Even the Darkest Stars

by Heather Fawcett

  “Does the emperor know?” Lusha said. “Could he be part of this?”

  “The witches will destroy everything he’s built, if they get their powers back,” Tem said. His voice was hoarse. “I doubt he even suspects.”

  “He’s won the respect and trust of the court,” Mara said. “He will have learned many of the emperor’s secrets.”

  Lusha gazed at the blank wall of the cave. “Including what the emperor has been seeking. The witches’ talisman. River will see that the emperor and his shamans never touch it.”

  “There’s more to it than that,” Tem said. “The talisman is an object of great power—all the ancient shamans’ accounts say so. A power to remake the world—that’s how one described it. I think it’s likely River means to use it to break the binding spell.”

  For a long moment, no one spoke. The wind howling outside somehow only magnified the silence.

  “But that would mean . . .” Lusha’s face was pale as death. “Azmiri.”

  At that word, I felt something break inside me. Azmiri, perched on its mountain overlooking the Southern Aryas—and the Nightwood. Azmiri, its neat, terraced farms stretching to the Amarin Valley, the very route the witches would take if they decided to invade the Empire.

  They had once tried to burn the village to the ground, and had very nearly succeeded. What would they do this time, their powers unleashed and a two-hundred-year-old vengeance in their hearts?

  “We won’t even have a chance to warn them,” Tem murmured.

  I lowered my face onto my hand. Spots flitted across my vision, as if I was about to faint. I would have welcomed the darkness, but after a minute, it parted like a curtain.

  Lusha was gazing at me with an unfamiliar expression on her face—something akin to pity. It made me want to shout at her or hit her—or bury my face in her neck and sob.

  “Kamzin—” she began.

  “Stop,” I said. “Just stop.”

  I felt ill, and hot. Too hot. The storm was still raging outside, but I didn’t care. I walked out of the cave. No one called after me.

  Stepping outside into the wind and blowing snow was like being struck by a charging animal. I staggered a few steps, only barely managing to maintain my balance. Then I stumbled headlong into the wind.

  I didn’t know where I was going. I didn’t care. At one point, I tripped and fell, sliding down a small ridge. By chance, I found myself in a depression partially sheltered from the icy wind. I didn’t move. I merely lay where I had fallen and cried. Around me the wind howled and the snow pounded its tiny, insignificant fists against the mountain.

  How could he do this? How could he lie to me?

  On some level, I knew that it was a nonsensical question—if River was truly a witch, asking his reasons for betrayal would be akin to asking why the winter nights brought frost. I pictured all the things he had done—rescuing us from the fiangul, plucking me away from the ghosts, sacrificing part of his soul to save my best friend’s life. Cutting the rope on the ice wall. What had been the reason for it? Had he merely wanted to keep me at his side, to keep me loyal, so that I would help him? None of it made any sense. And now he was gone, and I could not ask him. He was gone, and I could not rage at him, or kiss him. I loved him and I hated him, but I couldn’t tell him.

  Lusha found me a few moments later, still in the same position. She didn’t say a word, but merely helped me to my feet and led me back into the cave, her arm a gentle weight around my shoulders.

  Something tickled my face in the darkness. My eyes opened, my hand reaching automatically to brush at—whatever it was. Something nipped me on the ear, and I caught the glow of tiny green eyes.

  Ragtooth. He had been gone since River left. I pulled him to my chest, relieved that he had returned. The fox bore this for only a moment before struggling for freedom. He went to the mouth of the cave—I could see his small outline silhouetted against the night. He glanced over his shoulder, as if waiting for me to follow.

  My heart began to pound. Lusha, sleeping next to me, murmured something as I sat up, but did not wake. Silently, I rolled my blanket up and gathered my pack. Then I slipped out of the cave.

  I blinked at the view. It was the clearest night I had ever seen. The clouds were gone, chased away by the wind that scraped its chilly fingers over the mountain. The stars were so bright and so close I felt as if I were standing among them. I could reach out and catch one, trapping it between my palms like a firefly.

  Ragtooth growled quietly. As soon as I had emerged from the cave, he had trotted down the slope, heading north. He was stopped now, looking over his shoulder at me.

  I followed him.

  But I had only traveled a short distance when I heard someone clear their throat. I started, whirling around. Lusha stood only a few steps behind me.

  “Where are you going?” she said.

  “I don’t know.” Lusha was a dark, ominous figure above me, her arms crossed and her long hair entwined with the breeze. “Ragtooth wants to show me something.”

  “And you thought you’d bring your pack?” Lusha limped forward into the starlight. Her expression was almost wry.

  My startled brain tried to come up with a response. “I—”

  “You think he’s going to lead you to River, don’t you?”

  I said nothing. I looked away, glad that the darkness would hide the flush creeping up my face.

  “I can’t stop you,” she said quietly. “And I can’t follow you. None of us can. Do you know what that means? If you keep going, you’ll be on your own.”

  I swallowed. “I know.”

  She gazed at me. “You might think you know what it’s like to be alone in a place like this, but you don’t. There will be no one around to fix your mistakes. You’ll have to stop making them.”

  I stared at her. “So you’re not going to argue with me?”

  She let out a long sigh. “I’m tired of arguing. Aren’t you?”

  I didn’t trust myself to reply. Instead, I simply stepped forward and wrapped Lusha in a hug.

  She stiffened at first, likely out of surprise more than anything. Lusha and I did not hug—the last time had probably been when we were both too young to remember it, and no doubt at Father’s urging. But, after a little pause, she hugged me back, patting me awkwardly.

  She pulled back and lifted her hand. A ribbon of darkness fluttered toward us—Biter. Lusha transferred him onto my shoulder. The raven gave her finger a gentle peck.

  “He’ll go with you,” she said. “At the very least, if you lose your way and want to come back, he’ll lead you right.”

  “Thank you,” I murmured.

  Lusha paused. “You can’t stop River. He’s powerful, and he’s determined to get his way.”

  “I know.” I shook my head. “But I have to try. This is my responsibility. I brought him here, didn’t I? If it wasn’t for me, he never would have come this far. If the Empire falls, if Azmiri—” I couldn’t finish the sentence.

  I wouldn’t have made it without you, Kamzin. For a moment I felt like screaming, or collapsing again into sobs. But I forced it down, down, until the fury and pain condensed into a weight deep inside me, small but impossibly heavy.

  Lusha touched my face briefly. “None of this is your fault.” She stepped back. “Good luck.”

  My eyes stung, but I nodded and turned to follow Ragtooth. Biter took to the air, weaving back and forth through the wind like a dark needle.

  I turned back only once. Lusha was still standing where I had left her, arms folded, watching me. I could not make out her expression. She looked small from that distance. A childlike figure suspended between the immensities of sky and mountain. I turned away and hurried after Ragtooth.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  THE NIGHT WAS eerily quiet.

  After enduring the wrath of the wind for so many days, it was liberating to be free of it, at least temporarily—though the still air was heavy with foreboding. It was as if the great mounta
in had drawn a deep breath, and this was the moment before the exhalation. The sound of my feet crunching through the dry snow was all there was.

  Ragtooth, ahead of me, was silent as a ghost. He did not slow or pause, but led me along the ridge Lusha, River, and I had traversed the previous day. I felt a shiver of fear as I spied the disturbed ground. With all the snow that had fallen since, it was difficult to make out the exact path of the avalanche that had trapped Tem and Mara.

  “Are you sure this is right?” I said. Ragtooth, of course, made no reply, nor did he pause even to glance back at me. Gritting my teeth, I followed him. I was limping now; the pain radiating up my legs intensified with each step. The simple act of breaking a path through the loose snow seemed to demand more energy than I had left. In spite of everything, I couldn’t help fantasizing about the warm cave I had left behind, the feel of blankets piled around me. There was a small noise behind me, and I jumped, my thoughts immediately leaping to Mingma and the other ghosts. But it was only the snow settling. We were moving up the mountain now, away from their tunnels. That, at least, was some small comfort.

  Past the ridge was a rocky outcropping that melted into the upper spine of the mountain. Ragtooth led me alongside it for a while, beside a ledge that narrowed and narrowed until I was hugging the rock, and then he stopped.

  “What?” I stared. “He went this way?”

  The fox lifted his leg and begin licking his foot.

  The rock face staring back at me was pale, brittle limestone, perhaps two hundred feet high. Past the halfway point, it seemed oddly free of snow and ice. It was not the snow or ice, however, that concerned me—it was the gradual backward arch of the rock, which continued toward a bulge where the snow disappeared altogether. From this bulge I would be suspended, nearly horizontal to the ground thousands of feet below, and travel perhaps fifteen feet in that position until the rock bent back again, after which it seemed to be a reasonable climb to the top of the face.

  I sat down, hard.

  Ragtooth placed his front paws on my knee, nosing my chuba. I barely noticed. I stared at the rock—ordinary rock, grainy and fragmented. I removed my glove and ran my hand over it to feel its texture. I tilted my head back, back, gazing up at the mountainside.

  “This is ridiculous,” I finally muttered. Sitting there wasn’t going to solve anything. I stood up, ready to launch my attempt—

  Then promptly fell to my knees and threw up.

  This pattern repeated itself over the course of an hour, until I had nothing left in my stomach. I leaned against the rock, gazing at the clouds sweeping over the landscape below, while I swished a lump of snow around in my mouth. Ragtooth had barely moved throughout my convulsions—he merely crouched on a ledge, his tail folded under his chin. Waiting.

  I had two options—continue or turn back. The thought of continuing made my stomach churn again. But turning back?

  Everything in me recoiled as I imagined walking back down the slope, back to camp, and telling Lusha and Tem that all was lost. Returning to Azmiri with the shapeless, inevitable threat of the witches and their dark powers hanging over the fate of the village. No matter what Lusha said, what had happened with River, and what he would do when he achieved his goal, was my fault. I had led him to Raksha, I had risked my life time and time again to help him. And for what?

  Guilt, heavy and cloying, overwhelmed me as I looked back on the days since I had left Azmiri. I had been so consumed with my own success, with impressing River and the emperor, making a name for myself as a great explorer.

  How meaningless that seemed now. People had already died because of my choices—how many more lives would be lost?

  My mother, I remembered, had once compared guilt to a dagger. You can let it defeat you, she had said, cut you, strike you down. Or you can take it and use it as a weapon against the world.

  I drew myself to my feet. Nausea rose again, but I forced it down.

  “All right, River,” I said to the wind, “if you made it to the top, I can too.”

  Not that this statement made sense. River, for all I knew, had turned himself into a cloud shaped like a mountain goat and floated up the rock. I chewed my lip, tilting my head back. Which route should I take? There were several possibilities. If I chose wrong—

  I glanced down at the earth, as distant as a star. Well. I would have a long time to regret it.

  As I paced, I tripped over a lump in the snow. I kicked at it, expecting to dislodge a rock. Instead, the lump snapped back, dislodging the snow that covered it. I blinked, my mind failing, for a moment, to understand what my eyes were telling it.

  It was a boot.

  I stumbled back, tripping over Ragtooth in the process. The scream in my throat died as the fall knocked the wind out of me.

  Breathe, I told myself. Breathe. It’s just a body. It can’t hurt you.

  My mind worked frantically. The boot was old-fashioned, the leather stitched together in a crosshatch pattern that was rarely used anymore. It was weathered, some of the stitches broken by years of exposure to sun and ice. It was another member of Mingma’s expedition, still here after fifty years on this lonely slope. I was astonished—I hadn’t known that any of those long-ago explorers had made it this far.

  The wind rustled over the broken snow, revealing the hem of a familiar, gold-stitched tahrskin chuba.

  Mingma’s.

  A tear spilled down my cheek. The explorer’s face rose before me—not consumed with bitterness, but the way he had looked when he spoke of his village, lost in a sadness so old it had etched itself across his face like a tracery of scars. He had been young, and brave, and he hadn’t deserved what had happened to him.

  I wiped my eyes. I had little time for this—I had to catch up to River. But as I turned from Mingma’s body, I remembered something.

  Did you look through it? I ran out of ink, near the end.

  I started. The memory was so vivid it was as if the ghost had spoken in my ear. I wrenched open my pack and pulled out Mingma’s maps. With shaking fingers I found the panel that showed the slope I was standing on, then held the thin paper up to the sky. The starlight shone through it.

  There. Etched into the malleable parchment, as if with the edge of a fingernail, was a thin, looping scratch. A line—a route, up the side of the mountain.

  My vision blurred again. Mingma, like a true explorer, had recorded even his last moments. A character indicating a waypoint was etched onto a ledge above the rock face—he had made it to the top. And then, judging by the position of his body, he had fallen.

  Had he been alone? One of his companions had found the body, that was certain—one of the only two survivors, who had retrieved the map and a few of his belongings and fled. But had he been alone when he died?

  My hands shaking slightly, I unwrapped Lusha’s scarf from my neck. I placed it over the explorer’s face, which was only faintly visible through the snow, weighted it with rocks and then covered it with more snow. I felt as if I should say something, but I couldn’t find any words. I turned back to the mountain.

  I stuffed Ragtooth into my pack and set about arranging my harness. I considered climbing without it, which would have been faster and less fiddly, but Lusha’s cautions still rang in my ears, and with Biter circling above, it felt as if my sister were still watching me. I attached two loops of rope to the harness, wrapping them over my shoulders to keep them out of the way. Then I started to climb.

  Almost immediately, my mind cleared. My worries about what was ahead quieted to background noise—all I could see was the mountain. Following Mingma’s route as closely as I could, I reached the overhang. There I hammered an anchor into a crevice in the rock, and attached one of the rope loops to it with a spring hook. I attached the other loop to a second piton a few feet higher, unclipped from the first, and then repeated the process, moving slowly but surely. Now I was surrounded by stars; I could almost feel the night sky pressing into my back. I did not look down. I tried not to thin
k. One wrong move, just one—

  I shoved the terror back, over and over, as I moved through the thin, hungry air.

  Ten minutes later, my nails cracked and bleeding from gripping the rock, I had cleared the overhang. Biter squawked at me, his wings beating frantically. He settled into nooks and crannies in the rock above, croaking encouragement. Once I reached him, he would take flight again before positioning himself upon an even higher ledge.

  An inhuman moan cut through the regular sound of my footfalls. I pressed my body against the rock as a blast of icy wind engulfed me, nearly knocking me off the mountain. It subsided, but I could hear another howl picking up, speeding in my direction. My chest clenched as I realized why this part of the mountain was free of snow—it was battered daily by vicious winds that beat against this side of Raksha like a turbulent river against a stone.

  I had to get off this rock face, fast. I was too exhausted to withstand prolonged attacks by the wind. Another gust struck me, swinging my body sideways like a door. The impact knocked the breath out of me, but I held on. Somehow, I forced myself to pick up the pace. Each time the wind struck, I braced myself until it passed, then climbed another few feet. It was exhausting. I barely noticed the passage of time, or the ache in my arms. All I knew was the feeling of the rock against my hands and the sound of my breathing. I was almost startled when I looked up and found that I had almost reached the crest of the rock face. A few moments later, I was hoisting myself onto flat ground, and crawling to the shelter provided by a small boulder.

  I sat there for a moment, breathing heavily, my legs dangling over the side of the cliff I had just scaled. The sun would rise within the hour; the horizon was lightening and the stars were beginning to fade. The view was immense, too much for my exhausted brain to take in. I took a drink from my canteen and ate a few bites of dried yak meat. Ragtooth hopped onto my lap and accepted a small piece of cheese. Biter settled next to me, his feathers puffed out against the wind. He turned up his beak at my breakfast, but accepted a drink from the water I poured into the palm of my hand.