“You should not be here,” the woman whispered. Her fingers fluttered over Feisal’s face, light and erratic as blind butterflies. Fear made her eyes enormous. “You must not be here. The white ones will find you.”
Feisal tried to lift his head. Couldn’t. Everything from his neck down was cold and dull, utterly unresponsive to his efforts. The numbness frightened him worse than pain would have. Pain meant he was alive, if hurt. Numbness meant … what?
Curly-furred sheepskins covered most of his torso, but they had slipped off one of his shoulders. By tilting his chin down, he could just glimpse the stiff gray flesh, puckered with withered rings as if some enormous many-mouthed leech had sucked not only the blood but the life out of his body.
“Where am I?” Feisal whispered. “What’s happened to me?”
“Hush,” the woman said. Her back was to the fire, and it was too dark for him to see her face, but he thought he heard kindness in her voice. Kindness, and exhaustion. And fear.
Gently, the woman lifted Feisal’s head and held a wooden cup to his lips. Splintery dried leaves floated on the steaming liquid inside. “Drink.”
He did. Warmth suffused him. Then a soft, suffocating heaviness.
He slept.
* * *
The woman was gone when he woke.
Feisal sat up. He was in a small cottage, its single room partitioned into three smaller spaces by folding wooden screens. Paneled shutters covered the uneven windows. Although seams of daylight showed above and beneath the shutters, it was dark enough in the cottage that Feisal could only make out the general shapes of things.
He got off the pallet, intending to lift the shutters and let some light in, but stopped just before reaching the windows. Something dangled in the middle of each one, on the far side of the shutters: a crude doll-shaped fetish made of wicker bound with human hair. Their faces were blank, wrinkled balls.
What had the woman said? Something about “white ones”? She’d been terrified of them, whatever they were. Not just for herself, but because she feared they might find him.
Perhaps she’d had a reason for leaving the shutters closed. Licking his lips, Feisal stepped back.
He lit a candle instead. Holding its flame over his body, he saw that the wounds that had frightened him so badly the previous night—if it was the previous night; he had no idea how long he’d slept—looked much better. The dead grayness was gone. Welts still dappled the right side of his body in an odd looping pattern, but the flesh appeared to be a healthy pink under the layer of greasy ointment the woman had rubbed into his wounds.
What had done that to him?
The last clear thing he remembered was talking to his employer, Luswick, as they sat around a campfire waiting for the company’s dinner of sourbroth and beans. They’d argued over which road to take as they neared the southern Uskwood. Feisal, mindful of the forest’s reputation, had wanted to follow the trade road that skirted its periphery. Luswick, who fancied himself the best Pathfinder in Isger, wouldn’t hear of it. To him, an unmapped forest cried out for chronicling, and none of Feisal’s arguments could sway him. None of the other mercenaries had even tried to dissuade the eccentric.
“The Uskwood is mapped,” Feisal had protested before they crossed the border. He’d seen the inked deerskins himself. They weren’t especially sophisticated, true. The Nidalese kept all the good maps to themselves and forbade their sale to foreigners, so the only maps available were those drawn by unlettered borderlanders or itinerant peddlers. But they showed the things that mattered. A forest, a few small settlements. Roads. What more was there?
Luswick had snorted hard enough to flap the ends of his bushy white mustache. “Guesses, boy. There are guesses. Scrawls and doodles by illiterate amateurs, one step removed from sailors’ lies and ‘here be dragons.’ Not maps. No, this place cries for an expert’s hand. Besides, there’s treasure to be had.”
What treasure, he’d never specified. The most Luswick would tell any of his hirelings was that he was on the trail of some Desnan artifact—not enchanted, he claimed, but valuable nonetheless as a historical relic of the faith. Why the Pathfinder believed it was in the Uskwood, how he intended to find it, or what it even was, he stubbornly refused to say.
Feisal remembered little of their journey. The Uskwood had been strangely cold, strangely hushed under its canopy of unmoving leaves. Its shadows had seemed to stretch longer than they should. He’d pointed that out to Luswick and the others—how the shadows reached toward them from the wrong angles, going against the sun—but Luswick had only nodded, recorded it in his journals, and dismissed the phenomenon as a harmless curiosity.
For a while Feisal had let himself hope the chronicler could be right. The forest was an eerie place, and he never came to like it any better, but it didn’t seem dangerous. Nothing disturbed their camps; they never saw so much as a pile of bear scat among the trees.
Until the night a storm brought the dark down early, trapping them inside the wood.
Eerie, that storm was. Unnatural. It hadn’t touched the trees. Even Luswick, seeing that, had stopped talking and moved closer to their campfire. High overhead, wild winds raked the clouds to shreds and lightning stabbed the tatters … but around them, silence reigned. It was as if an enormous glass dome encased the forest. It shut out any breeze, any raindrop that might have splashed into the perfect, deathly stillness.
The air had … thickened, too. Feisal put a hand to his throat, remembering. He hadn’t been able to breathe. Dizziness had overwhelmed him, and in that choking delirium he had imagined shapes moving in the dark. Snakes. Or whips, maybe. Had they moved on their own, or had someone held them? He couldn’t recall. But there had been pale figures, pale faces, floating in the gloom … and they had passed him by, because he was already dying when they came.
Then oblivion. Until he woke up here.
Putting the candle down, Feisal pulled on a spare set of trousers and a clean shirt. The clothes he’d been wearing that night were nowhere to be seen, but his other belongings—excepting his weapons, he noted sourly—were piled neatly beside his pallet.
So were some of his companions’. Luswick’s sketchbook sat among his saddlebags. Feisal picked it up, flipping through the maps and notes written in the Pathfinder’s blocky, familiar hand.
He tossed it away. Luswick treasured that book above his own life; he would never have abandoned it while he still drew breath. So he was dead, or as good as.
Was it worth it? For an unfinished map of the Uskwood’s shallowest reaches?
Feisal turned the book over with his foot so he wouldn’t have to look at its owner’s mark. He was standing beside it, wondering if he dared search the cottage for his missing weapons, when the woman bustled back in. She carried firewood under one arm, a bucket of water in her other hand, and a freshly plucked chicken tied to a sash at her waist. Daylight washed over her from the open door, revealing that she was younger and more careworn than Feisal had initially realized. Her hair was soft brown without a streak of gray, but her face was deeply lined.
“I feel much better,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Rest,” she said, not unkindly. Her accent was heavy, but Feisal couldn’t quite place it. Was this how villagers spoke in the Uskwood?
She didn’t look at him, instead busying herself with hanging the water bucket in the hearth and dumping the firewood on the floor. The door closed, leaving them both in shadow. “I am not surprised you feel better. The white ones’ curse fades quickly if it fails to kill. But you are not well, not yet, and you will need all your strength to evade them.”
“What happened to my companions?” He gestured to Luswick’s book.
“Dead.”
“All of them?” He knew the answer to that, or thought he did, but he wanted to hear someone else say the words. Let her be the one to make that horror real.
“Better if you think so.” The woman arranged her firewood in the hearth, piled kindling beneath it, and struck a spark to the heap. “In truth, I do not know. We only found you.”
“The others could still be alive?”
“No.”
“But you said—”
“We found you, so you lived,” she said impatiently, straightening and taking the chicken over to a bloodstained board. With swift, practiced strokes, she chopped the bird into stew-sized chunks. “Two of the others were dead: an elf woman and a young man with an old rope scar around his neck. We buried those. If anyone else was in your company, the white ones took them. They may not be dead, but they do not live.”
“That doesn’t make any—what do you mean?”
“They give their captives to the shadow. Or … other things, sometimes, but most often they sacrifice to the shadow. Do not think to rescue your friends from that fate. Even if they still draw breath, they are your friends no longer.”
Feisal exhaled, struggling for calm. It wasn’t just frustration at her cryptic answers that beset him. It was fear. The men who had vanished were all gifted with magic; he and the dead ones were not. There was only one place in Avistan where albinos hunted wizards and fed them to the living dark. But he needed to hear it. “Where am I?”
The woman rinsed her bloody hands in a bowl of water. She emptied the water into her stewpot along with the chopped chicken. “You know that already.”
“Where?”
“Nidal.”
Nidal. Cursed land, cursed people. Feisal sank bonelessly onto his pallet, closing his eyes. All his strength had fled. Her answer was not a surprise—of course he was still in Nidal. He was likely still in the Uskwood, which guarded the darkest of that nation’s secrets. But he had dared to hope, when he woke alive and unmaimed, that somehow a miraculous benefactor had found him and carried him away.
Because he could think of no reason that he would still be alive, and unhurt, in Nidal.
He’d heard the stories all his life. At the end of the Age of Legends, when Earthfall shattered the world and cast its sundered empires into darkness, the people of Nidal had struck a terrible bargain. In the cataclysm’s wake, ash blotted out the sun; nothing green could grow. Facing an endless winter and sure starvation, the Nidalese swore allegiance to a dark and twisted power. In exchange for eternal servitude, they were granted the gift of survival. After a fashion.
Life in Nidal was not as it was elsewhere. Feisal didn’t know how many of the tales were true and how many were fanciful exaggerations, but if it was one in ten thousand, it was too many for him. He had advised Luswick to give the Uskwood a wide berth for precisely that reason. Pangolais, the darkly glittering heart of Nidal, was said to lie in the depths of that forest, and to be the source from which all its terrors sprang.
Despite his best efforts, those terrors had found him after all.
His hands were shaking. Feisal concentrated on stilling them—on attaining that one small measure of control over his own terror—and failed. Completely. His hands obeyed him no more than his near-dead body had the night before.
“Where?” he asked again, hoarsely. If he was close to the edge of the forest, perhaps he could slip out. Even on foot, he might make it across the border. If he was near the Menadors’ passes, or a caravan road, or anywhere else he might find merchants, travelers, anyone willing to shelter a stranger in their numbers …
The woman paused before answering, probably wondering whether he was half-witted, but eventually she caught his meaning. “A village. I will not tell you its name. When the time comes, I will tell you which way to go, and that is all you need know. Anything more might bring trouble to us.”
If you get caught. She didn’t say it, but she didn’t need to. Feisal understood her implication clearly.
“I suppose that means you won’t tell me your name, either.”
“No,” she said, with a faint smile.
“Can I call you Lyrael?” he asked, naming one of Desna’s legendary priestesses. According to the tales, she’d appeared to wayward travelers lost on starless nights, and had guided them gently through the dark to safety. Considering the circumstances, Feisal thought, it was an appropriate name for his benefactor.
The woman’s smile vanished. She turned away from him abruptly, lifting her stewpot in rag-mittened hands and setting it over the fire.
“I’m sorry,” Feisal said. “I didn’t mean to —”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, you can call me that.”
* * *
Day by day, Feisal’s vitality returned. He hobbled around the cottage, doing what small chores he could, but Lyrael refused to let him venture outside. Knowing where he was, Feisal felt no temptation to disobey her. If he escaped Nidal alive, it would be by Desna’s good graces and hers.
He occupied himself playing with Lyrael’s son, Isiem, a three-year-old boy with long white hair. Not white-blond, as many children had, but stark white. The child himself was not much darker. Head to foot, he was the color of new-fallen snow … and of the pale ones who had hunted the Uskwood on the night of the storm.
Feisal didn’t ask Lyrael about that. Neither did he ask where the child’s father was, or how she eked out a living alone with one young child in her home and, judging by the bump under her apron, another on the way. It wasn’t his concern, and prying would have been a poor reward for her generosity—the woman was already angry enough that her son had unwittingly told Feisal his real name. So instead he watched the boy, playing simple games and retelling the handful of stories he remembered from his own childhood. He wasn’t much of a talespinner, but any story seemed to fill the child with wonder, no matter how clumsily told.
When he wasn’t mangling folktales for Isiem, Feisal watched the village’s life through the shuttered windows. What little he could see didn’t look so fearsome. People drew water from a communal well, gossiped in the grassy square, carried firewood and game from the forests. They dressed like the commoners he’d known in Isger, although their homespun tunics were drab and plain, with none of the brightly colored embroidery or glass beads that even the poorest Isgeri girl prized. In all, the Nidalese seemed ordinary.
But wicker dolls hung in all their windows, and he never saw them outside after dark.
“What are the dolls for?” he asked Lyrael one night. She sat by the fire, humming a wordless lullaby as she darned holes in Isiem’s clothes. Behind one of the wooden screens, the child was already sleeping.
“The dolls?” she echoed, looking up.
“The ones in the windows. Everyone has them here. Why?”
Lyrael set the needle down. She folded the half-darned sock in her lap and stared into the flames. A knot of dried sap hissed and popped in the hearth. “To show we are loyal,” she said.
“I don’t follow.”
“It is said that the white ones can see through the eyes and speak through the mouths of those dolls. We put them in the windows so that the white ones know that we are the faithful subjects of Nidal.”
“But the dolls don’t have eyes,” Feisal said. “Or mouths. They all just have blank cornhusk heads.”
“And they sit outside the shutters, yes.” Lyrael picked her needle up and resumed her work. “If their eyeless heads see anything, it is what we do outside, not in our own homes. Well, we are only ignorant villagers. If we do things clumsily—make our dolls without eyes, or forget to put them in the right places—it is only to be expected. The white ones will hiss and snarl, and we will grovel for forgiveness, and when they go away we will doubtlessly make the same mistakes again, stupid as we are.”
“A clever cover for your rebellion.”
“Clever or not, it is limited.” She gave him a pointed glance. “Small rebellions we can survive. Large ones remain beyond us. We are still the subjects of Nidal, and its rulers are not all as blind as their cornhusk dolls.” Dropping the finished sock in the basket by her chair, Lyrael picked up a shirt and began mending the rip in its sleeve. “You have your strength back. It is time for you to go, before the white ones catch your scent. Travel quickly, and go by daylight, and they will not find you. Their hunters are seldom abroad before dusk.”
“Which way?”
“South. Your friend’s maps are well drawn. In a day or two you will reach the parts he covered. They can guide you from there, if need be, but once you are out of the Uskwood, the danger will be past.”
Feisal nodded slowly. He dug Luswick’s book out of the pile of his belongings and paged through it until he came to the chronicler’s last map: the one that showed the southern Uskwood, and the lands that lay beyond.
He’d memorized the map during his long days of enforced idleness. He had no further need of it, except as a reminder of his dead friend’s last journey, and that was a memory Feisal intended to forget as soon as he could.
Lyrael, however, might find a better use for the Pathfinder’s final work. She’d shown courage by taking him in and cunning by keeping him hidden. She was strong enough to raise a child alone in a realm whose very name still made Feisal feel a thrill of fear. For the sake of that child, and the second babe who would shortly join him, she might wish to flee someday soon.
If she did, she’d need a map.
He tore the page free. Ripping Luswick’s book felt like sacrilege, but Feisal ignored that pang of conscience, creased the map down the center, and offered the folded sheet to Lyrael.
“Maps don’t just show the way into places,” he said. “They show the way out, too. You might like to have this someday. For the children, if not yourself.”
She took the page cautiously, using the tips of her fingers. For an instant she stared at the yellowed paper as if all the secrets of the universe were written inside—those that could bring her dreams to life, and those that would summon her nightmares to slay them. Then she tossed it into the fire.
“A gracious gift,” she said, as the paper curled and charred, “but perhaps you did not hear me. We are in Nidal, and its rulers are not blind.
“Leave in the morning. I will not wake to watch you go.”