by JA Andrews
Will pointed at the runes. “These aren’t normal.”
“They’re ancient.”
“No. Ancient runes I can read.” He paused. “Sort of. These are different. I’ve never seen any like this.”
“I thought Keepers were brilliant scholars.” Killien’s voice was harsh.
“Most are. You captured the wrong one. But even if I could, I wouldn’t translate something called The Gleaning of Souls for a power-hungry Roven Torch.” Will shoved the book away. “So go ahead and kill me or whatever you have planned. Because I’m not helping you.”
“You do not understand—” Killien clenched his jaw. When he spoke, his calmness sounded strained. “I could kill you. But contrary to what you think, I’m not thirsting for the blood of my enemies. I’m looking for the quickest way to peace.”
Will let out a sharp laugh. “You won’t find that in a book by Kachig the Bloodless.”
When Killien spoke, it was quiet, spilling out onto the table like shards of ice. “I thought you might need convincing.” He motioned to the door and a guard stepped aside.
Ilsa walked in.
Chapter Twenty-Two
All the air left the room and Will’s body froze.
Ilsa gave the Torch a small bow and carried Will’s bag over to the table, never lifting her eyes off the floor. Her hair fell in a curtain across her face. Will opened up toward her and her nervousness rushed into his chest.
She set the bag down next to the table. Her eyes flicked up to Will’s face for the merest second, and he leaned toward her. She flinched away from the movement and his gut turned to ice at the spike of fear she felt. A guard took a threatening step forward.
“Thank you, Ilsa.” Killien waved her away, his eyes burning into Will.
Will started to rise, but the guard shoved him back down. Ilsa kept her head down and backed up against the wall.
“You’ll have to excuse Ilsa’s nervousness.” Killien spoke calmly, like he was discussing the weather. “Imagine her surprise when she found out she’d spoken several times with a Keeper. She’s relieved she didn’t anger you. She says you often seemed agitated.”
Will dragged his gaze back to Killien. “How…?”
“I told you that your books made fascinating reading,” Killien said.
Of course. His search for Ilsa had been written in his books starting long before he’d met the Morrow. She moved quickly back from the table and Will searched her face to see if Killien had told her, but she didn’t look like someone who was worried about anything as complicated as having a new brother. She was looking at him more the way one might look at a snake that might be poisonous.
Killien set his hand on Will’s bag. “They gave me so much insight into why you were on the Sweep. What you’ve been looking for all this time. I thought about keeping them for myself, but I’ve decided to let you have access to them, in case they are helpful to you while you work.”
Killien stood, leaning on the table until Will had to look up to meet his gaze. “Translate those runes, Keeper, or…” He let the threat hang unfinished.
Killien walked out the door, followed by Ilsa and the guards
Will dropped his head into his hands. It felt heavy, his arms hollow and shaky.
Killien had Ilsa. The thought stopped every other thing in his mind.
Whatever hope he’d had of freeing her from the Morrow crumbled to ash.
The gnawing fear of what Killien could do to her forced his head up. He pulled Kachig’s book closer.
The silver medallion was back on the cover, a drip of hardened resin running along the edge. Four daggers split the disk into quarters. Intertwined around the blades were strings of runes connected with thin, snaking lines. Or maybe they weren’t runes. There was something odd about them, something ominous. In the very center of the medallion, in a small square formed by the hilts, there was just smooth silver. Except it didn’t reflect light right. It was somehow both silver and dark at the same time, and that darkness made the emptiness into something horrible.
Will leaned forward, his gaze drawn along a path of the symbols. It pulled at him gently, but persistently. None of the runes were recognizable, and the daggers themselves were part of the path. A shadowy sort of haze fell over his mind and he wrenched his eyes away and flipped the book open.
The strange runes covered the page in faded black ink. There was no way he was going to be able to read this. He scanned the page, looking for anything he recognized. Each time he found one, age, exhaustion, coldness, death, there was something wrong with it. As though it had been broken and put back together with too many pieces.
Something scuffed outside and Lukas limped in the door, followed by Sini. She carried a large pitcher to the table.
“I don’t suppose that’s saso?” Will asked.
She shook her head, with a little smile and pulled a stack of small papers and a jar of ink from her pocket.
“Prisoners don’t get saso,” Lukas said. “Back away from him, Sini.”
“It’s alright, Lukas.” The girl added a short stub of a candle to the table.
“I’m not going to hurt her.” Will worked to keep his voice even.
Lukas set a book on the table and Will picked it up. It was a dictionary of runes. Lukas took a step and his leg twisted awkwardly. He grabbed the chair, a grimace crossing his face.
“I might be able to help with the pain—” Will stopped at the look of undisguised hatred Lukas shot him.
“Ah, the great Keeper will fix everything.” Lukas's knuckles whitened around the back of the chair. “You’re fifteen years too late to help me.”
Will lay the book down on the table, guilt snaking into him. “The wayfarers took my sister twenty years ago, but we thought it was an isolated event. No one knew they were still taking random children. If we knew—if the Queen knew—”
“Can you translate the runes?” Lukas interrupted.
Will fought against all the other things he wanted to say, before letting the topic of the wayfarers drop. “I’m working on it.”
“I for one, don’t think you’ll be able to.” Lukas turned and limped toward the door. “Which means Killien will kill you soon. I just hope it’s before I have to walk all the way out here again. Come on, Sini.” Without looking back, he left.
Sini gave Will a smile, half apologetic and half worried, and followed.
Queensland had failed these two. The Keepers had failed them. The wayfarers had been taking children all this time. He dropped his head into his hands, fury and impotence clashing against each other.
When he got home, he was taking this to the queen.
If he got home.
He forced himself to focus on the book again, and on the next page, one of the runes looked familiar. Grabbing his own bag, he unwrapped his books and flipped through one of them, searching through his writing for a specific page. Someone else’s handwriting caught his eye. Will had recorded what he knew about the death of Killien’s father, but underneath, in bold strokes, new words had been added.
Tevien, Torch of the Morrow, was betrayed by a man he trusted.
A man who lied about everything he was and everything he wanted.
A man who befriended him to sneak and spy and destroy.
Will let out a long sigh and flipped to a page with six runes he’d drawn down the side, each formed in the same sort of odd way as the ones in Kachig’s book. He’d seen them months ago embroidered on a robe worn by a stonesteep in Tun. Will had walked behind him for ages memorizing the shapes so he could record them. Next to them were written guesses at their meaning, but they weren’t good guesses.
There was a flutter at the window as Talen flew in and landed on the table, a mouse hanging from his beak.
Will ran a finger down the hawk’s neck. “Good morning. How do you like our new home?” He pulled his bedroll out of his bag and took it over to the bed. “There.”
Talen flew over to the blanket and picked at it with hi
s beak.
“Have you seen Shadow?” Will sat next to the bird. “Or Rass? I haven’t seen her since…” Before the goblin attacks. A little knot of worry for the little girl sat in his stomach. “Or have you seen Sora? She’s sharp enough to stay safe from Killien. Right?”
Talen let out a loud squawk.
“I wonder if I’m ever going to stop wishing you could talk to me.” Will slumped back against the wall. “This place is so…lifeless. I’m surprised you came back.”
Talen turned and launched into the air, flapping out the door of the hut, and soaring up into the sky.
Will stared after him for a moment. “Although I suppose this place isn’t as bad when you’re free to fly away.”
He trudged back to the table. There had to be a way to read these runes. He rubbed at his face, trying to push away his frustration and focus on the book.
Talen came back three times, bringing with him beakfuls of dead grass. The third time, Will followed him into the bedroom. Talen stood next to a neat little nest, looking at Will expectantly.
“I have no food.” Will brushed the back of his fingers down the hawk’s chest. “You know what would be useful? If you brought back something that had energy in it. Like living grass. Or better yet, a tree.”
Talen leaned down into his nest and nudged the stalks of grass around with his beak.
Emotions resonate. They don’t move.
Will considered the bird. He’d tried in the past to push emotions toward Talen, but maybe there was another way. He opened up toward the hawk and felt a nebulous pleasure that seemed to be focused more on the nest than anything else.
His finger froze against Talen’s chest.
Talen felt pleased about the nest. Because emotions were focused on something.
Will fanned his own emotions, trying to make them strong enough for Talen to notice, willing them to resonate in the little bird.
“Or you could find Sora. Because if anyone could get me out of this, it’d be her.” That was very easy to want. He let his need for her help grow until it filled his chest. “I need Sora.”
Talen shifted his weight and Will held his breath. The hawk twitched his head toward the other room and launched into the air. Will, stunned that it had actually worked, watched the hawk flutter to the next room—and come back with the dead mouse. He dropped it onto Will’s blanket.
“Or you could just keep bringing me mice.” Will leaned back and closed his eyes, exhaustion washing over him.
Talen let out a short, self-satisfied squawk, and Will heard him rustling in his nest.
The wall and the bed spun slowly underneath him. His body felt hollow except for a gnawing fear. He considered the fear for a moment, wanting to believe it was all for Ilsa. But it wasn’t. A healthy chunk of the fear was for himself. Because as sure as Talen was going to bring more mice, Will was never going to figure out these runes.
With a quick screech, Talen took off and flew out of the hut rising effortlessly out of the rift. Will had never wanted to fly so badly.
But Killien had Ilsa. Will pushed himself up.
Laying out some paper, he studied the first rune. A page of runes is like a story, Alaric liked to say. Each symbol interacts with the ones next to it, altering it slightly, changing the shape of the tale.
Except runes were nothing like stories.
He copied rune after rune, hoping to see something that made sense, but copying them was awkward. The lines were all too crowded. He flipped one rune upside down and found…something vaguely like tree.
This wasn’t getting him anywhere. It seemed unlikely that Kachig wrote something-like-a-tree, maybe-upside-down. Or why it sat between the almost-rune for winter, and the backwards—and embellished—rune for fish.
Will paused, studying that last one. Fish or disease?
Talen flew back in the door, and winged into the bedroom.
Will shoved himself away from the table. There was no way he was going to get even a single rune translated. He walked to the door and leaned against the wall, staring up at darkening sky.
Runes are like stories
Will let his head fall back against the hut. No, Alaric, stories were a series of events that took you someplace. Runes didn’t go anywhere.
He pushed himself off the wall. The rune didn’t move, but the pen did.
The room had fallen into a dark orange gloom. He set his finger against the wick of the candle and gathered a bit of vitalle from himself.
“Incende.” The candle flickered to life.
Talen had fallen asleep in the bedroom, his head turned backwards and tucked into his back, leaving him looking morbidly headless.
Will looked at the first rune. Instead of looking at the completed form, he focused on how the pen must have moved. There were two possible starting points. He picked one and drew the rune from there. A line down, more pressure at the top, lifting to gentle thinness at the bottom. A slope up to the right, a slash across. When there was no obvious next stroke, he lifted his pen, ignoring the rest of the marks.
Empty.
Clear as day, it said empty.
Or hollow. Or void. He couldn’t quite remember the nuance between the three.
That wasn’t important. At least not yet. He started on the lines left in the original rune. They began at the left, curled across and down before thinning again to a spidery line that connected to an accent mark.
Soul.
Will stared at the words, then back at the original rune. Kachig had intertwined soul with empty. The runes were stacked.
The empty soul?
No, empty wasn’t descriptive, the rune leaned to the side—an action. To empty.
To empty the soul.
Will moved to the next. It split into four. Stone, require/must, be chained, fire.
He split the next rune, and the next, until the page was full.
When he finally put down the quill, his hand was shaking.
Absorption Stones
To empty the soul, the fire must be chained in a stone. Drawing out (or washing out?) the fire (life?) leaves __________ (possibly ‘kill’, but more like ‘unmaking’ than ‘killing’.)
It went on, describing death and power and stones.
Will leaned back in his chair. This was what Killien wanted? Absorption stones.
And how could he possibly do it? There was no way he had a stonesteep with these skills hiding in the Morrow.
The candle sputtered out hours later. He stood and stretched, walking outside the lump of a hut. A swollen half-moon sat atop the cliffs, casting dim silvery shadows through parts of the rift and leaving most of it in blackness. Rising out of the east, the Serpent Queen’s shadow stretched up into the sky. Her shape seemed to grow out of the darkness of the rift itself, leaving him with the eerie impressions that this rift was something she’d already devoured.
A scuff sounded just behind him. He spun, casting out. The bright vitalle of a person stood only paces away.
“It seems I should have snuck you away from the Morrow a little sooner,” Sora said from the darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Sora!” he snapped, his heart slamming into his chest. “Why are you creeping around in the dark?”
“You’re not supposed to have visitors,” she said mildly, her voice almost agreeable. “Can we go inside?”
He blew out a long breath, trying to calm himself. “It makes me nervous when you talk nicely.”
When they’d stepped inside, she pulled a cloth off a small bowl in her hands and a dim orange light filled the room.
“You have glimmer moss?” He leaned closer. A small bundle of the luminescent moss sat submerged in water. “I’ve never seen any outside Duncave.”
“My people live in caves, Will,” she said, exasperated.
Despite everything, he grinned at her. “There’s your real voice.”
The moss glowed dimmer than candlelight, more diffuse and gentle. She studied him with a small wrinkl
e in her brow. “I thought you’d be dead by now.”
“So did I,” he admitted, sitting down. "How’d you get past my guards?”
She raised an eyebrow. “You think I can’t get past two lazy, distracted boys playing ranger in the dark?”
“Could you get me out?”
She bit her lip to hold back a smile. “I’ve heard you walk through the grass, Will. They could be unconscious and they’d still hear you.”
He tried to smile, but he couldn’t muster a real one. For a heartbeat, he considered the idea she’d been sent by Killien. But he couldn’t imagine her feigning friendship like this. With more than a little surprise, he realized he trusted her.
He took a deep breath. “Killien has my sister.”
She sank back in her chair and nodded. “He told me.” At Will’s surprised look, she added, “He doesn’t suspect I knew you were a Keeper. So far all of his anger is focused exclusively on you.”
“I just need to make sure he keeps it focused on me, not on Ilsa.” Will sank back in the chair. “I don’t think he’s told her yet. At least Ilsa didn’t seem to be trying to decide if I am her long lost brother.”
Sora gave him a half-smile. “I’ve known Ilsa the entire time I’ve been here. I haven’t been around her often, mostly because Lilit never warmed up to me, but we’ve spoken several times, and I like her. Lilit always has too, if that makes you feel any better. As far as I know, she’s been well-treated.” Her smile turned to a smirk. “And now I feel a little better about how horribly awkward you were around Ilsa all the time.”
Will ran his hand through his hair. “I needed to talk to her without scaring her.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I doubt she was scared, but she might think you’re a lunatic.” She sat back in her chair. “I can’t figure out how to get her away from Killien, though. Any more than I can figure out how to get you away from him.”
He pushed the next question out. “Does he have Rass too?”
Sora shook her head. “No one’s seen the girl since the attack.”
