The Winter Vow

by Tim Akers

  “Then they seem to have succeeded. Outside these walls, Sophie Halverdt has clearly thrown her lot in fully with Lady Strife, and these… these void priests, as you name them, most wear the black and silver of Cinder. As for Suhdra and Tener…” Bassion threw her hands up in frustration. She snatched the chalice from the table beside her and drank a hurried draught, wiping her mouth with the back of her sleeve. She grimaced at the cold slither of chain across her lips. “What do those names even mean anymore? Every house must stand for itself, or fall by itself. Every ally has betrayed me. Every friend has turned their back on me. My power is in these walls, and this sword, and nothing more.”

  “Then we are lost. All of Tenumbra is lost,” Lucas shouted. He turned away, marching angrily out of the room. Martin followed. As they reached the door, Lady Bassion’s voice overtook them.

  “Be careful what you say, Lucas! You are only in this castle because of my good will, and your comfort is fragile. Displease me, and I will throw you to the wolves at my gates. Or worse!”

  Lucas drew up short, turning angrily back to the throne.

  “If this is what you think of as good will, then I will gladly take the wolves. At least they only bite once before the kill.”

  Before Bassion could answer, Lucas stormed out.

  38

  THEY WORKED IN silence, three figures against the snowy backdrop of the courtyard. The wreckage of the Fen Gate was silent, a broken crag that surrounded them like an unholy henge, finally robbed of its power. Gwen tried to keep her thoughts on the task in front of them, to not look around at the broken walls, the shattered windows, the empty rooms. There were too many memories there. Too many regrets.

  Frair Gilliam rose from the intricate circle and dusted off his hands. They had cleared a place in the snow and filled it with the instruments of their varied faiths. From Gilliam, the silver and iron symbols of the celestial church, icons wrought in the blood of holy men and women, crafted to dispel the feral gods of Tenumbra. He placed them in divine order, muttering and checking his placement against the stars and the calendar.

  Elder Kesthe offered a wilder magic. She filled the circle with totems of the tribe of bones, bound in leather and crafted from stone, echoes of the very gods Gilliam sought to dispel. She let her hands be guided by the spirits, chanting and whispering as her fingers nudged the totems into ley lines that her eyes couldn’t see. They snapped into place like lodestones. Smoke from the dozen fires that surrounded them began to swirl in strange patterns, answering to the swelling power of the ritual. Gwen could feel a change in the air, in her soul.

  From Gwen Adair, they had power, and the corruption to stain it. Both priests watched her nervously as she stepped forward. Gwen did not belong to either of their sects. There was a time when that would have bothered her, this sense of not belonging, of outsideness. But Gwen was adjusting. This was her life. This was her gift to the world.

  “Are you ready?” Gwen asked.

  “As ready as I can be,” Gilliam answered. He nervously ran his palms over the hilts of his twin swords, before clasping his hands together in prayer. “Though I’d feel a measure better with a troop of guards at my back.”

  “You saw what this thing did to Marchand’s men,” Kesthe said. “We can’t risk it. If it corrupted our rangers, we’d just be wandering the forests alone.”

  “The gods are with us,” Gwen answered. “We are never alone.”

  “Hardly comforting,” Gilliam said. “Just be about it, witch.”

  Gwen smiled and closed her eyes, then stepped into the circle. Her feet brushed the consecrated ground, and a spark went through her skin. It was there, waiting to pounce, slavering in the darkness.

  “Prepare—” And then her breath was taken from her.

  The thing growing beneath the Fen Gate was larger than even Gwen could have imagined, and she had already brushed its mind during her struggle in the shrine. It spread throughout the castle like a cancer, eating through the walls and burrowing into the very spirit of the Fen Gate. For a moment, Gwen wondered if this was some remnant of the corruption the inquisition had always feared, a splinter of the dark spirit that led to the fall of the castle and Sacombre’s heresy. But no, there was nothing of Fomharra in this demon. There was nothing but destruction.

  Gwen stood in the circle consecrated by the Orphanshield and Elder Kesthe, staring in horror at the gheist that twisted through her home. It was a pervading darkness, tentacles latched on to fragments of memory, shadow images of Gwen playing with her brother, Grieg, in their childhood. Of her parents, and then their parents and grandparents, generations going back to the foundation of the castle, and House Adair. Back to the tribe of iron. Back to the days of the gods.

  All that history swirled together, presenting Gwen with lightning-quick flashes of memory, scenes half-sketched in shadow, shot through with the corrupting darkness that now held the Fen Gate in its thrall. Each memory came and went, leaving Gwen with only a breath of the time that had been, the times that were lost, the secrets that they held. They fled from her mind, until only the corruption remained. Then it was past. Then she was alone.

  The gheist surrounded her. It filled the castle, towering into the air on limbs as smooth and liquid as oil, twisting like smoke, as hard as stone. Lithe arms reached for her from the walls, snaked out of the ground, rose from broken stone and shattered doors, beckoning, longing. They wanted to take her home. Home as it was, a place of memories, without the regrets. Without the mistakes. Without the heresy and the lies and the deaths. Home.

  “No,” Gwen spat. Tears streamed from her eyes. “No. That place is gone. You offer nothing but a lie. A lie made worse by its promise.” She rubbed her face. Kesthe and Gilliam were outside the circle, frozen in place. When Gwen smeared the tears across her cheeks, they came away in icy splinters. She turned to look at the Hunter’s Tower, her home for years and years. “No!” she shouted.

  The gheist collapsed on her, crashing like a wave on the thin shield of the holy circle. Black smoke skittered across the invisible shell of the circle’s protection, a storm against glass, beating down on it. The air rang like a bell. The demon’s howling fury drove Gwen to her knees. She covered her ears with her hands, screaming back, begging for it to stop, to end, to die.

  The circle shattered. The image of the gheist froze and splintered, spinning away in shards of terrifying darkness. The real world rushed in, filling Gwen’s mind with silence. She knelt among the instruments of the circle, knees scuffed by the rough stone of the courtyard.

  “What happened?” Kesthe asked. “Did you see it? Is it still here?”

  “It is,” Gwen said.

  The shadows of the courtyard came alive. Cracks in the wall turned to dark arms, as thin and fast as lightning. The shattered windows that looked down on the courtyard moaned; broken stone turned to teeth, shattered glass glinting with dark malevolence. The ground shook and fissured. Smoke rose into the air.

  Gilliam’s swords were out in a flash. He drew naether from the air and the season, robing himself in Cinder’s cold power. Gwen had a flash of Frair Lucas, a memory of the inquisitor facing off against the hunter gheist in the wilds of the Fen, his form turning to shadow and violence.

  “In Cinder’s name, I condemn you! By winter’s power, I will destroy your heart!” he bellowed. Bands of naether wrapped around his body, an orbit of purple runes that spun slowly in the air, binding his flesh to the god of winter. “Flee, or know the true power of the inquisition!”

  “Gods don’t listen to speeches, frair,” Kesthe snapped. She raised her staff of carved bone and breathed an invocation into it, then slammed the butt onto the ground. A circle of rumbling earth spread out from the impact, growing until it enveloped the three of them. The shadowed arms of the gheist tried to reach across the boundary, but dove into the ground, disappearing as they crossed the circle. “The grave consumes all,” Kesthe growled.

  “Not memory,” Gwen said. She stood, drawing two short
spears from her quiver and holding them crossed in front of her. “Not even the grave can hold that.”

  True to Gwen’s word, the tentacles of shadow that Kesthe’s circle had consumed burst suddenly from the ground, scattering the icons and throwing the elder to the ground. Kesthe screamed in frustration, rolling away from the attack and spinning her staff like a hammer. A surge of inky darkness washed across the ground toward them, its surface bubbling with tiny mouths, each one whispering a different story. Gilliam countered it with a scythe of purple light, cast out from his blades, empowered by the inquisitor’s gravelly voice. The two waves met, the air boiling at their contact, until the darkness subsided.

  The gheist flooded the courtyard. For every whipping tendril that Gilliam severed, or gibbering wave that Kesthe shattered with her staff, three more rose from the broken stones of the Fen Gate. The gheist was a god of memory, and this place was thick with it, memories that went back to a time before mortal breath stirred the air of Tenumbra. There was no way two priests, even as powerful as this witch and this inquisitor, would be able to defeat it.

  Gwen fought as her training taught her. Her spears were effective against the shadowy limbs that grasped at her from the ground, the flickering shades that rose from behind windows or reached out of the walls to lunge at her heart. Most dissipated at a touch, but a few fell screaming under the bloodwrought steel of her weapons, and those were memories she recognized. Her mother’s disapproving face, her father’s jovial laughter, the sound of Grieg playing in the hallway while she prayed, all memories given teeth and anger and the will to cut her to the bone. But memories can’t be fought. They can’t be defeated. As corrupt as this gheist was, it was true to its nature.

  “It’s no use!” Kesthe shouted. “We need to fall back. This will take all the elders, and a bit of luck besides! We have to leave this place!”

  “Godsbless, but you’re right,” Gilliam said, panting. “I will hold it here. Get to the gates!”

  “You’ll die!”

  “In the service of my god,” Gilliam said. “Yes, I will die.”

  “There has been enough dying,” Gwen said. “Leave it to me.”

  She spun her spears one final time, clearing a space in the grasping darkness, then buried both weapons point down into the courtyard. Holding the shafts like the edges of a window, Gwen closed her eyes, and opened her heart to the darkness, and to regret.

  The last time Gwen saw her parents, they were already dead. The gheist brought them back to taunt her, animating their voices, piecing their torn bodies back together, lifting them from the grave long enough to drive her mad. It hadn’t worked. The loss was too sharp in Gwen’s mind to fall for a puppeteer’s tricks.

  But this was different. Here were her parents as she remembered them, as she loved them. Her father on the Allfire, chastising Gwen for drinking too much wine in front of her brother. Her mother, watching from the tower as Gwen rode off for her first hunt, the secret of their heresy shared in a look, the lie that they had to tell to keep the Fen God safe. And Grieg. Young Grieg, not yet drawn into that lie, marching through hallways and singing nonsense songs, praying earnestly in the doma, mouthing the words of the invocation at each evensong. A faithful boy. Still a child.

  Dead, because of her lies. All of them. Her mother and father both had made their choices, long before Gwen was born, and their parents before them. But Grieg made no choice. He just died.

  Memories of her brother flooded Gwen’s mind, each one tinged with sadness, each one limned in shadows. The gheist pressed against her, whispering her failure in her ears, promising release from this guilt. Gwen let the promises drift through her mind, let herself pretend she could release her pain so easily.

  Without the pain of loss, the memory meant nothing. That was the gheist’s corruption, this promise that couldn’t be fulfilled. Gwen knew. But she let herself believe, if only for a moment. Then she opened herself more fully, not to the memories and their pain, but to the corruption that the void priests had infected the gheist with. Thinking its victory was at hand, the gheist rushed forward, filling Gwen’s heart, clawing at the inside of her soul. Only when it was trapped in the complicated weave of Gwen’s spirit did the gheist see its error. Only then did it understand.

  The spirit of memory fell through Gwen as if she were a sieve, straining out the corruption, filling her mind with everything that she had lost. What she had lost, yes, but what she had gained, as well. The memories of her family could not be tarnished by their loss. They were made sharper, more precious, filled with light. She would cherish them, despite the pain that they brought.

  As for the corruption, Gwen absorbed it. She purified the gheist, skimming the darkness from its surface like spoiled milk, leaving only the spirit of memory behind. No longer tethered to the Fen Gate by the corrupting influence of the void priests, the gheist dissipated. Gwen fell to the earth.

  A glimmering light drifted out of the ground. It looked like a cloud, mingled with a thousand faces, each appearing and disappearing so quickly that their features blurred together. Vast expanses opened in the sky, a field of green so bright it could have been gemstone. Mountains as sharp and high as the sun itself, dusted with snow. A hearth, warm and inviting, and the family that huddled around it. Battlegrounds, birthing chambers, the soft scent of wool, a treasured toy. All these things and more pulled softly away from the castle, shimmering as they rose into the sky, to mix with the clouds and eventually disappear.

  “What was that?” Frair Gilliam muttered. The old inquisitor looked around the silent courtyard, his voice muted and soft. “I saw… I saw my mother. My wife. Our…” his voice broke. “Our children.”

  “The god of memory,” Kesthe said. “No wonder I couldn’t hold it. The void priests corrupted it, used it.”

  “They were trying to sift Fomharra from the memory of my family, stripping our history for its spirit,” Gwen said. She got to her feet slowly, head still spinning. “They nearly succeeded.”

  “But they did not,” Kesthe said. “And now the god of memory can go free.”

  “We can’t let that thing roam the world,” Gilliam said in shock. “Drinking the memories of its victims! Haunting the dreams of the innocent.” He reached for his staff, to bind the gheist.

  Kesthe took his hand. “It is not our enemy, inquisitor. The gheist is free, and must be left to do its business. Without it, we would forget our families, our failures. Our hope.”

  “Some things should be forgotten,” Gilliam said shakily.

  “No.” Gwen turned to face the inquisitor, one hand casually on her knife. “The old gods are not our enemy, Orphanshield. It’s the void priests and their corruption that we must fight against.”

  “But… but…” Gilliam’s eyes grew distant. He cast about the courtyard, seeking the gheist among the shadows. When it didn’t rise, his shoulders slumped. “I have been fighting that war for so long…”

  “We all have,” Kesthe said. She put a hand on his shoulder. “And now we must let it go. A greater threat has arisen, and it will not be defeated in small wars and petty vengeances.”

  Gilliam turned to her slowly. His face was old, wrinkled, filled with sadness. But he nodded, and Gwen thought she saw a spark of hope in his eyes.

  “So be it. I never would have believed it, if I hadn’t seen… But you saved my life, huntress. You saved me, when you shouldn’t have.”

  “We have to stand together. There’s no one else to stand with, and if we don’t, the void priests will destroy our gods,” Kesthe said. She glanced at Gwen. “We can’t do it alone.”

  “No, we can’t,” Gilliam agreed. “So what now?”

  “We find Malcolm Blakley. He’s the last strong voice in the north, and perhaps our last hope for an ally among the Tenerrans. We will tell him what we know, and what can be done about it,” Gwen said. “Do you have any idea where he went?”

  “South,” Gilliam said. “To the Reaveholt.”

  “To the Reave
holt, then.” Gwen pulled her spears out of the ground, giving her home a final look. It was but ruins now. Ruins and memory. She turned to the gate. “And may the gods guide our steps.”

  “All the gods,” Kesthe answered.

  “Wherever they lead us,” Gilliam said.

  39

  IAN LED FIVE riders down from the forest heights, keeping to the scrub as they approached the plains around the Reaveholt. Their progress was slow, both because of the snow and also the need to keep to whatever cover they could find, winding through defiles and hopping from grove to grove. The same weather that impeded them also kept other armies’ scouts out of the woods, and let them make their way to the plains without being spotted.

  When they finally breached the treeline, Ian was shocked by what they found. Not one, but three armies camped around the Reaveholt, with Bassion’s colors still flying from the citadel’s walls. A host of celestial guards had set up fortifications just north of the Reaveholt, while two armies lay further west, well away from Ian’s own position. Of those two, the largest and closest flew banners of red and white, graced with flame. Their tents stood between Ian and the smaller encampment of House Blakley. They were cut off from his father.

  “What are we to make of this, then?” Ian mused out loud. “Mother said that Malcolm had allied with Sophie Halverdt, but that encampment looks more like a prison yard than a meeting of equals. And the celestials seem focused on the Reaveholt. Why, when an army sits in the field before them? They shouldn’t be pinning themselves against the walls of the castle, not when they could be taking to the open field.”

  “There has already been a battle, my lord,” one of the scouts said. A sharp-eyed man pressed into service for his eyes, if not his skill with the sword, he was peering into the distance. “Hard to see with the snow, but clear signs of heavy movement near that ridgeline.”