Frigid wind blasted across the lake, sweeping flurries into my eyes as the surface began to lock in ice. It spread in a thickening fan from the toes of the Winterborn called Effa and one of her brothers, both of them doubly graced with their father’s gifts—Windwalking and Icecarving.
The ice began to crackle beneath the snap of Arpa banners, the click and shift of armor, the stamp of feet and the whispers of waiting legionaries.
Beside me, Berin carried a tear-shaped Arpa cavalry shield, sword bared. Esan stood to his other side, with Seera beyond him. Ittrid, Bara, Sedi, and Askir arrayed themselves behind us, and Ursk stood beside me with his chin level and his attention focused on the island. He, like I, carried no weapon save a staff and belt knife.
Lastly Nui stalked the lakeshore under the eyes of the Winterborn and the first lines of stalwart legionaries.
I followed my twin’s gaze toward the island, willing my heart to steady. I held my staff in both hands, its end firmly planted in the churned snow. Ahead, the island writhed with Revenants, and I saw more than one great hulking form like the giant from the forest. As I watched another lumbered out of the lake, sheeting water and stretching like a hound as smaller Revenants scattered.
The forming ice gave a deep, rippling boom. It had solidified into a broad bridge, crystal clear, reflecting the light and yawning with the darkness of the water below. It stretched nearly to the island, where a gap remained between the bridge and the far shore. Revenants swarmed and shrieked, climbing atop one another and tumbling into the water in their haste to jump the gap and charge us.
Kygga and Arune stepped forward, eyes set on the bridge. More wind rushed across the lake at their unspoken call, scattering snow onto the crystalline surface. It caught and froze, turning the slick surface into snowy, crunchy grit.
Then an Arpa horn blew, and another and another, and we stepped out onto the ice.
Those moments on the lake writ deep on my memory—the crunch of my boots, the bite of the bitter wind igniting my mind and stripping all tiredness, all reserve and hesitation. Driven snow was our vanguard and the wind was threaded with silver. The sound of the moving army was a susurration and a roar, the blending of two thousand footfalls, the grind of leather and chink of armor and rumble of hooves at our flanks.
Sheltered in the heart of our company, I held out my hand and crushed several snowflakes between my fingers. Some melted, cool and gentle. Others smeared, gray and dirty. Not snow, but ash.
I traced their fall to the branches of the Binding Tree, lording over us against a backdrop of gray sky. The light had taken on an ominous quality, a pulsing, roiling movement like wind-brushed coals. And where the branches burned, ash rained.
“All is as it should be,” Ursk murmured at my side, his voice barely loud enough to hear. He spoke to himself—a consolation and a prayer. “The gods are coming.”
Another horn blasted, clear and high. The Arpa lines ahead of us solidified, clapping their shields together, spears resting atop and short swords poised.
Ursk and I retreated behind our companions, giving way to their shields and ready weapons. Nui, beside Berin, scented the air with her ears pinned back and growled, low in her chest.
The wind continued to blow and the ash to fall. I couldn’t see what was happening ahead of us, but thuds and screeches came to my ears— the first few Revenants, those brave enough to swim the gap from shore to ice. I heard movement down the line too, barked orders and shrills of inhuman pain. Then the horn blew again, and our advance resumed.
Soon I stepped over a butchered corpse, the body of what had once been a child sewn back together with fur and vine and vulpine teeth.
“Which gods are coming?” I asked Ursk as we went. I didn’t dare hope he meant Thvynder, and at the same time, feared he did. But would Thvynder side with us and Eiohe to stop Imilidese? Or would they join her?
“The true gods,” he replied, turning to me, his eyes glazed with fervor. “All of them. Do you hear the loom?”
All I heard was another horn, this one whining and oddly angular in sound—crooked and off-key, yet sonorous and billowing. Silver streamed overhead in response and forming ice once again stretched over the lake.
The last protective barrier between us and the shore sealed. The not-so-distant shrieks and howls and roars of the Revenant horde took on a harsher, greedier quality.
The hairs on the back of my neck rose.
“This is it,” Berin said, hefting his shield. “We make for the caves beneath the tree. Yske, stop for nothing. We have you.”
Trepidation and warmth washed through me at his words. I caught his eye and smiled as we stepped from ice to solid ground. His smile back was brief, at once deep and passing, full of meaning and portent.
He was ready. So was I.
Revenants leapt at the shield wall ahead of us, throwing themselves to certain death amid the unstoppable Arpa advance. I tasted the blood and putrefaction on the breeze, the mingling of moldering flesh and rotting mushrooms, of earth and damp and green and twisted life. More and more Revenants already lay dead in our path, and above us the trunk of the Binding Tree smoldered.
A bone-rattling roar shook the ground as not one but two of the massive Revenant beasts charged the lines. One reared on its powerful, boar-like haunches, the jaws of its lichen-crusted skull open and its rotting piecemeal lungs releasing a horrid, whistling shriek.
The monster crashed down on the first three rows of legionaries and swung its head, sweeping aside dozens of men—including the line right before my companions and me.
Only the screaming and dead now lay between us and the horde. The huge beast shook its head, dislodging a limp body from its tusks, and charged straight toward us. A hundred smaller Revenants churned around its feet, leaping and streaking and clawing.
Three Windwalkers materialized, two facing the monstrous Revenant down and one climbing its exposed ribs—Arune, lithe and fast and armed with a vicious spear and a bone-white bow across his back. A fourth Winterborn burst from the carnage to one side, her own spear lengthening as she came. Thray. I just had time to see her slash at the sinews of the Revenant’s legs, her pale hair already slathered with black blood, then Berin blocked her from sight.
“This way!” My brother darted and we surged after him. Nui flitted alongside with a vengeful snarl. Smaller Revenants swarmed, legionaries stepped in to cut them down, and the roots of the great tree bubbled from the earth.
Berin’s memory led us true. A narrow tunnel opened between the roots and we flowed through, one by one, as the presence of Imilidese swelled. Foxfire raced through the roots around us in serpentine welcome, tracing fresh cracks and igniting old runes. I wiped dirt from my sweaty brow and hurried faster through the eerie foxfire-lit shadows.
Gradually, the path lightened even more, blazing around the forms of Berin and Esan and Seera ahead of me. We entered the central chamber to the light of a dozen torches, laid out as if in preparation for a ritual.
My blood chilled. I glimpsed Logur standing beside the ancient rift, surrounded by a sea of living flesh. Not Revenants, but humans. His servile Fith—men and women with varied expressions of terror, determination, and zeal.
My presence of Imilidese tripled, now so thick the air itself seemed to have fled. I grasped my staff tighter and stood my ground.
My friends spread out by unspoken command, shields locking, and Ursk’s arm brushed mine.
“The Gods are coming,” he murmured again in my ear. When I looked at him, his eyes were glazed, edged with an ecstatic intensity I recognized from the Vynder priesthood. “All is as it should be.”
The Fith formed a line on the other side of the cavern, staggered and twitching, and Logur spoke to them in a voice I couldn’t hear.
“Ursk.” I tried to catch the Duamel priest’s attention, but his eyes would not focus. “Are you here? Are you with me?”
He smiled, and though his eyes did not clear, I sensed his attention return to the room. “I am present. As is Fate. Duck.”
I dropped. An arrow sang over my head and embedded in a root. I had just enough time to gawk back at the Priest of Fate before the Fith charged with shrieks and howls.
A spear flashed toward Berin’s face. He threw up his shield and spun it, tearing the embedded spear from the wide-eyed Fith woman. In the same movement he hunched, shielding himself as he stabbed out his sword.
The Fith woman fell back into the riot of her kin.
Over Berin’s head, I glimpsed Logur on the far side of the cavern. He grinned as our eyes met, satisfaction thick in his obsidian eyes.
Someone jostled me forward. I braced my forearm on Berin’s back, sheltering behind his bulk as another spear stabbed past my head. Behind me, Ursk calmly stepped back. The spear stopped a handsbreadth short of his glassy eyes.
Windwalkers laced around us on threads of winter wind and legionaries flowed out of the tunnel on the far side of the hollow. Instantly the cave was full to bursting, with Logur and his Fith surrounded. The smells of blood and viscera became stifling, screams of fear and vengeance battering my skull.
Something fluttered beside my ear. I flinched, turning just in time to see the owl Mawny alight on Ursk’s shoulder and fix me with an impatient gaze. It was time.
“I’ll open it!” I shouted to Logur, but my voice was drowned. Taken by sudden inspiration, I reached up and seized a root of the tree. Foxfire flared at my touch, and the presence of Imilidese drove into me like a spear.
I shuddered, gagging and breathless, and clasped the root harder.
I will heal you, I willed the god in the tree to hear. I will free you. Let me through.
“Stop!” Logur’s voice reverberated through the chamber. His human servants skittered back to the walls, more terrified of his voice than our weapons. One dragged at the body of a fallen companion, but the rest of the dead and wounded were left strewn across the floor, dismembered and twitching.
“Yske.” Logur remained behind his barrier of subservient flesh. It crossed my mind that there must be a reason for his hiding—a mortality he feared. “Do it.”
I stepped between Berin and Esan, shoulder to shoulder before me. “Let me through.”
Berin shot me a hard look but broke the line to precede me, advancing through the carnage with the rest of our company spread around us. Mawny fluttered ahead, alighting on the tumbled stone, trailed by Ursk. Logur eyed the bird sharply, but if he recognized it as a messenger, he had no time to intervene.
The Winterborn and legionaries formed into a circle around the ancient doorway, closing me off from the rest of the chamber. Seera pulled a dead Fith away, leaving the stone streaked with blood, and I came to stand over it.
I touched my Sight. The once lifeless network of threads still converged over the central slab, now half-awake and radiating a thin, luring light. I reached my hands into the web, brushing them like the strings of a tangled loom.
I closed my eyes, drawing in upon myself. I listened to the drum of my heart, the rush of my blood. I smelled the earthen damp, and the sour, vile stench of butchered flesh. I drew upon my magic, taking it in and exhaling it with steady, measured breaths.
I waited until my magic was thick enough to drift like mist through the cavern, then I sketched one last rune in the air and pushed it into the threads of awakening power.
Open.
Light burned on my closed eyelids. Power skittered across my skin like the charge before a storm, growing and rising and condensing. The runes on my arms burned like strained muscles and the swell of power… leveled.
It was not enough. My power drained and the rift flickered, still closed to me.
Without conscious thought, I knelt beside the stone slab and laid an open palm on the cool, blood-streaked stone. I stabbed my hand. I felt the pain, felt the jar of blade off bone and heard Berin’s strangled protest.
As the pain reared and bile struck my teeth, I experienced a blistering moment of clarity. I saw myself from a distance, from another doorway—the door of my little house on the mountainside, where the wings of dragonflies captured the sunlight and the yarrow bowed under the weight of contented bees.
Then power blossomed in my blood like lust, demanding and insatiable. My head spun with the potency of it and the runes I’d carved in my flesh threaded with sparks of lavender-gold fire.
I whispered the name of the rune for opening again. Then there was no more sound, nothing more to see. The rift unlocked in a blaze of golden light and I toppled out of time and space.
I knelt in a world of hip-high, swaying meadow grasses. Above, the sky shifted from color to shadow, light to aura. The air itself seemed to flicker like a waterfall beneath the sun, and Mawny alighted on my shoulder with a soft flutter of wings.
In that odd, ever-changing light, I saw the island as it must have been, before the tree. The door itself was an archway, leading into a small, empty stone temple with a thatched, Hask-style roof. Soft grasses, flowers, and heavy-laden sumac spread in every direction toward the lakeshore and the Unmade, which yawned as broad and empty here as in the Waking World.
In the archway stretched a golden rift, its light becoming brighter and steadier with every moment that passed. And as it did, the reforging sky began to solidify and separate into the familiar quadrants of the High Halls, though they were skewed from my vantage. A clear horizon took on shape too, to the south and west and north. East, the vastness of the Unmade still yawned.
I raised my hand, still oozing blood, and sketched runes in the air for communication and speech. “Go,” I breathed to Mawny. The little owl took off with a second rustle of wings, passed through my runes, and vanished west.
Time and space distorted again as I waited. I bled, not willing to risk the flow of power, and for a time I lost myself in the heady pain. I heard no sound save the swish and clack that I distantly marked as a loom. The loom of Fate, I supposed. Weaving. Weaving time, weaving our lives. Weaving the beginnings and ends of us all.
Finally, across the meadow, a sea of faces came into sight. But I saw only one—my mother, her lynx-painted shield at her shoulder and her eyes smeared with black paint.
She began to run as they drew near, her boots eating up the distance, grasses parting. The full force of the west followed with her—Eangen and Algatt, Soulderni and Duamel, Winterborn and Vynder.
I rose to my feet, slowly. I put a hand to the rift and it opened, golden power filling the archway to bursting.
I led my mother out into the Waking World.