Nether Kingdom

by J. Edward Neill

  “Aye, a fine tempest.” Daed stood beside her chair. “Since yestereve, I’ve spied neither sun nor moon nor star. County Shiver’s never been so wet.”

  “I like it,” she said.

  “Of course,” Daed grumped.

  She sank deeper in her chair. “We had best enjoy it while we can. The rain quenches the sky before the fire. The winds soothe the world until the end.”

  Her morbidity paled poor Daed. He sagged, the puddle beneath his boots spreading. “You won’t relent, will you?” He plopped the basket of bread and cheese atop her table. “No happiness for you. Only grey skies and gloomin’.”

  “Yes, I suppose. Grey skies and gloomin’.”

  “I’m to blame.” He grimaced. “I should’ve stolen us away weeks ago. We could’ve been in Kilnhome by now, sipping wine before roaring fires.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “My coldness is my own. The rain will follow wherever I go.”

  Daed’s eyes darkened. “Aye, this sad song you sing, m’lass. You sing it too much. You think I don’t believe in the things you’ve said, but ‘tis not entirely true. I know Grim is up to no good. I see the skies weeping. I know where the waves’ll smash hardest.”

  “Then…” She gazed hard at him, greyness smoking in her pupils. “…you know why nothing matters. Every good thing we have done in our lives will come to nothing. And soon.”

  Daed frowned deeply. “No, m’lass. No, no, no. That’s farther than this here Thillrian’ll believe. Woe and wickedness you rattle every eve, and sometimes I think you’re right, but I’ll follow you only so far.”

  “As you like.” She shrugged.

  “No. Not what I like. What the Grimheart does in Sallow might not be so well for Thillria, but ‘tis no reason to throw ourselves overboard. Here you and I are, no deader than before. We’ve lives to live. We’ve years ahead of us. Can’t you see it?”

  She took a hunk of bread from the basket, but enjoyed only the tiniest bite. I should fake happiness better, she thought. Not his fault he cannot believe.

  “Maybe you are right,” she sighed. “Must be the rain. What if I promised not to gloom anymore.”

  Tugging a second chair beside her, Daed sank into it across from her. “M’lass…” He pried at her with his familiar charm.

  “Yes?” She looked at him.

  “Won’t you relent?”

  “No. Not knowing what I know.”

  “I don’t just mean your gloomin’. I’m asking about you and me. What about my offer? Does my Shiver stock ruin me? Am I too…Thillrian?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe mountains are what we need. Maybe my uncle’s tower.” His smile was wide and hopeful. “You and I could make it there by the skirts of summer. I know what you’re thinking. You think, ‘My husbands would gut you, Seaman Daed, if they knew what you were schemin’.’ But ‘tisn’t so. My plans aren’t sinister. I say you and I leave County Shiver and buy a carriage to take us north. The wolf men stop none from leaving Thillria. You and I could blow out of here, free as falcons. Whether or not the winds see your heart to mine, I’d leave to luck. I only ask your company, m’lass. Nothing more. What do we have to lose, besides? We have only each other.”

  In another place, another time, she might have considered it. Appealing, she thought. To wander the mountains. To live a new life in a new place. But with one glance at the rain and another at Daed, she thought better of it. The Ur do not care whether I stay or go. They will smoke me out of any hole. They will burn me no matter how far I run.

  And the same for poor Daedelar.

  “I cannot,” she said. “I am sorry.”

  Daedelar tried to put a fair face on his disappointment. He rose from his chair with none but the mildest sigh. “Ah, ‘tis no mild hurt, m’lass,” he said. “But I think I understand. I’ll be away for a while. I’ve much to think on, much to do. This here basket of curds and bread is for you. I’ve a bottle of wine also, if you want me to bring it up later.”

  She saw the pain in his eyes and hated that she was to blame. His heart…big as any, she knew. And here I have smothered it.

  “Sorry,” she murmured, gaze downcast.

  “Don’t be.” He backed away.

  “But I am.” She closed her eyes. “I mean it. If you were wise, you would send me away. I am well enough to take to the city. I can use the silvers from Bretaen’s bag to find a room.”

  “No.” He wagged his finger. “Don’t say such things, m’lass. I’ll come back tomorrow, the day after, and the day after that. With luck, the sun’ll be out and you’ll be ready to go. But if not, you’ll always have a place to stay with me. I’ll not boot you out. Never.”

  He shambled to the door, still sodden and dripping. She opened her mouth to wish him well, but nothing came out.

  The grey day deepened. The rain, swelling to mirror her mood, lashed the tower walls. In Daed’s absence, she remained frozen in her chair, silent and stoic, her presence in the world so tenuous she felt like a thread waiting to be cut. The rain reached through her window, crossing the room to sting her cheek, but she did never shied from it. She was all but inanimate.

  * * *

  The next dawn, she awoke to the sound of rolling thunder. Still alive, she accepted. Another day or two, and Lyrlech will drown the same as Muthem.

  Her room was dim, the sun blotted by clouds even darker than yesterday’s. The rain slashed, and the puddle beneath her unshuttered window conquered a third of the floor. Twenty-one days. Surprised it took so long.

  As during all other dawns, she began by slipping into her gown and treading lightly to her window. Her feet pattered on the rain-covered floor, her toes turning blue. Heedless, she crawled into the window frame and sat atop the sill, curling her knees close to her chin. Perilous place to be. She smiled a morbid smile. One slip, and Daed will have to scrape me off the street.

  Tomorrow I will leave.

  I will fly to the farthest shore I can find.

  Daed will not follow me.

  He does not love me like Marid did.

  She felt certain of tomorrow, of everything afterward. Nothing could ever happen, nothing to save her, nothing to slow the rain.

  And then, in the small space between her next breaths, something changed.

  Absently, she caught herself peering to the street, where a hooded and cloaked man shouldered his way through the searing rain. At first she thought nothing of it. She observed the man’s movements, her curiosity roused only because he seemed the one ambulant thing in Lyrlech besides the rain. It was during those moments, even as she watched him march below her window, the Nightness in her eyes glimmered.

  Her skin subtly warmed.

  Her heart quickened in her chest.

  Striding unhurriedly, his shadow falling like a second twilight, the passerby felt somehow familiar to her. She glimpsed his face, seeing for a half-breath the man behind the hood. The longer she lingered, the more her mouth fell open.

  Impossible.

  She had no doubt of who he was. Though clad in a hooded cloak and shrouded by the rain, she recognized him. His gait, slow and measured despite the storm, was as familiar as anything in the world. His chin, barely visible beneath his hood, was as hard as a mountain, his movement sharp as swords.

  Stunned out of somnambulance, she slithered off the sill and staggered back into the room, where she stood still as chiseled ice as consciousness caught up to her.

  Can it be? She questioned what she had seen. How is it possible? How here? How now?

  She looked out the window again. She glanced up and down the street, but the man was gone, vanished into one of the hundred alleyways behind Daedelar’s tower.

  A dream.

  No, not a dream.

  You were there.

  I saw you.

  A ghost.

  Her heart thumped hard beneath her breast. The Nightness dimmed in her eyes. Frantic to chase after the man, she ran to her door and flung it open. Again she was stun
ned, for Daedelar stood before her, a tray of bread and piping hot tea in hand.

  “Daed!” she exclaimed. “The impossible…it happened!”

  Wide-eyed, Daed blushed and gazed to the ceiling. “Um…m’lass.” He looked modest for once in his life. “Your gown, your hair. You’re wet as a ‘Haunt fish. You should drop something drier over your skin a’fore you come charging out your door.”

  Modesty meant nothing to her. Sodden as the bottom of Shiver’s Pride, she stared at Daed until he cracked one eye open. “I saw him.” She quivered. “He was in the rain just outside the south window. No swords, no stallion, but it was him. I know it!”

  Daed crooked a half-smile and looked down upon her as though she were sick. “Who, m’lass? Not many out in this rain today.”

  “One of my husbands,” she said, disbelieving herself.

  Smile fading, Daed shook his head. “Nay. ‘Tis impossible. You’ve gone and seen a ghost.”

  “No. He was real.” She glared. I know it.

  “What will m’lass do?”

  “Find him,” she blurted. “Right now.”

  “Right now? Aye, but…”

  Before he could finish, she pushed past him. She moved swift as a shadow, nimble as a candle’s flame, and in the span of two quick breaths she descended the curling stone stair leading to the tower’s bottom. Daed called after her, but his words drowned in the blood pounding in her ears.

  “I have to hurry!” she shouted up the stair. “Else I might lose him again!”

  Daed pursued her, but she was faster. She sped to the door at the bottom of the stairs and tore it open as though it were made of paper. Like an arrow with the wind behind its feathers, she sprinted across Daed’s bedroom, swished through a crate-filled pantry, and slapped her bare feet onto the cold stones of the tower vestibule, in which lay the only way out.

  The tower door, tall and thick, stood between her and the rest of Lyrlech. Imbibing her life’s deepest breath, she turned the iron key lodged in the door’s rusted lock, set her hands on the hard, weather-worn wood, and shoved her way into the haggard, grey-stained day.

  Breathless, she emerged beneath the weeping sky. Droplets of rain peppered her face. Her heart pounding, her eyes wide with hope, she pattered across a dilapidated courtyard and strode straight onto the wet stones of the street in front of Daed’s tower. Not here. She looked left, then right. Nor there.

  Stone houses, tall and weary, were shelved like books on either side of the street, obscuring everything beyond her tiny cranny of Lyrlech. Nothing and no one moved on the streets. She was alone with the rain again.

  Before she could think another thought, Daed burst out of the door behind her. His boots splashed in the street and the rain drummed on his shoulders. Do not look at him, she commanded herself.

  “M’lass?” he called to her. “You’ll catch a nasty death in this. Safer to come back inside, I think. At least until the rain stops.”

  “The rain will not stop,” she said.

  He splashed several steps closer. “No? My gut tells me the sky’ll be empty soon. No rain lasts forever.”

  After a deep breath, she spun to face him. “Daed,” she said his name, her gaze hard as a full moon. “You should leave me. I am not coming back inside. I have something I must do. The rain cannot hurt me.”

  “Well then.” He sagged. “Will you come back if your husband proves a ghost?”

  “Yes,” she said, not sure she meant it.

  “And if he really is here? What then?”

  “I do not know.”

  She could not stand to stay still a moment longer. She reached out and brushed Daed’s bristly cheek with her forefinger, but then backed away.

  “M’lass?”

  “Good bye for now, Captain,” she told him with a half-smile. “If I never see you again, thank you for all you have done. I mean it.”

  “Don’t go.” He looked miserable.

  She opened her mouth to reply. Nothing came out. She blinked once, spread her arms like wings, and in the small space between heartbeats, slipped into Nightness form, becoming little more substantial than the wind. What Daed’s expression changed to, she never saw. She became shadow once again, darkness the shade of a raven’s feather, and as she took flight into the rain, she remembered her power.

  Goodbye, she thought of Daed as she soared into the sky. In another life, maybe.

  But not with Garrett near.

  Cold Souls Crossing

  Daedelar’s tower, with its crumbling roof and sagging stones, became the compass by which Andelusia searched Lyrlech.

  In an ever-widening circle, she soared around the grey and black pinnacle. She was invisible, consumed by clouds and falling rain. The crows huddled beneath every dwelling’s eaves and reacted none when she flew past, for she was soundless, and the only mark of her passage was the rain turning to ash. Daed became but a speck in her sights. She saw him staring into the clouds, miserable, until finally he walked back into his tower.

  Goodbye, Daed.

  Where are you, Garrett?

  Faster and faster she sailed through the falling rain. Lyrlech seemed frozen in time, and all the streets from Daed’s tower to the edge of the Selhaunt looked as empty as tombs never filled. She soared past windows, flitted down streets she swore Garrett had used, and twisted like a winter’s breeze through a hundred alleys. Everywhere were warrens of shops, ramshackle warehouses, and crooked stone dwellings. Lyrlech felt like a vast web, too big to dream of finding a single wandering soul.

  And then, even as a swell of panic surged through her ethereal body, she sensed him.

  Garrett.

  He is close.

  She ascended high above the city. Her eyes smoldered black and her Nightness vision burned away the rain. She narrowed her sights onto a street two dozen blocks away. There, she knew. Him.

  He walked through the rain, marching with grim patience toward Lyrlech’s outskirts. He headed for the quay, against which the Selhaunt smashed a cruel rhythm. She saw his cloak, his strides long and slow, and she knew it was him.

  A dagger of black lightning, she soared toward the street he walked. She flew faster than the rain, knifing through the grey sky, skirting the tops of a thousand cobbled dwellings. She reached the street in the span of ten heartbeats, and when she touched down some twenty steps behind him, her shadowy body shook with terrified anticipation.

  Exhausted, she retook fleshly form in the street’s center. She staggered, dizzy with hope, as he marched away from her. He does not know, she realized. I was too quiet. He did not hear me.

  Oblivious, he walked beneath a crumbling archway.

  “Garrett!” she shouted.

  He halted beneath the archway. Rain curtained him on both sides, and the Selhaunt’s surf rose over the quay in great pale plumes beyond him. She took several tentative steps closer, needing him to face her fully.

  “Are you real?” she called into the rain.

  He faced her. His cloak, slicked to his shoulders, gleamed like the black of the Selhaunt at night. His hood hid his eyes like a highwayman’s mask. Inclining his chin, he appraised her from a distance.

  “I know you.” She walked closer. “If you are you, and not a ghost.”

  He said nothing. For fear he might not be Garrett after all, her heart halted.

  If I am wrong, what then?

  He stepped out from beneath the archway and back into the rain. He took one step closer, then five, his head cocked as though he doubted she were real. She stood still. The only sounds were the rain crashing and her heart clattering against her ribs.

  After a moment of hesitation and a dark, unknowable gaze, he spoke.

  “Ande,” he named her.

  Her heart nearly erupted from her chest. Streaking barefooted across the street, she rushed him as though she were sunshine breaking over a dark horizon. She splashed to a halt so close to him that her naked toes came to a rest against the tips of his boots.

  Garrett, s
he knew. Alive.

  His lips, the silver glint in his eyes, and even the smell of his wet hair belonged to him. His beard was freshly shorn and his black raiment grimmer than usual, but he was every bit the man she remembered.

  “Garrett.” She touched his face. “Alive.”

  “You are a ghost.” He pulled his hood back.

  “No, not a ghost. I am me. I am Ande. Touch me. I did not die in Cornerstone.”

  She stood trembling beneath him. He looked different to her, but the same. His hair was shorn closer to his scalp than she had ever seen, and his eyes were the color of the calm before the storm. Most familiar was his stoicism, rooted like mountain rock within him.

  “You are dead.” He looked her up and down. “You were killed. The wolflings told me. We were certain.”

  She cracked a slender smile. “No. I am right here. You walked beneath my window. I saw you. What are you doing out here in the rain?”

  Deep into her eyes he roamed without answering. She knew what he was doing. Searching me. Deciding.

  “Home,” he said after a long silence. “I was going home.”

  “Home? You mean back to Mormist, back to Graehelm?”

  “No. I live here now. In Lyrlech. At the water’s edge, not far from here. I have a little house. There is nowhere else to go.”

  She stood with her mouth wide-open. I might already be dead, she imagined, and this conversation no more than two spirits colliding on our way to the afterlife.

  “How?” Her voice cracked. “How are you here? How are you alive?”

  “I might ask you the same.”

  “Is there somewhere we can go?” she pleaded. “Somewhere we can sit and tell each other everything? Somewhere out of the rain?”

  He glanced skyward. “The rain has stopped.”

  He was right. The rain was gone. She gazed into the heavens, which were cool and grey but no longer weeping. Stranger still, she felt a chill course though her body as a gust of wind whisked through the archway and down the street. With him near, I can feel. And this gown, not enough in the cold.