by JA Andrews
Talen came back three times, bringing with him beakfuls of dead grass. The third time, Will followed him into the bedroom. Talen stood next to a neat little nest, looking at Will expectantly.
“I have no food.” Will brushed the back of his fingers down the hawk’s chest. “You know what would be useful? If you brought back something that had energy in it. Like living grass. Or better yet, a tree.”
Talen leaned down into his nest and nudged the stalks of grass around with his beak.
Emotions resonate. They don’t move.
Will considered the bird. He’d tried in the past to push emotions toward Talen, but maybe there was another way. He opened up toward the hawk and felt a nebulous pleasure that seemed to be focused more on the nest than anything else.
His finger froze against Talen’s chest.
Talen felt pleased about the nest. Because emotions were focused on something.
Will fanned his own emotions, trying to make them strong enough for Talen to notice, willing them to resonate in the little bird.
“Or you could find Sora. Because if anyone could get me out of this, it’d be her.” That was very easy to want. He let his need for her help grow until it filled his chest. “I need Sora.”
Talen shifted his weight and Will held his breath. The hawk twitched his head toward the other room and launched into the air. Will, stunned that it had actually worked, watched the hawk flutter to the next room—and come back with the dead mouse. He dropped it onto Will’s blanket.
“Or you could just keep bringing me mice.” Will leaned back and closed his eyes, exhaustion washing over him.
Talen let out a short, self-satisfied squawk, and Will heard him rustling in his nest.
The wall and the bed spun slowly underneath him. His body felt hollow except for a gnawing fear. He considered the fear for a moment, wanting to believe it was all for Ilsa. But it wasn’t. A healthy chunk of the fear was for himself. Because as sure as Talen was going to bring more mice, Will was never going to figure out these runes.
With a quick screech, Talen took off and flew out of the hut rising effortlessly out of the rift. Will had never wanted to fly so badly.
But Killien had Ilsa. Will pushed himself up.
Laying out some paper, he studied the first rune. A page of runes is like a story, Alaric liked to say. Each symbol interacts with the ones next to it, altering it slightly, changing the shape of the tale.
Except runes were nothing like stories.
He copied rune after rune, hoping to see something that made sense, but copying them was awkward. The lines were all too crowded. He flipped one rune upside down and found…something vaguely like tree.
This wasn’t getting him anywhere. It seemed unlikely that Kachig wrote something-like-a-tree, maybe-upside-down. Or why it sat between the almost-rune for winter, and the backwards—and embellished—rune for fish.
Will paused, studying that last one. Fish or disease?
Talen flew back in the door, and winged into the bedroom.
Will shoved himself away from the table. There was no way he was going to get even a single rune translated. He walked to the door and leaned against the wall, staring up at darkening sky.
Runes are like stories
Will let his head fall back against the hut. No, Alaric, stories were a series of events that took you someplace. Runes didn’t go anywhere.
He pushed himself off the wall. The rune didn’t move, but the pen did.
The room had fallen into a dark orange gloom. He set his finger against the wick of the candle and gathered a bit of vitalle from himself.
“Incende.” The candle flickered to life.
Talen had fallen asleep in the bedroom, his head turned backwards and tucked into his back, leaving him looking morbidly headless.
Will looked at the first rune. Instead of looking at the completed form, he focused on how the pen must have moved. There were two possible starting points. He picked one and drew the rune from there. A line down, more pressure at the top, lifting to gentle thinness at the bottom. A slope up to the right, a slash across. When there was no obvious next stroke, he lifted his pen, ignoring the rest of the marks.
Empty.
Clear as day, it said empty.
Or hollow. Or void. He couldn’t quite remember the nuance between the three.
That wasn’t important. At least not yet. He started on the lines left in the original rune. They began at the left, curled across and down before thinning again to a spidery line that connected to an accent mark.
Soul.
Will stared at the words, then back at the original rune. Kachig had intertwined soul with empty. The runes were stacked.
The empty soul?
No, empty wasn’t descriptive, the rune leaned to the side—an action. To empty.
To empty the soul.
Will moved to the next. It split into four. Stone, require/must, be chained, fire.
He split the next rune, and the next, until the page was full.
When he finally put down the quill, his hand was shaking.
Absorption Stones
To empty the soul, the fire must be chained in a stone. Drawing out (or washing out?) the fire (life?) leaves __________ (possibly ‘kill’, but more like ‘unmaking’ than ‘killing’.)
It went on, describing death and power and stones.
Will leaned back in his chair. This was what Killien wanted? Absorption stones.
And how could he possibly do it? There was no way he had a stonesteep with these skills hiding in the Morrow.
The candle sputtered out hours later. He stood and stretched, walking outside the lump of a hut. A swollen half-moon sat atop the cliffs, casting dim silvery shadows through parts of the rift and leaving most of it in blackness. Rising out of the east, the Serpent Queen’s shadow stretched up into the sky. Her shape seemed to grow out of the darkness of the rift itself, leaving him with the eerie impressions that this rift was something she’d already devoured.
A scuff sounded just behind him. He spun, casting out. The bright vitalle of a person stood only paces away.
“It seems I should have snuck you away from the Morrow a little sooner,” Sora said from the darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Sora!” he snapped, his heart slamming into his chest. “Why are you creeping around in the dark?”
“You’re not supposed to have visitors,” she said mildly, her voice almost agreeable. “Can we go inside?”
He blew out a long breath, trying to calm himself. “It makes me nervous when you talk nicely.”
When they’d stepped inside, she pulled a cloth off a small bowl in her hands and a dim orange light filled the room.
“You have glimmer moss?” He leaned closer. A small bundle of the luminescent moss sat submerged in water. “I’ve never seen any outside Duncave.”
“My people live in caves, Will,” she said, exasperated.
Despite everything, he grinned at her. “There’s your real voice.”
The moss glowed dimmer than candlelight, more diffuse and gentle. She studied him with a small wrinkle in her brow. “I thought you’d be dead by now.”
“So did I,” he admitted, sitting down. "How’d you get past my guards?”
She raised an eyebrow. “You think I can’t get past two lazy, distracted boys playing ranger in the dark?”
“Could you get me out?”
She bit her lip to hold back a smile. “I’ve heard you walk through the grass, Will. They could be unconscious and they’d still hear you.”
He tried to smile, but he couldn’t muster a real one. For a heartbeat, he considered the idea she’d been sent by Killien. But he couldn’t imagine her feigning friendship like this. With more than a little surprise, he realized he trusted her.
He took a deep breath. “Killien has my sister.”
She sank back in her chair and nodded. “He told me.” At Will’s surprised look, she added, “He doesn’t suspect I
knew you were a Keeper. So far all of his anger is focused exclusively on you.”
“I just need to make sure he keeps it focused on me, not on Ilsa.” Will sank back in the chair. “I don’t think he’s told her yet. At least Ilsa didn’t seem to be trying to decide if I am her long lost brother.”
Sora gave him a half-smile. “I’ve known Ilsa the entire time I’ve been here. I haven’t been around her often, mostly because Lilit never warmed up to me, but we’ve spoken several times, and I like her. Lilit always has too, if that makes you feel any better. As far as I know, she’s been well-treated.” Her smile turned to a smirk. “And now I feel a little better about how horribly awkward you were around Ilsa all the time.”
Will ran his hand through his hair. “I needed to talk to her without scaring her.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I doubt she was scared, but she might think you’re a lunatic.” She sat back in her chair. “I can’t figure out how to get her away from Killien, though. Any more than I can figure out how to get you away from him.”
He pushed the next question out. “Does he have Rass too?”
Sora shook her head. “No one’s seen the girl since the attack.”
A wave of relief washed over him until he realized what she’d said and jolted forward.
“I don’t think she was hurt,” Sora said quickly. “There were a lot of injuries, but only twelve deaths, and all of that happened along the front line.”
Twelve dead. “Did they have families?”
“Most of them.” She paused. “Killien will never say it, but he knows the only reason there aren’t more is because of you.”
Will dropped his head down onto his fingertips, staring at the table without seeing it.
Sora shifted, and Will felt her hand on his arm. “We should have lost many more, Will. No one has ever heard of that many goblins on the Sweep.” She pulled gently but persistently on his arm and he lifted his head. “The only reason the clan wasn’t massacred is you.”
“Twelve dead.” He shook his head. “I should have done it sooner. I could have pushed the heat toward the holes in the ground as soon as they appeared, chased them back in.”
She dropped her hand from his arm, leaving a cool spot in the shape of her fingers. “Why didn’t you?”
He couldn’t look up at her. The goblins had come so fast, like a flood.
“You didn’t know you could do it, did you?”
His gaze flicked up to her, expecting her usual sharp contempt, but she was solemn.
He rubbed his hands over his face and let out a laugh. “I’ve never done anything remotely like that.”
“Will,” she said seriously, “you need to give Killien whatever it is he wants from you. I’ve never seen him this angry”
The blue book sat heavy and undecipherable on the table.
“I can’t.”
“Do something magical”—she waved one hand in the air, fluttering her fingers—“and give Killien what he wants.”
Will stared at her. “I can’t just do something magical.”
“You can make a wall of heat. You can walk through a crowd and have no one notice you’re there.”
“Congratulations.” Will glared at her. “You’ve named the two magical things”—he wiggled his fingers at her—“that I know how to do.”
She sat back in her chair, looking at him in disbelief. “You can’t do anything else?”
“Not anything worthwhile. Gerone, the Keeper who spent years trying to train me, says I have a motivation problem. Which maybe is true, because I just mastered the not-being-noticed thing since coming to the Sweep, and I figured out how to move the heat while the goblins”—it had been the goblins racing toward Sora. She’d looked so exposed in the face of their viciousness— “Ran toward us.”
“Are most Keepers better at magic than you are?”
He gave her an annoyed look. “Yes, but it matters less than you’d think. We do a lot of reading, and writing, and research. Most of the Keepers are elderly and never leave the Stronghold. I’m the youngest. Alaric is next. He’s the court Keeper. He’s decently good at magic, and he could decipher these runes in his sleep.”
She looked at him curiously. “Sounds irritating to have someone who’s better than you at everything.”
“He’s not better at storytelling,” Will corrected her. “And he’s not irritating. He’s been like a brother to me since I was ten.”
She looked at him for a long moment. “If he was the court Keeper, what was your job?”
“I traveled around Queensland telling stories and learning stories and looked for new Keepers. When a child develops the ability to do magic, around the age of ten, their family brings them either to court, or to the nearest Keeper. For poorer families that can’t afford to travel, it’s nice if there’s someone close.”
“But you’re the youngest.”
“I was looking for new ones, not finding them. There should be at least two younger than me. The gap between us is usually less than ten years.”
Sora gave him a long, probing look. “Is it true Keepers can sense people they can’t see? And suck the life out of them?”
Will let out a laugh. “We’re opposed to things like sucking the life out of people. But living things are full of energy—vitalle, and we can sense it when it’s nearby.”
Sora’s face grew taut and she sat perfectly still.
“Grass and plants have a little vitalle,” he continued, uncomfortable at her rapt attention. “Humans have a lot.” He cast out through the rift finding only Sora, blazing bright in front of him, and the compact energy of Talen, nestled in the other room. “You, Talen, and I are the only ones in the rift.”
Sora nodded slowly, her eyes losing their focus. Will waited for some sign of disbelief, or doubt. But she sat still, her eyes unseeing and her head slightly bowed.
“People are usually surprised to learn that I can do that.”
Her gaze flickered up at him, more uncertain than he’d ever seen her. She was almost frightened.
Several disparate ideas he had about her clicked into place.
He leaned forward. “You can sense it too.”
She flinched at his words.
Will stared at her for a long moment, then burst out laughing. “You can! Hal’s right! You have creepy magic. No wonder you can—what did Killien say? Find a mountain hair in a snowstorm?” He leaned closer, grinning. “You have magic.”
The edge of her lips curled into a reluctant smile.
“How much can you see?” he asked.
“It’s not like seeing. It’s more like a smell…or like feeling the temperature. I can tell when something is alive nearby, but not what direction it’s in. I just have to move and see if it gets stronger.”
“Fascinating! I’ve only met two people who had the ability to sense vitalle, but not manipulate it, and they were both in Queensland. It’s unusual for people to have abilities like you.”
“Can all Keepers sense things the way you do?”
Will hesitated. That was a complicated question.
“Can they sense vitalle as clearly as you?” she prodded, testing out the word.
“Yes. They can all sense vitalle.”
She waited a moment, her eyebrows raised expectantly. “There’s a but coming. Do they do it like I do? Without knowing really where it is?”
“No, we all send out a…wave of sorts, searching for energy, and it echoes back to us where things are.”
Her brow knit together. “So what can you do that they can’t?”
“I can…” He’d never told anyone this outside the Keepers.
“I don’t really talk about it,” he said.
She leveled a gaze at him, her face incredulous.
“And you don’t talk about your creepy magic either,” Will said. “Right.” He rubbed his hand across his mouth. “I can feel people’s emotions.”
One of her eyebrows shot up. “Feel them?”
Will no
dded. “Right around here.” He pointed to the left side of his chest.
Sora was silent, pondering this. “Can you tell what they’re thinking?”
Will shook his head. “It isn’t like that. You know how if someone’s angry, it can make you feel angry? Well I can feel that anger as strong as they do, but still separate from my own emotions.”
“Can you read me?”
Will laughed. “I gave up trying to read you ages ago.”
Her brow dove down and she looked at him, insulted.
“I’ve never met anyone who keeps their emotions as clamped down as you. When I try to read you, all I feel is…emptiness.”
She considered him for a moment. “How many times have you tried?”
“At the beginning, a lot. You were terrifying. And finding out you had no emotions made it so much worse.”
She looked satisfied by that answer. Then her eyes widened. “That’s how you tell stories so well. You feel the audience. You change your story to please them.”
Will shifted in his seat. “Well, it helps, of course. But all storytellers do that. They watch expressions and notice when attention starts to wander. I just have…a little more information. And I like to think that my success lies in the fact that I have some storytelling skills.”
She shook her head, smiling. “I was right about you, storyman.”
“In the most negative way possible.”
“Let’s see if I can control how much you feel. I’ll try to open up.” She leaned forward expectantly. It was strange to see her face so pleasant. The slight smile in her eyes was distracting and he closed his eyes before opening up toward her.
Emptiness bloomed in his chest and he shook his head. She kept her emotions too tightly controlled. As though she didn’t want to feel them herself, never mind let anyone else know they existed. But then he felt a hint of…something.
“Curiosity,” he said, “and a bit of worry, or fear.”
She made a noise that sounded like agreement.
He focused and found the current of seething anger that he’d felt in her a few times before. It was so deep-rooted and so…foundational.