Sleepless, they waited for the light before dawn and saddled the horses. Holly’s mare was gone. Her tracks led off into the deep wood and, although it tore Ember’s heart in two, they all knew they couldn’t search for her, especially since her hobbles lay beside the holly tree, cut clean through, although none of them had heard anything in the night, and the dogs had not woken. The Forest had its own way of taking what it wanted.
They left the two holly trees behind them with deep sadness.
Ember sought for the right words to say goodbye, but in the end all she could think of was, “Gods bless and keep you,” which she felt the Forest might not like. “We will miss you and pray for you,” she whispered to the living tree, instead, and watered its roots with her tears.
Curlew led the way out of the clearing, his face set against tears, but he looked back for as long as he could until Holly was out of sight.
They began to climb upward soon after, the path curving in a long, gentle rise, so gradual that they didn’t know how high they had climbed until at sunset they paused at the top of a small knoll and looked back. The tall larches and black spruce were still on either side, but if Ember looked straight back down the path she could see an expanse of forest below them, tree tips emerging from the evening mist, the shadows falling blue.
They were out of the huge bowl they had seen from the far ridge.
“We’re in the foothills,” Curlew said, staring upward to where the rounded hills were raised, rank on rank. They were too close to them to see the peaks beyond, but they could feel their eternally snow-covered presence in the chill of the evening breeze flowing down the slopes toward them.
Ember knew that they were safer out of the Forest than in, but she felt, as they climbed higher, that a familiar blanket was being slowly pulled away from her shoulders and leaving her exposed to the chill air. Cedar seemed to share her discomfort. He looked behind often, back at the bowl of Forest. When he caught her watching him, his mouth twisted wryly and he shrugged.
“It feels too easy,” he said.
“We paid our toll,” Curlew said harshly, his eyes red from weeping.
“Even so,” Cedar replied.
It was not a straight climb. The foothills were reached by ridge after ridge, each one appearing to be the last, and each time they came to the top to find what seemed like exactly the same view, as though they had been climbing the same ridge over and over. Even the trees looked the same.
Ash was riding in front, his horse flanked by the two dogs. Ember brought Merry up beside Thatch and said quietly, “Are we just going over and over the same ground?”
Ash flicked a surprised look at her, and then his eyes narrowed.
“We’ll see,” he said. He reined Thatch in and dismounted, then went to the side of the track and overturned a big lichen-covered rock. Underneath, insects scurried for shelter in the dark earth. Grip sniffed at them and sneezed, and they all laughed. As if embarrassed, he lifted his leg onto the rock and pissed.
Ash smiled up at Ember.
“We should be able to recognize that again,” she said.
They toiled up the ridge and down into the next valley, over the stream at the bottom and on. Halfway up the hill on the other side, there was the overturned rock, the earth below it beginning to pale as it dried out. Grip sniffed at his own mark and looked puzzled.
“Dragon’s fart!” Curlew said. “Have we been climbing the same hill all morning?”
Cedar cocked an eyebrow at Ember and she said, “Yes, I know you said it was too easy. Now what?”
“It seems to me,” Ash said, “that this hill is a gate.”
Following his thought, Ember nodded. “So where is the gatekeeper?”
“Let’s go to the top,” Curlew said to Ash. It was a suggestion, not an order. With Holly gone, Ember had expected Curlew to take control, but the other men looked to Ash as the leader. She never quite understood how they worked those things out. In every group of men there was a leader, she’d noticed, but it wasn’t always the one a woman would have expected. None of them even considered her as a possible chief. She smiled ruefully. She’d have chosen Ash, too.
“Aye,” Ash replied to Curlew. “Best get our bearings if we can.”
The view from the top of the ridge was the same as before. Ember had half-hoped that just noticing the spell would be enough to break it but, as Cedar had said, nothing was that easy. The path was wide enough here for them to range across it abreast, each of them looking hard to see if there were any other way to go than straight down again.
“Cedar?” Ash said. “Can you See anything?”
“No. Nothing that wasn’t there before.”
Curlew’s hand was at the pommel of his sword, but there was no enemy in sight.
Courtesy was a warlord’s daughter’s main training. Courtesy, rank, honor, hospitality, command. Perhaps this was one of those times when a soft word was more powerful than a sword.
Ember edged Merry forward just a little, until he was poised so that one more step would take him on the downhill track.
“Humbly we request passage through this land,” she said clearly, making her voice as sweet and pleasant as she could. “To whomever guards this place, we make promise: we will respect the life we find here, we will journey through without malice or greed.”
The ring of scar on her wrist burned suddenly, and she bit back an exclamation. Was it Fire which barred their way?
The air shimmered like a heat haze and the expanse of trees, hills, ridges before them shifted and disappeared. Beyond was grassland dotted with trees and small streams; a plateau with knee-high grasses and wildflowers blooming sky blue and sun gold. Beyond, the Eye Teeth Mountains rose sheer and astonishing, much closer than they had looked only moments before.
A wisp of fog along the ridge thickened and became two figures. Ghosts.
Of course, Ember had seen ghosts before. In the Last Domain, the quickening ceremony, held three days after someone had died, was a well-attended affair; the kind of wake that other places had after the burial. But burial in the north was often difficult during the winter months, when any corpses were reverently stored in a special cabin at the fort until the ground had thawed enough to dig graves. Unlike the southern domains, there were no caves near most of the northern settlements to take the dead and the ground was too hard or too marshy lower down to dig anything but single graves.
So the quickening ceremony had come to take the place of the burial feast, and everyone came, hoping that the spirit of the dead person had gone on peacefully to rebirth. But sometimes, when the death had been an accident, or an assault (more common as the long winters dragged on), the person didn’t realize they were dead, and three days later their spirit rose at the place they had died. Then, if someone had caused their death, that person admitted guilt and gave blood to the spirit in recompense. Ember had seen her first ghost when she was four years old—a cranky old woman she’d never liked who had been speared by an icicle dropping from the eaves of her house when she went out to get snow for cooking. She was used to seeing the pale, insubstantial form flow together. But normally ghosts were a shimmer in the air, a suggestion rather than a shape, although people with Sight saw them more clearly, she’d been told. And the Prowman could even make them speak.
She wished that the Prowman were with them now.
“Greetings,” she said to the ghosts. Squinting, she could just make out male shapes. Cedar said quietly, “Men of the Northern Mountains Domain,” and she realized that he could see them clearly enough to make out the insignia on their uniforms.
“We greet you, men of the Northern Mountains Domain,” Ember said clearly, inclining her head graciously at the correct angle. “We ask permission to pass through this land to the mountains beyond.”
The ghosts turned to stare behind them, at the cold shapes of the Eye Teeth jutting dark gray against the pale sky. There were clouds at the snowy peaks, twisting in a distant wind.
Then, moving together as though they were the same being, they raised their swords and crossed them. It was a clear signal: No passage. Then one freed a hand and pointed south.
Obediently, they looked: there was a path, now, just below the rim of the ridge. A deer trail, Ember thought, or an elk walk. The bushes on either side were cropped, a sign that elk had been that way.
“South,” Ash said. “Toward Starkling.” He swiveled in his saddle to face Ember. “Best not go there if we can help it.”
Starkling… it and Elgir, the warlord of Northern Mountains Domain, had an eerie reputation. This use of ghosts as gatekeepers was typical. In a world which had almost been destroyed by ghosts, who else would use them as warriors? It was unthinkable.
Ember studied the ghosts. They were still standing with crossed swords, one with his finger pointing, in exactly the same position. She supposed that ghosts didn’t get tired. Her mother would know. Her mother was the one to deal with strange events and unchancy threats, not her. But they had to do something. They couldn’t sit on their horses until the ghosts went away to be reborn.
Tentatively, she said, “By your leave, good men, our task is urgent and we cannot risk delay. Let us pass.”
They didn’t move.
“Ride through them!” Curlew said. “They’re just ghosts.”
He kicked his horse and she leaped forward as though glad to get moving again.
“No!” Cedar cried. “Curlew, don’t!”
Ash reached for Curlew’s bridle, but too late. He had cantered past them and straight through the ghosts.
The horse screamed, threw up its head and fell, twisting as it went as though its legs had been swept out from the side. They all reached toward Curlew, but it was futile; he was falling, too. Ember had time to see that his face was astonished, not afraid, and then he hit the ground.
And disappeared, horse and rider both. Ember cried out in alarm, and heard Cedar and Tern echo her. The ghosts hadn’t moved, hadn’t reacted at all: they still stood with crossed swords, hand pointed south.
Ash had readied his bow, but there was nothing to shoot. The grasslands stretched out before them. But Curlew was simply gone.
“Where is he?” Ash demanded. “What have you done with him?”
The ghosts ignored him.
“Perhaps,” Cedar said slowly, “they are not gatekeepers, but guardians. Saving us from whatever took him…”
“No,” Ember said bitterly. “This is Elgir’s work. My father warned me to avoid him. He gathers power like a dragon hoarding gold. He wants us to go to Starkling.”
“Then we should not go,” Cedar said. “But I suspect we will, anyway.” He looked at Ash quizzically.
“Curlew may not be dead,” Ash said. “Elgir might be able to bring him back from wherever he was sent. We will go and ask him.”
Ember had never heard him so grim. Part of her agreed with him, but that part was Curlew’s friend, not the daughter of his lord.
“No,” she said, her eyes filling hot and sharp, because the part that was Curlew’s friend was large in her. “We cannot risk a whole domain for the sake of one man.”
Ash looked at her in astonishment and dismay, but then his face hardened and he nodded.
“North, then,” he said. “Try to go around them.”
“But Curlew!” Tern protested. “What if he’s hurt, somewhere? What if we could save him?”
Ember brought Merry across to him and held his gaze so he could see that she meant what she said. “I wish we could forget everything else and find him,” she said. “But what do you think Curlew would tell us to do?”
Tern looked mutinous. “Just because he’d say it doesn’t mean it’s right!”
Cedar laughed shortly.
“Well said, boy. But she is right. Do you want to go back to the mothers of dead children and tell them we were too late because we tried to find a missing soldier, who knew the risk when he agreed to come?”
Tern’s lip trembled, his eyes blurring with tears. His shoulders sagged and he looked away, saying nothing.
“North,” Ash said again. They turned the horses to the north, and dismounted. The slope would put too much strain on the horses if they rode—there was no path this way, although the trees and shrubs were not dense and they could easily weave through them.
As they left, the ghosts turned their heads to watch but did not otherwise move, and Ember wondered how long they would stand there, barring the way.
Barely half a league to the north, they rounded a bend and found themselves headed back toward the path they had left, with the ghosts still standing there, swords crossed.
Cedar swore. “They’re laughing at us!”
“No doubt we look funny,” Ash said. He tilted his head back to watch a bird circling, high overhead, and sighed. “Heron,” he remarked absently. “Or crane, maybe. South, princess?”
Although the name was teasing, his tone was weary and Ember wished they could all fly away.
“Let’s see what the stones say,” she said, turning to Cedar. As a family, they were used to consulting the stones. Ember hoped Cedar would have at least some of that talent.
Cedar handed his reins to Tern and came to them with a mixture of alacrity and nervousness. His first casting, she realized. He took the yellow pouch from his waist, and then looked dismayed.
“I don’t have a cloth!” he said. It was odd to see the normally saturnine Cedar so discomfited. Ember concealed a smile and pulled a kerchief from her pocket. It was a little grubby, but it would do. Cedar took it and sat on the ground, smoothing the green fabric as carefully as if it were silk from the Wind Cities.
“Ask,” he said, looking up at her. But something made her turn to Ash instead.
“You ask,” she said. “Make sure Fire doesn’t get involved in this.”
He grimaced, but he squatted opposite Cedar and spat into his palm. Cedar did the same and they clasped hands.
“Should we go to Starkling?” Ash asked. Tern edged nearer, holding the horses, so that their hot breath swept over Ember and raised the hair on her neck. She waited, heart beating hard, aware from the corner of her eye that the ghosts had turned to stare at them.
Cedar dug in his pouch and cast the stones on the kerchief. That moment, watching the stones fall, was always long, always exciting. No matter how many times Ember saw it, she was still astonished at the gods’ generosity—to share the future with humans, how amazing!
Five stones. Some face up, some down. Cedar touched each delicately with one long finger, as Martine did.
“Chaos,” he said, a rough edge to his voice, as though this wasn’t easy. “Loss. Face up, both. And hidden…” he turned the others over. “Love. Destiny. Hope.”
“Hope,” Ash repeated.
“Chaos and loss,” Tern muttered.
Cedar gathered the stones together slowly.
“That’s what they are,” Ember asked, “but what do they say to you?” The others looked at her strangely, but her mother had often talked about the stones speaking to her.
“They laugh,” Cedar said blankly. “I think they think we have no choice.”
He put the stones back in the bag and dropped Ash’s hands. They stood up, staring at each other, wiping the spit off on their legs with identical movements. They had never looked more like brothers. Cedar made to give the kerchief back to Ember, but she waved it away. He would need it again.
“So, south, princess?” Ash asked her, his eyes steady.
“South,” she said, fear welling in her chest and making it hard to breathe. “South to Starkling.”
They turned and headed south, leading the horses, and the trail appeared in front of them, clear as day, where they had walked through scrub and grass only moments before. Oddly, Merry and the other horses seemed completely unconcerned by the change, as though there had been no change.
What kind of power did Elgir have? Had he clouded their minds or physically moved them? Had he looped a part of the world back on itself? How was that possible?
They mounted again. Ash held Thatch back until he was level with her, and asked, “What has your father told you about this warlord?”
“Rumors, mostly,” she said, feeling better for being with him. “That he’s an enchanter. That he never does a thing in the ordinary way if there’s an unchancy way to do it. That he’s besotted with the forms and uses of power. No one is allowed into Starkling without his leave, and his people…” She dropped her voice. Her father had hesitated to even say this out loud. “They say his people mate with the water spirits and the forest sprites, and carry their blood.”
Ash paled. “Can that happen?” he asked.
“Who knows? I didn’t think so, but then I didn’t think the world could be turned in on itself as it is around here.”
He looked up at the sky again, and to their left, where the Forest loomed, dark and somehow more mysterious since they had passed through it. Ember shivered at the thought of riding back into that gloomy shade, and told herself that they’d be lucky to make it that far.