Hearthfire, page 7
When she saw hyr again that night, she said nothing. And again the next day as the glen widened still more and they took their midday meal on a rocky spit that jutted out into the river’s expanding girth. She saw hyr yet again when she woke in the early hours the next day to relieve herself.
She said nothing to the others. Sy never approached or spoke. When sy appeared, sy seemed to busy hyrself with mundane tasks, sharpening hys belt knife or whittling pegs for the furniture sy liked to make. The more often Lyah saw the face of the lover she’d always thought she might take to name, the more she believed hys presence a simple, if mad torture of her own making.
The glen soon began to bustle with the life Lyah had noticed lacking outside Haver’s Gate. Tiny picas chirped in the rocky outcroppings of the glen, sometimes bathing themselves in its many waterfalls. Sometimes Lyah would hurry ahead, jogging for a short time to outstrip Carin and Ryd until she found a waterfall herself. There she held her wounded arm under the icy water, shivering at the contrast of the cold on skin that still felt like it had been set aflame. The daily compresses of feverfew did little to numb it; the white webs across her brown skin did not fade, but stood out like bone beads on leather.
When the others caught up, she would pull her dripping arm back from the water and continue. She sometimes saw Ryd doing the same, and their eyes would meet in understanding. Carin strode grimly on without acknowledging neither the inspiration nor the attempts to treat it.
On the eve of the new moon, they set up camp at the head of the glen. There, cliffs rose higher than the glen’s walls that had hemmed them in on either side for the past turns. A smattering of grasses invaded the glen there, rough scrubby blue stems that stood stark upright in the gravelly floor and yellowed at their tips as if they had only managed to draw enough nutrients from the earth to rejuvenate part of the way from the winter’s dormancy.
Lyah volunteered first watch. The morning would see them on a climb—even in the fading golden light of the setting sun, she could make out the rough-hewn path that cut to the left and began to switchback across the edge of the hill ahead. It would lead them to the Jewel, and from then to the Mistaken Pass.
Carin and Ryd fell to sleep before long, both snoring lightly in the quiet of the night. Here the crickets didn’t sing so loudly yet; spring started sluggish in the higher foothills.
“Lyah.” A soft voice behind her made her turn.
She already knew to expect hyr, and there sy stood.
“You can speak.”
Hys gaze darted upward, but then Jenin stepped forward to meet her. “I haven’t time.”
“You’re dead. You have nothing but.”
There it was then, a hint of a smile around her dead would-be lover’s lips. Lyah felt something clench tight in her chest, something that fused her ribs until she wanted to double over and rend the ground with her fists. Instead she held herself steady and made her eyes meet hys.
“Why do you come to torture me?” Her voice was only the lightest wind in the night. She should ask about Dyava, if he was all right. Carin would want to know—
“I’ve not come to cause you pain. Only to give a warning.”
The tightening in her chest loosened, and Lyah stifled a laugh. “A dead friend’s warning. What could you have to say?” Ask about Dyava. Lyah could not make her mouth form the words, too afraid of what the answer might be.
“That not all paths are what they seem to be.”
“That sounds like the warning of the dead,” Lyah said, feeling the bitterness of her words as if she’d bitten into a cajit without removing its husk. Vague, like a soothsayer’s words. Like Merin’s endless proverbs. Lyah had never ascribed undue meaning to Merin’s pronunciations before; why should she listen to the dead now?
Jenin’s body tensed, and sy looked around hyr. “I cannot tell you more. Names are as much choice as they are discovery. And some magics cannot be forever sustained. They rot, just like fruit.”
“What does that mean?”
Hys face, harshly grey in the dim starlight and still cast with the pallor of death, grew panicked. Sy stepped forward and cupped Lyah’s face in his hand. “It would have been you,” sy said.
Then sy was gone, leaving her alone with the night.
TWO DAYS trekking up the face of a cliff took their toll on Ryd’s arm. The exertion of climbing made him perspire, and the sweat that beaded on his arm felt like cave chili juice poured into a cut. Lyah had gone silent during the hike up the mountainside, and Carin hadn’t been much more talkative. She stumbled once on the climb and scraped her right palm on a sharp rock, but she refused to stop even to bandage the wound.
This Journeying had turned to a grim business.
Ryd wasn’t sure what he’d expected. In his mind, the Journeying had always been a key to his freedom, a marked transition from being the scrawny child all the younger kids sat on and knocked over into a respected adult. When he returned he could ply a trade, earn a living, grow up. In two more cycles, he would join the village in full. He had thought that he would embark on the Journeying with a full heart, not with a hole of grief growing wider in his chest and an arm that was nearly unusable for the pain. There was no soothsayer to consult, no answers to be found. Only the road ahead.
And back, he reminded himself.
A thought slithered into Ryd’s mind, making him wonder if things would really change when they got home. His expectations for the Journeying had been so fully thwarted and covered with death. Perhaps when he got home, everything would remain as it ever was, with Ryd being hounded by children half his age and the only difference being what name they called him when they did it. Could he bear it, if this were the whole of his life?
Even the sight of the Jewel could not cheer him. The lake itself was all it was meant to be. It appeared as a glittering blue pool of pure beauty against the jagged backdrop of the Mad Mountains beyond, the size of an egg in the distance even though were he to stand on its shore, the whole of Haveranth would fit comfortably into its waters twice over. Sharp white peaks stretched as far as Ryd could see, but they did nothing to settle the anxiety in his belly.
The saiga meat was long gone, and they lived only off the fish Lyah caught. Too early for berries or fruits, the glen had been devoid of any wildlife to hunt. Pikas were mostly too fast to catch, too smart to be snared, and not worth the effort besides.
Thus the days continued. The Jewel glimmered in and out of sight through the trees and ridgelines of the foothills. Ryd’s arm throbbed with every step, pulsing with the beat of his heart and footsteps alike. He tried to ignore its nagging just as he pretended not to feel the gnawing knot of hunger in his belly that increased each day. Each night, fish. Each morning, fish. And not enough. The swiftly moving currents of the Bemin’s infant waters harbored only tiny fry fish and fresh-spawned climber fish. Lyah pointed out these depressions in the gravelly banks, filled with eggs that had yet to hatch.
If Ryd ever returned to Haveranth—and as the days went on, his doubts grew and would not be assuaged—he was quite certain that he’d not touch another fish until three High Harvests had come and gone.
It was in Carin he first noticed the changes. She stripped on the Bemin’s banks one day, her back to him as she crouched in a sandy hollow to splash water on her underarms and neck. Her back was lean and powerful. She’d always been muscular—an affinity for wood and metalworking was not for the weak—but her body now resembled a rock snake coiled to strike. Any hint of fat had been worn away; her legs bunched beneath her like springs, the lines of her sinews and muscles clear to his eyes.
He looked down and pulled up his shirt. The planes of his stomach had flattened—and beyond, the constant hunger had made his belly almost concave.
Ryd pulled his shirt down and turned away from Carin, wondering what else was changing besides their bodies. Who would they become?
• • • • •
Two days later, they reached the Jewel just as the sun passed its zenith in the sky.
Its banks were pale grey rock, its beaches pebbly. The water itself shone in the midday sun like the deepest of blue topaz around the edges and darkened to rich cerulean in the depths, clear and clean.
A surge of hope filled Ryd’s chest, ballooning his lungs. He held his breath without realizing it, stripping his scuffed leather boots and tunic and stumbling toward the water. His injured arm dangled at his side, sore and swollen. He splashed into the cold water, not caring that his trousers were soaked immediately. Wading deeper, he reached chest level before he stopped, letting out his breath with a gust of air that rippled the water in front of him. So clear. Ryd could make out the pebbles under his toes. They massaged his aching feet, and though the temperature made him shiver and gasp, he filled his lungs again and sank under the water.
It was said that the Jewel’s purity was healing. Some of the older villagers made pilgrimages to the Jewel to take the waters, saying they were good for the heart and the blood. And so Ryd let his arms fall to his sides, hovering under the water with his knees bent and his head bowed, the tiny bubbles of his slowly releasing breath tickling his nose.
He hung suspended until his lungs burned from the need for fresh air and his skin burned from the cold of the water. He exploded to the surface, spitting water and coughing. Snot trickled from his nose, and his eyes watered.
His injured arm looked the same.
Disappointment tugged him downward, irrational but heavy nonetheless. He trudged back to the bank, shivering. No healing from the Jewel’s waters after all. Ryd ignored Carin and Lyah’s curious stares and sat on a large rock, staring back at the path from whence they’d come.
Hungry, hurt, tired.
Now also cold and wet.
LYAH’S STOMACH chastised her loudly. Though the others didn’t know, she’d had no food for two days, opting instead to split her portion between Carin and Ryd. Though her body said she was hungry—said it with vehemence—she could not bring herself to eat.
Ryd had yet to move from his perch atop the wide white rock on the banks of the Jewel after inexplicably dunking himself in the glacial water. He’d stopped shivering only because Carin, after two hours of whittling a stick and watching Ryd’s back remain uncovered and shaking, had built a fire a few feet from him where the warmth would reach him even if he decided never to turn around.
They passed the evening that way, no one speaking except their stomachs’ churning growls that gave away their hunger. Carin at last pulled out the last handful of cajits and divided them into two piles. She handed one to Lyah.
“Eat these. If you don’t eat something today, you may not make it through the pass tomorrow.”
Startled, Lyah met Carin’s gaze. The flicker of firelight danced with the golden remnants of sunshine, weaving across Carin’s face. Lyah looked to the west almost involuntarily, toward the Mistaken Pass. Why it was called that, she didn’t know, but the path itself was obscured by jagged peaks. If she didn’t know the pass existed, she would never see it there. It was there they had to go, and Carin was right. She took the cajits and shelled them, making a tidy pile in the cleft between two stones at her feet. The nuts, usually sweet with a light hint of spice to them, tasted like charcoal in her mouth.
Carin watched her until Lyah ate the last of her portion, then nodded, turning to Ryd. “Ryd, your turn.”
Ryd didn’t answer.
Lyah brushed fragments of cajit shell from her knee and stood. “Ryd?”
She rose to her feet and walked past the fire to where he sat, back to them. He didn’t turn, but shining tracks of tears glinted in the light of the moon. His injured arm stretched out in front of him, he tried to bend it at the elbow and winced.
“I don’t know if I can keep going,” he said.
Lyah and Carin exchanged a glance.
Carin frowned, looking from Ryd to the Jewel. Its waters matched the sky in the last vestiges of dusk, the small waves quietly lapping the shore. “You thought it would heal your arm, and it didn’t.”
Lyah started, flexing her own injured arm. She hadn’t even thought of that possibility, and now, looking at Ryd whose trousers had dried in stiff folds and whose skin was littered in gooseflesh, she was glad it hadn’t occurred to her.
“I don’t think it’s that easy,” she said.
“I thought that Tillim—”
Tillim. He had left Haveranth on the shoulders of his fellow Journeyers and strode back into the village on two healed legs. Of course Ryd would think of Tillim.
“We don’t know what healed him,” Carin said. Her voice held a hushed apprehension rather than the awe Lyah might have expected.
Lyah understood. So many unknowns on the Journeying.
Suddenly the air felt colder and too quiet. Lyah sat facing Ryd. His rock wasn’t big enough for the both of them, so she sat in front of him, looking up. “You can do this. You have to. We all do.”
She looked northwest at the blue-white peaks of the pass. Lyah couldn’t have said if she thought they’d find healing beyond those mountains or just more pain.
CARIN INSISTED on bringing up the rear the next day as they began the ascent to the Mistaken Pass. Once she hung back enough to shoot a rabbit, still sluggish in the spring air that was slower to warm the higher altitudes. She cleaned it and scraped the hide while Ryd and Lyah stopped to drink from their water skins, then wrapped the small steaks in the waxed canvas for later, preserving the organs as well. She was tying the bundle when Lyah came up to her with a handful of green onions, nodding once over her shoulder at a mulchy hollow. She tucked them into Carin’s pack without a word, and they continued on.
Soon they would climb past the snow line, Carin knew. Those onions could be the last fresh food they would find. That night they looked at their meager food stores and counted out the days they could afford to eat. After a night with empty bellies, the three Journeyers woke with somber eyes and the thought of their hollow stomachs being drawn out for turns to come. Together they picked through the hollows and gathered more onions and yarrow. The first shoots of spring were all that could be found, peeking pale blue and green through the loam and undergrowth. Pricklebush grew early, and they picked it, mindful of the stings of its leaves. Lion flowers sprouted, bearing no blooms yet, but they harvested the early greens. Ryd climbed trees to raid the nests of birds, gathering eggs to boil in one of his cook pots. Food became their first priority, to ensure they would survive the remaining turns’ hard walking to the Hidden Vale beyond the Mistaken Pass. For three days they foraged out around them, the need for food outweighing the press of time upon them.
On the third day, it rained through the sun’s arc across the sky, turning to sleet as the sun set around them. All three worked to harvest as many plants as they could, to save them from freezing in the night.
Carin kept her bow always at the ready, and Lyah and Ryd made sure their fire was always tended, to smoke and dry the meat from the rabbits and even a few pikas she shot and snared. Lyah speared fish on the banks of the Jewel, and in those three days, their bellies rumbled even as they amassed a hoard of foods to carry with them. When they finally set out on the fourth day with grim looks all around, they each chewed a strip of dried rabbit and a bunch of cold cress from a marshy pond they found near the Jewel.
The mountains rose on either side of their path. The trio of Journeyers threaded through the Mistaken Pass, the trees shrinking around them until Carin felt as though she and the others had simply grown to dwarf them, like giants. They had left the Bemin behind at its source, but runoff from the Mad Mountains cascaded down through the foothills even here. Though the steep slopes on either side of them looked like mountains to Carin, she knew that these were merely anthills compared to the peaks beyond their destination. Five hundred leagues of impassable mountains lay to the north.
That was why it was called the Mistaken Pass, she knew. From the lush plains and rolling hills to the south where Haveranth and Cantoranth grew on the Bemin, prosperous and flourishing, the Mistaken Pass looked like it would cut through the mountain range to the north. But it ended at the Hidden Vale, an alcove of rocky caves and strange stone formations to which every villager from the Hearthland’s three settlements Journeyed to come of age.
There was no pass through the mountains, no avenue of travel to whatever lay on the other side.
As a child, Carin had sometimes wondered what existed beyond. When she had asked her mother, Rina had responded, “Not land nor sea, nor journeys three.” It was vague enough that Carin had walked away feeling rankled, and after a time, she’d never brought it up again. As she grew older, Lyah once traveled to Bemin’s Fan by the sea and came back to Carin with tales of a seafarer who had crashed upon the rocks to the north where a jutting promontory protruded under the waves. There were just the mountains and no telling of what could lay beyond.
The days passed, became turns as first five sunsets, then ten, then fifteen pushed them deeper into the mountains. Snow dotted the hills around them, creeping closer to their path with every new step.
When the path rose sharply between two rough outcroppings of rock one day, Lyah and Carin met each other’s eyes. Here was the Mistaken Pass, the last major hurdle between the Journeyers and the Hidden Vale. They walked on silent feet between the jagged stones. The air became cold where it had been cool, and Carin pulled her cloak around her, raising the hood to cover her head and conserve her warmth. She noticed Ryd and Lyah doing the same, but still the three shivered in the alpine air. Any fat they had carried with them out of Haveranth had sloughed away, carved off their bones by the lack of food and the constant trek into the highlands.
The hawk cried out above Carin’s head, startling her.
In the days that had passed since they entered Haver’s Glen, Carin had almost forgotten about the hawk. But still it circled, soared, swooped above their heads with each passing day.
