“Assemble,” Mag said, striding onto the scene. “We need all roots armed and manning the ramparts. The dwarves won’t rest with one attack. We pushed back the ladders, but I’m sure that’s not all they have in store for us. We need a group of people digging paths to the ramparts also, making way for us to maneuver.”
“You heard her!” Maeven yelled. “Two groups, start making a path to the ramparts. Go to the right side of the court; the snow isn’t as deep, less digging to get them up there.”
Before Grace knew it the little girl was back, pressing a paper packet into her hands. Grace smiled at the child and gathered the bucket to her. Maeven saw the movement and came to her side.
“Let me carry that for you,” he said, trying to take the bucket.
“Dear, we all have our parts to play,” Grace told him. “While I’m thankful for the offer, you’re needed more here than you are carting snow for me.”
Maeven frowned, but nodded.
“We are doing all we can for Jovian,” Grace said. “He’s in good hands. Your aunt knows what she’s doing.”
As if hearing that Rosalee was also helping Grace soothed his worried mind, Maeven nodded and picked his shovel back up.
“Maddie,” Maeven said. “Why don’t you stay in here and help carry my buckets to the back by the fireplace?”
Maddie nodded.
At a snail’s pace, Grace made her way back up the two flights of stairs to the room once more.
“Perfect,” Rosalee said, taking the bucket of snow and setting it beside a fire she’d obviously built up while Grace was out. The window stood open, venting out some of the heat so that Angelica’s temperature didn’t rise with the warmth of the room. Rosalee was bundled up in another blanket, worn around her shoulders like a cloak. The room was drafty, but markedly warmer than the entrance hall had been.
“What do you need me to do?” Grace asked, handing the packet of herbs to Rosalee.
“Put some snow in a kettle and set it on the fire; it will heat faster.” Rose spread the herbs out on the table. Using a knife, she chopped a small section off the bone-white winter root. As Grace scooped the snow into a metal kettle, she watched her friend pulp the root with the flat of her blade until she decided it was tender enough. She nodded and placed the flattened-out segment in a small glass.
“When it whistles, pour enough of the hot water on the root to just cover it,” Rosalee said.
Grace nodded. She knew how much water to steep roots in so they didn’t lose any of their medicinal properties, but Rosalee was better versed in medicine than Grace was, so she deferred to the other woman’s instructions.
Rosalee started humming and opened up the nalium. White powder puffed out of the packet in a cloud. Rosalee turned her head away from it. When it cleared, she took a pinch of the powder and placed it in a delicate ceramic tea cup with paintings of cherry trees and jade dragons on it. Rooting around in the packet, Rosalee came back out with another herb, which was long and delicate and looked to be knotted in two places.
“No child cap?” Rosalee asked. “Lady’s toe isn’t as strong, but it will work.”
She placed the root on the table and started to mince it. It looked much softer than the winter root had, and diced up perfectly. Rose gathered it up in a tea ball on the cup’s saucer and set it back beside the cup.
As if on cue, the kettle began whistling. Grace grabbed it out of the fire, using the hem of her dress to absorb the heat. The water steamed in the cool air as she placed a small portion on the root, and a larger portion in the cup.
She set the kettle back by the fire as Rosalee submerged the tea ball.
“And now we let it steep until it’s cool,” she said.
Grace sat in the chair at the head of the couches and watched Angelica and Jovian, tossing and moaning in the grips of some pain she didn’t know, and now that she was bereft of her wyrd, a pain she would never have the displeasure of knowing.
Angelica was aware of the pain in her head, like one was aware of a mosquito buzzing in their ear. She felt it, but it was easy to ignore within the fabric of the dream. Before her spread a forest of dead trees, their white wood stretching, parched, to the night sky. The ground, which she couldn’t see through the heavy veil of fog that surrounded her, was wet and slimy beneath her feet. Twigs lay beneath the corroded leaves, giving the impression of bones under rotting flesh. She wished her feet weren’t bare, but her entire body was naked.
“The realm of the dead, again,” Jovian said, stepping out of the darkness of his pre-dream to stand beside her.
“Baba Yaga calls to us again,” Angelica said. She was wreathed in fog from her neck down; she wore a miasma of it like a shimmering robe of smoke, covering her form. Jovian was also naked, and the fog clung to him as well.
“What do you suppose she has to tell us?” Jovian asked. In the distance an animal barked into the night, making Angelica jump.
“I don’t know,” she said, trying to calm her racing heart. To her left a twig snapped, and she thought a she saw a shadow darting out of her line of sight. “I just wish she didn’t have to put us near death to do it.”
“Well, she is kind of the warden of the dead, isn’t she?” Jovian reasoned.
Angelica nodded. Before them a blue light flickered into existence. Angelica remembered the pull she had felt before, when they’d ventured into the hag’s realm.
“At least now we know how to get into her house,” Jovian reasoned, taking a step forward.
“But you must have forgotten how to travel here,” Angelica said, and then laughed. “Like this.” She let her gaze linger on the blue flame, wafting in the still, foggy night before them. The desire of seeing the flame, supported on its bone white pillar, formed in her mind, and in an instance, she was there, standing before the torch and gazing up at the brilliance of the deathly flame.
“Oh, yeah,” Jovian said, still a distance back, his voice getting lost in the fog. In a stirring of mist, Jovian materialized beside her.
“Do you really think the trees are made of bone?” Angelica asked, remembering their first journey here.
“You can touch them again, if you need the clarification,” Jovian shrugged.
“I think I’ll pass,” Angelica said, studying the white torch before her.
“Look,” Jovian said. Angelica looked to where her brother pointed, and there, blooming up around a bend, was another blue light, calling them forward.
“What do you think they are?” Angelica asked, and they jumped to the next blue light.
“Who knows?” Jovian said, waiting for the next one to bloom into being. “Maybe the souls of the departed?”
“Some kind of necromancy?” Angelica wondered, seeing the next blue light flicker to life. They jumped to that one.
“Necromancy, maybe, or it could be something else. Remember, we used to think this was fog,” he gestured around to the fog around them. Angelica remembered the first time she had seen the dilapidated house of the forest hag and how out of the chimney billowed the smoke which snaked out along the ground, coating the forest.
“So if she was boiling the sin off the souls in her cauldron,” Angelica said. “The fog might be their sins?”
Jovian shrugged, jumping to the next wavering light. Angelica followed. “It seems likely,” he told her. “But you know how sorcerers can create lights.”
“True. It’s probably just some guiding wyrd, leading us to her.”
They continued to jump until the forest grew thicker, and the distances between the torches grew shorter. The jumps didn’t carry them so far now, and some kind of underbrush tickled their legs while they stood, waiting for the next light to guide them forward. Angelica shivered to think about what the underbrush could be, and she wished she could see it through the fog.
“I don’t remember coming this way last time,” Jovian said.
Angelica nodded, and shivered again. It was growing colder, and in three more jumps, a light snow start
ed to fall around them. As the snow thickened, and their jumps once more grew further apart, the trees thinned until they finally gave way to a field of dense snow. High above them a full moon hung in all its glory, making the field glow with an eerie, mystical blue light that was both romantic and bone-chilling in its splendor.
“This isn’t the way we came before,” Jovian said.
Angelica shook her head, wrapping her arms around her chest. Though the fog was thinning, it still clung to their bodies like garments; however, it did nothing to warm them.
In the distance, so far away they could barely see it, another blue torch flickered to life. They jumped. Before long their guides had carried them so far that the bone forest was nothing more than a memory on the horizon behind them.
The snow thickened to the point that now the blue light rested on top of it, rather than on the torches. The bone pillar that held it aloft was buried in the drifts.
“How much farther?” Angelica asked, as if Jovian would have any kind of answer for her. He frowned and shook his head.
Two more jumps and they found themselves at the base of a mountain, a winding trail leading up the side. The trail looked as though a lot of people climbed it, worn down with dirty tracks and covered with hay for traction. Along the path the same blue torches wavered in a slight breeze.
Another thought took them to the base of the path, but their thoughts wouldn’t propel them further from there. On frozen feet, they trod the distance up the mountain path, pulled onward by their feet rather than their minds. The further up the traveled, the more the wind picked up, making them hunch over, bracing against its bite.
Angelica kept casting her eyes up, wondering if they would ever make it, but the wind was blowing back at her, bringing with it gusts and drifts of snow, which were increasingly harder to push through.
Finally the wind stopped, and they stood in a small clearing before a large cave. Directly across from them, twisting up out of sight, the path continued, clotted by more windblown snow. The inside of the cave glowed a soft yellow and promised warmth, but out in the clearing they couldn’t feel it.
There were shadows also, slinking and dancing around the walls of the cave.
“Do you think that’s where we need to go?” Angelica asked, creeping up to the edge of the cave. Considering the writhing shadows on the walls, she didn’t dare show herself too soon, lest there be a beast inside other than Baba Yaga.
But even as she asked, two blue torches shimmered into being to either side of the cave entrance, and a thin sheen of fog slipped out of the top of the cave like smoke out of a chimney. Angelica’s eyes followed the fog up to the clouds above.
As one rather large puff of fog billowed out of the cave and up to the clouds, the snow began to fall harder, as if the fog was what gave the snow its form.
“I think that’s our answer,” Jovian said, stepping up before the entrance of the cave.
As with the lilting house of the forest hag, the opening to this habitat was gigantic. The woman who dwelt here needed all the space she could get. The interior of the cave was larger than Angelica could have imagined, stretching up into darkness where the light of the huge bonfire in the central room couldn’t even reach.
The back of the cave lay in shadows, but before it was claimed by complete darkness Angelica saw a path that lead to the left and out of sight. If she concentrated, she could almost see a ghost of firelight coming from further down the tunnel.
Jovian stepped forward, but he was met by resistance, unable to cross the threshold.
“Come on!” he said, banging his fist uselessly against the barrier. Where he touched, sparks flew off the force field. “She needed us here so badly, you’d think she wouldn’t always block our way with riddles.”
Angelica crossed her arms and thought. Last time there was something they could use to get inside. She remembered the rotting door with its large hole in the side that they thought was where the handle had been, but turned out to be a hungry mouth instead. Then they had used a bone.
Jovian hit the field again and sparks danced across the surface, illuminating faint traces of lettering. He turned back and slumped to the ground, deep in thought.
“I don’t know how to get in here. Last time we entered rather easily.”
“Wait, it looked like the sparks lit up letters or something,” Angelica said. She pressed her hands to the wall, and the sparks danced across the surface. The longer her hands stayed in contact with the invisible barrier, the more sparks flittered across the expanse, and the more letters were exposed. Words formed in blue light, like that of the moonlight on the snow, as some invisible hand scrawled the lettering in an arch over her head. But she was too close to read it.
“Jove,” she said. “Back up and see if you can read this.”
Jovian had already come to life when she mentioned the letters, and now he backed up as far as he could without toppling off the edge of the cliff. She watched his eyes squint as the letters continued tracing themselves across the open air.
“Speak your truth,” he said slowly, reading as the words wrote themselves out, “and enter.” He huffed.
“Is that it?” Angelica asked.
He waited for a while longer to make sure nothing else was going to be revealed, and nodded. “Yeah, that’s it.”
“Well that doesn’t make any sense,” Angelica said. Moving away from the wall, she watched the letters fade out, like a lamp burning out of all its fuel.
“But what truths does it want?” Jovian asked.
“It’s not like we’re hiding anything,” Angelica said.
“What does it even mean by truth?” Jovian wondered, throwing his hands to the sky and letting them fall in his annoyance to slap against his bare legs.
“Maybe we can just start saying things?”
“Like what?” Jovian said.
“I don’t know, anything. Truth doesn’t have to be something we know, can’t it also be something we fear?” Angelica said.
“Like that we are half angel, and we’re not even sure what that means?” Jovian said. The barrier seemed to ripple.
“Good,” Angelica said. “Or that Amber is already dead.” The barrier pulsed blue, lighting up her skin in cerulean relief.
Jovian nodded. “Or that we are slaves to our angel blood.” Another flare of light, this time brighter.
“We’re getting closer,” Angelica said.
“Or that we aren’t people at all, but just aspects of our mother,” Jovian said. The barrier flashed, and continued to pulse like a beating heart.
“And when we get to the Turquoise Tower, and our humanity is burned away, will that mean I will stop being Angelica, and you will stop being Jovian, and the only person who will exist is Sylvie?” Angelica said. Jovian looked down to his feet.
In a flash of light, a bright blue hole formed in the center of the invisible wall and burned across the air at the entrance of the cave. It sped out in blue sparks which showered down around the snow like drifting embers from the ethereal torches they had followed to the cave. Finally it was done, and Angelica tentatively placed a hand to the opening to see if they could enter. Her hand passed through where the barrier had been.
“It’s open,” she said, and then smiled.
Warmth poured out of the cave, returning sensation to their freezing limbs and their numb toes. It was a welcome feeling, and Angelica stepped into the embrace of the cave, standing near enough to the fire that she could warm herself, though she suspected the chill in her bones wouldn’t leave any time soon.
There on the stone floor, just out of sight from the entrance, lay two long jackets. Angelica shrugged her arms into the red one, cinching it at her waist, and felt a preternatural warmth suffuse her body.
“Look there,” Jovian said, tying the green one around himself. He nodded to the path that led to the left, just out of sight. Light came from that way, deeper inside the cave, and a noise tickled their ears. At first Angelica thought
it was a bubbling brook, but as the light flared higher and the bubbling intensified, painful screams greeted her ears.
“She’s back there,” Angelica said.
Jovian nodded and walked past his sister, deep into the shadows of the path. Angelica wasn’t sure if Baba Yaga could truly fit in the path; it didn’t seem large enough.
The light ebbed back out of sight, leaving them in near-darkness, with only the illumination at the end of the tunnel drawing them on. They placed one foot carefully before the other, not able to see what they might trip over on their way.
Before long they stood in the light of another room, this one much like the room in the leaning house where they’d first met Baba Yaga. On the wall was a large pestle, and to the side an even larger mortar. The floor was littered with hay, except around the fire.
A huge shadow filled the back of the chamber, and though the light touched everywhere in the room, the shadow behind the cauldron stayed.
“Ah, the Two return,” Baba Yaga said, her voice like hinges in need of oiling. The shadows in the chamber shifted, and then they were able to make out the image of the lumbering giant of a hag perched behind her cauldron. She was sitting, her knees drawn up like Angelica imagined a toad might crouch. Her arms were bent, stirring the contents of the cauldron. The flames spouted higher when the crone laughed. From within the bubbling brew she could hear the souls of the tortured, the deplorable in life, screaming out as their sins were boiled from their ether. The steam flowed higher, tracing its way down the path and out into the main chamber, where Angelica could only imagine it was creating more snow outside. “I was expecting you.”
Though it was hard to see the crone lurking in the shadows, Angelica could see the deathly white hands that stirred the pot and the trail of white hair that slunk down the front of her moth-eaten black robe to trail in the bubbling brew she tended in her black cauldron.
Her hands looked healthy. Her hair was vibrant and shining. She must have recently fed on the blue password which sustained her.
“Your truths are interesting ones,” Baba Yaga said.
On Wings of Chaos (Revenant Wyrd Book 5) Page 11
