Page 114 of The Salt King

She caught his arm before he could try. He pulled, but she got her boot behind his ankle and he went down with a slow bump, and then sighed from where he ended up on the ground. She helped him up again, and this time, he didn’t run. A little madly, she wondered if this what was what it boiled down to with Jacob too, and the one he had wrestled. Had it really been a fight, or had he just towed something along and then given it a pull when it thought it didn’t want to be rescued?

“You can’t stay down there in the dark. You’ll go mad,” she said.

He seemed to see she wouldn’t change her mind.

The people from Hreodwater were waiting exactly where she had left them, clustered around the archway. They were singing. She didn’t understand the words, but she could tell that it was a hymn.

As he came into their view, he . . . changed.

The plain white he had been wearing shimmered into silver, brocade forming down his sleeves like frost, and through his hair, what looked like diamonds crystallised into being and forged themselves into a crown.

The Hreoda all turned away before he came out into the open. They had their hands over their eyes. It was not what she had expected at all, not how anyone greeted a king or a priest, but it was clearly done with reverence, and the song never ceased, rising as high and holy as anything she had heard in the Hagia Sophia.

Snow was falling. Within a few minutes, the ground was white and frozen, and she stared around. What if she was wrong? What if he wasn’t an angel, what if he was some—ancient winter demon, the thing that people here used to make the turning of the seasons?

“They do not see what you see,” An El said, in perfect Greek, and she swung back to him.

“What?” she croaked.

He brushed his fingertips against his heart, the universal sign of apology. “You did not think I could speak to you, so I could not. But they know that I can.”

“I don’t . . . understand.”

“No,” he agreed, with the same unsayable weariness he had had when she bullied him out of the tower and above. “But don’t be afraid.” He looked up into the snow, ice already frosting the crown, and the fog came down so heavily that she could barely see him. “They see blinding light. It’s why they must turn away. I stand here too long with them, and they would soon be blinded. The fog helps, and the cold . . . is keeping you from burning any more.”

“Any . . . more.”

There was sorrow written into his whole posture. “A few moments with me would have been enough. Even with silver armour, you were not made for this place. They sent you down there to die. You will die, soon. That was why I tried to make you leave. I’m so sorry, brave witch.”

“But I’m not burned. I feel . . .”

“Not that kind of burn.”

She watched him for a moment, halfway to amused. “All my life, physicians have told me what I cannot do. I don’t believe you are much different, sir. I’m made of better alloys than you might think.”

Wholly unexpectedly, he smiled. “Really? Well, that would be some fine witching indeed.” He studied her, but then his black eyes flicked out to the snow and fen, as if he had heard something.

After a few seconds, she did too.

Hoofbeats thundered on the ground. That horrible thump and chink of heavy armour. Guttural French voices calling to each other. She didn’t understand. It was somewhere between Latin and Norse, and the knights who spoke it were a terrible mixture of the most frightening sides of both too, Romans and Northmen, the discipline of one and the savagery of the other. The old crack in her femur started to throb anew.

Someone must have told the garrison that something was happening here.

“We have to go,” she said. “They’ll burn this whole town. They’ve burned half of England.”

“Have they,” he said.

He looked into the fog, and she knew then that he could see through it as if it wasn’t there. Snow eddied around him, coiling the ends of his hair. “Yes, I see.” His eyes came back to her, and to the Hreoda, still singing, still covering their eyes, still facing away from him. “Well, I will not hurt you any more than I already have, but there are other things to be done.”

“Other things?” she whispered, because the knights were close: they must almost have been at the edge of the shallow water between Hreodwater and the fen. Shallow enough for them to ride across.

He pointed through the fog.

Across the water, something was rising from the fen. Towers, walls, battlements, rooftops that gleamed like diamond—God, it was salt—stairways swooping up the gantries from nothing, a titan edifice pouring peat and water from its angles as it powered upward fully formed, a miracle castle, greater than a castle: a citadel labyrinth.

Alarmed shouts in French pierced the fog.

Just visible through all the clouding whiteness, a great portcullis slammed shut. She felt the bang through the ground. It shook the rivets of the silver armour.