The woman, Elanerill, makes a little yelp of surprise as the world plunges into darkness. I reach for her before my mind can stop me, and then my hand is wrapped around her arm. She’s trembling, although whether it’s from cold or fear I can’t tell; belatedly, I realize that I’m trembling too.
When I heard footsteps in the forest, when I first saw that dark shape weaving between the trees. Voids help me, I thought it was a beast.
“W-What—” Elanerill says in a breathless little gasp.
“Shit,” I reply. “I forgot about this.”
I hear Elanerill’s breath catch.
“In the Outer Ring, the glowsoft orbs go out at night,” I explain.
She’s silent, and then I hear what almost sounds like a breathless attempt at a laugh. “I guess they do,” she whispers.
I blink in the absolute darkness pressing down all around us. I was only a child when the kingdom fell, but I remember the darkness. I remember huddling around magical fires, feeling like the darkness of the Lands Below was licking at my back, ready and waiting to devour. Fear pulls my body tight.
“You happen to have any luminous illusions?” I ask, trying to keep my voice light.
A moment later golden light blossoms in the darkness. It washes over Elanerill’s face, and for just a heartbeat time stands still. That must be how she looks in the Worlds Above. That must be how she looks when the sun shines on her face.
Then she raises her bound hands, and the golden light floats away above us. It grows and grows until it’s almost a miniature sun burning away the inky darkness. I stare at it for a long time, feeling like I should say something, but I can’t find the words.
“I can make another,” Elanerill offers.
My senses finally come back to me.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “No, that’s fine. We should stop for the night anyway. I’ll build a fire.”
Elanerill nods. “I can help.”
Her glowing sun follows us as we snap branches off the dead trees and stack them on the snow. After several fumbling attempts with my flint and tinder, I finally get the fire to catch, and Elanerill’s little sun illusion drifts apart like smoke as flames climb the sticks we’ve gathered. I pull out the stack of hard survival biscuits and offer one to Elanerill.
“It wasn’t always this dark,” I say as she takes the biscuit.
“Oh?”
“Wasn’t always this cold either,” I continue. “When we first came down here, it was—”
My voice falters. At first, of course, it was horrific. People wandered into the darkness and never returned. The void howled and screamed. The air was filled with sobbing. And one morning, I awoke to find that my mother had simply vanished.
Still, we fought back. The Kingdom of the Fall, King Galan declared from his stone perch after he’d created the first of the glowsoft orbs and sent it drifting across the ceiling of the world to spread light and warmth over what would become his new kingdom, may have fallen. But we are not finished.
“It was an entire world,” I finally said. “Even the Outer Ring here. There were farms, and villages, and—”
My voice fades. That world feels like it died a very long time ago. Elanerill’s watching me with her half-eaten biscuit in her hand.
“What happened?” she asks.
I shake my head. “I’m not sure. I’m no magician. But the magic’s been fading. Ever since we built this world, it’s been getting weaker. King Galan said it takes four times as much magic to power the glowsoft orbs as it did when he first created them. That’s why they have to turn off at night, now.”
I wave my hands at the darkness about us, where the sparks rising from our fire are dancing like brilliant, short-lived stars. Elanerill is staring at me with a sort of intensity I can’t begin to understand and, when she speaks, her words are so strange that I think I must have misheard her.
“Excuse me?” I ask.
“Is it the barrier?” she says again, very slowly and clearly.
I rock back in the snow, my biscuit forgotten. Elanerill takes a deep breath.
“I am from the Worlds Above,” she begins. “From the Kingdom of the Summer.”
I tense at the words, even though her hands are bound and I have her weapons.
“The Kingdom of the Summer killed my father,” I say.
“In the war?” She looks at me with a sad half-smile. “My father died in the war too. Or at least that’s what my mother says. I was born just after it ended, so I never knew him.”
She turns to stare at the fire. Scarlet light paints the curves of her dark cheeks and full lips. I toss another branch onto the flames, hoping it’ll be enough to deter the beasts the darkness brings.
“Things are—” She hesitates, then begins again. “Things are bad. In the Kingdom of the Summer, I mean. Four of the last seven harvests have failed. The royal treasury is nearly empty. Our population is declining by almost seven percent a year. And our Spirit Wood is dying.”
I let out a long breath.
“And you know all this because?” I ask, even though the answer is obvious. She’s clearly part of the royal court, a magician or an advisor or, hells, maybe she’s some sort of illusion magic entertainer.
“Because I’m the king’s granddaughter,” she replies. “I’m the heir to the throne.”
“Shit,” I mutter.
I figured she had to have some connection to the royal court to have access to that kind of information, but I didn’t imagine she was actually royalty. Somehow, tying a rope around the wrists of the heir to the throne of the Kingdom of the Summer seems like a bad move, diplomatically. On the other hand, she did try to kill me, and then to trick me with her wolf illusions. It doesn’t exactly make me want to hand over her sword.
She could be lying, of course. She could be lying about all of it, her status as royalty, all this nonsense about the barrier. But I’ve spent years and years in the very close company of accomplished liars, some of them criminals and some of them decorated members of my very own Royal Guard. And I don’t think she’s one of them.
I watch her closely in the firelight. She’s staring down at the hard biscuit in her bound hands with a look of intense concentration, and for a moment I almost feel like she’s toying with the same mental scales. Trying to decide if she can trust me.
It would almost be funny, considering she was the one who stabbed me. Still, the more I think about it, the more her actions seem like the desperate flailings of a trapped animal and not the motions of a trained killer. She moved like she’d been taught how to fight, sure, and she got the drop on me.
But she hadn’t pressed her advantage. She caught me in the arm when she could have caught me in the throat. And then, once the blood was loosed, she stepped back. It would have been easy to sink her sword into my chest while I’d staggered backward, a fact that any trainer in any world would have emphasized. She had to have known I was vulnerable.
She hadn’t attacked again.
I let my eyes close as I try to sort through my beer-soaked, blood-stained memories. Not only had she not attacked me again, but she’d also sheathed her sword once I was on my knees. She’d sheathed her sword, and then she’d said something.
I can help. That’s what she’d said. That’s why I’d decided the situation was secure, and that I could heal myself. My eyelids flicker open, and my gaze settles on the strange, beautiful woman sitting beside me. The one who hadn’t tried to kill me.
“I found the problem,” Elanerill says.