So what could have possibly happened that Vilnjar didn’t know how to work with it? Finn stretched his legs out beneath him, waiting for an explanation. When one didn’t come he finally asked, “Well? What was it?”
He heard movement, constant and steady, and knew his brother was shaking his head. “I don’t know if I should talk about it.”
“Are you kidding me? You can’t say something like that and then say you don’t want to talk about it.”
“I know,” he sighed. “It’s just… Part of me is afraid if I talk about it, I’ll be wrong. That I’ll look like a fool.”
“You always look like a fool in my eyes, so what do you have to lose.”
Vilnjar snorted an appreciative laugh and then he shook his head again. “I don’t want to talk about it, Finn. I’m sorry. You just…” He was carefully thinking through his next words, a pause so long for a moment Finn wondered if he drifted off to sleep again. Finally, he said, “You just have to be patient. I know that’s not easy for you. Gods know it never has been, but think of this as a test set upon you by Llorveth himself. You just have to believe she will come around, and when she finally does you’ll be more than ready for her. You’ll appreciate her in ways you can’t even begin to imagine.”
“Huh.” His nostrils flared with the breath he pulled in. “And here I thought you were going to offer sage advice, tell me something I don’t already know.”
“Sometimes I forget you know everything there is to know about everything and there is simply nothing I can teach you.” He rolled onto his side again, shoving his back up against Finn’s arm and moving about until he found a comfortable way to lay. After a few minutes he stifled a yawn, saying, “Just go to sleep, Finn. It’ll all look better in the morning.”
That was easy for him to say. He wasn’t leaving in the morning to take a journey that might or might not end with his death.
Not that Finn was afraid to die. It wasn’t that at all. Death in battle was honorable; it would ensure his life was worthwhile. On the other hand, it was just… well… it was just so damn permanent, and there were no guarantees he would die in battle. The seer only said one of them would not return.
He was so young, had only just found his mate. By all rights the two of them should have been given a long, healthy life together, but there were no guarantees.
“Viln,” he elbowed into his brother’s back again, making the man to sleepily grunt in reply. “Viln, will you make me a promise?”
“Finn, please just go to sleep.”
“I will, but only if you promise me something.”
“Fine, I’ll promise you anything if it’ll shut you up and help you sleep.”
“Promise me if anything happens to me on this journey, if Lorelei comes back from it without me, you’ll take care of her.”
Vilnjar was silent, but Finn knew he hadn’t fallen asleep that time. He could feel the heaviness of his brother’s thoughts, the trickle of fear he’d been trying to deny he felt ever since he stalked out of Hodon’s hall. In the tangle of thought and emotion, he felt his brother struggling with the position he’d held over Finn as long as he could remember. He contemplated forbidding him to embark on a fool’s errand, refusing to allow him to run off and do something so stupid he wouldn’t come back from it. He sighed, defeat wrestling him from his fears.
“I will make sure she’s well taken care of in the event you don’t return,” he said at last, adding, “but I won’t have to, Finn. You’re not going to die.”
He wished he felt even half as certain as his brother sounded. His lips parted, the question edging toward them but then catching in the back of his throat. How could he be so sure? He didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to hear his brother say he wasn’t sure. He just wanted to believe his older brother’s certainty was enough to make it so.
“Thanks, Viln.”
“Go to sleep, Finn.”
But he didn’t. He made effort to be still, stopped allowing himself to fidget and roll around as he laid on his back and stared into the darkness of the pantry cupboard waiting for morning to come.
CHAPTER FOUR
Lorelei should have been exhausted, should have felt as if her body was about to collapse from the sheer lack of sleep, abundant stress and overindulgence in cup after cup of her brother’s ale, but she felt as if she’d stood beneath the clouds in a storm and endured the jolt of a thousand lightning bolts through her body. She was wide awake, agitated, restless and terrified.
She didn’t want to be alone, couldn’t stomach the idea of sleep even though she desperately needed it if she was meant to leave Dunvarak at first light. Maybe it would have been different if Finn slept in the room with her. She might have found sleep and stayed in the confines of its comfortable embrace as she snuggled into his warmth and felt the certainty of his strength, but she doubted even Finn could have calmed the frazzled edges of her nerves on that night.
Long through the darkest hours before morning she and Logren shared drink after drink, spoke at great length about their lives, their separate childhoods and experiences. She grew fonder of him with every story, found herself filled with lament because she hadn’t been there for the most important moments of his life, and he hadn’t been there for hers.
She told him stories about her sister, about the mischief the two of them were famous for making in the palace at Rivenn and his appreciative laughter was often so loud it surprised her no one else in the house woke. She spoke reverently of Pahjah, the Alvarii nursemaid who devoted more to her care and raising than her own mother. The nursemaid often felt more like a mother to her than Ygritte herself. In that alcohol-induced insecurity, her fears grew with the ever-increasing possibility she might never see Pahjah or her sister again.
When her eyes stung with unshed tears, her drunken brother reached across the table, curled his fingers around her shoulder and drew in his other hand to lift her face so she couldn’t hide them. His clumsy thumb brushed away the tear that fell, smearing the cooling liquid across her cheek when he tilted his face in to study hers.
“It’s all right to feel things,” he told her. “It’s okay to be sad and afraid you might never see the ones you love again. You’d be a monster if you didn’t have feelings, but you don’t have to mourn them. They’re not dead, and you may yet see them again before all is said and done.”
She felt terrible then, as though she hadn’t considered his grief at all in the feeling of her own. Part of it was the alcohol, she knew, but the rest came from the guilt niggling at her conscious awareness. He lost his mother, and if the story he told her was to be believed, if she truly reached through the fires as their house burned down around them to save him, he should have resented her for not saving Galisa when she held a hand out to him.
But he didn’t.
As the tears slipped down her cheeks, over his fingers where he held her chin, she sniffled and tried to look away but he held her there. “Do you ever hate me because I didn’t save her?” She choked on the words as she spoke them. “Because I didn’t save your mother?”
“Sweet stars in the heavens, girl,” he barked, the rising of his voice startling them both as it echoed through the silent, sleeping household. “I could never hate you. No matter what you did. You’re my sister, blood of my blood, and you saved my life. I don’t know how you did it, how such a thing could even be, but you did it anyway. Without you, I wouldn’t be sitting here right now,” he pointed out. “None of the people in this city would be here at all. And maybe a few are missing, a few we loved well and mourned deeply, but my gods, Lorelei, you couldn’t save everyone!”
“Maybe I could have though,” she protested.
“Bah!” Withdrawing his hand from her face, he leaned back in his chair to stare at her. He shook his head, the auburn braids rustling through the waves of loose hair around them before nestling against his cheek. “Maybe you could have and maybe you couldn’t have, but you did what you could, and I, for one, am grateful to be s
itting here because of you. However it was you made it possible, I am glad!”
Alcohol made her weepy, lack of sleep filled her with regret over things well beyond her control, things she still wasn’t entirely convinced she had any part in doing. Her awareness of how tired she should be had an odd sobering effect, and even though she was exhausted beyond measure she sat up straight and swore off sleep entirely. She would hate herself for it come morning. She would probably fall off her horse just feet from the gates of Dunvarak and be dragged behind it through the ice and snow until one of her companions noticed and helped her up again, but she wanted to do something useful, rather than lie awake and alone in bed worrying about things she had no control over.
But what use was drinking? What purpose did filling her cup again serve, except to distantly dull and numb fears she would have to face eventually?
“You must be tired,” she said after a long silence. “If you want to go to bed…”
“Nah.” He shrugged up his shoulder and reached for his cup to empty it again. “I’ll stay up with you as long as you want me to.”
“You don’t have to.”
“Maybe I don’t have to, but I want to. I’ve waited years for this time with you. I’m not going to just sleep it away.”
He swallowed what remained in his cup and lowered it back to the table, but he didn’t reach for the bottle again. The bottle was empty and she knew it, but there were others where that came from, of that she was sure. They’d gone through two of them together, but he didn’t rise to grab another and she was glad because she knew she would go on drinking with him, foolishly feeling like she had to match him cup for cup just to drown sorrows she shouldn’t have been trying to avoid in the first place.
“You want to go for a walk with me?” he asked, pushing the bench away from the table. Its legs scraped heavily across the wood and she winced at the sound.
“We’ll wake the whole city, I fear.”
“Nah, we won’t,” he waved her off. When he stood up, he wavered and took a moment to steady himself before holding out his hand to her. “And if we do, why should they sleep if we can’t? Come on,” he urged, fingers wiggling with temptation. “I want to show you something.”
Hesitating, she watched the almost impatient urge of his hand and then she reached for it. He drew her from the bench and they stumbled before Logren steadied them both and placed hands on her shoulders as if he momentarily forgot what he was going to do. Then he nodded once, reached between them and took her hand again and led her toward the door.
The cold rush of air across her face sobered her almost as much as her awareness of how exhausted she was. She felt awake with unexpected suddenness, though her head tingled and swam as she took carefully planned steps to hold herself upright. Her legs felt so far away and rubbery as she commanded them to move and her hips were like jelly, swaying her body languidly as she attempted to look as normal as possible.
She’d never drank so much in her life.
Logren squeezed her fingers before he withdrew and lowered his arm across her shoulders. They walked together with difficulty. She was fairly certain, as they leaned against one another, it was that and that alone which kept them both on their feet as they moved through quiet streets bathed in the strange, ethereal light of the lanterns lining the street and the blood stain of the red moon burning through the clouds.
The sky was overcast and the air smelled like snow, though the subtle warmth of the city assured her the flakes would never fall within the walls of Dunvarak. She could smell it nonetheless, the crispness of it fluttering beneath her nostrils every time they flared outward with the draw of her breath.
“It’s going to snow.” Her voice sounded so loud; maybe it was.
Her brother laughed, a far louder sound than she’d made with her voice, and it echoed against the buildings rising around them with stark precision. The boisterousness of his amusement was becoming a familiar fondness for her, one she would carry with her and refer to in her memory whenever she needed a smile.
“It’s always going to snow here. Great gusts of blustery white battering at our gates like raging trolls, but they never touch us. They never break beyond the magical barriers that protect the city unless the mages want them to.”
“Do they ever want them to?”
“Rarely,” he shrugged. “Mostly they alter temperatures to create rain for the crops and gardens, but even that is so strange and unnatural I don’t even know if it could be called rain. There are fields beyond the wall that are mind-boggling to behold. Rich golden grains growing stubborn and tall despite the cold, and all because of the barriers the mages raise around them.”
“Magic is a strange thing.” She shuddered with the realization, momentarily playing over the hundreds of precautions Master Davin handed down to her and her sister over the years. It was a dark, terrifying power, unfamiliar and peculiar, and yet she knew inside it was the most natural thing in the world. There were beings born with magic flowing through their veins the way the silent wolf lingered beneath her skin, and they could do incredible, impossible things.
“It is what it is,” her brother shrugged her closer. “Without it, we would have died here long ago. It is a cruel land upon which we chose to build our city, and in the beginning we weren’t sure if we would make it out here, but magic made the tundra yield.”
“Do you know any magic?”
“Scarcely enough to start a fire. Don’t have the patience for it.”
“Roggi will one day though,” she thought aloud.
“More than likely. Bren’s been teaching him the fundamentals since he was old enough to take his own steps, and he’ll have the mind for it once he’s learned to sit still and focus.”
“I was taught magic was the bane of our existence,” she confessed. “I was taught so many things that aren’t true.”
“As are we all, I suspect. Life teaches us what’s true. Experience.” He took a few steps ahead of her, his arm drawing her forward with him as he turned right onto a long street paved with pale stones awash with green light. “Come on, we’re almost there.”
“Where are you taking me?”
“Someplace wonderful,” he promised. “Someplace beautiful.”
The houses all had a similar look about them, one level, built of wood and stone, roofs thatched with dried rushes. She wondered where they’d gotten the materials to build their city more than once, knew some of it was conjured with magic, but the rest must have come from somewhere. It took mountains of stone to build Dunvarak and the miles upon miles of wall blocking the city from the outside world, entire forests of trees must have fallen to make the wood that framed their homes and buildings. Where had it all come from, and how long had it taken them to build such a solid, thriving place?
He said there were fields somewhere beyond the walls, sustained with the same magic that maintained the city, but each household had a small plot for growing herbs and vegetables, and several of the homes boasted small stables near the back of their plot to house chickens, pigs, goats, sheep and a cow or two for milking.
By all rights, a place like Dunvarak shouldn’t have thrived; it shouldn’t have existed at all, and yet there it was, and it was glorious.
She remembered her brother saying there were just around two-thousand residents in Dunvarak, a number that seemed pitifully small as she tried to imagine what it must have taken to build such a city in the middle of the harsh, unyielding tundra, the amount of labor it surely required to hold such a city aloft. And how many of those residents were children, elderly folk no longer able to contribute hard work to the survival of the city? She’d seen quite a few children during her time there, carefree and dashing through the streets with life and excitement in their steps. They seemed to thrive, as if the harsh reality of the life their parents eked out had no effect on them at all, which in turn suggested life wasn’t as difficult as it should have seemed.
And all because of magic.
How strange and wonderful, she thought. How terrifying and powerful such magic must be.
They approached a gated wall surrounding a broad building with round windows made of colored glass. It stood ominous and tall in the absent moonlight. She lingered at his back while he tinkered with the gate’s lock, producing a set of keys to coax it open. Her gaze fell upon the yard as the silver light of Madra overhead broke through the clouds to illuminate the dark space. Hundreds of stones marked the dew-soaked grass and she found herself drawn toward the wall to study them. Hand perched atop the cold stone, she leaned forward and tilted her head to study the strange field leading to the building. The light grew, clouds moving away from the half-faced moon overhead and she saw they weren’t rocks, but small statues spaced about twelve to fourteen inches apart in long rows stretching all the way to the base of the building behind them.
“What is this place?”
“Llorveth’s temple.” The lock gave way to his fumbling hands and he jammed it into the pocket of his breeches before swinging the gate forward.
“And those statues?”
“We bury the ashes of those who’ve died beneath them so we might revisit and remember them while we yet live.”
Her thoughts immediately turned to Yovenna, the seer who’d welcomed her into Dunvarak and shared details of her destiny with her just the day before. It felt like weeks passed since she and Finn burst into the old woman’s cottage and found her dead in her chair, the light gone from her unseeing eyes, but it had been only hours.
Sorrow's Peak (Serpent of Time Book 2) Page 5