All things pass, Edda had told him in his youth: when he’d fallen and scraped his knees as a child, when he’d been twelve, mourning his first dog, and when a fire had killed two of his friends from the nearby village.Time makes us all unrecognizable.
He kept realizing how much she’d known, in different ways, throughout his life. Walking over the stones laid by people whose names he’d never learn, toward a fate he didn’t understand, Olvir found a new truth to the words.
* * *
The bones of the world rise closer to the surface here,said Ulamir.We have left the path that I once traveled. Now I know our road only from my own senses.
Now, when she wasn’t as caught up in the strangeness of the trip, Vivian wondered why Ulamir had been going north so frequently. It hadn’t been his home: he’d been born in the southeast, in jewel-studded caves below the plains that surrounded Nerapis.
Vivian kept her curiosity to herself. That was mostly the best approach when talking with soulswords about their pasts. Death healed some wounds, but lingering to watch the world change opened others. She trusted Ulamir to tell her information that would make a difference. Otherwise, she listened.
Either he caught the edge of her question or he felt disposed to explain.Once, my father’s sisters dwelled under the mountains north of Klaishil,Ulamir said.Guests were always welcome to their halls, stone of their veins or no. They were a merry lot.
He spoke with more wistfulness than pain. Vivian returned sympathy nonetheless.
The stonekin in the north had been Thyran’s first targets after he’d acquired his allies. Gizath bore Ulamir’s people a very old grudge. His servant had been thorough in acting upon it.
She and Ulamir let that knowledge lie between them as they went on. It filled the silence among the forest’s sounds, the space between her footsteps and Olvir’s. Ulamir had known the loss firsthand, Vivian from histories, but it weighed on them both.
In the days before,he said eventually,my cousin said that the wind wept at night when it blew over the mountains.
That made sense to Vivian. She couldn’t hear the elements the way the stonekin did, but if she’d been the wind, crossing such a place would have probably set her crying too.
Before much time passes, the truth of it will become clear.
Vivian’s thighs could have told her that they were approaching the mountains. The trees were thinner, shorter, and fewer, too, which didn’t make the walk any easier. More branches were at eye level, and the increased light had let a small second forest of briars sprout. She did enjoy being able to see more sky.
She reflected once in a while on their progress as it would’ve appeared on a map. The land, the one the stonekin had called Mortera, was shaped like a snake with butterfly wings. From Silane in the south, a traveler could follow the Larykan River upward, past Heliodar’s marshes and through Criwath. Rivulets fed it high in the Serpentspine, flowing cold from tiny springs.
Past that—the Battlefield.
Nobody living could say what else. Nobody had left any records that Vivian believed. Even the old peoples, the stonekin and the waterfolk, had left the northeastern lands after the Betrayal. Some stories said they’d fled south to escape too many memories. Others said that the gods’ fight had turned all the ground to black glass where nothing would grow or cracked holes in the world that monsters had come through.
Nobody had been fool enough to go and look. Before Thyran and his storms, there’d been barbarian tribes in the northern forests, who’d sometimes climb the slopes with their herds, but Vivian had never heard of anybody going to the Battlefield itself.
If they won and lived, maybe she’d be proud of breaking new ground. She suspected she’d have too many other feelings to notice it.
She went on through the forest, careful of her footing among moss-slick stones and half-hidden sticks. There was a knack to walking that way: motion coming from the hips, heel hitting the ground first, weight settling gradually through the ball of the foot once Vivian was sure of her balance. It came back quickly, even after months of confinement. So did the art of drinking and eating one-handed, without breaking stride, in small helpings that she could swallow swiftly at need.
If their scouts were correct, they’d passed the majority of Thyran’s forces—or those he’d sent toward Criwath at any rate. Outliers were possible, but the invading army tended to stay a day’s march away from the human camp. A day’s journey for one knight and one Sentinel, traveling light, was much farther than for a whole army.
The forest bore that out. Birds called more raucously. Small animals darted more freely through the underbrush—not fearless, but with no greater fear than any wild thing lived with in the normal course of its life. Once in a while, a louder sound signaled that a deer had caught their scent.
Vivian wasn’t initially alarmed when she heard another animal pushing through the forest. It sounded bigger than a deer or even an elk, but it could have simply been closer than those animals had previously gotten to them.
She stopped anyhow. So did Olvir, with no need for her to get his attention, though he glanced over his shoulder beforehand to make certain he didn’t take her by surprise and cause a collision. She nodded to show that she was all right.
The next sound was closer, louder, and definitely not a deer. Vivian couldn’t hear any footsteps or hoofbeats, but the sound of snapping brush was clear, loud, and low.
It’s no creature of Gizath that approaches,said Ulamir.But it is large.
She drew the sword swiftly and turned to face northwest, where the sound was coming from. Olvir had his shield up when he followed her motion. Vivian heard the metallicshingas he drew his own sword. There was no time to do so quietly.
A roar from the northwest shook the trees. A heartbeat later, a mass of green and gray fur, topped by a blocky head with four red eyes, crashed through onto the road.
The time for staying quiet was definitely over.
Chapter 11
