By the time the last glimmer of sunlight faded from the window, her mind was moribund. A day spent without Marid’s company might as well have been a hundred. She felt black-hearted and forlorn, and the Pages Black was now the only thing she cared for.
I am ready.
She stood tall, the Nightness crackling on her fingertips. Stalking to the door, she gave a last pitying glance at Marid to make sure he still lived, and then she gathered herself. The door opened at her lightest touch, a plank of its pale wood turning blacker than a scarab’s shell as she brushed it with a flicker of Ur fire.
One step outside, and everything changed. She set one naked foot into the knee-deep snow, and her serenity came undone. The wind rose against her. Like a terrible, world-swallowing ocean wave, the gale struck her and blasted her down to her backside. Her clothes were nearly stripped away as the wind whipped wantonly at her skin, stinging her, burning her.
Sprawled in the snow, she shielded her face and gaped into the darkness with Nightness smoke fuming from her eyes.
No, she shivered. No. It cannot be.
Out there, some hundred steps beyond her house, the wind made ghastly shapes of the swirling airborne snow. She saw gangly, skeletal arms reaching out as though to claw her, and she cringed as thousand-fanged jaws opened wide to consume her. Worse yet were the faces forming in the shadows between the snow. Horned heads and skinless shades writhed in the night like licks of fire, dancing to the wailing wind’s dreadful melody. She saw their stretching, soulless eyes. She tried to scream, but nothing escaped her lips.
The Ur, she gasped. Not real, not imagined. Here but not here. Please. No.
The shadows taunted and tortured her. How their presence was so strong, so nearly tangible, she dared not guess. Frozen in the cabin’s doorway, she dared a glance up to the sky, where a break in the cloud-fabric of the storm revealed an aperture of open heaven. She gasped, for though she expected to see stars, she saw only darkness.
Father’s moon.
The Black Moon.
The Eye of the Ur.
It was the Eye who met her stare. It hung lower in the sky than ever she had glimpsed, far closer to the earth than four months ago, when I saw it from my window in Muthem.
Wishing she had not seen it, she tried to become shadow and tear off into the night, but her terror compelled her to stay. There would be no chasing the thief, not tonight, not ever. They guard him, she understood. They are real. Please. Someone help me.
All at once, the ghastly shapes vanished.
The shadows broke, and the roaring wind quieted to its usual howl. Flustered and shaken, she clambered to her feet, afterward brushing the snow from her skirt and smoothing her tangled tresses. The thief, she exhaled. The wind covered his tracks. Not an accident. Have I gone mad? Am I dreaming?
No.
She looked to the storm’s heart again. The Black Moon was gone, concealed as though it had never been.
Dreaming, she thought. Dreaming. Or dead.
Or both.
Not of this World
At dawn Andelusia woke.
She cracked her eyelids open, and the smell of burning kindling washed over her. She no longer stood in the snow, but lay instead inside the house, curled on the floor like a kitten. She could not recall how she came to lie before the hearth, buried in a mound of blankets, but for once she felt comfortable, warm enough to feel my own skin.
“She lives.” Marid knelt beside her, offering a cup of warm water.
She felt embarrassed to face him. She shied when he looked at her, sheltering her nose beneath a corner of the blanket.
“I see no book,” he said. “Didn’t you find your scoundrel? Or did you come to your senses?”
Huffing, she tossed the rumpled blankets away and sat up. Her body made a stark silhouette against the roaring flame, and her countenance, streaked with shadows, showed the dark line of her lips.
“Are you well?” Marid worried.
“I am. What about you?”
“Got an ache in my skull.” He rubbed the shirt-bandage he had wrapped around his head. “But I’ll live. I just wonder why he didn’t kill me.”
Wish I could have asked him.
All at once, she remembered the Ur. Their faces haunted her, their knowing smiles pumping black thoughts through her blood. In the storm beyond her house, they had felt so tangible. But if they were here, everything would have ended.
She gazed at the hearth-fire. “I changed my mind. You were right. The Pages is cursed. I need it no longer.”
Beaming with the belief he had talked her out of danger, Marid crouched beside the hearth and offered her a skewer of cooked meat, one of few the thief had not taken. She accepted it with a frown.
“He took our food.” She shook her head disgustedly. “This is almost the last of it.”
“Aye. Almost.” Marid grimaced.
“And you are not well enough to hunt,” she sighed.
“I can manage. I think.”
“No.” She made a face. “It will not do. I will catch us something. You need to eat.”
She rose and stretched her arms over her head, completely unaware of the effect she had on poor Marid. Even now, even after drowsing the night on the floor, she intoxicated him. Her tattered garb and loose tresses settled on her shoulders like rain on the slopes of the world’s most graceful mountain. She realized Marid’s adoration only after catching his stare in the corner of her eye.
“By now you must know,” she said to him. “You have seen the things I can do.”
“Things?” He pretended not to know. “What things?”
“The shadows. The storm. I hope you will forgive me my secrets. But you need to understand there are things I can do to help us. Like hunting. We need food. I can find it and kill it tonight. I will leave you alone for a while. I doubt our thief will return.”
Marid scrunched his brow. “So…we’re not leaving? Not even now? What about the pale man’s warning? He said wolves, Ande. I don’t think he meant it literally. He was talking about your enemy.”
“Likely, yes.” She closed her eyes contemplatively. “Grim is exactly who I am waiting for. You know that.”
“What will you do when they…when he gets here?”
Eyes still shut, she imagined it. “On the day he comes I will spirit you away from here and face him alone. A few breaths is all it will take. I will burn him, him and all his men. I would have insisted you leave a long time ago…to keep you safe…but I need your company. You keep me sane.”
“Hardly seems fair.” He sagged.
“Nothing is,” she agreed.
“When?” He sank on his bedroll. “When does it end, Ande? When will you give this up?”
She sank onto the bedroll beside his. The strip of straw-filled canvas felt cold and flat, little more comfortable than bare stone. Now is your chance, she thought. Tell him everything. He deserves to know.
Closing her eyes and clutching her knees to her chin, she let out all the breath in her body. “Marid,” she began, “we both know I owe you an explanation. Now is as good a time as any.”
“You mean it?” He blinked.
“Yes.”
He tilted the last drop of water from his cup into his throat, and she sat across from him, greyness gleaming in her eyes.
“Marid…”
This was the moment she wished she had allowed to happen many years ago, the chance to tell the truth. No longer afraid, she embraced it. During the next hours, she sat with him. No games were played and no laughter shared. Like mother to son, she explained the ways of her world, beginning from the days of her adolescence, taking Marid all the way to her arrival at Muthemnal.
She told him of the darkness of Furyon, “…in whose black towers I began to see I was not like other girls.”
She told him of Graehelm, of the intense love she had shared with Rellen Gryphon, “…who was murdered by Grimwain at the world’s bottom.”
And she told of Grimwain
, “…who lied to everyone, and who is as much to blame for Thillria’s suffering as ever my father was.”
Many things she told him, and he listened wordlessly. Morning became midday, and midday stretched into late afternoon. She arrived at the tale of her father’s capture and imprisonment, reminiscing as though it had happened a hundred years ago.
“They sent him to a place called Cornerstone,” she said, her eyes damp with unwanted sadness. “He did all those terrible things to me, and yet I loved him. Now he is surely dead. Grim’s fault. All of it. All a part of his plan.”
Ever rapt, Marid said nothing. When she recovered from her sadness and described the powers of the Pages Black, he sat as still as a tree on a dead winter’s day. When she described the nightmarish magicks roiling in her blood, he barely flinched. He believes me, she knew. And she loved him a tiny bit more for it.
“So the thief was right.” She gazed into the barely burning hearth. “I am a witch-girl. Magic such as mine should never have existed, but here I am. When I die, these evil powers will live no more.”
“How do you know you’re the last?” Marid dared his first question in hours.
“Father told me.” She rubbed her eyes. “Though it could have been another of his lies.”
At dusk, the fire died. Winter’s breath crept through every crack in the house, and Marid, his shoulders shrouded in two layers of blankets, looked at her. “So that’s why the cold never bothers you,” he said. “And why you insist on walking around in nothing but sackcloth dresses and milkmaids’ skirts. You’re like a ghost, but not.”
She could not help but smile. “It was the same when I was a little girl. Mother would swaddle me in four layers of clothes, and by midmorning I would be naked and giggling.”
When the last ember perished and the wind began to howl at the windows, she finished. “You have had enough,” she said at the end. “No one has ever listened to me that long. Thank you.”
“It’s all true, isn’t it?” His eyes were wide. “You really are the Warlock’s daughter. You really did fight the Furies.”
“Yes.” She stood and flipped her hair over her shoulder. “And now, I hunt.”
“Please be safe,” he worried.
I will.
She knelt next to him, planted a kiss on his cheek, and then tugged the door wide open. The cold air rushed in, embracing her, calming her. She sensed tonight was not the same as last, that the Black Moon and the Ur would not show themselves again.
“If anyone comes, hide.” She reached out into the cold and caught a half-dozen snowflakes. “But I would not worry. Tonight the storm will do as I ask.”
“You mean you were serious? You can fly?” Marid doubted.
“Build a fire,” she told him. “I will be back before you know it.”
She closed the door. With a flicker of her ebon lashes and a shallow breath, she folded into the night, soaring into the sky, where the ebb and flow of the storm comforted her more than any earthbound setting. Curtains of frozen rain and oceans of wind raged over Sallow, but they were nothing, for I am the night.
* * *
The next nights drifted peaceably by. The thief never returned, and her daily jaunts to the Undergrave resumed. Grimwain is not here, she came to believe. Nor any of his minions. They have the book, but they are afraid of me.
After agreeing to set aside all talk of leaving, she and Marid resumed an almost comfortable existence. She told new stories while he invented fresh diversions, and life returned to the way it had been before the thief had come. If her mood was blacker, it was only because of the Pages. She ached for the Ur book, and with each passing day she dreamed ever more dreadful reasons for why it had been stolen.
Nine days and nine nights drifted by, and the storm over Sallow eased its grip. The snows thinned, the clouds paled from twilight greys to murky whites, and the winds bayed with far less fury. All because of me. Whether her darkest feelings were at last exhausted or whether the lull in the storm was only an effect of her daily meditations, she could not be certain. If anything, the sudden stillness was better for Marid, which was enough for her to be happy.
One day, long after the lump on Marid’s head had shrunk and the ache in his skull subsided, she allowed him to accompany her to the Undergrave. The cavern’s massive entrance, so like a vast, toothy maw, was stuffed from cheek to cheek with rocks hewn from the underworld. “No one has come this way,” she observed. “Grim is no sorcerer. He will have to move the rocks to get in.”
“How far down did it go?” asked Marid. “I mean…before King Tycus had it blocked.”
Standing in a snowdrift beside him, she closed her eyes to remember. “All the way to the bottom,” she said. “There is a lake down in the depths, and in the middle of the lake…an island.”
“Oh.” Marid marveled. “And that’s where it happens? Where everything ends?”
She stole a secret look at the clouds. “Maybe. My hope is no one will ever find out.”
The very next morn, her storm reawakened.
Pillow-soft clouds were usurped by ash-mottled nimbi, blighting the landscape under the pallor of death once again. She and Marid awoke before dawn to the sound of the wind clattering at the door, and they both knew without a word what it would be like outside.
“Going to need the shovel again,” Marid yawned. “Going to need more food as well. It’s just as well. I’m so bored I could die.”
She peered out the window. The snowdrifts beyond the door were already waist high, while the sides and back of the house were completely buried. She imagined in another few hours the cabin might well be a tomb, a powder-packed grave with only a chimney to announce its presence in the world. Worse was the lack of food. She glimpsed the last hare dangling over the hearth, and her shoulders sank at the prospect of having to hunt again.
“I will go again tonight.” She nodded at the hare. “It will be safe. Grim will have to wait until spring to come.”
“No. Not this time.” Marid stood and shook out his shoulders. “I’ve been locked up long enough. I’ll go.”
She grimaced. “No. You stay. I go.”
Marid looked her hard in the eyes. His gaze reminded her distantly of Saul, who had given her the same look more times than she could count. “My turn,” he declared. “You go to the Undergrave. I fetch supper for the next two weeks.”
“I could stop you if I wanted.” She cracked a slender smile.
“You could. But you won’t.”
An hour later, with breakfast devoured and hearth cooling, she watched Marid gather his tools for hunting. She helped him bundle in blankets, strung his homemade bow over his shoulder, and tied his sword to his waist. Once he was dressed, she stepped back. He was a fine sight in his hunting garb, as broad-shouldered as an ox beneath his pile of blankets, his cheeks ruddy with excitement. She could have kissed him for being so full of life, were she not worried he would kiss me back.
“You be careful.” She held his shoulders square.
“This is what, the hundredth time?” he scoffed. “I’ll be fine. I’ll see you tomorrow. If you want to help, ease off the storm a bit.”
She felt it then, a twang of sadness played on her heartstrings. If the thief’s invasion had taught her anything, it was that Marid meant more to her than she would ever admit aloud. “If you are not back before dusk tomorrow, I am coming after you.”
“Well and good.” He shrugged.
She opened the door for him. He brushed by, pausing just before leaving. When she lifted her gaze, he leaned in and smacked a surprise kiss on her cheek.
“One day,” he said with a grin, “you’ll love me.”
She blushed, and Marid waded into the snow. The wind howled and the snow tumbled on his head in great tufts. When he turned the corner and marched toward the vale between Undergrave Hill and its nearest neighbor, she shut her eyes and said a silent prayer:
Tomorrow, Marid.
Tomorrow.
In his absence
, she could but wait. At midday and twice afterward she swept into the shadows and flew to the Undergrave, each time finding it unmolested. She half began to wonder whether Grim was already within, whether there was a second entrance he had found and covertly entered.
If so, the Ur will at any moment set fire to the sky, she imagined. Thillria will burn first, then Triaxe, then Graehelm. Within a year, the world will be dead. In ten, it will be as I dreamed. Oceans of black powder, towers like knives watching over fields of ash.
Stop it, Ande. Stop.
Despairing, she returned from the Undergrave and spent the rest of the day outside. Perched on the western slope of Undergrave Hill, she sat atop the only boulder not buried beneath the snow, watching the grey day turn to dusky smoke and die.
Sleep, as it too often did, promised to elude her. In darkness, she returned to the cabin and built a tiny fire in the hearth. As the night deepened, old urges resurfaced. She lurked on the edge of Marid’s bedroll and recalled to mind her tower in Muthemnal, from whose window she had so many times contemplated leaping into the sea. Those were her darkest hours, she remembered.
The next dawn, her black mood tempered. She slipped outside and shoveled a fresh path for Marid’s return. It was hard work, and she could have done it with a few candles of Ur flame, but the simplicity of her labor felt rewarding. She carved a trench in the snow all the way from the door to the spot between the hills Marid had taken toward his hunt. The work blistered her hands and left her breaths ragged and sharp.
But once it was done she felt better.
Swords in the Snow
Drowsing on Marid’s bedroll, Andelusia dreamed of a knock at the door.
The noise tumbled into her senses. How long it lasted, she never could have said. The sound like soft thunder rolled at the edge of perception, falling like rain upon her mind. Not a dream, she began to believe. Real.
Pulled unwillingly from sleep, she snapped her eyes open. Someone was on the other side of the door. Her hope was that Marid had returned, but her fear was that Grimwain had arrived.
Nether Kingdom Page 27
