Page 102 of The Salt King

“Can’t you see when someone wants to pretend they’re all right?” Avelyn said, but not with any force.

“I can, but it’s my job not to cooperate,” Jericho said.

Avelyn supposed that was true.

Jericho watched him, but didn’t touch him. He still looked scared, not of what had happened around them; of Avelyn. “Can you see?” he asked.

See: there was an inferno behind them. “I can see,” he said. “Are you okay with the lamp?”

“Yes. Shall we see if the horses are . . . still there?”

They were both talking with a horrible forced courtesy.

As they walked towards the stables, there was nothing in the quiet but the crunch of their boots in the salt, and the snicker of engines cooling, shedding crystals.

They had to weave between close-spaced pillars of halite. Every so often, it was possible to see which of them used to be someone who had visited Hreodwater. Embedded into the salt, there were silver Hreod charms that hadn’t turned, a silver scarf, a jumper with the same purple-and-green Clan Teksa weave as Jericho’s. That was worse than the ones who had just changed wholly. Jericho had to turn sideways to slip between a tall pillar beside a little one. The little one was still holding a Hreod doll, the ones they made of Saint Hildegard with silver cloth for armour and a long plait of deep black wool for her hair.

“It feels like being in love,” Avelyn said, because he had to say something that wasn’t, My God, how many people are we walking past? “The—way those things . . .”

“No, it doesn’t,” Jericho said, with fractures in his voice. They were among a group of waist-high salt shapes all huddled together. A school trip. “It’s like being in love with someone who won’t ever love you back. Adoration wasted. It’s awful.”

“Ah,” said Avelyn, who had never known any other kind of adoration.

They were out of the crowd of salt standing stones now, on the narrow path back towards Hreodwater and the customs house. A beacon fire was burning on the roof there. Someone had realized what was happening in time to light it, at least. Avelyn wondered if anyone had seen it in time, and if they had, what the Witan had ordered. To evacuate, or to get everyone inside at An El?

Nothing moved but the flames.

“How are you doing?” Avelyn asked.

“I’m fine?”

“No, I mean you don’t like being outside.”

Jericho tilted a small smile at him. Usually he looked for much longer than Avelyn could stand, but he dropped his eyes fast this time, and let a fall of black curls hide them. “I’m fine,” he said again.

Avelyn stood on the edge of it for a moment, then took his hand. “I’m not angry,” he said.

“Really?”

“Really.” Avelyn kept Jericho’s hand, and Jericho leaned into him just enough to touch their heads together before he straightened again. “Thank you. For stopping me going towards the—God, I should have said that before. Thank you.”

“Oh, well, you know,” Jericho said miserably. “Always here to do things disturbing enough to shock you down to your soul.”

Avelyn almost said that the reason it had worked was that it was the opposite of disturbing. He couldn’t say that. “About before, in the mine, when I set your sleeve alight . . .”

“We don’t need to—”

“Yes, we do. Look . . . Christ says that no one reaches salvation but through him, but—for my money, you can be full of grace and goodness and never think that it’s from God, and that’s fine, because it makes no difference how you think of it. Red is still the same even if you call it akai or rot or hong. God is goodness and goodness is God, so—if you’re a good person, even if you think Catholicism is garbage, then fantastic, salvation is yours, you know God very well even if you don’t think so. But I was scared, because . . . maybe I’m wrong, and maybe it’s all exactly as cruel and vengeful and petty as you think.”

He saw Jericho turning that over, looking at it from different angles. “Why were you thinking about that?”

“Because I’ve never met anyone as good as you. I just—want you to understand that when I say God, I don’t mean a king in the sky. I mean goodness which is conscious. And when I said that rejecting God is the same as rejecting goodness, I did not mean you cannot be good if you reject the idea of some authoritarian tyrant on high, that’s stupid, of course it’s stupid. I just mean you can’t be good if you reject the notion of goodness. Does that . . . make any kind of sense?”

“Yes,” Jericho said.

“Are you lying?”

Jericho smiled. “Yes. Do you never think it’s all just a pile of very convoluted oddness some peculiar men wrote down once and everyone took too seriously?” He tilted his head.