Riftborn

The Ash That Listens

The ridge gave out under my left foot before I heard it c***k.

I threw my weight sideways and caught the lip with my forearms, basalt grinding through the leather wrap on my sleeves. Below me — a long way below me — the slope fell into the red. Not lava. Not yet. The Pale Vein only ran molten in the deep season, and we were three weeks short of that. What waited down there was worse in its own way: a slurry of hot ash and slipstone, knee-deep, the kind that cooked a body slow enough to know it was being cooked.

"Averyn." Doss's voice came from above me, tight, careful, the way he spoke to skittish goats. "Don't kick. I'm coming."

"Don't come," I said into the rock. My mouth tasted of grit and iron. "You'll bring the rest down."

"Don't kick."

I wasn't kicking. I was holding very, very still, the way you hold still when a wasp lands on the back of your neck. My boots hung over nothing. My fingers had found a seam where two old flows had cooled against each other and left a lip about the width of a knuckle. A knuckle was enough. A knuckle had to be enough.

Above me, gravel hissed. Doss was lying flat on his belly, I could tell by the angle of his shadow stretching down the cliff. He'd taken his coat off. He always took his coat off when he was about to do something stupid.

"Don't tie it to yourself," I said.

"Wasn't going to."

"You were going to."

"I was going to tie it to the spike."

"There's no spike up there."

A pause. "There is now."

I closed my eyes. In the dark behind my eyelids the world was steadier than it was in front of them. I could feel the slope through my forearms — the heat of it, the faint trembling that wasn't my own muscles but the island itself, the small constant breathing of Ashveil. People not from here said the island was dead because nothing green grew on its black flanks. People not from here were idiots. Ashveil breathed all the time. You only stopped feeling it when you slept, and even then, sometimes, it climbed into your dreams.

"Coat's down," Doss said. "Grab when I say."

"Tell me when you say."

"I'm saying."

The end of his coat slithered against the rock by my right ear. I didn't grab it. I couldn't. If I let go with my right arm, my left wouldn't hold me. My left was already shaking in that small bad way that meant the muscle was about to quit having opinions.

"Aver."

"I can't reach with my right."

"Then your teeth, i***t. Your teeth."

I almost laughed. It came out as a kind of cough. I turned my head, slow, slower, and the sleeve of his coat was right there against my jaw, smelling of him — woodsmoke and the cheap oil he used on his hair to keep the ash out. I bit down. The wool was thick. My jaw locked.

"Got it?"

I made a noise that meant yes.

"On three I pull. You walk your hands. Walk them, Aver, don't snatch."

I made the noise again.

"One."

The trembling in my left arm jumped a level. The lip under my fingers was warm. Everything on Ashveil was warm. It was the temperature of a thing that had been alive an hour ago.

"Two."

Below me, far below me, something in the ash slurry made a soft, slow sound. Plop. Like bread dough hitting a board. I did not look down. I had spent two seasons on the runner crews and the first thing they teach you is that down is a direction your eyes are not allowed to go.

"Three."

He pulled, and I walked my hands.

It is a stupid thing to write down because it sounds like a small thing. I walked my hands. What it meant was: I let go of the lip with my right hand, found a divot half a finger higher, weighted it, then let go with my left and found nothing, and then found something, and then the coat in my teeth went tight and Doss's weight was suddenly on the other end of it and I was being dragged up the face of the cliff with my knees scraping and my chin banging and my mouth full of wool.

He hauled me onto the shelf and I lay there. I lay there for a long time, which by the clock was probably ten seconds. The sky over Ashveil was the color sky gets when there's been a burn somewhere upwind — a flat brown-orange, not really a color so much as a thickness. I stared at it and breathed and tried to remember whether my left arm was supposed to feel like that.

"You're bleeding," Doss said.

"Where."

"Chin. Forearms. Knees probably."

"Knees don't count."

"Knees count if you want to walk down."

I sat up. He was crouched next to me, his bare arms streaked black from the climb, his hair plastered flat with sweat. He looked older than seventeen when he was scared. Right now he looked about thirty. He was holding his coat in a ball in his lap like it had personally wronged him.

"Why," he said, very evenly, "were you off the path."

"I was on the path."

"Aver."

"I was on the path until the path wasn't there."

"The path is marked."

"The marker stones came down in the shake last week. Someone was supposed to reset them. That someone wasn't me." I wiped my chin with the back of my wrist. The blood was already drying into the ash on my skin, making a gritty paste. "Did you see the goat?"

"What goat."

"There was a goat. That's why I went over."

"You went off a cliff for a goat."

"I went off a cliff because the rock went off a cliff. The goat was incidental."

He stared at me. Then he started to laugh. It was the bad kind of laugh, the kind that has fear in it instead of humor, and it kept going for too long, and I let him have it because he had earned it.

When he stopped, he said, "Your aunt is going to kill you."

"My aunt is going to kill you. I'm going to be busy bleeding."

We came down the long way, around the eastern shoulder of the ridge where the path was wide enough for a cart and the marker stones were still standing. Doss walked behind me with one hand hovering near my elbow like he thought I might tip over. I let him. My left arm had stopped trembling and started aching, which was an improvement on paper and a downgrade in practice.

The wind shifted as we cleared the shoulder and the smell of the lower town came up to meet us. Forge smoke. Pitch. The sour-sweet of the tanner's vats. Underneath it all, the constant low note of Ashveil itself — the smell that visitors couldn't name and locals didn't notice anymore, like hot stone and old fire and something faintly mineral, something almost like blood if blood had been left on a hearth.

Home.

The bell on the high tower rang the third hour of the afternoon as we came through the outer gate. Two strikes, then a pause, then one. Not the muster bell. Not the rift bell. Just the hour. I had been gone since dawn. I had nearly died once. The bell did not care. The bell rang the hour the way the bell rang the hour, and I found this enormously comforting in a way I could not have explained to anyone who hadn't grown up listening to it.

"Straight to your aunt," Doss said.

"Straight to the washbasin first."

"Aver—"

"She'll see the blood and she'll start before I can talk. I'd like to be able to talk."

He grunted, which meant he agreed and didn't want to say so.

The forge district was busy for the third hour. It shouldn't have been. Most of the masters break their crews between the second and the fourth, when the heat off the working floors is at its worst and the apprentices start making the kind of mistakes that cost fingers. But Hessen's yard had three bellows going and a knot of men around the slack tub, and Old Marn's place had its big doors thrown wide, which meant Marn was venting heat for some reason that was not a regular pour.

I slowed down.

"What are they doing," I said.

Doss followed my eyes. "Marn?"

"All of them."

He shrugged. "Orders, probably. Someone wants something fast."

"Marn doesn't take rush orders."

"Marn takes rush orders when the coin's right."

Maybe. But Marn also took her break at the third hour the way the bell rang the hour — because that was the way of the thing, and the way of the thing did not change for coin. I'd seen her turn down a Galehaven trader once because he wanted his order pulled forward by a half day. I am not a dog, she'd said, and you are not my supper.

"Aver." Doss touched my elbow. "Wash. Aunt. In that order. Stop sightseeing."

I let him steer me. But I was looking at the forge yards as we walked, and I was counting, and the count came out wrong. Marn. Hessen. Caradoc. Veil's son's place at the corner. Four yards working through the break. On a Tueday. With no festival coming and no muster called.

Something was moving in the lower town and nobody had told the runners about it.

That wasn't unusual by itself. Runners are the last to know things. We're the legs, not the head. But it sat in my chest like a small wrong stone, and I carried it with me down the lane to my aunt's house, and I was still carrying it when I pushed the door open with my hip and walked into the smell of boiling vinegar and my aunt's voice already saying my name in the tone she used when she had been waiting to say it for some hours.

"Sit."

"I need to wash—"

"Sit."

I sat.

My aunt Hela was a small woman. She was small the way a hammer is small. She was standing at the kitchen table with a cloth over one shoulder and a pot of vinegar steaming behind her on the stones, and her hair, which she wore in two short braids pinned up over her ears, had come loose on the left side, which meant she had been running her hand through it, which meant she had been worried for at least an hour.

"Doss," she said, without looking at him. "Out."

"Yes ma'am."

"Not far."

"No ma'am."

He went. The door clicked.

Hela came around the table. She took my chin in her hand — gently, the way she did everything that looked rough — and turned my face to the light from the window. Her thumb passed over the cut.

"How deep."

"Shallow. It's just bleeding a lot because of the ash."

"Forearms."

I held them out. She unwound the leather wraps without speaking. The skin underneath was scraped raw in two long stripes from wrist to elbow on the left, less on the right. She looked at them for a long moment. Then she went to the stove and came back with the vinegar pot and a clean cloth, and she sat down across from me and started to clean the scrapes, and she did not say anything for a while, and I knew better than to fill the silence.

When she did speak, it was quiet.

"Tell me what happened."

I told her. The marker stones. The goat. The lip of basalt. Doss and the coat. I left out the part about how my left arm had been about to quit, because she didn't need that part, and I left in the part about the four forge yards working through the break, because she did.

She stopped cleaning the scrapes when I got to that part. The cloth went still on my forearm.

"Four yards," she said.

"Four that I saw. Maybe more on the upper streets."

"Marn's was open."

"Big doors. Venting."

She set the cloth down.

For a moment her face did something I wasn't used to seeing on it. Hela had two faces, normally — the working face, which was hard, and the home face, which was less hard. This was a third face. It was the face of a woman calculating something and not liking the answer.

"Aunt."

"Hush a moment, child."

I hushed.

She got up. She walked to the window and looked out at nothing in particular — at the corner of the neighbor's roof, at the edge of sky above it, at the brown-orange thickness up there. Her hands were folded behind her back and one thumb was rubbing slow circles into the other palm.

"Aunt," I said again.

"You said the marker stones came down in the shake last week."

"Yes."

"Which shake."

"The one on—" I had to think. "Sevenday night. The long one."

"The long one." She said it like she was tasting the words. "Yes. The long one."

"What's wrong."

She turned around. Her face had gone back to the working face, the hard one, and I felt my stomach go cold, because the working face was the face she put on before she told you a thing you weren't going to like.

"Eat," she said. "There's bread in the cloth and cheese in the crock. Eat now, because you may not get the chance later."

"Aunt—"

"Eat, Averyn."

I ate. I ate because she had used my full name, which she did perhaps four times a year, and each of those four times had been a day I remembered for the rest of the year afterwards. The bread was yesterday's and the cheese was the sharp white kind that came down from the high pastures, and I chewed and swallowed and watched her move around the kitchen putting things into a satchel — flint, a folded oilcloth, the small knife with the bone handle, a coil of waxed cord, the little tin of burn salve she normally kept on the high shelf and would not let me touch.

She was packing the going-bag.

We had a going-bag. Every house in the lower town had a going-bag. You packed it once when you moved into the house and you checked it once a year at the turn of the season and most people went their whole lives and never opened it for any other reason. I had seen ours exactly twice. Once when I was nine and Hela had shown me where it lived under the loose board by the hearth. Once when I was eleven and the eastern flow had come down the Pale Vein farther than anyone expected and we had sat up all night with the bag by the door, and in the morning the flow had stopped a half mile short of the outer gate, and Hela had put the bag back under the board without a word.

Now the bag was on the table and she was putting things in it.

"Aunt."

"Chew."

"Aunt, what's happening."

She stopped. She put her hands flat on the table on either side of the bag and she looked at me across it, and her eyes were very tired in a way I had not seen them be tired before.

"I don't know yet," she said. "That's the truth of it. I don't know yet. But the shake on Sevenday wasn't a shake. Or it was, but it was a shake of a kind we haven't had in my lifetime, and I have been waiting all week to see whether I was wrong about what it was, and the fact that four forge yards are working through the break tells me I was not wrong."

"You're not making sense."

"I know."

"Tell me in words I can hold."

She almost smiled. It didn't reach her mouth, but it almost did.

"When I was a girl," she said, "my grandmother told me that the island talks. Not the way poets say it. The way a dog talks. With its body. With small movements you learn to read if you live close enough to it for long enough. She said there were three kinds of shake. The first kind is the island settling its weight, and you feel it in your feet, and it's done in a breath. The second kind is the island shifting, and you feel it in your knees, and it lasts as long as it lasts, and afterwards you check the walls. The third kind—"

She stopped.

"The third kind?"

"The third kind you feel in your teeth," she said. "And it doesn't stop when the ground stops. It stops days later, maybe weeks. And it means the island is answering something."

"Answering what."

"That depends on what asked."

I stared at her. The bread had gone tasteless in my mouth.

"The shake on Sevenday," I said slowly. "I felt it in my teeth."

"I know you did. I watched you put your hand over your jaw."

"You didn't say anything."

"I was hoping I was wrong."

The bell rang.

It was not the third hour bell. The third hour bell had rung an hour ago. This was three short strikes and a long, and then three short and a long again, and Hela's head came up the way a hunting dog's head comes up.

"Muster?" I said.

"No." She was already moving. The going-bag went over her shoulder. "Rift."

"Where—"

"Boots. Now."

I shoved the last of the bread in my mouth and grabbed my boots from under the bench and was lacing them when the door banged open and Doss was there, his face white under the soot.

"Lower flats," he said, before Hela could ask. "Past the southern wall. Half a mile out. They're saying it opened in the middle of the goat road."

"How big."

"Big."

"How big, Doss."

He looked at her. He looked at me. He swallowed.

"They're ringing it as a third."

Hela's hand went still on the strap of the bag.

I did not know, then, what a third meant. I would learn later that there were five sizes the lower town used to ring a rift, and that the bells for a fourth and a fifth had not been rung in any living person's hearing, and that a third was the largest thing the town had a real procedure for. I did not know any of this. What I knew was that Hela had gone still, and that Hela did not go still, and that when she moved again it was the fastest I had ever seen her move.

"Averyn. With me. Doss, run to your mother and tell her I said the south cellar, not the north. The south. Repeat it back to me."

"South cellar, not north."

"Go."

He went.

She caught my wrist — the bad one, the scraped one, and I bit back a noise — and pulled me to the door. The afternoon outside was the same flat brown-orange it had been an hour ago, but the air had a new note in it now, a hum I felt in the small bones behind my ears. People were in the lane. Not running. Walking fast, in the direction of the southern wall, the way you walk toward something terrible because not knowing is worse than knowing.

"Stay at my hip," Hela said. "Do not run ahead. Do not stop. If I say down, you go down where you stand. Do you understand me."

"Yes."

"Say it."

"Stay at your hip. Don't run. Don't stop. Down means down."

"Good girl."

She had not called me good girl since I was seven years old.

We came up onto the southern wall through the runner's stair, which was the fastest way and the one Hela should not have known about. She knew about it. I filed that away in the small back room of my head where I kept the things about my aunt that did not fit the rest of my aunt, and we came out on the parapet between two of the old watch points, and I looked south, and I stopped breathing for a moment.

The goat road ran out from the southern gate in a long pale line through the black flats, and a half mile out, where the road bent around the first of the slag heaps, the air was wrong.

That is the only word I have for it, even now. Wrong. There was a place in the air that was not the same as the air around it. It was not a hole. It was not a tear. It was a place where the world had become uncertain about being the world. The light bent around it the way light bends around a hot stone in summer, but it bent in the wrong directions, and there were colors in the bending that I did not have names for, and underneath the bending the ground had begun to do something I did not understand at all — it was breathing, slowly, the black ash rising and falling in a slow soft rhythm, and where it rose the ash was not ash anymore but something brighter, and where it fell it was darker than ash had any business being.

I had heard about rifts my whole life. Every child on Ashveil had. They were in the songs the old women sang at the loom and in the warnings the masters gave the apprentices and in the stories the runners told each other on the long nights at the upper stations. I had heard about rifts the way I had heard about Soulbind — as a thing that happened, a thing that was real, but a thing that happened out there, on other islands, in other lives, in stories.

I had never seen one.

I was looking at one now.

"Aunt," I said. My voice did not sound like my voice. "Aunt, the air."

"I see it."

"It's breathing."

"I see it, child."

The hum behind my ears had gotten louder. It was not in my ears. It was in my jaw. It was in my teeth, the way she had said it would be, and I put my hand up to my face without meaning to, and Hela saw me do it, and her grip on my wrist tightened until it hurt.

"Averyn. Look at me. Not at it. At me."

I looked at her. It was hard. The thing in the air wanted to be looked at. It wanted to be looked at the way deep water wants to be looked at when you are standing on a high bridge.

"Listen to my voice," she said. "Whatever you are feeling, you are going to feel it more in a moment. When you do, you are not going to fight it. You are not going to fight it because fighting it will hurt you. You are going to let it pass through you the way you let a hot wind pass through you on the upper ridge. Do you remember the upper ridge?"

"Yes."

"Tell me how you stand on the upper ridge."

"Knees soft. Weight low. Mouth closed. Eyes on the horizon."

"Stand like that now."

I stood like that now. My knees softened. My weight went into my heels. I closed my mouth. I tried to find a horizon and there wasn't one, only the wrong place in the air, and I looked at her instead, at the line of her jaw and the loose braid over her left ear, and the hum in my teeth got louder, and louder, and—

It was not a sound.

I want to be clear about this because I have tried, since, to explain it to people who weren't there, and the closest I have ever come is it was not a sound. It was a pressure. It was a pressure that came from inside my chest and went outward, the way a cough goes outward, except that I had not coughed and the pressure did not stop. Something in me — something I had not known was in me, something that had perhaps been in me my whole life and had been very quiet about it — answered the wrong place in the air. It answered the way a struck bell answers another struck bell across a courtyard. It answered without my permission. It answered before I had finished deciding whether to be afraid.

The air around my hands went hot.

I looked down. My hands were on the parapet stone. The stone under my palms had a thin film of ash on it, the way every stone on Ashveil had a thin film of ash on it, and the ash was moving. It was moving away from my hands in slow rings, the way water moves away from a dropped pebble, except in reverse — the rings were going outward from me and they were leaving clean stone behind them and the clean stone was warm, I could feel it warm under my palms, warmer than the rest of the parapet, warmer than it had any right to be.

"Aunt," I said.

She was already looking at my hands.

Her face had gone white. Not pale. White. The white of a woman who has been waiting her whole life for a thing to happen and is now watching it happen and does not know what to do with the fact of its happening.

"Averyn."

"I'm not doing it."

"I know you're not. That's the problem."

"What is it. What is it."

She did not answer me. She grabbed my face in both her hands — both of them, hard, harder than she had ever held me — and she put her forehead against mine and she said, very fast, very low:

"Listen. Listen to me. You are not going to tell anyone about this. Not Doss. Not the masters. Not the guild. No one. Do you understand me. The rift opened and you felt it and that is all that happened. You are going to walk down off this wall with me and you are going to come home and you are going to put your hands in cold water and you are going to forget the rings in the ash. Do you understand me."

"No."

"Averyn—"

"No, I don't understand you, Aunt, I don't understand any of it, what is happening to me—"

"It is happening because it was always going to happen," she said, and her voice cracked on the word always, and I had never heard her voice c***k on anything in my entire life. "It is happening because of who your mother was. And we are going to talk about it, I swear to you we are going to talk about it, but we are going to talk about it in our kitchen with the door bolted, and not on this wall, and not where anyone can see your hands, do you understand me, child—"

The wrong place in the air made a sound.

This one was a sound. It was a sound like a long slow inhalation, like something very large drawing breath, and the goat road below us bowed upward in the middle as if a hand were pushing it from beneath, and the slag heap nearest the wrong place tipped and slid, and somewhere down on the flats a man started to scream, and the bell on the high tower behind us began to ring a pattern I had never heard before — four short strikes and two long, four short and two long — and Hela's head came up and her mouth moved around a word and the word was not a word I knew.

"That's not a third," she whispered. "Oh, gods. That's not a third."

The hum in my teeth became a roar.

The rings in the ash under my palms went out across the whole parapet in one long pulse, and every stone they touched came up clean and warm, and I looked down at my own hands as if they belonged to a stranger, and somewhere far back behind everything else — behind the roar and the bell and the screaming on the flats and Hela's hands on my face — I heard a voice that was not my voice and not Hela's voice and not any voice I had ever heard before.

It said one word.

It said my name.

And then the wall under us moved.