When Anya reached the broken gap in the city wall closest to Bane Nevis, the stones that had been charred and cold hours before were crimson and smoking. She stared at them, and everything in her quailed. She glanced back toward Banevale, where a path of little fires still burned in the god’s wake, flames licking at the cobblestones and at places on the walls he’d touched.
It was, in a way, a good sign. She’d wanted to know the god was off his mountain and out in the city. She had little enough working in her favor—she could at least claim the element of surprise.
A waxing moon lit the slopes of Bane Nevis. Anya was glad of it. She hadn’t thought to bring a light, and the path, although well-worn and marked with occasional red arrows, was treacherous in places and choked with loose stones.
She climbed as quickly as she could, in a panic that the god would return and catch her on the trail. Everything passed in a blur until she came out, quite suddenly, on a plateau. At its center a long, narrow lake glinted in the moonlight, and Anya’s path ran past it. She slowed a little to catch her breath, and at the lake’s far side, stopped short.
Banevale lay spread out far below her, most of the city in shadow, but one glittering quarter of it shining with light and life. Buttoning up her oilskin, Anya pushed her hair back from her face and frowned. The city was under curfew—it did not seem right that part of it should glow so brightly she could see it from the mountain itself. As she peered down, she could make out a thin, fiery trail on the city’s darkened side, which ended in something that burned like an ember.
Swallowing, Anya hurried on. The next leg of her climb was a precipitous scramble, so steep in some places that her stomach dropped out from inside her. At last, she reached a broad, rock-strewn plateau. Casting about herself in the clear night air, she saw there were no further heights to climb.
She’d reached the summit of Bane Nevis.
Tall cairns, rising above Anya’s head, led across the plateau in an eerie procession. Each one was painted with red runes for protection, and as Anya drew closer to the first, she found that they were not built of stone, as she’d initially thought.
They were made of bone. Of hundreds of human skulls, bleached white by rain and sun.
Anya took in a sharp breath, thrown back to the day she’d broken up Ilva’s bones. It had been Arbiter Thorn she’d given her sister’s skull to. Tradition dictated that the Arbiter received it, and for all Weatherell’s many bone charms, she’d never seen that particular piece of a girl anywhere about the village.
Because they were brought back here, to the mountain.
Anya’s hands formed involuntary fists at her sides. It was unfair, and intolerable, that after being indelibly marked by their journeys to Bane Nevis in life, the Weatherell girls should have this part of themselves brought back in death. Enshrined on the mountain, watching with blank eye sockets every time another girl walked by, every time the god broke his vows and his infinitely costly bonds and went burning down the slope.
Though Anya burned too, there was a cold pit of fear at her center, behind that fire. Every cairn was a testament to the centuries the god had spent on his ruthless predations. A reminder of his unchecked power and of the history Anya was about to set herself apart from. Squaring her jaw, she walked on. There could be no true life for her while she remained burdened by her guilt over Ilva and by the weight of her own unfulfilled conviction, summed up in her sister’s last impossible wish.
Don’t go. Don’t let anyone else go.
Anya would be a blasphemous flame all the way into death if need be, even if it left her name forever cursed. She only prayed, to the sky and the mountain and whoever might be listening, that she’d be able to drag Albion’s vicious god along with her.
Ghosting between the shadows of the cairns, Anya couldn’t help but search for Ilva, uncertain whether she hoped to find her or wished for her to stay far from the god and his lair. There was no sign of Ilva, though, not peering out from behind the stone monuments nor materializing between shreds of the fog that had begun to gather.
Ice pooled in Anya’s stomach as she found herself utterly alone, and she forced it back by fanning the embers of her internal fire.
Ilva.
Willem.
Philomena.
Sylvie.
All the ones who went. She was here for their sake as much as for her own anger. She would not allow herself to be turned aside.
At the end of the cairn-marked trail, an edifice rose from the plateau at Bane Nevis’s summit. A hollow beehive of stone, forming the yawning entrance to a stair that led down into the bowels of the mountain itself.
For a moment, Anya fought back fear on the threshold. Her heart began to race, her breath to come hard and fast, but with a monumental effort, she forced herself into calm, or numbness—it didn’t particularly matter which. So long as she did what was required, one foot set in front of the other as she descended the winding steps going down into the pitiless earth.
It was not lightless, the god’s lair on Bane Nevis. Torches guttered along the circling stair and then the tunnel at its base. They’d burst into flame as the god passed, Anya imagined, though who replaced them when they burned down, she could only guess. The Elect, presumably. Gray-robed sycophants, so filled with faith that they were willing to risk the mountain, to keep the crimson-painted trail well marked and the god’s resting place lit for the girls who would placate him. The thought made Anya bitter and furious, until she rounded a bend in the tunnel and stopped short, her anger melting away.
She’d come out into a vast cavern, filled with shadows and torchlight. At its far end, a stone altar stood, but Anya could not bear to look at it just yet. Her gaze drifted to the cavern walls instead, one side lined with skull-filled alcoves, the other painted with faded frescoes. Removing a torch from its bracket, Anya walked.
She skirted the painted side of the cavern, taking in the frescoes as she went. They told a story—of the Romans arriving in Albion and building their towns and their walls. Of the uprisings that had occurred, the eventual hideous and bloody pacification of the Brythonic tribes, who gave up the fight and resigned themselves to life on the margins. And then, something Anya had never seen or heard before. An eventual alliance, between the Romans and the Brytons, as they mingled and dwelt together over centuries. A melding of their story and their history and their faiths, as those who hungered for power rose to it, regardless of their origins. Gray-robed figures appeared among the people and set themselves apart, and held themselves above reproach.
A trio of gray-robed figures climbed Bane Nevis, intent on determining whether the source of an old legend might yield them more power. They entered the god’s cavern, where it was not a girl who’d been bound to the altar but the god himself. The devout broke the god’s bonds and set him free, and he visited devastation on Albion, until the few Romans who still clung to their old ways and old citizenship fled, and the Elect forbade departure from the island, for fear of an exodus in the face of the god’s wrath.
The god of the mountain could not be contained—not in the same manner as before. The Elect struggled to subdue the demon they’d wakened, and lives were lost until at last a first girl, of her own choice, went up to Bane Nevis and met the god in the heart of his fiery lair. There, she lulled him into temporary peace and satisfaction with the sweetness of an offering—of a piece of herself, willingly given—and bound him to the altar once more.
Anya walked along, the frescoes unfolding before her. The god quieted and rose, quieted and rose, and every time, a girl went out to him. Some of them died, for reasons she couldn’t discern, but most of them lived, and the god rested, and on and on the offertory girls went, until whole villages were made to house them, to bring them up gentle and pure, and they were sent out in crimson collars, assuming the fate that had wavered before them from birth.
Abruptly, Anya stopped. She’d come to the end of the frescoes, and the altar stood before her, as tall as she was at the shoulder. Setting her torch in an empty bracket and reaching out with a trembling hand, she brushed her fingertips against the ancient stone. Several of the jagged rocks jutting out from the altar’s side had been worn smooth, used for footholds by Weatherell girls to ascend to the place that once held a god and to make an exchange that would subdue him for such a brief span of time.
So much given, in exchange for so little.
A muffled sob rose up in the back of Anya’s throat as she thought of Ilva climbing that altar and arranging herself for a sacrifice. She reached instinctively for the bone blade she’d carried since Weatherell, but the hidden sheath was empty. Anya was, for the first time since leaving home, truly on her own.
Slipping into the lightless gap between the altar and the cavern wall, Anya gripped a stolen knife in each hand and waited, the minutes and hours passing by in an agony of anticipation. She felt utterly alone, a thing meant to be preyed upon made a hunter by necessity. But violence was not in her nature and neither had it been nurtured into her. She could not help the hot tears that burned at her eyes and tempered the fierceness of the fire at her core.
And into the blur of Anya’s grief and fear and hatred stepped the god of the mountain.
She heard him before she saw him—a terrible grating whine of stone against stone in the tunnel, and footsteps so heavy the cavern floor shook. A scorching smell of burning things wafted into the chamber, and the light intensified, growing bright as day, though the color of it was wrong—all scarlet and crimson and flame.
Anya stayed motionless as a low growl rumbled out, thunderous in its pitch.
“I know you’re here,” the god of the mountain said, in a voice like grinding rock and hissing flame. It was a loathsome, unnatural sound that turned Anya’s skin clammy at once and sent a deep shudder through her as her stomach went sour. “Do you think I cannot tell when someone has hidden away in my home? Who are you, little coward? One of the grayrobes’ waymarkers? An assassin, come to die for your troubles? Or the next of my lambs, made shy by the glory of my presence?”
Anya said nothing. She wrapped her arms about her knees and wished that she had never been born, that she was back in Weatherell, that she was only dreaming. It was madness that had led her here. Madness and pride and folly. The hot, ashen smell of the god was everywhere, making her sick and dizzy.
Summoning the tattered shreds of her resolve, Anya stole a look around the altar.
There he stood, the god of the mountain, the very incarnation of her own dread and despair. Twice a man’s height, with curling horns and an inhuman face, he was a creature of flame and malice, wrought from shadows and fire and hunger. She had not expected him to be so vast, his presence so all-consuming. Ilva had tried to warn her, and yet Anya had not fully understood. The sight and awareness of him hurt some deep, indefinable piece of her, as if just to see him were to sacrifice.
“Come to me,” the god said, a curious note in his awful voice, and to her horror, Anya went. She hadn’t been prepared, and so she could not help herself. At his bidding, her feet moved of their own accord. All she could do was tuck her hands into her pockets, to hide the knives she held.
“You smell of sacrifice,” the god said quizzically as Anya approached, her eyes darting to him and down again because she could not look at him for long. “But why hide yourself, little lamb? And why do I think I have tasted someone close to you before?”
“My sister,” Anya said, unable to lie. “She came this spring. But she made no offering—you stole from her instead.”
“I am no thief,” the god scoffed. With her eyes fixed on the ground, Anya could see the way the loose pebbles moved, dancing across the cavern floor, stirred by nothing more than the raw power of his voice. “If a lamb is unworthy, she does not survive. Those who are strong and pure are the ones who live.”
“My sister was strong,” Anya managed to get out. Not even a god would malign Ilva to her. “She was pure. She was perfect. And you murdered her. You killed her when she would have given whatever you required.”
Drawing her eyes up, Anya met the god’s fiery gaze. She could feel his attention like something physical, weighing her down, scorching her skin. But she would not continue to look away. Not while this monster spoke ill of her sacred dead.
“Are you so certain?” the god asked. “That she would give whatever I required?”
“Yes.”
The god of the mountain shifted, and Anya nearly stumbled as the ground beneath her shook.
“I remember your mother,” he said. “I asked her for something at first, and she refused. Do you know what it was I bade her give?”
Anya shook her head and clenched her jaw. His words were like decay working in her, weakening her bones, stealing her breath.
“I bade her give the children, that she had not even known were quickening in her belly,” the god said. “And when she refused, I demanded something of equal value to her. A hand. One for each of her bastard girls.”
Anger blazed through Anya, but for the first time, it was on Willem’s behalf, not Ilva’s.
“A family trait, that refusal,” the god went on. “I asked your sister for something too, only to have her beg for a substitution. I grow weary of your bloodline’s denials, Weatherell girl.”
“What was it?” Anya whispered. “What did Ilva refuse to give?”
The god drew closer, until he was only an arm’s length from Anya, and she grew faint with the overwhelming heat of him.
“You would like very much to know, wouldn’t you?”
Anya could hardly breathe at all now. Black spots swam across her vision and she knew herself to be the worst of fools, to think she could stand against this creature.
“Kneel,” he commanded, and, unable to do otherwise, she knelt.
The god stooped, and Anya’s whole narrowing field of vision filled with him. All was fire, all was fury, all was hunger and cruelty and rancor. When he spoke again, his voice was low and uneasy, like the sound of an approaching storm.
“I asked the girl before you for one thing only. I asked for the memory of her sister, and when she refused, she had nothing of equal value to give.”
With a wrenching gasp, Anya caught her breath.
“I will see you suffer,” she said through tears. “I will see you hurt as I hurt. I will make a ruin of you, as you have made a ruin of me.”
The god’s brutal laughter brought stones falling from the cavern ceiling, which shattered on the floor around them. Anya fought the urge to duck—she must be in control, must not waver, must hold her wits together as it was so near impossible to do in the presence of this vicious thing.
“Empty threats, little lamb,” the god said, bending closer still. “Empty as your arms in the absence of your unworthy sister. None can stand against me.”
“I can try,” Anya breathed, and with one swift motion she forced herself to her feet and drove her steel knives into the god of the mountain’s heart.