The following weeks passed in a haze of walking from dawn till dusk. Of cold camps, made in haste and broken before sunrise. Of dreams of burning, and ghosts numbering themselves before they disappeared.
Seven.
Nine.
Fifteen.
Twenty.
Twenty-eight.
Of slipping away with Tieran, any night the moon was out. Though Anya had begun to hit a target reliably with a thrown blade, it still felt like too little from too close. It worried her, as Tieran explained how to drive a knife through the ribs to pierce the lungs or the liver, to think that perhaps the creature she intended to kill did not have lungs or a liver, or flesh that could be damaged at all.
But she said nothing of her pervasive fears, or her true reason for wanting to learn to do violence. And if Tieran ever seemed troubled by her determination and the relentlessness of her focus, well—with a look or a word she could ignite the spark between them, kissing him until his hands trembled and flashed like quicksilver and any doubt slipped from his mind. He’d proved an easy mark, this changeling thief, and Anya tried to ignore the soul-deep unease that ate away at her when she surreptitiously held his hand, or when he looked at her and she caught sadness in his eyes. Perhaps she had not been entirely honest, but he knew she was going to the mountain. What more was needed? That much was enough to warn him they’d never have a happy ending. She wasn’t keeping him entirely in the dark.
And then one day, after a fortnight of unforgiving travel, it was simply there.
The wanderers had carried on walking under cover of darkness for hours the previous night, eager to reach the city of Banevale and the god’s mountain beyond, knowing their goal was close at hand. When Anya woke in the cold gray light before dawn, sore from weeks of travel, she could see it on the horizon.
The mountain. Bane Nevis. Her beginning and her end.
A few of the wanderers were stirring already, but most kept to their scant bedrolls. It was cold at night in the northlands, which were wild, barren places. The roads they traveled now were not sunken lanes and hollow ways but faint footpaths across wind-torn and heather-clad moors. Matthias and Lee traded off leading the group, picking their way forward carefully at the head of the straggling procession, and more than once Anya had been struck by the thought that even without her crimson band, she’d found as much support on the road as any Weatherell girl had ever been given. The realization made it worse, to know that she would soon leave the wanderers without a word or a thank-you and attempt the unthinkable. The unholy.
Shivering, she made her way to the edge of the haphazard, open encampment. Morning was coming on clear and fine, and rosy light already softened the distant mountain’s face. It was no young and jagged peak, but an ancient thing, worn down by weather and time. It sat amid a range of lesser precipices, and something in Anya splintered as she looked at it. She felt herself fragment, breaking down into yet smaller pieces, and it had been a lie when she told Tieran that a little more damage couldn’t possibly hurt. It took her breath away—the sight of that gray, weathered mountain, the knowledge of what waited on its heights, the fire that seared everything within her, burning her up from the inside out. Anya wrapped her arms about her middle and stood utterly still, wishing that she, too, could be impervious stone.
“It cuts at you, seeing it for the first time. Don’t you think?”
When Anya turned, it was not Tieran standing an arm’s length away, but Ella.
“First I saw it was in winter,” the other girl went on, soft and wistful as she fixed her eyes on the peak. “All that gray was covered up with snow, white and fair against a far blue sky. It was beautiful. And it hurt to look at.”
Anya stole a glance at her, quiet and gentle, yet radiating a sort of confidence. Ella was certain of her people and her place in the world, in a way Anya herself had never been. And at last, she found it in her to ask what truth Ella and Janie had meant to tell her the night of the cautionary play.
“Ella?” Anya said. “Who are all of you? Why do you choose to stay hidden?”
“It’s not much of a choice,” the girl said with a slight smile. “Or at least, Mum and Matthias say it didn’t feel like one when we first set out.”
Anya waited and Ella gave her a searching look. “We don’t… tell many folk the truth of this, you know. There are wanderers like us across Albion, and not all of them have our reasons for it. Some fell on hard times, some like the freedom, some were born to the life and can’t imagine any other way of being. It’s not easy—the Elect and Albion’s lords never approve, but they’re more at odds with us than with others. Or at least, the Elect are.”
“Whatever the truth is, you can trust me with it,” Anya said. “I’m certainly carrying secrets of my own.”
“Aren’t we all?” Ella said. Letting out a breath, she nodded. “Well then, Anya. Welcome to Weatherell. Or what’s left of our version of it.”
Ice lanced through Anya. “What? I don’t understand.”
Ella’s expression grew pained. “No. Mum and Matthias didn’t either, when we first took to the low roads. They’d thought we were the only ones. But we weren’t, and we aren’t. The Elect have copies of Weatherell all across Albion—villages cut off to raise spotless lambs for the sacrifice. Best we can tell, a girl goes out to the god every year—some years more than one is sent, if the monster on that mountain is restless.”
Anya could not look away from the distant gray shape of Bane Nevis, and it felt as if all the world were shifting beneath her.
“Mum was one of the girls who went from our village,” Ella continued. “The god twisted her spine, and that’s what gives her trouble walking. She’s stubborn and never complains, but I know it’s been worse than ever this year. When Janie and I were still little things, she told Matthias she was leaving with us, so we’d never be pushed into what she did. Matthias was our Arbiter back then—can you even imagine him as an Arbiter?—and he’d never yet had to send a girl out. The Elect kept him in the dark about a great many things, because despite his position, they didn’t trust him. I suppose they were right not to. He says the job didn’t fit him, on account of him and one of the selectmen carrying a flame for each other. They could never say anything, or even let on how they felt. And when Mum told Matthias she was going, he knew she was doing the brave and right thing, and that if the rest of the village didn’t have the courage to follow, they’d be worse than cowards.”
Anya shivered and wrapped her arms about herself. She could not even imagine such a thing happening in her own Weatherell. Arbiter Thorn was unfalteringly strict and stringent in his application of the Cataclysm’s requirements, and Willem—well. Willem was who she was.
“So those of us who were willing left,” Ella said. “In the dead of night one spring, we disappeared. Matthias’s selectman wouldn’t come, and Mum said if our father hadn’t died of flux a few years back, she doubted he would have left either. Mum and Matthias cut our village in half to do what they knew to be right. I was little yet, but I remember creeping away, and those first days on the road. None of us are who we were then—we’ve all taken new names, and been changed by the traveling and by living out here at the edges. But Mum and Matthias still say we’d have lost ourselves if we’d stayed and kept on watching our girls suffer to keep us safe. This way, we chose who we became. I think they’re right in that. Always have done.”
Anya hesitated. She glanced back at the encampment and saw that while many of the wanderers were up and ready, none were within earshot of herself and Ella. The girl’s quiet thoughtfulness made her brave, and she decided to risk speaking of something she’d never so much as hinted at since leaving Weatherell.
“Has no one tried to end the god?” she asked, her voice low, fire burning hot and bitter in her belly. “Has no one ever decided to cut this trouble off at the root?”
“Five times, that I know of,” Ella said without hesitation. “I’ve asked Matthias the same thing. The Romans tried, when they first woke the god. Sent a centuria of men—eighty souls, all told—up that mountain. Every one of them died in torment. Those were bad days, and the Elect don’t speak of them. For years after, the god ravaged the north country, killing countless folk. So the Romans built walls clear across the countryside, which did little to stop him, and finally they declared this land cursed, and left it altogether. There was no peace until the Elect had already risen and begun to worship the god and sent out the first offering.”
With the sun warming it, Bane Nevis looked serene and untouchable, as if it could not possibly have weathered so much trouble, and seen so much bloodshed on its vast gray slopes.
“And the others?” Anya asked.
“Two more groups made it up the mountain,” Ella said. “Both failed and died and brought about a year of terror afterward, as the god refused to rest. Another two were found out by the Elect before they ever reached Bane Nevis and put to death in ways crueler than even the god could manage, to spare the north the devastation another failure would bring. The last attempt was over a hundred years back. No one tries anymore.”
Nearby, Ilva took shape like a will o’ the wisp, and stared at Anya with mournful corpse eyes.
Has one of us ever tried? Anya wanted to ask. A Weatherell girl, I mean?
But it felt too close to the heart, and she could not bear to speak her truth within sight of the mountain, so she kept silent.
“Lee says we’d best get moving,” Tieran said from behind them, and both Anya and Ella turned. The thief stood hunched into the oilskin coat like a disgruntled crow, all spines and discontentment. His eyes shifted from Anya to the mountain, and without another word Tieran strode back to camp.
“Don’t think I’ve ever seen him so anxious before, and not light out for elsewhere,” Ella said. “You’ve worked wonders with the boy.”
But it was not enough for Anya. She found herself hungry, here within sight of the end. Starving for life and contact and gladness and a certain future. For more of a chance than she in her collar, or Janie and Ella with their ceaseless wandering, had been given.
If this was how it had felt to be Ilva, always yearning for more and better, she wondered how her wild sister hadn’t flown apart.
The first sign that things would be different in Banevale came when Matthias and Lee called a halt in the afternoon, before the city had even come into view. They broke the wanderers up into little groups—no more than three or four together at most. Everyone was given instructions as to where to enter the city, what names to give, which guards to bribe and which to avoid altogether. A map was passed around, with entire sections of Banevale engulfed in alarming red-painted circles.
“Anya, you’re with Tieran,” Matthias said gruffly when the wanderers had already begun to scatter, and in spite of the mountain, Anya felt a small lightening of her soul, followed by an immediate stab of remorse and dread.
Not long now. Not long until she did the leaving.
Banevale was not at all like Sarum, which had been busy and dirty and loud, nor like Oxnaforde with its glistening streets and glittering lights and crowds of happy people. The mountain towered over the city, a constant and undeniable presence, and the entire place was surrounded by an old Roman wall, kept in immaculate condition.
Through the nearest gate, Anya could see a line of people waiting to exit, but she and Tieran were the only ones on their way in.
“Just keep quiet and let me talk,” he said, taking her hand, and she anchored herself with that—with the touch of his skin, warm against her own.
At the gate, a pair of bored guards in blue-and-black uniforms were looking over travel papers or openly accepting bribes. They glanced quickly at Tieran and Anya, and then one held out a hand. She was an older woman, perhaps Willem’s age, with a self-assured way about her.
Tieran passed the guard a heavy gold coin, his half of the exchange moving so swiftly it was as if the coin had appeared on the guard’s palm by magic.
“Names and purpose of travel?” the guard asked.
“Tieran and Anya of Stull, brother and sister, here to see about bringing our cousin Esme out to Essex with us till the city’s safe again,” Tieran said without hesitation. “Just her, though, the rest of her family stays, and she’ll be coming back—don’t want too many people shifting about, and we’ll get papers sorted for her before going. To be honest I think my uncle and aunt’ll be glad to see the last of our Esme for a while—she’s a bit of a lazy one, she is.”
The words tumbled out of him, jovial and assured, as if, just as he claimed, he’d been born with lies on his tongue instead of truth. But when Anya gripped his hand tighter, he gave hers a reassuring squeeze in return.
“And you?” the guard said, turning to Anya. Her gaze was intent, searching up and down, though Anya couldn’t sort out what she was looking for. “What do you think about your shiftless cousin Esme coming to stay?”
“No use asking her nothing,” Tieran cut in before Anya could speak. “She’s mute, see. Not much luck in my family when it comes to the girls.”
Anya shot Tieran a glowering look and he returned it with a bland and innocent stare.
“Well, I don’t envy you your journey home, with a mute sister and a lazy cousin,” the guard said with a smile. Her gaze cut again to Anya, who fixed her eyes instinctively on the ground. “Here’re your entry papers. You’re to present them if a guard ever asks, so we know you came in properly and were accounted for at the gates. Move on then, boy.”
Nodding, Tieran drew Anya through the gate and on into the city.
“Look, it was either I make you mute or a liar too,” the thief muttered as they passed out of earshot of the guards. “And much as you like to pretend to be the last, I know telling falsehoods doesn’t sit right with you—can see it in your eyes every time you twist the truth. Maybe you lie, Anya, but that doesn’t make you a liar. You don’t lie about what matters, either—think if I could see through to the heart of you, there’d be only true things.”
Anya slipped her hand out of his, suddenly unable to bear the touch. She feared she’d burn him, with the fire beneath her skin, the force and scope of the lies even he hadn’t been able to see.
They hadn’t got far from the gate when a sound of booted feet came hurrying along behind them. Tieran glanced anxiously about, but the road they traveled on was busy, the buildings on either side pressed up against each other with no convenient alleyways to bolt down.
“You there,” the Nevis guard who’d questioned them at the gate called out. “I need a word.”
Tieran squared his shoulders staunchly and stepped in front of Anya, but the guard shook her head.
“Not with you, boy. With the girl.”
“It’s all right, Tieran,” Anya assured him under her breath, before approaching the guard.
“Anya Astraea,” the woman said bluntly, “it’s no good pretending you’re anyone else. We’ve been keeping an eye on you since you first appeared on the road.”
“Well, who hasn’t?” Anya said with some irritation. It seemed every shadowy power in Albion was following her progress, and she hated the idea of being watched, whether she could see her audience or not. “I don’t see what business my journey is of yours, though. I’m here on behalf of the Elect.”
“Everything that happens in Banevale is Lord Nevis’s business,” the guard said, taking no notice of Anya’s frustration. “And most of what happens in Albion, besides. If he has his way, the Elect will hold less power before long.”
Anya stayed stubborn. She could not falter this close to the mountain—could not let on that she was anything less than holy, and a perfect offering. “All of that may be your Lord Nevis’s business, but it isn’t mine. I’m meant for climbing a mountain and placating the god. No more, no less.”
The woman fixed Anya with an incisive stare. “You wouldn’t want more if you could have it?”
Anya swallowed. “No.”
Still unconvinced, the guard held something out. A small, unremarkable coin, one face stamped with the god’s mountain and the other a smooth blank.
“If you ever change your mind, just leave this sitting out. It doesn’t matter where you are—we have people everywhere. Once you do, Lord Nevis will ensure your safety.”
Reluctantly, Anya reached out and took the coin. “I won’t be needing this. But thank you for your concern, I suppose.”
The guard nodded. “I’ll relay your thanks to Lord Nevis. Good day to you.”
And with that she was gone. Anya turned back to Tieran, who’d been watching all along.
“They’re uncommon interested in you,” he said. “Nevis is always making trouble, and I think someday he’ll have it out with the Elect, but I’ve never known him try so hard to push a Weatherell girl off her path.”
“They haven’t succeeded, and they won’t,” Anya said, entirely truthfully. She couldn’t be pushed off a Weatherell girl’s true path, not when she’d never really been on it.
“Well, if you mean to do what you set out for, you got a plan from this point on?” Tieran asked as they walked side by side through Banevale’s too-quiet streets. There were not enough people about, and everywhere, doors were closed tight and windows shuttered. The air smelled vaguely of ashes, too, and in some places gaps showed between buildings, filled with charred and smoking rubble.
“Wait till tomorrow morning,” Anya said. “Then put my collar on, find the Elect, and finish what I started.”
She chose her words with care, adding layers to her lies, so that he might not see all the way to the truth. Sure enough, Tieran gave her a disbelieving look.
“You dodged the Elect all the way here only to have them see you off at the end? Not likely.”
Anya gave the appearance of relenting. “Well, all right. I’m not going to do what I ought to. I’ll go quietly at first light, on my own, and get things done without a fuss.”
“I’ll see you off,” Tieran said. “Don’t care what I told you, or what anyone else did. I can be here for that, Anya. I can stay for you.”
“Thank you,” Anya murmured. What she did not say was that it was the wanderers she intended to slip, and not the Elect. It would not be tomorrow that she went, but tonight, as soon as she was able to get away unnoticed. And Tieran the thief would certainly not be given an opportunity to see her off. It would break her yet again to have him do so, and she could not endure it—not here, with her task and her vengeance scant miles away.
As they walked on, the streets grew not just quiet, but abandoned. The city turned into a dwelling fit for ghosts, and Ilva peered around every corner. Then, quite suddenly, they reached a place of utter devastation.
A square opened up before them, and beyond it lay the city’s northern wall, right up against the lowest slopes of Bane Nevis itself. The wall, so well maintained elsewhere, had been blown to pieces. A vast, rubble-strewn hole gaped in it, the edges blackened with scorch marks. Trails of burned and broken cobbles led off into unknown sections of the lifeless city, and here and there immense, charred handprints blossomed upon the walls of buildings, cracks radiating out from the god’s destructive touch.
“Don’t look,” Tieran said under his breath, “don’t look, it’s all right, you don’t have to look,” and Anya could not be sure if he was speaking to himself or to her.
For her part, she looked. She fixed her gaze on the scale of the devastation the god had wrought and let it sink down into the very deepest parts of her soul. She let her fire answer his until it seemed as if the word vengeance rang from the empty housetops and echoed from the sides of the mountain itself.
Vengeance is mine
I will repay
And Ilva’s words, whispered back from every alleyway and shadowed corner, tangled together with that louder refrain.
Don’t go. Don’t let anyone else—
Vengeance is mine
I will repay
“Come on,” Anya said fiercely to Tieran. “Let’s not stand about, I want to get this over with.”
The wanderers had already begun to gather in a disused mill at the center of a near-abandoned section of Banevale. Pigeons roosted among the rafters, making soft, frowsy sounds, and the whole place smelled of dust and bird droppings. A few doors led off the mill floor to small storerooms, but after looking them over, the wanderers kept to the expansive open space at the mill’s center. The mood among them was hushed and expectant, and Anya sat restlessly at Tieran’s side as Matthias and Lee got up to speak.
“I’ve put out word that we’re in Banevale, with the intention of assisting anyone who wants to leave without the permission of the guard or the Elect,” Lee said without preamble. Her voice was strong and even, but she looked tired and a little sad. Anya couldn’t even imagine Philomena or Sylvie braving the road north a second time, as Lee had done. Willem, perhaps, might manage it if necessary, but it would be wrath that carried her, not the resolute compassion that fueled the wanderers.
“We’ll let a few good people know where we can be found, so the news will spread,” Lee went on. “By day some of us’ll go into the city, looking for anyone who seems like they might want help. The rest will stay here, to sort out whoever turns up. Matthias and me will buy spare packs and travel rations, so we don’t have to send folk away with nothing—you all know better than most what a blow it is to leave everything behind, even if it’s just for a while. We’ll outfit those we give a hand to until our money runs out. If you’ve got a bit set aside and want to chip in, that’s kind of you. If you can’t, there’s no shame in it.”
Anya watched as a number of the wanderers, spread across the dim, echoing space of the mill floor, began to search through their packs and pockets.
“We won’t pretend to you that what we’re doing isn’t a risk,” Matthias said, straightforward as always. “But it’s something we all agreed to before heading north. Should anyone turn up here who seems like other than what they say, you turn them away without a second thought. If they so much as look at you strangely, or give you an odd feeling in the pit of your stomach, you heed that warning. We’ve all been on the road too long and been through too much not to trust ourselves and each other. Better we turn aside one or two on a faulty suspicion than have all of us fall into the hands of the Elect, or even the guard. We’ll be using the old tunnels under Brewer’s Square to get folk out this time, but if you end up in a tight spot, a guard named Wicks at the northeast gate is a friend too.”
A thought struck Anya as she glanced over at Janie and Ella. The sisters sat side by side, Ella’s head resting on Janie’s shoulder.
“Tieran,” she said under her breath. “The Elect always want the girl who goes to the god to choose it for herself. So why do they bother making life difficult for all of you? Why do the wanderers have to hide, just because they preferred not to be another Weatherell?”
“Someone told you who they all are, then?” Tieran asked, and Anya nodded.
“Ella did.”
The thief shrugged. “Trouble is, you think if anyone else knew they could leave—like this Weatherell done—they’d stay and watch their girls suffer? They’d all try to get out from under the Elect, and there’d be no one left, and it wouldn’t be just Banevale that ended in flames.”
Tieran spoke the words tersely, as if it hurt to dredge them up and speak them.
“It’s cruel,” Anya whispered, drawing her knees up and resting her chin on her arms. “All of it.”
“Think I don’t know that, sitting here next to you?” Tieran said.
As darkness gathered over Banevale, deep-voiced bells tolled throughout the city, the sound echoing back from the slopes of Bane Nevis.
“They’re curfew bells,” Janie explained. She’d drafted her sister, Tieran, and Anya to help her fill packs with rations and blankets for anyone taking to the low roads, and they all sat together in a circle, working quickly by firelight.
“The god only comes down from Nevis after dark, so folk are supposed to be locked up indoors. Some can’t, though, on account of working late in the woolen mills, or running messages, or being corner girls. Others don’t care—they think themselves righteous enough, and that the god wouldn’t visit his wrath on them if they crossed his path.”
“So he’ll be here tonight?” Anya asked. She felt dizzy with the knowledge, but forced herself to stay placid, to keep on with the work at hand.
“Maybe,” Janie said. “Some nights he comes, some he doesn’t. They say he walks the city more nights than not, though. That it’s getting worse, and he’s roaming farther. If he’s not checked, eventually he’ll move past Banevale and start preying on the villages beyond.”
Anya scrambled to her feet.
“Going to bed,” she murmured. “I’m worn out.”
Halfway to where she’d left her bedroll, Tieran caught her up.
“Anya?”
“Yes?”
He sighed. “Nothing. Just… don’t leave without saying goodbye.”
Stepping forward, Tieran bent and pressed a kiss to her forehead, gentle and delicate in the way of a wild thing. Anya fought a ferocious urge to cling to him—to tell him all of her truths, and to warn him that she was likely on her way to her own end, and that he ought not to break his heart over her.
But the words stuck in her throat. She wanted to leave with him still thinking she was good and righteous, rather than this creature she’d become. A bitter soul, half alive and haunted, unable to shake her ghosts or her fate or her guilt.
So Anya lied to Tieran. She lied to him more cruelly than she’d ever done before, and she did it with a smile on her face.
“I’d never,” she said. “I want you to know when I go, so you can watch for when I come back.”
For an interminable stretch of time Anya lay on her side on her bedroll, eyes shut tight, feigning sleep. Finally the hum of the wanderers’ quiet, purposeful activity subsided. Fires were doused, blankets laid out, and silence fell over the mill.
Anya sat up.
Halfway across the mill floor, Ilva stood beside the embers of the encampment’s central fire. So close to the mountain, she was hardly a ghost—more a wraith, the suggestion of someone who had once been human. Her once-lovely eyes were preternaturally large, turned to vast wells of grief, and her mouth, as she counted the dead, worked in a stomach-churning, unnatural way.
One, Ilva wept, her voice like wind over old bones. Two. Three.
On and on she counted, numbering the girls Anya had seen die and vanish, until more spirits glimmered to life before her.
Forty-eight.
Forty-nine.
Fifty.
Each counted herself and vanished, leaving only Anya, among all the living, to number the sorrowful dead.
Staring at the final shreds of her sister’s tormented spirit, Anya could not bear the thought of bringing still more of her up the mountain. The god had been tearing Ilva to pieces since before she and Anya were born—they’d inherited a legacy of injustice and brokenness. Anya would not bring even a shattered fragment of Ilva into his presence again.
Soundlessly, she crept between the wanderers to where Tieran slept. Slipping her hand beneath the bundled blanket that served him for a pillow, she drew out two of his short, sharp-edged blades. In its place, she left the bone knife crafted from the last remnant of her sister.
It was as much of an apology and as much of her heart as Anya could spare, this side of the mountain.
From there it was only a few steps out of the mill and into the night air, and it all but killed Anya not to look back. She felt utterly low—only a shade less bleak than in the moments after Ilva died. But she did not look back, and she did not give in. She let the fire in her grow to an unrelenting heat, and left the wanderers and her thief behind.