After her first contract, Rora’d hidden away topside, somewhere not even Aro knew about, because he hadn’t been training the same way she had. Tare knew, though, because she’d shown the place to Rora. Tare’d found her there, hiding, and just sat with her for a while. “It’s a hard thing,” the hand had finally said, “to have no choices left.”
It’d felt, then, like the worst thing in the world. Now Rora knew how stupid and young she’d been. It was much worse to have choices, and have all of them be shit.
She didn’t trust the head man, Joros, with half his face burned raw and a hard smile that did touch his eyes but was all the scarier for it. She kept the stone he’d tossed her, the one Aro’d whispered had let him see out her eyes, but it was just like a normal stone since she’d shattered its match in her dagger. To be safe, she’d smashed all the gems in Aro’s rings, too, though it went against everything she knew to destroy good money like that. Joros’d given them each a purse of coins, mostly copper rames and sests with a few silver gids thrown in. A man who had to pay you to stick by him wasn’t usually someone worth sticking by.
That was where the shit choices started. Keep with the untrustworthy bastard and his collection of freaks, keep her and Aro’s bellies full and their heads attached—or go back out on their own, where all the world wanted them dead and would do it without blinking. Shit choices, but one of ’em had more shit in it than the other.
So they had a new pack, probably the strangest pack Rora’d ever seen.
Aro liked the big bear of a Northman; he’d always made friends with the fists back in the Canals, admired the way they could just punch through life without spending a moment of it thinking. The Northman was like two fists put together, so big he could block out the sun if he stood the right way, but for all that, he wasn’t just a fist. There was a brain behind his eyes, and it even seemed like he knew how to use it. Didn’t stop Aro trying to make friends, though.
There was the merra, who no one except the Northman seemed to like, not that Rora could blame them. She was a mess to look at, the kind of thing that shouldn’t exist outside stories meant to scare kids, and Rora got the sense that if she was ever stupid enough to be alone with the merra, one of ’em would likely end up stabbed. She kept glaring at Rora, and Aro, too, and spitting whenever they happened to catch her eye. Kept chanting prayers, too; seemed like her favorites were the ones about killing twins before their plague spread out on the earth, so there wasn’t any kind of friendship to be made there, even if Rora’d been looking.
Then there was Anddyr. He stared at her even more than the merra, and turned a bright red whenever she caught him staring. He never talked to her—then again, he didn’t do much talking to anyone except himself. The merra’d tried to talk to him, the night they’d all made camp just out of sight of the burned-up village, but Joros’d stepped between her and Anddyr, and they’d had themselves a nice glare. “That is your doing,” Joros’d said, pointing back toward the village. “Anddyr is weak, susceptible, and your corruption poisoned him, twisted his mind. Their blood is on your hands. You will not speak to him again.”
The merra hadn’t had anything to say to that, but she hadn’t turned away before she’d glared and spat some more. Woman had so much spit in her mouth, Rora was thinking she was half water. Then Joros’d talked to Anddyr some, and Anddyr’d pulled out a little jar and eaten something from it and gotten so shaky and mumbly that Rora’d thought he was dying, but none of the others seemed to think anything was wrong. The merra’d glared, and Joros’d smirked, and Anddyr’d finally stopped shaking and spent the rest of the night staring at Rora with too-wide eyes. He was the mystery she couldn’t crack.
Then there was the fact that every time she closed her eyes, she saw the fire shooting out of Anddyr’s hands, and all the death it’d left.
She’d been trying to get up the nerve to ask him about it, because Aro wouldn’t even look at Anddyr, so she knew he wouldn’t ask on his own. It was left to her, just like usual. Took two days, but she finally tugged on her horse’s reins to get it to drop back to where she could feel Anddyr’s eyes. They’d found some horses in a part of the village that hadn’t gotten burned, and there’d been no people around to tell them they couldn’t take the beasts, so Rora’d gotten to learn to ride a horse. Hurt like hells when they bounced around, but she had to grant it was better than running on bloody feet. Aro kept falling off his, for no reason any of them could figure out, but the horse would go running off soon as it didn’t have a rider, and the Northman always went to drag the sulky thing back. He almost smiled every time he did it, and that made Rora wonder if Aro’s falling was such an accident. She’d never claim to understand the way men made friends.
She didn’t look at Anddyr, even though she could feel his eyes bright on her face, because she was hoping he wouldn’t be so shy if she didn’t look at him. “I’ve been meaning to ask,” she said, keeping her voice low enough no one else was like to hear. “The night you all found us. You . . . did something. With your hands. It was like you made fire . . .”
“I did.” He had a nice enough voice, soft and solemn, the kind of voice that alone wouldn’t make you any friends but wouldn’t get you into any fights either.
“How?”
“I’m a mage.”
Rora almost looked at him, but just glanced out the corners of her eyes instead. He was winding his horse’s mane between his fingers, not looking at her for once. “What d’you mean?”
She felt his eyes again, real quick. He spoke a little slower, like he thought she maybe hadn’t heard him: “I’m a mage.”
She did look at him then, with her forehead scrunched up and a frown on her face. “What’s that word?” she asked, in the nicest way she knew how. “Does it mean . . . Well, if I had to guess,” and she was careful with her words here, didn’t want to offend him or anything, “I’d guess you were a witch.”
His nose wrinkled at that, but it sounded like he was talking just as careful as she was. “No, I am a mage.” That didn’t help Rora any, so she just kept looking at him. Tare’d taught her that was one of the best ways to get the answers you wanted, just let the silence go on long enough the other person felt the need to fill it. That was how she got anything important out of Aro. Finally Anddyr sighed the saddest little sigh, and he looked over at her with his eyes like a dog’s, and he didn’t even blush too much when their eyes met. “We don’t like being called witches.”
Rora grinned at that, as much to encourage him as anything, though her heart was beating a little faster. “I’ve never seen a wit—mage.” She corrected herself real quick when she saw his eye start to twitch, and a smile pulled at his mouth. He didn’t have a face that was used to smiling. “Never seen a mage before. Are they all like you, throwing fire around?”
His face went sad again, and he looked back down at his fingers in his horse’s mane, turned them over so he could stare at his palms. She hadn’t noticed it before, but they were reddish, looked a lot like the healing skin on Joros’s face, and there were deep gouges crisscrossing his palms. “No,” he said softly. “That was . . . I shouldn’t have done that. I didn’t mean to. I . . . I’m not always as in control of myself as I should be.”
She could feel him slipping away, curling back in on himself, running away from whatever sort of bond they’d started to make. Quick, she asked, “What else can you do?” He glanced back up, and she flashed him a smile. Aro should’ve gotten up the stones to do this—he was so much better at charming people, pulling out answers slow and careful like pulling a worm from the earth, gentle so it came out whole instead of leaving behind broken pieces of itself. Rora could get good enough answers with the tip of a dagger, but that wasn’t always the best way, not when answers were dug in deep. “I like to know everything I can about everything,” she said, trying to sound all innocent, “and I don’t know anything about mages.”
Anddyr shrugged, twisting the horse’s mane again. “I can perform many spells—there are more spells than any one mage could ever learn.”
“Then how d’you learn to do any of ’em? Does it just . . . happen?”
“No—well, not usually. Control is the first thing a mage learns, so that it doesn’t ‘just happen.’ That’s the most dangerous thing for a mage . . . not being in control.” He looked down at his hands again for a bit, then shook himself and looked up at Rora, like meeting her eyes was a test he wasn’t sure he’d pass. “All mages are taught at the Academy. We learn as much as we can in five years, and then we’re free to do as we please.”
Rora didn’t ask the obvious question, which was how Anddyr ended up with Joros when it didn’t exactly seem to be by his choice. Instead, she asked, “So this place . . . the Academy, it’s just full of mages?”
That little smile went on Anddyr’s face again. “Yes. It’s rather like an anthill. Everyone with a job to do, everyone helping each other out.” That seemed like a topic he could warm up to, his face going clearer than she’d seen it yet, his eyes bright on hers even though there was still some red to his cheeks.
It sounded a lot like life in the Canals, truth told, except for the everyone-working-together part. It seemed like a strange thing, that Rora’s life as Scum had been anything like this high-talking witch’s. “So how’d you know?” she asked. “How’d you find out you were a witch?”
“Mage,” he corrected, but there wasn’t any anger behind it, just the same tone Garim’d always used when he’d tried to teach Aro to speak right.
“Mage, right. How’d you know you were a mage?”
Anddyr laughed, and that was enough to make Rora’s eyebrows shoot up. She regretted it right away, because his face looked like it’d just realized how much his mouth had been talking. He turned that bright red again and wouldn’t look at her anymore. “There’s not much mystery to it,” he mumbled. “A young mage . . . makes himself known.”
“How?” Rora prompted when it seemed like he wasn’t going to say any more.
He fidgeted a bit, but it seemed like he won an argument with himself to keep talking. “The signs started when I was young. It’s usually fire—when I was angry, things near me would start afire with no reason, or fires would go out if I got scared. Pottery would crack if I got sad. The sorts of things that don’t just happen on their own. My parents knew what that meant, and so they took me to the Academy. The masters tested me for power, and accepted me when they found it.”
“So things would just happen, without you being able to control it?”
“That is what I said,” Anddyr murmured.
Rora rode next to him for a while longer, trying to decide if she could dig out any more answers or if Anddyr’d break apart if she pulled any harder. Finally she said, “Thank you,” and tapped her heels into her horse’s sides without waiting to see if Anddyr’d look back up at her. She rode up next to Aro, but didn’t look over at him either. She was sure he’d heard every word.
Time passed strange, traveling on the twisting roads. Rora’d never been outside Mercetta till now, and the days themselves seemed different. It’d feel like it’d only been a few days since Joros’d found them, and then she’d realize Aro had more’n a week’s worth of beard growing on his usually smooth cheeks, that more time had gone by than she could keep a hold on. They rode into a village and the Northman rumbled that it was the last they’d find before they left Fiatera. It’d started to snow near right after he said the words, like the sky itself was giving them a warning. Didn’t stop them from pushing on, after they’d bought as much food as they could. Rora got herself a nice cloak lined with fur, probably the finest thing she’d owned since what she’d stolen from Nadaro Madri, and stealing wasn’t quite owning.
After they’d left that last village behind, the road faded away into scraggly grass that got covered by snow, and they slept on the cold ground, and didn’t run into any other travelers, and had only each other for company. It got so cold that even talking got to be a chore, an open mouth like an invitation for the cold to seep down into your bones. They rode quiet, and slept around big fires. It seemed like the merra cared about having a fire more’n she cared about food to cook over it, and mostly the Northman seemed set on keeping her happy. Didn’t seem like she ever was happy, but maybe he kept her from being a raging horror.
There was nothing to mark the change, but up at the head of the group, the Northman rumbled, “We are in the North.”
“How d’you know?” Aro asked.
The Northman gave him a look that didn’t seem to hold any emotion at all. “I know.”
No one else questioned him.
“Anddyr,” Joros called, and the witch rode up next to his master. Joros passed him a pouch and Anddyr held on to it with both hands, his eyes closed and his face screwed up. His hand shot out all sudden, finger pointing in a direction that looked no different’n any other. Joros took the pouch back, tucked it safely away.
“What was that?” Aro demanded, riding up right next to Anddyr. “What’d you just do?”
The witch just blinked like he was staring into the sun, and it was Joros who answered: “My servant and Northman friend share the task of guide.”
“But what’d he do?”
Instead of giving an answer, Joros turned his horse to line up with Anddyr’s pointing finger, and the journey continued.
Rora rode up, Aro a beat behind her, to ride next to Joros. “We’re gonna start needing some answers,” she said.
“Then you’d do best to seek them elsewhere,” Joros said evenly.
“What is it you’re looking for?” Aro asked. “What’s in the North?”
“An item of personal value but of no meaning to you.”
“Then what d’you need us for?”
“I don’t know that I will.” Joros wasn’t looking at either of them, his words coming out with their ends clipped off like a caged bird’s wings. “If I don’t, you’ll have received a few weeks’ respite from being hunted.”
“And what if you do need us?” Rora asked.
He did look at her then, and his voice was hard as rock: “Have you heard the expression ‘don’t test the gift of a blade’?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Aro demanded, but Rora and Joros were too caught up with staring to answer him. “We need to know what we’re doing here,” he went on, but he was all bluster, and Joros knew it. They just ignored him, and even though Joros was the first one to look away, it didn’t feel like Rora’d won anything. His eyes just stayed fixed on the direction Anddyr’d pointed, and there were no answers to pull out of him.
Quietly, Rora dropped back. The witch was there, riding just behind Joros like always. Pausing next to him, she kept her eyes ahead and her voice low as she said, “I suppose it’d be too much to hope you might have some answers?”
His face went red, then green, staring like her at a sick dog too stupid to know good food from bad. He swallowed a few times, then just shook his head. Rora nodded, and dropped back farther.
Time was hard to keep a hold on in the white blanket of the North. The sky turned to gray, like the clouds were huddling together for warmth, like even the sun couldn’t reach through. The nights were darker than the days, but not by so much. Worst, the cold was like a live thing that found its way into any clothes, brushing against skin and stealing any warmth it could wrap its fingers around. It bit away at Rora, who was used to living in a packed-full city, where the air shimmered above the canals just with the heat of the day. The Northman, wrapped up in a cloak almost as white as the snow but dotted with old stains, he was the only one who seemed not to feel the cold. He gave it to Rora, that bear-head cloak, handed it over without a word as she sat shivering on her horse. That made the merra spitting mad, but she did it silently, just glaring murder at Rora’s back even harder than before. She refused to speak to any of them for a while, even the Northman, who seemed like the only person in the world she didn’t hate.
They saw heavy clouds in the distance the next day, but the closer they got, the clearer it got that they weren’t actually clouds. Without any of them agreeing to it, they all stopped to stare. You could see parts of a wooden wall from so far away, but smoke covered most of it, and it didn’t look like there was much wall left under all the smoke anyway.
“What happened here?” the merra asked softly, and it sounded like the first time she hadn’t been happy to see a fire.
“A raid,” the Northman said, and there still wasn’t anything in his voice besides the words. “There is always a raid.”
“It’s one of the convict camps?”
“It was. It has been. Aardanel.”
Aro piped up at that: “That’s a Northern word?”
“Aye. A Northern name, but a southern place.”
“What’s it mean?” Rora asked softly.
“Lost hope.”
Joros snorted. “We’ll stop there,” he said. “They’ll give us fresh horses, enough supplies to last us.”
“No,” the Northman said. Just a simple word, and it made Joros’s face go a bright red, but somehow none of ’em thought to fight against that one little word. Scal turned his horse, and the merra followed him. Rora was happier about sticking by the Northman than by Joros, and Aro would always stick with her, so they turned, too. Joros with his red face finally followed, the witch trailing after him like always, face and body frozen in a flinch like he expected to be hit any second.
With the nights as gray as the days, they stopped for sleep when Joros decided he was tired. The trees stopped like someone’d drawn a line on the ground that they couldn’t grow past, and that meant no more fires. They slept cold, all lying close to try to hold on to what warmth they had. The merra would mutter her prayers all through the night, just loud enough to be annoying, just annoying enough to make sleep hard.
The Northman showed them how to find a hard, black berry that grew under certain patches of snow, and he could usually bring down hares with his shortbow. He got a fox once, white as the bear cloak he hadn’t asked Rora to give back. They ate the meat raw, all slippery and stringy, but it made your stomach stop howling if you could choke down enough of it. Anddyr only ate the berries, until Joros ordered him to eat the raw meat. The witch got down a mouthful and brought it back up right away. They didn’t give him any more after that.
Whatever it was, the witch did his magic with the pouch more often, finger always pointing off to somewhere that didn’t look any kind of special. Joros already had a short temper, but it got shorter the longer they went without finding whatever he was looking for. He set to beating the witch one night, not for any real reason, and his elbow took Rora in the nose when she tried to pull him off. The Northman grabbed Joros by the neck and threw him into the snow, stood at the center of the huddled witch, the pissed Joros, and the bleeding Rora. Joros was no kind of idiot, so he just sat where he fell and glared for a while, and Rora kept her eyes sharp on him while blood from her nose froze on her face.
Aro’s horse broke a leg, slipping on a spot of ice as Aro slipped from its back. The Northman cut the screaming horse’s throat as Anddyr, sobbing, cradled the horse’s nose against his chest. They ate horse meat that night, still warm enough that it steamed in the cold, all of them except the witch.
When they set off again, Joros ordered his witch to give Aro his horse. Anddyr trudged through the snow, far behind the rest of them. Rora finally rode back, holding out her hand to help pull the witch up behind her. Even through the bear cloak, his hands were gentle around her waist. They didn’t speak a word, any of them. Opening your mouth let out too much warmth.
They’d stopped to sleep three times since passing by the burned-up place. It was hard to know just how many days that was, since it seemed like the sun was always fighting to break through the clouds and the snow, night and day the same flat gray. It was the second time since waking that Joros rode back with his face all fury to hand Anddyr the pouch. It seemed like the witch’s whole body shook where he sat behind Rora, knuckles white around the pouch. It came all sudden, the weight of him suddenly gone as he fell clean off Rora’s horse. He landed in a sprawl, but it wasn’t enough to knock the air from him, and he used that breath to laugh and laugh and laugh, face stretched in a crazy grin and his eyes bright with triumph as they met Joros’s.