The Bitter Twins

by Jen Williams

  26

  ‘Fuck this fucking storm!’

  Next to Tor in the makeshift oilskin tent, Noon poked a foot out from under her heap of blankets and kicked him in the leg.

  ‘Can you keep it down? I’m trying to sleep.’

  Tor gestured wildly to the slick walls of their tent, well aware that she wouldn’t be able to see his actions and doing it anyway. Outside, the howling wind rose a few notches, as if actively competing with him, and the sound of the rain, like handfuls of pebbles being thrown at their tent, grew in volume.

  ‘Could you ask the storm to keep it down, then? I don’t know if you’ve noticed but we could very well be lost.’ He ran a hand over his face. ‘I can’t reach the netherdark with all this roots-damned racket, and if I can’t do that, I can’t dream-walk into Micanal’s stupid roots-damned amber map.’

  A sound rather like muttered swear words came from under the heap, and then part of a face poked out of the blankets. In the light of their tiny fire, now down to glowing embers, he could see the stark shape of the bat-wing tattoo on her forehead and a pair of dark, narrowed eyes.

  ‘Maybe you should join the war-beasts.’

  Vostok and Kirune had chosen to fly out and away from this particular miserable excuse for an island, looking for clear skies above the storm. Noon, who had been nodding off in the harness despite the wind and the rain, had insisted they rest, and despite his increasing concerns about the whole mission, Tor had to agree. They had been flying in circles for two days and two nights, trying to find the next stage of the blasted map and failing, and he had put Vintage’s written notes away, reasoning that a fresh look at the amber map might help. But privately, he wasn’t convinced; it looked more and more like they were wasting their time out here, that Micanal had been mad and desperate after all. The only bright spot of the process had been Kirune, whose swollen face had shrunk back down to normal proportions with the medicine given to them by the strange little man on Firstlight.

  ‘Yes, thank you, useful advice as ever.’ Tor turned back to the dim glow of the fire, turning the amber tablet over in his hands. It was too gloomy in the tent to see the delicate carvings, but he could feel the shape of them, cool under his fingers. ‘To be honest, I’m not sure I have the strength. You’d think it would be the easiest thing in the world, but the reality is quite different. Finding the netherdark takes focus, and keeping yourself from being overwhelmed in the dream requires a presence of mind. When did we last have a decent night’s sleep? I fear that if I close my eyes I will just drop off.’

  Noon sat up, her mouth open to speak, but at that moment the storm bounced and rattled against the tent walls with extra violence, and they both sat still, waiting for it to pass. When it had quietened a little, she cleared her throat.

  ‘Do you want to . . . would it help?’

  The dragon was far away. Or at least, Kirune was – Tor could sense it, and he was sure that Vostok would be keen to explore at least as far as the giant cat would.

  ‘It might.’ He looked down at his boots. ‘It has been a while.’

  In that matter-of-fact way she had, Noon pulled the blankets back, rolling up her sleeve as she did so. It was all very practical, even sensible. He needed to be at his peak, if they were going to succeed at this ridiculous mission. Without human blood, he was weaker, and would only grow more so – it was a reasonable solution to an inevitable problem. So why was his heart beating faster at the thought of it?

  ‘I have my own . . . blade. Would you like me to . . .?’

  Noon nodded as she shifted around to sit next to him. She held out her arm, then seemed to hesitate.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘We never really talked about it. The crimson flux, I mean.’ She paused, eyeing the knife as he slipped it from his belt. ‘Vintage and I talked to Eri about his father dying, and it was . . . Am I putting you at risk? By doing this?’

  Tor smiled. ‘No more risk than usual.’ He took her hand and turned it face up, baring the paler skin of her underarm. ‘What I mean is, I am the one who takes the risk. I have been taking this risk for a long time now, and it’s my decision, in the end.’ The veins at her wrist were dim blue threads, warm and alive under his touch. ‘If I’ve doomed myself to die that way, then I’ve probably already done it. And it’s that or die of unnatural old age. Those are our choices these days.’

  ‘Unnatural old age,’ snorted Noon. Some of the tension had eased from her shoulders. ‘Anyway, you don’t know that. What if we do find this island place of Micanal’s? What if there is another tree? More sap?’

  ‘Then I will be free to outlive you by five hundred years or so.’ He had meant it jokingly, but all at once the dismal little tent seemed all the darker, and the storm outside more threatening. Noon’s face was in shadow, and he couldn’t see her expression.

  ‘Do it, then,’ she said, and he heard the effort it was costing her to speak lightly. ‘Before I die of old age.’

  He cut her, and the blood rose up black against her tan-coloured skin. Bending his head to drink, he kept her hand cupped in his, and the old familiar sharpness slipped down into his gut, sending out its threads of life and warmth to every part of him. His heart was still beating too quickly, but now it was strong too – impossible to believe that such life could ever end. Her skin tasted of sea salt.

  When he lifted his head again she was staring at him, her eyes wide. The dragon, he remembered, was far away.

  ‘Noon . . .’

  ‘I’ve missed you, you know. Bloodsucker.’

  A look passed over her face, almost angry, and then she reached up and kissed him. Somewhere, the sound of a storm faded, growing faint under pounding in his own head. When they broke apart, he grinned.

  ‘We really should find more comfortable places to do this. We were just at a palace full of empty rooms.’

  She pressed a hand to his shirt, warm fingers slipping between the silks to find his skin. ‘Maybe we don’t get to . . . Oh shit. Wait.’

  ‘Wait?’

  But she was turning away from him, and a second later he heard it too: the beating of enormous wings. Something heavy landed outside.

  ‘Look, if we’re quiet, maybe she’ll go away.’ Again he tried for levity, but before he could register the reaction on Noon’s face one side of the oilskin tent was abruptly lifted up and away, letting in a huge gust of freezing wind and rain, and a long dragon nose. Tor scrambled to his feet while Noon shouted with alarm. The tiny fire winked out in a smear of black smoke.

  ‘What’s going on in here?’

  ‘Roots be damned!’ Tor snatched up the amber tablet from where it had fallen into the dirt. He was suddenly furious, and he found himself shouting over the wind. ‘What’s going on? None of your business, that’s what! Look what you’ve done to the tent. And I could have lost this!’ He waved the amber tablet at Vostok, and felt a strange surge of triumph in his belly. This was so at odds with how he felt – humiliated, angry – that for a moment he was too confused to continue; until he saw the grey shape of Kirune skulking in the background. He was sensing the big cat’s feelings, not his own.

  ‘None of my business?’ Vostok rose up on her hind legs, huge white wings held out to either side to keep her balance. Her feathers shivered constantly in the wind. ‘Noon is my companion. Anything that concerns her concerns me.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Noon was on her feet too, her hands held out towards them both. A gust blew her black hair across her forehead, obscuring her eyes until she pushed it irritably out the way. ‘Shut up the pair of you.’

  ‘Believe me, Vostok, this definitely doesn’t require your concern, your approval, or even your knowledge!’ Tor squeezed the tablet between his fingers. He could still taste Noon’s blood in his mouth. ‘So give us a bit of space!’

  ‘Son of Ebora, I assure you it certainly does concern me! Noon and I are a unit, which is more than can be said for the rest of you.’ Vostok’s eyes flashed purple and white in the storm light.
‘We are a weapon, a sword. We do not have time—’

  ‘I said shut up!’ Green winnowflame popped into existence, twin-gloves around Noon’s clenched fists. Tor hadn’t even seen where she had taken the energy for that. The green flames were guttering and hissing in the rain and wind, casting wild shadows around the slick dirt and grass. ‘Listen, you both need to . . . I can’t . . . This is the last thing we need right now!’

  Kirune slunk between them, his wings folded tightly at his back. He looked around as though noticing them there for the first time, and finding them all beneath his notice.

  ‘If you’ve finished your squabble,’ he said, in what Tor thought was a fair impression of Vostok’s imperiousness, ‘you should come with me. I have found this island for you.’

  ‘You have not found it.’

  The storm had passed, and they were flying high above a calm sea again, sunlight jumping from waves like shoals of iridescent fish. Vostok was far to their right, with Noon bent low over her neck – her eyes endlessly sweeping the water. Tor leaned over so that his mouth was closer to Kirune’s ear. Days of flying over the sea had turned the war-beast’s fur stiff and unruly.

  ‘You should just admit it now, or Vostok will only take even more pleasure in showing you up. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. You were flying in a storm, the visibility must have been terrible, and it would certainly be easy enough to see islands where there were none.’

  Kirune’s growl reverberated through his chest and up through his harness.

  ‘I saw it. It was strange, though, like lots of lights, or pieces of water.’

  ‘You’re not even making sense now.’

  ‘It was here. We keep looking, we will find it.’ Kirune paused. ‘You do not like the snake either. I can feel it.’

  ‘You really shouldn’t call her that. And I like Vostok well enough.’

  Kirune hissed. ‘You do not. You do not like her because she keeps you from humping the witch.’

  ‘She keeps me from what?’

  ‘I know what humping is,’ said Kirune, suddenly haughty. ‘I have heard the humans speaking about it. The snake is protective of her little warrior. She wishes their bond to be the only one the witch has.’

  ‘Roots save us. You know, Vostok is right. Any chance we ever had of working together, of being a team, all went out the window long ago. Drained away into the dust.’ Tor sighed heavily, shifting in the harness. ‘I am sick of looking at the bloody sea. Sick of looking at the lot of you, if I’m honest. We should go back now, so I can have a hot bath, drink several bottles of wine and sleep for at least a decade.’

  ‘Hoy!’ Noon was waving at him from the back of Vostok. ‘What’s that? Do you see it?’

  He looked where she was pointing, and made a disgusted noise. ‘Has the sea air driven you all mad?’

  ‘No! It is there.’ Kirune leapt forward, diving towards the stretch of sea Noon had been pointing at. To Tor it appeared to be exactly the same as every other piece of water nearby – grey, featureless, cold.

  ‘This is ridiculous. Can’t you see there is nothing there?’

  And then something ahead of them changed. At first Tor thought it was a trick of the light, that he had spent too many hours squinting hopelessly at the sea and his eyes were too tired to be reliable. It looked like there were shards of light hanging in mid-air, as though they approached some huge edifice made of glass, only visible by the muted sunlight bouncing off it, and then he saw that there was a pattern to it – like the diamond-shaped panels in an elaborate Jarlsbad window. Slowly, like a giant whale moving under the waves, his stomach turned over. Now that he could see the pattern, he could see that there were pieces missing, and beyond that, landfall.

  ‘Can you see it?’ Noon’s voice was high and excited.

  ‘I can.’ He thought of what Vintage would say when she heard that they had found this, and she hadn’t been there to see it first. He grinned. ‘Can we get through this barrier, do you think?’

  Noon lifted her hand and a small green fireball, no bigger than her fist, flew from her outstretched fingers towards the light barrier. It passed clean through, with no apparent disruption to the shapes in the light.

  ‘I think it’s passable,’ she called back. ‘But there’s really only one way to find out.’

  Before Tor could open his mouth to advise more caution, or perhaps suggest that as a son of Ebora he should take this risk, Vostok surged forward. She and Noon passed through the barrier as smooth as silk, and were quickly reduced to snatches of scales and feathers glimpsed through the diamond-shaped holes.

  Kirune didn’t need to be told to follow them. Passing through the light barrier was strange – a cramp of cold moved through Tor, and then was just as quickly gone. He felt Kirune shiver underneath him. Beyond the light barrier was a sizeable island, much bigger than any they had passed so far, and it was unbelievably green and lush. A thick forest coated it from coast to coast, bristling with trees that Tor did not recognise from the northern regions of Sarn; they had huge, glossy green leaves, or were heavy with blossoms – tiny points of startling colour from where they were. The beach that they could see was capped with white sand, and even the seawater looked bluer. He blinked rapidly, wondering if he were imagining things again.

  ‘This must be the place,’ he called to Noon, who nodded vigorously. ‘Shall we land?’

  As they swept down, Kirune rumbled low in the back of his throat. ‘There is another one of these walls of light,’ he said. ‘In the middle of the island.’

  Tor looked up sharply, and caught a glint of something far to the north before they dipped below the treeline and approached the beach. Normally, he would be inclined to dismiss it, but Kirune had been right about the island, after all.

  ‘Another mystery. Let’s tackle them one at a time, shall we?’

  27

  The beach was wide and empty, and sweltering.

  Once they had landed and unstrapped themselves, Noon turned back to look at the sky they had left. It was blue and hot, like the midst of high summer on the plains, but every now and then she caught a glimpse of a diamond-shaped patch of gloomier, cooler sky.

  ‘Does this place have its own weather? What sort of magic is that?’

  Tor shrugged. He was already pulling off his jacket. ‘I can tell you it’s not Eboran magic, at least. But I think if Micanal was looking for an unusual island, this Origin, as he called it, then this must be it.’

  Vostok had stretched out on the beach, rolling back and forth so that the hot sand rubbed and cleansed her scales – Noon could feel her pleasure at that, after days of damp and cold – while Kirune had gone loping off up towards the thick line of trees. After a moment, he called them.

  ‘There is something here. Come and see.’

  It turned out to be a great number of rounded stones, sitting neatly in several rows. They were a light greenish-grey, and each one had been inscribed with what Noon recognised as Eboran writing in an elegant hand, and each had a single leaf carved on it too.

  ‘Well,’ said Tor. He looked faintly bemused, his mouth pursed into a frown. ‘We know for certain that Micanal was here, at least.’

  ‘This is his work, then? What are they?’

  For a moment, Tor did not speak. He looked up and down the row, as if he were counting the stones.

  ‘Gravestones, Noon. They’re gravestones. Each one is inscribed with a name, and a short line.’ He pointed at the nearest. ‘Keanla the Solemn, “forever looking homeward, my friend”. And next to it, Gwidinal Brightest Song, “May the stars be bright for you”.’

  There were around forty of the stones, all along the shallow slope that looked out to sea. ‘I mean, they’re not necessarily gravestones, are they?’ Noon pushed her hair back from her forehead. ‘Are there any dates?’

  ‘There aren’t, but those leaves . . . A long time ago, when Ygseril was alive and we were very far from the Eighth Rain, when an Eboran died, he or she was given one of Root-
Father’s leaves to take into the grave with them. Death leaves. Micanal did not have any leaves to give them, but he did what he could anyway.’

  ‘All of them, dead?’ It was Kirune, his big head hanging low.

  Tor sighed. ‘It looks like it. We don’t know the exact number of people who went with Micanal on his fool’s voyage, but this certainly looks like most of them.’

  ‘You should look and see if Micanal’s name is on here anywhere, or his sister’s. If he died, someone else might have taken on engraving duties.’

  Tor grimaced at that, but he went and did it anyway. It was eerie, watching him walk past the stones, his head bowed to read the names, and despite the heat Noon felt a cold shiver move down her back. This place looked beautiful – the white sands, the trees thick with the scent of flowers – but it was like listening to a piece of music where one of the instruments wasn’t tuned properly. Something was off.

  ‘He’s not here, and neither is Arnia.’ Tor returned to her. His hair was loose and untidy from the time spent in the air, and his shirt gaped open. ‘So. We know they got here, and we know a lot of them died.’ He smiled lopsidedly. ‘One of those good news–bad news situations, I suppose.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Noon looked at the trees. They were beautiful and lush, not Wild-touched at all, but healthy and green and welcoming. Yet something about that made her wary. Maybe I’ve lived in a poisoned world too long, she thought.

  ‘It’s been a rough few days,’ she said eventually. ‘What do you say to spending today resting up and eating? We can explore the island properly tomorrow.’

  Tor shrugged, and they made their way back to where Vostok lay in the sand, the sky beyond flat and blue.

  They slept that night on the edge of the tree line, still within sight of the sea. Noon built the fire, as usual, but kept it small – thanks to the strange warmth of the island they did not need it to heat their bodies – and together they set up the pair of oilskin tents, and then ate a good chunk of their stores. There were fruits and seeds everywhere, and small animals in the trees and in the undergrowth, and it was obvious to all of them that it wouldn’t be difficult to find food here. Vostok curled her great bulk around the camp, twining her tail around the trees, and Kirune sat some distance off, watching as the shadows grew long.