Anya was unaccountably restless. In less time than she’d thought possible, the wanderers had entirely reorganized themselves, galvanized by their encounter with the unfortunate party from Banevale. They’d left the travelers in the care of their own elders and families with small children, and Matthias and Lee had been up well before dawn, settling all those who could not risk the journey north on an expansive and out-of-the-way farm in the vicinity, whose caretakers were sympathetic to their plight.
Since then, they’d moved fast, heading north at a brisk pace, stopping seldom, and then only for a few minutes at a time. Anya was anxious on Lee’s behalf, but though the older woman’s limp seemed more pronounced and there was a grim set to her mouth, she was as matter-of-fact and good-humored as ever, never letting out a complaint. Ella and Janie kept close to her too, and Anya noticed Matthias and Janie in quiet conversation in the early afternoon, after which the stops grew more frequent, though no lengthier.
Anya herself drifted between the wanderers, but as the day wore on, impatience and anxiety rose up in her. The sense of being on edge only intensified when she fell in with Matthias and Tieran, so she walked aimlessly along the sunken lane, moving from group to group, pretending to be checking on the ever-gregarious Midge.
But Anya had no taste for the idle conversation others attempted to draw her into, and by the evening halt, she found herself reluctantly returning to Matthias at the head of the band. To her annoyance, Tieran was gone. She’d seen him walking with Matthias not half an hour ago, and now there was no sign of him. It wasn’t that she particularly wanted to see him—in fact, she’d rather avoid him after the embarrassing way she’d bared her soul the night before—but it irritated her that he’d disappeared.
“He went up top,” Matthias said long-sufferingly, after Anya sighed for the third time in as many minutes. They were making a cold camp along the low road—no fires, dried rations, bedrolls spread along the packed earth of the lane. “I’ll boost you up.”
“Oh no, I—” Anya began to protest, but Matthias raised a hand.
“You’re not staying here with me, not when you’re all nervous edges.”
Anya frowned.
“You know, you’re much nicer to Tieran sometimes than you are to me,” she complained, though there was no bitterness behind the words. Matthias was unfailingly kind to everyone, even if he did fuss a little more over the thief he’d raised.
In answer, Matthias only got to his feet and held out a hand. “This is me being nice to you. You’ll figure that out eventually. Go on, then.”
Putting a foot into his cupped hands, Anya let herself be helped out of the hollow way and into the tangled woods above. As soon as she scrambled upright, a rhythmic sound that had been muffled by the earthen walls of the sunken lane caught her attention. It was not unlike the familiar noise of wood being split for the hearth, but softer, and more even. With a glance back at the wanderers, Anya headed in the direction of the sound.
It led her to a small clearing a quarter mile from the low road. At the center of the open space, Tieran paced back and forth. The same uneasiness rising to a fever pitch in Anya seemed to have afflicted him as well, the only difference being he’d found himself an outlet of sorts. In each hand, the thief held one of his throwing knives. All his restless energy had been honed to a point, and as he paced he would occasionally stop or turn, and launch one of the blades at a distant tree, or both blades in quick succession. That was the sound Anya had heard—the dull impact of a cutting edge striking wood—and as she stood watching Tieran, her lips parted.
Anya thought, suddenly, of her intention in traveling to the mountain and of the bone knife she carried. Seeing Tieran work so capably set despair uncurling in her belly. What was her intent, after all, but idle fancy? However powerful her wish for vengeance, she’d been brought up in peace and bred for one thing—sacrifice. She was made to shatter and made to suffer, and it was foolishness to grasp for anything else.
“Show me how to do that,” she said, before she could wish the words back.
Tieran did not startle at the sound of her voice, but he glanced over swiftly, uncertainty written across his face.
“Don’t think Weatherell girls are supposed to know how to throw knives,” he said, crossing the clearing to pull his blades out of an unoffending tree trunk.
“They’re not supposed to fall in with thieves, either,” Anya pointed out. “Or cut off their collars, or vanish on the high road, or wander about with half-finished prayers inked into their skin. I’m not a very good Weatherell girl, as it turns out.”
“Seem all right to me,” Tieran said.
Anya stepped out from among the trees and went to him.
“Please,” she said. “The world’s harder than I thought it would be. I want… I want to feel less helpless, while walking through it.”
It wasn’t entirely a lie, but nevertheless, the half-truth sat heavy in the pit of her stomach. Tieran was already wavering, though.
“I dunno, I—”
“Tieran.” Anya fixed her eyes on his, refusing to give way. “Don’t make me beg.”
Scrubbing his free hand across his face, the thief nodded. “You ever done this before?”
Anya laughed nervously. “No. I’ve skinned rabbits and butchered goats, but nothing like this.”
It was not Ilva’s ghost that looked out at her from the trees as she answered him and tried to collect her focus. It was a bastard version of the god of the mountain—an amalgamation of the effigy she’d seen at the Elect’s way station, and the creature the cautionary play had brought to life, and the demon that haunted Anya’s own imagining. Tall and shadowy and broad, he stalked the edges of the clearing, never fully visible through the trees, smoke trailing in his wake.
“I’ve never done this before either,” Tieran confessed. “Taught somebody, I mean. Maybe come over here?”
Anya took a step closer.
Tieran shook his head. “No. Closer yet. Like this.”
Reaching out, he pulled Anya nearer still, and turned her gently so her back was to him. It was the night he cut the band from her neck all over again, only this time, Anya knew that the way her heart thundered in her ears had nothing to do with the knives in his hand.
“You’re all tied up in knots, Weatherell girl,” Tieran said quietly. “Can’t throw nothing like that. Shut your eyes and let it go.”
Anya did as she was told, taking several deep breaths. Though her blood still sang in her veins and her pulse ran like a river in spring flood, a bit of the tension drained from her shoulders.
“Better,” Tieran said. “Now stand just so.”
His hands went from Anya’s shoulders to her hips and she did as she was told, shifting her feet, fighting to maintain the slight calm she’d settled into.
“Which hand?” Tieran asked.
“Um. Right.”
He pressed the hilt of a knife to her palm, and she glanced down at it. It was an unappealing, keen-edged thing, fit for violence and not much else. But Tieran arranged Anya’s grip around it as if he had gifted her something precious and fine. He showed her how to draw her arm back and where in the arc of her throw she ought to loosen her grip.
“Think you can manage?”
Anya blinked at the tree towering before them and envisioned the god of the mountain in its place. “We’re awfully close. Shouldn’t we back up a bit?”
She could hear the smile in Tieran’s voice when he answered. “This is plenty far enough for now. Gonna be surprised if you stick it, to be honest.”
Anya scowled and did as she’d been told, staying loose on her feet as Tieran stepped away.
“Don’t forget—keep that wrist locked up,” he cautioned.
The god of the mountain. The god of the mountain before her, wreathed in flame, with Ilva’s name on his monstrous tongue.
Anya threw the knife, and it stuck fast.
She turned on her heel immediately, cutting Tieran off as he began to say something congratulatory.
“Would that kill someone?” she asked.
The thief frowned. “Depends. On what you threw, and who it was, and where you hit them. I don’t do this to kill nobody, just so we’re clear, Anya. You were right—I like sharp things and it’s a trick that earns me a bit of coin if I show it off in market towns. But that’s all.”
Anya pulled her bone knife from its hidden sheath. “Could I kill someone with this? It’s sharper, now you looked after it.”
Tieran gave her a pained look. “Dunno? Expect you could kill somebody with anything, if you wanted it badly enough. That’s not gonna do much if you throw it, though. With that, maybe you could cut someone’s throat? But you’d have to go in from the side and really get your arm into it.”
“Show me,” Anya said, and Tieran pantomimed how it might be done—the thrust of the bone blade in through the side of the throat, the jerk of the arm forward to sever the artery and the windpipe.
When he handed the knife back, Tieran hesitated. “You got someone what wants killing? Because if somebody hurt you, you can just say.”
“No,” Anya lied. “It’s nothing like that. I’m just tired of being afraid, that’s all. Will you show me how to throw again? I want to be sure I remember.”
There was something uneasy in Tieran’s eyes, but he came to her at once and positioned himself behind her. Anya busied herself with finding the right stance, and it wasn’t until she felt the brush of his fingers against the base of her neck that she realized Tieran’s attention had settled on her in a new and entirely different way. When she turned, he drew his hand back quickly, guilt plain on his face.
“What were you—” she began.
Then she remembered the unreadable prayer, etched into the skin of her back. For a moment, she and Tieran only stared at each other, wide-eyed.
“You can read Divinitas,” Anya breathed, and Tieran, to his credit, did not lie. He only nodded miserably.
“Can read it on account of my father, from back before I joined the wanderers.”
“Will you tell me what the words say?” Anya asked, unable to hide her eagerness. “I can’t even read them, we’re only taught Brythonic.”
Tieran shook his head, fierce in his denial. “No. Not gonna do it.”
“Please,” Anya said. “I don’t want to ask the Elect. Not ever. But I don’t want to just live with not knowing, either.”
Fixing his eyes on the ground, Tieran flushed. “You’re wanting a lot from me today, you know that?”
In answer, Anya turned her back to him. She slipped out of her braces and pulled the shirt up over her shoulders, leaving her back laid bare. She could hear Tieran draw in a quavering breath, and then he was closer again, his fingers trailing across her skin.
“It’s from the Cataclysm,” he said. “But I don’t like it. You’re not gonna like it. And it isn’t finished, but I can tell you what the rest would say if it was.”
“Just read.”
Slowly, Tieran spoke the words.
“A garden enclosed is my lamb, my offering;
A spring shut up, a fountain sealed.
Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south;
Blow upon my garden, that the sacrifices thereof may flow out.
Let me come into my garden, and feast upon the offered fruits.
As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters.
My beloved is mine, and I shall feed upon her: I feedeth among the lilies.
Open to me, my lamb,
My love,
My sacrifice,
My undefiled.”
For a long moment, nothing was audible in the clearing but the wind and the night insects, already shrilling as the last dim remnants of daylight faded.
With infinite care, Tieran smoothed Anya’s shirt back into place. She stood as she was, and the tension that had plagued her all day came rising up with a vengeance. It blazed through her like fire, even as she cast her eyes on the woods and saw the shadowy form of the god, dogging her footsteps, haunting her path. This time he had Ilva at his side, one of his ponderous hands on her narrow shoulder, and her face was a mask of agony.
“Anya?” Tieran said. “You all right?”
When she turned to him, all she could feel was flame, searing everything that lay beneath her skin.
“I’m not his,” Anya said adamantly, even as Tieran nodded in agreement. “Whatever they say, whatever they make of me, I’m going to choose what I give or don’t give, and it won’t be all of me, and I’ll never be his. You know that, don’t you?”
“I know,” Tieran said, and he made the words a prayer for her, to rival the injunction written across her back. “You’re your own, and nobody else’s.”
“My own, and nobody else’s,” Anya repeated. “I choose what happens to me until I get to the mountain, and afterward, if I come back down.”
“When you come back down,” Tieran said stubbornly.
Anya reached up and cupped the side of his sharp, clever face with one hand, running her thumb from the corner of his mouth to the line of his jaw.
“I choose what happens to me,” she whispered.
“You do,” Tieran answered, his voice a raw and wanting thing.
And Anya chose. She rose up and kissed Tieran the thief the way a dying girl kisses a boy—with hunger and regret and desperation. She kissed him like a sacrifice, holding nothing of herself back, her hands on his shoulders and on the stubble of his shorn hair. And Tieran, despite his sharpness and his lies and his leaving, kissed her like a worshiper, as if he would lay all of himself out at her request, and count it glory just to be looked upon by his god. They came together and did not part for a long while, and when at last they did, it was Tieran who moved back first. His hands were trembling, shifting from shape to shape, and Anya took them in her own and pressed them to her lips.
“I want to be a knife,” she told him.
“You are,” Tieran swore.
“Make me believe it.”
“Anya Astraea, you could cut me open with a look.”
“With a touch?”
Anya glanced up at her thief. She put a fingertip to his chin and ran it down his neck, his chest, the travel-lean stretch of his abdomen, and before she could go further, Tieran let out a sound that set every part of her alight. He took her by the wrist and pulled her closer and they were kissing again, a wildfire between them, but the burn of it did not feel like blasphemy or vengeance or anger. It felt, to Anya, like shackles cast off. Like the first bright day of a journey that could lead only to joy.
So Anya knew as she kissed Tieran that her heart was a worse liar than the rest of her, and selfish as well. There could be no joyous ending for them, and if she were righteous and fair, she’d pull back now, for the journey she’d set herself upon would only lead to devastation. But Anya could not bear to think of that or to pull away. Instead, she carried on, tangling herself and the thief together, and it was a mystery to her how she could all at once feel so tainted by guilt and radiant with glory.
Something was burning.
Down in the hollow way, smoke hung everywhere, oily and choking, filling the air with a thick gray pall until Anya could not see her hands stretched out before her.
“Tieran?” she called, starting upright from where she lay on her bedroll. “Matthias?”
A fit of coughing seized Anya, bending her double. There was no sign of the camp she’d dozed off at the heart of—everyone was gone. Her eyes smarted and panic clawed at her insides, but the wanderers kept to the low road whenever possible. She could not risk climbing up to clearer air and losing them in the smoke.
“Tieran? Midge?”
Reaching out, Anya felt for one of the sunken lane’s earth walls. Her fingertips hit gritty soil and gnarled tree roots and she stumbled forward, still calling for the wanderers.
“Janie? Ella? Anyone?”
Through the smoke, a noise grew audible over the hammer strikes of Anya’s own heartbeat. Hot and arid, a hiss and snap—the sound of flames eating away at dry fuel. She pushed forward in spite of it, desperate to find the wanderers. But as she rounded a bend in the lane, she stopped short, feet striking something heavy and yielding.
Her eyes shut, and she took a sudden breath, which ended in another fit of coughing. When it had calmed, Anya knelt.
There was a body, propped up against the wall of the sunken lane. As Anya knelt beside it, a gust of wind tore down the hollow way, clearing the shroud of smoke for the first time.
Matthias lay before her, his plain clothes singed and scorched through in places, his face a ruin of crimson and ashen burns. Even in death, he’d found no rest, for his eyes were open, staring farther down the low road to where the remainder of the wanderers lay scattered. Every one of them was utterly still, the sunken road turned to a graveyard.
“Tieran,” Anya whispered, and struggled to her feet, moving unsteadily forward.
At the center of the carnage she found the thief, facedown in the earthen lane. She knew him by the fraying, charred oilskin coat he wore, and by the way he had one arm thrown over Midge’s lifeless body. A piece of Anya knew she shouldn’t look. That she should spare herself the sight of Tieran’s sharp, familiar face.
Instead, she reached out.
As she did, the dim hiss and snap of flames intensified. A new billow of smoke wafted through the hollow way, pouring not from some unseen source, but from Anya herself. Her hand, reaching for Tieran, was a twisted and inhuman thing, wreathed in fire that emanated from her, and yet she did not burn.
It was only those around her who had.
With a sickening jolt and an intake of breath, Anya woke. In the quiet dark of the lane, surrounded by sleeping wanderers, she pressed both hands to her mouth, fighting to keep silent, to stay still, to stop shaking with leftover panic and despair. Everything around her was as it should be—night insects singing in the woods overhead, the camp at perfect peace.
Or almost perfect. Before Anya, in the few feet between her and the wall of the sunken lane, Ilva wavered to life. A trio of girls flickered into being too—strangers this time, the marks of the god’s dread touch unmistakable on each of them.
One, Ilva whispered. Two.
Three, the first of the girls said.
Four, added the next.
Five, said the last.
And after numbering themselves among the dead, they faded entirely, leaving only Ilva to linger a moment longer, her filmy gaze a reproach.
Then Ilva vanished too.
Anya curled in on herself, alone in the dark with the unbearable weight of the guilt she’d carried for as long, it seemed, as she could remember.
Soft noises drifted through the night. Anya stayed just as she was. A blurry, mottled gray-and-black shape appeared before her, and Midge settled down, warm and real and comforting, fitting herself into the curve of Anya’s body with the uncanny and perfect geometry of dogs. As Anya’s arms went around Midge, she felt an equally stolid presence behind her.
“Just gonna sleep here for now if that’s all right?” Tieran murmured, quiet enough not to wake his people. “On account of maybe you could use someone close by.”
Anya nodded. Carefully, Tieran shifted until his back was to hers, and draped the oilskin coat over them both. Little by little, the fear and creeping darkness that had taken hold of Anya subsided, driven back by the sounds of Midge gently snoring, and of her thief humming tunelessly under his breath.
When sleep found her again, she did not dream.