Dherak cannot be created. It cannot be destroyed. It can only be moved from one place to another, and the price is always paid.

Professor Haltora, lecture notes, year unknown

Chapter 10

Defluo

The dew woke me.

It lay on everything. On my blanket, on my hands, on Alôpex's fur, which glittered in the early light. It smelt of night and earth and that sweet, cold something in morning air you never breathe from a bed. The sky above the treetops was grey and pink, and everything was still except the birds, which had started singing with an insistence that said the night was over, whether you were ready for it or not.

I sat up. My body was stiff and sore and cold in the places the blanket hadn't covered. But the air that filled my lungs when I took a deep breath was the cleanest air I had ever breathed. It tasted of pine forest and dew and whatever is left when everything human has been taken away.

Ahra was still asleep. His leg was swollen, and the cloth around the bite was dark with dried blood. Lynx lay awake at his side, looking at me with yellow eyes that said he wasn't well, but he was alive.

Retia was already up. She was standing at the edge of the clearing with the map open in the air in front of her and Fulmen on her shoulder, studying the symbols with the concentrated intensity she had when she was deciding something.

"Morning," she said without turning round.

"Morning."

"The second scroll is there." She pointed to a symbol north-east of our position, halfway up the side of the mountain. "The third is there." Another symbol, higher up, close to the house. "If we keep the pace up, we can reach the house before dark." She folded the map. "I don't want another night with whatever came last night."

"Ahra can't keep that pace up," I said.

"Then we help him," she said. Not coldly. Just as a fact. Retia wasn't the type to wrap the truth up to make it easier to swallow.

Ahra woke half an hour later with a face that had faded to the greyish colour skin goes when it has spent the night fighting something on the inside. The bite on his leg was swollen and dark, and the skin around it was hot when I touched it.

"It's infected," said Retia, looking at it with the matter-of-fact gaze she used when she was assessing things.

"It's fine," said Ahra, and tried to stand. He winced and grabbed hold of a branch to keep his balance. Lynx pressed himself against Ahra's good leg, and Ahra laid a hand on the lynx's head and stood still for a moment with his eyes closed, breathing through his teeth.

"I can walk," he said. "It hurts, but I can walk."

He said it with a determination that was new for him. Not Ahra's usual nervous energy. Something calmer, something that had come to him during the night, between the pain and the dark and the silence we had shared by the fire.

I took his bag and slung it over my shoulder, on top of my own bag and the bow and the quiver. It was heavy. Everything was heavy. He started to protest, but I looked at him, and he stopped.

None of us said anything. We just started walking.

We followed Retia.

And she was good. Not in a showy way, not with big decisions and dramatic choices. It was the little things. She stopped where two paths crossed and didn't just look at the map, she looked at the sun, at the direction the trees grew in, at the side of the stones where the moss grew thickest. She chose paths that avoided the steepest climbs, not the shortest ones, because she knew Ahra couldn't climb with his leg. She didn't say anything about it. She just took the way that was easiest for him and let him think it was the only way.

It was the kind of leadership that doesn't ask to be noticed.

Halfway up she stopped and looked at a group of stones lying in an arc. "There was a path here once," she said. "These stones were laid by people, not by nature. Look at the edges."

I looked. She was right. The stones were too even, too regular. Somebody had put them there a long time ago.

"A path up to what?" I said.

"I don't know," said Retia. "But it's going the right way."

We followed the old stones upwards, and they led us through the thickest part of the forest faster than the map had suggested was possible.

And I let her lead, and it didn't hurt. That was the strange thing. My whole life I had built myself out of being the best, the fastest, the strongest, the one who ran the Fjord Run in four minutes and twelve seconds and took the slope straight down, where the others took the steps. Letting someone else go in front ought to have felt like giving something away. But it felt like putting down a rucksack you have carried for so long that you've forgotten it's there, and only when the weight is gone do you understand how heavy it was.

For the first time in a long time, all I had to do was follow. And it was a relief in a way my body understood before my head did: my shoulders loosened, my jaw loosened, and my steps got lighter.

The ground got harder the higher we went. Earth turned to stone, and stone turned to rock, and the trees got lower and more windswept, bent in one direction by decades of storms. The air got thinner and colder, and it brought a new scent with it: snow. Somewhere higher up there was snow, even though there was no snow down by the coast. The wind had changed, and now it came from above, cold and clean, with a sharpness that cut at my cheeks and made my eyes water.

The second scroll was lying in a crack in a rock face. Retia found it.

Not by accident. She stopped, looked at the map, looked at the rock, walked over to one particular crack in the grey stone, put her hand in, and pulled it out again with a roll of parchment between her fingers.

"Two down," she said.

"That was your find," I said.

She looked at me. Surprised. Retia wasn't used to people giving her credit for what she did. She was used to people either ignoring her or accusing her of cheating.

"Yes," she said. "It was."

Ahra was sitting on a stone holding his leg. "Great. Can we have a break?"

We had a break. Ahra drank some water and straightened the bandage on his leg, and his face was grey with pain. Lynx sat at his feet, looking up at him anxiously.

"We could still turn back," said Ahra quietly. "It's not too late."

"No," said Retia.

"My leg..."

"Is going to get worse whatever we do. We might as well go up as down." She crouched in front of him so they were at eye level and put her hand on his knee, the good one. Her look wasn't stern. It was steady. "We're not stopping, Ahra. Not now."

Ahra looked at me. I wanted to protect him. I would have carried him all the way up the mountain if I'd had to. But I knew Retia was right, and the fact that she was right, and that I knew it, and that it hurt anyway, was one of the things I learnt that day about what it means to have people you care about.

"We keep going," I said.

Ahra closed his eyes. Opened them again. Nodded.

I gave him my arm. He took hold of it with both hands, and his fingers were warm and clammy against my skin. He pulled himself up. Lynx walked close on his other side, pressing his body against Ahra's leg with every step. We started climbing again, slowly now, three people and three animals moving upwards through a forest that smelt of moss and wet stone.

The third scroll was visible from twenty metres away. It lay on a rocky ledge under an overhang, in plain sight, and it glowed faintly gold in the light that slanted in under the overhang.

We could see it. We just couldn't reach it.

The barrier was invisible. Retia walked straight into it and bounced off with a jolt that sent her three steps backwards. It wasn't a wall you could see or touch. It was just a no. A point in the air where the world said "no further."

"Ignis," said Retia, holding her hand towards the barrier. The blue flame hit the surface and sprayed out to the sides and died. Nothing.

Ahra tried. "Scutum." The invisible shield met the invisible barrier, and there was a brief flash of white light, and then nothing. Ahra sat down on the flat rock with a face that had given up.

"What do we do now?" he said.

I looked at the scroll behind the barrier. It was ten metres away. Ten metres and an impossible wall.

"Say the word. Think of the place. Let go."

The instruction from the scroll in the preparation room. Three sentences. Simple. Impossible. My hands closed round nothing, the way they closed round the iron rung every morning.

Retia looked at me. "Chris."

"Yes."

"You've never done it before."

"No."

"If it goes wrong..."

"Then you find the last scroll without me."

Ahra started to say something, but Retia touched his arm, and he went quiet.

I stepped up to the barrier. Alôpex was sitting on my shoulder, and her fur was warm against my neck, and her heart was beating against my jaw.

"Together?" she said inside my head.

"Together."

I closed my eyes. Alôpex's fur against my neck. Her heart against mine. Two hearts beating in time, and I didn't know when they had started doing that, but they were doing it now.

I didn't think about the scroll. I didn't think about the barrier. I let my thoughts fall away from me, one after another, like stones you let drop into water. The fjord. Hanne. The letter. The porridge. The gate that shut with a click. The ladder. The old woman by the fire. Ahra's papers falling. Retia's wild roses. Edrin's closed hand. Surain's shaking hands. All the people who knew my name and wouldn't tell me what it meant.

Stone after stone after stone, down into the water, and the water closed over them.

And when there were no more stones, there was just silence. And in the silence there was room.

I let go.

"Defluo."

My body vanished. Not painfully. Not frighteningly. It was just absence. I was nowhere, and I was everywhere, and there was a taste of copper in my mouth and a sound that was too deep to hear, more a vibration than a note, and it sang through my bones and my teeth and my fingertips.

And then I was somewhere else.

Not by the scroll.

A cave.

Dark. Cold. But not empty.

Walls of black stone that glittered faintly, and in the faint light I could see symbols cut into the surface with something sharper than any human hand. They covered everything, from floor to ceiling, rows of signs and patterns twisting round each other, and they pulsed faintly, as if they still carried what was left of the magic that had made them.

And in the middle of it all, bigger than the rest, cut with a precision that made it look as if it had grown out of the stone itself: a wreath of hawthorn. A sword through a stone. A dagger laid across it. The same symbol. The same symbol that had been on my letter and on the shield in my bank vault.

The air in the cave smelt of old Dherak. Thick and metallic, a hundred times stronger than in the Fonté Hall, so strong that it settled on my teeth and my tongue and felt like breathing metal. And there were other scents underneath it: old stone, old fire, old grief. Something terrible had happened here once. The walls of the cave remembered it, even though there was nobody left to tell it.

And there was something else. Marks in the dust on the floor. Footprints. Not old ones. The edges of the prints were still sharp, the dust still pushed aside. Someone had been here recently. Days ago, perhaps. Perhaps hours.

My hand touched the wreath of hawthorn on the wall. It was warm. The stone was cold everywhere except where the symbol was cut into it. There it was warm, alive, as if something were pulsing behind it.

Alôpex pressed herself against my neck. "Chris. We have to get away from here. This place isn't for us. Not yet."

Not yet.

I had time to see it for five seconds. Six, maybe.

Then the magic pulled me onward, and I was standing by the scroll.

My hands were shaking. My heart was hammering. Alôpex's claws were dug so deep into my shoulder that it hurt. But the scroll lay in front of me, and the barrier was behind me, and I was through.

I picked it up.

Retia and Ahra were standing on the other side of the barrier, looking at me with eyes that were wide and silent.

"What happened?" said Ahra. "You were gone. Not just through. Gone. For ten seconds you were nowhere."

"I don't know," I said. For me it had lasted five seconds.

That wasn't quite true. I knew I had been somewhere that wasn't on the map. Somewhere that wasn't part of the test. But I didn't say so. Not yet.

The barrier was gone now. They walked through without any resistance, and all three of us stood on the ledge with three scrolls and a mountain rising above us.

"The house is up there," said Retia, pointing.

We climbed the last hundred metres in silence. The sun had begun to go down, and the light was golden and slanting, and it threw long shadows from the stones, like fingers pointing upwards. The air was thin and cold and clean, and it tasted of snow and stone and something bigger than us.

The house stood near the top. Small. Made of stone. With a door that was open.

Inside there was a table with a circle drawn on it. A teleport circle.

"Place the three scrolls in the circle," said a voice that came from the walls. Arcanus's voice.

I put down the first. Retia put down the second. Ahra put down the third, because he had come all the way up here on that leg.

The circle lit up. White, then blue, then gold. And then we weren't in the house any more.

We were standing on Déynáir's lawn. Evening light. My knees gave way, and I sat down in the dewy grass and felt the cold and the damp soak through my trousers. Ahra was already lying flat on his back with his arms spread out. Retia was still on her feet, but her hands were shaking, and she pushed them into her pockets to hide it. The castle lay in front of us. The river to the left, wide and clear in the last light.

Retia looked at me. Ahra looked at me. Alôpex lay heavy around my neck.

"We did it," said Ahra.

We had been gone for less than a day.