by Callie Bates
He could have come after me; he could have shot me from behind. Still, I know better than to assume my words made any difference.
I have to wake the circle. I rush on to the next stone, and the next, until the whole circle is humming. Until the light coalesces into a blinding ring. I sag in the center, against the altar stone; its rough gray skin scrapes my hands. So it has been anointed, too, by my blood. Around me the circle of ancestors, men and women in ancient garments, grasping spears and scepters, flares white. And then they begin to cry out.
“Mo cri, mo tire, mo fiel. Mo cri, mo tire, mo fiel!”
I shove myself upright. I’ve woken them. This is the moment. “My heart, my land, my blood!” I shout back to them.
It’s time to set them free.
Sing them free, Tuah said. You know the song.
The only melody in my head is the one I’ve known all my life—the one my mother wrote for me when I was a child. Except she didn’t invent it; she heard a melody beneath the grief of the stones at Cerid Aven. Her musician’s ears made sense of the chaos of noise, where mine couldn’t—where no one else’s could. She must have spent hours listening, teasing it out and crafting it into a true melody. She couldn’t have known it was the key to waking the land.
It’s the song the golden pines make. The keening of the stones above Cerid Aven. The song only my mother could hear. The true song, beneath the story of their grief; all of it, the same song, uniting all of Caeris.
My voice is thin and scratchy. I have no range. Nor can I recall the words my mother set to the music, the ones that Sophy sang. “In dreams and silence,” I venture. At last I give up on the words and simply hum.
The earth pulses into life beneath me and I match my voice to the sound of it until we’re humming in unison, trading notes, splitting apart and coming back together.
The land unfolds. It opens. It wakes.
And it pulls me in.
I close my eyes, which are leaves. I swallow, and a stream moves down a mountainside. I taste an early-winter acorn from the ground. I am aware of the layers of soil under me, the thoughts of each rock and tree, the anxious movements of the animals.
My arms drop to my sides. Then I fall to my knees. But I’m like Ossian. I don’t collapse.
A great crack deafens me. My eyes fly open; I’m on my feet. It’s the altar stone beside me. It seems to be exploding from within—radiating with light. Light runs in shining lines from it to the other stones around the circle. I’ve stopped humming, but the melody continues. My ancestors have taken it up. It echoes around me, waves of sound, as the light from the altar bursts into each of the stones around the circle.
I sang to the land, and it woke. And its waking has broken the bindings at last.
The light seems to implode inside me—in my head, my chest, my gut—as well as through the earth. I’m thrown back down, to my knees, to my side. The wound in my back is screaming with pain. I have to get up. I have to command the earth and the ancestors.
But my mind is being pulled away—north, high up, to a woman in a stone circle on a mountainside. Granya. She looks down the hills that form my body. My brother and sister stones open their eyes. The golden pines dip their branches; they tear their roots from the ground. Stones and trees begin to sing.
This cannot be. I dig my fingers into the turf, trying to bring myself back to reality. The circle at Dalriada can’t have broken its binding—I wasn’t there, I didn’t do it—
But again I’m drawn away, to a different ring of stones. The Sentry Rock over Cerid Aven. These stones are singing now, too. My song; their song. The song that echoes in my bones.
Then my mind is spread wide as circles all over Caeris begin to sing.
Is it all of them? All at once? The whole land, waking?
I am wrenched south, farther and farther, to a ridge overlooking a city, where a warrior leaps from the stone and shouts, “Mo cri, mo tire, mo fiel!”
The whole city rings with it. All of Laon. All of Eren.
The circles in both Eren and Caeris have thrown off their bonds. The entire land has woken. This is more than I ever expected—more power, more awareness. By freeing one circle, I’ve freed them all. All of my ancestors. Every piece of Tuah’s spell is shattering.
I am swelling, overflowing, too large for my skin. I have no skin. I have the covering of forests, the girdle of rivers, the crown of mountains. I have two bodies: the human, and the land. The human is frail, but the land is awake. And she has been chained too long, bound along with my ancestors.
But now she begins to move.
—
I OPEN MY eyes.
The world rushes in my ears as I sit up. Figures burn around me in the circle—men and women, my ancestors, set free from the stones. Standing at attention surrounding me, waiting for me to tell them my bidding.
The land is waiting for me to tell it my bidding. All of Eren and Caeris.
My witch stone twitches in my hand and I clamber to my feet. The blood still seeps from my wound, but no longer as thick. It sags in the waist of my pants.
I don’t have a lot of time.
How does one communicate with the land? With ghosts? A map of the earth seems to run through my muscles and bones: I feel the weight of the mountains above Dalriada, the flowing rivers, the denseness of trees, the press of the sea against the shore. I can touch the minds of the creatures that live in the land. It’s all there, part of me.
And it’s moving. It’s awake.
“Come,” I say simply, and the trees around Barrody leap into life, dragging their hoary roots from the ground. I feel the weight of them thrumming through the earth, walking to surround the city’s walls. The river that flows out of Lake Harbor turns into a different channel, rerouting itself so that it floods over the road leading south. A flock of crows rushes to my summons, crying out over the city and the burning garrison. Fog gathers, woolly and dense, along the shores of Lake Harbor.
I whisper to the land, and a hill shoves sideways to block the road between Barrody and the Ereni army. The whole earth seems to tremble. I stagger, but remain standing.
I send more trees to surround the Ereni army and, for good measure, reroute two more streams and whisper to the clouds to deluge the soldiers with rain. I don’t know if the clouds will obey, but they do. It won’t be a pleasant day to be an Ereni soldier.
The walking trees are clearing a path for my army, for the mountain people, down to Barrody. It won’t take my people long to get here now.
I open my eyes. The ancestors still surround me, waiting. Shining.
“Go outside the city walls,” I order them. “Let the soldiers see you among the trees. And when my army arrives, call your brothers and sisters from the other circles. Call your armies from the memory of the past. On my order, show yourselves!”
I look around for confirmation that my orders have been heard, but the ancestors simply disappear, as if swallowed by thin air. I’m suddenly alone, surrounded by an empty circle of stones that are only stones now, not vessels for my ancestors’ spirits. Yet, even so, they hum. They still have a power of their own, as Granya said. But light, shining, no longer bound in death and sorrow.
Dawn lights pink on the eastern horizon.
I have to go. I take a step forward and stumble, almost falling. My trousers are soaked with blood. A gasp escapes me. Pain grinds through my back. I’m losing too much blood, and I can feel the flesh gaping open at my wound site, the pockmark effects of the shot peppering my skin.
I’m not going to make it back to the army. I could take off my neckcloth and wrap it around my hips, but that won’t be enough. The wound is too open, the blood still flowing too freely.
Yet I refuse to sit here, waiting for help, and miss my own victory.
The humming of the stones around me shifts in frequency. They once had an intelligence of their own, Granya told me, a kind of magic that could be harnessed by a sorcerer with enough power—which is what Tuah did. But th
e Caveadears used this energy, too.
I drop back down to the altar stone. It’s a relief to sit. I spread my hand over the stone’s gritty surface. I can see the white speckles of quartz; the daylight is growing.
“Will you help me?” I ask the stone.
As if in answer, the humming deepens, aching up into my body, pulsing through my veins. I hear myself groan. Then I feel, low on my back, my skin begin to crawl. It sews itself together, sealing out the dirt from my hands and the ground.
I’m shuddering, shaking all over. My body pulses cold, then hot. A sudden, unbearable thirst dries out my throat.
The humming recedes. I touch the wound, just to be sure, but indeed the skin is healed over. Only the blood remains, sticky and cold.
“Thank you,” I say to the stones.
I push myself to my feet. My head swims a little, then steadies. I walk to the edge of the circle. Smoke puffs into the air from the castle chimneys. The Butcher has Jahan there, prisoner. Or does he? If my plea made any difference—if my mother and the weight of his own conscience made any difference—maybe the Butcher is willing to help us. We’ll see if he takes the opportunity to prove his loyalty once we arrive at the gates.
Either way, I have to believe that Jahan is safe and can fend for himself. I have to wait to find him, for the sake of my country.
The trees have begun to move down from the top of the ridge. A storm of birds bursts into the air above the stone circle. From here, I can glimpse the city walls and the notched stone of the north gate. Beyond the ramparts, it’s dark with trees. The sun muddles through the fog rising from Lake Harbor.
I allow myself a smile. Then, one foot in front of the other, I make my way toward the army that will soon be amassing on the other side of the gate.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
A battalion of trees meets me en route to the city gates. They crawl like massive spiders on their roots, flinging dirt into the air; the wind hisses through their branches. I have a sudden, irrational fear that they’ll trample me if I get too close—but instead they part so that I’m walking amid them, like a general surrounded by her regiments.
Birds circle overhead. It’s hard to see much else through the dense, moving trunks and branches except for patches of lightening sky.
“Surround the walls,” I command the trees, and a great line of them peels off to obey me. Twenty or so remain, their roots skritching through the soil, an honor guard escorting me to the road.
We descend an embankment and arrive on the northern road at the same moment as my army’s outriders come into view around the curve. Behind me, near the city walls, I hear men shouting.
I hail the outriders. They greet me and my tree guard with a mixture of reverence and terror.
In a few minutes, Hugh, Rhia, and the others catch up and surround me; even on horseback, they seem small among the shifting trees. Hugh gives me a smile and a small nod, and the pride in his eyes makes me stand even taller. This is what he brought me back to Caeris for.
Rhia pulls up right in front of me. Her eyes are enormous. I look back at her. Then she breaks into a laugh and points at me. “I was right about you, Elanna Valtai!” She punches her fist into the air. “Caveadear Caer-Ys!”
All the others take up the shout. “Caveadear Caer-Ys!”
I hold up my hands for a moment to accept their adulation, trying not to smile too broadly. We haven’t won yet.
Hugh’s second in command has a spare horse for me, but I decline to mount. I need to feel the earth under my feet. “Keep in formation,” I order Rhia, Hugh, and their commanders, who relay it to those beyond them. “And stay back. Let the ancestors take the brunt of any attack the Ereni might attempt. It’s my hope we’ll terrify them into surrendering without bloodshed, but I don’t want to lose any of our people.”
While they assemble behind me, I focus myself, digging my roots into the land. I feel for the ancestors; I still have some doubt that they’ll come, or that I’ll even sense them. But I do: They shift like unseen fire, waiting.
“Ancestors,” I call, and they appear in ranks surrounding us, their light blinding in the dimness of the trees. There are hundreds—thousands—of them. The nearest have come from the circle above Barrody, for I recognize their faces, but they must indeed have summoned their brothers and sisters and the armies of the past. The armies are not only human: I see a ghostly cavalcade of deer and the lumbering forms of bears among people carrying pikes and claymores. Not all the humans hold weapons. Some are armed with glowing stones and carved staffs, and one grasps nothing but a candle.
And among them are the ghosts of trees: golden pines shining brighter than the rest.
Rhia’s horse startles, but she keeps her seat. Around us other horses are shying, and the warriors are shouting at one another. “It’s the past!” I hear someone say. “No,” someone else answers, “it’s the Caveadear!”
Alone among them all, Hugh is gazing around in wonder, as if marking each ancient face.
At last everyone settles. I glance at Rhia. My mouth is dry, but I’m damned if I’ll let her sense my nerves. She raises her eyebrows at me. A challenge.
I nod. “Let’s go.”
I march forward, and they follow. The ancestors lead the way, glowing through the tree trunks. I have to trust that Sophy, Alistar, and the Barrody underground have finished with the garrison and reached the north gate—but even if they haven’t, I have another plan.
The bricks of the gate become visible through the trees. My ancestors surround them, a silent, near-translucent force, all the more terrifying for the light that emanates from them. I pause on the edge of the trees. The gates are closed; neither the underground nor, more unlikely yet, the Butcher has opened them. Spots of blue and gold reveal soldiers up on the ramparts, but among the shining ancestors, the mist seeping in from Lake Harbor, and the shifting trees, I doubt they’ve seen me.
I touch the ancestor nearest me. Her substance fills my hand with a hot buzz. She looks like one of the older ones, a mountain woman with spirals decorating her face, a horned helmet on her head, and a broadsword in her hand. “Ask the Ereni to surrender,” I tell her.
She makes a fist at her heart and strides away, impossibly fast, to the ground below the gate. “Barrody!” she bellows. “Do you surrender?”
No one answers from the ramparts.
The gates are wood, reinforced with iron. The wood is old, rotten in places; these gates haven’t been used to keep assailants out in decades or more, so confident have the Ereni governors been in their hold on Caeris. I reach into the wood for the lingering warmth of life, a green streak in my mind, and I murmur to it to grow. To open.
Branches burst out of the planks, warping the gate. Someone screams on the other side. The ground shudders as the gates take root in the earth and the roots crawl through the ground, like my army of trees, until the gates swing open.
More people are shouting inside the walls. A musket blasts off, spraying shot into the trees. A man bellows, “Hold your fire!”
The Butcher. But I don’t wait to see if he intends to help.
Again, the ancestor by the gates shouts, “Barrody, your gates are breached! Do you surrender?”
No answer.
I reach for the cobblestones that pave the road. They shake. The ground beneath them shakes. The soldiers on the ramparts are moving in a blur of blue and gold—running, I think, most of them.
One last time, my ancestor shouts, “Barrody! Surrender!”
But their running is good enough for me. The ancestors surge through the gate—and several trees follow, without my permission. I order the rest to stay back. Hugh, Rhia, and our force come behind me.
As we approach the gate, a group of Ereni soldiers plunges out of the gatehouse. I swear, reaching again for the dagger I don’t have, as they swarm among the ancestors and the trees. But then I realize they’re holding their bayonets over their heads, and on someone’s order, they all drop to their knees.
> The Butcher steps out from among them. He has another man by the collar. “Lady Elanna,” he calls, “this is Master Villeneuve, captain of the city guard. Tell the Caveadear you surrender.”
“I surrender,” the man gasps. “Barrody surrenders.”
“Barrody is ours!” I cry out for the benefit of my troops. Then I look at the Butcher, who meets my eyes with a cool nod. “And you, Lord Gilbert?”
He drops to one knee. “I pledge myself to the Caveadear of Caeris.”
Beside me, Hugh swears and mutters, “How did you manage this one, El?”
I allow myself a smile.
The Butcher leaves the soldiers with orders to stand down and comes to join us, though Hugh pins him with an openly hostile stare. I pretend not to notice; we’ll confront the Butcher’s history and crimes later. “Where’s Denis Falconier?” I ask him.
“Still at the castle.”
“And Jahan?”
The Butcher raises an eyebrow and points at the gate. “Right there.”
I stare. It is Jahan, standing on the other side of the gate, as whole and hale as if he never fell beneath musket fire not two hours ago. He’s watching us approach, hands on his hips. Grinning.
“He broke all our guns,” the Butcher grumbles. “I don’t know what we’ll do to repair them.”
But I can’t hold myself back any longer. I’m walking fast, and then I’m running, and then I’ve grabbed Jahan Korakides by his hair and pulled his face down to mine, kissing him in front of everyone. Let him just try to stop me. “You’re alive,” I say against his mouth.
He pulls away, still grinning. “It’s very hard to kill me.”
“But they shot you! I thought you were dead!”
“This”—he touches his chest—“is just skin and bone. It’s easy enough to knit back together, if you know how to do it.”
I’ll have to get a real explanation later because, through the gate, I see a great mob of people coming down the street toward us. They’re brandishing a flag: a red creature on white. The Dragon. It’s the Barrody underground, and Alistar Connell is running ahead with the flag in his hands, giving the Hounds of Urseach’s ululating cry. Others join him.