by Rachel Dunne
“Wait.” Rora held up a hand, and the witch went quiet as fast as if her hands were around his throat again. It was one of the hardest things she’d ever said, but it needed saying—if she was going to learn to listen to the truth, she’d have to hear it first. “If you let me out now, I swear to any god you want that I’ll just kill you. You look half-dead as it is, but I promise I’ll finish the job because the way I see it, you deserve to die ten times.” She met his eyes, the one with the pupil too big, and he stared right back, looking as serious and focused as she’d ever seen him. “Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you. Give me any reason I shouldn’t kill you for all the good people you killed.”
He gave her a look like she’d punched him. “I didn’t kill anyone.”
“Let ’em die, then. We came in here with ten other people, Anddyr, but somehow we’re the only ones left. So what I’m wondering—” she couldn’t help it, she leaned forward some and her hands flexed like they were around a neck “—is if that was Joros’s command, or something you decided to do all on your own.”
His mouth dropped open, full of blood still. “I—God, no! It’s nothing like that.” A big shudder rolled through him, as if he felt the cold for the first time. “You think I betrayed you. No. I did, I mean, but not in the way you think . . . I was weak, I . . . I disobeyed the cappo’s directions and I set the timing off, and I was . . . was too stupid to even think they’d have their own mages. They probably don’t go anywhere without those swordsmen and a mage to keep them hidden, just in case someone tries to . . . well. I . . . I wasn’t myself, when I needed to be, and I couldn’t save you . . . them . . .”
Much as she didn’t want to believe him, that made more fecking sense than that he’d just decided to betray her or Joros wanted her dead. Damned hells, that made it harder to hate him—but he’d still let her people get killed by the black-robes’ hidden protection. Something he’d said in there . . . “Weren’t yourself?” she repeated.
The witch got that just-punched look again, and his eyes flicked down to Etarro. The boy shook his head and said, “Tell her.”
Anddyr’s body slipped slowly down the bars, his hands loosening, sliding down until he lay in a ball on the floor, not looking at them, not looking at anything. His voice was small, when it drifted up. “I’m dying, Rora. A slow thing, but I can feel it creeping closer with every beat of my heart. It’s the price I have to pay, but . . . I’ve judged it worthwhile. It’s a fair trade, for freedom.”
“Tell her, Anddyr,” the boy said again.
“I’m broken. I was broken here, years ago. A life ago. They enslaved me. You’ve seen it—the black paste the cappo made me take.”
“A cure for your madness.” That’s what Joros’d told Aro, when he’d asked.
The witch shook his head. “No. And yes. It causes the madness, and gives me relief from it. It is both redemption and ruin. It will destroy me if I let it, but . . . I don’t think I want to let it, anymore. I’m learning how to fight it. I . . . I want to be better than I was. I don’t want to be a slave to it anymore. I’m learning how to be . . . free. But there’s a price to that, too.” He smiled, but it was like a bad carving of a smile, all wrong. “I’m a dead man either way—I can keep taking the skura and it will kill me, or I can stop taking it even though what’s already in my system is enough to kill me early. That makes it easy, though, doesn’t it? If I’m going to die a madman, why not die a free madman?”
There was so much in there she didn’t really understand, like he was speaking a different language and she could only pick out every other word. “You . . . you don’t seem too mad,” Rora offered. He seemed more normal’n he usually was even after he took his medicine that apparently wasn’t medicine—more weird and rambly, but still pretty damned normal, as far as he went. Take off all the blood and broken bones, and he could maybe be any regular person.
He just shook his head again. “With big storms, storms that shake the very sky, there’s a center in the madness. A small circle of peace, quietude. I’m like that now, only there are a hundred storms, all swirling around me, in me . . . but every once in a while, a storm-center will drift over me, and I’ll have a few moments of . . . me.” He twisted his head up to look at her, and she could almost see the truth sitting there in his mismatched eyes, see the storms circling. “It’s easier to be strong, when I’m me. I . . . I think it will be a lot harder, when the storms come. When I’m more like . . . like who I used to be.” He made that bad-carved smile again. “I don’t expect anything from you—I know I haven’t earned it—but . . . it would be nice to have some help, when it gets bad. I’m trying to be better, but I don’t know if I’m strong enough.”
Rora shifted uncomfortably, looking away from his face. He was making it so much harder to keep hating him . . . “You still let them all die.”
“I did. I’ll spend the rest of my life apologizing to you for it. But . . . I’m trying to be better than I was.”
Rora’s fingers still itched for a neck under them, but truly, the fire’d gone out of her. The anger had slipped away and she just felt tired and cold and sad, sad for the dead knives, sad for herself, even a little sad for the witch. She closed her eyes, let out a sigh that clouded up the air in front of her face. “If you let us out,” she said, “I won’t kill you. Not right now anyway.”
The witch dragged himself to his knees by the bars, swaying unsteadily, his face flickering back and forth from pale to green and back. Rora saw again how beat up he was, how much pain he must be in. She couldn’t watch his fingers as they wove his spells, because they didn’t move like fingers should, bent and twisted. She heard it, though, when the lock sprang open.
It looked like Anddyr maybe tried to tug the door open, but it ended up being him grabbing the bars and being too stupid to let go when he fell backward. Still, it got the door open. She pushed Etarro out the cell first, but once she was out, she came near to just dashing up the tunnel, the rest of ’em be damned. It’d be the smart thing to do. You took care of yourself first, always. You had to.
The witch was staring at her from the floor, eyes still all weird, and even weirder for how . . . simple he looked. Innocent, like a kid who’d never seen a hard day in his life. Maybe it was one of those storms passing over him, like he’d said, making him less than he was but still better’n he’d been.
And the boy was staring, too, looking like he’d gone and snatched all the years from Anddyr’s eyes. He had that far-eye look but he didn’t say anything, just stared at Rora like maybe the whole world’d stopped to hold its breath, waiting on what she’d do.
Rora knelt down, and she didn’t touch the witch but she patted the air near his shoulder. “You look hurt. You . . . can’t you fix yourself?”
The witch shook his head, paused, nodded. “I could.” His voice sounded like it was moving through clouds, or water. “But I’ll need all my power to get us out of here. And . . . I deserve this. I’ve earned it.”
She couldn’t really argue with that. “Right, then. So what d’we do now? You think that far ahead?”
The witch opened his mouth, got a panicked look, and snapped his mouth shut. He grabbed at his hair with his broken fingers. “No . . . I don’t know . . .”
“I can help.” Etarro said it with his kid-voice, the one he got back when his far-eyes went away. “I know all the ways out. And I know a way out even the Ventallo don’t know about. I can show you.”
That sounded damned promising. “Then you can finally see what the world’s like outside this fecking mountain.”
“I can’t go with you.”
“Why in all the hells not?”
Etarro gave her a sad smile, somewhere between kid and far-eye. “We all have our parts to play.”
“The black-robes’ll know you helped us. You’ll get in trouble. Much worse trouble than giving me a blanket.”
The sad smile didn’t go away. “There’s nothing they can do to me that scares me.”
That wasn’t really any kind of reassuring.
It took both Rora and Etarro to drag the witch up. He helped where he could, but it looked like at least one of his legs was broke, and there was wet blood on him mixed with all the dried, though she couldn’t figure where it came from. They got him standing, but he was near to twice as tall as either of them, so they made for poor supports. They got about two steps forward before the witch collapsed. When something didn’t work, it was stupid to keep trying it—ignoring her not giving up on the piss-rope lock picks, Rora’d always been pretty good at moving on to a new plan. She left the witch lying on the ground and hooked her arms under his, dragging him along. Etarro tried to lift his feet up, but even though the witch was thin as a stick and weighed about as much, Etarro didn’t have much muscle to him. He still held on to the witch’s feet to keep ’em from dragging along the ground, and Rora let him feel like that was helping. She paused on the way out, dropped the witch to go grab a bundle from against one of the walls. It was the cloak she’d worn into the mountain, that the swordsmen’d yanked off her shoulders before throwing her in the cell, and it was wrapped around her daggers, all of ’em, even the old broken-stone one that Neira’d held. There was still blood along its edge, dried and brown. There wasn’t time to clean it, so Rora just hid the daggers away in their usual homes and threw the cloak around her shoulders before she went back to dragging the witch.
“No one will see us,” the witch kept muttering as they went up the tunnel. He’d waved a hand and the little blue light’d gone out, leaving them in the dark again. “No one will see us.”
“What about hear us?” Rora growled, and then muttered a curse as her back bumped hard into a wall. Apparently the tunnel wasn’t too straight. “Way I see it, a piece of air that won’t fecking shut up is more suspicious’n a bloody witch.”
He got quiet for a while, and then she could feel his arm muscles moving under her hands. “No one will hear us. No one will see us.”
“Fecking great.” She’d been hoping he’d just stop talking instead, but she had to admit whatever magic he had was probably a better way, since dragging a witch across a stone floor wasn’t exactly quiet business.
Light snuck up behind Rora, creeping down the tunnel, and she near dropped Anddyr when she saw it dancing around her feet. She’d known the black-robes would come back for Etarro, but of course, it was just fitting they’d come back right as they were about to escape . . . Twisting around, she felt a flood of relief not to see a group of black-robes and swordsmen coming down the tunnel. It was just the tunnel mouth, letting in light from the hall beyond.
The hall was empty, actually, she saw when she dragged the witch out into it. Nothing but the one torch and, so far away she could barely see them, two more torches, one leading up and one down.
“Now what?” she asked, whispering even though she didn’t have to. Part of it was maybe she still didn’t trust the witch, no matter what he said about being someone different—it’d be stupid to forget who he’d been, or everything that’d come before. Even if she did trust him, it felt just as stupid to go shouting while you were sneaking around. She’d been trained for sneaking, and sneaking meant whispering. Sneaking usually meant not dragging bodies around, too, but she’d also been trained to readjust when she needed to.
“Up,” Etarro said. Since Rora didn’t want to find out what horrors the black-robes put below their dungeons, she was happy enough to drag the witch up the slow-curving tunnel.
The witch wasn’t too heavy, but still, dragging a thing up-hill had a way of wearing you down. Rora’s breathing was so loud in her own ears she didn’t hear it, not till Etarro tugged hard on one of the witch’s legs to get her attention. That, and Anddyr’s muffled scream, made her stop, and the look in Etarro’s eyes made her listen hard. She heard the voices then. Low, but not too far off. The people coming down the hall might not see them, or hear them, but Rora had a feeling they’d sure as shit notice when they tripped over an invisible witch.
This stretch of the hall was empty, no doors or other tunnels—nowhere to hide. “Shit,” Rora muttered. She tried to think back to how far it’d been since the last tunnel and couldn’t remember it. Probably far enough that she couldn’t get to it at body-dragging speed faster’n it took for black-robes to catch up to them. “Shit.”
“Rora . . .” Etarro was looking at her with his wide eyes that looked young as they ever had, all innocence and fear.
“I know, I know.” She shifted her grip on Anddyr’s armpits, heaved him up, pressed his face and chest against the wall, and used that to get him upright. “If there’s anything you can do to make yourself smaller,” she hissed at the witch, “now’d be the time to do it.” He just shook his head, eyes as big as the kid’s and looking swirlier than usual. “Shit, shit, shit.” She got the witch pressed flat to the wall, nudged at his broken leg so it stopped sticking out weird, ignored the pain-noises he made. Looking up the hall, she could see a circle of light getting closer, stretching around the hall’s curve. She flattened herself against the wall, and Etarro pressed in on the witch’s other side, each of them throwing an arm across Anddyr to keep him flat. If it’d been up to Rora, she would’ve picked a different way to test if the witch’s spells were working, but life hadn’t left ’em too many choices.
Rora didn’t spend much time thinking about all the different hells the Parents’d crafted for dead people who hadn’t been good enough to become stars, but she thought maybe she could guess what one of those hells was like, because there was something awful and helpless about just standing there while danger walked slowly toward you, like staring down a stalking wolf. Knowing you could run, but not doing it anyway. It was a deeper fear. If you were running, at least you were trying to get away, trying to save your own life even if it was hopeless. Standing still, waiting . . . there was nothing to do but think how your heart had about three beats left before it stopped beating forever.
The black-robes came around the corner, four of ’em and just as many swordsmen. A big group, and with the way the walls curved, it was hard to tell how close any of ’em came to brushing against the walls. Everything in Rora shook with the need to run, to get as far away as fast as she could, but she stood frozen like a deer, watching as the wolf prowled closer. She could see the old man, the head black-robe, near the center of the group, his empty eyes fixed ahead as the others chattered around him.
They passed by, not quite close enough to touch, but close enough she held her breath so the swordsman closest to her wouldn’t feel it on his neck.
And then they were past, going on down the hall, and Rora didn’t know whether to cheer or sob.
A few seconds passed, and then Rora’s mind started whirling again. Pretty soon, the black-robes would find the cell empty, and the whole mountain would probably burst in searching for Rora. They’d need to be a long ways away by then.
Rora’d stood still in front of danger, but now that it was out of sight, everything was screaming at her to move, and this time she wasn’t going to ignore it. Dragging the witch was too slow, so she grabbed his arms, hauled them over her shoulders, and pulled his chest onto her back. It left his legs dragging on the ground, and put an awful ache between her shoulders, but it was the fastest she could think to move without leaving him behind. Not to say she didn’t think about that, but she figured her chances of living were better with someone who could set a whole village afire without blinking.
She ran, best as she could, with Etarro keeping just ahead, ran from one circle of torchlight into near darkness until her feet found the edges of the next torch, trusting the kid knew where he was going. He swung down a side tunnel, Rora right on his heels, and she stopped dead inside the room—or, more like, she was stopped, by running headfirst into a carcass hanging from the ceiling.
The room was full of dead things, some whole, some carved up, some no more than bones piled against the walls. They all looked to be animals, far as she could tell standing there
a little dazed from running into a froze-solid pig. Etarro dashed ahead of her, weaving around the hanging carcasses and the piles of meat or bones on the floor, and she followed after him slower, dragging the witch careful around the dead things.
The room was a dead end, but Etarro seemed pretty sure there was something against the back wall. Anddyr was starting to flail, and so she let go of him next to Etarro, leaving the two of them to scrape through the offal piled against the wall. Rora stepped back, wrapping her arms around herself. It was as cold in the storeroom as her cell’d been, and she took a second to moan over the fact that she was going to die half-froze.
The witch gave a breathless shout: “I remember!” He was pawing at the wall in a spot that looked no different from any other, far in a corner where the single light hardly touched. “It was here . . .” He waved his hands around, broken fingers twitching and twisting. A horrible sound shook the room, rattled the chains the carcasses hung from, knocked over piles of clattering bones, and the wall broke. A crack appeared out of nowhere, spread, and peeled back like the layers of an onion, rock melting away into nothing.
She didn’t know how he’d done it, but the witch had made a tunnel through the wall of the very mountain, and sunlight spilled through it.
A crow of triumph burst out of Rora, and she lunged toward the tunnel. There was no feeling as good as escaping from death.
She had to go on hands and knees to fit into the tunnel, and she was already in it when she realized neither of the others was following her. “Come on!” she shouted. She could see the sun, smell the air. She hadn’t realized how stale the air inside the mountain smelled. They still didn’t move, and so she backed out of the tunnel, found the witch and the boy staring at each other—Etarro shaking with his arms wrapped around himself tight, Anddyr with tears freezing to his bloody cheeks. The witch was holding his stupid stuffed horse, holding it so tight it looked like his broken fingers might burst it. “What?” she demanded. “What is it?”
