The grass was just the right height that it tickled against Anddyr’s elbows as he walked along through the unending darkness, and it made him want to scream. There was no time for screaming, though. He had to keep walking, they had to get as far away as they could. That was what the others kept telling him, at least.
“I shouldn’t be here,” he said. He never meant to speak aloud, didn’t know he did it half the time, but they all told him he had a bad habit of mumbling. It came out of him like a gut-punched whine, sounds he couldn’t help making. “I should have stayed.” The unrelenting darkness made it easier to sink into the miserable puddle he kept shoring up with guilt and grief. The darkness made it easier to pretend he was alone, abandoned as he rightly deserved to be. “I made the wrong choice.”
And then the grass tickled his elbow just right, and a shrieking laugh burst out of him.
Rora turned and thumped him on the shoulder, none too gently. She had impeccable aim, considering the darkness, but Anddyr supposed she was used to working in the dark. He’d seen the Canals. He’d heard enough of her brother Aro’s stories. Or it was possible she’d been aiming for his face, and the darkness truly did throw off her aim.
She was just a dim, silent outline in the darkness, lit around the edges by faint starlight and nothing more. Still, Anddyr couldn’t look away from her. Even in the unending night, he saw her clear as daylight. If he focused on her, he could ignore the tickling grass, ignore the Long Night itself. Looking at her, he could sink quickly back into his misery.
I made the wrong choice.
The thought played through Anddyr’s head like a tide: rising to a scream, crashing and shattering, and then leaving nothing save a deceptively calm surface, until it rose screaming once more. It drowned out everything else, no room for anything but the thought and the emptiness it left in its wake.
He stared at the back of Rora’s head, watched her march stubbornly on ahead of him, and his hands groped uselessly at his sides. It had seemed such a simple choice at the time. He’d seen Rora’s face in his mind, clear as he could now, and not choosing her had seemed such an intolerable thing. It was Rora. He could face any wrath, for her. He could face the end of the world.
He’d seen the Twins rise in their new bodies, gods freed from their centuries-long imprisonment. And because of Anddyr, the Twins hadn’t taken Rora and her brother as hosts—instead they’d done the very thing Anddyr had been meant to prevent, and stolen the bodies of a different set of twins. Etarro and Avorra had been groomed from birth for that very purpose, to become hosts to their godly counterparts, and at least one of them had gone to it willingly enough. But Anddyr had seen Etarro’s face, his gaze stretching across the distance, and the boy had been almost unrecognizable. Lost inside himself, or cast out . . . gone . . .
Etarro had been the closest thing Anddyr had to a friend inside Mount Raturo. A sweet boy, painfully intelligent, and more insightful than he had any right to be. He’d given Anddyr a stuffed horse named Sooty. Etarro had freed him from the drug-locked prison that Joros had made for him, given Anddyr the chance to fight for his own wretched life. Etarro had given him everything.
And now he was gone, because, to Anddyr, Etarro hadn’t seemed an important enough choice. That alone felt like ten belly punches, to his mind-stomach and his real stomach.
Maybe it would have been bearable, if not for Rora being so—
“Shut your fecking hole,” she growled at him, like a wolf in the night scenting its prey. He didn’t know he’d been mumbling again.
Maybe it wouldn’t feel so much like the wrong choice if she didn’t hate him so much.
A pained groan boiled out from behind Anddyr, which brought Rora to a sudden stop—Anddyr learned that when he ran directly into her. She was so much shorter than he that he almost went tumbling over her completely, but her helpful shove kept him on his feet. In the darkness of the night without end, Anddyr could see so little . . . but he could see the stars in her eyes. He wasn’t sure which burned more furiously. There was anger and sadness there, and a small lost part of him ached for her, wanted to reach out and comfort her—and yet. I made the wrong choice. It was no less true. She still made him hurt, but there was a new layer to the pain. She, so heartless and cold and distant, was still here with him, throwing her anger like a fist, while a boy’s sad soft smile was gone from the world. And that was Anddyr’s doing, his choice. Perhaps her wrath was his punishment, for choosing so poorly. If that was the case, then maybe she was exactly what he deserved.
The groan again, and the sadness in Rora’s eyes briefly flickered stronger. But it vanished when she turned away, her footsteps whispering through the tall grass. It was left to Anddyr to deal with. It wasn’t fair, but nothing was.
Anddyr turned away from the dark outline of her, turned instead to the very similar, groaning outline huddling behind him. If Rora was his punishment for choosing her, then this was a different kind of punishment . . . but a punishment all the same.
Looking at Aro, her brother, was like staring into a mirror that looked a decade into the past. Once, Anddyr had been just as Aro was now: shaking, twitching, wide-eyed in terror and need. Truth be told, it hadn’t been so long ago that Anddyr was just like him, a slavering mess, but it was worst early on. The mind-twisting drug got easier to bear over the years.
Anddyr walked to the younger man’s side, put an arm around his hunched shoulders. Aro was taller than Rora, but otherwise the two of them had been made on the same loom, their eyes full of the same stars. “You’re all right,” Anddyr lied. “Remember what I said before?” Aro just mumbled, shuddered inside the ring of Anddyr’s arm. Anddyr jostled him a little to get his attention. “Come now. Remember it? You said you would remember.”
Voice shaking as badly as his limbs, Aro said slowly, “It will pass. And I’ll be better.”
“That’s right,” Anddyr said in his best encouraging voice. Those were the same lies he told himself, and they’d always made him feel better. They weren’t entirely lies either—occasionally, mixed in with feeling like he was about to die or feeling so awful that he wanted to die, Anddyr felt like his old self, before Raturo, before Joros, before the foul black paste that had twisted his mind. It would be the same for Aro. He’d only gotten one dose of skura, but that was enough of the drug to do its nasty work. Anddyr would make sure that no more of it twisted Aro’s mind further, but Rora’s brother had already become an abacus, the measure of his days balanced in madness and sanity until the days reached their end. Anddyr was still trying to decide how to tell Aro that he’d now have a much shorter life than he might have expected, but that conversation might remind Aro that it was Anddyr who had done this to him.
Anddyr tugged gently with the arm around Aro’s shoulders and the younger man obligingly walked forward. Aro was still a muttering, twitching mess, and he was only getting worse, his bad spells coming more and more frequently. Anddyr knew from personal experience that he would get much worse before he could get better—after forcefully weaning himself off the skura, Anddyr felt as though he were finally on the upswing of his own downward spiral, but that had been a process of nearly a month, during which he’d very nearly killed himself or the others multiple times entirely by mistake. The loss of control was the true issue of the detoxification process; a mage without his carefully instilled control was a danger to anyone unlucky enough to be nearby. Aro hadn’t reached truly dangerous levels yet . . . but it was only a matter of time.
Anddyr looked up at the star-dotted sky, always dark now, save when the moon deigned to make an appearance. Those were happy hours, the closest thing they had to a sun anymore. But the moon was smaller, darker, each time it visited. Anddyr worried that the moon was vanishing like the sun had, just at a much slower rate. None of their group could remember how full the moon had been before the start of the Long Night, or how full it should be. All they could do was hope that once it disappeared, it would grow slowly back as it always had.
“Stop.”
Her voice brought him up short, and his arm around Aro’s shoulders was as good a restraint as a guide. Rora had stopped and, squinting, Anddyr could see why: their leader had stopped. It was a statement that applied to the moment—where he seemed to have simply chosen to sit down among the waving stalks—as well as to his general state of mind since the rise of the Twins. Joros had stopped. Stopped thinking, stopped leading, stopped speaking. He had become a walking, breathing corpse.
Joros spent much of his time trudging along either far ahead of or far behind the rest of them, so quiet Anddyr wouldn’t have known he was there if not for the sound of his footsteps. He stopped and started on his own whims, leaving the rest to follow his example or leave him behind.
Somewhere inside his working-or-not mind, Joros had decided that it was time to stop, and there was no arguing with that either. He was sitting amid the waving grass, staring just as vacantly as ever, and Anddyr knew from the three previous attempts that there would be no moving him. Rora could only shout so much at a slab of stone.
“We’re done for now,” Rora said. She said it as though it had been her choice, rather than an inarguable fact beyond her control. This was the fourth time they’d stopped since leaving the seething hill behind—the fourth time she’d had a halt imposed on her. She grew unhappier each time.
Anddyr could understand it. She’d had a bad time of things at the hill. She’d been offered up as sacrifice to the gods whose very existence made most of the world want to kill her, she’d watched her brother poisoned, she’d perhaps felt the brush of the newly freed goddess Sororra against the edge of her existence, and her brother had betrayed her in some way Anddyr couldn’t understand but that seemed to have cut to her core. Things hadn’t been going particularly well for her, and so, in the logical part of his brain that bubbled up every so often, Anddyr could see why she was so angry and so sad . . . and he didn’t think Cappo Joros was helping with her mood at all.
Anddyr knew she blamed the cappo for her brother’s condition at least as much as she blamed Anddyr himself, but the issue with Joros was that he refused to be antagonized, refused to let her make him a target of her rage. He seemed to have locked himself inside his own mind, and Anddyr knew how dangerous that could be.
Anddyr carefully patted down a section of the tickling grasses, and lay down in such a way that they wouldn’t be able to get to his elbows. He had to admit he was grateful for the rest—Rora set a grueling, unforgiving pace. They all wanted to be away from the hills and the Twins as quickly as possible, and Rora seemed determined to make it happen at superhuman speeds. Anddyr, though, was only a regular human, and a poor excuse for one at that. He was tired.
As Anddyr drifted off to sleep, wrapped around the miserable knot of his guilt, the only sound was Aro’s low muttering. Anddyr couldn’t make out the words, didn’t really want to—he didn’t want to know what horrors his actions had put into the younger man’s waking nightmare. He didn’t want to listen, but as sleep finally claimed him, he could make out two words, repeated endlessly, not quite Aro’s voice but a constant stream of the words, Find me. Find me. Find me . . .
It’s a tower. Anddyr knows that, somehow. A spire that hangs in the air, built from clouds, floating like a puff of down on the wind, but its wall feels solid against his back. It might even be real.
At the tower’s center there’s a boy staring into a mirror, but no—he’s facing a girl whose face matches his. The boy’s is softer, but the girl’s has smile lines. A lot of grimacing can carve those same lines into a face, though. Anddyr knows their faces, can name them even, factual as reciting to a professor: Etarro and Avorra. He knows he should feel something, looking at them, but he doesn’t. He’s shaped out of cloud and air, too, just like the skytower.
The twins are talking, and as Anddyr watches, the boy lifts his left arm. At the end of it, his hand flops like a useless piece of meat. “You said it would work,” the boy says, accusation and hurt in his voice, both barely held in check. “You said it would be like it was before.”
“It did work, Brother! Just look.” She spreads both her working hands, though they only encompass the inside of the floating tower. “Look at all we’ve done. And this is only the beginning . . .”
The boy drops his arm, shoulders hunching. At his side, one hand curls into a fist, though the other doesn’t so much as twitch. “I see it. I see how you have everything you’ve ever wanted.”
“Everything we’ve always wanted.”
“I never wanted this!” The outburst shakes the stone at Anddyr’s back, makes the skytower tremble and waver. “I only wanted to shape, and now even that has been taken from me—”
“They’ll pay,” the girl interrupts, fierce as a mother cat. “All of them, I swear it. Our Parents will pay for all they’ve done, and their people will, too. They’re all guilty, all of them, and soon they’ll learn. Soon they’ll know.”
Softly, quiet as clouds, the boy whispers, “I only want to shape.” He wraps his working hand around the useless one, looks away from his sister, and his eyes find Anddyr. He sees the surprise grow in those eyes, sees the outrage forming on the girl’s face, her mouth shaping a curse—he sees all these as facts, as a historian at the center of a war, careless of the surrounding danger. He observes this, and he observes when the clouds swallow the girl, dragging her down through the floor of the skytower, soundless. He observes the confusion in the boy’s eyes, and the war raging within him.
The boy stands in front of Anddyr sudden as blinking, and his eyes are different. Younger. More human. “Find me,” he breathes, and he raises his left hand, the one that didn’t work, and in it now is clutched a stuffed horse. That had been Anddyr’s stuffed horse, which he’d loved beyond all reason. Her name is Sooty. “Find me.” The boy’s hand is wrapped around her, bone and muscle working beneath flesh. He holds her toward Anddyr, the toy closing the space between them, and Anddyr reaches, too. “Find me . . .” His hand touches the boy’s, and the shock that springs between them makes the skytower crumble, clouds swirling away to wisps, and he plummets through the open air, down and down and down . . .
Anddyr woke flailing and choking, clawing his way up through the ground that had swallowed him. A hand grabbed his shoulder and yanked, and Anddyr sucked in air as he stared up at stars, grateful just to be alive, grateful he wasn’t trapped beneath the earth like the Twins had been.
“Fecking idiot,” Rora muttered at him, and Anddyr was, for the first time, grateful for the darkness of the Long Night—it hid his burning cheeks as he realized he hadn’t been swallowed by the earth, only sleeping on his stomach with his face pressed to the ground.
The dream almost slipped away from him in a sleepy haze of shame, but with another gasp of air, Anddyr grabbed on to the edges of the retreating dream, and pulled it back.
“Etarro,” he blurted.
Rora glared at him, along with two other half-asleep sets of eyes. “Shut up about him,” she said. Anddyr didn’t realize he’d been talking about the boy, apparently often enough that it had started to prick at Rora.
“No, he’s . . . he’s not gone. He’s still there, still fighting.”
“Sounds like you shouldn’t’ve stopped taking your medicine,” she said, and since she knew very well now how the mage-enslaving drug skura worked, that cut especially deep. The guilt and self-hatred threatened to overwhelm Anddyr once more, but he clung to the dream. It had been more than a dream, he could feel that in his bones.
Anddyr crawled clumsily toward Cappo Joros, and went rifling through the pockets of his robe. Any other time, he never would have done such a thing, not even when gripped by the deepest madness, but he was desperate to prove himself right—no, not even that, he was desperate to prove that Etarro still lived, that he could be saved . . .
Luckily Joros was half asleep and slow to react. By the time he growled and began to turn away, Anddyr had already found what he was looking for, pulled the smooth stone out of the cappo’s pocket—
It was like a punch to both his mind and his body. He could tell, in a very disconnected way, that he went tumbling over backward to land on his back with all the air exploding out of his chest, but that was the smaller of the two concerns. Dark flames blossomed before his eyes and tore through his mind, a wildfire made of starlight, and it scorched everything it touched. There was nothing it didn’t touch. Anddyr’s world narrowed to the pain of its burning, and he could see nothing but the flickering flames, hear nothing but their roar in his ears, and there was a tug like a child at a sleeve, an inexorable pull south—
His fingers released the seekstone, or one of the others knocked it from his hand—Anddyr didn’t know or care which, he only knew that he could breathe again, and see, and think. Still, he lay there for a while longer, reeling. The world seemed to spin around him, or perhaps he spun around it, and his stomach churned.
“What in all the hells was that?” Aro’s voice, high and nervous. He reached for the seekstone and Anddyr lurched upright, knocking the younger man’s hand away. Aro looked back at him with the saddest eyes.
Anddyr ran his shaking hands through his hair, trying to pull back any composure he might have left. Even if he’d ruined the man’s life, Aro was still his pupil. Even if Aro’s sanity now faded like a tide, he could still learn. “What do seekstones do?” Anddyr asked in his best, calmest teacher’s voice.
“They let you see out of someone else’s eyes.” Aro’s tone suggested that he expected it to be a trick question, that he was bracing for the blow of a wrong answer.
“And what else?”
“Give you a . . . a directional pull on where the other person is, so you can—”
“Enough with the witch-talk,” Rora growled. “What’d it fecking do?”
It was incredibly hard, but Anddyr ignored her and spoke only to Aro. “Exactly. And this seekstone”—he pointed to the one sitting so innocently at his side—“is attuned to Etarro.” He waited for that to sink in, but three blank expressions told him it wasn’t going to. Gently, he prompted, “Etarro, who is . . . ?”
“Dead,” Joros said flatly. It was the first word he’d said in hours, if not days.
Anddyr winced, but ignored that, too. He fixed his gaze on Aro, willing him to think through the answer. Aro looked between the others, curled his shoulders up to his ears, and made a timid guess: “Dead?”
“Not dead.” Anddyr sighed. “He’s host to Fratarro, his mind and body usurped by a god. When I touched the seekstone, I touched Fratarro’s mind, saw through the eyes of a god. That’s . . . not something any person is made to withstand. It burned me . . .”
Joros snorted, and with a corner of his robe wrapped around his hand, he reached out to grab the seekstone and drop it back into his pocket. “You think because you saw through Fratarro’s eyes when you touched Etarro’s seekstone, that means Etarro is still alive? Sounds rather like the opposite, to me.”
Anddyr opened his mouth to argue, and stopped. The only argument he had was the dream, which had felt more real than a dream, but was even now starting to fade, the urgency and surety drifting away like wisps of cloud. The cappo was right—the seekstone didn’t prove anything aside from Etarro’s body still being to the south. A few seconds of touching Fratarro’s mind had nearly burned away Anddyr’s own mind—how could he expect that Etarro would be able to withstand constantly sharing his body and mind with a god?
With all of them awake now, there was no reason not to keep moving on—as far as the others were concerned, the sooner they could be away from the Plains, the better. But Anddyr hung back, staring south, staring back the way they’d come. He could still feel that pull, that insistent tug, and no matter how often he told himself it had just been a dream and nothing more, he couldn’t forget Etarro whispering, Find me, as he’d clutched the stuffed horse that had belonged to both of them. He couldn’t help wondering what he’d find if he were to go back to the hill where the Twins had risen to steal the bodies of the children that had been provided for them. Would he find only a boy with an ancient god’s eyes, or—worse—would he be able to see the trapped boy’s eyes behind the god’s?