Grey light bled across the eastern ridge, thin and colorless as old iron. Aldric Vance stood at the edge of the high pasture with his hammer across his shoulders, the leather grip warm from his palms, and watched the village flock drift down the slope in its slow woolen cloud. Forty-three head, if the shepherds counted true. A lambing season of careful work spread out across the frost-bright grass, the ewes' breath pluming in the cold.
He had been awake since the third bell, when a dream of his wife's voice had dragged him from sleep and left him standing at the window of his chamber with his heart knocking against his ribs. Marda had been dead eleven years. Her voice still came to him in the small hours, murmuring things he could never quite catch, and he had long stopped trying. The dreams were weather. They passed.
Brennan appeared from the path that wound up from the village, his boots crunching on the loose shale, his breath a quick white flag in the chill. He moved the way he always did in the morning, fast, restless, as though the world might slip past him if he did not keep ahead of it. At twenty and three he had his mother's eyes, dark and a little too quick to find the horizon.
"Father." Brennan stopped a few paces off, chest heaving. "Caelith sent me. There is smoke on the north ridge, low and black. He thinks the herd-smiths are at it again."
Aldric did not turn. His gaze was fixed on the flock, but his ears had caught the sound first, a thin, high, wrong note threading under the wind. Not a bell. Not a child calling to the dogs. Something with teeth in it.
"Then Caelith's eyes are going soft," Aldric said quietly. "That is no forge smoke."
Brennan went still, the color leaving his face in a slow wash. He knew that note too. Every man of the mountain hold knew it, though most pretended they did not, the way one pretends the old stories are only fireside nonsense. The hounds of the higher valleys had been quiet for seven winters. Seven good winters.
"How many?" Brennan asked.
Aldric had already lifted his hammer from his shoulder, weighing it in his right hand. The head was iron, heavy, set on a haft of ash and wrapped in cord at the grip. A working tool, not a lord's weapon. He had carried it since he was a boy younger than Brennan, and his palms knew every nick and weld. But the head had been reworked twice in his lifetime, and the second time the smith had sunk a thing into the crown of it that did not belong there. A black splinter, sharp as sorrow, the size of a man's thumb. He had never told anyone what it was. He had only ever used it once.
"Count the silence," Aldric said. "Listen."
They listened. The flock was still moving, slow, down-tending. The shepherds were not yet visible over the rise, but a boy with a switch would be somewhere up there, singing to keep the ewes calm. The bell on the lead ram should have been audible, a thin clapper-note that carried. It was not.
Then the sound came again, closer, a rip of snarl that broke the morning into two pieces.
Aldric's hand closed on the grip. He felt the splinter in the hammer's head pulse once, a faint heat against his palm through the leather, the way a sleeping coal pulses when the bellows find it. He did not flinch from it. He had carried that warmth for years.
"Go to the flock," he said. "Drive them into the lower fold, the stone one. Take the lambing pen if you must, but get them off the open ground. If the dogs come down the main path, the shepherds' children will be in their way."
"And you?"
"I will meet them."
Brennan opened his mouth, closed it, then nodded once, sharply, and turned and ran, his boots scattering the shale, his hand going to the short blade at his hip as he went. He was reckless, but he was not stupid, and he had grown up in the shadow of the hold with the same stories Aldric had. He would drive the flock if he could. If he could not, he would die trying, which was its own kind of stupid, but Aldric had long ago made his peace with that.
Aldric walked north along the ridge path, his hammer loose at his side, his breathing slow.
The wind shifted and the morning reeked of it, copper and wet fur, a stink that did not belong to any natural beast. A wolf smells of pine and old blood. A bear smells of rot and honey. This was neither. This was the sharp, almost sweet tang of something that had been changed, that had been pushed out of its proper shape and left to fester in the new one.
He had smelled it before, once, in the year Marda died, when a pack of the things had come down out of the high passes and taken three of the goatherds. The men had been found afterward, what was left of them, in a fold of rock above the tree line. The hounds had left only the bones and the boots. Aldric had not slept well for a year afterward. He had not expected to smell it again.
He came over the rise and saw them.
Five of them, ranging across the upper pasture, their bodies wrong in the pale light. They were hounds, or had been, long and lean and low to the ground, but the proportions had been broken somewhere along the way. Their shoulders sat too high. Their jaws were too narrow. Their eyes caught the grey light and threw it back green and sick. One of them was dragging something across the snow, a shape that had been an ewe an hour before, now folded and bloody and still.
The alpha was at the center of the pack, larger than the others, its hide a patchwork of old scars and a new darkening along the spine, as though something had been poured over it and left to set. It carried its head low, and when it turned toward Aldric, the movement was wrong, jointed in too many places. The thing watching him from inside that skull was not a dog. It might once have been.
The shepherds were on the far side of the flock, a woman and two boys, frozen in place, the switch dangling from the older boy's hand. They had seen the hounds. They had not seen Aldric yet. Good. If they ran, they would run toward the stone fold, and Brennan would meet them there.
Aldric set his feet on the frozen turf. He did not call out. He did not warn the alpha. He had no quarrel with the creature, not in the way men have with beasts. The thing in front of him was beyond quarrel. It was a problem of the border, the same border he had held for thirty years, the same border his father had held before him, the same border his grandfather had walked with a lantern and a prayer when the nights grew long and the high passes began to whisper.
He raised the hammer. The splinter in the crown caught the first pale edge of the sun, and the heat in his palm flared once, sharp and certain.
The alpha saw him. Its head came up, and the green light in its eyes deepened to something that was almost black, and its lips drew back from teeth that did not fit its mouth. A sound came out of it, not a bark, not a snarl, something between, something that the wind took and twisted into a shape that almost resembled a word.
Aldric did not wait to hear what the word was.
He came down the slope in long, careful strides, his hammer loose in his right hand, his left hand open at his side. The other four hounds saw him move and split, two to the left, two to the right, flowing around him in that wrong, jointed way, trying to circle behind. He kept his eye on the alpha. The others would do what hounds do. The alpha was the one that had been changed the most, the one that had carried the change the longest, the one that had been twisted by whatever it was that the high passes had been leaking for generations. If the alpha fell, the others would break. If it did not, he would not see the next dusk.
The first of the flankers came in low and fast, jaws snapping for his hamstring. Aldric did not stop moving. He shifted his weight, brought the hammer around in a short, ugly arc, and caught the thing on the point of the shoulder. The iron rang against the bone, and the hound yelped and tumbled sideways, one foreleg folding under it. It did not die. It was already trying to rise, its eyes rolling, the green light in them flickering.
He did not have time to finish it. The second flanker was already on him, jaws closing on the edge of his coat, the teeth finding the wool and the leather and the skin beneath. He felt the pinch of it, sharp, hot, and he swung the hammer two-handed into the base of the thing's skull. There was a crack, and the hound dropped, and he kicked it off his leg and kept moving.
The alpha was watching him now, its head low, its shoulders bunched. The other two hounds had come up on either side of it, panting, their tongues lolling, their eyes still fixed on him. The alpha did not move. It was waiting for him to commit.
Aldric had held the border for thirty years. He knew how to wait.
The two of them stood in the pale morning, the breath of them rising together, the wind moving through the long grass, the flock somewhere behind him beginning to move as Brennan's voice rose, distant and urgent, calling the shepherds in.
The alpha moved first.
It came in faster than he had expected, faster than anything that size had a right to move, its body folding and unfolding in that wrong way, its jaws stretched wide. Aldric brought the hammer up to meet it, the haft braced against his forearm, the head of the weapon swinging up in a rising arc. The alpha's jaws closed on the iron, and the teeth ground against the metal, and the thing's weight came down on him, forcing him back a half step in the soft turf.
He twisted the hammer. The splinter in the crown came around and found the side of the alpha's skull, just behind the ruined ear.
The heat flared again, sharp and sudden, a heat that had nothing to do with the sun or with iron or with the morning. The splinter bit into the bone with a sound that was not a sound, a sound that the air swallowed whole, and the alpha's whole body shuddered, and the green light in its eyes blew out like a candle in a gale.
The jaws relaxed. The weight sagged. The alpha dropped at his feet, and the other two hounds, seeing it fall, turned and ran, back up the slope, back toward the high passes, their shadows streaming behind them in the pale light. The two wounded ones dragged themselves after them, leaving dark trails in the frost.
Aldric stood over the body, his breath coming hard, the hammer still in his hands. The splinter in the crown was hot now, hot enough that he could feel it through the leather of his grip, hot enough that he had to set the weapon down in the grass before his palm blistered.
He flexed his hand. Across the heel of it, where the leather had pressed, there was a mark, a long dark line that had not been there a moment before, raised and tender to the touch, the color of old ash. It would fade, or it would not. The last time he had used the splinter, the mark had lingered for a year. His wife had seen it, and asked him about it, and he had told her he had caught his hand on a hinge. She had not believed him. She had let it lie, the way she had let most of his lies lie, with a patience that he had never deserved.
He did not pick the hammer up again. He stood in the pale morning, listening to the flock move down the slope, listening to Brennan's voice in the distance, and he looked at the alpha's body at his feet, and he thought, as he always thought when the splinter spoke, that he was going to have to tell someone, someday, what it was, and what it cost, and what it was for.
Not today. Today there was a flock to bring in, and a wound to tend, and a mark on his hand that he would have to explain to a healer who already asked too many questions.
He picked up the hammer, careful to keep the mark on his palm clear of the hot iron, and turned back toward the village.
By the time Aldric reached the lower paddock, the sun had climbed past the shoulder of the ridge and burned the frost off the grass. Brennan was already there, sleeves rolled to the elbow, a smear of something dark across his jaw where he had wiped sweat without thinking. He took one look at his father's hand and stopped mid-stride.
"You used it."
It was not a question. Aldric did not answer it. He handed his son the hammer, wrapping it in the sacking he kept folded at his belt for the purpose, and walked on toward the gatehouse without slowing. The mark on his palm had begun to throb in time with his pulse, a slow, insistent heat that would not fade for hours.
Maeve Rowan was waiting on the stone bench beside the well.
She had brought her satchel. That was the first thing he noticed, the worn leather buckled shut, the wooden pestle tied to its loop, the smell of dried yarrow and willowbark rising from the cracked flap. She had not come to gossip, then. She had come prepared. The second thing he noticed was that she had brought her grandmother's book, the slim green volume she kept locked in a chest at home and never showed to anyone, not even to him, not since the year his wife had died.
She rose when she saw him. Her eyes went to his hand at once. She did not ask permission. She simply took his wrist, turned the palm upward, and studied the long dark line across the heel of it. Her thumb was cool against the burn. She smelled of woodsmoke and something sharper beneath it, something mineral, like rain on hot stone.
"It spoke," she said.
He sat down on the bench beside her. The stone was cold through his wool. "You knew it would."
"I knew it might. There's a difference." She opened her satchel and took out a square of linen and a small clay pot of salve, the kind she kept for burns that did not behave like ordinary burns. "Sit. Let me see to it before the skin hardens."
He let her work. The salve stung, then eased, then left a numbness that spread up the bones of his hand and into his wrist. He watched her face while she concentrated. There were new lines at the corners of her mouth. He had not been down to the village often enough to notice them being put there.
"You brought the book," he said.
"I did."
"You haven't opened it in a long time."
"I haven't needed to." She wound the linen around his palm, snug but not tight, and tied it off with a single knot. "I need to now. Your wolf is the third this season."
"I know the count."
"Do you know what the count means?"
He looked at her. "Tell me."
Maeve sat back. The book lay in her lap, and she rested one hand on its green cover as if to keep it from sliding. Around them, the hold was waking. He could hear the clang of the smith's hammer, the lowing of the herd being driven through the lower gate, the thin sound of Wren's voice somewhere in the gatehouse, asking a question no one answered. The morning smelled of woodsmoke and wet wool and the iron tang of the forge.
"What do you know of the Ember Lords, Aldric?"
He almost smiled. It was the question every child in the mountain valleys asked at some point, usually in front of a hearth fire on a winter night, usually by a grandparent who would tap the ash from a pipe and begin the long recitation. He had heard it from his own grandmother, sitting on the edge of his bed while the wind screamed down the chimney. He had heard it from Eira, Maeve's grandmother, in the years before the sickness took her. He had heard it from Elder Carrick, who told it in the old cadence, as if reciting the names of the dead.
"I know the fires went out," he said. "I know the forges of the deep places were sealed. I know we are not supposed to dig, and we are not supposed to ask, and we are not supposed to forget, and we have done two of those three things very well, and the third not at all."
"And the seals?"
"Seven." He held up his free hand and counted them off on the fingers. "The Ember Lords bound the deep fires with seven seals, and they gave the keeping of them to seven houses, and our house was one of them, and the rest are names in a book I was not permitted to read."
Maeve nodded slowly. She opened the green volume to a page near the middle, and turned it so he could see. The page was yellow with age, the ink faded to the color of weak tea, and the script was Eira's tight, careful hand, with little sketches of mountains and flames in the margins. At the top of the page, in letters that had been traced and retraced until the parchment had grown thin, were the words: OF THE KEYS AND THE KEEPING.
"You were not permitted to read the book," Maeve said. "That is true. You were permitted to keep the secret. That is also true. What is not true is that the seven houses kept the seals."
He frowned at her.
"They kept the keys, Aldric." She turned the page again, and there was a list of seven names, each with a small symbol beside it. The third on the list was a hammer crossed with a coal. "Seven houses. Seven keys. The seals themselves are not kept by anyone. The seals are the deep fires themselves, bound in place by oaths and iron and the bones of the first lords. The keys are what lock and unlock them."
"And the hammer."
"And the hammer." She did not look at the bundle of sacking at his belt, but she did not need to. "Your father carried it. His father before him. Back and back, to the first Aldric who took the oath in the long hall under the mountain. The splinter is not a weapon. It is a key. When you set it against something that has been bound, the binding answers."
"The wolf," he said.
"The wolf. And the stag, last spring, the one Brennan tracked for three days and never found, because what he was tracking was not a stag. And the boar on the south slope in the deep of winter, the one that walked through a wall of spear-shafts and left no blood." She closed the book gently. "The deep fire is restless. The splinter is responding to it. And when the splinter speaks, the deep fire hears."
The wind shifted. Across the yard, the gatehouse door opened, and Wren Halloway came out into the light with the ledgers under her arm, blinking as if she had been underground for a year. Behind her, one of the household guards stepped out and looked at the sky, then at the ridge, then at Aldric on the bench. The guard's hand went to his belt. He had seen the smoke too.
Aldric rose from the bench. The numbness had spread past his wrist now, up into the forearm, and the linen around his palm was already spotted through with a faint rusty color. He looked at Maeve.
"The smoke on the ridge," he said. "Where is it coming from?"
She did not pretend to be surprised. She had known before she came, then. She had known and brought the book and the salve and sat on the bench and waited for him to walk down off the hill with a mark on his hand and the splinter cooling in its wrappings.
"The old mine road," she said. "The one that goes up past the broken cairn. There is a vent there that has been sealed since before my grandmother was born. If it is open, then something has opened it, and whatever did it did not ask the council's leave."
He thought of Elder Carrick, of the long hall under the mountain, of the oaths that were sworn there in the old cadence by men whose fathers had sworn the same oaths in the same words, going back to a first lord whose name he was not permitted to speak aloud. He thought of the splinter warming in the bundle at his belt, and of the wolf lying dead in the grass with the print of a hammer on its brow.
"You should not have come," he said. "If the council learns you brought the book down from the village, if Carrick learns you opened it for me, there will be a reckoning."
"There will be a reckoning regardless." She tucked the green volume back into her satchel and buckled the flap. "The seals are breaking, Aldric. One by one. The hammer is one of seven. When the splinter burns without being called, it means one of the others has been turned, or lost, or destroyed. There are six houses left to ask, and no time to ask them the way the council would have us ask, with letters and forms and a proper quorum."
She stood up and faced him. She was a head shorter than he was, and half his weight, and her eyes were the pale green of river water, and she did not look away.
"Take me up the ridge," she said. "Let me see the vent. Let me see what is coming out of it. And do not send for Elder Carrick until I have had a chance to put my hand against the stone and listen."
"You would do that."
"I would." She lifted her chin. "My grandmother Eira bound the last wound in the deep places, the year before she died. She went down into the long hall with your father and three of the elders, and she came back up three days later with her hair white at the temples and her hands shaking. She never spoke of what she saw. She wrote it down, instead, and locked the book away, and told me that if the day ever came when the splinter answered without being struck, I was to bring the book to the Lord of the hold and let him decide what to do next." She paused. "I am letting you decide."
Aldric looked at the ridge. The smoke was thicker now, or seemed thicker, a pale column rising against the blue and bending slowly east in the high wind. Somewhere up there, a vent that had been sealed since before the village had a name was open, and the wind was carrying the smell of it down the slope, a smell like old iron and hotter stone, a smell that lived in the back of his memory from a single visit to the long hall, decades ago, on the night his father had passed him the hammer and the oath.
He looked at the guard by the gatehouse, who was waiting for a word. He looked at Brennan, crossing the yard with a bucket of water in each hand, who had stopped when he saw the smoke and was standing very still, the way a young man stands when he knows he is about to be asked to do something he has spent his whole life rehearsing.
"Go and find Iola," he said, quietly, to Maeve. "Bring her and her daughter. I will want witnesses who are not of the council."
Maeve nodded once. She did not smile. She turned and walked toward the village path, her satchel bumping against her hip, the green book pressing against her back through the leather, and Aldric watched her go, and then he looked back at the ridge, and the smoke was no longer pale. It was the color of a bruise.
Brennan set the buckets down at the edge of the well, water slopping over his wrists and soaking the wool of his sleeves, and did not look at the buckets. He was watching the smoke. His jaw was set in a way that Aldric knew, the way a father knows the small weather of his son's face, the way a man who has watched that face for twenty-four years knows the difference between a mood and a decision. Brennan was deciding something. He had been deciding it, perhaps, for years.
Aldric felt the old reluctance settle into his shoulders, the reluctance of a man who has spent decades keeping a thing still and knows that stillness is about to end. He had held the secret. He had held the border. He had held the line between what the village knew of itself and what the mountain knew of itself, and the holding had cost him the things that holding costs, which is to say everything that was not the hold, and many things that were. His wife had died in the long winters, and the long winters had gone on, and he had not gone to her grave as often as a man should, because the grave was down in the lower meadow and the ridge was up, and there was always something on the ridge.
He crossed the yard. The stones were cold under his boots, and the small wind that came off the peak smelled faintly of the same iron-and-stone scent that had been in the long hall the night his father had placed the hammer in his hand and said, in a voice that was already becoming the voice of a dead man, you will hold this, and you will not speak of it, and when the time comes you will know what to do, because the mountain will tell you, because the mountain has always told us.
The mountain was telling him now. The smoke was the telling. The smoke was the first sentence of a long sentence the mountain had been composing for a century, and the second sentence would come when the vents opened wider, and the third when the thing beneath the stone began to push upward with the patient, enormous patience of a thing that had been waiting since before the village had a name.
Brennan turned to him as he approached. "Father."
"Brennan."
"I am going up."
"No."
The word landed between them the way a stone lands in still water. Brennan did not move. His eyes were the same pale grey as the sky behind the smoke, and in them Aldric could see the thing that had been building in his son for as long as he had been trying to keep it down: the need to be more than the heir, the need to be the man who did the thing, the need to stand on the ridge in the wind and meet whatever was coming and not be the one who waited at the bottom of the hill with the hammer in his belt and the oath in his mouth.
"You do not know what is up there," Aldric said.
"I know what is down here. I know what is down here, Father. I have known it since I was a boy, and I have walked the walls of this hold for ten years and watched the smoke on bad nights and not been told, and I have not asked, because you are my father and you asked me not to ask, and I have honored that. I have honored it past the point of honor. I have honored it until the honoring tastes like iron in my mouth."
"Then keep tasting it."
"I cannot." Brennan's voice cracked on the word, and he closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them they were bright with something that was not tears and was not anger and was the third thing, the thing that is the child of both. "I have been a son. I have been a soldier. I have been a shadow on a wall. I have not been a man of this hold. You will not let me be a man of this hold, and now there is smoke on the ridge and the mountain is waking, and you are going to stand in this yard and tell me no."
Aldric looked at his son. He looked at him for a long time. He looked at the set of his shoulders, which were broader than his own had ever been. He looked at the calluses on his hands, which were sword calluses, and not hammer calluses, and which he had never corrected, because correcting them would have meant acknowledging the thing that he was correcting them away from, and the acknowledgment would have been a kind of permission, and the permission would have been a kind of surrender, and Aldric had not surrendered the hold in forty years and was not going to begin now, not even for the look in his son's eye.
"Where were you," he said, "when the second seal cracked."
Brennan blinked. "What?"
"The second seal. The night the snow came early and the herd went into the upper pasture and did not come down. You were twelve. You had begged me to let you go with the herders, and I had said no, because the upper pasture is a three-day walk and you were twelve and the snow was coming. You went anyway. You and Tam Halloway, with a lantern and a short sword you had taken from the armory without asking, and you were gone for two days, and when you came back your fingers were black with the cold and Tam had a cut across his cheek that he would not explain, and you both said that the herd had come down on its own and that you had not seen anything, and I believed you, because I wanted to believe you, because you were my son and because believing you was easier than the alternative."
The yard was very quiet. A bird sang somewhere on the far side of the hold, a single clear note, and the smoke moved on the ridge, and Brennan did not speak.
"You went up past the second seal," Aldric said. "You saw the vent. You saw the light under the snow. You and Tam, with your lantern and your short sword, and you stood at the edge of the place where the oath begins, and you did not go in, because even at twelve you knew enough to know that going in was not a thing that a boy with a lantern did. You came back down. You told me you had not seen anything. And I let the lie stand, because the lie kept you safe from the knowing, and I thought the knowing would come later, when you were ready, when I had decided you were ready, when the hold had decided."
Brennan's mouth opened and closed. His face had gone the color of old parchment.
"I was not ready," Brennan said, at last, and his voice was small, and the smallness of it hurt Aldric in a place he had thought was closed.
"None of us are ready," Aldric said. "That is the first thing the oath teaches. The second thing is that readiness is not the point. The point is the holding. The point is that you stand in the place you have been given to stand, and you do not leave it, even when the smoke is on the ridge and your son is asking to go up, and the asking is reasonable, and the reason is the right reason, and the right reason is still the wrong answer."
"I am not a boy on the upper pasture."
"You are my son, which is worse."
The wind shifted. The smoke bent, and for a moment the shape of the ridge was clear against the sky, the long line of it with the dark notch where the old path went up, and beyond the notch the paler smudge of the plume. Aldric could feel the heat of it from here, or thought he could, which was the same thing in a hold where the heat was a matter of oath and not of stone.
"I am going to tell you something," he said, "and you are going to hear it, and you are not going to speak until I am done, and when I am done you are going to go inside and take the cold meat from the larder and a skin of water and sit with the men at the lower wall, and you are going to wait, because waiting is what we do. It is what we have always done. It is the only thing that has kept the village on this mountain for two hundred years."
Brennan did not speak. His hands were at his sides, and the tendons in his neck were standing out like cords, and he was, Aldric thought, the image of his mother at the same age, which was a thought he did not want and could not refuse.
"I was not always the Lord of this hold," Aldric said. "Before I was Lord I was a boy, and the boy was not a good boy. The boy was restless and the boy was proud and the boy thought the oath was a story for old men, and the boy went to the Ember Watch."
Brennan drew in a breath.
"I was seventeen. I had a sword and a horse and a coat with the Watch colors, and I rode the southern passes with a company of men who were older than me and better than me, and I learned the songs they sang in the watch-fires at night, and I believed the songs. I believed we were holding the border against the dark. I believed the oaths were real. I believed, because believing was easier than the alternative, and the alternative was that we were a line of men on a line of rock waiting for a thing that was not coming, and men do not stay on a line of rock for a thing that is not coming, and so we told each other it was coming, and the telling made it true, and the songs were how we made the songs true."
He paused. The smoke had thickened. The bird had stopped singing.
"The winter I was nineteen there was a night when the southern vents opened. I was on the wall. I was the youngest on the wall, which was a thing I was proud of, and the man beside me was a deserter from the eastern passes who had come to us because he had nowhere else to go, and he had been with us three weeks and had not spoken his name. When the vents opened, the wind came down the pass like a held breath let out, and the heat came with it, and the man beside me looked at the heat and his face went the color of tallow, and he said to me, very quietly, run, boy, this is not the holding, this is the leaving, and the leaving is the only mercy. "
Aldric stopped. He had not told this story in forty years. He had not spoken the words aloud, even to himself, in forty years, and the words had a taste in his mouth that was older than taste, that was the taste of the cold air of the pass and the heat of the vent and the face of a man he had never seen again.
"I ran," he said. "I did not think. I did not choose. I heard the word mercy and my legs took me off the wall and down the cut, and I ran until the cold was in my lungs and the heat was behind me, and I did not stop until I was in the trees, and the trees were burning, and I kept running. I ran for two days. I came down off the mountain in a country I did not know, and I slept in a barn that belonged to a woman who did not ask my name, and in the morning I stole a horse and rode north, and I did not look back. I did not look back for six years. When I came home, my father was dying, and the hammer was on the table, and the oath was in his mouth, and he gave me the oath and I took the oath and I have held the oath for forty years, and I have not spoken of that night to a living soul."
Brennan was very still. The smoke moved on the ridge, and the shadow of the hold lay long across the yard, and the men at the gatehouse were pretending not to listen, and the pretending was a kindness Aldric would remember.
"The man on the wall was right," Aldric said. "That night was the leaving. The men who stayed on the wall died on the wall, and the company was broken, and the Ember Watch was a name for a year and then the name was gone, and the men who had worn the colors went back to the lowlands and the colors faded and the songs were forgotten, and the oath the Watch had held was broken, and no one held the southern line again. I broke the oath of the Watch by running. I took the oath of the hold by coming home. I have carried both oaths in my mouth for forty years, and the carrying is the weight of me, and the weight is what you saw in my shoulders when you were a boy and wondered why your father walked as if the air were stone."
He looked at Brennan. Brennan's face was wet, and he did not seem to know it.
"You asked me why I will not let you go up the ridge. I will tell you. It is not because you are not ready. It is not because I do not trust you. It is because I went up once, and the going up is a thing that takes a man apart, and the man who comes down is not the man who went up, and the man who came down for me was a man who had left nineteen of his brothers on a wall in a pass in a country I could not find again on a map. I will not have that for you. I will not have you be the man I was on the night the vents opened. I would rather you hated me from the lower wall than loved me from the ridge."
Brennan made a sound that was not a word. His hand came up and gripped the air, and then dropped.
"Go inside," Aldric said, and his voice was rough, and the roughness was the cost of the words. "Take the meat and the water. Sit with the men. Wait."