by Callie Bates
The mare clomps closer, and my eyes are drawn to the words written below the image of my face.
Elanna Valtai:
Dangerous Caerisian Witch
She has already murdered our King
Stop her before she endangers all of Eren
I can’t breathe.
I am not a witch.
I am not a murderer.
I am—
The man who nailed the paper up is standing next to me. Was he there all along? He looks at the poster and back at me. His eyes are a worn brown, widening with surprise. I don’t look like the girl in the portrait; he can’t recognize me. He’s only a country man, not too clever.
“Elanna Valtai?” he says.
My heart leaps. It’s my skin. My tawny-brown skin that doesn’t need walnut powder; in the city, no one takes any notice, but here, among these pale country folk, I stand out.
My body’s shaking—no, it’s the ground. The earth is trembling. I can feel it, shivering up into my legs, and my horse shifts with it, rolling her eyes. No, not my magic, not now, not here—
The man, who’d taken a step forward, now scrambles back toward the door, grasping its handle to hold himself steady. “Witch!”
The horse’s skin twitches all over. She sidles. I cling to the pommel. Behind us, a tree grows in a circle of cobblestones at the center of the square. I’m aware of it with sudden violence, like another limb lurching out of the ground at my back. It seems to be moving, to be waking. No. I can’t use my magic. I have to get out of here.
“Witch!” The man’s cupped his hands to his mouth, bellowing. He launches himself past me, toward the gong that hangs from the tree’s limbs, snatching up a fallen branch to strike the alarm. But the tree sways and the gong swings out of his reach.
Others have heard him, though—men and women run out of a nearby tavern. I’m frozen on my horse, my hair moving, electrified, into an aureole around me. I swell and swell. I am in the earth. I am shifting.
The earth rumbles.
And my mare bolts. I’m flung up out of the saddle, but somehow I stay on. The mare charges through the town, toward the slow-moving river that separates us from Tinan. I slip, fling my arms around her neck. Even the saddle is twisting. I’m going to fall, going to get trampled, then killed by the villagers—
“Elanna!”
Hugh shouts somewhere behind me. But the horse and I have already plunged into the black water. Her hooves slide on the gray rocks. I slip—and I’m falling.
Cold water drenches me. It seeps through my trousers, into my shoes, up the back of my coat. I try to crawl upright but slip on the rocks. My head goes under. I shove my hand down into the silt, then push myself upright, gasp in air.
I’m kneeling in the middle of the ford. The water that tried to suck me down can’t be more than three feet deep. The mare stands up to her fetlocks in the water beside the Tinani shore, her sides heaving, nostrils flared.
I have to move, but I’m shaking. I scrub a hand through my hair, my fingers snagging in its wet, chestnut-brown snarls.
How did that happen? Why does my magic keep bursting out of me, whether I will it or not? I used to have more control than this. All the years I lived at court, I never revealed myself.
Except I never allowed myself to think enough of my magic for anything to happen. And now that I’m aware of it, I can’t control it.
The horse snorts. I glance over my shoulder, toward the Ereni bank, which I see now is grown up with thickets of hazel and alder. Hugh hasn’t yet appeared. I still have time to get to Tinan.
If Loyce has branded me a witch and a murderer, King Alfred won’t offer me sanctuary, no matter how much he likes to thwart Loyce. He won’t risk himself or his country for my sake. The witch hunters will be the only ones waiting for me. They’ll clap me in irons and ring me with witch stones and drag me off to Ida. To madness and death.
Still. I have to try. I won’t go back to Caeris. And sitting in the middle of the Ard isn’t doing me a damned bit of good.
I flounder to my feet—just in time to hear rocks and water splash behind me. I startle, slip-sliding on the slippery stones, down into a hollow in the river bottom, so I’m up to my thighs in water.
Hugh’s edging toward me through the ford. I’d almost prefer it was the villagers.
“She’s here,” he shouts over his shoulder. Jahan and Finn gallop to the bank. Finn’s got a sword in his hand, and Jahan’s face is strained. He tumbles to the ground, his hands cupped before him. He kneels there.
Hugh gestures for Finn to follow him. “Get across the river.”
Finn obeys, urging his horse forward, upstream of me. He doesn’t look me in the eyes.
Hugh reins in his horse. He’s listening. I hear it then, too: voices raised, coming from the village.
Oh, no.
I flounder back toward Jahan, who jerks his chin at Hugh. “Get across. Quickly.”
It’s no quick thing to ford a river, but Hugh listens. The horse moves toward me.
I break into a run, spraying up water and slipping on rocks. Hugh makes a grab for me, but there’s too much space and rushing water between us. I launch myself at Jahan, grabbing his elbows, his horse’s lead. “Come on.”
He looks up, startled. “I can’t. The queen will know I’m helping you. I’ll be under suspicion. You go. You stay safe.”
“He’s protecting us, you fool,” Hugh calls at me. “Come across before those villagers put your head on a pike—or worse!”
I am not leaving Jahan, even if it means Loyce discovers he’s working against her. I refuse to sacrifice another person for my safety. “You must come.”
Our eyes lock. For a dizzying moment I see what he sees, or feel what he feels—the effort of cupping a whole ford in a swathe of nothingness, of invisibility. There is nothing here but water and rocks.
Then his concentration breaks. “I have to go back before your queen or her people realize where I’ve been,” he says. “I’ll misdirect the pursuers.”
“You can do that with us.”
The shouting villagers are drawing closer. Jahan shakes his head, and suddenly I’m angry—angry that he must leave, that this is my fault, that his magic is protecting me. There must be a way I can stop the villagers from crossing the ford, a way I can protect Jahan so he can escape to return south.
And…maybe there is. If I have some control over plants and stones, then perhaps I have control over water. For Jahan’s sake, I have to try.
I rush back through the river, the heaviness of it weighing down my legs. My soaked clothes drag at my body. The fish murmur beneath the river’s surface, and the water itself is alive and shining…
Such a simple thing, in the end, to lift my hands. To summon more of it.
“Go!” I shout to Jahan.
He gets to his feet, staring at me. Then he glances over his shoulder, back toward the village, and in one swift movement launches himself onto his horse’s back. They plunge deep into the alder thicket just as a crowd of villagers spills around the curve toward the ford, armed with pitchforks and decrepit muskets.
The river swells. It gathers itself. It crests into a wave, crashing around me. But I don’t break. I don’t fall.
Jahan got away. Downriver, the shrubs bob as his horse moves through them, unseen by the villagers, toward the south.
The water pours around me. The villagers are shouting, some in wonder, some in horror, some in both. I am water and I am a woman. I am the land. I’m everything. Just as I was as a child—though I tried to bury the knowledge so deep I couldn’t find it. But I didn’t put it deep enough.
I collapse backward so the water supports my head, so that I am floating just over the surface of the earth, a hair’s breadth from unity. I want it, this total awareness of the land. Come. Consume me.
But fingers twist in the back of my jacket, dragging me toward the Tinani shore.
—
FINN WON’T LOOK at me.
But Hugh does. We’ve moved up the bank; he caught my horse. I’m so wet my bones seem sodden, and I’ve begun to shiver. But I did it. I helped Jahan escape. I protected us from the villagers.
Of course, I also blew our cover and tried to abandon my would-be friends for King Alfred’s dubious sanctuary.
“Well,” says Hugh, in a tight, hard voice. “Now we are in Tinan. We’ll ride up the Tinani bank to Caeris.” He nods at Finn. “After you.” A glance at me. “And you.”
I sit my horse. I am still not going to Caeris.
“Elanna!” Hugh’s temper finally bursts. He jabs a finger at Finn’s back, though Finn has turned to stare at us. “Follow a simple order.”
He speaks to me in Caerisian, the language I’ve given up. The language I don’t speak, do not know.
But it comes bursting out of me all the same.
“I won’t go home!” I shout in childish Caerisian, a little girl’s Caerisian. “You can’t make me.”
Now that I’ve made this stellar showing, I begin to cry. Small, useless tears.
Finn and Hugh both sit there, watching me.
I refuse to wipe my eyes—too much like a child—so I stare at the trees through my blurring vision.
“I have one question,” Hugh says. “Where did you think you were going?”
Though I shake my head, my eyes jerk to the road ahead of us.
“Tinan? Damn it!” Hugh glances at Finn. “Go ahead. We’ll catch you up.”
He swings off his horse and walks to me, grasping my mare’s bridle. I look down into his worn face. His eyes are both stern and kind. He closes one hand over mine.
“El,” he says, and the deliberate gentleness of his tone makes me feel even worse. He is trying so hard to hold down his anger. “It isn’t a matter of want. You need to come with us. There’s no other place for you. You know this.”
I nod, wordless. The tears start up again, leaking from my eyes even though I will them to stop.
In a soft voice, Hugh asks, “What are you afraid of?”
The breath catches in my throat. I can’t answer that. I can’t tell him about Nobody, and how I betrayed them all.
Hugh’s hand comes up to cover mine in silent sympathy. Then he begins to speak. The words are old and raw with memory. “Wildegarde came, bearing a flame in her heart, her hair crowned with the pale light of stars.”
My head jerks up. It’s the poem—the words I’ve hidden within me for years. I stare at him. He taught me the words, didn’t he? He and my old nurse? I have a sudden memory—or is it just my imagination?—of my child’s voice galloping after his deep, grown-up one.
“You’re not my father’s spymaster,” I whisper.
He smiles faintly. “No. I am his Ollam.” His poet. The Chief Poet of Caeris. That’s what Hugh is: the keeper of legends and singer of songs.
He squeezes my hand and recites the lines. “Where she placed her foot, the earth trembled; when she raised her hand, mountains moved. The trees moved with her, the golden pine, the white ash, the ever-living cedar. Down she walked into the soft valleys of Caer-Ys, and the people came out from their dwellings to see what manner of creature moved among them, to see what threat or marvel awaited their eyes…”
He looks at me, almost a challenge, and I find myself answering, the ancient, practiced words rolling supple over my tongue. I used to repeat them to myself when I lay in bed as a child, all the meaning stripped out of them and only the comfortable rhythm remaining. And maybe…maybe Hensey spoke them with me. Hensey, who infiltrated the palace as my father’s spy. Maybe it was she who saw to it that I never forgot. “They saw but a woman, white as snow, all grown over with leaves as a tree is.”
Hugh takes the villagers’ part: “They said, ‘What art thou?’ ”
I whisper, “She said, ‘I am the wildness.’ ”
“They said, ‘Why hast thou come?’ ”
My horse shifts, impatient. And my words are so soft that her hooves trample them into the ground, into nothing at all.
“ ‘For thee.’ ”
CHAPTER SEVEN
We ride along the Ard—on the Tinani side—and I twist my fingers into my horse’s mane while Finn asks Hugh questions about everything from Caerisian customs to Caerisian sheep to Caerisian weather. My ears ache with talk of Caeris this and Caeris that. Finally, about midday, two days after we crossed into Tinan, Finn eagerly says to Hugh, “Is that Caeris across the river?”
“Yes. That is Caer-Ys.”
Hugh pronounces it the proper way, like a caress, instead of the careless way we say the name in the south of Eren. Finn reins in his horse to stare beneath the overhanging boughs of the firs. I watch him. There is something golden about him—maybe it’s his hair, but maybe it’s his hope. I want to shudder away from it, and at the same time I can’t stop looking.
A frown is falling over his face, chasing away the boyish enthusiasm. Hugh’s gone on ahead, and for the moment, the two of us are alone. My heart kicks and I tell it to be quiet. I don’t know what Finn expects of me. Maybe he doesn’t expect anything.
“I thought it would look different, somehow,” Finn says. He doesn’t look back at me, but the words seem to be offered in my direction. “But it looks the same as all the land we’ve been passing through.”
I say nothing. What is there to say? It does look the same.
Now he swivels around on his horse with a creak of the saddle leather. His forehead is still wrinkled. “It seems as if we’ve been waiting to see Caeris so long. All our lives.”
I press my lips together. I don’t see why he wants to include me in this statement. We are not the same.
“I grew up in Ida,” Finn says. “Sometimes I feel I don’t belong here.”
He waits, still twisted around in his saddle, as if he expects me to chirp an agreement. Or maybe he’s fishing for sympathy.
“That’s because you don’t belong here,” I say. “Neither of us does.”
He looks at me. I look back at him. I don’t want to be his friend.
No. That’s a lie.
I’m afraid to be his friend. I’m afraid of what he will expect of me if I offer him even a grin.
But he’s the one who muscles his mouth into a smile, and my jaw tightens. That’s my smile—the one I wore when I faced Loyce and the Butcher, the expression that allowed me to pass through the royal court.
Finn turns and urges his horse ahead. But it’s too late—too late to pretend that our conversation didn’t happen. Too late to pretend I didn’t see myself in him.
—
AFTER THREE MORE days of slow going, we glimpse the mountains. The hills have turned high, tumbling into one another, and through the gaps between them I see the distant peaks of the Tail Ridge, snow crusting the horizon. Hugh doesn’t call it the Tail Ridge, vaguely sneering, like everyone in Laon. He says it’s the Bal an-Dracan—the Dragon’s Mouth.
Which makes me shiver.
As we ride on, Hugh tells us stories, legends of dragons sleeping beneath the snow in the highest mountain peaks, taking in an orphan child whom they called Wildegarde. Wildegarde, who came down into Caeris and woke the land, who could look through the eyes of a tree or a bird, a brook or a stone. “She lived in the time before Eren and Caeris were divided into two nations, centuries before the Paladisans conquered us. In the time when the Children of Anu were new to our lands, having followed our gods here.”
It should not surprise me that Hugh still believes in the old gods—after all, he told me himself that’s one of the reasons the Caerisians want their own king—and that even Finn is nodding eagerly. I think of Loyce saying with scorn, Those stinking shepherds and their legends of Father Dagod. As if any god would think Caeris a heaven on earth!
Hugh must sense my skepticism. “When the Paladisans conquered Eren and Caeris, they tried to drive all memory of our gods out. But we clung to them in the deep valleys of Caeris; the mountain people held on to them. In any case, the Paladisans weren’t
here long enough to eradicate our beliefs.” He laughs. “Their empire had grown too large for them to control. One too many rebellions in Ida, too much corruption at the court, and they had to pull out.”
“And so Eren conquered you instead,” I say crossly. “Because Caeris was weak and disorganized, and easy prey to attack. They took your capital in a single day, and you should be glad. Otherwise Caeris would just be an impoverished backwater. What sort of economy would you have? What sort of life would you live? Oh, I know, you’d have your gods and your language and your customs, but what’s that worth if you can’t even govern yourselves?”
Hugh turns in his saddle to study me. “I didn’t think it was possible for them to have fed you so many lies.”
“This is the truth,” I snap. “I’ve had the best tutors in the kingdom.”
Finn stares between us, his eyebrows rising.
“The truth,” Hugh says, “used to give you nightmares. You used to run downstairs from your bed, begging your mother to hide you from the Ereni monsters come to murder you in your sleep.”
A pulse of rage surges through me. I am no longer five years old; all the nightmares I’ve ever had come from him and what they did to me by letting Antoine Eyrlai claim me as a hostage. “Tell me your version of the truth, then, Hugh. And I’ll compare it with what I’ve been taught.”
Hugh reins in his horse, causing Finn’s to skitter off into the shrubs. Reaching out, he grabs my horse’s bridle. I start to protest, but the look on his face silences me.
“Let’s start at the beginning,” he says. “You know that Caeris and Eren used to be one nation?”
I roll my eyes. “Until the rival queens, Rionach and Tierne, four hundred years ago. Yes. Rionach was elder and might have ruled both, but Tierne claimed Eren for herself, because she knew her sister was greedy and shortsighted.” My Ereni tutor had a dramatic account in which Tierne cried out, Let my sister be queen over a nation of cowherds and thieves if that is what she desires!
