The following hours etched into my memory in bursts of pain and disbelief. I welcomed intervals of unconsciousness when they came, and endured the stretches of disorientation when I awoke to find myself dangling over the shoulder of a monstrous human construct, my leg possessed by unyielding agony.
I did not know where Berin was. Isik, I glimpsed here and there. The creatures dragged him on a makeshift litter like a fresh kill, and he showed no signs of waking. The side of his head was crusted with gold-tinted blood in my Sight. Ichor.
My blood ran gold, too. I saw it on my hands, dangling below me, and watched it smear across my captor’s moss-and-wood flesh. Though tinted with lavender, it was nearly as bright as Isik’s. Berin’s blood too, dried and caked beneath my nails, glistened a duller amber.
Eventually, we came to a village. I didn’t have the strength to raise my head, so I saw the settlement upside down. The homes were rudimentary but tidy, constructed of unhewn logs, chinked with moss and clay, and overhung with eaves of moss and small, hearty ferns. Scrawny forest chickens watched me from one roof, while under the eaves of another a cluster of cautious children stared, lorded over by a protective father. This man looked similar to the one who’d pulled me from the cave in the ravine—broad cheekbones, hair in varying shades of brown, and warm skin seemed to be features of the people of the East.
Children. Humans, watching the riverman and monsters—his monsters—pass them by with cautious familiarity.
Isik and I were deposited in a low empty building, dug into the earth and capped in moss. I pretended to be unconscious, and only moved once I heard a bar wedged into place across the door. I caught retreating voices, heavily muffled by the walls—questioning but not demanding, overridden by one whose tones I immediately recognized.
The riverman.
You and all your kind will be driven out of the High Halls, Aita had once said to this same riverman. Go back to whatever den you’ve been hiding in, and never return.
Was this village, here in the east, the den the riverman had been driven back to?
I shivered and forced myself to sit upright, taking stock of my surroundings. The cellar was small and dark, smelling of earth and straw, but not damp. The floor was layered with fresh cuttings and as my eyes adjusted, I made out deep shelves and racks for wintering food. They were empty, despite the season, and the scent of apples, carrots, and whatever other sundries that might have been here were absent.
There was only one door, heavy and at the top of a short stairway. There was another small opening for ventilation, but it was too small to crawl through, and covered with sturdy wooden grating.
I turned my focus to Isik. I bent over him in the weak light, brushing hair back from his face and gently touching his beard, looking for the source of the blood. I couldn’t help but wonder why he’d come back to me, but my questions would have to wait.
I found a deep gash under one of Isik’s ears, surrounded by swollen flesh and caked dirt. I tsked worriedly and paused, trying to collect myself. The urge to heal him was overpowering, to end his suffering and make sure my friend was whole and well.
Healing Isik would require another sacrifice. I was willing to do it—healing Berin had dulled the edges of guilt and obligation I felt at the thought of shedding my blood. I needed to heal myself too, if we were to have any chance of escape and finding out where the rest of our company had been taken. It was practical. Necessary.
But the riverman didn’t know of my magic—though, as he was likely Sighted, he would suspect I had power of some kind. Perhaps it was best to wait, assess the situation, and keep my healing as a knife up my sleeve.
My horn was still at my belt, bizarrely. I stared at it for a long moment, then looked up to the grating. I could call for help, but surely the riverman knew that. Either we were too far from aid to be heard, or our captor wanted us to be found. Neither thought was comforting.
My eyes dragged to the shadowy arrow protruding from my thigh. The sight and the rush of pain that came with it made my stomach contort, but I swallowed it down.
I needed to bide my time, hide my magic, and try to learn what I could. My pack was lost, as was my knife. I had nothing but my horn, my worries and these few, quiet moments with my unconscious friend.
So, I took one of Isik’s heavy hands, held it to my chest, and waited. He did not move, but his steady breathing, the weight of his arm, and the warmth of his skin consoled me.
Light from the setting sun had just begun to filter through the grating when the door opened and four humans flooded the cellar. Two spearmen prodded me back against the wall, away from Isik. Then the others took me by the arms and hauled me toward the stairs.
Pain clapped over me, and my next clear understanding was lying on the floor of a hut. My disoriented mind detected the scents of musky sage and earthy camphor and stale valerian before my eyes found their desiccated bundles hanging from the beams, and an old man squatting at my side with a shallow bowl.
He spoke to me, face surrounded by carefully combed white hair, and pointed to the arrow in my leg. Then he held out the bowl and motioned for me to drink.
Panic seized me, quick and violent. If this man was a healer, I could guess what was in that bowl, and I doubted it would clear my mind. The thought of being unconscious, helpless while a stranger cut into me—
I started to sit up, but the hands of two other people came down upon me. My breath was thin and fast, but I slowly regained control of myself.
This was a good thing. It meant they wanted to keep me alive. It meant they didn’t know my secret.
I looked at the hovering locals, letting them see the submission in my eyes, and took the bowl.
* * *
I sat in a corner of the healer’s hut as darkness fell over the forest. I was still groggy, but my pain was distant and the lack of an arrow in my thigh was reassuring.
“What did she name you?”
I looked up as the riverman filled the open door. The hair rose on the back of my neck and I resisted the urge to flatten myself into the wall.
“Yske.” My name passed over my lips before I could consider lying. I blinked forcefully, shocked at my honesty.
“Your tongue will be loose for a time.” The riverman stepped inside and stood over me, the watery rasp of his voice filling the small, close space.
I glanced at the healer’s bowl, set on a nearby low table, and pressed my lips closed. There were multiple things the healer could have added to loosen my tongue, including several that were tasteless or easy to mask. In my pain, I hadn’t identified them.
“So, why are there two young Miri in my lands?” the riverman inquired. “And who are the humans who travel with you? My Revenants have been reporting you for some time.”
My lips started to open, almost spilling the truth before I diverted. “We came to see… By Revenants, you mean the monsters. The constructs.” I was careful to speak in statements, not questions—a lifetime of warnings held fast, even through the drugs in my blood.
The creature nodded. “You came to see what?”
“The tree in the East,” my traitorous tongue supplied.
“How did you learn of it?”
“The Arpa.”
“Arpa.” The riverman’s tongue moved over the inside of his woven lips, a nearly reptilian gesture. “So, they did make it home?”
His river-stone eyes glistened in the dim light. “I had nothing to do with them. But the Guardians of the Tree are diligent in keeping its existence hidden from the outside world. Other explorers have come, but either they stay or they die.”
He unfurled his grin, revealing a forest of fish teeth. “You should be grateful I found you before the Guardians. You would not have lasted long with the Hask.”
“Your people are not the Hask.”
He shook his head slowly and cast his gaze toward the hut and the village as a whole. “No. The Hask live by the lake and worship the Bear; the Fith inhabit the deep forest and look to me and my Revenants for their protection. These clans are not allies.”
Ursk hadn’t known this, and it raised a host of questions about the politics and relationships of the peoples whose land we had so blindly entered.
“Where are my friends—” I cut my question off too late, and my captor leveled a cold gaze.
“They are not here. You were attacked by Fith, yes, but outliers, worshipers of a foreign god. They call themselves the Aruth. They captured some of your companions, while others escaped into Hask territory.”
I kept silent, mind scrambling. This riverman could be lying, but for the moment, I could not fathom what he’d gain by that. He was dangerous, but apparently so was everyone else in the East—to us and to one another.
The riverman’s depthless river-stone eyes watched my face with unsettling intent. “Your company is sundered, Yske, and your people obviously unequipped to navigate my realm. You need allies.”
Outside, the sounds of a village settling in for the night drifted to us—chattering children, a mother’s lullaby, the clinking of pots and slosh of water. It sounded so similar to home—from east to west, from a mossy village ruled by a riverman to one watched over by my black-haired mother, her smile warm and her eyes like flint.
Make allies of your enemies, Yske, murmured my mother’s voice, repeating one of her favored proverbs. Or put them in the ground.
Wind trickled through the open door beyond the riverman, tugging me back to the moment. I swore the wind tasted of winter, clean and sharp, layered with the promise of snow and icy nights.
Perhaps the strife between the peoples of the east was something I could use.
“We need not be enemies,” I stated, even though my skin crawled. I imagined the constructs this being had created, their human and animal bones cobbled into a grotesque semblance of life. “Let me and my friend go. Let us rescue our companions from the Aruth, and we’ll go home.”
The riverman considered me for so long, I questioned whether I’d spoken at all. Then he crouched before me with a creak and rasp. “All right. But first, do something for me.”
Here was my opportunity. I met his inhuman eyes.
He held out a hand. “Come.”
I didn’t protest. I took his hand, startled to find the woven reed of his skin warm with life, and wavered to my feet.
My world spun, sparked, and settled. The riverman put a worn staff in my hand and led me into the village.
People stared as we passed, the riverman pausing every so often to wait for me while I hobbled painstakingly behind. I met the eyes of a few locals, trying to gauge if I might find allies among them, but their gazes glossed over me and rooted on the riverman, or looked back on the ground.
They all fell away as we left the village, heading north. Dusky light purpled among half-stripped autumn branches and the cold prickled at my skin, making me shiver. I inhaled deeply, trying to calm myself, and choked.
The scent of decay hit me like a fist. I shied back, covering my mouth with one arm.
The riverman kept walking, striding through the trees with the roaming, diligent gaze of a gardener among the furrows.
I saw a body in a tree first, vines suspending it by the wrists. It had no legs save for one dangling femur, stained dark with old blood, attached to the rotting torso with a single shriveled tendon. Its skull had no skin but tufts of mossy spoors spilled from every orifice, including a slack jaw full of canine teeth.
Next, a half-constructed animal twitched from the shadow of a huge oak. It raised the sightless head of a fox, though it had a dead serpent for a spine and tail, and its ribs were mismatched, woven with strips of rough leather like a grisly basket.
Everywhere I looked, more and more half-formed—half-grown— constructs looked back. Some stared blankly, eyeless and inanimate. Others watched me hungrily, still others pitifully. Most were human. Some were not. Larger shadows off in the woods foretold even more terrifying beasts, and as the riverman neared, the trees wavered as if nudged by a massive body.
The riverman stopped in the center of the terrible grove, his face obscured by blossoming shadows. All eyes moved to him, including mine.
I gripped my staff fiercely and battled the urge to shrink into myself, seeking the embers of my anger and stoking them instead. The riverman wanted something from me. He’d simply brought me here to frighten me.
Light sparked, thin in the dark. Foxfire lit along exposed roots and up the trunks of several dead trees, but unlike the foxfire I’d seen along our journey, this was only blue and not so bright. Weaker somehow, here in the riverman’s domain.
My captor glanced at the foxfire too, then back at me. I saw consideration pass through his eyes, then decision—as if he’d intended to say one thing and decided on another.
“What do you want from me?” The question leaked from my lips.
The riverman let out a soft hiss of displeasure. “Question me again and I will kill you. I have two prisoners; I need only one.”
I closed my lips.
“Who sired you?” the riverman demanded.
I held my tongue, turning over my options. Back when I’d met this creature in the High Halls, he’d speculated that either Gadr or Estavius were my father—which made sense, they being the only male Miri left, other than Isik and half-blood Winterborn.
But I was no Miri at all. My blood might look like ichor to the Sighted, but I was still a human. That, however, seemed unwise to confess. Rivermen might hate the Miri, but they still feared them. That might protect me.
“Gadr,” I lied, with effort. “My companion is my brother, Isik.”
“Mmm,” the riverman made a considering sound. “Did your parents tell you of our history? The rivermen and the Miri? And the woodmaidens?”
I hesitated, but the silence stretched, demanding an answer. I spoke carefully, choosing the version of events that he would want to hear.
“I know you—we—were all made equal, in the beginning,” I said, earning a wry smile from the riverman. He knew I was pandering. “The Miri took the High Halls, and the rivermen were driven away. Some of the woodmaidens were permitted into the Halls, but many of them vanished instead, to the far corners of the world.”
“To the edge of creation,” the riverman added in an affirming murmur. “Go on.”
I changed my grip on my staff to ease the weight on my bad leg. I felt pinned by the empty stares of the Revenants, grotesque and pitiful. “That’s all I know.”
He picked up the tale. “Some of us outcasts were driven east, to the edge of the world. And here, we made a home. This is our realm. The Fith are my people. I am their god and protector.”
The cool of the night seemed to double. I glanced up at the canopy, half expecting to see snow beginning to fall, but dry leaves just rattled in the breeze.
“But,” the riverman dropped his voice, “we found more here in the east than forests and the Unmade, and the tribes that became the Hask and Fith. There was a door to the High Halls here, once.” He smiled when surprise flickered over my face. “Forgotten and neglected. So we used it. And gleaned the power of the Halls, for a time.”
I gripped my new staff with both hands.
“That doorway was closed through… unforeseen events. Long have I sought a way to reopen it.” The riverman stepped closer, the structure of his neck creaking as he stared down at me. I shifted my grip, ready to turn the staff into a weapon, but he did not touch me. “I saw your golden blood on the moss, daughter of Aita. I saw your brother on the wind, and I thought… these children, these young Miri. They can help me.”
I met his gaze, refusing to shrink. “How?” I asked, consciously questioning him this time. A small test of power. A tiny rebellion, charring the edges of my insidious fear.
He grimaced in a flash of needle teeth. “All Miri can open doorways to the High Halls. Your holy grounds. Do you have one? Can you forge one?”
My life hung on my answer, even if I hadn’t the faintest idea how to accomplish such a task—even if I would consider doing it. I knew Thvynder’s Watchman Omaskat had made a door at the White Lake, but he was a part of the god. How the Miri forged doors was a secret I’d never learned.
“Of course,” I lied, infusing my tone with a restrained imperiousness, as if I’d been holding it back this entire time.
“Do you know the cost?” he asked, clearly testing me.
“Of course,” I lied again, and took a chance. I was claiming to be a Miri—I might as well act like one. “Release my brother and me, safe and unharmed, and I will make a new door for you.”
The riverman considered me for a breath, giving me ample time to consider that I’d no idea if he truly believed me, no guarantee he would keep his word, no notion of how to fulfil my promise, and no intention of doing so. I was buying time, pure and simple.
Finally, he nodded, his eyes glittering in the dark. “We have a deal.”