Ingo followed Hesio for two days along the lower contours of the mountain range. They moved yet further from his home, as quickly as Gavan’s pace would allow. He had no spare energy to fret about his destination. His legs felt as heavy as wet logs and his tongue was like a piece dry bark in his mouth. They had walked and sweated for two full days since the last rainfall. They had barely spoken, concentrating only on putting one foot in front of the other.

At least Gavan, upon whom Hesio had lavished the remaining supplies, could now walk unsupported. He had lurched upright, screaming, in the middle of their first night on the hillside. He had clawed at his arms and legs as though trying to dig something out from under the skin and begged Hesio to let him return to the forest.

“She needs me. She chose me,” he had repeated over and over like a mantra until he fell back asleep.

At sundown the next night Hesio bound his arms and legs to prevent him from running into the darkness. Ingo tried not to hear or think about what he babbled in his sleep.

“They’re older than us. They hate us so much. Those fools in the forest broke their promise. We were never meant to get the better of them. Their way is so simple, so cold. She can wait forever.”

The gibbering disturbed and frightened Ingo, and he wished that Hesio would see sense and abandon his comrade. It could not be right to keep company with a wed man, even if he had somehow defied his fate.

At least, Ingo reflected, he walked free of his bonds now. Only his oath on the gods tied him to his captor, at least until he met this ‘advocate general.’ Besides, he could not find his way home from here, across what would now be the hunting ground of the sleepers. And despite his determination to hate the big man with a bottle of fire, he could not quite do so. Hesio had saved his life, even if he had endangered it in the first place.

As he walked, he thought about the word that Hesio had spoken in the darkness of the forest on that first night. It still rung in his ears, like a well-made bell that held the sound long after it was struck.

‘Faith.’

On the third day, they reached a stream. The trickle was barely transparent, but Ingo fell upon it greedily and sucked all the water he could hold through cracked lips. Only when his thirst was slaked did he register the taste of earth in his mouth. As he dried his face on his sleeve, he put his thumb and first finger together and muttered into the crook of his arm,

“Farlean, your domain is racing water, protect me from my negligence.”

They sat for a moment after drinking, unwilling to move on from the one source of water they had found so far. With lubricated tongues, they started to speak again.

“What’s wrong with him?” Hesio asked Ingo.

Ingo glanced at Gavan, who sat apart from them with his eyes lolling back and forth.

“He got bitten. I told you, no one survives that,” Ingo replied.

“Well, he’s alive, isn’t he?” the soldier challenged.

“He is,” Ingo grunted. “If you can call it that.”

Truthfully, Ingo had no idea what happened to a person after a sleeper wed them. Elder Joturn only said it was a painless death, unless some fool tried to prolong it. Well, Hesio was that fool. At least the sleepers had not followed them out of the forest. This far north the mountains were hard and dry, with no trees or plants to hide behind. Perhaps they feared the limit of their domain as much as they feared the lick of flame.

“Have you got a cure?” Hesio persisted. “A way to help him?”

Ingo shook his head. Hesio looked disappointed, perhaps even hurt.

“Whatever happens between your people and mine, it doesn’t mean you have to let him suffer.”

A flash of anger pushed Ingo’s tiredness aside and he snapped back:

“What happens between us? What you’re doing, you mean. Whatever that is.”

Hesio lowered his head for a moment and then looked up, imploring and determined.

“Our own stories are all a part of something bigger. We don’t always get to choose our role. You think I wanted to come here and drag you away with us? I didn’t, but I did choose to protect you when I could have abandoned you. Can you help him?”

“I can’t,” Ingo admitted in a softer voice. “I would help, if I could. I would help anyone against the sleepers if I only knew how. The best you can do is let him go, that’s all I know.”

“How did you know they were scared of fire?”

“All forest creatures are afraid fire. Big and small, weak and strong. All except humans, who know how to make it and how to control it.”

Hesio nodded slowly and appeared to chew over the thought. In the silence, Ingo asked a question that had been on his own mind since they escaped.

“That fire you made.” Hesio looked up as Ingo spoke. “How did you do it? It came from nowhere.”

“Nothing comes from nowhere.”

“Well then, where did it come from? That tube you carry?”

Hesio smiled and looked a little triumphant.

“You can ask the advocate general when you see him. I can’t tell you, but I have a feeling he might be happy to share the secret.”

Stolen novel; please report.

They set off walking again, steadily rising until they looked down on the forest from so far above that it resembled a green blanket spread out over a lumpy patch of earth. Ingo stopped and stared for a long time, wondering at this new perspective on his home.

The only features he could discern in any detail were the rivers, town and a brilliant white blur that he supposed were the waterfalls in the distant South. Beyond that was a tiny, shining disc that looked like a polished silver coin dropped in the grass. Was that Lake Silence? The mouth of the river Scursrun lay behind the mountains, but upstream it snaked through the heart of the forest. It travelled through the valley where two distributaries, the Sevarun and Westrun, cut East through the Virunin’s land and West respectively. It was up the Westrun that occasional traders braved the currents at the fork of the two rivers to bring, via Scursditch, the rare luxuries of the Kingdom. They returned with sacks of the intoxicating scursleaf.

As they walked, Ingo scanned the green blanket for his village. If he could locate it from above, perhaps he could find it more easily from down there. Perhaps it was too small, but he could see the clearing in which Scursditch stood, close to the fork of the river. It looked so small from up here. A few blocks of stone on a brown island in the green ocean of the forest. It didn’t seem so grand, from this angle. He thought about the last time he had visited with his father. All his visits had been in secret after that.

----------------------------------------

Heridan took Ingo to buy a sword on his twelfth birthday. Not content with wood, nor even iron, he declared that Ingo would begin training with a small steel sword, forged by a real blacksmith. Aimar’s predecessor, Fulton, had grumbled about the expression ‘real blacksmith,’ for years after until he died. Others objected to the extravagance of the gift but, with the ashes of Ingo’s mother still cooling, they all contributed.

Though ambivalent himself about the weapon, Ingo received it with his best imitation of eagerness and his father grinned for the first time since the funeral. They would have returned in high spirits had they not been engaged by some colourfully dressed locals. No sooner had they approached with smiles on their faces, he felt his father stiffen.

“Forest cousins! You’re buying weapons? Tell us, which clan are you from?” the oldest of the group asked, smoothing down the light, yellow fabric of his shirt and robe.

“The Hallin,” replied Heridan, pushing his shoulders back.

“Very good. So long as you didn’t buy that to rob us with in winter.” The man smirked and his companions chuckled.

Ingo shifted uncomfortably, nervous about what his father might say. Anyone else would have asserted that the Hallin were nothing like the Sullin, who bothered everyone in the forest with their demands for tribute. Not Heridan. He could not bring himself to see fault in a people whose campfire he had shared throughout his childhood. A people who had rescued him from starvation.

“No clan robs. The Sullin guard the northern border and the mountain pass. Godless criminals and hoarders would be crawling across the forest if it weren’t for them. They exact a fair payment for it.”

“Hear, hear, gentlemen,” cheered one of the men. “We can all get behind a fair protection racket, can’t we?” The others laughed and he continued, no longer smiling: “We’ll have the king’s army out here one day. Then we won’t need to give up grain every winter. But it’s not your fault. The forest clans are all so different, aren’t they?” He smirked provocatively.

Then the older man addressed Ingo, still leering as though amused by a secret joke.

“What do you think about our town, boy? Do you like our stone buildings?”

“Why do you build them out of stone?” Ingo asked.

“Well,” said the man, lowering himself to the Ingo’s level. “They keep us nice and warm in the winter, and they never blow down. Wouldn’t you like a warm house instead of living in the mud?”

“But isn’t it difficult to move them?” Ingo asked.

He remembered when they last moved the village upstream and had to build every home anew. Nobody had ever told him that Scursditch stayed still. It was one of those facts known to adults that were obvious in retrospect. To Ingo, at twelve years old, villages were transitory.

The men erupted once more into laughter and his father’s face turned bright red. He was embarrassed, Ingo understood, at the ignorance he had displayed. Still laughing, the oldest of the men gestured toward them and said:

“Gentlemen, our cousins from the woods! You tell me if our future is with the forest or the cities."

----------------------------------------

After another day’s walking, before noon, Hesio instructed Ingo to stop. He pulled out the sheaf of folded parchment that Gavan had once carried and frowned over it.

“We passed near here on the way down. It could be over the top of the next rise!”

“What could? The city?”

Ingo tried to sound nonchalant, but his voice betrayed a tremble of fear and anticipation. The Godless City was infamous. So infamous it did not even feature in Elder Mildred’s horror stories. If there was something that really piqued Ingo’s curiosity, it was something that nobody talked about. Right now, though, he hesitated to take another step. What little anyone said implied it was a place of depravity and cruelty, with none of the gods’ laws to keep the powerful in check. What were the people like, he wondered, who had made themselves the focus of the heavens' ire? Would his presence there taint him? What a choice, between breaking a vow to the gods, or entering the only place in which they are openly scorned.

“Haha! Not Dombarrow!” Hesio guffawed. "That's a week's march away, or more." Relief washed across Ingo's chest, followed by the faintest twinge of disappointment. “The mountain camp is near. If Captain Tristor made it, that’s where he'll be. That’s where you’ll meet the advocate general. I won’t make you come to the city.”

Ingo doubted the captain had survived and sincerely hoped he had not. He suspected that his treatment would have been worse had he been left alone with that man instead of Hesio. The captain looked like he had anger coiled inside, waiting for any opportunity to spring out.

They ascended the rise and the mountains gave way. Beneath them, the land sloped gently through the peaks from the North to the South. A broad, dusty plain spread out before Ingo that looked like a pathway scooped through the middle of a mound of mud. The famous mountain pass, The Lawbreaker’s Pass, could have been impressive enough in its own right. Ingo’s first sighting of the Tower of a Thousand Follies, rising into low clouds in the distance beyond the pass, might also have moved him to awe or horror had something else not struck him first.

Ingo had never seen so many people gathered in one place. Across the pass, groups of men in shining armour sat and stood around tents and fires or tended to wagons and carts. Had Dombarrow emptied its entire population onto this stretch of barren land? Even the marketplace of Scursditch never contained such numbers, though it bustled with considerably more activity. Here, the bright red tunics and glinting steel moved with purpose and quiet coordination. Against the deep, dusty red of the pass they created the impression of single, scaled body.

“What is this?” gasped Ingo, his mouth agape in awe.

“My people,” replied Hesio, sounding both proud and relieved. He glanced at Ingo’s leg, where the rope had been tied a few days earlier. His hand moved toward him but then faltered, and he drew it back.

“When we get down to that encampment and you speak to our leader,” he pointed at the network of tents and wooden structures which looked to Ingo like a gigantic honeycomb, fully populated with a swarm of enemies, “your promise is good. After that you can go on your way. You have my word.”

Gavan emerged from the isolation of his private mumblings to express muted joy at the sight of his countrymen.

“A doctor,” he stammered, blinking in the sunlight as though he had just opened his eyes. “A doctor might help.”

“Yes,” said Hesio, patting his shoulder, “We’ll get you to the doctor now. Come on.”