Chapter Ten

The girl in the pen was watching the light, and the light was a paper lantern strung over a fishmonger’s stall, the cheapest, sorriest light in the whole Hollow-market, and she could not look away from it, and neither could Wren.

“Move,” Orrin said, low, at her shoulder. “There’s nothing here you can carry. Move your feet.”

The pens ran along the cold downwind edge of the Lampway, the way the dead-house had run along the low edge of Lowmere, because the world always knew where to put the things it was ashamed of and still wanted near. Slatted stalls of grey salt-brick, a walk of trodden salt gone the colour of old teeth. And in the stalls, behind low rails a child could have stepped over, the Hollows stood or sat where they’d been put, collared at the throat with a band of certified glass — somebody’s spent years, fused hard, worn as a leash — each band lit flat and even, a little burn that said this one is empty, this one is paid for, this one will do as it’s told and never once remember being told.

They were so quiet. That was the thing the songs never told you about the Hollow. Wren had been called half a Hollow her whole life, and had built the word into something fierce — a ruin, a thing that lunged. But the pens were quiet as a held breath. The emptied did not lunge. They were gentle. They turned their faces to whatever was warmest and waited for the next hand to tell them what they were for.

There was a man folding the same square of cloth over and over, his face soft and pleased, because folding was a thing his hands still knew and the knowing felt like being someone. There was an old woman holding her own wrist as though it were someone else’s, comforting it. There was a boy no bigger than Pip.

Wren made herself look at the boy and then look away, because there was nothing she could do for the boy, and she did not yet understand that she had already decided there was something she could do for the girl.

The girl was perhaps four years older than Wren — early twenties, thin the way the pens made everyone thin, cropped dark hair grown out ragged, a drudge’s smock, bare feet on the cold salt. Leased, not sold; a wooden tag wired to her collar with a lessor’s mark, the kind they hung on the ones rented out to haul and scrub and carry. She stood at the rail with both hands open at her sides and her face tipped up to the paper lantern, smiling a small uncomplicated smile, the smile of a person for whom the world has just this instant arrived, warm and gold and asking nothing.

And under the smile — under the flat even burn of the collar, under the quiet — something reached back.

Wren had not meant to read her. You did not read the living; the living were a wall you weren’t allowed to put your cheek against. But she had walked the pens with her guard worn through, sick to her stomach, raw as a scrape, and the girl’s open empty face had pulled at her the way the black shard had pulled across Cole’s dead-house — not toward, exactly. Up. From very far down. The faintest ember Wren had ever felt off anything, fainter than a candle three rooms away. A coal under so much ash that no one in the world but Wren would ever have known it was warm.

There was someone still in there. Buried, all but out. But there.

“You feel it,” Wren said. It came out a whisper.

“I feel a frightened girl about to do something that gets us both killed,” said Orrin. His hand closed on her arm, the too-fine fingers surprisingly hard. “Whatever you think you feel, put it down. These are gone, Wren. Not asleep. Gone. You can’t wake a person who isn’t there. There’s no door. You’d only break your own hand knocking.”

“There’s a door.” Her voice sounded strange to her, far off, certain in a way she had no right to be. “It’s behind everything. At the bottom.”

“Wren—”

“Her collar’s somebody’s years, Orrin. They put a dead stranger round her neck to lead her by.” The words came up out of Wren the way the smells came up out of the glass, without asking. “She’s looking at the worst light in this rotten place like it’s the sun, and she’ll look till somebody turns her round, and then she’ll look at that, and there won’t ever once be a her in it.” She made herself stop shaking. “I know what that is. They called me that my whole life.”

“You are not—”

“I know.” She pulled her arm free. “But I know what it is.”

The girl had felt them, the way the Hollows on the Pale had felt the lamp — not as people, as warmth. She turned her open face from the lantern to Wren and her smile brightened the way a plant leans, and she lifted one bare hand off her side and held it out, palm up, the way you offer your hand to a frightened animal, or to a child in the dark.

It was the gesture Wren had made to the black shard in the dead-house. It undid her.

“I just want to see,” Wren lied, to Orrin, to herself, and stepped over the low rail before he could stop her.

---

Up close the girl smelled of cold salt and the lye they scrubbed the pens with, and under that, faint, a smell that was just hers. Her eyes, when Wren took the offered hand in both of hers, were soft brown and unafraid and unoccupied — two lit windows in a house where no one lived.

“Hello,” Wren said.

The girl said nothing. Words were among the first things to go, the lessors said, because words cost the most to keep. But her fingers curled around Wren’s, soft, trusting, doing the one thing the body still knew, which was to hold a warm thing that held you back.

And Wren reached down to the bottom of her.

She had told Orrin she only wanted to see, and that was the lie. The truth was her whole body had known what it would do from the moment she felt the ember, the way it had known to cross Cole’s dead-house, the way her hands knew set glass from fuel without being told. She had no craft for this. No lesson, no in, take the one thing, come back. There was only the feel of the faintest live coal in all the world going out, and Wren leaning over it the way you lean over the last red eye in a grate at the end of a cold watch — hands cupped, breath held, every part of you bent to the one task of not letting it.

She found the door at the bottom. It was almost no door at all — a hairline, the place where a person had been scraped down to nearly nothing and the nearly had not finished. And Wren — not knowing how, only that it was the most natural thing in the world and the first thing that had ever truly fit her hands — leaned her cheek against the cold of it and breathed on the coal.

The market went away.

There was no green field this time. There was no sun. That was the thing Wren would carry afterward like a splinter she couldn’t dig out: that when she reached the bottom of the girl, expecting the rooms of a life the way the black shard had given her the rooms of the world, she found instead a house swept bare, the furniture all carried out and sold, the windows blank. No face for a mother. No name for a town. No first love, no last bread, no smell of anyone’s hair. They had drawn it all and crystallized it, and the glass was scattered now across the Reach, burning down to warm strangers in a thousand lit rooms, gone past any waking, gone the way the dead were gone — the emptied can be filled, but never made whole — and there was nothing for Wren to give back.

Except the coal. The one banked ember at the very bottom that was not a memory at all, that was older and more stubborn than any memory, that was simply the live red point that said I. The keeping itself, the bare power to hold a thing and call it your own. Not the years. Just the hand the years had been torn out of.

Wren breathed on it. And it caught.

She felt it catch the way she’d felt the black shard go from drinking-the-light to giving-it-back, all at once, a flooding, a bloom — except this was warm flesh, not glass, and it went up through the girl’s hand into Wren’s, and there was a sound, a single rising note, the place where a word had been, the same sound, always the same sound, the sound under the world. And then the cost came down the back of Wren’s skull like a cold hand.

She knew this now. The copper, the warm line down her lip, the lamp of the world swinging far away. But it was so much heavier than waking dead glass — that had been a thumb of crystal and this was a person — and it took her at the knees, and she went down in the salt with the girl’s hand still locked in both of hers, falling out the back of herself toward the dark —

— and the girl caught her.

The hand that had been a Hollow’s soft trusting nothing closed hard, with a strength that had a want in it, gripped, held Wren up out of the falling; and Wren came back into her body kneeling in the salt with blood on her chin and the worst light in Saltgate burning over them both, and looked up.

The eyes had someone in them.

That was all. It was everything. The two lit windows had a person standing in them now, looking out — not at Wren’s warmth, at her — and the soft brown face was doing a thing no Hollow’s face did, expression after expression breaking across it like weather across the Pale: wonder, then fright, then a terrible dawning, a hand going up to her own collared throat, her own cropped hair, her own — her own, the word itself new, the having of a self at all not an hour old —

She opened her mouth. A sound came out, cracked, unused. Then the first word.

“Cold,” she said.

And began, very quietly, to cry.

---

“Get up.” Orrin had her under the arm, hauling, his voice a furious whisper, and Wren realized the market had gone strange — the fishmonger stopped calling his prices, a ring of faces turned, a man already shoving back through the press to fetch someone, the lessor, the watch, anyone, because a leased Hollow was on her knees in the salt weeping, and Hollows did not weep, Hollows had nothing to weep with, everyone in the Reach knew that, it was the one true thing, the dead do not come back and the empty do not fill and glass does not come back. “Get up, you bleeding fool, you’ve done it in front of forty witnesses—”

“I can’t leave her.” Wren’s tongue was thick. The salt tilted. “Orrin. Look at her.”

He looked at her. And Wren, half-fainting, watched the thing she had dreaded her whole life happen on a second face — the fear curdling into the worse-than-fear, the not one of us — except Orrin knew enough to be more afraid than Cole had ever dreamed of being. There was no wonder in him. None. Some childish part of her had wanted one person in the world to call the most impossible tender thing she had ever done clean. Instead Orrin looked at the weeping woman and at the blood on Wren’s chin and his weatherbeaten face went the colour of the salt, and what came into the dead grey eyes was not awe.

It was grief. The fear’s grandfather. The look of a man watching a beacon he loved get lit in the dead centre of the open Dark, where every wrong thing for a hundred miles would now turn its head and come.

“You can’t make light from nothing,” he said. It wasn’t to her. It was to the cold, to whoever he’d lost long enough ago to learn the rule by heart. “You can’t. The empty can be filled and never made whole. Never. And you just—in front of—” He got hold of himself the way you’d get hold of a bolting horse. When he spoke again it was flat and final. “You have just lit yourself up like the High Hearth in a town full of people who hunt exactly this. The grey men. The ash-faced ones. Worse. By the next watch this story will be on the road to the Hearth, and no version of it ends with anyone leaving you be. You haven’t saved her. You’ve named yourself. To all of them. At once.”

The woman looked between them, an hour old, learning the shapes of fear off their faces because she had none of her own yet. And then she did the second thing no Hollow did. She put shaking fingers to the band of years fused round her throat, and pulled, and made a small broken hating sound, because she had just understood what it was — a leash, somebody dead, put on her by people who’d taken everything else — and she wanted it off.

“She wants it off,” Wren said.

“Wren—”

“She wants it off, Orrin.” Wren got her feet under her, swaying, one hand fisted in the woman’s smock to hold them both up. “An hour ago she wanted nothing. Now she wants the collar off. You tell me that’s not a person.”

Orrin did not tell her to her face. He looked, for one moment, unbearably old. Then he drew the cold-tongs from his kit and, with a glance at the gathering ring, worked the wire on the lessor’s tag and snapped the collar’s catch — a thing that could get a man hanged in Saltgate — and the band of fused years came away in his hand, and the woman gasped as though a hand had come off her throat, and Wren understood that for an hour she had been breathing under it without knowing she could not breathe.

“We are leaving,” Orrin said. “Now. Both of you. Hooded. And you—” to Wren, low and savage, the fury and the fear all one thing now— “you do not touch another living soul in this city, not one, not if the whole pen weeps for you, or I swear by the last light I’ll carry you out over my shoulder.”

He turned to go — the crowd, the muttering, the man coming back with someone official and pale. Wren got an arm around the woman, who leaned into her at once, trusting — except it wasn’t the Hollow’s trust anymore; this had a person behind it; this was chosen — and they went, the three of them, fast and low toward the dark mouth of an alley, away from the worst light in Saltgate.

At the alley’s edge the woman stopped, planted her bare feet, and looked back at the lantern, the cheap gold thing she had worshipped when she was no one. And Wren felt her go still all over, felt the new self reach back down for something — a face, a name, the shape of the life that had hung beneath that collar — and find the swept house, the bare windows, the nothing. Find the her-shaped hole. The aching kind.

She turned to Wren. Her brown eyes were wet and bewildered and terribly full of a grief she’d been given no memories to attach to — grief with nothing under it but the certain knowledge that there had been a something, a whole someone, taken and scattered and burned to warm strangers, gone past any waking even Wren could do.

“Who,” she said. The voice still cracked. She touched her own chest. “Who. Am. I.”

And Wren — who had no name to give her, because the woman’s name was glass now in a hundred lamps, the one thing in all the world Wren could not reach into the dark and pull back — held the aching, miraculous, ruined person up in the cold, and bled, and could not answer, and did the only thing left, which was to give her a candle to carry in the dark even if it wasn’t her own.

A grey bird had got into the market and was picking at spilled salt-meal by the pens — the only thing there that had come and gone as it pleased its whole life and owed nobody its years.

“Dove,” Wren said. Her voice broke on it. “I’ll call you Dove. Till we find the rest.”

The woman looked at the bird, and at Wren, and tried the word in her cracked unused mouth, holding it the way a Hollow holds the one warm thing — except she was not a Hollow now, she would never be a Hollow again, and that was the miracle, and the price of the miracle was that she would spend the rest of her life able to feel exactly how much had been stolen.

“Dove,” she said. And held on.

Behind them, the whole market was talking at once.