The fourth time a bramble catches her skirts, Emilia has had enough. Torn linen and wool flutter down in scraps. A cloud of birds scatter like sorrel seeds, twittering danger, danger, danger!
It isn’t modest or proper to walk around with her ankles showing, never mind her calves. What have modesty and propriety ever brought her? It isn’t modest for a girl to tell a boy to his face that she doesn’t want to marry him. It isn’t proper for her to be lettered, to be taught numbers and money by Uncle Enryk when his wagons stop by.
As far as she can see, modesty and propriety are just lying-words for being stupid, and useless, and letting Young Tom the Miller’s son do whatever he wants with her.
She pauses her march for a moment. Closes her eyes. Breathes in the richness of Sun-warm leaves and bark, the way the smell of flowering spicebush hangs near thick enough to taste; the sharper notes beneath. Sourberries in her lunch bundle, redberries lurking under thumb-length thorns, young eyebright budding in some nearby rotten log, and – eugh – scrubfowl droppings.
It’s easy to feel like nobody really wants or cares to help her. At least – nobody who can truly can. Girlhood memories of Midwife Ziva are faded and time-thin, however Emilia cherishes what remains. Oliga and Hana and Idony share what they can: time and company, trust and secrets, and every so often some little treat. Four girls have no great power in a whole village. Less when one of them won’t and can’t fit in, set aside her interests, smile prettily and do as she’s told. Stop asking questions. Be a good girl.
There’s a reason she’s never ‘prenticed a craft. For the mocking or strained or sad edge to the idea that she might come of age as Bookbinder Emilia, Scholar Emilia, Librarian Emilia. Those are things men do in the heartland.
Anger could come so easily, if she let it, but she’s determined to be better. To keep her thoughts clear. To see that she herself isn’t the only important thing in the world. Miner Bodan finally married Jeweller Gretel this past spring. Who would have put the word in his ear that she’d been waiting half a decade for a proper courting-gift, if Emilia had spent all that time thinking only of herself?
Were it just Miller Tom and Young Tom acting at lords, she might have reason to be bitter. When the menfolk came back and cleaned off their tools and sadly shook their heads over how poor Miller Tom should’ve known better than to wander out to the cliffs of a night, even drowning a widower’s sorrows in mead… Well, their grain might not be so finely or evenly ground, but they would manage a while until someone learned the art, or the Baron arranged a new Miller to move in.
But Miller Tom and Apothecary Roan and Smith Arter are thick as thieves, and well in with the Magistrate besides – weasel that he is, with half the Militiamen grubbing in his pockets and his lips by the Baron’s ear.
Emilia spends as much time as she can either buttoned up at home, where even Young Tom won’t dare barge in, or out a-forage where he can’t find her. Today was good for herbs; the straps of her wicker back-basket pull tight on her shoulders. Hidden right at the bottom is almost a palm’s width of inkstone, enough for weeks of sketches.
She’s still almost given up on the weight of it all what must have been twenty times, just these last five degrees of the Sun. If it weren’t for her bundles of staunchleaf and burnwort and carefully-wrapped mountain-mallow and all the other healer-herbs, she’d have gladly traded inkstone and dye-flowers for speed and endurance. Uncle Enryk always laughs about heartlanders who don’t give downhill any respect until their first time on real terrain.
For almost three leagues, the valley slopes shallowly away from the cliffs, following the curve of the old glacier. Then it gets steep. The scramble over the false crest as you turn northward around the Nail is maybe nearer to a cliff than a hill, but once you’ve made it you’re out into the truewilds, among old-growth trees tens of spans high. There’s roots and herbs that just won’t thrive in the commonwilds – it’s too low, and too managed. Her basket is worth lives.
There’s never enough bloodflower.
She resettles her mother’s cloak so it sits just right on her shoulders. If the wildsmen had their way, she’d never come out here. Half their craft is putting just enough of a yoke on the truewilds to see the village provisioned without ruining future crops or spreading poisons everywhere, but the upper valley isn’t safe even if you know your morel from your mandrake. There’s mountain wolves, wild goathog, even the occasional rogue Scarbeast.
As a child, they never quite seemed real, not until Mensur came back without an arm and eye and ear and had to go ‘prentice for Old Yorl instead of becoming a Trapper. Until Obrad never came back at all. By then she’d been sneaking out for years: further and further though the commonwilds, at first, and soon into the upper valley. Most of the wildsmen had given up on making her stop. Ranger Ota and Hunter Saban taught her as much as they could get away with – enough to avoid wandering into anything too dangerous, if she was careful. How to pace herself and cover ground and know the best routes, instead of blundering in as straight a line as the trees will let her. All the teaching-songs for herbcunning. And what you have to do, when care and caution aren’t enough.
She’s grateful for that, always, but never more than now.
Plainsfowl flutter away from her stride. There’s almost a league of meadow and pasture between the village proper and their managed woodland, portioned out by deadwood fences and fruiting hedgerows. She crosses it in barely over nine degrees of the Sun, even keeping safe distance from the aurochs.
Along the way, she gets frowns and scowls from Herders as they notice her torn skirts. Their ‘prentices watch her wide-eyed, blush, giggle, gasp, leer. They all leave off when she signals the worst kind of danger – she can’t shout, not with younger kids following along behind parents and siblings, but everyone learns armspeak once they’re of an age to know what living next to the Scar really means. The older ‘prentice boys take off, running flat out to spread word to the next group, who’ll pass it on from there. Emilia glances at Katka as the old ewe matron, feeling the changing mood, gathers her flock and heads for shelter. She always was a clever one. Hopefully she’ll live.
By the time Emilia reaches the village, everyone is making ready. Terracers are taking in what harvest they can, younger ‘prentices are spilling out into the commonwilds for fruit and berries under the womenfolk’s eyes, and the market square is halfway full of wagons. Apothecary Roan is on the crier’s podium, screaming like he thinks the packing will go faster the redder he gets.
The kids are quiet, and at least mostly behaving. They pick up on moods better than most give them credit for.
Militiaman Demir is as close to a Master-at-Arms as they have, stubbled and scarred and sour. He trains the other Militiamen, keeps an eye on the village for the Magistrate, decides on watch-pairs and their stations. The ones who have hearts always end up standing nights on the Scarwall. They stagger home with the Sun’s rise, and can’t never stay awake nor fight well enough to do anything about the Magistrate’s bully boys.
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He's talking to the Magistrate as half the village rushes back and forth across the market square. It’s her warning that’s sent everyone to gather supplies and check caches and set up new ones; if they have to scatter, they’ll be ready. But seeing the knife-glint in the Magistrate’s eyes, the smile he gets when he sees a chance to put the squeeze on, she wonders if she did the right thing at all.
She hates that question. She thinks about it a lot, every time Young Tom butts in to ask about what she’s been doing of late and tell her very kindly how she won’t need to trouble herself once they’re married. Not with anything but being his wife.
Uncle Enryk can talk and talk and talk and still say almost nothing, but every time his caravan stops in the village he unloads a little box of books and quills and inkstone and paper, passing it to her with a clap on the shoulder. She thinks of his stories of the Bloody Marshes and the Barrier Hills and the heartland, the cities where nobody’s got enough garden to grow so much as a few herbs. Where everything is strange and different.
Some of his people have families they leave behind each time they go on circuit, and she wonders how they stand not knowing if the coin will keep coming back. There’s no farm or forage to support them, and the Guilds won’t let a trader’s blood swear their oaths nor let them sell their craft alone. Uncle would smuggle her out if she asked, she’s almost sure. What then?
Young Tom would complain to his father. Miller Tom would bully and snarl. And Uncle wouldn’t be able to go back as long as he lived, or if he could they’d gouge him something fierce for berry-mead and meadow-honey, mountain cheese and horn – which means, with losses and spoilage and hiring Delvers through the Scar, he’d have to stop coming anyway. What margins would he be left with on the same routes all the other traders follow, scrabbling in the dirt to cut below each other’s prices?
She can’t do that to him. He’s done his best, she knows. He paid every expense of her raising and then some, never speaking a word even when it’s a village’s duty to look after their own young. It would be a lie to say it’s been a bad life, she supposes. She has Ma’s house, with all her books and paper and ink and the sketches she likes enough to keep. Dawn chorus echoing through the mist in the upper valley. Oliga, who grumps and complains and squashes into the window seat with her, stone to shoulder to shoulder to stone. Hana, who can’t speak above a half-whisper after the Scar-sickness that caught in her throat as a babe, who watches and listens and finally says just the right thing. Brilliant, beautiful Idony.
But what’s there to look forward to? Cowering in some heartland city where everything she knows of living is useless. Gambling her life and health and soul as a Delver. Being ground down and worn away by Young Tom as his father had poor Weaver Alis, who would sit and stare at nothing, flinching and shaking if startled.
Or.
As the sky starts to turn all the colours of a low-burning hearth, Emilia crests the hunchback ridge that divides the new glacier valley from the old. The trees get shorter and more twisted, giving way to scrubby heath as the slope curls northwards, and her burning legs force her to a halt. She’s climbed to the upper valley more times than she can count, but never twice in one day, and even the tallest trees there fall far short of the valley walls.
She focuses on breathing deep and steady. Wildsmen tell fear-tales of how mountain-sickness can get you, if you climb too fast or just too far. Push your body harder than it’s ready to deal with. She can hardly go back, though, so her body’s just going to have to keep up.
After she stops to get her wind back. She’s not a fool.
From the outer edge of the valley’s curve, opposite the Nail, she can see all the way up to the Twin Peak and down to the village and over the other side to the grinding flow of ice. She pulls her mother’s cloak closer around her shoulders; the air is crisp and clear, and turning her back to the main run of the Stonespines, she can see the razor-straight course of the cliffs from horizon to horizon.
Below the bare stone and highland heath of the ridgetops, broad deciduous crowns and tall, proud conifers jostle for height and space and Sun. No more than three leagues from the mouth of the valley they fade into the meadows and managed woodland of the commonwilds, and from there into the catchroofs and terraces of the village proper. Those run all the way to the quarried stone of the Scarwall, at whose easterly end the Magistrate’s manor squats on an outcrop, like a toad eyeing up pondskimmers.
She can hear the distant boom and hiss of the Highfall; at just gone midsummer, with the weirs and pumpwheels making sure the terraces stay well-watered until the rains return, the rush of the upper Meltwater quickly diminishes into a glittering thread. Uncle Enryk’s maps give the notch it cuts in the cliffs some lordly name from a noble explorer — the only good route up to clean land for leagues upon leagues.
Everyone who lives here just calls it the Cleave.
Beyond, below, there’s only the Scar: a simmering cauldron of tainted magic and all its curses, where living landscapes fight to consume each other. Its animals are twisted into beasts, swollen stores of magic fuelling unnatural alchemies. Sickness and taint seep out on dark winds, held at bay by wardoffs worked into every stone and beam and boundary-post that makes up the village.
It’s barely kept from boiling over by the rag-patch quilt of barons and marquises that stretch from here to the marshmarches – them, and the Delvers.
She could stand here until last light, running her mind in circles. Until the Moon rose to pin her beneath its soulless light. The Scar has a thousand histories, or more. Was it left behind in a war between gods? Between dragons? Between the arch-alchemists – or in the nameless ruin that ended their empire?
For a few hundred paces before it starts the climb to merge with the Twin Peak itself, the ridge lies almost flat. It's a good view, here. High and sweeping, with great sightlines. Anyone can respect a good sightline; the more warning you have of a Scarbeast on the hunt, the better.
There’s a watchtower, only manned when the Baron sends word of more than the usual trouble from the Scar. Aurochs can’t make the climb, and nobody with any sense hitches a goathog to a load, so everything a watch-pair of Militiamen needs to live must be hauled up, by as many men as it takes, and all the leftovers and salvage hauled back again when they’re stood down.
Emilia almost doesn’t get up again; the Sun is falling towards the western peaks. She could shelter here, if she dared gamble on nothing happening overnight.
She moves on, a little slower now.
Only this morning, she watched an archway being cut into the side of the Twin Peak and rushed warning back to the village. Up close, it’s the most beautiful work she’s ever seen. Birds and beasts and beetles flow across stone melted as smooth as the glass beads Uncle once strung around her neck. They dart in and out of leaves and branches and flowers and fruit: layers and layers all woven together around nothing at all, leaving just enough gaps for you to see how deep it goes and the hollow in the middle.
It's beautiful, impossible, and large enough to swallow the Magistrate’s manor and the outcrop it sits on.
Mason Boian had been asked, three summers ago, whether he could work some alchemy to replace one of the wardoffs in Riverkeeper Antal’s workshop walls. Half a boathouse, built out into the Meltwater, it’s a real goathog of a building to do any work at all on – let alone near enough demolishing and rebuilding it.
He'd shied like an untrained horse at the suggestion alone, and this is far finer work than that would have been. It even uses little changes in the colour of the rock to help you see all the tiny shapes without covering everything in dye the way nobles do. She can’t imagine what kind of danger it could turn away – if any of this is alchemical at all, and not just for the art of it.
Very politely, she knocks on the wall just inside. There’s about a span of nearly-flat knotwork there, the border on the first block of the murals carved into the walls. She could surely never damage a dragon’s work, but she doesn’t dare risk finding out she’s wrong.
“Lord Dragon?” It’s a touch bitter that her knowledge of lordly manners comes almost entirely from the Magistrate’s hawkish pride. A lot of medicine is bitter, she supposes. “May I seek the honour of an audience?”
Fourteen heartbeats pass in silence, and she starts wondering if maybe the tales are wrong about a dragon’s senses. Then, there’s a sound like – well, she supposes like scales on stone. Or maybe claws. Only faintly, but the muralled hall runs two or three hundred paces before turning; it must be very loud for her to hear it at all.
“Oh? Well, this is a surprise.”