The climb was four hundred paces of upright limestone, frozen birch roots, and howling wind.
Every yard of height was paid for in blood. Ren Vale climbed with his teeth set against the scream of his fractured collarbone. His right arm locked Mira against his ribs while his boots slipped on frost-glazed shale. Above them, Vane Vale led the way, his blackthorn stick wedging into rock fissures to test handholds before hauling Ren upward with cold, trembling hands.
They finally breached the crest of the Crag-Spur escarpment. Then, the wind dropped by half, baffled by a crescent of towering granite ledges.
Before them, half-buried under eight inches of wind-packed alpine snow, stood Abandoned Lime & Charcoal Kiln Four.
It was an ancient, cone-shaped dome of dry-stone stonework, eight paces in width, built eighty years ago by royal quarrymen. The low south-facing entrance was barely four feet high, sheltered beneath a massive top door beam of split slate.
Ren crawled through the opening, dragging Mira inside.
The inside was dry. The circular stone vault smelled of ancient soot, dried bracken, and cold, hardened lime. The wind howled harmlessly against the three-foot-thick walls, reduced to a hollow, distant whistle in the upper chimney pipe.
“The chimney,” Vane murmured, ducking through the low portal and dropping a heavy armful of dry hemlock branches and dead birch bark onto the floor. “We can’t afford a heat plume. If the High court brings up an aerial search balloon from the High Spire, a straight smoke column will pinpoint this bluff within twenty leagues.”
Ren leaned against the curved stonework, panting for air, his vision swimming. “There are loose slate slabs outside the door. Baffle the top of the chimney pipe at a forty-five-degree angle and pack the rim with green pine scrub. It will scatter the smoke along the cliff face before it can form a bright light.”
Vane nodded once, slipping back out into the blizzard.
Ren knelt beside Mira in the dark.
He cleared a circle of gravel on the earthen floor, built a small teepee of dry birch curls. Then he drew the silver-sleeved mammoth awl from his apron sheath. He struck the silver metal ring against a nodule of dark river flint he had pocketed on the gravel spit.
Chink. Chink. Fssss.
A bright shower of orange sparks caught the tinder. A pale, fragrant tongue of birch flame leaped upward, lighting up the soot-scaled dome of the kiln with golden, flickering warmth.
Ren laid Mira upon a deep bed of dried hemlock boughs and dead bracken near the hearth. He took off his torn wool coat. He wrapped it around her shivering shoulders. Then he pulled his lambskin apron over her legs to keep the floor dampness from seeping into her hips.
Her clothes were stiff with river ice. With careful, trembling fingers, Ren peeled away the sodden linen of her right sleeve.
The lamplight caught her arm.
Ren’s breath caught in his throat.
The violent amethyst flashing had fully vanished. The frozen stillness shock from the cut breathing mask had passed. But the crystal-forming was permanent.
From the hollow of her right collar bone, spreading across her chest muscle, over her shoulder, and down the entirety of her right arm to the tips of her fingernails, her flesh had stone-hard into solid, many-sided smoky quartz. It was semi-clear, layered with deep lilac, charcoal, and lavender striations that seemed to capture an eternal, frozen dusk.
Beneath the glassy surface, the outlines of her outward bones, tendons, and upper-arm arteries were visible, perfectly preserved like ferns trapped in amber. Her fingers were curled in a gentle, natural resting stance. Unbending as sculpted marble, fully rigid, cold as glacier ice.
And yet, she was alive.
She drew a deep breath. Then, her chest rose naturally, and deep within the hardened apex of her right lung, a soft, crystal-clear ringing rang out. A clear, four-hundred-and-forty-cycle pitch that echoed against the soot-blackened stones of the kiln.
Mira’s eyelids fluttered.
She groaned—a small, sleepy sound—and turned her head toward the warmth of the fire.
Her silver-grey eyes opened.
For several seconds, she simply stared at the rough stone ceiling. She watched the shadows dance across the mortar. Then her gaze drifted downward. It took in the small hearth, the hemlock boughs, and Ren’s soot-blackened, blood-streaked face hovering above her.
“Ren,” she whispered. Her voice was hoarse, dry as autumn leaves.
“I’m here, Mira,” Ren choked out, a ragged sob tearing from his throat. He caught her warm left hand in both of his, pressing her fingers against his trembling lips. “I’m right here. You’re safe. We’re off the train.”
Mira looked down at her right arm resting upon the wool blanket.
She didn’t scream. She didn’t cry. She had known this frost was coming for two years, ever since the first lilac speck appeared beneath her thumbnail in Tanner’s Row.
With a slow, deliberate effort, she tried to lift the limb. The arm was heavy—fourteen pounds of solid quartz—and the muscles of her shoulder strained against the unbending stone. The fingers remained curled, immobile.
“It’s stone, Ren,” she said softly, her grey eyes remarkably calm, devoid of fear. “All the way to the bone.”
“The frozen stillness is broken,” Ren said fiercely, his tears dripping onto her linen collar. “The dendrites stopped. They didn’t touch your heart, Mira. A tiny fraction of an inch from the main heart artery, the mammoth ivory held. You can breathe. You’re going to live.”
Mira looked at him—really looked at him—taking in his cracked ribs, his hanging left arm, the purple iron-gall stains worked into his knuckles. The sheer, terrifying tiredness etched into every line of his nineteen-year-old face.
With her left hand—her warm, mortal, chapped hand—she reached into the pocket of her torn linen apron.
Her fingers closed around the small, carved piece of boxwood. She pulled it out, holding it up in the firelight.
Her thimble.
“You brought it,” Ren whispered.
“Of course I brought it,” she said, a faint, dry smile touching her chapped lips. “You think I was going to let some old lord in the Spires keep my sewing kit? I have six handkerchiefs left to finish for the baker’s wife.”
She reached up with her right arm. She hauled the heavy, crystal-clear limb upward with the muscles of her torso. Then she rested the back of her quartz hand against Ren’s bruised cheek.
The stone was cold—smooth as polished glass, unbending and hard. But beneath the crystal, Ren could feel the faint, rhythmic pulse of her blood humming through the stone lattice. That living rhythm defied every law of royal medicine.
“Look at me, Ren,” Mira murmured, her voice steady and warm. “Not at my arm. Look at my face.”
Ren met her eyes.
“We’re still here,” she said softly. “You didn’t lose me. And you didn’t sell your soul to that church. We’re still here.”
Ren closed his eyes, leaning his cheek into the cold, smooth quartz of her fingers. His shoulders shaking with was silent, unspent weeping. For ten years, he had lived in terror of the day the thick parchment would tear beyond repair, the day a door would close that he could never force open again.
The door had closed. Her arm would never hold a teacup again. Her fingers would never thread a needle. She was permanently marked by the plague of the dying gods.
And yet, she was alive.
“Ahem,” a dry, high-born cough sounded from the low entrance.
Vane Vale ducked back into the kiln, brushing snow from his shoulders. He carried an armful of dry birch bark and an iron kettle he had scavenged from the freight wreckage below.
His tailored velvet frock coat was gone, replaced by a soot-stained woolen blanket pinned around his neck with a rusted nail. His manicured goatee was disheveled. His calfskin boots were crusted with frozen mud. But his stance remained erect. His sharp grey eyes swept the stone vault with the calculating gaze of a clerk inspecting a warehouse.
Mira turned her head toward the newcomer. She looked at Vane’s face, then at Ren’s face, then back at Vane.
“Well,” Mira said dryly, her thumb tracing the rim of her boxwood thimble. “I see you brought another one of your imaginary friends, Ren. Except this one looks like he owes someone a great deal of money and hasn’t had a bath since Michaelmas.”
Vane froze in the center of the kiln, his blackthorn stick poised mid-air. For the first time since he had stepped out of the Speculum, the Merchant of Guilt was fully struck dumb.
“I’m Vane Vale,” the merchant said stiffly, drawing the soot-stained blanket tighter around his throat. “I’m an international commercial factor and a sovereign creditor of the maritime fleet.”
“You have Ren’s nose,” Mira observed calmly. She pulled the wool blanket up to her chin with her left hand. “And you have Ren’s eyes when he’s trying to convince me that turnips taste just like mutton. Put the kettle on the hearth, factor. The draft in this oven is appalling.”
Vane stared at her for five long seconds. Then, slowly, a small, genuine smile broke through the merchant’s cynical facade, crinkling the corners of his sleepless eyes.
“The girl,” Vane muttered, kneeling stiffly by the hearth and setting the kettle onto the embers, “is entirely unbearable. Just like her brother.”
He reached into his pocket and produced a handful of roasted acorns he had scavenged from an abandoned squirrel cache near the cliff birch.
“We have no tea,” Vane said, brushing snow from the nuts. “We have no sugar. But if we boil these acorns in river melt, it will produce an infusion that vaguely resembles low-grade chicory. It will warm your ribs, at least.”
Mira settled back into the hemlock boughs, her smoky quartz arm resting peacefully beside her like a rainbow-bright bough of winter ice. Meanwhile, the soft chime in her chest harmonized with the crackle of the birch fire.
Outside, the blizzard howled against the stone dome. But inside Kiln Four, for the first time in sixty hours, the world was still.