Chapter 841: Owed Back

The Stillfrost came at them across the frozen grass.

It did not run. It did not need to. Its long white legs carried it forward in great, slow strides, and the cold came with it. Each step it took, the air grew colder. By the third step, Natalia could no longer feel her hands.

"Spread out!" Big D shouted. "Don’t bunch up! Make it choose!"

They scattered across the white grass.

The Stillfrost stopped in the middle of them and lowered its long, eyeless head. It turned slowly, as if it was listening. Then one of its thin legs lifted, and stabbed down like a spear.

Rudra threw himself sideways. The leg drove into the ground where he had been standing. The frozen earth cracked around it in a white star.

"It can’t see!" Natalia shouted. "It feels the warmth! It’s going for whoever’s warmest!"

"Then let it come for me," said Big D.

He walked straight toward it.

The cold hit him like a wall. His breath froze in his beard. Ice formed on his eyelashes and in the creases of his coat. His fingers went white, then gray.

Endure.

He kept walking.

He had been cold before. In the bottom world, for ten thousand years, he had slept on stone floors in chains with no blanket and nothing to eat. He had been colder than this a thousand times. Every time, he had woken up in the morning. Every time, he had got up.

The Stillfrost’s head turned toward him.

It could feel him coming. He was the warmest thing on the field. He was walking toward it through a cold that should have dropped any living thing in its tracks, and he was not stopping.

It lifted two legs and drove them down at him.

Big D caught the first one in both hands. The ice burned his palms like fire. He held it anyway, and twisted, and the thin white leg cracked across the middle.

The second one went into his shoulder.

He grunted. He went down on one knee. Frost raced out from the wound across his coat.

He did not let go of the broken leg.

"Now!" he roared. "While it’s busy with me! Now!"

Natalia had her mark ready. It glowed deep in the Stillfrost’s long chest, small and red, at the very center of all that white ice.

"Kael!" she shouted. "It’s there! Right there!"

Kael was standing thirty paces away. He was so cold that his hands were shaking on his sword. He looked at the red mark, and the white shape around it, and the old man on one knee in the frost with a spear of ice through his shoulder.

He opened his status. He looked at the first word.

Certainty.

He reached for it raw.

Afterward, nobody on the field could quite describe what happened next.

It was like the fight in the spar on the Shelf, when Kael had used his last card on Almond. It was like the fight in the heart, when he had pinned the gray thing on the end of a strike that could not miss.

But it was also nothing like either of those. Because this time, there was no deck behind it. There was only Kael.

Every way the fight could still go folded down into one line.

Every dodge the Stillfrost might make, every leg it might lift, every way it might turn its head or shift its weight, all of it collapsed. It fell away like snow falling off a branch. What was left was a single strike, running from the point of Kael’s sword to the small red mark in the Stillfrost’s chest.

It was going to land. Nothing could stop it from landing.

Kael felt it take everything he had.

It did not take a little and then a little more. It took all of it at once, the way the crossing had taken everything from Almond. His strength. His warmth. The air in his lungs. He felt his knees begin to go before he had even taken the first step.

He took the step anyway.

Swiftness.

He did not reach for Quickstep. He did not have time for a handle. He went raw into that as well, three steps at full speed, on legs that could barely hold him.

On the third step, he struck.

His sword went into the Stillfrost’s chest through the red mark. It went through the ice as if the ice were water. It went in to the hilt, right into the small, hard, cold heart.

Then Kael let go of the sword, and fell, and did not move.

"Rudra!"

Rudra was already running.

He reached the Stillfrost as it reared back, shrieking without any sound. Kael’s sword was sticking out of its chest. Pale blue light was leaking out around the blade. The whole thin, white body was shaking.

He grabbed the hilt of the sword in both hands.

The cold that came up the blade was beyond anything he had ever felt. It was the cold of the whole day. It was every bit of warmth the Stillfrost had pulled out of thirteen thousand people since dawn, all of it held inside it, all of it stolen.

He felt it, and he knew exactly how much it was. He had been counting all day.

Debt.

"You took it," he said through his locked teeth. "From the fires. From the stones. From thirteen thousand people who never did a thing to you." His hands were going white on the hilt. "From an old man who gave his blanket to a child. From nine more after him. That’s yours. Every bit of it is yours."

He opened his hands on the sword, and he called it in.

"And it’s owed back."

The warmth came out of Rudra all at once.

It was not his own. It was a whole day of stolen fire, from thirteen thousand people, and it had been sitting in the Stillfrost as cold. Now the debt turned it back the way it had come. It poured in through Kael’s blade and into the Stillfrost’s heart. It did not come back as cold. It came back as what it had been before.

Heat.

The Stillfrost’s chest lit up from the inside like a lantern. Red light shone out through its white body. The ice began to steam. Then it began to run. Its thin legs went soft and sagged. Its long, eyeless head drooped, and water poured off it in streams.

Rudra held on to the sword until his hands were burning.

The Stillfrost melted.

It did not fall. It came apart, standing up, into steam and water and a great hissing cloud of white. When the cloud cleared, there was nothing left of it but a wide, steaming pool in the middle of the grass. Kael’s sword lay at the bottom.

Rudra fell to his knees beside it.

His hands were red and blistered from the heat. He looked down at them for a long moment. Then he laughed, short and hoarse.

"Paid in full," he said.

Behind them, inside the line, the frost was melting.

It went all at once. The silver crust on the grass turned to water and soaked into the earth. The fires leapt up as if someone had thrown oil on them. All across the rise, thirteen thousand people looked up from their huddled knots and felt warmth coming back into their faces for the first time since dawn.

The warm white stones blazed red.

On the top of the rise, the Pyreking was still kneeling beside the shoot. He had held his small flame beside it for sixteen hours straight. When the warmth came back, his hand finally dropped. The flame went out.

The shoot did not need it anymore. Its flame-like leaves were bright and open, glowing in the dark.

The Pyreking sat back and looked at it. Then he looked at his own hand. The skin was blistered all over from holding the fire so long.

The Warlord knelt down beside him in the wet grass.

He did not say anything. He just put his arm around the Pyreking’s shoulders, and the two of them sat there together and watched the shoot glow.

Big D got up.

It took him a long time. There was still a hole in his shoulder, and the frost was only now melting out of it. Natalia came and got under his good arm and helped him.

"Kael," Big D said.

Kael lay face down in the wet grass where he had fallen. He was not moving.

Hessa was already running across the field toward them. Behind her came the Empress of Skytheum. She was not walking like an Empress. She was running as hard as she could, with her gray coat flapping open.

She reached Kael first. She dropped to her knees and turned him over.

He was very pale. His lips were blue. But he was breathing. Shallow and slow, but breathing.

"Kael," the Empress said. "Kael. Open your eyes. That’s an order."

Nothing happened for a long moment.

Then Kael’s eyes opened, just a little.

"Did it land?" he whispered.

"It landed," Rudra said. He was kneeling on the other side, with his blistered hands held carefully in his lap. "Right where Natalia marked it. Right in the heart."

"Good," Kael whispered. His eyes started to close again. "Good. I’d hate to have done that for nothing."

"You disobeyed me," the Empress said. Her voice had gone thick. "I said come back."

"I came back," Kael said, without opening his eyes. "Just slowly."

They lost fourteen people to the cold.

Ten had died by sunset. Four more had died in the dark, before Rudra paid the debt. Most of them were very old. Several had given their blankets to someone younger.

Big D took every name. He sat by the biggest fire with his shoulder bound up and the frost finally gone out of it, and the families came to him one by one.

Keeper of Names.

When it was done, he sat there for a long time without speaking.

At the bottom of the steaming pool where the Stillfrost had stood, something small was glinting. Natalia waded in and fished it out. It was a hard, pale-blue crystal, about the size of a walnut. It was very cold.

"Its heart," she said. "What’s left of it."

She brought it to Rudra. He looked at it, and then at his blistered hands.

"It’s yours," Natalia said. "You were the one who called it in."

Rudra took it carefully between two fingers.

Debt.

It folded. It left an orb the deep red-gold color of a coal at the bottom of a fire.

[Power Orb: Owed Back]

[Quality: C]

[Whatever is taken from you or yours is remembered and owed. Call it in, and it returns all at once.]

His status changed.

[Life Rank: C]

Rudra looked at it for a long time.

"Three of us now," he said quietly. "Big D. Ainen. Me."

"Kael should have one too," Natalia said. She held up a long, thin sliver of white ice. It had broken off the Stillfrost’s leg when Big D snapped it. It had not melted. "I’ll keep this for him. He’ll want it when he wakes up."

Hessa had sat down a little apart from everyone else. She had her hand over her eyes again.

Big D saw her, and went over.

"The others," he said. "The other lords."

"Two at the Door," Hessa said. Her voice was strange. "One of them is already dead."

Big D went very still. "Corvin?"

"Corvin’s fine. Frosthold’s fine. It wasn’t them." Hessa lowered her hand slowly. "It was John. He walked out of the line alone, an hour after it arrived. I watched the whole thing, and I couldn’t see what he did. Not with my eyes, not with the orb, not with anything." She swallowed. "The lord just fell down. And the second one turned around and ran."

Big D did not say anything for a long moment.

"And Greywatch?" he asked.

Hessa did not answer right away.

When she did, her voice had gone very quiet.

"Greywatch is my home," she said. "I’ve been watching it all night. I didn’t want to tell you while you were out there."

"Tell me now."

Hessa looked up at him. Her face was gray.

"The stones are going dark," she said. "One by one. All the way around the ring."