by Callie Bates
She nods, still avoiding my gaze, busying herself with the map. I remember the maps in Denis’s study, the ones that made no sense because the landmarks shifted in each of them, because no hill or valley was ever quite the same. You have to be Caerisian to understand it—not just Caerisian, I realize. You have to be from the mountains.
I pace away from her, and then I start back down the hill.
Rocks clatter as she hurries after me. “Stop! That’s not the way it works. You can’t just go back and arrive in the same place—”
“I don’t believe you.” I jump over a fallen log, and my feet skid on the steep slope. I force myself to slow down. It’s not worth a broken leg.
Rhia says nothing more, but I hear her coming along behind me. We reach the hollow faster than we left it, and I am dismayed to see the hill on the other side is only a low rise, made up of birch and hardwoods, not the pine and fir I remember walking through.
I grind my teeth together. I am the steward of the land. The land should obey me, but I have no idea how to make the land shift. When we crest the low hill, we encounter a flock of sheep huddled in a pasture, and beyond, the smoke and stone walls of a town. A hamlet, really. I see no more than six buildings.
I stop at the wooden stile separating us from the sheep and take a breath before turning back to Rhia.
She folds her arms, raising an eyebrow, uncompromising.
“Where are we?” I demand.
“I think it’s called Altan.” She shrugs.
I have never heard of it. I fight to stay in control—to keep myself from screaming at her. “We’re a long way from Taich-na-Ivaugh, aren’t we?”
She nods.
“How far?” My voice is rising despite my effort to control it.
“Sixty miles. Seventy.” Another deliberately casual shrug. “I don’t know exactly.”
“How did we get here?”
“The land shifted us.”
“Well, then, make it shift us back!” I’m almost shouting.
“You made a bargain.”
I jab a finger at her. “And you tricked me.”
Her nostrils flare. “And you wed the land last night without so much as a second thought! Why do you think you feel ill? Because you attempted something you should never have done, you ignorant southerner. You were supposed to come with me to Dalriada before the Day of the Dying Year so this didn’t happen.”
I splutter, but it only magnifies the ringing in my ears. “I am the steward of the land. It’s my right! It’s my choice to wed the land with whomever I wish.”
She stares at me, then loosens a sharp, high-pitched laugh. “You think I care who you made love with? Fionnlach Dromahair or your Idaean sorcerer; it doesn’t make a difference to me. It doesn’t make a difference to the land. No.” Her nostrils pinch again. “But now you’ve bound yourself to the land. You’ve made a bargain you can’t even begin to understand.”
My hands fist—because, of course, she’s right. I don’t understand.
“Oonagh said no one even remembered what it meant,” I begin.
“Oonagh!” Rhia rolls her eyes. “As if the Connells have ever been keepers of the ancient knowledge. We, the wardens of the mountains, are the ones who have guarded the old ways since the invasion. We are the ones who know what it means to wed the land. You think you can just come here and put on a stupid animal mask and let your lovemaking wake the earth and lead your revolution with glory? It’s not that simple. You’re the Caveadear now—you never were before, no matter what your ignorant lowlanders believe—and the land lives in you.”
I feel it as she speaks, a deep thrumming that pulses in my bones, far more present than the small whispers I used to sense. My teeth clench together. I feel a fool, which only makes this worse. I hate admitting ignorance, especially to Rhia Knoll. “The land lives in me?”
“It means you have a responsibility. The land is part of you now, and you can’t deny awareness of it.” She takes a breath, squares her shoulders. “You must come north, to where your true people live in the mountains.”
I look toward the mountains. I do want to go there. I want to learn what Rhia’s people know, I want to see the singing golden pines, I want to understand the land whose awareness crawls under my skin. But how can I, when the warning bell rang just before we left?
“Rhia,” I say, “the Butcher could be laying siege to Taich-na-Ivaugh right now.”
She folds her arms. “And how do you expect to stop him, if you don’t know what you’re capable of?”
We stare at each other for a moment. Rhia’s eyes are fierce with determination.
“If we go back now,” she says, “you’ll never come to the mountains. You’ll never learn the secrets we’ve guarded for so long, and without them, you’ll never succeed. Our revolution will fail, and that will be the end of it.”
“Our revolution?”
“We want Caer-Ys to be free as much as you do. If Loyce Eyrlai finds a way into our mountains, she’ll cut our golden pines the way her ancestors cut them in the lowlands.” Rhia’s voice is rising. “She doesn’t care that they’re the symbol of my people—she doesn’t know the stories about how they sing, and she doesn’t care that the wood must be worked a certain way to preserve its song. She doesn’t care for my people or our customs.”
I should have understood that the revolution matters to Rhia—almost as much as it does to me. I see it in her eyes.
But the bell…
“I’m sorry.” My voice is small and strained. “We need to go back.”
A vein ticks in Rhia’s temple. I thought maybe, in the face of my fear and worry, she’d back down. But more than anything, she seems betrayed. Her mouth is a dark, curved line. “My people have been under attack for two hundred years. Your people made friends with the Ereni. You adopted their customs. Their language. You let them cut the golden pines, our sacred tree. The pines never grew back, but you still wear their symbol on your finger.” She points at my signet ring: the tree encased in knot work. “You still wear the symbol of united Caer-Ys, but Caer-Ys is hardly whole and you know almost nothing of our true customs and history. But we, who know, have always been hounded, mocked, derided, because we live in the mountains and keep the old ways. Now you want our knowledge—you need our knowledge—but you refuse to pay the price of getting it. I almost believed in you. I almost thought you had what it takes to be a real Caveadear.”
My mouth opens, but no words come out.
She stares at me for another moment. Then she swings herself over the stile and marches off toward the flock of sheep.
She almost believed in me? Rhia Knoll almost believed in me?
“Hey!” I pull myself onto the first step of the stile. “You’re going the wrong way. The mountains are behind us.”
“It doesn’t matter which direction I go,” she shouts back at me. “The whole damned thing is over.”
I start walking in the direction I assume to be south, but my footsteps slow. I seem to be moving uphill, though I have gone hardly any distance at all, and, if anything, the pasture slopes down.
I take another step forward. Treacle. My stomach is churning, and the echo dins in my ears. The land pulses and groans. Ahead of me, where Rhia and the sheep should be, the clear air dissolves into mist. Figures push through it toward me. Their silhouettes look strange, peaked at the head and shoulders, and as they come closer, I realize it’s because they’re wearing armor. Their peaked helmets were used more than two centuries ago.
Cold trickles up my spine.
I have to run, but I am fixed to the spot. The Ereni advance, their gaits wary. I am only peering into the past, I remind myself. It is only a glimpse; it’s the Souls’ Day and the veil is thin. The land is doing this to me. They don’t really see me.
And then they do.
One man holds up his arm. He points. The man behind him draws his broadsword. He starts to run toward me.
I have no weapons. I have nothing. I hold up m
y empty hands. “Don’t!”
He jerks to a stop. Not out of compassion. His eyes roll up in his head and he falls, slamming into the ground.
I stare at his slumped body, at the dagger impaled in the chink in the back of his armor. On the other side of him, Rhia Knoll strides toward me through the mist, which is dissipating around her. The shouting Ereni soldiers tear into scraps of figures, then into clouds of memory, and at last into nothing.
The dead man has also disappeared from the ground before me. But the dagger remains.
Rhia crouches to pick it up, cleaning the blade on the grass.
I’m shaking all over, and the land booms in my ears. “What—?” I can’t speak any other words. There are no words.
“Time is thin here.” Rhia stuffs her dagger back into her boot. Her tone is short. “It’s part of the land shifting.”
“But,” I stammer, “you never shift into the past, do you?”
She looks at me. “Not usually.”
I swallow. Then I drop to my knees in the sheep dung and am sick all over the damp grass.
When I look up, wiping my mouth, Rhia stands over me. Without a word, she offers me the flask of cider. I drink, then drop back on the grass, rubbing my forehead. My legs are shaking.
I close my eyes. “Explain this to me.”
Rhia shifts from foot to foot. I hear the squeak of her leather boots. “My aunt Granya could tell you better than I can. She’s the memory-keeper of Dalriada.” A pause. “And if you came to the mountains, you could hear it from her lips.”
“Just try.”
“During the invasion, there was a sorceress,” Rhia begins. “A very powerful sorceress. Back in those days, magicians were itinerant, you know. They lived everywhere. During the invasion, King Ossian employed a sorceress to help Caeris, and when Barrody fell, the sorceress wove a spell of protection around the mountains. That’s what keeps the land awake here, why we’re able to shift the land. But somehow pieces of the past are caught up in it.”
I squeeze my eyes tight and then open them. I force myself onto my feet. My stomach writhes with nausea. I turn in a half circle until I’m facing north. Facing the mountains, the land of the golden pines, the place where Caeris’s deepest secrets are kept.
The nausea eases. Looking north makes the pounding in my head grow less.
I sigh. “All right. We’re going north.”
“We are?” Rhia sounds astonished.
I squint at her. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? North. We’re going to see your father.” The land’s not going to let me rest until it gets its way, I can tell that much. I totter back to the stile. The nausea is easing, but I still feel dizzy. I grab on to the stone wall, the stones cold and gritty under my hands. A terrible thought occurs to me. “Rhia. This ‘wedding the land.’ It doesn’t mean—Does it—I’m not pregnant, am I?”
Rhia Knoll comes up beside me. She looks down into my face. Then she throws back her head and roars with laughter.
“Somehow I don’t find this quite as amusing as you do.” A damp sweat lingers on my upper lip. What a fool I was last night, not even to think of using any herbs or moss to prevent pregnancy—I just came together with Jahan in blind, dumb lust.
Rhia clambers up onto the stile. The mountains are grim and white behind her. “You aren’t pregnant. Caveadears can’t have children once they’re wedded to the land. Come on.”
I crawl over the stile, though each step north makes me feel slightly clearer-headed. I can’t have children? How does she know?
I swallow, and follow Rhia toward the mountains.
—
THE LAND WHISPERS to me as we walk. It tells me of things that happened long ago, and just yesterday.
Around noon, as we wind out of a village, a hare shoots out from the undergrowth and across the road before us. I smell the feral odor of the mountain cat pursuing it. Then I feel my heart pumping, my legs scrabbling not quite fast enough, smell the damp ferns flying past my nose as I leap deeper into the woods.
A touch on my arm brings me shooting back into my human body, which seems large and clumsy and breathless.
Rhia frowns at me. “The hare?”
I manage a wordless nod. My lungs still ache with the urgency of flight.
“They say the Caveadears can see through the eyes of the animals,” she says. “Now you’ve wedded the land, I suppose it’s stronger.”
I shake my head, but my skin still feels too large, shining with uncomfortable awareness. I am the steward of the land. It’s the land I’m supposed to feel, not every animal on it. If I can see the world through a hare’s eyes, how will I ever eat rabbit stew again?
We tramp on, up into the hills. The trees hide the mountains from sight. It smells different up here, and the forest composition has changed again. I wish for my field notebook and hand lens—both lost for good by now. A lump swells in my throat. Everything has changed—so much, so fast. I want to learn the magic of the land, but I still want to study botany. Why do the laws of the Paladisan emperors prevent me from doing both? It isn’t right. It just isn’t.
“How do you know I can never have children?” I demand of Rhia.
The subject seems to startle her. She gives her typical shrug. “It’s in the lore. You’re wedded to the land now, and you can only make things of the land. You’ll select and train the next Caveadear instead of having a child. What?” she says, when I bite my lip. “You can make a tree grow from your hands, but you’d rather have a bawling infant?”
“No. I—That is—I don’t know.” I stare up at the trees, which seem to shift in order to better look at me. For the first time in my life, I feel uncomfortable beneath their eyes. “It’s not that I dreamed of having children, the way some girls do. Some girls can’t wait to be mothers. I never felt that way. I just thought—you know, when I got married, if Antoine let me live that long, I imagined I would have children. With my husband.”
“Well,” says Rhia.
I glance at her. “Oh, no. Now you’re going to tell me the Caveadear can’t get married after she weds the land.”
“I don’t know that it’s strictly forbidden,” Rhia says. “Or, like having a child, physically impossible.”
“But it’s a good thing I didn’t marry Finn.”
“Since he probably would have wanted an heir…yes.”
I run a hand through my hair. I don’t have a ribbon to tie it, and it’s gone wild, a tangle of knots. The worst part of it is the feeling of relief. Relief that I don’t have to marry Finn; relief that I don’t have to reduce my life to making heirs for the future of Caeris.
But if I’m not to be a wife or a mother, then what am I to be?
The answer whispers through the earth under my feet. I am the steward of the land, and now I’m wedded to it. I am Caeris. All the magic I loved as a child belongs to me again—more powerfully than I ever knew. I find myself starting to smile.
Rhia has pulled out the map. “There’s another line just up the hill. We’ll shift there. We should be able to make Dalriada tomorrow.”
Dalriada: the home of the wardens of the mountains. The gateway to the high peaks.
—
WE SET OFF early the next morning, having spent the night in a village called Noch-Ysal. Yesterday was the Souls’ Day, and by custom, all the villagers gathered around a fire to speak the names of their ancestors aloud. I stiffened when I realized I didn’t know the names beyond my father’s and grandfather’s on the Valtai side, and on my mother’s, just her. Even the shepherds know their lineage better than I do.
Rhia takes us to another shift. With a show of great reluctance, she lets me look at her map. Like the ones Denis and the Butcher had, it is a mess of jumbled towns and landmarks—but unlike theirs, hers is traced over with long lines stretching the length of Caeris. They seem to amble, but, like the veins on a leaf, they all stretch forth from a single point: Barrody.
The principal artery stretches from Barrody north, straight
to Dalriada.
“This is what the sorceress did?” I ask. “She made the lines?”
“No.” Rhia shakes her head. “The lines have always been there. They put the stone circles on them, back in the time before Wildegarde, before Caer-Ys existed as Caer-Ys. Maybe it was the gods who built the circles, before the Children of Anu came. I don’t know; no one does. But the sorceress kept the lines alive, though they were only used by memory-keepers and others trained in the art. Instead she made it so they would shift constantly, so that no one who is not of the mountains would know where they are.”
But if Denis and the Butcher learn how to read them, they will know. Does my mother know how to read them? She might; she certainly knows about their existence. If Denis finds a way to pull the truth from her…
Neither of us says it, but the urgency of knowing the danger drives us forward.
We access the point of shift simply by walking through it. The line, Rhia shows me, goes straight through Dalriada, so the shift will bring us closer to the city and her father.
This time, as we walk into the line, I pay attention to how it feels in my body. It hums in my bones, as if my blood and marrow are reshaping themselves along with the earth.
We walk for hours. Snow trickles from a gray sky.
And at last, through a gap in the trees, I see it: the sharp edges of the mountain above Dalriada, sudden and close.
The wood murmurs with the memory of the past.
Rhia is actually smiling. I look at her, and she shrugs and says, “Home.”
As if home is such a simple thing. I have never envied Rhia Knoll before, but my jealousy springs to life now, bitter and unexpected. I wish I had known all my life what it is like to know where you belong. To have a home, to have a people, who claim you without question or qualm.
But I do have a home. I’ve wedded the land, and all of Caeris is my home. The realization makes my heart soften. Awareness of the earth pulses through me with renewed intensity, as if the land is affirming my choice.
The road grows steeper. We pass an orchard clinging to the rocky soil, and sheep spread out at pasture. A river rushes into sight, roaring between the narrow walls of a high canyon. We trudge on into the lowering sun, and eventually the canyon opens into a green valley: the gateway to the Tail Ridge, the Bal an-Dracan. The white mountain peak gleams behind a palace growing precipitously from a cliff face. With its high, pitched roofs and rambling gables, it does not look like any noble residence I have ever seen. I try to remember what I read about Dalriada at my father’s house. There used to be a school here centuries ago, for sorcerers, and their library contains many books that have been banned. But that is all I know.