“Small comfort,” she murmured. “You are not the one he asks to do it.”
“You fear to die?” He glanced skyward, where the stars gathered as if in worship.
“Yes.”
“A natural sensation.” His stallion stamped, and he calmed it with but a touch. “But pointless. We all know how the world ends, milady. Poorly. For everyone. But not tonight and not tomorrow. There is time yet to work your deeds and live a long life afterward. Then of course, you could turn back to Denawir. You think you are a captive here, but it is not so. If your stomach turns and your heart shakes loose of your ribs, we will return you to your friends. All you have to do is ask.”
“No,” she said quicker than she meant to.
“No?”
“I will do what I promised. I know what Rellen would say. ‘Crows take my heart, girl,’ he would yell. ‘You are a fool, Andelusia.’ But I do not care. I made an oath. You will see. I am not the coward you think I am.”
Three hours after nightfall, the cities and lamplights of Shivershore fell far behind her, while the wind cut through the darkness like a scythe. The road, having wound its way through dozens of ghost villages, ended abruptly before her horse’s hooves. A dark pasture lay ahead. Soundless, it swept to the edge of the night. Nothing stirred within it. No birds sang and no crickets chirruped. The world was too quiet.
“Shivershore,” she murmured.
“Aye,” said one the Thillrians.
They made camp. The Thillrians raised their tents at the black pasture’s edge, conjured a small fire to cook a paltry dinner by, and scurried behind their canvas flaps as though fearful of the dark. Only the Captain remained outside. He stood alone, bathed in moonlight, staring southward. Too anxious to eat, she went to him.
“Is it out there?” she wondered aloud.
“It is.”
“How much further?”
“Less than an hour’s ride. No more.”
“I wish Garrett were here.”
“Your champion.” The Captain smirked. “Be happy he is not.”
“Why?”
“This place is not for heroes,” he said. “By the thousands, Thillrians once lived where we now stand. There were villages up and down these fields, and castles in the hills behind you. But that was before the Uylen awoke. The Thillrians never imaged the day they would return, but now you see what remains: weeds and dry earth, gravestones and grass. One man and a pretty sword would make no difference.”
“One would not, but your dozen will?”
“You poor thing.” He shook his head. “It must have felt easy for you, riding through the heartland in a matter of days. Thillria would’ve eaten you alive if not for us. Our dozen was the only thing between you and a lifetime chained in some Shiver dungeon.”
She stared at him, through him. His face was gaunt, his age indeterminable. He moved with the fluidity of a young man, but spoke with the wisdom of some hallowed king. “If you are so magnificent, why even bring me?” she asked. “Why not do it yourselves? Or are you afraid of the Uylen, too?”
He set his gaze upon her, consuming her in the voids of his pupils. “Cleaner for you to do it, and faster. If I go in there, the rivers will run red for a day in each direction and the grasses choke with all the bodies. But you…you will be the knife the Uylen never saw coming. A dagger in the darkness, you’ll be, a quick and painless death.”
“Here I am, inches from death, and you talk with such bravado,” she shuddered. “How can you be sure?”
He tugged on his ropey beard and smirked at the midnight fields. “Because you possess the one thing I do not, little one. You are a sorcerer, your blood as black as any who ever lived. If you’ve not gone and guessed that much by now, you are ten times the fool I thought you were.”
The Bone People
Dawn’s pallor crept across Shivershore’s sky. The death of night felt rather like a second twilight, for all the gloom curtaining the heavens. The clouds swallowed all sights, a bulbous ocean of blue and grey drowning the earth as far as the eye could see. Andelusia had expected no less from today. After dressing in a pale gossamer shirt, black riding pants, and high sandals, she crawled from her tent in the center of the Thillrians’ camp, looked to the sky in reverent silence, and wandered to the very spot she and the captain had stood the night before.
Nightmare. She gazed across the pasture. I see you. And you see me.
Far across the pasture, the dark forest lurked. If any place on earth was eerier, she could not imagine it. The trees, twisted and pale as dead men’s limbs, climbed like corpses out of the earth. Every branch, twig, and root was knurled like a broken bone or crooked finger. She could not tell if anything lived inside. The spaces between the trees looked empty enough, but in the black hollows beyond, she swore she saw white eyes roaming. My mind playing tricks, she tried to convince herself. I should go now before the Uylen wake.
Before her escorts finished their breakfasts and scurried to assemble their arms, she wandered off toward the cursed wood. She knew she should be terrified, but felt herself drawn like a moth toward a deadly flame. The morning air was still and dead. The dry grass felt like blades beneath her sandals, licking her ankles for tiny tastes of her blood. As she walked toward Nightmare, she parted her lips, thirsting for something within the tangle of gloom. Like a whisper across the grass it came, wooing her, arousing her, making her quake from the inside out.
Ten of the Thillrian lads, armed to the teeth with swords, spears, and daggers, ran into the pasture behind her, leaving but one behind to guard their mounts. Oblivious, she ambled ahead of them, drifting toward the trees as though dreaming. Nightmare’s scent, so horrid to the rest of Thillria, tasted like sweet red wine falling in droplets upon her tongue.
“Perhaps you are not as afraid as I assumed.” The Captain’s voice invaded her dreaming.
She halted in the heart of the pasture and opened her eyes. Nightmare remained at a distance. “No. Still afraid. But you were right. I know what I must do.”
“Good,” he rumbled.
He stood beside her, gazing at the twisted trees as though Nightmare were an ordinary forest. His braid was loose, his knotted hair a riot of brown and black lashes spilling down his shoulders. In his piecemeal armor, he looked less a soldier and more a scavenger. His half-hauberk was leather on one side and tarnished, dented steel on the other. His greaves and vambraces were pockmarked as if by dozens of quarrels, his singular pauldron so frayed and rusted it might have belonged to a soldier five-hundred years his elder. For all his pitiful armor, his twin swords were magnificent things. She saw only the jeweled hilts and shining black quillons, but she knew somehow they were marvelous things, deadlier than any of the simple steel the Thillrians carried. At a glance, she was reminded of Garrett’s pale, milk-like sword, only these are black, the opposite. If Garrett’s came from Mother Moon, the Captain’s came from farther out among the stars.
“This is all?” she asked him. “Just you and these boys?”
“Indeed.” He smirked.
She and he walked on. The Thillrian lads sulked behind them, miserable beyond words. The nearer to Nightmare she came, the more surreal it appeared. The canopy of leafless limbs looked like a wasteland of knucklebones, crooked ribs, and disfigured elbows. Each tree seemed its own crypt, each shadowy hollow stuffed with the spirits of the dead. The loam on the forest floor was neither black nor brown nor any natural shade. Rather, the dirt seemed wet, the color of blood, slick with newly-spilled gore. The trees’ roots writhed in and out of the scarlet muck. Like a mess of bloodworms and leeches. She made a face. Disgusting…
She slowed at forest’s edge. Several of the soldiers did the same. They know better than to be here. She heard their shudders. They did not choose this journey. It was chosen for them.
The moment she thought it, two of the soldier boys bolted. They ran wildly back toward camp, fleeing like deer hounded by an entire pack of wolves. “Grinley! Muryk!” their friends shout
ed, but the two only ran harder.
Halting beside her, the Captain rolled his neck. With a snort, he stalked to the eldest of the soldier lads, a tall, pale-faced Thillrian with a longbow and quiver strung over his shoulder. “Your bow,” the Captain told him.
“But ser, I…”
“You’re a spiritless, spineless lot.” The Captain snatched the bow and quiver away. “Your hearts are soft and squishy, like yon mud. Watch and learn.”
She watched him test the bow, plying its string like a harp before nocking his first arrow. He arched his back, rolled his neck again, and let two arrows fly in the space of half a breath. Grinley and Muryk collapsed in the pale pasture, arrows in their upper backs, falling just twenty paces from one another. They made no sounds when they died, for both were lifeless before they struck the earth.
“Was that Thillrian courage?” The Captain tossed the bow and quiver back to the tall soldier lad. “Where I am from, we’d butcher a soldier’s family for such cowardice. His father, his mother, his wife and children…we’d paint the fields red with them. Now, does anyone else wish to run?”
None of the boys said a word. They know what will happen.
She gazed at Grinley and Muryk, their bodies cooling in the morning mist, and she wondered what would happen if she fled. Would he kill me? No. Jix would be angry. But why should he care about Jix? He looks like he cares about nothing. Lunacy though it seemed, she turned her cheek to the Captain and marched until she breached the border of the forest. Ten steps in, Nightmare swallowed her. She strode past the first tree, the twisted branches drooping as if to sniff her, and she froze. “I will die here,” she said. “I know it.”
“No,” said the Captain. “You won’t.”
The forest felt a world apart from the rest of Thillria. Shadows worshipped the earth, kneeling in thrall to the endless warren of skeletal trees. She wandered a hundred steps deeper, and her heart hammered away in protest, thumping like horses’ hooves beneath her breast. The Captain trailed her, followed by eight Thillrian lads.
“You will go to the heart of this place,” the Captain commanded as he followed. “The more Uylen you see, the closer you are.”
A few steps more, and she knew there was no going back. The branches shivered above her head, dangling like haunted chimes. The limbs seemed to fold shut behind her, a door locking from the outside. The quiet was oppressive. She heard only the footfalls of her escorts, whose boots slapped against the shallow crimson mud and crackled over the dry, colorless brush. “Where are the Uylen?” she wondered aloud.
“They will not have expected you,” the Captain answered.
“How far will you accompany me? Will you give me a sword? How far to the Pages?”
“You need only this, mistress.”
He caught up to her. She would have been sweating her life’s blood out, save for the fact she was freezing. When he took her palm and laid the three-tined ebon dagger therein, she staggered, remembering what the stranger Wkhzl of Kilnhome had told her when he gave it to her in his shop. ‘Keep the blade close,’ the creepy old creature had said. ‘You have the look of someone who might need it.’
“You left it in your tent.” The Captain smirked.
She fought off a shiver. “What good will it do against the Uylen?”
“None. This blade is not for fighting. I’d keep it close all the same.”
She thought it queer he should bring the blade to her. When I had forgotten all about it. “Why this?” She shot him a dark look. “Food would have been wiser. Or maybe an army.”
“You should know by now you will need no army.” He shrugged. “Or food. Or water. Or anything made by man.”
The way he said it filled her with a startling sort of confidence. Why should he believe in me? Why should anyone? Unless Jix was right and I am powerful. What if it is so? What if the Uylen should be afraid of me?
After lashing the blade to her hip, she walked on. Her sandals squelched in the crimson mud. The darkness of Nightmare closed in around her. The Thillrians struck up torches, though their feeble light looked rather like candles smoking on their last inch of wick. She tied her hair back, kept her chin down, and cut between the trees, always one step ahead of the Captain and his fearful lads. She felt the tension inside her fading, her boldness soaring in her blood. But why?
No sooner did she slip beneath a hundredth sickly oak than she heard a cry split the silence behind her. The tall Thillrian with the yew longbow threw out his skinny arms to stop his fellows from proceeding. “Look!” he hissed. “The Uylen! Their totems!”
She looked where they looked, and immediately wished she had not. In a clearing to her left, she glimpsed raw human ligaments strung like spiders’ webs between the trees, red tethers from which skulls, ribs, and other bloodstained bones dangled. The ground in the clearing was a jumble of remains. At a glance, she reckoned the bodies of many hundreds had been broken and strewn across the earth. She drew in a breath and gagged at the scent of the charnel trinkets. A day dead at most. She swallowed back her bile. And children among them.
The Captain grinned. The Thillrians backed away. Without thinking, she strayed closer. She held her breath and reached out to tap a hollow, toothless skull with her forefinger. The man’s empty cranium bobbed on its bloody rope, dancing like a puppet’s head, staring back at her as though it knew something she did not. “What kind of creature would do this?” she asked anyone who would answer.
“Uylen,” murmured one of the Thillrians. “Who else?”
While wandering in the skull’s gaze, she felt the hairs on her neck rise. The Thillrians’ fearful chatter fell out of her ears, and the deadness overwhelmed her. She felt as though her senses were crying out, ‘Listen! Listen!’ and listen she did.
The crack of a distant limb breaking rushed into her ears. The crunch of a footfall, then many more, drummed in her head and rattled her teeth. The Uylen, she knew. They are here. Like a rabbit sprung from its hole, she darted out of the clearing and away from the totems. She whisked past the Captain and the Thillrians, gusting so swiftly through them that they seemed not to see her. “Run!” she shouted as she ran.
Full of primitive terror, she dashed into a maze of half-fallen trees, where the day was as night. She vaulted a rotting trunk, crashed through a labyrinth of skinny limbs, and scuttled between three tumbled oaks whose bodies were hollowed out like coffins. There she dropped to her knees amid a nest of thorns and bonemeal. Her arms bled and her knees stung, but she had no time for pain. “Run, you fools!” she cried. “The Uylen are coming!”
The Captain rolled his shoulders. The Thillrians, dumb and deaf to her cries, gaped into the trees. Deep in her hiding place, she cringed and watched and waited for them to die. Time seemed to slow. Her pulse thrummed in her head, a drum of dismal proportions. She saw pale shapes lope like deer from the darkness of the wood. They were the Uylen, she knew, though none broke off to murder her. Either my hiding place is perfect, she thought, or no one can see me.
The Uylen came by the hundred, or so it seemed. Clacking and groaning, they erupted from all angles of the darkness, overtaking the path she had occupied only breaths ago. She blinked hard at the sight of them. She doubted her eyes, for they looked like neither man nor beast, but rather something else, a creature never told of in lore or children’s tales. Their limbs were somewhat like a man’s, but their faces were as pale as milk, their fingers sharp as ivory daggers, and their flesh pulled far too tightly over their misshapen skulls. Bag of skin filled with bent and broken bones. She held her breath. Hideous.
Save for a few strips of dun cloth, the Uylen were naked. Their mouths hung open, their white saliva dripping in ropes from their mandibles. They looked hungry, as if a feast lay within their grasp. Worst of all were their eyes, pale as moons, behind which no emotion lived.
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