by Evie Manieri
Sweat was already dripping down his forehead. There was a wooden bar across a door on the other side of the room, but he stopped to take down his cowl and remove his hood before he lifted it up. He pulled the inner door open, slowly this time, and felt heat pouring out through the crack as if a creature of pure flame was about to burst through and scorch his flesh into blackened, oozing sores—but when nothing did, he stepped inside and pulled the door almost shut behind him.
Fire lit the room in streaks and shadows, and in the first confusing moment he thought no one was there. A fireplace took up the whole of the near wall, and some irregularly chiseled holes provided the only ventilation; the place was an oven. A long table took up most of the remaining space and was crammed with the kind of junk he had used to build his model on the Argent: chipped jars and bottles, biscuit- and nut-boxes, thaw-vine cones, all kinds of completely ordinary rocks, and a colony of live brass-beetles buzzing under a blown-glass dome that had probably cost more than a year of Rho’s wages at the Shadari garrison. A small bed piled with furs stood in the corner.
Finally he picked out the hunched little figure sitting at a table by the wall, holding a pen in a tiny hand. Her Shadari face had the unnatural pallor of dyed cloth washed and washed again until the pigment had nearly drained away, and the brown deerskin scarf around her neck gave Rho the macabre impression that she needed it to keep her bird-like head from falling off. Her eyes, though … for some reason, they reminded him of the hollow eyes of the stone gods on the headland.
Something moved beside the bed and what had looked to be a cushion on the floor turned out to be the boy, huddling under a deerskin.
“Dramash,” Rho burst out in relief, “oh, thank Onfar. Come on, come out of there. We’re going back to the Argent now. Hurry up; we need to leave right now.”
“You’re Rho,” said the old woman, wiping her pen. She set it down with a deliberateness that felt oddly like a reprimand. “You can call me Ani.”
“Both of you,” he amended, looking down at her, and making a snap decision to ignore Kira’s advice to leave her behind. If Ani was a threat to Trey, then Ani had to go. The tremendous heat was making him dizzy. He went to the bed and began rummaging through the scraps, searching for Dramash’s coat. “I can take both of you, only we have to go now, before the guard comes back.”
Dramash didn’t move or make a sound.
“Dramash?” He took a step forward and a great rush of acid filled his throat as the boy shrank back against the wall. “I’m not going to hurt you, Dramash, I swear. I had to knock you out in the throne room. That was—” Words piled up in his mind, but none of them fitted properly. “I shouldn’t have brought you to see the emperor. I swear I’ll never ask you to use your powers again. I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do.”
The deerskin came down to reveal a mat of curly hair, a furrowed brow and then a pair of wary eyes.
“Dramash?” Rho called out again. One of the logs in the fire fell, sending sparks everywhere.
“I don’t want to go.”
“Why? If it’s because of Ani, she can come with us.”
“I don’t want to go with you.”
And there it was: the gut-punch. Everything around Rho went very, very still. Even the fire couldn’t breathe.
“You saw my temple fall, in the Shadar,” said Ani. Her voice was as frail as her body, but it had a resonance that made everything in the room vibrate in sympathy. There was a hint of sibilance there too, somehow both lulling and thrilling at the same time. “You were there?”
“Yes, I was there,” said Rho.
“And my people,” Ani went on, “did they weep when it fell?”
“Yes.” Rho knew that the grating sound he was hearing was his own breathing, but it didn’t feel like it belonged to him at all. “They wept.”
Ani nodded to herself. He thought for a moment that he saw her smile, then he realized it was only her wrinkles and a trick of the firelight.
“You must go,” she said. “This is not the time for me to leave. Dramash is not going to come with you now.”
Rho picked up one of Dramash’s gloves. “Isn’t he?”
“You swore you wouldn’t make him do anything he didn’t want to do,” said Ani. “Why would he go with you, after what you’ve done?”
“I know what I’ve done. Trust me, I know. But I can’t just leave him here. I won’t. Anyway, who are you to judge me?” Rho stopped and swallowed back his anger, remembering that Dramash could hear every word. “Emperor Eoban found out about the ore thanks to you. You’re the reason he invaded the Shadar in the first place. You’re as much to blame for what happened there as I am.”
“I’ve done my penance,” said Ani, sitting back down on her stool and folding her wrinkled hands in her lap. “Can you say the same? Do you have anything to offer the child except more pain?”
Rho remembered his panic in the throne room, how hurting Dramash had been the only idea to come to him. Even now he couldn’t think of anything else he could have done. That night when Frea had told him to keep Dramash’s mother quiet, the night she had taken him; there had to have been dozens of ways he could have stopped Saria from screaming. Instead, he had slit her throat.
Ani’s dark eyes moved over his face and he felt as if every one of his sins were written there.
“What am I supposed to do?” he asked helplessly.
“Dramash will stay with me,” said Ani. “He and I are the same. I am the one he needs now. You’ve brought him to me so that I can protect him. Now you need to let him go.”
“Dramash?” Rho knelt down next to the bundle of fur on the floor. He could still feel Saria’s hot blood spattering down onto his hands and neck and soaking through his tunic. Whatever penance he had done so far was not enough. He wasn’t a better person now than he had been then. “Dramash?”
“Go away.”
There was a sudden rush of cold air through the vents high up on the wall and the door opened a little further. The guard had not yet returned, but he would, and most likely soon. Rho stood up, feeling the heat of the fire passing right through him. He walked out through the open door and shut it behind him, then remembered to put the wooden bar back the way he had found it.
The sweat on his forehead chilled into an iron band as he walked back out onto the top of the tower. Halfway to the door he had left open and creaking in the wind, the breathless awe of five thousand people moved straight through him, tingling through every nerve. The emperor had found Valor’s Storm. Good for him.
For a moment he mused on the fact that Gannon had gone down into a tomb sealed up for a thousand years and retrieved the fabled sword of an ancient monarch, while he had been unable to free one little boy and old woman from an unguarded room.
He started back down the steps, but stopped after a moment to compose himself. For Rho, this meant slamming his arm against the wall, then kicking the stone hard enough to feel the shock all the way up through his leg. He would have bashed his thick skull against it too, except he wasn’t sure the wall could take it.
Chapter 25
The “stride” was the second-worst thing Isa had ever experienced—and the first was having her arm burned to a cinder.
Everything blurred by so fast that she felt like her eyes would burst, the speed blending it all into a tunnel of hectic colors. Panic kept her fingers clenched around the fold of her sister’s cloak, but she couldn’t feel Lahlil’s presence at all. Her bones felt like they had slipped free from her joints and gone careening off into the nothingness. The pressure in her ears grew and tightened into a sharp stabbing pain. She was terrified they would crash into something and shatter like mirrored glass into a million pieces that would never fit back together again.
And still it wen
t on, and on, and on, and with every squashed heartbeat Isa could feel herself moving further away from Daryan until she feared she would never get back. She realized that she would have to let go of that fear, just as she had had to let go of Aeda by the farmhouse. There simply wasn’t enough of her to stretch all the way to Norland.
The world returned at first as a dull point of light that spread out in front of her until Savion took shape as a blurred silhouette; but then she had to shut her eyes as the speed at which they were traveling became apparent. She reopened them just in time to see the darkness at the edges of her vision burn away in a blinding white glare, and then they were through.
She lost hold of Lahlil and pitched forward, slithering down a rocky slope covered with something white: real snow, so much colder and wetter than she had ever imagined. Her pack caught on a bush and tore away from her shoulder. By the time she recognized the nature of the mist-covered oval she was sliding toward there was nothing to do but snatch a breath of freezing air and hold it in her lungs. She heard the splash as she broke the surface of the water, but then sank underneath where there was no sound at all. She wasn’t sure if the others were in the water with her, or if they had even come out of the stride alive.
She kept sinking down until she hit the rocky bottom, then tried to kick up to the surface, but the weight of her sword and her wool cape made it impossible. Her lungs had already begun to burn, and she was too confused to know in which direction to find the bank. Then someone hooked their arms around her and an interminable moment later she crested out of the water and flopped out onto the rocks, coughing and gagging with her throat on fire.
The landscape around her gradually came into focus. The pool steamed like bath-water, and a greenish substance, crystalline like salt, ridged the rocks along the edges while a vivid yellow slime washed up and down in the cracks between them. Berry bushes of some sort ringed the pool, together with low trees furred with scarlet lichen, and further out was a dense forest—pine trees, she thought. Moisture hung in the air and carried a strong aroma that reminded her of the poultices made by her father’s physics.
A long scar zigzagged down his neck and terminated in a fist-sized, puckered mass along his shoulder. Another scar cut across his temple, notching his hairline. Neither interfered with his chiseled profile or the quintessentially Norlander symmetry of his features. She would have known him anywhere—but she felt no recognition from him at all. For a moment, she feared he had lost his memory somehow—but then she realized that it wasn’t Rho at all.
<“Rho?” You know my brother?> asked the man.
But the conversation went no further as half a dozen men and women in patched old furs ran out of the trees with blankets, cloaks and all kinds of things in which to wrap them up, along with a stretcher for Jachad. Savion waved them off and continued kicking up the snow with his bare feet, grinning wildly. The newcomers took off Isa’s cloak and swaddled her like an infant, pulling her toward the trees before she even had time to ask who they were or where they’d come from.
She stumbled and slid through the snow as her new friends brought her through a subtle gap in the trees and onto a narrow trail. Lahlil came behind her, holding on to the side of Jachad’s stretcher with one hand as if determined not to let him go. Patches of creeping shrubs stuck barbs into Isa’s clothes, and broken pine branches left sticky trails of sap on her hands and face when she pushed them aside. Creatures she barely glimpsed darted through the undergrowth, calling to each other with savage little barks. A single blue bird streaked out of the sky and circled around them before alighting on a branch. It watched them for a moment with black eyes and then took flight again, knocking snow from the branches as it darted through the trees.
This was Norland. This was the place Isa had dreamed of for as long as she could remember.
And she hated it. She hated the way the gray sky pressed down on the tops of the trees, and she hated the glare of the snow under the colorless light. She hated the sound of the snow crunching under her feet and the way the cold reached its hands through her wet shirt and under her skin. She hated it just as much as its gods hated her.
The trees thinned out and gave way to open space; she was glad to be out of the overbearing woods until the wind slapped her in the face. Rows of pillars broken off at various heights marked out what might once have been a hall, and just behind them sprawled a vine-covered heap no taller now than the trees around it except for a bit of tower poking up on one side. One of the walls on the right side had collapsed, leaving rooms and staircases exposed. The left side of the building and the tower had fared a bit better, but the main section was nothing more than a wide set of stairs and a broken gallery with tree branches poking in through the doorways. Judging by the encroachment of the forest, this house dated back at least to the Second Clan Wars, maybe even the First.
She huddled inside the furs they’d given her and hurried across the slippery stone paving, caring about nothing except getting out of the perishing cold. Lahlil took the lead as they passed through a wide door made of split logs and into a corridor. People came out of the rooms as they went by, and suddenly Isa began to take note of the scars, the burns, the crutches, the missing limbs. She looked through some of the doorways as they passed and saw crude beds with deerskin curtains, lamps fueled by some sweet-scented oil sitting in niches in the walls, and little else. She counted people—around forty so far—but she sensed others less eager to be seen hanging back in the shadows. Not one of them said a word.
Lahlil finally brought them into a room furnished with fur-covered pallets and work-tables spaced out along three of the four walls; the fourth housed a big fireplace with a poorly drawing fire that did little more than take the edge off the unbearable chill. A woman was waiting there for them, leaning on the shoulder of a girl of about ten years old. The woman had no obvious scars or missing parts, but her torso was encased in a wood-and-bone contraption buckled on with leather straps and a strange piece of furniture sat behind her, a bit like a cross between an upended plank and a chair. Isa guessed it must have been made for her to lean against, since she couldn’t see how anyone could possibly sit down while wearing that brace.
Cyrrin said nothing in reply, but her emotions flickered and jumped like the fire behind her. She instructed the stretcher-bearers to move Jachad to the pallet closest to the fire, and then rattled off a string of orders that sent them hurrying off to fetch or do various things. Her tone of brisk efficiency never wavered, but underneath was a physical pain so deep and const
ant that it reminded Isa of the sound of the surf at home.
Savion said something Isa didn’t understand and flopped down on an empty pallet in the far corner of the room. He curled up his thin body on the fur blanket and appeared to fall instantly asleep. Cyrrin’s surgery only had one other patient at the moment. He kept his face turned to the wall and looked to be asleep as well, but the smoky air around him stank with his despair. Isa noticed the bandaged stump of his right wrist poking out from under the blanket as she moved close to the fire.
Jachad didn’t stir as Lahlil knelt beside him and undid the clasps of his cloak, but he moaned softly when she opened his shirt. The black mark over his heart looked like the spatter from a broken ink-bottle. Vines crawled under his skin and reached out in every direction, twitching in time with his heart’s labored beating. The buckles on Cyrrin’s brace jingled as she hobbled over and stared down at him. The way her eyes moved up and down his body made Isa uncomfortable; she wouldn’t want to be looked at like that, reduced to little more than blood and bones.
Lahlil reached into her pack and pulled out the wineskin with the yellow smudge.
