“It can’t be helped.” He flinched as I slipped an arm under his and helped him to the fire the others were building. They avoided us, as they always did when I lapsed into the Gift to speak to him, assuming I wanted the privacy. “This land has little to give, and it’s darkening in my sight.”
“Are we too late?” I asked, low.
He shook his head and would say nothing more.
“Won’t he eat?” Ivy asked me later, worried.
“The curse makes it immaterial, that he might starve for lack of food.” I set out our blankets. “What he needs can’t be derived from it.”
“What does he need?” Eyre said.
“For us to succeed.”
That night I slept with my arms around my brother and my nose in his hair. The physical warmth was as meaningless as food, but the emotional… that was nourishment. I felt his almost inaudible sigh, a bare lift of his knife-like ribs beneath my arm, and grieved. I had seen him reduced before and loathed it. Though the sickness that afflicted Troth was not Sedetnet’s fault, I laid it at his doorstep anyway.
At my back, Ivy made no complaint at my shift in attentions; rather she cuddled in against my spine, her cheek against my shoulderblade, and now and then stroked my arm and set a hesitant hand on my brother’s shoulder. Truly she was more than I deserved.
7
“And now what?” Chester asked.
For several hours we’d pressed on through a drizzle that had chilled us all to the marrow, having drawn a mantle of miserable silence around ourselves to concentrate on picking our way through the softened soil and the irregular ditches that sliced through the trees. The world smelled of cold mud and dying leaves, close and wet, and more immediately for me of damp genets, and compounding those sensations with the increasing nausea as we drew nearer the source of the wrongness had made for an interminable ride… until the trees simply stopped.
Before us spread a broad lip devoid of anything taller than grass. We’d been approaching it from an oblique angle, which had prevented us from the sight of it, and the sight of it….
“Master!” Almond said, bracing me as I swayed. Kelu grabbed at me as well, but I ignored her to croak something I hoped to be Amhric’s name. He was riding alone—
“Got him,” Chester said, snatching at my brother before he could fall from his mount.
“What is it?” Ivy asked, guiding her horse up along mine. “Morgan?”
The wrongness was a river here, flowing past the lip and into the trees. Drums beat in my ears, and my heart accelerated to match the relentlessness of its rhythm. The taste of blood was on my tongue, and grief.
“We’re close,” Amhric said for me.
When I was sure of my voice, I said, “Somewhere ahead of us.”
“Then… there’s a problem.”
I lifted my head, managed to focus on Carrington by her voice… her voice, and the glow in her, which had grown sure and steady, a lighthouse in fog.
“When I was reading about Mother’s Stand, most of the accounts agreed that there was more than one path to it, and to use the low road was to die. We have to find the high road. There should be something… a path, a trail, something that leads up instead of down.”
“Down is where the feeling leads,” I said in a voice that felt like scraped-up butter.
“If down is what’s making you feel this poorly, perhaps Doctor Carrington is right,” Ivy said.
“But if she’s wrong, we’ll lose time. And we don’t have time,” Chester murmured.
Eyre spoke. “But if she’s right, we might die taking the low road.”
“We might die doing anything,” Chester said. “We’re chasing a sorcerer who’s going to summon a demon. What are the chances of us surviving this? Us, the humans, anyway.”
And with a single utterance, Chester made my decision for me. “Can you find this high road?”
“The accounts all agree that it’s close enough to the entrance to be obvious.” Carrington’s voice was firm.
“Then lead, please,” I said. “I know our chances of success are slight. But I have been making decisions based on folklore for months now. There’s no use stopping now.”
The light in her flared, and for a moment it cut through the miasma gripping me. My eyes watered behind the spectacles and I closed them.
“All right,” Carrington said. “Let’s go then, but stay alert. Legend says the bones and blood are layers deep here. I can’t imagine there’s anything left to trouble us, but there’s no use tempting fate.”
“But before we go…” Ivy slid from her horse and said to the genets, “Will you share a horse with Chester and myself? So we can put the king and Morgan on the drake.”
“So that the two people most likely to collapse will be on the same mount?” Kelu asked.
“Because there’s no use not putting them on the same mount. Morgan won’t let anyone else ward him. Besides, the drake can keep them astride.” She ran a hand over its cheek. “Can’t you?”
It huffed, a soft exhalation that smelled of ash and burning wood.
Looking up at me, Ivy said, “Yes?”
“Yes,” I said. And knew the other reason she’d made the suggestion. With someone to be strong for, I would master myself more completely.
We made the trade then, and Amhric went before me, and we resumed our trek in the wake of Carrington, who led us with more confidence than I’d anticipated, or perhaps than she had. We had brought her to the threshold of the culmination of years of research, and she was eager for it in a way none of the rest of us could be.
For no one else was eager. There was something about the gulch into which we were descending that discommoded everyone, something invisible and yet all too tangible to other senses. Even the drake’s nostrils flared, over and over, as if reacting to some stink too faint for human noses. It was so distinct an unease that the very innocuousness of the landscape made everyone skittish. When at last, several hours later, Carrington said, “Here!” Ivy jumped, her horse shying at her twitch, and even Last brought his mount up short.
Carrington’s high road was in fact, a broad path that went up, skirting the edge of the gully. Someone had maintained it, for there was not so much as a weed to mar it, and the surface had been leveled.
“Now that makes me as nervous as if we were to go straight in,” Eyre admitted. “Do you suppose there are people ahead? Was there some mention of a community that waits at Mother’s Stand?”
“No,” Carrington said. “A witch, certainly, but not a large number of people. This is purportedly a lonely redoubt, built to repulse the casual visitor.”
“If it’s supposed to repulse the casual visitor, it probably shouldn’t be so easy to use or find,” Ivy muttered.
Kelu nodded from behind Chester. “Looks like a trap to me.”
“Perhaps the witch is kind?” Almond asked.
“I doubt there’s a witch,” Carrington said. “That’s one of the least common of the stories about Mother’s Stand. There’s probably nothing here, except maybe that sorcerer you’re chasing.”
“Let us hope he’s not there before us,” I said.
I allowed Carrington to continue leading us, not because I thought there would be any more choices on where to go—it was obvious to me that we were now heading in the right direction—but because it meant so much to her. The time would come when I would have to take the fore, but until then, let her enjoy herself. Someone should.
“And you?” I murmured to Amhric, who was slumped in front of me, using the arm I had around his waist for support. “Do you do well?”
A long silence. Then he seemed to marshal himself. “Well enough. Weak, though, and no notion as to why that might be.”
“I sense we will have some answers soon.”
“I pray.”
I tightened my hold on him, ignoring my own nausea, and concentrated on the path.
We were soon above the floor of the gully and rising, and not even an hour afte
r we gained it we were over some of the trees. The vantage afforded us a good view of the area we would have been riding through, and it seemed inoffensive enough, despite the growing oppression that thickened the air. Looking over his shoulder, Last commented, “It narrows.” At my quizzical glance, he pointed. “There, you see? The walls close in. They named this place well, if they call it a redoubt. One man could hold off an army there, at that point. And if I am not mistaken, there is another such lock ahead.”
“As if someone had built the place to defend it,” Chester said.
“Or to trap with it, as the genet suggested.”
I was grateful this conversation had been conducted in the Gift. It was hard enough not surrendering to my distress without having to reassure half our members that we were safe enough. I closed my eyes and trusted to the drake to carry us in the wake of the others, and took some solace from the nearness of my brother, and the heat of the drake’s skin beneath us.
Stopping was what made me realize I’d fallen asleep. But though Ivy’s gasp was strangled, I woke immediately, reaching for the staff.
Ivy, Eyre, and Carrington had halted at the edge of the road. We’d not ridden much higher, though it was hard to tell—the trees had fallen away, leaving the gulch an open channel that snaked around a turn.
It was entirely filled with the animate dead. Like a mound of insects roiling, they were pushing at one another, scrabbling in an attempt to move forward and failing because there were so many of them. They churned, a nauseating carpet of bone and gristle and decaying tissue. And they were not silent: the scrape of their limbs against one another, the scrabble of skeletal fingers clawing, the rattle when one fell and the others trampled it in their mindless need to plow forward….
“My God,” Eyre whispered, face blanched.
Almond was whimpering, her face hidden against Ivy’s back. My beloved was pale but resolute, staring down into the mass.
Carrington… Carrington was shocked. Perhaps she hadn’t believed us, not fully. To be healed is one sort of magic. To see the unnatural, and in such profusion….
“But what are they seeking?” Last said from behind us, using Lit so all could understand. He guided his mount up alongside the others. “And why have they not gotten it yet, when there are so many?”
“Obviously...” Carrington stopped, moistened her lips, continued somewhat more steadily. “Obviously they’re here for the shrine.”
“Or to attack the witch?” Ivy said. “There’s a witch, isn’t there?”
“There is no witch,” said a new voice in accented Lit. “But I believe I am the woman they mean.”
8
She stood some distance before us on the road, and cast no shadow.
I had thought myself pale, but this woman was white, like clouds, paler than pearls, and she had hip-length hair that fell in columnar spirals the color of mist, gathering gray. Her body was an attenuated elegance, but there was strength in it, the strength of long durance, the patience of stone. She was beautiful in a way altogether untouchable, and she had gray eyes rimmed in black.
Like mine.
And I knew her, in the bone and the blood, where words are meaningless.
“Morgan,” Ivy whispered. “Your mother!”
“Are you the witch of Mother’s Stand, then?” Carrington asked. “And are you responsible for… that?” She waved a hand toward the dead.
“I keep the vigil,” the elf answered. Impossible to tell if she found the question offensive. Her reserve was glacial, and as impersonal. “And I am responsible for it, insofar as I watch it for any changes. But what you see has been here for centuries, and I did not create it, though I saw its genesis.”
I did not recall sliding from the drake, though my hands remembered steadying Amhric before I left him. I did not remember the footsteps I took to put me in front of the others. Seeing her close by made the throb of my heart rise into my ears. She had my lips along with my eyes. We were the same height. Her length of limb… now I knew where I’d derived my build, though she made it ethereal with her calm.
“You are my mother,” I said.
“I am. And I have been waiting for you.”
This surpassed all I could conceive, I who had been stretched so far already. And yet it was completely expected. Of course she was waiting for me. I swallowed. “Why?”
This question brought forth the first show of humanity I’d seen in her: she canted her head, as if for once a ready answer escaped her. “Why what? Why did I bear you? Why did I leave you? Why did I foster you among humans? Why am I waiting—why here?”
“Yes,” I said.
Her gaze skated off mine, encompassed the others.
“They should hear it,” I said. “They’ve come with me this far.”
She nodded. “Follow me. There is a place you can rest.”
It was not a comfortable procession. The dead ravened below us, close enough that the squeak and patter of their movements were easily discernable. Before us, enigma, in the form of an unlooked-for elf, the woman who’d borne me. And the wrongness that had been assailing those of us with the blood to feel it had now become so palpable that it affected everyone. Even Carrington, faced with the culmination of all her research, looked grim and sick.
I led the drake by a hand on its neck, and it caressed my face every few steps, as if to be sure of me. I was glad of it, for the fire scent of its breath was preferable to the fetor that lingered on any breeze that blew toward us from the gully. We climbed, and I averted my eyes from the edge of the road, and in this way we continued for long enough that I no longer counted time, until abruptly our guide stopped. The path broadened into an overlook, and to one side, set against the wall of the cliff, was a single-room shrine with a peaked roof, almost too small to lie down in.
My mother was standing at the rim of the overlook, and I knew, suddenly, that what her eyes rested on would overset my world. I stopped. The drake halted alongside me. Everyone behind me paused.
Looking at me with my gray eyes, the elf said, “Come and see.” Raising her gaze. “You as well.”
I helped Amhric down, ignoring the tremor in my arms. We went together and beheld the treasure toward which the dead were so desperately striving.
On an altar, a simple stone table watched by the missing skeletal vultures, a man slept, one hand on his chest, the other open, palm up, at his hip. His face was turned to one side, just enough to expose the slanted ear. He was lean, with a warrior’s scars, and in that countenance I could read more years of responsibility and power than I could number.
He had Amhric’s golden skin, and my black hair, and we shared his face.
I was shaking. Had Ivy not slipped her arm around me from behind, I might have fallen.
“Marne,” my mother said, in that voice of unearthly calm. “The King of Elves.”
“Is he... is he alive?” Ivy asked.
The woman’s voice was even, too tranquil. “Bespelled so, yes.”
“But how is that possible?” Eyre asked. “I thought there was only one king at a time?”
“There is.” She looked at Amhric. “You see a king-in-waiting, and his prince.”
I said what everyone thought, what I could not keep from saying. “I don’t understand.”
“This was Marne’s choice,” said she. “To save us from demons. He came here, leading the dead from the battlefield, and the angel allowed him to remain thus, in stasis, forever holding them to him through the divine light that was given him to attract them. All the magic on this continent has been raveled to this cause, to keep him thus, to hold that light to his flesh. So he has remained all the centuries of our exile, fulfilling that trust against the day when the ending comes. All those with royal gifts since have been slain or quelled as part of the rot of our society.” Her eyes rose to Amhric’s face, considered it. “I knew your mother. Henite e Aresset. A cunning woman... clever to keep you concealed from those who would have noted you. She sent you on a wanderjah
r, did she not? A pilgrimage. Something that would allow you to strengthen your ties to the land while keeping you far from the strongholds of other elves. Something that would give you a chance to wait for the prince to complete you.” She nodded. “She would be gratified to hear how far you’ve come.”
The implication that Amhric’s mother had died... how? He was serene, so perhaps he’d known. “And me?” I asked, quiet.
“I had a dream.” She looked down at the king on the altar. “After humanity betrayed us. After Marne saved us. I prayed that we might find some answer, and though I long begged I received no visitation, nor guidance, and thought the cause lost. But centuries later, I dreamed of a youth come forth from my womb and knew he would be prince. I woke understanding that, were we ever to have a chance at redemption, he must be born and live to adulthood, be born and grow to be worthy of the gifts... which he certainly wouldn’t on the Archipelago. So I came here and begot that child on the king, and when you were born, I gave you to humans to raise.”
“You were the one who enchanted me,” I breathed.
She inclined her head.
“You almost killed him!” Chester said.
“A risk,” she said. “But he would certainly have died in Serala. And I could not leave him unconcealed among humans after what humanity did to us. His only chance lay in deception. I did my poor best.”
“It served,” I said, because what else could I say and speak truth? It had. “But if Marne lives, then Amhric is not yet king, and I am not yet prince—yes?”
She gave another of those nearly imperceptible nods.
“Does it work that way? Does a king have a particular prince, and only that prince?” Eyre asked.
On Wings of Bone and Glass Page 9
