We’d gotten through one of the Fox’s forests with only a 25% casualty rate. That would be an excellent number, were it not for the fact we’d killed them ourselves.
Out of all the memories that could’ve lingered past the edges of the forest, that putrid moment where everything about Andros seemed to have curdled lay stuck in my throat like a piece of bone. When he’d asked after his little vial of oblivion – my vial of oblivion, I reminded myself – I could’ve happily slit his throat myself. He was just so pathetic, with his raggedy beard, lacklustre groping towards authority, unearned arrogance…
And yet his death was such a callous waste.
I trudged through the menacingly edged tallgrass behind Kit, carrying Aron’s two surviving relatives, neither of whom had said a word about his passing. Judging by the fading heat of Willow’s head on my back, whatever sickness had seized her blood was finally on its way to evaporating into the air. I’d failed to understand what happened behind closed doors, right up until my spiteful companion had decided to share her insight. Would I have done anything even if I’d known? The easy answer drifted within reach, but I knew enough about myself not to take it so readily.
While sitting atop my shoulders, Daisy lightly tapped the side of my head. “Excuse me, Vin?”
Still stumbling forward, I nodded. “Yes?”
“Isn’t there only one?”
It didn’t take a genius to know what she was referring to. “Of Kani?”
“Yes.”
“I’d thought so.”
“Even though you’re a Face?”
“Especially because I’m a Face.” I smiled down at my feet. “Our masks can only bear a single expression at a time. I suppose that’s just…”
“Wrong?” she finished.
I shrugged slightly. “Less than correct.”
In front of us, Kit – who carried my halberd across her shoulders – scoffed. “Ha! No, th’ kid’s right. You were wrong.”
“No one said to take Faces literally- “
“If I took ‘em un-literally, would you be correct-er?” The tall woman refused to wait for a reply. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” She turned around to look up at Daisy. “Y’should be proud, kid – you know more about a god’n most Faces.”
The girl hunched down, attempting to conceal her body behind my head.
“Ah, well, yeah,” stuttered the swordswoman. “That’s, uh… Okay.”
“Are you old enough to go around calling people ‘kid’?” I smirked.
“Shut up, Vin,” she muttered, and accelerated her movement through the grass.
Few words were exchanged after that. The weariness of long-distance trekking across an environment determined to bite our heels every dozen steps soon stole the desire to speak. Everyone with their feet on the ground dealt with the same reality of grass frequently sliding through their skin – everyone except me. Underneath the ubiquitous stretches of tallgrass, my shins were clad in a thin layer of ivory material – the same that had erupted from my fingers several days ago. With an ease that must’ve been borne of long practice, I’d used it to turn Willow’s dagger away from my spine during our encounter with the Fox.
If anyone had noticed, they hadn’t mentioned anything. Maybe they assumed my ‘Lizardblood’ healed the wounds I should have borne. Or maybe they hadn’t the will to press a man twice their weight, who they’d seen slaughter twenty-odd men, on something he wanted to keep hidden. If I decided to walk away, Kit probably would too, and then Baylar might have their heads on stakes before sundown. Neither Maddie nor Tully had any way of knowing the spell their offer had cast upon my veins.
The house always wins, I thought. Except when there’re two betting against one another. That was enough to elicit a snort.
When we were several hours away from the god-thing’s forest, Tully declared we needed to get an approximation of our location. There were no landmarks nearby, but Gast had managed to engrave a pebble with a rune that would point it towards its partner. If the path between them was mostly unobstructed. If the rock floated in a small pool of water.
Which is what led to Kit slowly shuffling up a speartree with a rope in her bandaged hands, a bowl full of water clenched between her teeth. Despite me hovering at the tree’s bone-white base with outstretched arms – scared the effort would tear the stitches in her cheeks or wreck her still-healing hands and cause her to fall – each step she took up was careful and seemingly absent of significant strain. In an outstanding display of athleticism, her lean, wiry build managed to get her to the top without incident. After a few moments with her eyes narrowed on the bowl, she moved the rope to one hand and pointed in the direction the blockade group were in – and to my great relief, it was parallel to the forest’s edge, meaning they’d likely broken through the blockade. She spat the bowl out. Then the swordswoman looked down, realised she’d climbed nearly five storeys into the air, and proceeded to hold her position until our constant calls of unsolicited advice caused her to release a quavering string of cusses and quickly slide to the ground.
Seeing Kit shiver at the top of a speartree must’ve endeared her to Daisy, because she soon transferred over to the swordswoman’s back, whispering an endless stream of questions to the swordswoman. When the girl finally fell asleep, Kit’s smug glance in my direction struck me as so absurdly funny that I nearly soiled my underpants cackling. After a few moments, the dark-skinned warrior joined in. Maddie and Tully found us pointing at one another, tears rolling down our cheeks as we laughed.
Eventually, the humour slipped through our fingers and we were back to walking in silence.
Nightfall was spent underneath another tree, dark roots greedily consuming the dirt’s surface and preventing the tallgrass from piercing through. In the distance, the prairie began to fade away into a rougher environment. Hills burst from the ground like growths, red earth pushing upwards to split what used to be a layer of compact stone into mounds of mismatched boulders and rock shelfs. Rarely were the signs of a past Aching so clear; in the Heartlands, stone shelfs usually prevented any radical growths – which is why most Heartlanders built their homes atop them – but here the red earth’s heaving had been violent enough to shatter what usually contained it.
Without fire or lantern, the darkness felt like a physical thing – soft as a smothering blanket. Absent of a child’s chatter, the air sat still. Tully bedded down beside Daisy and Willow, leaving three of us awake.
Kit squatted on a small boulder, an unlit cigarillo between her lips. She began to strike at it with her flint and steel. I swiftly pulled it from her mouth.
“Oi.” Her reprimand lacked bite.
I handed it back to her. “Not at night.”
She tsked, but stuck the offending roll back in a pouch.
I slowly panned my gaze through the darkness.
“Have you…” Maddie’s voice trailed off, then picked up again. “Smoked for long?”
“No.” Apparently content to let me keep watch, she sprawled out onto the ground, mishappen with roots. “Few months, maybe.”
“Why did you start?”
“Dunno. No one breathing down my neck, tellin’ me not to.”
“Who did that?”
A long pause. “My mother. Told me it’d fog up my chest.”
“She’s not wrong,” I offered.
“Yeah, well; I’d listen more’f she didn’t smoke like a chimney.”
A cold wind blew, straight through my bones and out again. I heard both women root around in their bag for a blanket or bedroll and wrap it around themselves. Maddie lay swaddled in hers like a child’s head poking from the top of a mountain, while Kit rolled into hers like a sausage.
“Do you need one, Vin?” asked Maddie.
Kit cackled, then halted as it stretched the stitches in her face. “You offerin’ to share?”
“Wha- No!” she vehemently spat.
“Wow,” I said flatly. “Protest harder, why don’t you.”
Kit chuckled.
Maddie’s spittle flew as she searched for an excuse. “No, uh- “
“Joking.” I raised my hands. “Joking. Lizardblood keeps the worst of the chill away,” I lied smoothly.
Comfortable silence lingered for a moment.
“Where’d you get th’ blood anyways?” asked Kit. “Join an army?”
I pursed my lips. Finally, I deigned to give something resembling truth. “…Dure.”
Kit sat upright. “Damn, the Lizard?”
“Its parasites, but the god was around.”
“…What was that like?” Maddie’s question slipped from her lips.
“Filthy.” I paused. “Violent. Everything was just kind of… circling around… this rotten heap of flesh. Everyone and everything going everywhere.”
Kit’s drawl came from her blanket. “It stink?”
“Yeah.”
“How bad?”
“Pretty bad.”
A short pause.
“So Kani’s yer second god.”
“…Yeah.”
Kit’s dark eyes locked on mine, which still watched our surroundings. “It’s not?”
I kept looking around.
“What’re th’ others?”
Levelly, I returned her stare.
“Fine, fine. So where’d you see Dure?”
I continued staring at her.
She clicked her tongue. “C’mon. This is like… Building rapport, or somethin’.”
I groaned, and turned back to the darkness.
“Our dead-eye Head here wants to know too. Ain’t that right, Ma-leen.”
“…I’d like to know.”
I drummed my hand on my upper thigh. “Saw the Ox, too.”
“What is it like?” Maddie quickly asked.
“It’s, uh…” I considered lying, for a moment – save her from the truth of her home’s destruction – then dismissed the idea. She was a big girl. “Bad. There’s more blood than you’ve ever seen in one place. Every move it makes turns someone into… several pieces. Usually more than one. And it’s bleeding too – showers of blood, everywhere – and there’re all these runners scrambling amidst all the dead and people missing pieces of themselves trying to bottle the Godsblood before someone else does, or it loses potency. They usually die, too.
“And the god’s wailing, every time it goes anywhere. Because every time Enn moves it gets snapped into pieces. So the sound’s constant. Ubiquitous. It’s not much if you’ve mortal blood – just loud and unpleasant – but sometimes a Blooded will simply… drop dead from the sound. That’ll happen with the cries of every god, but Enn screams the most.”
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
A silence stretched as Kit and I waited for Maddie to form words.
“…How do you think the Spires of Heltia fared?”
I looked down and scratched my head. “…It, uh, depends on what angle it entered from. The best case scenario is that one or two spires were knocked down.”
“…That isn’t how it went, though.”
“…No.”
“How many died, do you think?”
“I don’t know how many live in- “
“Twenty thousand in the towers. Around forty thousand in the camp.”
Amongst unarmed, unprepared citizenry, confident in their fortifications? For the most furious of gods, it was always going to be a slaughter. “…At least a quarter of that. Probably a third.”
“Blood,” Kit gasped.
Maddie said nothing at all.
Besides the mist of our breaths and rustling of grass, complete stillness reigned.
The swordswoman slowly released a breath. “Least you’ve- “
“Kit,” I snapped.
“Right, yeah, okay.”
The wind blew across the prairie, reaching tendrils into my clothing’s many tears to dive into bare skin. Excepting my sword, halberd, knife, and the things shoved into my belt-pouches, all my possessions had been lost to the Fox. Including my bedroll. Frost had yet to fall into its full, smothering stillness, but when it did no amount of Godsblood would stop me from freezing solid. I’d need to find supplies somewhere. Given the forces pursuing us, I somehow doubted it would be a problem to simply… take some.
Until then, the cold would take residence in my bones. I rubbed my hands together and began pacing around the campsite.
“So…” Maddie’s voice quietly slid out from beneath her blankets, apparently unwilling to let the conversation end on such a note. “Your mother.”
Kit sniffed. “What about her?”
“Did she… stop you from doing many things?”
“Jus’ the stupid ones.”
“Like what?”
“I dunno.” Kit clicked her tongue in thought. “Uh… Spendin’ my time badly?”
“What did she want you to do?”
“Train, mostly.”
I looked over at the pair. “She’s the one who taught you to fight?”
“Her, mostly. A few others, too.”
“Was she part of a House?” I asked.
Kit laughed. “What? No. Why you ask that?”
“Really?” My brows furrowed. “I was actually certain you were an expatriate.”
“An ex-what?”
“Ex-House,” I reiterated. “Your style looks like it’s derived from one of the northern Houses. Andoras or Illico.” The latter was said slowly – the ‘co’ required a click at the back of the throat too foreign to say quickly. Most decided to forgo it entirely, but the politics of a General’s office demanded inoffensive pronunciation.
Her frown was audible. “Maybe she was.”
I noted the use of ‘was’, and decided to change the subject. “What about you, Head Maleen? What was it like being the scion of such a noble house?”
She huffed. “Be quiet, Vin.” With a less aggravated tone, she continued. “From what I gather, House Heltia is a bit strange compared to its peers. Most of my relatives are… were scholars. Bureaucrats. A few worked with Neelam- “
“What was ol’ Neelam like?” interrupted Kit.
“Uh, I didn’t see him very often. He kept in his room, doing Owlblood things, mostly.”
“Did he kidnap people? Use ‘em for ex-per-i-ments?”
“That’s so stupid,” Maddie scoffed. “Is that what you thought he did?”
“Whaddaya mean, it’s stupid? Big damn witch sitting in a big damn tower an’ no one ever sees his big damn face – bloody reasonable, to me.”
The Head gave the same smile I’d seen her give to small children, and shot me a knowing look.
When I agreed with Kit, her smug cast vanished. “It’s a bit far-fetched, but I thought he was doing something strange up there.”
“You too? Why?”
“Have you even been in the Heartlands?” My next words were said in a slower cadence. “The ground grows food… in response to blood. It’s meant to have earthquakes that rearrange the land. There hasn’t been one for a while, but even so – none of it’s natural.”
“And you thought- “
“I don’t know. The man was a century old – surely he could’ve worked some sort of magic over the land.”
“The Heartlands have always been like this!”
I threw up my arms. “I’m not a historian, okay? He still could’ve been channelling some weird Heartland-power or something.”
“He was doing research.”
“Research on how t’eat people’s souls, maybe” muttered Kit.
The young woman’s orange hair swished as her head jolted towards the swordswoman, which provoked an immediate cackle.
“You’re messing with me.”
“Vin’s not.”
I turned my face towards the darkness, hoping my olive skin concealed the heat in my cheeks. “It makes sense.”
I stumbled slightly, as a bolt of pain ran through my skull. For some reason, as soon as I’d said those words, the theory rung false – as if I’d just spoken a lie.
“Or.” I rubbed my forehead. “I guess it doesn’t. No human hand could create the Heartlands.”
“Weird, angry place, huh?” Kit drawled from her blanket.
Maddie hummed and I grunted.
The conversation quickly trailed away, into something approaching a companionable quiet. Given how long it took for the other’s breathing to slow into slumber, it didn’t quite make it there. There had been a lot placed at our feet, over the day, and good mental health demanded we bury it. Yet the mind was a finite box, and no amount of shovels could dig at its borders. All a person could ever do was drape something over the problem and hope that nothing tore the covering off.
Sleep helped with that. It placed yesterday somewhere else; forming a wall between one day and the next, formed of absence speckled with dreams. That barrier artificially delineated the flowing of time. Even if the wall only existed in the soul, unreflected by reality, it still gave the only break that anyone ever got from existence. Except death, I supposed. Perhaps the oblivion sleep meant the end of the soul, with its visions sparked by the death throes of a failing thing. Maybe some other, freshly birthed spirit took up the mantle of the next day. But that seemed too easy a way out. Tomorrow inherits all the faults of yesterday – any break was an illusion formed by failing memory. And sometimes sleep was no reprieve, anyway.
My stolen Lizardblood meant most physical wearing formed by the grind of the day faded within a few hours, whether asleep or not. It made it easy to ignore the slurring of the mind and seize the time that usually belonged to slumber for other endeavours: carving, staring blankly into the night sky, or the twiddling of thumbs. Sometimes all three. Tomorrow became altered by the weight of the mental fatigue that extended wakefulness brewed, curbing some of the harder edges while sharpening others. Kind of like being drunk, but with a worse hangover. The third day was painful, with fatigue warping everything into gnarled, jutting points, digging into the brain with every chance it got. There’d been a point a few years ago when going two or three days without sleep was common for me – I’d gradually gotten better at it over the years as well – but I’d rarely gone four. The call of a soft bed had been too alluring to ignore by that point.
It had been five days since I’d last slept, and all I felt was a slight itch behind my eyes. I wouldn’t be waking anyone for second watch. Given how the Frost had begun to settle into my bones, nodding off might see me dead by sunrise anyway.
So I paced around the roots of the black heartwood tree – its leafless branches gnarling towards the moons making it seem like a wizened old witch – with my hands stuck in my armpits and my breath fogging the air in front of me, staring across the prairie and wondering where chance would place me next.
The world turned. I stared at the countless stars in the sky and the freezing of my body and the wind blowing its song through the tallgrasses and the sounds of small rodents scuttling and the flames of my companions and the beat of my heart and I wished its turning would cease. It didn’t, though, because that wasn’t how it worked. So I drew a few chunks of wood from my pouch and began working at them with my knife – taking frequent breaks to breathe on my fingers and rub them together – even as my divine sense stretched a thousand paces into the night. The moons spun above as I lowered myself into a fugue.
After a few attempts, I managed to draw Kit from the wood – blade drawn in a neutral stance, her vicious smirk softening at something outside the carving’s scope – and by the time the others began to stir, I’d created a miniature Maddie as well – arms vehemently castigating someone below a mourning brow, trembling lips, and fiery eyes. But without colour, the small figures would remain blank imitations. I sighed and rubbed a smear of dirt from my forehead.
Kit sat up, rubbing her eyes, then squinted down at the form of Maddie beside her. They’d huddled together over the night. Dawn had yet to colour the horizon. After a moment running her fingers through her short hair, she looked at me. “You did the whole watch?”
Tully was already up, gazing towards the rocky hills waiting before the horizon. “That was foolish of you, Vin. We need you ready.”
I shrugged.
Willow, absent of the flush of fever, brushed Daisy’s hair with a small comb I’d made them. She whispered into her daughter’s ear, and though I could’ve listened, I turned my hearing elsewhere.
The scarred Spiderblood gently shook her charge awake and packed the younger woman’s blanket in her bag while Maddie blinked blearily at the rest of us. She adjusted her chitin armour, slightly, then donned her helmet after a few moments.
I scoffed down a chunk of pemmican I’d kept tucked away in my pouch, while the rest ate the same fare. After a moment weighing whether I should ignore the gnawing in my gut, I took out four mushrooms – they were safe enough, I’d found – and began nibbling on them amidst quick sips of water to curb the flavour. The species tasted like spongy dirt, but the knowledge that the Heartlands had poisonous fungi to spare helped season the experience.
“That good?” asked Kit, glancing up from beneath her iron helm as she checked her lute was tied to her pack.
“No.”
She looked back down. “Figured.”
Soon enough we were all striding back through the tallgrass. By the time dawn finally broke, we’d reached the beginnings of the hills. On closer inspection, they seemed more like massive mounds of gravel piled beneath boulders of various sizes, with the occasional blade of tallgrass laying in wait to pierce an errant foot. The remnants of some titanic heaving of the land. I took Willow off my back and Daisy off my shoulders, but as we walked and scrambled between the hills found myself frequently aiding the two to cross more precarious obstacles.
“Thank you,” the brown-skinned woman told me as I hauled her atop a boulder.
I smiled briefly, and leaned down to lift her daughter up.
Scattered beneath and between the rocks were hints of previous settlements: sanded logs peeking underneath the rubble; the occasional shattered piece of pottery; a surprising amount of masonry; brief glimpses of pecked bones. The houses would’ve been built atop the stone that should’ve contained the Aching’s regrowth – only for the ground to erupt and swallow them. I’d heard the last Aching – which would’ve happened when I was four years old – was particularly violent. Despite the havoc the lack of a recent Aching had wrought on the Heartlanders, I was glad I’d never experienced one.
Kit, who had silently become our trailblazer, tried to choose the easiest, most stable paths through the hills. Yet the instability of the many moss-covered stones conspired to make picking a safe path impossible. Everyone except the swordswoman and myself tripped several times, and Daisy was just barely saved from cracking her skull open by Maddie placing herself in the rolling girl’s way, which managed to arrest her momentum in exchange for the young Head crashing several meters down. Whatever runework had been carved into her armour no longer had the Godsblood to operate, leaving the woman with a handful of bruises.
But, somewhat miraculously, by the time we’d reached midday, we’d all avoided major injury. We ate lunch just below the ridge of a small mountain, after which Kit and I clambered upwards to lay with our heads peeking over the top. Both of us were squinting into the constant wind, vainly trying to blink moisture back into our eyes as we checked Gast’s rune-compass, when I spotted something shining on the side of a mountain. A few tarnished bronze and copper pans were the only metallic objects remaining on the mountain; age and exposure had cruelly robbed them of any gleam. The shine meant something valuable – something recent.
Kit won the ensuing game of dice, granting the right to slide down piles of gravel towards whatever it was, provided she split whatever she found with me. Twenty minutes later, she returned.
In her hands was a gold-daubed bracer.
“Man died with a whole set o’ armour. One hit, and poof.” She mimed a spike going through the top of her head. “Stiletto or pickaxe or somethin’.”
I took the bracer in my hand and scraped at the outside. Beneath the dirt caked onto it, the gold flaked easily to reveal steel. “Any others?”
“Two, I think. Both had th’ yellow, but on leather. Barely any blood – attackers didn’t get hurt none.” She clicked her teeth. “They Baylar?”
“It’s not yellow. It’s gold.”
“…Ox’s swingin’ balls,” she swore.
“Yeah,” I agreed.
We brought it to Tully.
“An Albright patrol,” the older woman mused. Her grey hair blew sparsely in the wind. “It is a long way from their territory.”
Maddie tilted her head up at her guard. “Who would attack a king’s forces?”
Tully took a moment to respond. “…The other group hadn’t the equipment to puncture steel in such a manner.”
“Then who?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
Somewhat reluctantly, I scratched away the gold from its outside. “So, on top of the Albrights, there’s someone else in these hills.”
“Yes.”
I swore.
Avoiding the area wasn’t viable: if we didn’t reach the other group, Kit and I would threaten to leave. Even if the Heltians could afford to lose our strength, the area was a dead zone for Baylar forces – a chance to gain ground unmolested. But even knowing that, I expected Tully to raise the idea of outright leaving. Instead, she just shot me an appraising glance.
With any other group of people, this would be a bad plan. They had me, though. Worst case scenario: I’d pick up who I could carry and run a thousand leagues away from the problem. Yet if I did that, I’d never know what lay at the centre of the area – what Baylar had been ordered to hide. Curiosity was the foolish desire of someone with far less experience, but it lingered still.
We recharted our course over the highest mountains, rather than through them. Any scouts worth their chits would take up residence at the tallest points possible, and they would leave us with our blood replaced with arrows if they sighted us. For such a small group, this was the stealthiest plan – but also the most strenuous.
Over the next few hours, our speed was halved, even as we travelled thrice the distance going up and down. The hills progressively got taller, until they could only be described as small mountains of stone. At one point our hike turned to outright climbs up short stretches of unstable cliff. Somewhat miraculously, it managed to hold my weight.
It didn’t take long to sight another patrol: five as dead as the last, corpses bearing impossibly angled limbs given by a long roll down the rocky hillside. However, this time they weren’t alone. A single splotch of mottled brown lay amongst the gold: a tall, muscular man dressed in furs and wearing a cloak covered in forest detritus.
Kit hawked a gob of spit from our position atop the mountain and watched it fall to the bodies beneath. “Who in Siik’s big damn hole is he?”
No one had an answer.
We continued onwards, breathing growing increasingly ragged as the strain of constantly pulling ourselves up mounds of unstable rock and hopping down without injury ground muscles into balls of hurt. Thrice more we spotted dead Albright soldiers: a scout with an arrow sprouting from their skull atop a peak; two female Oxbloods gored from behind; a man with his skull broken by rocks. Eventually, we peaked the tallest in our journey so far, and found the landscape in-front of us deepened, trailing in a spiral of crimson dirt downwards until it flattened into a crater of fragmented stone. Its cracks radiated outwards, drawing the eye towards a small mound in its centre, surrounded by a cluster of speartrees more densely packed than any I'd seen before.
Around the huge depression in the earth, a battle was being fought. The sun had passed its zenith, casting the entire affair into shadow, but despite that a glimmering of gold was visible against an assortment of greys, browns, and blacks. At the central mound, the shining forces held against a horde of earthier colours; even as they rammed themselves against some kind of obstruction within it.
I pointed. “That’s got to be where the Ichor is.”
Kit carefully poured water into a depression formed in a boulder, and placed Gast’s runic compass in the centre. The six of us gathered around and watched it slowly, inexorably rotate towards the centre of the battle, where it finally stilled.
We looked at the forces: two sides of at least a hundred, crouching and warring beneath a shroud of arrows.
“Raven’s bones,” Tully swore.