Glass and
Granite

The mountain kept no weather of its own. It borrowed the sky's and made it crueler.

On the last pass the wind came sideways off the black rock. It stripped the words out of a mouth before they could be said. It found every seam in the wool and laid its hand flat against the skin beneath.

Reya Orne climbed into that wind with the master ahead of her and her sister's eye shut warm in her fist.

Let it be set down plainly, while the hand can still set things down. They had come for the ore. For the vein the old maps would not name and the new ones did not dare draw. The fleece, the river-men called it, though it was not gold and was not soft. It was ore. And the vein was covered in eyes.

Maddox went first up the scree. Maddox always went first. Piers Maddox, who had taken the fleece once, before any of them were born. Who had a song made of it. Who had a chair at the governor's table and a way of saying a hard thing softly.

He climbed without his gloves. He did not slip. The cold did not find him the way it found everyone else.

"Keep your feet wide," he called back, not unkind. "The mountain throws the proud."

She had heard him teach a hundred such things on the long road. How to read a sky. How to cut a step in ice. How to take a hard country one patient hour at a time. He had taught her the way a good master teaches, by letting her fail small so she would not fail large. She had loved him for it, in the plain way you love the one who keeps you alive. That was the trouble with the master. He was easy to follow. He had always been easy to follow.

The night before the last pass, he had shared his fire with her, because hers had blown out in the wind. "When this is done," he had said, "there is a chair at the governor's table with no name on it yet. There is a verse in the song with a gap the right size for a second name." He had not looked at her when he said it. He never looked at you when he handed you the thing you wanted most. "You have earned it twice over, girl. Carry one piece down with me, and it is yours."

She had lain awake on that promise like a warm stone. She carried it still, heavier than the eye.

Reya kept her feet wide. She had kept her feet wide for two winters now. Since the crossing. Since the white salt flat took Thea and gave back nothing but a body and a coat.

She had buried the coat. She had kept the eye.

Thea had lost the true one young, to a thrown stone, and worn a glass one ever after. Grey-blue. Painted by a doctor in the capital who had never once seen her face. The iris came out a shade wrong. Thea used to pop it from the socket at supper to make the little ones scream, then laugh, then beg her to do it again.

Now the glass eye lived in Reya's fist on the cold days. It warmed to her. It was the one round true thing in a world gone to grit. She did not look at it. A keepsake, she called it, when she called it anything. It was a hand she had not finished holding.

She remembered the crossing in pieces, the way she remembered everything since. The crust of salt. The way it looked solid. The way it was not, in one place, for one step. Thea's weight on the rope, then no weight. The master's voice, very calm, telling Reya to let the rope go before it took her too. She had let the rope go. She set that down here once and will not set it down again.

They had set out three from the lowlands. The master, and the two Orne girls who had nothing and would dare anything to stop having nothing. Now they were two. The mountain did not care about the arithmetic. The mountain had never heard the name Thea Orne, and never would. Not unless Reya carried it up here in her own mouth and set it down somewhere the cold could not reach. That was the other thing she had come for, under the ore and the chair and the song. A place high enough and hard enough to keep her sister in.

The enclave gate stood where the song said it would, though the song had made it grand. It was only a low stone arch in the cliff. Carved over with eyes. Worn nearly smooth by the hands of how many takers, going under, coming back, or not coming back. A woman waited beneath it with a lamp that gave no smoke.

"You'll be the takers," the woman said. Not a question. "You always are."

"We are pilgrims," said Maddox, and bowed.

The woman did not bow. Her name was Quenna. She kept the vein. She had a cleft in her chin a person could lay a thread in, and she smelled of cold stone and tallow and something older underneath, like a struck flint.

She looked at Maddox a long time. The way you look at a debt that has come walking up the road on its own two legs. Then she looked at Reya. At the freckles. At the closed fist.

"One of you has brought something," Quenna said. "The other has only brought tools."

"We have brought respect," said Maddox.

"You have brought a chisel in an oilcloth and a second chisel in your boot." Quenna lifted the lamp between them. "And a girl who has not let go of her own hand since the pass." She turned. "Come in, then. This arch has heard worse lies than yours. Watch how the mountain answers them."

"And the girl?" Maddox said, easy, behind her. "She is my apprentice. She keeps the chronicle. She is no taker."

Quenna looked back at Reya over the smokeless lamp. The cleft eye and the whole eye both. "She is the only taker here," the Keeper said. "You only carry tools. She carries a price. The mountain knows the difference, even if the song never learned it."

Maddox laughed at that, warm, the way he laughed off everything that came too near. But Reya saw his bare hand tighten on the strap of his pack. The laugh did not reach the rest of him. She filed it away with the gloves and the unbled knuckles. With the other things about the master she had carried for two years and never let herself add up.

Quenna went into the dark of the cliff. The lamp went with her. And there was the whole of the choice already, laid plain at the threshold: follow the light, or freeze in the dark behind it.

Reya followed.

She told herself it was for the ore. For the chair. For the song. For the place at the long table the master had sworn would be hers when this was done. She would carry a piece of the fleece down the mountain and her name would go into the next verse, beside his, where Thea's never could. She told herself a great many things on that threshold. The carved eyes watched her go under. Her own two eyes were open. Her sister's was shut, and warm, in her hand.

The eyes carved over the arch had been cut by some hand long dead. Rough, deep, a child's notion of watching. The eyes inside the mountain, she would find, were nothing like them. But she did not know that yet. At the threshold she knew only the cold, and the lamp going on ahead, and the master's broad back, and the small warm weight in her fist. The weight she had carried a thousand miles and would not, she told herself, would never, set down.

The wind cut off the instant the arch took her. The silence on the other side of it was worse.

The chamber was the throat of the mountain. The vein ran down one wall of it like something that had been poured and left to set.

It stood waist-high and twice a man long. The ore was the color of old iron. And set all through it, catching the lamp, were the eyes.

Not carved. Grown. Stones the size of a thumbnail, banded grey and blue and a wet amber, each one ringed round with dark, each turned a little differently. So wherever Reya stood, some of them found her face. And some looked past her shoulder, at a thing behind her that was not there.

She had heard the fleece was beautiful. No one in the song had said that it watched.

Here and there in the vein, between the watching eyes, were empty sockets. Dark rings where an eye had been and was not. Reya counted them without meaning to; she counted everything. Not many. A dozen, in a wall that held a thousand. A dozen pieces carried down out of the mountain across all the years there had been years. A dozen people, then, who had given the wall something it agreed to keep. She did not yet think to wonder what they had given. Or which of the dark empty rings was the size of the thing she carried in her own closed fist.

Reya had kept the chronicle of three expeditions before this one. She knew how to set a thing down in plain words so it could not lie to her later. She tried it now, in her head, the way you say a charm you do not believe. The vein is ore. The eyes are only stones. Stones do not watch.

But the lamp moved when Maddox moved, and the eyes moved with the lamp. And under that there was a slower movement that had nothing to do with the light. A turning toward her. Patient. Like a room full of elders deciding what she was.

The air smelled of cold iron and old smoke. And under it, faint, of salt. She did not let herself think about why a mountain a thousand miles from any sea would smell of salt.

The lamp showed the rest of the throat in pieces. A black ceiling too high for the light. A floor swept clean, except for one thing. Across the dust, near the wall, ran a second set of bootprints. They did not match the master's. They did not match her own. She said nothing of them. There was too much else in that room to be afraid of.

Maddox set down his pack with the ease of a man home from a long errand. He unrolled the oilcloth on the stone. The chisel inside was good steel, capital steel, and it threw the lamplight back clean.

"Stand off a little," he told Reya. "The first strike spits."

"It does not spit," said Quenna. She stood against the far wall, where she had gone so still she was nearly part of it. "It does nothing you would expect. Tell the girl the law, Maddox. Or I will tell her myself."

Maddox set the chisel to the vein, just under one of the amber eyes. He breathed out, slow. "The law is that the bold are paid," he said. "I have crossed worse mountains than your manners, Keeper. Stand back and watch a thing get done."

He struck.

The hammer came down true. The steel bit. A flake of the ore broke away, and Reya's heart leapt up after it, because it was real, it was happening, the fleece could be taken after all. The flake dropped into Maddox's open palm. He lifted it to the lamp.

It was grey. Plain grey. A chip of dead mountain. No eye in it. No shine. The kind of stone you would step over on any hill in the world and never look at twice.

Maddox turned it once in his fingers. His face did not change. That was how Reya knew it mattered.

"Again," he said.

He struck again. Again the steel bit and the ore came away dead in his hand, grey and dull and nothing. A drift of grit began to build on the floor at his boots.

He shifted his stance and struck higher, under a blue eye this time. Grey. He struck lower, under an amber one. Grey. He worked along the vein the way a man works a problem he has already solved a hundred times and cannot believe has stopped obeying him. The drift climbed over the toes of his boots.

He struck until his arm must have screamed. He never let it show. The floor went pale with the dead of the wall, and not one flake of all of it kept its eye.

Then the chisel betrayed him. The capital steel, the best in the governor's armoury, ground a generation ahead of anything this old mountain had ever seen. He set it under an amber eye and struck hard, and the tip of it turned. Just bent over, soft as a spoon, against ore that should have crumbled before it. Maddox stared at the ruined edge. A tool that had opened strongboxes and split granite. It had folded like tin against a wall that gave dead grey to a hammer and would not give an eye to the finest steel in the world. He took the second chisel from his boot. The mountain had no opinion of his steel. It had its own law, older than smithing, and his cleverness was not invited to the table.

The eyes still in the wall watched him do it.

"You may quarry the whole wall if you like," Quenna said. "You will carry out a barrow of road-metal and a song that no longer rhymes."

"Be quiet," said Maddox.

It was the first unkind word Reya had heard from him in two years on the road. It told her more than the grey grit had.

She crouched and picked a flake off the floor. Dead in her hand, too. Cold and ordinary. She looked from the dead chip to the living wall. To the eyes that would not come away. A cold worse than the cold of the pass got down into her chest and sat there.

"Master." Her voice came out small in the throat of the mountain. "You took the fleece before. You carried a piece of it down. It is in the governor's hall, under glass. I have stood and looked at it. It has an eye in it, an amber one, still bright." She swallowed. "How did you do it, if the rock gives only grey?"

Maddox did not turn around. He set the chisel to the rock again.

"Look at his hands," Quenna said. Quietly now. To Reya alone, as if it were only the two of them in all that dark. "His hands stayed clean. All these years. A miner with clean hands. A man who climbs a mountain like this one without his gloves, and never bleeds. Never splits a knuckle. Never carries the dust home under his nails." She came off the wall at last, one slow step. "He has never once paid for a thing he has carried out of here. Ask him, child. Ask him who did the paying."

"Don't listen to the wall," Maddox said, without turning, without missing a stroke. "Mountains and old women tell the same story. That nothing is free. They tell it because they have nothing, and they want company in the having of nothing." Strike. Grey. "I have a hall full of things that say otherwise."

"You have a hall full of things other people bled for," said Quenna. "And a pair of clean hands."

Reya looked at the master's hands on the chisel. She had watched those hands for two years and called them steady. Now she saw what the Keeper saw. No scar. No split. No grime of any mine driven under the nails. Hands that had never once paid the body's plain tax for the things they carried down.

She looked at her own hands. Cracked. Grimed. A thread of dried blood at one knuckle from the pass. Then at the fist that had not opened since the salt.

Maddox set the second chisel down at last. He did not look beaten. He looked like a man deciding that the rules just described to him were only a stronger party's opening offer. "We rest," he announced, to the chamber, to the wall, to the Keeper, as though any of them answered to him. "In the morning the mountain will see reason. Mountains always do, in the end." He said it the way he said everything. Soft. Certain. Then he lay down with his back to the vein, and inside a hundred breaths his breathing went slow and even.

Reya did not believe it for a moment. You do not sleep that easy with a wall of eyes at your spine. Not unless you have spent thirty winters teaching yourself not to feel them on you.

The chisel lay where he left it. The rock gave nothing back. And every eye in the vein, grey and blue and wet amber, held the three of them in the lamplight with a patience far older than any song.

They camped in the throat of the mountain because there was nowhere else to go. A chamber that will not be quarried makes a poor enemy and a worse host.

Maddox slept. Or he made the shape of sleeping. He lay rolled in his fine coat with his back to the vein, his breathing slow and even, and Reya did not believe a moment of it.

She did not sleep at all. She sat with her shoulders to the cold wall and Thea's eye warming in her fist. The Keeper sat across a small fire of dry root. The eyes in the ore caught the embers and passed the light along. Grey to blue to amber and back. The whole wall seemed to blink, slow, in the dark.

She had not slept right since the salt. When she shut her eyes she was back on the white crust with the rope going slack in her hands. So she kept them open here, in the throat of the mountain. The wall blinked at her, and she blinked back. And somewhere in the long not-sleeping she lost the trick of telling the eyes in the rock from the one warming in her fist.

"Tell me the law," Reya said. "The real one. Not the song."

Quenna fed the fire a knuckle of root. "The vein does not give to the strong," she said. "It does not give to the clever. It does not give to the man with the best steel or the loudest name. It gives once. To each soul who comes. And only ever to a gift."

"What gift."

"The thing you love past sense. You put it into the rock with your own hand. You do it in the dark, alone, where no one will see and no one will ever after know. So that the giving cannot be a thing you did for the having." She watched the fire. "Then the vein lets a piece come free, and that piece keeps its eye, because it has been paid for in kind. Eye for eye. That is the whole of the law. It has never once been anything else."

"Then he paid." Reya nodded at the sleeping shape. "Before. He carried a piece down. So he paid."

"He did not." Quenna's voice did not rise. The cleft in her chin held a thin line of shadow. "I kept the vein when Piers Maddox came up this pass the first time. He was young. He had the same soft way of saying a hard thing. And he could not give up one single thing he loved. Not one. He sat where you are sitting now, with the whole wall watching, and he wept, and he could not do it."

The fire ticked. Reya waited.

"So I did it for him." Quenna turned her face full into the light. And Reya saw the thing she had not let herself see at the gate. One of the Keeper's eyes did not move with the other. It was a shade too round. A shade too still. Grey-blue, and painted by no doctor's hand.

Reya could not look away from it. The still eye held the firelight and gave nothing back, exactly like the eyes in the wall.

"I was younger than you," Quenna said. "I kept the vein because my mother kept it, and hers before her. I knew the law in my sleep. A gift given in the dark, for nothing, or the rock gives only road-metal. But I had never given anything. I had nothing I loved past sense, which is its own kind of poverty, though I did not know it then. Then he came up the pass. Young. Gloveless. Already half a song. And I loved him within a few days, the way you love weather you can do nothing about."

"I gave my own," Quenna said. "In the dark. While he slept, the way he is sleeping now. I pressed it into the vein and let the rock believe the gift had come from him. Because I was young, and I loved him, and I believed the song they made would carry his name and mine, the both of us, together."

She let that sit in the cold a moment.

"The piece came free in the dark. In the morning I put it in his clean hand and told him the mountain had judged him worthy. He believed me at once. That is the easy part. Men believe that part without trying." She fed the fire a second knuckle of root. "Then I waited for him to send for me, the way he had sworn he would, once the song was sung and the chair was his. A season. Then a winter. Then I stopped counting the winters, because the counting was only a thing I did to myself, like pressing on a bruise to be sure it was still there."

Her voice did not break. It had broken so long ago there was nothing left in it to break.

"He never sent. He never came. Not once in thirty winters. Until tonight, with a chisel in his boot and a girl who carries her dead in her fist." Her good eye moved to the sleeping man. "He did not come back to thank the wall. He came back to rob it."

Reya's own breath had gone shallow. "Does he know? That it was you?"

"That is the worst of it, child. He has told the song so long that he has forgotten there was ever a price at all. Or a Keeper. Or a girl who paid it in the dark and waited thirty winters at this fire for a thank-you that was never coming." Quenna almost smiled. The smile did not reach the still eye. "He does not lie to you. He believes it. He believes the bold are simply owed. He will quarry this whole wall to grit and walk home and not a word of the song will change."

Reya thought of the piece under glass in the governor's hall. She had stood in front of it the day the master took her on. A half-starved girl with a sister three months in the salt. She had wept at it. At the amber eye. At the proof that a person could reach into the hardest place in the world and bring back something that shone. She had thought it meant the world could be beaten.

"I wept at it," she said. "In the hall. The day he hired me. I thought it was the bravest thing anyone had ever done."

"It was," said Quenna. "It only wasn't his."

"Why should I believe you," Reya said. "You have every reason to poison him to me. He left you here thirty winters. Of course you would tell it this way."

"I do not ask you to believe me," said Quenna. "I ask you to believe the wall. The wall does not hate anyone. It has not lied in ten thousand years, because it has never learned how. Strike it with his fine steel and it gives you grey. Give it what you love, in the dark, and it gives you an eye." She nodded at the closed fist. "You watched the first half of that tonight, with your own two eyes. You are sitting there holding the second half. Believe the rock, child, if you will not believe an old woman. The rock is the only thing on this mountain that has never once wanted something from you."

Reya looked at the woman's still glass eye. Grey-blue. The exact twin of the one warming in her own closed fist. And the throat of the mountain seemed to tilt under her, slow, like a deck going over.

"Why tell me," she said. "Why not let him fail and freeze, and keep your wall."

"Because you are still holding your own hand," said Quenna. "Because the wall has watched you hold it since you came under the arch. The vein does not want him, girl. It never wanted him. It has been waiting, all this time, to see what you will do with the thing that is in your fist."

And every eye in the ore, grey and blue and wet amber, turned at once. Slow as cold syrup. And looked at Reya's closed hand.

Her fist tightened on its own, the way a hand closes over a wound. The fire had burned to a low red eye. Across it the master breathed his slow, lying breath. The breath of a man who had once slept easy on this exact choice, by letting a girl make it for him.

The eyes waited. The glass eye in her fist did not weigh any more than it ever had. That was the worst of it. The heaviest thing she had ever been asked to set down weighed nothing at all in her palm. It never had.

She thought of the dozen empty sockets in the wall. The dark rings between the watching eyes. A dozen people had knelt where she was kneeling now. Not one of them was named in any song she had ever heard sung. And all of them were still here. Somewhere in the cold rock. Keeping a watch that no one had ever climbed back up to thank them for.

Dawn does not reach the throat of a mountain. There was only the moment the fire burned down to a single red eye, and then to grey ash. That was the dawn they were given. After it there would be no more dark left to do a thing in.

Quenna was gone from the fire. She had risen at some point Reya had not marked. She had walked off into the deeper black of the mountain. The way a Keeper goes when she has said the one thing she came to say. The lamp went with her. There was the dying fire, and the master's lying breath, and the wall.

Reya understood the shape of it now. All of it. The way you understand a drop the instant after the floor is gone and before you have started to fall.

The vein wanted a gift. The gift had to be given in the dark. Alone. For nothing. And she had a thing she loved past sense shut warm in her hand. She had until the last of the fire to decide whether her name went into the song, or into the wall.

She turned it over, kneeling there. Both ways.

She could wake him. She could cross to the master. Shake his shoulder. Open her fist and say, here, this is the price, the woman told me. Give it for the both of us. She could let Piers Maddox press her sister's eye into the rock with his own clean hand. Let the piece come free for him. Let him carry it down and set it under glass beside the first. Let him sing.

And her name would go in the verse beside his. The way he swore it would, on the long cold road. When Thea was newly gone, and a promise was the only warm thing left to hold.

That was the master's way. The bold are paid. Someone else does the paying.

She let herself want it. Fully, one time, in the dark where no one could see her want it. The chair. The long table and the warm food. The faces turning to her when the new verse was sung. Reya Orne, who climbed the black mountain at the master's side and brought the fleece down. Her sister's name was nowhere in the whole world now but in her own mouth. Here was a way to set her own name somewhere the cold could never get at it. And all it asked was that she let Maddox do to Thea's eye exactly what he had let Quenna do to hers. Hand the price to someone else. Take the song.

She wanted it so much her fist began to open.

Then she thought of the Keeper at the fire. Thirty winters of waiting folded down into a still grey eye. And the wanting turned over in her like meat gone bad.

She looked at the sleeping man a long, long time. His face was smooth. His hands, even in sleep, were clean.

Then she did not wake him.

She had thought she knew what kind of person she was. The kind whose hands obey too fast. On the salt the master had said let the rope go, and she had let it go, and hated for two winters how quickly her fingers had opened. She had come up this mountain half believing she was owed nothing now but the cold. But the wall was not the salt. The salt had taken Thea in an instant, against her will, and left her nothing to do but obey. The wall only waited. It let her choose, slowly, by her own hand, in the dark, with her eyes open. No one was ordering this. No one would ever see it. For the first time since the crossing, what happened next was hers to do.

She crossed to the vein on her knees, over the pale grit of his failure, until the cold of the wall was on her face. And she opened her fist for the first time since the pass.

Thea's eye sat in her palm. Grey-blue. Warmed all the way through with two winters of being carried. The iris a shade wrong, where a doctor in the capital had guessed at a face he would never see. Reya had carried it so she would never have to set her sister all the way down. A keepsake, she had called it. It was a hand she had refused to stop holding.

She put her thumb to it. She made herself look at it, full, for the first time since the salt. It looked back, the way it always had, a little to the side, painted, patient, hers.

It was only a painted ball of glass. It was the whole of her sister. Both at once, the way it had always been. She remembered Thea at the supper table, the eye held up in two fingers, the little ones shrieking, Thea's real eye bright with the joke of it. She remembered the rope going slack. She had carried this glass two winters so that some part of her sister would still be warm somewhere, in a fist, on a cold day.

To let it go was to let the last warmth of Thea go into a wall a thousand miles from the sea that should have held her. The wall did not want a painted ball of glass. It wanted what the glass had become in her fist over two winters. The last warm trace of her sister. She would have to give that up for good, and tell no one she had.

She found the socket then. An empty dark ring in the vein, between an amber eye and a blue. The exact size, it seemed to her, of a child's grief.

"I'm sorry," she said. So quietly the words did not reach even the dying fire. "I have to let you go to get us off this mountain. And the law is that no one will ever know I did it. Not the song. Not him. Not anyone. That's the price. That's the whole of the price. That you go where no one will ever come to thank you."

She pressed Thea's glass eye into the vein.

The rock took it the way still water takes a dropped stone. Without a sound. And closed over it. For one breath the new eye in the wall was Thea's, grey-blue and painted and wrong. Then it was the vein's. Ringed dark. Turned a little aside. Watching the chamber with all the rest.

For one moment Reya could not breathe. The thing was done. It could not be undone. The warm fist she had carried up the whole mountain was empty now. There was a new eye in the wall, the exact grey-blue of a doctor's wrong guess, and it was already turning aside to watch the dark with the others. Already not Thea. Already only stone.

She put her empty hand flat to the cold rock and held herself up.

And under her other hand the ore moved. A fist of it came free into her palm, warm, heavy, the weight of a held breath. And in it an eye of wet amber opened and found her and held her, alive, keeping its shine, the true fleece, paid for in kind.

It was warm. That was the thing she had not braced for. The dead grey flakes had been cold as the chamber floor. This was warm. Warm the way the glass eye had been warm in her fist. Warm the way a living hand is warm. She turned it once in the last of the firelight and the amber eye turned with it and stayed on her. She had not lost Thea, then. She had only moved her. Out of a fist that would one day fail and rot, into a wall that would outlast every song ever sung about it.

She knelt there with the price gone into the wall and the prize warm in her hand. She made no sound. The law was that no one would ever know. She meant to keep it even from the dark. Even from herself.

She woke the master with the ore already wrapped in the oilcloth, so he would never see which hand it had come to.

"It gave," he said, sitting up.

And there it was in his voice, under the triumph, quick and gone before he could catch it. Not relief. Disappointment. He had wanted the wall to beat him. He had crossed half the world for one last fight worth the losing. One more reason to keep climbing, keep going, keep being the man in the song. And the girl had handed him a clean win in the dark, and now there was nothing left up here to come back for. He covered it well. He had been covering it for thirty winters. "I told you," he said. "The bold are paid."

"The bold are paid," Reya said.

The smokeless lamp sat burning at the arch, left for them. Quenna was gone into the deeper dark of her own mountain, to keep a vein that held one more eye than it had held the night before. She did not say goodbye. There is nothing in the law about goodbye.

They went down faster than they had come up. That is the way of the place. The mountain that fights you all the way up will hurry you down, glad to be rid of takers before they think to take more.

It did not want them now that it had been paid. Stones came loose under their boots that had held all the way up. A whole shelf of scree let go behind Reya and went into the white with a long hiss, off the very ledge she had stood on a breath before. The wind put its hand in their faces, then behind their backs, herding. Twice the path she remembered was simply gone, slid away in the night, and they went down by a worse one. The mountain was not trying to kill them. It only wanted them gone, and fast, the way you hurry a guest out the door once you have found what he took from the house.

The wind found them on the last pass and shoved at their backs like a flat hand. Maddox sang under his breath as he climbed down. The old song. His song. He did not seem to notice that he had begun.

Reya stopped once. Where the scree gave a clean fall to the white flat far below. Where Thea was. Where the salt still had her.

She knelt in the loose grey stone and dug. With her bare fingers. Until they split and bled on the grit. Scrabbling for a thing that was not there. That could not be there. That she had pressed into a wall a thousand feet up and a whole life back. She knew it was gone. She knew exactly where it was. She dug anyway, until her nails were broken and the cold had her hands.

Maddox stopped on the path above to watch her. "What did you lose?" he called down, puzzled, not unkind. He thought she had dropped a coin, a buckle, some small payable thing. He could not picture a loss a person would dig bleeding for on the side of a mountain. "Nothing," she called back up. "A stone." He believed her, the way he believed everything that cost him nothing. After a moment she pressed her bleeding fingers flat to the rock. She stood, and went down after the master and his song.

The piece of true fleece reached the governor's hall in the spring. They set it under glass beside the first one. The two amber eyes looked out at the visitors, side by side, bright, patient. The song got its new verse that summer. The new verse had Piers Maddox's name in it. Twice. And no other name at all.

Reya was there for the singing. She stood at the back of the warm hall in a borrowed coat and watched them lift their cups to the master. Watched him take it. The praise. The chair. The second piece set glowing beside the first under glass. He sang the new verse himself when they begged him to. His voice did not shake. There was no gap in it where a second name might have gone. He had long since forgotten there was ever meant to be one.

He caught her eye once across the loud bright room. He raised his cup half an inch. To her. The master to his apprentice. Well done. He did not know what he was thanking her for. He never would. That was the law, and she had kept it. Even from him. Even there, with the proof of it shining in a case ten feet from his hand.

She stayed in the city a week. Long enough to see the chair filled and the song settled and the master folded back into his legend like a hand into a worn glove. Long enough to know there was no room in any of it for what she carried now. She could tell a hundred people the truth and a hundred people would hear an ungrateful girl slandering a great man. So she stopped meaning to tell anyone.

This is the last the chronicle will hold, for the hand that has kept it is needed elsewhere now.

Reya Orne did not go home. She left the city while the master slept off the wine of his welcome. She told no one where she was going. There was no one left to tell. She bought rope and oil and hard bread. And a blank book to keep a record in. Keeping records was the one thing she knew how to do that a mountain might find a use for.

She turned back up the pass, into the wind that strips the words out of a mouth, and went again under the low arch carved with eyes.

The smokeless lamp was still burning where it had been left, as if it had known. Quenna sat at the fire in the same place. As if she had not moved in the days Reya was gone. As if she had not moved in the thirty winters before that. She did not look surprised. Keepers, Reya would learn, are never surprised; it is half of what the keeping is. The old woman shifted on the cold stone to make a place at the fire.

"You came back," Quenna said. "They never come back."

"I came to say thank you," said Reya. "For paying. For him, and for me, and for whoever comes up the pass next."

And the still grey eye that had waited thirty winters for exactly those words took the firelight at last, and held it, and did not give it back.

The vein has one more eye in it now than the song will ever count. Below, on the road, a younger hand is already closing on a chisel. Above, in the throat of the black mountain, two keepers sit in the dark and wait to see what that hand is holding when it comes.

And in the wall, between an amber eye and a blue, a grey-blue eye painted a shade wrong keeps the watch that no song will name.