Now, the spindly, bony horrors twitched, peeking out of their moldy caverns in the rotted wood, their dark eyes looking to the north, and the west. Willow followed the direction of their gazes. The sky was dark, but the Dark Months were nearly upon them. Sooner than they should be, true, but the Dark Kind had never come against them as they had the Valleyfolk to the south.
She didn’t know what had the Sightless so rattled. So disturbed. A part of her even took pleasure in it, to see them squirm where they had made so many others squirm before them.
She heard it before she saw it.
It sounded like a tree being split down the middle, its splintered guts being rent apart by the claws of a great bear. It sounded like a deep peal of thunder, but one that didn’t end, and when she looked back into the sky to the north, she saw a deeper swath of black rising like a tower beneath the roiling clouds overhead.
The tops of the farthest trees took on the bloody hue the sky gave off, and Willow smelled rot and ozone on the breeze.
She straightened from her branch, looking toward those across the way, where her sisters stood, looking in the same direction.
The Sightless never spoke. Now, it did. They did. Before the first of the demons broke through the northern trees, they screamed one word over and over, maddening and melodious.
“Doom,” they said. “Doom. Doom. Doom.”
“Do you really think we’ll be passing messages to the elk in the Untamed Hills?” Jes asked him, and not for the first time, albeit in different words. She always found different words to give voice to the same complaint.
Karin ignored her and kept on running, putting one foot in front of the other, his gait widening with each stride until it would look to an observer as if he leapt from place to place rather than ran. Others thought when they ran, or walked, or trained. Karin did not. He didn’t think of his wayward son. He didn’t think of his recently buried friend. He didn’t think of the World ending like he did when he tossed and turned into the deepest hours.
But then he heard Mial grumbling and grunting, which he had come to know as the prelude to his next complaint. Jes complained often, but not long. Mial was the opposite. If he was going to complain, he was going to stop to do it, and Karin wanted to be back at the Lake by sundown.
“Was actually hoping we’d startle a silver lion,” Karin called back, only half joking. “Might give you lot a tickle close to the real thing. You want to call yourselves runners, you learn to run, and over difficult, deadly terrain.”
“Hasn’t been a lion attack in ages,” Mial said dismissively. “Not in my lifetime, at least.”
“You live in Hearth, Mial,” Karin tossed back. “Ask the folk in the Villages about the cats. I’m sure you’ll get a different story.”
“Villagers aren’t so different from you Lakemen in your telling of tales,” Mial shot back.
“You’d think you might be careful with what you say, given what you saw in the north,” Jes countered.
“What?” Mial said, his breath going ragged as it always did when he ran and whined at the same time. “You think there’s a Night Lord hiding beneath these hills? Bah! Nothing but some oversized worms and the odd wolf.” Mial was older than Karin by a decade or more, but he had a strong heart and full lungs. He also had the instincts of a fox. Made him ideal for running, and Karin suspected they would need more like him in the months to come, if what Iyana had said—if what she had seen—truly came to pass.
“You’ve seen what those wolves can do given the right training,” Jes said. “The Lakemen have turned them into the fiercest fighters in the Valley.”
Mial grumbled something unintelligible. He liked to start arguments, not further them.
Karin skidded to a halt at the bottom of a grassy hill that stood three times the height of the tallest towers of Hearth, stopping before a line of trees. Jes and Mial nearly collided with him. He looked behind the other two, who took the rare respite to bend forward and pant with mouths agape.
“Where’s Ket?” Karin asked, his heart quickening.
The other two looked askance at one another, and then back the way they’d come down from. Karin was about to call out to him, but then he saw a dark-haired figure standing atop the rise, framed against the darkening sky.
“What is it, Ket?” Karin called up to him. “What do you see?”
The direction of Ket’s gaze was south. South and east, toward Last Lake. Karin called up to him again, and still he didn’t answer.
Finally, he had enough of the youth’s delays. He climbed back up the rise, cutting south, toward the steeper slope, and pulling himself up through the long grass with his hands. Ket had lost one of his in the north. He wouldn’t be able to make it down if he tried it from here.
“What is it?”
Karin grabbed Ket on the left shoulder and made as if to turn him toward him, but the young soldier of Hearth only pointed with the hand he had left.
Karin followed it, and though at first it looked like nothing more than a passing storm over the water on the other side of the western woods, he focused, and the image came clearer. He swallowed.
“First Runner?” Jes called up. “Karin?”
“What is it?” Ket asked him.
“I expect we’re soon to find out,” Karin answered, his voice more steady than he felt. “Come on, Ket. Let’s get ourselves back to the Lake.”
“That’s … that’s closer to the storm,” Ket said, seeming to hate the quaver in his own voice.
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
“I told you to turn that sail, Nathen!”
Nathen mumbled his reply. Bali caught it. Even in the midst of the most violent storm winds Nathen had felt in … well, forever, Bali caught it. He caught everything his crew said, especially his son.
“What’s that?”
“I did!” Nathen shouted back. He tapped a passing deckhand on the shoulder—one of Rhees’s cousins, he thought—and nodded at the rigging. “Give me a hand with this, yeah?”
The man complied, and together they managed to swing the lone sail of the fishing vessel to the southeast. It nearly pulled away from both of them as the crosswind took it, but Nathen was stronger than he had been last season. He managed to hook the rope onto the iron hook in the center of the deck and kept the mast from snapping like a twig.
“Captain?” Nathen heard another crew member shout. Lena. She was new this season, and while he’d never had many dealings with her at the Lake, he’d been impressed—they all had—with her uncanny ability to locate the biggest shoals, no matter the depth or the light in the sky above them.
“Captain!”
It wasn’t like Bali not to answer. Nathen finished tying off the rope and stood, wiping the salted sweat from his brow as he looked toward the stern.
His father stood with his back to the rest of them, facing the southern sky. They were on the northern side of the ring, and soon they’d be around the eastern side of the spur that watched over the town he’d lived in most of his life. Nathen had been eager to return. Eager to stand on dry land. Eager to hear news of Kole and Linn, Baas and Jenk. Another vessel had passed them out on the southern coast, told them Captain Talmir Caru had returned from the deserts, and that not all had come back with him.
Nathen had held himself apart from the larger affairs of the World. He had set his mind and his hands to the task of feeding his people for the Dark Months ahead. He had thrown himself into it, and it shamed him to know why.
Nathen did not want to be in songs or stories. He didn’t want to face Sages in red-topped keeps, nor fight the Dark Kind any more than he had to to protect his nearest neighbor.
He had let his friends down, some part of him knew. It was a part that had started quiet enough when they had first set out at the start of the Bright Days. And it had grown louder and more insistent with each passing swell,
each loaded haul. It was the part of him that said even he could make a difference out in the wider World, helping to guide Kole’s blades, to aim Linn’s eyes.
It was the part of him that thought they had failed, as he looked into a sky that had been split in two by a black scar with burning edges. A scar that continued down until it met the lake below and split that as well, lighting the water like oil.
The end had come. The end of the World, and Nathen was closest to it, with nothing but a fishing pole and nets to beat it back.
Talmir made his extra round along the southern walk. He made an extra round on top of his extra round.
Anything to keep him out of the stuffy confines of the gaudy palisade at the edge of the market bowl, where Yush would glare and fume beneath his bouncing, feather-filled hat, and where Rain would delight in his discomfort, and where Kenta would not be there to save him. Where they would go over the provisions for the tenth time that month, argue over the placement of squadrons for the sixth and where Talmir would be questioned about the validity of this Faey girl’s dreams for the thousandth.
As if he hadn’t asked the same of himself twice as often. As if he hadn’t gone over the numbers a thousand thousand times. As if he hadn’t wondered what they were doing, preparing for an army of Dark Kind that might not come—that should not come, now that the White Crest had been defeated and the Dark Hearts destroyed.
But Iyana Ve’Ran was not the only one who had had dreams these last weeks, though hers counted for much more than his. And Talmir couldn’t help but revisit them in the relative silence his relative solitude afforded him.
He had had no word from Iyana since she had left for the Eastern Woods with Kenta and Ceth. No word from Center and beyond, where Kole Reyna and Misha Ve’Gah and the others had gone to, and where the Eastern Dark was headed.
Here he was. Talmir Caru, brave, now-storied Captain of Hearth. Waiting on the word of others’ deeds or failures. Waiting on someone to tell him what to do, so that he might say it again in a voice more sure-sounding than he ever felt.
Thus it was not fear that first entered Talmir’s heart as his eyes fixated on the southern horizon, where the sky had gone dark before its time. He would feel guilty for it later—another helping of that familiar acid to lend to the mix—but when he saw the black scar separate the burnt amber and purple of the sky above the lake, Talmir felt relief.
He felt something else, as well. It was faint, more a sound than a feel, at first. It was like a buzzing, a flutter that tickled the hairs of his chest.
He didn’t see the glow beneath his armor and shirt, but he felt the heat. Warm as butter, at first, but growing hotter quickly. Hot as mulled wine, and then it began to burn.
Talmir dug his fingers into the collar of his mail and dug for the chain that rested beneath his shirt. He pulled as soon as he snatched a handful of the warm links and earned a scrape across the skin of his chest as he yanked it free.
The Bronze Star glowed like the sun. Bright as he had ever seen it before. Brighter than it had even in the bloody caves to the north, where he and Karin had survived the Song of the Seers and lived to keep the secret of it.
He unlooped the chain from around his neck and held it out, the glowing pendant twisting before him, hypnotizing and stinging in its intensity. He held it up, framed against the black tower that broke the southern sky, and the Bronze Star pulsed like a firefly in its death throes.
“Captain! Captain Caru!”
Jakub nearly collided with him as Talmir turned with effort from the sight to the south, where the other soldiers along the wall—those who weren’t too busy lighting torches to notice—watched the spectacle with mouths agape.
“Order the gates closed,” Talmir said, his voice as always stony calm despite his warring, twisting insides. “And get me a runner.”
“They’re with Reyna,” Jakub said quickly. “In the Untamed Hills.”
“Where did you come from just now?” Talmir asked him as he walked past him, making for the stair before the black gate with haste. He could already hear the questions and the gasps, the sound of panic planting its fast-growing seeds.
“I came from the North Walk,” Jakub said hurriedly, trying to keep up with Talmir as he descended the stairs two at a time. “Soon as I saw—”
“Then I’ve got a job for you,” Talmir said as he strode into the dirty square. He cast about, searching for Garos, or someone who could point him in his direction. When he turned back to Jakub, the boy was beaming with purpose, chest puffed out, chin high. His hair was as dirty as ever, and his face was marked with soot. Where he managed to collect the grime, Talmir couldn’t guess.
“Take one of the smaller steeds,” Talmir said. Jakub reached for a torch that guttered in the wind that hadn’t whipped so much just a few minutes before. “No.” Talmir shook his head. “You’ll burn half the Valley down, and likely the walls of Last Lake while you’re at it.”
Talmir held the Bronze Star up again, his eyes and his thoughts lost for a moment in the strange, insistent glow. He handed it over to the blinking boy, and the medal seemed to dim ever so slightly as he accepted the chain and looped it around his neck. It lay against the black homespun shirt Rain had given him, pulsing steadily.
“Last Lake,” Talmir said, laying a steadying hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Go now, before you can’t. Fetch Karin. He’ll be back there by then. Send him here. He’ll have sussed out what it is we’re facing. And Jakub.” He gave him a squeeze. “Tell them our gates are open.”
“They won’t leave the Lake—”
“I didn’t say they were leaving.”
Jakub frowned, and then smiled in a determined way that made Talmir feel better despite the circumstances.
There were a thousand things Talmir had to do before they departed. A hundred people he had to speak to. A city of hysterics he had to calm.
Before that, he raced back to the top of the white stone stair and leaned on the parapet that still bore black smudges from the last doom that had befallen the Valley. The one they had survived.
He watched Jakub ride a white steed into the burning twilight, across the shining streams, the Bronze Star bouncing on his chest like a lantern. Like a ward against the coming night.
He looked like hope. Hope riding into the teeth of despair.
Steven is a fighter turned writer who resides in the Boston area. He wishes all disputes were still settled with a friendly game of hand-to-hand combat, is a fan of awesome things, and tries to write books he’d want to read. He hopes you like them.
You can find him and his musings at his official web site…
StevenKelliher.com
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