When his fever let him wake, a dull winter dawn peered in at the edges of the cave mouth. The meager light betrayed the snow and skeletal trees of the highlands beyond. Through the relentless chills that seized him the instant he woke, he glimpsed the bear's tracks—one set leading out and back, where the animal had dragged back its prize from the creek bed, and a second heading away to the southeast.
It's starving, Iggy thought, remembering their conversation. It doesn't want to eat me, but it can't help itself. I have to get out of here. But every halting effort he made to drag himself toward the cave mouth ended in an explosion of agony that left him gasping and wheezing on the stone. Throbbing pain, hot as a live coal, burned in his gut, and the skin on his left side—from shoulder to hip—crinkled like burned paper whenever he moved it. The fever chewed on him through it all, scorching his thoughts to ash when he tried to form them and nibbling blackly at the edges of his vision.
Can't, he realized. I can't. He gave up trying, crushed under the weight of his anguish. The fever dragged him back down into the soup of his nightmares, chasing him endlessly while forcing him still.
Speaker. Another voice that may have been real or imagined. Speaker. Open your eyes.
But he couldn't. Agony or exhaustion kept them closed. He huddled behind them, enduring the lashes of his fever dreams.
Speaker. A great, warm tongue lapped at his eyes, pulling them open. Grey light swam into his vision, mingling with the drifting ashes of his nightmare. Speaker. Look at me.
Another brown bear towered over him, but this one dwarfed the first: it reminded him of the massive animals they'd encountered just inside Ordlan Green, that had destroyed the logging camp there. Unlike them, though, it had a single white horn jutting from its forehead.
No. He was still dreaming; he had to be. Ciir? he whispered, the word barely escaping his thoughts, dripping with fever.
He felt a flush of relief from the animal. You recognize me.
You . . . He could hardly form the thought. Words had become a bizarre abstraction, a construct whose value he could no longer comprehend. You're a Ciir.
I am. Ciir-bunta. Kabel came to me for help.
The smaller bear lurked behind, watching. I thought you were going to eat me, Iggy tried to whisper, but couldn't summon the strength.
Kabel said you have herbs. You can heal yourself with these?
The words pricked him, reminded him of a last, slim hope for survival. Yes, he forced himself to say. Yes.
I don't see them. Did you carry them with you?
Yes.
Ciir-bunta approached and nuzzled around his belt, snuffling, looking for his pack and making his lightning burns sizzle. Iggy let out a long, helpless groan.
Not here, the great bear whispered.
Iggy was too weak even to weep.
Wait here, Speaker. I'll go look. Perhaps they're still in the creek bed.
No, Iggy whimpered. No time, please . . .
Only the All-Mother can tend you now. Your fate is Her decision.
The bears plodded outside, leaving him to wonder if he had imagined them. His fever, alone with him once more, dragged him back into a seething ocean of nightmares. Mother, he tried to call—but when he did, his terrors flowed into his mouth like seawater, drowning him. Mother!
And he heard Her Pulse, deep and strong. It enveloped him like a womb, Her heat cocooning him. Shhh. Rest now. Just as She had said in the Keldale alleys all those months ago, before he had known who She was.
Mother! He poured out his grief, his terror, like a child in his mother's arms. My legs . . . I can't walk . . . I can smell the spirits, they're overtaking me, I—I'm dying.
Yes, She said. You may be. There was no malice in her whisper, only the soothing caress of Her breeze upon his brow. You may. But life goes on, dear son, and you are a part of it always. Have no fear. She kissed his forehead, smoothed back his blood-matted hair. No one life is so important that it cannot end, even one as precious as your own.
But I— He thought of his friends, of Ordlan Green, of the journey he had only just begun. They made him realize a simple truth, so stark and desperate it made him sob: I don't want to die.
Oh, love. I know. She squeezed him, even as the fever wracked his body and his life seeped onto the cave floor. I know, and I wish it were otherwise. But death comes for all. It must. Do you know why?
And She sang him a lullaby.
It began with his terror, a discordant threnody like screeching violins. She didn't create that horror. She merely acknowledged it and let it play out—as the wind must play over the hills or the storms must crest on the sea. He hated it, resisted it with every fiber of his being. But he was weak, and he succumbed eventually. Then it buffeted him like a hurricane of anguish, until his misery and his terrible grief had spent themselves. His inevitable surrender felt like freedom.
His breathing faded. His bleeding stopped. The song fell to a deathly black silence which gave way to peace.
But that, to his awe, was not the end of the song. It was only the start.
From the ashes of the threnody rose a deep, earthy bassline, stealing into his senses like a morning mist. A powerful baritone of worms and soil, rot that gave way to health. A secret world, one at which his meditations had hinted but he'd never truly explored, a world of darkness and loam.
Now, Her song made him part of it. His flesh melted from his bones, eaten by spring's worms and turned into new soil. His mind dissolved as he watched, flowing into the great river of the Pulse and bringing it new strength. He was gone, like his Mother said—but he was not ended.
Then a lilting melody, flitting lightly around the stones and the dead tree branches, tickled the corner of his senses. Gentle as a flute, fragile as a flower—glimpsed only at the edges at first, like a memory of the heat of the spring sun. Then it crescendoed.
From the remnants of his own body and all the other death beneath the sky, a single green shoot wriggled skyward—naked in the cold, struggling, but defiant. Then another joined it, and another, until the loam of death frothed with new life and the gentle melody became a symphony of rebirth. A butterfly's eggs on the leaves, a newborn wolf who could barely open her eyes, majestic butterwood trees that always kept one foot in the death that had birthed them.
All must die, Mother said, so that all can live.
Iggy was not the most important part of the symphony. The most important part of the symphony was the symphony itself, the interplay between death and new life, the delicate yet enduring cycle. To take his place in that great majesty was no more frightening than leaving home for the first time. It was a duty, unavoidable—but it was also an honor.
I'm not afraid anymore, he told his Mother, and She smiled and kissed his head with frost. I'm ready.
The vision faded. He came back to his ruined body, ravaged by fever, and felt nearly eager for it to feed the cycle. His life was only pain now, his flesh a broken wreck. He craved release.
I'm ready, he whispered again. If it's time, it's time.
And when the darkness rose to take him, he didn't resist.
9
i. Angbar
He wondered what he was doing out there, at first. He didn't share Lyseira's certainty; he had never heard the voice of any god. He had come to the field, like the rest of them, out of shame and obligation—neither of which precluded the little voice in his head from whispering, This is crazy.
But as the minutes turned to hours, as the wry novelty of it all turned to cramped muscles and a body full of aches, such thoughts fled his mind. In time all that remained was the blank mundanity of the labor.
He sank the shovel into the snow: shunk. He lifted, his back groaning, and carried the snow to the nearest pile, where he tossed it in—whuff—and walked back. His entire existence became marked by this endless cadence: shunk-walk-whuff-walk, shunk-walk-whuff-walk. Now and again he would glance up and feel a bit of dull surprise at how quickly the work was going—frozen, black ea
rth gaped from the field now like an exposed wound—but then he would see how much still remained, and he would turn back to his work.
He barely noticed when Seth and Lyseira left, spirited away by some runner from the city. But he noticed when they returned, because they brought more help with them: another dozen Kesprey and other faithful, and a half dozen Blackboots, sent by the King. They had rounded up some more shovels from somewhere, too. That's good, he managed to think coherently before turning back to the work.
Lyseira and the other Kesprey called manna mid-afternoon, and all of them took a break to wolf it down. There's one perk, Angbar thought wryly, of hitching to Lys's wagon: full manna rations. But he'd managed the church's food supplies for too long to enjoy his largess. Twoscore people eating full rations in the field meant that others were going hungry back in the city: kids and poor people, innocents who didn't have as many options as he did. Ah, Lyseira, he thought as he scanned the slowly blackening field, this better sehking work.
After lunch they labored until nightfall, then went back to the city to rest before returning to the field the following morning. They didn't have enough picks for everyone, so they split the labor: three-quarters of the group kept clearing snow, while the others started working the field. This was less a matter of tilling the soil as it was chipping out enough of it to "plant" the wheat seed, which Lyseira promised would be arriving in a few days.
All told it was five days to finish clearing the snow, and an overlapping three to complete the tilling. When they finished, the King sent his head Crownwarden, Melakai Thorn, out to survey the work. The old man shook his head, frowning as he took in the broken, meandering till lines and the patchy field, pockmarked with wisps of blown snow.
"We're ready for the seed," Lyseira said.
"Yeah," Kai returned. "It should be here in the morning. We're going to bring it out under cover of darkness. The fewer people that know, the better."
"As long as it's here," Lyseira said, and Kai fixed her with a look.
"As long as I can't talk him out of it, it will be."
Back at Majesta, Angbar slept like the dead. His dreams consisted of vague, heavy snowfields that vanished like steam upon waking—which he did before dawn, when Seth came in with a whispered, "It's time."
He stumbled to his wardrobe and dressed warmly, splashed his face clean and swished the sour taste of sleep from his mouth. They were still taking full rations for breakfast, and he ate mechanically as dread gnawed at his guts. It's time. Seth's words shadowed his thoughts like a premonition. Once the seed was in the ground, there was no going back. If Lyseira had gotten something wrong, or if Akir failed them, odds were good Angbar would end up back on the road as Keswick burned behind him—assuming he survived the inevitable uprising in the first place.
They walked a tightrope, all of them, and Lyseira held the far end of it.
"Angbar!"
He looked up as he entered Majesta's chapel, looking for the source of the familiar voice. "Syntal?"
She smiled and hurried over to hug him. "I heard today's the day."
"It is." She looked clean and beautiful, if a bit wan in the face like they all were. "What are you doing here?"
"I've been busy at the school since we got back, but—I finally had a chance to get free today. I wanted to help plant."
We could've used you a week ago. Angbar swallowed the admonition with a sigh. Classic Syntal, he thought instead. Not so much as a word while the hard work was underway. The city's starving, but you've got the chanter school you always wanted and more wardbooks to find, so sehk on all of it, right?
He hated that he felt that way. He didn't want to resent her.
But every time he thought of her now, he remembered how she had lived in luxury and studied her books while he had been tortured in the dungeons of Basica Sanctaria—how she had saved herself, literally vanishing before his eyes, when he had been captured for a second time and forced to endure the most horrible torments imaginable. That time in the dungeons still haunted his nightmares; it had left welts on his soul that were still raw. But she looked . . . happy. Like all her dreams were coming true, like she didn't even realize how dire the situation in Keswick actually was.
"Great." He forced a smile. "It'll be good to have your help."
She fell in beside him as they crossed the chapel and headed outside. "I'm sorry I couldn't help earlier, but we've been so busy—the King came to visit the school!"
"Oh?" He fought to keep the word disinterested, despite the jealousy rearing up in him. We're struggling to keep the populace from killing us because they all think we're hoarding food, and he visited you? He wondered if it was even still possible to just be happy for her, to appreciate her successes without comparing them to his own abysmal failures. "For what?"
"To meet the chanters, see what we're doing there. He shared his vision for the school's future. He's warming to us, Angbar. He was worried at first, but we've promised to take oaths of loyalty to the throne to help him be more at ease. Harth said it really well: we're going to be griffons. I think the King understands that we're too important for him to ignore. We can help in the fight against Tal'aden."
"No doubt you can," Angbar said. "That was your big idea, right? You've been talking about it for months."
"Yes! We're faster than them, stronger—I gave him all my reasons. I think the Fatherlord's scared of us."
"Mm." He returned a wave from one of the new recruits; called a hello to Elthur as the older man emerged, shivering, into the morning cold. "Makes sense."
"He thinks so, too. And he loved what we're doing there. He even mentioned giving us some coin to expand, to take over the next building so we can house more students. It's really happening."
"That's great." A host of wagons waited in the temple square. Lyseira stood near one of these, her breath steaming as she greeted the day's workers. Angbar maneuvered toward another, where several more people called out their hellos.
Syntal took his elbow, pulled him to a stop. He glanced at her hand, remembering a time when that simple touch would have ignited him with excitement. She lowered her voice. "You should join us."
Angbar forced a chuckle. "Syn, I'm not half the chanter you are. Hel, Takra just learned, and she's better than I am."
"She's better than everyone. Maybe even me. But that's not the point." She still had his arm. She settled toward him, eyes intent. "You belong with us. You're one of us. You've known about it all since the beginning. And you have a way with kids and students—you proved that in Tal'aden. We could really use you."
Somehow, she managed to flatter and insult him at the same time. Didn't she understand he was tired of being "used"? He sighed. "Syn, it's not that the idea's not appealing. But we're trying to do something good here, too. Lyseira's god . . . Akir has called on us, here. We're trying to keep the city from starving—maybe the whole kingdom. None of your chanters are going to be able to do anything if they don't have food to eat."
"I know. I understand that. But . . . digging up the field with pickaxes? It's grunt work. You're too important for that."
He bristled. "Grunt work?" He thought back on the past week, on the glaring ache still seething in every muscle in his body. "Yeah, I suppose it was. It took almost a week just to clear the snow. It was backbreaking work. I'm going to be limping for a month, my back hurts so bad. And I did it—we all did it—even though we have no way of knowing if it will make a difference, just on the bare hope that Akir will come through for us like He always has. That thin, single thread. That's all we have, Syn, and you weren't here, but I was. I made sure it happened."
"You . . . shoveled the snow?" she asked. "Why didn't you just use Detonations to clear it?"
He blinked, struck dumb.
Then he turned away and left her standing there.
They arrived an hour after dawn. The field looked a mess: earth haphazardly torn up and scattered about, swirls of blowing snow already settling in the broken lines that
were meant to house the wheat seed. A slate-grey winter sky shrouded the daylight like Stormsign, intimating a day which forgot to raise the sun at all.
But the King's covered wagon had come in the night, presumably bearing the last fifty bushels of reserve grain seed. From a distance, Angbar mistook the small crowd around it for Blackboots or Crownwardens. Upon coming closer, though, he saw it was nothing of the sort.
"You're not touching this grain, witch," a short, stocky woman at the head of the group called out as Lyseira's wagon rattled up. "First you drive out the Church, then you starve us—now you're going to destroy the last of our food?" The crowd—maybe thirty people, all wan and starving, eyes darting behind sunken cheeks—growled their support. "Over our dead bodies."
"Glora Terling," Syntal muttered. "Usually she's outside the chanter school. Now I see why she wasn't there this morning."
They must have gotten here just before us, Angbar thought, taking in the scene. There had only been three Blackboots left to guard the grain wagon—all now trussed up and lying in the road.
"This is the King's grain," Lyseira answered levelly. "It's his decision, and he believes in Akir. He's doing this for the good of―"
One of the dissidents spat into the snow. "He's no king of mine," Glora threw back. "Jan Gregor is the true King. We all heard what the Bishop said, we were all there—Isaic is a traitor. They took his birthright. He's nothing but a thief now."
"Akir restored that birthright," Lyseira said.
"Through you?" Glora scoffed. "Some peasant whore? How stupid do you think we are? You're warming his bed, more likely, willing to do anything to prop him up."
Seth glowered and started to jump down, but Lyseira put a hand out to stop him.
"Listen," she said. "King Isaic rules here. He's gifted that grain to the Kespran church so we can feed the city with it. If you have a problem with―"
Of Dark Things Waking (The Redemption Chronicle Book 3) Page 16