Episode 271 · Both

Krista did not let go. She lay flat on the stone with both hands around his wrist and her boots braced against the leg of the table, and the slit pulled at him, and she counted.

At eight the pull eased. At ten it stopped.

Soles lay where it had left him, an arm’s length from the light. The heat was on his face. The pale blade stood out of him under the collarbone, his own hand still around the handle.

— Don’t take it out, Krista said. Soles. Don’t.

— I have to.

— You don’t know what’s under it.

— Nothing that matters, he said, and was not sure why he was sure.

He drew it out.

It came easier than it had gone in. The blood came after it, warm, quick, and then slower. He pressed his dead hand over the hole without being able to feel his own fingers.

Something sat in the dark behind his ribs and waited. It did not speak. It had no face that he could find. It felt like a man who had been put to work in a room he had never seen, and had already started.

Later.

Tesa came around the end of the fallen shelf, holding her right hand against her coat. Blood ran from her knuckles to her wrist. She looked at the hole in his shirt, then at Varren, and took one step toward Varren.

— Tesa, Soles said.

She stopped.

— You’re bleeding, she said.

— So are you.

She looked down at her knuckles as if they belonged to somebody else, and did not answer.

Varren had not moved since his hands came off the handle. He stood by the pillar with his coat gone and the cut over his eye still bleeding, and he looked at Soles the way a man looks at a door he has walked through all his life and finds locked.

Soles lifted the pale blade, so that Varren could see it.

— I told you I’d cut blind without it, he said. I’m not blind now.

Varren’s eyes went to the blade, and then to Soles’s face, looking for whatever he had seen wake there a minute ago. Soles let him look. He did not know what it was either.

He looked.

It was not like the first night. Then the two halves had shown the root and the strands to everyone in the room. This was only his. With the pale blade in his hand and his mind on it, the people around him were no longer only people.

Threads came out of their chests.

One from Tesa, pulled tight. One from Krista, pulled just as tight. From Varren more than Soles could count at a glance, pulled in every direction, as if he were tied to a dozen walls at once. On the stairs, a single one from Noct, trembling. Beside him Zora, kneeling, one thread, and a hand on Noct’s back. Noct was still in the middle of the tread. Zora had come down to him rather than ask him to come to her.

Behind the rock, where the teams were, nothing. Not one. Men with no threads at all.

Then Soles turned the pale blade toward the slit.

The root was there, the way it had been the first night, dark at its center and lit along its sides. The fine strands ran out of it into the ceiling and the walls, toward the mill and the street above it. There were more of them than before, many more, as if the town had come closer to the root tonight. One went out through the grating, to wherever Halloran was. One went to Noct. One to Zora. The rest went up through the stone in a bundle as thick as rope, toward houses Soles could not see.

That’s what he meant. Cut blind.

— I can see which ones are yours, Soles said. I can cut around them.

Varren said nothing.

— I need two hands. He lifted the dark blade a little on its chain. It hung from his wrist like something tied to a dead man. Let it go.

For a long moment Varren did not move.

Then he crossed the floor, stepping over Tesa’s blood, and crouched, and laid two fingers on Soles’s wrist, exactly where his thumb had been.

— Go, he said.

The wrist came back. It hurt, all at once, the whole forearm, as if the blood had been waiting outside. Soles closed his fingers on the dark blade and felt them close.

Varren stayed crouched beside him a moment longer.

— If one of them goes, he said, I’ll know.

Krista got under his good shoulder and Tesa under the other, and between them they stood him up at the edge of the slit.

— Lean, Tesa said. I’ve got the heavy side.

Heat came up around his legs. He had the dark blade in his right hand and the pale one in his left, and he brought them toward each other.

The low note came. Not quiet this time. It came up through the floor and through his boots into his teeth, and the threads in the slit went bright.

Too bright. They would not hold still. They shook, every one of them, the way a wire shakes when a truck goes over a bridge. The three he had marked as Varren’s people crossed the bundle going up to the town. He lost one and found it and lost it again.

And something was going out of him.

Not blood. He knew what blood felt like. This went out of the middle of him, out of the place where the forester’s quiet lived and the slowed time came from, as if both blades were drinking from it at once. His knees went soft. Krista took more of his weight without a word.

Not much. Not much left of whatever that is. Do it now or don’t do it.

He found the root again. Dark at the center. Three fine strands on its near side, to the stairs and the grating. The thick bundle on its far side, going up toward the town. Between them, a gap a finger wide where nothing crossed.

He put the dark blade into the gap.

For one heartbeat the gap held.

Then every thread in the slit moved at once.