Edge of Hope

"Give a child hope and you hand them something to be let down by. Give them none, and you've done the letting-down yourself."

I'd walked out to the rocks above Lake Gunlah to do my thinking, which was a poor habit in a place like Belkeep, where a think never turned up anything but more of what you already knew. The lake lay flat and grey below me, gone so still it had given up on moving—ice creeping in off the edges the way it skins a dam back home, except this one never thawed to prove me wrong. It was quiet enough out there to hear the blood going round in your own ears. Thirty-odd years I'd stood at edges like this and called it home, and not once had it looked the part. It looked like what it was: the last hard ground we'd backed ourselves onto, with nowhere left to run if it took a mind to have us as well.

Lewyyd Drikarsus, our Chief, had stood over this same water once and seen a place to make a stand—the far edge of things, past which lay only the sea and the cold and the giving-up. He wasn't wrong. Belkeep was more stone than soil, and every year we broke our backs trying to make it give something back: a crop, a catch, a season that didn't finish in a fresh row of slates. Mostly what it gave us was practice at going without. So we Guardians did what Guardians do—put ourselves into walls and roofs and stores, stood between our people and the weather, and called it a life.

Across the water the cottages sat low and close against the grey, hunched in together the way beasts stand with their backs to a wind. Smoke bled thin out of a few of them—too thin; we rationed what we burned the same as we rationed all else—up into a sky that hadn't made up its mind whether to snow. Somebody had dreamed this place once: a proper lakeside settlement, folk fishing off the rocks, children growing up with full bellies. You could still read the shape of the dream in how the houses were set out. You could read, just as plain, how far short of it we'd come.

The first flakes came down while I stood there, and I drew my coat—a great heavy thing, more hide than cloth—in tighter. The rock struck up cold through the soles of my Blundies. The cold in Belkeep isn't only weather; it gets in under a man and settles somewhere near the middle of him and stops there. My mind went where it always went in the cold: to Earth, to a sun that warmed your skin, to a sky that was blue the whole way up.

But it wasn't the cold that held me here, and I knew it. It was the pair of them—Freya and Fryar—born to this ground and bound to it, and me bound to them. Their mother had died handing them to it. Wherever they were was where I'd be. I stood at the water's edge and turned the old argument over one more time, duty in the one hand and a world I'd walked out of in the other, and came to no better answer than I ever did.

Then I heard it: the quick, uneven scuff of boots over the rocks, and under it a tune, hummed roughly in the direction of a melody. There was only one soul in all of Belkeep who came at the world like that, as though the cold were a thing you could out-cheerful. My face had gone to a grin before I'd told it to.

"Aren't you cold, Krid?" I asked, laughing at the sight of her—bare arms, skinny legs, winter boots two sizes too big, and not a shiver in the lot of it.

"I'm never cold!" she announced, with the flat certainty only a six-year-old can manage, and threw her arms up and spun on the spot to prove it.

I crouched to her height and opened my arms, and she barrelled into them the way she always did. "It's good to see you," I told her, and meant it to the bone. Krid was born here—Clivilius born and bred, not a scrap of Earth in her, no sun she'd ever stood under, no notion of anywhere but this. By rights a child raised on nothing but Belkeep ought to have been a small, grim thing. She was the flat opposite. God alone knew where she'd got it from.

She'd had it hard, even by our reckoning, which is saying a fair bit. When Sylvie died—Guardian Sylvie, the one we could least afford to lose—something went out of Belkeep that we never did get back. It wasn't only grief, though there was plenty of that. It was the Belkeep Winter proper: the thing that gets down into people over the long dark of a season, slows their thinking, hollows them out, sits them down in front of a wall for an hour and lets them call it rest. Sylvie's dying set it loose in the whole of us at once. Some walked out to the cliffs one grey morning and didn't come back, and there was a stretch there where I counted heads at first light not knowing what the tally would come to. We stopped bringing new souls through the Portal at all—no sense hauling a person into a place we couldn't swear to keep them breathing in. Krid lost what little family she had somewhere in the middle of all that; no one could tell you the exact shape of it, only that one week she belonged to someone and the next she belonged to everyone. The settlement raised her between one crisis and the next, passed her hand to hand like a warm thing nobody wanted to be the one to set down. And still she came over the rocks humming. I never did work out how.

"I've brought you back something," I said, and dug into my back pocket. Her eyes lit—that pure, greedy curiosity nothing had managed to grind out of her yet.

"Another surprise?" she breathed.

"Thought you might add this one to your collection." I opened my hand slow, the way you do to make a small thing feel like a big one, and let her see what lay in my palm—a small magnet, worked into the shape of an island.

I hadn't set out to bring it anywhere. It had come across on its own—stuck to Gladys's fridge when I'd opened the Portal against the door, carried through with me as though it had every right, and I'd found it on the cave floor and closed my fist on it before I'd worked out why.

"What is it?" she asked, lifting it off my palm with those careful fingers and turning it to the light.

"It's a place called Tasmania," I said, and watched her face. "It's where our next Guardian will come from."

"It is?" She looked at the little island as though it had begun, faintly, to glow.

"It is." I heard myself say it and didn't chase the thought that came in behind it—a woman, an island, and me not half a day gone from standing in her kitchen, steering her towards a door she didn't know was there. I let it go before it could put on a name.

My eye went past Krid to Freya, coming up over the rocks with her arms wrapped round herself against the chill. "Honestly, Freya," I called. "You're as bad as Krid."

Krid didn't wait to be told twice. She was off across the uneven ground towards Freya before I'd finished, holding the magnet up like a prize. "Freya! Look what Guardian Cody gave me!"

I hung back and watched the two of them, heads bent over that scrap of metal. Krid had lost near everything before she was old enough to feel the size of it, and she'd gone and found herself a fresh family in Freya—a big sister, a teacher, someone to trail about after. And Freya—Freya and Fryar both—were the whole of what Grace and I had wanted out of this place, back when we still let ourselves want things. Grace only ever held them the once, the two of them at her chest together, before the cold and the blood took her and left me the pair of them and no notion in the world of how to do it alone. Watching my girl now—gentle with that child, steady and strong and kind with it—the old ache came up the way it always did, hand in hand with the pride, the one never turning up in me without the other. Grace never got to see who they'd grow into. Wherever the dead fetch up, I hoped word reached her. I hoped she'd be proud.

"It's beautiful," Freya said, and when she looked up there was a warmth in her eyes that, in Belkeep, is worth a good deal more than it sounds.

"Chief Lewyyd wants a word," she said then, and the weight came back into her voice as she got to her feet. "He's up at the Council Cottage."

"And Fryar?" It was out of me before I could dress it in anything calmer.

She shook her head. "Not back."

The sky had gone the colour of an old bruise while we talked, the storm making up its mind. Freya looked at it, then at me. "Aren't you worried about him?"

"Course I am." There was no dressing that up either.

"Then send men out after him."

"Is that what the Chief wants me for?"

Freya let out a small, tired laugh, one that sat oddly on someone her age. "The Chief doesn't need your say-so to send men out. If he wanted them out, they'd already be gone."

"But he doesn't want them out."

"No." The laugh was gone. "He says we've lost too many already. Says Fryar had no business going out after that boat in the first place. Nobody comes back off those seas." She said it flat—a thing already decided, already grieved.

"You sound like you've talked yourself into burying him," I said, watching her, and the child too.

"I know he's—" Freya started, and the rest of it wouldn't come.

"Not dead," said Krid.

She said it the way she'd tell you the colour of a stone. I went down to her height again. "How do you know that?"

"Same way I do," Freya put in, before the girl could.

"And that is?"

"I don't know how to say it." Freya's hand went flat to her own chest. "I can just—"

"Feel him," Krid finished.

"Exactly," said Freya.

Freya and Fryar were twins; that she carried a thread of him in her, I could credit—I'd watched it run between them their whole lives. But Krid, feeling for a lad she was no blood to at all... I let it lie. The child felt him, and I was long past fool enough to tell her she couldn't. And the islands out there were riddled with caves. If Fryar had made land at all, he'd have found himself a hole to sit the storm out in. I held to that. It was that or the alternative, and I wasn't having the alternative.

"So if it's not Fryar," I said, "what does the Chief want with me? I've a hundred things need doing before dark."

"The next phase of the plan. He's got—"

I put a hand up before she could get rolling. I hadn't the stomach for a long sit picking over the plan, not with my son out in the coming weather. "Tell the Chief I'm on my way."

Freya gave me a look fit to strip paint—she'd heard me on my way to a good many things. "If you're on your way, walk down with me and tell him yourself."

"I need to do something first."

"Then I'll tell him you're not coming." She was already turning, already going, and the set of her shoulders said plainer than words what she made of me just then.

"Freya!" She stopped. "I'll come. I will."

She carried on down towards the cottages without another word, that dark hair of hers swinging—Grace's hair, near enough to catch me in the chest every time it did. Everything we'd lost, and everything we still stood to lose, walking away from me over the rocks.

Krid had held her ground through all of it, planted at my side, watching me out of those dark eyes that always seemed to know more than they'd any right to at six. "You'd best get in too," I told her, with a nod after Freya. "Go on."

"When will she be here?"

"Who?"

"The new Guardian."

It stopped me flat. I'd not said a word about the Guardian being a she. "How do you know it's a woman?"

Krid only shrugged, as though I'd asked how she knew snow was cold, and that was the whole of the answer I was getting. I looked at her a long moment—this small, bright thing who could feel a lost lad alive across a sea and name a stranger who hadn't yet come—and let it go. There'd be a time to go pulling at that thread; this wasn't it. I watched the small shape of her pick her way back over the rocks towards the cottage lights, still humming, that thin bright thread of a tune holding out against the whole grey weight of the place. Then the wind swung round and brought the first hard bite of the storm down off the ridge, and I left off watching the child and turned my mind to my son—out there in the failing light and the coming weather, alive or not depending on who you asked: the Chief, who'd already buried him, or the little one, who swore blind he wasn't gone.