A Consuming Fire, page 17
“I know,” Tieran said, and he made the words a prayer for her, to rival the injunction written across her back. “You’re your own, and nobody else’s.”
“My own, and nobody else’s,” Anya repeated. “I choose what happens to me until I get to the mountain, and afterward, if I come back down.”
“When you come back down,” Tieran said stubbornly.
Anya reached up and cupped the side of his sharp, clever face with one hand, running her thumb from the corner of his mouth to the line of his jaw.
“I choose what happens to me,” she whispered.
“You do,” Tieran answered, his voice a raw and wanting thing.
And Anya chose. She rose up and kissed Tieran the thief the way a dying girl kisses a boy—with hunger and regret and desperation. She kissed him like a sacrifice, holding nothing of herself back, her hands on his shoulders and on the stubble of his shorn hair. And Tieran, despite his sharpness and his lies and his leaving, kissed her like a worshiper, as if he would lay all of himself out at her request, and count it glory just to be looked upon by his god. They came together and did not part for a long while, and when at last they did, it was Tieran who moved back first. His hands were trembling, shifting from shape to shape, and Anya took them in her own and pressed them to her lips.
“I want to be a knife,” she told him.
“You are,” Tieran swore.
“Make me believe it.”
“Anya Astraea, you could cut me open with a look.”
“With a touch?”
Anya glanced up at her thief. She put a fingertip to his chin and ran it down his neck, his chest, the travel-lean stretch of his abdomen, and before she could go further, Tieran let out a sound that set every part of her alight. He took her by the wrist and pulled her closer and they were kissing again, a wildfire between them, but the burn of it did not feel like blasphemy or vengeance or anger. It felt, to Anya, like shackles cast off. Like the first bright day of a journey that could lead only to joy.
So Anya knew as she kissed Tieran that her heart was a worse liar than the rest of her, and selfish as well. There could be no joyous ending for them, and if she were righteous and fair, she’d pull back now, for the journey she’d set herself upon would only lead to devastation. But Anya could not bear to think of that or to pull away. Instead, she carried on, tangling herself and the thief together, and it was a mystery to her how she could all at once feel so tainted by guilt and radiant with glory.
* * *
Something was burning.
Down in the hollow way, smoke hung everywhere, oily and choking, filling the air with a thick gray pall until Anya could not see her hands stretched out before her.
“Tieran?” she called, starting upright from where she lay on her bedroll. “Matthias?”
A fit of coughing seized Anya, bending her double. There was no sign of the camp she’d dozed off at the heart of—everyone was gone. Her eyes smarted and panic clawed at her insides, but the wanderers kept to the low road whenever possible. She could not risk climbing up to clearer air and losing them in the smoke.
“Tieran? Midge?”
Reaching out, Anya felt for one of the sunken lane’s earth walls. Her fingertips hit gritty soil and gnarled tree roots and she stumbled forward, still calling for the wanderers.
“Janie? Ella? Anyone?”
Through the smoke, a noise grew audible over the hammer strikes of Anya’s own heartbeat. Hot and arid, a hiss and snap—the sound of flames eating away at dry fuel. She pushed forward in spite of it, desperate to find the wanderers. But as she rounded a bend in the lane, she stopped short, feet striking something heavy and yielding.
Her eyes shut, and she took a sudden breath, which ended in another fit of coughing. When it had calmed, Anya knelt.
There was a body, propped up against the wall of the sunken lane. As Anya knelt beside it, a gust of wind tore down the hollow way, clearing the shroud of smoke for the first time.
Matthias lay before her, his plain clothes singed and scorched through in places, his face a ruin of crimson and ashen burns. Even in death, he’d found no rest, for his eyes were open, staring farther down the low road to where the remainder of the wanderers lay scattered. Every one of them was utterly still, the sunken road turned to a graveyard.
“Tieran,” Anya whispered, and struggled to her feet, moving unsteadily forward.
At the center of the carnage she found the thief, facedown in the earthen lane. She knew him by the fraying, charred oilskin coat he wore, and by the way he had one arm thrown over Midge’s lifeless body. A piece of Anya knew she shouldn’t look. That she should spare herself the sight of Tieran’s sharp, familiar face.
Instead, she reached out.
As she did, the dim hiss and snap of flames intensified. A new billow of smoke wafted through the hollow way, pouring not from some unseen source, but from Anya herself. Her hand, reaching for Tieran, was a twisted and inhuman thing, wreathed in fire that emanated from her, and yet she did not burn.
It was only those around her who had.
With a sickening jolt and an intake of breath, Anya woke. In the quiet dark of the lane, surrounded by sleeping wanderers, she pressed both hands to her mouth, fighting to keep silent, to stay still, to stop shaking with leftover panic and despair. Everything around her was as it should be—night insects singing in the woods overhead, the camp at perfect peace.
Or almost perfect. Before Anya, in the few feet between her and the wall of the sunken lane, Ilva wavered to life. A trio of girls flickered into being too—strangers this time, the marks of the god’s dread touch unmistakable on each of them.
One, Ilva whispered. Two.
Three, the first of the girls said.
Four, added the next.
Five, said the last.
And after numbering themselves among the dead, they faded entirely, leaving only Ilva to linger a moment longer, her filmy gaze a reproach.
Then Ilva vanished too.
Anya curled in on herself, alone in the dark with the unbearable weight of the guilt she’d carried for as long, it seemed, as she could remember.
Soft noises drifted through the night. Anya stayed just as she was. A blurry, mottled gray-and-black shape appeared before her, and Midge settled down, warm and real and comforting, fitting herself into the curve of Anya’s body with the uncanny and perfect geometry of dogs. As Anya’s arms went around Midge, she felt an equally stolid presence behind her.
“Just gonna sleep here for now if that’s all right?” Tieran murmured, quiet enough not to wake his people. “On account of maybe you could use someone close by.”
Anya nodded. Carefully, Tieran shifted until his back was to hers, and draped the oilskin coat over them both. Little by little, the fear and creeping darkness that had taken hold of Anya subsided, driven back by the sounds of Midge gently snoring, and of her thief humming tunelessly under his breath.
When sleep found her again, she did not dream.
SEVENTEEN Banevale
The following weeks passed in a haze of walking from dawn till dusk. Of cold camps, made in haste and broken before sunrise. Of dreams of burning, and ghosts numbering themselves before they disappeared.
Seven.
Nine.
Fifteen.
Twenty.
Twenty-eight.
Of slipping away with Tieran, any night the moon was out. Though Anya had begun to hit a target reliably with a thrown blade, it still felt like too little from too close. It worried her, as Tieran explained how to drive a knife through the ribs to pierce the lungs or the liver, to think that perhaps the creature she intended to kill did not have lungs or a liver, or flesh that could be damaged at all.
But she said nothing of her pervasive fears, or her true reason for wanting to learn to do violence. And if Tieran ever seemed troubled by her determination and the relentlessness of her focus, well—with a look or a word she could ignite the spark between them, kissing him until his hands trembled and flashed like quicksilver and any doubt slipped from his mind. He’d proved an easy mark, this changeling thief, and Anya tried to ignore the soul-deep unease that ate away at her when she surreptitiously held his hand, or when he looked at her and she caught sadness in his eyes. Perhaps she had not been entirely honest, but he knew she was going to the mountain. What more was needed? That much was enough to warn him they’d never have a happy ending. She wasn’t keeping him entirely in the dark.
And then one day, after a fortnight of unforgiving travel, it was simply there.
The wanderers had carried on walking under cover of darkness for hours the previous night, eager to reach the city of Banevale and the god’s mountain beyond, knowing their goal was close at hand. When Anya woke in the cold gray light before dawn, sore from weeks of travel, she could see it on the horizon.
The mountain. Bane Nevis. Her beginning and her end.
A few of the wanderers were stirring already, but most kept to their scant bedrolls. It was cold at night in the northlands, which were wild, barren places. The roads they traveled now were not sunken lanes and hollow ways but faint footpaths across wind-torn and heather-clad moors. Matthias and Lee traded off leading the group, picking their way forward carefully at the head of the straggling procession, and more than once Anya had been struck by the thought that even without her crimson band, she’d found as much support on the road as any Weatherell girl had ever been given. The realization made it worse, to know that she would soon leave the wanderers without a word or a thank-you and attempt the unthinkable. The unholy.
Shivering, she made her way to the edge of the haphazard, open encampment. Morning was coming on clear and fine, and rosy light already softened the distant mountain’s face. It was no young and jagged peak, but an ancient thing, worn down by weather and time. It sat amid a range of lesser precipices, and something in Anya splintered as she looked at it. She felt herself fragment, breaking down into yet smaller pieces, and it had been a lie when she told Tieran that a little more damage couldn’t possibly hurt. It took her breath away—the sight of that gray, weathered mountain, the knowledge of what waited on its heights, the fire that seared everything within her, burning her up from the inside out. Anya wrapped her arms about her middle and stood utterly still, wishing that she, too, could be impervious stone.
“It cuts at you, seeing it for the first time. Don’t you think?”
When Anya turned, it was not Tieran standing an arm’s length away, but Ella.
“First I saw it was in winter,” the other girl went on, soft and wistful as she fixed her eyes on the peak. “All that gray was covered up with snow, white and fair against a far blue sky. It was beautiful. And it hurt to look at.”
Anya stole a glance at her, quiet and gentle, yet radiating a sort of confidence. Ella was certain of her people and her place in the world, in a way Anya herself had never been. And at last, she found it in her to ask what truth Ella and Janie had meant to tell her the night of the cautionary play.
“Ella?” Anya said. “Who are all of you? Why do you choose to stay hidden?”
“It’s not much of a choice,” the girl said with a slight smile. “Or at least, Mum and Matthias say it didn’t feel like one when we first set out.”
Anya waited and Ella gave her a searching look. “We don’t… tell many folk the truth of this, you know. There are wanderers like us across Albion, and not all of them have our reasons for it. Some fell on hard times, some like the freedom, some were born to the life and can’t imagine any other way of being. It’s not easy—the Elect and Albion’s lords never approve, but they’re more at odds with us than with others. Or at least, the Elect are.”
“Whatever the truth is, you can trust me with it,” Anya said. “I’m certainly carrying secrets of my own.”
“Aren’t we all?” Ella said. Letting out a breath, she nodded. “Well then, Anya. Welcome to Weatherell. Or what’s left of our version of it.”
Ice lanced through Anya. “What? I don’t understand.”
Ella’s expression grew pained. “No. Mum and Matthias didn’t either, when we first took to the low roads. They’d thought we were the only ones. But we weren’t, and we aren’t. The Elect have copies of Weatherell all across Albion—villages cut off to raise spotless lambs for the sacrifice. Best we can tell, a girl goes out to the god every year—some years more than one is sent, if the monster on that mountain is restless.”
Anya could not look away from the distant gray shape of Bane Nevis, and it felt as if all the world were shifting beneath her.
“Mum was one of the girls who went from our village,” Ella continued. “The god twisted her spine, and that’s what gives her trouble walking. She’s stubborn and never complains, but I know it’s been worse than ever this year. When Janie and I were still little things, she told Matthias she was leaving with us, so we’d never be pushed into what she did. Matthias was our Arbiter back then—can you even imagine him as an Arbiter?—and he’d never yet had to send a girl out. The Elect kept him in the dark about a great many things, because despite his position, they didn’t trust him. I suppose they were right not to. He says the job didn’t fit him, on account of him and one of the selectmen carrying a flame for each other. They could never say anything, or even let on how they felt. And when Mum told Matthias she was going, he knew she was doing the brave and right thing, and that if the rest of the village didn’t have the courage to follow, they’d be worse than cowards.”
Anya shivered and wrapped her arms about herself. She could not even imagine such a thing happening in her own Weatherell. Arbiter Thorn was unfalteringly strict and stringent in his application of the Cataclysm’s requirements, and Willem—well. Willem was who she was.
“So those of us who were willing left,” Ella said. “In the dead of night one spring, we disappeared. Matthias’s selectman wouldn’t come, and Mum said if our father hadn’t died of flux a few years back, she doubted he would have left either. Mum and Matthias cut our village in half to do what they knew to be right. I was little yet, but I remember creeping away, and those first days on the road. None of us are who we were then—we’ve all taken new names, and been changed by the traveling and by living out here at the edges. But Mum and Matthias still say we’d have lost ourselves if we’d stayed and kept on watching our girls suffer to keep us safe. This way, we chose who we became. I think they’re right in that. Always have done.”
Anya hesitated. She glanced back at the encampment and saw that while many of the wanderers were up and ready, none were within earshot of herself and Ella. The girl’s quiet thoughtfulness made her brave, and she decided to risk speaking of something she’d never so much as hinted at since leaving Weatherell.
“Has no one tried to end the god?” she asked, her voice low, fire burning hot and bitter in her belly. “Has no one ever decided to cut this trouble off at the root?”
“Five times, that I know of,” Ella said without hesitation. “I’ve asked Matthias the same thing. The Romans tried, when they first woke the god. Sent a centuria of men—eighty souls, all told—up that mountain. Every one of them died in torment. Those were bad days, and the Elect don’t speak of them. For years after, the god ravaged the north country, killing countless folk. So the Romans built walls clear across the countryside, which did little to stop him, and finally they declared this land cursed, and left it altogether. There was no peace until the Elect had already risen and begun to worship the god and sent out the first offering.”
With the sun warming it, Bane Nevis looked serene and untouchable, as if it could not possibly have weathered so much trouble, and seen so much bloodshed on its vast gray slopes.
“And the others?” Anya asked.
“Two more groups made it up the mountain,” Ella said. “Both failed and died and brought about a year of terror afterward, as the god refused to rest. Another two were found out by the Elect before they ever reached Bane Nevis and put to death in ways crueler than even the god could manage, to spare the north the devastation another failure would bring. The last attempt was over a hundred years back. No one tries anymore.”
Nearby, Ilva took shape like a will o’ the wisp, and stared at Anya with mournful corpse eyes.
Has one of us ever tried? Anya wanted to ask. A Weatherell girl, I mean?
But it felt too close to the heart, and she could not bear to speak her truth within sight of the mountain, so she kept silent.
“Lee says we’d best get moving,” Tieran said from behind them, and both Anya and Ella turned. The thief stood hunched into the oilskin coat like a disgruntled crow, all spines and discontentment. His eyes shifted from Anya to the mountain, and without another word Tieran strode back to camp.
“Don’t think I’ve ever seen him so anxious before, and not light out for elsewhere,” Ella said. “You’ve worked wonders with the boy.”
But it was not enough for Anya. She found herself hungry, here within sight of the end. Starving for life and contact and gladness and a certain future. For more of a chance than she in her collar, or Janie and Ella with their ceaseless wandering, had been given.
If this was how it had felt to be Ilva, always yearning for more and better, she wondered how her wild sister hadn’t flown apart.
* * *
The first sign that things would be different in Banevale came when Matthias and Lee called a halt in the afternoon, before the city had even come into view. They broke the wanderers up into little groups—no more than three or four together at most. Everyone was given instructions as to where to enter the city, what names to give, which guards to bribe and which to avoid altogether. A map was passed around, with entire sections of Banevale engulfed in alarming red-painted circles.
“Anya, you’re with Tieran,” Matthias said gruffly when the wanderers had already begun to scatter, and in spite of the mountain, Anya felt a small lightening of her soul, followed by an immediate stab of remorse and dread.
Not long now. Not long until she did the leaving.
