I rummaged around in my pack until I found my canteen. I took a long drink, then handed it to River. He drew himself up and leaned against the rock.
“Let me see that bite,” I said.
River was motionless and quiet as I examined his ear. Ragtooth had bitten clean through the lobe, and blood stained his neck and the collar of his chuba. But it seemed to have stopped. I pressed a piece of snow against it so that the melting would clean the wound while it reduced any swelling.
We sat in silence. The clouds below us parted briefly, revealing the valley far, far below. They drifted together again slowly, like a door swinging shut.
“I couldn’t think,” River said. His gaze was unfocused. “It didn’t even occur to me to use magic. I was about to die, that was all I knew.”
“It’s normal to feel that way, in that situation,” I murmured. “You must have had close calls before.”
“Never that close.” He laughed. I watched him warily, wondering if I would have to summon Ragtooth again, but he soon stopped.
“I don’t think there’s another person in the world who could do what you did,” he said. “I don’t think I could have done it.”
I shrugged. I couldn’t meet his eyes. “I don’t know about that.”
He gazed at me. “I wouldn’t have made it without you, Kamzin.”
“That’s true enough,” I said, smiling as I heard the echo in his words. He had said the same thing when I led him to Winding Pass, breaking the spell that had hidden it from his eyes. “Without me, you’d still be wandering the Samyar Plains right now.”
He laughed at that. Before I even realized what was happening, he leaned forward and kissed me. His lips were cold and dotted with snowflakes that melted as we came together.
By the time he drew back, my heart was hammering again. He leaned against the mountain and closed his eyes.
“Give me a few minutes,” he said. “Then we can set up the tent. I’ve had enough for now.”
“Me too,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. I was indeed exhausted, my body one large ache, and I was relieved that I would not have to travel farther today. But part of me wished we could simply keep going, to use movement as a way of shaking off this new awkwardness I felt. The wind eddied over the mountain, its voice a distant howl. We were protected from it here in our little pocket of rock.
“You cut the rope,” I said quietly.
River didn’t open his eyes. After a moment, he said, “I guess I must have. I barely remember. It’s all a blur.”
I didn’t reply. I was still having difficulty comprehending it. A fall while climbing with a running belay was dangerous—but one scenario was far more dangerous than the other. If the first climber fell, the consequences were usually minor—the second climber’s weight would stop the first from going far. But if the second climber fell, he pulled his partner down with him, and the force of that pull could be deadly. By cutting the rope, River may have saved my life. At the same time, I thought, stunned by the realization, he had almost thrown his away. It would have been a split-second decision based more on instinct than anything else.
Why?
But the question felt too big to ask, so I didn’t ask it. The adrenaline was wearing off, and I felt drained. Finally, River declared that he thought he could stand again without falling over, and we began setting up camp.
TWENTY
WE WOKE THE next morning to a sky of liquid blue, scoured and scrubbed by the winds to such purity that it almost hurt to look at it. The mountains gleamed in the early sunlight. Raksha’s peak loomed overhead, as if it too was yearning toward the distilled sky. Everything was stark, and keen, and glistening.
River and I had entered uncharted territory. Mingma’s map did not detail the terrain past the Ngadi face. The air seemed to crackle with anticipation.
The vague unease that had plagued me since the icefall was not dispelled by the fine weather—if anything, it had only intensified, dogging my every step like a living creature. I didn’t like the pattern that was emerging. First I had been nearly crushed by the seracs, and then River had been cast off the mountain—both of us brushing against almost certain death within the space of a day. What future calamities did the mountain have in store for us? Could we count on being so lucky next time?
River, by contrast, was merry again, almost as if yesterday did not exist. I recalled what he said about finding it difficult to hold on to feelings. I made a point of mentioning his fall several times, just to see his brow furrow and his expression darken slightly. It was important, I thought, for him to remember what it was like to feel things like an ordinary person, even if those things were unpleasant. Even if I wished for the ability to so easily abandon my own fears and worries.
The kinnika were in my pack. The black bell had sounded briefly that morning, as had the burned one beside it. River, no doubt noting the anxiety this caused me, had encouraged me to put them away. I couldn’t see any reason to argue with him. They were as useful, in my hands, as a lump of rock. Less—I could do more damage with a lump of rock.
Azar-at trotted ahead of us, his bushy tail wagging. The mountain sloped almost gently here, and we were slowed only by deep snowdrifts—some as high as my chest. A rock face loomed ahead, curving around the mountainside. It was hard to tell at this distance, but it looked taller even than the Ngadi face, with few good places to fix ropes.
I clenched my jaw, trying to ignore the now omnipresent pain in my knee. The episode yesterday had not helped it, and now that pain was accompanied by an even worse throb in my shoulder, from my wrenching arrest with the ice ax. I rubbed it gently, praying it wasn’t dislocated.
River stopped suddenly, interrupting my thoughts.
“What?” I came to stand beside him. And froze.
Against the boulder ahead of us, covered in a thin layer of snow, was a body. It lay on its side, facing away from us, arms and legs folded. It was as still as the rocks themselves.
“Who is that?” I murmured, my ears ringing. Please, no. Please, please, no.
River bent over the body. After what felt like an eternity, he replied, “I don’t know. Whoever he is, he’s been here awhile.”
My knees wobbled with relief. “He has? Are you sure?”
“Oh yes. Years and years. He must have been trying to take shelter here, poor fellow.” River surveyed the terrain, his expression thoughtful. The discovery of the body did not seem to disturb him at all. “Perhaps a storm caught him unawares, and he grew senseless from the cold.”
“Could it be Mingma?” I didn’t like to consider the possibility, which stirred up both sadness and dread.
“Perhaps, or a member of his expedition.” River stood, dusting his hands. “We should keep going.” He moved on but stopped when I didn’t follow. “Kamzin?”
“Right.” I shook myself. It was difficult to stop staring. The dead man’s arms curled toward his head, as if, in his last moments, he had pressed his face into his hands. It was not that I had forgotten that twenty men and women had died trying to reach the summit of the very mountain I was challenging. But after days of pouring over Mingma’s map, reading his notes, I had begun to see him almost as another companion on the journey. And now, this stark reminder.
The fear seemed to lengthen and grow.
We reached the rock face that afternoon and began exploring the terrain. It was not an easy task. As the winds tossed snow against the mountainside, much of it settled here, creating drifts that extended far above my head. River and I roped ourselves together as we walked, keeping a safe distance so that if one of us fell through the snow, the other would be able to haul them out. While we slogged through the drifts, Azar-at glided over the surface like a puff of cloud.
“What do you think?” River shouted as the sun dipped behind the mountain, plunging the world into shadow. Clouds billowed over us in cold sheets, and the winds grew ever more ferocious.
I kicked at the snow in frustration, nearly falling ov
er in the process. We were over halfway up the mountain, but how we would make the final ascent was a mystery. We had spent hours traversing the uneven bench that bisected the upper third of Raksha from its lower slopes, searching for a way up the rock face. It was possible that a path lay ahead, beyond the curve of the mountainside, but we were not likely to find it in the dark.
I rubbed my hands over my face. I was exhausted—so exhausted that the world seemed enveloped in a heavy fog, separating me from the mountain, from River, from everything. I was moving my feet, and yet moments would pass during which I was aware of nothing, not even the snow crunching beneath my boots. Despite my annoyance, I was relieved that River wanted to stop too.
The rock face was scarred with innumerable pockets and caves. River had discovered a large one earlier that day that he declared would serve as a perfect shelter—flat and deep, and almost high enough to stand in. Returning to it as the shadows deepened over the landscape, I felt a shiver of apprehension. There was something about the mountainside here—its nakedness perhaps, or the caves that riddled the rock like the holes of burrowing insects, that made me uneasy. I would have sooner chosen to sleep outside in the tent than turn to Raksha for shelter.
Still, once we were settled in the cave with a small fire burning—our first since leaving Tem and Dargye three days ago—and River had piled snow in front of the cave entrance to block the howling wind, I began to feel more comfortable. It was warm enough to remove my chuba and heavy boots. After a hot meal, I felt almost like my old self again.
“What are you doing?” I asked River. The fire was dying down. I was wrapped in my blankets in the corner of the cave, watching him.
He looked up from the bundle of string he was weaving with his fingers, forming intricate shapes between his open palms. “It’s a trick for divining the weather. If you can read the patterns, you can see what the winds have in store for you.” He loosened several strings and rubbed his hands together. When he drew the string taut again, it showed an entirely different image. He peered at it closely. “Hmm.”
“I’ve never seen anyone do that,” I said. “Not even Chirri.”
“It’s very old magic.”
“Like astronomy?”
“Not really. Astronomy is a messy way of seeing the future. There are too many variables. I’ve never had much use for variables.”
We fell silent. I was warm, almost too warm, though it was far from hot in the cave. It was as if my body was becoming so accustomed to the snow and the ferocious chill that it had begun to believe that was its element now.
“Tell me about your family,” River said suddenly.
I dragged my eyes open. “What?”
“Your family.” His voice was quiet, musing. “Tell me about them. I never had a normal family—you have no idea how fascinating you are to me.”
“My family isn’t all that fascinating.” I yawned. “You’ve met my sister; you know what she’s like.”
“I know she’s nothing like you.”
“That’s true enough. We’ve spent most our lives arguing about something or other. When we were little, and I did something she didn’t like, she used to threaten that when she was Elder, she would have me exiled to the barbarian lands, or tied to a yak and dragged down the mountain.”
River laughed. “She sounds vicious.”
I shook my head. “She hated that I wasn’t afraid of her, the way everyone else was. I used to follow her everywhere. Sometimes I think she started hanging around the seer’s observatory to get rid of me. I always found astronomy terribly boring.”
“And your father?”
Elder’s face rose before me, and I felt a pang. I missed him badly—I hadn’t realized how much. “My father is a busy man. He didn’t always have time for us growing up. I know he loves me, though. Even if I am a disappointment and a stain on the family honor.”
“How do you know?” River’s head was bent over the strings. I couldn’t see his expression. “How do you know he loves you?”
I thought. “I don’t know. How do you ever know someone loves you? You just know.”
River seemed to ponder this. “Tell me more,” he said.
So I did. I told him about my mother—her frequent absences, her laughter, her ability to rivet the attention of a room with one of her stories. I told him about Father’s desire for me to be a great shaman, my years of miserable lessons with Chirri. I told him about Tem, and how I was always dragging him along on my adventures.
River, in turn, told me stories about life in the emperor’s court. He told me about a dinner at the palace, when the emperor’s niece had mistaken a carelessly placed dish of dragon treats—dried beetles and kitchen scraps—for an appetizer, and no one had the courage to correct her. I was soon snorting into my pillow as he described the looks on the courtiers’ faces when they realized they would have to go along with the mistake. He told me about the strangest expeditions he had undertaken, such as his visit to the Ajnia Lakes, ringed by mountains, where the villagers lived in floating huts and rarely set foot on land. I asked him question after question, and he answered them all.
We talked for hours. Eventually, we fell silent again. The gentle rustle of the string against his hands formed a soothing backdrop to the crackle of the fire. I closed my eyes, intending to rest only briefly. But when I opened them again, the fire was out, and River was gone.
I sat up, rubbing my eyes. “River?”
The snow we had packed over the door to the cave was still in place, apart from a narrow gap just wide enough for a body to slip through. I looked around. Azar-at was gone too. River’s pack was still there, leaning against the cave wall.
A strange sensation passed over me—a sort of echoed foreboding, as if something I had been dreading had at last come to pass. I clambered to my feet, my injured knee protesting the unexpected effort.
Something had woken me, I was sure of it. I listened hard, but all I could hear was the wind sweeping over the mountainside. But then there came another sound—faint, almost impossible to distinguish.
Whispering.
I woke Ragtooth, who protested sleepily, burrowed down among my blankets. Once he saw me pull my boots on, however, he stirred and stretched. He hopped onto my shoulder as I stood up and nestled himself in his customary place between my hood and neck.
The whispering came again. It was definitely coming from outside, but whether it was beside the cave, or halfway down the mountainside, I couldn’t tell. The wind carried sound over long distances sometimes. I wasn’t afraid—River and I were the only ones on the mountain, so what was there to be afraid of? I was only curious.
With Ragtooth secure around my shoulders, I stepped out into the night.
It was cold, so cold. The winds had died down, but even a gentle breeze was fierce at that altitude—it funneled through me, draining away the warmth that clung to me from the cave. The pale slope of the mountain stretched before me like a gray canvas, and snow gleamed dully on the nearby peaks. The sky was thick with stars, their cold light blazing more brightly than I had ever seen. The Winter Tree constellation hung directly in front of me, its many branches reaching up to ensnare the Dancing Dragons. Nothing moved, apart from the loose snow sweeping over the mountain like fog.
“River?” I called. I could just make out his tracks in the snow, leading off to the right. The whispering came again—from the opposite direction.
I wandered toward it. The wind was against me, whipping my hair back from my face. I called River’s name again, and thought I heard someone reply.
I stopped in my tracks. A figure stood before me. A young man—tall and broad-shouldered, with an imperious tilt to his head. His skin glowed with a sheen like fish scales, and he wore a long chuba edged in gold thread and cut in an old-fashioned style. It rippled around him in a way that seemed oddly familiar.
I stared, openmouthed. Ragtooth let out a long, low hiss. He leaped to the ground, placing himself between me and the stranger, hi
s fur standing on end.
“Who are you?” I said when I finally found my voice.
“Never mind that.” The young man’s voice was cold and strange. It reminded me of chimes moving in the wind. “You must come with us.”
“What?” Something moved out of the corner of my eye. I screamed.
A head—a head—floated through the air toward me. Its cheeks were sallow and sunken, giving it a skull-like appearance, and its eyes were wide and staring.
I staggered back, still screaming, and collided with the man—who was not a man at all, judging by the iciness of his skin and the strange softness of his body, which felt like a wall made of wind.
“Take her,” the ghost said, and suddenly I was surrounded. Ghosts stretched their pale arms toward me, gaped their hideous mouths. Cold hands closed around my arms and legs, and I was borne away, screaming all the while.
TWENTY-ONE
I SCREAMED UNTIL my throat was raw. The ghosts traveled terribly fast, leaping over chasms and snowdrifts as if they were nothing. As they moved, they swirled together to become indistinguishable, so that I felt as if I were being transported by a chill fog with many viselike hands. I did not touch the ground, and no matter how much I struggled and screamed, I couldn’t loose myself from their grasp.
A rock wall loomed before us, craggy and thick with shadow. We seemed to be heading right for it. I squeezed my eyes shut, but rather than striking hard stone, we passed into a cave, much larger than the one River and I had sheltered in. The faint glow of the ghosts illuminated a tunnel of sorts, broad enough for several men to walk abreast, sloping down toward the heart of the mountain. The ghost cloud bore me along, not taking any care to prevent me from bumping against the rubbly boulders that lined the tunnel, evidence of previous cave-ins. These obstacles did not hinder the ghosts—they raced on, whispering together too quietly for me to interpret what they were saying. I caught only the occasional word. Girl. Others. City. Witch. Demon. Stardust. Coming. It was a meaningless jumble.
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