He didn't stop running.

  The trees came at him out of the dark and he moved between them with his arms around her and her weight against his chest and her breath at his neck, and he did not think about where he was going because the only direction that existed was forward and the only task that existed was the next step and the one after that. Three moons hung in the breaks of the canopy overhead, their light falling in pale sheets between the trunks, enough to see the ground by, enough to see her face when he looked down and did not let himself look down. He did not think about the wound. He had looked at it once and looked away and he would not look at it again.

  She said his name.

  "Keep breathing," he said. "Just keep breathing."

  She said his name again. He didn't answer. He ran.

  The forest pressed around them, dark columns of bark and the faint sound of wind in branches he couldn't see, and he ran and his lungs burned and he kept running because stopping was not something the night was offering and he was not ready to ask it for anything.

  "It's all right," she said.

  "It will be." His voice was not steady. "It will be, just stay with me."

  "Kraken, it's—"

  "Stay with me."

  She went quiet. He felt her shift against him, settling her head against his shoulder, and her hand found the front of his shirt and held it. Her grip was not weak. He noticed that. He held onto it.

  He ran until the trees opened slightly and a shaft of moonlight found the ground ahead of him and he could see further than a few metres, and then he ran some more because more was still possible and while more was possible he would take it.

  After a while she said: "I'm not in a lot of pain."

  He kept running. He did not have words for that right now, nothing that would not come out wrong.

  "I thought you'd want to know that."

  "Good," he managed. "Good. Save your breath."

  "You've been running for a long time."

  "I can run longer. I'm going to get you home and Maeve will look at you and tell me I panicked over nothing, and you will enjoy that enormously and hold it over me for years."

  She didn't answer that. He felt her shift against him once more, and her hand found his shirt again and held it.

  Then she said: "I've loved you for a long time."

  He kept running.

  "I don't think I ever told you that properly. I wanted to tell you properly."

  "You don't have to tell me anything. Save it."

  "I've been saving it." A pause. "I think I've been saving it too long."

  "Tawny—"

  "My father wouldn't have approved of you." Her voice was quiet, matter-of-fact, the way she said things she had thought about carefully. "You know that. You haven't a craft to your name and you're reckless and you make decisions before you've finished having them, and he would have had opinions about all of that." He could hear the shape of a smile in it, faint but there. "I wouldn't have cared. I would have gone with you anywhere you went. I want you to know that. Anywhere."

  He stopped running.

  He hadn't meant to. His legs simply stopped, mid-stride, and he stood there in the dark holding her with the trees around him and his breath coming hard.

  She talked about what she had dreamed for them. She talked about a home near the hall fires, somewhere the stone kept the warmth in through the night. She talked about growing old alongside him, which she said quietly and without drama, as if it were simply a fact she had decided on long ago. She talked about what she had imagined their daughter would look like. She said the name she had chosen for her, Edith. She said it the way you said something you had been carrying for a long time and had never found the right place to set down.

  He started running again. He was crying and he didn't know when that had started. He didn't try to stop it.

  "I'm going to get you back," he said. His voice was not steady. "Alebrath isn't that far. I've run all night already and I can run further, I can carry you all the way back, and when we get there—"

  "Kraken."

  "When we get there Maeve will know what to do, she's set bones and treated wounds worse than this and she'll know—"

  "Kraken."

  "—and you'll be all right, you'll be fine, it's not—"

  "I know what it is," she said. Gently. Not unkindly. The way you said something true to someone you loved when the truth was the only thing you had left to give them.

  He ran.

  "You should have let me die," he said. The words came out broken, not the shape he'd intended, fracturing as they left him. "You should have stepped aside. You had an important life. You had everything ahead of you and I have—I have nothing, I am nobody, I have no blood worth protecting and no name worth a damn, and you are the Lorcan’s daughter, you had—you were meant to live, do you understand that, you were meant to have the life you were supposed to have, not this, not out here in the dark—"

  "Stop."

  "I left Alebrath and everything went wrong from the moment I left and I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, this whole night was wrong, every decision I made was wrong, coming up here was wrong and bringing everyone into this was wrong and I would take all of it back if I could, every single part of it—"

  "Kraken." She said it softly, as she always did when she was trying to bring him back to where she was. "I love you."

  He couldn't speak.

  "I love you," she said again. "I've always loved you. Even when you were being an idiot. Especially then." A pause. "I love you."

  "Don't," he said. "Tawny, don't say it like that. Don't say it like you're going to—" His voice broke apart. "Please just hold on. A little longer. That's all. Just hold on a little longer, I've got you, I'm not going to let—"

  "I love you," she said. Quiet and final and certain, the way she said things she had decided on.

  He ran. The dark ran with him. Her hand held his shirt and her breath was warm and present and he ran because as long as he was running this was still the same night and nothing in this night was finished yet.

  His legs gave at the base of a wide tree at the edge of a small clearing. Not a fall, not a collapse, just the simple end of what they had left to give, the knee coming down and then the other, and he was on the ground with her still in his arms. The three moons were bright overhead, the clearing open enough that their light came down clean and full, and he could see her face clearly in it and he kept his eyes on her face.

  He looked at the wound.

  He looked away.

  He stayed as he was, her in his arms and his back against a tree, holding her so her face was level with his, and he pushed the hair back from her face with one hand and she opened her eyes and found him in the moonlight.

  "There you are," she said.

  "I'm here." He kept his hand against her face. Her skin was cold. "I'm right here."

  She lifted her hand, slowly, the effort of it visible, and it was dark with blood, her palm and fingers dark with it from where she had been pressing against her side. She looked at him first. Just looked at him, her eyes finding his and staying there, as if she were memorising something or confirming something she had always known. Then she found his jaw in the moonlight and guided his face to hers and kissed him. Soft. Certain. The way she did things she had decided on.

  When she pulled back his jaw was wet. The print of her hand stayed on his face.

  She tried to speak.

  She started a sentence and the coughing started before she finished it, racking and wet, and she held her hand up, wait, wait, and he held her through it and when it passed she tried again and could not get the breath behind it.

  He watched her face change. Not with fear, with the frustration of someone who had a thing to say and the mechanism for saying it had just been taken from them. She looked at him for a moment with that frustration and then past it, through it, to something quieter on the other side of it.

  She reached for her wrist.

  The torc. Her fingers found it and worked at the clasp and her hands were shaking, a fine unsteady tremor, and it took time. He didn't help. He understood, somehow, that this was hers to do. He watched her work at it with her shaking hands until it came free and then she found his wrist and her hands on it were cold and still shaking and she worked it onto him, slowly, and it sat there on his wrist and she held his hand in both of hers.

  She looked at him.

  She said: "Kraken. I'm really scared to die." Her voice was very small. "I'm so scared."

  He pulled her in close. Both arms around her, her face against his neck, her hands between them still holding his. He held her the way you held something you were not going to let go of and began to stroke her hair, slowly, his hand moving through it slowly, steadily, the only warmth he had left to give.

  "I know," he said, his voice barely above a breath. "I know. But I'm right here. I've got you. You're not alone, you hear me, you are not alone.”

  Her breathing changed. He felt it before he understood it, a shift in the quality of it, something becoming irregular, slowing, the intervals between breaths lengthening. He held her tighter. He kept stroking her hair.

  "You're going to be all right," he told her. He knew it wasn't true. He said it anyway, quietly, just for her, just to fill the silence with something warm. "You're going to be fine. I've got you. I'm right here."

  Her breathing changed again.

  Her hand loosened. Not suddenly, gradually, the way a grip loosened when the body stopped being able to maintain it, the fingers opening one by one until her hand lay open and still against his chest and the weight of her arm was different and the weight of everything was different and he knew.

  He pressed his face into her hair and he made a sound that he had no name for.

  He sat with his arms around her and the forest settled into the space the sound of her had occupied and he could not move and he could not speak and the three moons moved in the open sky above the clearing and he sat and sat and sat and the night went on around him without her in it and he could not move.

  The wind shifted in the high branches. An animal somewhere in the dark moved through its ordinary night entirely indifferent to what had just left the world. He held her and the forest went on and he held her and held her and did not move.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  He sat through the night with his arms around her and the dark moving in its slow arc overhead.

  He thought about the time she had talked him out of a fight. He had been twelve or thirteen, full of himself over something that hadn't warranted it, going after one of the older miners' sons, and she had simply stepped in front of him and said his name once with a particular quality that stopped him cold, not afraid, not even especially emphatic, just certain, and then she had looked at the other boy and said something quiet that Kraken hadn't caught and the other boy had walked away. Kraken had stood there feeling slightly foolish and she had turned back to him with the expression she wore when she had done a thing and considered it done and said: are you hungry. He had laughed despite himself. He had never quite understood how she'd done it.

  He thought about the morning she'd brought him food when his father had just died. She hadn't said anything. She had knocked on his door at first bell and when he opened it she had a cloth with sweets in it, far too good for someone as poor as him, and she'd put it in his hands and looked at him for a moment and then she'd just sat down on the step outside his door and stayed there. Not talking. Not doing anything in particular. Just there, on the step, in case he needed it. He hadn't asked her to. She hadn't asked if he wanted her to. She'd just known.

  He thought about how she'd been the only one who ever called him by his name the way it was meant, not with the wariness some people gave it, not with the edge of mockery some of the younger ones put into it, just straight, clean, like it was the right name for the right person and she had never had any doubt about that. They had been close since they were six years old, for what had been a lifetime. He had never told her that he liked how she said his name. He had never thought to.

  He didn't sleep. He didn't try to. He sat and held her and sometimes he talked to her because the silence was wrong and talking made it less wrong, and the words dissolved quickly, each one spending itself against the dark and leaving nothing behind. He told her he was sorry. He said it and said it until it had no shape left, just a sound that kept coming out of him because it had to go somewhere. He wept in the formless broken way of someone who had never learned how, ugly and without any of the composure he would have wanted, and he didn't stop and he didn't try to stop. He held her tighter when it got bad and it kept getting bad and he held her and he kept talking and the night was very long.

  He told her he would never look at Isolde again. He said it out loud like a vow to the dark and the dark absorbed it without ceremony because the dark did not care about his vows and neither did she anymore and that was the worst part, that nothing he promised here mattered to anything, that the accounting of his failures had been closed and could not be reopened and every sorry he had was going nowhere.

  He begged.

  He pressed his face into her hair and he begged in the way that men begged when there was no one to beg, openly, without calculation, without any thought for how it sounded. He begged her not to be gone. He begged whatever might be in the dark and the trees and the indifferent night to give her back to him, to undo the day, to put him back at the moment before he left Alebrath and let him do it differently. He promised things. He bargained with nothing. He said please over and over until the word stopped meaning anything and kept going.

  Come back. He said it against her hair and the dark did not answer and the forest did not answer and nothing answered.

  Come back. Please come back. I'm not ready. You are not finished. You were not supposed to be finished yet. Come back.

  She did not come back.

  The dark did not answer.

  He held her through it and the shaking in him went on and on and the cold came up from the ground and through his legs and he held her tighter and the night went on and he kept asking, kept begging, kept saying her name into the dark like the name alone might do something, like if he said it enough times or with enough of himself behind it something would shift, something would change, something in the order of the world would decide it had made a mistake and correct it.

  The world did not correct it.

  Dawn came very slowly. He was still holding her when it came. The first sign was not light but a change in the dark, a quality to it, a thinning, the black becoming something slightly less absolute. Then the highest branches became visible against it, thin lines against a sky that was not yet blue but was becoming something other than black. Then the clearing around them. Her face, against his chest, turned slightly toward the growing light.

  He looked at her face for a long time.

  The contrast was the worst part. Not the wound, not the cold of her, not the stillness. The worst part was that he knew every version of her face: the look she got when something struck her as quietly funny, that particular compression at the corner of her mouth that came a half-second before the laugh. The expression she wore when she had made a decision and was waiting patiently for everyone else to catch up to it. The way she looked when they were young and she had solved some problem he hadn't seen coming and was pretending she hadn't, not wanting him to feel slow. The open, unguarded look she got sometimes when she didn't know he was watching, when she was just existing without performing any version of herself for anyone. He knew all of them.

  What remained was a face he knew completely and could not recognise.

  He sat until he could not sit anymore.

  He stood. His legs were stiff and the cold was deep in them and he stood. He remembered something then, a conversation from years ago, one of those wandering talks they'd had when there was nowhere in particular to be and they'd ended up sitting on the low wall near the blind garden, just talking until it was late. She had said, out of nowhere, that she thought it must have been something to be buried under a tree on a hill in the old days, before Alebrath, before underground. She had described it with a quiet wistfulness: a marker above ground where anyone could see it, proof that someone had loved another person enough to put a stone there and mean it. Not cremation, not the practical dispersion of ash that Alebrath made of its dead. Something that lasted. Something that said: this person was here and was loved and the earth received them.

  He looked at the clearing around him. The tree at its edge. The ground.

  Not here.

  He picked her up.

  He walked with her until the land began to rise, until the trees fell back on a low slope and the slope opened at its crest into grass. A single wide tree stood at the top, its roots spread out and gripping the hill like something that had decided long ago it wasn't going anywhere. From here the sky came in from three sides: pale gold where the sun was coming up behind the eastern ridge, the hills rolling away north in long dark lines, and to the west the last of the night still holding in the valleys below. He could see further than he had seen since the surface opened above them. He could see a long way.

  He had not expected it to be so much.

  He set her down gently at the base of the tree and found a heavy branch and he began to dig.

  The ground was hard. It took a long time. He dug and the morning came fully around him and the birds woke and the light moved across the hill and he dug, steady and methodical, until the hole was deep enough. Then he stopped.

  He did not look at what he had dug.

  He looked at her. He said her name one more time. Then he said the other thing, the thing that had come too late, that she had never heard from him while she was alive to hear it and would not hear now and that he said anyway into the morning air, because she deserved to have it said clearly even if only the hill and the tree and the sky would receive it.

  "I love you," he said.

  She had died without hearing it. That was the fact of it, and it would remain the fact of it. He said it to the air and to the long accounting of everything he had failed to do in time, and then he finished what he had started, and he covered her, and he found a flat stone from the slope below and set it at the head of what he had made.

  The torc sat on his wrist. He turned it once in the morning light. Strange material, something that was not quite metal, the rune-carvings along it catching the light in a way that seemed to come from somewhere inside it rather than reflected from without. She had put it there. She had wanted him to have it. He didn't know why and she hadn't been able to tell him and he would carry that question for the rest of his life alongside everything else.

  He did not stand up.

  He sat with his back against the tree and his legs out in front of him on the hill and he did not stand up. The morning moved around him. The birds came and the light shifted and filled the hill and moved across the grass toward him and he sat and looked at nothing and he did not stand up. There was nowhere to stand up for. There was nothing north of here that was his and nothing south of here that was his and the person who had made any of it worth the having was in the ground and he sat and did not stand up and the morning went on and he sat and the light reached him and he let it and he sat.

  He had no more words in him. He had no more anything. He sat in the light with his back against the tree and his hands in his lap and the torc on his wrist and he was very still and the world went on without him and he let it.

  ~

  Edric had been warden of the crossing three times prior, by now at his fourth consecutive posting, he had learned the weight of normal. The sound of normal. The look of it. And he’d learned, more usefully, the precise quality of everything that was not.

  The man who came out of the forest was not normal.

  He had been at the top of the Stair since before dawn with a handful of others: Selred the tanner and his two brothers, and young Ida who had brought up a pot of something warm and a roll of cloth to string between two posts as a windbreak for the day ahead. They were making ready for the morning gathering, the small daily ritual of the opening days when people came up to the platform to stand in sunlight and breathe air that wasn't recycled through stone. It was quiet work. They had been comfortable in it. Then the tree line moved and then there was a man.

  He wore Tairseach colours. Edric clocked that immediately. He filed what it meant.

  The man came across the open ground between the trees with the particular gait of someone whose legs were still executing instructions the rest of him had stopped issuing, moving forward because forward was the last directive they had been given. His face was not present. Something had happened to it during the night, some arrangement of the features had changed, and what remained was a face that had been recently vacated.

  He reached the platform and stopped.

  Edric stood. He looked at Ranulf, the name from the roster matching the face, the face belonging to a man who had gone up three days ago with the Tairseach party of twelve, and something in him went very still.

  "Ranulf." He said it evenly. "What happened."

  Ranulf looked at him. Not quite at him, past him, at the entrance to the Stair. His chest was still working hard, the breathing of a man who had been running and had not yet told his body to stop.

  "Ranulf." Edric moved between him and the Stair. Not forcefully, just into the space, just present. "What happened up there."

  Ranulf's eyes were wide and fixed, the whites showing fully, the eyes of a man still inside something the night had put him in. His mouth opened. A sound came out that was not a word. He tried again.

  Selred had stepped back from the windbreak. Edric held up a hand without turning, stay back, give him room, and kept his eyes on Ranulf.

  "The others," Edric said. "The rest of the party. Where are they."

  No response.

  "Your wife," Edric said quietly trying to reassure him. "Elga. She's at home. Your daughter is at home. You just have to tell me what happened."

  What came out of Ranulf then was not language. It was the shape language made when the mechanism for it had been broken by something the mind couldn't process and then run through the night on top of, fragments and sounds and something that might have been a name and then nothing coherent at all. He was shaking. His hands were shaking and he couldn't stop them and he was looking past Edric at the Stair, at the dark of it, at the opening of it, and his feet were moving and Edric had both hands on his shoulders before he reached the edge.

  "Easy." Edric held him. Ranulf was pushing against his hands, not with aggression, just with the blind forward momentum of a body still in the grip of the night's instructions. "Easy. You're here. You made it."

  Ranulf said something. Edric caught the word Grolg. He caught the word camp. He caught a sound that might have been a name, and something in him went quiet and cold.

  Ranulf's knees went. He went down hard and Edric caught part of the weight but not all of it and for a moment they were both low to the ground, Edric's hands on his shoulders, Ranulf's palms flat on the grass. Then something happened in Ranulf's eyes, a refocusing, a return, something that had been absent snapping back in, and before Edric had processed it Ranulf was upright again and moving.

  Edric reached for him. Ranulf was past him before the hand found purchase, past Selred who grabbed for his arm and missed. Ranulf ran towards the Stair's mouth and his foot caught the lip of the top step at the wrong angle, and the momentum of a man who had been running all night and could not stop, and the edge was there and then Ranulf was not. Edric stood at the lip of the Stair with one hand still extended. He looked down. Through the passage from the platform above he could see Ranulf falling, could see him turning, the body loose and wrong, the arms out, smaller and smaller as the Stair took him, until the distance swallowed it and then, from a very long way below, the sound arrived.

  Selred made a sound behind him. Ida did not make a sound.

  The birds did not stop. The light continued east.

  Edric stood at the top of the Stair for a long time.

  ~

  At the base of the Stair the morning was well underway.

  The festival square had been filling for an hour: weavers and leatherworkers setting out their first pieces, a few early risers crossing the square with their baskets, children who had got out of bed ahead of their mothers circling the fountain. The light from the braoch fell sweet-green on the stone as it always did in the early hours, the long shadows of the square's east wall lying across the cobbles, everything ordinary and alive.

  The sound, when it arrived, arrived fast.

  A fraction of a second in which every person in the square heard the same thing, and then heads turned, the scatter-pattern of people pressing back from the base of the Stair.

  What they found there was not easy to look at. The body had come down twelve hundred steps and the stone at the bottom had received it fully: Ranulf's body a broken, spread thing, the limbs at angles that had no name, compound fractures visible where the skin had torn, blood reaching further than seemed possible in every direction. In the first confused seconds of the crowd's pressing back, a young man named Ingild who had been standing at the Stair's base had taken the full weight of it, and now he was part of the same terrible scene, indistinguishable from it in the chaos of the first moments except to those who knew his face, and his mother, who knew his face, was already on her knees at the edge of the crowd before anyone had made sense of anything.

  Nearby, Ranulf's wife Elga was already on her knees and her daughter was on her knees beside her, five years old and screaming because her mother had gone to her knees and the stone was wet and red and she didn't understand any of it, and Elga could not answer, could not look at her, could not do anything except stay down on the stone with the Tairseach colours in her vision.

  Rhoswyn was at the far side of the square.

  She heard it. She turned at the same moment as everyone else and she saw the uniform, Tairseach colours unmistakable even across the square, and her hands went cold before the rest of her caught up. Kraken had gone up with the Tairseach. Kraken had been up there three days. One man had come back, and he had come back like that, and the rest of the party.

  She had worried for him these past three days, the low constant worry of someone who knew better than to show it. Not like this.

  She didn't cross to the body. She didn't cross through the crowd. She stood with one hand flat on the counter and the other pressed against her sternum, and she did not move. She didn't make a sound. The crowd moved around her and she let it pass. She was still, in the manner that things were still when they had been completely emptied out. Kraken was gone. The only thought in her mind. She was now alone.

  The leatherworker's hammer started up again from somewhere in the side passage, rhythmic and ordinary, because he didn't yet know.