by JA Andrews
She stared at him, speechless.
“You don’t have to tell me now, of course.” He let go of her hands, pushing down the regret that threatened to drown him. “But if you’re willing, I’d like to show it to you.”
Alaric cleared his throat from behind them and Will turned to see him watching Will with a wide smile. “We should get going. The way the mountains run, if we move quickly and make tonight a short night sleep, we think we can beat Killien to the enclave.” Alaric raised an eyebrow toward him and Sora. “If you two are ready.”
Sora pushed herself up and walked over to her pack. Will watched her before shoving himself up from the table. Alaric stepped up and slung his arm over Will’s shoulder. Evangeline asked Sora a question, and the two stood with their heads close together, looking in Sora’s pack.
“I see a new future for the Keepers,” Alaric said with a grin.
Will spun his ring. “That future is terrifying.”
Alaric laughed. “It gets better.” Then he paused. “But also it stays terrifying.”
They walked for hours through the dwarven tunnels, the blackness barely ruffled by the bowls of glimmer moss they carried. Douglon led with Rass. Evangeline and Sora went behind them, talking in low voices while Will and Alaric followed behind them. Hal brought up the rear, peppering Patlon with questions about the dwarves.
“Do you think there’s any chance we’re going to find Ilsa?” Will asked Alaric when the featureless walk through the darkness began to feel as though it was all they’d ever done.
“I don’t think finding her is going to be the problem.” Alaric pulled a cord out from under his shirt with a glitter of yellow light. “The problem is going to be getting to her. The mountain where the enclave is held isn’t terribly big, and the Roven are camped only on the southern side of it. Hal has been there a number of times. There’s a network of tunnels near the front of the mountain. The ones that head toward the back are barred and locked to keep people from doing what we’re doing, sneaking in. Patlon believes the humans tunneled all the way out the back side of the mountain, and that the locks shouldn’t be a problem. The dwarves and Hal seem fairly hopeful that we can find a back entrance and get in without having to walk through an army of Roven.”
“That would be nice.”
Lunchtime passed, noted only by Douglon passing along a sack of hard rolls that tasted of honey and pine nuts. Sora contributed some sticks of dried meat, and they kept walking.
The day was a strange mix of tedious walking through darkness, gnawing worry about what lay ahead, and pure enjoyment of talking with Alaric. The dwarves kept up the humming song as a backdrop. Will had to stop himself from talking too fast, asking too many questions. His mind felt awake in a way it hadn’t been in ages. There was something inside him that was free, reveling in the fact that there was nothing to watch out for, nothing to keep hidden. By the time Douglon called back that they were close to where they’d stop for the night, he felt more normal than he had in ages. Which considering he’d spent the day in darkness, was saying a lot.
This cave was nothing like the ones with the scattered lights. This was merely a room hollowed out of the side of the tunnel with a flat floor and more darkness. Will finished his cold meal and closed his eyes. The cave spun beneath him. It had been two days since he’d had a real night’s sleep. The others murmured around him, all their voices enveloped by the silence of the cave. He leaned back against his pack. Even the stone floor wasn’t enough to make him uncomfortable.
There was mention of several more hours of tunnels tomorrow, speculation on how they’d cross the open Sweep between their exit and the enclave mountain, and a debate between the dwarves about the likelihood of human tunnels actually reaching the back of the mountain. But Will couldn’t get his mind to focus on any of it. Soon there was only the feeling of his body sinking down against the hard floor and the mountain wrapping around him like a cocoon.
The next morning Will discovered Rass curled up next to him.
“I’m tired of tunnels,” she groaned when he roused her.
“I’m a little tired of them myself,” Will said, “but I don’t think it’s too much farther.”
“How long until we’re back near living things?” Will asked Douglon.
Douglon considered Rass with a small frown. “It’s not far to the grasses now.” He reached down and lifted her up. “Just a couple hours.”
“I can walk,” she objected. “You can’t carry me for hours.”
“You’re just a wee snip of a thing. The only fear is that I’ll drop you and not even notice.”
She made a petulant little noise, but wrapped her arms around his neck and dropped her head onto his shoulder. Douglon walked back into the tunnel and began to hum. Patlon grabbed some glimmer moss and everyone followed.
The hours dragged on. To pass the time, Will told one story after another, first just to Hal and Alaric, but soon Sora and Evangeline had moved close enough to hear too. He’d told four reasonably long ones and was convinced the walk was never going to end when they spilled out into a small storage room. Patlon ordered everyone to wait, then moved to the far wall and shoved at a large rock. He disappeared through a gap while sweet, fresh, clean air rushed in and swirled through the room. Rass lifted her head from Douglon’s shoulder and looked around sleepily.
In a few moments Patlon was back. “There’s no one nearby. But come out slowly, it’s bright.”
Will filed out with the rest of them. The wind brushed across his face and the clean scents of pine and earth revived him with an almost magical power. He stepped out into a shadowed, rocky gorge with trees stretching up around them, but still, the light was painfully bright. Rass sat in a wide patch of bright green grass, squinting and beaming and running her fingers back and forth through the blades.
The grassy slope they were on angled down, interspersed with bushes and pines until it flattened out onto a wide swath of grass that lay between them and the lone mountain that held the enclave.
Mountain was too big of a word for it, really. Large hill. Oversized outcropping. Whatever it was, it sat detached from the rest of the range, surrounded by a moat of grass.
Off to the south on the far side of the enclave, smoke from dozens of campfires rose into the air. Small bands of rangers roamed across the grass between them and the mountain, and as far out into the Sweep as Will could see. The sun hadn’t reached midday, and if Lilit had been right, Killien shouldn’t reach the mountain for hours.
Of course, they weren’t going to reach it any sooner.
The sky above them was a clear, empty blue, and Will scanned through the trees around them for Talen. Not that there was any way the little hawk could know where he was. A twinge of sadness rippled through him. He cast out into the sky, but found nothing beyond the slow, ponderous energy of the pine trees. He thought of the little bird’s mind and threw an image toward it of where he stood.
The idea faded away, doing nothing. With another look across the empty sky, Will pulled his focus back to the others around him.
“You really think you can find entrances on this side of the mountain?” Alaric asked Douglon.
The dwarf nodded. “Hal says there are tunnels that come this way.”
“I see three places with possible entrances,” Patlon said, pointing out rocky sections of the mountainside. “What does the front of the mountain look like?”
“There’s a huge cave,” Hal answered. “Fifteen mounted men could easily ride abreast each other through the opening. Inside the cave is a lake that’s fed from somewhere under the mountain, and it pours out of the mouth in a waterfall down to another lake down on the Sweep.”
“How high is the cave?”
“A third of the way up the mountain,” Hal answered.
“That makes the top entrance unlikely,” Douglon said. “Unless someone just really liked digging uphill.”
“I think the bottom one is too low,” Sora said. “If there’s
water in the caves where the enclaves meet, anyone stupid enough to tunnel down would have been flooded.”
“Agreed.” Patlon tugged on his beard and nodded.
Sora turned to Alaric. “We’re headed for that reddish cliff face about halfway up.”
“You don’t seem worried that there are doors blocking all the passages that lead to the back of the mountain,” Hal said. “And they’re locked. The Temur Clan controls the mountain. They’re the only ones with keys. If there even are keys any more.”
“Locked doors aren’t a problem,” Patlon said. “Wide open grassland is a problem.”
“We’ll be seen by a half-dozen scouts if we try to cross here,” Sora agreed. “Most of the clans are here. And each will have their own rangers on the lookout for anything unusual.”
“Good thing there’s nothing unusual about this group,” Patlon muttered.
A pair of Roven rangers rode slowly across the grass between them and the mountain.
Rass gave a small sigh. “We could go under the grass.”
“There are no more tunnels,” Douglon told her.
“No more dwarves tunnels. But”—she wrinkled her nose—“the frost goblins have tunnels all over down there.”
No one answered for a moment.
“We can’t go into a goblin warren,” Hal said. “We’ll be ripped apart.”
“Only if goblins come,” Sora said.
“The one thing we know,” Hal answered, “is that Killien plans to call goblins to the enclave. And when that happens, I really don’t want to be standing in the way.”
“I can tell if they’re coming,” Rass said.
“From how far away?” Will asked.
She set her hand on the ground. “The closest ones are far to the west of here. There are none under the grass close by.”
“How can you tell?” Hal asked.
“The roots of the grass reach down to the warrens. And when the goblins brush past them”—she shivered—“the grass knows.”
“Can you tell if they’re under the mountains we’re on?” Douglon asked her.
Rass shook her head uncertainly. “I don’t think they tunnel in the mountains. They can’t get through rock, just the soft earth of the Sweep.”
“I agree,” Sora said. “In the mountains they travel above ground, I’ve seen their tracks.”
“Can you lead us through the warrens?” Will asked Rass.
She wrinkled her nose and nodded, pushing herself up. “The closest one is this way.”
The mouth of the warren sat at the bottom of the slope, gaping open just as the grassland flattened out. A few trees straggled out into the grass, and a small finger of bushes ran almost to where the warren started. When there were no Roven rangers in sight, the dwarves clambered down into the hole and disappeared. In a matter of breaths they were back.
“Filthy worm hole,” Patlon said, brushing clods of dirt from his head.
“It’s not pleasant,” Douglon agreed, “but it looks stable. Rass is the only one of us that’s going to be able to walk upright, though.”
A hoarse screech echoed off the rocks behind them and Talen dove out of the sky. His wings faltered slightly and there were gaps in the feathers of his left wing. He landed hard on Will’s arm with a weak chwirk. Feathers along his neck were disheveled and wet with blood.
Sora came over and ran her fingers gently down his neck, smoothing the feathers. Talen flinched once. Will opened up to the little hawk and felt a tangle of fear and exhaustion.
“A larger bird must have attacked him.” Sora pulled out a piece of dried meat and offered it to Talen. The hawk snatched it up, his feet unsteady on Will’s arm.
“You have bad timing,” Will said to him. “We’re about to go into another tunnel. But we’ll be out soon, over on that mountain.” He walked over to a nearby stump and set his arm next to it. “I’ll leave you some food, and you can meet us over there.”
Talen’s claws tightened on Will’s arm. Will rolled his forearm toward the stump, but the little hawk turned his head away from it and grabbed Will tighter. A spike of fear flashed across Will’s chest.
“Ok, you can come with us, but that means the hood again.”
Sora helped Will slide the leather glove on his other arm and the hawk willingly stepped onto it. Talen didn’t move at all as Sora put the hood on him.
“Can we go?” Douglon asked. “Or are we going to collect any other animals that have no right to be underground?”
Will waved him on, offering Talen more meat.
“You’re sure there are no goblins?” Patlon asked Rass.
She nodded and, although no one looked happy about it, the group dropped down into the hole, one at a time.
The hole was wide enough for two people to walk next to each other, but even the dwarves had to duck to avoid the ceiling of loose dirt and dangling roots. Will held Talen close to him and stretched his other hand out to run along the wall. His feet sank into the soft churned up earth on the floor and the wall crumbled off beneath his fingers while he hunched over and took a few steps into the gloom. The walls and ceiling were gashed from the scrambling mass of goblin claws that had burrowed through. The smell of the earth mingled with the fetor of rotting meat.
The tunnel ran straight ahead as far as he could see, past the stooped forms in front of him, and the dwindling light lasted long past the point when his back began to ache from bending over. Roots brushed past his head and down his back, pellets of dirt showered down on him, crumbling and rolling down his neck.
Their feet sank silently into the soft earth, so the only sound was the breathing of his companions. Something from the wall tangled wetly in his fingers and wriggled across his palm. He flicked his hand and the squirming larva gripped his finger for a breath before flinging off.
The warren dimmed to the point where the orange glow from the glimmer moss was visible, tinging the dark earth a bloody red.
Time stretched on interminably. Will’s back and neck ached from hunching over and the rotten stench had settled into a sour taste in his mouth. The arm holding Talen had developed an ache that demanded he shift position. He stretched his shoulder and elbow, trying not to alarm the bird.
To pass the time he concentrated on the little hawk. It could have just been his imagination, but when he cast out toward Talen, the bird felt dimmer. Gently, Will funneled bits of vitalle into him. Letting it seep up from his arm through Talen’s legs. Inside the hawk were three different injuries. The cut at his neck, and two slashes on his wing. Will drew in vitalle from the roots brushing over him as he walked and fed it into Talen, directing it toward where the little bird was healing. Slowly Talen’s grip relaxed. Will offered Talen the last piece of meat, and the little hawk gobbled it up, standing straighter than before.
“We’re halfway.” Rass’s voice trickled back, muted from the front of the group. She walked next to Patlon with her arm stretched above her head, trailing her fingers through the hair-thin roots that hung down.
Alaric fell back next to Will, holding glimmer moss up near Talen. “How did you get the hawk to come?”
“I’m not sure.” Will ducked under a low-hanging clump of roots. “I sort of threw the idea of where I was out at him.”
The edges of Alaric’s eyes tightened in such a familiar way, Will laughed. “I know that doesn’t tell you anything.” Will explained the connection he’d built with Talen.
“More interesting than that, though,” Will said, “is that Sora can…push her emotions at me, and I feel them when I’m not trying to.”
Alaric’s eyebrows rose. “Did you know that was possible?”
Will shook his head. “Gerone spent all his time developing ways to close myself off to people. We never got to the point of experimenting with anything else. And outside the Keepers, Sora’s the first person I’ve told that I can feel them.”
“The first?” Alaric said mildly. “Interesting.”
“Can we stay on topic? The im
portant part here is that she was able to do it. To show me how her childhood memories made her feel.”
“Is that really the important part?” Will could hear the grin in Alaric’s voice.
Will shook his head. “Evangeline has changed you.”
Alaric laughed. “You have no idea.” He was quiet for a moment. “Can you push your emotions into me?”
Will searched for a good emotion to share. What was the last strong emotion he’d felt? There was the conversation with Hal, but that was too complex. There was the dark tunnel with Sora, but that was even more complex.
The dragon.
Will focused on the memory of the dragon, plummeting down toward them, the flames licking the trees next to them as they ran. The rush of air from the wings, the glint of red scales. His heart quickened at the memory of being utterly defenseless in the face of such overwhelming power. He gathered that feeling and pushed it toward Alaric.
Alaric’s breath caught. “I feel…scared? It’s small, and distant. Like the echo of being terrified.”
Will cut off the push of emotions with a surge of triumph. “The dragon.”
Alaric let out a long breath. “Yes, that’s what it felt like. Both times. He gets no less terrifying upon the second meeting. How have we never tried this before?”
“I don’t know if I could have done it before. In Queensland I did nothing but try to close people off. It wasn’t until I came here that I was nervous enough to need to read people around me. I’ve gotten so much better at it. I can pick out individual people in a group and filter out only their emotions. And I can feel people from much farther away.”
Smaller warrens branched off to the sides, but Rass led them on without hesitation. Alaric and Will continued to test what Alaric dubbed Will’s trans-emotive skills. Thankfully they soon spilled out into a slightly larger warren and there were groans and grunts as the group stretched slightly taller.
“Not far now,” Rass called back over her shoulder. “This warren runs—”