Courtesy was the victim of exhaustion. He let them find their own way out.
It was not proving easy to make a fire. The forest was damp and there was little deadfall. Ferras Vansen eyed the small pile of gathered wood in the center of their ring of stones and could not help a longing look at the great branches stretching overhead. They had no ax, but surely an hour’s sweaty work with their swords and he and Collum Dyer might have all the wood they wanted. But the trees seemed almost to be watching, waiting tor some such desecration he could hear whispers that seemed more than the wind We will make do, he decided, with deadfall.
Collum was working hard at the pyramid of sticks with his flint. The noise of the steel striking echoed out through the clearing like the sound of hammers deep in the earth. Vansen couldn’t help but think of all the stories of his youth, of the Others who lurked in the shadowy woods and in caves and burrowed in the cold ground.
“Done it.” Dyer leaned forward to blow on the smoldering curls of red, puffing until pale flames grew. The mists had cleared a little around them, revealing sky beyond the distant crowns of the trees, a sprinkling of stars in a deep velvety darkness. There was no sign of the moon.
“What time of the clock is it, do you think?” Dyer asked as he sat up. The fire was burning by itself now, but it remained small and sickly, shot through with odd colors, greens and blues. “We have been here for hours and it is still evening.”
“No, it’s a bit darker.” Vansen raised his hands before the fire, it gave off only a little heat. “I can’t wait for bloody daylight.” Dyer chewed on a piece of dried meat. “I can’t wait.”
“You may not get it.” Vansen sighed and sat back. A wind he couldn’t feel made the tops of the trees wave overhead. The campfire, weak as it was, seemed a kind of a wound in the misty, twilit clearing. He couldn’t help feeling the forest wished to heal that breach, to grow back over it, swallowing the flames and the two men, scabbing the injury over with moss and damp and quiet darkness. “I do not think it is ever full daylight here.”
“The sky is above us,” said Dyer firmly, but there was a brittle sound to his voice. “That means the sun will be there when day comes, even if we can’t see it. Not all the mists in the world can change that.”
Vansen said nothing to this Collum Dyer, veteran of many campaigns, dealer and risker of death, was as frightened as a child. Vansen, an elder brother in his own family, knew you did not argue with a frightened child about small matters until the danger had passed.
Small matters Like never seeing the sun again.
“I will take first watch tonight,” he said aloud.
“We must keep calling for the others. “ Dyer rose and walked to the edge of the clearing, cupping his hands
“Halloooo! Adcock! Southstead! Halloooo!”
Ferras Vansen couldn’t help flinching at the noise, which was quickly swallowed by the trees. His every instinct told him to stay quiet, to move slowly, not to attract attention. Like a mouse on a tabletop, he thought, and was bitterly amused. Don’t want to wake anyone. “I think by now the others must have made camp,” he said. “And if shouting were enough, they would have found us hours ago.”
Dyer came back and sat by the fire. “They will find us. They are looking for us. Even Southstead, although you might doubt it, Captain. The royal guard won’t walk away while two of their number are lost.”
Vansen nodded, but he was thinking something quite different. He suspected that somewhere the rest of the guards and poor Raemon Beck and the mad girl were just as lost and frightened as he and Dyer. He hoped they had the sense to stay put and not to wander. He was beginmng to understand a little of what happened to the girl, and even to the madman in his own childhood village who had come back from beyond the Shadowline.
“Try to sleep, Collum. I’ll take first watch.”
At first he thought it merely a continuation of the strange dreams that had seeped into his increasingly desperate attempts to stay awake. It was not full night-dark—he sensed it would never be fully dark because the mists were shot through with the glow of the moon, which had at last appeared in the sky above the trees, round and pale as the top of a polished skull—but it was definitely the dog-end of night. He should have woken Dyer hours ago. He had fallen asleep, a dangerous thing to do in such a strange place, leaving the camp unguarded. Or was he asleep still? It seemed so, because even the wind seemed to be quietly singing, a wordless chant, rising and falling. Something was moving in the trees along the edge of the clearing.
His breath caught. Vansen fumbled for his sword, reached out with his other hand to wake Collum Dyer, but his companion was gone from the spot where he had lain sleeping only a short while earlier. Vansen had only a few heartbeats to absorb the terror of that discovery, then the movement at the clearing’s rim became a white-shrouded, hooded figure, as strangely translucent as a distillation of mists. It seemed to be a woman, or at least it had a woman’s shape, and for a moment he was filled with the unlikely hope that the girl Willow had gone sleep-wandering from the guards’ camp, that the rest of the company were somewhere nearby after all and Dyer had been right. But the hairs rising on the back of his neck proved it was a lie even before he saw that the figure’s feet did not touch the earth below her faintly shimmering gown.
“Mortal man.“ The voice was in his head, behind his eyes, not in his ears. He could not say whether it was old or young or even male or female. “You do not belong here.“ He tried to speak but couldn’t. He could see little more of her face than pallid light and faint shadows, as though it were hidden behind many veils of glimmering fabric. All that was truly visible were her eyes, huge and black and not at all human. “The old laws are ended,” the specter told him. The world seemed to have collapsed into a single dark tunnel with the luminous, vague face at the other end. “There are no riddles left to solve. There are no tasks by which favors can be won. All is moving toward an ending. The shadow-voices that once cried against it have gone silent in the House of the People.”
The figure moved nearer. Vansen could feel his heart thundering in his breast, beating so hard that it seemed it must shake him to pieces, but yet he could not by choice move a single muscle. A gauzy hand reached out, touched his hair, almost seemed to pass through him, cool and yet prickly along his cheek like sparks from a campfire settling on damp skin.
“I knew one like you once.” Some tone was in the voice that he almost recognized, but in the end the emotion was too strange to grasp. “Long he stayed with me until his own sun had worn away. In the end he could not remain.” As the face loomed closer it seemed charged with moonlight. Vansen wanted to close his eyes but could not. For a brief instant he thought he could see her clearly, although what or who he was seeing he couldn’t entirely understand—a beauty like the edge of a knife, black eyes that were somehow full of light like the night sky full of stars, an infinitely sad smile—yet during that moment it also felt as though a chilly hand had tightened on his heart, squeezing it into an awkward shape from which it would never completely recover. He was gripped as though by death itself but death was fair, so very fair. Ferras Vansen’s soul leaped toward the dark eyes, toward the stars of her gaze, like a salmon climbing a mountain rill, not caring whether death was at the end of it.