In Nordmark the shepherds count their sheep twice every winter evening: once when they drive them out, and once when they drive them home. It is always the second number you remember.
From "Customs and Ways of Nordmark", Déynáir library
Chapter 26
The Night on the Mountain
The mountain at night was another world.
Not the world we had seen by daylight, with paths and stones and trees you could put names to. This was a world of darkness and cold and sounds that didn't belong, a world where every step was a choice, and every choice was wrong, and you kept walking anyway because the alternative was to stand still and wait for whatever was out there to come to you instead.
We walked in single file. Retia in front with Fulmen flying back and forth over the path and coming back to sit on her shoulder and flying off again, eyes made for the night reading the dark for us. Retia's scent of salt wind and wild roses was sharper than usual, sharpened by something straining beneath her control. I walked behind her with Alôpex at my feet, and her white fur was the only bright point in the black-green dark. Ahra walked behind me with Lynx, and his breathing was faster than it should have been, but his steps were sure. Nihil walked last, alone, with his hands in his pockets and a face that was closed and concentrated. Just once I saw something white run low across the frost beside him, without a sound, and then it was gone again. Brúma. She followed him the way Nihil himself kept track of things: close by and almost without being there, and without anyone having asked her to.
The path was the same one I had walked the night I was alone. But it felt different with four. Narrower. More deliberate. The low-hanging branches reached down towards us with fingers of frost, and the roots under my feet seemed to be moving. The air smelt of frost and bark and the dense, metallic Dherak that was stronger now than it had been on any of the other occasions.
None of us spoke. For ten minutes there was no sound except our footsteps and our breathing and Lynx's paws on the frozen ground. Ahra walked with his hands clenched around his staff, and his scent of warm bark and honey was mixed with something sour that was pure fear, and his fingers tightened and loosened in a rhythm that said he was trying to control something inside himself. Nihil walked with his shoulders slightly raised, and his scent of winter wind and bare iron was sharper in the cold, the posture he always had when he was getting ready, and his eyes moved from side to side, taking in everything.
Retia walked the way she always walked: straight back, firm steps, eyes forward. But her left hand, the one that wasn't holding her staff, touched her trouser pocket at regular intervals, and I knew that Cajis's message was in there, crumpled and refolded many times.
The cold grew the higher we climbed. Not the cold in the air, but another kind, a cold that came from inside, from the mountain itself, a radiance of Dherak that was colder and older than anything I had felt. My fingers were stiff, and my breath was thick and white, and it almost froze before it had time to spread.
"Can you feel it?" I said.
"Yes," said Nihil behind me. He took his hands out of his pockets and blew into them. "It's stronger than I expected."
"What is it?" said Ahra.
"Dherak," I said. "Dense. Everywhere. The mountain is soaked in it."
"It isn't just the mountain," said Alôpex in my head. She had stopped with one paw raised. "There are people out there. Ahead of us. Several."
I stopped. The others stopped. We stood still on the path in the dark and listened. And now I heard it too: voices. Low, muffled. Not one voice. Several. And the sound of footsteps that weren't ours, heavy and fast, and a smell drifting down towards us through the night air.
Burnt wood. Ash. The Thief King's men.
"They're already here," whispered Retia. Her hand gripped her staff, and her knuckles were white in the moonlight.
We left the path.
Retia led us into the dense forest to the left of the path, in among the trunks, into a darkness too thick to see through. We went slowly and silently, and Alôpex went ahead and found the places where the forest floor was soft enough that our steps made no sound. Lynx moved at Ahra's side with the flowing, silent movement cats have in the dark, and Fulmen sat still on Retia's shoulder with its wings folded tight.
We walked parallel to the path, and my heart was hammering so hard that I was sure the nearest man could hear it. Through the tree trunks, half hidden by bark and darkness, we could see them. Torches. Four, five, six of them, orange lights moving upwards in a line, and the men carrying them were shadows behind the flames, heavy coats and caps and steps that were too fast to be careful. They were in a hurry. They knew where they were going.
Their scent drifted over to us through the cold air: burnt wood and ash and something sour that was sweat and fear and resolve. And under it, dark Dherak, black and metallic and wrong, a smell that was Dherak but not really Dherak, a twisted version that lodged in your nose and your teeth.
Ahra put his hand on my arm. His fingers were shaking. I put my hand over his and held it still. We looked at each other in the dark, and his eyes were big and frightened, and mine probably were too. Everything I knew about armed men in the dark, I had learnt from Haltora one Tuesday afternoon with a wooden stick. It didn't help as much as I had hoped.
And ahead of them, further up the path, there was a single torch that moved differently from the others. Slower. More deliberate. And the person carrying it wasn't walking at the others' pace. He walked with the kind of controlled calm that says you own the place you are walking through.
"It's him," whispered Retia. Her voice was so low that I could hardly hear it. But I heard what was in it: a tremor that wasn't fear. It was recognition. "My father."
I looked. The man with the torch was too far away for me to see his face, but his silhouette was clear against the orange light: medium height, broad across the shoulders, and he walked with one hand at his side and the other raised with the torch, and there was something in the way he held himself that was commanding and not to be argued with.
Retia's hand tightened on her staff. Her jaw was locked. Fulmen spread its wings a centimetre.
"Not now," I said. Quietly. I put two fingers on her sleeve. "We follow them. We see where they go."
They went to the symbol.
The same place where I had found the wreath of hawthorn that night with Arcanus. But it had changed. The rock around the symbol had been cleared, the bushes cut away, and the ground in front of it trampled by many feet. Someone had prepared this. Not today. Over weeks.
The six men formed a half circle in front of the symbol. Their torches threw orange light up onto the rock face, and the wreath of hawthorn shone in it, and the sword and the dagger were sharp and deep and alive in the way they caught the light. The thorns were carved so finely that they looked as if they could prick.
And the man with the slow walk stepped forward.
Retia's father. Niram Caritas. The Thief King of Tés Aváir.
He pulled down the scarf that had hidden his face. And it was the face from the picture in the hallway of Retia's house. Dark hair, cut short. One eye grey, the other blue. The scar running from his ear down over his cheek and on down his neck, a thin white line that caught the torchlight. A face that was handsome and hard and bore the marks of a life that had not been soft.
And his scent reached me. Not burnt wood and ash like his men. Something else. Something that surprised me: salt water and cold stone and something flowery, faint, almost gone beneath layers of dark Dherak and many years of bitterness. Retia's base scent. Her father's scent was the same as hers, only ruined. Buried beneath everything he had done since he left his home.
Retia stood at my side behind a big oak, twenty metres from him. Her body was rigid. Her breathing had stopped. One of her hands gripped the bark with fingers that dug into the rough wood, and the other held her staff so hard that I was afraid it would snap. Her eyes were fixed on her father with an intensity that was physical, and they were wet, and she didn't blink, and the tears didn't fall.
Her scent was sharper than ever, salt wind and wild roses and under it something bitter. The grief of seeing the person you loved most and feared most standing so close and doing something you didn't understand.
"Retia," I whispered.
She didn't answer. Her fingers in the bark clenched deeper. A small flake of bark broke off and fell without a sound to the ground.
"Retia. Look at me."
She turned her head. Slowly. And her eyes were the hardest eyes I had ever seen. Not hard with hatred. Hard with decision. The decision you make when you love someone and know you have to stand in their way.
Niram Caritas laid his hand on the symbol. And it lit up. Not white, as it had when I touched it. Red. A deep, dark red that pulsed slowly and threw shadows that looked like nothing natural.
"That's wrong," said Alôpex in my head. She pressed herself down against the ground. "That colour. It's dark Dherak. He's forcing the seal, he isn't releasing it."
The ground shook. Not the short, hard tremor in the First-Year Room. A slow, deep shaking that came from below and went up through everything, through the stones and the trees and my legs and my teeth, and the thing beneath the mountain stirred, not slowly this time, but with a force that said someone was beating on its door with a hammer.
But the door held. I could feel it all the way over by the oak. He pushed, and it held.
"We have to stop them," said Nihil. He had crouched down behind a rock, and his voice was flat and calm, but his eyes were wide in the dark.
"How?" said Ahra. His voice was shaking now, and he wiped his hands on his trousers.
"The symbol," I said. "It responds to Godrand blood. I can close it. Maybe."
"Maybe," said Retia. She finally let go of the bark and looked away from her father and at me. "That's not good enough."
"It's all we've got."
She looked at me. For a long time. Her blue eyes in the torchlight that seeped through the trees. And then she nodded.
"Fine," she said. "What's the plan?"
"Nihil and Ahra, you create a diversion and draw their attention. Retia, you cover me. And I go to the symbol."
"That's a terrible plan," said Ahra.
"Yes," I said. "It is."
It went wrong straight away.
Nihil stepped out from the trees with his staff raised. He walked out into the open torchlight with a calm that was too controlled to be real. His blue eyes were flat. His staff pointed forward. He said the word as if it were a door he was kicking in:
"Scutum!"
The shield flickered in the air in front of him, big and bluish-white and humming. Nihil Mathson had thrown everything he had into it. All six men turned towards him. A split second of silence. Six men. Six hands reaching for staffs and knives and the dark light that sat in their fingers.
Ahra followed a second later. He stepped out at Nihil's side with his own Scutum. It was smaller than Nihil's and weaker, but it overlapped and filled the gap. Two boys with two shields against six grown men.
It worked for exactly five seconds. The men hesitated. Nobody had expected two teenagers to plant themselves in front of them in the dark.
Then one of them struck. The tallest. Not with a sword. With magic. He raised both hands, and something that looked like black fire rushed through the air. It wasn't fire. It was a wave of dark, reddish force, and it hit Nihil's shield.
The sound was wrong. Not a bang. A snap. Brittle and cracking. Nihil's shield shattered like glass thrown against a wall, and the pieces vanished into the air like sparks. Nihil was thrown backwards. His back hit a tree with a sound that was too heavy. He slid down the trunk and stayed there.
"Nihil!" shouted Ahra.
Ahra's shield held. It creaked. It bent. A web of cracks ran through it. His face was grey, and sweat ran down his temple, and his staff shook in his hands. But it held.
Nihil lay at the foot of the tree with open eyes that saw nothing. He was breathing, faint and shallow. There was blood at the corner of his mouth from where he had bitten his tongue. Lynx stood in front of him and growled, deeper and wilder than I had ever heard him. His ears were flat. Every tooth was bared. The next one to come close would lose a hand. At the foot of the tree, close to Nihil's hand, something white stood up on its hind legs.
Ahra's shield creaked again. His nose began to bleed, a thin stripe of red running down over his mouth. He wiped it away with the back of his hand without taking his eyes off the men.
"Now!" said Retia behind me. "Chris, NOW!"
Her voice cracked on the last word. Not from weakness. It was the anger finally taking over: Nihil lying limp, Ahra bleeding, and her father standing there forcing a seal that ought to stay closed.
We ran. Through the bushes. Branches slashing my cheeks. Roots under my feet. The cold air burning in my lungs. Out into the open, into the torchlight, towards the symbol. Retia ran ahead of me with her staff in one hand. Fulmen flew above her head and screamed the sharp, metallic scream falcons give when they dive. Two of the men ducked and turned towards the bird. That gave us three seconds.
Retia used them. She stopped in mid-stride and planted her staff in the ground with both hands.
"Ignis!"
The blue fire broke out of the ground, wilder than anything she had made before. Not a controlled line. An explosion of bluish-white flames that spread across the frozen ground with a sound like a hundred pieces of cloth being torn at once. The wall of fire rose between us and the men. The heat hit my face and my hands. It smelt of scorched stone and melted frost and ozone, and the smoke wound up between the trees.
Retia swayed. Her knees buckled, and she caught herself with her staff. Her face was white under the blue light. The price. The fire cost Dherak, and she was paying more than she could afford.
"Run!" she shouted. Her voice was hoarse. "I'll hold them!"
I ran. Through the narrow gap in the wall of fire. The heat burned my arms, and the smoke stung my lungs. Past men drawing back from the flames with curses on their lips. Across the scorched ground that was still glowing, and the heat came up through the soles of my boots. To the symbol.
Niram Caritas was still standing at the rock face with his hand on the wreath of hawthorn. The red light pulsed under his fingers. His face was concentrated and tight, and he didn't look at me. He looked at the stone.
I slammed my hand against the symbol. Next to his. So hard that it hurt.
The thorns cut me. They were carved in stone, and still they bit, a row of small, sharp stabs across my palm. I felt the blood come, warm against the cold stone, and I watched it run down into the grooves of the wreath. Red in the red light. The stone drank it.
And the seal screamed.
Not with sound. With Dherak. It was the most intense sensation I had ever felt: a wave of power that exploded out of the stone and went through me from my fingertips to my shoulders to my spine to my feet. It was like standing in a river that suddenly changed direction and tried to take me with it both ways at once. My Dherak collided with his. Warmth against darkness. Blue against red. Two currents that met and sparked where they touched.
The symbol under our hands burned. Both colours at once, blue and red twisting around each other. The stone was hotter than any stone ought to be. It vibrated under my fingers with the heartbeat I had felt all the other times, only faster now, and the thing beneath was awake and pressing against the inside of the seal.
My hand was shaking. His wasn't. He had done this many times. I could feel it through the stone: his Dherak was trained and used to pushing. Mine was raw and big and uncontrolled, a sea against a river, but his river knew where it was going.
Niram Caritas looked at me. For the first time.
His eyes. One grey. The other blue. And there was something in them that surprised me: it wasn't hatred. It wasn't evil. It was desperation. The eyes of a man doing something he knows is wrong because he believes it is necessary.
"Move, boy," he said. His voice was lower than I had expected. Rough. Tired.
"No," I said.
"You don't know what you're doing."
"I'm closing the seal."
"The seal has to be OPENED." His shoulders came forward, and his hand pressed harder against the stone. The red light grew stronger, and I felt his Dherak pressing against mine, heavy and dark and insistent. "There's something in there that has to come out. Something that has been held prisoner for three hundred years that should never have been imprisoned."
"What?"
"This isn't about you, Godrand." He said my name, and it sounded different in his mouth from in everyone else's, it sounded like something you are tired of, something you have been fighting against for a long time. "It's never been about you."
His gaze went past me. Over to the wall of fire, and through the smoke and the blue light he saw her. Retia. His daughter. He stood still for a moment, and something in his face cracked, a millimetre's crack in the control he carried, and his hand on the symbol shook for the first time.
"Retia," he said. Quietly. Not to me. To himself. To the night.
Then his face tightened again, and the crack closed, and he pressed harder against the stone.
Behind us I heard voices. Kalmin shouting my name. Arcanus shouting something I couldn't hear over the noise. And Ahra's shield finally breaking with a sound that was too small for what it meant.
But it was too late. The red and the blue fought in the stone under our hands, and my blood lay glowing in the grooves of the thorns, and then the thing happened that should not have happened.
The stone burst.
Not outwards. Inwards. The rock face in front of us opened with a boom that was too deep to come from stone, a boom that came from something beneath the stone. There was an opening now, a passage, black and cold and breathing, and it smelt of old Dherak and old earth and something that had been waiting for three hundred years.
I stood with my bleeding hand raised and stared at it.
He had been pushing for weeks. Cleared the bushes, trampled the ground flat. And it had held. It had held right up until I put my hand on it.
It wasn't him who had opened it.
Niram pulled his hand back and ran. In. Into the passage, into the mountain, with two of his men right behind him, and they vanished down into the dark with the torch as their only light.
"NO!" shouted Kalmin behind me.
He came through the smoke with Arcanus at his side. The other four men saw them coming, a man with a drawn sword and a teacher from Déynáir with light between his fingers, and they turned and fled down the mountain, and their torches disappeared between the trees like sparks going out.
Kalmin didn't stop until he reached the opening. He smelt of dry oak bark and dark heather honey and ink, and it was a Retonk scent, but drier than Ahra's, like an archive with the window open onto the forest. He raised his left arm. Something big and dark dropped out of the night and landed on his forearm, and I heard its talons scrape against his leather sleeve. A golden eagle. Golden brown in the torchlight, with a beak like a hook and eyes that didn't blink. I had never seen it before.
Kalmin rested his forehead against the bird's head for a brief moment and said something to it. Quietly. I only caught one word, and it was Edrin.
The eagle lifted off with heavy, broad wingbeats, and the air from them hit my face. It turned towards the castle and vanished into the dark.
Then Kalmin ran. In. After them.
Arcanus stood in the opening. His hood had fallen down as he ran, and for the first time I saw his whole face. It was younger than I had thought, narrow and smooth and not much older than Kalmin's. But the eyes were older than the rest of him, as if they had come to that face from somewhere else. His Dherak scent was open now, all the layers drawn aside, old pine and warm iron, the same thing I had felt that night on the mountain, and it still reminded me of someone I couldn't place. He looked at me. Then at my hand.
"We follow them," he said. "We don't have a choice."
And he went in.
Retia was already on her knees by the tree where Nihil lay. She took his face between her hands and said his name. He didn't react. She said it again, harder, and slapped him lightly on the cheek. He coughed. Blood and spit. His eyes found her and sharpened.
"Up," she said.
Ahra and I took him under the arms and pulled him to his feet. He swayed and grabbed my shoulder, and his fingers were ice cold. He spat red onto the frozen ground.
"I can walk," he said.
He almost could. Retia put his arm over her shoulders, and he let her do it without saying anything, which said more than anything else about how much it hurt. The ermine vanished like a streak of snow into the dark ahead of us.
Ahra stood at my side. His nose was still bleeding, and his staff was broken, and Lynx was pressed against his leg with his fur on end. He looked into the black passage and then he looked at me, and his eyes said what his mouth didn't: my brother is in there.
"Come on," I said.
We went in. All four of us. Chris, Retia, Ahra, Nihil. And four Amícûs: Alôpex ahead of me with her ears pricked, Fulmen on Retia's shoulder with its wings held close, Lynx at Ahra's side with yellow eyes shining in the dark, and Brúma somewhere ahead of us, so quiet that we only knew she was there because Nihil kept looking for her.
The passage swallowed us. And behind us, slowly and heavily, the opening began to draw itself together. Not close. Just draw together.
My hand was still bleeding. I closed it around the blood and walked on.