“There,” I said, pointing to the gentle mound that sat in the center of the blood-tainted ground between us and the southern horizon…and, at the same time, far past it to that other swelling prominence some two hundred quellae to the south, known in the realm of humankind as Mon Viel. Reveling in the success of my combined Danae–human magic, I was already recalling the feel of the springy turf beneath my feet, the scents of wild lavender and lemon thyme, the calls of meadowlark and blackthrush that spoke freedom to a child run off from home in stinking, noisy Palinur. “We’re going there.”
Ignorance and inexperience put a quick damper on my satisfaction. Each leg of our journey took longer than it should. We had walked halfway to the horizon before I could join the knowledge of my senses with the power of my walking gards to make the shift southward to the slopes of Mon Viel. We were yet in Aeginea, of course, for the nearby heights where Caedmon’s royal city ought to rise in all its glorious might sat dark and bare.
Next it required three false starts before I gave up trying to use a rocky little grotto to walk into a similar nook I remembered from my journey in Mellune Forest. Perhaps I recalled too little of the snow-drowned nook’s scents or actual conformation to make the Danae enchantment work.
And then I discovered the risks of impatience when I tried to use a boggy spring surrounded by dry vineyards to plant us in the vastly different boglands of the River Kay. Saverian and I both spent two hours spewing our last month’s meals from fore and aft into the muck and praying we would expire before we drained ourselves to raw husks. Human bodies—even those half Danae—were evidently not meant to move through the world so abruptly.
Subtle moves, Kol had told me. I now understood that he’d not meant subtle in distance, but in distinction. To shift from one steep, shaded mountain path to another so much like it was easy, even were they a hundred quellae apart. To shift from a puddle among barren hills to a forest-bounded bogland was possible, but would wring a body inside out. At least I had remembered to “place” my feet, so that we writhed and retched on mostly solid ground and not neck deep in mud.
“If you can find anything to burn, I can spark a fire,” said Saverian in a croaking whisper. “Tea will get us on our feet again.”
She sat halfway up the steep little bank, her head resting on our provision bundle nestled in her lap. A seep around the woody roots of a larch had induced her to crawl up the bank to clean her face and hands. That she could consider doing more stoked my admiration. I yet wallowed in my own stink half in the mud, half out, thoroughly humiliated, exhausted, and shivering. I wasn’t sure anything could help.
“I’ll find something,” I said, dragging myself to my feet. This bog was the last place in the world I intended to die. Did I touch this muck with magic, I was certain I would hear the wails of drowned Harrowers, even across the barriers of the human plane and Aeginea.
I dragged handfuls of dry sedge and leatherweed and a few dead alder saplings from high on the bank to Saverian’s feet, and tore open cattail pods to provide tinder. Half an hour more and we sipped lukewarm tea made from Picus’s blessed herbs.
“I’m sorry,” I said, clutching the bundle of clothes in my lap, my throbbing head propped on one hand. “I need a bit more schooling.”
“You should put on those clothes,” said Saverian, ever the physician, as she passed me the blackened clay bowl. “Your lips are blue, and not with Danae sigils, and I can walk not one quat farther tonight. Assuming this is night.”
I gazed dully at the sky. Though it had gleamed azure in the wintry daylight at Mon Viel, it now glowered with the blue-black sheen of a magpie’s wing. I could not sense the sun anywhere. Snow dusted the landscape, and wind moaned over the bog, rattling the leafless willows.
“We can’t stay here,” I said. “This is Moth’s sianou. She hates humans—and has proved it. Would as soon drown us all as look at us. We can walk all the way to the oak if need be. Rest, get your legs back, and then we go.”
I downed a swallow of the rapidly cooling tea and passed it back. The pulse and twitter of a curlew echoed through the morbid stillness, reminding me of the deserted mine above Renna. “When are you going to tell me what Osriel plans?”
“I will not. I cannot.” She threw a rotting limb on the fire, and a veil of sparks spurted upward.
“Have you seen the place where he imprisons the souls? Have you felt them? It’s wrong, Saverian. Evil. They are so angry, so terrified, filled with hate. I’ve never felt the like.”
“Impossible. Those people are dead. Emotions are created by the living body and mind in response to changing circumstances. They are no more than the body’s humors infusing the blood, like the tincture in an alchemist’s vial. There is no such thing as a soul.” Her utter conviction was tinged with a bleak and weary sadness that surprised and grieved me. What had happened to her to cause so sere a vision of life?
“Then what does Osriel capture when he seals a dead man’s eyes in a calyx?”
“Waste. Dust. Echoes of life.”
“So why not tell me what he thinks to do with his nasty treasury? Certainly it’s not too dread to speak of, if he but plays tricks with dust and waste.”
“He is my lord and my friend. I will not violate his trust.”
I wished I had the wit to argue with her. So sharp and scholarly a mind as hers should not be burdened with so barren a philosophy. She was no ale-house philosopher, taking a position for the sake of argument. Yet having so recently examined my own state and come up with no conclusive evidence of a soul, I had no weapons to bring to a joust about the rest of humankind. And while I remained firm in my belief that the essence of a human person lived beyond the last breath, I certainly didn’t want Saverian providing sensible evidence to crush my own hope for the same.
As the last of our pitiful lot of fuel fell to ash, I stood up, slung the bundle over my shoulder, and pointed south along the bank, where in the other realm so like to this, Thalassa had escorted me toward Gillarine. “Let’s go.”
Saverian wasted no breath on conversation along the way, so I amused myself imagining what various monks would say did I come striding through their gates clad only in blue fire. And then I thought of Thalassa, and, for the first time in my life, found myself wishing I could talk with my sister…half-sister…no, half-niece…now. A priestess of the Mother, she could tell me of souls. It might be easier to hear the truth from her than from Picus or Saverian.
We left the treacherous bogland and soon trudged across the river-looped valley floor where Gillarine ought to lie. Clumps of slender beeches dotted the grassland, their trunks split and peeling. The limbs of scattered oak scrub curled like the legs of a dead spider. And everywhere patches of blackened, slimy grass testified to the land’s death—to my mother’s death and Gerard’s death—to poisoning by people who stole innocents like Jullian and slaughtered bold and noble spirits like Abbot Luviar.
I knelt and touched the damp earth, snowflakes melting on the back of my blue-scribed hand. The land’s sickness coursed through me like a river of sewage, bearing the stink of betrayal, mindless ravaging, and death. I welcomed it, allowing it to fuel anger and temper the steel of my resolve. Whatever I had to do to stop this, I would do.
“We need to move,” said Saverian, tapping a cold hand on my shoulder. “This place is too open. Someone…something…unfriendly lurks here.”
“Did you not say such feelings are but a body’s humors mingling?” I said, bitterness overflowing. “You are part alchemist, Mistress Mage, so repair them yourself.” But I rose and led her southward.