“But you understand them?”
“Often, but not always. My mother spoke their language best.”
Eda saw her own mother, dead between white sheets, and shuddered.
Morin’s brow creased. “What’s wrong?”
“The gods take. They take and take, and give nothing in return.”
He studied her, his dark eyes seeing deep. “Nothing at all?”
His question hung in the air between them as Tainir appeared with a brace of rabbits hanging from her belt. She greeted Eda and Morin, then skinned the rabbits with neat efficiency. Morin turned his head away, looking more than a little green, but he was the one to dump the meat into their little cooking pot.
Eda was relieved when the ayrrah returned, anxious to get back into the air, to reach Tuer’s Mountain before Rudion found her again. She brushed one hand against the side of Filah’s head. “Let’s chase the wind, swift one. I think we could catch it.”
She flushed when she realized Morin was standing close enough to hear her.
They flew on, west and a little north, on the heels of the falling sun. Eda found herself glancing over at Morin, and tried to parcel out the reasons why. He confounded her, this boy who drew maps and talked to eagles, whose grief was as large as her own and yet had not made him turn away from the gods.
She was glad when the ayrrah set them down for the night on a flat rock ledge bare of trees or brush, then took to the sky again to find nests for themselves. Tainir scrambled down the cliff, like the mountain goat Eda began to suspect she actually was, in search of dinner, leaving Eda and Morin alone once more.
The last rays of the sun vanished and the stars came out, gleaming and bold in the vast inky sky. Morin let Eda build the fire, and she was pleased to have absorbed his instructions from earlier well enough to get a good blaze going. She helped him lay out the trio of bedrolls, and then crouched on her heels to watch him finish the map he’d been working on in the mingled light of the flames and the stars.
“Not nothing,” she said after a while.
He looked up from the map, a question on his face.
“What you said before,” she explained. “You were right. The gods don’t always give nothing in return.”
His eyes were dark pools of memory, of grief. They seared through her, down to her soul. “It is our choices that make us, Eda. What we choose to do with the things the gods give us.”
A gaping discomfort opened inside of her. “What have you chosen?”
He answered without hesitation. “To take you on this journey. What have you chosen?”
She couldn’t answer that. She looked away.
“Eda.”
She glanced back. He put down his brush, paint staining his hands. He leaned toward her, grazed hesitant fingers across her chin. Wet spots of paint clung to her skin in the places he touched.
“What have you chosen?” he repeated, his face mere inches from hers.
“Death. I have chosen death.” Niren’s, first. Tuer’s, soon. She jerked up and paced away from him, hugging her arms around herself in the freezing wind. He didn’t follow.
Lightning crackled on the distant horizon, and for a moment the wind smelled like rot and worms. Fear cut through her.
But the next moment the sky was dark again, and the scents faded to nothing more than smoke from the fire and the icy mountain air.
Tainir appeared with two squirrels, stepping past Eda with a brief glance at her chin and a raised eyebrow. Eda flushed hot, rubbing her hand against the place Morin had touched her over and over until she felt sure the paint was gone.
Then there was dinner to make and eat, and the moon was halfway up by the time they’d finished. Just like last night, no one seemed in any hurry to crawl into their bedrolls, so Morin made more tea, and they all sat around the fire.
Tainir began to sing, a quiet thread of melody that was almost more like a sigh than a song. Glints of gold danced around her lips, and when she raised her hands more appeared, echoes of the fire glimmering on her fingers.
Morin noticed Eda’s stare. “There has always been magic in the mountains. Tainir feels it, in a way I’ve only ever felt when I’m speaking with the ayrrah. Our mother was like that, too. She never came to harm, until now.”
“You want to bring her back, don’t you?” said Eda.
Grief touched his face. “The dead are the dead. It isn’t my place to bring her back. But I would like to see her one more time. My father, too. I’d like to know they’ve gone to their rest, that they’re not suffering. That they’re together.”
“And you have faith that the gods will … let you see them again?”
He shrugged. “Perhaps.”
She kicked at a clod of dirt. “Does Tuer often send you visions? Do you always do what he tells you to?”
“I never vowed myself to him, if that’s what you mean, but the gods have always been part of my life. I go up to Tal-Arohnd on feast days. I bring offerings to the temple. I listen for Tuer’s voice. He never spoke to me, before the other day, but I always knew he was there.”
A knot pulled tight inside of her. “How?”
“I just do, Eda. I can sense him, watching over his mountains, watching over his people.”
“You still think he’s benevolent, even after everything I told you?”
Morin sprawled out on the stone ledge, propping his head up on one hand. “I think you only know one side of him.”
“And you know another?”
“It seems I have heard different stories than you.”
“Tell me one,” Eda challenged.
Morin glanced up at the spangled sky as Tainir stopped singing, her glance passing between the two of them.
Morin shut his eyes. “When Tuer first saw Raiva, she was so beautiful he thought that she must have been born of the Stars themselves. In a way, he wasn’t wrong. Raiva alone of all the gods and goddesses had touched the Stars and not been burned—save Caida, who was the Stars’ keeper. Their light had sunk into Raiva. Become part of her. And so she was the embodiment of light and truth and beauty. Tuer didn’t know it then, but love woke like a flame inside of him, and the more he knew her, the more it grew.”
Eda kicked at the dirt clod again. Morin clearly wasn’t telling a thinly disguised story meant to flatter her. She was no Raiva, and no one would ever think that about her. Ileem’s face rose unbidden to her mind, and she bit back a curse. If anything, she was like Tuer. Selfish. Possessive. Guilty.
“She was gentle and wise,” Morin continued, “and yet also fierce as a flame. She taught mankind music under the shadow of the Tree, and she mourned the falling of it, the division between them and the gods. She withdrew, for a time, to her great wood, where she watched mankind from afar and sang every night to the lesser stars the songs she had learned at the beginning of time.
“From deep inside his mountain, Tuer heard her sing, and he took to emerging every evening to better hear her. He could see her shining among the trees, and, little by little, he began to descend from the mountain and venture into the wood.
“One evening, he came very near to where she was, standing ankle deep in a pool of water, her face tilted up toward the sky. She turned and smiled at him, then bowed very low. ‘Won’t you join my song, my lord Tuer?’
“‘My lady, I do not know it,’ he replied.
“‘Then I shall teach you.’
“And she did. When he had learned it, they sang together, and their voices were like starlight and earth, strong and bright.
“‘Come again tomorrow, my lord,’ said Raiva. ‘The wood is beautiful, but I am lonely.’
“And so the next day he came, and the next day and the next. Always she looked for him, and they sang together. Sometimes they sat and took bread in the shadow of the trees. Sometimes they drank deep of the wine of wood and earth. Sometimes they simply were with one another, content each in the other’s presence.
“Raiva’s heart warmed to him, and she knew that
she loved him, as she had seen the men and women of the earth love each other. But she saw in him a great and heavy sorrow, and it grieved her.
“‘My lord,’ she asked. ‘What troubles you?’
“The god of the mountain bowed his head into his hands and wept. ‘You were there,’ he said. ‘You saw my greatest sin. You were there the day I slew the man Tahn, who stole the seed from the Tree. It was I who began everything: death, time, sorrow. It was I who put to naught everything the One meant for Endahr to be.’”
Eda squirmed with discomfort. She had begun everything, too: Niren’s death, the Empire’s fall, Ileem’s betrayal. She hated Tuer for reminding her of herself.
But Morin wasn’t finished. “‘Not everything,’ Raiva argued. ‘There is still life and light and music. There is still love.’
“Tuer couldn’t bear to look her in the eye, because he was not brave enough or strong enough to ask her if she loved him as he loved her. ‘I wronged gods and men alike that day, and I have made no recompense.’
“‘Have you entreated the One?’ Raiva asked. ‘Have you asked him what you must do?’
“‘I dare not show my face before him.’
“‘If you do not ask, you will never know,’ Raiva told him. ‘I have known the One’s mercy; I have seen his heart. You need not fear him.’
“But Tuer couldn’t hear her. ‘I must atone for the life I took. I must restore Tahn to Endahr. I will find his soul, Lady of the Wood. I will bring him back.’
“‘Tahn’s soul has been at peace these many centuries. It is folly to seek him. It is evil to drag him away from his rest.’
“‘It is what I must do. It is the punishment I deserve.’
“Raiva sighed, because she knew she could not sway him, but she took his hand in hers and kissed his brow. ‘Then do what you must do, my lord, but make haste. The light in the wood will be dimmer in your absence.’
“And then he turned and went up into his mountain. He never came back.”
The snap of the fire sounded overloud as Morin stopped talking. Eda stared at him across the flames, her discomfort sharpening to anger. She was like Tuer. There was little difference between them. And now here she was, seeking that very mountain, seeking to drive a knife into his heart. Isn’t that all Ileem had wished to do? To end her cruelty, her mistakes, as she intended to end Tuer’s, Rudion whispering in both of their ears?
“What’s wrong?” said Morin.
She jerked her eyes away. “You’re right. I’ve never heard that story. But it doesn’t make me think better of Tuer than I did before.”
“You forgot the ending,” Tainir admonished her brother. Golden sparks were dancing all around her face and her shoulders. She raised her hands to reveal more flecks of light cupped in her palms. She blew on them, gently, and they drifted up into the night like so many fireflies.
“What’s the ending?” asked Eda. Pain pulsed through her.
“After a year of waiting in her wood, Raiva went into Tuer’s Mountain. She went after him.”
“But not even she could save him,” Eda guessed. Her eyes found Morin’s of their own accord, and this time, she didn’t look away.
Tainir lowered her hands to her lap again, and the sparks around her faded. “So it would seem.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
THE SPIRITS WERE HUNTING THEM.
Every day the stain on the horizon grew larger, and the wind from the east brought with it the stench of rotting things. Sometimes, from the corner of her eye, Eda thought she saw Rudion: his flaming crown, his jagged teeth, his dark-feathered wings. Yet every time she turned her head, there was nothing beside her but empty air.
The days fell into a rhythm: flying most of the morning, with a break midday for the ayrrah—and the humans—to hunt and eat. Then flying in the afternoon and making camp just before sunset. It was always Tainir who went hunting, always Morin and Eda who stayed behind. She felt perpetually awkward around him when they were alone—she didn’t know what to make of him, and more importantly didn’t know what he made of her. So she talked to him about little things. Unimportant things. Just to fill the silence until Tainir came back, her eyes straying always to that stain on the horizon, in constant dread of dark wings and bone swords filling the sky.
Every time they stopped, Morin marked their progress on one particular well-worn map, showing Eda where they were, how far they’d flown.
“When did your mother become a cartographer?” she asked him on the fourth day. The ayrrah had put them down for the night on the very tops of enormous pines, and they’d had a long climb down to the forest floor. There was sap in Eda’s hair, and she’d scraped both arms on the rough bark. She felt a little safer, under the cover of the trees.
“My mother could draw before she could talk,” he told her, brushing pine needles from his trousers as he knelt to make a fire. “My father said she was born with a pen in her hand.”
Eda helped him arrange the wood, then struck a match and set it to the kindling. “What about you?”
“The year I turned seven I contracted a terrible fever and was confined indoors for months. I was restless, so my mother let me try her pencils and paints. I’d had no interest in them before, too busy climbing rocks and learning to speak to the ayrrah. She showed me how she sketched her maps, traced the outline with thick black ink, filled them in with watercolors. It fascinated me, and I discovered a talent for it. On my next birthday, my mother gave me a beautiful set of colored pencils she’d sent for all the way from Pehlain. I used them so sparingly I still have a few of the stubs somewhere back home.”
“You miss her so much,” said Eda across the crackling flames. “I’m sorry.”
“I can’t believe she’s gone. I can’t believe she just … fell.”
“Is that how she died?”
He shuddered. “Her back was broken. Her neck, too. She must have fallen.”
Eda read the truth in his face, and her heart wrenched. “You dug her grave. Alone.”
“I didn’t want Tainir to see.” He bowed his head into his hands, his shaking shoulders the only evidence he was crying.
Something compelled her to go around to his side of the fire, to take one of his hands in her own. His skin was rough and warm, and for some reason that startled her. She let go.
He looked up at her, his face shiny with tears. “I’m afraid, Eda. I feel the world weighing on me—I feel it splintering apart at the seams. And I feel my mother’s soul, wandering, lost. We can’t get to Tuer’s Mountain fast enough. I don’t know if we can even get there at all.”
Eda crouched on her heels beside him, the fire popping and sparking, the light dancing on Morin’s hair. “I feel it too. The weight of the world.”
“Every night when I dream, I see spirits slipping through cracks in the world. They devour all life, and Endahr dies, and its light is put out, and all is nothing more than wheeling dust in the void.”
“We’re going to find Tuer,” she said, with more conviction than she felt. “We’re going to put your mother’s soul to rest. We’re going to fix this.”
“I thought all you cared about was making him pay for what he did to you.”
“I’ve found I can care about more than one thing,” she told him simply.
His eyes met hers in the flickering flames, and she felt a sudden, fierce kinship with him.
Somewhere out in the boundless night, something screamed. The scent of decay crowded her nostrils and she shuddered. Morin grabbed her arm, squeezed tight. “I know they’re out there. I know they’re following us.”
“What are we going to do when they catch up?”
“Keep going, as fast as we can. Trust that Tuer is stronger than they are.”
“Do you think he is?”
“I think he wants us to reach the Mountain. I don’t think he would have brought us this far just to let us fall.”
Eda took his hand in hers, lost in Morin’s eyes, in the strength of his faith in the go
d she hated.
And then Tainir came through the trees with a fat hare draped over her shoulders. Eda let go of Morin immediately, but his hand remained on her arm for half a dozen heartbeats before he drew away.
Two days later, the ayrrah circled the cliffs for a long while, looking for a place to deposit their riders as the sun slid too quick down the rim of the sky. The air smelled like dead things, and the eastern horizon was writhing with shadows. At last, Morin blew a series of notes on the horn that hung around his neck, and the birds approached a narrow rock ledge barely wide enough to stand on. The ayrrah hovered awkwardly while Morin dug climbing spikes from his pack and hammered a few into the cliff. Dread shot down Eda’s spine, and it only deepened when Morin clambered off his ayrrah to perch precariously on the spikes, clinging to the rock with his fingers.
“Sit tight,” he called to Eda and Tainir. “They’ll take you round a few more times, and then I’ll have the hammocks ready.
“The what?” said Eda, but Filah had already shot into the sky again. “He surely can’t mean we’re sleeping on the side of the cliff!” Eda called to Tainir.
But Tainir didn’t seem to hear her.
The last rays of the sun were glinting off the mountain when the ayrrah returned to Morin’s perch. He’d rigged three hammocks on spikes pounded into the rock, and had somehow managed to put his climbing harness on. He waved Tainir over, and helped his sister climb off her eagle and join him on the cliff. She put her harness on, too, and settled into one of the hammocks.
Filah flapped her wings uneasily, clearly ready to find her nest for the night. Eda would have preferred to take her chances sleeping with the giant eagles, but Morin held out his hand. “Come on. It’s not quite as terrifying as it looks. We’ll be safe here.” He glanced at the darkness behind them. “As safe as we can be.”
Eda gulped and took his hand, lunging off Filah’s back and colliding with Morin on the impossibly narrow rock ledge. For an instant, her feet slipped and she thought she was going to fall, but Morin wrapped his arm around her chest and held her tight. She could feel his heartbeat, rabbit quick, pulsing in time with her own.
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