Chapter 109: Favored

Theo lay in the snow with a clean knife in his hand and got it in one.

’The wound was real and the dark shut it, the way you’d put your hand over a cut on your own child... It’s on its side.’

He rolled onto his good side and got up on the fourth attempt, one hand flat in the crust and the knife held wide of himself, with three ribs going about their business inside him. Then he started back down the road. One person left, and four hundred yards to think of something.

He did not think of anything.

Rill was at the mouth of the cut with her back to the rock and both hands on the last of the rope.

She knew before he said it. He heard her know, in the two seconds between his boot on the road and her mouth opening, and what came out of her was not a question about Berrin.

"Which way."

Theo put his hand on the rock beside her head.

"Up."

"Into it."

"It came out of the pass and it came down here, and it’s down here." He got the rope out of her hands and put the loop over her wrist himself, which took him three tries in the dark and which he was not going to let anybody else do. "Which means the pass behind it is empty. Two miles of road and nothing in it. And past the top is Fenn, and your father’s standing on it."

For a moment Rill said nothing.

Then she took the slack out of the line the way he had shown her nine hours and one lifetime ago, and offered:

"Rim first."

’...’

Theo took his hand off the rock and agreed with her.

"Rim first. Walk."

Two miles uphill in the black, at the end of a night, with a girl of sixteen on four feet of rope.

She did everything right.

He was going to carry that out of this and set it down in front of himself for the rest of his life. She held the line and not the man. She breathed through her mouth going uphill so her ears stayed free. Inside the first quarter mile she was reading the crust with her heel, and twice she called the bend in the road before he could, and both times she had it.

The rope went tight against his hip and slack and tight again, and she was the one keeping it honest. The old crust broke at the edges and held in the middle and gave them two different sounds to walk on, hers quick and light, his flat and heavy behind her. His ribs took something off him on every second step and he kept his mouth shut about that.

Twice the cold came across them, and both times she went flat without being told and lay in the snow with her face turned until the cold sat even on both cheeks, and pointed. Both times her arm was on the right piece of mountain.

’Two hundred miles to the nearest person authorised to test her, and she taught herself the trail in the dark in under a mile, and there’s nobody left alive on this road to write it down.’

At the top of the pass the wind came at them side-on for the first time in hours, and it had grit in it off the rim, and Theo turned his face into it and understood, from the way it moved, that there was open sky above them.

Then Rill stopped dead on the line and said one word.

"Light."

Two hundred yards ahead of them the black had an edge on it, and the edge held still, and past it there was grey.

Grey rock, grey snow, grey miserable pre-dawn mountain daylight, the ugliest and most beautiful thing Theo had seen since a kitchen doorway with soup in it.

He got her by both shoulders and turned her at it.

"You run that. You don’t stop, you don’t turn round, you don’t come back for me, and if you hear my voice behind you in the next two hundred yards you keep running, because it won’t be me."

Rill’s hands came up and got hold of his forearms.

"You’re behind me?"

"I’m behind you."

’I am not going to be behind you.’

The grey behind her had got wider while they stood there. She stayed where she was.

"Say the rest of it."

It was Berrin’s line. She had heard him say it under a stone and kept it.

Theo took the wrist loop off her, working the frozen turn of it open with his thumbs, and put the rope in his own pocket.

"Fenn. Top of the pass road. Every morning. Go and ruin his day."

She shot away.

And Theo stayed where he was, with his back to the light and his face to the pass, and listened. He heard her the whole way. She ran the way he had taught her to walk, heel down soft even at a sprint, and by then his ears were the only thing he had left.

Forty yards... Eighty... A hundred and forty.

And the cold came past him on his left, going up the road, faster than anything had moved all night.

Theo went after it and he was not close.

He was two hundred pounds of broken ribs on a frozen road and it was already gone and he ran anyway, with the knife in his fist and his mouth open, and he got eleven strides and heard the sound at the top of the road and did not get any further.

She did not scream.

That was what stayed. She was twenty yards from grey daylight, running properly, doing every single thing he had put into her, and she went off the road, and the grey went on being grey.

Theo stopped in the middle of the pass.