The morning came up grey and washed, and Hollowmere had decided overnight what had happened.
Elliot heard four versions of it before he had finished crossing the square. A star had fallen. A god had thrown something away. The old shrine at the crossroads had finally answered a prayer, and nobody could agree whose. The one thing everyone agreed on was that the pillar of light had come down out by the eastern reeds, and that no sensible person would be going that way for a while.
What is a shrine, said Etreuf.
Elliot nearly walked into a fence post. You don't know what a shrine is.
I know what one is in my realm. It is a place where the weak go to beg. A pause. This one appears to have a stone man in it with no face, and your neighbours are arguing about whether it woke up. I have been listening to these people since dawn and I have understood perhaps one word in three. They speak of guilds. They speak of shards and coin as though the two were the same thing. They speak of ranks with letters attached, which is the single most idiotic arrangement I have ever heard of, and yet they all seem to agree on it. The voice curdled. Explain your world to me, boy. Slowly. As though I were stupid, since apparently I am.
Elliot bit down on a smile, which was a mistake, because Etreuf felt him do it.
I don't know that much, he admitted. Nobody here does. Hollowmere doesn't get hunters.
Then tell me what a village idiot believes, and I will subtract from it.
So he told him. Badly, as it turned out, though neither of them knew that yet. That there were monsters, and the guilds ranked them by letters so you knew how many people to send. That the guilds sold you the killing of them, for coin, or sometimes traded in shards, which people said were worth more than coin, though Elliot had never seen one and could not have said what they did. That out past the hills there were kings, seven of them, everyone agreed on seven, and that a man became a king by being strong enough, though how strong, and how measured, was the sort of thing Hollowmere argued about on feast days and got wrong on purpose.
And these kings, Etreuf said. How does a man become one. By blood. By vote. By murder.
By being the strongest, Elliot said. That's all anyone ever says.
That is not a system. That is a rumour wearing a crown. Etreuf was quiet a moment. Still. Seven thrones and no lineage. That means they can be taken.
You've been here two days.
I have been here two days and I have already found the door out of the cellar, said Etreuf. You have lived here your whole life and you did not know there was a cellar. Do not mistake my ignorance for your wisdom, boy. I am new. I am not slow.
Elliot was still turning that over when Maya came running across the square.
She came at a flat sprint, apron still on, flour to the elbows, and did not slow until she had caught Adam by both arms. "Have you seen Perrin? Since last night. Have either of you seen him?"
Adam straightened. "Your brother? No. Maya."
"He wasn't in his bed." Her voice was doing something careful and terrible, holding level by force. "His boots are gone. He talked all evening about the light. He said he wanted to see where it landed, and I told him not to be an idiot, and I went to sleep, and."
"The reeds," Elliot said.
"The reeds." Maya's chin came up, daring either of them to say the rest.
Elliot was already turning east. He did not remember deciding to.
No, said Etreuf.
He's nine.
I do not care whether he is nine or ninety. Flat. Unbothered. Listen to me very carefully, since you appear to have mistaken me for something with a conscience. I do not know what is in that marsh. I cannot feel it, I cannot smell it, and I cannot reach past the inside of your skin to find out, which I have spent two days discovering, and which I like considerably less than you do. A beat. What I know is arithmetic. If you die, I die. That is the whole of our arrangement. And you propose to walk into water, in the dark, after a thing that ate a child, with a demon lord in you who currently has the strength of a bad cough.
Elliot stopped in the middle of the square.
So don't help, he said.
I have no intention of helping.
Fine.
Fine, Etreuf repeated, with loathing.
Adam had grabbed a lantern pole off the widow's fence and was checking it in his hands like a man who has never held a weapon and has decided to start now. Maya was already six steps ahead of both of them. Elliot went to the notice board, because it was the sensible thing, and he wanted to do one sensible thing before the rest of the day happened to him.
The posting was still there, the ink run to grey. B-rank in the eastern reeds. Coin or shard. Mind the children. Pinned four days, and no hunter had come. Hollowmere was a long way from anywhere that had hunters in it.
B, said Etreuf. Is that bad.
It's in the middle.
The middle of what. How many letters are there.
I don't know. Elliot pulled the paper down and folded it into his shirt, for no reason he could name. More than three.
Marvellous, said Etreuf. We are going to be killed by a letter.
The reeds began where the fields gave out. A flat grey country of standing water and green stalks taller than Adam, hissing softly against each other in a wind Elliot could not feel on his face. The crater was off to the north, still smoking faintly. Nobody looked at it.
The path in was a spine of half sunk stones that the reed cutters used. Maya went first, because nobody could have stopped her. Elliot went second. Adam brought up the rear with his lantern pole, breathing like a man doing arithmetic about his own death and disliking the sums.
Fifty paces in, the sound stopped.
Not the wind. The wind kept moving the stalks. The frogs stopped. The insects stopped. The whole marsh took a breath and held it, and in that hush Elliot heard, very clearly, a woman singing.
Low and warm and wordless. The kind of tune you hum without knowing you are doing it. The most comforting sound he had ever heard in his life, and something in his chest turned toward it the way a plant turns toward a window. He thought, distantly, that he should go and see. He thought it would be rude not to.
Maya's face went slack and sweet. She stepped off the stones into the water.
Stop, said Etreuf. And then, sharper, with the first real alarm Elliot had ever heard in him: Boy. Your mind is going soft. I can feel it going. I do not know what is doing it and I cannot hear whatever you are hearing. Stop listening to it. Right now. Or I swear on my own name that I will spend whatever is left of me making the inside of your skull unbearable.
The tune broke.
It was suddenly just a noise, an ugly wet clicking dressed up in something borrowed, and Elliot lunged and caught Maya's wrist and hauled her back onto the stone. She fought him for a second, genuinely fought him, and then her eyes cleared and she made a small sick sound and clutched his arm.
"What was that," Adam whispered. "Elliot. What was that."
The reeds ahead of them parted.
It came up out of the water slowly, and all at once. Taller than a man by half again. Its body was a long, pale, jointed thing the colour of a drowned root, hung with reed and weed so that standing still it would have been nothing but more marsh. It had no face. Where a face should have been there was a smooth wet hollow, and in the middle of the hollow a small round opening, working. And out of the opening came the singing.
It had a boy's shoe in one long hand.
Maya screamed. The thing turned the hollow toward the sound with a terrible, delighted attention, and its singing sweetened.
"Perrin's alive," Maya sobbed. "That's just his shoe. That's just. He could be."
It kept the shoe, Etreuf said, very quietly.
What does that mean.
In my realm it would mean that it keeps things. A pause. I do not know what it means here. I know nothing here. And then, in a tone Elliot had not heard from him before, not contempt, not fury, but the cold flat calculation of something very old looking at a bad position: It has seen you. It is deciding which of the three of you is softest, and it will not choose you, because you are the one standing still. It will take the girl, or the large one. And then it will take you at leisure.
Elliot's hands were shaking. Give me the fire.
Now we are talking sense, said Etreuf.
The dark under his ribs opened.
---
It came up his spine like heat off a road, and where it touched, everything sharpened. The water's cold. The stink of green rot. The exact place on the stone where his heel would slip. His hands stopped being cold. His hands were burning, red bleeding into black, a dark fire licking off his knuckles that gave off no heat he could feel, that made the nearest reeds curl and blacken and lean away.
He looked at his own burning hands and felt no fear at all, and understood that the absence of fear was not his either.
"Get her back," he said to Adam. His voice came out level. "Down the stones. Go."
Adam stared at him, at his hands, at whatever his eyes were doing, and for one awful moment Elliot thought he would argue.
Adam grabbed Maya and went.
The thing came fast. It came the way a stork strikes, all at once, folding out of stillness into a long white blur. And Elliot moved. Etreuf moved. The seam between them was nowhere he could find. He went sideways off the stone into knee deep water, and the arm cracked past his ear close enough to stir his hair, and then his burning hand was on it.
The fire went into the pale flesh and took.
Not the way a fire burns. The way an insult burns, deep and personal, black threads racing up under the skin from the print of his palm. The thing that had no mouth screamed anyway, out of that small round opening, an appalling wet sound that stopped being a song entirely.
Again, Etreuf said, in the voice of a man tasting wine after three hundred years of water. There. The joint. Whatever this thing is, it is built like everything else that has ever been built. It has places where it comes apart.
Elliot hit it there. The joint went. The thing folded onto him, all weight and reed and stink, and drove him under.
Water closed over his head. His shoulder hit mud. The fire went out like a snuffed candle and the cold rushed in, and above him, through the murk, he saw the long white shape settling down over him with the patience of something that had all the time in the world, and was already singing again.
Get up, Etreuf said. Get up. If it eats you it eats me, and I did not climb three hundred years to end in the gut of a marsh worm in a country I cannot even name. Get up, you miserable little animal.
Elliot's hand, scrabbling in the mud, closed on a boy's shoe.
Something in him went very quiet and very hot at once, and it was not Etreuf's heat. It was his own. The stubborn thing at the bottom of him that walked down into craters, that carried pies through the rain, that decided things and would not be talked out of them.
Against his chest, under his shirt, his mother's coin flared like a coal.
Elliot came up out of the water.
He never knew what he did. There was a sound, one clean note, struck somewhere behind the world, and he heard it with his teeth. And the black fire that came off him then was not licking or curling but pouring, a column of it, and the marsh lit red and black under a grey morning, and the pale thing came apart in the middle of it like a moth in a lamp.
The reeds burned in a wide ring. The water boiled and stank.
Then it was over, and Elliot was standing in the ruin of it, shaking, up to his thighs in scalded water, holding a shoe.
Etreuf said nothing at all.
It was the loudest silence Elliot had ever heard. Not sulking. Not thinking. The stillness of something ancient that had just watched a thing happen and did not have a shelf to put it on.
Etreuf.
I am here.
What was that.
A long pause.
You are tired, Etreuf said. Get out of the water.
He was lying. Elliot knew it the way you know a person's footstep. Two days in, and he already knew the shape of the demon's voice when it was covering something. He filed it away with the rest, and said nothing, and later he would think that this was the first time either of them had chosen to keep a thing from the other.
He would learn, much later, what Etreuf had been too proud to say aloud. That the fire in that last moment had not come from him. That he had reached for it and found it already burning. That whatever had answered the boy in the water had not asked the demon's permission.
---
The light was still there when Elliot turned round.
It hung in the air where the creature had come apart, a slow turning knot of pale green, no bigger than a fist, drifting down toward the water like ash that had forgotten to fall.
Elliot stared at it. What is that.
I have no idea, Etreuf said.
You're a demon lord.
I am a demon lord of somewhere else, Etreuf snapped. That thing sang with no mouth, and this world puts letters on its monsters, and my own fire did. He stopped. Started again, smoother, and Elliot noticed the seam. I do not know what it is. But I know what it feels like, and it feels like the thing that was in the creature, and now the creature is not using it.
So it's just left over.
Everything is left over, said Etreuf. That is what a corpse is. The question is whether this world lets you pick it up. Something old and hungry moved under the words. Take it.
You just said you don't know what it is.
I know that it is power, and power lying in mud is an insult. A pause, and when he spoke again it was almost gentle, which was worse. You are weak, Elliot. Not as an insult. As a fact, and it is a fact that will kill both of us. Something in this world is strong enough to throw a demon lord across the wall of the universe like a stone. If we ever meet it, everything you have will not be enough, and everything you have is currently a plank, a marsh worm's leavings, and me. Take it.
Elliot looked at the little turning light for a long moment.
Then he reached out and closed his hand around it.
It hurt. It went in through the palm and up, and settled behind his sternum with a click he felt in his whole body, and for a moment he could taste green water and hear, faintly, from somewhere far inside himself, a woman singing.
Then it was his.
He stood there breathing. Nothing looked different. The reeds still burned. The sky was still grey.
But when he stepped back onto the stones, his legs came out of the mud easier than they had any right to, and he could hear Adam's heart hammering from forty paces off.
Well, said Etreuf. Apparently it does.
---
He found the nest by searching for it, quartering the reeds for the better part of an hour with the water at his knees, because it seemed to him that a thing which kept a shoe might keep other things. He was right by accident, and he would think about that later too.
It was on a hump of dry ground behind a screen of stalks. A foul, matted, half woven thing, and in it, four village children and one old reed cutter, cocooned to the chest in green, filthy and starved and blinking in the light.
Perrin was the smallest. He was crying too hard to walk, so Elliot carried him.
They came up out of the reeds into the fields a little after noon. Elliot in the lead with a boy on his hip and a shoe stuffed in his belt. Maya sobbing. Adam carrying two of the children and shaking so badly he could barely hold them. The reed cutter limping behind with a hand on Adam's shoulder.
Half of Hollowmere was standing at the field's edge, because word travels fast in a small place.
Elliot had imagined, in the last stretch of the walk, in some warm foolish part of himself he would be embarrassed about later, that there would be cheering.
There was not.
The mothers came forward and took their children and carried them away, and some of them thanked him, in low voices, without meeting his eyes. And behind them the rest of the town looked past him. At the black smoke standing over the marsh. At the wide ring of burned reeds. At the scorched prints of two hands on the front of his own soaked shirt.
Nobody said what did you do. Nobody had to.
Old Hesk was at the back of the crowd, leaning on his stick. He looked at Elliot for a long moment, and what was in his face was not fear, exactly. It was worse. It was the look of a man watching something happen that he had seen happen before, a long time ago, to someone else.
Interesting, Etreuf said.
Don't.
I will say it whether you want it or not, because it is the first thing in this world that I have understood completely. The voice was unhurried, almost pleasant. They will love the children back. They will not love you. You have stopped being one of them, and they smelled it before you did. Every court I ever walked was the same, and this is a village with mud on it. There is no place in any world for the thing that is stronger than the people around it. There is only the fear, and then the leaving. A pause. You may as well get on with the leaving.
Elliot said nothing, because there was nothing in it he could argue with, and that was the worst part.
That night he sat on the widow's back step with his mother's coin in his fist, watching the last light go off the valley and the muddy road running east out of it.
He had taken the coin out to look at it. It was cool now, and ordinary, and gave nothing away. A small iron disc worn smooth, marked with signs that no one in Hollowmere had ever been able to read. It had been hot in the marsh. It had been hot at the exact moment the world made that sound.
He had not told anyone that. He was not going to.
Adam came out and sat down beside him and did not say anything for a while, which was the kindest thing anyone had done for him all day.
"You're leaving," Adam said at last.
"Yes."
"When?"
"Tomorrow. Early."
Adam nodded slowly. Then he said, "I'm coming," in the flat voice of a man who has already lost the argument he is about to have and intends to have it anyway.
Elliot smiled at the dark and did not answer, because he had already decided, and he was stubborn about the things he decided.
He left before dawn.
He took bread, a knife, his mother's coin, and the boy's shoe, which he could not have explained keeping. The shrine at the crossroads was a shape in the grey. He stopped there a moment out of habit, looking up at the faceless god whose name nobody in Hollowmere had known for a thousand years.
Sentiment, Etreuf said.
Probably.
The large one would have followed you.
I know. Elliot shouldered the pack. That's why I left before he woke up.
He was a hundred paces down the east road when he felt it.
It had been there since the crater. A pressure at the back of his skull, a note too deep to hear that he could feel in his back teeth. He had told himself it was the headache. He had told himself a lot of things.
It had just turned toward him.
He stopped dead in the road.
Etreuf.
What.
There's something out there. His mouth had gone dry. Something's following me. It's been following me since the light came down, and it just. It knows where I am. Can't you feel it.
The silence stretched.
No, Etreuf said.
Look again.
I have no eyes, boy. I have what you have and nothing else, and you have not seen anything, and you have not heard anything. A pause, and something moved under the voice that Elliot could not put a name to. There is nothing there.
It's there, Elliot said.
Etreuf did not answer.
Elliot looked back once, at the lamps of Hollowmere going out one by one in the valley behind him.
Then he faced east, and walked faster.