The Lost Daughters

by Leigh Grossman

  While Ketya and the chancellor slept, I scouted the trail, making sure conditions remained as I remembered. We had camped amid a grove of young chestnuts, and the air of newness lingered on the trail. I moved quickly but appraisingly, looking for traps, wet spots that would mire boots, poisonous vines, and any other potential surprises to my castle-bred charges. On the way back I moved more slowly: Human travelers were scarce here, even when gods weren’t attacking, and the hunting would be good. I caught two hares with knife throws on my return to camp.

  The smell of cooking meat woke the others.

  “Is it safe to burn a fire?” Ketya asked. From the look in the chancellor’s eyes at his daughter’s question, her father rather hoped that it wasn’t.

  “The smoke won’t show from here. We can’t risk fires at night, but it’s safe enough now.” I smelled the air, making sure I was telling the truth. “We’ll be leaving soon, and we’ll cross water that will hide our trail even if we are followed.”

  Ketya looked relieved at my answer, and very hungry. Her father acted more reserved, but seemed disinclined to argue this morning. They ate quickly, with better appetite than I had expected. As soon as I broke camp both of them followed me willingly enough.

  The stream ran fast but not deep; we barely wet our feet crossing the ford a little ways upstream. For a while we walked mostly through young hardwood forest and meadow, scarred here and there by past fires. Gradually our path became rockier, as we entered the band of foothills that would lead us into Ananya’s rocky spine.

  Now and again I stopped them, and got on hands and knees to check spoor on our trail.

  I pointed out bear scat to Ketya. Her father seemed uninterested.

  “Should we be worried about bears?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “There are other things I would worry about more. Bears will have easier food than us this time of year unless we’re stupid. It’s fey I’m worried about.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned fey. Fey, like...faeries? Brownies and things you leave saucers of milk out for? Are they really worse than bears?”

  “What do you think was attacking those poor fools upstream from us last night? Just because they drink your milk doesn’t make them your friends.”

  Ketya looked offended. “I’ve never heard of faerie attacks before.”

  “There used to be plenty. I’m sure your father can tell you all about them.” I nodded at the chancellor. “Usually they don’t attack where magic is strong. During the Holy War and its aftermath, they attacked often enough, though. I’ve known soldiers who fell asleep on watch to be replaced with changelings: I had to explain to a husband once why one of my troopers—his wife—had been replaced by a badger in an exact replica of her uniform. Thanks to your father, there’s even a form to fill out when it happens.”

  Ketya looked unsure whether to believe me or not. Her father chose not to contradict my exaggeration.

  “The fey haven’t forgotten that we were their enemies in the big war. Even if the gods left them behind when the war ended and the gods went back to their own lands. The fey have long lives and long memories.”

  Ketya

  Northwest of the Westbarrow: Three days after the Loss

  I had never been so tired before. My legs were holding up, but my hips and shoulders ached fiercely by the time we stopped for lunch. Sweat covered me and soaked my undershirt. Sperrin had made us stop often for water and brief rest breaks, but it hadn’t seemed to help.

  I had made it through the Westbarrow without getting too sore, and that had left me a bit too confident. In retrospect I had made it through the previous day on a combination of fear, excitement, and the graveyard’s mostly flat ground. Today’s foothills attacked my feet and hips in entirely different ways. And we were still nowhere near the mountains themselves.

  Sperrin seemed unaffected by the walk, even with the little hunting and scouting expedition he had taken before my father and I awoke. How does he do it? He’s been in the palace for years. He should be tired, too. It’s not fair.

  And it’s what’s keeping us alive, I admitted to myself ruefully. Stop complaining to yourself about it and get in shape. Not that I would dare complain out loud in front of my father.

  If he suffered like I did, my father showed no signs of it. As always, he seemed cool and in his element, no matter what the environment or even the state of his sanity.

  We ate lunch by a racing stream, on a little patch of water-smoothed stones surrounded by huge rocks. After he ate, refilled his water flask, and rinsed off, Sperrin sat on the flat top of one of the big rocks and wrote in a small book bound in red fabric.

  My father had settled down for a nap, so I pulled myself to my feet, shook away the soreness, and clambered up the rock.

  “Do you mind if I join you?” I asked Sperrin.

  He nodded to a spot next to him, flat and sunny. Crawling over, I lay on my back, closing my eyes. Sun on my face felt more soothing than the heat of the trail, somehow. A thin breeze from the stream cooled me.

  “It’s nice here,” I said. If Sperrin answered I didn’t hear it.

  After a while, I opened my eyes and sat up. Sperrin continued leaning over the book.

  “What’s that you’re writing in?” I asked.

  Sperrin glanced at me, then paused, as if deciding whether to answer. Normally, Sperrin looked at me very directly when we talked. Now, I could see he didn’t want to make eye contact.

  Finally he spoke. “It’s a lifebook.”

  “A lifebook? What’s that?”

  “It’s a sort of journal. I write descriptions of everyone I kill in it. Sort of a life list of the people I’ve killed. I’m still trying to work my way back and reconstruct some of the older deaths. With some of the memories that the Empress blocked returning, I can remember some more details. I was filling them in.”

  “What do you put in there? You list their names?”

  “Names if I know them. That’s why I asked the man in the palace before he died. Whatever I do know goes in there.”

  “Why? What would you use something like that for?”

  “Not for any particular reason. It’s a way of remembering.” Again, he avoided eye contact. He’s a terrible liar, I thought. I guess he wasn’t lying about the fey before, because he looked me right in the eye when he told me the badger story.

  “So it’s just for you? Or are you planning to do something else with it?”

  “I haven’t decided,” Sperrin said heavily. “Right now it’s just for me. It gives killings more...weight. Heft. Lets me remember details that I might want later.”

  “I see,” I said. Hefty killings. But I didn’t. “Have you been keeping it all these years?”

  “No. I wish I had been. I started after...a little more than ten years ago. A friend of mine suggested it, before I came to the palace. It had started to bother me that I didn’t know very much about the people I killed. I tried to fill in as many from before as I could remember.”

  “That sounds like it would be very hard on you,” I said. “Most people would want to forget.”

  “Most people would,” said Sperrin.

  I lay back on the stone, and let the sun soak me. I was becoming accustomed to the rhythm of Sperrin’s silences, and was pretty sure he didn’t want to talk anymore.

  Closing my eyes, I listened to the breeze, and the birds, and the scratching of his pen on paper. Not a magical stylus like the now-useless one I’d lost in the palace, but a soldier’s pen with a refillable well of ink. I didn’t really know how to react to anything he had said.

  Sperrin

  Longhold Hill: Four days after the Loss

  The guard tower at the top of Longhold Hill sat empty. The door had been ripped from its hinges. Blood covered the floor of the central hall. Up the stairs I found part of a guard, half-eaten, in the barracks. Only four soldiers and a channeler had been stationed here; it looked like the last two soldiers had made a brief stand on the roof
. Nothing remained except some blood and a dropped blade. I’d seen the second soldier’s blade at the base of the tower where it had fallen.

  Ketya followed me up to the roof of the tower, while her father stayed below. She looked shaken.

  The west side of the hill, behind us, overlooked the Mountain Road, where our journey would continue. In front of us, the tower had an unobstructed view of the Trade Road and most of the Westbarrow, as well as a partial view of the rear of the Drowned City. We couldn’t see the harbor from this vantage point, but we could see enough. Flames licked at the great towers. Whole neighborhoods burned. A handful of refugees dotted the ring road, but only a handful.

  I saw tears streaking Ketya’s face.

  “I thought there would be more people on the roads,” she said, quietly. “There have to be more survivors. That can’t be everyone.”

  “There will be,” I said. “People are resilient.”

  “But not many.”

  “I don’t know, Ketya.”

  Ketya

  “We need to leave,” Sperrin said suddenly.

  The specter of the burning city still held me. I couldn’t stop staring at the flames, lighting the horizon.

  “Ketya, we need to go.”

  “Can’t it wait one more minute? Maybe you can wait on mourning, but not all of us are like you.” The tears wouldn’t stop coming now.

  “Whatever killed those troopers will very likely be back at nightfall. Did you see how the tower door was torn off? We have less than two hours until darkness. It can’t wait.”

  I just shook my head and sobbed. I couldn’t talk.

  Sperrin stood there until it became clear that I wasn’t moving.

  “Just for a moment then. I need to bury the body anyway. Come downstairs as quickly as you can.” Then he walked back down the stairs, pausing incongruously to take a ring of keys from a hook at the top of the stairwell.

  By the time I pulled myself together, Sperrin had covered the partial body with enough dirt and stones to keep animals away. I didn’t know where he’d found a shovel; presumably someplace he’d needed the keys to unlock. “It’s not much of a grave,” he said. “But better than leaving the rest of him to be eaten. Someday, he’ll have better.”

  I just stared at him, my eyes puffy.

  “We do the best we can.” Sperrin sounded a little defensive. “We had to do this or worse after some battles that went badly, and send details back for the bodies later, so they could be treated properly.”

  I said nothing. I picked up my pack and fell into line ahead of my father as Sperrin started us down the steep trail to the Mountain Road.

  I must look terrible, I realized. My father hasn’t said a word. Not even a look to remind me how to conduct myself. I wiped at my face as much as I could on the rugged trail.

  Here and there stairs had been cut into the roughest parts of the path, but it had never been intended as more than a shortcut to the Mountain Road. Assigning channelers trained in stonecutting to smooth the trail beyond its initial rough cut had never been a priority.

  Sperrin walked down the path with almost catlike smoothness, but I found myself half-sliding at times. I scraped both hands catching myself from near-falls. Springy foliage spanked my legs and torso and sometimes my face. I kept reaching back to make sure the Talisman hadn’t been dislodged, until I wondered if I was making it obvious to my father I was hiding something. But I feared losing it in the mountains without ever noticing I had dropped it.

  Very little light remained when we reached the base of the trail; darkness came early in the mountains.

  We found ourselves on a smooth-cut stone road, wider than a pair of army wagons. Despite my father’s talk about its roughness, the Mountain Road had been designed for a marching army, with its supply wagons and channelers’ battle-wagons. I knew it would be a lot rougher in some places, but now we might as well have been on one of the coastal highways that connected the Drowned City with the bands of farmland that had fed the Ananyan Empire. It felt awfully exposed. Sperrin walked us down the middle of the road, dim in the last fading daylight and emerging stars.

  “Don’t we need to stay hidden?” I asked. It seemed very different from the furtive way we’d traveled so far.

  Sperrin shook his head. “Hiding won’t help. Whatever destroyed the fort can probably smell us if we’re close. We need to get out of its territory before it knows we’re here. If we’re lucky it’s still on the city side of the hill.”

  I gave him a puzzled look. Fey had territories? “What do you think it was?” I asked.

  “Some sort of giant, I think. Possibly a mated pair. Maybe stone giants, based on the strength and appetite for human flesh.”

  “You’ve read about them, too?”

  Sperrin missed the sarcasm. “Of course. Soldiers have a lot of time to read. And Ananya had a lot of potential enemies for me to study.”

  “And you read about them all?”

  Sperrin shrugged. “Enough of them, I hope.” He gestured for me to stop talking. “Sound can carry oddly in the mountains. We can talk later, when we stop for the night.”

  It began drizzling as we walked, but Sperrin did not slow our pace. Once the moon rose, I could see a little bit, but it seemed like nothing but smooth road, with rocks rising high around us in the darkness.

  Twice I tried to ask questions, but he motioned me to silence. We walked quietly amid the patter of increasing rainfall. Occasionally, I heard distant thunder.

  After two hours, Sperrin turned off the road abruptly. I would never have seen the side trail in the steady rain. I followed closely; even a few paces away, I could barely see Sperrin’s back in the rocks. I feared being lost forever in these mountains.

  I almost ran into Sperrin’s back when he stopped. He was feeling the flat rock surface in front of him. Then I saw thin, parallel ridges: wood, not rock. We stood in front of a heavy round door, fitted almost seamlessly into the wet rock.

  I heard a keyring clattering, then the click of a key in the lock. Sperrin stepped back and the ironbound door gaped outward.

  “Come inside,” he said. “It will be warm and dry and we will be safe here until the storm passes.

  An unexpected voice sounded behind me. “What is this place?” my father asked.

  “Inside,” said Sperrin. “Inside, we can talk in safety. You will find, chancellor, that the Mountain Road holds a few secrets that even you do not know.”

  Part III

  The Mountain Road

  Chapter 12

  Sperrin

  The Mountain Road: Four days after the Loss

  I expected the rain would last for days. Storms tended to linger here, in the vanguard of the Ananyan mounains. I rather hoped the rain lasted; finally, we could begin to make preparations without immediate danger.

  As soon as the others entered, I shut the door and lit one of the candles from my pocket. With an audible click I locked the door behind us, then returned the keyring to my pocket. Holding the flickering candle carefully, I lit four large wax tapers that stood in unornamented wrought-iron wall-sconces. The tapers burned brightly and almost smokelessly—nowhere close to the brightness of magical lamps, but enough to work by.

  Checking the stove, I found dry kindling already prepared. It caught quickly: We would have a hot meal and dry clothing soon enough.

  I saw Ketya’s wide-eyed look, and forestalled her question: “It’s safe enough. Even without the rain outside, the smoke is ventilated in a way that can’t be seen. Unless you know where to find the door, we might as well be invisible. And the door is warded and bound with iron, in a hillside of iron-filled stone. It would be difficult even for gods and their servants to look here. And it should be proof against fey.”

  “Even the ones that attacked the tower?”

  “I don’t think a stone giant could fit in that narrow corridor leading up to the door. And there would be no leverage to open it, even if it wasn’t bound in cold iron.”

&
nbsp; “Who paid for this room?” the chancellor asked abruptly. “I certainly didn’t approve it.”

  “This hideaway has been here for centuries. It doesn’t cost anything to replenish the firewood and supplies—an extra day of candles brought from Longhold Hill now and again, as a guard against disaster. I had hoped the troopers in the fort would have enough warning to use it.”

  The chancellor grunted in disagreement.

  “How could they use it when it’s so far away?” asked Ketya, mostly to forestall her father, I suspected.

  “They would have needed to be lucky,” I acknowledged. “Forts like Longhold Hill are built for strategic location—that tower guarded the approach to the rear of the city and watched the roads. Shelters like this needed to be built where the stone has a certain kind of iron content, deposits that fey are reluctant to approach.” I shrugged. “It would have cost more money to seal it up than to keep it stocked. That’s how the army thinks. We fought them before, who knows when we might fight them again. Politics and budgets may mean that big city defenses are disassembled. But what’s the harm in keeping small shelters like this one intact?”

  “How did you know about it?” Ketya asked. “Even my father didn’t know it was here.”

  I shrugged again. “I spent a lot of time walking these trails, hiked and hunted in the mountains when I had to take leaves these last ten years. I stayed in Longhold Hill more than once. Soldiers like to talk, especially in postings where there’s not much company. And with my rank and reputation, there was no secret they weren’t allowed to tell me.”

  Racks for weapons, mostly empty except for a scattering of practice blades and wooden knives, lined the wall on the right. Food barrels had been stacked along the left wall. Shelves above them held boxes and jars and other supplies. Alongside the stove, a large, round, stone-lined basin cut into the floor filled the center of the room. It looked almost like a deep stone bath.