The Lost Daughters

by Leigh Grossman

  I wasn’t sure about his motives. Part of me felt that my father wanted me to fail, as a way of teaching me some inscrutable point. And a part of me wondered if he preferred not to lose one of his audience members to nursing duties. Or perhaps, there was a distant possibility that he had noticed his daughter’s friendship with the young soldier and saw some reason to encourage it. Whatever the reason, I felt grateful for my father’s support.

  Mostly I hoped I could keep Guthre alive long enough to reach better-qualified healers at Whitmount. Guthre had broken ribs and a broken arm, along with gashes on her face and side. Bruises covered her body. New cuts layered over old scars, most of them old enough to predate her time in the scouts. However melodramatic it had sounded, Guthre’s account of her father didn’t seem to have been exaggerated. I wondered how the girl had survived to adulthood. I wondered how Guthre had survived the newest injuries.

  Perhaps I would never understand what Guthre meant when she said she liked to be chased. I would have crumpled and died with injuries like these. I would have stopped running and given up before I’d had half this much damage done to me.

  I was glad that my father had never hit me. But I wasn’t really sure I knew how to relate to Guthre. One conversation the night before a desperately risky adventure wasn’t really enough to tell me how to heal her.

  I didn’t exactly have what you’d call maternal instincts growing up. My parents were both well-known and successful, but they stressed learning, not helping others. They left that part of my education to my nurses. I don’t think that changed a lot as I got older. I don’t mean that I was cruel or callous; I think I was nice enough to other people, it just wasn’t a trait that was especially valued by any of the people I loved or respected. They didn’t mind if I was kind or caring, but no one was going to praise me for it, either.

  The Empress’s Academy was a pretty cold place in a lot of ways, but the importance of empathy in channelers was at least touched on in a theoretical way. Being a nice channeler could make you a more popular channeler, which was important if you didn’t already have the Empress’s favor. And being a more popular channeler might mean the difference between an appointment someplace comfortable and an appointment helping to build sewer systems in some disease-infested tropical colony.

  As part of that training, and because as channelers we were supposed to be able to help keep our support staff and troops alive in a variety of ways, we were given a certain amount of medical training. Most of it was useless in the face of Guthre’s broken body. I knew how to set broken bones with magic, but had no idea how to do it with my bare hands.

  I had no idea whether Guthre wanted to live or not. I hoped she did. But how many times could you stand having your body broken before you gave up? I didn’t know the answer to that. And I couldn’t really ask her friends and fellow soldiers. They did help me bind her wounds and change her bandages for the first time. And they made sure I had clean bandages to do it myself from then on. But after that they didn’t come near me or her. I suspected a few might have if it hadn’t been for Talye: The sergeant scowled any time she caught me looking near her, and she never came close. But she seemed to always be watching me and Guthre, almost possessively. I wondered what had really happened between the two of them.

  In some ways I was glad to be busy, even if caring for Guthre meant my new knife lessons ended again almost before they had begun. It meant I had no time to be jealous or angry or frustrated at my situation. It meant for once I was actually doing something useful.

  Sperrin

  The Mountain Road: Five weeks after the Loss

  Sometimes I needed time alone and scouted ahead of even the lead scouts. Talye and Kern hated the practice, and did their best to discourage me. But I needed time to think, to plan. Sometimes I needed to see the ground ahead of us for myself. While the scouts did their job well, they mostly thought like scouts rather than line soldiers. They could smell out traps and ambushes, but not places to lay traps for others. And three of the scouts whose eyes I trusted the most had been sacrificed in the attack on the giants: Even though Guthre had lived, we would reach Whitmount before she could walk again, much less scout.

  It was midmorning on one of those days. Sunlight glittered through the needly branches of a thornwood grove, turning the carpet of fallen needles almost golden when I met the wolf again.

  One moment I was alone in the clearing and the next the wolf stood in front of me, eyes gold and luminous. It looked a little smaller than when I had met it before, with a few splashes of gray on its legs that I didn’t remember.

  “Are you even the same wolf?” I said out loud.

  “Yes. And no,” the wolf replied. Its voice had a slightly high-pitched canine tenor, halfway between words and yips.

  Something about its eyes looked familiar, from before I’d fought the wolf pack. Suddenly it came to me.

  “You were a merrow!” I said. “The golden-eyed merrow in the tunnel. Didn’t I kill you once already?”

  “My kind is not so easy to kill.” The wolf bared its teeth, in what might have been a smile or a snarl.

  I shrugged. “I killed the giants, I’m sure I can kill you. It just may take a little innovation.”

  “That was nicely done against the giants. And they will be difficult to replace. But you will notice that I am not a giant.”

  “So what are you?”

  “At the moment, a wolf. Wolves are easy to come by in these mountains. Merrows, not so much.”

  I nodded. Some servant of the gods, here to make trouble. It might even be one of the messengers who had alerted the fey to the Empress’s impending death. The chancellor might know what god the creature served. Which reminded me of something else that had happened the first time I had met the creature.

  “In the tunnel, when you were a merrow. Why were you trying to kill the chancellor?” I didn’t expect an answer, but the creature surprised me.

  “I made an assumption that was, regrettably, misinformed. I no longer seek to kill him.”

  “And the rest of us?”

  “You, happily, are fair game.”

  I almost drew my blade, but the wolf seemed in no hurry to carry out its threat. Its shoulders remained relaxed.

  “Not yet,” the creature clarified. “The hunt is too amusing. You amuse me. You can kill my giants, but you have no idea where to find your own daughter. Not even when she is close enough that I can smell her. Perhaps I will let you search a little longer before I kill you. Consider yourself warned.”

  The words almost made me relax. For some reason, the creature thought it couldn’t kill me now. If it had been confident it wouldn’t have given me a warning, it would have attacked. But the other part of what it said annoyed me.

  “Does everyone in these mountains know about my daughter’s whereabouts except me? Would you like to tell me where to find her, or do you and the chancellor want to have a conversation about it first?”

  “Would you believe me if I told you?”

  “Probably not. You have a trap to repay me for. You would want to make me pay a price for your giants.”

  “Fear not. You will pay that price, presently. We will meet again soon. You know better than to think you can hide safely in your fortress of stone and iron.” By which, presumably, the creature meant Whitmount, only a day or two away depending on the condition of the trails.

  But the wolf didn’t stay around to elaborate. With a swish of its bushy tail, the creature turned and almost vanished. By the time I drew breath it had disappeared into the underbrush.

  How literally could I take its words? I had always heard gods couldn’t lie, but I had no idea about their servants. And the creature had no need to lie to be deceptive.

  Close enough that a wolf could smell her? Allowing for poetic license, that might well meant I would find her in Whitmount. That seemed too much to hope for. Assuming she remembered me after so many years.

  I shook my head, as if I could banish the u
npleasant thought that way. I needed to focus on scouting. For all I knew the creature might not be the only magical wolf in these woods.

  Ketya

  By the second day after her injury, Guthre regained consciousness for a few minutes here and there, long enough to sip water or broth. Travel along rocky mountain paths, even on a carefully padded stretcher, took a lot out of her, slowing her healing; several more days passed before she could eat solid food or speak again.

  The bruising on Guthre’s face slurred her words, making them hard to understand at first. Soon, though, I got the hang of it.

  “Are you in a lot of pain?” I asked. The column had stopped for a rest break while scouts checked the final route to Whitmount for ambushes. Soon we would be able to see the great fortress looming from the rock face, I had been told. I didn’t really care at the moment.

  “A little,” Guthre answered. “I’m good at pain, remember?”

  Gently I wiped the scout’s forehead with a damp cloth. I brushed away a strand of damp hair from the discolored edges of the bandage on Guthre’s cheek.

  Guthre managed a wan smile. “I never told you how I survived the pain when my father hurt me.” She squeezed my hand. I squeezed back, at a loss for a response.

  Guthre didn’t seem to expect one, though. She took a ragged breath and continued.

  “From the time I was little I had this fantasy that I had a different father—that my father was really a dashing soldier who would swoop in and take me to exciting places. I’ve had the fantasy for as long as I remember; I must have made it up by the time I was five or six. I remember him taking me to the most outlandish places, magical gardens and things like that which couldn’t possibly have been real. Any time he would catch me and start to...do things to me, I would imagine I was back with my real father, and he was taking me on a trip to some exotic place. It was like I could go to another place and not feel the pain so much.”

  “And that’s what you’re doing now?”

  “I’ve been doing the same thing since I started waking up. It’s funny, I hadn’t thought a lot about those fantasies in the last couple of years, until that day with the wolves, when I first met Overcaptain Sperrin. Something about the way he carried himself reminded me of my pretend father.” I could see Guthre fighting sleep. She wanted to talk, even as her energy faded.

  “I’ve never tried to be another person,” I said, hoping to sound soothing. “I’m glad it helps.”

  “It does,” Guthre said. She looked at me fiercely, as if rallying the last of her energy. “I needed to go to another world to survive sometimes. Sometimes you need to be a different person, in a different place. Some things you can only live through that way. When I was being hurt, it was like I was a completely different person. I even had a different name. Pretty strange, I guess.”

  “It doesn’t sound strange,” I said. “I used to have another name, too. Sometime I’ll tell you that story.” As awful as these weeks had been, I suspected the disaster had robbed my father of the ability to dictate who I chose to tell secrets to, and who I chose to befriend.

  “I would like that.” Guthre’s eyes were starting to close.

  “Do you still remember what you used to call yourself?” I asked. I wished I could remember my original name.

  Guthre smiled wanly again. “Of course. I used to call myself Lynniene.”

  “That’s pretty,” I said.

  “Thanks. I don’t know where it came from. Maybe something I heard in a story, or maybe I made it up when I was really little. I just know that as long as I can remember, that was what my pretend father called me.”

  Part IV

  The White Fortress

  Chapter 19

  Ketya

  The approach to Whitmount: Five weeks after the Loss

  I walked around the bend, just ahead of the stretcherbearers carrying Guthre, and suddenly stopped. To my right the trees faded away to brush, leaving a sort of narrow plateau, sloping steeply downward into a narrow valley.

  Across the valley, Whitmount rose from a sheer rockface. Flecks of crystal in its white walls and towers sparkled as they caught the sunlight. The massive fortress city had been formed out of the living rock in the days of the Holy War. Although modern magic worked in the city—or had until the Empress’s death—no channeler could scrape its walls, which were said to be immune to fey as well as the gods’ magic. During the Holy War, waves of attackers had foundered at the walls of Whitmount. Unlike the ruin out of which the Drowned City had been reborn, Whitmount wore the scars of past war lightly. The shaped stone of its walls, whitened by magical arts banned in the Talisman of Truce and since forgotten, still remained smooth and polished a dozen lifetimes later. High towers rose above the vertical walls, some of them still containing ancient war machines in armored metal swivel turrets that commanded the valley and surrounding mountains. One turret had been cleared away to form a broad cable-carriage platform, the only outwardly visible sign of the channelers’ art. Change came slowly to Whitmount.

  I could hear some sort of commotion on the trail ahead. My father seemed to be making a speech. That meant, I supposed, that soldiers from Whitmount had come to meet us and escort us in. Briefly, I thought about heading toward the head of the column to see what was going on. I glanced back at Guthre, who had her head propped up on the stretcher, trying to see something around the obstruction of her burly stretcherbearers. I can wait, I decided.

  The whole column had come to a sort of confused halt. From where I stood I could hear Talye calling out orders to send skirmishers to the rear, lest wolves or other mountain creatures try and take advantage of the confusion. Sperrin had seemed to think there would be no more attacks before we reached the fortress—he had told me so himself, while checking in on me and Guthre—but no one wanted to count on that.

  * * * *

  Eventually, Sperrin came looking for me, with a couple of tough-looking soldiers flanking him. They carried heavy infantry blades and wore the badge of the Mountain Cougars on their uniform tunics.

  “Are you ready to go?” Sperrin asked, a gentle note in his voice. “Time for you to see Whitmount.”

  I glanced back at the stretcher, now grounded, where Guthre lay sleeping. Her bearers had vanished for the moment, probably to get some sleep themselves while officers sorted the slowdown out. “I hate to leave Guthre behind.”

  “She’ll be fine. There’s a military hospital in Whitmount. Even without channelers to help, they’ll take good care of her. She’s one of their own. You can visit her there, probably keep tending her there if you want. But your father wants you with him when he enters the fortress. And I’d like you there as well. There will be a lot of questions about what happened in the Drowned City, and many of them you can answer better than I can.”

  His tone made it a request, not an order, but I nodded and stepped forward. He wanted someone to remind him of his daughter again, I knew. Usually I bristled at feeling like I was a symbol of someone else in the soldier’s eyes, but right now I didn’t mind. We had reached Whitmount alive, almost entirely because of Sperrin. I owed him anything I could do to make the arrival easier for him. Even if part of me would prefer to remain more anonymously behind, making sure Guthre received proper care.

  Almost without thinking about it I touched my back to make sure the Talisman remained in place. In Whitmount it might finally be useful again. I wondered why I still hadn’t told my father I had brought it: Caring for the Talisman of Truce had been one of his primary duties as chancellor, something he had emphasized over and over to me. When his mind was whole he never would have left it behind. Soon, it would be wanted again. Soon the process of repairing whatever had gone so horribly wrong between Ananya and at least one of the gods could begin.

  The trailhead had been built up into a small redoubt of precisely cut stone blocks left rough-finished. Where the trail narrowed, soldiers guided a few refugees at a time across a long plank bridge that led to the strongpoint. A wide
chasm had been cut across the trail, and far below I could see a forest of iron-tipped spikes. Cables on either side held the bridge in place: strongly enough to withstand winds, but designed so a single soldier could release the cables and send the planks tumbling into the spikes below, along with anyone on them.

  Given what we were crossing, the refugees looked glad for the escort across the bridge. Most of the scouts seemed to have gone ahead already, except for the rearguard, which had been augmented by Mountain Cougars. The soldiers I saw looked animated, nearly all of them talking with each other and with the refugees, with none of the aloofness between the different groups I’d observed during their mountain journey. I could make out only snatches of conversation: enough to hear many repetitions of Sperrin’s name. That made me smile in spite of myself: My father was used to being the most important person in almost every situation (or second-most important in the presence of the Empress), but here in the shadow of Whitmount, Sperrin’s name seemed to generate a lot more excitement. That had to sting.

  The redoubt opened onto a broad stairway that led down the steep slope into the valley. I could see the Mountain Road far below, following the broad curve of a river that flowed through the valley. A fortified bridge over the river seemed to mirror the stonework of the redoubt.

  After weeks of mountain foliage and spindly trees that grew in the rocky soil, the lush greenness of the valley below took me by surprise. It didn’t look much different from the belts of farmland that had surrounded the Drowned City, but those lands seemed like part of a different world to me now.

  The stairs down to the valley had been sculpted from the mountain by the same magic that had built Whitmount. From its narrow top at the well-guarded redoubt, the stairway widened dramatically, a flood of glittering white nearly a mile wide where it finally touched the valley. The stone looked newly polished and unworn, despite almost a thousand years of traffic. I have no idea what sort of magic can do this. But in a way, I did: When I stepped on the first stair I felt a warmth against my skin, and a slight weight—as if I wore real magical armor beneath my clothes, rather than a stylized Snake Slayer costume. In the long mountain trek I had almost forgotten the armor, as invisibly as it had clung to me. Now the promise of its warmth gladdened me, like the sun emerging from behind a sea of clouds to brighten an overcast day.