The nurse was supposed to be under the wall. That was the arrangement, and everybody in the manor yard knew it, including the boy on top of the wall, who was perhaps seven and already furious about most things. He was allowed to climb the old wall at the back of the manor yard as far as the third course of stones and no further, on condition that Nurse Orme stood at the bottom with her arms out. She had stood there every afternoon that summer, in all weathers, looking up at him with the particular resignation of a woman who had been told by a lord that his son would climb things regardless and that it was her task to see he came down them alive. Then, one afternoon in late August, somebody called her into the kitchens about a delivery of mending, and she went, for a moment, because it was only a moment. The boy was on the fifth course of stones by then. He had been waiting all summer for her to go. Talon was smaller than him by a head. His mother had brought the mending. He had been told to stand by the kitchen door and touch nothing, and he had stood by the kitchen door and touched nothing, and then the nurse had come past him in a hurry and gone inside, and he had looked out across the yard at the place where she had been standing. It was empty. He did not like it. He could not have said why, then or for a long time after. It was like a missing tooth, a place the tongue keeps going back to. He walked across the yard and stood in it.
The boy came off the sixth course about four seconds later. He did not slip, exactly. A stone moved under his hand, an old one, loose in its mortar, and came out of the wall, and he came with it. He came down onto Talon, who was much too small to catch anything, and they both went flat on the packed earth of the yard, and the stone landed a foot from their heads and broke. The boy got up first. He had grazed both hands and was not crying, with enormous effort.
COR: Who are you?
TLN: Talon.
COR: You were in the way.
TLN: I know.
COR: Why were you standing there?
Talon thought about it seriously, because it seemed to deserve it.
TLN: Somebody was supposed to be.
The boy looked at him for a long moment with an expression Talon would come to know very well in the years that followed. It was the face of somebody deciding whether he was owed an apology or ought to offer one, and finding he did not know how to do either. Then he looked at the wall, at the gap in the sixth course where the stone had come out.
There was no gap. There was a stone in it. It was darker than the others, and smoother, and very slightly the wrong shape.
Nobody ever asked about it. Talon, when he was older, decided not to. He went back to the manor the next week, and the week after, and stood near the boy on the wall, and then near the boy at the table, and then beside him, for the rest of his life. It was a choice, in a way.
DUN: Pryce. Pryce. Look at me. Get up, lad.
He was on his back on the wet stone, with the mist above him and Dunne's hand on his good shoulder and his bad one making a sound inside itself he could feel rather than hear. He lay there, and noticed something, and for the first time in his life he did not decide not to mention it.
A chipped cup for a good one. Somebody else's glove, a size wrong. An inkwell knocked over in their first month that was full again by the end of the lesson. A stone in the sixth course of the old wall in the manor yard that did not match. The eleventh match of the Trial, where an upperclassman had split her strikes into a dozen afterimages, and every afterimage was a strike that was not where it had been, and something in him had gone to fill every one of those empty places at once with nothing, nothing, nothing at all, until he was so busy answering ghosts that the real blade came through and he had gone out with a shrug and never once wondered why. Mira on open stone in a cave under a hill, asking for somebody to stand near her, and Talon there before she finished the sentence. Before. Not quickly. Before.
TLN: Oh.
DUN: Pryce?
TLN: I've been standing where somebody else should have been my entire life. I thought it was a choice.
DUN: You're concussed.
TLN: Very possibly. It still was a choice. It just wasn't only that.
He got up. Then he could hear it. It was not a sound, quite. It was the whole of the headland at once, held the way a chord is held: the wall and the stones torn out of it, the iron basket and its small grey fire, the men and the places they stood and the places they had stood a moment before, the sea under the cliff and the long pull of it. And all through it were the wrong notes. There were gaps where things had been taken and spaces left open, and every one of them was already being filled, constantly, everywhere, the way a tide fills a footprint. He had been hearing it his whole life. He had just never once turned his head toward it. The sergeant was ten yards off in the white, with his palm already on the parapet. Talon said the words aloud, because he was not very good at pretending, and it was rather a flaw of his.
TLN: All things are in harmony. When the harmony is broken, when a thing is moved, or a thing is ruined, or a thing is changed from what it was, then something else will come to take its place. It always has. It always will. Nothing is ever simply taken.
RSK: What are you rambling on about?
TLN: I'll call this ability... Bitter Sweet Symphony.
RSK: Just shut up alr-
The sergeant's left shoulder dropped. It did not take a blow. Nothing had touched it. It simply went, all at once, the arm falling against his side, and the scaled face twisted in pure astonishment before it got round to pain. Talon rolled his own left shoulder once, carefully. It was whole. It ached the way an old break aches in the rain, deep and dull, an injury from years ago. Pseudo-random. He had asked for it to be mended. He had not asked for it to be mended like that. He found, examining himself, that he did not mind.
RSK: I never touched you.
TLN: No.
RSK: You never touched me.
TLN: No. Something did, though. My shoulder was broken. That's a thing changed from what it was. Something had to come and take its place.
RSK: And you just picked mine.
TLN: I didn't pick, exactly. I suggested. It's very open to suggestion tonight. I think you've upset it.
The sergeant stared at him. Then he did a thing Talon would remember for a long time afterwards with something close to respect. He did not attack. He stood in the white with one arm hanging and thought about it. He put his good palm on the parapet and fired a single block. Not at Talon, and not at any man. Straight down the empty walkway, into the mist, at nothing. Then he looked at the wall to see where the hole was.
There was no hole in the wall. There was one in the walkway, two yards behind the sergeant's own heels, neat and square, the exact size of the block. The block itself had gone off into the white and landed somewhere with a sound like a dropped sack.
RSK: You're swapping things.
TLN: No.
RSK: The stone goes out, the hole goes somewhere else. That's a swap.
TLN: A swap is two things. Count again.
The sergeant counted. Talon could see him do it, the eyes going from place to place in the mist, pricing. The hole in the walkway. The block out in the white. And the iron basket at the cliff's edge, which had moved a foot to the left. A spear, which had been leaning on the parapet and was now lying flat. The bucket from earlier, which was gone. And a gull, which had not been anywhere in the whole of the night and was now sitting on the parapet, looking at both of them with enormous offence.
RSK: That's six.
TLN: Seven. You've missed one.
RSK: Where?
TLN: I'm not explaining it.
The sergeant fired two blocks at once, one from each side of a gap in the wall, and watched. Three things moved that he could see and an unknown number he could not, and the gap he had fired them from was full again, of something darker and smoother and very slightly the wrong shape.
RSK: It's the stones. You're doing something to the stones.
TLN: It isn't the stones.
RSK: Then what?
TLN: It's anything. Anything that moves. Anything that breaks. You're simply the one doing most of the moving.
He had not meant to say that much. It was true, though, and he had never been any good at keeping a true thing behind his teeth once somebody had asked for it properly. The sergeant heard it. Talon saw him hear it, and saw him take it apart and put it back together. And then the sergeant did something Talon had not expected, which was to throw at him anyway.
It was a plain shot, fast and direct, a block off the parapet straight at Talon's chest. Talon was already stepping out of the line. The block went exactly where the sergeant had aimed it, through the place where Talon had been, and on into the mist, and hit nothing at all. Talon heard the sergeant's satisfaction, very brief, at having at least put the thing where he wanted it.
Then the iron rod came down out of the white and struck the sergeant across the top of the head. It came from nowhere. It came from directly above, falling, the way a thing falls when it has simply been dropped. And it was his own rod, the short iron rod he had fired at Talon's head at the start of the fight and that had hit a bucket and never been seen again. The sergeant went down on one knee with a sound of pure bewilderment.
RSK: I didn't throw that.
TLN: You did. Twenty minutes ago.
RSK: I threw it at you.
TLN: Yes. And it had to land somewhere. It's been waiting. And just now you made that block go where you wanted instead of where it would have gone on its own. It would have fallen, if you'd left it alone. Something had to take its place and do the falling.
RSK: That's not-
TLN: I know. I'd stop throwing things, if I were you.
The sergeant got up slowly. Blood was coming out from under the scales of his scalp, thin and dark, and he looked at Talon, and at the mist, and at the wall with its holes that did not add up and its stones that did not match. Talon watched the third theory arrive behind his eyes, and saw that it was the right one.
RSK: You need me to move first.
Talon could have lied. He had never once in his life lied about a thing that mattered, and found he was not going to begin with this one.
TLN: Yes.
The sergeant smiled again, the bad smile, and took his hand off the parapet, and stood quite still.
RSK: Then your move.
TLN: I don't really have moves. I've never needed them.
RSK: You'll need one now.
It was a good answer. It was the best answer anybody could have given. Talon stood ten yards from him in the white with his old-break shoulder and his borrowed spear and listened, and the whole of the headland went on filling its gaps around them, and the sergeant did not move.
But he breathed. Talon heard it. Every breath moved the air in front of him and every breath the air came back, and the sergeant could no more stop doing that than stop his heart. He was disturbing the harmony with every breath he took, and he would go on doing it until the moment he died. There was no way to stand still enough. There never had been. That was the horror of it, and Talon, who was not a cruel person, found that he would rather not have known it. He did not use the breath. He took one step.
It was the first gap he had ever made on purpose in his life. It was very small. The place where he had been standing was empty for a moment, and the mist went into it, and the place the mist had left was filled by the next thing over, and that one by the next. It went out across the walkway as a chain, one small thing into the space of another, quieter than footsteps, and Talon leaned on it, very slightly, the way you lean on a door. He was not choosing where it went. He was only suggesting where it might like to end.
It ended under the sergeant's feet. The stone he was standing on was simply not there. It had gone to fill something nine places back along the chain, and what came to take its place was the sea, a single slab of cold black water, the exact size and shape of the flagstone, holding that shape for exactly as long as it took the sergeant to put his weight on it.
He went in to the shin and pitched forward. His one good hand came down on the parapet to catch himself, by instinct, and the flash under it was not a candle any longer but a lamp. It was everything he had left. The whole section of wall in front of him came out at once and went off into the white toward the men behind Talon like a door blown off its hinges.
Talon let the harmony take every stone of it. He could hear exactly where each was going and exactly what was waiting in the places it would leave, and the stones found shields, and timber, and the iron basket's long chain, and the walkway itself, and none of them found a man.
The sergeant came up out of the water and through the breach he had made, at a run, one-armed, at the men, and stood in it.
It was the largest gap on the headland. Talon could hear it the way you hear a missing note in a tune you have known all your life. There should have been a wall there. There had been one there a minute ago.
Something would take its place. It always did. He had stood in a training yard once with a padded sword in his hand and found that he could not imagine swinging it at somebody, though he had tried very hard for about four seconds. He did not try now. He did not need to imagine anything. He only had to stop holding the door.
TLN: You've made a great many holes tonight.
The sergeant looked round. He looked at the breach he was standing in, and at the wall on either side of it, and Talon watched the whole sum come out at last behind his eyes.
RSK: It was always the same wall-
The wall came back. It came from the bottom. The lowest course was there first, the old grey stones of it standing exactly where they had stood a minute ago, and they were standing where the sergeant's feet were. There was no room in the world for both, so the stone won, because the stone had been there first. The sergeant's boots were simply not there any longer, and nor was anything above them to the height of the first course. He did not fall, because there was nothing left to fall from. He was held, upright, in the breach, by the wall that had been there a minute ago, coming back to take its place. Then the second course came.
He understood it. Talon saw that he understood it, all at once and completely, the whole sum coming out. And he did the only thing he had, which was to put his good palm flat on the nearest stone and fire it. The flash came under his hand, a lamp, the brightest yet, and the stone went out of the wall like a shot, off into the white.
Something took its place. It was the same stone, as it had been a minute ago, sitting in the course exactly where it had always sat.
He fired it again. It came back again. He fired it a third time, roaring now, a sound that had nothing to do with words. It came back a third time, the same stone from a minute ago, and a minute ago, and a minute ago, as many times as he cared to throw it. There had been a wall here a minute ago, and the harmony had decided that there would be one now, and the sergeant who had spent the whole night moving things found that he had come at last to a thing that would not be moved.
The third course came up to his chest. Talon heard what it did to him there, and would hear it again, on and off, for a long time. The breath went out of the sergeant all at once and did not come back, because there was no longer any room for it to come back into. The fourth course came up to his throat. The scaled face above it looked across the breach at Talon, very close, with the gills along the neck working at nothing, and the eyes were not angry any longer. They were simply astonished, the way the eyes of a man are astonished at a sum he has done a hundred times and has only now seen the answer to.
His good hand was still on the stone in front of him. The flash under it was a lamp, and then a candle, and then a spark struck off flint, very small. The fifth course came. The last of it, the top course, came up and over the hand where it lay, and closed.
Then the wall was whole: the wall as it had been a minute ago, every stone of it, the old grey courses and the nine holes the sergeant had made at the beginning, and the two darker stones that did not match. It did not look built. It looked as if it had never gone anywhere. Low down on the face of it, where the mortar met the walkway, a thin dark line of something that was not seawater came out from between two of the stones and ran down onto the flags, and stopped.
TLN: Yes.
Nobody on the walkway said anything for some time. For a breath, perhaps less, the mist around him stopped moving. It did not part. It held still, every thread of it in its place, as if all the white on the headland had been listening and had heard something it knew. Talon felt himself very nearly become something else, something larger that stood exactly where he stood and understood all of it at once, the chain and the chord and every gap in the world, without any effort at all. Then it passed. It went back to wherever it had come from, a long way down and a long way off, and left him standing on the walkway with his old-break shoulder, knowing very clearly and very quietly that it would be there when he was ready to go and fetch it. He was not ready yet. He could tell that too.
He sat down. He had not meant to. His legs had simply made the decision for him, and he found himself with his back against the wall from a minute ago, which was cold, as walls are, and entirely ordinary.
He had done that. He noticed that he had done it, and that he could, and that it had been very easy. That was the bitter part. He sat with it, because it was not a thing he could decide not to mention. He would mention it, to somebody, someday, when he had found the words, and he thought he already knew who it would be and that she would not look away while he did. That was the sweet part. He had a letter to finish.
Then he noticed something else, and was on his feet again before he knew it. Out in the white, beyond the cliff fire, where the commander had taken Corin, it was very quiet. Not the quiet of a fight that has ended. The other kind. And somewhere in all that listening mist there was a gap opening, wide and cold, that Talon could hear from forty yards away. He had stood beside Corin Ashby since an afternoon in a manor yard, in a thousand rooms, and he had never once heard anything like it in him. It was fear.