I awoke to silence and warmth, the crackle of a fire, and the even breathing of my companions sleeping around me. The air was close and smelled of beeswax, smoke, leather and sweat—familiar, yet edged with something foreign. The wheel of the ceiling beams spread above me in the firelight, topped by the sightless wooden totems. A little gray owl watched me too, its eyes as round and golden as autumn moons.
A messenger, my half-awake mind decided. “Mother, is that you?” I whispered.
The owl ruffled its feathers and looked away. I followed its gaze to a throne on the upper tier of the hall. There Arune sat, one leg crooked over an armrest, the other stretched lazily out before him. His hair was fully loose in the firelight, his icy eyes colorless and considering.
“Your brother has reached the Hask,” his voice said in my ear, though he remained on the throne. His words came with a prickle of wind, so soft and light that it barely stirred my hair and didn’t rouse my companions—Isik to one side, Seera to the other. “I think it would be profitable for you to go directly to him, on your way to heal my sister.”
“Is he safe?” The wind took my words, carrying them away.
Arune nodded. “He and the Priest of Fate have been welcomed. For now.”
I took a moment to digest that, stilling a sudden tremble in my hands. Safe. Berin was safe.
“I see. So where is your sister?” I asked.
Arune sat forward, putting both feet flat on the ground and bracing his elbows on his knees, fingers laced between them. His eyes took on a hard, distant look. “She lies in her barrow of ice on the edge of the world. Where the riverman slew her. On the Hask’s sacred island, at the foot of the great tree.”
“Why there?” I asked, sensing this was important.
“That’s where the original door was, long ago. Before the tree consumed it.”
“Did the tree grow out of the High Halls?”
Arune shrugged languorously. “I do not know or care. All I want is my sister healed.”
“Do the Hask allow just anyone onto their sacred island?” I asked, though I already suspected the answer.
“No. You will have to go unseen. Run to the Hask, allow them to take you in like they did your brother, then steal a boat. Do not get caught.”
“What if I am?”
Arune leaned further forward and the distance between us suddenly felt like a single breath. “If you’re very unlucky, they’ll butcher you and feed you to their sacred bears. They’ll be fattening for their winter sleep right now. It’s excellent timing.”
I considered that for a moment. “I saw Aegr. Perhaps I could… use that?”
Arune tilted his head to one side. “Maybe, if you had a common tongue. The Bear hasn’t been seen for several years, though. If the Hask realize he’s back…” The Winterborn trailed off, staring through me, calculating. “It could either be a useful distraction or cause unnecessary turmoil. The Fith and the Hask are always out for one another’s blood, Eangen. Keep that in mind when you go to the lake.”
“I will. Arune…” I hesitated, mulling over another confession. “I didn’t just see Aegr. I heard a voice in the forest. It came with white foxfire I’ve never seen before this year, and it asked me to free it. Do you know who it is?”
Arune shrugged. “There are many things in this land I can’t begin to understand, nor do I care to. The sun rises in the south. A riverman rules as a god, a giant tree grows at the edge of the world and, yes, white foxfire flares at noon. Once, I even saw a flock of starlings peck one another to death in absolute silence. This place… is what it is.”
I suppressed the urge to shiver. “So you have no answers for me.”
“No. The east is full of mysteries.” Arune lounged back in his throne. “Take my advice: dwell on only what touches you. Get to the island and heal my sister. Winter with me if you choose—and then go home before the forest devours you.”
* * *
The lake stretched toward an empty horizon, a vast lack that I might have called the sky if it hadn’t been so devoid of depth, movement, and hue.
The Unmade. It was the space between the stars, the belly of an endless sea and the pause after exhale. It was everything and nothing, both the potential of life and the impossibility of it. It stretched unbroken to the north and south, fading into the distance and reaching up into the clouds.
The magnitude and impossibility of the sight left me speechless, crushed by my own fragility and temporality. Glancing at Isik, where he crouched next to me in the forest above the lakeshore, I saw the same depth of wonderment in his handsome face.
The Unmade, however, was not all that loomed before us. Just before the edge of the world grew a great spreading tree. It was an ash, as tall and broad as a mountain, its trunk burdened by ten thousand branches and its heights lost in the clouds. But not a single branch was in leaf. Now, in the height of autumn, when it should have bathed the sky in scarlet and purple, every branch was barren, and there was no sign that the leaves had already fallen. It made the tree’s magnificence desolate and heightened my sense of mortal fragility.
“It’s completely dead,” Isik murmured. Nui and the rest of my companions remained back in the Fith village, their cautions and solemn eyes still heavy in my mind.
Arune, on my other side, appeared unaffected by the tree or the nearness of the world’s edge.
“That is the Hask’s main settlement.” He directed my gaze toward the lakeshore, where marshy peninsulas of dead trees reached gnarled fingers into the water around a walled town. “There are others, but this is the largest. It’s where your brother went.”
The Hask settlement was indeed large, jumbled in behind well-settled palisade walls. Fishing boats anchored at docks on the lakeside and storehouses on stilts straddled the edge of the water. Gulls alighted on sod roofs and soared on lazy currents of air. Smoke drifted from the chimneys and Hask moved everywhere, throughout the settlement and the surrounding forest and fields. Other villages hazed in the distance, two or three—some on the shore, others closer to the forest.
Arune continued, reminding me, “Berin is no prisoner to the Hask. They have taken him in, and they’ve no reason to suspect our alliance, so give them none. Play the victim. A few tears on a pretty face go a long way in any place, regardless of the fact that they won’t understand a word you say. Let them play the heroes.”
Isik murmured on my other side, “I still think it’s best not to tell Berin our plans. Your brother is—”
“I’ll judge what’s best when I see him,” I interjected. I reached to squeeze his hand before I unfolded from the ferns. “Just be at the island when I arrive. Both of you.”
* * *
“Yske!” Berin shoved through the crowd gathered around the gate of the Hask village. He pushed past the guards I’d been waiting with and enfolded me in his arms, squeezing so tight I lost my breath.
I couldn’t speak, couldn’t see beyond the burn of relieved tears. I dropped my staff, leaning all my weight into him and burying my face in his beard. His clothes were clean, his hair freshly braided and he smelled of oil and cedar—healthy and alive.
“Where are the others?” Berin asked, finally pulling back. Around us, Hask villagers—indistinguishable from the Fith—stared and murmured, but made no move to interfere. Some even smiled fondly, charmed by our reunion.
“What happened?” my brother pressed. “How did you escape?”
“The others are all alive and well, for now,” I said, grasping his forearm like an anchor. “They’re with the Fith tribe that captured us. Can we speak somewhere more private?”
“Yes. In the headman’s hall,” Berin said, glancing over his shoulder. “Ursk is there. We’ve been trying to convince the Hask to rescue you.”
I was taken aback. “How are you communicating?”
“We’re not.” Berin pushed stray hair back from his face with his free hand and gave a wan half-smile. “But there’s been a lot of gesturing, and Ursk has picked up more of the language than I can believe. Fate is at work. Gods know where we’d be without him.”
I twisted my lips in response. “We wouldn’t be here at all. But, Berin, we shouldn’t involve the Hask in any of this. We’re foreigners here. We shouldn’t cause conflict.”
“We may not have a choice. But we can discuss that later.” Berin bent to pick up my staff and handed it back to me. “You need to rest. Do you need a healer? They have wonderful baths.”
Ursk appeared with a woman in heavily embroidered burgundy skirts. She wore a scarf over her coiled gray hair—a style I saw among the rest of the crowd, now that I looked closer. She had broad cheekbones, lovely, intelligent eyes and unbowed lips—a combination that seemed, at once, to echo every Easterner I had yet seen. As if she were a carving they had made to summarize themselves.
I smiled in relief, an expression which Ursk returned.
“You escaped!” His eyes ran over me, noting my dirty, battered clothing. “Well come. This is Feen, member of the ruling council of the Hask and leader of this settlement.”
The headwoman laid an open palm over her stomach and inclined her head in a gesture of respect. I nodded in reply as Ursk spoke to the woman in her own language. His speech was careful and halting, but not so much that I couldn’t tell the language sounded similar to the Fith’s, with slurred clusters of consonants and a jostling tempo.
“Come,” Ursk said when he’d finished. “We’ll return to the hall and you can regale us with the tale of how you escaped. Then, I suspect, we must turn to plans.” His eyes shifted to Berin. “Plans of rescue, without starting a war.”
* * *
I sat at a table in the Hask’s meeting hall. The building was broad and long but low, lower than a Eangen hall would be, though in other ways it looked much the same—smoke-darkened beams, small slit windows that allowed glimpses of light and the village beyond, and a large central hearth. The Hask, it seemed, were a people of forest and water, as the Eangen were.
The Eangen, however, did not worship bears. Everywhere around me I saw evidence of the Hask’s venerations, from the heavy bearskin mantles on the cloaks of local leaders to the ursine skulls tucked into alcoves on every side. A young girl went from skull to skull, lighting smoky tallow candles inside their propped-open jaws. The flames made their eyes glow in the dimness of the hall, and their discolored teeth glistened.
Feen, the headwoman, took a high-backed chair at the hearth. The chair was modestly adorned save for a drape of bearskin, brown and reddish in the firelight. Folding wooden stools, their seats made of fine, dense cloth, were set out for Berin and me, while Ursk took position beside Feen and offered us a bracing smile.
Feen began to speak, and Ursk translated her words slowly and thoughtfully. “Do you need to rest or bathe, or see a healer? Before we speak?”
I was sorely tempted to say yes, but Ursk followed his translation with a slight warning shake of the head.
“No, thank you,” I replied to Feen. “I’m simply grateful to be safely inside your walls.”
Ursk related this with a mixture of gestures and carefully chosen words. The corner of Feen’s mouth twitched at his efforts and she replied with slow, articulate patience.
“You will be able to go soon, then. To the baths,” Ursk related, looking embarrassed by his own fumbling. “She wants to know how you came here, so I assume she means how you escaped the Fith.”
I glanced at Berin and found him watching me closely. His expression was grim, braced for whatever horrors I was about to share.
Arune and I had discussed the lies I was to give the Hask, but now that I was here and the Hask were real, warm-eyed strangers who’d accepted me with little suspicion, guilt reared up inside me.
“I was separated after the attack in the gorge,” I began, nodding toward my brother. “I found a tunnel leading into the forest and ran, but the Aruth caught me.”
As Ursk painstakingly labored to translate this, silence crept over the hall. Even the girl who’d been lighting the lamps paused, a waning wick in one hand and her other cupped to catch the ash. Beside her, the eyes of a bear skull glowed with captive flame.
“I was brought to a settlement ruled by a white-haired man, an immortal from the north.” I looked at Berin as I said this, knowing it would be a shock to him. Sure enough, his eyes widened.
“Arune,” Feen named him, her smile flat and bracing. Through Ursk she communicated, “We’re familiar with him.”
“The rest of our people are with him. As guests.” I hesitated over the word, unsure of how it would translate. “They’re all alive and cared for. They weren’t harmed, other than in that initial attack, and I was able to escape when the others caused a distraction.”
Feen watched me closely as Ursk translated my words. She questioned him a great deal before her narrowed eyes relaxed in understanding.
“I do not think there is a need for violence,” I ventured, holding Feen’s gaze and waiting for Ursk to translate.
Feen straightened in her chair and spoke a little more quickly.
“She also does not want violence,” Ursk said, his expression grave and thoughtful as he worked through the leader’s words. “She speaks much of the Divine Bear and his… protection? I am sorry, I cannot understand.”
The Hask in the hall, however, had no such difficulties. A murmur rippled through the assembly. A paler-haired woman spoke, stepping in from the side. She had the slightly rounded belly and full breasts of a recent mother, and I’d seen her pass a tiny, red-faced baby to a young boy not long ago. Protective indignance etched her posture.
Ursk’s eyes flicked between Berin and me as he tried to parse this new woman’s words.
“I think she’s saying that we owe them for taking us in,” Ursk related to us in a low voice. He met Berin’s gaze. “They want our help to fight the Fith and someone called Logur.”
“He’s the one who captured me. He’s a riverman—Ursk, please do not translate that.” I shot a worried look between the two men. I’d already feared becoming trapped in the conflict between the peoples of the East, but this went beyond that. “Why would they want our help? What do they know about us?”
Berin grimaced, while around us the Hask continued to debate among themselves. “They took us in because they saw me kill one of those bone monsters. I Shadow Walked to do it. They’ve gotten it into their heads that a priest of Fate would be useful. And I may have… told them of your skills.”
I flinched. “Berin.”
“I needed them to know how valuable you and the others are. I wanted them to help—”
Berin cut off as Ursk raised a hand, his eyes fixed on the pale-haired woman. “She’s proposing… She wants to help rescue the others if we kill the riverman. And lend the Hask Yske’s healing power.”
The Hask now fully descended into their heated discussion, and our increasingly baffled translator stood in the middle of the fray, lips closed and one eye half-slitted, as if he had a headache coming on.
“There will be a council in one day… two days,” Ursk said, rubbing his forehead with two fingers and a thumb. “I don’t think they will do anything before then. But I do not like this, any of it.”
I didn’t either, and from the tic in Berin’s jaw he shared our feelings. He’d made us more valuable than we wanted to be, as strangers in a foreign land rife with conflict—and swiftly being pinned down by an approaching winter.
We were at the Hask’s mercy.