A Consuming Fire, page 18
Banevale was not at all like Sarum, which had been busy and dirty and loud, nor like Oxnaforde with its glistening streets and glittering lights and crowds of happy people. The mountain towered over the city, a constant and undeniable presence, and the entire place was surrounded by an old Roman wall, kept in immaculate condition.
Through the nearest gate, Anya could see a line of people waiting to exit, but she and Tieran were the only ones on their way in.
“Just keep quiet and let me talk,” he said, taking her hand, and she anchored herself with that—with the touch of his skin, warm against her own.
At the gate, a pair of bored guards in blue-and-black uniforms were looking over travel papers or openly accepting bribes. They glanced quickly at Tieran and Anya, and then one held out a hand. She was an older woman, perhaps Willem’s age, with a self-assured way about her.
Tieran passed the guard a heavy gold coin, his half of the exchange moving so swiftly it was as if the coin had appeared on the guard’s palm by magic.
“Names and purpose of travel?” the guard asked.
“Tieran and Anya of Stull, brother and sister, here to see about bringing our cousin Esme out to Essex with us till the city’s safe again,” Tieran said without hesitation. “Just her, though, the rest of her family stays, and she’ll be coming back—don’t want too many people shifting about, and we’ll get papers sorted for her before going. To be honest I think my uncle and aunt’ll be glad to see the last of our Esme for a while—she’s a bit of a lazy one, she is.”
The words tumbled out of him, jovial and assured, as if, just as he claimed, he’d been born with lies on his tongue instead of truth. But when Anya gripped his hand tighter, he gave hers a reassuring squeeze in return.
“And you?” the guard said, turning to Anya. Her gaze was intent, searching up and down, though Anya couldn’t sort out what she was looking for. “What do you think about your shiftless cousin Esme coming to stay?”
“No use asking her nothing,” Tieran cut in before Anya could speak. “She’s mute, see. Not much luck in my family when it comes to the girls.”
Anya shot Tieran a glowering look and he returned it with a bland and innocent stare.
“Well, I don’t envy you your journey home, with a mute sister and a lazy cousin,” the guard said with a smile. Her gaze cut again to Anya, who fixed her eyes instinctively on the ground. “Here’re your entry papers. You’re to present them if a guard ever asks, so we know you came in properly and were accounted for at the gates. Move on then, boy.”
Nodding, Tieran drew Anya through the gate and on into the city.
“Look, it was either I make you mute or a liar too,” the thief muttered as they passed out of earshot of the guards. “And much as you like to pretend to be the last, I know telling falsehoods doesn’t sit right with you—can see it in your eyes every time you twist the truth. Maybe you lie, Anya, but that doesn’t make you a liar. You don’t lie about what matters, either—think if I could see through to the heart of you, there’d be only true things.”
Anya slipped her hand out of his, suddenly unable to bear the touch. She feared she’d burn him, with the fire beneath her skin, the force and scope of the lies even he hadn’t been able to see.
They hadn’t got far from the gate when a sound of booted feet came hurrying along behind them. Tieran glanced anxiously about, but the road they traveled on was busy, the buildings on either side pressed up against each other with no convenient alleyways to bolt down.
“You there,” the Nevis guard who’d questioned them at the gate called out. “I need a word.”
Tieran squared his shoulders staunchly and stepped in front of Anya, but the guard shook her head.
“Not with you, boy. With the girl.”
“It’s all right, Tieran,” Anya assured him under her breath, before approaching the guard.
“Anya Astraea,” the woman said bluntly, “it’s no good pretending you’re anyone else. We’ve been keeping an eye on you since you first appeared on the road.”
“Well, who hasn’t?” Anya said with some irritation. It seemed every shadowy power in Albion was following her progress, and she hated the idea of being watched, whether she could see her audience or not. “I don’t see what business my journey is of yours, though. I’m here on behalf of the Elect.”
“Everything that happens in Banevale is Lord Nevis’s business,” the guard said, taking no notice of Anya’s frustration. “And most of what happens in Albion, besides. If he has his way, the Elect will hold less power before long.”
Anya stayed stubborn. She could not falter this close to the mountain—could not let on that she was anything less than holy, and a perfect offering. “All of that may be your Lord Nevis’s business, but it isn’t mine. I’m meant for climbing a mountain and placating the god. No more, no less.”
The woman fixed Anya with an incisive stare. “You wouldn’t want more if you could have it?”
Anya swallowed. “No.”
Still unconvinced, the guard held something out. A small, unremarkable coin, one face stamped with the god’s mountain and the other a smooth blank.
“If you ever change your mind, just leave this sitting out. It doesn’t matter where you are—we have people everywhere. Once you do, Lord Nevis will ensure your safety.”
Reluctantly, Anya reached out and took the coin. “I won’t be needing this. But thank you for your concern, I suppose.”
The guard nodded. “I’ll relay your thanks to Lord Nevis. Good day to you.”
And with that she was gone. Anya turned back to Tieran, who’d been watching all along.
“They’re uncommon interested in you,” he said. “Nevis is always making trouble, and I think someday he’ll have it out with the Elect, but I’ve never known him try so hard to push a Weatherell girl off her path.”
“They haven’t succeeded, and they won’t,” Anya said, entirely truthfully. She couldn’t be pushed off a Weatherell girl’s true path, not when she’d never really been on it.
“Well, if you mean to do what you set out for, you got a plan from this point on?” Tieran asked as they walked side by side through Banevale’s too-quiet streets. There were not enough people about, and everywhere, doors were closed tight and windows shuttered. The air smelled vaguely of ashes, too, and in some places gaps showed between buildings, filled with charred and smoking rubble.
“Wait till tomorrow morning,” Anya said. “Then put my collar on, find the Elect, and finish what I started.”
She chose her words with care, adding layers to her lies, so that he might not see all the way to the truth. Sure enough, Tieran gave her a disbelieving look.
“You dodged the Elect all the way here only to have them see you off at the end? Not likely.”
Anya gave the appearance of relenting. “Well, all right. I’m not going to do what I ought to. I’ll go quietly at first light, on my own, and get things done without a fuss.”
“I’ll see you off,” Tieran said. “Don’t care what I told you, or what anyone else did. I can be here for that, Anya. I can stay for you.”
“Thank you,” Anya murmured. What she did not say was that it was the wanderers she intended to slip, and not the Elect. It would not be tomorrow that she went, but tonight, as soon as she was able to get away unnoticed. And Tieran the thief would certainly not be given an opportunity to see her off. It would break her yet again to have him do so, and she could not endure it—not here, with her task and her vengeance scant miles away.
As they walked on, the streets grew not just quiet, but abandoned. The city turned into a dwelling fit for ghosts, and Ilva peered around every corner. Then, quite suddenly, they reached a place of utter devastation.
A square opened up before them, and beyond it lay the city’s northern wall, right up against the lowest slopes of Bane Nevis itself. The wall, so well maintained elsewhere, had been blown to pieces. A vast, rubble-strewn hole gaped in it, the edges blackened with scorch marks. Trails of burned and broken cobbles led off into unknown sections of the lifeless city, and here and there immense, charred handprints blossomed upon the walls of buildings, cracks radiating out from the god’s destructive touch.
“Don’t look,” Tieran said under his breath, “don’t look, it’s all right, you don’t have to look,” and Anya could not be sure if he was speaking to himself or to her.
For her part, she looked. She fixed her gaze on the scale of the devastation the god had wrought and let it sink down into the very deepest parts of her soul. She let her fire answer his until it seemed as if the word vengeance rang from the empty housetops and echoed from the sides of the mountain itself.
Vengeance is mine
I will repay
And Ilva’s words, whispered back from every alleyway and shadowed corner, tangled together with that louder refrain.
Don’t go. Don’t let anyone else—
Vengeance is mine
I will repay
“Come on,” Anya said fiercely to Tieran. “Let’s not stand about, I want to get this over with.”
The wanderers had already begun to gather in a disused mill at the center of a near-abandoned section of Banevale. Pigeons roosted among the rafters, making soft, frowsy sounds, and the whole place smelled of dust and bird droppings. A few doors led off the mill floor to small storerooms, but after looking them over, the wanderers kept to the expansive open space at the mill’s center. The mood among them was hushed and expectant, and Anya sat restlessly at Tieran’s side as Matthias and Lee got up to speak.
“I’ve put out word that we’re in Banevale, with the intention of assisting anyone who wants to leave without the permission of the guard or the Elect,” Lee said without preamble. Her voice was strong and even, but she looked tired and a little sad. Anya couldn’t even imagine Philomena or Sylvie braving the road north a second time, as Lee had done. Willem, perhaps, might manage it if necessary, but it would be wrath that carried her, not the resolute compassion that fueled the wanderers.
“We’ll let a few good people know where we can be found, so the news will spread,” Lee went on. “By day some of us’ll go into the city, looking for anyone who seems like they might want help. The rest will stay here, to sort out whoever turns up. Matthias and me will buy spare packs and travel rations, so we don’t have to send folk away with nothing—you all know better than most what a blow it is to leave everything behind, even if it’s just for a while. We’ll outfit those we give a hand to until our money runs out. If you’ve got a bit set aside and want to chip in, that’s kind of you. If you can’t, there’s no shame in it.”
Anya watched as a number of the wanderers, spread across the dim, echoing space of the mill floor, began to search through their packs and pockets.
“We won’t pretend to you that what we’re doing isn’t a risk,” Matthias said, straightforward as always. “But it’s something we all agreed to before heading north. Should anyone turn up here who seems like other than what they say, you turn them away without a second thought. If they so much as look at you strangely, or give you an odd feeling in the pit of your stomach, you heed that warning. We’ve all been on the road too long and been through too much not to trust ourselves and each other. Better we turn aside one or two on a faulty suspicion than have all of us fall into the hands of the Elect, or even the guard. We’ll be using the old tunnels under Brewer’s Square to get folk out this time, but if you end up in a tight spot, a guard named Wicks at the northeast gate is a friend too.”
A thought struck Anya as she glanced over at Janie and Ella. The sisters sat side by side, Ella’s head resting on Janie’s shoulder.
“Tieran,” she said under her breath. “The Elect always want the girl who goes to the god to choose it for herself. So why do they bother making life difficult for all of you? Why do the wanderers have to hide, just because they preferred not to be another Weatherell?”
“Someone told you who they all are, then?” Tieran asked, and Anya nodded.
“Ella did.”
The thief shrugged. “Trouble is, you think if anyone else knew they could leave—like this Weatherell done—they’d stay and watch their girls suffer? They’d all try to get out from under the Elect, and there’d be no one left, and it wouldn’t be just Banevale that ended in flames.”
Tieran spoke the words tersely, as if it hurt to dredge them up and speak them.
“It’s cruel,” Anya whispered, drawing her knees up and resting her chin on her arms. “All of it.”
“Think I don’t know that, sitting here next to you?” Tieran said.
As darkness gathered over Banevale, deep-voiced bells tolled throughout the city, the sound echoing back from the slopes of Bane Nevis.
“They’re curfew bells,” Janie explained. She’d drafted her sister, Tieran, and Anya to help her fill packs with rations and blankets for anyone taking to the low roads, and they all sat together in a circle, working quickly by firelight.
“The god only comes down from Nevis after dark, so folk are supposed to be locked up indoors. Some can’t, though, on account of working late in the woolen mills, or running messages, or being corner girls. Others don’t care—they think themselves righteous enough, and that the god wouldn’t visit his wrath on them if they crossed his path.”
“So he’ll be here tonight?” Anya asked. She felt dizzy with the knowledge, but forced herself to stay placid, to keep on with the work at hand.
“Maybe,” Janie said. “Some nights he comes, some he doesn’t. They say he walks the city more nights than not, though. That it’s getting worse, and he’s roaming farther. If he’s not checked, eventually he’ll move past Banevale and start preying on the villages beyond.”
Anya scrambled to her feet.
“Going to bed,” she murmured. “I’m worn out.”
Halfway to where she’d left her bedroll, Tieran caught her up.
“Anya?”
“Yes?”
He sighed. “Nothing. Just… don’t leave without saying goodbye.”
Stepping forward, Tieran bent and pressed a kiss to her forehead, gentle and delicate in the way of a wild thing. Anya fought a ferocious urge to cling to him—to tell him all of her truths, and to warn him that she was likely on her way to her own end, and that he ought not to break his heart over her.
But the words stuck in her throat. She wanted to leave with him still thinking she was good and righteous, rather than this creature she’d become. A bitter soul, half alive and haunted, unable to shake her ghosts or her fate or her guilt.
So Anya lied to Tieran. She lied to him more cruelly than she’d ever done before, and she did it with a smile on her face.
“I’d never,” she said. “I want you to know when I go, so you can watch for when I come back.”
For an interminable stretch of time Anya lay on her side on her bedroll, eyes shut tight, feigning sleep. Finally the hum of the wanderers’ quiet, purposeful activity subsided. Fires were doused, blankets laid out, and silence fell over the mill.
Anya sat up.
Halfway across the mill floor, Ilva stood beside the embers of the encampment’s central fire. So close to the mountain, she was hardly a ghost—more a wraith, the suggestion of someone who had once been human. Her once-lovely eyes were preternaturally large, turned to vast wells of grief, and her mouth, as she counted the dead, worked in a stomach-churning, unnatural way.
One, Ilva wept, her voice like wind over old bones. Two. Three.
On and on she counted, numbering the girls Anya had seen die and vanish, until more spirits glimmered to life before her.
Forty-eight.
Forty-nine.
Fifty.
Each counted herself and vanished, leaving only Anya, among all the living, to number the sorrowful dead.
Staring at the final shreds of her sister’s tormented spirit, Anya could not bear the thought of bringing still more of her up the mountain. The god had been tearing Ilva to pieces since before she and Anya were born—they’d inherited a legacy of injustice and brokenness. Anya would not bring even a shattered fragment of Ilva into his presence again.
Soundlessly, she crept between the wanderers to where Tieran slept. Slipping her hand beneath the bundled blanket that served him for a pillow, she drew out two of his short, sharp-edged blades. In its place, she left the bone knife crafted from the last remnant of her sister.
It was as much of an apology and as much of her heart as Anya could spare, this side of the mountain.
From there it was only a few steps out of the mill and into the night air, and it all but killed Anya not to look back. She felt utterly low—only a shade less bleak than in the moments after Ilva died. But she did not look back, and she did not give in. She let the fire in her grow to an unrelenting heat, and left the wanderers and her thief behind.
EIGHTEEN The Shadow of the Mountain
When Anya reached the broken gap in the city wall closest to Bane Nevis, the stones that had been charred and cold hours before were crimson and smoking. She stared at them, and everything in her quailed. She glanced back toward Banevale, where a path of little fires still burned in the god’s wake, flames licking at the cobblestones and at places on the walls he’d touched.
It was, in a way, a good sign. She’d wanted to know the god was off his mountain and out in the city. She had little enough working in her favor—she could at least claim the element of surprise.
A waxing moon lit the slopes of Bane Nevis. Anya was glad of it. She hadn’t thought to bring a light, and the path, although well-worn and marked with occasional red arrows, was treacherous in places and choked with loose stones.
She climbed as quickly as she could, in a panic that the god would return and catch her on the trail. Everything passed in a blur until she came out, quite suddenly, on a plateau. At its center a long, narrow lake glinted in the moonlight, and Anya’s path ran past it. She slowed a little to catch her breath, and at the lake’s far side, stopped short.
Banevale lay spread out far below her, most of the city in shadow, but one glittering quarter of it shining with light and life. Buttoning up her oilskin, Anya pushed her hair back from her face and frowned. The city was under curfew—it did not seem right that part of it should glow so brightly she could see it from the mountain itself. As she peered down, she could make out a thin, fiery trail on the city’s darkened side, which ended in something that burned like an ember.
