A Line in the Sand

"There's a line you don't cross, even to save everyone. Especially then."

I'd been on my knees a long while by the time she found me—long enough that they'd stopped hurting and gone to a dull, numb ache I could lean into. I was picking the glass out of the snow one shard at a time, the big pieces first, feeling along the cold ground with my fingers for the small ones and setting them into my palm as I went. It was slow work, and there was no need of it being done that hour, or that day, but it kept my hands moving, and while my hands moved I didn't have to do anything else. I couldn't have told you whether it was still night up above or come round to morning. There's no telling, down in the Portal Cave, past where the lamplight gives out. Time gets to be just whatever you're feeling. And what I was feeling had no clock on it, and no bottom to it either.

"Whoa. What happened in here?"

Her voice came down off the walls and found me before I was ready to be found. I hadn't heard her on the path—she moves quiet, Freya, always has—and now here she was, and here I was, on my knees in the ruin I'd made of the place, with a face I didn't want her seeing. I kept it turned away. Some cowardly part of me reckoned that if I didn't look at her, she couldn't properly look at me.

"It's nothing," I said, to the floor, and reached for the next piece.

She didn't believe me, and she didn't say so. She came across the stone careful of where the glass had scattered and lowered herself onto a shelf of rock a little apart from me—close, but not crowding, the way you'd settle down near a dog that's had a fright. "Come and sit," she said.

"Someone'll open their hand on this if I leave it lying about." I still didn't look up. It was a lie, or near enough—nobody comes down here but me, and I could've swept the lot into a crack in the floor in two minutes flat. The truth was I couldn't be still. If I stopped, I'd have to sit in it, and sitting in it was the one thing I hadn't the stomach for.

"Hmph." She let a moment go by. "Looks to me like there's someone already opened himself up pretty good, and it's not going to be helped by picking up glass."

That got me. I sat back on my heels and looked at her at last, and whatever my face was doing—the eyes gone raw and swollen, I could feel that much, the skin tight and sore with it—it told her the whole of the story before I'd said a word. She didn't look away from it, and she didn't cover it over with a kindness. She just waited.

"I don't know what came over me," I said. My hand closed round the glass it held, and opened, and closed again, of its own accord. "I was that angry, Freya. Angry like I've not let myself be in twenty years. Angry like it frightened me."

"I can see that." She tipped her head at the pile of it in my palm, and there was the ghost of something dry in it—not quite a joke, but the shape of one, thrown to me like a rope over water.

I didn't take it. "No," I said. "It's worse than the bottle."

She went still. "Worse how?"

And there it was—the thing I'd been on my knees an entire night not saying. But Freya was the one soul left in either world who'd hear the worst of me and not get up and walk out of the cave, and a thing you won't say out loud doesn't go anywhere. It just grows down there in the dark, roots and all. So I said it.

"I nearly took her. Last night. I stood over Gladys in her own bed and I nearly picked her up and carried her through the Portal against her will—and told myself I was saving her while I did it."

Her breath left her in a rush. For a moment the steadiness went out of her and she was just a young woman hearing that her father had nearly done a monstrous thing. "You—how? Why would you ever—"

"I panicked." Then I stopped, because that was a clean, small word, and there had been nothing clean or small about it. "No. I came apart. I walked into her dark house expecting nothing, and I found two glasses and two bottles and a sound coming out of her room, and I came apart at the seams like something gone rotten."

I gave up on the glass then. There was no more hiding in it. I got up off my aching knees and crossed to the rock and sat myself down beside her, close, the cold of the stone striking straight up through me, and I told her the whole of it. All of it—what I'd seen, and what I'd let myself believe about it, and how I'd gone into that room, and what my hands had done before the lightning showed me I'd had every last bit of it wrong. I didn't spare myself in the telling. I'd done enough sparing of myself for one night.

She heard all of it without once flinching from me, which was a harder thing to sit under than any telling-off would have been. When I'd run dry she reached over and laid her hand flat against my cheek. Her palm was warm—the only warm thing in that whole cold cave, it felt like—and she held it there, the way you'd steady a face that couldn't hold itself up, and she looked at me not like a Guardian and not like a fool but like her father.

"Don't you give up on Gladys," she said. "If you love her—and you do, I can see that you do—and if you believe in your bones she's the one meant to stand at your side, then you don't give up on her. Not over this. Not over a jealous night and a broken bottle."

I wanted to believe her. I was too raw to manage it. "There were two glasses," I said, as if the two glasses were an argument that settled the whole matter. "Two bottles."

"It means she had company for an evening. A friend, a neighbour, her sister—someone to sit and drink a bottle of wine with of an evening. It doesn't mean the thing you've spent all night down here torturing yourself with. You've built a whole betrayal out of a bit of glassware." She said it plain and certain, the way you'd tell a spooked dog the thunder had moved off—not arguing with the fear, just quietly refusing to feed it.

"It was my bottle." That was the part I couldn't get past, and it came out of me small and childish, and I heard how it sounded and couldn't stop it. "The one I'd been keeping, Freya. It was going to be the one I opened the night I finally told her all of it—about me, about here, about you and your brother. And she drank it down to the dregs with somebody whose name I'll never know."

Freya looked at me a long moment, weighing whether I was ready to be handed something simple. "Then ask her," she said. Gently, like it was the most obvious thing in the world—and to her, I suppose, it was; she'd not yet learned how good grown people get at making the simple things impossible. "Just ask her, Dad."

"Ask her." I turned it over like a foreign coin.

"Ask her straight out whether she had somebody with her last night. You've known the woman long enough now to hear the truth in her when she gives it—or the lie in her, if it's a lie. Either way you'll have your answer. And either way it beats sitting down here in the dark deciding the worst of her on the strength of two wine glasses."

She was right, and I knew she was right, and instead of saying so I let the worst thing in me open its mouth. That's how it goes when you're worn down past your own defences—the ugliest part of you gets to the door first. "And if it is the truth?" I said. "If she won't have me? If she won't be one of us?" And then, lower, because I couldn't hold it back: "She's the leverage, Freya. She's how we bring Luke to us. I need her whether she loves me or not."

The warmth went out of her face like a lamp turned down by a hand. I watched it go. She took her palm from my cheek, and the cold came straight back into the place where it had been. "Tell me that's not the reason you want her here," she said, and there was an edge on her voice I had never once heard her turn on me in all her years. "Tell me you are not sitting there planning to prise two sisters apart from one another to save your own skin."

"It's for the greater good." Even to my own ear the words rang like a cracked bell, false all the way down. "It would give Luke a reason to come looking. A reason to find us. To find all of us."

She came up off the rock. "If I had a bottle of my own right now, Dad, I'd be putting it through that wall an inch from where yours went." Her arm flung out at the wreck of it on the floor. "Have you listened to yourself? Have you sat still one single minute and heard the shape of what you're saying out loud?"

I felt my face go. There's no describing the particular weight of your own child looking at you like you've let her down—it settles into all the old lines of a face and drags them lower, and mine are cut deep enough to hold a great deal of it. I was ashamed, right down to the ground, and there's no old face on this earth that hides that well.

She saw it land, and it took the fight out of her the way it always did—she could never stay angry at me for long, and I've never rightly known whether that's a mercy in her or a fault. She let a breath go and came down off her anger and spoke to me softer. "I know," she said. "I know you're tired. I know you're lonely. I know you've had this whole place roped to your back for thirty years and forgotten a body's allowed to set a thing down now and again. But you hear me. If Gladys comes to Belkeep, she comes to the truth of it. All of it. No tricks. No walking her where you've already decided she ought to go. And for the love of every soul we've got left up on that lake—no carrying anybody through a Portal in the dark."

A smile got out of me before I could stop it, small and tired but real enough. She had a way of laying a thing out so square and so plain there wasn't a gap left anywhere in it to crawl through—and I'd spent the better part of my life finding gaps. She'd had that in her since she was tiny. Her mother had it too.

"Gladys deserves better than to be tricked into loving this place," she said. And then she said the other thing, and she said it quiet, with no heat left in it at all—which is how I knew it was the truest thing she'd said yet, and the one she'd come all the way down here to say. "And I deserve a father who wouldn't do it."

That went in where none of the rest had. All her anger I could stand under; I'd earned it, and anger you can weather. But that—the plain, quiet fact of my own daughter telling me she deserved a better man than the one kneeling in front of her—that took the legs clean out from under whatever I'd still been holding onto. Because she was right. She'd always deserved better than she'd got, the both of them had, raised on a frozen rock by a man half-hollowed out with grief—and here she was turning out good all the same, turning out kind, asking me for the one thing a child ought never to have to ask a parent for: to be someone worth looking up to.

"You're right," I said. It came out on the tail of a breath I felt like I'd been holding all night. "You're right. I've gone selfish and frightened in my old age, and I've been calling it duty because duty's the easier thing to live with."

She came back and sat herself down against my side, shoulder to my arm, tucked in close the way she used to when she was small and the wind came screaming down over the valley and the little ones would pile in against whoever was nearest for the warmth of him. She was a grown woman now, and it was me leaning on her, and we both of us knew it.

"You've a good heart, Dad," she said. "There was never a thing wrong with your heart. You just lean on it too hard, is all, till it buckles under you. Be honest with her. Be honest with your own self. And then let the thing land wherever it's going to land, and stop trying to force the whole world into the shape you need it to be in."

"I'll tell her," I said. "All of it. Everything I am."

"When?"

"Soon." It came out with less iron in it than either of us wanted, and she heard that.

She took both my hands and folded them up in her lap and held them there, and her grip was stronger than any hands that size had a right to be—her mother's grip, that was, the kind that doesn't let go of a thing until it's good and ready. "Until you're ready, then," she said. "And in the meantime—if you truly believe, the way you've told us your whole lives you believe, that this Luke Smith is the one—"

"I do." That one needed no thinking on. It was about the only certainty I had left.

"Then help him," she said. "Properly. Any way you can, whatever it costs you. If he's the Guardian you've spent my whole life promising us he is, then he'll come looking for Belkeep of his own accord in the end—Gladys or no Gladys, sisters or no sisters, tricks or none of it. You have never once needed to break a single soul to make the right thing happen, Dad. You just forgot it for a night."

I looked at her a good long while then—my girl, full grown, sat in a freezing cave with her father's ruined bottle glittering all round her boots, telling the old fool how to be a decent man again—and it was Grace I saw looking back out of her. Grace to the life. The same steadiness. The same way of walking straight up to the true thing and putting her hand flat on it while the rest of us were still talking round the edges of it. "You've got your mother's head on your shoulders," I said, and my voice went on me a little. "Her sense. Her backbone. She would be so proud of the woman you've made of yourself, Freya. She'd not believe her own eyes."

"And my father's soft heart," she said, and there was a smile in it now, small and warm, breaking through the last of the weather. "The pair of you, gone into the one person. Somebody had to end up carrying both. Might as well have been me."

I squeezed her hands where they held mine, and for the first time since I'd fallen out of that Portal and gone to pieces on the floor of my own cave, I felt something in me come up off its knees and stand. Not fixed—nothing was fixed. Gladys was still a wound I'd have to walk back into. Belkeep was still dying by inches up on its lake. Fryar was still out on those seas somewhere with nothing but a child's certainty to say he was alive at all. But the ground was back under me, and it was my daughter who'd put it there.

"All right," I said. "All right, then. I'll help Luke—the right way, the honest way, and no other. You have my word on it. And my word still counts for something, whatever else I've let go to ruin."