“Merek!” She threw herself down, her own pains forgotten, her fingers tearing at the rough rock.
He was gasping for air, groping at his own legs, feeling where the rock had crushed his thighs. “Go,” came his faint reply. “Just go. They still need you.”
“But—”
“Go!” he shouted more forcefully this time, wincing with the effort before collapsing back on the ground and closing his eyes, turning his face from her.
She stopped and stared, her fingers scraped raw and bloody. It was the Knights’ philosophy—to sacrifice one for the good of the many. But it should have been her. She should have killed her sister when she’d first opened the door, even at the cost of her own life. Then Merek never would have come looking for her, and she wouldn't have to return a failure.
“Merek,” she said, quieter this time.
He didn’t answer. His hands were balled into fists at his side and she remembered the way they had felt as they worshiped the curve of her shoulders, how his lips had felt, gentle and soft on her neck. Her failure had cost him his life. Who was she to have been given that responsibility? She wasn't a Crowheart or a Knight, or a Duskan or a Shaddern. She lived a life in between, not really belonging to any particular place. She was nobody. A nobody who desperately longed to be a somebody, though she would never have admitted it.
The trembling intensified. Overhead, through the gaping roof, people were screaming, their footsteps causing the ceiling to quake and crumble, sending bits of dust down on her and Merek. She shoved the boulder again but it didn’t move. She strained against it, feeling blood soak her stomach and drip down her face from the open cuts there. What she wouldn’t give for a bit of magic, for something that would let her move the stone, for something that would get them out of this situation.
A loud crack was the only warning she had before the ceiling collapsed. She scrambled away and when she looked back, Merek was gone, buried beneath the rubble. Rayne ran, not the way she had come but in the opposite direction, away from what she had done and what she had to leave behind. Rocks fell, pelting her from above, bruising her arms and her shoulders, sometimes sending her toppling to the ground. Time and again, she got to her feet. Her face was wet with tears and sweat, her vision blurry so that when she came upon a wooden-runged ladder leading to a door in the ceiling, she nearly passed it and had to backtrack.
She climbed, ignoring the pain in her hands and hoping against hope that the door wouldn’t be locked. When she reached the top, she shoved the door until it snapped open and she frantically pulled herself over the rim, rising from the dust and darkness into chaos.
She emerged into what had once been a cellar but now lay open to an abandoned alley, one wall sinking into the tunnels below. She climbed to her feet and stood at the darkened entrance to survey the damage. Her friends had done their job, even if she hadn’t. Iblia was burning because of the firewater, and collapsing because of the prince’s protection, the tunnels that ran beneath the city caving in. People screamed as they tripped, escaping the fire in the palace only to plunge into the underground maze. Even the sound of ringing bells was different now—raucous and panicked, mingling with screams as people ran and shoved and pushed. Rayne watched as a crack opened down the middle of the street to her left, swallowing a storefront and a whole mob of people. All Rayne saw was a mass of wide, white eyes as they plunged to the caverns below.
A cloaked figure appeared out of nowhere and wrapped its fingers around Rayne's hand. Rayne tried to jerk away but the grip was too tight.
“Stop it,” the figure said in a familiar, scolding voice.
Imeyna.
Somehow the older girl had found her in the midst of this madness. It was not the first time Imeyna had come to her rescue, and Rayne felt it wouldn't be the last. It seemed to be what she did best, on her first day in Shade and now today, on what would possibly be her last when they discovered her failure.
“We have to go,” Imeyna said from the deep shadow beneath her hood.
“Are we meeting the others somewhere?” Rayne asked, but Imeyna didn’t respond before pulling her into the street, where the noise made conversation impossible.
The flakes were falling in earnest now. Behind them, black smoke filled the sky, twisting and roiling against the white snow clouds. They went with the crowd, moving away from the market and the palace beyond. At one point, a squadron of iron-armored soldiers marched past them, but the girls made themselves as small as possible in the mob of citizens, pressing up against a stone wall to let the group pass. Her hood still hid her face, but Rayne's mouth went dry, and she was dismayed to feel her fingers tremble. She couldn’t fight anymore today. She balled her hands into fists until the soldiers passed and they could continue on their way.
The chaos of the inner city faded as they neared the outer gates. People were huddled together or searching frantically for loved ones. An old man with a wrinkled brow grabbed Rayne’s shoulders, trying to get a better look at her, but Imeyna shoved him away with one hand and glowered at him until he turned away. Rayne choked on a sob in her throat but didn’t look back at the man who was almost certainly looking for someone he would never see again. At one of the stables near the town gate, Imeyna tossed a young stable boy a bag of silver coins.
“We'll only need two,” she told him.
Two? Were they the only ones to escape? Her eyes searched Imeyna’s face but she looked away, her eyes on the boy instead. She wanted to ask but knew better, biting the inside of her cheek, running through the names of the lost. Giles. Rolf. Emma. Merek. It was her silent offering to Enos. She hoped that the smoke would carry them to Elanos, His realm beyond the sky where they would feast with other warriors for an eternity.
The stablehand opened the pack and withdrew one of the coins. He bit it hard between his teeth before pocketing them.
“You're lucky,” he said. “Everyone else left when the quakes started. But I knew you'd be back.”
“I think you're the lucky one,” Rayne said, eying the bag of coins he now kept for himself.
He smiled ruefully, then led out two horses—one Rayne recognized as Warrior, Imeyna's black gelding. The other was a small, nondescript brown mare. Both were tacked and ready to ride. Rayne dismissed the stableboy's attempt to help her onto the smaller horse's back, throwing herself up into the saddle in spite of the pain in her abdomen. The horse nickered at the smell of blood but Rayne kept a firm grip on its reins.
“Thank you, young man,” Imeyna said to the boy. Beneath her, Warrior huffed. With a twitch of her wrist, the horse marched out into the road, followed by the obedient mare that now belonged to Rayne.
Once they cleared the city gate, Imeyna looked back at Rayne for the first time since leaving the alley. “It will be a hard night's ride,” she said, “but we must go. We cannot stop or spend another night on your father's land. They will be looking for you if they aren't already.”
Rayne nodded, then spurred her horse forward and into the path through the trees where the two girls disappeared like shadows into the burning night.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sibba
The shovel’s long, wooden handle cracked as Sibba drove it into the frozen ground and she cursed, tossing it aside and wiping the frozen sweat from her brow. The curse felt good in her unused voice and she said it again, louder this time so that it echoed in the silence of the island.
“You frozen heap of shit!”
The trees called it back to her in her own voice.
She should have burned the body. It would have been a hundred times easier than digging through the ground that had been coated with snow and ice until this morning’s sunrise. But her mother hadn’t believed in the burning.
“We should bury our dead and honor their bodies.” This would be said with an obvious shudder whenever they attended a funeral pyre. Sibba didn’t know if burying her on what was soon to be an abandoned island was honoring her, but it was the best she could do.
She had been working on the grave all afternoon and was ready to be done with this ritual, and so decided the hole was deep enough to endure the weather and minor floods of the southern shore. It wasn’t easy to extract herself from the hole with it being nearly as deep as she was tall, but she was finally able to pull herself over the ledge. She dragged her mother’s shrouded body to the edge of the grave and lowered it gingerly inside, arranging it so Darcey was on her back, her closed eyes turned to the sky where the sun was just dipping low behind the bare branches of the trees to the west.
She pulled back the edge of the shroud for one last look at her mother’s face. It might have been gruesome except that the body had stayed frozen and perfectly preserved beneath the lean-to behind the house for the duration of the blizzard. The woman could have been sleeping, with her eyes shut and her hair arranged in a yellow fan around her head. In her hands, she clasped the hook-nosed knife that had drawn the blood of her killer, and beside her, Sibba had placed the golden arm ring that her father had given to Darcey on the day of their wedding. Her mother never wore it. In Casuin, where she had grown up, it was a symbol of slavery. Here, it was a symbol of honor and dedication. Sibba didn’t know which one was right, but she wasn’t taking any chances. If her mother was going to Elanos, the Realm of Warriors, she would not go empty-handed. They would know her status and honor her as she wished.
She had considered adding Gabel's sword, but it was too valuable. The steel blade was finely made, and the grip was crafted to look like the body of a crow while the guard was its widespread black wings. Two small rubies inlaid in the handle were meant to be the bird's eyes. Sibba felt constantly like the crow was watching her, following her movements as she bid farewell to her mother. But as uncomfortable as it made her, it might bring her a trade that could get her out of the Fields, and so she had not sent it to Elanos as well.
Sibba had searched for Gabel's bow—the one he had used to kill her mother—but had found no trace of it. She was certain he hadn't been carrying it when she met him, so the only possibility was that he had lost it in the woods. But when she thought about how careful he had been with the sword, she couldn't reconcile him losing his other weapon. Had he discarded it on purpose? She would never know. Instead, Sibba had placed the two halves of her brother's broken bow on Darcey's other side, before wrapping her in the ruined sail, her makeshift burial shroud.
Looking down at her mother surrounded by such meager possessions, an apology had been on Sibba’s lips, but she pressed them together to keep it inside. That would not be a way to honor her mother or her death. If the Fieldings were right—and a secret part of her hoped they were—this wasn’t goodbye. They would meet again in Elanos and feast with the warriors for all eternity if Sibba met an honorable end.
Returning the dirt to the hole with the broken shovel was harder than she expected. It wasn’t the physical work involved, but the pain she felt every time a clump of dirt collided with her mother’s body. But Sibba kept going, not stopping to wipe the sweat from her forehead or the tears from her eyes. When the sun fell and the moon rose—Fusilis and Narchos in their eternal chase across the sky—she stood over what looked like nothing more than a mound of dirt. She thought she should say something, but words had never been her strong point and so she simply bowed her head and sent a silent prayer to whoever was listening, hoping that it would be enough.
That night, Sibba felt truly alone for the first time ever, surrounded only by trees and animals and an unrelenting ocean. She slept restlessly and rose with the dawn. The tide was low and the beach beyond her door was wide, shining yellow in the sunrise. She saddled Gerd, her gentle mare, bribing her with a handful of oats and apples from her own breakfast. When she was done, there was a small bag of supplies tied to the saddle, including the broken shovel and a spade that Darcey had used for gardening.
Sibba mounted and held a gloved hand up, letting out two shrill, short whistles. Aeris appeared in a harried beating of wings, landing on Sibba's outstretched hand, talons wrapping around her palm.
The bird gently touched her curved beak to Sibba's chin.
“I know,” Sibba said quietly. “Me too.”
Then she squeezed Gerd with her heels and the horse lumbered west into the forest.
✽ ✽ ✽
Sibba had always liked the way the island felt after it snowed. All of its secrets were laid bare; nothing was hidden behind leaves or in darkness. These trees had been her constant companions for five years. She had been safe beneath their canopy until Gabel had ripped that away from her. Now she felt uneasy, and even though the white snow cover and the leafless trees meant she could see for miles in every direction, the feeling that she was being watched only grew stronger. Even Aeris was on high alert, perched on Sibba's shoulder, her head twitching toward every sound.
The remains of the old village were on the northern side of the island, and Sibba wanted to make it there and back by nightfall. Now that her mother was gone, she had no reason to stay on Ey any longer than she had to. The sooner she got what she needed, the sooner she could leave.
They followed one of her hunting paths around the base of the hills and came out on the northwestern beach near the old settlement. It had been razed by invaders long ago, its residents killed or taken into slavery before the practice of human trading had been abolished. Some said it was cursed by Coris. Together, she and her husband Valdos ruled Malos, the Realm of Shadows, where those who died a dishonorable death spent eternity. She had been human once and had been taken from her home here on Ey. This old, abandoned village was allegedly the place where Fieldings had killed Coris’s mother, and so all who walked here would be doomed to an afterlife in shadow instead of light. Even the women that Darcey traded with would never travel to Ey, insisting on meeting her only on the mainland.
Darcey had never been afraid, though of course she had not been raised to believe in these gods. In Casuin, Enos was the only god. They believed that glory lay in conquering other people and spreading Enos’s influence as far and as wide as possible. A leader’s success was his people’s success, and so Darcey had drilled unity and obedience into her children.
All this while their father preached individual strength and glory. To a Fielding, Enos was their war chief, and he and his sons, Valdos and Lumos, valued bravery and independence above all else. The rest of their gods were innumerable, ranging from Interis who wove the loom of fate, to the spirits of the fields that helped protect a farmer’s land. While Darcey spoke of Enos with reverence, Fieldings spoke of their gods as if they were just other people—flawed and beautiful and terrifying. Sibba didn’t know which was correct, or even which she preferred, but she hoped not to meet any of them during this trip to the old village.
When the sun was almost at its peak, the ruins came into view—low, weathered stones forming rectangular outlines where walls had once been. A garden now overgrown and wild. A clay pit that her mother had said was for cooking, its sides cracked.
Sibba and Darcey had only come here once, when they had first arrived, and even then the place had made Sibba's skin crawl, whether or not the story was true. Aeris seemed to feel the same. As they approached the ruins now, she plucked at Sibba's hair. When Sibba didn't turn around, the bird leaped from her shoulder and took a watchful perch in a nearby tree, the branches rustling as they dropped the last of their ice to the ground, narrowly missing Sibba and Gerd.
In the middle of the town, the sutvithr tree still stood, the white bark peeling off of its trunk to reveal the red pulp beneath, its bare branches drooping until they nearly brushed the leaf-covered ground below. It still bloomed, even though everything else around it was dead, as if it were draining the place of life. Said to have been planted by Interis, the goddess of hearth and home who wove the loom of fate, it was around one of these trees that every Fielding town was built. Sibba gave it a wide berth before dismounting and leading the horse further along the path between the fallen houses.
Leav
ing Gerd with her reins draped over the rotting remains of an old fence, Sibba untied the shovel and spade and carried them against one of her shoulders. She followed an overgrown path to the third gathering of stones that had once made up the foundation of a small house. The walls still stood in places, jagged shards of wooden planks covered in moss and vines. Sibba touched a post and shivered. There was more than a cold wind biting the air here.
She walked around the stones to the garden in the back and took another path through the trees. Aeris followed, hopping from treetop to treetop, the beating of her wings the only sound. As always, Sibba's footsteps were silent and her breath was calm and controlled as she wound around the thicker tree trunks in this part of the forest. These trees had stood against storms for hundreds of years and their roots ran deep. Some of them were wider around than three men. Sibba sneaked around each one carefully, like someone might be waiting for her on the other side.
Once she had counted off twenty yards, she turned west and followed the coastline until the cliffs came into view. Sibba's eyes scanned the horizon. There, just before her on one of the many rocky ledges, three trees formed a triangle. She hadn't realized how anxious she had been until relief washed over her. It had been five years, after all. There had been countless storms and any one of them could have disfigured the landscape. She didn't think she would have known the spot if not for the three sister trees.
“Darcey,” her mother had said, her hand on the smaller of the trees, somehow thriving in the shade of the two larger ones. “Carys.” The second tree, the one closest to the edge, was thin and gangly, but tall, defying logic in its height. “Jamisen.” Her mother had stood a long time staring at the Jamisen tree, her eyes cast upward into its branches. It was taller than any of the nearby trees, its branches reaching far over the cliff and back into the forest that it had left behind.
Even though her mother was not with her now, Sibba made sure to follow in her footsteps, touching and naming each tree in turn. The names belonged to her mother's sisters, aunts that she had never known. Maybe she would travel to Casuin when she left here and seek them out. Maybe there was somewhere out there that she could call home after all. She leaned her cheek against the rough bark of the Darcey tree, longing for the embrace of her mother. Then she stepped through the trunks, into the small clearing between them, and began to dig.
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