When she got to the bottom of the ladder and turned around, Rora saw that Neira was playing with the corpses, and that was just too much.
Rora hadn’t liked the witches, had hated every minute she was stuck with them, but bleeding hells—they’d been people, people she’d got to know. She could recognize the look in Peressey’s eye that meant she was about to start spewing fire, knew that when Soris started crying the best thing to calm him was singing, had heard Travin describe all the different kinds of plants in the Highlands so many times she’d probably be able to name them all on sight. They were people, and she’d known them, and Neira was busy cutting all their eyes out.
It pushed Rora right away from scared and into boiling mad.
“Get away from them,” she snarled, and Neira’s eyeless face twisted toward her. Tare, coming down the ladder still, bumped into Rora, nudged her stumbling forward, but that was fine. Rora stamped the rest of the way to the not-wall. She dropped all the firewood and slammed her hands against the barrier, feeling the sting from her palms to her elbows. “Get away from them.”
Neira raised her hands, bloody and sticky, one still holding the dagger, and she easily stepped away from the witch she’d been picking at. Travin, the second cellar-witch, who’d been down there almost as long as Rora’d been. There was curiosity written on Neira’s face, even without eyes.
“Go sit over there,” Rora ordered, jerking her chin toward the space she’d been chained up for so long, the space they’d left Neira tied up in but she’d managed to get out of. Rora realized too late that Neira wouldn’t see the chin jerk—but the shadow-woman did go over to the spot. Lucky guess, Rora supposed. The cellar was small.
Neira sat against the wall, folded her bloody hands in her lap, and waited.
It was hard to hold on to the boiling anger, in the face of that. Rora sent a sorry look toward Travin, toward the other witches whose eyes Neira’d gotten to, but it wasn’t like they were doing any complaining or any forgiving. Rora picked up the firewood she’d dropped and, with Tare’s help, went about building the fire Neira’d asked for.
There wasn’t too much of the cellar not taken up by the bubble, so they had to build the fire close to the barrier, and close enough to the open cellar door that the smoke could find its way out without filling the cellar too much. Rora and Tare sat on the other side of the fire, and with the way the flames moved and the way the smoke played with Neira’s witchlight, it almost seemed like the not-wall wasn’t there, like they were just three normal people sitting around a fire in the night.
But Neira, at least, was a far way away from normal, and she proved it when the first thing she said was, “The sun is still there, you know.”
Rora kept her mouth shut, but Tare barked out a laugh. “I told you this was stupid,” she said, and she had—she’d kept saying it as Rora filled her arms with firewood, kept saying it as she told some of her knives where they’d be if things went wrong, kept saying it even as they climbed back down the ladder. Rora made the hand sign for silence at her again, and was amazed—again—when Tare didn’t rip her throat out for it.
“It is,” Neira said firmly, with the same calm confidence that Rora’d once seen in a madman explaining to a rock how rain fell up.
Rora folded her hands in her lap and stared at Neira over the tips of the flames. She’d promised she’d listen, and she would.
“If the sun was truly gone,” Neira went on, “think what the world would be like. Plants would die, and the animals who eat the plants would die. It would be cold—there would be a thousand winters, all at once. The world would collapse, and crumble, and wither away to nothing. That might even be what the Twins truly want—a fresh start, an unencumbered place upon which they can build their better world . . .” Neira lurched up to her feet, so sudden it made both Rora and Tare shift back, hands to daggers—but Neira stalked off, away from the fire, prowling along the not-wall. “You’ve been outside now. It’s spring. The snow has melted, crops are growing, and all the wildlife are doing their damnedest to see to the continuation of their species. The world goes on . . . just in darkness.”
Rora frowned, because she’d never thought about it, but it did make sense that the sun being gone should’ve made things colder. It got colder at night, so the Long Night should’ve been cold. But she’d been wandering the estate with her new freedom, and she’d seen trees going green beyond the walls, she’d seen wildflowers someone had stuck all through the house for decoration, she’d seen baby birds clumsily learning how to fly. The world was getting warmer, not colder.
Neira was pacing now—pacing at the barrier’s edge, pacing through the witches’ bodies. Her hands were moving inside the sleeves of her robe, but Rora couldn’t make out what she was doing. “If you throw a blanket over an apple,” Neira said, “you can’t see the apple anymore, but it still makes a noticeable lump. That’s all they’ve done. The sun is hidden, not gone. They lied.” She practically hissed the last bit, and that black smoke suddenly appeared and swelled out from around her feet, full of angry waves like reaching hands.
Tare glanced over at Rora, but Rora didn’t take her eyes from the shadow-woman. She knew better than that. She didn’t look away, and she didn’t take her hand off her dagger. The plain but sturdy one, the one Tare’d given her.
Neira kept pacing, her steps short and sharp, but the smoke settled around her. It didn’t go away—just died down and trailed after her. “Grumbling” was the word Rora thought of, without really knowing why. Neira almost seemed like she’d forgotten she wasn’t alone.
Rora chewed the inside of her cheek, and finally cleared her throat. Neira’s head spun toward her like an owl. Rora said, all careful, “You think there’s some way I can help pull that blanket off the sun.”
Little flutters shivered through the smoke at Neira’s feet, and the woman grinned. “Oh yes,” she said.
Rora was starting to feel like this couldn’t end quick enough—the sooner Neira got through saying all the things she wanted to say, the sooner Rora could tell her to leave. The sooner Rora could find out if the shadow-woman had been telling the truth, or if she’d have to learn how to kill a witch.
Thinking back on it, Rora realized Neira’d never actually promised to leave peacefully—just that Rora’d never see her again. Sitting there in the cellar, in front of a crazy woman who could make smoke out of blood, Rora realized just how many ways there were to take that.
“Why?” Tare asked, before Rora could think through what to say. Rora was actually surprised she’d been quiet for so long—Tare was more used to giving information than listening to it. “Why would you want to bring the sun back? You’re . . . you’re one of them.”
“You don’t know what I am.” Neira said it in such a flat, pleasant way, and that was what sent prickles crawling up Rora’s neck.
Tare wasn’t put off by it. “Then what are you?”
The black smoke writhed, stretching out from Neira to pool against the not-wall, and her grin suddenly looked much more like a skull’s smile. “I am vengeance, and I am salvation. I am a power that can shake the world. I am the shadows.”
Rora swallowed, and her hand still hadn’t left her dagger, and she thought about pulling it even though she didn’t know what she’d do with it.
Tare, though, just snorted. “Try that again, but without all the bullshit.”
The smoke settled back again, no longer rising waves—but a bunch of it stayed pressed against the not-wall, and it’d shifted to loom directly in front of Tare. Like it was staring at her, even though Rora knew that was crazy. Neira’s smile turned into just a normal smile. “I do like you,” she said. “Your bluntness is . . . refreshing.”
“Just say what it is you mean to say.”
Neira made a soft, almost amused noise, and the smoke crept back from the not-wall, shrank and faded until it was just a shadow around her feet. Rora made a quick sign with her hand that she hoped Tare saw: Thanks.
“I am one of the Fallen.” Neira spread her arms so the black robe billowed around her. “One of the truly faithful, one who saw the chance for the Twins to rise and did everything in my power to see it happen. But I have been lied to.” She started pacing again.
Now that Rora had her heartbeat a little better under control, she could talk without feeling like it might turn into a scream. She asked, “Who lied?”
“Who hasn’t?” Neira almost snapped it, but when Tare made a low growl, Neira laughed. “Yes, yes. Speak plainly. I am here now because the Twins themselves lied.” The smoke was starting to lash again, creeping out to flow over the bodies of the witches. “They promised to tear down the sun.” A wave of angry smoke filled her side of the cellar and crashed silently against the barrier. “More, they promised equality in the darkness. That no one should suffer because they were not good enough.”
Rora swallowed, trying not to look at the smoke, because doing that reminded her of when she’d last seen Neira, inside Mount Raturo, and she’d felt that black smoke crawling over her skin. She tried to just look at Neira’s face, which—even without the eyes—showed the hurt under the anger. “So they lied,” Rora said, as evenly as she could.
“As I said, the sun is still here.” Neira’s bitterness made the smoke swirl wildly.
“And everyone’s not even.”
“No. They’re not.”
Neira wasn’t the normal kind of witch that Rora’d gotten used to, but it was getting clearer that she was just as badly broken as all the witches Rora’d seen. It was a different sort of broken—the kind that made you want to see everyone else broken, too, because then you wouldn’t be the broken one. You wouldn’t be not good enough.
“All right,” Rora said. “Tell me how you want to stop them.”
Neira’d been pacing, but she stopped—didn’t turn, just stared off at nothing, at the empty cellar wall. “You’ve always been clever,” she said quietly, still without turning or moving. The smoke still surrounded her but it was motionless as she was. “Resilient, too. Stronger than you think. Things might have been so different if they’d taken you instead . . .”
Neira moved so quickly it made Rora jump, the shadow-woman spinning around at the same time as she dropped into a crouch. The smoke, still unmoving, hid what she was doing, but Rora could hear it, and she knew the sound of a blade in flesh. It made her stomach churn, made her mouth go dry, made her skin go cold—but she didn’t say anything. Dead was dead. The more she listened to Neira, the more interested she was in not pissing the woman off.
“There is a power,” Neira said, her voice coming from just above the top of the smoke, “in sacrifice. There is power in blood. There is power in a life. There was a time, before the Fall, when preachers would go around the country making ritual sacrifices for the glory of their gods, and the Twins were filled with so much power. Until the preachers discovered that a willing sacrifice gave the Twins yet more power . . . and then they began sacrificing themselves.
“You were there,” Neira went on, “when the Twins were freed. I know you fled, but perhaps you stayed long enough to see all those who fell to power their rise. Did you see scores and scores of the Fallen die, all at once?”
Rora didn’t like thinking about that day for a lot of reasons. “Yeah. I saw it.”
Neira stood, with the smoke swelling around her, and there was blood coating her hands. Rora was glad the smoke hid whichever witch she’d been working on. “There is a power in sacrifice. And on the night the Twins rose, all the Fallen gathered to free them, and all the Fallen were willing to do whatever it took to restore their bound gods.”
Into her waiting pause, Rora said, “They were all willing to sacrifice their own lives for the Twins. To give them power.”
“But it seems,” Neira said with that smoke-swirling bitterness again, “that it was not enough. They needed mortal flesh to be free, but mortal flesh makes them weak. They don’t have the power to tear down the sun, or to pass their judgment upon the world, or make all equal under their rule.”
“They lied,” Rora said softly.
And Neira agreed, “They lied.” The smoke shrank back, like a tide slowly letting go of the shore, and Rora didn’t take her eyes off Neira’s face—didn’t want to know what this tide would leave behind. “And now they must be destroyed.”
“How?” It was Tare who asked the question that Neira’d been . . . not avoiding, but she kept circling away from it and rounding back and kiting away, like she was herding prey toward a trap.
“There is power in blood,” Neira said. “My blood flows through all the mages who have been addicted to skura, and when my blood commands them, they will listen. Every one of them.”
Rora thought of her brother, going crazy after Anddyr’d dumped the black paste down his throat, his shaking and how terrible he’d looked the last few times she’d seen him, how he’d hissed, I’m dying here, Rora . . . She cleared her throat and pushed her mind somewhere else. “How do witches help?”
Neira smiled that skull-smile again. “There is power in a life.” She motioned both hands to the floor of the cellar, where the smoke had cleared, but Rora didn’t look down. “Their lives, to fuel my power. Other lives, to fuel the Twins’, but they’re not doing what they should be—if they were enforcing their judgment as they’d said, they would have a constant stream of power, but all they’re taking is a trickle. They are allowing themselves to be weak. That is what will let us destroy them. When I command it, every mage I control will give their life to me—and then I will have enough power to face the Twins.”
“You . . .” Rora groped for the words to describe one of the particular things knotting her gut. “You talk about yourself and the Twins like you . . . like you work the same. Like you have the same . . . powers they do.”
Neira laughed again, ripples flowing through the smoke. “I’m not the first one in history to wield the power Sororra once taught freely, but I am the first one in a very long time. I know how the Twins work. I know what they could be. That they are not taking the power rightfully theirs is the same kind of weakness Sororra has always despised in humanity, the same—”
“You said you’d face the Twins,” Tare interrupted, sounding almost impatient. It was the same tone Rora recognized from all her years of training, and it got very close to putting a smile on her face—of course Tare wasn’t scared. Didn’t keep Rora from feeling the chills creep-crawling down her arm with every word from Neira, but she was glad she wasn’t facing this alone. “What, just you against them, hoping you kill enough witches that you’re stronger?”
“If only it were so easy. I will face them, and I will push them. If they are driven from their human hosts, they will try to return to their true bodies. I can send them fleeing, and then they can be caught, and redirected.” Neira paused, and the empty holes of her eyes turned to Rora.
“Redirected,” Rora repeated, wishing she didn’t understand the word, didn’t understand everything Neira was saying, “into me, yeah? Me and Aro.”
“Precisely.”
Rora didn’t ask what’d come once she was playing host to one of the Twins. She knew. The answer was all in Neira’s smile and her gone, dead eyes. Hearing it would turn it into something she couldn’t pretend she didn’t know. “So how are we supposed to trust you? How in all the hells do you expect me to think you’re not just lying about everything? How’m I supposed to know you’re not just trying to destroy everyone who might get in the way of the Twins?”
“I’m no liar,” Neira said, her voice dangerous and low. She brightened up some when she said, “I’ve known you most of your life.” Tare startled, but Rora didn’t dare look away. “I’ve never hurt you, have I?”
Rora rolled her shoulder and felt the skin there stretch where Neira’s nails had left deep gouges. “You did. After you—after the witches.”
The way Neira laughed made it sound like Rora’d just told her favorite joke. “You were trying to kill me,” she pointed out, all cheerful about it. Her voice changed to something almost like annoyed when she added, “You didn’t even give me the chance to explain myself. You just assumed the worst of me. What would you have had me do?”
Killing a half-dozen people in the space of a breath was a damn good reason for not trusting someone, as far as Rora was concerned—but then again, Rora herself had jumped to killing Neira pretty quickly. Maybe that made them something like even. Rora couldn’t quite bring herself to say that out loud, but she made a grumbling noise to show she understood.
“So excepting that dark moment in both our lives.” Neira’s smile was a little crooked, when it was an honest smile.
Rora thought about how much shadows had haunted her nightmares, but it was true enough. In all those years, Neira’d never done her any real harm. “No. You’ve never hurt me.”
“I’m always fair and kind to those who serve my purposes.”
“What about the people who don’t?”
Neira smiled, softly this time. “Obstacles can always be overcome.”
Tiredness washed over Rora all of a sudden. So much had happened in the last few hours, in the last few days, in the last few months. It had to’ve been close to a year since she’d run away from the Canals and the pack, and she just hadn’t stopped since then. This—the crazy shadow-woman and defeating the Twins and witches that could be controlled with just a word from the right mouth—it all felt like one more step than Rora could manage. She put her face into her hands and pressed her fingers against her eyelids until all the world glowed white.
Neira didn’t say anything for a while, and fabric rustled like she was sitting down, though Rora didn’t look up to see. At least there weren’t any dagger-in-flesh sounds this time. Neira’s voice was soft when she finally said, “I only have one other thing to say to you, Rora. Those who follow the Parents believe that staring into the heart of a fire will show you the truth. So look into the fire, and tell me what you see.”
It was stupid. It was so stupid. Rora dropped her hands from her face and looked over at Tare, but Tare was staring at the fire between them and Neira and frowning. The light hadn’t touched the shadowy smoke around Neira.
Rora looked up to the shadow-woman, who was staring at her, or maybe at the fire. It was hard to tell, with the no eyes. Her smile was gone, and she just looked deadly serious. “Please,” Neira said.
Rora sighed, and put her elbows on her knees, and leaned in to look at the fire.
It was just a fire. Just red and yellow and orange, and heat on her face, and smoke that made her throat feel thick.
“I see you,” Tare said softly, and Rora could hear the frown in her voice. When she turned her head, Tare was staring at her instead of the flames. Tare acted like she’d got caught looking at something she shouldn’t and turned back to the fire, frowning harder, her whole forehead wrinkling up.
“Rora?” Neira asked.
“I don’t see anything.” She looked back at the flames, but they were still just flames. She didn’t see her own face in the dancing shapes they made.
“You have to open your heart, and clear your mind. You—”
“You can’t believe this,” Rora interrupted. She’d heard plenty of Neira’s talking, and she’d had enough. She was ready to find out if the woman would leave like she’d promised, and how much blood she thought she’d be taking with her. “You don’t believe in the Parents. Why would you believe some dumb superstition from gods you don’t even care about?”
Neira’s head tilted a little to the side. “I’ve seen so much, Rora. As much as you have, if not more. And I know the gods can choose strange ways to communicate with the world.” She shrugged, opened her hands, and smiled with just one side of her mouth. It was the most honest smile Rora’d seen from her so far. “I have seen things when staring at a fire, and I know others who have as well, and I think it would be madness not to listen when the gods speak. Any gods.”
Rora glanced over at Tare again, but the older woman was still staring at the fire. Rora couldn’t tell if she’d even heard anything Neira’d said. But Neira was still staring at her, waiting, so Rora tipped up her chin and stared at the place where Neira’d had eyes once, and she asked, “What do you see?”
Neira looked away from her, down to the fire, and after a quiet minute she said softly, “I see an army. A small force, but powerful. And I see them cleaving through Raturo.”
Rora rubbed her mouth and looked down at the flames, too. It was just a fire, just a stupid fire. “What’m I supposed to see?”
“I can’t tell you what to see, Rora. I can only tell you how to look.”
It felt a lot like getting drunk, only before you actually got drunk—when there was a group of you, all drinking your drinks, and everyone else started laughing and singing because they were feeling the drink, only you hadn’t really started feeling it yet. But everyone else was getting good and drunk, so maybe you started acting like you were drunker’n you actually were, until you couldn’t tell anymore if it was really the drink making you stupid or if it was just you.
Rora stared at the flames, squinted so that the edges blurred even more, and maybe—just maybe, just for a second—it looked like a cow floating through the fire. If she closed one eye, the way the flames moved looked like water in the Canals, running sluggish through old channels.
And then she saw a boy. Even though the flames still danced and flickered, they kept his shape. There were chains around his wrists, holding his arms spread wide open at one end and the other ends attached above, somewhere she couldn’t see. He hung like that, just from his wrists, and blood streamed down his arms and sides and legs to float away into embers. His eyes burned like coals, but Rora knew that was blood, too, that his eyes were gone, same way she knew his lips were sewn together. But he stared at her out of the flames, and she knew his face, even as broken as it was: Etarro, the boy who’d saved her inside Mount Raturo. The boy who’d been sacrificed to a god.
He stared at her, and he tried to call out to her, but he couldn’t with his lips sealed shut. He fought, tugging at the chains around his wrists, his skinny chest heaving, but he couldn’t break free. Ash boiled out of his eyes, and his whole body went slack, and his head sagged forward, chin resting against his chest.
“What do you see?” Neira asked softly, and then the flames were just stupid flames again.
Rora must’ve leaned too close, the smoke’d made her eyes water and she rubbed at them hard. The smoke was thick in her throat, too, made her sound like she was half choking when she said, “Anddyr kept saying Etarro was still alive . . .” She couldn’t look at the fire, and she didn’t want to look at Neira, so Rora just stared at her hands. Her fingers were twisted around each other so tight they couldn’t move, not even a bit, not even a tremble. “Is . . . d’you think he was right?”
“I don’t know.” Neira sounded sad about it, but Rora couldn’t tell if she was sad over thinking about Etarro, or sad over not having the answer to everything. “In all of history, nothing like this has ever happened before.”
Rora’s fingers were aching, with how hard they were twisting around each other. A hand touched her wrist, and she looked over, surprised to see Tare sitting there—for a little while, the world’d melted down to just Rora and Neira and the fire between them. Tare pressed at the back of her hand until Rora opened her fingers, let her hands come apart. Her joints ached. Tare’s hand didn’t leave—her fingers curled around Rora’s, holding without squeezing, gentle.
Rora closed her eyes. If she squeezed them shut tight enough, the world burst into white again, but she still saw Etarro’s battered face screaming. And if she squeezed her eyes too tight, his face turned into Aro’s, and she thought she’d be sick.
She blurted out the words that were stuck in her throat, because it was them or puke. “I’ll help you.”
Tare’s fingers shifted, the two middle ones tucking up against Rora’s palm—the hand sign for good.
Neira bowed her head. She was either a good actress, or more honest than most people Rora’d met. She didn’t care anymore which was true. The nod of appreciation felt good. “Thank you,” Neira said.
The cellar was filling with smoke, maybe that was what was making Rora feel so crowded, so small, so cornered. Maybe she would’ve tried to run, if Tare’s hand wasn’t keeping her grounded. But she did want to leave the cellar, leave it behind forever, seal the fire up inside it and let it burn away everything that’d ever touched the room.
“So how d’we get you out?” she asked Neira, because that’d put Rora the next step closer to being able to leave. “If Anddyr put this wall-thing up . . .”
Neira looked up, and gave an apologetic smile. When she stood, her smoke surged forward and hit the barrier, racing along it, covering it—and then the air shimmered, and the smoke fell like water from a broken cup. It pooled on the floor, creeping slowly toward the fire, creeping slowly toward Rora—
And stopped. Shrank back, and faded, and the sorry smile was back on Neira’s face.
“You could’ve done that anytime,” Rora said around the heart-sized lump of fear in her throat.
“I thought you’d be more comfortable with it in place.”
Rora swallowed. She’d committed to working with a not-witch who was only a different kind of crazy than all the witches—she’d have to get used to doing that without running and screaming every time Neira did something crazy. Still . . . Rora said, “Leave your dagger over there.” Neira laughed and raised her arm, the dagger held far away from her body. The sound when she dropped it made Rora’s teeth hurt. Neira’s empty eyes looked back at Rora, waiting, patient.
Rora opened her hand, and Tare let her fingers go. All three stood up at about the same time, and Tare kicked the fire to half-burning pieces. Rora led the way up the ladder.
It was still night out, of course, still dark. But the night was full of clear air, and stars, and a sliver of moon that looked like the sky was giving a crooked smile. Rora closed her eyes, not hard enough to see white, but enough to swallow down the image of Etarro trapped and trying to scream for help. Not like she’d ever forget it, but she couldn’t walk around living any kind of normal life with that stuck at the front of her eyes. There were some things you had to bury, or they’d bury you.
She opened her eyes. Tare stood to one side, Neira at the other. Even a day ago, that would’ve seemed like the wrongest thing in the world—either of ’em at her side, much less both. And maybe it didn’t feel right, but it was the best she had. Her fingers, which still ached a little, curled up, the two middle fingers tucked in. It was good.