Distant tales of the Dichotomy

Fel never remembered the climb.

He remembered the beetle running. He remembered the wind roaring in his ears, and the saddle rattling under him, and the great dark mountain rushing past like a wall. He remembered Veyra’s voice, over and over, a hoarse, broken cry. Faster. Faster. He remembered Old Clatter’s wings, spread wide, humming at a pitch that shook the whole railing. He remembered, with terrible clarity, the way the smoke grew as they climbed, until it filled the sky.

The last bridge was gone.

It had been a long silver cable, a hundred feet above a drop. Now only the stumps remained, two blackened posts on either side of the chasm, and a few shreds of burned rope fluttering in the wind. The beetle stopped at the edge. Veyra was off his back before he had finished moving. She ran to the rim, and stood there, and Fel, climbing down after her, saw the look on her face and did not understand it.

Then he looked past her, across the gorge.

Veilrest was burning.

All of it. Every house. Every bridge. Every hanging garden and paper lantern and curving eave. The great golden domes, grown from living roots over hundreds of years, were wrapped in sheets of flame. The roofs had fallen in. The walls were black and cracked, and where the fire touched the old wood it ran along the grain in bright red veins. Smoke poured into the sky in towering clouds. Burning leaves drifted down like snow. Somewhere deep in the heart of it, a house collapsed with a long, slow, thunderous groan, and a column of sparks went whirling upward into the dusk.

There was no sound but the fire.

No screams. No bells. No voices. No wind chimes. Only the low steady roar, like a great beast breathing, and the crackle of timber, and a hundred small noises that he could not name.

“No,” whispered Veyra.

She said it so softly. She said it as if she were asking a question.

“No.”

Brannoch laid the long rope bridge, the one they had carried, across the gap. He did it in total silence, with a face like stone. Thara drove the pins into the rock with her bare fists. In three minutes, they had a crossing. In four, they were running.

They ran through the dead village.

It was not a village anymore. It was a kiln. The heat struck them in the face like a blow. The air was thick with ash and the smell of burned hair, and the street, the long curving street where he had walked on his first day with an arm around his ribs, was littered with fallen beams and blackened tiles. A paper lantern lay in the road, half melted, still glowing. A child’s shoe. A broken loom. A pot of something that had boiled dry. The fire leapt from roof to roof above them, and the timbers screamed.

He saw bodies.

He did not look at them. He saw them the way you see things in a nightmare, out of the corner of his eye, sudden and fragmentary and terrible. A man lying across a doorway with a spear through his chest. A woman on her knees in the street. A shape under a burning cart that was too small to be anything but a child’s. He kept his eyes on Veyra’s back and ran.

She did not stop. She did not look to either side. She ran as she had never run before, her long legs flashing, her braid whipping behind her, and her mouth was shaping a name that he could not hear.

They came to the house.

It was at the end of the street, where the road bent. It was a low round dome of golden roots, with a curtain at the door and a ring of small round windows. He remembered it. He remembered the hammock, and the smell of mint, and the strings of paper moths turning in the light. He remembered a child with a wooden spoon.

It was still standing.

The roof had gone, and the walls were black, but the great arch of the doorway had held. Fire licked along the frame in a thin red line. Veyra didn’t pause. She hurled herself through the curtain, and Fel went in after her.

The heat was incredible. He felt his skin tighten. His eyes streamed. Smoke rolled across the floor in thick black coils. He couldn’t see. He dropped to his knees, coughing, and found himself face to face with a ruin.

The room was empty. The hammock was gone. The shelves had fallen. The jars lay shattered on the floor, and the dried herbs had burned to nothing, and the whole space was a black, glowing hollow.

In the middle of it, on the floor, lay something.

It was hard to see at first. It was a low dark shape, curled in on itself, like an old log at the bottom of a pit, or a lump of coal in a forge. It glowed a dull, sullen red along its spine. It was black. It was entirely black, cracked and fissured, with a crust like burned bread. It was so small that he thought it was a stump.

Then he saw the horns.

They were silver. Long, spiral, elegant horns, curving back from a skull that was no longer a skull, only a blackened knot of bone and char. They were the one thing the fire had not touched. They gleamed in the glow like polished steel.

Mother Osha.

She was kneeling. That was what he understood, in a slow, dreadful wave. She had died on her knees, curled forward over something held tight against her chest, her back bent in a protective arch, her arms wrapped around it. The flames had taken her hair. They had taken her face. They had taken her apron, her hands, the very shape of her, and left a thing like a statue, a black crouching figure bowed over whatever she had held.

Veyra stopped three paces away. She made a small noise.

It was not a word. It was not a scream. It was the sound a person makes when something is torn out of them.

He didn’t want to look. He looked anyway.

Under the old woman’s arms, tucked against her breast, held with such fierce, rigid tenderness that even the fire had not been able to pry it loose, lay another shape.

It was very small.

It was less burned. That was the horror of it. The old woman had curled around it like a shell, and the flames had had to come through her first, and so what remained was only scorched, only blackened at the edges. The shape was a child’s. The limbs were curled tight. The head was bent into the old woman’s shoulder, as if for sleep. Most of the hair was gone, but a few strands, at the nape of the neck, were still pale green.

He could not see her face. He could only see the shape of the mouth, drawn back, as if in sorrow. And it was not enough to be sure. It was not enough to say, This is her. The fire had taken too much. It had made her anonymous. It had made her, in the end, a thing that could have been anyone.

But her hands lay open.

They lay on the ruined floor, outstretched, small and black and curled, the fingers drawn into hooks. And in the palms of them, clasped so tightly that they had fused to the burned skin, lay a little thing of bone and iron.

A knife.

It had a short black blade. It had a handle carved from bone, worn smooth. It was the knife Fel had given her on the edge of a cliff, at dawn, with a promise. Keep that for me. Until I get back. So I’ll have to come and get it.

I’ll keep it safe, she had said.

I know you will.

Afterward, he would remember the next moments only in glimpses.

He remembered a sound. It was Veyra. She had dropped to her knees on the burned floor, and she was screaming. It was a scream like nothing he had ever heard from a human throat, a raw, ragged, endless howl, as if all the grief in the world were coming out of her in one piece. It went on and on. It rose to a shriek and broke and rose again. She tore at her own hair. She drove her fists into the ground until the skin split. She said a name, over and over, a child’s name, and the sound of it was a wound.

He remembered Brannoch standing in the doorway with his hand pressed to his mouth. The big man was trembling from head to foot. Tears were running down his face, and he made no sound at all.

He remembered Thara on her knees, curled over, rocking, with her arms wrapped around her stomach.

He remembered himself.

He remembered kneeling. He remembered reaching out, and his hand shaking so hard that he could not control it, and touching one small black finger, and feeling it crumble.

He remembered the world going quiet and very far away.

I promised.

I promised her. I looked at her, and I said, I’ll come back. I’ll come back, I promise. I knelt in front of her and I said it. And she said, don’t die. And I said I’d try. And she said, don’t try, do.

I did. I did, Pim. I did it. I’m here.

I’m too late.

He bent over. He pressed his forehead against the floor. Something came out of him, an animal sound he didn’t recognize, and he felt the hot ash against his face, and his tears hissing on the stone.

A hand closed on his shoulder.

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It was shaking. It was gripping so hard that it hurt. He lifted his head and saw Veyra’s face, a mask of soot and tears, her eyes red and swollen, her lips cracked and bleeding. She was staring at him with an expression of such total devastation that it frightened him.

“Veyra,” he said. “Veyra, I…”

“She was waiting for you.”

“I know.”

“She was waiting. She kept the knife. She kept it, and she held it, she held it with both…” Her voice broke. “She was six years old, Fel. She was six.”

“I know. I know.” He caught her hands. They were burning hot and icy cold. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so…”

“Do not.” She wrenched free. She pressed her fists against her eyes. “Do not say it. There is nothing. There is nothing.”

He reached for her again. He pulled her in. He did not know what else to do. She fought him for a moment, hard, with her fists against his chest, and then all at once the fight went out of her, and she collapsed against him, and her whole body shook. She sobbed into his shoulder with great, tearing, gasping sobs. He held her. He put his arms around her, and his face in her hair, and they knelt together in the ashes, over the dead, in the roar of the burning world.

He had never felt so small.

He had never felt so powerless. He could say nothing. He could do nothing. He could only hold her, as hard as he could, and pour his own tears into the silence, and know that his pain and hers were far, far too big for either of them to carry.

They found the Hall at midnight.

It was the one place on the mountain that was not burning. It stood at the very top of the village, on its spire of grey stone, with the three great trees curved over it like hands. The fire had not touched it. The flames had stopped at the foot of the rock, as if held back by a wall. The leaves of the great dome stirred gently in the wind. A pale light shone through them.

They climbed the stairs in silence.

Fel went first. He did not know why. Perhaps because he could not bear to see Veyra’s face. Perhaps because some stubborn part of him, the part that had grown up in the Gallows, had decided that if there was one more horror to meet, he would meet it first.

At the top, the great green archway stood open.

The Hall was lit. A hundred candles burned in a ring around the central bowl, and the fire in the stone basin leapt high and clear. The circle of root seats stood empty. The floor was swept. The air smelled of pine and incense.

And in the center, around the burning bowl, in a great wheel, stood the crosses.

There were six of them.

They were made of black wood, thick as a man’s thigh, planted in the floor and braced with iron. They stood upside down. That was the first thing he saw. They had been built that way, the long beam reversed, so that the crossbar stood at the bottom and the foot of the cross rose into the dome, and on each of them, bound by the ankles to the high point, hung a figure.

They hung head-down.

He knew every one of them.

He knew the hooked-nosed elder with the crown of black antlers. He knew the silver-braided woman, whose hair now swept the floor in a long, bloody curtain. He knew the broad, bearded man with the heavy shoulders, and the thin quiet woman who had never spoken in the Hall. He knew the old man with the crown of branching antlers who had asked him whether the people of his country still said their prayers to the Mother. They had been stripped of everything. Their clothes were gone. Their bodies were pale, in the candlelight, and marked from head to foot with the long, careful, patient work of a man who had taken his time.

He did not look at the marks. He could not.

And on the last cross, at the head of the circle, with her long white hair trailing across the stone and her golden-green eyes open and fixed on nothing, hung Seluine.

Her antlers had been broken. Both of them. They lay on the floor beneath her, in a pale tangle, like the roots of some fallen tree. Her lips were parted. Her arms hung down. And she looked, to his horror, so very small, an old, thin, tired woman, hanging upside down in the firelight with all her dignity stripped away.

Someone had pinned a piece of parchment to her chest. It was white. It was neat. It bore a seal, a green wax moth.

FOR HARBORING THE ASSASSINS OF THE HOUSE OF VAEL.

Behind him, Veyra made a sound.

It was very quiet. It was the sound of a person who has nothing left.

“Don’t,” said Fel. He had turned. He had put himself in front of her, with both arms spread, as if he could block her view. “Don’t look. Please. Don’t.”

She walked past him.

He didn’t stop her. He couldn’t. She walked slowly across the floor, between the crosses, with her arms hanging at her sides. She stopped in front of Seluine. She stood there for a long time, looking up at the old woman’s face.

Then she raised one hand, and with infinite gentleness, closed the eyes.

No one spoke for a long time.

They sat on the steps of the Hall, in the grey before dawn, in a row. Brannoch with his head in his hands. Thara with her knees drawn up. Veyra between them, white-faced, dry-eyed, staring at the horizon. Fel sat apart from them, a little lower, with his back against a pillar. He was holding something in his lap. He had taken it from the little burned hands, gently, very gently, and wrapped it in a piece of cloth.

It was a small black knife with a bone handle.

The sun was rising. It touched the peaks with pink and gold. Far below, the cloud sea turned to a sheet of fire. It was the most beautiful dawn he had ever seen, and he hated it with all his heart.

“It was the king,” said Brannoch.

He said it very quietly. It was the first thing any of them had said in hours. His voice was rough and slow, like a millstone grinding.

“Obviously it was the king.” Thara wiped her face on her sleeve. “Who else? The paper says so. Right there. On her chest.”

“How?” said Veyra.

They looked at her.

“How did he reach here before us?” Her voice was flat and dead. “It is seven days. We came in six. We ran. We did not stop. We went through the Weeper’s Gap, where no one goes, and we took the fastest road in the kingdom.” Her hands were clenched in her lap. “There is no way that he could have sent his soldiers here before us.”

Fel opened his hand.

There was something in it. He had found it on the stone floor of the Hall, near the foot of Seluine’s cross. It was long, and soft, and curved, and it shimmered in the dawn with a faint iridescent sheen, green on one side, black on the other.

A feather.

It was a flight feather, from a wing, as long as his arm. It was the size of a sword.

He had seen one like it before. He had seen the animal it came from. It had crossed the sky in front of him on his first morning in the world, and turned its head, and looked at him with one golden eye the size of a dinner plate. It had been so beautiful.

“A wyvern,” he said.

Veyra’s head came up.

“The king’s riders. They fly.” He held out the feather. “That’s how. They didn’t come by road. They came by air. They could have reached this mountain in a day.” His voice cracked. “They left the same hour that we did. They flew over our heads, probably. While we were in the river. While we were in the culvert. While we were lying in that spring…”

He stopped.

Nobody moved.

“The spring,” said Thara. Her voice was very small. “We stopped. We stopped at the spring.”

“We slept,” said Fel. “We were tired. We sat in a pool and made jokes and ate cheese.” He was laughing. It was a horrible, ragged, broken thing, and he couldn’t stop. “And while we did it, they came here. They came here. And they…”

“Stop.”

“We were so stupid. We were so, so stupid. I said we should leave. I said we should go right away, and I let you, I let you talk me…”

“Fel. Stop.”

He stopped.

She had risen. She was standing over him, tall against the dawn. Her hair was loose and tangled. Her face was streaked with soot and tears. But her eyes, her eyes had changed. The wildness had gone out of them. In its place was something hard and cold and utterly still, like the surface of a frozen lake.

“We were not stupid,” said Veyra. “We were tired. We were children playing at being soldiers. We trusted a map, and a night’s sleep, and the idea that a king would not murder a village of old women and children over a dead man’s brother.” She drew a long breath. “It was a mistake. It was his crime. It was not ours.”

“But…”

“It was not ours.”

She knelt. She put her hand on the feather in his palm, and closed his fingers around it.

“Listen to me,” said Veyra. “All of you. Listen.”

They did.

“I will not weep for them. Not anymore. I have wept all that I will. What I have left is something else.” She looked from face to face. Her voice was low and quiet and terrible. “Aldemar Vael has killed my people. He has killed Osha, who raised me. He has killed Pim, who was six. He has killed Seluine, who would never have raised a hand against him in her life. And he has done it to find four people, for a murder that none of us committed.”

She stood. She drew the white bow from her back.

“I want him to know what that feels like,” she said. “I want him to burn. I want his city to burn. I want everything he loves to be taken from him, one piece at a time, until there is nothing left but the sound of his own screaming.” The bow trembled in her hand. “And I will not stop. Not for a day. Not for a year. Not until I am dead.”

Nobody answered.

Then, slowly, Brannoch rose.

He stood like a mountain, vast and silent, his great antlers black against the red sky. He unslung the war-spear from his back. He laid it on the stone before her, point down. He said nothing, but the line of his shoulders spoke for him.

Thara stood. She was sniffling. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand and drew a hatchet, and she laid it on the spear.

“I’m in,” she said hoarsely. “For Osha. For her pie. For all of it.”

They looked at Fel.

He got to his feet. His legs were shaking. In his left hand, the ring burned through the glove with a cold white light. In his right, he held the little black knife.

He walked to the pile. He knelt. He placed the knife, very carefully, on top of the others.

“I made her a promise,” he said. His voice was steady. It surprised him. “I said I’d come back. I said I would.” His hand closed on the hilt. “I did. And now I’m going to keep the other one.”

“What other one?”

“That whoever did this,” said Fel, “is going to pay.”

Silence.

The wind sighed through the leaves of the Hall. A single feather of ash drifted past, and settled on the knife.

“Swear it,” said Veyra.

They swore it.

They swore it in the old way, with blood. Each of them drew a blade across the palm and let the red fall on the pile of weapons, on the spear and the hatchet and the knife. Fel’s blood did not fall. It welled from the ring in his hand, thick and black, edged with red, and when it touched the steel, the metal hissed. Nobody remarked on it. Veyra took his bleeding hand in hers, and pressed it against her own.

“For the dead,” she said.

“For the dead.”

“For the dead.”

“For the dead,” said Fel.

The plan came together slowly.

It came together in pieces, as the sun climbed over the ruins of the village and the smoke thinned to a haze. They sat in a ring around the pile of weapons and spoke in low, flat voices. They did not argue. They did not weep. They spoke the way soldiers speak, with the dry, bleak efficiency of people who have run out of everything else.

The king had wyverns. Fifty, perhaps a hundred. They could not be fought. They could not be matched. The king had a standing army of ten thousand, and a capital with seven walls, and a Tree that had stood for a thousand years. He had the loyalty of his people. He had the love of the court. He had the blood of a prince on his hands, and all of the kingdom to say that it was not his.

They had four swords, a beetle, and a feather.

“It’s insane,” said Thara.

“Yes.”

“We can’t. It’s not possible. It’s like trying to put out the sun with a spoon.”

“Yes.”

“So what do we do?”

“We do the thing that Corvane told us to do,” said Veyra, “in the only breath of sense he ever uttered.”

They looked at Fel.

He held up the black sword. It lay across his knees, its surface dull in the grey light, the ruby dark. He thought of Silence. He thought of a white room, a woman with eyes the color of falling asleep in fear. He thought of a promise. Each time you call upon me, you will fulfill a request of mine. He thought of a golden saber, and a flash of light, and a serpent screaming.

“The forge,” he said slowly. “Dun Vurrim. The dwarves.”

“Yes.”

“If I’m going to fight a king, I need my swords.”

“You need more than that.”

“I know.” He looked up. “But it’s a start.”

For a moment, no one spoke.

Then Veyra rose. She walked slowly across the ash to where he sat, and stood over him, tall and straight against the sky. The sun was behind her. It lit the edges of her hair, and the points of her horns, and made a crown of gold around her head. Her face was in shadow.

She held out a hand.

He took it. She pulled him to his feet, and they stood facing each other, hand in hand, among the ashes of the village.

Her eyes were violet. They were deep, and dry, and burning. They held his without wavering. There was no softness in them anymore, no teasing, no humor. There was only a single bright, hard, unbreakable thing that he recognized, because he felt it too: a vow.

I will not leave you, said her eyes.

I will not stop, said his.

Whatever it costs.

Whatever it takes.

The wind blew. The ash swirled. Somewhere far below, the clouds parted, and a shaft of light fell across the ruins, and for one moment the whole world held its breath.

Neither of them looked away.

Behind them, Brannoch gathered the weapons. Thara went to fetch the beetle. And on the broken steps of the Hall, in the first light of a terrible dawn, two people who had known each other for a month stood with their hands clasped and their eyes locked, and knew that nothing would ever be the same.

They had a road to walk.

It led north.