I hurried to descend the boulder, suddenly nervous. I didn’t like leaving Tem and Lusha alone.
Mara had gone south. Alone, despite the danger—though, as he had pointed out, in his dismissive way, danger couldn’t very well be avoided, as it lay in every direction. He would go to Jangsa to see if there were any survivors. Then he would continue south to the Three Cities and tell the emperor what the witches were planning.
I hadn’t thought I was capable of feeling admiration for Mara. He hadn’t spoken a word of complaint, despite the fact that he had poor odds of surviving the long journey without the protection of a shaman. When he set off, Lusha followed at his side for the first few paces. They had stopped together briefly, speaking in low tones. Then Mara had carried on, growing smaller and smaller until he passed the brow of a hill and was gone.
Now we were only three.
I tried not to dwell on that as I marched back to the campfire. Eight of us had left Azmiri on a mission to save the Empire. And now it fell to Lusha, Tem, and me to finish it.
The ground beneath me gave a shudder, and I leaped back. But it was just the snow settling, not a crevasse opening to swallow me as it had swallowed Aimo.
My heart pounded. I didn’t trust the snow fields as I had before—now, whenever they groaned or shifted, I saw the blackness of the crevasse, Dargye’s face as he clutched the torn scrap of Aimo’s chuba. Death came so quickly in the wilds—it was something I had never understood before, when I used to run heedless with Tem over the slopes of Azmiri. Without warning or ceremony, it could snatch away someone you had known your entire life.
Our camp nestled between two boulders, which leaned drunkenly together, forming a natural shelter from the wind. I hurried toward the fire, shivering. The climb had warmed me, but it was still bitterly cold, particularly with the wind running its claws over the earth. At the edge of the light, I stopped.
Three figures sat around the fire, huddled together in conversation, their backs to me. Tem and Lusha—I would recognize either of them from a mountain summit—and someone tall and slender, with disheveled black hair.
He wore a tahrskin chuba.
My breath caught. I was surging forward, my heart in my throat, when Tem saw me. His expression was wary, but not alarmed. The man turned.
With a start, I recognized the heavy, brooding brow, the stiff posture. The light fell on his tahrskin chuba—the garb of one of the emperor’s explorers—revealing it to be old-fashioned in style and cut.
“Mingma,” I breathed.
“Kamzin,” the ghost said drily. The light glinted strangely off his skin, as if he were made of water. “I gather you aren’t overjoyed to see me.”
My mouth seemed to have stopped working. When I had last seen Mingma, he and his terrifying companions were attempting to drown me in a glacier-fed mountain pool, all acting under the power of a spell laid down centuries ago by the witches. I felt again the agonizing chill of the water, the thin fingers dragging me below the surface—
“He’s been following us since we left the Aryas,” Lusha said. “He won’t hurt us.”
“I’m sorry about that business on Raksha,” the ghost said. “As you know, I didn’t have much choice in the matter.”
“That business?” My terror was giving way, slowly but surely, to fury. “That business?”
“Kamzin,” Lusha said in a quelling voice. “Mingma has offered to help us locate the star—as you know, he spent more time in the Ash Mountains than any explorer.”
“He tried to kill me,” I said, emphasizing each word through my teeth.
“I also saved your life,” Mingma said. “You’d be a mound of snow on that mountain if it weren’t for me.”
I froze. I saw a figure silhouetted against a sky blazing with shooting stars, chuba rippling in the wind. I had been desperately lost. And like a familiar star, he had pointed me home—to Lusha and Tem.
I had thought it was River that night. Then, later, my own delirious imagination. But it had been Mingma.
“He didn’t have to stay,” Lusha said. “The other ghosts crossed over when the spell holding them on the mountain broke.”
“I thought you could use my help,” the explorer said, scanning the landscape with that clear, intelligent gaze, as if he were comparing his surroundings against a memorized scroll. “Though Kamzin less so, perhaps. I kept an eye on you as you descended Raksha—I don’t think I’ve seen a climber so skilled. You’d make an excellent explorer.”
In spite of myself, I felt my face warm at the compliment. I hid it behind a stony glare. “How did you free yourself from the spell? How can we be certain this isn’t some kind of trick?”
“When River broke the binding spell, he also shattered the one holding us on Raksha,” Mingma said. “I doubt he intended it, or even knew it had happened. The breaking of a powerful spell like that often has an effect on other, nearby spells, particularly one as old and brittle as that which bound us to the mountain.”
I glanced at Tem, who, as usual, had been quiet, listening as the conversation played out, his expression partly shielded by his hair. “What do you think?”
“It’s true that he isn’t under the witches’ spell anymore,” he said thoughtfully. “I was able to detect traces of it, but that’s all that’s left—traces.”
The wind played with Mingma’s hair—I found myself staring at it, marveling at how he could at once be there and not there.
“We’d be foolish not to accept his offer,” Lusha said in a pointed tone. “He knows the terrain. He’s mapped the terrain. He can help you navigate.”
“I don’t need help. I can find the way.”
“The nights are long here. Can you find the way in the dark?” Lusha sighed. “Kamzin. We need Mingma. We can’t move nearly as fast as the witches, but this gives us a chance.”
I felt backed into a corner. Even the sound of Mingma’s voice set me on edge, but what could I say? I thought of his maps of Raksha, which had guided me safely almost to the very summit. And Lusha was right—we needed to move fast. We’d already lost too much time.
“Lusha showed me where she believes the star landed,” Mingma said. “I can get us there by sunset tomorrow. I know a valley that will take us through the foothills.”
“Why are you still here?” I said.
He gave me a smile that was so easy and open I couldn’t help staring. In that moment, he was an entirely different person from the man I had met on Raksha, twisted by bitterness and a lifetime trapped in that bleak, inhuman place. Something in his expression had dissolved, like frost under the spring sun.
“I thought I’d have one last adventure” was all he said.
I gave him a long look. He returned it mildly. “Fine,” I said. “Just you. None of your . . . friends.”
I didn’t know what I would do if he didn’t agree—he was a ghost, after all—but Mingma took me seriously, nodding and gesturing to the map in Lusha’s hands. “I can show you the route now.”
I came closer, trying not to think about what I had just agreed to—being guided through a twilight landscape with witches lurking nearby, by a ghost who, only last week, had attempted to kill me. Mingma laid the map on the ground by the fire, sketching out the details of tomorrow’s hike. It would be grueling, but it seemed doable. I avoided leaning too close to the ghost as he gestured at the map.
“Have you ever tracked a fallen star, Mingma?” Lusha said. I gave her a dark look. I strongly suspected that her too-easy acceptance of the explorer was a veiled barb directed at me. We had spent much of the day arguing—despite my designation as navigator, Lusha remained largely incapable of adjusting to a situation where she was not in charge. She had challenged every change of course, every conclusion I drew from the maps. My musings about Tem’s knowledge of silencing spells had not been well received.
“Emperor Lozong sent me on several expeditions for that purpose,” the ghost replied. He was settled comfortably on the ground, leaning back on
his hands, as if he had been a member of our party from the beginning. In a way, I thought with a little shiver, he had been. “I never came close.”
“Then the emperor has always coveted them.”
“The emperor covets many things,” Mingma said.
“Lusha,” Tem said, “can you tell us anything else about their powers?”
Lusha frowned. She was perched cross-legged on a blanket, a dragon’s light spilling across her star charts. Her hair was in uncharacteristic disarray, and her eyes were shadowed. She had spent most of the previous night by the fire, poring over the charts. Despite her initial skepticism about my plan, she seemed to have dedicated herself—with her customary decisiveness—wholeheartedly to finding the star.
“As we all know,” she began, “shooting stars are said to be the spirits of ancient heroes.”
“As well as great villains,” Mingma said.
Lusha nodded. “Anyone who has had an impact on the course of history—for good or ill. Star showers like the one a few nights ago occur because someone on earth has changed that course. Altered the world somehow. When that happens, it’s said that the spirits of those heroes rejoice and dance across the sky. Some fall to earth. Those that do can be captured.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?” I said. “If it’s the spirit of some vicious barbarian lord?”
“There is that risk,” Lusha said in a chilly tone. It was a tone that had become more frequent since we turned north, always directed at me. At first I had thought Lusha was angry about my contract with Azar-at, but she hadn’t mentioned the creature again, or seemed to take any interest in its presence.
“Risk?” Tem repeated.
“It matters little,” Lusha said. “A captured spirit is bound to you and must do what you ask of it.”
“Like Azar-at?”
“Not really. For one thing, the star isn’t really a being anymore—it’s closer to a talisman than a person, and can be used as such.”
My brow furrowed. A captured star didn’t sound like a talisman at all—it sounded like a ghost held prisoner against its will. I looked at Mingma, but he was gazing into the fire with a fascinated expression, as if he had never seen one before.
In spite of my best efforts, my thoughts strayed to River. I saw him by the campfire, laughing. I saw him on the mountain, after the serac had fallen an inch from me, his face rigid with horror. In some moments, I was able to convince myself that it had all been feigned, but my conviction didn’t last. What would I do if I met him in the Ashes?
I drew my legs up and rested my chin upon my knee. The answer was simple enough, on the face of it—I would have to kill him. Or watch Tem do it.
A mountain pass, deeply shadowed under a dark sky—
I jerked my head up. Beside me, Tem murmured, “What is it?”
I crouched on the edge of a sheer promontory, rolling a handful of pebbles across my palm. Before me stretched a vast valley tucked between jagged mountains, blanketed with drifts of snow a hundred feet deep. A shooting star blazed across the night. I selected a single pebble—it was icy, coated with flecks of frost. Under my gaze, it began to smolder like coal, enveloped by fire that could burn any material, even solid stone.
Once the pebble grew bright enough, I casually tossed it over the cliff. It illuminated the valley as it descended. I ignited another pebble and launched it in the other direction.
Nothing.
I grimaced as I imagined Esha’s reaction when I came back empty-handed again. I stood and leaped off the cliff, my arms dissolving into owls’ wings—
“No.” I wrenched myself free of the vision.
Lusha and Mingma hadn’t noticed—their heads were bent over Lusha’s star charts. Tem’s grip was the only thing holding me upright. His face was bloodless. My hands tingled, as if River’s magic had coursed through them. The flame he had lit seemed to brush against my palm, feather soft.
“What did you see?” Tem said.
“They’ve reached the mountains. But they haven’t found it.” I swallowed against the nausea rising in my throat. “He—he’s still searching.”
Tem’s eyes narrowed. “How much time do we have?”
I shook my head. There had been a moment of freefall, before River transformed, and I felt that sensation now.
“Very little,” I said.
Eleven
River
THE LANDSCAPE GREW starker the farther they traveled. Trees gave way to snowy plains scoured by wind that stirred up an omnipresent, icy haze. Now they were in the foothills of the Ash Mountains, farther north than River had ever been as Royal Explorer.
It was not for nothing that the Ashes were called the twilight mountains. The stories of a land of perpetual night were exaggerated, but it was still a strange place. Dawn and dusk were longer here, and the stars never faded completely—River could see them now, faint behind the cerulean sky. It was as if the spirits that had once haunted the place had cast a net and drawn the stars closer.
The Ashes themselves were smaller than either the Aryas or the Drakkar Mountains to the west. But they were sharper, wilder, the winds having weathered them to dramatic points of snowy rock. They rose like the tines of a comb, their slopes close to sheer. In the foothills, subterranean springs melted the snow, creating pools of star-strewn water brushed with clouds of fog. It was a world of sky, above and below.
Though he would never admit it to Esha, River was enjoying himself. He sat atop one of the hills, examining the vertical terrain before him, which bristled with rock and ice. He felt the same stirring of excitement he always had when he visited a new place as Royal Explorer. It was a relief to be away from the Nightwood. River had forgotten how much he hated it.
He was going to find the star. He could feel it in his bones, a pulse of anticipation. He didn’t care much about the star’s mysterious powers—mostly, he just felt a juvenile urge to hold in his hands something that had eluded hundreds of explorers before him.
He held a bundle of string, twisted and stretched to form a pattern. He let the wind loosen several strands, and a new picture emerged.
“I don’t know why you bother with that,” came a voice behind him.
His concentration shattered. Without turning, he said, “What do you want, Thorn?”
“The same thing I wanted yesterday.” He sat beside River, carefully arranging his chuba. “We’re not going to find the star if you keep wasting time worrying about the weather.” He motioned to the divining strings.
“It’s more than that,” River said. “You should know. Sky used to read them.”
Thorn shrugged. Suppressing a sigh, River said, “They pick up disturbances in the atmosphere. Storms. Magic. Stars falling out of the sky.”
River pulled a small telescope from his pocket—a gift from the emperor, and one of the few things he had kept from his former life. He scanned the mountains. After a welcome moment of silence, Thorn gave a loud yawn.
“What does River Shara, Royal Explorer, need with divination?” His voice was lazy. “What about those celebrated instincts?”
River twisted the strings once more around his fingers. Thorn gave him a sweeping look, taking in his well-worn boots and tahrskin chuba, which, for reasons River didn’t fully understand, he was still wearing. The other witches, with the exception of Thorn, were barefoot and cloaked in rags. Thorn had made several barbed remarks about River’s human appearance, despite the fact that he was dressed in a similar manner. It didn’t trouble River, for he understood the source of Thorn’s antipathy, which was not disgust, but envy. He had long been fascinated by the pomp and finery of the emperor’s court, and was known to kidnap merchants from the Three Cities who strayed close to the Nightwood—not to torment them, though he no doubt enjoyed that as well, but to add their wares to his collection of trinkets.
There was a hardness in Thorn’s eyes, though he still smiled his languid smile as he stood. In his tall, polished boots and black chuba, he could have been a visit
ing aristocrat in the emperor’s court. “My lord dislikes being kept waiting. Why is this taking so long?”
River suppressed a grimace at the “my lord.” Thorn had always trailed after Esha when they were children—now that he was emperor, Thorn was practically kissing his feet.
“I’m flattered Esha places such confidence in me,” River said. “That he would think I could locate a fallen star in a vast mountain range within a matter of hours.”
Thorn made a low sound of disgust. River ignored him. He wasn’t trying to irritate his brothers—which wasn’t to say that he didn’t enjoy it. When the emperor had sent him after a star before, he had been given precise coordinates by Lozong’s seers. He didn’t have that now—he had nothing more than a vague description from the witches who had seen the star land somewhere in the Ashes. River might be able to move like the wind, but that was of limited benefit if he didn’t know where to go.
“Esha will not—”
“If Esha wants the star found more quickly, he can kidnap a seer,” River said. “As I’ve told him, I’m no expert in astronomy.”
River’s words stirred up a memory. Kamzin’s sister was a seer, a talented one—she had guessed things about River’s identity that not even the emperor’s seers had discovered. No doubt she would be able to track a fallen star. He wondered if they were still on Raksha, or if they had made it off the mountain and were now heading back to Azmiri. Either way, they wouldn’t be far—not for him. Lusha would have little interest in helping them, but River had no doubt Esha could find a way to convince her.
He gazed thoughtfully at the mountains. It wasn’t as if River had warm feelings for Lusha—quite the opposite. She had tried to sabotage his expedition. She had nearly destroyed everything he had been working toward for over three years. He felt nothing for her but animosity.
“Unfortunately, seers are in short supply in these parts,” Thorn said drily. “You’re the best we have.”
River pressed his lips together. He bent his head over the strings again. “So it seems.”
All the Wandering Light Page 10
