Imuru,” she whispered, her shaking hand touching the cold iron ring. The light did not come.
“Imuru,” she said, louder, but the word was buried, thickened by the copper tang of blood on her tongue. She reached up with her other hand, fighting past painful spasms in her shoulder. The blood that ran down the length of her wounded arm had turned sticky and cold. Trembling fingertips brushed along the rough stone of her cell wall until they, too, found the ring where it hung. She felt the ancient runes etched into its face, felt the thick steel nail that held it up. Both hands gripped the ring hard.
“Imuru.” And still nothing. The magic was dead.
The wall shook again, forcing her to clutch the ring lest her weakened knees fail. Dirt and dust rained from the ceiling, but she could not see any of it in the dark. The spattering sound made by falling grime sent goosebumps across her arms. She did not know what was happening, did not know what could make a fortress tremble.
My head is bleeding, she realized. A heavy wetness weighed her hair down, matting it to the back of her neck. Her skull ached abominably, and the left side of her face felt numb. And her arm…
How did I injure my arm?
She dimly recalled a gathering of students in the Proving Hall. She had been nervous about something—a task, or a test looming before her. Someone had called her name. She had stood immediately, pretending composure, forcing her nerves to calm, eager to prove—
She could not remember what she was supposed to prove. She could not even remember what day it was. Memories that should have been fresh in her mind were indistinct, hazy, whilst other, older ghosts swirled up with odd clarity.
A woman’s weeping face recalled the day she had been torn from her mother’s arms. “She has the mark,” her mother had sobbed, begging. “See her hair. See her skin. She was foretold. She is for the village, for the valley.”
The man who took her said, “She is for the Blackstone now.”
They stole the girl she had once been. They ripped her from her world of wind and trees and sunlight, and thrust her down, down into the dark. It had been three years since she had last seen her mother’s face, three years of ceaseless night. The first year had been the hardest. The first day had felt like death.
She took a deep breath, trying to force calm—inner stillness, as her training commanded. The Master had mandated they must control their fears. He had prepared her for darkness and pain. Focus past it, she told herself. Pretending bravery would avail her nothing here. This was no test.
The floor and walls had finally stilled. All was quiet. She adjusted her grip on the iron ring and considered moving to the front of her cell. The door and its high window would be closed and locked, but the window had bars she could grab and hold on to. She could call for help. Someone might hear her, come for her; someone might let her out of her crumbling room.
A primal part of her was loath to release her grasp on the ring, however. The silence around her was disquieting. Where were the voices of the other students? Where were the shouts, the hoarse throats crying out, as frightened as she felt? The adjoining cells were all silent, as was the hallway beyond her door. Surely there should have been the sound of running guards—of pounding boots and ringing armor and shouted commands.
The blood on her neck was slowly trickling down her back. Pip. A drop fell to the stone floor as she shifted her feet. Pip, pip.
The cold on her skin grew colder. She resolved not to die at the back of her cell clutching a useless piece of iron. She steeled herself, released the ring, and took three tentative steps out into the black.
The darkness closed in around her, primitive and menacing, squeezing her chest and stealing her breath. It was as dark as the walls of her Walking Dreams. But this was no dream.
Two more steps and she almost fell, dizzy in the dark. Her head throbbed. She could no longer feel her arm. The fear that she could be dying became very real; her injuries were as bad as any she had ever had—even worse than the ones she’d gotten that first terrible day.
“Everyone fights,” the Master had told the children. She had not known what he meant back then. No one knew. But they all learned.
Another tentative step was taken. Her one good hand reached out before her in the dark. She knew the door was near.
A quick slant of light appeared, flickering beneath the door. Her heart jumped.
“Hello!” she called; voice raspy. “I am hurt. I—I need help. Please, can you help?”
No one answered. The silence was like a wall.
She pushed forward, stumbling through the blackness. She reached the door and fell against it—the metal cold and solid and familiar. She placed her lips to the crack, where aged iron met stone. She could smell the blood on her breath as it washed across rust.
“Please,” she said again, softer. “Please. I am bleeding.”
She heard a soft noise outside her cell door—the subtle crunch of a stone underfoot.
“Domiév?” she whispered. It was irrational to hope it was him, but that did not make her wish it any less.
Something slammed into the door, the jolt of impacted metal jarring her cheek. Another fresh lance of pain bloomed in her skull. She stumbled back, tripping over her feet, and fell hard onto the stone floor.
Jangling keys clattered against the door, rattling across the keyhole before she heard the familiar click-clack of the turning lock. The iron door was pulled open, its hinges squealing, and firelight flooded into her cell. A tall armored man followed the torch. He was hunched over, breathing heavily, his torch and a ring of keys in one hand. The other hand quickly pulled the door closed behind him. The bright torchlight made her shield her eyes, but she already knew who it was.
“Gangly Shanks” they called him, though she knew his real name was Duris. Students were not allowed to call the Blackstone guards by their names; protocol demanded each should be addressed as “Guard,” but most of the students secretly identified the guards by the nicknames they had given them over the years. There was Stumble Foot, and Nine Fingers, and Parrot, and Bear Beard; there was the Beater, the Nap-Taker, the Whistler, the Cougher, and more. Some of the students mocked them behind their backs. She never did.
Gangly Shanks was tall and thin, with a large hooked nose, and a protruding throat-knot. For armor he favored an oversized iron-studded leather cuirass, which hung loose and heavy from stooped shoulders. With thinning hair, bulging eyes, and a wart on his cheek, Gangly Shanks was one of the ugliest guards in the Blackstone—but he was also one of the nicer ones. He might tell a joke or two when the others were not around. He would smile and laugh more often than most. He almost never used his cudgel.
And he was especially kind to her. He knew her given name, and even used it at times, even though it was forbidden. She once confided to him that she was fond of plums, so he would sometimes slip one into her dinner when no one else was looking, when they were in season and plentiful. “Somethin’ for ya, Bai,” he would say quietly, adding a wink on some occasions.
I am Bai, she remembered with a start.
It was a name so rarely used, it sounded strange even in her head. They all called her by another name these days. But now she held onto the memory of her real name stubbornly.
I am still Bai, daughter of Jin’su. I am Bai of the Nabi Anh, Bai of the Blue Valley.
A crumbling keep could never change that. Smiling guards could not make her forget.
Gangly Shanks was not smiling now. He was sweating, breathing hard, eyes wide and darting. Drops of blood dotted his face like freckles, and more blood seeped out from under his armor, running down his left leg, staining his breeches. He dropped his torch while fumbling with the key-ring, trying to switch it from one hand to the other. He didn’t bother picking it back up; he let it burn on the floor.
Gangly Shanks turned to the door with jangling keys, seemingly attempting to lock it—before quite clearly remembering the cells only locked from the outside. He grunted in frustration.
“Duris,” Bai called out weakly. “Please, can you help me?” She held one pleading hand up to him.
“To yer bed,” he ordered with an angry snarl. Students were supposed to retreat to their beds when any guards entered their cells. Gangly Shanks did not wait for Bai to move to her bed—he limped past her, heading for the near wall. His gait was so clumsy he nearly tripped on one of the garments that the shaking cell had strewn across her floor.
The sight of one tugo reminded her of the other, forcing a dreaded glance down to her injured arm. The sleeve of her garment was completely gone, frayed at the shoulder, burnt away. Her skin beneath was streaked with blood and blistered—reddened in places and blackened in others. It should have been pale as milk.
I was burned? It was still so hard to recall. Seeing her ghastly arm brought the pain back with a vengeance, but it was somehow more distressing to see her ruined raiment; the one she wore had been crafted as a personal homage to the beautiful snow-silk hamok her mother had presented her with on her twelfth naming-day. The Blackstone tugo had been earned as a merit, made especially for her, fashioned from soft white cotton, tailored with elongated bell sleeves and a wider hem. It was one of the few items she had ever earned—as close to a prized possession as anything she had here. Bai rarely earned merits; she was sometimes slow to learn, and only ever seemed to gain demerits these days. Even her cell’s side windows had been sealed up.
Gangly Shanks was struggling with the small wooden desk that was, apart from her bed, the only furniture the room would allow. He had shoved aside the desk’s chair and was dragging the desk back to the door in an attempt to bar it. Bai rose unsteadily to her feet and moved out of his way, backing against the far wall, watching him in silence, wary. Surely, he would realize that he could not bar an outward-swinging door from the inside.
He finally did. Gangly Shanks stopped struggling with the desk and made a frustrated, gurgling noise in the back of his throat. It might have been comical had he not seemed on the verge of violence. He let out a string of curses, only a quarter of which she understood. The guard ran a shaking hand through his thinning hair, pulling on it. He looked desperate.
“Sir, help me. Please. Take me out of here.” Bai spoke carefully, ensuring each word was clear. Her accent had not been buried by three years of speaking the custom tongue, and it was thicker when she was afraid. But surely, he would take pity on her. He had cared about her before. Could he not tell how hurt she was?
“Help you?” Gangly Shanks whirled on her, eyes bulging. His jaw quivered. “I should bloody kill you.”
Bai just stared at him. She could not back against the wall any more than she already had.
“You started this whole fetid mess,” he accused, his anger seeming to grow with each word. “After you, there was no control. The rules was worthless, less’n nothing. An’ the others—they thought they was protectin’ you.” She had never seen a look so full of loathing.
“I—I do not remember—”
Everyone fights.
It was finally coming back. She remembered facing off against a demon of a girl. She does not like me at all, she recalled thinking. And she has fire. She knew she would need to finish this fight quickly.
Something had struck the back of the head before she could—
“‘Course you don’t remember,” Gangly Shanks snarled. “You was already twitchin’ in the sand.”
Everyone fights.
The Proving Hall had been spinning in her blurred vision, walls and high ceiling tilting wildly as her opponent stalked nearer. She remembered throwing her hand up to ward off the vortex of fire that had been flung at her face. The flames twisted and spun, alive. The sound was akin to a low, breathy roar.
“You can’t stop fire with your hand, silly,” someone had once told her, giggling.
My face. She remembered only white-hot agony. The left side of her face was still completely numb. Did she burn my face?
“An’ now see what that’s done,” Gangly Shanks rasped. “This whole…escape…” He gestured angrily, almost helplessly.
“Escape,” she whispered in echo. The word felt foreign on her tongue.
Gangly Shanks shook his head and spat, glancing at the door again nervously, then down at the wound in his side. He touched it and winced.
We are escaping. The thought stunned her. We are the ones doing this. We are making the guards bleed. Her heart skipped a beat.
We are shaking the walls. We are stifling the magic.
This is us.
He was watching her now, oddly. Something in her eyes must have changed. Something in his eyes did, too. She recognized fear all too well.
Gangly Shanks came at her in one lurching rush, his hands going for her throat. He needed only three long steps to cross the eight paces between them.
Instinct took half a heartbeat in time. She channeled her gift.
Winter. They all called her Winter now. Winter is who I am here.
She froze his eyes. She took the wetness, the tears, the soft fleshy pulp—and before either of them could blink she turned it all to ice. His eyes made little popping sounds as the tissue rapidly expanded in the sockets. Blood welled and immediately hardened, lines of red veining beneath the surface, red rivers under a frozen lake.
Gangly Shanks let out a choked cry, his hands missing her throat and impacting the wall behind her. One of his fingers bent sideways at the knuckle and snapped. His scream roared in her ear.
“Bloodlines.” Someone had whispered the secret to her, some time long ago. My gift. It sings. She felt it humming in every part of her. Blood defined her power’s source in only the most rudimentary way. It was, in fact, a gift—a gift from her mother, and from her mother’s mother, handed down, generation to generation.
I am Bai. My bloodline names me Winter.
Winter circled around behind him. The use of her blood-gift had numbed the pain of her wounded shoulder, had cleared her head. She felt no more of the cold, even though the room’s temperature had just dropped significantly. She felt alive, as she always did when she used her gift. The pain would return later, worse than before. She knew it would. All the students accepted the Cost of Use. Their gifts were both temporary and everlasting.
Gangly Shanks scrambled away from the wall, breaths coming in quickened puffs of white. His head jerked to and fro, but his frozen eyes could see nothing. His hands swiped the air, desperate to locate her.
“Do not,” she warned, and only then realized her mistake.
He rushed to the sound of her voice, and this time his hands did not miss. His momentum put her hard against the wall. The back of her head bounced on stone. He forced her down, buckling her knees with his strength, his hand tightening on her neck to strangle her.
She did not feel the pain of his assault—did not feel anything when she called her gift to sing. The rush of frigia roaring through arcane channels suffused the whole of her being. There was only a vague awareness of his hands tightening around her throat. She stared defiantly back into his gruesome, glassy eyes. He stank of days-old sweat and boiled leather and blood and terror, but that too was a distant thing.
The last warning she might have given him would have come far too late, had she breath to speak. The room temperature was plummeting. It was so cold the torch was nearly guttered out; the room was almost dark again.
She did not need to see the wall behind her to know it was crawling with frost, webbing the black stone with thin lines of white, spreading outward in a slow and inexorable wave. The crackling sounds that snapped the air told her that. Gangly Shanks’ wheezing struggle for breath told her that.
People said her eyes would glow the softest blue when she called her gift. This was the first time she saw it, reflected in the guard’s frozen eyes. It was pretty. It made her sad.
“She is for the village, for the valley.”
Her mother had been wrong. Hers was no gift for anyone but Death.
Gangly Shanks fell away from her, mouth wide open. A fist-sized mass of frozen blood and saliva forced his jaws apart. He looked like a fish. When he impacted the stone, she heard his bones crack, and ice shards scattered across the floor.
Already the power rush was fading, and with its exit came the inevitable return of pain. She stumbled toward her bed on instinct, though she knew she should be going out the door instead.
Escaping. We are escaping.
She was one step away from the bed when the whole room suddenly shook again, harder than it ever had before. This time there was no illumination ring to grab; Winter was flung to her knees and then thrown to the wall. She clutched at the floor, even though she felt the blocks of stone shifting beneath her.
No, her mind protested. We are escaping! This is us!
There was a rumble of grinding stone above, followed by a sharp CRACK. Instinct made her look up, half a heartbeat before the ceiling split in two and collapsed on top of her.
Winter was gone; only Bai remained, and she lay dying. Her body was broken, limbs twisted amidst the rubble that had once been her cell. Again, she did not know how much time had passed—only that the pain was finally gone. Sweet oblivion was surely soon to follow.
She realized there was light only when a shadow passed before her eyes.
Bai gazed up at a woman she did not know, though she recognized the mask she wore, a veneer carved of polished ivory. Delicate runes were etched across its face, circled and spiraling across the brow, chin, and cheeks. The runes drew the eye and made everything around the mask seem blurred.
Is death a Walking Dream? The mask always came in the darkest moments of those peculiar dreams. She had more than a few of those of late. Perhaps she had been dreaming of death all this time.
“Child,” the masked woman said gently. “This is not the end for you.”
But I want it to end, Bai thought. The Blackstone had broken and buried her, and she was so, so tired of this life.
“You will live,” the masked woman asserted, “though there will be pain. There is always pain. But I have come to take you from this place. You wished for freedom. I am here to grant it.”
Bai could not speak the questions she needed to ask. She did not need to.
“I am Ashmei,” the masked woman whispered in answer, close to her ear. “And you are Bai. You told me in a dream. My name, this most informal introduction, is my gift to you. That, and life.”
Why?
“Because we three are at war,” Ashmei murmured. “And in war, one needs weapons. He knew. In this there can be but one victor.”
Why?
“For love,” Ashmei said, though there was no love in those words.
Bai’s last question was a selfish one.
“No,” Ashmei answered. “Some have refused me. They are beyond my reach. For them there can be only sorrow.”
Bai felt a sorrow all her own. Domiév. He was truly lost to her now.
The mask did not smile, and neither did Ashmei’s eyes.
“You will see many of them again, I promise. I told you, today is not the end. Neither is it the beginning. Today is but the smallest point in time. The end of an era is no true conclusion, for it always heralds the next. You are a part of something much larger than you could have ever known.”
Ashmei touched Bai’s forehead with a fingertip, and even the mask began to blur.
“Time turns eternal, be it dialed stone or clockwork steel, and it gives no pause but to a blessed few. Rejoice in your heart. Together we will sing this song complete.”
The dark of Bai’s dreams closed over her eyes.
“You are my dagger now.”