by Jeff Seymour
“You’re sure?” asked the boy. He was young—even younger than her, she thought. He leaned against the wheel. His eyes shone green and gold, and beneath his hood a thin layer of red-orange stubble crawled along his head. A pink scar ran down the top of his skull, splitting what little there was of his hair into two parts. A purple splotch covered most of his face, extending from his forehead down to his chin over the whole left side.
“Yes,” the man snapped.
The boy trailed a finger down his jaw, and a wicked smile crossed his face. His eyes settled on her, and she shivered. “Want me to make sure?”
“The Sh’ma was quite clear on that,” the man grunted. Ryse swayed in her chains. It was so hard to stay awake, to stay upright. Her vision blurred. “And there are some lines that even you are not to cross.”
Ryse’s vision cleared again. The young man was still leaning against the wheel, watching her. She knew the look in his eyes. Had seen it before, in the eyes of men whose faces she would never forget.
The older man turned his back and walked toward the door.
Aegelden, she realized. That was the man’s name. Aegelden Elpioni. Yenor’s Highest.
She tried to speak again, to warn him about the dragon or to plead with him or both, but she couldn’t get out anything more than slurred syllables.
Aegelden turned back to her. She saw sadness in his eyes, but not kindness, not pity. Not for her.
“Beyond that, do what you please,” he said. “I have business to take care of on Menatar. We’ll speak again on my return.”
He stepped through the doorway that was her only link to the outside world, the doorway that would shut again and leave her alone in the blackness to waste and wait. She almost tried to scream.
And then the god in her mind came to her rescue, and the fear bled away drop by drop.
In darkness Zhe was born, and in darkness Zhe abides…
Ryse watched the boy in gray as Aegelden walked away and the light faded. He didn’t move. Nor did he release her chains. The blackness returned, and she hung in silence. The chains hurt her wrists, so she leaned forward, searching for comfort.
Light flared. Not white but red. It came from the hand of the boy in gray.
Ryse jerked her head back. The boy’s face was right in front of hers, pink and purple and leering. Heat flowed from his hand.
Strong, painful heat.
“Hello,” he said, and the stories of Yenor in the dark fled and left only raw terror in their wake. His head snapped from right to left like a mad dog’s, and he growled, “Do you want to know who you are?”
There was anger in his voice. Anger and betrayal and disgust and despair and a thousand unhappy emotions. The little girl from the slums inside Ryse knew it was terribly dangerous to be in front of him. She wanted to run, to scream for help, to scratch or to bite or to kick—
—or to weave—
—but she was too weak to do anything but squeak and strain against her chains, and even that effort soon exhausted her.
She hung from her confinement, panting and trembling, and she waited.
“I’ll give you a hint,” the boy rasped. The heat of his fingers drew nearer, until her face was as hot as the air before an open oven.
When he touched her cheek, she found the strength to scream.
***
Ryse awoke with her head hot and throbbing. The darkness spun around her like a top. She couldn’t remember where she was, but her lips felt sticky and misshapen, and her face was wet and puffy. Her head hurt, and so did her eyes. Something had awoken her. She’d been asleep and something had awoken her.
She heard hurried footsteps and spotted a light in the hallway. It was dim and distant at first, and then it became a long, brightening cone across which tall shadows flashed. The footsteps grew louder, nearer. Two people approached. Her body ached. She found it hard to breathe.
The people reached the iron bars of her cell door and stopped. One of them held a white light in their fingers. Ryse winced and whimpered. The god in the darkness was nowhere to be found.
Not again, she thought. No more, please, Yenor. No more, just let me die—
The metal squealed and opened, and a woman’s voice screeched, “Ryse!”
Thin, strong arms clasped tight around her waist and back.
Her chains were loosened.
She collapsed into the arms of a young woman with black hair and dark skin and brown eyes. A woman she’d known for years. A friend whom, in brighter times, she’d laughed with and confided in. Whom she’d scratched out a desperate note to half a year before, explaining where she was going and why.
“Quickly,” said the person with her. He held the white light in his hand. His voice echoed heavy and deep in the darkness. He touched Ryse’s chains, and they fell from her body.
The light crashed across his face. His hair was black and short, his eyes blue and young, his jaw hard and strong. She’d seen him too, half a year ago, in the robe of a Twelfthman. He’d taken her from the Old Temple on the night she’d written the note to the young woman.
Jen, she told herself.
To Jen, who was helping her down and holding her up.
“She can’t stand, Ren. Yenor’s eye, she’s so light, and her face…”
“Our brother’s work,” said the Twelfthman. She lost him in the brightness of his light again, but she remembered his eyes. Calm and cold and hard. She felt herself lifted, didn’t know if it was Jen or the Twelfthman who’d done it. Her arms dangled limply, and she stared at the soiled stones of her cell, her head spinning.
They left her cell; she heard its door ease shut.
And then they were running. The stale prison air moved over her face. She bounced in a pair of strong arms, felt her bones knock against each other and realized how thin she’d become. Jen and the man were talking, but she lost track of their conversation in the darkness and the movement, and then she was rising, bouncing up one set of stairs, then another, then another. Fresh air kissed her face. The dampness of Eldan City enveloped her. The wind and the breeze passed over her scalp, and she saw one star in an otherwise black and cloudy sky.
Then there was nothing for a long, long time.
***
When Ryse woke again, she was wrapped in something soft and warm. A fire crackled nearby. A wonderful scent perfumed the air.
Peas. Beef. Potatoes.
She opened her eyes. The world spun, but not unbearably. She was lying under a pile of blankets in someone’s lap. A decrepit shack pieced together from ill-fitted bits of wood stood above her. A few feet away, the Twelfthman was hunched over a pot on a fire, and from that pot came the smell.
Stew. The word floated in front of her, tangible, and her whole being focused on it. She licked her lips, reached for the pot. A thin, veiny apparition of a hand stretched forward. It shook as she reached, but that didn’t matter. The Twelfthman’s head came up. His hand met hers and clasped it gently.
“Wait,” he said, and she didn’t have the strength to resist him. She collapsed into the lap below her.
Time passed. Ryse lay breathing shallowly until a hand touched her jaw. She opened her eyes and saw the Twelfthman squatting next to her, carrying a spoon full of dark, thick stew. The left corner of her mouth stretched strangely as she opened it, but her mind had little room to think about that. The food was so close, so close, and then the spoon was in her mouth and she could taste it—salt and fat and juice and warmth.
She wanted to hold that spoonful in her mouth forever and just taste. She swallowed, and then she opened her mouth and it was filled again and she wept for sheer joy.
After she finished the stew, the Twelfthman wiped her mouth, gave her a few sips of wine from a skin and helped her lie back down. The stew felt warm and heavy in her stomach. For a while her guts heaved, but she wanted to keep the food down so desperately that every time it came up she swallowed again. Each time, her head bucked and the woman—
—Jen—
—whose lap she was lying in whispered calming things and stroked her forehead.
Eventually the heaving stopped. Jen and the Twelfthman talked while Ryse lay there listening to their voices. They gave her something strong and minty to sip, and her stomach finally relaxed.
She felt calm, beloved, at peace. Like all the horror and pain were past. There was only warm food and a warm blanket and the love of a friend and a stranger. The feebleness of her body melted away.
Sleep overtook her like a sheet of fur and feathers.
***
Ryse woke feeling more lucid. The fire was low. Thin, bright, natural light crept through holes in the slats above her.
The light of early morning.
For a while she simply stared at it and let herself cry.
Her bones ached. Her limbs felt cramped. Jen lay asleep on one side of her under the blankets, and the Twelfthman stirred the fire near their feet on the other. There was a chill in the air, but beneath the blankets and between the others she was warm. She wore a thick wool robe. Her prison shift was nowhere to be found.
She hoped they’d burned it.
Ryse lay still for as long as she could, afraid of breaking the spell. The memory of her confinement and the events leading up to it rolled over her like a scroll, and the peace was pierced briefly by a flare of horror and rage before its warmth came rolling back.
The Twelfthman leaned to his left and picked something up. His eyes never left the fire. For a long time, he stayed silent.
“I…” He cleared his throat. “You’ll want to know who I am, I guess, and why I’m helping you.”
Jen stirred. The rhythm of her breathing changed. Her heartbeat quickened. But she didn’t get up.
The Twelfthman drew Ryse’s hands from the blankets and placed a book in them. It was small and bound in leather.
“Twenty-one years ago,” he said, “Aegelden Elpioni took a Sh’ma captive in the White Forest and brought her back to Eldan City. This is her diary.”
The book felt well worn, well read, well loved.
Important.
As Ryse struggled to sit up, the diary fell open to a page in its middle. The paper was yellowed but firm, and covered in thin, neat, flowing black script. At first, Ryse’s eyes couldn’t focus, but eventually they found the distance, the words—
24 Earthmonth, 7962
The labor is over. The child is a girl, and I have named her Beloved.
“I don’t know why she wrote it in Eldanian…”
She is so beautiful—hair of the fall-color and eyes of the sea. I love her already. I understand now why we are willing to die for this—
Two words were scratched out, as if tried and rejected.
—privilege. When she looks at me, my life, despite its shortness and its dark present, has been worth living. I love her so—more than my home, more than myself, more than anything.
They have a plan for her. I am sure of it. But if it means my life, I will protect her. My love. My daughter. My Shar.
The Twelfthman was speaking, but Ryse couldn’t hear him.
Shar.
She remembered a tall woman with indigo hair and pointed ears. The woman smiled while sweat poured down her face. Her belly loomed huge and swollen. She stroked Ryse’s head and kissed her hands and told her everything would be all right.
And then the woman sent her away with a stranger, just for a few hours. She kept a baby by her side, a child with black hair and blue eyes who was Ryse’s brother. Another baby was growing in the woman’s belly.
My mother. My mother called me Shar.
Needles of ice ran up Ryse’s veins. Her mouth opened and closed. The little leather-bound book shook in her hands, and she closed it and pressed it to her chest and needed to cry but couldn’t. Her eyes wrenched shut. She couldn’t breathe.
My mother. My mother called me…
Jen sat up and wrapped her arms around her.
Ryse’s whole body shook. Her mouth worked silently, until her shaking hand found Jen’s and her lungs found her breath again.
And then Ryse moaned, and she breathed, and she sobbed and she sobbed and she sobbed, while the sun rose deep in the mud-spattered slums of Eldan.
TWENTY-EIGHT
Twenty-seven days before the destruction of Nutharion City
Litnig woke up with cold feet. His eyes burned. His arms ached. His calves felt cramped and tight, and a pit of unease writhed deep in his stomach, like a bed of snakes roiling endlessly. He rolled over, half asleep, and felt for the warmth of Maia’s back with one arm.
His fingers grazed the slickness of ice.
Litnig opened his eyes. In the night, the cavern under the glacier echoed with the dripping of water, the cracking of ice, the rush of the unending gray river. From the shallow cup of his bed hole, he saw starlight through the frozen grotto’s mouth.
Half the furs in the bed hole he shared with Maia were gone.
So was she.
“Maia?” he called.
Nothing.
Litnig sat up, pulled on a worn pair of deerskin moccasins, and stood. It took only a gentle pull at the River of Souls to ignite small spheres of light up and down the little cavern around him. The ice brightened in orange. Near the river, the forge stood dark and abandoned, its anvil quiet beside it. The flat space by the water where Maia had trained him was empty. By the mouth of the glacier, the hump of supplies they shared looked diminished.
She’s gone, said his mind, but he didn’t want to believe it. Maia had been acting strangely for a week. Every once in a while, he’d caught her looking somber, as though she was dreading something. He’d guessed that it was their departure from the glacier. Together.
Apparently, he’d guessed wrong.
A drop of ice water fell onto his head, but he scarcely felt it. His hair had grown shaggy and wild. An unkempt beard covered his face in places where before he’d always been careful to shave. His body felt strong and taut, and he was more free than he’d ever been in his life.
Yet his heart ached, and his fingers yearned for Maia.
He walked to the edge of the cavern and stood with his hand on a dirty chunk of ice. Below him the long gray-shadow sides of the valley beckoned. The stars swung above his head in clouds of thousands. In their grand, silent cacophony he recognized only the Abyss, hanging like an empty octopus of blue and black in the crowded eastern sky.
“Maia!” he called again, louder the second time, as big and as strong as his voice could make the name. The sound echoed from rock to rock, peak to peak, ice to gravel.
He saw a flash of gray down the valley.
“Maia!” he shouted again, and he flew after it, feet racing over dark paths, scrambling over sharp rocks and leaping gullies, following the river as it flowed out of the mountains and away from the ice and back into the world. The grayness stopped moving, a swatch of color at the side of a boulder. Her shoulder perhaps, or her leg…
But when he raced around the boulder and came face-to-face with the shape, he found only a marmot. It disappeared into the rocks with an indignant shriek.
Heart pounding, lungs heaving, he searched the night with wide eyes and found nothing.
“Come back,” he whispered.
But Maia didn’t return.
***
For six days, Litnig stayed under the glacier. For six days, he searched for a message hidden in the rocks, the ice, the supplies. Maia’s touch was everywhere—in one place she’d laughed with him, in another scolded him or told him stories, hurt him, healed him, smiled and taught him to cook—but he found nothing. The sword they’d forged together lay in a scabbard she’d sewn for it, three and a half feet long from tip to pommel, four inches wide at the haft, sharp as a razor on the cutting edge.
It pained him to look too long at it.
Early on the morning of the twenty-first of Twelfthmonth, he dressed in warm furs, put the moccasins on his feet, hoisted his sword and what supplies he could carry, and set o
ff down the valley. The sky was filled with layer on layer of gray, churning clouds. Mist covered the rocky skin of the mountains like a living thing, surging back and forth in the wind, swirling over the river and the rocks, and over him. He felt numb and purposeless, a weapon without a wielder. When he looked at the crumbling castle of blue-white ice that had watched him grow for two months, he found it difficult to breathe.
He turned and walked away.
By early afternoon, Litnig had reached the bottom of the valley, where the mountains gave way to a wide plateau covered in tall golden grasses. The clouds had quit the sky, leaving a depthless dome of warm blue behind. The sun shone big and bright, and he set down his sword and his supplies and basked in its warmth. He’d forgotten, in the mists of the valley and the world underneath the ice, how wide the heavens could be.
He wondered how much else he’d forgotten as well.
Cole, he thought. Ryse. He remembered a hundred variations of their faces. Warm and laughing, dark and angry, pained and desperate. The golden flatlands beckoned. So did the green and brown of a second range of mountains beyond. He heard birdsong on the wind, saw insects in the grass, smelled the sweet scent of early autumn dampness. It would be an eight-day walk to Du Fenlan, though he’d reach the first Aleani villages again in two.
His brother was gone forever; Litnig had accepted that during his months under the ice. Cole had fallen too far from shore. Even with Dil’s help swimming, he wouldn’t have survived the cold.
The fall still haunted his nightmares. He’d woken weeping and screaming his brother’s name more than once.
But Ryse—
Wait for me, Ryse, he thought.
Litnig stepped into the grass and began to walk. The feathery tips of the stalks swept across his legs.
He had a feeling he would never return to the space beneath the ice.
But scarcely a day would go by that he didn’t tread there for at least a moment in his mind.
TWENTY-NINE
Nineteen days before the destruction of Nutharion City