by Rachel Dunne
Under the sparse cover of the young trees, they stayed close together. It was not wise to part, in the darkness lit only by stars. There was no knowing what danger lay beyond, and so they stayed close, the space between them like a chain, a bar. Never farther apart, never closer together. A turning wheel.
His one arm that was not holding the sword could still carry more than Vatri’s two, and so she piled sticks into his arm. Deadfall, where her roving hands found it, but there was not much. She jumped into the air, fingers wrapping around a half-dead branch, and for a moment she hung there. Arms stretched and feet swaying, and there was a small and childlike joy on her face. He stood far from her, distant, separate. Her joy was not a thing he could share. The branch snapped, and her feet thumped to the ground. She put the branch in his arm, and though she had to step closer to do it, the space between them felt no smaller. The silence had burst free, and it filled the circling, turning space.
“You are so calm,” he said. The words came before he could think of not saying them.
Vatri paused, bent in two as she poked through a pile of brush. Her still hands resumed, plucking at branches, and her voice was light: “Why shouldn’t I be?”
“This is not right.” Scal waved with the sword, the flaming sword that should not have been, at the unending dark around them. Her back was to him, but he thought, still, that she would see. “The world has gone wrong.”
“It has.” Vatri straightened. Put her small branches into the pile in Scal’s arm. Her eyes slid away from his.
Scal could not think of the right words to ask the question that shivered through him. He might have let the silence take hold again. Let it fill the space between them until they were nothing but two strangers. Divided by the sole piece of light in the dark world. But the thought of it made him ache. “You are so calm,” he said again. The closest he could come to asking, How?
She walked past him, back to where the trees shrank to tall grass. He followed. There was nothing else for him to do.
He dropped his armful of sticks and branches, and it made a mighty crashing, cracking sound that set birds screeching somewhere not so far off. He remembered a night—a short night, but just as dark—when Vatri’s shouting had woken birds, and Scal had laughed until his belly hurt. It had been a life ago. He had been a different man then, and there was no laughter in him now.
How many rebirths since then? One, surely. Waking in Aardanel, beneath the glow of the everflame, where the shadows of all the other lives had seemed small. But Aardanel had burned, and he had gone south again. Was that a new life? The wandering, the waiting. He had stepped unburned from the great bonfire Vatri had built—that, surely, was an ending and a beginning. But he felt no different from the man who had woken before the everflame. No different, truly, from the boy who had seen the everflame for the first time. Felt its slow warmth reaching to the tips of his fingers. Flames as warm as the voice of the red-robed priest. He had not come so far from that boy. Lost, alone for all that another body stood nearby, cold for all that fire licked near his skin. Seven lives, or one?
“Scal,” Vatri said. “The fire.”
He knelt, set aside the sword so that its fire-glow died. Only the stars to guide him, and the pads of his fingers. He arranged the twigs and the sticks and the branches, and a few careful strikes of his flint set a spark alive among the twigs. He fed it, let it grow strong enough to chase back the darkness. He looked across the tops of the flickering flames, to where they shone in Vatri’s wide eyes.
There was the look in her face. The searching look, the listening look. Waiting for the flames to speak, or her gods. She had never told him how it worked, but he knew better than to interrupt her. And so he sat in silence, watching the flames, too, and ignoring the twisting in his stomach that was half hunger and half fear. Clinging to the pop of wood, the hiss of fire.
“I’m calm,” she said, hardly louder than the fire’s sound, but still it might have startled him if he had not been listening for her voice, “because this isn’t the end. Not yet.”
Scal thought of all the black-robed preachers, the sea of them gathered around the hill where the Twins would rise. Shifting and writhing like a swarm of flies on a corpse, their number beyond counting. “You think we can fight them.”
He could not tell if her eyes were on him, of if they were only on the flames. “I think we don’t have a choice.” She almost smiled. “And that makes things simple, doesn’t it?”
Scal looked to the sword that lay at his side, that would line with fire or with ice if he touched it. He did not let his fingers near it. “I am only one man.”
“You’re not alone. We’re together in this, Scal.”
“We are only two.”
The fire-sounds filled the night again. It was not a large fire, nothing like the one that Vatri had built for him to walk into, nothing like the flames that had licked at the belly of the sky. But it was a fire, in a world where the sun had died. Anyone walking through the Long Night would see the flames. Perhaps no one would see, no one would come. Perhaps it would draw fellow travelers, grateful for the light and the warmth, grateful to stack their numbers against the night. Perhaps it would draw in the black-robed preachers, the endless sea of them, with their anger and their triumph and their hatred of the light. He knew he should turn from the fire, let his eyes soak in the darkness so that he could see any moving shadows. See any threats before it was too late. But he could not look away from the flames. Could not look away from the woman beyond them.
“You don’t see it, do you?” Vatri’s voice was still soft, and the screen of flame between them made her moving lips seem to dance.
He had tried so often, when they had traveled together, to see the things she saw within the flames. It had never worked. He was not touched by the gods. He was not chosen. He did not know, sometimes, if he believed there was anything to be seen within the fire. “No,” he said. “I do not.”
“Look,” she whispered. “Look.”
For her, he tried. Staring into the fire as it blackened the wood he had fed to it. Bark curling away, the strong wood beneath cracking and fracturing, spreading open a dozen mouths of fire. A line of smoke twisting into the air, lit by the flames below. Almost like a dancer. He had seen a woman dance at a festival once, beauty and grace, and it had hurt that nameless place in his chest to watch her. The flames reached, always reaching, always hungry. They would eat the world, given half a chance.
“I see nothing.”
The flames twitched toward him with Vatri’s sigh. She rose, not as graceful as that long-ago dancer, but nearly. When she sat beside him, it stirred that same nameless place. Without the fire between them, with her arm almost touching his, he did not know how small the space was between them. Smaller, surely. Her head only reached his shoulder, but her eyes were wide and clear when she looked up to him, and the flames did not reflect in them at all.
“Are you cold?” she asked.
“I am not.” The blood ran warm in his veins, his own flesh a shelter against the cold of the North. “Never.”
“Am I cold?” She held her hand toward him, her fingers near his knee, but he hardly saw it for her eyes. Wide and bright as the slow-waning moon, clear and lovely. The dancing light and the shadows it cast played across her face, and they melted away the damage a different fire had done. Smoothed away the old scars and the warped ridges of flesh, made her soft. She was so close. Nothing between them, nothing at all. “Scal?”
He reached for her hand, held her fingers gentle in his. They were warm as summer, and the skin of her palm was smooth, untouched by that old fire. “No,” he said. She was warm. She was life.
“Do you see?” Her voice rose with excitement, fingers tightening in his. Her other hand rose to clutch his. There was a touch of fire in her eyes, the flames creeping in from the edges.
He saw her. Fire or no, he saw her. But with the flames in her eyes, he did not think she saw him. “No,” he said. Regret, for
the things he could not see, and the ones he could.
She sighed again, heavier this time, and dropped their clasped hands to his knee. Did not let go, but her fingers were looser. Her eyes slid away, looked to the fire, flame-bright, before she looked down at their joined hands. She ran her thumb across his knuckles, and he could not see her eyes. “It’s warm, Scal. It shouldn’t be, but it is. The sun’s fire warms us all, and with the sun gone, it should be worse than winter. But it’s not! It’s no colder than before they took away the sun.” Thumb over his knuckles, smooth skin trailing back and forth over the roughness of his hands. “Do you understand what that means?”
Scal did not want to think. There was so much, too much, and he did not know how to handle any of it. Better, surely, not to think. To be led again, to follow. To not have to think, or to hurt. “No,” he said, staring at her thumb drawing shallow circles.
“It’s still there. The sun. It’s not gone, not at all, and that means they’ve done something else to it. It means they’re not nearly as powerful as they want us to think. It means we can fight them.”
Too much. Always, too much.
In another life, or perhaps it was still the same one, he had asked Vatri to shape him. To make him whole, to make him a better man. A good man. He had asked, and she had done what she could. He had asked, though. “Yes,” he said, squeezing her fingers, looking up to meet her soft smile and her flame-touched eyes. It was easier. “We can fight them.”
Chapter Three
The Plains stretched on like an ocean—Keiro could say that, for he’d seen the wide ocean that swallowed the western half of the world. He’d watched the tides hide and reveal beaches of sand and stone, seen the earth crumble away in sheer cliffs that the ocean crashed against, and he’d seen how the water went on endlessly, stretching far and away to nothing more than a shimmer.
He’d seen the ocean swallow people, too: swimmers who thought they were stronger than the tides, boats tipped by a sudden storm, whole villages washed away by angry waves. In one of his darker times, after Algi’s feet had taken her away from him, Keiro had stood shoulder-deep in the cold water, his toes clinging to the stony floor, waves lapping beneath his chin, and he’d wondered what it would be like to walk deeper. A wave had slapped into his face, filling his throat with water, and he’d flailed back to shore sputtering with fear and regret. The ocean was a fickle thing, and Keiro had not been unhappy to put it at his back.
He’d found himself thinking of the Plains as an ocean more often of late. In the glow of the stars, the way the grasses moved in the wind looked very much like the ocean at night. He wondered, if he walked deep enough into the grass sea, if it would swallow him, too, and take his body far away.
“Brother Keiro,” a voice called softly, timidly. Keiro didn’t need to turn to see who it was; the cringing tone was enough to mark Laseneo. The man had installed himself as Keiro’s attendant, without giving Keiro much choice in the matter. He’d tried more than once to dismiss Laseneo, both gently and firmly, but the man had looked so wretched each time that Keiro had given up on it. Trying to dismiss Laseneo made him feel more guilty than the fact of having an attendant. “They’re ready for you . . .”
Keiro let himself stare over the dark grass for a moment more, pretending it was all there was to the world. But it wasn’t. There was so much of the world—he should know, he’d walked much of it—and much more that needed doing in it. The Long Night had come, and in it, there was little enough time for sleep.
Keiro stood, and a shadow stood with him. His constant companion was like a piece of the sky fallen to earth: glowing with pinpricks of starlight and as dark as the space between each star. Though most of the world would call him a mravigi, here in the Plains his kind had been named Starborn. Cazi’s reptilian face peered up at Keiro, attentive and keen as ever, red eyes steady. Not so very long ago, he had perched on Keiro’s shoulder, rather like a big gray bird; now he was the size of a dog, and a big dog at that, his shoulder reaching halfway up Keiro’s thigh. Cazi rarely left Keiro’s side, and with his scales gone to black, there was more than one reason Keiro thought of the mravigi as his shadow.
Laseneo stood on the edge of the hill, wavering between trying to disappear in the grass and trying to do what he considered his duty. The man had the nervous habit of rubbing the back of his neck with both hands, as though he thought wringing his own neck might be the kindest thing he could do. He had the tendency to rock as well, swaying back and forth, always looking truly caught between staying and fleeing. He was almost worse than the mages, some days. If Keiro had felt he needed an attendant, Laseneo would have been near to his last choice, but one of the things Keiro had come to accept was that one wasn’t usually given a choice in life.
As Keiro walked down the hill, Cazi kept pace, a proper shadow, while Laseneo tried to walk as close to Keiro’s heels as he could without actually stepping on them. Keiro was too tired even to sigh at the man. In the dozen days—or, Twins’ bones, nights? spans? how was he supposed to track the passing of time?—since the sun had been torn from the sky, Keiro had gotten so little sleep. He was kept busy, his long hours filled with questions and commands and reassurances . . . but he was given plenty of time to rest, to sleep. They wanted to make sure his head stayed clear, his mind focused. It was simply that Keiro, alone among the uncountable bodies that filled the hills, could not seem to sleep in the unending dark.
You should be sleeping the sleep of a triumphant hero.
It was the whispering certainty, the voice that tickled so unobtrusively through his thoughts that he hadn’t even noticed it at first. Even now, knowing the whispers were Sororra’s careful manipulation, knowing to listen for them, it was so hard to tell. The suggestions always seemed so reasonable, the conclusions so natural, the assurances so comforting. Why would he ever have cause to doubt the thoughts in his own head?
There are more important things to worry about. There was so much that needed to be done, so much Keiro alone needed to do, that it was a small wonder he was having trouble sleeping. Responsibility was an ill-fitting, uncomfortable coat.
The sound of the assembled Fallen was like a moan, loud and ceaseless and wordless: too many voices talking, too many bodies shuffling. He heard them well before the smaller hills parted to reveal the largest hill, the mound that, until so very recently, had housed a pair of gods. The Fallen were gathered around the base of this hill, a shifting, swelling, writhing mass of them, more like an angry ocean tide than the Plains. Keiro paused for a moment, Laseneo stepping on his heels and quickly jumping back. He was far enough away that they wouldn’t have seen him yet, for he was nothing more than a dark-robed spot of black against the greater blackness. The longer he watched them, the less they looked like an ocean tide. No, they looked more like maggots, wriggling atop a corpse—
“Brother Keiro?” Laseneo prompted timidly, the wince in his words.
Keiro sighed, and started forward once more.
The Fallen parted for him, bodies pressing back to make a space wide enough for Keiro and Cazi to pass side by side, closing again on Laseneo’s heels. Laseneo stopped at the edge of the crowd, the base of the hill, but Keiro continued on with Cazi. The silence came gradually, but it was fully quiet before he even reached the top of the hill, no sound but the wind stirring the grass, the scrape of dirt beneath Keiro’s feet.
There was no good place to stand where they could all see him, for the center of the hill was a crater, its smooth edges beginning to crumble. Keiro stood as close to the hill’s crest as he dared, and he turned in a slow circle, taking in all their silent expectations, their held breaths, their tempered excitement. For all that had been done since the Long Night had fallen, so little had been shared with the common preachers. They didn’t know what they were meant to do now, or why the Twins hadn’t issued commands, or why the Twins hadn’t been seen since the sun had disappeared. They didn’t know why so many of their brothers and sisters lay buried in the vast, s
hallow pit they’d spent long hours digging to the south. They didn’t know why they’d been spared the Twins’ judgment, or when the next wave of their appraisal would come.
This would be the first time, in the long days or nights or spans since the rise of the Twins, that the mass of the Fallen would be addressed. And of course, that task fell to Keiro.
He opened his mouth to speak and then paused—he’d almost forgotten. He wasn’t a loud man, and even a loud man’s loudest shout wouldn’t have reached the far edges of the living sea in any useful way. He noticed, finally—how were they always so unnoticeable?—the dark shape huddled some lengths away. With an uncomfortable lump in his throat, Keiro went to the folded-small form, touched its shoulder. He recognized the man who lifted his face from the curl of his arms—some distinctive Highlands features in the mouth and the hair, but an otherwise nondescript Fiateran face. Still, the blue robe marked him for what he was: a mage. This one was named Terstet; Keiro had made a point of learning as many of the mages’ names as he could.
“It’s time?” Terstet asked, his voice shaking as badly as his hands when he unwound his limbs.
“It’s time,” Keiro agreed. Thanks to the flippant explanation offered by one of the Fallen, he knew now that the mages were unable to resist any direct commands, and he’d vowed to never issue one—foolish as that was. So he waited while Terstet flexed his hands, rubbed his arms, blinked owlishly. Keiro didn’t doubt someone else had given the mage his commands, and he didn’t mind waiting for Terstet’s damaged mind to find its way through the mire.
