by Shae Ford
Kael gasped as Kyleigh pulled away and the stark light of reality rushed in. For a moment, the chirping of the nighttime creatures sounded impossibly loud; the scents of the forest were too thick for his lungs. He blinked. He took deep, steady breaths. And slowly, the power of the vision eased back.
“She was a healer,” he said quietly, remembering how Amelia had grasped Setheran, how her worry had only lifted after she’d held him for a moment — how she seemed to know by merely touching him that all was well.
Kyleigh inclined her horned head. He’d guessed correctly.
There was another question in her eyes, but he pretended not to see it. Kael turned away as a memory of Setheran’s face rose unbidden. His hand twisted in his curls, pulling painfully on his scalp — but the memory of that look raged above the pain.
He’d been unlucky from the beginning. The symbol Setheran had seen in his eyes had turned his face from merry to dark. Had Kael been born any other way, Setheran and Amelia might’ve lived happily. He might’ve been able to grow up inside that castle with two people he knew as nothing more than mother and father …
But that wasn’t at all what had happened — he’d been born a Wright. He’d messed it all up from the very beginning … and that was precisely why he hadn’t wanted to look.
Dark things swirled inside him — their bubbling muses an angry, painful mystery. Kael would’ve spent all night with them churning beneath his skin, had it not been for Kyleigh.
“No, I don’t want to,” he growled when he felt her pointed teeth clamp around his shirt.
The garment was simply made — nothing more than a thick leather jerkin with iron studs clamped down its front. But Kyleigh had made it for him, and he rather liked it. So he told himself it was for the jerkin’s sake that he allowed her to drag him back against her, that he only fought a little when one of her wings pinned him to her side, and didn’t grumble at all about the heat that radiated from her scales.
He could feel the rhythm in her chest: calm, steady, and remarkable deep. Most of the time he forgot she was supposed to be ancient. But when he listened to her heart, he believed it. There were centuries of depth in there — a calm beyond human.
With the song of her heart and the warmth of her scales, it wasn’t long before Kael’s eyes began to get heavy. He pushed the darkness cast by his shadow aside and instead, he focused on what lay before him … beside him …
And slowly, he fell asleep.
Chapter 36
Hundred Bones
For mornings on end, Kael rose with the gray dawn and followed at the back of the wildmen’s march.
The treacherous climb seemed to carry them quickly through the seasons. One day they crossed summer’s edge and passed into a land that looked like autumn, where the trees had burst in fiery shades of orange and red. They’d trekked through a snow of fallen leaves for miles after — a snow that hissed as it fell, a snow with flakes that danced in each gust of wind and often got themselves lodged in Kael’s hair.
The higher up the mountains they climbed, the sharper the weather became. Oaks shrank back under the chill; they grew bare and bleached as bone. The evergreen arms of the pines sagged on their limbs, as if the cold had drained them of their marrow.
Though the trees creaked miserably at every gust, the wildmen only grew stronger. Their laughter came more frequently. Their chatter filled the air in a near-constant, white-puffing stream. The warriors seemed to gain breath as the air grew thinner; the craftsmen stopped their moaning. Every time Gwen turned to bark an order, her teeth were bared in a grin.
The wildmen’s eyes brightened beneath their caps and helmets — as if the frigid air had somehow warmed their spirits. Occasionally, the brightness grew so fierce that they seemed unable to contain it: the warriors would break into a dead sprint with Gwen at their lead. They would howl and run with their weapons raised high while the craftsmen followed, beating their chests with their fists.
“Mountain folk,” Kyleigh muttered as she watched them gallop off. “The more miserable things get, the happier they are. I’ll never understand it.”
Not so long ago, Kael would’ve rolled his eyes and agreed. He would’ve said the wildmen were behaving like children, and that they ought to save their strength for walking.
But now as he watched the whole thundering, fur-clad lot disappear around the next bend, it felt strange not to run after them. The craftsman in him studied the wilderness: he saw the beauty in the sharp terrain, read the secrets that the mountains’ wild, untouchable spirit had cleft into the rock. The warrior in him was tuned to every deadly shift in the mountains’ temper. He felt the danger in every step.
He wanted to sprint along the rocks and streams, to battle against the slapping force of the wind, to dance the wild dance of the mountains …
“Oh, go on, then.”
Kyleigh was watching him — her exasperated look slightly muddled by amusement. “Go on where?”
She waved up the road. “I know you want to chase them.”
He did. Very much. His leg took one lurching step before he shook his head. “I should save my strength.”
She rolled her eyes. “Yes, because that’s far more exciting than spending it. Ah, well … it’s probably for the best.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because you’d only lose.”
She took off like a shot, and Kael was determined not to let her win.
He chased after her. He charged in behind her as they tore around the next bend. He stayed directly at her back, so close that he could’ve reached out and touched her.
Ahead of them, the wildmen had come to a stop. Some of the warriors spotted the dust flying up from their charge and they formed a wall — holding their arms out, goading them into a faster sprint. Kael stayed behind Kyleigh until the last possible second. He matched her pace-for-pace, keeping his head ducked even with her shoulders. He waited until she risked turning back to see where he’d gone, and then he shot past her.
He whipped by her blind shoulder and thudded into the warriors’ arms. She thudded in beside him — just a half-pace behind.
The wildmen howled and shoved him roughly. Gwen hurled him away by the roots of his hair, laughing. “He stomps dragons, he beats them in a footrace. Is there anything he can’t do?”
Kael’s face burned under their looks. “Well, I can’t stop the snows from coming. So we’d better press on,” he said gruffly.
The wildmen glanced around each other before they shrugged in agreement. Gwen got them all moving with a snap of her fingers. They filed in behind her, heading straight for a section of the road that sat so precariously over a rift that it looked as if it’d been carved from the edge of the earth.
Kael waited until they’d gone before he turned back to Kyleigh. “You let me win, didn’t you?”
Her hands went to her hips; her elbows bent into dangerous points. “Kael of the Unforgivable Mountains,” she growled, “you know very well that I would never let you win at anything.”
“So you’re admitting I beat you?”
The fires in her eyes blazed hot. They glowed with that strange light he’d seen once before — with the fury he was certain wasn’t rage, with the heat that didn’t quite burn. There was a fierce and terrible danger there …
One that made his heart quicken its stride.
“If you force me to say it aloud, you’ll be sorry.”
His chest was pounding so violently that he was sure anything he might’ve said would’ve come out as a stutter. So instead, he offered her his arm.
And to his great surprise, she took it.
*******
More days passed, and Kyleigh walked beside him more frequently. When he asked her why she’d suddenly decided to stop running through the woods, she looked away.
White mist trailed from between her parted lips and the frozen air seemed to make the green in her eyes stand out all the more sharply as she gazed around the woods. “I thought Titu
s might have something planned for us after the … incident,” she said, giving him a smirk. “I thought for certain he would’ve answered by now, but he’s been quiet.”
“He’s frightened of us,” Gwen called as she passed. She pushed through the line of wildmen, the limp carcass of a badger hanging from her pack. “After my warriors were finished him, the Man of Wolves had to use rocks to pound the stains from his breeches!”
“It seems like only yesterday she was hurling a door at my head,” Kael muttered under the wildmen’s cheers. “And now it was suddenly all brilliant.”
Kyleigh didn’t reply. When he glanced at her, she was tugging at the end of her pony’s tail.
“You still think Titus has something planned,” he guessed.
She nodded. “To him, war is a game. Titus doesn’t charge out with his teeth bared: he circles, he waits, every move he makes is a step towards victory — no matter how sideways it seems. He doesn’t attack unless he knows he’s going to win. When he finally strikes, it’s with a blade measured to fit his enemy’s neck. The only blow he deals is the ending one,” she said quietly. “Mages are bothersome, but Titus is the real reason I’ve always given Midlan a wide berth.”
“How do you know so much about him?” Kael asked, trying to smother the chill that’d suddenly crept up his spine.
“I used to fight with him.”
“You fought against him, you mean.” When she didn’t reply, Kael felt as if he’d just had an iron fist clamp around his stomach. “You mean you’ve fought with Titus before? On his side?”
“I once fought alongside all the Sovereign Five, and Crevan. They were our allies during the Whispering War. I told you I was a knight of Midlan,” she said testily, scowling at his look. “What did you think that meant?”
“You were only a knight for a day! What about all the days before? What in Kingdom’s name were you thinking, fighting with the Sovereign Five?”
“They were all the Kingdom had left,” she said sharply. “Most of the whisperers had abandoned Midlan to join the Falsewright, and King Banagher had tossed the rest out on their ears because he feared they might be spies. By the time Setheran and I joined the fight, war had been raging for two years across the realm. And who do you think held the rebels back all that time?”
“The Sovereign Five,” Kael said quietly, piecing it together.
The only story he’d ever read about the Whispering War had been the one at the end of the Atlas, and it hadn’t exactly been detailed. Now it was beginning to sound as if some bits had been intentionally left out.
“Why would Setheran have waited so long to fight?”
Kyleigh shrugged. “He’d given up his title in Midlan long before I met him, and he’d sworn never to shed blood again. When I asked him why, he said it was because he’d been broken. He would never tell me anymore than that,” she said with a hard smile. “The memory I showed you was the most he ever spoke of it.”
There must’ve been lead inside Kael’s boots. That was the reason he could hardly lift them. “But Setheran … I can’t believe he would ever side with villains, not even to save the Kingdom.”
Kyleigh sighed heavily. “They weren’t villains in those days. Crevan and the Five wanted power, but no more or less than any other humans. It’s what they did with their power that turned them villainous.”
Kael couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t grasp it. The whole idea was far too hot to wrap his head around. If he tried, it would burn him up. So he didn’t. He forced his legs to move, hoping the mountain air would cool him.
“Don’t stomp off,” Kyleigh called from behind him. “I don’t want you to think badly of me —”
“I don’t. In fact, I don’t know what to think. Even if you thought the rest of the Sovereign Five weren’t villains, you can’t tell me you didn’t see it in Titus. You can’t tell me you didn’t know he was wicked from the start.”
“You’re right. I can’t.”
He whipped around to face her, matching her glare with one of his own. “Then just answer me one thing,” he said through his teeth. “If you knew Titus was a monster, why didn’t Setheran kill him? Why didn’t he save the Kingdom seventeen years of pain and suffering? Why did he let Titus live?”
Kyleigh studied him for a moment. “Titus was a hero during the Whispering War. His tactics were unbelievably cruel, I’ll give you that. But he kept the rebels from taking Midlan. Setheran always said that Titus was a necessary evil.”
With that utterance, a thing Kael had held onto all his life crumbled between his fingers. A hero he’d fought beside in his dreams, a warrior he’d aspired to be — a man who’d been such an unwittingly large part of his childhood perished before his eyes.
“I could never do that,” Kael said quietly. His eyes were on Kyleigh, but behind them he watched the last of the earth cover Setheran’s face. “I could never stand by and let a man with so much blood on his hands go on living.”
Kyleigh grabbed his arm before he could turn away. “I know how all the stories painted him, but the truth is that Setheran preferred to spare lives rather than end them. He wanted Fate to have her say. Setheran was very much a reluctant hero … a bit like someone else I know.”
I’m nothing like him.
Those were the words he wanted to say — the ones that waited on the edge of his tongue. Kael wanted to twist out from under Kyleigh’s hand and sling his fist into the nearest tree. But then he would’ve been no better than Setheran.
So he swallowed the words back and instead of swinging, he placed a hand on top of hers. “I’m not angry,” he insisted, when he saw her searching. “I suppose I’m just a little … disappointed. I’ve spent my whole life thinking that Setheran the Wright was the greatest warrior who’d ever lived. Now I’m beginning to realize he was just an ordinary Wright who was very lucky in friends.”
She smiled at this — which made it much easier to forget his anger.
*******
One day, the wildmen marched out from between a forest of sagging pines and into the opened mouth of a field.
Here, the land was completely flat — as if the peak they stood upon had been cleft of its top. The nub it left behind was a gap between fall and winter: perched above the autumn slopes and cradled in the shadow of the mountains’ frosted peaks.
Three of the peaks stood higher than the rest, with the tallest, most formidable in the very center. “That’s the summit,” Gwen said, pointing. Then her finger trailed to the left, where the second-highest peak rose beside it. “Thanehold — our lands. And over there,” her finger went to the smaller peak on the right, “is Wynndom.”
Kael was more than a little surprised: he thought the wildmen would’ve put their castle at the very top of the mountains. The fact that they hadn’t made him wonder if perhaps the wynns truly did exist. Something powerful was obviously keeping them from the mountain’s top.
As he studied the harsh, frozen edges of the summit, he began to think that the real mystery was why anybody would want to claim it in the first place.
A scant layer of grass covered the field’s rocky skin. It was surprisingly green, though it wasn’t the crisp, healthy green of the Valley: it was a deep, defiant green — a green nearly blackened by its depth. Sickly-thin blades whipped violently in the wind, their roots clinging to their rocky perches. It was if the grass was green here because it wanted to be, as if it’d flexed the tiny fibers of every blade and willed itself to turn.
Tuffs of snow-white reeds dotted the rocky earth. They grew several hands apart, surrounded by patches of greenish-black. Kael had seen fields like this before. Roland called them stubble fields, because the way the white reeds clumped together made them look like the sprouts of an old man’s beard.
This patch of land was like a valley dug out of the mountains, the sort that seemed to droop down and suck everything else in along with it. Even the clouds got caught in its snare: the gray marching beasts sat so closely above them that Kael sw
ore he could feel them scraping the top of his head. They covered the points of the trees and draped over the land in front of them like a blanket. He could see the peaks of the mountains in the distance, but the land before them was hidden in cloud.
He knew where they were. This low point near the mountain’s top, with its ghostly field and the low-hanging clouds was a place he’d read about in the Atlas. The air seemed colder here — as if it was made of ice. Though it wasn’t the cold that chilled him so much as the spirits: the ghosts of one hundred of the King’s noblest men, all drowned at once.
They were near the banks of Hundred Bones.
“It’s the only way across, mutt,” Gwen said when he voiced his very serious concern. “The river’s been frozen over for centuries. It’s not likely to crack under us.”
Kael knew very well that Hundred Bones was always frozen over — but only because it fed upon the souls of the King’s men. The river would need new souls, eventually. He just hoped it would hold for one more crossing.
“Move, mutt!” Gwen barked from up ahead, startling him.
“If she falls in, do we have to pull her out?” he muttered under his breath to Kyleigh.
She didn’t answer. While he’d been arguing with Gwen, Kyleigh had fallen behind. Now she wandered several paces away, staring wide-eyed at the shaded bellies of the clouds. She didn’t look frightened, exactly. But she certainly didn’t look comfortable.
“Do you feel the ghosts?” he wondered.
When her smile came, it was disturbingly frail. “You could say that, I suppose.”
Her eyes finally dragged to watch the wildmen from over his shoulder. The clink of their armor faded as they left the banks and stepped carefully onto the river’s icy back. But Kyleigh didn’t move.
Her teeth dragged across her bottom lip as she stared emptily at Hundred Bones. “The mountain’s voice is so much stronger here. I can hear it screaming at me. Do you ever feel like it’s … after you? Am I mad to think that?”