Even the Darkest Stars

by Heather Fawcett

I gazed at him. River, in spite of all that had happened, was evidently troubled by no new misgivings about the journey ahead. I found that I was not surprised.

  “How are you feeling?” I said, sitting beside him on the rock. The fire was warm against my back. It was now light enough to see his features, but only just.

  “I’ll have a nasty bruise, I think. But I managed to roll out of the way before she stepped on my head, so that’s something.”

  “I don’t mean that,” I said. “I mean the spell yesterday.”

  “Oh.” River shrugged. “It hurts less. Each time less than the last time. I suppose I should be concerned about that, but I’m not. It’s a great relief. The first time, it felt like—well, it’s rather hard to describe. Like being burned alive, but from the inside.”

  He could have been describing a pulled muscle, his tone was so mild, rather than the feeling of some otherworldly creature devouring pieces of his soul. I scrutinized him in the half-light, expecting to see a difference there. But he was the same River, to my eyes, his handsome face flushed in the firelight, his hair sticking up on one side—which it always did, unless he bothered to comb it, which was rare. His eyes registered faint amusement as he returned my gaze.

  “What?” he said.

  I sighed, looking down at my hands. “My father knew someone once, a long time ago, who did what you did. I haven’t been able to stop thinking of it.”

  River gazed at me silently.

  “She was the shaman of a village in the Southern Aryas,” I continued. “She lived with her fire demon for years, and eventually she—I don’t know how to describe it, exactly. Father said she became broken. She was powerful, so powerful, but she decided that it wasn’t enough. She began sacrificing animals to the spirits, praying that they would grant her more power. It didn’t work, of course—she was mad to think of it—but still she kept trying. Eventually, she started killing people. She took several lives before the villagers discovered what was happening. When they confronted her, she just laughed. Father said they found the skulls of those she had killed buried beneath the floor of her hut. Perhaps she thought to use them as talismans.”

  “That’s a dark tale,” River said. “I’ll admit, I’ve heard similar things about other shamans who have formed contracts with fire demons. The risk seems real enough.”

  I gazed at him. “Then you’ve never felt—”

  “The desire to start a skull collection? Fortunately not. My guess is this sort of magic doesn’t touch everyone the same way.” He looked thoughtfully at the fire, and seemed to search for words. “It’s more difficult to hold on to feelings, I think, than it used to be. Happiness, fear, grief—it doesn’t really matter what. I feel it, I think I do, but then it fades. As if it’s muffled somehow.” He looked back at me. “Did you think about Aimo last night?”

  I swallowed. “Yes.”

  He sighed slightly. “I didn’t. Not once. It wasn’t until I was walking past that crevasse again with the yak that I remembered. Really remembered, I mean. It’s the same with Norbu—the man has been at my side for three years. I should miss him a great deal more.”

  I didn’t know how to reply to this. The cold wind eddied over the campsite, and I tucked my hands into my sleeves.

  There was a rustling sound from the tent I shared with Tem. Then, low and muffled, the sound of his cough.

  “I should go,” River said, standing. “I don’t like good-byes, they’re bad luck. Give Dargye my thanks, will you? And Tem. He fought bravely back in the pass. I don’t think I ever told him that.”

  “What?” I said. But he was already walking away, heading toward his tent. He ducked briefly inside, then reemerged carrying his pack. “River!”

  “What?” He approached the yak, pausing every few steps as if trying to anticipate an attack. The beast didn’t even raise her head—she seemed to be sound asleep.

  I hurried after him. When I caught up, I grabbed his arm and wrenched him around to face me. “What are you doing?”

  “You know what I’m doing,” he said, looking surprised. “What I came here to do. Fetch the emperor’s talisman.”

  I sputtered. “You can’t climb Raksha alone!”

  “What do you suggest? I won’t ask you to come with me, Kamzin. Not after all that’s happened.”

  I stared at him. “So I’m just supposed to turn around and go home?”

  He removed one of the satchels from the yak’s load, checked it, then slung it over his shoulder. “Why not? I know why you’re here. You want to be an explorer, to have great adventures. Well, you’ve had a great adventure, haven’t you? And I promise that if I ever make it back to the Three Cities, the emperor will know your name. You’ll be celebrated at court, with your pick of the best expeditions that will take you to the farthest reaches of the Empire. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  I stared at him. He stood before me, offering casually what I had dreamed of my entire life. The breeze stirred his tahrskin chuba. I had gazed at it so often, so often imagined wearing one just like it, the feel and movement of it.

  It was what I wanted. And yet—

  “If anything goes wrong—” I began.

  “If anything goes wrong, I have Azar-at. He’s very reliable.”

  I shook my head. I could think of a hundred words for Azar-at, and “reliable” wasn’t one of them. The idea of abandoning River to that creature, whether he had asked for it or not, was too awful to contemplate.

  “I’ve warned you before about trusting me,” he said, and his voice had no levity in it now. “You see why. I lied to you. I would do it again, to complete the mission. It’s the most important thing in the world to me. I must succeed, no matter the cost.”

  “You think I don’t understand that?” I glared at him. “Azmiri overlooks the Amarin Valley, the path to the Nightwood. If the witches get their powers back, what would stop them from attacking my village, my family? Will the emperor’s armies be able to defend us against creatures that can take any form, or conceal themselves in a hundred ways? Aimo died because of them—they’re the reason she came with us.” I lowered my voice, suddenly fierce. “I won’t let her die for nothing.”

  And I won’t let you die either.

  He gazed into the shadows. I noticed, suddenly, that Azar-at was there, standing just behind him. Had he been there all along, watching us?

  “Kamzin.” He took my hand, drawing me toward him. “If you’re truly determined to come with me, I won’t argue with you. I’d lose—I know you well enough by now to realize that. Besides, I—I don’t really want to leave you behind. But please consider this carefully.”

  “I have.” I stepped closer, so that my face was only inches from his. “I don’t do anything halfway. Besides, I’m the better climber.”

  He laughed then, a familiar sound, wild and twisting. Somehow, in spite of everything, I felt a stab of excitement. I remembered the Elder of Jangsa’s words. He had said I sought danger, even reveled in it. He had also said I would succeed—though not in a way I would expect.

  I thought of Aimo. Was that what he had meant? A success shadowed by sorrow and loss? Or something else entirely?

  “Get your pack,” River said. “Let’s begin.”

  PART III

  RAKSHA

  EIGHTEEN

  THE ICE GROANED beneath my feet, threatening to cleave in two. I regained my balance and continued trudging forward. One step at a time, that was what I needed to focus on. Not the groaning, creaking, shifting icefall.

  The icefall—a deadly mass of broken snow and ice that flowed slowly down the side of a mountain—was the only viable route onto Raksha, according to Mingma’s maps. I had estimated that it should only take River and me an hour or two to cross it, if we kept up a good pace. I thought we could reach the summit of the mountain, and the sky city, in three or four days.

  It was pure guesswork. I had no idea what we were facing.

  I hopped across a narrow crevasse, my arms out at
both sides for balance. Despite the eeriness of walking over a moving carpet of ice, I couldn’t deny that the icefall was beautiful. It was as if some giant had taken an ax and carved the glacier into strange and beautiful shapes. When the sunlight hit the pillars of ice that poked up from the surface, they shone like blue-green glass. Ripples and cracks in the ice reminded me of the rings of a tree stump, only there was no discernible pattern.

  I tried to keep my mind off the painful scene that had unfolded with Tem, once he realized I was leaving. I had told him the plan, which was highly sensible—he and Dargye would remain at camp, to rest and stand watch over the bulk of our supplies. When River and I returned with the witch talisman, hopefully in a week or so, they would be ready with spells and medicines and anything else we needed to recover from our journey.

  To say Tem wasn’t happy with this plan was an understatement.

  “How can you say this is sensible?” he had yelled. It was all he managed to get out before his voice dissolved into a wracking cough. I grabbed his shoulder and forced him to sit down by the fire. He leaned against his knees, coughing until he could barely breathe. Finally, he leaned against me, spent.

  “Please don’t do this,” he said, his voice barely a whisper.

  I felt a wrenching pain in my chest. “I have to.”

  “I’m coming with you.”

  I would have laughed if it weren’t so sad. “Tem. You’ll be dead before the day is out.”

  “I have my magic.”

  “Yes.” I leaned back to look at him. “And if you stay here and rest a few days, you might be able to use it to heal yourself and Dargye. You need to stop worrying about following me.”

  “Kamzin.” Tem gazed at me. His face was so pale that I could have cried, his eyes larger in his thin face. He had lost the most weight out of all of us over the course of our journey. “Kamzin, you’re all I have. How can I stop worrying about you?”

  I pressed his hand between mine, pushing the tears back. “Because I’ll be all right,” I said fiercely. “I promise. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  Tem seemed about to say something, but the fight had left him. His gaze dropped to the ground. We sat there for a long moment, and the only sound was the wind whistling over the glacier, and the rustling of oilcloth. Then, Tem rose and ducked inside our tent. When he reemerged, he was carrying the kinnika.

  “Take them,” he said, pressing them into my hand.

  “I can’t.” I tried to give them back. But Tem stepped away, and they fell onto the rock. The black bell made no sound when it hit, but then, of its own accord, it let out a whisper. I paid it no heed—I was used to its errant murmurings by now.

  “You need them.”

  “Not as much as you do.” He picked up the kinnika and dropped them in my lap. “At least you’ll have fair warning if anything attacks you. And you know the protective spells. I know you do.”

  I stared glumly at the chain of bells. Certainly, they would warn me that some monstrous beast was about to tear me in two, allowing me time to mull over my demise before it arrived. I could say as much to Tem, but I knew he wouldn’t listen. Magic came as easily to him as breathing, and so, naturally, he refused to accept that it couldn’t be the same for me, if not for my obstinate refusal to apply myself. I gazed into his eyes, and swallowed my arguments. If it would make him happy, I would take the kinnika. But that was the only reason.

  Half an hour later, I was packed. I gave Tem one final hug good-bye, part of me hating myself as I saw the sorrow in his eyes. I knew he would spend every moment worrying until I returned. I fell into step behind River, and I didn’t look back. I didn’t want to have that image of my best friend as he grew smaller and smaller burned into my mind.

  Unfortunately, my imagination supplied it anyway.

  In contrast to my gloomy mood, River was in high spirits, chattering about rappelling techniques and hot-air-balloon maintenance and the last party he had attended in the Three Cities, and a dozen other things—I had a hard time keeping up with it all. He seemed relieved to be moving again, and determined to cover as much ground as possible by sundown. He paused only to hurry Azar-at, who was slithering over the ice some yards away. I wished he wouldn’t bother—I was much happier when the fire demon was out of sight.

  “Are you sure you want to bring him along?” River said. He was eyeing Ragtooth, whose lithe body was slung half over my shoulder and half across my pack. He had been waiting outside my tent when River and I set off, looking as self-satisfied as it was possible for a fox to look.

  “He’s coming whether I bring him or not.” In truth, I had been relieved to see Ragtooth again, so much that I had almost crushed his ribs hugging him. The fox had struggled mightily, twisting his head this way and that in a futile attempt to bite. I released him before he succeeded, and so he had to content himself with gnawing on my boot.

  “There’s something unnatural about that creature,” River muttered, but he made no further complaint.

  The terrain rose steadily as we left the icefall and followed a ridge that ran along the southern face of the mountain. The snow was only ankle-deep, and the going was still easy, but the terrain had steepened. We were climbing now, not hiking.

  We were climbing Raksha. The thought made me shudder with a not-unpleasant fear.

  Now that we were alone, with no one to wait for, River and I moved quickly. It was a wonderfully freeing feeling—I hadn’t realized, before, how much I had been holding myself back, forcing my steps to assume a slower rhythm than was natural. Lusha had once nicknamed me “the plow horse” for my dogged, tireless energy, and even I had to admit it fit. I would never be as graceful as my sister, who often seemed to float, rather than walk, across the landscape like the shadow of a cloud, but I had greater reserves of strength than anyone I knew.

  I felt a pang when I thought of Lusha. I trusted Tem when he said that she and Mara had turned back—but why had they done so? Had they decided the mountain was too much for them? Or had something else, an injury perhaps, forced them to retreat?

  As the sun rose higher, I estimated that we were nearly halfway to the Ngadi face, a wall of ice that connected the smaller Mount Ngadi to Raksha. Below the feature, Mingma had added a single note:

  Tricky.

  We stopped for an early lunch atop a knuckle of rock overlooking the glacier below. From this vantage point, it was stunningly enormous—easily a mile across when it reached the valley, a long tongue of ice nestled between Raksha and a neighboring, nameless mountain. The landscape in this part of the Aryas was little explored, and not all of the peaks had names. I felt strangely sorry for the smaller mountain, which, after all, was still much higher than those that surrounded my village.

  “We should name it,” River said when I mentioned this. “Why not? Most mountains are named by explorers. Go ahead, pick something.”

  “I don’t know.” I squinted. “From this angle, it reminds me of a boot. That curve there could be the arch.”

  “Mount Boot? I think we can do better than that.” River dusted the crumbs off his hands, and pointed. “That little band there? Those are the coils of a snake ready to strike. The col is a hand wrapped around the snake’s neck—the peak is the head of a man, you can see the nose and a hint of a mouth. It’s Belak-ilen—the hero who slayed the serpent of creation before it swallowed the Earth. He strangled it with his bare hands, even as its venom spread through his body, killing him.”

  I couldn’t help smiling. River’s face grew animated as he spoke, his cheeks flushed red by the cold. He looked several years younger than he was, and about as far as could be from the fearsome explorer of his reputation.

  “Belak-ilen is all right,” I said. “Though I’ve never liked that story. I prefer ones with happy endings.”

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  “Yes.” My voice was quiet. “Aimo.”

  River’s expression grew thoughtful. He gazed at the mountain. “There’s hardly a ha
ppy ending in that. But it is fitting, isn’t it?”

  We began packing up the remains of lunch. We were traveling as light as possible, and not a single scrap of food could be wasted. We weren’t even bringing dragons, in order to avoid having to carry enough to satisfy their voracious appetites.

  River glanced back at me often, to make sure I was keeping up, and I smiled at him, delighting in the simple pleasure of movement. He smiled back. His face was flushed, but otherwise he seemed about as tired as I was—which, with the warm sun on my face, and the mountainside stretched out before me like a dream, was not much. The foreboding I had felt at the thought of Raksha seemed to have vanished, unexpectedly, now that I was actually climbing it.

  It grew warm as the day wore on. The sky was cloudless, the sun seeming to burn hotter the higher we climbed. Fortunately, the wind picked up in the afternoon, drying the sweat on my brow.

  I can do this, I thought as we traversed a maze of seracs, boulder-sized lumps of ice and snow that towered over our heads, or leaned heavily against one another like weary giants. I felt better than I had in days. As if I could fly up the mountain, as if it were barely a challenge at all. It was how I often felt back in Azmiri, roaming about with Tem. And really, what was Raksha? A mountain. I had climbed mountains. I would climb Raksha just as I had climbed the others—by putting one foot in front of the other.

  “Kamzin!” River shouted.

  “What?” I almost laughed at the look on his face, it was so uncharacteristically serious. Something groaned strangely behind us. I felt something brush my pack, light as a bird’s wing, as a shadow passed over me. Then, suddenly, I was knocked off my feet by a tremendous impact.

  I rolled, and would have rolled farther, if River hadn’t raced to my side and seized my arm. I drew myself to my knees, dazed. When I looked behind me, my heart stopped.

  A serac had fallen into the space where I had been standing only a heartbeat ago. It was a monstrous size, taller than two men and wider than the widest tree. So heavy that its own impact had cleaved it in three—long, jagged fissures running through the ice like veins.