One year earlier.

  It came through the stone before it came through the air.

  A resonance, deep and slow, felt in the chest before the ears made sense of it. The Braoch was already dimming above them, that luminous pale-green hemisphere embedded in the cavern's apex which had kept Alebrath alive and lit for eight centuries, stepping back for what was coming. Then the sound of wind from far above, threading through a gap that had not been there a moment ago.

  Then the light fell.

  It came down through the canopy of the great trees first. There were seven of them across the whole of Alebrath, vast and named and ancient, their upper branches long since pressed flat against the cavern roof and spread wide toward the Braoch, and the real light broke through their leaves and scattered across the black marble of the Colonnades in shapes that moved and shifted, colours that had no names down here, nothing like the steady faithful green of the Braoch.

  Everyone went quiet. Not because anyone called for it. The silence just came.

  Then the children ran into it.

  The ones born since the last Waking had never seen real light. They hit the column of it at a full sprint and stopped in the middle with their arms wide, turning their faces up, laughing and blinking and laughing again. A girl of five stood with her palms held flat toward it as though she could keep it still. A boy of three dropped to the ground right in the centre of the avenue and refused to be moved, and his mother knelt beside him and let him stay, because she remembered being small and doing the same.

  The older ones watched without speaking. Some were smiling. Some were doing something that wasn't smiling, quieter than that, the look of people who have lived long enough to know how fast a light can go.

  Kraken stood at the outer edge of the Colonnades between Wiglaf and another lad whose name kept slipping away from him. Wiglaf already had a cup, which was typical of Wiglaf at any occasion that could reasonably justify one, and was saying something about the wall-climbing routes that Kraken was only half listening to because he was watching the children in the column of light.

  He had seen two Wakings before this one. The first at three years old, of which he retained almost nothing except an impression of warmth unlike ordinary warmth, a feeling of being held inside something vast and gentle, and he had spent years afterwards reaching for that quality in other things without ever quite finding it, or knowing that was the search. The second at ten, standing beside his father in the light, his father looking up with an expression he had never worn in any other moment and which Kraken still remembered fondly, though he had never found a name for it. His father had been dead for seven years now, gone not long after that Waking, as though the light had been a kind of farewell he hadn't known how to give any other way. Today it looked exactly as it had then.

  He felt Rhoswyn before he heard her. The specific warmth of someone standing too close on purpose.

  "Kraken."

  Her voice had a flatness to it this morning. Not angry. Attending.

  He didn't turn. "I'm watching."

  "You have that look on you."

  "What look."

  "The one that means I should be watching you instead."

  He turned. She was twenty years old and had been the load-bearing wall of his life since she was thirteen, a fact he knew without examining it. She had their father's jaw and their mother's patience and the expression she used when a thing was already decided that made further discussion feel faintly beside the point for everyone present. She was using it now.

  "I'm fine," he said.

  "I know. Come and eat something with me."

  He looked back at the girl with her palms out in the light. He weighed the cost of arguing with Rhoswyn at half eight in the morning and found it higher than it was worth.

  "Fine," he said.

  He pushed off the pillar. Wiglaf caught his eye as he turned to go, raised his cup in a loose salute. "Wall-climbing at midday. Don't make me face the route without someone there to appreciate it."

  "You'll manage."

  "I'd manage better with a witness."

  Kraken almost smiled. "Later," he said, and followed his sister in.

  ~

  The Waking had a smell before it had anything else.

  The roasting pits had been going since before most people woke, the cattle fat rendering down slowly, and with it the festival vine. The vine grew along the wetter underground passages unremarkably for seven years and was then harvested at the Waking, sliced thin and laid in the fat until its edges crisped and it became something dense and sweet, a flavour with nothing to compare it to. A smell that belonged to no other occasion. You only had it at the Waking.

  The stone runnels along every thoroughfare ran fast and cold, and someone had set the small cobalt-blue blooms from the Blind Garden floating in them before dawn. The flowers moved slowly in the current and caught the mixed light, real sun and Braoch-green together, in a way that made them look like pieces of fallen stars finding somewhere to go.

  The great trees overhead made the Colonnades feel like a celebration inside a forest. Their fruit hung in amber clusters along the lower branches and the children had already been through them. Cores littered the base of the Old Arbiter, the ancient tree at the avenue's centre whose roots had long since lifted the surrounding granite flagstones and whose canopy in the mixed light of this morning made people stop mid-stride and tilt their heads back.

  Rhoswyn moved through all of it without needing to look where she was going. Kraken followed a step behind.

  Bríd had her cup and her position near one of the festival fires, the old crónaí of Alebrath, its keeper of stories and names and the long thread of who had done what to whom across eight centuries of underground life. She was holding court on some subject that three people were nodding along to with the faces of those who had stopped listening some time ago and saw no advantage in admitting it. The Brennan boys, the butcher's three between seven and twelve, were running a territorial campaign between the festival tables that their father was working very hard to appear not to notice. At the far end of the Colonnades the weavers had laid out their cloth in Alebrath's three colours, the deep red and the clean white and the blue that the underground dye-plants produced, shades with no equivalents above ground because they came from things that only grew down here.

  He had not yet understood that this was not a permanent condition.

  The competition stones had come out near the great hall, six of them worn smooth by generations of Waking-day hands. Coll was already there with his shirt off, loudly confident in a way that was about two-thirds genuine. Gunther stood over the heaviest, unhurried, and pressed it overhead with the economy of someone completing a formality rather than winning a competition. Set it down. Looked around for Kraken with the slight frown of a man who had expected someone and found the space where that someone should have been.

  Kraken was not there.

  The frown lasted no more than a breath before someone clapped Gunther on the back and the crowd absorbed him. Coll turned to his own stone, made a creditable attempt, and failed in a way that produced language colourful enough to make the people around him laugh, and the moment passed.

  Rhoswyn stopped at the bread stall near the eastern pillar, the woman there selling the flat loaves pressed with the back of a hand before firing so they kept the print. A custom old enough that nobody remembered where it had started. She bought two and held one back toward him without looking.

  He took it. They walked and ate.

  "You're not at the stones," she said.

  "I'm not."

  She looked at him sideways. "You're not at the climbing either."

  "I'm at the bread."

  "There's an argument to be made," she said, "that a person who turns down every available contest on the best day in seven years is doing something other than enjoying himself."

  "There's a version of that argument," he said, "that I don't want to hear."

  "I know," Rhoswyn said. "That's the one I'm making."

  He said nothing to this. She said nothing further. The bread was good.

  Inside the great hall the musicians were finding each other. Alebrath's instruments were their own kind of thing: the bodhrán-cousins stretched from cave-beast hide and carved from the wood of the great trees, the low-bellied citterns whose resonating chambers had been refined across generations until the tone they produced was richer and darker than anything he had a name for, the reed-flutes cut from the hollow stems of underground plants and tuned to the resonant depths of stone. A fragment of melody emerged between them, vanished, reappeared. Two people in the colonnade stopped walking and tilted their heads toward it. The music settled into the stone and came back changed, fuller, closer, as if the cavern itself had joined in.

  He almost didn't see Isolde.

  She was near the hall's entrance, laughing at something the man beside her had said. He recognised the laugh, the slight performance in it, the way it was always angled just enough. He had seen it many times and had always found reasons not to examine what he was seeing.

  The man was from the northern passages. Broad, easy in his posture, the look of someone who did not spend much time in his own head.

  A week ago Isolde had told Kraken she'd find him at the Waking, that she needed a few days to herself first. Come look for me when things are quieter, she had said, with the careful warmth she used when she wanted to appear kind rather than be it. He had believed her because it was easier, and he had been choosing easier for months, and somewhere in the part of himself he had been declining to consult he had known exactly what he was doing the whole time.

  Too busy. Find me later. Later had arrived early and brought company.

  He watched her check, once and briefly, who was looking before she leaned toward the man.

  The anger he expected didn't come. What arrived instead was quieter: the embarrassment of a man who has misread something on purpose for a long time and has finally run out of ways to keep misreading it. The waste of all those months.

  He turned away. Rhoswyn had stopped a few paces ahead at a craftsman's table, her back to him, giving him a moment he had not asked for and would not acknowledge receiving.

  He breathed out once and kept walking.

  ~

  "Kraken Kilbracken."

  She put a slight lift on the second syllable of his name, the way she had done since they were children, somewhere between calling and teasing, a tone she used on nobody else. He stopped. He knew that voice the way he knew the sound of the runnels. He turned before his mind had caught up with his body.

  Tawny was a few paces back, her hair slightly wind-moved from walking fast, which she was pretending not to have been doing. She wore the blue festival dress, the fine-dyed one she kept for the Waking, and he noticed it and then set it aside, the way he always did with things about Tawny that his attention caught on. The wrist torc caught the light as she reached up to pin a loose strand back with the ivory clip, the old piece of metal she had always worn, unremarkable the way things become when they have been present long enough.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  She was smiling. There was something behind the smile he couldn't quite locate.

  "There you are," she said. "I've been looking everywhere."

  "Here I am."

  She held his gaze for a moment with the quiet attentiveness she used when she was checking a conclusion against the evidence. Then her eyes moved, just once, past his shoulder toward the hall entrance.

  She found Isolde and the man without being pointed.

  Her expression did something small and complicated that she folded away before he could read it.

  "Oh," she said.

  "It's fine."

  "Kraken."

  "She can do what she wants." He turned from the hall. "Come on."

  She looked at him. She looked at the hall. She looked back at him.

  "Where exactly are you going?" she said.

  He was already moving.

  She fell into step beside him without being asked. They moved through the thinning edge of the morning crowd and she kept whatever she was thinking to herself, which was not quite the same as having nothing to think. He could feel it beside him, the things she was not asking.

  They passed the weavers' end of the avenue, where two women were bent over a length of red cloth at a workbench, not looking up. Someone called Tawny's name from a nearby stall; she lifted a hand in acknowledgement without breaking stride. He kept walking.

  After a while she said, simply: "You know."

  "Know what."

  She didn't answer. She didn't need to. He did know. He had always known. That was the problem she was leaving unraised and he was not ready to address.

  He didn't look at Tawny. A moment passed in which neither of them said anything, and then she was beside him again, her pace resuming as if there had been no interruption, and perhaps for her there hadn't been. He couldn't tell.

  They went on through the far colonnade pillars where the real light no longer reached and the Braoch-green resumed its quiet authority, into the passages where the morning crowd hadn't been. The knotwork here was older and rougher than the main avenue, cut by hands that worked without the craft Alebrath would spend centuries accumulating. He walked until the passage curved and the Cuimhne opened on both sides of him.

  He hadn't meant to come here. That was generally how it worked.

  The Cuimhne, the Remembering, ran the full curve of the wall in both directions as far as the passage went, every inch of reachable limestone covered in eight hundred years of what Alebrath had needed to put somewhere outside of itself. The oldest pieces near the floor were abstract: spirals and knotwork whose precise meaning had worn away with the people who first made them, though the beauty hadn't. Moving upward through the centuries the work grew more willing to name specific things. Women nursing children in the lamplight, their faces tilted down, intent, private. Men in painted duels, swords catching light from somewhere. The great trees as saplings, their girth no wider than a man's reach. Festival crowds rendered from memory, approximations of joy that looked both exactly like and nothing like the crowd outside right now. Faces with names in the old script beneath them, and dates, and sometimes a single word that served as both epitaph and introduction.

  And near the newest section, large and carefully rendered: a party of Tairseach ascending the Stair, those chosen to cross the threshold and go up, each figure in silhouette, each man's posture different, each one carrying the particular weight of what he was climbing toward in the angle of his shoulders.

  The real light reached even here, filtered through two corners of passageway. It made the old pigments look inhabited in a way the Braoch alone never quite managed.

  Kraken stood in front of a face painted perhaps two centuries back. A man of middle age, no name beneath him, only a date and the word for grief in the old script. The face was composed almost to stillness.

  Footsteps behind him. Of course.

  Tawny stopped beside him and looked at the same face. She was quiet for a moment.

  "She knew what she was doing," Tawny said. "You just didn't want to see it."

  There was little to say to that. He didn't try.

  "That part's your own fault."

  It was plainly said, without cruelty. It settled in the part of him that was uncomfortable precisely because she was right.

  "Why do you care?" He said it before deciding to. It came out with more edge than he'd meant.

  Something in her face went still.

  "I'm sorry," he said immediately.

  "You're my friend." She said it simply, looking at the painting rather than at him. "That's the whole of it."

  She left space after that. The Cuimhne held them in its quiet, the painted faces patient around them, the real light doing its slow work on the old pigments.

  After a while she nodded toward the nameless face.

  "Do you know who that is?"

  He looked at the date carved beneath, the grief-word. "No."

  "His son went up during a Waking two hundred years ago, one of the escorted hours above, stepped through the perimeter rope and ran." She paused. "The Tairseach found his bones seven years later on the next crossing, still wearing the clothes he'd left in. The father lived long enough to be told." A moment. "Someone painted his face the same year. Nobody signed it."

  Kraken looked at the face for a long time. A man who had years to arrange his face before anyone thought to paint it. The grief-word underneath, and the date, and nothing else.

  He thought about what it would take. Seven years of not knowing. And then knowing.

  "How do you know all that?" he asked.

  "The Cuimhne records are in the old archive. Bríd let me read them once." Tawny glanced sideways at him. "She lets people read things she thinks they should know."

  Kraken looked at the still face on the wall. He had no answer for it, and it expected none.

  The music had found itself properly now and was drifting through the stone of the passage in fragments, the bodhrán pulse and the citterns finding each other, the reed-flutes threading above. He could feel it as much as hear it. Alebrath on the other side of the stone, fully alive.

  "Come on," Tawny said. "You're missing the best day in seven years standing in front of someone else's grief."

  He looked at the face one more time. Then he followed her back toward the light.

  ~

  At dusk the column above them thinned and faded, the sky visible through the seal shifting from gold to a deep blue none of them had a word for, and then the real light was gone and the Braoch filled the space it left, the cavern settling back into its familiar pale green. The musicians stopped. The dancing stopped. People turned toward the centre of the Colonnades on their own.

  Lorcan Trelawny stood at the centre, where the avenue was widest and the oldest pillar-carvings flanked him on both sides. He was a large man gone solid with age, grey-templed, wearing the formal torc of the eldest clan chief, old silver worked in knotwork that predated the Waking itself and whose meaning had been mostly lost across the centuries. He held the naming list in one hand and the iron key in the other. He waited until the crowd had gathered completely, and then he read.

  "Ranulf Wynthorpe."

  A man of perhaps forty stepped forward from somewhere in the middle of the crowd, broad-shouldered, a miner's hands. Lorcan placed both hands on his shoulders and spoke the old words, the ones most people could no longer translate precisely but knew the shape of: go out, come back, bring something of the world with you. He said them without hurry. The ceremony was eight hundred years old and its power lived entirely in repetition.

  "Ciarán Domhnall."

  A younger man this time, early twenties, moving to the front with the slightly stunned expression of someone who had known his name might be called and still found the reality of it arriving like a stone dropped from height.

  "Everard Fernhurst. Oisín Comingore. Peredur Runevale. Torsten of the West-Warrens. Leofric Rafferty."

  More names were read. By the last of them a wave of both relief and envy moved through the crowd, the particular mixture that comes when the list is finished and you have not been called and cannot be certain how you feel about that. He hadn’t realised until the list was finished that he had been waiting too. Kraken looked toward the festival tables and found one of the named men standing very still among the faces he'd grown up beside, a hand on each of his younger boys' shoulders, his face arranged into something careful and proud.

  No applause. Alebrath had mourned men lost after a Waking before. Not many, not often, but enough that applause before a departure felt like courting something.

  When the last name had been read the men did not go immediately. They moved back into the crowd, back to their families, and the crowd received them quietly. Kraken watched Ciarán Domhnall find his mother and hold on for a moment longer than either of them had probably planned. Watched Ranulf Wynthorpe take his wife's face in both hands, his forehead pressed to hers, not speaking. Watched Torsten of the West-Warrens stand beside his mother while she gripped his shoulder and looked away. The families said what they needed to say and Lorcan waited. There was no hurry. The Stair would keep.

  Kraken found Tawny at his shoulder. He had not seen her come to stand there.

  "Your father reads well," he said.

  She was watching Lorcan, not him. "He's been reading that list since before I was born," she said. "He still treats every name like it's the only one on it."

  Kraken looked at Lorcan Trelawny's face as he waited for his people to say their goodbyes, patient and still in the way of a man who has done a hard thing many times and found no easier way to do it.

  When the men were ready they assembled at the gate. Lorcan produced the iron key, the length of a forearm, black iron worn smooth with age, and walked to the lock. The gate opened. The Tairseach filed through and began to climb, one by one disappearing into the passage of twelve hundred steps that wound upward through the stone. Kraken watched the last pair of boots vanish around the first curve of the spiral.

  Then they were gone.

  Lorcan locked the gate. Put the key away. Above the gate the passage was dark and the stone gave nothing back. The Tairseach were on the other side of it now, beginning their first night on real ground, and the gate would not open again until morning.

  The crowd stood still.

  Then, from throughout the Colonnades, the chandlers began to move.

  They had positioned themselves during the ceremony, each one standing beside a tall iron tube mounted upright in a bracket, the tubes narrow as a man's wrist and packed from below with mineral-dusted beeswax from Alebrath's own hives, dense and slow-burning. The mineral dusts had been prepared over months: copper for the blue, iron oxide for the red, something quarried from the deep galleries that burned white and bright. At a signal Kraken missed they touched the embers carried in clay pots from the great hall fire to the base of each tube.

  The columns of coloured fire rose thin and tall into the cavern dark. Blue and red and white, narrow as lances, burning clean and high. Some were positioned near the pillars and the light they threw hit the limestone knotwork sideways so the carved patterns leapt forward in colour, the old designs suddenly vivid against the black marble. Others were angled outward, the coloured flames shooting free into the open dark above the trees, bright threads climbing toward the cavern roof and dissolving there in embers that drifted down like slow rain. The tree canopies above caught both kinds of light and broke it apart across the floor in fragments that moved.

  Then the drums.

  Every drummer in Alebrath struck once, together.

  The stone took it and made it enormous. One concussive note that came up through the floor and moved through the chest and was gone, vast and physical and already a memory by the time anyone had processed it. People exhaled. Children pressed into the nearest adult. The note faded, and into the silence after it the music came properly, the bodhrán and the citterns and the reed-flutes all at once, and the dancing came with it, and the night of the Waking opened.

  ~

  Tawny pulled him onto the floor before he could think of a reason not to.

  Alebrath danced the way it did everything, with generations of practice and no interest in performing for anyone who wasn't there. The steps were old enough that no one remembered learning them, they had simply always been known, and the music set a tempo that made standing still feel like a decision that required justification. The coloured flames threw red and blue and white across the moving crowd. Overhead the great trees held the whole of it under their canopy.

  Gunther appeared inside the first song. He had Coll with him and another two from the Warrens, the residential tunnels on Alebrath's eastern side, and he arrived with a wide easy grin and immediately attempted to spin Tawny in a direction the dance did not call for, which she redirected with patient efficiency.

  "You were supposed to come watch me lift," Gunther said to Kraken, over the music.

  "I heard you won anyway."

  "That's not the point. I pressed it twice."

  "Nobody asked you to do it twice."

  "I was establishing something."

  Coll appeared at Kraken's other shoulder. "He was," Coll confirmed, in the tone of a man filing an official record. "I was there. It was very establishing."

  "What did it establish?" Kraken asked.

  Coll considered this seriously for a moment. "That he could do it twice."

  Kraken laughed. It came out easier than he expected.

  The music shifted and the crowd shifted with it, and for a stretch of time that felt longer and shorter than it actually was he stopped thinking about Isolde, stopped watching the gate, stopped doing the interior accounting he had been running since morning. Tawny danced with the unselfconscious ease of someone who has always known these steps and is genuinely glad of the occasion to use them. Gunther was loud and present and entirely himself. Coll made everyone near him laugh without appearing to try.

  Wiglaf found them eventually with refilled cups, which he distributed in the easy way of someone who considers this a natural part of any gathering.

  Someone pressed a warm cup into Kraken's other hand, and he looked down at it: the bloom tea, the Waking brew made from the sealbloom harvested in the Blind Garden, the flowers that opened only at the Waking, for exactly one fortnight. The smell of it was something between floral and mineral, a smell you couldn't place until you'd had it before and then couldn't forget. He drank. It tasted of the deep earth and of something older, something that deepened whatever was already present in him, and what was present in him right now, standing in the coloured light with Tawny's hand finding his arm to pull him into a figure of the dance, was something he preferred not to examine too closely.

  When the figure ended her hand stayed a moment longer than it needed to, and then it was gone, and the music carried on.

  He noticed. He set it aside. He was good at that.

  The night ran on. The coloured flame-lances burned long and steady in their iron tubes. The Braoch held its quiet watch over the dark. Somewhere behind the Colonnades the great hall fire was doing what it always did, fed and tended and indifferent to occasion.

  He danced. He was in Alebrath. For a few hours, without quite deciding it, he was simply and completely where he was.

  ~

  He lay in the dark of his room later with the last sounds of the celebration coming through the stone, thinned and faint, a drum somewhere and voices, the sound of a long night winding itself down.

  He thought about the Tairseach, above him somewhere, camped on real ground under a real sky, a world laid out around them that nobody in Alebrath had seen for seven years. He thought about the trail they would leave in the morning grass when they set out at dawn. He thought about the column of light that had come through the seal and the colours in it that had no names down here, and he thought about what it would mean to stand under the sky that made those colours and look up at it from the other side.

  The painted face in the Cuimhne came back to him. A man who had years to arrange his face before anyone thought to paint it.

  He lay there for a long time with his eyes open.

  The sounds through the walls thinned to nothing. Alebrath settled into its sleeping. The runnels ran in the dark. The great hall fire kept its vigil, warm and solitary in the empty Colonnades.

  He was not thinking about Isolde.

  He was not thinking about the surface.

  He was not.