A shiver ran through my body as we passed the imposing statues, as though we had crossed some sort of perimeter within the mountains where the air changed. I didn’t like how it felt, but curiosity and duty propelled me forward, onwards, until the statues were long behind us. Enja and I walked so closely together our shoulders brushed from time to time, neither of us finding any comfort in the yawning cavity of the mountain’s belly, or the darkness that lurked just beyond our faint light. What things skulked beyond the reaches of the candle, watching, waiting? Or was it worse to imagine that we were the only living things in this mountain, other than the troll we had left behind? The possibility of that kind of isolation swirled as a shadowy fog in my mind, whispering alone, alone, alone.
“Who do you think made those statues?” Enja whispered. “I mean, who do you imagine?”
She knew I didn’t have the real answer. She was after my thoughts, my speculations. I kept my whisper even quieter than hers. “I don’t know.” But those age-old stories of an ancient people who lived long before our memory, long before we fled Löska to find safety, permeated my thoughts. I could have told her that, told her what I knew, and we could have continued to muse and imagine what they had looked like, how they had acted, and what had become of them, but a voice in the back of my mind told me that it didn’t matter. Who had built those statues was far less important than why, because what they bowed to – if it wasn’t the Goddess – would be far more relevant in the coming moments or hours than whatever long-dead people had constructed them. “People like us, I imagine,” I said finally. “Long ago.”
We carried on.
“Always check behind you,” I told her after a pause, as I glanced over my shoulder to ensure that we were alone. I wasn’t quite sure why. Certainly these archaic rooms and stone passageways had not been walked in centuries or longer, and Siiva would surely hear if anything approached, but the events of the past few days had left me overcautious and on edge.
The room we were in seemed to narrow a bit, evidenced only by the change in the echo of our footsteps on whatever walls stood just out of sight. My mind tried to fill in the blanks, to map out the cavern where we walked and paint in the details that eluded my senses, but there were too many unknowns. Too many things that were impossible to know. The air grew closer, my sense of space less expansive, and then suddenly, we were descending. The floor banked at just enough of an angle to tell us we were headed down a sort of hill. Further into the mountains. I felt less like myself with every step, less like the girl who loved the lofty forests and magnificent icy hills of the land above. So, so far above, and so far away. Down below it was … different. It was nothing like the land I knew, or the land I loved. The sense of space I’d grown to cherish, the sense of beauty and peace and wonder, was replaced by the creeping sense of unease and disquiet.
Do not let her die.
So onwards we walked.
The sounds of our footsteps changed once again, what felt like hours later but could have been minutes. Time was difficult to tell, and though I sometimes tried to count our footsteps in order to keep some track of its passing, my mind always began to wander. I could not place exactly what had changed in the soft sound of our footfalls, but I drew us slowly to a stop and held the small torch aloft for a better view. Nothing presented itself. Just a few paces of golden light flanked by darkness.
“Something’s changing,” I whispered to Enja, and then vaguely wondered at myself. We’d been whispering since we had entered the mountain, though perhaps we could have shouted and not a soul would have heard us. But I didn’t know if that was more, or less comforting.
“I heard it, too,” she said, watching Siiva for any hints or signs. He was sniffing the air ahead of him, curious, but seemingly calm.
“I have a third torch,” I told her, tapping it gently within my cloak, “but we need to save it. Eventually we’ll run out entirely, and we need to stretch out our light for as long as possible.” I did not tell her something else that had been weighing on my mind: that if we didn’t find something within the mountain to use for light, we would have nothing for the return journey.
She nodded, subtle fear glinting in the whites of her eyes.
“Just move slowly. Listen. I don’t know what’s ahead.”
She nodded again, adjusting her grip on her torch to hold it more tightly. We were even more cautious when we again began to move, our boots barely making any sound at all as they made contact with the stone beneath us. Siiva crept along with his head down to the ground, sniffing and pausing every now and then to look up. Each time he did so I hesitated, imagining in visceral detail what shadowy things might be lurking beyond our pool of light. On any other day, I would give little thought to each individual step I took. But here, every inch my feet moved was deliberate, careful, slow to the point that my muscles gave frequent complaint.
The air, I realized suddenly, was curiously warm, lacking that icy tinge to it that my body had grown accustomed to over its eighteen years on this island. A bead of sweat, perhaps from my apprehension, trickled down my back between my shoulder blades.
Something on the ground pulled me to a stop, and I knelt to examine it. A sort of greenish film I recognized from four years back, when a warm summer left this odd growth on some of the rocks by the sea. It was a plant, perhaps, or at least it bore the colour of one, but if it was a plant that grew by the sea…
I stood and slowly took a few steps forward, holding the torch high.
And a velvety black body of water yawned before us, its surface as still and smooth as undisturbed snow. A lake, in the belly of a mountain.
I moved to stand close enough to it that the toes of my boots rested just shy of the water’s edge. Siiva sniffed the inky water intently, his body rigid with a kind of focus I had not seen before. He lapped up a sip or two, and promptly spat it back out, making little coughing sounds and backing away.
Enja came to stand beside me, bending down to inspect the water. “It’s difficult to tell if the water is black or if it’s just the lack of the light,” she mused, refusing to get close enough to let her feet touch it. “But there must be a way to cross.”
I looked at her quickly. “Why?” I had been entertaining the wretched sinking feeling that we would have to turn back, maybe find another way.
“Because clearly we aren’t the first people to come here. Those statues opened the way to something, so others must have passed. This lake can’t be the end of the road.”
She stood tall and held her torch aloft. The flame flickered, bending to a faint breeze I couldn’t feel. “That’s why,” she said. “There’s something on the other side.”
“Then find a crossing,” I told her, turning to the left and treading along the water’s edge with my torch. “I doubt they swam.”
She travelled in the opposite direction, and our little circles of light followed us as we split ways. I examined the surface of the water carefully, looking for a ridge, a shallow area, anything that could allow us to cross. Doubts began to set in as we searched. This lake could have formed since the last people walked here. Perhaps it did not exist so long ago.
“Janna.” Enja’s voice shattered the silence, and I turned quickly and trotted over to where she stood. The distance was considerable, this lake spanning far wider than I had imagined.
When I stopped beside her, my eyes fell on a few irregularities in the water, small, flat surfaces that resembled to be … stepping stones. Enja reached out one foot and pressed gently against the first one. It held strong. “This just might be it.”
I looked up from the stones and to the pitch blackness that lurked beyond the comfort of our pale lights. If we took this pathway and crossed these stones, what awaited us on the other side? And was there, indeed, another side? What if we carried on and on, our legs growing tired and our bodies growing weak, but there was no way to rest, no way to sleep? I thought of the lake back home, the Hornstrăsk, with its expansive waters and sweeping depths. How much larger could this lake be? And, more importantly, what cost could we face in crossing it?
“Forward,” Enja said, echoing my words from earlier. “We go forward until there is nowhere else to go. If there is a path, then we must take it.”
This murky lake reeked of death and warning.
Do not let her die.
These stepping stones were narrow, and the faintest breeze could throw us off balance.
Do not let her die.
The distance was unknowable; the energy required substantial.
Do not let her die.
“Forward,” I said, and I placed my foot on the first stone.
If you followed the Horn River south for a good ways, it reached a point where it went tumbling over a series of high cliffs, forming waterfalls as loud as thunder. The water was always white and churning, daring you to get too close so it could swallow you whole. No one who fell into that water would ever come out again, so we always gave it a wide birth.
But today, I had crept behind the crashing water at the point where it fell through the air away from the rock, and into the small cave set just behind it. Stone stood damp and strong at my back, and the roaring waterfall tumbled before me. It was loud, louder than anything else I had ever heard – but not loud enough to drown out my thoughts, as I’d hoped. As I stared at the falling water, listened to the roar as it plunged, I saw Finni’s face before he had disappeared for ever. Why had I thought coming here would help? The rushing of the waterfall became the rushing of the river that had killed him, and my head spun.
He’d been so close. So close to living, to being saved, to surviving. He could be here right now, be in Skane with the rest of us; be going about his day, doing his chores, and never know that he’d very nearly died. I hadn’t known him well, and yet I’d witnessed his last moments; witnessed his death and had to describe it to his mother and father while their tears fell like rain. Describing it was like reliving it all over again, and thinking about it now, set against the background of rushing water, made my stomach churn.
A second had always seemed so simple, so inconsequential, but what a difference it could make. It could draw a line between life and death, between here and there, between breathing and drowning. One second was all it took for his fingers to slip, to the current to pull him in, and for the river to consume him.
“Janna.”
A voice cut through my thoughts, stabilizing me. It was a voice I wanted to hear, like a pillow to my heavy heart. Sølvi ducked behind the waterfall and sat down beside me, wrapping one arm around my shoulders. He said nothing at first, just sat there with me while I quietly let a few tears fall and soak into his cloak. I wanted to go back and save him, save Finni, take those fingers that were holding on so dearly and use them to pull him towards warmth and safety. Towards us. Towards life.
“I want to save him,” I sobbed, and the tears came faster. Sølvi embraced me tighter, saying nothing. “I want to go back to the river and help him, risk falling in myself if I have to. I shouldn’t have been afraid. His life was in danger, and he lost it, because I was afraid.”
“Because I was afraid,” Sølvi corrected, and I remembered suddenly that it had been him reaching out for the boy. “The ice would have never held either of us if it couldn’t hold Finni. I had to make a decision between losing two lives and losing one, and it was the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make.”
I sat up and looked at him, suddenly aware of how much this must have been weighing on him. I’d been selfishly caught up in my own thoughts and my own pain that I hadn’t even registered what he must have been going through.
“I’m so sorry, Sølvi,” I said, my voice catching from crying. “It wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, I suppose.”
“I feel awful,” he said, tracing a gloved finger along the stone. “Terrible. Every time I see his sister around the village, something inside me breaks apart. But I cannot change it. Skane is harsh, all ice and snow and cold. It demands respect, or it will take your life. Think of all the others, the first ones who came across the sea. More of them died once they arrived than lived to tell the tales. They were smothered by snow, froze to death at night, drowned in the frigid sea. The landscape is as much a villain as you allow it to be. Finni was unlucky. He let his guard down for a moment and in the blink of an eye, he was gone.”
I stared at the water before us, mighty and powerful and, as Sølvi had said, demanding respect. Skane was vicious, as much as I desperately loved it, and if we weren’t careful, it would weed out the weak ones among us, catch us when our guard was down even for a few seconds. It would always be a fight to survive here, but it was a better existence than the one they had left behind in Löska.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice stronger. “I’ve just … I’ve never seen someone die before. Not someone so young, anyway, and not like that.”
He held me again, and I could feel my strength returning with every second. He sat there with me for a long while as we shed our sorrows and worries, until sunset began to threaten the sky and we were forced to leave, and while I did feel better, the guilt of watching Finni’s fingers slip away towards death would haunt me for the rest of my life.