“We cannot cut away from them and yet still reach our destination,” Leeka said, humor in his eyes. “Even if we did, we’d find others walking beside us.”
That evening their small group built a fire. Wren went off to buy meat and returned with an entourage of several adolescent Balbara boys. They were obviously enamored of her, clamoring over each other to be useful. Dariel offered no greeting to them, but they settled in and the others seemed happy enough to jest with them. The boys spoke Acacian proficiently, except when reverting to their native tongue to share peals of laughter at the foreigners’ expense. Before long a flutist joined them, offering music in exchange for food. By dusk they hosted a festive gathering, from which people came and went as they wished.
Dariel sat at the edge of it, feeling strangely deflated. He could not put a finger on why. Nobody else seemed to feel the same melancholy. Clytus-mildly intoxicated at this point-led the boys in a raunchy song about an old peasant who loved one of his hens in an inappropriate way and got into all manner of trouble for it. Leeka sat in quiet conversation with a honey-pale man whose origins Dariel could not place. Even Wren seemed at home among these people, laughing with them. She looked up at him and smiled every so often, but she took no notice of his mood. And that was part of his problem. Nobody noticed him. Nobody looked at his features and read his identity on his forehead. He had wanted to remain anonymous until finding his brother, but now that it was clear he was anonymous, he began to doubt this whole venture. How could he be central to the workings of the world when nobody even knew who he was?
Still, listening to the roundabout flow of the conversation he did hear a few things that interested him. Several people claimed to have just recently come off the mist. They did not know how it happened. They had not planned it, and each of them admitted they had committed their lives to the opiate. They would have worked all day forever just so long as they could dream their nights through in mist trance. But something had changed. Each of them had a different story, but all amounted to the same thing. The mist, instead of providing them joy, became a nightmare. Instead of losing themselves in their most cherished fantasies, they were thrown into the most vivid versions of their greatest fears. This happened night after night, getting worse each time. Within a week the nightmares were so bad that every one of them stopped the drug and chose instead to suffer through the near-death experience of withdrawal. It was an ordeal they would never forget, but they did not die because of it. And now, clear headed and free from the hunger, they had found joys in living they had forgotten about entirely. It was a miracle of sorts, and it seemed to be spreading across the world just like a contagion.
At some point an Acacian joined them. He offered to tell a tale of the Snow King in exchange for a few strips of goat meat. In between pauses in which he chewed or drank, the man told of how the Snow King decided that only the ancient, banished magicians could bring balance back into the world. He went in search of them, ranging all through Talay, fighting back packs of laryx, going days without food or water, stumbling through regions that would have withered most men. He told of how he eventually found them, rocklike giants that they were, and how he had to use tricks and cunning to convince them to join in the coming war.
Dariel sat listening, fascinated by what seemed like a distant legend. But he had never heard it before. He could recall no mention of this Snow King, which surprised him. The epic tales he had learned in childhood were clearer to him now than most things from those times. Besides that, the title the storyteller had given this king made no sense at all. There was nothing in the dry, sun-ripened landscape that had anything to do with snow. Why would such a land produce someone called by that name?
Eventually, during a lull, he asked as much. “The Snow King? Who do you mean by that?”
The Acacian set his eyes on Dariel. His face showed the disdain for what he observed: the loose-fitting shirt of a sea brigand, open down to the navel, longish hair caught up loosely in a ponytail. But he was eating their food and could not give offense.
The Snow King, he explained, was Aliver Akaran himself, the heir to the throne of Acacia. He took that name on the night his father was stabbed by the assassin’s blade. “That night it snowed in Acacia. Snowed, understand? When white balls of ice fall from the sky. It hadn’t done so in a hundred years, but the royal children were so fearless they wished to play in the snow, to toss it at one another and test themselves, yes? Well, Aliver-the oldest-said that by the end of that night he’d be crowned Snow King. It was a prophecy, see? A prophecy because his father was killed that very night. That is why we call him the Snow King. It’s a name he gave himself. I’m surprised you haven’t heard it. Most of us here are on our way to join the Snow King. He pledges that if we fight for him, we can make the world a more just place. I believe him.”
“We all do,” said one of the boys, a sentiment that several others echoed.
“He says it doesn’t matter that we are each small compared to the might of the Mein. He reminds us to think of the ants that live in the acacia tree. They bore holes into the thorns and live inside them, and they defend the trees against any who would harm it. To them the tree is life. It’s their world. They live their entire lives high up in the branches. The Snow King says to think of those ants and the power they have when they all remember their purpose and answer the call. That’s what we’re doing. That’s why we’re here, to defend the tree that gives us all life.”
Dariel did not sleep a wink that evening. He walked through the next day with an uncertain hold on reality. He was not troubled by thoughts or memories, nor was he elated and anticipatory. He simply felt a blankness at his center. He realized this space had been there within him for years. It had inflated inside him as he lay trembling in the mountain hut, and he had lived with it ever since. He knew that he was approaching the place and the moment when this void would be filled in one way or another. This nearness awed him. Whatever came, he would accept it. Perhaps that was why he stopped imagining, hoping, or dreading what was to come.
Leeka promised that they were near their goal, so they walked on through the dusk and for an hour or so after dark. The land took on a rolling, pastoral quality. They must have gained some altitude, for the evening was cool and pleasantly breezy. And then came the moment when, with Leeka at his elbow, Dariel crested a hillock and gazed out over Umae. The sight that opened up before them caused him to stop in his tracks. The land was filled with as many points of light as the sky. Hundreds of them, dotting everything in his wide view.
“They are just fires, Dariel,” Leeka said. “Campfires and lamps.”
“But so many of them! It’s like a city.”
“No, not a city. It’s just a village, but around it is the beginning of your brother’s army. And yours, as well.”
Together they walked down toward the sea of lights, the individual points bobbing and rising with each step. Their entry into the camp and progress farther into the town was a blur. Leeka handled it entirely. Dariel could not have said how long it took, but at some point he found himself approaching a particular compound. Leeka whispered that this was the place they were searching for.
A Talayan squatted on his heels a little distance from the door. He did not move anything except his eyes as Dariel approached, following him each step of the way forward. The man’s expression did not change in any overt way, but there was something in the quality of how he stared that altered. By the time Dariel stopped before the man, he was sure that there was something like a glimmer of humor behind the stillness of his handsome, dark-skinned faзade. Dariel opened his mouth to speak, but the Talayan beat him to it.