The Waking Land

by Callie Bates

  —

  PAGES RUN OUT to summon all the lords to council. Those who have already assembled gather in small groups in their brilliant woven cloaks, talking earnestly, sending sidelong glances at Sophy. If she’s self-conscious, it’s hard to see it. She moves into the corner, her spine straight, and talks in a low, serious voice to Ingram Knoll.

  I look at Jahan. We’ve retreated toward an alcove, together, out of the crowd but not quite out of sight. I want to curl up against him and wrap my arms around his ribs. I want to be tucked up, content, at ease.

  “You’re not upset?” I ask him softly. “Are you? That I left, or—or about—”

  “Your betrothal?” He raises an eyebrow. There’s an odd look on his face, as if he can’t decide whether or not to smile. “Do you know what Finn said to me? He said that a betrothal is just a slip of paper.”

  I catch my breath.

  “He said,” Jahan adds, “that his father wouldn’t want him to marry you anyway. You’re too alarming. King Euan doesn’t trust magic.” He snorts. “Even though he claims to be the rightful king of Caeris.”

  “Finn isn’t in love with me, then?” I flush as I say the words.

  Jahan actually laughs. “Did you think he was?”

  I punch him in the shoulder, and he just laughs more. “He wanted to marry me, so I don’t think it’s exactly unreasonable.”

  “You were betrothed as children. There’s a difference between desire and obligation.”

  “Well,” I huff, “I don’t think I’m such a poor catch as all that…”

  Jahan is grinning. “Besides, he was mooning about with your friend Victoire before she went back to fomenting rebellion in Eren. Like two puppies about to be separated.”

  I glower at him. “You really know the key to a woman’s heart, don’t you?”

  He shakes his head. “Elanna Valtai,” he says, “you are an utter neophyte at love. If Finn Dromahair loved you, he’d be here. He’d put you before his kingdom and his responsibility. And the moment he saw you again, he’d know you are the best thing he’s ever seen. The person who matters more to him than anyone he knows, and for no reason he can understand except for the opening of his heart.”

  I stare at him; he’s not quite meeting my eyes, but then he does. He looks almost resentful, as if he didn’t mean to say what he did. “Jahan Korakides,” I say, pretending tears haven’t clotted under my eyelashes, “you are a rogue, and if you don’t say things like that more often, I’ll—I’ll—”

  He leans closer, so that our lips are a hand’s breadth apart. “You’ll what?”

  I slide my hands around the nape of his neck, where errant hair curls, feeling the smoothness of his skin there. I bring my lips to his ear. “I’ll turn you into a tree. Or a toad.”

  “You can’t do that,” he whispers back, his mouth catching at mine. “But if you do, just so you know, I’ll turn you into a toad, too. We can have warts togeth—”

  I cut him off with my lips. He only resists for a moment; then his arms come around me, gathering me up against him.

  And I am home.

  —

  WE SIT TOGETHER in the alcove, his arm around my waist. I lean against his shoulder. The question comes spilling out of me. “Why can’t you marry anyone?”

  He’s quiet for a moment. Then he says into my hair, “I made a vow not to.”

  I push back to look at him. “Why?”

  His free hand reaches for the scar behind his ear. I watch him force the hand down. He looks away from me, and his mouth twitches as if in memory of some grief I can’t share with him. “My parents. What my father did to my mother…And then,” he adds, “there’s the fact of what I am.”

  “But you aren’t your father. I know,” I add to stop his unvoiced protest. “Besides, there’s the fact of what I am.”

  He draws in a breath. “El…”

  I wait for him to continue, but he doesn’t. So I say, “Listen. I’ve never been interested in marriage. It’s always been a sort of obligation to me, something I knew I would have to do. But I don’t mind not doing it.”

  His eyes open wide. For once, I’ve startled him. He starts to speak, but I tap his lips, shushing him. It’s time to be bold.

  “I just want to love you,” I say. “And like a betrothal, marriage is just a slip of paper. I don’t want it. I only want you.”

  He pulls me back against him, cradling me against his chest so that I feel the beat of his heart in my ear, a counterpoint to the pulsing of the earth, which I seem always to be aware of now, even when I’m not searching for it.

  So softly I almost can’t hear it, he says, “Then I am yours, in all the ways that don’t require that slip of paper.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Ash blows on the wind, curling amid the falling snow. It does not smell of the comforting odor of peat fires.

  It smells as if something has died.

  My horse shifts under me, and my knees squeeze together. Everyone else hangs back: Rhia, Sophy, Jahan, Ingram Knoll. The message boy who came to us, running up the path to Dalriada, crying, “They’ve broken through! They’re in the mountains!” stumbles off his horse and onto his knees. He’s weeping, silent tears.

  “How did they get here?” Rhia is saying to her father, a furious whisper. “How did they get past the shifts in the land?”

  Someone betrayed us. Was it my mother; did they force it from her? Or did someone else sell or sacrifice this information? The anger that burned within me when we first got the news has dimmed into a hard, cold grief. I have to go back to Barrody; I have to find my mother.

  But not yet. And that hurts as much as anything else.

  I swing down from my horse, passing the reins back to Jahan. He looks down at me, his lips a tight line, then he, too, dismounts. He comes to stand beside me, fitting one hand into mine.

  It gives me the courage to go to the weeping messenger boy. To put a hand on his head. He doesn’t look up.

  A whistle pierces the snow-and-ash-filled sky: one of the scouts from the village. All’s clear. I start forward, Jahan behind me. There’s a flurry and the sound of running feet, and Sophy bursts up to the other side of us.

  We walk together toward the destroyed town. Altan. The village Rhia and I shifted to, when we left Taich-na-Ivaugh. The place we didn’t set foot in, because we turned north instead.

  Its windows gape, soot-smeared and black.

  A scout meets us on the edge of town. “There’s no one left. Not one Ereni or Caerisian. Must have been a raiding party.”

  Jahan tethers the horses, while Sophy and I continue into the village.

  The first body lies ahead of us, alongside the street. Blood stains the trace of early-winter snow crimson, though it is mid-Artemenion, surely too early for snow. The body belongs to a girl; she lies curled on her side with one arm flung out. Her glassy eyes stare at nothing. Ash pours over us, awhirl on the cold wind.

  The land aches its grief.

  Sophy makes a choking sound. I swallow my own revulsion—not so much at the corpse as at the soldiers who did this—and put out a hand to grasp hers. She tightens her fingers around mine.

  This must have happened under the Butcher’s orders. Who else? The mountain lords finally decide to lend their help, and the first thing that happens is this atrocity: an entire village, slaughtered and burned.

  I lean down and gingerly tug at the girl’s hood. It pulls up, crackling with dried blood. I let it drop to cover her face. “Mo cri, mo tire, mo fiel,” I whisper. Let Father Dagod come and take her soul in his hands, if he hasn’t already. Let him carry her beyond the veil, into the light of the otherworld.

  Sophy is weeping and Jahan has come to my other side, putting his hand on my arm. But though I’m grateful for his presence, I don’t feel like crying. I don’t need comfort. It’s rage that burns through me, scalding away any tears I could think of weeping.

  It’s rage that sends me striding into the rest of the village, the
land pulsing in counterpoint to my stride, so that I can see the rubble of burned-out roofs, the twisted horror of bodies. Finn’s flag, the Dragon, is trampled into the cobblestones in the village square, covered in dung and burn marks, but still intact.

  The scouts move around me, gathering the bodies for burial.

  I stare at the half-destroyed flag. Patriotic rage rises in me, and then I’m on the ground, tugging the fabric from the stones with my fingernails. The land pounds in my head. Jahan drops down across from me without a word and starts working at the other side.

  Sophy arrives at my shoulder, her eyes wide with anger above the tears silvering her cheeks. “We don’t have time.”

  I stand up, ripping the flag from the ground. Pebbles bounce off it. Jahan grabs the other side, and between us, we hold up the tattered flag. Sophy stares at it, wordless.

  I look at her. “They have to pay for this.”

  —

  BY MIDAFTERNOON, THE scouts have gathered the word: The Ereni and Caerisians have met for battle some miles south of Altan.

  So that is why the earth aches and keens with grief—not only for this village, but also for the battle. The sound makes me feel hollowed out.

  We don’t have a choice. We have to fight.

  Jahan comes up beside me. “We might still get there in time.” We both glance at our assembled forces: a few hundred mountain lords. Certainly nothing like a full army. They didn’t bring enough forces from the distant cantons. I wish Finn hadn’t gone into battle so quickly, but of course he didn’t have another option.

  “Rhia,” Jahan calls.

  She comes over to us, brisk and impatient. “We’re trying to make a plan.”

  “And while you plan, people are dying,” I snap. “Listen. I have an idea. In the books, Granya and I discovered that the Caveadear and the warden used to work together in battle. But what if all three of us work together? You know how to shift the land; you’re better at it than your father. I can listen to it—I’ll know where the battle is taking place. We can pull our entire force through with us.”

  I should be able to raise an army of trees. I should be able to make streams flood. But I’m not Wildegarde. I have wedded the land, but I don’t have her power. Not yet.

  Rhia folds her arms and raises a brow at Jahan. “And what can he do?”

  Jahan looks between us. “I’ve been in battle before. I can destroy the enemy guns—when we get there.”

  Rhia nods. They both look at me.

  “That’s perfect,” I say. I knew Jahan would be better than any of us on a battlefield. The burning desire for revenge is making my heart pound faster. And the terror that Finn and Hugh and Alistar, their forces already reduced, cannot possibly hope to win this battle. “Now.”

  Rhia gestures to her father, who nods for her to take his place, for the moment, as warden. The mountain lords assemble around us in their colorful cloaks, with Sophy pushed toward the center, her eyes large in her pale face.

  The three of us make a circle. It’s Rhia who grasps both our hands, and Jahan and I reach out for each other’s. As we are joined, a shock of heat passes between us, one hand to the other, leaving a ringing in my ears. Awareness of the land explodes within me. Trees rustle in my ears, and water runs through my veins. I see through a wolf’s eye, breathe with a fish’s gills.

  And, some distance away, I feel the echo of gunfire rock up through the soles of my feet.

  Rhia gasps. “I see the line—it’s like a light, running through the land.”

  Her voice is so small in the vast, living world.

  “Can you tell us where, El?” Jahan says.

  I concentrate. It is a matter of altering my perception, of listening for something rather than to everything. I sink through the earth, toward the south, past fields and forests, to a place where the stone walls fall away and the earth is bare except for grass and the desperate bodies of fighting men. A crack of musket fire startles me back into my slight human body. Jahan and Rhia hold me tight.

  Rhia nods to the mountain lords assembled around us, then the three of us form a line, with me at the center. Heat from their hands radiates into my body. The mountain lords gather themselves to follow us. We walk, more than a hundred of us, through the shifting earth.

  —

  WE ARE TOO late. Even with our speed, even knowing just where to go, our small force is too late.

  We’ve come to the edge of a forest. Beyond it spreads a wide field, and the field is a mass of carnage, with the bodies of the dead slowly freezing into the wintry ground. Far off, an Ereni soldier looks up from scavenging the corpses, letting loose a single shot into the gray air. It comes nowhere near us. He’s no better than the crows who circle overhead.

  Other Ereni, discernible by their blue sashes, move among the dead.

  But the only Caerisians are on the ground.

  I’ve fallen to my knees. Behind me somewhere, Sophy is stuttering. “But how—Where—” Jahan grasps my shoulders, turns me to face him. I can’t feel anything, not even the warmth of his touch.

  So many bodies.

  “Scouts!” Ingram Knoll calls, and, as if from a great distance, I hear the rattle of the scouts riding out to see what’s become of our Caerisians.

  Sophy says in the smallest voice, “Are they all dead?”

  “Some will have escaped.” Ingram Knoll’s voice floats, grim but pragmatic, over my head. “Maybe more than some, if we’re lucky. But the Ereni will pursue them. We have to act fast—go after them, harry the Ereni off.”

  On my shoulder, Jahan’s hand closes into a fist. He forces it back open.

  I stagger onto my feet, moving forward among the bodies, alone. Bodies trampled by horses, ripped pinkly apart by bayonets and cannons. I pass among the dead, looking into what remains of their faces.

  One man—a boy, really—is still alive. His lips part as I approach him, like a fish gasping for air. There’s a wound in his stomach. I look away from the glistening organs that show through his flesh, up into his bloodshot eyes. His lips form the word Caveadear.

  I crouch beside him. His fingers are sticky with gore, but I hold them tight. A distance away, another Ereni soldier fires another shot at us. Sparks flare. A distant crack explodes; I hear cursing.

  The boy’s throat works. I hold his fingers tighter. He’s breathing shallowly now, quick gasps for air. The space between breaths grows farther and farther apart, until that is all there is: space, and silence.

  I set his hand back on his chest and stand up. The boy’s open eyes reflect the clouds overhead. I didn’t feel Father Dagod take his soul in his hands, but I felt the quiet as the life left him. Perhaps it is the same thing.

  I squelch through the churned mud. The Ereni soldiers shout at me, but I ignore them. I’m aware of Jahan somewhere behind me, picking his way toward me over the dead. Still a distance away, though.

  Another body moves just ahead. I quickly step closer, and stop. It’s another young soldier with an identical wound in his stomach. His cheeks flash as he tries to breathe, his legs pushing at the mud.

  But he wears an Ereni sash.

  I drop down beside him. The soldiers are shouting, “Hey, you! Bugger off!”

  The boy’s huge eyes widen at the sight of me. He didn’t expect a woman on the battlefield. He certainly didn’t expect me.

  His legs keep thrashing. I take his hand in both of mine, and I find myself humming a song—an old Ereni song, one Hensey used to sing to me.

  I start to sing. “Hush little baby in the shroud of the high moon…”

  Tears leak out of the boy’s eyes. He tries to stretch his other hand up to touch my face, but his chest convulses. He falls back. The soul flies out of his eyes. I don’t see which god catches it.

  I fold both his hands over his chest, just as I did with the other boy. I press a hand to his brow. “Mo cri, mo tire, mo fiel,” I whisper, because the words belong to him as much as to any Caerisians. The earth rumbles.

 
I stand up. The carrion thieves fire again at me. “Stop!” I scream at them. “Leave the dead in peace!”

  “Witch!” they yell at me. “Caerisian witch!”

  With a racket, their guns explode—I see the burst of smoke, the startled exclamations of pain. I glance over my shoulder to see Jahan some distance behind me, grinning a savage grin. It’s his magic, then.

  My foot catches against something. I startle and look down, and for a horrible moment, seeing the spiked hair, I think it’s Alistar Connell who’s lying there dead. I kneel, heaving the body over.

  It’s not Alistar. It’s Declan. Declan, who was with us when my father was captured, who climbed the walls of Portmason with Alistar. Whom I last saw full of life.

  Rage pulses into my temples. I lunge toward the Ereni scavengers. A long twisting rope seems to be growing from my hair. Leaves and water and rocks shoot from my hands, scatter before my feet. The earth shakes.

  The scavengers turn and run.

  I watch until I’m sure they’re gone, their figures lost to distance. Then I face back to the battlefield, my throat tight with grief. Horses come running from the edge of the forest—the scouts coming back to Ingram Knoll.

  Jahan is just behind me. He must have comforted others of the dying; blood splatters his hands. He hurries to me.

  “The dead need to be buried,” I say.

  He looks at me in confusion and some distaste; in the Paladisan tradition, corpses are burned, not buried. “What do you—?”

  I gather the words Alistar spoke over the two Hounds, the night my father was captured. To think it seemed so much to lose two of them.

  Two is such a small number, amid all this.

  “Mo cri, mo tire, mo fiel.”

  I speak the words with intent, pitching my voice as loud as it will go. Come, I whisper with all the grief tight within me. The earth rumbles again. Now, just as it did when the Hounds died, it swallows the bodies of all the dead—Ereni and Caerisian alike—within it.