by Kim Wilkins
Ash curled up on her side on her old blanket. Unweder sat by the fire, counting coins. The charm he wore on a strap of leather around his neck had worked free of his shirt and swung as he moved. He had eaten some rabbit and parsley soup, but she had no appetite; never had any appetite after performing magic. The breeze came from the west, fanning the smoke back into the hollow and making her eyes sting.
Sleep wouldn’t come. Her scalp itched. Her scalp had been itching for seven weeks now. At first she’d thought lice had bred in her hair, and she’d packed her scalp with oil infused with stavesacre and sweet wormwood. Then, when the itching didn’t cease, she took a knife and shaved off all her hair. Still, the itch.
Slowly she had come to believe this was a new symptom of using magic. Over the years, she had outgrown the worst of the gut aches and head fogs, and she knew that if she didn’t try to stretch her undermagic too far, to things that she had no natural talent for, she would mostly be comfortable. But now this crawling feeling across her scalp. In some ways it was worse than the other ailments, given it was constant, and driving her to madness.
Her dark hair only half an inch long, her shins and elbows as sharp as knives. No, she wasn’t the same person any more. Or at least, would never be recognised as the old Ash, should her sisters ever see her again.
‘We have a lot of gold here,’ Unweder said. ‘We will be well furnished at our next location.’
‘Our second-last location,’ she muttered, knowing that Unweder would stay away from society and the money mightn’t buy them more than a few new blankets from a trader on the route.
He fell silent a few moments, then said, ‘Yes, yes, Ash. I’m aware of that.’
‘And after that there is no more hope.’ No more fear.
‘The vision was clear, and you know I paid dearly for it.’
Ash did know. She had nursed him back to health after the long night he had spent, half poisoned on god-eye toadstools and nightshade, sweating in a trance by the fire, pupils huge and black. Afterwards, waking from a deep sleep, his blind eye had turned milky and ghastly, but his mind could now reach out to the memories that still quivered in the vast web of knowing and follow the threads to every dragon sighting for centuries. Seventeen. A number that had once seemed impossibly high, but had dwindled to almost nothing.
Two more locations. And if there was no dragon, then her dreams would have been made into lies and she could return to her family, her old life, and know both were safe.
If there was a dragon …
Ash had seen her future. She had seen fire and fear. If there was a dragon, then she would destroy it, before it could destroy all she loved.
‘Do you know where we will go next?’ she asked him.
He sat back and gazed at her a moment. ‘You look tired, Ash.’
‘I am always tired.’
‘After all these years, eh?’ He considered her a little longer. The two of them had spent every waking moment together for four years, but they were not lovers. They were not even friends, really. She needed the knowledge he had, certainly, and not just about where dragons may lie. A century of practising undermagic meant that he was wise in ways she simply couldn’t be yet. Without him, her own magic would have killed her at the start.
But lately things had shifted: he was far more dependent on the power she possessed. He inhabited a stolen body that would rot all around him without the few drops of her blood pressed between obsidian on the strap around his neck. He relied on her command of elemental spirits to keep them safe. She often wondered if it had occurred to Unweder that she might not need him any more, that she might have her own aspirations for their journey that ran counter to his, rather than still being the compliant apprentice.
‘You’re a good girl, Ash. Get some sleep.’
‘My scalp is itching.’
He shifted, sat next to her, and lay his fingers gently on her head. ‘Here, this will help.’ He often stroked her hair while she fell asleep. She closed her eyes.
‘Sleep well,’ Unweder said. ‘Tomorrow we head towards the sea.’
They struck out in the cool of the following morning. Ash had long since lost her sense of direction and distance from home; she had followed Unweder, obedient, from one side of Thyrsland to another. They were back in her father’s kingdom of Ælmesse, but in the far southwest, which was sparsely populated because of poor pastureland. Undermagicians like Unweder avoided other people; they demanded isolation. He insisted they walk the low roads, the green paths, the holloways. Ash had embraced the knowledge that she was an undermagician, too. The friends she had trained with in the common faith would certainly say she was. But Ash missed people. She missed the sweet daily whirl of chatter and activity by which most people lived their lives. Also, her high sensitivity meant that she could see things on the low roads that Unweder could not.
Every child grew up in Thyrsland knowing to stay on the road, that bad things lurked off the main routes. Now, Ash could see them. Not directly; more like the bright flickering impression left on her eyes after staring at a flame. But they were there. Not just bad things. Not just the mournful spirits of the lost dead and impossible creatures formed of bones and feathers that lurched along beside them a while, staring with uncanny intensity through hollow eyes. But wonders too. A seven-foot man with the head of a deer accompanied them for half a day. Ghostly women of aching beauty wrapped themselves around low-hanging branches and called to her by name in bell-like voices, only to snarl and turn to vapour when she refused to answer them. And of course there were her elementals, the tiny, pointy-faced piskies who had taken her as their queen.
No, that wasn’t right, for a queen could be loved. The elementals did not love her. They believed themselves enslaved. Somehow, her voice and thoughts could command them. Even Unweder couldn’t explain it.
On the third day, after balmy evenings when they had slept under shady elms and oaks, the sky filled with grey and rain set in. They kept moving. They had walked in rain before, in colder weather than this. But as the afternoon deepened and so did the rain, they passed into a tiny village on the edge of a wood. A hunters’ village, little more than an unpaved road, a collection of small houses, and a tiny wooden inn.
Rain was dripping off the tip of Ash’s nose when she turned to Unweder and said, ‘Can we sleep under cover tonight?’
Unweder’s brows drew down. ‘Worried about a little rain?’
‘Please? We have money. Imagine. A roof over our heads. A hot meal. Beer.’
Unweder nodded. ‘Beer.’
‘It’s only for a night. This rain won’t last.’
‘I don’t know if predicting the weather is one of your talents,’ he said with a half-smile. ‘All right, but we must hide the gold. I’ll keep a pocket of change to pay, but the rest …’ His eye roved up and down her body.
‘I can pin the purse to my under-dress.’
They retreated into the trees and Unweder helped her pin the heavy leather purse under her pinafore, up near her hip where her dress would skim loosely over it. She hitched her pack so it rested on that side, and together they walked back down the muddy road to the inn.
Inside, the smell of mould and wet dog. A little weak illumination straggled through the shutters, but most of the light came from the low fire in the grate. The stone floor was so cold Ash swore she could feel it through her shoes. Summer seemed as though it had never come here. The inn was empty.
The smell of sweet steam and stewing meat came from a back room. Unweder called, ‘Hello?’ and a moment later a large, hairy dog came bounding out happily, with a pale, pretty woman behind him.
‘Can I help?’
‘We’re looking for food and drink and a place to stay.’
The woman’s expression was genuinely puzzled. ‘A place to stay? Well then.’
Ash crouched to pat the dog, who put his paws up on her knees and tried to lick her nose.
‘You have rooms?’ Unweder was saying.
&nbs
p; ‘No, sir, we do not. The rooms … nobody has stayed here in a long time. Rats ate the beds. Once we were on a trade route. Now …’
‘Ah.’
‘We make a modest living serving locals, so there will be food and drink enough for you. And if you’re willing to sleep on the hearth tonight, you’d be most welcome to shelter from the rain. Looks like it’s set in for a day or so.’
Ash stood again, and the dog tried to stretch its paws up and love her some more. As it did, it brushed the purse under her dress, which chinked faintly.
The woman glanced at her, then said to the dog, ‘Go on with you, Featherfeet.’
The dog slid off, the click of its claws on the stone floor at odds with its name.
‘Ash? What do you think?’ Unweder said to her.
Sleeping inside, by a fire. Yes, she would be in the company of dogs, but after days of walking, the twin hardships of rain and mud would tip her into misery. ‘Let’s stay,’ she said.
The inn began to fill up a few hours after they arrived. Unweder grew less and less comfortable as more people arrived, shifting in his seat and casting his eye around nervously. Ash sat close to him, close enough to feel the heat from his shoulder, and urged him to be calm. In truth, fewer than twenty people came in and out of the inn that night, but the building was so cramped it felt like many more. The fire seemed too hot and their voices too loud and too sharp.
Ash and Unweder ate their fill of deer stew and drank good beer, and as the last few men and women left for their own homes, they rolled out their blankets next to Featherfeet and her brother Longbelly, and settled for the night. The fire burned low, the candles in the sconces glowed dimly, and silence stole over the room.
Ash woke – unsure how many hours later – to movement behind her. She thought at first it was one of the dogs shifting against her, but then in a blur there were fingers over her mouth and a hand roughly pulling at her clothes. All was dark but for the faint glow of embers.
The gold. Somebody was trying to take the gold.
Ash bit down hard and when the hand pulled away she shouted for Unweder. Unweder flung back his blanket and struggled into a crouch, but the pretty woman who had served them that afternoon had yanked Ash’s head back and positioned the tip of a blade against her throat. Ash’s pulse thudded in her ears.
‘Just give me the money,’ she said. ‘Don’t tempt me – I am desperate.’
Unweder said, ‘Give her the purse, Ash.’
But Ash, just woken and bent so violently to this woman’s will, filled with a rage that swept away sense. She had walked for hundreds of miles over years and years, and this small treasure was her just recompense. It meant the difference between sleeping in dry blankets and sleeping in damp holes. She was tired of sleeping in damp holes.
‘No!’ she shouted, struggling against the woman.
The blade began to move, drawing behind it a searing, stinging pain. Immediate regret. Her vision clouded. She was sure she could see the walls shaking. She heard a woman’s voice shouting in fear; presumed it was her own.
The pain stopped. The knife clattered to the ground. Ash’s vision tunnelled. The fire billowed into yellow-bright life and Ash tried to make sense of what was happening. The roof was falling in … beams cracking and shards of wood dropping all around her, but not landing on her or Unweder. The walls were also swelling out and out, as though they might at any moment burst and let the night in. The flames shot out of the grate and made orange wings on the walls, and Ash leapt to her feet, grabbed her pack and turned to Unweder. He stood, horrified, as he watched two fiery hands reach out from the grate and take the woman, screeching, around the throat and ankles. The dogs howled and ran, scratching at the front door as shards of wood continued to rain down. The rushes had caught fire and now the flames were spreading fast around them, but a clear path – so neat it seemed unreal – laid out before them direct to the door.
‘Run!’ Ash called to Unweder, stumbling towards the door and yanking it open. Cold rushed in; the dogs rushed out. Unweder was behind her. Mighty beams fell as the roof collapsed.
They churned the mud with their feet, stopping only at the top of the hill to turn and watch as the walls of the inn split outwards, fire surging into the damp night air.
Ash was struck dumb. Her heart hammered. Her hand went to her throat and came away bloody.
Unweder turned her so he could see her wound by the firelight, and touched her under the chin gently. ‘It’s shallow, just the skin. I can dress it once we …’ He trailed off, no doubt wondering, as she was, where they would sleep that night.
‘They killed her,’ Ash said. Then she turned and shouted, ‘I didn’t ask you to kill anyone! I don’t want you to act without my command!’
Unweder caught her arm and faced her to him. ‘You would have been dead if your elementals hadn’t saved you.’
‘They burned her alive.’ The woman’s screech echoed in her mind, amplifying and slapping from one side of her skull to the other. She smacked her forehead with the heel of her palm, a grunt of fear and frustration coming unbidden from her mouth.
Unweder gazed at her with hungry intensity. He licked his lips. ‘And they say your sister is the unkillable one.’
How she hated him in that moment. How repulsed she was by his venal curiosity. She had to look away. Mizzling rain began to fall. Down at the inn, voices and movement as the fire was discovered.
‘We should keep moving,’ Unweder said. ‘Dawn can’t be far away.’
‘As you wish.’
They hugged the edge of the wood to give the burning building a wide berth then rejoined the narrow rut that passed as a road. Ash’s heart felt sick and her scalp itched, and the darkness grew upon her soul.
Two
The Howling Wood, at the bottom of Greyrain Range, was dense and gloomy, and Skalmir’s first glimpse of his little house at the end of a long working day always made him smile. Out into the long sunshine after a shadowy day tracking, trapping, hunting, into the fresh air after the cold tang of blood by the stream then the choking air of the smoke house. Yes, he was muddy and bloody and his hair smelled of smoke, but inside were clean clothes and sweet-smelling herbs hung from the ceiling beams and, of course, Rowan. His dogs wrestled and growled around his feet, happy.
Skalmir opened the door and there was Rowan, sitting by Sister Julian. The shutters were all open to let the afternoon breeze in, and yellow sunlight hit Rowan’s hair and found auburn highlights. She looked up at the same time as Sister Julian. Rowan’s first instinct, he could tell, was to bounce out of her seat and hug him hard around the middle, winding her little legs around his ankles and demanding he walk around the house with her hanging off him, a limpet – her favourite way to greet him. But with Sister Julian’s eyes on her, she sat still.
‘Snowy!’ she cried instead. ‘You’re home!’
Strike and Stranger jumped up on her lap, wagging their tails happily.
‘That I am, little one,’ he replied, sitting at the freshly lit hearth and taking his boots off.
‘Good afternoon, sir,’ Sister Julian said, eyes returning to her stitching.
‘Good afternoon, sister.’
Sister Julian came from the village daily to mind Rowan, to teach her to sew, and to tell her stories about Maava, the god of the new religion that hadn’t quite spread as far as the Howling Wood. She rarely spoke more than a few words to Skalmir, but seemed kind enough with Rowan, and Wengest had insisted on hiring her for Rowan’s care and instruction.
‘I’ll clean myself up. You may go,’ he said to her.
She nodded, but he couldn’t see the expression on her face below the headscarf she always wore over her long, fair hair. He sometimes wondered if she was embarrassed by him, as if the fact of her being a spinster and him being a widower meant they should never look at each other directly.
‘Rowan, can you water the dogs?’ Skalmir made his way across the room and through to the back door, which opened on
overgrown weeds and a stone slab with their water barrel on it. He ladled water over his head and hands, then stripped to the waist and left his clothes in a bundle for Sister Julian and Rowan to wash tomorrow. A robin chirped above him and he glanced up. ‘Good afternoon to you, too,’ he said.
He ran his eyes along the length of the eaves, checking for loose parts and gaps where the rain could get in. He had built this house with his own hands ten years ago, when his wife Mildrith had been expecting their first child. He knew every nail, every inch of oak and elm, every handful of mud, every flat stone collected from the stream. He had never worked so hard as he worked that year, watching his wife’s belly grow, keen to keep them all warm. But the first child had not survived the birth. The small ante-room off their bed chamber remained empty. No, not empty: hollow.
By the time Mildrith’s belly swelled again, they were raising Rowan together, King Wengest’s daughter in hiding, deep in the ancient woodland reserved for Skalmir’s work as king’s hunstman. This time the birth was more brutal, and neither his child nor his wife lived through it.
The house still stood, sturdy as ever.
Skalmir found a sunny bank of grass to lie on and closed his eyes, filling his lungs with afternoon air.
A few moments later, Rowan was there, flinging herself on top of him. ‘She’s gone! Today was very long,’ she declared.
‘Why is that, dear heart?’ he asked, spitting her long hair out of his mouth.
‘Because Sister Julian is very old and very boring.’
‘She’s the same age as I am,’ Skalmir said, although even he found it hard to believe that a woman of only thirty could have such a pinched face.
‘Yes, but you’re my lovely Snowy and she is just an old bore.’ She wriggled off him and grabbed his bare arm, trying to pull him up. ‘Take me shooting.’
‘I don’t want to go back out.’
‘In the sapling grove, then. Please. I’ve been sitting still all day and I’m dying.’
