With each step the melody grew stronger, until she cleared the peak and the valley gaped before her feet. Tauros’s flaming orb had already fallen behind the surrounding mountains, abandoning the valley to the ravages of night. But enough light still reached the fortress on the opposite peak to throw into sharp relief the solid lines of the enormous walls and tall, square towers, and the glint of weapons and armor on the ramparts.
Cadel-Gidhar still stood.
Birdie grasped blindly at hope and gloried in the sight, her gaze roaming across that monument of unbroken strength and impenetrable solidity from the topmost battlements down the mighty walls and into the valley below.
There, hope left her.
“Emhran save us,” Gundhrold rasped. “We are too late.”
Countless campfires transformed the valley floor into a web of blazing light, casting a hazy glow halfway up the mountain slopes on all sides. Though the night concealed the numbers of the gathered host, the campfires alone testified to a larger horde than Birdie could have imagined. Months ago, shortly after meeting Jirkar and Nisus, the dwarf twins, in Dunfaen Forest, Birdie had glimpsed the army that the Takhran was preparing to loose upon the Midlands. The sight had terrified her. But the army clustered in the valley before her feet could have swallowed that first army five times over.
And still hungered for more.
Birdie eased the axe from her shoulder and let its weight carry it to the ground. The head bit into the earth with a solid thunk. To think that after all their traveling, all the days of gritted teeth and stiff-legged endurance, all the cold and sleepless nights, they were simply too late. The Khelari had reached the stronghold first.
Cadel-Gidhar was under siege.
She stood still a moment, transfixed by the sight, then with an effort tore herself away. The griffin sat statue like at her side, chest outthrust, ears pinned back. The only sign of life came from his eyes as his gaze darted about the valley with the speed of a striking hawk.
“Perhaps . . . Yes, it may be . . . We may yet find a way through them.”
“To what end?” Birdie strove to keep her voice even, but the thunder of the melody in her ears made it difficult. “We would be trapped under siege like everyone else.”
The griffin studied her, seeming to weigh his words carefully as he spoke. “And yet the arrival of the Songkeeper could well turn the tide of the battle to come. Sieges take time if a fortress is as strong as Cadel-Gidhar. The numbers of the besiegers mean nothing if they cannot defeat the walls. And even then, the dwarves—particularly, the Adulnae—are fierce warriors. They may hold out long.”
“But can they win?”
“Perhaps if the Songkeeper joins them . . .” He sighed. “In truth, little one, I do not know what the best course of action might be. We are all blind here. I am simply trying to find my way through. Much like you.”
No doubt he meant the words to be comforting. But it was a cold and hopeless sort of comfort on a cold and hopeless sort of night.
Without a word, she turned and trudged back down the slope, dragging the axe behind her. She could feel the griffin’s gaze following her, but he did not call her back. Even so, she did not wander far. Only a few yards. Just far enough that she could no longer see the glare of the campfires in the valley.
Far enough that the dark melody was muted.
She dropped with her back to the trunk of a hallorm. Its knobby bark dug into her spine, and its web of branches tangled her hair with each breath of wind. The spring chill pierced her tattered cloak and lodged in her bones. Here, in these rugged Nordlands, she was even more grateful for the fringed-hide leggings of the Saari than she had been in the desolate winds and sandstorms of the desert. But she would have liked something heftier than the thin red tunic that hung loosely around her arms and billowed in the breeze.
She suppressed a shiver. At some point, the griffin came and stood beside her. She did not hear his approach, merely sensed the presence of his melody, but a moment later his wing settled around her shoulders, drawing her against the purring warmth of his side.
Somehow, there, she found her voice. “I’m just so tired, Gundhrold.”
“I know, little one.”
•••
Ky blinked the fog of sleep from his eyes and gritted his teeth over a yawn. Behind him he could hear the scrape of dragging feet, whimpering from the littles, and harsh whispers from the others. Right about now, he reckoned all the Underground runners were cursing his name. All through the day he had kept them walking, and now on into the night. They lagged farther and farther behind with each step. But one day was all Slack had given him. One day.
And he meant to make the most of it.
Even if they had to march clear until dawn . . . or beyond, if Slack would let him.
He sucked a ragged breath into his lungs and forced his legs to keep climbing. He must have looked like a drunken sailor, the way he staggered and weaved up the slope, trying to pick the easiest path through the scrubby heather and loose stones. Meli’s forehead thudded against the back of his skull, and her weight draped over his shoulders like a sack of apples, but somehow she was still fast asleep. Probably knew he would otherwise make her get down and walk, the sly little thing. Brotherhood only went so far. Especially in the Underground.
Meanwhile, Syd had a firm grip on his left hand and wasn’t above using Ky’s arm as a support to haul himself up rather than walk up the mountainside. The boy moved so slowly that Ky almost had to drag him, leaving him feeling like his body was being yanked in three directions at once. And all the while Slack trudged on at his side, hatchets stowed in her belt. She didn’t try to feed the rumbles of discontentment or seek to slow him down with arguments. Her silence would have been worrisome enough, even without the sly smile playing on her lips.
Most likely, she thought him already played out. He’d made his gamble, and she thought he couldn’t satisfy it. Might as well sit back and watch the cards fall and the pieces roll.
Fool’s Dice.
Ky gritted his teeth. He might be a fool, but he wasn’t done yet. Not by a long shot. This had to be the way to the Caran’s Fortress. “We’re almost there,” he muttered and felt Syd’s pace quicken just a bit, relieving some of the strain on his aching shoulder.
But at the top of the next slope, he found yet another rise beyond. And when they scaled the second rise, there was a third, even higher, rise waiting. By the time they neared the top of the third, the mutterings had grown loud enough that he could catch part of what was said. Nothing complimentary, of course. Lots about Cade and the old cavern and how it would have been better if they’d stayed in Kerby. But still Slack said nothing. Just smiled that sly smile of hers and waited.
Well, if she thought he was going down easy, she had another thing coming. Challenge or no. He swung around midstep, scanned the cluster of exhausted faces that turned up to him in frustration and hope, and raised his voice to carry down the line.
“It’s been a hard road since Siranos. But you’ve come farther and faster than I could have imagined.” He cleared his throat. He never had been much good at speechmaking, and knowing that Slack judged his every word and thought him a fool didn’t help. “But we still got a ways to go and no time at all to get there. So don’t give up now. You got to keep up. Keep up . . .”
Or get left behind.
There was no need to say more. The runners knew the ways of the streets by heart. They could fill in the rest of the phrase sure as breathing. It was the rule of the Underground. Cade’s rule. And now Ky’s rule as well.
Hefting Meli’s sleeping weight higher on his back, he turned and trudged on up the slope. But not before he caught Slack’s eye and detected a hint of something more beneath the smirk. A hint of respect.
Wasn’t much, but it was a start.
•••
“Time’s up, Shorty.” Slack pulled up short beside him, forcing the line of runners below to a halt. Pale morning sun softened the hard
lines of her face but did nothing to lessen the gleam of satisfaction in her eye. “Your day’s passed and more. The challenge is over. I win.”
Ky tucked his chin and trudged past her, limbs moving mechanically now as if they had forgotten how to do aught else. He didn’t stop. Didn’t acknowledge her. Didn’t say a word. Sometime in the long hours of the night, he had begun counting his steps, finding strength in the rhythm of monotony and in the challenge of striving to reach the next ten and then the ten after that. They had come so far in just one day, pushing on past exhaustion and despair, but there was no telling how much farther there was still to go.
“Oi, Shorty!” Slack called after him. “Time is up. Fair’s fair. I won.”
No. Ky whispered the word to himself and found strength in its resolve. Right or not, won or lost, he had no intention of stopping. If Slack wanted a fight, she would have to overtake him first. He hefted Meli higher on his back and tugged Syd on.
“Ky!” Slack’s voice broke off in a muttered curse, and a moment later her footsteps pounded up the slope after him. “A pox upon your plague-addled hide. You gave me your word.”
Something whirred past his ear and buried with a thunk in the trunk of a hallorm just beyond. He blinked the haze from his eyes, focusing on the blurred shape of Slack’s hatchet. That brought him to a halt, muscles trembling from the strain. Attacking him was one thing. But when he had littles like Syd and Meli with him? That was another. He grappled with wisdom and stubbornness and the cold burn of anger in his gut. Stubbornness won out. But not by much.
“I’m going on, Slack.” He spoke without turning, because if he didn’t have to see the triumph in her eyes, there was less chance he would lose the feeble rein he held on his anger. “And the rest of you are coming too. The Underground is my responsibility, entrusted to me by Cade. I mean to see you safe.”
“Well, it was a bloody mistake,” she hissed. “And if he was here now, he would see it.” She shoved past him, ramming her shoulder against his. Burdened as he was with Meli’s weight and Syd’s grip on his hand, Ky staggered and nearly fell. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her set a foot to the hallorm trunk and yank her hatchet free.
“I’m not going to fight you.”
“You will.” Her voice was as hard as flint, and she swung the hatchet in a lazy circle, casually lopping a handful of leaves from a sage branch. “You will, or you yield to me now.”
Ky ran a tongue over his dry lips. “I won’t yield. I can’t.”
A slow grin spread across her face. “So be it.” She took a deliberate step toward him, and Ky backed away, trying to regain some ground. There could be no avoiding it now. Like it or not, Slack would have her fight—and win it too—if he wasn’t careful.
“Fists only.” He heard his own voice from a distance. “No weapons.”
That brought Slack up short. Her eyes narrowed, and she scrutinized his face as if trying to decide if it was a trick.
“Weapons are too loud. Don’t want to attract attention.”
She nodded, a quick jerk of the chin. “Fair enough.” The hatchet fell from her opened fingers. “Fists only.”
Right.
Limbs shaking with weariness, Ky released Syd’s hand and dropped to one knee, trying to shake Meli awake so he could ease her to the ground without dropping her. But she always had slept like a rock. “C’mon, Meli. C’mon, c’mon.”
Syd tugged frantically as his sleeve.
Ky threw a glance over his shoulder. Never one to stand on niceties—like waiting until her opponent was ready—Slack was already on the move. With a beating only inches away, Ky wormed free of Meli’s form, dumping her in a heap in Syd’s lap. She woke up then with a squawk, head emerging from a tangle of limbs like a petra poking its head out of a burrow.
She’d be all right.
Ky scrambled upright and instantly had to duck so Slack’s punch merely grazed the side of his head instead of slamming into his nose. He dove out of the reach of her second swing, but she dove after him, and the next instant they were grappling on the ground. A whirling knot of flying limbs crashing into hallorm trunks, barreling through spiked sedge and prickly heather, and sending rocks cracking down the slope. He had one of her braids wrapped around his fist, dragging her head back and away from his, while her fist hammered his stomach—
A terrible roar filled his ears. Next thing he knew Slack was torn, shrieking, away from him, replaced by a fuzzy shape that peered down at him. He blinked, and the shape came into focus. Not fuzzy. Feathered. A strange face that was somehow both cat and bird, with great golden eyes and a beak like a spear poised over his throat. He blinked again, and recognition quelled the burst of panic.
It was the griffin.
“Ky, are you all right?” A girl’s voice now, breathless and anxious, but with a sort of musical undertone that was impossible to mistake.
He sucked in a breath. “Birdie?”
The griffin’s head pulled back, replaced a moment later by Birdie’s. Her dark hair hung in matted tangles around her dirt-stained face, and there was a pinched look to her brow, but her eyes gaped wide and luminous like the moon. It had the odd effect of making her look both older and younger than she was.
“You’re not hurt? We tried to stop the attack but couldn’t get down here quick enough.”
He jerked to a sitting position, wincing at the ache. “Slack! Where is she?”
“The angry one?” The griffin made a strange, rasping noise deep in his throat and gave a quick downward jerk of his beak. Ky followed his gaze and saw Slack trapped beneath the griffin’s massive paw, her voice muffled by the griffin’s wing.
From the look in her eyes, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.
He scrubbed his face with the palms of his hands. Out of the corner of one eye, he saw Birdie back away to stand beside the griffin. She bent to lift a hefty, bloodstained axe that had been lying concealed in the gorse, swinging it up onto one shoulder with the ease of familiarity.
The strangeness of that more than anything else jogged his mind and brought him to his feet. “It is you.”
After everything that had happened since he first blundered his way into this fierce war of magic and music, it didn’t seem such a strange thing to have stumbled across Birdie and the griffin here in the north of Leira, countless miles from the desert where he had seen them last. But if the drawn look to Birdie’s face and the raggedness of her clothes was anything to judge by, her path had been no less difficult than his own.
“What are you doing out here?” he asked.
Neither answered immediately, but after a long look in which some message was apparently conveyed and confirmed, the griffin spoke. “We were headed to the Caran’s fortress, Cadel-Gidhar, intending to join the dwarves in their fight against this evil tide of the Khelari.”
The Caran’s fortress?
Ky felt as though his lungs had just released a breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding since Siranos. He had been on the right track. “Us too.” He turned to include the rest of the Underground runners and only then realized that they had come up the slope and formed a semicircle at his back. That sign of support—weak though it might be—formed a lump in his throat. He grunted to clear it. “At least we were until Slack here decided to start a fight.”
And that earned him a grunt and a glare from Slack. He just shrugged. Maybe it was taking the coward’s way out, but now that the griffin was here, Slack couldn’t force him to fight or to keep his end of the fool’s bargain he had made. At last they were in the clear.
“It’s okay now. You can let her up.”
“You are certain?” The griffin darted a sharp look in his direction.
He wasn’t. “Sure.”
With a rumble of disapproval, the griffin removed his paw from Slack’s back. She scrambled upright and darted out of reach, eyeing her discarded hatchet but evidently not daring to match her speed against the griffin’s. First wise move Ky could recollect he
r making. Ever.
Slack opened her mouth, but Gundhrold fixed her with a stern glare, silencing her before she could speak. “It is well that it was we who happened upon you when we did. These mountains are no longer safe.”
“Meaning . . . ?”
Birdie answered this time, and when she spoke, Ky realized what had been troubling him about her. There was no life left in her voice. Even the light seemed to have faded from her eyes. She seemed little more than a shadow of the girl he had known. Once again he was left wondering what had happened to her since he’d left the desert. “Meaning that if you were headed to the Caran’s fortress, it is too late. Gundhrold and I were there hours ago, but we had to turn back. The Khelari got there first.”
The news struck like a punch to the gut, knocking the wind from his lungs.
“I knew it.” Slack rounded to face him, and she was no longer gloating, just angry. Rock-splitting, fire-sparking angry. “Cade should’ve chosen me instead. You can be sure I wouldn’t have led us on a wild tramp through the mountains only to leave us footsore and lost within the reach of our enemies!”
Ky searched for words but could find none. It didn’t matter anymore. He had proven himself wanting. Failed before he began. Cadel-Gidhar had been his one hope for a safe place for the Underground. Ever since Siranos, it had been his driving goal. Get to the fortress, see the Underground safe. But that had only ever been step one.
And without that, how could he leave the Underground with a clear conscience?
Slack was still talking, her face only inches from his own, and he found himself reflexively backing away. He couldn’t make out her words over the clamor of his own thoughts, but whatever she was saying must have been heated, judging by the ferocity of her gestures.
Then she was gone, swept aside by a stroke of the griffin’s wing.
Gundhrold cocked his head to one side, considering Ky. Up close, his eyes seemed like twin lakes of molten gold. “Sit,” he rasped, and Ky sat. “Wait here for my return and be silent. The night is spent, and so are you. I must seek a safe place to camp.”
Song of Leira Page 4