They bound the pilgrim with wet rope and put him in the root cellar under the mill, and Lysa went down to see to the cut on his mouth because she could not help herself. He did not wake. His breathing was slow and even, and the grey cord at his waist lay across his belly like a sleeping snake. Brannoch cut it off him with a pair of shears and burned it in the forge. It did not burn the way wool should. It went up in a thin grey flame that gave no heat, and the smoke it threw off smelled of cold stone and wet ash, and for a moment every person in the smithy felt the grief again, faint and far off, like the ache of a tooth that has already been pulled.
"A tether," Brannoch said, when the flame had died. He wiped his hands on his apron slowly. "That is what that was. Something on one end, and something on the other. Whoever wore it was tied to him."
He did not need to say who him was.
By noon the whole village knew about the pilgrim, and by evening it knew that the pilgrim had not been alone. Harl Dunmore's boy had gone up to the north ridge to bring in a strayed ewe, and he had come down at a dead run with his face the colour of milk. There were lights on the far slope, he said. Grey lights, no brighter than glow-worms, set in a long line along the ridge-top, spaced as evenly as a surveyor's stakes. They did not flicker. They did not move. They only waited.
Dessa heard him out, and nodded once, and sent him home to his mother.
"Well," she said, to no one in particular. "That settles one question."
Serath asked to speak with Orrin alone.
They sat on the edge of the well in the last of the daylight, with the square emptied around them and every door in the village shut and every shutter drawn, though Orrin could feel eyes against the cracks. The god had not moved all day. He sat with his hands loose in his lap and his bare feet on the cobbles, and the shadow beneath him had grown, if anything, heavier. It lay on the stones in a dense, dark pool, and along its edges the frost had begun to form in pale lace-work, spreading outward a hand's breadth at a time.
"You are angry with me," said Serath.
"I'm not angry." Orrin turned the question over honestly and found it was true. "I don't know what I am. You walked into my village and said you were a god and asked me to kill you. And then a man with a knife came and said you could not die. And now there are lights on the ridge." He looked down at his hands. "I think I'm still waiting to be angry. It hasn't come yet."
"It will," said Serath, with a kind of gentle certainty. "It will come on the road, I think. But I would rather you were angry at me, and knew why, than calm and ignorant." He turned his face toward the fading sky. "I will tell you my terms, Orrin Vale. I will tell them plainly, and then you may do with them what you like."
He held up one long, pale finger.
"First. I cannot be killed by any weapon you have seen or heard of. Not by iron, not by fire, not by water or poison or fall. I have tried all of these, and some you would not wish to hear about. There is one place in the world where an end can be made of me, and one only. It is called the Hollow Altar. It stands at the edge of the Ashen Marches, in the far north, three weeks' walk from here if the roads hold. It was built, I am told, by those who first understood what we had become, and it was built for this. I cannot go there alone. I do not have the strength. It takes everything I have to keep from simply sitting down in the road and staying there."
A second finger.
"Second. You will have to carry me, in a way. Not on your back, though there may be days when that will be nearly true. I mean that I must travel in your shadow. The thing I carry is too large for me to bear to the Altar alone, and it has attracted attention. The grey lights on the ridge are the first of many. Others will come for me, and they will come for you because you are with me. I will not lie about that. I am asking you to put yourself in the way of a great deal of danger."
A third finger.
"Third. When we reach the Altar, the choice will be yours. Not mine. I will not compel you, and I will not trick you, and if at the last moment you stand before me and say no, I will not, then I will go back down the road with you and trouble you no further." His voice dropped. "But I think you will understand, by then, why I came to you. And I think you will not say no."
Orrin was silent a long time. The frost lace had reached his boots, and he could feel the chill through the leather.
"What's the price?" he said.
Serath looked at him with surprise. "I beg your pardon?"
"There's always a price. My mother taught me that. If somebody asks you for something enormous and tells you there's no catch, there's a catch." He lifted his eyes. "What is it? What happens to me?"
For the first time since he had walked into the square, the god seemed to hesitate. His ember-red eyes flickered, and he lowered his hand, and the shadow beneath him gave a small, sick lurch, like a heavy sack settling on a cart.
"I will not lie to you," Serath said slowly. "That is the one promise I will keep, whatever else I cannot. But I will tell you honestly that there is a part of the truth I am not yet willing to say aloud. Not because I wish to deceive you. Because I do not think you could bear it yet, and I would rather you reached it yourself, at the end of the road, with your own eyes. It is not a trick. It is a mercy, and perhaps a cowardly one." His long mouth bent. "I will tell you this much. Something will pass to you. When I die, it will not simply vanish. I have been a long time in the world, and nothing in it simply vanishes. It goes somewhere. I am asking you to be the place it goes."
"Something," Orrin said.
"Something."
"That's not an answer."
"No," said Serath. "It is not. I am sorry."
They sat in silence. A bird, the first Orrin had heard in four days, began to sing from a rooftop, a small thin broken sound, and then stopped as though it had remembered something.
"If you do not believe me," the god said, "I can show you a little. Only a little. Enough that you will know what I am asking you to carry. Give me your hand."
The whole of Orrin's body told him not to. His hand lifted anyway.
Serath's fingers closed over his, and they were not cold. That was the first surprise. They were warm, almost feverish, the warmth of a person who has been ill for a very long time. Then the world fell away.
He was standing in a field he did not know, in rain, and there was a body lying face-down in the mud at his feet. A soldier, young, with the red coat of some army that no longer existed. Nobody was coming for him. Nobody would ever come. Orrin knew that, with the flat, enormous certainty of a thing felt in the bones, and the weight of that knowing came down on his chest like a stone slab.
He was in a bed in a cold room, and an old woman was dying beside him, and her last word was a name, and no one was left alive who knew whose name it was.
He was a child in a burning house.
He was a thousand, a hundred thousand, all the lonely endings of all the world, one after another after another, a river of unmarked graves running through him, and it did not stop, it would not stop, it was so heavy, it was so heavy, and somewhere very far away a voice that might have been his own was saying enough, enough, I cannot, and he understood that it was not his voice at all.
Then the hand was gone, and he was back on the cobbles of the square, on his hands and knees, retching, with frost across his sleeves and the dusk gone deep around him. Serath was crouching beside him with one pale hand hovering uselessly above his back.
"I am sorry," the god said hoarsely. "I am so sorry. I should not have. It was too much."
But Orrin was already moving. He pushed himself up with his arms shaking, and sat back on his heels, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His eyes were wet. He did not think he had been crying, but his face was wet all the same. When he looked up at the god, his own voice came out raw and steady.
"That's all of it?" he said. "That's what you carry?"
"That was a drop," said Serath, very quietly. "That was a single drop from the sea. Nobody ever spoke over them, Orrin Vale. Nobody ever said, 'you were here, and it mattered.' It is all they ever wanted."
Orrin stared at him. The cold had gone out of his hands. He felt strangely clear, the way a field is clear after a storm has passed over it. And in that clearness he understood, without being told, that the god in front of him had been walking under that weight for longer than the village had existed, and had not once put it down.
"I haven't said yes," he said.
"I know."
"I haven't said no."
"I know that, too."
Orrin got slowly to his feet. Behind them, across the square, a door had opened a crack, and a thin line of lamplight lay across the stones. Someone stood in it, small and still. His mother.
"Then give me tonight," Orrin said. "I'm not carrying a god across the world on a guess. I need to talk to my village."