms crossed and looked him straight in the eye.

"Good. Come with me."

He led us out through the back door and down a path between tall bushes. The air was cool and smelt of withered leaves and wet earth, and a few late butterflies in colours I had never seen drifted lazily between the bushes as if they knew they were beautiful. We stopped in front of a door in a wall. The door was old and wooden, and when Surain opened it there was a hole behind it. Not a passage. A hole. A black, pulsing hole with a faint hum that reminded me of the sound of a great swarm of insects far away.

"It's a portal," said Surain. "It'll take you to the island where the animals live. Go in. I'll come after you."

Retia went first. Ahra next. I went last.

As I stepped into the portal, it began to rain.

There was no sound. That was the strangest thing about it. No drops hitting anything, no wind, no voices. Only the cold and the water, as if I were standing out in a night when it was raining, and the rain ran down my face and into my eyes and in under my collar. Someone was holding my hands. Cold hands, wet, holding on to mine as if they didn't want to let go, and then they did anyway. Far away something was burning. I could smell it, smoke and something that shouldn't be burning. And someone was crying. I couldn't hear it. I just knew it, the way you know in the dark when someone close to you is crying without a sound.

And under all of it there was a scent I couldn't place. It was there only for a moment, right where the hands had been. It wasn't smoke and it wasn't rain. It was something I had no words for.

My knees struck something that wasn't floor, and I fell forward onto my hands.

I had felt it before. I knew that at once. Not in a dream. Not in a memory. Somewhere in between. Somewhere I had been not quite awake and not quite asleep, and someone had held my hands in the rain, and then nothing.

The rain stopped. And everything stopped with it.

Light. Grass under my hands. A smell of earth and water and forest.

I opened my eyes. I was lying in a big green meadow under a sky that was blue and wide and endless. The grass under my hands was warm from the sun, and it smelt of hay and wild thyme and something sweet I didn't know, a flower that only grew here. The wind was light and carried the sound of a river with it, and the sun lay heavy and good on my face like a hand holding you steady. My face was dry. Ahra and Retia were standing beside me, looking down at me anxiously.

"Where did you go, inside the portal?" said Ahra. "You were just gone."

"I don't know," I said. I wiped my cheek, and there was nothing to wipe away. "Somebody was crying."

Ahra and Retia looked at each other.

"We didn't feel anything," said Retia.

Surain was standing some way out in the meadow with his back to us. He didn't turn round. But his shoulders were stiff, and his hands hung motionless at his sides, and I could see that he was listening. Listening very carefully to what I said.

Then he straightened up and said, in a voice that was completely normal: "Come on. The animals won't wait for you."

We followed Surain across the meadow and down towards the river. Beyond the river the forest began, dense and green and full of sounds, and above our heads birds flew in formations that looked as organised as an army.

"Get down!" shouted Surain.

A bird came diving out of nowhere and grazed Retia's left shoulder. Retia screamed and ducked, but the bird was already up again, circling above us on broad, sharp wings.

"Looks like we've found your animal," said Surain. "Give it a name. Say it out loud. If it's yours, it'll come."

Retia looked up at the bird. It was still circling, with a look that was too intelligent for an ordinary bird.

"Fulmen," said Retia. Her voice was firm. Not afraid. Not hesitant. It was the voice of someone who had decided something and meant it.

The bird folded its wings in and dropped like a stone. This time it landed on Retia's outstretched arm with a lightness that made it look as if it had always sat there. An Eleonora's falcon. Dark. Beautiful. With eyes as golden as autumn leaves.

Retia looked at the bird, and something in her face opened. Not much. Just enough for me to see it: relief. Not at having got an animal, but at something in the world having chosen her. It had looked at all the people it could have chosen, and it had chosen her. For a girl who was used to people turning their backs on her, that was perhaps the most important thing that had happened that day.

"Put it on your shoulder," said Surain. "Your arm gets heavy after a while."

We went on into the forest. The path grew narrower. The air grew colder and smelt of resin and of moss that never got the sun. Surain stopped and raised a hand.

It was completely quiet.

Then came the sound. Paws on the forest floor.

An animal came hurtling out of the bushes and hit Ahra in the chest. Ahra fell over backwards with a shout and banged his back against a root. The animal was a cub, but big enough to knock over a fifteen-year-old boy, and it was now standing on Ahra's chest with its claws planted in his jumper, looking him straight in the eye.

"Don't touch it," said Surain calmly. "Look it in the eye."

Ahra looked. The lynx looked. Five seconds went by, ten, fifteen. The lynx's yellow eyes didn't blink. Ahra's blue eyes didn't blink. Then the lynx turned its gaze away and laid its ears flat.

Ahra took hold of the scruff of the animal's neck and carefully lifted it off him. It let him.

"Lynx," said Ahra, in a voice that shook a little. He held the lynx up in front of his face, as if he couldn't quite believe it was real.

"He chose you," said Surain. "He attacked you because he wanted to see if you were strong enough. You were."

We went on. The forest opened out, and instead of trees and earth there was ice and frost and a white steppe stretching out in front of us like a sea of snow. The cold bit at my nose, and the snow creaked under our shoes with the dry sound it only makes when it is really cold.

I didn't see it coming.

The first thing I felt was the pain. A sharp, burning pain in my right arm, and when I looked down a small white animal was hanging from my sleeve with its teeth sunk into the fabric, just reaching the skin underneath. It wasn't much bigger than a cat. Completely white. Thick fur. Black eyes that were too intelligent for its size.

I shook it off and fell over my own feet in the same movement. The Arctic fox landed on the ice and stood still for a moment, looking at me with its head on one side, as if it were considering whether I was worth the trouble.

Then it attacked again. It went for my chest. I rolled to the side. It landed on the ice behind me. It gave a single bark, sharp and loud, and leapt again.

This time I didn't move.

I don't know why. Something in me told me to wait. That it was the right thing. That if I just stood still half a second longer than my body wanted to let me...

The Arctic fox leapt. I caught it in mid-air.

It lay in my hands and stopped fighting. Just like that. As if it had been testing me, and I had passed.

"Alôpex," I said.

The name came by itself. I hadn't thought about it. It was just there. It had always been lying in my head, waiting.

The Arctic fox rubbed her cold nose against my wrist. Her fur was thick and soft and smelt of ice and earth and clean air, and her body was warm under the fur, warmer than anything so small ought to be. I felt her heart beating against my fingers, quick and light, and in that moment I felt something I had never felt before. A presence in my head that wasn't my own. Not a voice. Something deeper than a voice.

"Chris. You smell of water."

I looked down at Alôpex. Alôpex looked up at me and sniffed again, slowly and thoroughly, at my wrist and my neck and my hair, as if she were reading something written on me. And for the first time in my life there was someone who knew me without my having said a word. It was the most intimate thing that had ever happened to me, more intimate than any touch, more intimate than any conversation: that something knew who I was, right down inside, without my having had to explain it.

She was right. I had gone down into the cold water every morning for as long as I could remember. I suppose that was what I smelt of.

"Let's keep moving," said Surain. But his voice was different now. Lower. More careful. As if there were something in the forest he didn't want to go too close to. "I don't feel safe in this place."

"Why?" said Ahra. "What are you afraid of?"

Surain stopped. He stood with his back to us, looking into the dense forest beyond the ice steppe. His shoulders were stiff.

"It's a long story," he said. "I've got a hut at the edge of the forest, back towards the meadow. I'll tell it there."

The hut was small and run-down. A roof that sagged a little to one side. Windows clouded with dirt and age. The walls were of untreated wood that had turned grey with weather and time, and when Surain opened the door the smell hit me in the face: old pine, damp moss, and the faint, bitter smell of a fireplace that hasn't had a fire in it for many years but still remembers it.

He shut the door behind us with a small click. It was as if he were locking more than just a door.

The room was small. The light was dim and yellowish, filtered through the dirty windows, and the specks of dust hung in it like tiny planets. Little furniture. A sofa at one end. Some chairs stacked in a corner. The floor was of broad, unpainted planks that creaked under our feet, and the wood was warm and smooth from years of wear. Surain took the chairs down and set them on the floor. He showed us over to the sofa and sat down himself on a chair with his back to the window, so that the light fell on us and not on him.

He said nothing for a long time. Alôpex lay still around my neck. Fulmen sat motionless on Retia's shoulder. Lynx lay at Ahra's feet, rubbing his head against Ahra's ankle.

"It happened many years ago," Surain began at last. His voice was low and even, but there was a tremor under it, the kind of tremor that isn't in the voice itself but in the place the voice comes from, like groundwater stirring under a road you thought was solid. His eyes weren't looking at us. They were looking at a point in the air in front of him, a point that only existed for him, and which lay many, many years away. "When I was your age, my father brought me out here to find me an animal. My father owned the animal shop in those days. He had already sold a lot of animals that summer and had done well. He was a good man."

He paused. His hands lay in his lap. They were trembling. Not much. But enough.

"We were out most of the afternoon. It was still light, and the animals were starting to settle down. We had walked almost the whole way round the island before we found my animal." He looked down at his trembling hands. "It was a ghost tiger. A cub. Pure white with grey stripes and blue eyes. I called it Idolon. It means ghost."

"A ghost tiger," whispered Ahra.

"Yes." Surain didn't look up. "I loved it from the first moment I saw it. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I wanted us to stay together for ever."

Silence. None of us moved.

"We were on our way home. My father was walking in front. Then he stopped."

Surain's hands stopped trembling. They went completely still, and that was worse.

"I asked him what was wrong. I should never have done that. Because as he turned to answer, it came."

"What came?" said Retia. Her voice was almost soundless.

"A tiger. Pure white. Grey stripes. But the eyes..." He closed his own eyes. "The eyes were black. Like water under ice, where you can't see the bottom."

He sat on with his eyes closed. Out in the forest a bird screamed once and then stopped.

"My father tried to fight. He used defensive magic. Attack magic. None of it worked. The tiger was too fast. Too strong." Surain's voice was starting to crack at the edges, like ice slowly splitting under too much weight. "It sank its claws into him. Tore great wounds in his chest. The blood lay in pools on the ground. His clothes were ripped open."

He stopped. Breathed. It took him a long time to go on.

"Before the tiger killed him, it looked at me. Straight at me. And I just stood there." His voice was so low now that I had to lean forward to hear it. "I was fifteen years old, and I just stood there and watched while my father died, and I did nothing. I didn't lift a finger. I didn't say a word. I just stood there."

The tears began to run down his face, slowly, two of them, one from each eye, two parallel lines down over skin that was weathered by sun and years and something harder than both. He didn't wipe them away. He let them fall, and it was the bravest thing I had seen anyone do that day, braver than going first into a river or catching an Arctic fox in mid-air: to sit in front of three teenagers and cry without trying to stop it.

"The last thing he said was: 'I will always be with you, my boy. Goodbye.'" Surain's voice broke. "He was dead a few seconds later."

The room was completely silent. None of us knew what you said to that. There was nothing you could say. You could only sit there and let it be true.

"Then I ran," said Surain after a while. "The tiger followed. But it wasn't hunting me. It was hunting Idolon. They both ran into the forest, and I ran after them. I wanted to avenge my father. I felt it was my fault he was dead."

He opened his eyes. They were red and wet, and his face was changed by what he had told us, as if the words had dug themselves into him all over again.

"I found them deep in the forest. The tiger was lying still. And Idolon was standing next to it. But Idolon wasn't the same. Its eyes were red now. Its stripes were yellow. It looked at me as if it didn't know me." He was quiet for a moment. "And then it ran. And I have never seen it again."

The sun had begun to sink lower outside, and its light fell in through the dirty window and lit up the opposite wall. A picture hung there. A man with a big tiger at his side. Surain didn't look at it. I had the feeling he never did.

I got up quietly and went over to it. Took it down from the wall. Turned it over.

On the back, in handwriting that was faded but still legible, it said:

Me and my animal. For ever and always.

"That's my father," said Surain behind me. His voice was thin. "But that tiger... it has blue eyes. The one that killed him had black." He stopped. "And my father never had a ghost tiger as his animal. In fact, he never had an Amícûs at all."

I looked at the picture. The man looked like Surain, but younger, and he was smiling the smile a man smiles when he is with something he loves, and the tiger at his side was white with grey stripes and blue eyes and lay calmly with its head in his lap.

"If your father never had an Amícûs, whose tiger is it, then?" I said.

Surain looked at me. And in his eyes there was something I recognised. Not grief. Something under the grief. A question you have asked yourself for so many years that it has stopped having words. Just a silence that sits waiting for an answer that never comes.

I knew that silence. I had lived in it for fifteen years.

"I don't know," he said.

He hung the picture up again. Wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. Straightened up in the chair.

And then he looked at me with an expression completely different from anything he had shown us so far. Not like a shopkeeper looking at a customer. Like a man looking at something he recognises.

"What's your surname, boy?" he said.

"Godrand," I said. "Chris Godrand."

His face didn't move. But something in him did. The dead fire in his scent, the one that had gone out long ago and never been cleared away, suddenly smouldered up, the way it does when you turn over an old ember in the ash and find it is still red underneath. For a brief moment there was a warmth in the room that I hadn't felt from him before. Then it sank down again.

"Godrand," he repeated, very quietly. "Yes. That makes sense."

He didn't say what made sense. And I didn't ask. I was beginning to understand that there was something everyone in this world knew about my name that nobody would tell me.

And of everything I felt that day, that was what hurt most: not being alone, but standing in a room full of answers and not being allowed to hear a single one of them.

"We'll teleport back," said Surain.

He went over to a cupboard in the corner and took down a small wooden box. When he opened it, the cold rose up out of it, and inside lay four balls of ice on a bed of hay, clear as glass and no bigger than walnuts. He laid one in each of our hands and took the last one himself.

The ice burned against my skin. It was colder than anything I had ever touched, colder than the fjord in February, and it shone faintly blue in the middle, as if there were a light caught inside it.

"Hold it until it's melted," said Surain. "Then let go."

Alôpex climbed down from my neck and sat on my foot. Fulmen settled more firmly on Retia's shoulder. Lynx put his paw on Ahra's shoe.

I held the ball. It melted slowly, and then faster. The water ran down between my fingers and dripped onto the floorboards, ice-cold, and I felt it run down my wrist and in under my sleeve. The ball grew smaller and smaller in my hand, and when the last little lump was about to disappear, Surain said one word, quietly, as if he were saying it to himself.

"Defluo."

I let go.

There was a white light, like lightning without a sound, and for a split second there was nothing under my feet and nothing in my hands, only light and speed and a cold that ran through me like water through a sieve.

And then we were standing in Surain's yard.

I was standing. I was actually standing, on the cobbles, with soaking wet hands and my heart in my throat, and Alôpex was still sitting on my foot, licking the water off my fingers. Ahra was sitting on a water butt by the wall and looked as if he didn't quite remember how he had got up there. Retia was leaning against the wall with her eyes closed and Fulmen on her shoulder, breathing through her nose, slowly, like someone counting.

Surain stood in the middle of the yard with dry hands, as if nothing had happened.

We put the coins on the counter. Surain didn't count them. He pushed them aside with the back of his hand and said goodbye. When we walked out of the shop and were standing in the street in Tés Aváir again, with the sun still above the rooftops and people swarming past us as if the world hadn't changed, I looked back at the shop just once.

Surain was standing in the window, watching me go. Not us. Me.

And his face still wore the expression you get when you see something you have been waiting to see for a long, long time.