‘I don’t know.’ His voice was shaking. ‘This is the first time I’ve ever been down here. I wanted to come down here, but I couldn’t.’ He swallowed.
‘Well, we’re both here now.’ She recalled Carson’s frequent words. ‘Everything the Elderlings did, they did for a reason.’ She turned in a half circle. Her boot snagged on something: a piece of dirty fabric. ‘Someone’s old tunic is down here. Did they throw garbage down here when the well went dry?’
‘No,’ he whispered. ‘No.’
She tugged at the dirt-caked folds. ‘Look. Here’s a glove. No. It’s a gauntlet.’ She picked it up by a fingertip, shook it free of dirt and sticks and studied it.
‘There’s the other one,’ he said, but made no move to touch it. He crouched with his back braced against the wall, watching her. She found the mate, and tugged it from under a stone that had trapped it. The stone rolled slightly and tapped against the wall with a hollow sound. She turned to look at it.
‘Amarinda,’ he said, and his voice choked on the word. She leaned closer. It was not a stone she had dislodged. It was a skull, brown and cracked. She stared, feeling the pressure of a scream build inside her. Then it died away to nothing. She took a long careful breath.
‘These were her gloves. For working the Silver.’
He nodded. She heard him gulp back tears before he gasped, ‘After the quake. I couldn’t find her. I was desperate. I even went to Ramose. I threatened him, and he finally told me that she might have gone down the well when it hit. To make it safe somehow. Everyone was running, trying to get on the boats, pushing toward the pillars, trying to be anywhere except in Kelsingra. In the distance, the mountain was smoking. They feared mudslides and floods. It had never happened here but other Elderling towns had been buried that way. So many people were fleeing, but I couldn’t go without you. I came here, but the mechanism was broken, half of it fallen down the shaft and no one answered my shouts. My shoulder was broken. I tried to move the debris but I couldn’t. I shouted myself hoarse, but no one answered. Then the second quake hit.’ He cradled his arm, his face creased with a memory of old pain. ‘I wanted to get down here somehow, to be sure. But I couldn’t. I went back to our home, hoping to find you. Someone told me they had seen you, leaving through one of the pillars. I knew it was a lie, knew you wouldn’t leave without me, but I hoped it wasn’t. I left you a message in my column by our door. And I went with the others.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘We all meant to come back. We knew the streets would mend themselves and that the walls would heal if we gave them time. The Silver in them told them what they must be.’
His voice died away. He looked around the well shaft blindly.
‘I must have died before I ever returned. Where or how, I’ll never know. After the message I left for you, no other memories are stored in the pillars. Nothing from me. Nothing from you.’
Thymara straightened slowly. She shook the gauntlets and the last stick that fell from them was a finger-bone. The broken sticks under her feet were in fact thin ribs preserved by the cold. ‘Is this why you made me come down here? To see this, to prove she died here?’
He shook his head. Her eyes had adjusted to the pale light the jewellery made, but there was no colour to his features, only planes and shadows. ‘I wanted you to be her. That’s true. I still want that. We always dreamed that we would live again in another Elderling couple. That we would walk and dance and dine together. Make love in our garden again. That was why we made the columns as we did.’ He drew a deep breath and sighed it out. ‘But that’s not why I brought you here. I brought you here for the dragons. And for Malta and Reyn and their child. For Tintaglia. For all of us. We need the Silver, Thymara. A bit of dragon blood or a scale can start the changes. But to sustain them, to move them in directions that let us live, that will let our children live? That will take Silver.’
She knew that. It didn’t change the facts. ‘There’s no Silver down here, Rapskal. Only bones.’
She found she had slipped the ring on her finger. It hung loose against her knuckle. Not her ring. The jidzin against her skin whispered secrets she didn’t want to hear.
‘You used to tend this well. You and some of the other artisans. You spoke of managing it. I thought …’
‘I don’t remember any of this, Rapskal.’ She slapped the gauntlets against her thigh, and tried to push them through the loop in her gear belt. She wasn’t wearing one.