I slowly drifted back into an upright position.
“You’re right. I forgot you.”
He was pacing to and fro, and I spoke to his back – he froze.
“I didn’t put you first.” I looked back at Jaid. “I put myself first.”
“No, Kas,” she whispered.
“Yes, I did! Unnnhhhh!” A moan of frustration burst from my lips. “I was never there! I tried, to make it look like I was there, but I wasn’t, not most of the time, and when I was there I was reading, I was thinking, I was plotting and planning or even just sleeping… But it’s over now. Don’t you get it? It’s over. We can – listen!”
Something in my tone caught both their attentions.
“We can start over. The world – it’s huge. Way beyond Mund. We can go wherever we want, once we’re past the point Duskdown gave me. We’re safe. No more champions. No more darkmages. You see a monster you don’t want me to fight, point us in the other direction. It’s simple. No Incursions. No demons. Well – no more demons…”
We looked down at Oldbeard – the imp’s creased, bat-like face was covered in jam, and his long tongue flickered through the spiky bristles of his white beard, snatching up the last dregs.
“I think you’ll be needing a new tart,” I observed.
Jaroan laughed. I shivered at the chilling sound – but that was that. After the morning stop-over on the hillside and my final jokey comment, things seemed to settle down, at least a bit. The awkwardness between us wasn’t brought up again, and for the first time Jaid asked me to tell her about Magicrux Zyger. I went into as much detail as I thought I could, leaving out the extent of my injuries and carefully avoiding any mention of Gilaela; the topic of conversation passed on, and we talked about what we could do once we found somewhere to settle. Jaid wanted a field full of horses – all Jaroan said before lapsing back into silence was that wherever we ended up, it had to have a good library.
Words could only go so far in mending what was wrong in our family. Recent events had done something to Jaroan that hadn’t only changed his personality – it’d changed his face, the bent of his features, sculpting a haughty scowl out of his jawline that never departed, even when he laughed. His laughter – that’d changed too. It was snide, sarcastic – I had no idea where he’d gotten it from, and didn’t want to know. Laughter like that – it said that he saw through you. Even if your joke was amusing, you were even more amusing, being so desperate for approval that you felt you had to make it. It ripped the amusement from almost every conversation, until it almost felt better not to speak at all.
If Jaid was different in anything, it was in her interactions with her twin. It appeared that they were no longer as close as they’d always been, a schism opened up in their mutual respect. He’d changed – she’d stayed the same, or almost. The differences between the twins were no longer trivial. We resumed our journey, this time flying with a lot less wraith and a lot more clinging on for dear life, with Zab coming behind on his imp-palanquin to provide concealment, and I spent a lot of time just going over it in my head, sorting and cataloguing the emotions sloshing like oil and water inside my mind.
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Jaid and Jaroan – I had to stop thinking of them in the same breath like that. They were two people. Two actual, separate people. Sure, they’d come out of Mum at the same time, but that didn’t mean they shared the same identity. Of course, they’d always diverged in their interests, their opinions, but only by a matter of degree – they’d always been so similar in their underlying personalities that this divide between them, between us all, felt magnified by its newness. I was like a child experiencing my first paper-cut, wondering whether it would stop, or whether it would keep hurting forever.
It’ll pass – it has to. Time will heal the rift, and one day I’ll look back and wonder when exactly it was that everything went back to normal.
I focussed my eyes on the mountains ahead instead of dwelling on things. I’d taken another peek at the map before we packed up and headed off again, and I had a good idea of the kind of territory we were looking at. The Five Peaks north-east of Mund were the south-eastern tip of a mountain range, the Brittlespurs that curled around above the city like a horseshoe or upside-down ‘u’. By heading north-west across Upper Agormand we’d run into the northernmost curve of the same mountains, and the location of the most popular pass through them: Irontooth Gates. The town inked onto the paper beneath the word ‘Gates’ looked about one percent the size of Mund, even as far as the map itself depicted it – I wondered what the people there would be like, living almost in Mund’s shadow, just a few days’ ride from the two-hundred-foot white walls.
I wouldn’t have long to wait to find out. We were travelling faster than a horse could gallop, outpacing half the birds we passed. Irontooth Gates might’ve been a few days’ ride for a lord, a week’s travel for a wagon – but we’d probably get there not much past lunchtime, blessed as we were with the ability to cut straight across the landscape. The bigger towns like Disholt we would avoid entirely. We saw as the Plain Road broke up at Ariath’s Cross, the junction-town where the broad, well-lit street, fit for several lanes going either direction, split into three far narrower pathways.
We continued north-west, and an undulating carpet of fields and small woods slowly rose up, up, steeper and steeper before us. Before long the Agormand meadows ahead were replaced with slopes wild with thorns – Jaroan pointed out the sleek shapes of a wolf-pack on the move, moving through the long grasses like eels beneath the surface of a pond. The emaciated woods became shrouded forests as they rose up onto the hillsides, dark of leaf and close-growing. These trees were smothered in their own oily shadows despite the sun beaming down – the canopy seemed to swallow away the light hungrily, churning it into mist.
Then at last all that was green gave way to murky grey basalt, the caps of the Brittlespurs looming above the countryside. It was breathtaking to see them from such an elevation – already feeling high up, yet knowing you were at but a fraction of their height… I’d noticed them not long after leaving Mund, obviously, but it was one thing to see their shadows against the night sky – another thing entirely to see them in the full radiance of the sun. The mountain-peaks, snow-crowned, ice-mantled, seemed to leer down upon the world, clad in their sheer cloaks, their armour of ravine and silence.
The great sentinels we would cross in order to leave it all behind, following the instructions of a mad seer to the very letter.
* * *