Among the Fallen

by NS Dolkart

  Something touched his shoulder and he spun around, his heart pounding. It was Phaedra. “I was starting to worry you wouldn’t make it,” she whispered. “Let’s get out of here.”

  They picked their way around the house until they were sure they could not be seen from either the house or the barn, then picked up their pace. The moon was bright enough that they were able to find their way with little trouble, breaking from the road once the farmlands and tukka orchards gave way to true forest. Hunter kept looking back in case they were being pursued, though of course they weren’t – if nobody had noticed them leave, they weren’t likely to be missed till morning.

  But for all that they had a tremendous head start, he worried about Phaedra’s slow pace. She had grown used to traveling with a limp, but that mostly meant that she stopped to rest and stretch her muscles far more often than he’d have liked. He took the time during one of these breaks to find her a good walking stick, but though she seemed to appreciate it, it didn’t much improve their speed. They walked on.

  The hardest part came when the initial excitement and anxiety of their escape finally wore off, and they were left sleepily plodding along, trying to keep their eyes open and focused and to get just one more mile farther away, and then another, just past these trees and after that, those ones. The night winds were chilly at this time of year, and all Hunter wanted to do was to curl up in some reasonably dry place and fall asleep.

  At long last, when Phaedra had decided that they should go no farther that night, they curled up back to back on the most level patch of ground they could find and passed swiftly into unconsciousness.

  When they awoke, a familiar face was staring down at them.

  24

  Phaedra

  Phaedra blinked, trying to place that face. It was a skinny continental face with close-set eyes and long brown hair, and it belonged to a girl who must have been at least a year or two younger than Phaedra. Where did she know her from?

  “I know you,” Hunter said to the girl. “You’re from that village that Psander took in! How did you get here?”

  “She sent me through,” the girl said. “She wanted me to get some things to help her fight off the elves.”

  “Like what?” Phaedra asked.

  The girl looked uncertain, as if she thought Psander might not have wanted her to say. “Like what?” Phaedra repeated.

  “Like relics from your lives. You islanders. She said you’d been to the elves’ world before and survived, and if I brought her some of your things she could use them against the elves.”

  For a moment, Phaedra just gawked at her. Psander meant to use relics from the Tarphaeans’ lives – from her life – to fight the fairies? How was Phaedra supposed to feel about that? Except, obviously, she wasn’t supposed to feel anything about it. She wasn’t meant to know.

  She vaguely remembered having fed this girl, back when Psander’s villagers had all been sick and weak from the wizard’s overreliance on their latent magic. Psander had made them pendants that siphoned off unused magical potential and used it to buttress her wards, and upon the islanders’ last visit they had found the villagers too weak to stand.

  “Have you all recovered from the pendant-sickness, then?”

  The girl nodded. “Mostly. Psander had us take the charms off after we got to the world of elves, so she could look them over and make some changes. They don’t make us as weak anymore, and we also don’t wear them all the time – we go one week on, two weeks off, in cycles. It’s not so bad now, and if it keeps the elves away, that’s worth more than anything we could give.”

  “How have you held them off?” Hunter asked. “They even knew you were coming!”

  “They didn’t know where, though,” the girl said. “We had a few days before they found us, for Psander to turn her wards around.”

  “Turn her wards around? What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. It’s what she said.”

  They went silent for a time, until Hunter pointed out that they had to keep moving if they were to stay ahead of Mura’s men. The village girl was confused. “Psander said the island would be empty when I came.”

  Phaedra explained the situation, and that ended the questions. They fled deeper into the forest. The girl followed them, occasionally consulting with a map she had brought with her. It was a strange sort of map that seemed to be marked differently every time Phaedra glimpsed it. It was made out of a patchwork of five or six pieces of cloth sewed together. Just over half of it was covered with signs and squiggles that shifted as they walked, but the other almost-half seemed to be permanently blank.

  “Those are your pieces,” the girl explained when she saw Phaedra looking. “They’re all supposed to go empty like that when I’m close enough to something of yours. These two parts must be from the two of you.”

  “I see.” The material this map was made from looked familiar somehow… Ah, that was it. They were patches of bed sheet. Psander must have made this map out of the linens the islanders had slept under when they came to Silent Hall. It was poetic magic, just as Phaedra had suspected: Psander was looking for relics from the islanders’ homes, so she had used the material she had that was closest to being their home at Silent Hall. Phaedra would never have thought to have done that, but it made fine sense now that she recognized it.

  “What’s your name?” she asked the girl.

  “Atella.”

  “Did Psander choose you for your name?”

  The girl looked confused, though she shouldn’t have. Atel was the God of travelers and messengers, and it was too fitting for a girl named after Him to be sent back to this unfamiliar place to seek and find relics of its native children. There might have been some magical benefit to sending a girl with a name like that. But then, perhaps you had to be a student of magic to recognize such things.

  “How are you going to get back to Silent Hall when you’re done here?” Hunter asked.

  “I’m supposed to find my way back to where I came through, and if I’m in time it’ll open for me. I’ve only got eleven days to find everything and get back, or Psander said I could be lost for years.”

  Elevens again. Phaedra wished she could make them all add up. Everything that had to do with the world of the elves seemed to come in elevens, but there was no rhyme or reason to it as far as she could tell. Perhaps Psander could explain it all, if she had mastered the theory of elevens so quickly.

  “We’ll go back with you,” Phaedra said. “It’ll save you time finding things to represent me and Hunter.”

  That, and it would get them away from Mura.

  “Thanks,” Atella said. “I hope we can get back in time.”

  Phaedra smiled reassuringly at her. “We will.”

  It was an incredible, overwhelming relief to think that Psander might once again save her and Hunter from their enemies and pursuers. Phaedra had thought that she and Hunter were trapped on the island for good this time, but now there was the possibility of leaving this world behind and seeing Psander again! In eleven days, she might sit in Psander’s library and learn how the wizard worked her magic without the support of a patron God.

  So far, the magic Phaedra had done was more similar to Mura’s terrible rituals than anything else: just as Mura seemed to rely on Karassa’s blessing for his power, so Phaedra had relied on God Most High. Their magic was at best an amplification of their prayers, a way to get more attention from their respective Gods than they might have warranted otherwise. Yet this was obviously not the way Psander worked – she didn’t have to rely on some God’s favor to disguise herself, or to summon a flame, or to make her fortress invisible. Phaedra wanted to know how she did it.

  On the other hand, what if it was this non-reliance on Them that had turned the Gods against the academic wizards, after a centuries-long tradition of tolerance? Perhaps magic was supposed to rely on the blessings of Gods, and it was the decoupling of magic from worship that had both empowered and doomed Psander’s co
lleagues.

  They followed Atella’s shifting map until another of its patches went blank, in a part of the forest that looked like any other. There were guardian trees here, and a healthy undergrowth of plants that Phaedra could not identify – she had never been that interested in plants. She scanned the trees and forest floor for any reason for them to have stopped. What could be here, among the guardian trees, that could be called a relic of the islanders? It must be something of Bandu’s, but what? What significance did this place have? Was it the place where she had met Four-foot? The place her father had left her when he first brought her to the forest to live or die without him? Was it the place where the fairies had first abducted her, some eleven years ago?

  Atella didn’t seem to know any more than Phaedra did. She turned round and round, looking lost. “What’s here?” she asked despairingly.

  “I don’t know,” Phaedra said.

  Hunter beat about in the underbrush, looking for anything that might be hidden among the vines and bushes, but it was no good. There was nothing there to be found.

  “What do we do?” Atella asked.

  “Take some of everything,” Phaedra suggested. “Some dirt, some bark, some leaves and twigs. If we leave without what you’re looking for, Bandu’s part of the map will start working again, won’t it?”

  The girl looked relieved. “I think so. Oh, thank you!”

  She pulled her satchel around and began harvesting little pieces of their surroundings. “We’d better get moving soon,” Hunter pointed out. “Mura can’t be that far behind us.”

  “Do you think we could try to find a road again?” Phaedra asked. “If they’re tracking us, they won’t still be on the roads anymore.”

  “It’s worth trying,” Hunter said. “Besides which, I’m not Criton – I can’t catch us a dinner with claws and fire. We can try throwing rocks at birds, but I think we’ll have better luck foraging around the old towns.”

  He was right. The three of them proved completely incapable of hunting for themselves, and the little streams they found along their way were not deep enough for fish, though their water was sweet. They walked in the direction they thought most likely to lead to a road without taking them back toward Mura’s outpost, but they found none that day, and broke for the night still surrounded by trees. Atella luckily had brought dried meat, hard bread, and cheese with her on her journey, but it was meant to last her a week and a half, and they had to share it in tiny portions to make it last. They settled down to sleep still desperately hungry, shivering in the cool winter night and listening to the howling wolves.

  The wolves made Phaedra think of Bandu and her wolf Four-foot, who had died of an infection so short a time after saving the islanders from Magor-worshipping highwaymen. Phaedra had always found the wolf terrifying, but she knew how Bandu loved him, and she loved Bandu. She missed the other girl, her generous soul, her insight, and even her infuriating lack of understanding about the norms of civilization. Bandu would surely have felt at home here, and Phaedra would have felt at home with Bandu.

  It was too hard, having all split up like this. Phaedra had lost her first family, found a new one, and now lost that one too. Would she ever see Bandu or Criton or Narky again? She wished she knew what they were all up to, or at least that she could have gotten some assurance that they were all still alive. Who knew what had transpired in her absence?

  She thought the wolves might be getting closer – their howls seemed to be becoming louder and louder. She prayed to God Most High to protect her, Atella, and Hunter while they slept. But her prayer felt hollow, so she got up and scratched it into the ground all around them with a sharp rock, reading it through three times, both for the power of the repetition and to make sure she was satisfied with her wording. That would have to do, she decided. She was a novice at magic, but Criton’s God had shown them such favor so far that hopefully He would forgive her amateurish work.

  They awoke the next morning and moved on, coming at last to a path that led them to a village. The village square was full of bones, where villagers had died during the divine plague and then been preyed upon by birds and wild animals. Some skeletons were mostly intact, others scattered by the rougher scavengers who had fed upon their flesh. The blackened bones of a ram still lay upon the altar in the center of the square, grinning at them.

  They went into the houses, looking for the stores of grain that had never seen another sowing season. It was an eerie feeling, walking into other people’s houses unannounced, knowing that the owners were inevitably among the bones outside. They found what they needed, though, and spent most of the day grinding flour and baking hard bread for their journey. She thought that would still give them enough time to collect everything Atella needed – from what Phaedra knew of Narky’s past, his village couldn’t have been more than a day or two away. With Psander’s map to guide them, they ought to reach it with still five or six days left before their eleven-day window closed. That ought to give them just enough time to get back to Karsanye for something of Criton’s before returning to the forest and, hopefully, Silent Hall. The only trouble was that Mura and his people still existed, and, unless he gave up and turned back, might catch the three of them at any point along the way.

  They left the village that evening and soldiered on despite their lack of rest, stumbling down the road weary and half asleep. They were glad they did: after dark, they spotted a light no more than a day’s journey behind them. Mura might not have reached the village tonight, but he surely would tomorrow morning.

  How many men could he possibly have with him? Presumably he had left his captives behind with overseers to guard them, and taken a small group to track down the escapees. He would kill them when he found them, that much was certain. Hunter wouldn’t give up without a fight, so he would die first, but Phaedra would be sacrificed and her ashes harvested for more spells. She had no idea what they’d do with Atella. Probably the same.

  They didn’t sleep at all that night. When Atella tried to sit down and rest, Phaedra snatched the map from her and kept limping on, forcing her to rise and follow. Mura and his men would be much faster than them – the only way to outpace them was to never ever stop.

  By midday the next day, Phaedra was seeing things she was pretty sure weren’t there. The fairies on their horses, pursuing them through the woods – that was a memory, right? But she kept thinking she saw or heard them, riding toward her and the others with their sky-nets and elvish sickles ready for slaughter.

  By early evening, when they arrived at the village that Atella’s map indicated as Narky’s, Phaedra could have sworn the skeletons in the yard were moving. She shied away from them as she passed through, afraid that they might snatch at her. The map led them just out of the village before Narky’s corner went blank.

  “I don’t understand,” Atella said, tears streaming down her face. “There’s nothing here but a clump of trees.”

  Phaedra’s vision was blurring too, and her eyes kept closing. She slapped herself in the face. “There has to be something. Narky isn’t like Bandu – places aren’t important to him. Whatever’s here, it’s concrete.”

  Hunter nodded. “I’ll look in the trees, you look on the ground. Atella, check that stream over there.”

  “Where?”

  Hunter blinked a few times. “Sorry. Just help Phaedra look on the ground, then.”

  This would have been much easier had they slept before their search. Phaedra kept finding things that struck her as full of significance, only to realize a moment later that they were simply rocks or sticks or blades of grass with interesting coloration. She crawled about on the ground, examining every pebble and trying not to be fooled by her own imagination. Even when she found what she was looking for, she almost ignored it on the assumption that it wasn’t really there.

  But it was there. No matter how many times she blinked or felt it with her fingers, she had found the front half of a crossbow bolt. Someone had snapped the thing somew
here near the middle and flung it away – the other half must be around here somewhere. Phaedra knew what it was, and she knew why it was important: it had been pulled from someone’s body after Narky had put it there.

  “I have something!” Phaedra cried. “Come here. We need to find the other half.”

  “It’s an arrow?” Atella asked, looking confused.

  “A crossbow bolt,” Phaedra corrected her. “Find the other half.”

  She did, lifting it out of the grasses a few minutes later. “So this is it? This is what we’re here for?”

  “This is what we’re here for.”

  Phaedra didn’t tell her any more than that. Hunter seemed to have figured out the bolt’s significance on his own, but it was not the sort of thing one said aloud. They knew that Narky had murdered someone, probably not long before they had met him. They had learned it not from his mouth but from a prophecy, one that had referred to Narky as he who was murderer. Narky had been the one to point out the other verses’ resemblance to the five islanders, but though Hunter had claimed to believe that he himself was the murderer for the things he had done in self-defense, Phaedra thought he must have realized the truth by now. Narky had fled his home after killing someone; that was why he had been so desperate to get on the boat that took them to the continent. Here then was the crossbow bolt that had turned Narky into a murderer, and saved his life.

  “So,” Hunter said, rubbing his eyes. “So. What… how are we supposed to get to Karsanye now? Our enemies are between us and where we need to be, we haven’t slept – there’s no way I can fight them off. What do we do?”

  Phaedra sighed and looked around. A dark cloud was coming across the island from the east, promising rain and maybe lightning too.

  “We go back the way we came,” she said. “And we pray.”

  25