The Shattered Sun

by Rachel Dunne

  Neira led them, since she was the only one who knew where they were going. That hadn’t sat right with Joros—he still didn’t trust that she’d spent so long as a zealot and now wanted to destroy the gods she’d loved. He thought Neira was still loyal to the Fallen, if not the Twins themselves, and that she’d lead them right into a trap and handily destroy the biggest resistance against the Twins. Neira’d stared at him in her empty way for a long while as more and more smoke boiled out of her, slow but deadly dangerous, and everyone else had started sliding away from where the two of them were facing off. “I’m not,” she’d said, and Joros hadn’t brought it up again. So that put Neira leading their group, and no one else had any complaints to make about it.

  Pacing in the courtyard before they left, Neira’d said, “We’ll have to move quickly, but we must do our best to remain unseen.” The dark out there in the courtyard hid her trailing smoke well enough. Seemed like she was having a harder time keeping control of it now that she was so close to getting what she wanted. “I’ll do what I can to help with that, but we cannot let word of us reach the Fallen. If you see any preachers, if you even think you see black robes . . . do not think, do not hesitate. The Twins cannot be warned of our coming.”

  Aro put up one of the witch-bubbles to keep everyone hidden, even though it made him sweat and shake the longer he held it, even though he started to look as bad as he’d looked before he and Joros had gone away. He held up the bubble, though, even when they stopped to sleep, and he held it while he slept, too. Maybe his time with Joros had actually helped him. Still, even with the bubble, most everyone kept quiet as they went, because careful was better than dead.

  “Three days, at most,” Neira had said, baring her teeth in a grin. “They’re so very, very close. Three days until we can put a stop to the liars.”

  Three days was all. It felt like a year, and at the same time, it felt like blinking.

  Rora made her way to Scal’s side sometime on that first moon-pass traveling, and for a while they just walked quiet together. But the silence stretched out until it had to break, so Rora said, “I’m sorry about your cloak. The bear one. I lost it somewhere along the way . . .”

  Scal’s shoulders rose up and fell back down. “It was not mine.”

  Awful weird thing to say, since it sure as shit had been his, but Rora let it drop. “So what happened with your, ah . . . your atoning? How’d you end up back with the merra?”

  “Aardanel is gone,” Scal said, talking about the prison camp in the North where he’d chose to stay. “Aardanel will always be a place of the dead.”

  Both times she’d seen Aardanel, the prison camp buried in the North, it had been burning or burned, and all the prisoners had talked about how the place was always getting attacked. Sounded like that had happened again, only with Scal around this time, but she was guessing even he wasn’t enough to keep the place from getting attacked. By the look on his face it’d gone pretty bad—he was always hard to read, but it was in little things like a muscle in his jaw and the lines around his eyes. “Sorry,” she said, looking down at her feet.

  “I am sorry,” he said, “for your brother.”

  “Yeah.” Rora kicked at a stone, sent it skittering down the road. Everyone up ahead turned to glare at her, and she glared back until they went back to their own business. Why had she bothered coming to talk to Scal at all? She should’ve known better than to think she could get anything like a story out of him, and his silences and funny ways of talking just made her feel . . . stupid, somehow. Like she should be talking more to say something that’d interest him enough to talk, or she should talk less to not embarrass herself, or she should give her words half the thought he did before he ever opened his mouth. She knew Joros had always thought he was just a big dumb Northman, not good at anything but killing, and it seemed like Scal was happy enough to let people think that. But it wasn’t true. And maybe she’d gone to find him because there was damn near no one else in all this group she could talk to, and talking at someone was at least better than silence. And maybe if she talked at him long enough, she’d find the thing that’d make him really talk back. “I just want to get this all over with,” she said. “We know what we need to know, we know how to do it, we’ve got the people for it. But now we’ve got days and days of walking before we can do anything. I just . . .” She trailed off, opening her empty hand like the right words would fall into it.

  “Want to be done,” he finished for her after a moment.

  “Yeah. It’s the waiting that’s hardest, y’know?” Rora rubbed her hand against the hilt of one of her daggers—the plain one, the one Tare had given her when she decided Rora was all trained up, was ready to take her place in the pack and be her own person. “You ever feel like all your life is just waiting? Waiting for things to start, waiting for things to end, waiting for things to happen?”

  He took his time to answer, same way he always did. “All of life,” he finally said, “is waiting to die.”

  “You’re in a right cheerful mood, aren’t you?”

  He looked at her then, the kind of look she wasn’t used to getting from him. He wasn’t the sort for eye contact. But that look reminded her that his people called him the Nightbreaker, that he had the power of the Parents in his hands, that he’d been touched by the gods. It reminded her that Scal had always been different, but he usually wasn’t ever wrong. “You sound like a person who is waiting to die.”

  And that touched awful close to all the things Rora wasn’t thinking on, close enough that she pulled up a quick smirk and a snort, the same sort of instant, unthinking reaction you got from a cornered cat. The kind of reaction that was supposed to prove you weren’t feeling threatened, even as you were looking desperately for any kind of escape. “Well, you’re like someone who’s already dead.”

  “Perhaps.” He turned his heavy look away from her, thankfully. Rora wondered, again, why she’d even wanted to talk to him. Back when they’d traveled together, it’d always been like this. He always said things that sounded dumb but cut deep. He always said things she had trouble forgetting.

  Rora faded back without saying anything. He didn’t stop her from leaving, and didn’t look at her again. They just parted ways, like they both wanted to pretend they’d never talked at all.

  All those months ago, when Joros had talked the Dogshead into helping him and the Dogshead had convinced him to find the pack a new home, they’d left the big city of Mercetta behind and gone out into the countryside. The same roads they’d taken then were the ones they took now, winding their way slowly back toward the center of the country, back in the direction of the capital city.

  Rora recognized these roads well enough, even in the dark. It almost felt like she was heading home. It almost made her want to go back in to Mercetta, to go back to the place she’d lived all her life.

  You sound like a person who is waiting to die.

  Rora clenched her fist hard enough to dig her nails into her flesh. She’d bit the nails down to almost nothing, but they could still cut if she squeezed hard enough.

  Neira stopped all of a sudden, staring ahead down the road. The fingers of one hand drew shapes at her side that made Rora’s head spin until she looked away. Neira said softly, “There are a lot of dead people there.”

  They’d all heard the stories: how it was chaos inside Mercetta, the city guard holed up inside their towers to keep safe from the mobs outside, people stealing and killing in the streets without fear, people eating corpses just to survive, and some horrible disease tearing through the city. Some said the king had been hauled off his throne and dragged outside and beheaded on the steps of his own palace; some said it was commoners that’d done it, while others said it was his own bodyguards, and still others said it’d been the Fallen, that they’d had people hidden inside the king’s court for years. Rora heard that all the gates of the city had been sealed shut, but no one was sure if it was to keep people out, or to keep the cityfolk in.
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  “Probably a lot of living people still, too,” Joros said. “We’re better off avoiding it.” Still, he didn’t start moving them forward. He didn’t seem too eager to face off with Neira again.

  She sighed. “Yes,” was all she said, but her hand stopped drawing shapes, and she led them off the road, angling away from the city.

  There was a big abandoned barn off the road where they stopped to sleep—the same barn they’d spent a night in when the pack was leaving Mercetta. It was the place where Rora, still loopy with blood loss and shock from getting her ear cut off, had made up some dumb fireside story to try to explain to Tare why she’d left without having to actually talk to Tare. They made new fires on the ashes of those months-old fires, and Rora sat with her arms wrapped around her knees and didn’t look at where Aro was sitting, and half wondered if another dumb, made-up story could fix anything.

  Sometime in the night, Rora got up to piss, talking to the door-watch before she felt her way out into the darkness. She was about to head back in when someone behind her said, “Rora?” and she was glad she’d already finished pissing or she might’ve embarrassed herself.

  With the starlight and her panic, it was enough to make out Aro standing there. She couldn’t see much of his face, but she could see he was looking down at the ground. “Shit,” she said, pressing her hand over her pounding heart, “you scared me.” And then she remembered she wasn’t talking to him.

  “I’m sorry.” He sounded like he was talking around a mouthful of rocks or cloth, the words thick and jumbled.

  “’S fine.” Rora made a sharp motion with her hand and stomped past him. She didn’t like being scared, and she didn’t like being tricked, and she didn’t like her brother all that much anymore neither.

  Aro grabbed her arm as she went by, which was real dumb of him, because she’d always been so much stronger. She twisted out of his grip easy as breathing—and then he grabbed both her arms, hard, and leaned down so their faces were close together. His eyes were as wide as worlds, and he was crying. “I’m sorry,” he wailed. “I’m so sorry, Rora. It wasn’t me, I didn’t—none of it should have happened, and I should have stopped it.”

  It wasn’t often Rora froze up, but she did now, staring at her brother’s sniveling face just a few inches away from hers, wondering all her whys and hows as he babbled. He was so broken, maybe broke beyond fixing, and if she could just—

  No. That wasn’t how it worked anymore. He didn’t get to ruin everything and then come to her with big eyes and tears and let that fix everything because he knew she’d always bend for him. She’d always done everything to keep Aro happy and safe, and he’d learned a long time ago how to use that against her.

  Rora unfroze. Close as they were, she didn’t have the space for a good punch, but she drove her knuckles into the spot below where all his ribs came together. It was a good place for hitting, drove all the air out of him and sent him stumbling back. There was that hot feeling in the back of her nose again, all unexpected—she could count up to the number of times she’d ever hit her brother, and it made her feel just as terrible now as it had all the other times. “It’s too late for ‘sorry,’” she said, mostly because if she was talking maybe that’d help her keep the tears inside. It didn’t work as well as she’d hoped—her eyes were starting to burn. She spun away from him before he could see, before seeing him made her break, too.

  “I’m going to fix it,” he called after her as he got his breath back. “Rora, I’m going to make it right!”

  Rora scraped at her eyes before she reached the barn, and the door-watch didn’t say anything, just let her back in. She found her corner, already far away from anyone else, and wedged herself into it tight as she could, curling up so small she felt like maybe she’d just disappear.

  They saw it the second moon-pass, but only because of how the moon disappeared.

  Once they knew to look, it was easy enough to pick out: the faint moonlight outlining the tip of a mountain against the sky. Only they weren’t near anywhere that should’ve had mountains, and there’d never been a mountain there before.

  “They wanted a new Raturo,” Neira said. “A new home to rival the old one. Proof that their power was not false.”

  It was hard to tell with the distance and the poor light, but it didn’t look like the new place was near as impressive as Raturo. Unless they were still days away—and according to Neira, they weren’t more’n half a day—this mountain was a lot smaller. Still spooky as all hells, and Rora hated it right away, but it didn’t make her guts clench like they had when she’d seen Raturo.

  Smoke whirled around Neira like angry hands. “You see how they lie,” she hissed.

  They kept on going toward it, back on the roads now that they’d got past Mercetta without anything terrible happening. The mountain got bigger, but only slowly, like one of them was sneaking up on the other one. Rora was still so damned sick of the walking and the waiting. It felt like having something sharp stuck in your clothes, that you couldn’t find no matter how much you dug and patted, but the second you stopped looking for it it poked you again. They were so close, Rora could actually see the end, but there was still waiting to go.

  Scal’s people made for good scouts, ranging up ahead, to the sides, and behind, keeping sharp eyes and reporting back if there was any trouble. Rora’d thought about joining them for a while, because that was stuff she could do well enough, but in the end there didn’t seem like a lot of point to it. No sense in making friends for the three days they’d be traveling. No sense in looking for a different purpose when it was almost time for her real job to start.

  You sound like a person who is waiting to die.

  One of the scouts came back to report there was a town up ahead, and the whole group stopped. They’d avoided all towns so far, avoided anywhere even a small group of people might gather. This close to where the Fallen lived now, a town could be real good news, or real bad news. “Didn’t seem like a lot happening there,” the scout said doubtfully.

  Neira looked grim, and some of the black smoke had started to lash around her hands and feet, if you knew to look for it. The words she muttered sounded an awful lot like “Dead town.”

  Joros frowned between Neira and the scout. “Go back,” he told the scout. “Take a few others with you. Get as close as you can.”

  “What’m I looking for?” the scout asked, started to look almost more spooked by Joros’s words than by Neira’s smoke.

  “Just see what you see, and tell me what you find.”

  Scal was one of the ones to go with the scout, no matter how angry that made Vatri, and Rora felt herself actually smiling a little. It didn’t last long, though, because once Scal and the scouts left, it was just a lot more waiting.

  They were back before too long, and the looks on their faces said everything. “Just like Beston,” one of them murmured, and pressed the back of his hand against his mouth. Rora had a hard time getting her head around an entire town being dead, but it looked like it wasn’t the first time Scal’s people had seen such a thing, nor Neira either.

  Into the grim silence, Neira said, “We’ll be safe there.”

  Vatri went right to angry, same way she always did. “You’re mad,” she snarled. “If the Twins have murdered an entire town, I won’t disrespect its people by—”

  “She’s not wrong,” Joros interrupted, and he just sounded so tired. This whole trip was the thing he’d been working toward since before Rora’d ever known him, and he hadn’t managed to look anything close to pleased since he’d got back with Aro. Maybe he felt the same way Rora did, and that’d be the first time ever. You sound like a person who is waiting to die . . . He said, “That town is the safest place for us to be. The Fallen have already taken what they need from it; they have no reason to go there, or pay it any attention. We can use that to our advantage.”

  Neira just smiled.

  And so they went to a town of the dead. Neira said that was how the
Twins worked—they had power and fear on their side, and the Fallen knew how to use those weapons well enough to turn entire towns into willing sacrifices for the Twins. Willing sacrifices gave the Twins the most power, that was what Neira had told Rora, and people who were scared of the Long Night, who were going mad without the sun, would be desperate for the promise of something better. They’d be easy to persuade, and they’d be the perfect sacrifices.

  They left the dead where they lay, in neat rows on the village green, just past the last line of houses. They didn’t want to draw any attention, in case the Fallen passed by. Edro raged for a while about not being able to put them to rest, until Neira demanded, “How would you do it? How would you see them honored?”

  “They were followers of the Parents before the blasted Twins came along,” Edro growled. “They deserve a proper funeral, a burning as—” And he stopped, and looked toward the outline of the mountain, much closer now.

  “Exactly,” Neira said shortly, and turned her back on him.

  The leaders gathered in the longhouse that’d served the town for exactly that sort of meeting. Rora locked eyes with Harin, who was maybe the closest thing to a leader out of anyone of the pack who’d come with, but Harin shrugged and looked uncomfortable. She wasn’t really any kind of leader, and she knew it. Rora stared at the longhouse, where Scal and Vatri and Edro had disappeared, where Joros and Aro were heading toward. The pack should have some kind of representation. No one stopped her from walking through the door, and Joros was the only one to frown at her.

  They gathered around a table, everyone else sitting while Neira paced, everyone trying to ignore when her smoke crawled over their feet as she passed by. She muttered to herself, but it didn’t seem like she had much to say to any of them.