by JA Andrews
Will shook his head “You’re telling the story all wrong. A Keeper is journeying through the night, using a secret tunnel shown to him by a friend, to reach the house of…an old friend, in order to save an innocent girl from slavery, and possibly death.” Her expression didn’t change and Will gave her a hopeful smile. “And he’s taking the greatest ranger on the Sweep with him, so that counts for something.”
“Changing the story doesn’t change the truth.”
“The truth is complex enough for more than one story.”
She shook her head and stood up, walking over to where Evangeline and Patlon were discussing supples. Will glanced at Hal who was running his thumbnail pensively along a grove on the table.
“Is my horse alright?” Will asked.
Hal nodded without glancing up. “Killien made him a work horse in the barley fields. He’ll be cared for.”
Will sighed. “I liked Shadow. Although I suppose he’d probably have been eaten by a dragon by now if he was here, seeing as how he wouldn’t have fit in the entrance to this tunnel.”
He watched Hal run his hand along the grain of the table. “I am sorry that I lied to you about who I was.”
The big man paused for a moment. “Telling us you were a Keeper would have been a death sentence.”
“Does it make it any better to know that it wasn’t long into knowing you that I regretted the fact that the lie existed?”
Hal grunted noncommittally and Will let silence fall between them for a moment, wondering if there was a better way to ask his next question. “Are you sure you should be helping us?”
Hal didn’t answer immediately. When he did, he sounded reluctant. “I’ve spoken to your sister several times, and I like her. I don’t think it’s right, Killien using her like this.”
Will thought back on the past few weeks. “I’ve never seen you with a slave. Do you have any?”
“My father did. I grew up with some of them. One was a girl just two years younger than me. She was…like a sister.” Hal ran his fingers through his beard. “And one day my father traded her for a breeding ram.” In the dim light, Hal’s eyes were hard. “When my father died, I took all our slaves to Kollman Pass and sent them off the Sweep.”
“You set them free?”
Hal nodded. “Never sat right with me, owning people like that.”
“But you’re friends with Killien, and he has plenty of slaves.”
“If I kept my distance from every Roven with slaves, I’d have no friends at all,” Hal answered. “Killien and I have been friends our entire lives. I love him like a brother even if we don’t agree on everything.”
“Won’t he see this as a betrayal?”
Hal ran his hand through his beard. “Maybe. But there’s a lot of what he’s done lately that feels like betrayal as well. I can’t believe he did that with the frost goblins, and still wants to capture more. Also, he already knows how I feel about slaves. I’ve tried to convince him more than once to free his.”
“How did he take that idea?”
“Not well. I don’t think Rett would know what to do with freedom, but Sini and Lukas deserve it. Sini is too fun and happy to be kept as a slave. And Lukas is bright, he could probably do anything he set his mind to.”
Except be pleasant. “Well, thank you. I appreciate the help.”
Hal gave Will a hard look. “When I met you, I thought you’d make my journey north more enjoyable. Instead you’ve made my life much more complicated.”
“I introduced you to dwarves,” Will pointed out. “And brought you into their tunnels.”
A smile showed behind his beard. “True. Maybe that’s the real reason I’m helping you. And I do like the stories.”
“Maybe after we eat I can tell the one about a dwarf princess who was so ugly she was mistaken for a rock.”
“I’ve never wanted to hear anything more.”
Down the table, Alaric leaned close to a page in Kachig’s book, squinting at a rune and muttering.
“What we need,” Will said to him, “are the more elementary books on how to do magic with stones. All the books I’ve read expect a familiarity with a process we don’t know anything about.”
Alaric cleared his throat and smoothed his hand across the page. “I may have figured out a little bit of it.”
“When?”
Alaric glanced at Evangeline, then began the story of how she was poisoned and how he drew out her vitalle into a Reservoir Stone to keep her alive.
Will stared at his old friend, stunned. “That sounds like the absorption stone that Killien’s book talked about, drawing the life out of someone.”
“Very much like it.” Alaric told of the long, painful search for the cure, and how it led to the discovery of a wizard named Gustav who planned to awaken Mallon.
“He was the reason the dragon attacked us the first time,” Douglon said.
“How did you fight it off?” Will asked.
Douglon looked away and took a bite of his bread.
“Ayda did,” Alaric answered.
“Ayda the elf? I underestimated her,” Will said.
“Everyone did.”
Will looked back and forth between them. “I followed a wizard onto the Sweep because he claimed he was going to wake Mallon. I found him, eventually, but he was just a doddering old man. His name wasn’t Gustav, though. It was Wizendor.”
Alaric laughed. “That’s him. His full name was Wizendorenfurderfur.”
“The Wondrous,” Douglon added.
They seemed perfectly serious. “That’s ridiculous.”
Douglon shook his head. “You can’t even imagine.”
“He was a master of influence spells.” Alaric’s distaste of the idea was obvious. “He fooled all of us.”
Will shifted. “Influence spells can be useful when you’re surrounded by enemies.”
Alaric raised an eyebrow, but after a moment’s thought, gave a nod of agreement. He explained how Ayda had been the last elf, and held the power of all the others, how she’d used it to help destroy Mallon and Gustav.
“But you said before there are no more elves.” Will looked at each of their somber faces, not wanting to ask the next question. “Did destroying Mallon kill her?”
Alaric shook his head. “No, that came later.”
Douglon let out a long sigh and pushed away from the table, going to rummage through another crate on the shelf.
“Douglon,” Will whispered, “and Ayda?”
Alaric nodded.
“That’s…” Words failed him.
“It is,” Alaric agreed. “When we got back to Evangeline, she was far too weak to revive. Until Ayda…”
Evangeline looked pensively at her own hands.
“She was tired of being the only elf, tired of carrying the weight of her people. She’d done it long enough to see Mallon destroyed, and she was done.”
Will sat back, taking in the whole idea. “So there really are no elves?” The idea felt so hollow. Granted he had only seen a handful of elves in his life, most of which were polite but distant emissaries at court, but elves always felt like a breath of life in the world. He’d often thought of returning to the Greenwood to find Ayda again. “Is that how you knew the dragon” he asked Evangeline. “Whatever Ayda put in you recognized it?”
Both Alaric and Evangeline nodded.
“She put some of her memories into me,” Evangeline explained. “It’s like when your doing something and you have that feeling that you’ve done it all before. Sometimes I see something, or Alaric says something, and I know about it. But it’s like a dream. If I think about it too much, it all goes away. So Alaric’s taken to slipping things into conversations to catch me off guard.”
“You would not believe the things I’ve learned about the elves,” Alaric said. “It’s fascinating. And depressing.”
“We should go.” Douglon pulled some squash and onions out of the crate. “There’s cavern not far from here with a chimney
. We can cook and get a few hours sleep before we need to head to the rift.”
“I thought we’d just sleep here.” Alaric glanced at the bedrolls.
“Trust me.” Douglon shoved the crate back onto the shelf. “You want to get to the other one.”
Patlon poured water into cup-like lanterns. As he did, each one began to glow with a faint orange light.
Sora pulled her own glimmer moss lantern out of her bag, and using a bit of Patlon’s water, set hers glowing a ruddier color. Patlon peered into her lantern and grunted. “Frostweed?”
“Mixed with crushed tundra lichen.”
Patlon gave her an approving nod. “You may be the most competent human I’ve ever met.” He motioned her toward the tunnel. “You’re going to like where we’re headed.”
Sora walked into the tunnel next to him, the sound of Patlon’s voice dropping to muffled echoes. Everyone else followed.
The world shrank to the size of their group. The lanterns cast four patches of orange light. Bits of the ceiling and walls slid through them. A nagging discomfort began to plague Will that they weren’t actually moving. That they were doing something like treading water. A peal of laughter echoed back from Sora, and Will craned around Hal to see her. She talked animatedly, outlined in the dim light of Patlon’s lantern. It felt partly reassuring, partly irritating that she was so at ease.
“You can’t listen with your ears,” Douglon’s voice came from behind him. “Listen with the part of you that understands the permanence of the stone. The part of you that knows that life should continue, that you should continue, that dying goes against what should be. The part of you that understands eternity.”
Will glanced back to see Rass reach out tentatively toward the wall. “When I talk to the grass, it is always growing and dying and growing again. There is nothing lasting about it.” She let her fingers trail along the rock.
“Don’t think about the voice of the grasses. Think about the voice of the Sweep, lying still and strong and unmoved for a thousand years.”
Rass’s brow furrowed and she pressed more of her hand against the wall, dragging her whole palm along it. She shook her head.
“Give it time, wee snip,” Douglon said. “The rocks speak slowly.”
They walked for more than an hour. At some point, Patlon began to hum a deep, thrumming tune. The melody echoed off the walls mixing with new strands of the song. Douglon joined in, humming from the back of the group, and the echoes became more layered and rich, the pulse of the song rang through the mountain like a drum.
Eventually the darkness paled and the tunnel, which had run reasonably straight, twisted sharply to the left. Will squinted into the hazy light that filtered around another turn not far ahead. The tunnel continued in the excessively serpentine way for four more turns, each growing gradually brighter before Hal mentioned it to Patlon.
“It’s giving your eyes time to adjust,” the dwarf answered. “You’d have been half blinded if you just stepped into what’s ahead.”
Even so, when the tunnel turned the last time, Will could barely open his eyes. The air was saturated with a blue-tinged light, as though they had stepped out into the middle of the shimmering sky. After the closeness of the tunnel, the cavern gaped open taller than pine trees and wide enough that the other side was lost in hazy brightness. The faint smell of trees and earth wafted past, but everything looked like sky.
“Move in,” Douglon grumbled from behind them.
Will took a stunned step forward along with everyone else, and the floor beneath him shot out fierce glints of light, flashing reflections of the glimmer moss like specks of blazing fire.
“It glitters everywhere!” Rass’s little voice skipped off the walls and echoed through the chamber.
The floor itself was a pale blue, but glitters of orange from the mosslight skittered across it with every step, like infinitesimally small fairies flitting by faster than he could see. On the rough walls, the lights tripped from crevice to ridge, scattering like shattered glass.
“Welcome to Hellat Harrock’lot.” Douglon’s words echoed as well, deeper and richer. “The Cavern of Sea and Sky. You may be the first foreigners to set eyes on it.”
“Another thing the High Dwarf is going to love,” Patlon muttered.
The cavern wasn’t as large as Will had first thought. His eyes adjusted and revealed the far side of the oblong cave only a hundred paces away. Four tunnels branched off, dark mouths opening in the blue-white walls. The ceiling was just the continuation of the walls, arching over them in a low hanging dome. Near the far side, the ceiling was cut by a gash letting in a trickle of light.
“We’re close to the surface,” Douglon said. “It’s only a short climb up that shaft to an outcropping of rock on the mountain side. Judging from the light, it’s close to sunset. Thanks to that little chimney, we can have a fire and a proper meal. We can get a few hours sleep before we need to leave.”
In a wide, flat area there was a circle of ash on the floor and a small pile of wood stacked up against a nearby wall. Patlon lit a fire, and the flames sent millions of tiny shards of light reflecting across the cavern. Sora took out the rabbit that had been wrapped around the heatstone. The stone had stopped glowing, but the entire package was still warm. The strips of rabbit were hot and dripping with juices, and they were divided up and eaten within moments.
Will set Talen on a thin piece of firewood and ripped off small bits of rabbit, feeding them to the hawk who seemed perfectly content to sit on his perch in his hood.
Everyone gathered near the fire except Sora, who faced out into the cavern. He walked over to her, watching the floor glitter and flash below his feet, like he was treading on the stars. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”
She shook her head.
“A place like this makes me understand why you like caves.”
“Everyone loves places like this. But it’s the small, common caves that feel like home. The tunnels that wander through the mountains.”
He thought about the passageways they’d traveled through all day, the darkness, the silence, the lifelessness. There was nothing homey about them.
“You think I’m crazy,” she said.
“No, I think you’re scowly,” he answered, “and have an odd definition of homey.”
With a small shake of her head she strode across the cavern. “Come.”
He let her walk a few steps before following. “I also think you’re bossy.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
He followed Sora to the nearest tunnel mouth. She paused at the opening, and with a disapproving grunt, she walked to the next.
“This one.” She stepped in and turned a corner out of sight. Her voice came back in an echoey, hollow way. “Come.”
Will followed her. Around the first turn, the tunnel dimmed and he found her waiting, arms crossed. The corners of the floor were lost in blackness, and shadows filled more spaces on the wall than seemed reasonable. “What are we doing in here?”
“You are going to see what tunnels are really like.” She turned and disappeared around another corner, proving this was just as serpentine as the one from earlier.
“What if we get lost?”
“It’ll make a great story,” she answered. “Hurry up.”
In two more turns the darkness crept out of the corners and seeped into the air itself. He could barely make her out in front of him. “Not to sound like a frightened child,” he said, letting his hands run along the wall as he walked deeper into the darkness, “but I’d be thrilled to find out you had a bit of glimmer moss tucked away somewhere.”
She turned back towards him, and he was almost certain she was laughing. She took one of his hands and started walking again, pulling him along.
“Not much farther.”
One more turn and the tunnel straightened out. His eyes stretched wide, but there was nothing to see but blackness. He could feel Sora’s hand in his, but there was no way to pick her out
from the dark.
She walked a dozen paces more and then stopped. He tried to hold her hand loosely, fighting the urge to cling to it. The darkness was so thick it felt like a thing in itself.
“Do you hear that?” she whispered.
There was nothing at all to hear. Beyond Sora’s slow, measured breathing and the unnerving sound of his own heart pounding, which he was sure she could feel through his hand, there was utter and complete silence.
“No,” he whispered. “I hear nothing.”
“That’s what you’re supposed to hear.” Her words slid through the darkness, calm and pleased. “The tunnel is like a cocoon, like the walls of a fortress so thick that nothing can get through them. Not noises, not armies, not other people’s expectations, not even the Serpent Queen.”
Will closed his eyes and tried to find what Sora felt. “It all feels too heavy. Like the rocks will crush us.”
“You’re thinking of the mountain as an enemy. It’s life and shelter and warmth and endless, timeless permanence.”
Her words almost made a difference. For a breath he felt the solid mass of the mountain above him like a shield. But it grew heavier until it was ready to smash down and flatten them all. His grip tightened on her hand.
“You’re not seeing the mountain for what it is, Will. You’re imagining what it’s capable of, but you’re not seeing what it is now, what it’s been for thousands of years. When you walk through the forest, you don’t imagine it will burst into flames at any moment, do you?”
“No,” he admitted.
“This tunnel is more permanent than the trees. Think about what the rocks are, what they do. Wind and storms that terrify us don’t affect them. Nothing is indestructible, but the rocks are close. They’re…” She gave a short growl of irritation. “I can’t explain it. Here, feel what it’s like for me.”
Emotion surged into his chest. Contentedness, security, belonging. Like he was a child again in the years before Ilsa had been taken, tucked under a wool blanket, lying in his bed in the dark cottage, alone but safe. The walls of the cottage surrounded him, blocking out the foxes and packs of little brush wolves that roamed the forest. All the dangers were outside the walls and inside there was nothing to fear. Just the endless night, a black backdrop waiting to be filled with imaginings.