Beyond the Shadowed Earth

by Joanna Ruth Meyer

  “All right?” he said into her ear.

  She was too shaky for speech, but she nodded. He helped her put on her harness, which he secured with another climbing spike and a length of rope into the rock. She sank gingerly into the central hammock, expecting it to rip off its moorings and plummet to the ground below, but it held.

  Morin climbed around her like a spider and took the hammock on her right, while Tainir got comfortable in the one on her left.

  “We’ve done this before,” said Morin, digging about in his pack. “There’s always a chance the ayrrah can’t find anywhere flat for us to camp, so we learned to make do.”

  “You’ll find it’s really quite comfortable,” added Tainir.

  There was no possibility of tea, but Morin had squirreled away some dried meat and an apple for just such an occasion, and divided the fare between the three of them.

  Eda watched him cut the apple with his knife, the blade flashing in the light of the rising moon, and for some reason couldn’t stop thinking of peeling an orange in Ileem’s chambers in Eddenahr, back when she’d thought he could be a friend.

  The night deepened and the moon brightened, illuminating half the sky while the other half lay plunged in darkness that looked thick enough to touch. Tainir began to sing, raising her hands to the cliff above them. Gold light swirled round her.

  “She’s singing to the cliff,” said Morin, “asking it to guard us from the spirits as we sleep, strengthening the ropes with the old Words of Power.”

  “Where did she learn to do that?”

  “She said the wind taught her, when she was small. I think perhaps she’s spoken with the wind gods, Mahl and Ahdairon, although she’s never told me as much.”

  Eda thought of the Itan priestesses and suppressed a shudder. She studied Morin in the moonlight, the planes of his face swathed in silver, and thought he looked like the chiseled image of a young god. Some impulse made her want to reach out for him, touch his face, pull him close.

  But then she thought of Ileem, crushing the orange under one knee, promising his fealty as he plotted her downfall, and she hated herself. Instead she turned to Tainir, who continued to sing to the mountain, ancient magic flowing out of her.

  When Tainir finished, all three of them settled down into their hammocks. Eda pulled her hat down over her ears and tried not to feel the wind ripping past the cliff, making her hammock sway in an extremely horrifying manner. At the moment, she feared the fall more than the looming shadows.

  “I’m never going to sleep up here,” Eda muttered, without really meaning to. Her head was pointed toward Morin’s hammock, but she couldn’t see him—all she could see was the blur of darkness below her, concealing the plummeting drop.

  “We just need another story,” said Morin. “Tainir, tell us about Raiva going to find Tuer.”

  Eda shut her eyes, her body pressing up against the cliffside.

  “Raiva went into the mountain,” came Tainir’s voice. “It was dark and stank of shadows. She called Tuer’s name, but he didn’t answer. She walked and walked and walked, ever deeper into the mountain, and she came to a door. It was locked, but it opened for her, because she was bathed in Starlight from the beginning, and there is almost no power greater than that.

  “She went looking for Tuer beyond the door in the Circle of the Dead, where lost souls moaned and cried, for many of the race of mankind had died since Tuer slew Tahn, centuries ago. Raiva knelt by one of these souls, a young woman with shining hair, and she touched her forehead, imbuing her with Starlight.

  “‘Go,’ Raiva told the young woman. ‘Gather the others. Bring them on to the One, who will give them rest.’

  “And the young woman kissed the hem of Raiva’s gown and went and did as the goddess instructed her. She was the first Bearer of Souls.”

  Eda shifted uncomfortably. Though she’d realized she did in fact mean to try and fix the tears in the world when she found Tuer—she still didn’t want to be the Bearer of Souls. She didn’t want to be bound to the Circles and the gods in such an inescapable way—she couldn’t think of a worse fate.

  “Raiva did not forget her,” Tainir went on. “When the first Bearer had gone about her task a hundred years, Raiva herself bore her beyond the Circles of the world and brought her to her own rest.

  “On Raiva went and came to another door and another. She passed through both of them and found Tuer, chained and weeping in the Circle of Sorrow.”

  Eda’s heart seized. “She found him?”

  “Yes. But she couldn’t free him, though she tried for a century. Because Tuer had trapped himself there. Tuer had forged his own chains and bound himself to Sorrow, to atone for his crimes. So he couldn’t see Raiva. He didn’t even know she was there. He thought he was alone.

  “And there he is still. Raiva goes as often as she can to see him, but she despairs that he will ever be free. She despairs, because she has the power to do so many things, but not to save him. Never to save him.”

  Tainir lapsed into silence and Eda rebuked the tears that pressed suddenly behind her eyes. She tried to hold on to the fact that she hated Tuer. That he’d sent Rudion to take everything from her. That he deserved to die.

  But she couldn’t deny the stark understanding of everything he’d done, and everything she’d done, and how they were nearly the same. She thought of how she’d wanted to touch Morin’s face, to pull him close. She couldn’t do that to him. Couldn’t entangle him in her web, so that he would lose himself like Raiva in the dark of Tuer’s Mountain. Morin was good, and she was not. He couldn’t help her. Not that way.

  But she was still on the side of the cliff, held up by a few lengths of rope, trusting her life to him.

  “How can you sleep,” she said, “knowing you might fall in the night?”

  “The stakes are deep and the rope is strong,” Tainir returned. “And we fear death. I fear it, more than my ancestors ever did. Because the doors are shut. There is no Soul Bearer now to guide me to paradise.”

  Eda could almost feel the bands of the gods’ fate closing around her. She swallowed. “That is not very comforting.”

  She heard the quiet thread of Morin’s laughter in the dark. “What Tainir means is, we won’t let you fall.”

  Somehow, Eda slept, and when she woke the next morning she was still secure against the cliff face. Darkness roiled behind them. She thought she could see the outline of shadowy figures, the flash of white swords.

  Morin and Tainir packed up in a hurry, hanging in their harnesses from the rock. Eda clung to Morin as he helped her out of her hammock. It was freezing on the cliff, but his proximity made her flush with heat. “I dreamed that you were searching for me,” she told him. “That you were calling my name in the dark.”

  He looked at her intently, opening his mouth to say something. But the ayrrah arrived in a rush of wings, and in another few moments Eda, Morin, and Tainir were all hurtling on into the silver sky, away from the grasping shadows.

  The spirits loomed large behind them, close enough for Eda to make out dark wings, the glint of talons, the bleached white of their swords. The stench of them choked Eda’s breath away.

  The ayrrah didn’t stop for their midmorning rest. They flew on into the afternoon, as, bit by bit, the spirits gained on them.

  All at once, a mountain peak in the near distance emerged through the clouds; it shimmered and danced in the watery sunlight.

  The ayrrah flew closer, revealing the mountain’s impossibly colorful rock layers, ranging from crimson to cerulean to a deep, rich green, its top a glistering yellow. As they drew nearer still, music curled strange through the air, a chorus of wind pipes and throaty percussion, a tinkling of bells and harsh splatters of lightning. And above it all, a wordless, mighty voice that seemed to shake the world.

  Eda glanced over at Morin to see his expression; his face was wide with awe.

  Tainir’s words echoed in her mind: Tuer made it for Raiva, in the days before the Stars wer
e plucked down from heaven. The Singing Mountain.

  For a moment, the spirits were forgotten.

  The music rose and fell in waves, sometimes deafening, sometimes whisper quiet, but always mesmerizing and impossibly, achingly beautiful. Eda got the feeling that perhaps all of Endahr had been like this, long ago when the One who was before the gods had first formed the earth.

  Morin pulled pen and parchment from his pack and started madly sketching the scene in front of them. Tainir opened her mouth to join the mountain in its song, her lips sparking with gold. Eda just stared and stared. She couldn’t get her fill.

  The ayrrah flew even closer, until Eda could see the thick, velvety moss that covered the mountain and gave it those impossible colors. Every part of her yearned to stand on that beautiful peak, to let its music seep into her and fill her up, to think of nothing else for the rest of her days.

  It seemed the ayrrah were drawn to it, too. Filah shot toward the mountain with terrifying speed; the music swelled to a roar, overwhelming her senses.

  And then the spirits broke on them with the strength of a crashing wave, and the music was suddenly cut off.

  The world went dark. The smell of decay enveloped her.

  Something collided against Filah with a horrific thud. And then the ayrrah was screaming and Eda was falling through empty air toward the valley far, far, far below.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  EDA PLUMMETED DOWN, DOWN, WITH SICKENING SPEED. She didn’t even have the breath to scream and so the terror swallowed her whole and she was helpless and falling and falling.

  The last thing she saw would be the Singing Mountain, a blur of color, silenced by the shadows.

  She had failed.

  Tuer and Rudion had won.

  The Circles were broken and there would be no rest for her.

  No rest, no rest.

  Then all at once a hand closed around her arm and Morin was there, still astride his ayrrah, but his bird was falling, too. One of the spirits was tangled up with him, its bone sword lost somewhere, its clawed hands ripping at the ayrrah’s wings. Eda clung to Morin, her fingernails digging into his arm as he struggled to hang on to her. The spirit shrieked and snapped its broken teeth at Morin’s head. He ducked in time to save himself, but the spirit’s teeth sunk into his shoulder. Eda screamed. Blood ran down Morin’s arm.

  They fell and fell.

  Rock and dirt rushed up to meet them. Eda and Morin, the ayrrah and the winged spirit, collided with the mountain, skidding to a stop in a tangle of earth and blood and feathers.

  The spirit leapt back into the air, joining two others who shrieked and spat, their teeth dripping red. They wheeled above the mountain, preparing for another strike.

  Morin scrambled to his feet, drawing his dagger, and Eda loosed the knife the Itan priestess had given her from her belt. It was too small to wound the spirits, a needle against dragons. She stood beside Morin, bracing for the attack, trying not to focus on his blood-soaked sleeve.

  The spirits pinned their wings to their sides and dove. Eda thrust upward with her blade, but she missed. One of them collided with her, talons raking her shoulders, tearing a line of pain from her neck to her ear.

  She scrabbled backward as the spirit bared its broken teeth. “He told us we may not kill you,” it hissed. “But he did not say we may not harm you.”

  “Go back to the void,” she spat, lunging with her knife.

  The spirit launched himself backwards into the air, easily avoiding her blow, laughing at her. “Your companions are not needed. Our lord Rudion only wants you. Their deaths will be your fault, as so many others already are.”

  Eda shrieked and leapt from the mountain, grabbing the spirit’s taloned feet with one hand as she used the other to plunge her knife into its shadowy breast. The spirit roared in pain. She let go, tumbling back to the ground as it wheeled away from the others and disappeared into the clouds.

  Gasping for breath, Eda scrambled back up to where Morin was fighting another of the spirits. There was a jagged scratch down one side of his face, and he was guarding his ayrrah as he fought, the bird too injured to protect himself.

  The winged spirits laughed, a sound like steel scraping stone, and gathered themselves to dive again.

  Eda stood shoulder to shoulder with Morin, her hand tight around her knife hilt, blood gushing down her hand. She glanced at Morin and he nodded, grim. They couldn’t survive another attack.

  The spirits rushed toward them, all shadow and malice and clacking bone swords; Eda and Morin raised their puny blades high.

  And then something leapt past them and collided with the spirits head on, and the spirits were fighting that something instead of Eda and Morin. Eda stared, dumbfounded.

  It took her a moment to make sense of what she saw in the whirl of shadow: the creature who’d come to their defense was a cat of some kind, a leopard perhaps, light colored and spotted, with massive paws and huge sharp teeth.

  Morin sagged with relief beside her, and Eda realized that he wasn’t surprised by the leopard’s presence. He adjusted his grip on the dagger and ran forward to help.

  The spirits drew back, screeching and seething and dripping shadow blood, and then they beat their black wings and flew away, leaving Morin and Eda alone with the spotted cat on the mountain. The leopard stared after the spirits, crouched and ready to spring again if they were to return.

  “It’s all right,” said Morin, stepping up to the cat and laying his hand on its shoulders. “They’re gone.”

  “He must have called them back,” said Eda. “Rudion must have called them back.”

  And then the leopard let out a long strange sigh and glinted suddenly with sparks of gold light. Its body stretched and strained and changed, and a moment later Tainir laid there, trembling, claw marks raking all down her bare shoulders.

  The wind was searing cold on the mountainside, and Morin took off his poncho and pulled it over his sister’s head. She shook and shook, unable to get warm.

  It was Eda who stumbled about in a daze, gathering wood for a fire, finding flint in her pack, laying the sparks and coaxing them to burn.

  It grew swiftly dark, and Morin and Tainir and Eda huddled round the flames, Tainir still trembling uncontrollably. Morin’s ayrrah perched with his huge head on Morin’s knee, his wide dark wing broken, unusable. Eda’s and Tainir’s ayrrah were nowhere to be found, and Eda knew, without wanting to know, that they wouldn’t be coming back again.

  “Tainir’s not usually like this when she changes,” said Morin, his voice low and tight. “Fighting those spirits has weakened her, like their shadow stuff has poisoned her blood.”

  And Eda realized that Tainir must have shifted into her leopard form—a snow leopard, Morin told her—almost daily on their journey, every time she disappeared to go hunting. “Our father could change, too,” said Morin, as he wrapped his arm around his sister and held her tight. “He did it only rarely, but I saw him once—he transformed himself into a mountain goat. But he didn’t like it. He said it made his head feel odd, his thoughts go dim. He was afraid if he changed too often he wouldn’t be able to become human again. I was always jealous of Tainir—her changes are usually so effortless.”

  “But you can talk to birds,” said Eda, part of her thinking absently that it turned out Tainir was part mountain goat after all.

  Morin laughed a little, though his face was creased with worry and pain. “Yes. Yes, I suppose I can.”

  Eda’s eyes went to his torn and bloody shirtsleeve. “You’d better let me have a look at your shoulder.”

  He let her peel the sleeve away, pull the shirt up over his head. His bare skin pricked with gooseflesh in the frigid night. The cut was jagged, and deep enough Eda glimpsed Morin’s bone. Nausea rose acrid in her throat.

  Morin peered at his wound in the firelight, and Eda thought he turned a little green.

  “Tell me how to fix it,” she begged him.

  He took a breath, and told
her to dig the medical pouch from his pack. “Can you sew?”

  A fair question. Empresses definitely did not, but her mother had taught her embroidery as a child. It was different, stitching Morin’s flesh back together. Bloody and wet and awful, and she knew with each prick of her needle she was causing him more pain. But finally she pulled the wound closed, and tied off the thread. She bandaged it clumsily, and then helped him pull his shirt on again.

  She felt more awkward around him than she had in days.

  “Now let me look at you,” he said.

  She acquiesced, flushing furiously as she shrugged out of her poncho and let him examine the cuts on her own shoulders. She drew off one sleeve, hugging her poncho fiercely to her chest and turning her back to the firelight. She’d never felt more exposed in her life.

  “The scratches aren’t deep,” he assured her after a moment. “The one on your neck is the worst.” He smoothed salve on all her cuts with his quick fingers. The salve tingled. Her skin sparked where he touched her. She was relieved to draw her shirt on again, to tie her poncho tight around her throat.

  His eyes caught hers across the fire. Something pulsed between them. Something she didn’t want to name. She thought of a wicked smile in the ballroom. Hungry kisses on a rooftop. She closed herself off, turned her face away. She was Tuer, shut in the mountain. She wouldn’t let Morin be Raiva, calling her name for an eternity in the dark.

  “Even with Tainir’s help, the spirits should have destroyed us,” she said. “Why did Rudion call them off? What are we going to do when they come back again?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t Rudion,” said Morin. “Maybe Tuer was protecting us.”

  “Tuer doesn’t care if I live or die.”

  Morin raised an eyebrow. “We both know very well that’s not true.”

  She didn’t answer.

  They passed a fitful night’s sleep on the mountainside, Eda and Morin taking turns keeping the fire going while Tainir tossed and turned on the hard ground, tears leaking from her eyes. Eda slept for the few hours before dawn, and woke to find Tainir awake and kneeling beside Morin’s ayrrah.