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Sunset from the mountaintop captured her heart.
Vibrant orange and coral, pinks and lilacs flung themselves across the clouds dotted along the horizon. A golden glow spread upward, turning to rose gold before pinking the edges of the clouds drifting overhead. Here on the crest, the leaves had browned and died, stripped from the limbs by the ever-present wind.
Leaning against an exposed boulder pitted by weather, Orielle drank in the colors while she snatched a rest. The Rho had climbed atop the boulder to gain vantage over the obscuring trees.
She rested in a shallow bowl of soft dirt. With the horizon before her, the breeze cooling her face, and a hawk performing a lazy wheel through the afterglow, she might imagine herself on a picnic.
But the vista was endless forest, more ridges and mountains to climb, no smudged smoke trailing up to mark the Haven’s location deep in the Wilding. The forest sheltered wyre and other predators, the ones she had expected and the ones that had surprised her. Gobbers. Ogres. Surely she wouldn’t encounter a gryph?
To the east, the next mountain towered. Snow clung to its steep crevasses on its north reaches. Beyond were the jagged spires of snow-capped mountains, nearly impenetrable barriers to the Shifting Lands. “There be dragons,” she murmured, quoting another ancient tome. She didn’t remember reading much of it. In her schooling, surrounded by powerful students who wielded multiple elements, she had scarcely dreamed her one-element self would venture into the Wilding. Adorée wielded both the Air and Water of the Letheina clan as well as the Earth of Galfrons. She would have made a better emissary to Iscleft Haven. Why had Adorée accepted the appointment then refused it?
The Rho hadn’t mentioned camp. He hadn’t mentioned where he expected to find his horse and hopefully Ghost. Did he know wards that would keep gobbers out of their camp? Gobbers and other creatures of the Wilding, creatures that her tutors had glossed over.
He leaped down, landing with a muffled thud that barely disturbed the exposed dirt. He straightened then touched her arm. His finger touched her lips. Then he pointed behind him. She peered around his wide shoulders.
The dancing lights wove among dead leaves.
He didn’t let her watch as long as she wanted. He stepped away from the boulder, and the sprites darted away.
Orielle sighed. “They charm, don’t they? ‘Jewel on the wing.’ That was printed in the margins of that book, Creatures of the Hinterlands. ‘Jewel on the wing’ and something about a sting.”
“Bite. Painful as a hornet’s sting. You don’t want to anger a nest of them.”
“Is that the way of the Wilding? Danger in the glove of beauty. Remove the glove, and sharp talons will claw you?” His head cocked, like a hawk trying to figure out its prey, so she explained, “My training is useless here.”
“I wouldn’t call it useless. You can punch with Air.” He rubbed his arm. Had her earlier thrust with the element left a sore bruise? “I doubt any of your Enclave wizards would do better.”
“The little I know won’t keep me from being killed.”
“That’s the first step to learning, admitting you don’t know. The second is a willingness to learn.”
“Don’t get excited,” she warned him. “My tutors complained that I fell back two steps for every three forward.” But she smiled to diffuse the complaint. “Do we continue off-trail? For I don’t think you’ll camp up here.”
“Too exposed,” he agreed. “You’re willing to go on?”
“As long as you know where we are.”
“I always know where I am.”
Was that arrogance or truth? Rather than search those eyes with their silvery cast, Orielle swept an arm toward the changing forest. “I don’t even know the trees. Fruit trees I can name, even out of season, but these—I’m limited to red leaves, yellow leaves, orange leaves, and evergreens.”
“Don’t forget the plum leaves, city lass.”
“Oh, aye,” she agreed with a country expression, and surprise flickered over his battered face.
“Ready?”
For answer, she pushed off the boulder. Turning, she stumbled over a stack of rocks hidden behind a stunted evergreen. The rocks toppled.
He hissed then dropped to his knees, gathering up the rocks like they shouldn’t touch the ground.
“What?”
“Hsst. It’s a cairn. You know what a cairn is?” A rock slipped from his cradling hold. He snatched it back with the others.
She knelt beside him. “A way marker.”
“Grave marker,” he corrected. “We have to re-seal the grave.”
She gaped. “Like—a formal ceremony?”
“Yours the deed that disturbed it; yours the hands to restore it. And pray we didn’t release more than we disturbed.”
He was serious. Energy emanated from him, waves radiating over her, impelling her.
“Now, wizard.”
“What could we release upon the world?” she whispered.
“The cairn,” he mouthed.
She brushed back the little tree with its prickly needles and saw what it had hidden. Four irregular stones forming a square sunk into the ground—or so old in place that time had built up the soil around them.
Orielle swept off the imbedded rocks. One flat surface looked like frozen ripples. Another had a scuff across it. She didn’t know what ceremony he wanted, but the sealing chant of the dead was the same for human and Fae, wizard and mundane, townie or farmer.
She flattened her hand over the plain rock above the one with scuffing. “Earth” then “Air” as she touched the scuffed one. The rippled one was “Water.” And the Rho exhaled, slow, long. He clearly had feared she would get it as wrong as her other knowledge was. “Fire” was the fourth rock.
“Earth and Air, Water and Fire,” she named and touched them again. He handed her a rock, flatter than others. A base, she reckoned as she carefully placed it. “Blood and breath, flesh and bones.” A rock for every word.
The light was fading, more quickly than she’d thought it would. The wind had a cold nip, reminding that autumn was harbinger of winter.
He handed her another rock, uneven of shape, harder to steady in place. “Sun and shadow, soil and stone.” The sealing chant was slower as she timed each word to a rock’s placement. “Sleep and peace. Sleep and ease. Return you to the path to Neothera.”
He gave her the last rock, one extra beyond the sealing chant. Orielle asked with her eyes. His gaze shifted to the cairn.
With a crack, she set it on the top. Both hands wrapping the rock, she repeated the chant. And she poured magic into it, imagining the power sinking through every placed stone and into the ground. Soft sifted dirt, the shallow depression, and the cairn the only evidence of the ancient burial.
She shivered as she finished. The world felt fogged, distant.
Then the Rho gripped her arm and hauled her to her feet. He towed her away from the cairn.
Her hands prickled from the evergreen’s sticky needles. The twilight brightened. Had a shadow—? Orielle peeked over her shoulder. No. The ancient grave at the boulder’s base would catch the last light of the sun.
But she shivered.
The slope on the mountain’s east wasn’t as steep as the west, facing the Lowlands. Shading trees clogged the incline. The way remained tricksy, but the Rho kept her moving, faster and faster, faster again as they hit a narrow trail and turned onto it.
The trail crossed another. He took that one, climbing briefly before descending again.
She clung to his hand. Roots snagged her toes. Stiffly-fingered branches snagged her hair. Light faded rapidly. How was he seeing?
She heard water, rushing, drowning the sunset bird calls.
The trail angled sharply down. The Rho stopped. She plowed into him.
Grim—for that was the name she’d dubbed him—steadied her before she pitched over. “You hurt?”
“Tired,” she gasped.
“Camp’s ahead.”
Camp. Pampered by the Enclave’s comfort, Orielle would never have imagined that a fire and a seat on the hard ground would inspire her to keep moving past aching muscles and joints. Pampered by the Enclave’s safe walls, she had considered the wyre a nebulous threat rather than lethal hunters. The hardships she had expected were the journey to the Haven and the carefully marshalled arguments to convince the Rhoghieri Haven to return to the alliance. When they’d abandoned the pact three generations before, the Enclave’s only threat came from a rebel heretic named Saldoran. Frost Clime now threatened. Frost Clime was winning.
“Waterfall ahead,” Grim said, an explanation for the drowning noise that she mutely appreciated. “We’ll cross above it before we continue down.”
She started to ask how Grim intended to make camp in the rapidly-falling darkness, but her ignorance covered so much that she decided to wait and see. She sighed at more walking, though, and hoped the waterfall obscured the soft sound. “Will the horses be at our camp?”
He lifted a shoulder. Orielle expected another explanation. As a teacher, he was more patient than her Enclave tutors. Yet those grey eyes sharpened. He focused on something just off her head. Then he grabbed her shoulder.
His fingers bit into her flesh. She cried out as he jerked her around. He swiped down her back, over and over, long sweeping motions, like he brushed off a clinging web.
“What?” She didn’t remember backing against anything. She had leaned against the boulder. She craned to see over her shoulder.
Those viselike fingers kept her from turning. “Hold still.”
He flicked his fingers, flinging something off. Again he swiped down her back and again, brushing off whatever clung. He flung away a misty, webby thing. She heard a high-pitched whine, like a summer insect buzzing her ears. Then the sound vanished with his last swipe down her back.
The day brightened. The chill left the air.
He kept brushing her off. His grip eased, but he held her still while he brushed her shoulders, her back, down the length of her cloak.
“Take this off.” He tugged the oiled cloth.
A tug removed the brooch, a luck charm from her mother. She held the circle and stick-pin while he gave her cloak a strong shake. A wind kicked it, billowing through the cloak, ensuring no trace of the thing lingered.
When he settled the cloak back in place, he took the brooch from her fumbling fingers and fastened it quickly.
While she searched the ground for what he’d gotten off her.
Shifting fog caught her eyes.
She gasped as the fog lifted from the ground. Misty tendrils rose, a cloudy mass that shaped into a head and thin shoulders, a torso with separating arms, wisps of hands and elongated fingers. The ghostly mist didn’t form a lower body as it hovered above the needle-carpeted ground.
In the air between them and the mist, Grim shaped a ward. The sigil glowed amber. The foggy mass retreated. The ward faded as the fog drifted upslope, obscuring tree trunks as it flowed past, following their back trail. Like a man with legs, the ghost climbed, hazier as it left the twilight cloaking the lower slope and mounted the upper reaches.
It had ridden her back.
“Just a ghost,” she breathed, reassuring herself. “I’m not afraid of ghosts.”
Wispy fingers clung to a tree trunk, digging those elongated claws into the bark to slow its ascent.
“Not a ghost.” Grim’s hand again swept down her back, ensuring nothing else clung to her. “A wight. Ghosts don’t have tangible form. A wight does. Give it enough emotional energy, and it grows claws and teeth that can draw blood. Give it blood, and it becomes bones and flesh with an insatiable need for more blood.”
The misty head turned toward them. It watched. It wanted fear. It waited for her fear so it could flow back to her, wrap its arms around her, cover its mouth with her own, and suck in her screams, dig in its claws, piercing her flesh as easily as last night’s gobber had punctured the thick hide of her food bag.
How do I know that?
Emotional energy. Orielle groped for Grim’s hand. He twined their fingers, reassuring warmth and solidity after the cold that had blanketed her on the mountaintop and ridden her back down that steep slope, when only his sure-footed passage kept her upright. Fear and hate. Feeding like a wraith.
“A wight is a wraith,” he said, although she didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud. “What exactly do they teach you in that Enclave?”
“Apparently not what I needed to learn. Did my magic draw it?”
“Cairns seal graves for a reason.”
“I freed it then. And it wanted my fear. I am very glad there are no wyre here.”
“Me, too. Give it terror, and it will take shape. Link it to your power, and it will never leave you, tapping into your emotions by taking the form of your dead bloodkin.”
Her heart hammered at her close escape. She retreated to flippancy. “The only dead kin that I would fear would be my cousin Raigeis.”
“Hsst. Don’t give it name.”
“It can hear me?” She peered through the deepening twilight, but the wight’s misty form had vanished. She shouldn’t have taken her eyes off it.
“It’s touched you. Clung to you. The connection will linger until sunrise.”
He pulled her after him, toward the rushing water ahead.
But not before she tried one last time to find the wight.
