The harshness of his tone caught me off guard. “Of course not, but this—”
“If you didn’t want to smell like blood and sweat and marsh mud, you should’ve stayed at Pendragon.”
A clump of burning peat collapsed in on itself, shooting sparks into the air. From the end of the lodge, Roland and Prudence snored in concert. I sat up. “Alastair, what’s wrong?”
“I told you to stay hidden. You broke your promise.”
My earlier guilt flooded back with the taste of bile and blood. I parted the sleek black hairs on the pelt draped over my knees and watched them spring back into place. It was that or meet his eye, and I could not meet his eye. “Yes,” I said quietly, “I did.”
The crackle of the fire filled the silence.
“That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say?” he said.
“What else can I say? I broke my promise and I’m sorry.”
“What you did out there—what you tried to do—could’ve gotten us both killed. I need a better explanation than that.”
Shame and anger twisted a noose around my voice and set it out to hang. How to account for what had gone through my mind in the instant before I’d left my hiding place? It was not a feeling; there’d been no time for feelings. Conviction was too weak a word. What was it called, that dreadful certainty of action, that flash of clarity in the midst of madness assuring me that whatever enemies rained down on us, he would no longer face them alone?
Mistake, came the answer from inside me. It’s called a mistake.
“Do you think you need to prove yourself?” He sought my gaze. “Is that what this is really about? Because you don’t. Not to me.”
“I know.”
“Then why’d you do it?”
“I couldn’t watch you fighting alone.”
“You can’t leap into the fray whenever I’m in danger.”
I stuck out my chin. “Why not?”
“This is no time for glibness, Aliza! You—but no.” He turned away. In those fire-flecked seconds, the quiet was frightening. “I was wrong. I shouldn’t have let you come.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s true. I see that now. Bravery alone doesn’t win battles. Strategy and experience do, and you have neither. You don’t understand the battlefield.”
“I do—”
“You’ve seen two battles. Two. I’ve been fighting Tekari since I was twelve. There is always more at stake when Riders fight than just our lives, Aliza, and if we must die so others will live, then it’s not your place to stop us.”
“Not my place? Not my place?”
“It’s never your responsibility to protect me. I bear the sword, not you.”
I shoved the poker deep into the embers. “Fine, I made a mistake. All right? I admit it. But don’t you ever tell me I don’t have the right to protect my husband.” I felt for the brooch among my clothes and tossed it onto the pelt in front of him. “You bear the sword, yes. Well, I bear your heartstone. This isn’t about what a Rider should or shouldn’t do for a nakla. This is about what I will do for the man I love, and if my leaping into the fray will save your life, then don’t ask me not to do it.”
“But it didn’t.”
“What?”
“It didn’t help. You couldn’t even keep hold of your dagger.”
My face burned. “I can’t do nothing!”
“You’re going to have to learn.”
I’d tasted anger on his behalf before: among the lamias, during my disastrous interview with the Drakaina, and when I’d seen what the poison of the Worm had done to him, but never before had I felt such fury. This was pure, instinctive, unreasoning, an animal cry against the arrow-tipped words driven straight into my heart. Nothing. Learn to do nothing, say nothing, because when the swords were drawn, I was nothing. A reckless, foolish nakla, now and forever. I couldn’t bring myself to speak.
The smoldering peat threw his features into sharp contrast, each unforgiving shadow edged in gold as he stared at the heartstone in front of him. “Say you do leap into the fray,” he said at last in a hushed voice. “Say I let you. Tonight, or tomorrow, or next week, or next year: someday your luck is going to run out. The next time you stand between me and a diving valkyrie there might not be a mysterious beoryn Rider on hand to save you, and gods help me, I’ll die a thousand deaths before I let that happen. I will not bury you.”
“No more than I’ll bury you, dearest.” I spat out each word like a mouthful of rotten fruit.
“You may not get that choice.”
I turned away, my words spent. He could tend the rest of his injuries by himself.
Mud clogged my dreams, sucking me down into suffocating darkness. I tried to run, to what and from what I had no idea, but it held me fast. Crow shapes hovered above my head, shouting taunts in Valk and Beorspeak and Eth, grasping for me with iron-tipped claws.
“Little bird.”
I sat up, clutching the bearskin to my chest. The Hall was cold and dark. The fire had burned to ashes and the light coming in through the high slits of windows was moonlight, not sunlight. Alastair snored next to me, his arm flung over his head.
A hand slid across my mouth. “Don’t scream, little bird. It’s only me,” Johanna said in my ear. Shock was the only thing that stopped me from biting her fingers. Shock, and the point of a knife as it slipped beneath my jaw. “Don’t make a sound,” she said. “I won’t hurt you, but we don’t want company. Understand?”
I nodded.
“Good. Now, come with me. Quietly.” Johanna released her hand but not the dagger and I stood, her blade following my every movement. “Outside.”
She prodded me onto the porch that ran around the Hall. Wind stirred the grasses around us. Mist lay like a thick white blanket over the marshes, but the sky was clear and the moon hung near the horizon. In its light the stripes of woad looked black against Johanna’s pallid skin. She had the same wolf pelt draped over her shoulders and her scabbard at her side. I pulled away when she lowered her knife. “What do you want?”
She gave me a long look. “You’re not one of us.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”
“You come in a Rider’s clothes, on a Rider’s mount, interfering in Riders’ business, yet you are not. Why are you really here?”
“We told you. We’re going to Lake Meera—”
“Not the dragonrider. You. Why are you here?”
“Because I chose to be.” Anger from last night, filtered through troubled dreams and exacerbated by my aching everything, conspired to make my head pound. I rubbed my temples. “Lady Johanna, you haven’t answered my question. What do you want from me?”
“I’m no lady.”
“Johanna then.”
“Shh!” She whirled around and faced the marshes, head cocked, hand on her sword. “Can you hear it, little bird? Listen!”
I forgot about answering. I forgot my anger too. It was the first time I had seen her back. Someone had carved a sigil in the skin below her shoulder blades, but this was no sigil of the fourfold faith. Deep lines spread across her back in a tree of scars, running from white to red near the tip of each branch. Some of them looked newer than the others.
The bleeding tree. Henry Brandon had sung of a symbol like that in Midwinter tales that had kept me awake for nights on end, staring at the ceiling and pretending I wasn’t scared. The Bleeding Tree of Rushless Wood.
“Madness, madness, and such ancient hate,” Johanna moaned. She clutched her head. “Ach! There’s something hunting in my mists, something old and foul and so very hungry. Oh, little bird, what have you brought upon us?”
“What are you talking about? I haven’t brought anything—”
She spun around, teeth bared. Her canines were filed long and sharp. “Don’t lie!”
“Johanna, I’m not lying! I don’t know what’s out there.”
“A nakla wouldn’t understand. Couldn’t. You’re not from our world. Magany!” Her beoryn ap
peared next to the stairs and Johanna leapt onto Magany’s back.
I watched until they disappeared into the mists before sinking to the edge of the porch. My knees had gone quite watery. What just happened?
“Yes, she is always like that.”
I jumped as Lydon Tam peeked out from around a piling below the porch. “Master Tam! What, ah, are you doing down there?” I asked warily.
“Keeping a weather eye. Johanna didn’t hurt you, did she?”
“She . . . no.”
He swung up onto the porch and sat next to me. There was a minute of uncomfortable silence, broken only by the tap of his heels against the piling. “You’re wondering if she’s entirely human, aren’t you?” he said suddenly without looking at me.
I blinked. That was not what I’d been wondering at all, but gods help me, I wondered it now. “I suppose.”
“Yes, she’s human, or as much as any Mauntell can be. By the look on your face I’m guessing you don’t know a lot about the Mauntells.”
“Last night was the first time I’d ever heard the name.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised. You southerners have your folktales; we’ve got ours. Though I think ours are darker.”
“Who are the Mauntells?”
“The guardians of Rushless Wood.”
My skin prickled. “You mean that mark on her back—?”
“Is the sigil of the Wood, yes. Family Mauntell has lived in Rushless Wood for longer than anyone can remember. It’s an old family with old blood, and not all of it human.” His solemn expression seemed odd and out of place on his boyish face. “Do you know how many Tekari live in Rushless Wood, Lady Daired?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“None. And very few Idar or Shani. Do you know why? The Wood is safe from the Oldkind because that family is the most dangerous thing within its borders.”
“Your mother would not approve of this kind of talk, Lydon,” a deep voice said, and Thummerrum stepped out of the shadows beneath the Hall. “You know she wouldn’t.”
“I’m not going to lie to our guest, bhraheg.”
“Nor should you, but these are family matters and with all due respect”—Thummerrum bowed to me—“Lady Daired is not family.”
“No,” Lydon said, seeing my reaction to the word family, “you needn’t worry. I’m no Mauntell, and neither are my parents. Johanna is their foster daughter.”
Thummerrum sighed and settled his massive chin on the edge of the steps. “Why do I even bother?”
“She ran from the Rushless Wood when she was a child,” Lydon said. “Our beoryns found her wandering along the borders of the Widdermere and brought her to my parents, who took her in and trained her up as a Rider. She bonded with Embardoben and Hurrummell’s eldest cub and, well, she’s been living with us ever since.”
“Did her family give her those scars?”
“We think so.”
“Some of them looked new.”
This time Thummerrum answered. “Once a year, in the weeks leading up to the Long Night, she returns to the Wood. Why she goes and what she does there we don’t know. Johanna does not speak of it, and if my sister knows, she will not tell us,” he said. “Magany doesn’t accompany her. Johanna returns with fresh scars.”
“We’ve learned not to ask questions,” Lydon said.
“And we have talked long enough on the subject as it is. Lydon, you should—what is it?”
Lydon had started to his feet and was staring out across the mists. The gray light around us had taken on the dead tinge of not-quite-dawn and my breath ghosted in front of my face. I hadn’t realized how cold it had gotten. The noise of distant splashing drifted toward us.
Thummerrum tilted his head. “I know that gait, Lydon,” he said. “Magany’s scared.”
A moment later Johanna and her beoryn hurtled out of the mist, sliding to a stop at the foot of the stairs. They were both breathing hard. Magany spoke to Thummerrum in Beorspeak as Johanna flew up the steps. Her face was streaked with mud and her eyes were so wide I could see the whites all around the pupil.
“Johanna?” Lydon reached for her. “What’s going on?”
She eluded his grasp and drew her sword. Marsh water dripped from the naked steel as she advanced on me.
“Johanna? What’re you—” I stumbled back as she raised her sword. “Johanna!”
There was a dreadful clang as Lydon threw himself between us. “What in Thell’s name do you think you’re doing?” he cried, blocking her blade with his own.
“She brought this on us!” Johanna cried. “She and her dragonrider!”
“What are you talking about?”
“The harbinger! They’re coming back, Lydon. All of them.”
Chapter 12
The Many Uses of Heavy Objects
Lydon lowered his sword. “You’re sure?”
“Yes,” Magany said from below. “We saw them coming a mile beyond the Broken Sedge. Valkyries and gods know what else. They’re not going fast, but they’re headed in this direction and they’re not stopping.”
“Wake Prudence and Roland and the dragonrider. We have ten minutes.” Johanna stepped back and sheathed her sword as Thummerrum went inside. “Maybe.” She leapt onto her beoryn and they loped off around the corner of the Hall.
Lydon turned to me. “What did she mean, you brought this on us?”
I opened my mouth to deny it, but a sudden idea stopped me. Something we brought. We’d brought nothing with us beyond the necessities—but what if it was something we hadn’t meant to bring at all? With no other answers it was worth a try. “Come with me. I need to show you something.”
Inside, Thummerrum stood with his head thrust through the curtain that guarded the elder Tams’ quarters. As he informed them of the advancing Tekari I dug through our panniers until I found the mysterious silver box. I unwrapped it and set it on the pile of furs, telling Lydon briefly how we’d acquired it. “You don’t know what’s inside?” he asked.
“No one could open it. Do you think it’s something the Tekari want?”
“I have no idea. Thummerrum?” His beoryn padded over, followed by two larger beoryns and a worried Roland and Prudence Tam.
Their approach woke Alastair. He blinked and sat up at once. “What’s going on?”
“The harbinger you escaped last night is returning, young master,” Prudence said. “They’ll be here soon.”
Alastair swore and leapt to his feet, wincing at the reminder of his injuries. Silently I helped him with his armor as the beoryns nosed the box.
“Can you tell what it is?” Lydon asked.
The slim, grayish beoryn grunted. “It’s a box. Made of silver,” she said.
“Nothing more?”
“Should it be?” said the other beoryn, a massive tawny male. “Embardoben, Thummerrum, come. The enemy approaches. There’s no time for idle musings.”
What slender tendrils of, not hope exactly, but a kind of desperate expectation, wilted inside me as the Tams and their beoryns retreated to the far end of the Hall to arm themselves. Alastair tightened his sword-belt with his good hand. Fear had washed the remnants of my anger clean away, leaving only a terrible sense of helplessness. I saw his weakened arm and bruised side and thought of dozens of valkyries descending to finish the job and knew that there was nothing I could do to stop it.
“Will you be all right?” I asked. Please say you’ll be all right.
“I’ve fought with worse injuries.”
“Akarra’s not far,” I said, as much to comfort me as him. “She’ll come back.”
“Pray she’ll come in time. Aliza, listen to me. Bar the door and don’t come out for anything. Not until you hear me or Akarra tell you it’s safe.”
“I will. I will,” I said again at his look. “You have my word.”
He pulled me close and kissed my forehead.
“Young master, you don’t think you could summon your dragon before they get here, do you?” Roland asked Al
astair as he joined them at the door.
“I’ll try, but I don’t know how far she’s gone. She . . .”
The door thudded shut before I could hear the rest. My hands moved of their own accord, fastening the locks and hefting a heavy plank across the door. As I dressed I tried not to imagine what Alastair and the others were doing outside, but the harder I tried, the more I imagined, and the worse the images got. For a minute I paced around the fire pit, fiddling with my dagger. Alastair’s whistled summons for Akarra were soon lost among the shouts of the Tams as they spotted the approaching Tekari, and I heard the rasp of swords being drawn from scabbards as they took their positions around the Hall.
Akarra, come back, come back, come back! If she’d nested within a mile of the Hall, surely she’d hear the sound of battle even if she hadn’t heard Alastair’s whistle. The Riders would only have to hold them off for a few minutes. Just long enough for her to fly to their rescue.
Claws scrabbled against the front wall, talons raking wood. I backed away as the door shook with a valkyrie’s effort to break it down, but the crossbeam held, and after a minute the valkyrie fell away with a squawk. Alastair grunted. The squawking fell silent.
What if next time it doesn’t? Out from under immediate threat, I pulled Henry’s notebook from my pocket and riffled through the pages until I found the passage about valkyries. “‘The killing blow to a valkyrie comes best from above,’” I read under my breath, and looked around. A gallery ran around the upper half of the Hall beneath the narrow windows. I tucked the notebook away and scrambled up the stairs, balancing on the moss-streaked boards as I made for the nearest window. The windowsill was scarcely wide enough to fit my hand, let alone my head, and I craned my neck and tried to see what was happening on the ground. The tawny flank of Master Roland’s beoryn flashed to the right. Johanna was a dark shadow to the left, hacking at the diving valkyries and shrieking her battle cry in a strange tongue. I didn’t see Alastair.
A face flitted in front of the window, white, bulbous, and fanged.
I screamed and fell back. A nixie squeezed through the window gap, followed by another, and another, until seven crammed onto the windowsill. They crouched beneath their translucent dragonfly wings, chattering to one another in Galeg and pointing at me, mouths open and grinning, each lined with needle-sharp teeth the length of my little finger.
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