The sundered seal

Chapter Two: Kaelen and Lyra's Twenty-First Year

The crimson thread in the northern sky faded by afternoon, and by evening most of Dawnhollow had decided that it had been a trick of the sunset.

People are very good at deciding such things. It is the oldest talent in the world, older than any rank or gift, and it has saved more minds than it has ever doomed. A baker told his wife it was only the weather. A mill worker told his friends it was smoke from a distant fire. Even the watchmen, who had smelled the iron in the mist and felt the unease crawling up their spines, told one another quietly that nothing had actually happened, and that a double watch was merely a sensible precaution.

Dorran did not tell himself anything of the kind. He sat alone in the council room of the Hall of Rank until the lamps burned low, studying a map of the northern reaches that had been drawn by his grandfather, and saying nothing at all.

The twins, meanwhile, were turning twenty-one, and Dawnhollow had never been a settlement to let a birthday pass without a celebration.

It was the custom of the valley that a child's twenty-first year was the year of the Lantern Walk. At dusk, the family and friends of the one being honoured would gather at the foot of the Hill of Lanterns, each carrying a small paper lantern lit with a spark of Dormant warmth. They would climb together in procession, singing the old climbing songs, until they reached the courtyard of the great house, where a feast waited. Dorran had presided over the Lantern Walks of half the town's children. Tonight he would hold the lantern for his own.

"I do not see why we must be dressed like this," Kaelen muttered.

He stood before a tall mirror in the room he had slept in since boyhood, scowling at the stiff blue coat that his father's tailor had pressed into his hands that morning. The collar scratched. The cuffs were fussy. He looked, he decided, like a man being prepared for a very formal funeral.

"Because it is our birthday," said Lyra from the doorway. "And because Father said so. And because Mistress Hale spent a fortnight sewing it."

"Mistress Hale also told me I look like a handsome scarecrow."

"She meant it kindly."

"She did not."

Lyra laughed, and the sound of it, bright and unguarded, loosened something in Kaelen's chest that had been tight since morning. She wore dark green, the colour of the pines on the eastern slope, and she had pinned back her hair with a silver clasp that had belonged to their mother. She came into the room and straightened his collar with brisk, practised fingers, and for a moment neither of them said anything.

Their mother had died when they were nine. It had been a fever, sudden and merciless, and not even Dorran's gift had been able to turn it aside. Neither twin spoke of it often. But on days such as this one, the quiet ache of her absence sat in the room with them like a third person, patient and familiar and gentle.

"She would have liked the coat," Lyra said eventually.

"She would have laughed at the coat."

"Yes. And then she would have liked it."

Kaelen smiled in spite of himself. "Come on. Father will be pacing."

Father was, in fact, standing at the top of the stairs with his lantern already lit, and he looked at the pair of them for a long moment with an expression that Kaelen could not quite read. Pride was in it, certainly. But so was something heavier, something that watched them as though committing their faces to memory.

"You look well," Dorran said, and his voice was rougher than usual. "Both of you. Come. They are waiting."

It would be easy, in later years, to look back on that evening and see in it only the last gentle hour before the storm. But those who were there remembered it simply as a good night, and in a way that was the truest memory of all.

The procession was larger than anyone had expected. It seemed that half of Dawnhollow had turned out, drawn by affection for Dorran's family and perhaps also by the instinct that people feel before frightening times, the desire to be close to one another and to light. Hundreds of paper lanterns bobbed up the hillside like slow golden fireflies. The climbing songs rose in the cool air, some of them sweet, some of them ridiculous, one of them so rude that the old women pretended not to hear it. Children ran ahead and were scolded and ran ahead again.

Kaelen walked at the front beside his sister, a lantern held awkwardly in his hands, and he found that his unease had begun to dissolve into something warmer. These were his people. He knew the names of nearly all of them. The cobbler who had mended his boots since he was five. The midwife who had delivered half the valley. Old Pell, who ran the mill, and who had once let two small twins ride the great wheel when they were far too young to be allowed.

And ahead of them all, in the courtyard, the tables were laid out in long rows under strings of hanging lamps, groaning with roast mutton and honey bread and bowls of late berries.

It was Pell who raised the first cup.

"To Dorran's children!" he bellowed, in the voice of a man who had been practising for some time. "Who are the finest young folk this valley has ever produced, and who will stay out of the river this year, if the gods are kind!"

A roar of laughter went up. Lyra covered her face with both hands. Kaelen, who had once fallen into the Wren at the age of fifteen while attempting to demonstrate a theory about water, could only bow his head in surrender.

Later, when the feasting had settled into a comfortable murmur, a little girl of perhaps six crept up to where Kaelen sat and stared at him with great seriousness.

"Is it true you are Ascendant?" she asked.

Kaelen blinked. He had not been expecting the question, nor the awe in her voice. "Where did you hear that?"

"My brother says you are the only Ascendant in all of Dawnhollow. He says you can do anything."

"I cannot do anything," said Kaelen gently. "I can do a few things."

He glanced across the table at Lyra, who was watching him with a small, knowing smile. They both knew how rare it was, and how strange. Of all the people in the valley, perhaps one in a hundred was Awakened. Of the Awakened, scarcely one in a generation passed beyond the second rank to become Ascendant, and until Kaelen it had not happened in Dawnhollow within living memory.

It had come to him at nineteen, quite without warning. He had been standing in the training yard, working through the slow breathing exercises that Dorran insisted upon, when he had felt something inside him give way, like a lock turning in a door he had never known was there. The world had opened. Colours had grown sharper. The air itself had seemed to hum with possibility. And when he had lifted his hand, light had gathered there, soft and warm and golden, light that did not burn but mended.

His father had wept, then. Quietly, and only for a moment. Then he had embraced his son and said nothing at all.

Kaelen's gift was unlike any of the common forms. Fire could be bent to destroy, water to shape or drown, wind to cut or carry. His light did none of these things. It healed cuts and knit bone, and on one occasion, to everyone's astonishment, it had coaxed a dying oak back into leaf. He did not yet understand it. Dorran had spent two years quietly writing to scholars in distant settlements, asking whether such an ability had ever been recorded. The replies had been polite, puzzled, and unhelpful.

Lyra's path had been different, but no less hard won. She had reached the Awakened rank at fourteen, a prodigy by any measure, and had spent the years since training with a ferocity that Kaelen sometimes found alarming. Her gift was wind, sharp and fast and precise. She could cleave a falling leaf in half from forty paces. She could hold herself aloft for hours, long after her father tired. And when Kaelen had ascended and surpassed her, she had been the first to embrace him, and had never once let him see the shadow that crossed her face afterwards.

He had seen it anyway. He was her twin. He saw everything.

"Do not look at me like that," she said now, quietly, as the little girl scampered away. "I am happy for you. I have always been happy for you."

"I know."

"Then stop worrying."

"You are worrying," Kaelen said. "I can tell."

Lyra sighed. She turned her cup slowly in her fingers. "I am worrying about the mist," she admitted. "I am worrying about the smell of iron, and the watchmen, and Father sitting in that council room for hours with his maps. I am worrying that tonight is a very nice night, and that nice nights never last."

Kaelen was silent. Above them, the sky had cleared into a deep, cold, star-flecked black. There was no trace of crimson left in it. No trace of anything but peace.

"Then we shall enjoy it," he said at last, "while it lasts. And when it ends, we shall face what comes together. That is what twins are for."

Lyra looked at him for a long moment. Then she smiled, and touched her cup to his.

It was, perhaps, the last perfectly happy moment either of them would know for a very long time.

The first horn sounded a little past midnight.

It came from the northern wall, long and low and trembling, a sound that Dawnhollow had not heard in forty years. The singing stopped. The laughter stopped. Every head in the courtyard turned, as one, towards the dark horizon.

Dorran was already on his feet, lantern forgotten, his face turned to stone.

"Stay together," he said quietly, and then, louder, so that the whole courtyard could hear: "Stay together, all of you. Do not run. Do not panic. Kaelen. Lyra. With me."

The twins rose. Behind them, the great house stood silent and lamplit, and the long tables lay still covered with the remains of the feast, and somewhere beyond the walls, in the black reaches of the night, something was screaming.

It was not a sound that any living animal could make.