Elomia was still for a long while. Then slowly, she wiped my tears with her blue fingers. “There, there,” she said with infinite comfort. “Do not weep so. Not all the spheres of the afterlives are beyond pity. Many come before me with grand and woeful sagas, with treasure to bribe and blades to threaten, justifying their need above all others with philosophy and logic so pure the touch of air cannot rot it. They received naught but my silence. Yet you bring none of this. No gifts, no weapons, no oratory. In fact, you bring nothing at all, nothing but love and loss. I am moved, and when blind judgment is moved, all the doors of possibility shall open.” Elomia drew back and laid her hand upon the mournful head of the statue of Regret. A black door opened in her stone gown. “You seek your sister, Courage,” the watcher said. “Very well: go and find her.” She held up a warning hand. “But know that it is folly, my child. Know that it would serve your poor heart best to let go of this pain and forget. Know that there is no reward in this but a deeper, richer agony. If you could see as I see, if you could but glimpse what is to come, you would ask nothing of me but a swift journey home and a warm bed at its end.”
I did not understand. Not then, and not for many, many years. I could see nothing but Courage, her pale-yellow hair shining, running ahead of me through the rivergrass, through the wild roses. “I cannot forget her. She is my sister. Does your kind not have such things?”
Elomia said nothing, but a milky diamond tear slipped down her strange blue cheek. She dropped her hand and moved aside. The shadowy door in the statue yawned down into nothing. I pulled my lynx-cloak tight and moved toward it.
“Bring me the soul of your sister, and I shall restore it to this ruined world. But you must convince her to come of her own true will. You may not touch her, not once, not for the smallest moment, or all you have suffered shall be for naught. Should so much as a single strand of your hair brush against her brow, she shall be lost forever, and you, Sorrow, must return to the battles of the living and trouble me no more until your time tolls at last. Do you understand?”
I nodded. What a sweet kind of symmetry the spirit healer offered, as though it was a warning dire and dreadful! I had spent half my life convincing my sister to do what I wanted. This would be no different.
For the first time since a knight of death spilled out my sister’s blood on the fields of our home, I felt no worry, no pain, nothing but certainty. I stepped joyfully into the dark—
—and into a rosy-violet dusk in a dreaming forest.
The cold was gone, as though the world had never gotten round to inventing it. The warm breeze smelled of good moss and wildflowers and baking cakes. Thick, soft grass rolled out before me like the richest tapestry, tumbling through banks of huge, twisting trees as wide around as fortress towers, down into crisscrossing brooks and streams that giggled lightly through purple and blue boulders. Green fireflies and great stags’ eyes glinted in the gloaming, creatures with ultramarine wings or long furred legs and glowing horns, but every one scampered or fluttered or galloped off the moment I looked in their direction. Curling violet blooms tottered on spindly stems, glowing softly, blue and pink and lavender. Cobwebs sparkled with dew; leaves cast dappled emerald shadows. There was a pleasant, whispering tension in the air, as there is in the hours before a great festival. Barely suppressed laughter, the breath sucked in just before someone plays their flute, merry fires just about to burst from the brush into the kindling.
I pressed farther into the wood as if I knew this forest. I smiled as I ran my fingers along the bark of one of the great trees beyond time. She would be here, of course she would, in this place where good hearts go. This forest would call our natures as true as a horn. We are creatures of the wood, and to the wood we must return, no matter how wide we have roamed or how high we have risen.
But no one came to greet me. The tension went on and on. The laughter did not laugh, the flute did not play, the fire did not spark. I felt as though I could see the flash of a heel or the swirl of a skirt around every tree and mushroom, but when I reached it, I found nothing but more grass and more trees and more fireflies. The scent of cakes and flowers grew stronger, overpowering. I covered my face with my sleeve to drive off the perfume.
“Sister of mine!” I cried into the many-colored shadows. “I am here! I have come! Where are you?”
A worried rustle through the branches answered me. A dimming of the fireflies and the mushrooms.
And the earth before me bulged sickeningly, then sagged, then opened like a terrible blind mouth, sucking and gnashing at all that sweet, thick grass and deep soil. I turned to run. I called out for my ancestors. But the mouth was everywhere, as wide as the past. It opened beneath my feet as I snatched a gnarled, tangled root and swung violently out over the void inside it. I hung hopelessly over a sheer pit for a moment or two before the screams began. They swarmed up from the depths of the mouth, thousands and more, screaming for release, for an end to suffering, clutching at my boots and my limbs to save themselves.
The root wriggled in my hand. I held tighter. It writhed with disgust and shook me free, dropping me down into the screams and the shadows. The tension broke, but not with flutes or laughter or bonfires. Only with my falling as far from the forest as it was possible to fall.
I did not land so much as land formed beneath me. Wretched, dry, cracked, heaving land, a desert, but unlike any desert in which I had thirsted on my long journey. The earth glowed gray where it was not red, broken where it did not twist into cruel spires of rock puncturing a brutal sky the color of a bruise. Screams darted and whirled over the landscape like vicious songbirds, not issued from guts or lungs. They had a life all their own.
I got to my feet and tried to understand where I was. Nothing to the north, west, or south but more tortured earth—but to the east flickered the lights of a city. If not a city, at least a fortress—or a prison. The screams seemed to love it best. They swooped down through its towers and battlements, howled through the windows and perched on its buttresses and rattled its vicious gates. And they swirled in a maelstrom around its massive, miserable spire, rising up out of the fortress and into the furious sky, where it met another spire reaching down, and between them lightning boomed and forked and collided.
I was never a fool. My sister could not be here. She could never be here—here in this pit of purposeless suffering. She had done nothing wrong. She had been kind and brave and clever. She had fought to defend her home and sacrificed all she loved for the right. Why would the Sister of Courage ever come near this reeking wreck of a hell?
“Have you seen my sister, Courage?” I whispered miserably, my lips as dry as the scar that marked my home.
I made for the great jail at the end of all, though I wanted nothing less in all my life. Shapes moved inside, shapes and crimson, fiery light. I dragged myself across the wasteland to the great prison. There were no souls free to guide me.
So I asked the screams as they passed me by: “Have you seen my sister, Courage? Has she come to this damned place?”
But the screams howled: There is no courage here, beyond the curtain of fear!
So I asked the blasted rocks: “Have you seen my sister, Courage? Has she passed over these cursed stones?”
But the stones said: You will find no courage here, beyond the mask of virtue!
So I asked the bruised sky: “Have you seen my sister, Courage? Did she walk beneath these doomed stars?”
But the sky answered only: Courage is banished here, beyond the shield of hope!
And all of them shrieked: You do not belong here. You do not belong here. You do not belong here. Get out, elf-cur. Get out.
No, she could not be here. They were right. The screams, the spires, the skies, the chains. No one as sweet as my sister could live in this mire. The land itself could not tolerate her. It would buckle at the touch of her foot.
I came at last to the edge of the prison grounds. To the gargantuan chains that lashed it to the mountains on all sides. I
t seemed like years had passed. I could feel my bones turning brittle, my blood turning to ashen sludge. But even now the damnable spire would give me nothing. I could not cross over. Mist and clouds whorled and knotted and unspooled around the tower like a moat, a river of miasma.
I sat down heavily on its banks, hopeless. Where else could I seek? Where could I go when I had come so far, yet my sister was no closer than she had been when I slept in my own tent with my own bow beside me in another world?
I felt a presence. A shadow deepened over my shoulder, seeping into the ground before me. A shadow that was more than the absence of light. A shadow that ate light and gave nothing in return.
I did not turn around. I did not get up. The hole in my heart was too heavy for any of that. I drew my knees up to my chest and sank my head in my arms like the frozen statue far beyond me.
“Have you seen my sister, Courage?” I whispered miserably, my lips as dry as the scar that marked my home.
The shadow offered silence. Silence and a terrible, unwholesome heat.
“You will not find her here,” its voice thundered finally.
“I know,” I murmured. “She could never be here.”
“Not yet.” Something like confidence and mockery simmered in the voice’s tone.
I turned and looked up into the sour-hot blue eyes of a giant. Dark spikes and blazing runes covered his massive body and his bald, unyielding skull. The sinews and muscles of him swelled so huge and tense they looked agonizing, meat straining to split the skin. His fists could have swallowed the whole of me. And in the center of his chest yawned a sucking black hole surrounded by hooks of bone dragging it open.
I laid my head on my forearm and sighed. I had no strength left in me for awe or fear.
“I have a hole in my heart like that,” I said gently.
His glowing eyes burned expressionlessly into mine. Hot orange sparks from the million fires of the wasteland tumbled through the air, disappearing into the chasm of his chest.
“Everyone does,” he said slowly. “It is only that mine is easy to see.”
I sucked in fetid air through my nose. Tears slid down my cheeks and hissed where they fell on the thirsty earth.
“Are you the master of this place?” I asked.
He seemed to consider, as though this were a question of grave importance. “Yes,” he growled finally. “But equally is it mine.” He shook his gargantuan head. “Go from this place,” boomed the warden of the damned. “You do not belong here. Go home and forget me. Forget her. Forget all but the fires of the living, for they do not linger long.”
“I cannot,” I said. “She’s my sister. Does your kind not have such things?”
The Banished One laughed. His laugh sent the screams into a frenzy, and I felt the bones of my limbs tighten as though they meant to snap.
“Family is only a title for those who can hurt you more piercingly than the rest,” he said, and his voice was soft suddenly, as soft as the dust left at the end of destruction. “My blood kin betrayed me to this fate. I would not take a single step for the sake of their souls. Nor should you. There is no balm to be found in the blood that binds, only the blood that is spilled. You must go. Courage cannot be found here.” He cocked his head to one side abruptly. Then he smiled. A smile of cruelty and hunger. And his smile annihilated the last of my heart.
He turned his impossible back to me and strode slowly toward the cutting black tower, toward his home. And the truth is, for a time I sat in something like peace on the edge of perdition, unbothered by the screams, untroubled by the hideous sky. I watched the loops and eddies of the cloud-current swirling round the spire of punishment. As long as I didn’t look anywhere else, it was almost beautiful. Golden and crimson, frothing whitewater air.
The Banished One looked backward at me over his armored shoulder. Was that pity in his twisted gaze? No, not pity, but not malice either. He let his great fist fall to his side above the churning current.
And then I saw it. Just a flash, a flash of silver leaping from his palm. It raced into the downdraft and leaped to catch the updraft, wiggling through the river of clouds. Something alive. Something alive and noble and striving in all this burning death.
It was her. Somehow, I knew it.
I called out to it, and the glimmer of silver paused. Then it dove down again, and I ran along the banks of the river of despair, laughing and dancing and calling out to my sister as she darted away ahead of me, glittering wherever the firelight of oblivion touched her, a candle in a storm. I called out again, more urgently, but she only swam faster through the miasma.
“Wait!” I screamed after her, my scream joining the others, the million billion others as they cackled and took my cry into their cacophony. “Wait for me! I’m only little! I can’t catch you!”
The flash of silver stopped. It turned around and struggled valiantly against the undercurrent, writhing toward me. I shouted with delight, and the chorus of screams ate that too, but I didn’t care. It flitted to and fro below me, nervous, unsure. I sat down on the edge of the river and relaxed my long, lithe body, from the crown of my head to my toes. I felt my face grow soft and sweet, as though I would melt away to nothing if I touched my own cheek. Remembering what Elomia said, I tore off my black wolf’s cloak and tenderly, slowly dipped its hood into the sulfurous river and scooped out the brilliant, silver-white soul of my sister.
But was it truly her soul? It seemed only a fragment somehow, a sliver of her, dancing with light. A little baby mithril-head trout, with her knowing eyes staring back at me, nuzzling the wolf-fur that covered my palm. Mist seeped away into the pelt and dripped back down into the mire. Any piece of her was worth enduring this trial.
The fish-fragment shimmered and thrashed in my hood, and then it was her, all of her, standing as tall as she ever did, poised as if to run on the edge of a land abhorrent to her nature, her golden hair in a long braid, her gray eyes shining, her face young and full of possibility.
“Is it magic?” she asked breathlessly.
I shook my head no.
“What then? How did you do it?”
Tears overflowed my eyes, and I choked on the sobs that had not come when she died. “Love,” I said.
“I love you. I missed you.”
Courage laughed. “Well, I say it’s magic,” she insisted stubbornly.
“Perhaps,” I answered, and my smile was full. “Perhaps it is at that.”
Tears overflowed my eyes, and I choked on the sobs that had not come when she died. “Love,” I said. “I love you. I missed you.”
My sister reached for me, but I shrank away. I was never a fool. “Not yet,” I whispered. “But soon. Soon, and forever. Now we must run.”
But the shadow stretched long over us, even as we ran across the blasted plains, even as the screams followed us, bellowing for thieves and intruders, even as the skies themselves sent up alarms, and shadows are so much faster than flesh. The man with the empty heart strode across the land without concern and blocked our path.
“Let us go,” I begged. “You said I could go.”
“And you may. But that may not.”
“She is my sister,” I pleaded.
“A piece of her, perhaps. But it is not for you.”
The Banished One raised a hideous mace dripping with the same blue fire of his eyes. I reached for my bow, and before the wind could gasp, three arrows bristled from his massive shoulder. But he did not seem to care. He swung the mace around his head once; I fired again. Three more in his neck. Fluid seeped hotly down his gargantuan shoulders, searing the skin. But he cared nothing for that either.
He swung the mace a second time around his brutal skull. I pulled my knife from my belt and threw it true. It turned end over end in the deathly light and fell into the chasm of his heart.
And that knife did not even slow his final swing.
But the man with the empty heart did not swing for me. He swung for her. The spiked head of that mace drove dow
n through the thick, volcanic air, and I ran for her. I ran, but it fell faster, straight through the gleam of her soul. She stared for a moment. She clutched her chest, mouth open wide with no scream to fill it. Then she stumbled.
I was a fool. I was always a fool. By instinct, by silly, years-bred instinct, I reached out my skinny arms without a thought, so fast it seemed to happen before the stumble ever came. And I caught her as she fell, pulling her back from the ruined earth as I did when we were young and the city thrummed beyond us, the whole future thrummed beyond us. I caught her in my arms, her body sinking into mine, her gray eyes looking up with sudden understanding and sorrow.
“No, no, no!” I cried out. “It’s all right. It’s all right.
I didn’t—Elomia! I didn’t intend to. It was just a second. An accident. No, no—”
The heavy sky boomed and cracked with laughter. My head snapped round to see the Banished One, bent double, hands on his rune-marked thighs, snickering to the ruined earth.
“Why?” I shrieked at him. “Why? Why give me a chance? Why give her to me only to take her back?”
The warden of the damned clicked his tongue against his ugly teeth in satisfaction. “I wanted to watch you fail. I see every type of failure here in the land of foundered souls. You would never succeed, despite what a watcher may have espoused. You are nothing. You are no one. And above all that, my little fish needed to know the truth: family always falters. Family always fails. Kinship is a blight. They will always disappoint you, as you demonstrated so well. But it is over now, mortal.”
Courage gasped for air. But she found only blood and love. She did not struggle, but held me tighter, stroking my face with her hand, trying to memorize me, wanting the love more than life. But the shaking of her limbs and the trembling of her lips were slowing down. Her eyes slid toward the Banished One, and fear crept into their calm silver shine.
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