by Rachel Dunne
“Go on, Anddyr,” the cappo said, his voice growing more sharp.
But he was weak, he always had been. Why had he ever thought otherwise? Anddyr twisted his other arm and it shook as badly. Half his forearm was bloodied and scraped, and he thought maybe that was a true thing, true seeing, but he couldn’t be sure. He felt nothing but the jar in his hands, the throbbing pulse of it. He wrapped his palm over the lid, began to twist—
“Joros,” Rora called out, and her voice set a spike into Anddyr’s brow, the storms shattering over him. They fell in sharp, glass-edged pieces, raining around him as the cappo’s thundercloud eyes turned away.
“What?” the cappo snapped.
“I met someone in the mountain. A woman named Neira . . .” Squinting through the storm-haze, Anddyr saw Rora wave her hand. Beckoning. That put iron in the cappo’s spine—he wasn’t one to be beckoned, and he stalked over to the twins likely to tell them so. Rora’s eyes flickered, looked around the cappo, past him . . . and fixed on Anddyr. Her gaze was hard, and her mouth was set, and the jar in his hands grew heavy as a boulder.
Joros snapped at Rora, “I know her. The woman is full of lies and cheap tricks. I’m sure she spouted plenty of nonsense at you about shadows.”
The storm sparked and spit around him, as Anddyr carefully set the jar on the ground before his face. I am free, he told himself, and this time the words rang like a bell through the storm. I am better than this. His hands still shook, though not so badly, as they began to weave sigils in the air.
“She knew things she shouldn’t’ve,” Rora said.
The cappo made a derisive noise, like a horse snorting. “She’s an excellent manipulator of people, I’ll give her that. She was one of my . . . subordinates, but she gathered a bit of a following of her own. Had them convinced they could bring back blood magic. But the secrets of blood magic fell with the Twins.”
“Doesn’t Anddyr’s medicine work with blood?”
Quietly, softly, a fire burned through the jar. The smell of it lanced through Anddyr, making his stomach twist, a pathetic moan bursting from between his lips. His fingers twisted, and the fire burned brighter, hotter, consuming the black paste—and then Anddyr let his hands fall, fingers still. He could sense the remaining skura like a living thing, boiling and growling in the bottom of the jar, so little of it, just in case, just in case. His hands shook as he lifted up the jar, shook as he tucked it into his robe. It’s not there, he told himself, hoping with his skuramadness that the belief would remain. It’s gone, all gone. I am free.
And then the lowering storm dropped. The skura was gone, but the need wasn’t.
Anddyr pressed his forehead to the ground, the snow hot against his skin, and wrapped his arms over his head, pressing them around his ears. He couldn’t see and couldn’t hear, was safe from the storm, from everything it could throw at him . . .
Daggers tore into his body. They started at his legs, found the places his bones and tendons and flesh were beginning to knit, found the weak places and plunged. He could feel the hilts, the cold metal against his burning flesh. He had felt this before, this same thing, when the scar-faced merra had whispered to him that he was strong, that he could stop—and the daggers had torn into him then, too, ripping him apart, and they’d made him burn that village, all those people . . . No, no, I can’t, not again, please. I am free, please, not again. The daggers dragged themselves up along his legs, slowly, steadily. He could feel them shifting, aiming higher, angling for his heart—
“Anddyr.”
Braving the storm, facing the burned village, he lifted his head, focusing on her. She knelt in front of him, and even though her face was twisted, concern drifted around her eyes.
“We’re leaving,” she said. “Get up.” Those were the words she spoke, but he could hear the words that lay under her voice, the words that spun on her face: You’re better than this.
Anddyr got his aching knees under him, pressed his hands to the ground that his blood had frozen into, rocked onto his heels, and pushed up. He swayed, near falling, but didn’t dare reach for her. Her hand caught him of its own volition, steady, warm, like her eyes. “Good,” she said, her fingers lingering just a moment, and then she turned away.
The storm still raged around him, but he had a small shield against it now, a shield that smelled like her, flowers and soft and dirt.
The cappo eyed him as they strung through the trees, four bodies together but so far apart. “You’re acting strange,” the cappo said.
Promptly, Anddyr offered, “I’m weak.” I’m healing. I’m growing strong.
The cappo snorted, and said no more.
The silence stretched with the shadows, save for the storm that swirled around Anddyr, the storm that stuck his tongue to the roof of his mouth until he finally peeled it away and asked, “What now?”
The cappo glared and said nothing. Rora didn’t look back at him. Aro finally took pity and said, “We don’t know.”
Anddyr reached within his robe, brushed his fingers against the smooth thing secreted away in one of his pockets. What he saw surprised him. Swallowing, Anddyr offered, “There were more preachers inside the mountain than ever before, and there was . . . even more mystery than usual. There were rumors that all the Fallen were leaving soon. I . . . I think something is happening, or they’re planning something.”
The cappo snorted. “Oh, you think so, do you?”
Anddyr felt a strange burning in his chest. He couldn’t name what it was; it had been so long since he’d felt anything like it. “Rebellion” wasn’t quite the word, but it touched at the edges. “I do,” Anddyr said, drawing his fist from his robe. He held his hand out toward Joros, fingers up, and uncurled them to show the seekstone sitting on his palm. Frowning, the cappo held one hand up to halt Rora and Aro, who were watching with raised brows, and he reached his other hand out to pluck the stone from Anddyr. He saw the cappo’s eyes narrow even as they went distant, drawn away by the seekstone’s power. Anddyr kept the smile off his lips.
“Who is this?” the cappo demanded.
Anddyr hesitated, but decided there was no gain in lying. “Etarro.”
Joros’s eyes flickered away from the seekstone’s pull, his glare resting on Anddyr. He could see the cappo’s own storm gathering, waiting to drop. “The boy? You got this, but you couldn’t—”
“It was the best I could do,” Anddyr interrupted, and then nearly bit off his tongue as anger washed over the cappo’s face. He never would have, shouldn’t have, dared to interrupt the cappo. He flinched away from the cappo’s palpable anger, and it was not entirely for show. “I couldn’t reach the boy,” he lied, “but I thought this would help . . .” He remembered Etarro’s hand, resting atop his, as they knelt together before the sunlit tunnel. He remembered how often Etarro had whispered of his sun-touched dreams. He remembered the boy’s sad soft words—“There’ll be peace, if you kill me”—even as his small hand had pressed the seekstone into Anddyr’s. He couldn’t look at Rora, for fear that she’d give voice to the lie in his words, that her accusing gaze would undo him. The words tasted like rotting meat, but Anddyr forced them past his teeth: “Did I . . . Cappo, did I do well?”
Joros glared a moment longer, and then his gaze slipped away, drawn once more by the second sight the seekstone offered.
A hand brushing his back startled Anddyr, and he twisted painfully to see Rora standing there, her eyes strange. She kept her voice low when she asked, “Why aren’t you ever who I think you are?”
“They’re leaving,” the cappo murmured. There was surprise in his voice, shock, and something almost like reverence. “All of them.”
“Are they coming after us?” Rora asked. She had a hand on one of her daggers.
The cappo shook his head, face going set and grim. “They’re hunting for a bigger prize.”
“They know where to find the Twins,” Anddyr whispered. “They know how to bring them back.” He didn’t have the seekstone a
nymore, so he couldn’t see it . . . but it was almost like he could. They were, truly, not so far from the mountain; not so far away that he couldn’t see the black-robed preachers boiling from Raturo’s peak like ants from a hill, spilling down its sides, an angry mass collecting, gathering, waiting like a coiled serpent wound around the mountain, slowly tightening.
He’d watched through the seekstone as much as he could, concerned for Etarro, so he’d seen the boy wandering aimlessly through the mountain, waiting for Valrik and the others to find him. Anddyr hadn’t heard the words of that confrontation, the seekstones didn’t have that power, but he’d seen Valrik strike Etarro, and he’d seen the way Valrik’s eyes held a touch of fear after. Whatever the boy said had sent the preachers scrambling, Valrik among them. Scrambling, no doubt, to mobilize the Fallen, to ready for their long journey. He’d watched Etarro go to one of the hidden doors, standing outside the mountain on the ridge that spiraled around its sides, and stare south. Waiting for the Fallen to ready themselves, waiting for the Fallen to take him to his godly counterpart. Anddyr wondered if, in those long staring moments, he had heard Fratarro’s unending call: Find me. The desperate plea of a broken god, that had found its way through Anddyr’s consciousness on occasion, but that seemed to pulse through Etarro like an irregular heartbeat. Find me.
“What now?” Aro asked, a higher echo of Anddyr’s earlier words. The younger man wavered in shades of green, when Anddyr looked to him.
The cappo tucked the seekstone into one of his pockets, and his face was set like a man about to put his head through a noose. “We follow them,” he said, and he turned, began walking through the trees the way they had come, walking toward the mountain, toward the rippling, black-scaled viper that waited there.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Vatri was silent as they walked through the thick trees, so close their arms brushed. Silence was strange on her, but she had changed since last he saw her. Thin-faced beneath the ridged scars, blue eyes grown dimmer. Pieces of herself, sheared off, stripped away, broken. But Scal, too, had changed since last he saw her face. Both of them torn like a wound and stitched closed as best as possible.
They found a glade. Free of the reaching trees, it was dusted with snow, marked by the feet of forest creatures. No boot prints, though. The sun winked at them over the treetops, slipping slowly away. They sat together at the clearing edge, backs to a tree broader than both of them. Their shoulders touched.
“I was wrong.” Vatri spoke softly, and did not look at him. Watched her hands, folded against her knees. He watched them, too. Saw how they clenched, loosened, shook. “I still look into the fire every night, but it hasn’t shown me anything in weeks. I thought maybe I’d offended the Parents somehow . . . and I suppose, in a way, I did. I took the wrong path, after they’d shown me the right one. I . . . thought I knew better than them.” One hand curled into a fist. “I thought Joros was the right path, but he’s not. Or maybe he was, once, but he’s taken a new path, and . . .” She stopped, and her face tilted, turned. Eyes finding his in the slowly dimming light. “The fires showed you to me. I should never have left you.”
There was too much in her eyes. He looked away from them, said, “I should not have left you.” An echo of her words, but it was all he could say. He could not look at her face, to see if they were enough.
The silence fell again. Shoulders touching, hands twitching restless. There had been a space between them, when first they had met. A space filled with Scal’s distrust and his isolation, a space filled with habit and fear. She had reached to him across that space, and closed it. He had not seen it until she was gone, and the space was left empty. Now, joined again, the space between them was slim . . . but in the sinking light Scal could see it growing wider. The space between them stretching like an open mouth, and her hands stayed on her knees. Clenching, loosening, shaking. She would not reach across that space again.
“I was wrong,” Scal said. Her words echoed, but they fit his mouth as well. “I thought that I should be something different. Something better. I have not ever been a good man. I wanted to be good.” So many words came hard to him. They tumbled around in his mind, breaking away and re-forming, and they did not find their way easily to his tongue. “But I do not know how. I am as I was shaped, and I do not know how to change it. All my life, I have been shaped by the hands of others. I . . . wished to learn how to shape myself. Wished to be my own man.” The trees swallowed the sun, shadows sinking deep. Their shoulders touched, but the dark lay between them, and he could not tell if it was only shadow or the great wide maw. In the dusky light, he thrust out his hand, crossing the space between them. His fingers clutched at hers. “I do not know who I am, or how to be better. Once, you would have shaped me. Made me the man you wished me to be.” He lifted his face, found her eyes, moon-wide in the seamed curves of her face. Meeting, across the shrinking space between them. “There are worse things than to be shaped by your hands.”
She twined her fingers around his, and her eyes were soft. There was a sadness there, and a surety. She rose, fingers slipping from his. “We need firewood,” she said.
Two fires she built. One small, fed with twigs and herb-pouches pulled from her belt, a fire that smelled like prayers against a clawing-cold night. A fire to hold back the darkness, to warm fingers and toes, to scare off predators and draw in friends. A gentle fire.
The second fire was like to swallow the whole forest. A fire great enough to swallow darkness itself.
Higher and higher she fed it, the flames dancing mad in her eyes, the heat making Scal’s skin feel tight-stretched even where he stood at a safe distance. It bit at the trees’ highest branches, leaves and needles curling, blackening. Falling gentle in a gray snow of ash. It drove back the night, making daylight in that small clearing. A sun in the night, that danced upon the snow-touched ground.
When the small fire died, deep in the night, Vatri told him to remove his clothes. “All of them,” she added, looking to the side of him. Her ridged skin could not blush, but he thought that it would have, when she looked at him. Even the pendants she took from him, the flamedisk and the snowbear claw that hung always against his skin. She put the leather cord around her own neck, the pendants resting over her heart, one of fire and one of the ice.
She took a handful of ashes from the dead fire, and with deft fingers drew the ashes onto Scal’s body. They were not any symbols he recognized, trailing over his flesh like leeches. If he looked at them too long, it seemed almost as though they moved. She drew a large symbol on each of his palms, designs that were like a mirror to each other. Her fingers brushed over the convict’s cross in his cheek, and dragged heavy over the other cheek, as though she were trying to grind the ash into his skin.
In the depths of the night, bright as any day with the huge fire blazing, she stepped back from him. A small figure, between Scal and the fire. Her hands were black with ash, and shadows made pits of her eyes. “Do you trust me?” she asked.
“I do.”
She did not touch him, did not risk smudging her long work, but she led him nonetheless. He would have followed, no matter where she went. Even to the edge of that great fire where his flesh felt as though it would melt from his bones. She held up one hand, finger pointing. Tongues of the fire, stretching to lick at that finger. Trying to pull her in.
With a breath, Scal stepped past her and into the heart of the fire.
The sun found him in a pile of ash. Bone-aching, bone-weary. Naked as the day of his birth, the cinder-drawn symbols faded from his flesh. It felt almost a dream. Perhaps it had been, for he remembered nothing after the flames had wrapped around his flesh, nothing but their whispering in his ears. Something like that, he surely could have dreamed.
Scal sat, ash rising in a cloud with his movement. It swirled around him, tugged by gentle breezes, a shifting shroud. His palms ached like they had been stabbed, but there was no mark on them. His head, too, ached so fiercely it hurt to think of it
. His eyes flickered, hunting through the clearing. Vatri would tell him what had happened. What was real, and what was dream. Why he hurt. His eyes searched, but the glade was empty.
Empty, save for the dozens of boot prints that marred the scattered, ash-dusted snow. Large prints, marching and crossing, circling, circling. A handful of men, likely drawn by the fire.
Scal stood, aching palm to aching head, and the ash wrapped around his feet, trailing his steps. He went carefully around the boot prints, curled toes sure against the snow. His clothes were where he had left them, half-frozen. He did not feel their cold against his skin. He was of the North, and his blood ran warm.
The rising sun shone off something bright, near the clearing’s edge. Leaning down, his fingers wrapped around the bright thing, drew it up. His pendants, the claw and the flamedisk. The leather cord broken, torn.
Scal closed his fingers around them, the edge of the disk biting into his flesh, the claw’s tip drawing blood. Cold from the snow, he held them over his heart. His eyes traced the path of the boot prints. He found where they had entered the clearing, and where they had left it. On their leaving, there was a smaller set of prints among the larger ones. Marched away, at the center of those who had found the clearing. Scal followed them, his feet covering the smaller set of prints. The pendants bit into his palm, and he felt nothing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Keiro sat at the crest of a small hill, barely more than a wrinkle in the ground, but it gave him height enough to look out over the grasses that stretched endlessly away. In the fading light, they moved like water, rolled like the great ocean Keiro had found at the western edge of the world. Often, he had found peace in watching the grass sway, found patterns to the way the wind stirred the brown-green sea.