A Season of Rendings

by Adam J Nicolai

  He's alive, Iggy thought, and then realized: I can fix the leg later. He turned toward the hill and nocked his bow, scanning the hillside. Most of his friends were nearly at the river's edge.

  Then Lyseira pitched to the dirt.

  Seth heard her scream and dug in a heel to stop. He turned back, eyes flashing, and leapt. A single, arced jump put him just behind her, where he caught the nearest troll's momentum with his shoulder and flipped it to the ground. He grabbed Lyseira's arm and pulled her to her feet, but she howled, limping, and nearly went back down. Something broken, Iggy realized, and a familiar litany of panicked cursing wound up in his head: Oh, Akir, ah, God.

  Scowling, Seth hauled his sister into his arms and jerked into a lurching run past the troll he had flipped. As it scrambled to its feet behind them, seven of its brothers tore past it.

  Helix splashed into the river, panting and wild-eyed, knee-deep before he turned back. Angbar and Syntal were just behind him.

  The bow hung limp in Iggy's hands, useless. He took a halting step forward, then stopped. Going back up the hill would just get him killed.

  What, then? he screamed at himself. What? Stand here, watch them die?

  Seth was fast—even with his sister in his arms, he was faster than Iggy would have thought possible—but it was too far, and he knew it. Twenty feet from the river's edge, Seth shoved Lyseira to the dirt, whirled, and stood over her body to face the onslaught.

  The trolls fell on him in an avalanche of fire and flashing claws.

  White darts shot from Syntal's hands. Angbar bellowed chants. Helix charged out of the river, roaring, rushing to his death.

  How could it end like this? How could the river be so close and so useless? It was just there.

  It didn't matter. Iggy surged out of the water, his throat raw with screams. He wouldn't let his friends die alone. He threw his arms wide and roared, his bow clutched in one hand—

  And his mother heard him.

  The river rose like a giant gaining its feet. It towered at his back, frothing and snapping. A heady revelation seized him, an insight deeper than the sea.

  It wasn't that the river couldn't help. It was just that it had never been asked.

  Please, he whispered.

  The wall of water burst forward, and the shoreline exploded with steaming screams.

  Clouds of flaming breath vanished like waking nightmares. Red flesh scarred grey, melting to sodden ash. When the surviving trolls scrambled to retreat, the water surged after them, flowing uphill, splashing over their heels and arms. As it receded it dragged the trolls with it, screeching, their claws raking long, desperate streaks in the earth. The water swallowed them all, melting them to a greasy slag that the river bore away.

  The screaming faded. The chaos ended.

  In the raw silence that followed, his friends' stares were deafening.

  7

  i. Harth

  Harth left the Safehold expecting a long overland journey to Keswick—assuming fair weather, at least twenty days of hard hiking—but he gravely underestimated Retash.

  The man was a slave driver. He went for three or four days at a time without food, even longer without sleep, and his pace never suffered. This would have been fine with Harth—it meant more food and less watch time for him, after all—but the man didn't seem to understand that Harth couldn't match him. He loped easily through Veiling Green's tangled mess of undergrowth, darting over fallen tree trunks and literally jumping across ravines without slowing, while meeting Harth's inevitable failures to keep up with subtle, disapproving glares and sidelong comments about the younger man's state of fitness. All this, Harth reminded himself, from a man who was on death's door two days ago.

  It was testimony to the strength of Lyseira's healing, Harth supposed at first, but it went beyond that. He had seen Preservers before, even witnessed them in action, but during this journey he realized that their combat prowess was simply the boulder's tip. It rested on a staggering foundation of self-denial and superhuman stamina. Traveling with Retash Harth felt he was, for the first time, truly witnessing what it meant to be a Preserver. He began to understand why Seth always berated himself for going a mere night or two without sleep, or for succumbing to his perfectly normal need for sustenance. Retash made Harth feel like a failure, and he hadn't grown up with the man; he could only imagine what Seth's experience had been.

  "Wait," he panted around midday of their second day of travel, when faced with a treacherous, thorn-choked bluff. He sank against a tree, red-faced and weak. "Can't. I can't." A slip on that descent would mean a broken leg or worse. "Need . . . go around." That was the first time Retash hauled him up and carried him bodily across an obstacle, by leaping directly down the thirty-foot drop to light in the weeds below, but it wouldn't be the last.

  "How can you do all this?" Harth asked one night, after Veiling Green was behind them and Retash had begun—impossibly, ridiculously—running through the open plain toward the Narrel river.

  "Practice," Retash said simply. He was a man of few words.

  But his talent for making progress didn't end with his physical capabilities. South of the Narrel they reached Felmar, a modest fishing village on the Narrel River, where Retash managed—despite their lack of coin, contacts, or anything remotely of worth—to get them a ride on the Gull's Dread, a sea-faring vessel that had moored off the southern sea shore while a small group ventured to town to drop off a sick crewman. Retash's negotiation tactics consisted of repeated offers to perform any chores necessary on the ship and protect it from would-be attackers, deftly interwoven with implied threats of enmity from the Church should his request be refused. The captain, a leathery woman with just the right amount of worldly experience to be persuaded by this combination, eventually accepted. They'd have to sleep on the deck, she explained, as only paying passengers were allowed cabins, but Retash agreed to this stipulation quickly enough. Easy for him, Harth thought as he carried his pack aboard. He never sleeps anyway.

  Harth had gained his sea legs long ago, growing up an urchin in one of the biggest port cities in Darnoth, but exhaustion from their brutal pace from the Safehold laid him low nonetheless. Once underway, the captain took pity on him and let him have the sick crewmate's empty cabin. Retash did enough chores around the ship for both of them, paying for their passage while Harth recovered. Fair weather and a strong easterly carried them swiftly west; a sea voyage that could have easily taken a week under adverse conditions instead drew to its conclusion as Harth regained his feet, two days later. When he finally stumbled above decks, expecting to spend the next several days on hard naval labor, he could scarcely believe his eyes to see the ship pulling into dock at Chesport. They had only left the Safehold a week ago.

  "I've booked you passage on a barge north to Keswick," Retash explained.

  "How?" Harth stammered. The man, like all Preservers, had taken a vow of poverty—he owned nothing besides the shirt on his back. Yet somehow, always, he found a way.

  "I struck up an acquaintance with the captain while you rested. She knows someone." He handed Harth a slip of paper with a name and address, along with a brief statement vouching for him. "Standing room only. No food. But it's only a day up the Ley, weather permitting. That should be endurable, even for you."

  "Thank you." Harth had worn the words out over the last week, and here he was, saying them again. This time though, instead of his usual stoic nod, Retash surprised him.

  "Not for you. Remember what you promised Seth's sister." He lowered his voice. "The public audiences."

  Truth be, in their mad flight south from the Safehold, Harth had forgotten his original excuse for leaving the others. His main goal had simply been to get away from them. Their lies had nearly cost him his life, nearly destroyed Mama Lorna's orphanage, where he had grown up, and turned him into an exile from Keldale, his home—and now, they were going to Tal'aden? Were they mad?

  Sure, he'd developed friendships with them over the winter. Lear
ning to chant from Syntal had been an incredible, unexpected gift, one he would always cherish. But he knew trouble when he saw it, and those people were trouble. Job one had been to get away from them. Job two was now to pick up the pieces of his life, to figure out where he went from here.

  Checking in on the Prince Regent's rumored public audiences was, at most, a distant job three. Even if it yielded promise, he had no way of getting that information to the group from Southlight, and in his heart of hearts, he would be content to never see any of them again—well, outside of Syntal, maybe.

  None of this showed on his face, though. Instead he gave a stoic nod of his own, figuring it was what Retash would want. "Of course. That's why I came." Retash fixed him with a penetrating stare. He knows I'm full of sehk, Harth thought, but he met it without flinching.

  "The captain's contact sets out every Sanday at highsun." Retash glanced skyward. "You'd better hurry."

  "You're not coming?" Harth couldn't decide if this news gave him more relief or trepidation—probably equal parts of both.

  "No. I'm heading to the Old Kingdom. I'm an outlaw myself, now—Seth saw to that."

  "He does have a knack for that," Harth admitted, and those were his parting words to Retash.

  Chesport's crying gulls and salty air reminded him of home, but he didn't have time to relish them. He reached the barge just as the crew began to untie it from the pier. They rebuffed him at first, but once he showed them the note from the Gull's captain, they allowed him onboard. Retash had been right—it was standing room only, squeezed into the back between barrels of pickled fish. Not the most dignified trip I've ever taken, Harth mused, but that was all right, because Retash had been right about something else, too: he could endure it.

  Once again, despite heavy clouds above and rain shadows to the east and south, the weather held. The crew took shifts rowing through the night, and his barge pulled through Keswick's Great Gate—where the river ran directly through the heart of the city's trade district—just before highsun the following day, jockeying with the others for a spot at the crowded docks.

  Now this is more like it, Harth thought as he disembarked. Keswick's river port still paled in comparison to Keldale's, but the city itself—sprawling, loud, indifferent—felt like coming home. Landmarks famous throughout Darnoth, like Basica Majesta and the spires of the royal palace, towered in the distance. He pushed into the streets with confident nonchalance, never sparing a glance at the street signs and maps posted along the way. Nothing gets you robbed faster than looking like an outsider. He knew; he'd robbed plenty of outsiders.

  The good news was that he didn't have much to steal. He didn't have a heel to his name, and his only possessions were a dagger, two days' worth of venison jerky, the loose sheaf of papers Syntal had given him as a stand-in for a real spellbook, and a pack to carry it all.

  The bad news, of course, was that destitute strangers who stunk to high heaven usually ended up sleeping in the street.

  No, he thought. I'll find a way. Everyone needed something—inns always needed dishes and linens washed, if nothing else. He thought of Retash's bearing, the easy force of personality that had carried them both all the way from Veiling Green to Chesport. I can do that. He spotted a little place, tucked away in a corner and sporting vacancies, and started mentally rehearsing a proposal for the innkeeper. He would channel Retash's confidence, find his own balance between welcome aid and subtle threat, and make his means meet the need.

  How hard could it be?

  Quite hard, as it turned out.

  It didn't work for him. It just didn't work. One after another, they turned him back into the street.

  Keldale was his home. He knew everything there, every back alley and scab-pusher, every old friend's job and every city guard's price. At home, he didn't need to prove himself; everyone knew him.

  But he wasn't at home. In Keswick he was nothing but a wild-eyed vagrant, reeking of desperation and pickled anchovies. His marks doubted his ability to deliver on any promises he made, and his "subtle threats" consisted not of the enmity of a monolithic church, but of whatever bluffs he could muster. Just now, one of these had gotten him kicked out of an establishment, and would've probably landed him behind bars for a night if he hadn't managed to scramble free of the city guards before they slapped the manacles on him.

  Maybe a night in jail wouldn't have been so bad, he thought as he listened for the guards' bootsteps. At least I'd have a roof over my head. But there, being out of his element was especially risky. He knew the laws in Keldale. More importantly, he knew the jailors—who would abide by those laws and who would take bribes. Here he was blind. What if he ended up in a cell run by someone like Duwain Gilly, a pompous do-gooder who could give Lyseira a run for her money, who would keep him as long as humanly possible?

  Doesn't matter anyway. Crouched in a dark alley with his back to the wall, he listened to the guards' shouts recede. I lost them. Out of energy and out of ideas, he slid to the ground.

  Dusk had crept in while he searched for a place to stay; his first night on the Keswick streets was coming on fast. It had been ten years since he'd slept that way: a piece of trash on the cobblestones, something disturbingly less than human, to be hurried past and disregarded. Last time, Lorna and Matthew had taken him in to their orphanage; given him a chance at life. Now Matthew was dead, and Lorna was on the far side of the continent. He was alone.

  He felt his eyes burning, and snarled. If he was sleeping in the streets, so be it, but he'd be damned if he'd do it with tears streaking his cheeks.

  No. Rev'naas take the streets. I'm never doing that again. He wasn't Retash; he couldn't make the old man's way work for him. Fine. He didn't have his network or so much as a copper heel in his pocket. Also fine. He'd sworn off certain options when Lorna took him in, but she wasn't here now, and everything was on the table. He'd go back to his own old ways before he'd sleep on the stones.

  He fished the dagger out of his pack.

  He wouldn't have to kill anyone. Probably. Just scare them into giving him what they had. That could go wrong, of course—he could end up trying to rob a hero, or the city guards could wander by at an inopportune time. It had been years since he'd done this, and he'd fallen out of practice. But he could still bury a dagger between the shoulders when he had to; he'd proven it the night they'd all escaped Keldale.

  I wonder how Retash would feel about getting me up here, if he knew what I would do once I made it. Angry, probably. Cheated. Harth didn't care. Retash was gone, too. There was only person he had to look out for now.

  "Here!" A young man, well-dressed and laughing, pulled his date toward the mouth of the alley. "It cuts straight through. I told you."

  His lady friend shied away. "This? It looks like a sehk-hole." She giggled at the curse, a sparkling sound that shimmered faintly with wine.

  A young couple out on a riverside stroll, just drunk enough to take the risk of passing through a deserted alley. He couldn't have asked for a more perfect pair of marks. He tightened his grip on the dagger, waiting.

  If you're staying here, there's certain rules. Mama Lorna's voice cut through the years as if he'd just heard it a minute ago. If you're leaving the streets, you're leaving the streets. Period. No more scab, no threats, no thuggery. Understand?

  He could still see her face, compassionate but firm, waiting on his answer. If he'd refused, she would've turned him out. If she knew what he was planning now . . .

  But she doesn't know. She never will.

  You went back to it so fast, she said. Barely even tried something new.

  What can I try? he demanded. This place doesn't care about me. It doesn't know me.

  The man led his date into the alley, whispering assurances. They were walking right into the spiderweb, and Harth was the spider. He had a death grip on the dagger's hilt, his mind racing. No one needs to get hurt, he'd say. Just give me what you have and finish your shortcut.

  They drew closer, the young w
oman clutching her beau's shoulder, the man radiating casual—and false—bravado. His eyes searched the refuse in the alley, but they passed over Harth without recognition. Then they were past him, their backs turned.

  Now.

  He was slick with sweat, the breath roaring through his nose.

  Now!

  They grew five paces distant, then ten.

  There's no other way! Do it!

  Hands trembling, he set the dagger down.

  Do you want to sleep in the streets tonight? You want to be a bum like your mother?

  Sleep in the streets, he thought. Sleep.

  He flicked a switch in his mind, and the alley vanished. Glittering rows of attributes took its place, its filth instantly translated into constituent ideas. The couple was there, too: male and female, human, their emotions—excitement, fear, shyness, lust—rippling in the air like plucked lute strings. Beneath those, flesh; beneath that, bone; within that, only concepts: life, energy, a unity to all things that he craved exploring further.

  It will entice you, Syntal had warned. This time, he heeded her.

  His own exhaustion was an excellent template; he infused the chant with it, projecting it outward as his tongue commanded the couple's minds. The woman started to glance toward the sound of his voice, but collapsed before she could finish looking. Her date promptly joined her.

  Harth released the Pulse and forced himself back into the mundane world. His own stink hit him first, the stale stench of sweat and filth and vinegar. He appalled himself. He wanted to go back.

  Instead he gritted his teeth and dug his fingers into the stone. The pain helped ground him, to tether him back to reality.

  Reality? This? Hardly. The true reality was that other place, where the Pulse's designs were laid bare and everything was made plain.

  To think Mama Lorna was so upset about the kids who tried scab. Scab was a quick high, over in minutes; it had nothing on Ascension. It might be worth it, to just Ascend as far as I can, as fast as I can, to learn as much as I can before it destroys me.