by Carol Berg
Philo, one of our three companions, snatched up my blanket and stowed it in a rucksack before I could wipe the sludge of unsleep from my eyes. The missing Nestor had gone in search of water to refill our depleted flasks, as we could not afford a fire to melt the snow. The third warrior, Melkire, stripped weapons and food packets from our abandoned saddlepacks and stuffed them in our belts, rucksacks, and pockets. We’d ridden our horses to frozen, quivering uselessness. Now we were afoot. I could only pray our pursuers fared no better. Deunor’s fire, there were so many of them.
I dropped to my knees and scraped away crusted snow until I could touch my palms to the forest floor and heed only the sounds of Mellune: the snap of frost-cracked limbs, the sough of overburdened pine fronds giving up their load of snow, the beating hearts of burrowers. Delving deep, I inhaled the faint aroma of the earth warmed by my hands, tasting pine resin and galled oak, dirt and mold on my tongue. As magic flowed from fingers through earth, my mind reached south and west through rotting trees and frozen soil, shearing through buried stone and dense thorn thickets, seeking a path to Gillarine’s valley and the wide River Kay that fed it. Tell me the way, I said as I examined the landscape unfolding in my head. Reveal your paths.
Perhaps it was the unaccustomed practice, or the fact that I no longer hoarded magic against the demands of the doulon, but my route finding had grown more assured over the past days. Or perhaps the need to accomplish something of worth in my life had at last forced me to fully accept the bent of my blood, no matter its connection to my parents. Or perhaps it was only that Mellune Forest and I had become intimate acquaintances.
The grim woodland straggled straight down the spine of Ardra, grown up in thin, sour land, broken by sills and ridges of limestone, its trails choked with briars and snake-vine since ill weather and disease had all but exterminated its game. Deadfalls, snarls, sinkholes, and gullies had diverted us constantly, making my carefully laid course of southward-spiraling circles resemble the route of a headless chicken. Our purpose was delay and confusion, but for our pursuers, not ourselves. I prayed I could get us out before we starved.
The route took shape in mind and body, a gray pattern of fading game trails, a dry watercourse, a logger’s track, long abandoned. High ground, Voushanti wanted. So I shifted the thread slightly here and there, searching for a more elevated way.
Beyond the southern boundaries of Mellune the land opened into the rocky pastures of upper Ardra. A single modest hill, crowned by a scarp, and a few scattered protrusions of dense black rock presented the only defensible positions. The mountain drainages—the upland valleys like the vale of the Kay where Gillarine lay—would give us much better cover, but the inexhaustible Harrowers would be stripping our bones before we made it so far afoot.
“Come on,” I said, scrambling to my feet.
Snapping branches and spitting snow, I broke through a wall of snow-laden bracken to find the narrow streambed that would lead us up a seamed ridge, heading the direction my gut named southwest. A chorus of terrified whinnies said the pursuit had discovered our blown horses.
The blizzard had abated on our third day in the forest, which worsened the cold, but lent us more light. Above the canopy of trees the stars shone clear and bitter, providing illumination enough to reflect on open snow and depositing inky shadows under trees and scrub.
An hour along the way, my purposeful spiral took us along the bank of a pond. There we found the signs of a Harrower camp and all that was left of Nestor. The thirsty fool must have walked right into their hands. The Harrowers had shredded his flesh and staked him to the earth as they had Boreas. I blessed all gods I had not eaten that night. Nestor’s mouth had been packed with dirt to silence his cries as he bled and died.
“We leave him lie,” said Voushanti harshly, snatching up Nestor’s waterskins that lay abandoned in a willow thicket. His boots and weapons were missing. “We’ve no strength to spare and no time. Move out, pureblood.”
Closing my eyes, I sought my guide thread, happy I did not need to touch the ground here. “This way,” I said and moved westerly.
Philo joined me, whispering the Karish prayers for the dead. Voushanti followed, mumbling curses with the passion of a lover scorned. But Melkire dropped to his knees beside the savaged body. I held up to wait for him, then blurted a malediction as the warrior dipped his thumb in Nestor’s blood and marked a spiraled circle on his own forehead.
“What the devil are you doing?” I said, anger and disgust raising my bile. The Harrowers had licked Boreas’s blood from their fingers.
“Nestor is a son of Evanore,” said Melkire, his eyes hard and fierce in the starlight. “The mark binds my memory, so that I can bring a full account of his deeds and his end to his family.”
I walked on. I had to find them a place to make a stand.
“I’ve not heard an untoward sound for an hour,” said Philo, passing Voushanti a waterskin. We had climbed to the brink of a limestone scarp to rest and drink. “We should get away from here and make camp, else we’ll not be able to move by morning.”
“No,” I whispered, plastering myself to the ground and peering over the edge of the scarp into bottomless darkness. The creeping up my back felt like an army of spiders. “They’re still coming. I need to understand how they can stay so close on our trail in the night.” I had my bent to guide me, but how could the Harrowers determine which crisscrossing trail of churned snow we had trod the most recently?
Voushanti hushed the two young warriors and wormed up beside me. “I sense them, too.”
Before very long, yellow light blazed from the wood—a torch, I thought as it moved through the trees. But the wind neither shook nor snuffed it. The silent procession passed below us like wraiths. Perhaps forty men. Fewer horses. They had muted their harness with rags. Only their tread in the snow and the occasional whuffle of a beast marked their passage.
Their leader bore the light—a gleaming ball of piss-yellow brilliance that emanated directly from his hand. And as he walked, he held one hand in front of him, fingers stiffly spread, and he turned his head from side to side, sniffing, his nostrils flared wide like some great hound. Sorcery. I knew it. As he vanished into the thicker trees, a gust of wind swept down the scarp to flutter his cloak—worn purple velvet with a dagged hem. The dog-faced man had tasted Boreas’s blood, watched the priestess lash Gildas’s back, and stood on the fortress walls with Sila Diaglou as Abbot Luviar was gutted. I prayed he would rot in this demon wood.
“Come on,” I said through gritted teeth. “We need to move faster. That one might have other skills.” He was Sila Diaglou’s companion in slaughter, either a pureblood or a mixed-blood mage powerful enough to create light in this overwhelming night.
Though purebloods were unmatched in native talent for sorcery by virtue of their untainted Aurellian descent, any ordinary with a trace of Aurellian blood carried potential for the bent—as did Prince Osriel by virtue of his pureblood mother. Most mixed-bloods became market tricksters, potion sellers, or alley witches, like old Salamonde, who had taught me the doulon spell. Registry breeding laws had assured that little talent remained outside pureblood families, but always a few took their talents seriously, training and testing with others of their kind, calling themselves mages. Purebloods disdained them, of course, and named mageworks trickery. Prince Osriel had already taught me elsewise.
Another day. Another night. The rapacious cold cracked bone and spirit, dulled the mind, and transformed limbs and heart to lead. Using my aching hips and legs to break a trail through thigh-deep snow, laced with broken tree limbs and frozen bracken, became purest misery. Sticks snagged clothes and flesh. Pits or sinkholes beneath the crusted snow left me floundering on my face at every other step. The sweat of my exertions froze beneath my layered garments.
I clung to the gray guide thread in my mind, checked and rechecked it, pouring magic into each test to be sure I followed true. My companions dragged me up when I fell, brushed me off, and t
rod carefully in my steps. We had to lose these devils, else they would follow us to Gillarine. Stearc’s clever choice of a rendezvous now seemed incalculably stupid.
We pushed across a broad meadow. It troubled me to find a clearing where my instincts said none should be, yet I dared not stop to assay another trial of magic, lest I freeze there in the open. It might have been a single hour or ten sunless days that we traversed that meadow.
My head swam with sleepless confusion, my frozen flesh no longer able to feel the pull of north or south. Southwesterly should take us higher, so that we would emerge, a day or so from now, atop Pilcher’s Hill where Voushanti could mount a defense. Yet every instinct cried that safety lay downward. And downward did not feel like southwest. Thoroughly muddled, I fell to my knees at the bottom of a long slope and scrabbled in the snow.
“Where are we?” gasped Voushanti, even his leathern toughness on the verge of shredding. “We’ll have no feet to stand on or hands to wield a sword, if you don’t find us a place to make a fight.”
“Just need to find the blasted hill. This terrain is all wrong.”
My fingers might have been wooden clubs for all I could feel of them when I touched earth. I poured magic from my core but sensed nothing of the land. Which way?
An owl screeched from atop a spindly pine. I rubbed my frozen hands together. Breathed on them. Stuffed them under my arms, trying to warm them enough so they could feel. Another shriek and a spread of dark wings drew my eye to the treetops. And there, shining in yellow-white splendor between the branches, hung Escalor, the guide star. North and south settled into their proper positions in my head.
“Mother Samele’s tits!” Sitting back on my heels, I laughed aloud at ignorant fools and their earnest blindness.
“Spirits of night, lunatic, will you be quiet?” Voushanti would have throttled me if he’d not been doubled up by a spreading beech, his lungs wheezing like a smith’s bellows. “Never knew a man could move so fast in such cursed weather and still have breath to cackle like a gamecock.”
I pressed my wet, filthy sleeve across my mouth to contain the hilarity that simple sense could not. Bound up in pureblood sorcery and earth-borne mystery, it had never crossed my mind to look up for guidance. The owl’s dark wingspan ruffled against the starry night.
As I pleaded with my aching legs to unbend and bear my weight again, I watched the kindly bird preening. Thus I caught the glimmer of sapphire brilliance in the leafless branches of a giant beech nearby. I held breath and dared not blink. From the snarl of twigs and branches, an arm scribed with blue fire reached out to host the wing-spread owl’s claws for a few heartbeats before the bird took flight. My heart came near stopping.
Twice in the past few days I’d believed us irretrievably blocked, facing the choice to be overrun by our pursuers or reverse course and meet them head-on. In both instances escape had come by seeming chance. A falling rock, dislodged by some scuttering animal, had exposed a stairlike descent of an impossibly sheer scarp. A bolting fox had revealed an unlikely passage through an avalanche slide the size of half a mountain. Now I wondered. Chance had never been my ally.
We could not linger. But I touched the earth once more and sent my whispered gratitude into the roots and rock, hoping that the one who aided us would hear. Would he have a dragon scribed on his face? Were his eyes the color of autumn aspen? Was that arm the same that had offered me refuge in an aspen grove as I fled Gillarine? Earth’s Mother, how I longed to know.
Of course, the Danae despised humankind. How could they not, when the Harrowers’ grotesque rites poisoned them? Yes, they had driven my grandfather mad, but he had stolen something precious from them. Danae were the essence of magic, the gift of beauty and grace below heaven. Even angels brought down the god’s righteous fury on sinners.
We ran. Onward. Downward. Slipping and sliding on wooded banks. The owl arrowed southward ahead of us, as if scribing the path across inked vellum, and my fatigued mind gratefully relinquished the guide thread it had gripped for eight unrelenting days.
Soon the trees thinned, and a flat wilderness of mottled white spread out before us. Darker patches marred the starlit landscape as if unseen trees cast shadows on the snow. Clouds burgeoned behind the ridge we’d just descended, hiding Escalor and her companion stars. Wind gusts brought flakes drifting from the heights. We had to hurry. If any of our pursuers were yet mounted, flat ground would be our end.
The owl glided in a circle above our heads, then soared serenely toward the heart of the wilderness. Instinct affirmed that refuge was near, though perhaps not so directly across the flats.
“This way,” I said to the three who had just arrived at my elbow heaving and coughing, their collected breath enfolding us in fog. I pointed to the wing-spread owl. “She’ll lead us to safety.”
I slid down the last few quercae of the steep embankment and struck out across the flats. In our weakened condition, a shorter distance likely outweighed the increased danger of exposure. Voushanti and the others trudged after, well behind me.
Fifty paces into the wilderness, I heard…or perhaps only felt…an unsettling noise beneath my feet. Instinct screamed warning. I motioned the others to halt so my dulled senses might register the sound, and I cupped my lifeless fingers over my nose and mouth, breathing out my last warmth to thaw my nostrils. Then I inhaled slowly, felt, tasted, and listened, as my father and grandfather had tried to teach me when I was small.
Water. Mud. Rot.
Appalled, I dropped to my knees and speared my hands through the snow and into the cold muck that lay just below. Dead trees. Rotted marsh grass. Burrowed frogs, cold and still. Old droppings and tufts of animal hair caught on buried willows. A harper’s distant song…Ever so faintly, the sounds, the smells, and the land’s retained memory seeped through the winter’s blanket. And nowhere did I find my guide thread. Fool! Blasted mindless idiot!
Dulled with cold and yearning for finer magic, I had forsaken my own path to follow the owl. And the Danae, who had no use for humankind, had brought us here.
“Stop! Go back!” I shouted hoarsely, peering at the treacherous landscape through the darkening night. I knew exactly where we were. How could my sense of distance be so far askew? It seemed impossible we could be so far south, but I had traveled here before. “Step not one quat outside our tracks. This is bogland.”
“What of you?” shouted Voushanti, wind blunting the edges of his words. “We have ropes—”
“I’ll be all right. Go around, stay on the side slope, head straight southward…that way. Only two quellae to Gillarine. Hurry!”
Thank all gods, the three were in no mind to argue. Voushanti’s beard and eyebrows were frosted pure white as if he had aged fifty years in an hour, and Philo and Melkire might have been but four glazed eyes in unfleshed skulls. They were in no state to fight anyone.
I watched until they had made it back to solid ground safely and vanished in the thickening snowfall. Then I shoved magic through my buried fingers and sought a path deeper into the bog. The trickster owl had vanished, leaving me no choice but to twist its vicious cleverness to my own purpose.
The route fixed firmly in my mind, I wiped my frozen, muddy hands, bundled them in my cloak, and set out across the snow-draped fens. The falling snow would blur my footsteps and mask the inadequacies of my spellworking long enough to close the trap—a snare I believed had been set for every human abroad this night, pursuers and pursued.
An irregular mound, well into the heart of the bogland, provided enough substance and variety for my purposes: a leafless willow, a sheep’s leg bone, a rotted branch, a charred stick. I structured two spells, one to serve deception, one to serve fear. Then I waited, stomping my sore feet and flapping my aching arms to keep my blood moving. Dawn was near—as much of it as I was like to see with the weather closing in.
As the moments slid by in abject silence, fear nagged that I had miscalculated yet again. I could scarce muster the strength to shake the
clinging snow from my cloak. While I became another stupid beast rotting in the bog, the Harrowers would follow Voushanti straight to my friends.
“Aaaagh!” I yelled in inarticulate fury, yanking my hair to force blood to my head. “Come find me! Any of you…come do what you will! Show me your face if you dare!”
My grandfather had warned me. Such torment as the Danae had wrought on him displayed a cruelty colder than this cursed winter. So whence came my sentimental folly that because they were beautiful and magical and caused my knees to grow weak with unfounded yearning, they had a benevolent interest in me? Perhaps the one writ with dragons had invited me into the aspen grove the better to destroy my mind.
Anger kept me living. I shivered and coughed and honed my spells, determined they would be sufficient to end this wretched journey.
They came in the purple gloom that passed for sunrise. Harrowers flowed over the ridge like a tidal surge, cries hoarse with triumph and fury when they spotted me in the open. I noted with grim satisfaction that they had dropped at least a quarter of their numbers since I’d seen them last. At their head rode the dog-faced man, his orange scarf flying, the glow of his hands like a bilious sun leading their way.
I fell to my knees and fed magic into my mound of sticks and bones, recalling the appearance of my departed companions to shape the illusions of harried travelers, stopped to succor a fallen comrade.
The yowling Harrowers swept onto the flats without pause, and even the shouts of the first to flounder did not slow the rest. When the yellow glow failed—snuffed by mud or fear—their triumph turned to dismay.
Weary and mind-numbed, they did not think to stay calm and press through the muck to seek firmer ground. Rather, weighed down with mail coats and supply sacks and weapons, burdened with legends of bogwights and sucking ponds and trickster Danae, they felt their feet sinking and their clothes waterlogged, and they panicked, as I had gambled they would. I touched the charred stick and set wispy tendrils of flame adrift from my hand until the cold numbed my fingers and I could conjure no more of them. The gloomy landscape was dotted with winking flames, and the men in the bog started screaming.