In the Shadow of the Gods

by Rachel Dunne

  “So things would just happen, without you being able to control it?”

  “That is what I said,” Anddyr murmured.

  Rora rode next to him for a while longer, trying to decide if she could dig out any more answers or if Anddyr’d break apart if she pulled any harder. Finally she said, “Thank you,” and tapped her heels into her horse’s sides without waiting to see if Anddyr’d look back up at her. She rode up next to Aro, but didn’t look over at him either. She was sure he’d heard every word.

  Time passed strange, traveling on the twisting roads. Rora’d never been outside Mercetta till now, and the days themselves seemed different. It’d feel like it’d only been a few days since Joros’d found them, and then she’d realize Aro had more’n a week’s worth of beard growing on his usually smooth cheeks, that more time had gone by than she could keep a hold on. They rode into a village and the Northman rumbled that it was the last they’d find before they left Fiatera. It’d started to snow near right after he said the words, like the sky itself was giving them a warning. Didn’t stop them from pushing on, after they’d bought as much food as they could. Rora got herself a nice cloak lined with fur, probably the finest thing she’d owned since what she’d stolen from Nadaro Madri, and stealing wasn’t quite owning.

  After they’d left that last village behind, the road faded away into scraggly grass that got covered by snow, and they slept on the cold ground, and didn’t run into any other travelers, and had only each other for company. It got so cold that even talking got to be a chore, an open mouth like an invitation for the cold to seep down into your bones. They rode quiet, and slept around big fires. It seemed like the merra cared about having a fire more’n she cared about food to cook over it, and mostly the Northman seemed set on keeping her happy. Didn’t seem like she ever was happy, but maybe he kept her from being a raging horror.

  There was nothing to mark the change, but up at the head of the group, the Northman rumbled, “We are in the North.”

  “How d’you know?” Aro asked.

  The Northman gave him a look that didn’t seem to hold any emotion at all. “I know.”

  No one else questioned him.

  “Anddyr,” Joros called, and the witch rode up next to his master. Joros passed him a pouch and Anddyr held on to it with both hands, his eyes closed and his face screwed up. His hand shot out all sudden, finger pointing in a direction that looked no different’n any other. Joros took the pouch back, tucked it safely away.

  “What was that?” Aro demanded, riding up right next to Anddyr. “What’d you just do?”

  The witch just blinked like he was staring into the sun, and it was Joros who answered: “My servant and Northman friend share the task of guide.”

  “But what’d he do?”

  Instead of giving an answer, Joros turned his horse to line up with Anddyr’s pointing finger, and the journey continued.

  Rora rode up, Aro a beat behind her, to ride next to Joros. “We’re gonna start needing some answers,” she said.

  “Then you’d do best to seek them elsewhere,” Joros said evenly.

  “What is it you’re looking for?” Aro asked. “What’s in the North?”

  “An item of personal value but of no meaning to you.”

  “Then what d’you need us for?”

  “I don’t know that I will.” Joros wasn’t looking at either of them, his words coming out with their ends clipped off like a caged bird’s wings. “If I don’t, you’ll have received a few weeks’ respite from being hunted.”

  “And what if you do need us?” Rora asked.

  He did look at her then, and his voice was hard as rock: “Have you heard the expression ‘don’t test the gift of a blade’?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Aro demanded, but Rora and Joros were too caught up with staring to answer him. “We need to know what we’re doing here,” he went on, but he was all bluster, and Joros knew it. They just ignored him, and even though Joros was the first one to look away, it didn’t feel like Rora’d won anything. His eyes just stayed fixed on the direction Anddyr’d pointed, and there were no answers to pull out of him.

  Quietly, Rora dropped back. The witch was there, riding just behind Joros like always. Pausing next to him, she kept her eyes ahead and her voice low as she said, “I suppose it’d be too much to hope you might have some answers?”

  His face went red, then green, staring like her at a sick dog too stupid to know good food from bad. He swallowed a few times, then just shook his head. Rora nodded, and dropped back farther.

  Time was hard to keep a hold on in the white blanket of the North. The sky turned to gray, like the clouds were huddling together for warmth, like even the sun couldn’t reach through. The nights were darker than the days, but not by so much. Worst, the cold was like a live thing that found its way into any clothes, brushing against skin and stealing any warmth it could wrap its fingers around. It bit away at Rora, who was used to living in a packed-full city, where the air shimmered above the canals just with the heat of the day. The Northman, wrapped up in a cloak almost as white as the snow but dotted with old stains, he was the only one who seemed not to feel the cold. He gave it to Rora, that bear-head cloak, handed it over without a word as she sat shivering on her horse. That made the merra spitting mad, but she did it silently, just glaring murder at Rora’s back even harder than before. She refused to speak to any of them for a while, even the Northman, who seemed like the only person in the world she didn’t hate.

  They saw heavy clouds in the distance the next day, but the closer they got, the clearer it got that they weren’t actually clouds. Without any of them agreeing to it, they all stopped to stare. You could see parts of a wooden wall from so far away, but smoke covered most of it, and it didn’t look like there was much wall left under all the smoke anyway.

  “What happened here?” the merra asked softly, and it sounded like the first time she hadn’t been happy to see a fire.

  “A raid,” the Northman said, and there still wasn’t anything in his voice besides the words. “There is always a raid.”

  “It’s one of the convict camps?”

  “It was. It has been. Aardanel.”

  Aro piped up at that: “That’s a Northern word?”

  “Aye. A Northern name, but a southern place.”

  “What’s it mean?” Rora asked softly.

  “Lost hope.”

  Joros snorted. “We’ll stop there,” he said. “They’ll give us fresh horses, enough supplies to last us.”

  “No,” the Northman said. Just a simple word, and it made Joros’s face go a bright red, but somehow none of ’em thought to fight against that one little word. Scal turned his horse, and the merra followed him. Rora was happier about sticking by the Northman than by Joros, and Aro would always stick with her, so they turned, too. Joros with his red face finally followed, the witch trailing after him like always, face and body frozen in a flinch like he expected to be hit any second.

  With the nights as gray as the days, they stopped for sleep when Joros decided he was tired. The trees stopped like someone’d drawn a line on the ground that they couldn’t grow past, and that meant no more fires. They slept cold, all lying close to try to hold on to what warmth they had. The merra would mutter her prayers all through the night, just loud enough to be annoying, just annoying enough to make sleep hard.

  The Northman showed them how to find a hard, black berry that grew under certain patches of snow, and he could usually bring down hares with his shortbow. He got a fox once, white as the bear cloak he hadn’t asked Rora to give back. They ate the meat raw, all slippery and stringy, but it made your stomach stop howling if you could choke down enough of it. Anddyr only ate the berries, until Joros ordered him to eat the raw meat. The witch got down a mouthful and brought it back up right away. They didn’t give him any more after that.

  Whatever it was, the witch did his magic with the pouch more often, finger always pointing off to somewhere
that didn’t look any kind of special. Joros already had a short temper, but it got shorter the longer they went without finding whatever he was looking for. He set to beating the witch one night, not for any real reason, and his elbow took Rora in the nose when she tried to pull him off. The Northman grabbed Joros by the neck and threw him into the snow, stood at the center of the huddled witch, the pissed Joros, and the bleeding Rora. Joros was no kind of idiot, so he just sat where he fell and glared for a while, and Rora kept her eyes sharp on him while blood from her nose froze on her face.

  Aro’s horse broke a leg, slipping on a spot of ice as Aro slipped from its back. The Northman cut the screaming horse’s throat as Anddyr, sobbing, cradled the horse’s nose against his chest. They ate horse meat that night, still warm enough that it steamed in the cold, all of them except the witch.

  When they set off again, Joros ordered his witch to give Aro his horse. Anddyr trudged through the snow, far behind the rest of them. Rora finally rode back, holding out her hand to help pull the witch up behind her. Even through the bear cloak, his hands were gentle around her waist. They didn’t speak a word, any of them. Opening your mouth let out too much warmth.

  They’d stopped to sleep three times since passing by the burned-up place. It was hard to know just how many days that was, since it seemed like the sun was always fighting to break through the clouds and the snow, night and day the same flat gray. It was the second time since waking that Joros rode back with his face all fury to hand Anddyr the pouch. It seemed like the witch’s whole body shook where he sat behind Rora, knuckles white around the pouch. It came all sudden, the weight of him suddenly gone as he fell clean off Rora’s horse. He landed in a sprawl, but it wasn’t enough to knock the air from him, and he used that breath to laugh and laugh and laugh, face stretched in a crazy grin and his eyes bright with triumph as they met Joros’s.

  CHAPTER 25

  The sun was warm against his face through the waving grass, and Keiro had to admit that he enjoyed the bathing warmth of it on his skin. Modesty had caused him to keep his breechclout, but it really was impractical to wear anything else, when the sun beat so mercilessly down on the Plains. His skin was tanned a rich brown, almost as dark now as the plainswalkers’ skin. He was hatch-marked with tiny, shallow cuts, the peril of walking through the Plains near naked. He hardly even noticed now when the grass sliced at him—his new-dark skin was tough as leather, and the grass never cut too deep.

  They’d called him Pale for the first weeks, a gently jesting nickname, but they called him by his real name now. He’d earned that, somewhere along the way. It might have been after he’d caught his first groundbird, leaping up from a low crouch in one explosive motion, arms wrapping around the squawking fowl and neatly snapping its neck. The children had cheered wildly—they’d been trying to teach him to do it for days. The adult plainswalkers, who hadn’t been there to see all the spectacular failures that had come before his success, had been duly impressed. He thought that was when they’d started to use his real name.

  It may, though, have been after Poret washed his feet—or tried to. Keiro had lost his boots sometime in the span between the river-that-ran-from-the-sun and Algi’s village. It had seemed as though everyone west of the river had gone barefoot, and so he had, too. His feet were hard as horn now, the soles so thick he hadn’t felt when Kamat had jabbed a spear tip into his heel. They were colored an even deeper brown, too, from dirt and mud and all the years of walking. It had impressed the plainswalkers, who did all their walking in the safety and softness of the grass and mud. That could have been what gave him back his name.

  His brown-stained feet were beginning to grow restless. It had been a very long time since he had stayed in the same place for so long, since his apprenticeship within Raturo so long ago, but it was growing harder by the day to leave these people who knew his tongue and shared his faith. That last had been a disappointment, though only a fleeting one—how could he do anything but rejoice at finding followers of the Twins, when he had expected his exile to be both physical and spiritual? They knew all the old stories, but they loved to hear him tell them still. They were a peaceful people, and innocent in so many ways.

  There was, unexpectedly, a place for him here.

  At his side Poret stirred, murmured sleepily. He stroked her hair, felt her contented sigh wash over his chest.

  The moon would be rising soon, ascending from the hills to the east. He’d been surprised by the hills, the ridges of land among the unfeatured Plains. The plainswalkers seemed to think the hills cursed, in some way, though he had yet to determine why. Perhaps a remainder of their old religion, whatever false gods they had worshiped before they’d learned of the Parents and the Twins. It would be night soon, and he’d lead the plainswalkers in prayer, thanking the Twins for their shelter from the sun that burned hotter here than it did to the north. He would tell a story, perhaps one of his journeys to the west, which they all seemed to love. Then he would sit up with the elder, Yaket, among the stars and try to find out the answers she was so unwilling to give.

  How had they learned to speak the language Keiro spoke, the language of Fiatera? “It has been so,” Yaket had said with a smile, “since the days before my grandmother’s grandfather.” How had they learned of the Twins? “They have been with us for as long as we have been worthy of them.” Had there been another preacher, before him? “No, Pale,” she’d said with a laugh, “you are the first of the black-robed to find us.” How had they learned all the old stories, then? “My father taught them to me, and his mother to him.” It was maddening, the same thing every night, no matter how he asked. “You will see, in time,” she’d said, tapping his cheek below his ruined eye, and then she’d rolled up on her grass pallet and gone to sleep.

  He shook Poret’s shoulder gently to wake her. She rose, rubbing at her eyes, and gave him a little smile before walking into the grass. She knew his habits well. He liked to pray alone, back to the lowering sun, before he went to lead the tribesmen in prayer. He was rarely alone, among the tall grasses and short walkers; he had learned to take what time he could for himself.

  It was Keiro’s thought that, after a length of time, after enough prayers spoken, after so many steps taken, a man developed a less formal relationship with his gods. He had heard it all through Raturo, the oldest preachers casually calling on Fratarro for patience, or suggesting to Sororra that it might be time for a smiting. Speaking to the Twins as if in conversation with a close friend, a well-loved relative. So it had been for Keiro, these last few years, when there had been so few others to speak with. He liked to think the Twins, should they bless him by listening to his voice, would smile tolerantly, fondly, when they heard his words. He wasn’t so sure of that anymore, after turning away from the desert, but it was the only way he knew.

  “Thank you for bringing me here,” he said tonight, to the faint red points of Sororra’s Eyes growing slowly deeper as the light leached from the sky. “I don’t know the purpose yet, but that’s often the way of things, isn’t it?” He paused, giving her a chance to respond, should she choose. The only sound was the wind brushing against the grass, so he went on. “There must be something more here. There’s a mystery, but I can’t find any more of the strings to pull, or think of the right questions to ask. You made me for walking, you know,” he said with a faint, gentle reproach. “Not for standing. Not for staying.” A sigh blew through him, an echo of the wind through the grass. “I know I’m meant to find something here. I can feel it. All my walking has led me here—but for what? I can’t see the end to this path.”

  And then, for the first time Keiro could mark in his life, his prayer—whether formal or casual, spoken or silent—was given answer.

  Sometimes the grasses played tricks with the eyes—reflected light strangely, fractured the vision, cast shadows where they had no business being. Keiro blamed some of it on only having one eye, of course, but every plainswalker had told him of the dangerous ways the grass cou
ld mislead. So naturally, he first thought that the two points of reddish light glowing within the grass, low to the ground, were just reflections of Sororra’s Eyes above. Then the two near points loomed closer, and blinked.

  Eyes, yes, but not any that lived among the stars.

  The creature that came forth slowly through the grasses should not have existed. It moved like the spotted cat he’d seen in the great forest at the edge of the desert, lanky and graceful, stalking low to the ground. A long body, slender but broad-chested, a thick neck carrying a wedge-shaped head. It was black, black as a moonless night, save for the eyes that glowed with their own fire and never left Keiro’s face. Scaled, Keiro saw by the last light of the sun, not furred. A tail, when it slid from the grass, that was longer than the rest of the creature altogether, slim and sinuous and forked at the end. It paced slowly around Keiro in the small clearing, the space of flattened grass that was barely large enough for two humans. As the sun vanished and the near-full moon dominated the sky, sending its wispy light washing down, points among the black scales began to glow, too, a perfect reflection of stars in the night sky. The head lifted, four long legs straightening to raise the barrel chest, eyes reaching level with Keiro’s, and the creature opened its mouth, a black pit dotted with sharp white teeth. Keiro, immobilized by awe and fear, squeezed his eye shut and dared not breathe. He could not watch his own death come for him.

  And then it spoke.

  “Child,” it said, in a voice high and lilting and otherworldly. “Son of gods.” Another breath, washing his face with warmth, and then the softest of rustling sounds.

  Keiro opened his eye to see the tips of the black tail disappearing through the grass.