“Fray! Saint Fray!”
Hold on.
Saint?
Fray’s not sure when that started happening.
He’s heard hero and gallant and even champion—all of them kind of feel like too much—but saint is new. Sainthood seems really excessive.
He was not consulted on this.
Fray stops in his tracks, peering over a heavily-obscured shoulder to see who’s calling. His new scarf, all wool and possum fur, feels wonderfully like sitting in a sauna, but it’s terribly bulky with his pack in the mix. It might be too big. He doesn’t cut an impressive figure in it. But then, he never does. Behind him, squeezing between frozen-over remains of archaic vehicles in the narrow alleyway with all the grace of a puppy, comes—ah. Of course.
Andrei.
Fray turns, eyebrows cocked as Andrei halts his bulk bare inches in front of him. Fray is short, but Andrei’s ridiculous. Six and a half feet, top-heavy, all muscle he’s never done a thing to earn as far as Fray can tell. Deep pockets and a deeper voice. Sort of cute with his gold hair and dimples, but not Fray’s type. Still, he’s nice enough. If nothing else he’s bought his way into Fray’s good graces with beer after beer at the Manufacturing. “You’re so fast,” Andrei complains, leaning on his knees. “Gimme a second.”
So: Fray shoves his hands in his pockets and thinks through his agenda. He’s not in a rush. The tailor’s doesn’t close for hours yet. The yotes that have apparently found a way to worm their frozen bodies under the wardings and onto the Merchants’ land won’t come out until the shifts change. He’ll work dinner into the middle somewhere. He’s got time for whatever this is.
There’s another thing about Andrei that Fray likes. When Fray tugs off his top pair of mittens to free the thin-gloved fingers underneath and signs S-A-I-N-T?, he can see Andrei focus on his hands, lips jutting out in his concentration. Andrei is nowhere near fluent, probably will never be, but being able to sort-of read what may as well be Fray’s first language goes a long way in endearing Andrei to him.
“Um,” Andrei says. “Are you not? That’s what they’re calling you.”
Fray squints at him. Signs: T-H-E-Y?
“The Children?”
It always takes Fray a moment to realize people usually say Children with a capital “C” around here. His face twists up in a grimace, and he shakes his head no emphatically. W-H-Y?
“Don’t know,” Andrei says, guileless as always. “I won’t say it no more, if you like.” At Fray’s resigned, bewildered shrug, he goes on, “Well, but, I’m glad I caught you!” With this he claps a huge hand on Fray’s shoulder, the blow barely cushioned by the thick layers of wool. Fray staggers instantly, unprepared knees almost buckling. Andrei yelps and helps him regain his feet. “Sorry! Sorry! Here, this is it, this is all, look, my sister got these and I thought to myself, you know who’d love that? Fray, that’s who! Lucky thing we crossed paths!”
The thing he shoves in Fray’s face smells like heaven. He starts salivating like a damn dog. It locks Fray in place momentarily as he tries to regain control of himself (it wouldn’t do to advertise how easily won over by food he is), but he might as well not have bothered. “It’s doughnuts,” Andrei tells him, conspiratorial. “Like at the market that time. You know?”
Fray remembers. A wagon on the merchant circuit pulled by four aurochs. The overpowering smell of fried dough drawing him nearly straight from his house. Standing in line for thirty minutes when Andrei pulled him in. Finally being handed the paper bag, transluscent with oil and steaming hot, and looking into it to see not just the miniature doughnuts, but for the first time he can remember since Before—sugar.
It had been physically painful for him to keep himself from cramming the whole thing into his mouth. Instead he forced himself to savor it. That had almost been worse, it turned out, because now his memory of it was such that he does not think anything will ever near its equal.
Andrei had said they were pretty good doughnuts.
Fray stares at the oil-soaked paper that Andrei holds level with his eyes, and before he can quite stop himself he looks from bag to man with naked want on his face. He points at himself with a disbelief that is exaggerated both to be clear enough for Andrei to pick up on, and as a show of his genuine surprise and delight. He probably does look like a dog, waiting for a treat. That’s fine. Fray knows what he is about.
Andrei, generous enough to overlook how Fray is practically vibrating, pushes the bag into his hands with a lopsided grin. “You bet! I remembered how much you liked them—oh, no, no,” he cuts himself off when he sees Fray pull out his wallet. “It’s a gift!”
Fray looks at the bag again, to Andrei again, to the bag once more. He gets it settled in his off-hand so he can use the other. W-H-Y?
“Well, because we’re friends, twerp,” Andrei says with the kind of smile that Fray can only read as knew you’d say that. Because this has happened before.
Because Fray kind of doesn’t … do friends.
Not on purpose. He’d rather if he did have friends. It just seems like it never quite sticks. It’s not unusual for him to be hailed in the street by someone grateful for some favor or other he’s gone and done for them months ago, something he’s already forgotten. But those aren’t friends. Or at least, he’s pretty sure they aren’t. Lots of people ask him for favors after what happened. But there just seems to be something about him that keeps people from wanting to stay too long, on the whole. It’s not too much of a surprise, what with his silence and the intensity in everything he does. Even at home, Before, his fellow servicemen would rib him for concentrating everything in his being on the smallest things. A few of them called it a turn-off.
But Andrei doesn’t seem to care, or even notice, and Fray is thankful for that.
Fray pulls the bag closer to his chest and lets the fried smell warm him inside and out. He works his face into something he hopes looks appropriately sheepish in answer to Andrei’s admonishment. “Thanks,” he signs, because he’s pretty sure Andrei knows that one. (He does, by the way he beams.) Fray adds, afterwards, F-A-V-O-R-I-T-E.
“Hell, Fray, you’re my favorite too,” Andrei says with amusement. Before Fray can correct him—tell him he meant the doughnuts—Andrei straightens and sticks his hands into his armpits against the cold. “Hoo! Bad as witch piss out here. I’ve got to be getting. See you at Manufacturing tomorrow night? I hear there’s going to be new music!”
Fray nods, giving up on the favorite comment. Sure, Andrei might as well be his favorite person. He likes him well enough. It’s not like there’s anyone else, anymore.
He doesn’t get swarmed just trying to cross the dome anymore, at least. That had been a problem last year. Far Haven has a scant few hundred souls to its name, and Fray is sure every single one of them has talked to him at one point or another by now. It drove him into hiding for a while, nerves shot with so much attention. The flocks of opinionated strangers died off only with time, as memories and emotions faded and what he’d done drifted out of the city’s mind.
Saving the lives of every one of those few hundred souls takes some time to drift.
These days he’ll only get a few hangers-ons, most of them children who want to see the sword. The children do not get to see the sword. Fray tries to prevent anyone from seeing the sword in general, because the sight of it draws questions that he doesn’t know how to answer anymore. This has never deterred them, of course, and he cannot bring himself to frighten off kids. It’s not uncommon to see Fray making his steadfast way through snow or tunnels with three or four ragamuffins tailing him, telling each other stories of the thing their parents say he did. Fray never confirms (or denies) anything.
That’s happening now, as a matter of fact.
“I heard you’s killed the thieves dead!” says a gap-toothed girl at least ten years younger than him, but nearly as tall. She reminds him of one of the cadets he’d taken a shining to in his first year of conscription. As soon as he has the thought he hastens to tuck it away. “I heard there was forty of ’em!”
“Nuh-uh! It was three! But they were big and scary and frostbitted!” This from a blond-haired boy with huge glasses and a mouth entombed by a scarf.
“You jokers gotta get your stories straight,” says that absolute goblin of a red-head girl with the false arm. Her voice is like a vulture croaking. “Short stuff, hey! Mr. Hero! You were there, weren’tcha? Cough up the details!”
She’s all but dog-piled by the other two. “Mr. Fray can’t talk!” protests the boy. “Because he got hit in the throat by the frostbitted!”
“Horseshit, I see him talk. Came saw my dad about maps and shit last week, didn’t he? He talks. Not a lot, maybe. You guys think he’s too stupid to say much or just stuck-up?”
“Definitely stupid,” says Fray in the painful scrape of his rusted-over voice, loud enough to catch all three of them off guard. There’s a shocked silence until he looks back at them and winks, and then giggles from the other two kids send up after him like a train of bubbles.
They peel off when he descends the iced-over stairs that will take him to the underground crafters’ bloc. Just as well. Fray pauses in the dark overhang of the passageway to pull his scarf down and palm his throat. The heat from his hand does little against the stain of discolored skin, blanched pale and blue against his dusky skin. It bleeds down his neck like a port-wine stain, a slashed jugular bleeding ice.
Fray thinks he is probably supposed to be dead, with the way that ice-white blemish hugs his neck. The skin is cold and hard in a way skin should not be, and it glitters at him whenever he looks at it in the mirror, like crusted snow.
Well. Nothing to be done. Fray fixes his scarf and pushes his way into the relative heat of the bloc.
He gets courteous nods and a smile or two on his way through the tunnels. Warm air licks at his face as he at last pushes into the tailor’s, smelling pleasantly of ironed fabric. He sighs in relief, stopping for a moment to relish it as it caresses his ears and cheeks. The shuffle of cloth and leather draws him out of his reverie for but a moment, long enough to cast a glance toward where Elle’s apprentice sticks her head out from the back. “Oh! Mr. Fray! Got more?”
Fray gives her an apologetic nod, unshouldering his pack to pull it open. From within he produces no less than five shirts, all of them damaged in exactly the same place and exactly the same way. Each one is black—that’s the first thing he figured out after he lost his specialized gear, not to wear anything but black against his skin—and each one has roundish-squarish holes burned into the same spots on the forearms and back. They’re as big as eggs, two on his left arm, one on his right, and three larger ones in a line down the spine, all identical and evenly spaced. Each has the remnants of half a dozen prior repairs. Elle’s apprentice looks the garments over and tuts. He should really try to get her name. “There won’t be much of these left to repair at this rate, you know,” she scolds. “One day I’m going to refuse you until you at least tell me how you keep getting them.”
Fray nods and has the decency to look embarrassed.
She scoots him out posthaste, telling him to return in two days. He should learn how to repair his own clothes, he thinks as he heads back into the tunnels. It’d be a way to pass the time if nothing else. And to avoid awkward questions.
That’s all Fray has in front of him for the rest of the day: passing the time. He meanders through the crafters’ bloc and the noisy Merchants’ district, eating his doughnuts. He picks up and loses more trails of children, none of whom get to see the sword. He finds lunch in the form of beaver steak and turnips at that place that has a jester on its sign. He pings back and forth slowly between shop after shop, recognized at each one, buying nothing.
Mostly he thinks, stopping at a mirror in one store to surreptitiously peek beneath his scarf again: this frost thing would have looked cooler if it had gone over my heart.
It’s the kind of thought that makes him feel oddly guilty. What a thing to be worried over, whether or not the injury that should have killed him looks good or not, but Fray is nothing if not vain. It’s the one thing basic training couldn’t work out of him, to his embarrassment. To his further shame, it was the first part of him to show itself again when he settled in Far Haven. He spent the first coins he ever earned on a hairbrush.
The day wanes on, and eventually Fray drags himself out of the stale air of the tunnels and into the biting wind of aboveground. He’s nearly to Merchant grounds when he’s waylaid by a tall, dark woman with wide eyes, the most visible thing in her bundled-up face. “Aren’t you the one who saved the city?” she says, breathless. “From that break-in?”
This is one of those questions where the answer makes him feel like a jackass, no matter how factual it is. He wants to add qualifiers, to tell her just doing my part. But he shrugs anyway, meekly; a non-answer that has been one of his most-abused luxuries since settling here. The vibes on this woman aren’t great. He’s not sure how much he wants to admit to her.
Her wide eyes go wider, until Fray thinks they might eclipse the rest of her face. “Saint,” she breathes, all awe and devotion. Fray almost cringes. “The Children are with you.”
He doesn’t know how to react until he remembers to capitalize that “C”. Oh. One of them. One of those cuckoos that worships the arcane frost that sits outside their little dome waiting to kill anyone it can. Fray gives her a weak smile and hopes it’s not very encouraging. “I would walk with you, Saint,” the woman says, catching up his left hand as she slips to his side. “Allow me to feel your presence.”
Oh, son of a bitch.
There are people you do not want to piss off, and those people are the Children of the Frost. They’re a religion? Cult? Club? Something. They’re fans of the cold nightmare outside this pocket of suvivability. Really into Frostbitten, he thinks. Most of them seem a little moonblinked. Unfortunately for him and everyone else, they’ve wormed their way into the council seats. They run half of Far Haven. It makes him long for the efficient, sensible leadership of home.
She starts walking before Fray can pull back, and as she is nearly as tall as Andrei, she does a marvelous job of pulling Fray along like one of those toy ducks on wheels. She’s power walking, even. They’re still headed where he needs to go, to the outer bounds of the dome, but there are fewer and fewer people here as witnesses. Fray does not love that. Fray’s of the belief that the Children need babysitters.
There’s just one person left in sight when Fray finally locks his knees and digs his heels in. He pulls his hand away and the woman rounds on him with alarming speed. “Something the matter?” she asks sweetly, looming.
Fray puts his hands up and shakes his head, then throws a thumb over his shoulder. I need to go that way. He could get to the Merchants’ from here, yes, but he could get there from a couple streets over, too, and those streets have lights. And people. It’s not that he feels in danger—Fray very rarely feels like he’s in danger from anything—but something about this is making his skin crawl.
The woman watches him with eyes that seem much too large for her skull. “Oh, of course,” she says, as if in a daze. “But, brother in the snow, would you grant me one favor?”
Well. He’s the favor guy. It would probably not go over well if he turned down what is evidently such a big fan. He makes a point of not actually nodding, but he does pause and wait to hear her request.
The woman says, “May I see it?” Her voice trembles. “Your kiss?”
Fray mouths the words what the fuck? before he can stop himself.
“Your mark?” the woman tries again, grabbing the plush fabric of his coat when he tries to back away. “The gift the frost left you. Grant me this, let me gaze upon it, Saint Fray of the Frost.”
Before he can think better of it Fray pulls her hands off with a firm grasp, and squares his shoulders before he shakes his head. To emphasize his point he crosses his arms in front of him, the universal gesture for no. No on several levels. No on the levels of stop-calling-me-that and who-the-fuck-are-you-anyway.
“I understand,” the woman says after a long pause. She sounds a million miles away. Her hand lifts again, drawn toward his disheveled scarf as if it was magnetized. “At least then allow me to fix your wardrobe.” Her fingertips brush the very edge of the scarf. The hair on the back of Fray’s neck prickles and shivers, and that’s his signal to leave.
By rights he should have been out of there before she could manage anything. He would have been, except his foot slips on the iced-over cobbles when he tries to retreat. The woman’s fingers sink into his scarf and it tears away in her hand as he pratfalls hard. The cold air strikes like a serpent at his exposed throat, and he swears he actually sees the glitter under his own chin as the uncloaked moon falls upon him.
The woman is agape. She falls to her knees in fervored prayer. Fray wonders if all the Children are actually fucking insane, or if he lucked out. For now he snatches back his scarf and sprints back up the road. Not as fast as he can go, nowhere near, but more than enough to put a few blocks between himself and the Child. He weaves through a few other snow-crushed buildings and through the edge of the red-light district’s aboveground portion just to be sure he’s not followed.
God. That probably won’t lead to anything good. But there’s nothing to be done about it now.
Fray shakes himself and sighs and politely waves off the folk pulling double shifts on the world’s oldest profession. No thanks, not today, nice to see you too. He tugs the scarf tighter against his neck.
It’s dark, the borders of the pasture empty of lights or people. The yotes shine dull white, glossed with blue icicles melting off their fur outside the embrace of the permafrost. They snarl and yap at him with eyes as pale and empty as the moon. He is between them and the Merchants’ wool flock. If these creatures get loose among the merinos, not only will Fray not get paid, but will probably not go a week before someone tries to assassinate him. The goodwill he’s won does not, he suspect, apply to the pragmatic Merchants.
And then he’d have to kill the assassin, and it would just be messy and he doesn’t want to piss off the Merchants.
But he’s not worried about that.
They’re not enormous, the yotes, but their skinny bodies are lithe and fast and hard to predict. There’s six of them. They have claws and superior weight. They have greater numbers. They have those ice-bound teeth that shatter into frostrot the moment they hit blood.
Fray has the sword.
The yotes mouth at each other, excited and riled. Only two of them seem to stop long enough to notice that Fray has removed his coat and set his arms before him as if he held a shield and a blade. For a moment he looks idiotic. In the next, he looks inhuman.
The shield ripples out of nothing across his arm, held there only with the humming of the gold-tinted implants set into his flesh. The air fills with the smell of singed cotton, the superheated elements too much for the fabric to resist. In his opposite hand the implant on his wrist makes a dull thrum, and suddenly the pretend sword in his fingers is not pretend at all. It is, instead (as Fray thought the first time he saw it), a fucking knight’s broadsword, like something from fairy tales he remembers from childhood. The blade is made of light, or so seems it, and it sits easy in his practiced hand. Both armaments glow and roil like molten gold, not adorned with any boss but a constantly shifting pattern of faint hexagons. He knows from experience it’s not just them: his eyes are lit up, too, glowing gold, those hexagons mirrored by his pupils. The reasons for this have been explained to him a dozen times, but he’s never been able to wrap his head around it. It’s not something he needs to know, anyway.
Fray checks his grip on the sword, raises the shield, and charges.
There would be no point in detailing the fight. It lasts around seventeen seconds.
The yotes on the ground, now mostly divested from their heads or guts, lay still. Fray approaches one, ever on guard, and nudges its crazed face with the flat of the blade. It’s already dissolving into that sludgy, slushy substance so many frost-touched creatures return to if they perish outside their domain. It’s gross. He wipes the blade off on the clean snow to its side, despite not needing to, and then the blade dissolves from sight. The shield follows, and not long after the dull hum of the implants dies down and goes back to matching his heartbeat. More ruined clothes, he thinks with a suppressed sigh as he surveys the new holes. He really needs to find a workaround.
Well. That’s his job finished, then. Nothing more to be done here.
Fray stands there for a long time, watching the corrupted bodies melt into the snow.
It’s not that the drop in his mood is unexpected so much as Fray doesn’t know how to mitigate it. Right now, curled on the nest of blankets he calls a bed, he feels like he’s in free-fall and he knows it’s because of the culling job but not why. He’s developed a sick kind of sympathy for the creatures he cuts down. They aren’t normal animals. Most of them were, once, a pack of wolves, a flock of ravens, things the frost struck down before reshaping into its own kind of native inhabitant. They don’t eat. They don’t even kill, some of them. They just carry the frost with them, trying to bring it into the scant few places the Chasm has not yet fully swallowed. There’s no understanding in their white marble eyes. They don’t know what they’re doing.
So many people don’t know what they’re doing, or what may come of it.
His house, an old thing built into the side of a hill and protected from the worst of the elements, is cold. There’s a fire in the hearth, but it’s hardly more than a glow, because Fray has not been affected by more than the most extreme temperatures in years. This is what kept the frost from killing him, of course. Not only the mark around his throat, but that month from hell when he sheltered in the gutted remains of that grand, ancient machine, toppled into the snow. He lived because he was lucky, because he was resourceful, but mostly, mostly because of the syringe of gold serum he volunteered to have injected into his spinal column at the age of seventeen.
In his free-fall, in the lurching sway of his mind in the aftermath of dispatching the yotes, he again visits his homeland: the beautiful Charn, its city tall and implacable stone and steel. The Company of the Hawk, heroes to the end. And fair Echo—he only ever allows himself to think of Echo at his lowest. Their handsome face, their clever hands and quick wit—and their absence is a weight too heavy for him to hold back when weakness strikes.
Fray reminds himself that he still carries out Charn’s work. He is a preserver, he is a Luminary, he will keep Far Haven from harm until Charn’s long reach can gather it into the fold. The people here are rough and difficult, but there is kindness under the ice; he knows they will accept Charn’s outstretched hand. And perhaps by the time Charn arrives, he will have found a way to forgive himself for what happened in that fell month.
In his dream, Fray is again in the underground chamber that keeps the entire city warm enough to survive. The implants’ roar as they form the golden sword shakes him down to his teeth. The thieves are very annoyed that he’s here. In front of him they argue about who betrayed their plan to extract the generator’s heart and let Far Haven freeze to death, a few hundred miserable lives less valuable than their payout will be. Fray does nothing but keep an eye on the young woman that’s accompanied them, the one who seems fraught and sick with guilt. She barely looks past girlhood.
They fight. It gives him more trouble than it feels like it should. After one of the men shoves a strange gauntlet against his throat and squeezes, after the glittering frost embeds itself in his neck—after Fray cuts him down and rushes to recover the ancient battery and shove it back into the squealing generator—he remembers the girl.
He finds her clinging to the edge of the magic runoff and its mile-long drop into a red-tinted black, her arms bloody and slipping against the steep concrete. Help me, she wails as he runs to her, I’m sorry, I didn’t want to do this, please help me, please, please. I won’t tell anyone you’re from Charn.
He stops in the middle of reaching for her hand, startled stiff by her last words. Just for a moment. Just long enough that when her weakening arms seize and fail her, his dive to grab her is just that little bit too late.
She falls, and Fray watches in horror. In his dream, he can see her panicked face right until the very end. When she hits the ground the impact shocks him awake, and he staggers off to the washroom to vomit up bile. In the mirror, the inert embrace of the arcane frost glitters in the candlelight, clutching his throat like a lover. The implants start to hum, responding to his pounding heart. It slows only when he closes his eyes and remembers Echo’s careful voice, the sweet smell of their hair. Here in the dark, it feels like the only thing he has left.
But there’s nothing to be done about that now.