At some point he stopped pretending he was going to sleep and got up.

  He had lain in the dark listening to it go: the music stopping, the fires banking, the last voices finding their rooms, and then the long silence that follows a place having fully spent itself. The ceiling was the same ceiling it always was, and it offered nothing.

  There was a cistern pool he knew, in the wider passage behind the east colonnade where the runnel broadened into still water. Three pools sat within fifty paces of each other there, stone-edged and deep, fed by the same underground source as the runnels. Not warm in the way of a fire but warm in the way of deep rock, the stored heat of something far below that had been giving it off since before anyone had a word for it. He had ended up there before, on bad nights, and found it useful. He went there now.

  In the passage near the pools a woman he half-recognised from the east-warrens came around the corner carrying her festival dress rather than wearing it, wet cloth bundled under one arm, bare figure entirely on display in the unself-conscious way of someone not fully awake and not particularly bothered about it. She had the look of a person who had spilled something on herself and decided the pool was a more pressing priority than modesty. She glanced at him without stopping. He nodded. She turned into a side passage and was gone.

  He lowered himself into the left pool and sat with the water at his collarbone and his back against the stone.

  After a while, footsteps in the passage.

  Eredan came along with the unhurried ease of someone whose feet had learned these passages long before the rest of him had stopped paying attention. He was very old, the oldest person in Alebrath by any reckoning that still meant something, and nearly blind, though this was difficult to verify because he had a way of locating things without appearing to look for them that made the blindness hard to confirm. He had been a Tairseach once, in the time before anyone now living could clearly remember. He kept his stories the way a good mason keeps tools: maintained and organised and ready for use against the day they were needed.

  He reached the pools. He considered them. He chose the left one.

  He lowered himself in and settled against the stone with perhaps two arm-lengths between them. He did not acknowledge Kraken's presence. Kraken did not acknowledge his. They looked at the middle distance in the companionable way of two people who have ended up sharing a pool and are committed to it.

  After a while Eredan spoke: "The night is still young."

  Kraken considered the cavern around them, which had been comprehensively asleep for the better part of an hour.

  "It is," he agreed, in a tone that was not entirely sure what that meant for either of them.

  Eredan nodded slowly as though this had been a satisfactory exchange. The water held its warmth. In the passage behind them the runnel moved with its constant low sound, the voice Alebrath used when it had nothing to say.

  "Do you know the dry-stone walls in the High Pastures?" Eredan said. Not as a question. As someone locating a thing in their memory.

  "The oldest ones," Kraken said. "Before the settlement."

  "Before the records," Eredan said. "The first ones built them, the hundred who came through. They had no tools for working limestone when they arrived, all of that came later with practice. Dry-stone was what they knew from before, so dry-stone was what they built. Stack the rock, trust the weight, keep the animals alive through the first winter. Then in the spring they started learning to cut stone properly." A pause. "The cattle in those pastures now are descended in a direct line from the animals they drove through the seal. Every Waking, the same walls, the same pastures, the same beasts. Eight hundred years."

  Kraken had not known that about the cattle. He sat with it for a moment. "How do you know that?"

  "Because I am very old," Eredan said, "and because the people who told me were older still, and because some things are worth the trouble of remembering."

  "Bríd never told that story."

  "Bríd tells the stories that keep people comfortable," Eredan said, without malice. "I tell the ones that keep people honest. They are not always the same stories."

  The water held its warmth between them.

  "There is something else," Eredan said, in a different register, quieter, as though he had arrived at the thing he had actually come to say. "Something you will not understand until you have been above and come back." Kraken waited.

  "Alebrath has a smell," Eredan continued. "Cold stone and the livestock and forge smoke and the underground grass and something underneath all of it which is simply the smell of people living together for a long time in a place they have made entirely their own. Every person here carries it and none of them can smell it, because you cannot smell the thing you have always been inside." He paused. "When I came back through the gate, after my crossing, I smelled it for the first time. I have not smelled anything since that I would trade for it."

  Kraken looked at the Braoch's light on the water. It moved slightly with the warmth currents rising from below. "And the men who don't come back," he said. "Do you think they smelled it. Before the end."

  Eredan was quiet for a moment. "I think," he said, "that the men who don't come back stopped thinking about what they were going home to. They started thinking about what was in front of them instead. The surface has that quality. It asks for your full attention, and it keeps asking."

  "Is that a warning?"

  "It is an observation," Eredan said. "You may do with it what you like."

  Kraken looked at the Braoch’s light on the water, contemplating.

  "Do you know how we came to be here?" Eredan asked. The shift in his tone was seamless.

  Kraken knew the version that was written down. Everyone did. The founding families, the eight clan chiefs, the survey of the cavern system. Bríd could recite it without pause and had done so in every corner of Alebrath.

  "I know the story," he said.

  "There is another one," Eredan said. He addressed the water now rather than Kraken, or the passage wall beyond it. "It does not appear in any record. It is older than the records. It sounds, when you first hear it, like something people tell children to make the dark less frightening."

  "Tell me anyway," Kraken said.

  "One hundred men came through a tear in the sky," Eredan said. "Not a passage or a gate or a door. A tear. As though the sky had been cut open and they fell through. They carried with them a woman who was not a woman, made of metal and thought, the story says, though I take that for a description of something the first people had no better words for. She knew things that men had forgotten. She taught them how to survive on a world that had not made room for them. She stayed with them and their children and their children's children for a thousand years, or what counted as a thousand years, and then she went quiet. And her descendants buried her where the world could not reach her."

  He stopped.

  "That's all?" Kraken asked.

  "The story says that in her absence the reign of men went awry. It does not specify how. It does not need to."

  Kraken thought about that. "A woman made of metal and thought," he said. "That's a strange thing to put in a story."

  "All the true parts of a story are strange," Eredan said. "The comfortable parts are the ones people added later."

  Somewhere beyond the passage walls the Braoch held its low night-depth across the cavern, indifferent as it always was to the questions people brought underneath it.

  "That's a good story," he said.

  "Every legend was true," Eredan said, "before people stopped needing it to be."

  The pool held them for a while longer, the stone sleeping around them.

  Without changing his tone or his direction, Eredan said:

  "The men who go up for the right reasons come back changed for the better."

  He paused.

  "The men who go up to get away from something," he said, "come back changed in other ways."

  He gave no indication that he was speaking to Kraken specifically, in the manner of very old men who have learned that the most important things land better when they are not aimed directly at anyone.

  Kraken sat with it. There was nothing to say that was not either dishonest or a concession he was not ready to make. Eredan seemed to understand this, because he let the silence stand without pressing it.

  After a while longer Eredan reached beside the pool for a cup that he had apparently left there on some previous visit. He took a long drink of whatever was in it. He made a face.

  "The bloomtea," he said, with feeling. "I do not know how anyone drinks this voluntarily. It is absolute filth." He set the cup down with the finality of a man who has decided. "Give me proper mead."

  Kraken laughed. It came out easier than anything had in a while.

  They sat together a while longer, and then at some point Kraken stopped noticing Eredan beside him, which with Eredan was how his departures always went.

  He sat alone in the cooling water. The pack was already assembled, back in his room, put together in the restlessness before he had come here: three days of food, a water skin, his masonry knife repurposed for something other than stone, rope. He had been meaning to go up since before the Waking began, not meaning in the way of a plan, but in the way of a door you keep passing and one day find your hand already on.

  He stayed until the Braoch began its slow brightening, the imperceptible shift from night-depth toward day-depth that happened too gradually to catch, the moment of change always already past before he noticed it. When it had brightened enough he climbed out and went back.

  He did not unpack the bag.

  ~

  By the second morning of the Waking the argument between Cuff Draycott and old Clovis Berhagra had escaped the private realm of personal grievance and become, as the Draycotts' disputes tended to, a matter of public record.

  It had started the previous afternoon at the eastern livestock pens, where Cuff had found one of Berhagra’s goats inside his family's pen eating from feed that had taken the better part of a season to put by. The goat in question, a grey-faced, preternaturally calm animal that the Berhagra children called Patience, had apparently exploited a gap in the pen gate that Cuff's youngest had been meaning to fix for some weeks and had not, a detail Cuff was choosing not to foreground in his account of events.

  Berhagra’s position, delivered at volume outside the common hearth that morning while the festival's second day gathered itself, was that Patience was a known and predictable animal of sound character and that if Cuff Draycott's infrastructure couldn't keep out a single elderly goat then perhaps the problem was not the goat. Cuff's position, delivered at equal volume, was that this missed the point by so considerable a margin that it amounted to a new point entirely.

  A small crowd had accumulated with the efficient instinct Alebrathians had for spectacle that cost them nothing.

  "She ate two days of feed," Cuff said. "Two days. Gone."

  "She is a small goat," said Berhagra.

  "She is a remarkably dedicated goat. I want the feed replaced."

  "I will replace the feed," said Berhagra, "when someone explains to me how my goat opened a gate."

  "Your goat," said Cuff, with precision, "did not open the gate. She walked through a gap in the gate that your goat had no business fitting through on account of the fact that she has been enormously overfe—"

  "If you finish that sentence," Berhagra said, in the tone of a man arriving at his limit, "I will have a great deal more to say about the state of your gate."

  "Say it."

  "The gate," said Berhagra, "is a disgrace."

  The crowd made the sound of people who have been waiting for this and are satisfied.

  Cuff drew himself up. He was a large man and the drawing up took a moment. "My gate," he said, "has stood for eleven years."

  "Yes," said Berhagra. "Poorly."

  What followed was the kind of argument that Alebrath did well: loud, specific, encyclopaedic in its references to previous incidents, guided by a shared fluency in the unspoken rules of how far a disagreement of this type could go before requiring a third party to bring it to a close. The crowd contributed occasionally, in the manner of a chorus that knows its cues. Eleri Draycott, Cuff’s cousin, who had her own feelings about Berhagra on grounds entirely separate from the goat, arrived and improved things considerably. Patience, for her part, had been located shortly after in the Draycott pen eating a second breakfast with the composure of an animal that has made its peace with whatever consequences arrive.

  The matter would eventually be resolved the way these things always were: someone older and less invested consulted, feed changing hands under mild protest, the gate fixed before the fortnight was out with a thoroughness that had everything to do with the audience and nothing to do with the goat. Kraken watched it for a while from the edge of the crowd, then moved on.

  The passage toward the north gate ran past the Tullamore forge, which was already going despite the Waking, because the Tullamores held that fire didn't take holidays. The smell of hot iron followed him halfway down the corridor.

  He had the pack over one shoulder. He wasn't sure when he'd picked it up.

  Edric was at the gate with a handful of people around him, evidently serving as the Warden of the Crossing for the fourth consecutive Waking. No instruction given, no line called for. People arranged themselves and waited.

  Kraken joined the back of the group.

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  The above hours had no ceremony attached to them, no formal permission sought or granted. They simply happened, the way most things in Alebrath happened: by custom so old it had become instinct, and by the quiet authority of the man who managed them. Anyone who wanted to go up went to the gate when Edric opened it, Edric managed the groups by size and time. It had always been done in that manner, and it carried the solidity of traditions that persist because they’ve never had reason to change.

  Kraken had been thinking about the above hours since before the Waking began, not as pilgrimage or ceremony, but as the one place in Alebrath where the boundary was real and crossable. He had been listening to the returned Tairseach for years, the way he listened to everything, filing things away. The terrain in the hills, the condition of the paths, the creatures that kept distance in summer. There was a world out there, and he was seventeen, and he had seen none of it. He was a mason's apprentice with a dead father and a sister who was holding everything together that he was not, and somewhere in the arithmetic of that life was a number that did not add up. The above hours were not the answer to that arithmetic. But they were a door, and doors were doors.

  And then yesterday he had seen Isolde, and the arithmetic had stopped being abstract.

  He was heartbroken for one day and it was still raw in the way it is when it hasn't had time to become anything else, the kind that is partly the hurt and partly the embarrassment of having not seen it coming, and partly the recognition that the hurt was smaller than it should have been. That somewhere in himself he had already known, though he had not been willing to look at it. That all those months of choosing easier had not been love but its comfortable approximation, and the gap between the two had been waiting for him to notice it.

  The group was the usual mix of a morning's above hours. Carys Windermere, who came up every Waking and returned each time with the expression of a woman who has confirmed something she already knew. Two brothers named Dryden from the South-Warrens, seventeen and nineteen, loud on the walk over and gone quiet as they neared the gate. A woman Kraken didn't know well with a daughter of about eight beside her. The girl was wearing the expression of someone who had decided to take everything about this morning with complete seriousness, and was succeeding.

  Tawny was three people ahead of him.

  He had not thought about her name when he'd decided to come. He thought about it now, briefly, and then set it down.

  She had not turned around. She was speaking quietly to Carys beside her, her hands at her sides, nothing carried. No pack, no provisions, just the festival dress and the wrist torc catching the Braoch-light as she lifted her hand to gesture at something.

  Edric spoke the words he always spoke before the climb: the rope is the boundary, the boundary is absolute, you come back when you are called. He left the rest unsaid, which was where the weight lived. The rest did not need saying. Everyone in Alebrath knew a Galmore had gone through the rope three Wakings ago. Names used as warnings had that quality.

  They began to climb.

  ~

  Twelve hundred steps.

  The Stair was narrow, cut into the cavern wall in a tight helix, wide enough for one person moving carefully or two pressing sideways past each other if neither was in a hurry. The smell inside was cold stone and the iron of handrails driven into the rock at intervals, and beneath both of those something deeper, the smell of a sealed shaft in limestone, very little air having moved through it in seven years. The Braoch-light faded in the first few spirals. After that there were the two lanterns, Edric's at the front and Pell Balroe's at the back, and between them the dark and the sound of twelve people's boots and breathing.

  Kraken counted. He always counted things on the Stair, had done since Bríd first brought the settlement’s children to the gate at the Stair’s foot, standing with a lantern in the dark while she told them what was above, how it would go when they were old enough, and that counting steps helped the climb. He counted now from habit, from the comfort of a number accumulating.

  Behind him, closer than he had registered, the girl's footsteps had been keeping pace with his since around the two hundredth step. He became aware of it the way you become aware of a sound that has been present for a while: all at once, as though it had been waiting to be noticed.

  She spoke without preamble. "Have you been before?"

  "No," he said.

  "Me neither." A pause. "My mother has. Twice."

  "Is she up here now?"

  "She's there." A gesture in the dark that he couldn't see but understood. "She goes every Waking she can. She says you feel different after."

  "Different how?"

  The girl considered this with the seriousness she appeared to bring to everything. "She said she couldn't explain it properly. She said it was like being reminded of something you hadn't known you'd forgotten."

  He thought about Eredan in the pool, the smell of Alebrath and the men who didn't come back. "That sounds about right," he said.

  She went quiet. They climbed. At around six hundred steps, where the passage narrowed and the handrail on the left gave way to blank stone, one of the Dryden brothers caught his foot on a step cut slightly shallower than the rest. He didn't fall. His hand found the rail and he caught himself, but the contact rang out sharp against the stone and the whole column went still at once, twelve people holding their breath in the dark without deciding to, twelve pairs of hands pressing into whatever was near.

  The stillness lasted three seconds. The Dryden boy found his footing. Someone ahead exhaled.

  Kraken had already reached forward, his hand in the dark at the height of the person in front of him, not touching, just there. When the column started moving again he withdrew it without remark. The girl resumed climbing half a step behind him as though nothing had interrupted.

  "Were you frightened just now?" she asked.

  "No," he said.

  "I was," she said, matter-of-factly. "A little."

  "That's sensible," he said. "We're a long way up."

  She seemed to find this satisfactory. They went on.

  By nine hundred and eleven steps, the sound of Alebrath's running water vanished completely, absorbed by the depth of stone between, and for the first time the world below felt not near but genuinely far. Then eleven hundred. Then, eventually, twelve hundred.

  Then the seal.

  The Stair simply ended. Above the last step was the opening the seal had made when it parted, a rough-edged gap in the earth three days old now, the morning sky visible as a brightness that had no shape yet, no frame, no sense of where it began or ended. There was no door, there had never been one. The seal itself was the only threshold that had ever mattered, and it was open, and above them was the world.

  Edric moved them up through the opening.

  The light came over the edge the way he imagined it must have come the first time, undiluted, without the trees to scatter it or the cavern height to give it room, and it hit them each in turn as they came up from the dark of the Stair. It was nothing like the column that had fallen through the seal the morning before, which had been a version of light that Alebrath could hold and understand. This was complete. It was not a brightness but an absence. No ceiling at all. The world opened upward without limit, and the thing this produced was not in the mind but somewhere lower, somewhere in the body that had spent seventeen years learning to live within a known height and had never once needed to account for this.

  He stood at the top of the Stair and let it happen.

  He had not been here before. Both times he had seen the Waking as a child, he had watched the light fall into Alebrath from below. His mother had not wanted him on the Stair, had said he was too young at three and too distracted at ten, and after she was gone there had been no one who felt entitled to bring him and no Waking for seven years in which to do it. He had asked the returned Tairseach about the sky and he had filed away what they said, but the accumulated descriptions of it had turned out to be maps of a place, and maps of a place are not the place.

  Edric moved them onto the grass.

  The perimeter rope was a hundred metres out in every direction from the opening, wooden posts driven into the earth by the Tairseach on their first night above, the rope strung chest-high between them. Within the circle, short grass and exposed rock and the smell of a hillside that had been left entirely alone for seven years. The Tairseach's tents stood empty at their centre, the party long since ranged out into the hills, but a fire was burning in the pit they had left behind, and around it a large crowd had settled in from earlier above hours, and from that crowd a voice was carrying in the manner of someone who has decided the morning warrants an audience.

  It was Fen Auchinleck, a broad, extravagant man Kraken half-recognised from the northern passages, with strong opinions about almost everything and a gift for an audience. He was standing on a flat boulder beside the fire and performing what appeared to be a dramatic reconstruction of his own encounter with a surface predator from the previous Waking, seven years ago, a story that had apparently only improved in the telling since. He used a long stick as a prop and brought a level of physical commitment to it that had his audience in various states of appreciation. A skin of something was moving around the fire's perimeter in the way of skins at fires when the morning is young and the occasion is sufficient. Two people Kraken knew vaguely, Oswald Thrale from the West-Warrens and a taller woman called Orla Briggon who worked the deep cisterns, were attempting a song from the common hall, though the words had been altered to reflect Fen's story with an irreverence that Fen himself appeared to be encouraging.

  And over everything: real wind. Barely a wind at all, the most tentative possible version of it, but it moved against his face and hands with an immediacy nothing underground had ever managed, because it was the actual air of the actual surface world in actual motion, and there was no analogue for it below.

  He stood in it.

  The fire's laughter carried. Oswald and Orla had found a second verse. Around the perimeter the morning group dispersed in their own directions: Carys Windermere making straight for the fire with the unhesitating purpose of a woman who knows where she is going, the Dryden brothers crouching over the soil, the girl running her straight line from one rope-post to the other and back. The posts were crowded near the fire, the pack of spectators three and four deep around Fen's boulder, and Kraken had leaned his pack against one of the nearer posts on the way in without thinking, just to have his hands free while he found his footing in the light.

  Tawny was standing twenty metres to his left, looking up at the sky. There was nothing complicated in her face. She was simply there, entirely present in it, as she was in most things, and he found himself aware of her with the irritating constancy she always occupied in his peripheral vision.

  He looked at the treeline instead.

  Two hundred metres beyond the rope: dark conifer and pale birch rising from the hillside, the morning light still low from the east so the grass between lay in long alternating bands of brightness and shadow. And through the middle of it, leading from the opening directly to the first trees: the Tairseach's trail. Boot prints in the dew, bent grass, the marks of their early departure still fresh and readable.

  He had been heartbroken for one day and it was still raw in the way it is when it hasn't had time to become anything else yet, the kind that is partly just the hurt, and partly the embarrassment of having not seen it coming. He was seventeen and the trail went away from here, and here contained things he was not ready to stand next to.

  Behind him the Fen Auchinleck performance had reached what appeared to be its climax, judging by the volume. Someone whooped. The skin made another circuit.

  He looked at his pack, three posts to his left, the crowd between him and it four people deep and not moving.

  He looked at the rope.

  He looked at Edric, standing at the edge of the group, eyes moving steadily over the perimeter. Edric looked back at him, briefly, with the evaluating attention of a man who has seen many people standing where Kraken was standing, deciding things.

  Kraken looked away first.

  He did not go back for the pack.

  He stepped forward.

  The rope caught him at the sternum and for a moment he stood there with it pressed against him, feeling the resistance of it. His hand found it without deciding to. The rope was rough and real and he could turn around right now, stay inside the circle with the others and let the morning pass and go back down the Stair and be in Alebrath by midday. This would all be something he had thought about doing rather than something he had done.

  He let go of the rope and pushed through.

  The grass on the other side was the same grass. The ground was the same ground. The sky above was the same sky. But the air had changed in a way he couldn't name, as though stepping through the rope had moved him from one version of the morning into another and the difference was in him now, not the world.

  Edric's voice came immediately, sharp and flat: his name, once, and then again. He did not stop. He heard Edric send Pell Balroe back down the Stair. Behind him the singing faltered, then stopped. He heard the grass pressing flat in the dew under his boots and above everything else the sound of open space, the sound air makes when there is simply enough of it.

  Goodbye, he thought, with a feeling he had not expected and could not name properly, some mixture of grief and recklessness and the particular lightness that comes from having finally done the thing you have been circling. Goodbye warren-dens and common fires and Tullamore forged tools. Goodbye Old Arbiter and your fruit that everyone takes for granted. Goodbye Isolde, you lovely, careless heartbreaker, goodbye the version of me that waited and waited and kept choosing easier.

  Goodbye Alebrath.

  He walked.

  "Kraken."

  Tawny's voice, from behind him. Not a question, not an instruction. Just his name, said in the tone she used when she had already decided something.

  He did not stop.

  He heard her footsteps, quick across the grass. Then the crowd's noise rising briefly as she pushed through it, and the thud of her hand finding his pack on the post, and then the sound of the rope under weight as she came over fast, and a sharp tearing as the pack's top pocket caught hard on the post head and gave way.

  She had her footing. She was moving. But the pocket was on the ground behind the post with the coordination horn in it, a thing of bone and leather that the Tairseach used to signal position across distance, and neither of them were going back for it.

  "Of course," Edric said, behind them, to no one specific, in the tone of a man updating a record he had hoped not to have to update.

  The ground steepened past fifty metres. Tawny's footsteps came up beside him and found his pace without being asked. He didn't look at her. She didn't tell him to stop. The treeline took them, and the light changed, and the sound of the fire and the voices and Fen Auchinleck’s ongoing performance faded behind them until there was only the trees and the birds and the soft ground receiving their boots, and ahead, the Tairseach's trail leading deeper in.

  The coordination horn lay in the long grass beside the post in the morning sun, small and still, the perimeter rope casting a thin shadow across it as the day moved.

  ~

  She heard it from Saoirse.

  Saoirse found her near the fried-vine stall, where she had been waiting for a fresh batch. She had been going to find Kraken before the morning was out, bring him some, because it was the nicest day in seven years and he liked them. Saoirse came through the crowd quickly, which was not like her, and when Rhoswyn saw her face she felt something shift in her chest before a word was said.

  The Warden of the Crossing had sent word to the clan chiefs, Saoirse said. Two people through the rope. A boy and a girl. Both in the trees before anyone could follow. She said the boy's name carefully, the way you say a name to someone who loves that person.

  Rhoswyn looked at her.

  "Right," she said.

  Saoirse said something else, something probably kind, but she was already moving. She stood at the edge of the stall for a moment with no clear destination and then walked toward the base of the Stair, because that was where she needed to be, because maybe it wasn't true yet if she was at the base of the Stair.

  Pell Balroe was sitting on the lower step looking tired, and when he saw her he stood up and told her what he'd seen: the boy walking through the rope, not stopping, the girl going after him, the pack catching and tearing on the post, the two of them into the trees before he'd been sent back down. She listened to all of it. She thanked him.

  The above group came down perhaps twenty minutes later, one at a time through the gate. She counted them out in her head as they came. Carys Windermere. The two Dryden brothers, subdued now in a way that had nothing to do with what had happened and everything to do with what the morning had done to them. The woman with the serious-faced daughter, the girl still wearing her focused expression, slightly quieter now, as if the morning had handed her something too large to immediately put down. Edric last, carrying both lanterns, who looked at Rhoswyn with an expression of plain regret and told her he was sorry. That he had seen the boy look at the treeline and had thought, but had not been certain, and that by the time he was certain it was already done.

  She thanked him too.

  Then she walked to their room, because there was nowhere else to go, and she stood in the doorway for a moment looking at what was inside.

  The food she had set out that morning sat on the small table untouched. Bread, hard cheese, one of the sweet fruits from the Listener tree she had picked two days ago and kept for him because he liked them and she knew he wouldn't think to take one. He had gone without eating. He hadn't even come to the table.

  She sat down.

  He was alive. She told herself this in the flat factual way she told herself necessary things. The surface in summer did not kill a healthy seventeen-year-old in the first days, not if he was careful, not if he had supplies. He was strong. He was resourceful. He would be cold tonight and hungry before long and frightened, probably, though he would not admit it, but he was alive and he would stay alive because he had to.

  She ate the bread. She didn't taste it. She kept his share to the side.

  Then she sat for a while with her hands in her lap and the room around her and the sounds of the Waking's second morning coming through the walls, voices and a drum somewhere, Alebrath resuming without him, and she thought about her parents. Not deliberately. They just came. Her mother first, and then her father, and the quality of the silence in this room after each of them, how a space changes when someone who was in it is not in it anymore.

  He wasn't dead. She knew he wasn't dead. That was not the same as knowing he was coming back.

  Something in her chest pulled tight and she pressed her hands flat against the table and breathed, and the breath came out unsteady, and she pressed harder against the table and tried again, and that one was worse, and the one after that didn't come out at all, just broke somewhere in the middle into something she hadn't meant to do, something she had been not-doing since Saoirse said his name, and then she was crying.

  Not quietly. Not in the composed way she did most things. It came up out of her the way grief does when it has been held against its will, in waves, each one worse than the one before it, and she put her face in her hands and let it, because there was no one here to hold herself together for and she was so tired of holding.

  She cried for her mother, who had gone so quickly after their father that it had seemed almost like a choice. She cried for her father, who had walked into the deep mines on an ordinary morning and not come back. She cried for seven years of being the one who stayed steady, who managed things, who knew how to keep going because going was what was required of her. She cried because her brother was seventeen years old and had walked through a rope into a world neither of them had ever seen and she had not been there to stop him and would not have been able to stop him even if she had been, and she knew this, and it made it worse.

  The sounds of the festival came through the walls. Someone laughed, somewhere nearby. A child ran past the door.

  Eventually the waves thinned. Not because she felt better but because the body has limits, and she had reached them.

  She sat up. Her hands were shaking slightly. She pressed them flat again against the table until they stopped, or nearly stopped, and then she wiped her face with her sleeve, and looked at the untouched food to the side, and thought: twelve days.

  Twelve days to the seal closing. She would be at the base of the Stair on the last morning. She would be there every morning between now and then. She would be there in seven years if it came to that.

  She stood up. She straightened her clothes. Her face felt raw and her eyes felt swollen and she did not particularly care.

  She went out.