by Rachel Dunne
And the shades surrounding Scal began to form a line, a cheering line, a praying line, a line of hope and promise, and they were taken to the stage one by one. Their arms held but not restrained, eyes staring up into the dark and sunless sky. The constant crackle of prayer. The knife. The rush of red across the rough-cut timbers. Another body laid out before the stage. Another person led forward. The line never faltering. The fervor in their eyes never dimming. Again. And again. And again.
Scal shook his head. Blinked into the flames, and all the bodies were lying down. None standing, none praying, and there were no shades beside him. Only his people, his followers. At his side Vatri stared deeply into the flames, as though trying to pull meaning from them. She was always looking, and it seemed she never saw what she hoped to see. Scal, who had never seen a vision in the flames, did not expect that he would find any more meaning in this place.
“They are still near enough,” Scal said, shattering the silence, the stillness. Heads swiveled to face him, wide eyes and fear. “This was not done so long ago. The preachers will see what we have made of their work.” Smoke from the fire rose high into the sky, the charnel-house air blotting out the stars. “They will run.” He looked over them all, and the fear was not gone from their eyes, or the anger, or the grief. He looked to Vatri, and he left his question unspoken.
Shape me, he had asked her, and she had, and she still was. She had made him, and named him, and he would do as she asked.
He saw the jerk of her throat as she swallowed hard. The firelight carved the scars on her face deeper, making her features into a mask from a sculptor’s nightmare, so that she hardly looked real. But her eyes. They were as scared, and as angry, and as grieving, as all the others. So human that it almost hurt to look. “We will find them,” she said. Her voice never wavered when she spoke, whether surrounded by joy or surrounded by death. “We will show them the Parents’ justice.”
No one cheered, and no one argued. Only gave their silent acceptance.
“We can’t leave them.”
It was Edro who said it—Edro who was always seeking a fight, always seeking glory. But he stared at the pyre, and there was something in the line of him that Scal did not recognize.
There was reason to stay. Such a large fire, left unwatched at the heart of a forest, could be a deadly thing. It had been too long since they had slept. Their stores of food were low, and could be replenished in the village. There was reason enough. But, truly, the only reason that mattered was that Edro was right: they could not leave the dead yet. Could not leave them alone in their fate.
And so they sat before the pyre, and the village was silent, and the village was still.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Most of the pack had never been outside the city before Joros had rescued them, and that had only been a short trip beyond the walls before they’d found another set of walls to cower behind. It meant that those who had chosen to follow Aro, and by extension Joros, were even worse than simple country bumpkins. The pack panicked at every sound on the road, and their first instinct on seeing another human was rudeness because that was how one treated Not Pack.
It nearly got them lynched at the first town they came to, where Harin laughed outright at the admittedly silly custom of burying two eggs each moon-pass that the townsfolk had come up with to bring the sun back, and where Trip walked around gleefully nicking from every pocket and pouch he could reach. Joros had to herd his new flock away before the angry mob turned murderous, and when they made camp early, he spent a good amount of time shouting at them. “We could have slept in beds,” he told them, kicking the leaf piles they’d be using as pillows, the rotting logs they’d pulled up to sit on around the fire, “at a warm inn, with ale and wine and fine company. Instead we’re here.” His shouting, though, only made them shout in turn.
Aro finally dragged himself far enough into sanity to explain in simple terms that even the pack could understand: townsfolk were like pups—stupid and wrong most of the time—but they should be treated like pack. People on the road should be treated like newcomers to the pack—good enough to have been allowed into the pack, but dangerous because they didn’t yet have ties or connections or a reason not to start stabbing anyone; accepted, but worthy of mistrust. Joros grumbled an amendment that if they met anyone on the road, the rest of them should just keep their mouths shut and let him do the talking.
As luck would have it—or whoever that bitch Luck’s cruel and petty brother was—the next moon-pass offered them a chance to test the pack’s obedience.
Harin, who as far as Joros was concerned had well earned her position of eye, was the first to spot another group of travelers approaching down the road. She nearly sent the others into a panicked race for the woods until Aro, sane enough, reminded them in a furious whisper how to act. So the pack walked stiff-legged as cats ready to fight—and Joros almost did the same when they drew close enough that he could see that all the other travelers wore black.
Shit, he thought, and plastered a smile on his face.
There were four on the approach—few enough that Joros’s group outnumbered them nearly two to one, which was a reassuring thing, but nothing about the Fallen would ever truly reassure Joros.
“Good night to you, Brothers and Sisters,” one of the preachers called out when they were within reasonable sight—sight for normal people, anyway, since the preacher had removed her eyes.
“Hello,” Joros said neutrally, keeping a sharp eye on them on the approach. The three preachers made no untoward moves, and neither did their guard, a solitary blade for the darkness, and no mage in sight. Joros stayed to the right edge of the road, his group lined silently behind him, and the preachers stayed to the left, and they passed without issue.
Joros looked over his shoulder at the four preachers’ backs, and he softly asked Harin and Aro and his four others, “How many of you have weapons?”
Joros was used to the comforting structure of a plan. A single goal to achieve, with clearly chiseled steps leading up to it.
The last few months of his life, though, had taught him how to adapt. Still, he’d gotten better at “turning with a punch,” as one of his older brothers used to say. He could look at the stepping-stones of a plan crumbling ahead of his feet, shrug, and find a hidden back staircase. He’d find whole webs of hidden staircases, if he needed to.
He had to have a plan. So long as he held on to his goal, he wouldn’t have to face the fact that he had nothing.
The steps beneath Joros’s feet now were the uneven skeleton of a staircase stretching up to the shining goal of destroying the Twins. Months ago, all that uncertainty would have driven him into a rage. Not now, though. Dealing with the pack had taught him how to hold his anger by a leash—ready to be released only when productive. He had at least begun the trek toward his goal, and for now, that was enough. He would keep climbing the steps so long as they held his weight, confident they would solidify into certainties, confident they were being built from the top down.
The only step that held his weight was that fewer Fallen could only make future steps stronger. He held one of the seekstones in his palm, and trusted that his chosen path would eventually, somehow, prove to be the right one.
This seekstone’s partner belonged to the one he’d dubbed “the walker,” who’d been weaving throughout the northern part of the country since Joros had obtained the seekstone. The walker had gone curiously still in the last handful of weeks, though. Not entirely still, for when he used the seekstone’s sight, Joros saw feet and faces and a dull village, but the walker was no longer walking. The walker seemed to have settled, for some reason, in a village buried in the forest that bordered the Highlands.
And Joros aimed to find out what had made the walker stop walking. He’d find out with the point of his sword, and make sure the walker could never walk again.
The others thought it a fine enough plan—they were at least doing something different from bumbling around the
estate, and they kept commenting that the air seemed to be doing Aro good. The boy still looked like shit, but Joros let them have their little lies.
Joros made a show of taking Aro aside whenever they made camp, leaving the others to make a fire and food, to lay out bedrolls and blankets, to set watch shifts. The brilliant thing was that none of them complained about it, they were so concerned for Aro’s health and so certain that Joros was helping it. If the boy was in a sane state when Joros took him aside, they would walk and talk of inconsequential things, what Joros called a prescription of normalcy to offset all the abnormal Aro had been forced to deal with over the last few months. If he was in his madness, then Joros would sit and sharpen his sword and tell the boy of cleansing fires and sharp deaths and a path stretching to the sun.
The forest swallowed them and made foraging harder but hunting easier. Trip got sick from eating undercooked rabbit, and halted their progress for two moon-passes while the others nursed him back to health like grandmothers. Aro was no help—he’d learned to knit bones and keep a heart beating, but he couldn’t figure out how to purge a disease from a belly. He wept and apologized, and the others coddled him as much as his sister ever had.
When they went back to fussing over Trip, Joros took Aro into the trees. He told the boy to hold his palms up, and indicated the healing tissue marring Aro’s left palm, where the boy had driven a dagger repeatedly into his palm. “Why did you do that?” Joros asked.
Aro frowned like he was seeking the trap in the question. “To . . . to keep myself sharp. To stay focused.”
“Indeed. And I’m unsurprised you proved an insufficient teacher for yourself. The lesson didn’t stick.” Joros ordered Aro to create a ball of soft-glowing light, floating in the space between them. When that was done, Joros pulled out his sword, and holding it in one hand and the back of Aro’s hand with the other, he drove the tip into the center of the scar tissue. Aro’s scream was delayed, and though he tried to pull his hand away, Joros held him tight. The ball of light winked out a moment after the scream began. He watched the boy’s eyes for a flicker of that deadly spark, but he wasn’t worried—Aro had spent his whole life suppressing the fire that boiled within him, letting it loose in only the most desperate situations. Joros had no intention of killing him, and so he strongly suspected the boy would return the favor.
Aro was already learning the lessons it had taken Joros years to grind into Anddyr.
Joros pulled his sword back and commanded, “Heal.” The disconcerting slackness flowed through Aro, his scream stopping and his eyes going blank as he sought to comply. Still holding to the back of his hand, Joros watched the blood flow stop, the flesh knit, the skin seal over cleaner and smoother than when they’d started. Just as Joros had thought—the boy hadn’t bothered to heal himself at all.
The lack of instincts was good in some cases, and frustrating in others. Joros ordered him to make the light again, and drove down his sword again, and was unsurprised when the light flicked out again. “You must learn to stay focused,” Joros said as the boy healed himself once more, and the next time the light stayed for longer.
By the end of an hour, Aro could stare at Joros and, breathing hard through his teeth, hold the light steady no matter how deeply Joros drove the point of his sword.
Anddyr, when they’d left, had shouted something raving about Joros driving Aro to lose his control. But Anddyr had coddled the boy just as much as any of the others. The boy didn’t need a kind and gentle teacher—he just needed to learn.
The road wound through the forest, a circuitous path, but so long as it kept going in the general direction of the walker, Joros was far more inclined to stay on it than to stray from it. It led them through the occasional village, where they could replenish their meager store of food and gather what little information there was to be had. The Fallen roamed the country, spreading the word of the Long Night, trying to seduce as many as they could to their side before the promised and swift justice of the Twins swept across the land. Everyone was waiting for someone else to stop them. It was no different from anywhere else in Fiatera.
Finally the seekstone’s persistent tug brought them to the village where the walker had stopped walking. Joros prepared his people in advance: he had Harin scout out the best vantage points and posted one of his people in each of them, bringing only Aro into the village with him.
Joros walked down the road as it ran through the village, trusting to his feet as he gripped the seekstone, its tug leading him, the walker’s sight blurring before his eyes. He stopped when he saw his own hip through the walker’s eyes, and he blinked down to find a girl frowning up at him. Her black hair was done up in two plaits that wound around her head like a crown, Highlands blood written in her sharp features, and she wore a pale blue frock with yellow ribbons knotted down her right arm.
Joros opened his palm and held the seekstone out toward her, squinting through the double vision it gave him, the girl’s image of Joros layered over his of the girl. He asked, “Do you have something that looks like this?”
Her face shifting into a variety of incredulous circles, the girl pulled out the matching seekstone. She’d wrapped a thin piece of leather around and around it so that it could hang around her neck. Likely she thought it made her look more adult.
“Where did you find it?” Joros asked her. One of his back teeth made a faint groan as he ground his jaw.
Her voice was high, even younger than he expected. “The Nightbreaker shrine.”
Meaningless babble. Joros put his seekstone back into his pocket so that his sight was his alone. “Show me.”
The girl led him out of the town, the rest of his pack falling in from the trees. The girl startled at each new one, but despite that she walked with a straight-backed fearlessness as she led them off the road and into the trees that shut out the sky. She grinned when Aro made a floating light—this close to the Highlands, she would be no stranger to magic. Joros almost smiled, too, for Aro had done it unprompted.
Though the forest was thick, and the undergrowth grabbed at his clothes, Joros began to notice that the girl was not choosing her path randomly—the ground beneath their feet was packed solid, a trail made by deliberate walking. The girl led them in silence, but Joros, behind her, could see that she clutched her seekstone with both hands, and that her lips moved in what he guessed was a silent prayer.
The trail ended at a wide clearing that Joros imagined had been a holy place even before this—the tree that stood at the center of the clearing was massive, its trunk wider around than Joros could have reached if his arms were twice as long, and he thought its spreading canopy might have blotted out the sky as thoroughly as the thick forest. The canopy was gone now, letting the stars stare down upon what was left of the tree—little more than the blackened trunk, a few skeletal branches reaching toward the sky. Posies of flowers were laid upon the scattered ashes that ringed the trunk, along with the occasional glint of coins or trinkets.
The girl walked across the clearing to kneel before the burned tree, and her high voice carried back clearly. “This is where the Nightbreaker saved us.”
Joros made her tell him all she knew. The Nightbreaker was a mighty warrior wreathed in flame, whose sword glowed with the power of the Parents. The Nightbreaker traveled through the Long Night like a star upon the earth, and he and his woman brought hope everywhere they went—hope, and justice. Preachers had been harrying the girl’s village, and the Nightbreaker had killed them, here, with his righteous fire. “We celebrated him more than we did when Gerin come back from the Academy,” the girl said, “and when the Nightbreaker and his woman left town to take their justice to more places, my auntie was one of the ones to go with them. All of us who were left, we come and found this place, where they killed the preachers and saved us all. People come from all around, even as far as Bentriver, to pray here and give thanks to the Parents for sending the Nightbreaker to us.” She tugged at the seekstone around her neck, running h
er fingers over the corded leather and the smooth pieces of stone that poked between. Joros felt a flare of something between revulsion and animosity, to think that she might have inadvertently seen through his own eyes. “I was here praying one day when I seen something in the ashes. I picked it up and I . . .” Her eyes filled and overflowed with tears. “I know I shouldn’t’a taken it, but it didn’t seem like tribute, it didn’t seem like something anyone would’ve left here, and I didn’t think anyone would miss it . . .”
Joros loosened his grinding teeth. “You should know the Parents are always watching.” He managed not to snap the words, and he held out his hand, palm up, toward her. “They don’t reward thieves.”
Sniffling harder, she pulled the leather cord from around her neck, and shakily released her white-knuckled grip so that the seekstone fell into Joros’s palm. He held the seekstone by its cord, and stretched his arm out now toward Aro; the boy stared and then, hand shaking as badly as the girl’s had been, took the seekstone and put it around his own neck. With Rora safely contained back at the estate, Joros couldn’t afford to lose this half of his twins. However he was to take down the Twins, he would need his own twins to play their part. Like calls to like.
Joros stood, his pack rising around him. Aro was the only one who looked shaken by the crying girl; the rest knew better. They would have hardened themselves to the world years ago, or had it forced upon them. All of them would have seen so much worse than a single sad girl. And if there was a pack rule Joros had learned, it was that one had to care for their pack, to the exclusion of everything else.
The ground was solid beneath his feet. It shifted, like steps stretching up toward the sun, firm enough to hold his weight.
He spared the girl a final look, and asked, “Where will we find the Nightbreaker?”
Chapter Twenty-Four