Ravens from the island do not fly over open water after dark. The exceptions are so few that the fishermen of Tés Aváir have their own word for them: a sent raven. You do not greet a sent raven. You leave the window ajar.
The fishermen's weather book from the harbour of Tés Aváir, written down from oral tradition
Chapter 16
The River
I found it by accident.
One Monday morning at the start of the third week, the day before Retia's letter came, I woke before everyone else. It was not quite six, and the room was dark and still, and the only light was the faint blue-grey the sky turns just before the sun begins to touch the horizon. Alôpex lifted her head from the pillow and looked at me with sleepy eyes.
"You're awake," she said in my head.
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I don't know."
But I did. My body had woken at six every morning, for as long as I could remember, to run out to the bathing jetty at Løverodde, and for three weeks I had not been in the water. First there hadn't been time, and after that I hadn't known whether it was allowed, and I didn't want to be the one doing something strange again. It was the longest I had gone since I was little. It sat in me like hunger.
I got up. Pulled on my trousers, a thin jumper, my boots.
"Where are you going?" Nihil was lying on his back in the other bed with his eyes open. He didn't sound sleepy. I doubted he had slept.
"The river."
"It's November."
"Yes."
He said no more. I went down through the silent corridors, past the creaking stair (seventh step, I stepped over it), down through the entrance hall, which smelt of night cold and old stone, and out through the main door.
The air hit me.
It was November now, late November, and the morning air had that sharpness that tells you the frost has lain over everything all night and has only just begun to draw back. The grass was frozen stiff and crunched under my boots, and my breath was a white cloud in front of my face, and the smell was clean and sharp, a smell of frost and earth and the cold water down by the river.
The river was narrower.
It struck me at once. The river I had walked on that first day, wide and shining and impossible to take in, was not the same river. It had drawn back twenty metres on both sides, and the bottom that had been invisible under the clear water could be seen now, dark stone and gravel and a single fish holding still in the current with its nose pointing north.
And down on the bank, someone was standing.
Three older students, two boys and a girl, stripped down to their shorts, stood at the water's edge, breathing. Their skin was pale in the early light, and the white clouds of their breath rose from their mouths in time. One of the boys lifted his arms over his head, stretched, and stepped into the water.
He didn't go quickly. He went slowly. One step. The water reached his ankles. Two steps. His knees. Three steps. His hips. And with every step his breathing sank deeper, slower, and his body shook, but he didn't stop.
When the water reached his chest, he stood still. Closed his eyes. And stood.
Just stood. In the ice-cold water. On a November morning. With the frost in the air and the sun not yet over the horizon. And his body stopped shaking. Slowly, step by step from shaking to calm, and his breath grew deep and even, and his face grew still.
The other two followed. The same slow steps. The same controlled breathing. The same moment when the cold stopped being pain and became something else.
I stood on the bank and watched, and I knew every single step they took. The first cold round the ankles. The breath that wants to climb into the throat. The moment when you decide to stay. It wasn't brave. It was quiet. It was the kind of discipline that isn't about strength but about letting go of the body's panic, of the reflex that says "out, away, warm", and instead letting the cold be there, letting it come in, letting it become part of what you are. I had done it every morning since Hanne stood on the bathing jetty with a towel, counting to ten.
I pulled off my jumper. My trousers. Stood in my shorts on the bank in the November cold, and the air cut into my skin, and my nipples tightened, and the muscles in my arms drew in. Alôpex stood at my feet and looked up with a look that said "are you sure?"
"Yes," I said. "This I can do."
I stepped into the water.
It was cold. It always was. The body never quite got used to it, however many mornings I had given it.
Not cold like a cold shower. Cold like something that wants to get hold of every part of you at once, from your feet to your bones to your ribs to your thoughts, a cold so total that it isn't a temperature but a state, a world you step into that is made of nothing but cold and water and the will to stand still.
My legs shook. My hands were clenched at my sides. My jaw was locked.
I breathed. Deeply. Slowly. Like on the ladder at Løverodde. Like in the Dherak lessons. And slowly, very slowly, the shaking began to settle. Not because the cold went away. Because I stopped fighting it. I let it come. Let it spread. Let it fill everything, and in the moment it filled everything there was no room for anything else, and the anything else was all the thoughts and worries and mysteries and fear that had filled my head for weeks, and they disappeared, not for ever, but for now, and now was all there was.
The water smelt of stone and frost and the metallic something that always lay under everything at Déynáir. The current pulled faintly at my legs, and my feet stood on the smooth stone bottom, and my toes were numb, and that was all right. The fish in the water swam around my legs without being afraid. A bird sang somewhere behind me, the first bird of the morning, and its song was sharp and clear in the cold air.
There was no ladder. It only dawned on me as I stood there: there was nothing to hold on to. My hands hung empty at my sides, and the current pulled at me, and I let it.
And then the river answered.
It wasn't a sound. It was something that came up through the soles of my feet, a slow, old current under the current, and it felt me, as I felt it. The fjord had never done that. The fjord was cold water and salt and nothing else, and that was why I had loved it. This water had something in it. In the stillness I felt that others had stood here before me. Many. For hundreds of years, in the same water, with their feet on the same stones, and something of them had stayed in the water, the way warmth stays in a blanket when someone has just got up.
I stood there for what felt like a long time. Five minutes, maybe. Maybe ten.
And when I walked up, out of the water, up onto the bank, up into the air that was cold but warmer than the water, and the wind hit my wet skin and my muscles tightened and my blood began to pound through my veins with a force I knew from the fjord, only stronger, it was like being born. That's the only word that fits. My skin burned with cold and with the warmth that came afterwards, the warmth that is the body's answer to the cold, the warmth that sits deep and that you can only feel once you have been through its opposite.
One of the older students looked at me. A girl with short dark hair and brown eyes. She nodded. Just that. A short nod that said: you've done this before. And I nodded back.
It became a habit.
Every morning. Six o'clock. Down to the river in the dark morning air, out of my clothes, into the water, stand still, breathe, and wait until the cold stopped being an enemy and became a friend.
Some mornings were easier than others. Some mornings the water was so cold that my legs shook for twenty seconds before they settled. Other mornings the cold sank into me straight away, and I stood there and felt the river through my feet and the earth through the river and Dherak through the earth, a slow pulse I had started to listen for, and everything was connected, and everything was still.
Ahra refused. "I'm not built for cold water, Chris. My grandmother would kill me. And if she didn't, the cold would." He stood on the bank in his robe with Lynx and looked at me with a face that was half impressed and half despairing.
But Retia came.
Not the first morning. Not the second. The third.
She was standing on the bank when I came down, already in shorts and a thin top, with Fulmen on her shoulder and her brown hair tied up. Her cheeks were red with cold, and her hands hung at her sides, and she was looking out over the water with the look she wore when she had decided something.
"I thought you might want some company," she said.
"You don't have to," I said.
"I know. But I want to." She pulled off her top. Her skin was pale in the early light, and there were goosebumps on her arms, and her shoulder blades were sharp under her skin. She went down to the water's edge and stopped.
"It's cold," she said.
"Yes."
"How cold?"
"Very." I went down to her. "Go slowly. Breathe out when it reaches your stomach, not in. And don't come up until I've counted to ten."
It was Hanne's rule. I had never said it aloud to anyone.
She stepped into the water. And she made the same sound everyone makes the first time, a half-strangled gasp that is half pain and half surprise, and her body shook, and her hands clenched. But she didn't stop. She went on, step by step, and when the water reached her chest she stood still and closed her eyes.
I counted. Aloud and slowly, the way Hanne had done on the bathing jetty. At four her hands stopped being clenched. At seven her shoulders dropped. At ten she breathed as if the water were hers.
It was the first time at Déynáir that I was the one who knew something.
I stood beside her. Not close. But close enough that we both knew the other was there.
We stood in the cold water and breathed and were quiet, and the sun began to peer over the horizon and threw its first light across the river, and the water glittered, and the air smelt of frost and stone and something like the smell mornings have in countries where the winter is real, the smell made of clear light and cold earth and the promise of warmth that comes once you have earned it.
When we came out, we stood on the bank and shook and laughed, and it was laughter that comes from having done something a bit too hard and a bit too stupid and still completely right. Retia squeezed the water out of her hair with both hands, and her hair was darker when it was wet, almost black, and it hung down along her neck and dripped onto her shoulders, and her skin was red with cold, and there were drops of water on her collarbones that caught the early morning light, and I looked away because my brain was doing something it shouldn't, and looked back again because it couldn't help it, and looked away again. She looked at me with a smile that was the most open smile I had ever seen from her, a smile that wasn't controlled or weighed up but was simply there, born of cold water and morning air and of having stood still beside another person in something that was hard.
"Again tomorrow?" she said.
"Yes," I said.
As we walked up towards the castle, Nihil was standing in the garden door with his robe drawn tight around him, watching us. He went in before we reached him.
And it became our thing. Chris and Retia's thing. Every morning. The river. The cold. The quiet. And afterwards the warmth by the fire in the First-Year Room, with blankets over our shoulders and tea in our hands and that particular tiredness there is in a body that has been in cold water, a tiredness that isn't exhaustion but contentment, the body's feeling of having done something right.
Ahra sat in the armchair with Lynx and shook his head and said "You're both mad," and drank his tea, and he was right, but the best things always are.
Jorin showed me the greenhouse one Saturday afternoon.
It stood behind the castle's kitchen garden, a building of glass in iron frames that were green with algae, and when he opened the door the warmth hit me in the face, damp and heavy and alive, and it was like stepping into another season. In there it was summer. Plants of every size and colour grew in beds along the walls and in pots on shelves and in jars hanging from the ceiling, and the air was thick with smells I knew and smells I didn't: earth and water and manure and the flowers of a hundred kinds, all blooming at once.
"Nobody comes down here," said Jorin, and went over to a bed of plants with leaves of a dark blue I had never seen before. "Most students think it's boring. But the plants are..." He stopped and carefully stroked one of the dark blue leaves with his finger. The leaf bent towards his finger, slowly, as if it recognised his touch. "They're alive in a different way from animals. Slower. More patient. You have to listen to them for weeks to understand what they need."
"A bit like Dherak meditation," I said.
"Yes." He looked up. His hair fell into his eyes as it always did. "Exactly like that, actually. Plants have Dherak. Not much. But it's there. And if you listen to it, you can feel when they're thirsty, when they need light, when they're ill."
He showed me. We sat on the greenhouse floor with earth under our hands and warm plants all around us, and he taught me to lay my fingers on a stem and feel the faint, slow pulse that ran through it. It was different from the river's Dherak, different from my own. It was warm and green and patient, and it asked for nothing, it simply was.
We sat there for an hour. Said almost nothing. Alôpex lay asleep in a patch of sun on the floor, and Jorin tended his plants with the slow, careful movements his hands always had, and I sat and felt a plant's heartbeat against my fingertips and thought that there are more ways of knowing the world than the one I had grown up with.
The river grew narrower every week. It was fascinating to watch. On the first evening the board by the door of the First-Year Room had said 109 metres. Now, at the end of November, it said fifty, in the same unknown hand. I read the number every morning when I came up out of the water, and it was how I knew that time was passing. You could see the bottom everywhere, and small islands of stone and gravel had appeared in the middle of the current, and in the mornings there was ice along the edges, thin and clear, which cracked under my feet when I walked into the water.
"On the last day of the year you can walk across it," said Maka one evening, when he had come down to the First-Year Room to look in on Ahra. "If you're daft enough."
"Have you done it?" asked Ahra.
"Last year." Maka grinned. "And it was still cold enough to make my ears ring for an hour afterwards."
I looked out of the window towards the river. It lay there in the evening light, narrower than yesterday, slowly drawing in towards its middle, and it was strange and beautiful to watch a landscape that changed from day to day, as if the island itself were breathing and the river were its breath.
It was at the end of the third week that Maka taught me to listen to the river.
It was a Thursday evening. He was standing waiting by the door of the First-Year Room when I came from supper, and he took me down to the river. The night was clear and cold, and the moonlight lay like silver on the dark water, and the air smelt of frost and ice and the clean, mineral smell cold water has in winter.
"Sit down at the edge," he said. "Feet in the water."
I sat down on the bank and pulled off my boots and put my feet into the river. The cold cut through my ankles and up into my shins, and I let it.
Maka sat beside me with his own feet in the water. He drew in a sharp breath and looked at me from the side. "You don't even flinch."
"I've bathed in a fjord every morning for as long as I can remember."
"Then I don't need to teach you the cold." He looked out over the river. The moonlight caught the small ripples the current made around our feet. "Retia says you taught her."
"I only counted to ten."
"That's more than most people can do." He smiled. "So feel the water. Not the cold. The water itself. Its movement. Its direction. Its Dherak."
I felt. And it was there, the same as on the first morning, but now I was listening for it instead of being surprised by it. The water had its own Dherak, faint and cold and old, a current deeper than the physical current, and it ran from the mountain in the north down towards the sea in the south, and it carried something with it, something older than the castle, older than the school, older than everything people had built here.
"Water remembers," said Maka quietly. "Water remembers everything that has run through it. Every raindrop that has fallen on the mountain. Every stone it has worn smooth. Every person who has stood in it. Water remembers, and if you listen, it tells you."
We sat in silence. My feet were numb now, but that was all right. I wasn't in the cold any more. I was in the river, and the river was in me, and we were the same.
"Breathe," said Maka. "In through your nose. Count to four. Hold. Count to four. Out through your mouth. Count to six."
I breathed. Four. Hold. Four. Out. Six. And with every breath I sank deeper into the place where the river and my Dherak met, and it was quiet there, quiet the way quiet is when there is nothing missing and everything simply is.
"This is it," said Maka. "To sit still in the world and let the world speak."
We sat there for half an hour. Maybe longer. When I pulled my feet out they were white and numb, and the blood began to flow back with the wild, prickling warmth that is the body rejoicing at being warm again. I pulled my boots on with stiff fingers and looked out over the river.
"Do it every morning," said Maka. "Not necessarily in the water. Just sit still. Breathe. Listen. Everything that fills your head, all the thoughts and worries and mysteries, put them down for a moment and just feel the world as it is."
"And then what?"
"And then you find out that the world already knows what you need to know. You just have to stop drowning it out."
I began to meditate.
Not only by the river. Everywhere. In the mornings, after the cold bath, I sat on the bank with Alôpex in my lap and breathed and listened. In the evenings, before I went to bed, I sat on my bed with my eyes closed and found the quiet place inside me, the place under the thoughts, under the worries, under everything that crowded in, and there was only Dherak and breath and silence.
Nihil saw it. He said nothing, and I said nothing. But the next evening, when I opened my eyes, he was sitting on his own bed with his back against the wall and his eyes closed, and his hands lay still on his knees. Neither of us ever mentioned it.
It changed something.
Not drastically. Not in a single day. But slowly, week by week, something in me began to shift. The thoughts that usually went round and round in my head like wheels that couldn't stop began to settle. Not disappear. Settle. The difference matters. They were still there, the mysteries and the fear and the hundred questions nobody would answer, but they were sitting still now, like stones in a river instead of leaves in a storm.
Ahra noticed. "You're different," he said one morning over breakfast. He was holding his toast in one hand and looking at me with his head on one side. "Calmer. More... here."
"More here?"
"Yes. Before, you were always half a step inside your own head. Now you're more out." He bit into his toast. "It's nice."
Retia said nothing about it. But she sat closer to me in the evenings in the First-Year Room, and her shoulders were lower, and once she rested her head against my shoulder for a brief moment and straightened up again without saying anything, and I didn't dare move for a quarter of an hour afterwards.