"Over_9780307446138_oeb_c30_r1" - читать интересную книгу автора (Jeffrey Overstreet - Cynderes Midnight)

Cyndere’SMidnight

 

30

AURALIA’S FEAR CHAMBER

During Mordafey’s failing charge at the Cliffs of Barnashum, Jordam had surprised his twin brother, stepping out of the shadows and beckoning him to follow. “Goreth, come. Follow. Run with me.”

But Goreth did not obey. He stared in confusion at Jordam’s stone costume, that burden of clay that had weighed him down since his struggle with Cal-raven. But when Goreth finally fixed both his eyes on Jordam’s face, he smiled in relief, and his shaking stilled. “Rockbeetles, Jordam! Strange armor.”

The journey from the cliffs to the Cragavar had been an excruciating ordeal. After crawling away from the caves, Jordam dragged himself into a shallow, icy ravine on the first tier of the cliffs, where he lay for the rest of the night. Abascar soldiers had climbed over him in the dark, too busy preparing Abascar’s defense to notice the breathing body in the stone encasement. When sunrise woke him, he had only enough strength to clutch at bundles of loose spineweed and pull them over himself for concealment before the pain of his broken bones burnt him unconscious.

During the long day before the siege, as flies buzzed about his ears and scourge-bugs crept across his brittle shell, Jordam remained in the ravine listening to Cal-raven’s people whisper and bustle about. Broad-winged brascles circled above him, harbingers of bloodshed. He could not move.

The weighty costume had cooled as the sun set. When he shivered, his brittle crust rattled with a sound like chattering teeth, intriguing a pair of crows who climbed about on his chest and pecked at him. Live, he had urged himself through the alarms of pain that blared from all corners of his body. Live. To help Cal-raven. To get back to O-raya’s caves.

He woke wishing the crows would return, for he was famished. He tried to move, but his ribs were fiery lances, and his knees were broken glass. Eying the dark forest, he knew Mordafey was coming. He began to grind his arms together slowly, chipping and crumbling the shell. With a sharp-edged stone, he shaved stone-burdened hair from his mane, tearing away as much as he could.

Then, just as the Cent Regus horde invaded the bushes below and assailed Barnashum, Jordam forced himself to climb down to Barnashum’s threshold. Mordafey’s swarm took no notice, intent upon their siege, distracted by fiery carts and lights on the cliffs. He recovered the Bel Amican saddlebags from the bushes where he had concealed them before his ascent. They seemed even heavier as he draped them over his shoulders and crawled.

When Mordafey loped past him, eyes fixed upon the cliffs, Jordam hardly recognized him for all that the Essence had wrought in his brother’s form. Like a team of bulls. Like a fangbear. Like a dragon from the Desert of Smoke.

In the forest Goreth gave him the old Abascar sword, and he scraped more stone away from his legs and arms. Goreth, unsteady in his fear and confusion, persisted with questions, and Jordam described a fight with an Abascar soldier. It was true enough. But Goreth was not put at ease. “Older Brother will finish you.”

“rrGoreth, listen,” Jordam said, dust in his voice. “You don’t know Mordafey’s plan. When he’s chieftain, he’ll kill us both.”

“Not the brothers,” Goreth scoffed. “Chieftain. Kill the chieftain.” His face and neck were swollen, emboldened to blistering with the Essence. Treasure. Glory. The chieftain’s throne. He turned his bulging eyes back toward the attack.

Jordam pleaded with him. “I found something. rrBetter than Essence. Better than treasure. Follow me.”

But Goreth began to tremble, unsettled. “Can’t run, Same Brother. He’ll find us. He’ll catch us.”

“You’re faster,” said Jordam, changing his tone. “You’re faster than Mordafey. Faster than Jorn. Faster than all…except me.”

But Goreth scowled, his voice filling with menace. “Don’t make trouble, Same Brother.”

“Same Brothers can be stronger together, stronger than Mordafey.” Jordam pointed into the darkness. “Did he tell us about the swarm? Did he tell us about the white giant? No secrets for the brothers, says Mordafey. But he lies to us.”

The ground shuddered. They beheld the massive shadows of falling boulders smashing their way down Barnashum’s stair. Jordam’s words wisped away like bursts of vapor.

“rrGoreth, I found better prizes than Abascar. Better strength. Run with me, or you won’t see me again. Gone forever. No more Same Brothers. Finished.”

“Brothers are everything,” Goreth whined. “Can’t remember anything else.”

“rrYou remember the Old Dog? Long ago? What happened to him?”

Goreth’s eyes widened. “Don’t make me remember.”

“What happened to the Old Dog, Goreth?”

Goreth looked down, trying to escape the memory of their father lying in the den with his sons, a metal pin driven through his head. Mordafey’s search for the killer had been short and unfulfilled.

“Who would kill the Old Dog, Goreth? rrWho would be stronger if the Old Dog was dead?” He seized Goreth’s arm, trying to drag him away, but Goreth laughed, pulling back. “Let’s run, Same Brother. Before Mordafey kills us too.”

Goreth wrenched his arm free then and lifted his Abascar sword in an unmistakable threat. Jordam, backing into the shadows, said, “Same Brother goes now, Goreth.” His eyes began to sting, his vision blurring. He raised his hands. “Listen. rrTonight, watch out. Step careful. Always let Older Brother go first.”

Goreth started after him. But horns sounded from the cliffs. Answering fanfare rang out in the treetops. Absorbed in the chaos playing out before him, Goreth seemed to forget that Jordam had been there.

“Say it back, Goreth. Always let Older Brother go first,” Jordam shouted.

“Always,” said Goreth absently.

“Rockbeetles,” Jordam sighed.

Jordam withdrew into the trees as Mordafey returned. He prowled in the shadows, worried that Goreth would warn Mordafey. But Goreth’s memory failed when Mordafey’s beating began. With every blow of the club, Jordam shuddered as if he were absorbing the strike.

When Mordafey led the swarm into the fangbear den, Jordam unbuckled the saddlebags. First he took Bel’s gift, the oceandragon whistle, and draped the string around his neck. Then he pulled out many coils of snare wire and did what he had mustered the courage to do. “Always,” he whispered, as if Goreth might hear him. “Always let Older Brother go first.”

A familiar sound had spun him around. The bellow of prongbulls nearby in the forest.

Jordam clung to the prongbull as fiercely as he had grasped the branch of the coil tree, exhausted, trying not to fall. This bull was not so cooperative, and it took every ounce of his strength to steer the beast.

And then his strength ran out.

He fell into a delirium and dreamt that he was snatched from the back of the bull by a storm cloud and carried into a cold, vast space, where he floated among the stars.

When he woke, the cold was no illusion. He was floating on the surface of Deep Lake, staring up into starlight. He remembered nothing of the journey, and the shreds of his dreams slipped through his grasp. Had the bull carried him all this way? Had he slipped from its back and run? Or had a winged shadow carried him over the forest?

He had never gazed at the constellations like this before, but now they seemed merely an extension of O-raya’s artistry, as if she had moved on from this world to paint the sky. He might have stayed there, floating and forgetting, but his wounds stung in the cold water, and he was weak from hunger.

As he struggled to the shore, the remaining patches of his crumbling costume weighed him down. He limped into O-raya’s caves, desperate for a fire. He blew on the skull-shaped whistle. Mournful tones echoed in harmony all throughout the caves. But Bel made no reply.

The ale boy’s blankets were empty. He found no sign of struggle.

He began to search the tunnels but found nothing more than Bel’s footprints in the dust. Waters deep within the recesses of O-raya’s caves whispered soothing promises, and he answered their call. He ripped away his tattered cloak and bathed in a deep, hidden pool. The water here was as strange and pure as what he had drawn from the well at Tilianpurth. Patches of luminous color floated on the surface. The water gave him strength and soothed his pain.

Sinking, he found glowing, translucent, eyeless fish. He caught them and swallowed them whole. They had no taste, but they filled his belly and gave him enough strength to continue his search.

Emerging from the water, he found that the remnants of stone had fallen away. He looked at his rippling reflection. His jutting browbone was gone; only a flat plate of bone remained on his forehead. His mane ragged and torn, the hair on his arms and legs shorn clean, he did not recognize himself. He looked like one of the weakerfolk.

The pain in his wounded foot still flared up when he walked, but he managed to make his way back down the tunnel toward the cave. He stopped outside that dark, forbidding chamber, and a worry closed his hands into fists. The curtain lay twisted on the floor.

Jordam stepped up to the entrance. Fear spread in tendrils through his body and chilled him. He knew before he reached the spot that Deuneroi’s garments were gone from the place where he had concealed them in his worry. He had tried to stop her, tried to keep them hidden until the time was right to tell her.

He turned and clambered out of the cave. Bel’s footprints led up through the tunnels to the ladder they had descended together only a few days earlier. On the vantage point high above Deep Lake, on the ledge where his journey had begun—where O-raya had slept and the Keeper had saved her—no one was taking in the view.

If Bel had found Deuneroi’s belongings, she would have guessed who put them there. She would have arrived at the inevitable conclusion.

Just as he suspected and feared, Bel’s footprints led into the forest, alone. His hand closed over the whistle, he stepped forward to follow her. But he had not gone far before he realized that another kind of path ran alongside Bel’s faint footprints. The impressions were enormous, the stride vast…and familiar. These very marks had led him to Tilianpurth in the first place.

How, he thought again, did I get here?

He ran then, compelled by longing, drawn by a vision of Bel waiting defenseless in the glen.

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Two days after Jordam’s departure, Cyndere began to get hungry.

Lake fishing was not at all like the sea fishing she had learned as a child. She found a small, timeworn net in the caves, but it drew little more than weeds and tiny crabs with unbreakable shells. Weary of striving for a catch in the cold rain, she returned to the cave and built a fire. But currents of wind discouraged her, filling the cave with smoke and stirring the fire’s appetite so the driftwood burnt too quickly.

Complaining to the silence, she found herself waiting for sisterlies to crowd into the chamber. But no one came. There was no one to hear her. A tantrum would last only as long as its echoes.

“Totally alone.” She fell back into the ale boy’s blankets and laughed. “At last.”

Night came but offered no sleep. Long, wakeful hours were nothing new to her, but the solitude, the isolation—it frightened and inspired her. She spoke things aloud she would barely dare to think in House Bel Amica. She could sing songs, tour the caves, practice telling children’s stories, wander wherever she wished without any fear of restriction or interference. She found a chalky patch of damp stone and drew versions of Jordam’s outline on the walls. “Auralia would approve,” she said.

She walked out to the water and listened to creatures scuttle along the pebbles—tappita tappita tap-tap tick—while frogs performed percussive melodies. Splinters of shadow shot up from the water and splashed back down, and she scolded the fish for eluding her net.

A paddle-tail swam across the water toward her. She could see its whiskered nose at the front of the rippling arrow. She couldn’t remember if paddle-tails were dangerous and tried not to budge. When it came close and caught sight of her, it smacked its tail hard on the water to alarm nearby kin and dove to safety. She glanced about for someone who could share the moment. But it was all for her, and all the more wondrous in that these things happened in the world every night. There was nothing quite like this in all of Bel Amica. She savored every detail, from the dissipating circles of the paddle-tail’s dive to the lazy glide of a fishercrane across the water, as if drinking her way to the end of a rare vintage. The ocean was a storm, but this, this was a place for rest, for dreaming.

Moonlight flickered. She watched frantic bats zig and zag, heard the faintest trace of their chatter. Wind rushed low over the water, and a cloud soared across the moon as if hunting. She scowled at that bold green disc and whispered challenges to it. She had come this far without the help of any moon-spirits.

She thought of Emeriene standing at the window and staring up at that same moon. The sisterly was probably exhausted from worry. “Forgive me for speaking so harshly, Emmy,” she whispered. “I was suffocating, and I made you suffer for it. You were only trying to protect me. And now I’ve run out on you. You must be worried sick.”

She thought of poor Night-scrap and wondered if anyone would feed him. Or if Ryllion would set a snare in her chamber.

The thought of Ryllion disturbed the peace of her lakeside idyll. She stood and walked across the pebbles, her heart heavy again. She did not want to go back home. Yet she could not stay by the lake. This place offered an appealing stillness, but only if she ignored the distant clamor caused by her absence.

All she could do was wait and hope that Jordam would return. Then she could work with him, coax the conscience within that massive, maned head. Together they could find more Cent Regus to rescue. They would need Auralia’s colors, for that was what had calmed Jordam’s temper. They would need the water from the well at Tilianpurth.

Back inside the cave, she heard the bats drop from their roosts and flutter deeper. In a sort of trance beyond sleep, she followed the leathery rustle up the tunnel. She listened for footsteps behind her. Nothing. Curtains in her memory stirred, opening to blackness, and she found herself standing at the mouth of the darkest cave. This time Jordam did not appear.

The braided curtain wavered, sparkling with green light from the wall’s embedded glowstones. It felt strange against her hand. She pulled it back and reached her arm into the space, then stepped into the cave’s cold, suspended breath. Keeping a hold on the curtain, she let in the corridor’s faint green glow.

She discerned a shape, a shrouded figure, far across the chamber. The figure seemed to move.

“Is it you?” she whispered.

Moving farther in, she allowed the curtain to fall, and she gasped at the depth of the darkness. Holding her hands out, she took cautious steps forward, her woodscloak sweeping along the floor. The air was stagnant and unmoving. Her heart beat like a ceremonial drum.

In illuminated chambers she had already discovered cloaks in hanging rows. A chiming crystal. A pedestal with a pool of milk-white water. The outlines of doors that would not open, of locks that sealed up secrets tight. On an impulse, she reached out to touch the figure, accepting whatever secret Auralia might have kept here. She remembered Jordam’s story, imagined Auralia’s scream.

Her hands met a smooth slope rising from the floor and cautiously traced the lines, discerning a woman’s shape. It was a statue. The woman wore a crown of leaves and brambles, a cloth cape draped around her shoulders. That was what had moved in the darkness—a draft had brushed the cloth.

Cyndere knelt. There was tension in the statue’s legs. This woman was leaning forward, striving.

Her hands moved down the woman’s wavering cape and found that it was caught, clutched tight in hands made of rough bark and twigs and something colder—bone. Cyndere drew back her hands, suddenly questioning what more she wanted to learn about this story in the darkness. After a pause she cautiously continued her investigation and found that there were many hands grasping and holding the woman’s cape. The fingers were webbed with spider-strands and fused to arms that reached up from a swell of densely woven branches, like a wave of the forest’s fallen. She patted her palms along that rising wave until her fingers found cold, smooth spheres. Her breath caught, and she was terrified. There were skulls here, set in gaps between the branches. Cyndere began to shake.

A ripple of air wriggled across the floor and tugged at her woodscloak, then prowled across the chamber. It shivered the curtain, letting in a flicker of light. Cyndere crouched, overwhelmed by the scale of detail that glittered around her. She glimpsed walls plastered with winter-blackened leaves, embedded with bits of bone and eggshell. Threads spun from ash webbed the ceiling, penetrated by tusks that hung like stalactites.

She knew, then, that Jordam had been wrong. Auralia had crafted this chamber. It was all her work. She had given her fears some kind of shape, screamed her secret suffering into a detailed expression, here in this private place. Vivid manifestations, appalling distortions, and colors that made Cyndere’s stomach turn—this was where Auralia had wrung horror, spite, and rage from her heart. And then she had left it all behind.

This ghastly vision culminated in a sculpted wave of slack-jawed skulls and empty eyes, of arms and hands reaching for a desperate woman and taking hold of her, trying to draw her down into their miserable grave.

Cyndere wanted an ax. She wanted to hew those arms, break the hands that held the woman’s cloak. Instead, she slid her hands back up to the woman’s shoulders and found her face. Unlike the detail of the feet that pushed against the floor, the face—a fragile mosaic of glass fragments—had no lines or features. It seemed this figure, in the force of her attempt to escape, had forgotten herself. Auralia had not finished this work. It stayed suspended, a question. And yet Cyndere felt she knew this woman, trapped by all that pursued her.

Tears stung her eyes. She had all but forgotten the sensation. She had wept when her father died. She had cried herself sick for the death of her brother, Partayn. But months had passed, and she had not found any way to cry for Deuneroi. Not yet.

Cyndere turned, then walked forward, leaving the woman behind. “You were trying to get somewhere,” she whispered. She needed to believe that Auralia had given this figure somewhere to go, some chance of escape. That mysterious, scuttling wind had to have come from somewhere. A window, a door, a passage.

Her foot came down upon a coarse fold of cloth.

She knelt.

Her hands gathered the folds of a bristling woodscloak made of skins and thistledown. It was a cloak just like the one that Deuneroi had worn. Her hands knew it so well, and she could hardly hold it for the shaking. Something tumbled loose from the folds. By the bell-like tone when it struck the floor, she knew it was the helm of his armor. She put the cloak down, felt about the stone floor, and found a ring.

Recognition burnt her hand. She forced herself to pick up the ring. Her fingertips moved back through the cloak, and she found a sharp-edged object pinned there—a brooch with an eagle-shaped jewel. With urgency, her hands ran farther, in search of an explanation. In the span that would have covered the space between his shoulders, she found it—a slit in the fabric cleanly cut by a blade.

She let go. Stillness, and then at last she felt a seam split, a barrier break. The grief rose. The flood.

Cyndere’s voice shattered the darkness, displacing the bats that roosted in bones glued across the ceiling. They slapped their wings together and rushed at the curtain where they fought to escape.

She whispered his name again and again, holding the cloak so tightly to her breast that the brooch’s pin pierced her garment. When the curtain rustled behind her, she waited for a footfall and whispered, “Jordam.” He did not answer. He had not come. But now her solitude had been disturbed, just as it had been that night in the glen. “Jordam,” she said. “No.” She let the cloak fall to the floor, and she pulled at her hair.

Cyndere cursed the Cent Regus beastmen. She raged at Deuneroi for leaving her behind. She punished her brother for running away on a mad errand in search of music. She damned the vast and reckless sea for taking her father. She cursed the moon-spirits. Cursed her mother. Cursed Bel Amica and all its blindness. She cursed herself for all her failings, the loss of her hopes, the ruin of her life.

When she lifted her head again, her body ached. The hours had emptied out her grief. But through her tears, she saw an intensifying light somewhere far away.

She rose to her feet, feeble in her anguish. As she did, she saw the faintest hint of detail and realized that the woman leaning forward was reaching out toward the distant light. Cyndere fingered the sculpted arm, found her way down to the hand, which was pointing directly toward that faraway glow.

Cyndere gasped, for as she touched the woman’s cold clay hand, it shifted like a lever. A rumble moved from the statue to the wall, and then a bold beacon shone in, illuminating something at the end of a tunnel.

While Cyndere could not make out the details of the spectacle illuminated there, she saw another figure standing just this side of the beacon. His arms were spread wide.

Cyndere let go of the woman’s hand and surrendered to the pull of that mystery. As she tiptoed down the cold, bone-encrusted passage, expecting to enter an embrace, she began to understand. This man was not facing her, nor was he raising his arms. He was spreading wings to venture ahead. To lead the way.

“Deuneroi,” she whispered.

The statue was as unfinished as the besieged woman’s face. He was just an outline, as if Auralia was not quite sure of him. He seemed enthralled by what lay before him. On a smooth stretch of wall, Auralia had painted a scene. The sunlight that now streamed into this cave illuminated the spectacle. Cyndere stared. A jagged sea of green filled the lower part of the wall’s canvas. Above it, a dark, mountainous line.

High above that line, over a vast space where nothing had yet been painted, Auralia had begun to sketch a mountain with white chalk. Cyndere did not recognize the place; Auralia had only swept the first brushstrokes of white. It hovered over the landscape, suspended. The figure standing beside her seemed free, eager, ready to fly, and his head was tilted back, looking at the mountain. Cyndere felt an urge to finish the painting, to fill that void with detail so the mountain would reach the ground and the man could make his way to the snowy peak.

Looking back, she could see the woman leaning forward from the mass of nightmares, from the surge of clutching hands. She approached the woman and saw her more clearly—a figure of sorrow. The surface of the sculpture sparkled as if made of salt. The strain in her posture was not fear but determination. The shadows were not seeking to drag her down. No, she had offered them her cloak that they might take hold and be drawn out of their darkness, like survivors from a flood.

“Auralia,” she whispered, “where did you go? Who will finish the picture?” Cyndere turned, leaned back into the woman’s robes, and shared her gaze. “And who was he for you?”

The figure in the distance blurred as tears came again. “I can tell you,” she said, “who he was for me.” She drew her husband’s cloak about her. She wept again for Deuneroi until at last the tears were gone, her heart wrung out, his bloody cloak baptized.

Cyndere’SMidnight

 

30

AURALIA’S FEAR CHAMBER

During Mordafey’s failing charge at the Cliffs of Barnashum, Jordam had surprised his twin brother, stepping out of the shadows and beckoning him to follow. “Goreth, come. Follow. Run with me.”

But Goreth did not obey. He stared in confusion at Jordam’s stone costume, that burden of clay that had weighed him down since his struggle with Cal-raven. But when Goreth finally fixed both his eyes on Jordam’s face, he smiled in relief, and his shaking stilled. “Rockbeetles, Jordam! Strange armor.”

The journey from the cliffs to the Cragavar had been an excruciating ordeal. After crawling away from the caves, Jordam dragged himself into a shallow, icy ravine on the first tier of the cliffs, where he lay for the rest of the night. Abascar soldiers had climbed over him in the dark, too busy preparing Abascar’s defense to notice the breathing body in the stone encasement. When sunrise woke him, he had only enough strength to clutch at bundles of loose spineweed and pull them over himself for concealment before the pain of his broken bones burnt him unconscious.

During the long day before the siege, as flies buzzed about his ears and scourge-bugs crept across his brittle shell, Jordam remained in the ravine listening to Cal-raven’s people whisper and bustle about. Broad-winged brascles circled above him, harbingers of bloodshed. He could not move.

The weighty costume had cooled as the sun set. When he shivered, his brittle crust rattled with a sound like chattering teeth, intriguing a pair of crows who climbed about on his chest and pecked at him. Live, he had urged himself through the alarms of pain that blared from all corners of his body. Live. To help Cal-raven. To get back to O-raya’s caves.

He woke wishing the crows would return, for he was famished. He tried to move, but his ribs were fiery lances, and his knees were broken glass. Eying the dark forest, he knew Mordafey was coming. He began to grind his arms together slowly, chipping and crumbling the shell. With a sharp-edged stone, he shaved stone-burdened hair from his mane, tearing away as much as he could.

Then, just as the Cent Regus horde invaded the bushes below and assailed Barnashum, Jordam forced himself to climb down to Barnashum’s threshold. Mordafey’s swarm took no notice, intent upon their siege, distracted by fiery carts and lights on the cliffs. He recovered the Bel Amican saddlebags from the bushes where he had concealed them before his ascent. They seemed even heavier as he draped them over his shoulders and crawled.

When Mordafey loped past him, eyes fixed upon the cliffs, Jordam hardly recognized him for all that the Essence had wrought in his brother’s form. Like a team of bulls. Like a fangbear. Like a dragon from the Desert of Smoke.

In the forest Goreth gave him the old Abascar sword, and he scraped more stone away from his legs and arms. Goreth, unsteady in his fear and confusion, persisted with questions, and Jordam described a fight with an Abascar soldier. It was true enough. But Goreth was not put at ease. “Older Brother will finish you.”

“rrGoreth, listen,” Jordam said, dust in his voice. “You don’t know Mordafey’s plan. When he’s chieftain, he’ll kill us both.”

“Not the brothers,” Goreth scoffed. “Chieftain. Kill the chieftain.” His face and neck were swollen, emboldened to blistering with the Essence. Treasure. Glory. The chieftain’s throne. He turned his bulging eyes back toward the attack.

Jordam pleaded with him. “I found something. rrBetter than Essence. Better than treasure. Follow me.”

But Goreth began to tremble, unsettled. “Can’t run, Same Brother. He’ll find us. He’ll catch us.”

“You’re faster,” said Jordam, changing his tone. “You’re faster than Mordafey. Faster than Jorn. Faster than all…except me.”

But Goreth scowled, his voice filling with menace. “Don’t make trouble, Same Brother.”

“Same Brothers can be stronger together, stronger than Mordafey.” Jordam pointed into the darkness. “Did he tell us about the swarm? Did he tell us about the white giant? No secrets for the brothers, says Mordafey. But he lies to us.”

The ground shuddered. They beheld the massive shadows of falling boulders smashing their way down Barnashum’s stair. Jordam’s words wisped away like bursts of vapor.

“rrGoreth, I found better prizes than Abascar. Better strength. Run with me, or you won’t see me again. Gone forever. No more Same Brothers. Finished.”

“Brothers are everything,” Goreth whined. “Can’t remember anything else.”

“rrYou remember the Old Dog? Long ago? What happened to him?”

Goreth’s eyes widened. “Don’t make me remember.”

“What happened to the Old Dog, Goreth?”

Goreth looked down, trying to escape the memory of their father lying in the den with his sons, a metal pin driven through his head. Mordafey’s search for the killer had been short and unfulfilled.

“Who would kill the Old Dog, Goreth? rrWho would be stronger if the Old Dog was dead?” He seized Goreth’s arm, trying to drag him away, but Goreth laughed, pulling back. “Let’s run, Same Brother. Before Mordafey kills us too.”

Goreth wrenched his arm free then and lifted his Abascar sword in an unmistakable threat. Jordam, backing into the shadows, said, “Same Brother goes now, Goreth.” His eyes began to sting, his vision blurring. He raised his hands. “Listen. rrTonight, watch out. Step careful. Always let Older Brother go first.”

Goreth started after him. But horns sounded from the cliffs. Answering fanfare rang out in the treetops. Absorbed in the chaos playing out before him, Goreth seemed to forget that Jordam had been there.

“Say it back, Goreth. Always let Older Brother go first,” Jordam shouted.

“Always,” said Goreth absently.

“Rockbeetles,” Jordam sighed.

Jordam withdrew into the trees as Mordafey returned. He prowled in the shadows, worried that Goreth would warn Mordafey. But Goreth’s memory failed when Mordafey’s beating began. With every blow of the club, Jordam shuddered as if he were absorbing the strike.

When Mordafey led the swarm into the fangbear den, Jordam unbuckled the saddlebags. First he took Bel’s gift, the oceandragon whistle, and draped the string around his neck. Then he pulled out many coils of snare wire and did what he had mustered the courage to do. “Always,” he whispered, as if Goreth might hear him. “Always let Older Brother go first.”

A familiar sound had spun him around. The bellow of prongbulls nearby in the forest.

Jordam clung to the prongbull as fiercely as he had grasped the branch of the coil tree, exhausted, trying not to fall. This bull was not so cooperative, and it took every ounce of his strength to steer the beast.

And then his strength ran out.

He fell into a delirium and dreamt that he was snatched from the back of the bull by a storm cloud and carried into a cold, vast space, where he floated among the stars.

When he woke, the cold was no illusion. He was floating on the surface of Deep Lake, staring up into starlight. He remembered nothing of the journey, and the shreds of his dreams slipped through his grasp. Had the bull carried him all this way? Had he slipped from its back and run? Or had a winged shadow carried him over the forest?

He had never gazed at the constellations like this before, but now they seemed merely an extension of O-raya’s artistry, as if she had moved on from this world to paint the sky. He might have stayed there, floating and forgetting, but his wounds stung in the cold water, and he was weak from hunger.

As he struggled to the shore, the remaining patches of his crumbling costume weighed him down. He limped into O-raya’s caves, desperate for a fire. He blew on the skull-shaped whistle. Mournful tones echoed in harmony all throughout the caves. But Bel made no reply.

The ale boy’s blankets were empty. He found no sign of struggle.

He began to search the tunnels but found nothing more than Bel’s footprints in the dust. Waters deep within the recesses of O-raya’s caves whispered soothing promises, and he answered their call. He ripped away his tattered cloak and bathed in a deep, hidden pool. The water here was as strange and pure as what he had drawn from the well at Tilianpurth. Patches of luminous color floated on the surface. The water gave him strength and soothed his pain.

Sinking, he found glowing, translucent, eyeless fish. He caught them and swallowed them whole. They had no taste, but they filled his belly and gave him enough strength to continue his search.

Emerging from the water, he found that the remnants of stone had fallen away. He looked at his rippling reflection. His jutting browbone was gone; only a flat plate of bone remained on his forehead. His mane ragged and torn, the hair on his arms and legs shorn clean, he did not recognize himself. He looked like one of the weakerfolk.

The pain in his wounded foot still flared up when he walked, but he managed to make his way back down the tunnel toward the cave. He stopped outside that dark, forbidding chamber, and a worry closed his hands into fists. The curtain lay twisted on the floor.

Jordam stepped up to the entrance. Fear spread in tendrils through his body and chilled him. He knew before he reached the spot that Deuneroi’s garments were gone from the place where he had concealed them in his worry. He had tried to stop her, tried to keep them hidden until the time was right to tell her.

He turned and clambered out of the cave. Bel’s footprints led up through the tunnels to the ladder they had descended together only a few days earlier. On the vantage point high above Deep Lake, on the ledge where his journey had begun—where O-raya had slept and the Keeper had saved her—no one was taking in the view.

If Bel had found Deuneroi’s belongings, she would have guessed who put them there. She would have arrived at the inevitable conclusion.

Just as he suspected and feared, Bel’s footprints led into the forest, alone. His hand closed over the whistle, he stepped forward to follow her. But he had not gone far before he realized that another kind of path ran alongside Bel’s faint footprints. The impressions were enormous, the stride vast…and familiar. These very marks had led him to Tilianpurth in the first place.

How, he thought again, did I get here?

He ran then, compelled by longing, drawn by a vision of Bel waiting defenseless in the glen.

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Two days after Jordam’s departure, Cyndere began to get hungry.

Lake fishing was not at all like the sea fishing she had learned as a child. She found a small, timeworn net in the caves, but it drew little more than weeds and tiny crabs with unbreakable shells. Weary of striving for a catch in the cold rain, she returned to the cave and built a fire. But currents of wind discouraged her, filling the cave with smoke and stirring the fire’s appetite so the driftwood burnt too quickly.

Complaining to the silence, she found herself waiting for sisterlies to crowd into the chamber. But no one came. There was no one to hear her. A tantrum would last only as long as its echoes.

“Totally alone.” She fell back into the ale boy’s blankets and laughed. “At last.”

Night came but offered no sleep. Long, wakeful hours were nothing new to her, but the solitude, the isolation—it frightened and inspired her. She spoke things aloud she would barely dare to think in House Bel Amica. She could sing songs, tour the caves, practice telling children’s stories, wander wherever she wished without any fear of restriction or interference. She found a chalky patch of damp stone and drew versions of Jordam’s outline on the walls. “Auralia would approve,” she said.

She walked out to the water and listened to creatures scuttle along the pebbles—tappita tappita tap-tap tick—while frogs performed percussive melodies. Splinters of shadow shot up from the water and splashed back down, and she scolded the fish for eluding her net.

A paddle-tail swam across the water toward her. She could see its whiskered nose at the front of the rippling arrow. She couldn’t remember if paddle-tails were dangerous and tried not to budge. When it came close and caught sight of her, it smacked its tail hard on the water to alarm nearby kin and dove to safety. She glanced about for someone who could share the moment. But it was all for her, and all the more wondrous in that these things happened in the world every night. There was nothing quite like this in all of Bel Amica. She savored every detail, from the dissipating circles of the paddle-tail’s dive to the lazy glide of a fishercrane across the water, as if drinking her way to the end of a rare vintage. The ocean was a storm, but this, this was a place for rest, for dreaming.

Moonlight flickered. She watched frantic bats zig and zag, heard the faintest trace of their chatter. Wind rushed low over the water, and a cloud soared across the moon as if hunting. She scowled at that bold green disc and whispered challenges to it. She had come this far without the help of any moon-spirits.

She thought of Emeriene standing at the window and staring up at that same moon. The sisterly was probably exhausted from worry. “Forgive me for speaking so harshly, Emmy,” she whispered. “I was suffocating, and I made you suffer for it. You were only trying to protect me. And now I’ve run out on you. You must be worried sick.”

She thought of poor Night-scrap and wondered if anyone would feed him. Or if Ryllion would set a snare in her chamber.

The thought of Ryllion disturbed the peace of her lakeside idyll. She stood and walked across the pebbles, her heart heavy again. She did not want to go back home. Yet she could not stay by the lake. This place offered an appealing stillness, but only if she ignored the distant clamor caused by her absence.

All she could do was wait and hope that Jordam would return. Then she could work with him, coax the conscience within that massive, maned head. Together they could find more Cent Regus to rescue. They would need Auralia’s colors, for that was what had calmed Jordam’s temper. They would need the water from the well at Tilianpurth.

Back inside the cave, she heard the bats drop from their roosts and flutter deeper. In a sort of trance beyond sleep, she followed the leathery rustle up the tunnel. She listened for footsteps behind her. Nothing. Curtains in her memory stirred, opening to blackness, and she found herself standing at the mouth of the darkest cave. This time Jordam did not appear.

The braided curtain wavered, sparkling with green light from the wall’s embedded glowstones. It felt strange against her hand. She pulled it back and reached her arm into the space, then stepped into the cave’s cold, suspended breath. Keeping a hold on the curtain, she let in the corridor’s faint green glow.

She discerned a shape, a shrouded figure, far across the chamber. The figure seemed to move.

“Is it you?” she whispered.

Moving farther in, she allowed the curtain to fall, and she gasped at the depth of the darkness. Holding her hands out, she took cautious steps forward, her woodscloak sweeping along the floor. The air was stagnant and unmoving. Her heart beat like a ceremonial drum.

In illuminated chambers she had already discovered cloaks in hanging rows. A chiming crystal. A pedestal with a pool of milk-white water. The outlines of doors that would not open, of locks that sealed up secrets tight. On an impulse, she reached out to touch the figure, accepting whatever secret Auralia might have kept here. She remembered Jordam’s story, imagined Auralia’s scream.

Her hands met a smooth slope rising from the floor and cautiously traced the lines, discerning a woman’s shape. It was a statue. The woman wore a crown of leaves and brambles, a cloth cape draped around her shoulders. That was what had moved in the darkness—a draft had brushed the cloth.

Cyndere knelt. There was tension in the statue’s legs. This woman was leaning forward, striving.

Her hands moved down the woman’s wavering cape and found that it was caught, clutched tight in hands made of rough bark and twigs and something colder—bone. Cyndere drew back her hands, suddenly questioning what more she wanted to learn about this story in the darkness. After a pause she cautiously continued her investigation and found that there were many hands grasping and holding the woman’s cape. The fingers were webbed with spider-strands and fused to arms that reached up from a swell of densely woven branches, like a wave of the forest’s fallen. She patted her palms along that rising wave until her fingers found cold, smooth spheres. Her breath caught, and she was terrified. There were skulls here, set in gaps between the branches. Cyndere began to shake.

A ripple of air wriggled across the floor and tugged at her woodscloak, then prowled across the chamber. It shivered the curtain, letting in a flicker of light. Cyndere crouched, overwhelmed by the scale of detail that glittered around her. She glimpsed walls plastered with winter-blackened leaves, embedded with bits of bone and eggshell. Threads spun from ash webbed the ceiling, penetrated by tusks that hung like stalactites.

She knew, then, that Jordam had been wrong. Auralia had crafted this chamber. It was all her work. She had given her fears some kind of shape, screamed her secret suffering into a detailed expression, here in this private place. Vivid manifestations, appalling distortions, and colors that made Cyndere’s stomach turn—this was where Auralia had wrung horror, spite, and rage from her heart. And then she had left it all behind.

This ghastly vision culminated in a sculpted wave of slack-jawed skulls and empty eyes, of arms and hands reaching for a desperate woman and taking hold of her, trying to draw her down into their miserable grave.

Cyndere wanted an ax. She wanted to hew those arms, break the hands that held the woman’s cloak. Instead, she slid her hands back up to the woman’s shoulders and found her face. Unlike the detail of the feet that pushed against the floor, the face—a fragile mosaic of glass fragments—had no lines or features. It seemed this figure, in the force of her attempt to escape, had forgotten herself. Auralia had not finished this work. It stayed suspended, a question. And yet Cyndere felt she knew this woman, trapped by all that pursued her.

Tears stung her eyes. She had all but forgotten the sensation. She had wept when her father died. She had cried herself sick for the death of her brother, Partayn. But months had passed, and she had not found any way to cry for Deuneroi. Not yet.

Cyndere turned, then walked forward, leaving the woman behind. “You were trying to get somewhere,” she whispered. She needed to believe that Auralia had given this figure somewhere to go, some chance of escape. That mysterious, scuttling wind had to have come from somewhere. A window, a door, a passage.

Her foot came down upon a coarse fold of cloth.

She knelt.

Her hands gathered the folds of a bristling woodscloak made of skins and thistledown. It was a cloak just like the one that Deuneroi had worn. Her hands knew it so well, and she could hardly hold it for the shaking. Something tumbled loose from the folds. By the bell-like tone when it struck the floor, she knew it was the helm of his armor. She put the cloak down, felt about the stone floor, and found a ring.

Recognition burnt her hand. She forced herself to pick up the ring. Her fingertips moved back through the cloak, and she found a sharp-edged object pinned there—a brooch with an eagle-shaped jewel. With urgency, her hands ran farther, in search of an explanation. In the span that would have covered the space between his shoulders, she found it—a slit in the fabric cleanly cut by a blade.

She let go. Stillness, and then at last she felt a seam split, a barrier break. The grief rose. The flood.

Cyndere’s voice shattered the darkness, displacing the bats that roosted in bones glued across the ceiling. They slapped their wings together and rushed at the curtain where they fought to escape.

She whispered his name again and again, holding the cloak so tightly to her breast that the brooch’s pin pierced her garment. When the curtain rustled behind her, she waited for a footfall and whispered, “Jordam.” He did not answer. He had not come. But now her solitude had been disturbed, just as it had been that night in the glen. “Jordam,” she said. “No.” She let the cloak fall to the floor, and she pulled at her hair.

Cyndere cursed the Cent Regus beastmen. She raged at Deuneroi for leaving her behind. She punished her brother for running away on a mad errand in search of music. She damned the vast and reckless sea for taking her father. She cursed the moon-spirits. Cursed her mother. Cursed Bel Amica and all its blindness. She cursed herself for all her failings, the loss of her hopes, the ruin of her life.

When she lifted her head again, her body ached. The hours had emptied out her grief. But through her tears, she saw an intensifying light somewhere far away.

She rose to her feet, feeble in her anguish. As she did, she saw the faintest hint of detail and realized that the woman leaning forward was reaching out toward the distant light. Cyndere fingered the sculpted arm, found her way down to the hand, which was pointing directly toward that faraway glow.

Cyndere gasped, for as she touched the woman’s cold clay hand, it shifted like a lever. A rumble moved from the statue to the wall, and then a bold beacon shone in, illuminating something at the end of a tunnel.

While Cyndere could not make out the details of the spectacle illuminated there, she saw another figure standing just this side of the beacon. His arms were spread wide.

Cyndere let go of the woman’s hand and surrendered to the pull of that mystery. As she tiptoed down the cold, bone-encrusted passage, expecting to enter an embrace, she began to understand. This man was not facing her, nor was he raising his arms. He was spreading wings to venture ahead. To lead the way.

“Deuneroi,” she whispered.

The statue was as unfinished as the besieged woman’s face. He was just an outline, as if Auralia was not quite sure of him. He seemed enthralled by what lay before him. On a smooth stretch of wall, Auralia had painted a scene. The sunlight that now streamed into this cave illuminated the spectacle. Cyndere stared. A jagged sea of green filled the lower part of the wall’s canvas. Above it, a dark, mountainous line.

High above that line, over a vast space where nothing had yet been painted, Auralia had begun to sketch a mountain with white chalk. Cyndere did not recognize the place; Auralia had only swept the first brushstrokes of white. It hovered over the landscape, suspended. The figure standing beside her seemed free, eager, ready to fly, and his head was tilted back, looking at the mountain. Cyndere felt an urge to finish the painting, to fill that void with detail so the mountain would reach the ground and the man could make his way to the snowy peak.

Looking back, she could see the woman leaning forward from the mass of nightmares, from the surge of clutching hands. She approached the woman and saw her more clearly—a figure of sorrow. The surface of the sculpture sparkled as if made of salt. The strain in her posture was not fear but determination. The shadows were not seeking to drag her down. No, she had offered them her cloak that they might take hold and be drawn out of their darkness, like survivors from a flood.

“Auralia,” she whispered, “where did you go? Who will finish the picture?” Cyndere turned, leaned back into the woman’s robes, and shared her gaze. “And who was he for you?”

The figure in the distance blurred as tears came again. “I can tell you,” she said, “who he was for me.” She drew her husband’s cloak about her. She wept again for Deuneroi until at last the tears were gone, her heart wrung out, his bloody cloak baptized.