by D. P. Prior
Already Snaith was edging her back toward the corridor they’d entered by, but Tey couldn’t wrench her eyes away from the macabre gyring of the Hand. A grating sound accompanied each turn, and puffs of bone dust wafted away in spirals. Then the Hand gave one final, grinding twist, and it came free. Tey half-expected the skeleton to rise from its throne and protest, but it did not move. It had one hand now. Where the gauntlet had been, there was nothing attached to the wrist. Vilchus remained a sullen presence, sightless, yet seeming to glower through the minuscule cavities that would have once burned with violet eyes.
Rather than falling to the floor, the Hand hovered in midair, still alternating between white and kaleidoscopic brilliance. Its fingers twitched, made sudden grasping motions. It pivoted, then pointed straight at Snaith.
Snaith gasped, half-screamed, and stumbled. And still Tey watched the Hand in fascinated dread. It scuttled through the air toward them like some malevolent floating spider. Not them: Snaith. She could hear the Grave Girl pleading, “Please let it be him!”
She barely felt Snaith pulling at her. Barely noticed her good leg give way, and Snaith dragging her across the floor on her back. Barely noticed the bump and scrape of stone.
Darkness enveloped her as they passed through the archway. The other side, Snaith helped her stand and they backed toward the steps.
The Hand of Vilchus emerged beneath the arch, hesitated, suspended in the darkness of the opening. It closed into a first but came no closer. It just hung there, waiting, as if it knew they would have to come back. Sooner or later.
A PATH WALKED ALONE
By the time he’d dragged Tey to the top of the steps and slumped beside her on the grass of the tumulus, Snaith was too exhausted to be terrified. But he had been scared; he was honest enough to admit that. More scared than he’d ever been in his life. That thing… That hand… Moving through the air. Pointing. Coming for him.
Tey remained motionless, eyes shut tight. He had to check she was still breathing. When he bent close to her lips to feel her breath, she started and her eyes snapped open. Her pupils were fixed, and blacker than the chamber that had held the hand.
Something was wrong. Not just with Tey. With the sky. Already it was banded with the red glow of dawn. That couldn’t be possible. They had only spent minutes beneath ground. Sunrise should have been hours away.
A rumble passed through the earth beneath him. He rolled over and watched as the two sides of the slab emerged once more to cover the opening. When they met in the middle, there was a resonant clack, and the hairline join vanished.
Snaith breathed a sigh of relief. He looked at Tey for a response, but she remained locked within herself.
Wearily, he stood and began to kick dirt over the slab. In a trance, Tey joined him, awkwardly balancing on her bad leg, using the shovel to throw clods of soil over the entrance to the burial chamber. When they had finished and patted the earth flat, Snaith looked around for some way of disguising where they had been digging. The barren patch stood out like a scar amid the green of the mound. Perhaps if they pulled up grass from the forest floor… Maybe they could cut out sods and lay them on top.
But before he could even suggest such a thing, Tey leaned on the shovel and began to giggle, childlike at first, but soon it was a full-fledged cackle.
She ended as abruptly as she had begun. Tears spilled down her cheeks. She wiped them on her sleeve, cocked her head, and fixed a smile on her face. It happened in an instant, the change from child to woman, from distraught innocence to something harder, more brazen.
“Come here,” she said.
Snaith stood his ground. She was starting to unnerve him. All he could think to do was divert her attention. “That thing,” he said, nodding toward the patch of dirt they’d piled over the entrance.
“Vilchus,” she said. “His hand. Don’t forget what you saw down there. Don’t forget how it felt.”
Snaith shuddered. There was no chance of forgetting. Probably no chance of sleeping, either. But all the same, whatever it was he’d seen was more than an impression given by the Weyd, no matter what Theurig might say. There had been no strings. No puppetmaster. Nothing but magic could cause a gauntlet to crawl through the air that way. Did the sorcerer know what was down there, buried beneath the Copse? Why had he lied about there being no magic? Or was he as ignorant as he claimed the clansfolk were in his belief there was no such thing? Had they been right to be superstitious?
“I’m cold,” Tey said. She let the shovel fall and took a step toward Snaith.
Her bad leg caught on the the uneven ground. She stumbled, and Snaith lunged to catch her. No flinching at the contact. As if he were becoming desensitized. Either that, or he was starting to want her near.
She chuckled, snuggled her face into his chest, worked her way up till her cheek pressed against his, then covered his mouth with hers.
She didn’t kiss him, just brushed her lips against his. They were dry, cracked. Her breath was sickly sweet. Heat stirred in Snaith’s loins. He tried to step back, but Tey held firm to the back of his head. Her other hand rubbed his inner thigh, moving upward. This time, he was powerless to pull away. All he could think of was the scars beneath her dress, whether the skin would be soft or hard where it puckered.
“We don’t need a sorcerer to marry us, Snaith,” she breathed in his ear.
Her hand unlaced his britches, felt its way inside. He gasped as she found him, shuddered at the coolness of her touch. This time, it was different. No taboo. No panic. Fleetingly, her hand was the sorcerous gauntlet they’d seen beneath the earth. Then he was the one wearing it on his own maimed hand. Fire and lightning streaked from its metal fingertips.
His mind screamed at him to break away, to flee the Copse and never look back. But whatever Tey had done to him, whatever spell she had woven, was one more proof that she knew things that Theurig had said didn’t exist.
She guided his good hand inside her dress, made him trace the scars on her chest. Forced him to cup her breast, press his thumb to her nipple.
“If we are to be parted,” she said, “I want to carry you within me.” She yanked on him urgently and he lost control. A torrent of flame erupted from his loins. He cried out, pushed her away from him. Turning his back on her, he laced up his britches, stumbled for the edge of the tumulus.
“It’s all right, Snaith,” Tey called. “I have you now.”
He looked back at her, horrified as she licked each of the fingers that had held him one after the other. When she’d finished, she met his eyes, hers moist and gleaming with affection. She was suddenly calm, contented, beatific.
“They are coming, husband, but don’t worry. We are one now. Forever.”
Husband? Snaith wanted to say. No. Not now. Not like this.
He heard voices approaching through the trees, the crack of twigs underfoot. He glanced away from Tey, looked back again. Held her gaze, tried to fathom what she was thinking.
And then Theurig entered the clearing, a stocky man at his side. Fat would have been more accurate. This other was robed in velvet, a material seldom seen in Malogoi and never worn. It was too costly, and more than that, it was the fabric of Hélum, a borrowed affectation that any clansman worth his salt wouldn’t even wipe his arse on. A gold chain hung heavy around the sorcerer’s neck—for his unusual dress marked him as such. His fingers were adorned with rings, each set with an enormous gemstone. He was bull-necked, soft of face. His nose and cheeks were veined purple, and his grey-streaked beard was glistening with oil. He waited, leaning on a twisted walking cane that came up to his waist. It was topped with a bronze skull as big as a baby’s.
“You survived the night, then,” Theurig said from the base of the tumulus. His eyes betrayed that he’d noticed the digging but he made nothing of it. “Come, Tey. Slyndon Grun is here to mentor you. He cannot tarry. It’s a long walk back to the village of the Valks.”
Tey brushed down her dress, tugged it straight, keeping her
eyes averted from Snaith’s. She had grown shy, timid, a girl once more. It made what she’d just done seem even more wrong.
Tey let out a sharp rasp of breath and faced him once more. This time, there was steel in her eyes, a firm set to her jaw. She smiled thinly, nodded once, then gave him her arm to lead her down the hill.
At the bottom, she presented herself to Slyndon Grun, a haughty tilt to her chin. The fat man eyed her up and down, wrinkled his nose at where her injured leg had caused her hips to be uneven. Finally, he glanced at Theurig and nodded, then turned on his heel, snapping his fingers for Tey to follow.
Snaith took a step forward, fire in his veins, but Theurig held up a staying hand.
“She cannot remain here. One apprentice, one master. That is what the Weyd decrees. Ours is a path walked alone.”
“Theurig,” Tey said with a curt nod. “Snaith.”
She was cold. Distant. Not even a hint of sadness, a measure of past affection. No indication of what had just happened between them; the claim she had made on him.
And then she was gone, stumbling through the trees after her new master, leaving Snaith beside Theurig, numb with the horror of what they had seen beneath the ground, with a loss he couldn’t yet articulate, and with a rising sense of what he slowly began to recognize as shame.
PART 2
THE SORCERER AND THE WITCH
SLYNDON GRUN
Tey limped along a dozen paces behind Slyndon Grun, bare feet bleeding from the flint and chalk poking through the grass of the incline, but only one of them hurting. She squinted venom at the sorcerer’s velvet-robed back, as if he were the twin of Khunt Moonshine.
Nothing about him boded well. He was fat as a pregnant sow, for one thing. No one grew that big without being lazy and gluttonous. The rings on his fingers showed him both vain and avaricious. The walking cane was for show; for the most part it was slung over his shoulder, the bronze skull that topped it more like the head of a mace. His gold chain was a statement that he was better than the clansfolk, not to be trifled with—because only sorcerers possessed such riches. Not even the High King was so finely adorned. Theurig had been more dour in his dress, but that’s only because Theurig was a snake in disguise. This man, though, enjoyed the show of power as much as the thinness of his lips conveyed he enjoyed its use.
Every step took them closer to the summit of the earthworks surrounding Malogoi. They were closing in on the border no one crossed, save for war or reasons of personal gain. Tey had done it once, that time her father had made her help carry booze from his fishing boat, but this was different. This was permanent.
She tried to stay empty, tried not to care, but the taste of Snaith on her tongue, his scent in her nostrils filled her with a desperate longing for home, no matter how hideous the memories of her life there. It didn’t matter. Malogoi was what she knew. Rather that than the unknown. New things discovered were seldom better than the old and familiar. In her experience, they were always immeasurably worse.
There was a thready connection between her and Snaith now. She could feel it squirming in her guts, urging her to turn round and flee. Snaith would feel it, too, only far worse. They were bound now. She’d given him a parting gift parting gift, a way to ensure he never stopped thinking about her, never abandoned her. It was a hard thing to admit. She’d never needed anyone before; never even cared if she was wanted or not.
But she was lying to herself, like she always did. It was what made her a fraud and a sham. She wasn’t a person like everyone else. She was nothing but a shifting series of thoughts, a tangle of fear and guilt and self-loathing that skirted the bottomless pit at her core.
Truth was, she’d needed her mother, more than anyone could know.
Distress quickened her lunging, dragging gait, till she came within stabbing distance of Slyndon Grun. Not that she was going to stab him. It was just a thought. A searing in her veins.
The sorcerer stopped walking and turned on her.
Tey flinched. Did he know what had been playing out in her mind? Or had he been having similar thoughts himself? Atop the earthworks, so far from the village, he could do to her whatever he liked, and she wasn’t ready; she’d not prepared herself.
“Down the other side and we’ll be away from Malogoi lands, Tey Moonshine. How does that make you feel?”
How did it make her feel? It made her feel blank, empty, frightened. It made her feel alone.
She wrinkled her nose and shrugged.
“It doesn’t bother you? My dear, I had imagined it would feel like stepping off the edge of the world.”
It had the first time, and it did again now. He was right about that. The Malogoi all knew there were other clans, other lands, even, across the sea. But knowing such things made no difference to their lives. Except for the festivals, the village may as well have been the whole world to them. Some of the older warriors had seen more, but even they had been only as far as the contested land between borders.
“And you’re not tired? In my experience, clansfolk suffer a lack of endurance, there not being much call to walk any distance.”
It felt as though thorns were stabbing her beneath the kneecap, from where her good leg had taken the brunt of her weight. And there was a tightness in her hips from dragging her maimed leg, a dull ache in her lower back.
She cocked her head to study the sorcerer’s face. He was smiling, and his eyes glittered. She almost smiled back, almost dropped her guard, but something about the rolls of fat on his neck disgusted her. She dropped her gaze to his swollen belly, caught herself wondering if he could see anything when he pissed.
“Oh, don’t let this deceive you.” He gave his belly a playful jiggle. “I’m the first to admit I’ve a taste for good cooking, but it’s what’s inside that matters. These lungs have drawn upon the air the length and breadth of Branikdür, and it was these old legs that took them there. Perhaps that should be your first lesson: don’t be deceived by appearances. It’s an axiom that’s tinged with irony, as you will no doubt learn under my tutelage. The sorcerer’s way is, after all, about hoodwinking others.” He gave a goodnatured chuckle and started down the slope on the far side of the earthworks.
Out of the corner of Tey’s eye, something moved. A Malogoi warrior sitting up from the grass some fifty yards to her right. He’d been sleeping on watch, by the looks of him. A dereliction of duty punishable by death.
“Ho there!” he called in challenge, stumbling to his feet and jogging toward her, sword already in hand.
Slyndon Grun came back up the far side, an impressive sight in his velvet and gold. “Is there a problem, clansman?”
The warrior stopped dead, sheathed his sword. “I seen nothing,” he said, averting his gaze and backing away.
Slyndon Grun nodded. “A wise man and a warrior? Now that’s a rare combination.”
He set off back down the slope, and this time Tey followed. It was hard keeping her balance with her bad leg. She slipped and stumbled, before she decided it was easier to go the rest of the way on her backside.
At the bottom, Slyndon Grun gave an elaborate sweep of his arm. “Welcome across the threshold.”
Tey hesitated, watched his face for any sign of mockery or intimation of danger.
“It’s all right, my dear. One more step and you are in no-clan’s land, as I call it. See there, where the forest starts to thin out? There’s a ridge beyond, and down the bank the other side there’s a creek. That’s the border of the Wolvers’ territory.”
“And the Valks?” Tey asked. Her voice came out little more than a squeak, and it was then that she realized the Grave Girl had once more come to the fore.
Slyndon Grun extended a finger and slowly panned away from the direction of the Wolvers Clan, saying at successive points of his arc, “The Krosh, the Skaltoop, and way off to the east, the Lakelings, all forming a line of hostility between the Malogoi and the Valks. Hence, my accoutrements.” He touched his golden necklace. “I want none of these ba
rbarians to doubt me as a servant of the Weyd. That said, however, I still prefer to take a more… discreet route.”
When Tey frowned her incomprehension, he simply turned and snapped his fingers twice for her to follow.
Crossing the border, same as the time she’d done so with her father, she expected to feel something, though she had no idea what. The way the elders warned against such a transgression, it seemed she should have been burned to cinders by magical fire, or blasted apart by a bolt of lightning. But that hadn’t happened the first time, and nothing happened now. It set her mind to thinking that the borders were as insubstantial as she felt. They were borders purely because folk said they were, but they had no real existence in the world of plants and beasts.
Slyndon Grun slowed down and offered his arm so Tey could walk beside him. She nearly took it. Anything to ease the pain of walking. But in spite of his kindness, she couldn’t shake her first impressions, though she was starting to think she might have been unfair.
They walked at her pace for hours, stopping only for water at streams and creeks, or for Slyndon Grun to snack on hunks of bread and cheese he kept in the bottomless pockets of his robe. At one point, he even produced a wineskin, tilted his head back and took long, gulping pulls on it.
Not once did he offer any food to Tey, and not once did she ask. She’d never been one for eating, beyond the minimum her body demanded to keep it this side of the Nethers. Over the years it had grown used to the scraps she fed it, and made fewer and fewer demands. Khunt Moonshine didn’t like it; said her face was sallow and skull-like, that he could see her ribs. Said if she ate more, she’d have more essence for him to sup on, then he wouldn’t have to drain her so frequently. Said he’d take a belt to her if she didn’t start gaining weight; but no matter what he threatened, it only made her more determined to put as little in her mouth as she could. She didn’t trust anything that vile prick told her. The only person she could trust was herself, and she knew for certain she wasn’t wasting away. Quite the opposite. That’s why Slyndon Grun’s obesity revolted her; it was a reminder of her own.