They did not sleep. Nobody at Harlow's Reach slept that night, and nobody suggested it, and when the captain came along the walkway an hour after the mist had fallen with a lantern in one hand and a roll of bandage in the other, he did not suggest it either. He knelt beside Corin and looked at the four cuts by the light of the lantern and said nothing about any of them, and dressed them, one after another, with the quick unhandsome competence of a man who had dressed a great many cuts on this walkway and expected to dress a great many more. The one along the ribs needed stitching. He did that too.
CAPT: Hold still.
COR: I am holding still.
CAPT: You're shaking, my lord.
COR: Corin. I know. It isn't the cut.
The captain looked at him over the lantern, and then went on with the stitching, and said nothing more about it, which Corin understood was the kindest thing anybody had ever done for him in his life, and which he did not know how to thank him for. The shaking did not stop. It had not stopped since the fear came back, and it did not stop while the captain stitched him, or afterward, when the men brought the body of the drowned man along the walkway on a shield and laid it at the top of the cliff path, or when the captain stood over it with his lantern for a long time and then said, quietly, that the sea had not taken this one, and that they would burn it in the morning, and that he would like very much to know what the coast road would make of it. It came in waves. It would go down, and he would think that it was finished, and then he would see something, the mist lying in puddles on the stone, or the three fires, or the place by the cliff fire where he had knelt, and it would come up again from the bottom, all at once, as if it had only been waiting for him to look.
He sat with his back against the parapet and let it. There did not seem to be anything else to do with it. Talon sat beside him. He had been there since the end and had not moved, except once, to let the captain at his shoulder. The captain had felt along the bone with his thumb, frowning, and said that whatever had hit it had very nearly broken it and somehow had not, and that it would ache in the rain for the rest of his life. Talon had said that this seemed fair, and the captain had looked at him for some time as though he suspected he was being made fun of, and had gone away.
They sat. The fires burned down and were built up again. Down the walkway the men were talking, the low, ceaseless, unimportant talk of men who have lived through something and are not yet ready to stop hearing each other's voices. Somebody laughed. Somebody else told him to shut up. Somebody, very quietly, was being sick over the seaward side of the wall, and nobody remarked on that either.
COR: I was afraid.
He had not decided to say it. It simply came out of him into the dark, the way the fear had come back, all at once.
TLN: I know. I heard.
COR: You keep saying that. What do you mean, you heard? You were forty yards off in the mist. I couldn't hear my own feet.
Talon was quiet for a while. Corin knew this quiet. It was the one Talon used when somebody had asked him a thing he had decided, a long time ago, not to be asked. Corin had watched him use it on Briar at the long table, and on Mira, and on every teacher they had ever had, and on Corin himself, perhaps a thousand times, and had never once in all those years pushed past it. He did not push past it now. He waited.
TLN: You saw the wall.
COR: I saw a piece of the wall that wasn't there when I went into the mist, and isn't the same colour as the rest of it, and isn't the same colour as itself, in places. And I saw that your sergeant isn't anywhere. Yes.
TLN: That was me.
COR: I assumed.
TLN: Things go, and something else comes to take their place. You've seen it. The cup. The glove. The inkwell, in our first month. It's always been that, only small, and I never looked at it, and nobody else did either, because it was only ever small. Tonight it wasn't. Tonight I could hear all of it. Every place on the headland where something had been moved, or broken, or taken away. They're like gaps, in a tune you know. You can hear them. And at the end, when I'd finished with the sergeant, there was a gap out in the mist where you were. A big one. Something had gone out of you that had never once gone out of you in your life, not once since the yard. I could hear it from the other end of the wall. That's what I mean.
Corin sat with that for a long moment.
COR: Hope.
TLN: Yes. I think so.
COR: And then?
TLN: And then something came to take its place. I could hear that too.
COR: Fear.
TLN: At first. Then something else. I don't know what. It was very loud.
COR: Pride.
TLN: Ah.
COR: Not the kind you're thinking of.
TLN: I wasn't thinking of any kind. I was thinking it was very loud.
Corin laughed. It came out better than the last time.
COR: Has it got a name? The thing you do.
TLN: Bitter Sweet Symphony.
COR: That's three words.
TLN: Everyone keeps saying that.
COR: Who's everyone?
TLN: You, and a man who's now part of a wall.
Corin stopped laughing. He did not mean to, and he could see that Talon had not meant him to, and that Talon had said it the way he said true things, all at once, before he could think better of it. They sat with it between them. Down the walkway somebody laughed again and was told again to shut up.
COR: I killed a man tonight too.
TLN: I know.
COR: Before he died, he told me something. He said it was his sergeant's stone. On the coast road, in the retreat. The thing that hit my father.
Talon went very still. It was not his ordinary stillness. Corin had known him long enough to tell the two apart, and he watched Talon hear it, and take it, and turn it over, and understand all of what it meant at once, the way he understood most things before anybody else had finished saying them.
TLN: Then I've killed him too. The one who threw it.
COR: Yes.
TLN: Without knowing.
COR: Yes. Both of us. Neither of us knew. He told me afterward so that I'd have to carry it home.
TLN: Will you?
COR: Tell him?
TLN: Yes.
Corin looked out at the sea. It was very flat and very black, and it was not empty, he knew that now. It never had been.
COR: I told him the Trial before the soup. I don't know how to tell him this at all. But I'm not going to let him be proud of the wrong thing twice.
TLN: No. I didn't think you would.
There was one more thing. Corin had been carrying it since the drowned man's hand had closed on his ankle, and he had not known until this moment that he was going to say it aloud to anybody, ever.
COR: He cursed me. At the end. He gave my name to the King's forces, all of them, he said, every one, down to the grey things and up to the Fingers. And he said that one of the Fingers would come for me, and that it would not need to climb, and that I would die by its hand.
TLN: Do you believe him?
COR: Something went out of him when he died. I saw it go. It went out over the water, very fast. And the grey things that were still in the sea turned and looked at me as it went over them. All of them. They haven't got faces, Talon. They looked at me anyway.
Talon did not say anything for a long time. Then he did a thing Corin had never once seen him do in all the years he had known him, which was to put out his hand and take hold of Corin's wrist, firmly, over the bandage, and hold it, the way the captain had held it to stitch the cut.
TLN: Then they know where you'll be standing.
COR: Yes.
TLN: Good. Then they'll know where I'll be standing too. I've stood there since the yard. I'm not likely to stop now just because something with a title wants the place.
Corin looked at him. Talon looked back with the particular unbothered composure of a person who had decided a thing a long time ago and saw no reason to discuss it.
COR: That's the most you've said to me since the yard.
TLN: It's truly been a long night.
The sun came up out of the sea at a little after five, red and enormous, and Harlow's Reach stood on its headland in the light of it, soaked and scorched and bleeding and entirely whole. They burned the drowned man on the cliff path. The men stood and watched it, and nobody said anything over him, and when it was done the captain kicked the ashes off the edge into the water and said that the sea could have him now, if it still wanted him. Oswin Tarrow came along the walkway after that, with his arm in its sling and a fresh cut over one eye that he had not mentioned to anybody, and stopped in front of Corin, and looked at him for a while in the morning light with the particular unhurried assessment Corin had first seen in the yard at the last watchtower.
OSW: You've stood a night up here.
COR: I have.
OSW: I said I'd call you champion when you had.
COR: I'd rather you didn't.
OSW: Aye. I know you would. That's why it's worth anything.
He did not call him champion. He held out his good hand instead, and Corin took it.
OSW: What's your name, lad?
Corin looked at him. Oswin looked back with no expression at all, and waited, and Corin understood, slowly, and then all at once, what he was being asked. It was what the captain had told him in the yard on the first afternoon. He'd ask every man his name, and then he'd ask it again the next time, because he said a man doesn't believe you remember him until you've done it twice.
COR: Corin.
OSW: Aye. I'll remember.
He went back along the wall to his place by the cliff fire. Corin stood looking after him with something in his chest that was not fear and was not pride and that he did not have a name for, and found that his hands, for the first time since the mist fell, had stopped shaking.
Talon was sitting with his back against the new piece of wall, the piece that was the wall from a minute ago, with a sheet of paper on his knee and a pencil he had borrowed from the captain. He was writing. He was writing slowly, in his narrow hand, and stopping often, and looking at the sea, and writing again. He did not cover it when Corin came near. Corin did not ask. He sat down beside him on the warm stone, on the side away from the paper, and looked at the sea, and waited for him to finish.