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1

The stories of this age begin and end with blood, and mine is no exception.

I went still when I saw it. Stark, bright spots of poppy-red trailed across the snow, leading upwards between the pines. Dark voids fell away through the pure white glare, where blood’s heat had cut into the banks.

I saw her curled beneath a tree, the snow around her stained bright as summer flowers. A woman. She was young and ragged. Bloody. Unmoving.

I knelt and scanned between the trees. Checked the ground for churned snow. Bear tracks or bootprints. It all seemed quiet. Just a body, and the bloody trail.

Dead? It was hard to say. Maybe.

No sign of a lingering soul between the trees, no bitter ghost of the unhappy dead. They were often around us, silent, unknown. Silent to everyone else, at least. They passed by the living, their presence felt as little more than the rise of hairs on a neck, or the momentary, unplaceable feeling of something lost, or forgotten. Nothing but echoes of the past. If the woman in the snow had breathed her last, her ghost had already moved on.

She wasn’t my concern, and time was not on my side. We’d fled to Dalnesse, once a proud fortification that had sheltered monks from the hardships of the world, now barely more than an echo of its former grandeur. We’d fled here because it had walls, and walls count for a lot when a lord takes it upon himself to slaughter you. But once our safe haven was surrounded, it had become a cage. Opening the doors would invite in malice, and blades, and the end. So when I found the river tunnel beneath the crypts, saw the light of day beyond the tunnel mouth, I had allowed myself a flicker of hope.

I had not expected to find friends out here in the snow.

Whoever this was, or had been, she was neither friend nor salvation to me. And yet seeing her fallen body set that little flame fluttering. She had climbed up here, which meant that, spirits willing, we could climb down. There was a way off this cursed rock, which meant we might yet get out of this alive.

Someone—or something—had got her pretty good, judging by all that blood. Another good reason to get us out of here. I should leave her and follow her trail. Track it down off the mountain.

That’s what I ought to do.

Ah, damn it.

I crept towards her, snow crunching softly beneath my frozen, leaking boots. The cobbler had sworn they were winter-proof. You can never trust a cobbler. Anyone who spends that long thinking about feet has something wrong with them. I kept an arrow nocked on the string. If this was some kind of trap, then it was an elaborate one. No one should be up here, not even if they were just crawling up the mountain to die.

The slope was steep, the trees ahead sparse. Mountain pine, a scattering of stark-branched shrubs. I looked for plumes of steam, the breath of men hiding in the still morning. Nothing. Not a sound, save for the call of mountain bluebirds, the occasional rustle of snow dropping from a branch. I put no tension on the bowstring, moving fast, tree to tree. No point exposing myself here.

I crossed the last distance and knelt beside her. Not much older than me. Dark haired, her complexion too dark for the highlands. Her threadbare, tattered clothes were better suited to city living than a hike in the wild, and better than I’d ever worn, that’s for sure. A few embossed buttons clung to the edge of her coat, the silver slicked red. No ghost lingered over her, or wandered the trees, but that didn’t mean much. Only the unhappiest dead appeared to me. I’d seen ghosts bound by bitterness, chained with ropes of remorse, caught in nets of grief. But most of the time, dead was just dead.

‘I’m sorry you’re dead,’ I spoke into the cold. Just a whisper of frosted breath in the stillness of the mountain’s mantle.

She was probably dead. She looked dead. I felt a pang of guilt as I eyed her buttons. The coat was ruined, but the silver would sell. It was a sour thought, but Light Above, Braithe and I needed the money. We all would, if I could find a mountain trail to carry us from Dalnesse. Money to feed us, to hide us from a cold heart’s fury. But before I went cutting off a dead woman’s buttons, I had to make sure she was actually dead. I took my arrow from the string, jabbed it down into a foot of snow and reached to check for a pulse.

Her eyes flared open and her hands shot out, wrapping my throat. She stared without recognition, confused and angry as her lips curled back in a snarl. I jerked back but she was strong, cold fingers choking me. I thrashed backwards, once, twice, couldn’t break her grip. There was no air. No air! I fumbled at my belt, and then my dirk was in my hand and I drew it across her forearm. The not-dead woman gasped and I snapped free. I kicked back, the light snow flying as I fell, rolled clumsily, head over heel.

She struggled to rise, the pain across her face mirroring the snow across mine.

‘Hold it,’ I panted, brandishing the blade in front of me. ‘Just hold it there.’ Blood pounded through me, but relief fed my bones. I hadn’t wanted her to be dead. I didn’t have to cut off her buttons now.

The woman’s eyes were unfocused as she pushed herself back against the tree trunk. Not much older than me, and just as frightened. I’d told myself that if I came across one of Clan LacCulloch’s clan riders, I’d be able to do it. Able to put an arrow into an enemy. But this girl wasn’t one of his men. She’d no clan colours on her at all, and her coat was made for summer days in summer towns. A southern girl lost in the northern fall. She blinked, tried to focus, appraising me as I had her.

‘I have to keep going,’ she said. Her voice was hoarse, weak, and she pressed her hand against the shallow slice in her arm. Red drips in the snow. But there was already a lot of blood on her coat, and none of it my doing.

‘You don’t look like you’re going anywhere fast,’ I said, still holding my knife. ‘You aren’t with LacCulloch.’

‘No,’ she said. Too much weight in that one word. ‘I have to get to the monastery.’

The burst of panic had faded. In the moment, she’d seemed wild and terrible, but as my heart slowed and my breathing calmed, I saw how ragged she was, how thinly worn. Red-tinged eyes over gaunt cheeks. She was twenty, twenty-two at a push and she didn’t belong here, up in the mountains where we were fighting to stay alive while others were fighting to kill us. None of us did. I gathered up my bow and arrow. I didn’t trust her.

‘Dalnesse is under siege,’ I said. ‘Niven LacCulloch’s men have blocked the mountain road. Guess you know that already, seeing as you’re trying to get in the back way.’

‘I have to keep moving or he’ll catch me,’ the woman said. She shivered. Her fingers were bolts of white marble against the blood oozing from her forearm. ‘Please. Which way is Dalnesse?’

Nobody in their right mind wanted to go to Dalnesse. Monastic absolution houses were literally the most miserable places in the world, and I never saw the appeal of a religion that tells you that you’re inadequate all the time. But Dalnesse was even worse, since the monks had all buggered off years ago, and the people inside—my people—were beginning to starve.

‘It’s that way,’ I said, jabbing a thumb over my shoulder at my footprints. ‘Who hurt you?’

‘Men who want to stop me,’ she said. She was sweating despite the cold.

‘Where are they now?’

‘Think I lost them.’ She spoke in a desperate, pleading whisper. ‘I have to get to Dalnesse.’

Thrice-damned Dalnesse. We’d been stuck for over a week now. It wasn’t Braithe’s fault. He only had forty grown men and women, and fewer than half were capable fighters, while Niven LacCulloch had brought nearly one hundred mail-clad warriors. We were caught now, behind Dalnesse’s walls, our backs to the mountain. If Braithe’s cousins didn’t show up soon with a whole lot of swords, then we were in trouble. All the walls in the world weren’t going to feed us.

I’d reasoned that not even monks would pen themselves up against a mountain without a back way in, but I’d only found the underground stream, and the tunnel that had let me out onto the mountainside, by following the ghost of an old monk. He’d probably been dead for a few hundred years or more, but that’s what the dead do: repeat, repeat, and endlessly repeat. Echoes of their lost lives.

‘You need to get that arm wrapped up,’ I said. ‘You’re not going to make it much further.’

‘I don’t have a choice,’ she said. She forced herself up from the snow and began to stagger in the direction I’d pointed, boots even less suitable than mine sinking into the snow.

‘Wait,’ I said.

My plan had been a simple one. The iron grille that had blocked the stream tunnel had been rusted, easily kicked free. If I could find a safe path down the mountainside, maybe we could all slip away through the tunnel, onto the mountainside. We’d have a chance to get out of Dalnesse, avoid LacCulloch and his men in the night. Some of the sooth-sisters and their followers were probably a bit too old for a daring nighttime escape, but desperation was leading me now. I wasn’t supposed to be out here, and Braithe would be angry when he couldn’t find me. Strange that sometimes I feared his reaction as much as I feared LacCulloch’s swords.

The woman stumbled in the snow, leaving a stark red handprint sunk below her as she pushed herself back up. If I followed my plan, I’d be leaving her here to die. My mother may have been a bitter old soul, but for all her spite, she’d not raised her girl to leave people to freeze to death in the snow. Shit. I couldn’t take her with me down the mountain, and I couldn’t abandon her to die here either.

I pulled her good arm up over my shoulders. She was made of sticks, like she hadn’t eaten in weeks, weighed about as much as a rabbit.

‘I’m Raine,’ I said as I dragged her along. It was less than an hour back to Dalnesse. I could get her into the sooth-sisters’ care and be back on my way before midday. Probably best to avoid any questions about where I’d been. If Braithe knew what I was planning, he’d stop me. He loved me too much to let me go.

The bloody young woman grimaced. Her strength was a shallow pool, drained by exhaustion and blood loss, and after an hour’s struggle through the snow we’d managed less than half the distance I could have traversed alone. The cut on her arm had stopped bleeding, but there was fresh blood on her coat. Every step drew an animal grunt of pain from her cold-hardened lips.

‘I’m Hazia,’ she said. It seemed to cost her a lot. Somehow, she didn’t sound certain.

‘Why are you trying to get into Dalnesse, Hazia?’ I asked. She didn’t reply. ‘It’s one of the worst places I’ve ever been to, and I’ve seen some shitty places.’ I didn’t expect an answer.

‘Have to take it back there,’ she muttered.

‘This is an awful lot of effort to make a delivery,’ I said. ‘Watch out for the log. Right in front of you. Big step over. That’s it.’

‘Nothing else matters,’ she said. Pain cobwebbed through her voice.

‘Maybe focus on staying alive first, and delivering things second,’ I said, since she visibly had nothing of value on her. No bag, no purse, not even a knife on her belt. Not even a belt. Nothing to deliver. ‘Not too far to the bridge now. We’re going to have to take that slow and careful.’

‘Need to hurry,’ Hazia said. ‘I can hear him. Like drums, through the hills. He’s coming.’

‘Drums?’

‘Yes. Drums. He’s coming.’

Delirium must have been setting in. Wounds and cold twined together into ropes of uncertainty in her mind … but someone other than me had put that blood on her coat. Only then, as I dragged her onwards, I heard them. Distant, to the east.

Dhum, dhum, dhum.

Dhum, dhum, dhum.

A soft, gentle sound, the rhythm perfect and steady. I felt it as much as I heard it, like a painless headache, a pulsing that rose gently at the edges of my mind. I shook my head to clear it, but the three beats replayed themselves, one-two-three, one-two-three, over and over. Hazia whimpered as I forced a harder pace, following my own trail of footprints.

A sound on the slope below us made me stop, pulling Hazia down behind the wide trunk of a pine before a man on a huge black horse rode slowly through the trees. He was the biggest man I’d ever seen. Not tall, but wide, filling his oxblood-red coat as though it were inflated with hot air. His hair was tawny, his face didn’t need to see a razor very often, and he wore eyeglasses. Expensive ones, with brass rims. He wore mail beneath his coat, and there was a five-foot longsword on his saddle, but I knew a lot of tough men, and he didn’t have their cast. That size spoke more of bread than brawn.

‘He’s the one that’s after you?’ I said.

Hazia nodded, her voice a whisper of wind. ‘One of them. But not the one to be afraid of.’

I settled an arrow on the bowstring and kept sight of the young rider. He wasn’t exactly scanning the trees, only half-focused on what he was doing, and he looked soft beneath his armour. Though I kept some rough company, I’d never killed a man, and I didn’t think I would be able to start with this one. At seventeen, I was a woman grown, and men treated me like one when it suited them. But though he had to be around my age, the man on the black horse seemed more boy than man to me. I lessened the tension in the string.

‘Wait here,’ I whispered. ‘Maybe he’ll ride by. If he had your trail, he’s clearly lost it. We can cut along the high ridge there. He shouldn’t see us unless he turns north.’

Hazia winced, shifting against the tree as she put a hand beneath her coat. Her fingers came away licked with red.

‘He’s no threat,’ she said. ‘Listen for the drums.’

They were still there, off to the east. Faint, but steady. Dhum, dhum, dhum. Dhum, dhum, dhum. Repeating, over and over. I felt my eyes close and opened them again with a jerk, suddenly aware that time had passed. How long, I didn’t know. Like I’d just woken from sleep. This, all of this, felt wrong to me. Hazia’s eyes were closed, exhaustion taking her. I tapped her cheek twice and her eyes opened blearily. At least she didn’t try to strangle me this time.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Come on. Stay awake. Can’t let you pass out and die out here, can I?’

I could have. My mother would have said that the weak deserve what they get, and then hated herself for saying it. She’d hated a lot of things, including me, which hardly seemed fair, but she’d seldom demanded fairness except for herself. What would Braithe have done? I supposed he would have helped Hazia too. I hoped he would. He was a hard man, but he did his best. That’s why I loved him. If not for him, those poor soothsaying sisters would have been severed heads on LacCulloch’s castle walls by now.

Hazia winced as she struggled to rise. I hadn’t looked at the wound beneath her coat. I was no surgeon and couldn’t have helped her out here even if I was. Sometimes it’s better not to know how bad it is.

A sound made us both freeze. The fat young man was back, a good hundred yards away, retracing his steps, but that wasn’t what had taken my attention. Another sound was emanating from him, like the distant drums, but instead of a steady, constant rhythm, it was more akin to a drunk child beating a spoon against a saucepan. Hazia grabbed my jaw and turned my face to hers as she pressed her finger to her lips. Her eyes were near rolling with fear and she held me until the young man and his clattering racket had gone on their way.

‘What was that?’ I asked.

‘You heard it too?’ Hazia said.

I nodded.

‘That’s not normal.’

‘None of this is normal,’ I said. ‘But if I don’t get you somewhere warm in the next hour, you probably aren’t ever getting warm again.’

Hazia grunted with pain as I dragged her up.

‘What do they want with you?’ I asked.

‘Trying to stop me,’ she whispered. ‘No talk. Just walk.’

Dragging a person is hard work, and dragging them through snow is worse. My feet were numb and heavy and I started dreaming up painful deaths for the cobbler who’d sold me my now entirely sodden, freezing boots. I hated snow. The monks who’d decided to live up here may have enjoyed plenty of clear mountain air and a big open sky, but snow is like springtime dancing: idiots think that it’s fun, and everyone with any sense avoids it.

‘Not far to the bridge now. Dalnesse is less than half a mile beyond it,’ I said. Hazia walked with her eyes closed, trusting me to guide her feet. My teeth were gritted against the cold. Not so much further. There wasn’t much to eat in Dalnesse, but there were warm fires and kettles of tea. And company. I should never have set out on my own. I’d thought I was being clever, thought I was going to impress everyone, maybe even save us.

A deep, male voice bellowed on the wind.

‘Hazia!’

Another rider, his horse black and monstrous beneath him, emerged on our trail. He was thick and broad as the pines, his oxblood-red leather coat hanging over green-and-black breacan trousers. Iron rings protruded from the ends of his sleeves. An iron-grey beard framed a wide face, the morning sun shining from his scalp.

Dhum-dhum-dhum, dhum-dhum-dhum.

The vast black charger stalked through the trees, its rider’s eyes filled with deadly intent. His sword was alive and gleaming in his hand, the steel silver-blue in the dappled light.

‘Hazia!’ he bellowed again. Snow dust shivered from the pines.

‘Run,’ she whispered. But it was too late for running. The warrior drove his heels into his mount’s sides, and the glossy beast kicked into a run, snow erupting around its hooves.

You can’t outrun a horse. Panic cycloned in my gut as Hazia staggered ahead of me. Our options flitted through my mind, instinct pulling my thoughts one way, reason another, fear a third until they solidified into something that resembled a plan.

I put an arrow to the string.

When you learn to shoot, you become one with the bow. You reach out to make it an extension of you, drive your essence through the grain of the wood so that arm, stave and spirit are one. Woman and weapon together, a mystic dance of precision and poise.

Not really. You just pull the string back, point it and let go. The less you think, the more likely you are to send it where you want.

I loosed. The string slapped against my bracer as the arrow took flight. The horse screamed in pain as the shaft hammered into its chest, its pounding advance ending as its forelegs collapsed beneath it and the rider pitched headfirst into the snow. Poor horse. With luck, the rider had broken his neck in the fall. That would have been something.

No luck. He surged from the snow in a cloud of white, the drum-beat thundering louder in my mind.

‘Kill him!’ Hazia yelled back at me. ‘Kill him before he takes your mind!’

There was a savage determination on the fallen rider’s wide, round face. One cheek was grazed and bloody, but he still had a grip on his sword and he still came on, ignoring the dying horse behind him. His murderous intent was clear, his shoulders working up and down. The drums grew louder, louder, dhum-dhum-dhum, dhum-dhum-dhum. I was taller, but I couldn’t outrun him and help Hazia. She’d fallen down a short way on, staring back with terrified eyes.

‘Drop the bow, girl,’ the old man bellowed. He favoured one leg, the barest twitch of an eye and the clench of his teeth telling me he hadn’t fallen well. ‘You don’t know what you’re dealing with. I will kill you if I have to.’

‘I’ll only warn you once,’ I shouted. ‘I will shoot you.’

It was true. It had to be true. I could do it. I had to be able to do it.

‘No,’ he growled. ‘You won’t.’

He was stocky, built like an ox, and he made an easy target, floundering through the snow. I’d given a warning. Couldn’t ask much more than that. My second arrow was for him.

Braithe would be proud of me. He always said I was too soft. That the world was hard and I needed to harden myself to match. Not all lives were precious. That’s what he said.

Draw, settle, breathe out, release. Snap of string against bracer. The arrow flew.

The warrior struck out and caught it.

He caught it. My damn arrow.

And then he was limping towards me, tossing the cracked shaft aside, staggering as he blundered into a snow drift. I’d thought fast, I’d acted fast. Now I just stared at him.

He’d caught my damn arrow.

I turned and fled onwards, dragging Hazia’s arm across my shoulder. Whoever or whatever he was, Hazia’s enemy was now mine and I was damned if I was going to let him catch me. I got to see enough ghosts without becoming one myself. He sure as damnation shouldn’t have been catching my arrows. The bow had an eighty-pound draw. It wasn’t possible.

I dragged her, dodging beneath the pines where the snow was lightest, glancing back to see him struggling behind us, limping and getting bogged down like he’d never seen snow before in his life. Didn’t know how to find the easy footing. Even dragging Hazia, half-blind and mumbling to herself, we began to pull ahead. I tried to look everywhere at once, vision roaming between the trees. Where was the second rider, the young one with the child-and-pan clatter about him? He couldn’t be ahead of us. He couldn’t. I pushed the girl to move faster. Hazia gasped in pain, but pain is fleeting and dying is forever. No resting now.

This way, a whisper seemed to ride on the breeze. Calling me on. Louder than the tapping of the drums. Desperate hope giving rise to imagination.

I dragged us up a bank, turned and looked back. He was a good way behind us now, foundering in deep snow. Maybe he’d got lucky with that catch? Maybe the part of me that was telling me to run and run and never stop running was wrong. I drew a shaft, knocked it. Another chance. This time it would—

He locked eyes with me and made an angry swipe of his hand. The snow around him evaporated in a cloud of steam, a boiling cloud obscuring him from view. I lost my target, I lost control of my jaw, and then the snow between us melted away, mud, stones and sheltering plants revealed as the air grew hot and wet, winter blossoming into summer. The warrior surged through the new-formed mist, splashing through wet mud as he closed the distance.

Run, that whisper ghosted into my mind. You cannot fight him yet.

Whoever or whatever he was, all thought of shooting him died at that moment. His sword gleamed with morning fire, reflected across his broad, mastiff face. He was a charging bull, and no arrow was going to stop him. I fled, felt him closing the gap behind us as snow hissed and boiled away to nothing, clearing his path.

The trees ended and we staggered to a halt, lungs heaving, drawing up on the edge of the canyon. The mountain river flowed below, a twenty-foot drop to fast-flowing water which frothed across blade-edged rocks. The bridge ahead was old, and rotten in parts, but the monks had made it to last.

A woman from another time stood on the far side of the river. Her form rippled like a mirage, trailing vapours in a wind I didn’t feel. A heavy fur-lined cloak sat over a royal-blue dress, raven-dark hair falling to the small of her back. Feathers formed a wreath above her ears, and streaks of battle paint crossed her cheeks and eyes. A queen from a bygone age, a ghost. A useless ghost. She couldn’t help us.

‘Please,’ Hazia breathed. ‘Have to get to Dalnesse.’

‘You will,’ I said and pushed her forwards. ‘You go first.’ The bridge creaked beneath her, rotten planks groaning. It was only forty feet to the far bank, and her strength seemed to flow out of her as she got halfway. Planks creaked, and one cracked beneath me, but I slowly made it to Hazia and pulled her across.

The ghostly queen’s eyes seemed to track me, though the dead did not see the living, the living did not see the dead. That was how it always was. Her face was narrow, her eyes deep-set and hard as the ice beneath feet that drifted off into mist. But she smiled, a feral curl of her lip.

The warrior was panting as he drew towards the far end of the bridge. Blood ran down his right leg.

‘Keep back!’ I yelled, but I didn’t even have an arrow ready. My heart hammered in my chest.

‘It’s over,’ he called in a deep voice that spoke of a life far from here. ‘Hazia. Stay there. Let me end this.’ He held out an open hand. Almost a gesture of friendship. ‘Hazia. Please.’

‘No,’ she said from the far bank. ‘Let me go. I have to finish it.’

‘Run, Raine. They shall not catch you. Not today,’ the feather-crowned queen said, and the last of my reserves blew away like dandelion breath with my sudden rush of fear. She was calm as snowfall; vapours rose from her shoulders, twisting on unmoving air. She had spoken my name. It was impossible. I sank to my knees. People didn’t see the dead. The dead did not see people. They were only ever echoes of the past, blind and broken shadows of what had been.

Only she had called me by name …

The big warrior stepped onto the bridge, the wood groaning beneath his armoured weight, but he advanced anyway, one steady pace after another.

‘Do not fear. This is not the end,’ the ghost queen said. ‘I will not let him hurt you, Raine. This is only our beginning.’ She smiled. A warm, ghostly smile. And then she uttered a word. A word that was a tangle of three different equations, all identical and all giving different answers, an impossible word that was the things that only the glaciers know, a word that was never spoken but always heard, that was ancient and new and powerful. And for a moment, I thought I saw the shadow of raven-feathered wings spreading behind her.

Wood splintered. The bridge in front of the warrior groaned, and then the long beams shattered, as though a giant had grasped them in his hands and twisted. Supporting beams that had been laid long years ago buckled, and with a vast crash the whole bridge gave way. The mail-clad warrior and his oxblood coat disappeared into seething, vicious water below in a swirl of sharp debris, the current sweeping it all away to dash against the rocks.

2

The ghost queen was gone. She left no plumed breath on the wind, no tracks in the snow. It was as if she had never been there at all, and perhaps she hadn’t been. Her stark white eyes amid the face paint, the flicker of corvid wings at her back, even her rich voice already seemed a distant memory. Though the twisted, broken spars of the bridge were very real.

It shouldn’t have been possible to shiver more than I already was, but my body insisted. I shook it off. Blinked back the betrayal of my eyes. I had no time for wondering, no time to examine my own senses. I was needed.

Hazia was facedown in the snow. The man who’d been trying to kill us was nowhere to be seen.

I stared down into the foam-crested waters, expecting to see a hand burst from the wreckage as it was swept away, hoping to see a body. But there was nothing, no more sign that there had been a man there than there was evidence of a lady wreathed in feathers.

I looked around for her again. It seemed impossible that she had destroyed the bridge, that she had spoken to me. Called me by name. A ghost was nothing but an echo, a confused, misplaced portrait of the person that was. Her words were tangling in my head, in the pumping fire of the battle-rush. It was all wrong. Nothing made sense.

I looked down at the crumpled woman. I’d brought Hazia this far, and she still needed help. She was semi-lucid, speaking nonsense about books, and the darkness, and fire and a black well. Nonsense talk on the edge of consciousness. If we didn’t hurry, her babbling was sure to end altogether. I didn’t know this woman, didn’t owe her anything, but she was hurt, and she was alone, and that’s enough to make someone deserving of your help.

It wasn’t all that far to the hidden back entrance to Dalnesse, but Hazia was barely able to stagger, tripping and falling constantly. Fresh blood wetted her coat as whatever wound lay beneath it tore open.

‘Come on, just a little further,’ I said. ‘Haven’t dragged you all this way for nothing. You might as well live until tomorrow, given all the trouble you’ve put me to.’

We were twenty feet from the stream that cut a tunnel into the rock face when she went down again and wouldn’t get up. I rolled her over. Still breathing, just worn through. This time, slaps didn’t get her moving, and my strength was spent. No choice but to leave her there. I’d left a cadanum lamp inside the tunnel when I left. A few flicks of the mechanism got the little chunk of blue-grey metal inside it glowing. As the tunnel lit up before me, I cast a glance back towards what had once been a bridge, and my hope of escape, and felt that last chance tumble down into the crevasse below to be swallowed with Hazia’s pursuer. There was no way out now.

Light Above, had I saved one soul only to damn us all to LacCulloch’s spears?

One thing at a time.

I splashed into the calf-deep stream, slipping on uneven stones, past the broken grille, and on into the crypts. The monks had buried their dead down here, but we’d been using it to keep our last few barrels of ale cold. The tunnels extended a fair way, further than anyone was interested in going, and some of them were flooded where springs and streams had forced their way through stone. Dalnesse was old, predating the Succession Age, raised and burrowed out in a time that predated the Hallenaen War, perhaps even the Yanni Dominion. There were many places like that across Dunan, our shoes falling in the tread of once-mighty empires. They all came to the same end, though: dark, faded and flooded. My feet were wet, my legs were wet, and my cheeks must have been rosy with the cold.

The monastery of Dalnesse must have been a busy place in its heyday. The large absolution house which held the sept and the crypts was one of only a dozen granite buildings set behind the defensive perimeter wall. For all that the monks believed the Light Above was going to come and save them all, provided they said enough bad things about themselves, they seemed to have placed a great deal of faith in erecting battlements too, to ensure that brigands or feckless highborn thails didn’t decide the gold-loving monks would be better off living a life of pious poverty. That had worked out just as well for me, Braithe, the three sooth-sisters who formed the centre of the troop, and their forty or so followers, who were probably regretting their life choices right about now.

Braithe wasn’t going to be pleased with me, and I feared that, but there was no helping it. I found Lochlan and told him what I needed. He went off to find it with an open mouth and overly bright eyes. Poor Lochlan. He was sixteen, a year younger than me, and he was a sweet boy. Everyone had a different reason for following the sisters, but I didn’t know what had possessed him to leave what had seemed like a pretty good gig on the farm to travel with us misfits. I’d hated living under my mother’s heels in a dank, wet scribing house, and I regretted not one of the four years I’d spent on the road with the sisters and their people. It seemed less important to me to be part of a friendly community than to believe in singing the colours. But Lochlan had shed tears as he bid his parents and at least a dozen siblings farewell, in a bright, sunny valley filled with golden corn. It hadn’t really mattered to me whether what the sisters said was true or not. They’d offered me a way out, and I’d had a bag packed and was out the door before my mother even knew I was gone.

I pushed the memories away as I waited, trying to suppress them like the ghosts I ignored. She had fed me, clothed me, given me what passed for an education in the thaildom of Dornoch. Even if she hadn’t loved me the way other mothers loved their daughters, I’d still thrown all of that back in her face the day I walked on out. Perhaps she was on my mind now, brittle, with her old-thatch-coloured hair, because I’d absconded again. Perhaps, all the time I’d been looking for a way down the mountain for my new family, a quiet voice at the back of my mind had been telling me: Run.

I had not run. I had come back, and I had helped a woman in need. I was none of the things my mother had bitterly said I was.

Lochlan returned with a wide plank of wood and one of the big dumb miners who’d joined us the year before. I took them to Hazia, and together they loaded her onto the plank and did the hard work of carrying her inside.

‘Who is she?’ Lochlan wanted to know.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘She needed help.’

Lochlan winced as a splinter bit into his hand, but he didn’t complain. He was a good kid, really. Like the brothers and sisters he’d left behind, his hair was yellow as the corn. Judging by where we’d all ended up, he should probably have stayed there. Hazia should probably have stayed wherever she’d run from too. There was a fairly high chance that we were all going to die, or find ourselves chained and indentured.

‘No parley this morning?’ I asked.

‘There’s nothing much to say,’ Lochlan said. ‘LacCulloch’s still camped down there, and he’s not going anywhere.’

‘You’d think he’d be bored by now,’ I said. Saying the words gave them solidity, as though they might be true.

The two men with the plank negotiated the bend in the stairs that led up, out of the catacombs and towards the light.

‘LacCulloch thinks Sister Marthella is grave-touched,’ Lochlan said sadly. ‘So he’s not going to stop until he has them. Or until he’s made to go away.’ For a moment his eyes shone with fervent zealotry. ‘But we’ll stand and fight. They showed us the way, didn’t they?’

‘Aye,’ the big dumb man agreed. He, like Lochlan, wore one of the many-coloured tabards the sisters knitted. They’d abandoned their breacan, their clan colours, in favour of a riot of mismatched hues. They wore them in the morning when the sisters led them in meditation, when they danced the colour dance, and when the sisters were reading their futures in the ashes of a fire or the lines of their veins. It hadn’t occurred to any of them that despite the three sisters supposed power, they hadn’t foreseen our being forced to flee from a town in the middle of a night, chased into the mountains and besieged in a monastery so on the verge of collapse that not even monks wanted to live in it.

It wasn’t fair to blame the sisters. It was my words that had brought us here. Careless, ghost-ridden words. I thought that I’d been helping. Just once, I thought I’d offered something others could use.

There were barely fifty of us in total, hiding behind the monastery’s stone walls. Half a dozen men and women were up on the wall, their hunting bows resting against the battlements. We didn’t think LacCulloch would try to attack us directly. He had overestimated our fighting potential, but Braithe had us ready for it if he did. At least, that’s what we told ourselves. If he did try to attack us, then some of his men would be hurt, and possibly killed. He had us like rats in a trap. The stream tunnel could have changed that, even if only for the young and the hardy. But the feather-mantled woman had torn the bridge asunder and taken even that chance from us.

It was my fault. Sister Marthella had shared my unwise words. And now the bridge was gone because I had tried to help Hazia, who was not one of us, not a burden our buckling backs should have had to bear. But what else was I to have done? A sob was brewing down in some deep, wet, crooked place inside me. I swallowed it down, just as I swallowed the rest. I had to be strong for Braithe. Had to be his right-hand woman. Had to make him proud.

Lochlan delivered Hazia to Sister Marthella. She was a wrinkled old thing, sunbaked and white haired, lodged in one of the old monkish cells. She had no teeth, but she once told me she’d pulled them out to aid in her augury casting, and they rattled on a string around her neck. She hustled the young men from the room.

‘Cut away her clothes,’ the sooth-sister said. ‘Let’s see how bad it is.’

‘Will she live?’ I asked.

‘I’d have to cast some proper guts and bones to know that, dear child,’ she said. ‘And I think if I spend the time to do so, I might as well use hers. She’s very weak. Where did she come from?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How did she get in?’

‘Not sure of that either,’ I said. Better to avoid those questions until I’d spoken to Braithe.

‘If she can get in, we can get out,’ Sister Marthella said slyly.

‘Maybe. Let’s make her better so she can tell us. Please.’

Marthella summoned her sisters as I laid Hazia out on a trestle table, one of the ones they usually set up at summer fairs. I drew a knife along the seams of her clothing, rags so torn and damaged that I hardly seemed to be cutting anything at all. I sliced through the last of the fabric and pulled her coat away. A yellowed piece of paper covered in rows of red-and-black script covered the wound. I lifted it carefully away, but it hadn’t stuck to it, hadn’t even soaked up her blood. I put it to one side, and though I’d seen a few gruesome injuries before, even I had to wince.

‘This is very bad,’ Sister Marthella said. Her sooth-sisters murmured their agreement. ‘The wound was made with a blade. A knife, a sword, perhaps a glancing blow across the ribs from a spear. But it has torn open further.’ She leaned in and sniffed at the red-and-black mess, wiped her brow with the back of a hand. ‘Her colours are weak. I fear your efforts may have been in vain.’

‘Just do what you can,’ I said. I had no authority to command them, not truly, but I was Braithe’s woman. That had started to count for more in recent days. I was not surprised when they nodded quiet agreement, but perhaps they were just nodding to themselves. I’d had my reasons to join up with these travelling fortune-tellers, and they’d welcomed me along though they had little need of me. They had been a way out from beneath my mother’s skirts, an escape from a life she had always told me was beneath her, and there was something magical in the portents and omens they read in soup and bone. And of course, there had been Braithe. Strong, handsome, commanding, and his eyes had slipped on me the first time he saw me. I would have followed those eyes anywhere.

But what did I know back then, thirteen years old and pining for a man twice my age? He didn’t touch me until this last year, and I was the one who had opened that door. The frustrations of my young teenage years had only blossomed into admiration that he had waited for me to grow up. He had made me promises, and he had kept them. I loved him all the more for that.

I picked up the odd sheet of paper. I’d learned my letters early, the one thing my mother had done for me. And yet, I had no idea what the writing was. It wasn’t Harran. It wasn’t Kwendish or Iska either. The letters were laid out on faint lines, but as I looked they seemed to be drifting off into the distance, and a wave of nausea hit me. I glanced away and they were back where they should have been.

The paper was old, yellowed, but surprisingly clean. Lying atop the dreadful mess of Hazia’s ribs, it should have been soaked through with blood. Some kind of wax or oil that made it resistant to water? I tried dripping a couple of drops from a clay cup, and it ran right off, like it was made of glass.

‘Hm!’ I exclaimed, rather impressed by my discovery.

‘Very bad, very bad indeed,’ the sisters crowed together. One threw piles of fragrant herbs onto a brazier while another lit incense sticks, but one of them was mixing a salve. That wound was going to turn green with infection without toadbell, or the paste they made out of those slugs in the northern reaches. Rhinar horn was said to clean a wound too, but Braithe had laughed at that and told me it was a myth. Her injuries looked so hopeless I was glad I hadn’t looked at them before I brought her here. Dragging Hazia through all that snow had left a stiff ache in my arms and thighs, and if I’d seen just what shape she was in, perhaps I would have been weak. Perhaps I would have left her there, to bleed and freeze and die alone.

If I had, we would still have the bridge. Would still have some hope. The world seemed washed with grey, little distortions eating away at the possibilities of the future, like beads of rain running down a clouded windowpane.

Lochlan was waiting for me outside.

‘Where’d you find her?’ he asked.

‘Nearby,’ I said. I didn’t want to talk about it, not while so much needed sorting out in my mind. Half the things I’d seen had been too strange to believe. Snow bursting into clouds of steam, and a ghost who’d shattered the bridge. None of it made any sense. I kept walking, hoping that Lochlan would drop away, would find someone else to bother. People were at work around the compound, cutting wood, sawing planks, shoring up the doors as though we could just sit here forever. They’d started to follow the sisters because they believed they had a string reaching up to the Light Above, heard its whispers in the splashing of wine, saw its plans in the drifting of a cloud. If the sooth-sisters were touched by divine inspiration, surely they had a plan to get out of here?

I’d known it was all bollocks from the first day their travelling party had set up outside the scribing house that Mama so resented. She had been a child apprentice to the village scribe until the woman shuffled on to the next life, and Mama had found herself a woman of learning in a community of illiterate foresters. She left to live with others as educated and extraordinary as herself, only to find that outside the highlands, her knowledge of letters and numbers was considered mundane. Capable enough to record sales and write up deeds of ownership, and little more, she had to swallow her scorn and scribe for her bread. Then of course there was me, and I was no great joy to her, but the sooth-sisters had, for a moment, lightened her life. They talked godliness in a language the common ear could understand, opened up a path to spirituality that went beyond the droning priests in the churches. Morning meditations, using little bits of rock crystal to cleanse their auras, all of it was welcomed wherever the sisters dispensed it, but I’d seen from the first that all of it was nonsense.

I’d allowed myself to think it was a bit of harmless fun at first. Why shouldn’t someone believe that a piece of rock crystal beneath their pillow will bring them good fortune? But then I saw Sister Anthra whisper to an old, dying woman that she could talk to the spirit of her husband, ten years in the grave. Saw her pretending to relay information back and forth, when there was no spirit there. If there had been, I would have seen it.

It was no easy thing to live with the dead. As a young child, sitting beneath my mother’s desk in the scribing houses she so loathed, I hadn’t known what they were, or that they were worthy of comment. The first time I mentioned one, my mother took a slipper to me so hard that I never dared breathe word of it again. It was a kindness, of a sort. Had I spoken freely of what I saw, I would not have lived. The sisters were careful. They stuck to their singing-colours, their rabbit’s feet and dandelion prophecies for the living, and resorted to spirits only to comfort the dying. They meant no harm by any of it.

My only question on that score was whether they were under a collective delusion, or if they knew how full of horse shit their proclamations were. And all the same, despite their care, they had made a mistake. LacCulloch’s wife had but hours left to her when Sister Marthella comforted her, using her long-gone mother’s childhood pet name for her. Only ‘Snowbell’ hadn’t faded. She had rallied at the last, and when she told her husband of the sooth-sister’s secret, deathless knowledge, he turned his ire upon us. I’d heard that long-gone mother’s soul talking around the keep. I’d told Sister Marthella. Joining in, like I was one of them. It had felt safe, and perhaps part of me desperately wanted to trust someone with this secret I’d kept hidden for so long. And perhaps I had been testing Sister Marthella. Perhaps I wanted reassurance that having the grave-sight didn’t make me evil. Didn’t make me a thing that needed killing.

Whatever my thoughts, whether or not the sisters had saved Lady LacCulloch’s wife, LacCulloch did not agree. He hated and feared the spirit-sight as much as anyone. And now he would kill us all, because I had given the sisters a name.

I needed to be alone. I needed air. I needed to be away from all of it.

I walked up the steep flight of stairs onto the walls in a bid to escape Lochlan’s attention. He didn’t like heights, or the wind up there, but apparently he was prepared to brave them for once. The mountain gusts blew hard, turning wet legs and frozen boots even colder. I gazed out at LacCulloch’s encampment. A single road led up to Dalnesse, flanked by towering limestone rock faces. It must have been impressive, once, but yesterday’s splendour was today’s rat trap. They were camped out of bow shot. I knew because Braithe had made me try to get an arrow to them. They were safe in their tents, the smoke of their campfires quickly whipped away on the wind.

‘More soldiers arrived today,’ Lochlan said. ‘How many do you think there are?’

‘I counted a hundred, give or take,’ I said. ‘He can’t attack, though.’

‘He has enough men.’

‘He does, but the gates are big, these old walls are still high, and we’ve enough bows to hurt a lot of his men on their way up here. Besides, how would they get through the gates?’

‘A battering ram,’ Lochlan said. ‘I saw them felling trees yesterday.’ He worried at his thick yellow curls.

‘Look down there,’ I said, pointing at the thick mud in front of the gate. ‘Anyone trying to carry a ram through that is going to get themselves full of arrows. LacCulloch has his household warband, his sworn-swords, and a bunch of men from his clanhold who’re feeling feisty. But there’s nothing they can do here. With luck they’ll start drifting back to make sure their farmers aren’t fiddling the harvest.’

I spoke with a confidence I didn’t feel. I was mimicking Braithe, I realised. He would have been proud.

‘You think it’ll all end peacefully?’ Lochlan asked.

I wanted to give him some encouragement, but I didn’t hold out much hope. The worst of it was, I couldn’t really blame Niven LacCulloch for wanting to get his hands on the sisters. Everyone knew the grave-sight was forbidden, that it marked a person as drawn to the Night Below. Every great terror of the past—Hallenae the Riven Queen, Sanvael LacNimue, Grandmaster Unthayla, the Remnant Sul, the ancient Faded Lords—all of them had seen the dead and bound them to their will. And my selfish little whisper had broken the seal and cast the sisters onto my own pyre. LacCulloch’s wife I could resent, but the thail himself was only doing his duty. I had never felt that I was a monster, never felt that what I saw hurt anybody. I would have cast off the ability if I could. But since the sooth-sisters followers were true believers—in what wasn’t exactly clear, but they were definitely believers—surrender had proven not to be an option. And that was why we were all going to die.

‘It’s OK, Raine,’ Lochlan said. ‘I’ll keep you safe.’ He made to put his arms around me, and I snorted a laugh and pushed him away.

‘The only thing you’re keeping safe is your virginity,’ I told him, and Lochlan reddened, then drew a long dirk with a flourish, making me step back. He brandished the blade before me.

‘I got this from Braithe,’ he said. ‘I’ll fight if I have to.’

‘You think you could kill a man, Loch?’

He shrugged, and maybe for the first time I saw how much he’d filled out over the last year. He had farmer’s shoulders. But he sagged a little and lowered the knife.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘If you were in danger, maybe I could.’

‘I’m always in danger,’ I said. ‘Don’t wish it, Loch. The sisters preach about inner peace, don’t they? It’ll be a sad day that they bring us to violence.’

Braithe had taught me to shoot, shown me how to stick a man whose hands wandered so he wouldn’t die but would remember it. Until today I hadn’t known if I could do it. Whatever I’d said, I hadn’t really believed that I could.

Only I’d loosed an arrow straight at that warrior’s chest. I’d not had a choice. I’d never wanted to kill a person—I’d seen too many ghosts to make one myself—but neither was I going to lie down and die. But he’d snatched my arrow out of the air like it was nothing. It didn’t seem to matter now. He was dead in the river, and Hazia probably wasn’t going to last much longer either. All that fear and panic had been for nothing, and I was right back where I’d started, looking out at a bunch of men who wanted to kill us.

I didn’t want to look at them anymore. But when I turned to head down the stairs again, I saw Braithe staring up at me. He did not look happy. He stalked up onto the wall beside me, while Lochlan muttered an excuse and melted away like a shadow.

‘Where did she come from?’ he demanded. Braithe was tall, broad and thick in the chest without being muscular. Just naturally big. His hair was northern-red, his beard smartly brushed. He was wearing his mail shirt, and his sword, as he’d done ever since we’d been forced to run. I’d given him that sword to celebrate his thirtieth winter, and I think he fancied himself the leader of a warband now, rather than the unelected leader of a bunch of spiritualists. It suited him. Made him look dashing.

I told him everything, save for the painted queen with feathers for a crown. All of our troubles had come because the sooth-sisters had played with fire when they whispered comforting lies to the dying. And I had only given them a name … I could never tell anybody I saw ghosts. Every clanhold had a different name for those that had the spirit-sight: nightcrafters, witches, dark-speakers. But the message behind the name was always clear. The lucky ones were banished. The unlucky met the end of a rope. I wasn’t just a corrupted thing that saw the dead. I was poison to anyone around me.

I needed time to think. I wanted to go back, to live those moments again when the ghostly woman had spoken to me. If she had been speaking to me. My blood had been in my ears and a man had been trying to kill me. Maybe I misremembered. But then the bridge, twisting, buckling and tearing apart like that? None of it felt real to me, even as I told Braithe that it had collapsed beneath my pursuer’s weight.

‘You’ve let me down again, Raine,’ Braithe said, leaning on the crenulation and staring out towards LacCulloch’s men. ‘Whoever Hazia is, she’s bad news and she’s not one of us. I don’t want her here.’

‘I couldn’t just leave her out there to die.’

‘She wasn’t my problem,’ he snapped. ‘I’ve problems enough!’

‘Hush, love,’ I said, linking my arm through his and leaning my head on his shoulder. ‘The man chasing us might well have been one of LacCulloch’s men. So at least we got one of them?’

I meant it light-heartedly, but I suppose it wasn’t funny. Braithe swung me around to look at him, all affection gone.

‘Are you half-asleep in there, Raine?’ he demanded, rapping the side of my head with his knuckles. ‘More of LacCulloch’s men are going to go up there looking for him. What if they find the tunnel?’

‘The bridge is gone,’ I said, knocking his hand away. ‘And don’t do that. You don’t get to treat me like a child out here and a woman when it suits you.’

I didn’t see the slap coming. One moment I was standing in front of him, and the next I was leaning against the battlements, my face stinging and red, unsure sure what had happened. My mind wasn’t quite there for a few moments while Braithe stood over me, red-faced and furious. I trembled.

‘Then be the woman I love, not a feckless girl!’ he snapped. I was too shocked to move. I had no words. ‘I’m sorry,’ Braithe said, his anger fading as swiftly as it had risen, and his big arms enfolded me in his heather and wild-oat smell, in his warmth. The other followers on the walls stared out at LacCulloch’s men as though they’d heard nothing, seen nothing. ‘I’m sorry, Raine,’ Braithe said. ‘I was scared. I can’t bear the thought of anything happening to you. How could you go out there alone?’

It was hard to account for what had just happened. It seemed as impossible as the ghost queen at the bridge. It always felt impossible. Like something from another world had risen up and shut out the sky.

‘I’m sorry.’ I don’t know why I was apologising. My face hurt. He’d done me more harm than the warrior in the red coat, and still somehow I was apologising.

Braithe kissed the top of my head, twice, three times, and leaned it against his broad chest. We’d kept our relationship secret for a time, but there were few secrets once we were in Dalnesse. The others had treated me differently the first morning I walked out of his room. At first I’d thought it was respect. Then I’d realised that if it was, then it wasn’t respect for me.

‘We’ll escape this place, don’t you fear,’ he said. ‘My cousins will come. They’ll go to the Brannish governors, and raise enough men to make LacCulloch back down. You don’t have to be so scared.’

He spoke with such confidence, though I couldn’t see the bottom of the trench from which he dredged it. The Brannish had sat upon the throat of our nation for over six hundred years, and Braithe’s cousins held no lands of worth. I could not imagine the lord of a Brannish garrison riding to our aid with their banners fluttering in the wind. They took our tithes and left clan-land bloodshed to the clans.

‘What if they don’t?’

‘Then we’re all going to be sick of pigeon and rat by the end of winter.’

He smiled, and he was strong and warm and sure and it was better to think on those things than the burning in my cheek.

3

There is always magic in an old woman’s hands. Sister Marthella had done a good job with her needle and thread, and Hazia was still alive. For now. Breath eased in and out of the thin hollow of her chest in shallow, strained exertions, and perspiration slicked her skin. The fire was banked, although there was little dry wood left in Dalnesse. I didn’t want to think about how we’d keep warm once that ran out. Niven LacCulloch didn’t need to get in here to kill us all; he could sit back and let nature do the killing for him.

I found Lochlan wrapped in blankets in the cold of a monkish cell, huddled close to a fire that was running low on fuel as he sharpened his new dirk. He didn’t meet my eye as I sat down beside him. Didn’t say a word, just drove the edge along the whetstone. The light was starting to fade from the world.

Another day, gone. Nothing achieved. Just less food to go around tomorrow, less wood to keep us warm.

I was so tired of the despair. Tired of trying, and failing, and hurting and failing again. I wanted to cry, but I wanted to cry all the time, and tears had never brought me anything but more of the same.

‘Want to see something interesting?’ I said, dragging an edge of enthusiasm from the dry pit where I put the parts of me that weren’t quite spent. Lochlan just shrugged. He wasn’t one for sullen moods, but the days weighed heavily on even the most deluded of the sisters’ followers. They still sang and prayed in the morning, still danced to the colours in their minds, but their voices had grown quieter.

I took out the page that I’d taken from Hazia. It had been torn from a book, ragged along one edge.

‘See this?’ I said. Lochlan nodded. I took my waterskin and poured water across it, let it run onto the floor. ‘Doesn’t get wet. That’s pretty interesting, right?’ Lochlan glanced up at me, looked away quickly and resumed his knife-grinding.

‘I guess,’ he said.

‘Now look at this. Stab it with your knife.’

‘Why?’

‘Just do it.’

I stretched the page out in front of him, and Lochlan gave it a short jab with the blade. Nothing happened. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘put some effort into it.’ Lochlan’s pride took the bait, and he tried harder. Still nothing. We stood up and took one side each and tried to force the blade through, but the paper—if it was paper at all, which I doubted—didn’t show the slightest of nicks. We tried to score it, scratch it, but nothing. Lochlan forgot his sullen mood and started grinning.

‘Doesn’t make any sense at all,’ he muttered as he tried to saw at the edge.

‘You think that’s impressive? Watch this.’

I took the page from him and fed it slowly into the fire.

‘Don’t burn it!’ Lochlan said. He watched as the paper crumpled in on itself, a pained look on his face. ‘What a waste. That must have been worth something.’

‘Come on, I’m not an idiot,’ I said. ‘I tried it on a candle first. Look.’

I fished it from the fire with a stick. The paper had curled into a ball, and it was hot to the touch. The flames hadn’t even singed it.

‘This is really something, Raine,’ Lochlan said. He beamed at me, happy to be sharing a secret.

‘At first I thought it was treated with some kind of oil,’ I said. ‘Now I don’t know. It’s stronger than steel. I wonder if I could make it into a helmet?’ I draped it across my head. It felt heavier than ordinary paper, like the meaningless words forced whatever weight they carried into the world.

‘Don’t think that’d work,’ Lochlan said seriously. ‘Your skull would still break, even if you didn’t get cut through it.’

‘I thought I’d find you here.’

Braithe loomed in the doorway to Lochlan’s cell. I folded the paper and put it to one side. The skin on my cheek seemed to tingle. Flesh remembered, even if I didn’t want to.

‘How’s everything out front?’ I asked.

‘Quiet, for now. Are you coming to bed?’

I nodded and rose.

‘Good night, Lochlan,’ I said.

‘Good night, Raine. Good night, Captain.’

Captain. That was new. It had always paid for the sooth-sisters to travel with a group of strong young folk. In the north, children played at stick-and-shield as soon as they were big enough to hold them, although Mama had never allowed me to join in with those games, which was a shame, as a bit of skill with a sword would probably extend my life by a few moments in the near future. So even though they gathered carpenters, milkmaids, flower dancers and bored tavern maids, the sooth-sisters weren’t short of a few strong arms when they needed them.

‘Captain now, is it?’ I asked, my arm linked through Braithe’s as we walked the short way towards the rooms he’d found to make his quarters. ‘It suits you.’

‘It seems to make them happy to call me that,’ he said. ‘Come on. I have a real fire going. Some wine warming.’

He ushered me into his small domain, and I could see he’d made an effort to clean it up. Old bread crusts and bird-bones had been tidied away, the blankets on the floor had been smoothed out as if to make a bed. Little efforts, but they counted.

‘I’m sorry about before,’ he said. ‘You just make me so worried.’

‘Let’s not talk about it,’ I said. I didn’t want to, and I could see he was trying. You don’t blame a horse if you spook it and it kicks you. This was the same. Sister Marthella had explained it to me the first time Braithe hit me. She’d said his aura had been out of alignment and she’d work some rock crystal over it on the morrow, but what did I expect, embarrassing him by calling him drunk in front of his friends? Sister Marthella was about the oldest person I’d ever known, so there had to be something to what she said. It sounded wise. Didn’t feel right to me, though.

‘Have some wine,’ Braithe said. He poured into wooden beakers for us both.

‘We should probably save that,’ I said. ‘For when we get hungry.’

A big arm wound around my shoulders.

‘Can’t deny ourselves all the best things in life,’ he said. ‘I’m keeping optimistic. I want to hear more about this stream tunnel.’

‘There’s not much more to tell,’ I said. ‘It leads out onto the eastern slopes. They’re not steep, but there’s a river that cuts a gorge there. With the bridge collapsed, I don’t know if anyone can cross it.’

‘You think someone could swim across it?’ he asked.

‘I wouldn’t want to try it.’ My eyes would have narrowed suspiciously, but the bruise on my cheek was stiff and swollen and the expression came out more like a slow wink. ‘What are you thinking?’

‘I’m thinking that if the worst comes to the worst, we’ve a back way out of here.’

‘The sisters would never make it out that way,’ I said. ‘Or the older followers.’

‘I’m doing all I can for the sisters, Raine,’ Braithe sighed. ‘And I’m a believer in their teachings. I do my singing and my colour dances with the rest of them. But I have to be the practical one here. I have to plan for the worst. Have to know what we’ll do if the trumpet sounds on the walls.’

After we made love, Braithe stroked the hair from my face and kissed me on each eyebrow, as delicately as if I were the last autumn leaf clinging to a bough. Then he turned his back, lying on his left side as he always did, leaving me to curl around him. Other girls talked about falling asleep in a strong man’s arms, but that had never been our way. By day, I clung to him: to his strength, to his worldliness. By night I clung to him in a different way, latched on to his back like a babe in its mother’s basket. I held to his solidity, to his realness. To his need for me, in a world where no one else saw any need for me at all.

The torn, impervious page lay between us that night, tucked inside my winter coat. I felt my heart beating against it, the dull pulse bouncing back at me, not into him as I sometimes imagined it did. Out there, in the dark beyond our borrowed walls, men would be sitting around campfires, drinking ale and telling stories. Maybe they would sing a song. Mama had made me sing to her, when she was filled with whisky and her tongue was too slow in her mouth to find the lash. She was slow when she got deep in her cups, and for a time she’d forget what I’d done to her. Something had twisted inside her when she forced me out into the world, some bone had misaligned, and she had never walked easily after that. Had never been able to stand for more than a few minutes without the pain spreading from her pelvis, cutting down through her legs and up into her back. Her body had not wanted me to live, I sometimes thought. In retribution for breaking her, it had wrapped my cord around my throat and turned me purple before I had even entered the world. But when she was drunk, and when I sang the songs she had brought down from the highlands of Ardentathy, she sometimes forgot that I had taken her legs, and that she had killed me for it.

I died before I was even born. Before I even had a name.

The midwife had unwound my mother’s garrotte and filled me with life again. But I wondered some nights whether all my mother’s resentment and spite had somehow conspired to do it. It must have been a relief for her when I ran away with the sooth-sisters. Was it guilt that gave her venom so much fire? I had tried to turn my sorrow to anger, but it’s hard to despise someone when you are the one who cut their wings away. It was safer to accept that her dislike of me was driven by resentment. I’d taken her legs, and trapped her forever in the scribe-house, in a life she hated, looked down on by the rest of the clerks for her clumsy northern script and lack of culture.

I felt her absence tonight as I had not, not even once, since the day I followed Braithe’s bright eyes and the sisters mumblings. A woman had appeared to me today, a woman I did not and would never know, and she had uttered words that I had never thought to hear.

‘I will not let him hurt you, Raine. This is only our beginning.’

To speak of seeing the dead was to die. That was why we were all trapped here in the first place, wasn’t it? I could explain away the collapse of a bridge. What remained of the rest of the monastery was practically falling apart. And perhaps there was part of me that couldn’t quite admit, even to myself, the things that I’d seen. How could I explain what even I didn’t understand? Those beams, twisting like wet cloth being wrung out, and the man who had pursued us who had boiled snow from his path. Everybody within Dalnesse’s walls believed in magic, except perhaps the sooth-sisters themselves, but reading a child’s life line and proclaiming good health was a long, sobering mile away from seeing the dead tear the material world apart with a word. I lived in a realm of blame, of such fear of the unknown that even claiming to see such things marked one out as a witch; a nightcrafter; a dark-speaker. Confined in Dalnesse, with the noose-bringers at our gates, how long before a friend saw their way out through betrayal and revelation?

Whoever she had once been, that lady in her feathered glory was not of my time. Not of my world, perhaps. My education had been gathered piecemeal here and there, but many hundreds of years ago, wielders of great magic had levelled civilisations with their spells and workings. Maldouen had brought the Riven Queen and her Sarathi sorcerers to their final defeat. Fireside stories from passing troubadours talked of their great magic and said that even death could not contain the most powerful practitioners. But the one thing every story agreed upon was that no good came of such power. Darkness followed in the shadow of those that broke the laws of nature.

‘If you are out there, watching over me,’ I whispered into the slow rise and fall of Braithe’s back, ‘whoever, whatever you are, help us escape, without hurting anyone else. Please. It’s not their fault. It was my fault. Don’t hurt anyone else because of what I did.’

I lay quietly in the darkness, my fears keeping me from sleep as I listened to Braithe’s low snoring. I thought that I’d been clever, that I would find a way to impress him. I’d been foolish, and now my cheek throbbed for it. I wouldn’t anger him again tomorrow. Dawn began to rise, faint light beyond the shutters, and I clung to him as though he alone could protect me from the dead.

Three trumpet blasts sounded from the walls.

Braithe started alert, and a rat-terrier’s excitement bright in his eyes.

‘Up,’ he said. ‘Help me with this.’

I dressed him in his coat of mail, secured his sword belt, fixed his cloak. He looked so grand, so much the man who could lead us out of the nightmare into which I had led us. I grabbed my bow, slung my quiver of arrows over my shoulder and followed him, already striding for the wall.

4

‘They want to talk,’ Braithe said as he came back down from the parapet. ‘Got a parley branch up.’

‘How many?’

‘Just four,’ Braithe said. He took a deep breath. Steeled himself, filling up as if he inhaled pride from the cold mountain air. ‘I’m going to go meet them.’

‘I’m coming too,’ I said. I shouldered my bow.

‘No,’ Braithe said. ‘You’ve had enough adventures. Stay here with the children. You will know your place.’ He called to his two best men, Farlan and Fergus, both sturdy highlanders with heavy beards.

The children. I was seventeen, and by highland law I’d been a woman for two years already, and Braithe’s “men” counted a dozen women among their number, two of them barely a year or two older than me. I glared at his back, willing him to see that I was capable, but he was busy with his preparations. Was that how he saw me, beyond the fall of his sheets? No. He was just afraid for me, sheltering me. That’s what yesterday had been about. Fear and anger are the head and thistle of a coin, and one cannot exist without the other.

I had to show him that he didn’t need to fear for me. How could he protect us if worry for me filled his mind? I saddled the horse I usually rode, a docile, roan mare called Ivy. As the gates cracked open and Braithe and his men rode out, I nudged her after them.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Braithe scowled at me.

‘I’ve as much right to be here as anyone, Captain,’ I told him. ‘We’re all free people. One of the sisters’ rules, isn’t it?’

‘Things are changing around here,’ Braithe said, and his men grunted agreement. I ignored them and heeled Ivy into a trot, focused on staying in the saddle. Sitting a walking horse is easy, but I’d never been a natural horsewoman. It was only when I was a hundred feet from the walls of Dalnesse that I saw the red coats among LacCulloch’s party, and my jaw locked tight as winter.

Niven LacCulloch was a young man, his desire to prove himself to the world written across his face. His mail was polished, and a helm with an ornate faceplate rested beneath his arm. He and his bodyguard of four men and two women, carrying the branch that signified parley, would usually have looked imposing, but their highland horses hadn’t the sheer size of those ridden by the men in the oxblood coats, which easily stood four hands taller. One of them was the fat young man who’d ridden by me, but for a moment I had to check that I wasn’t seeing yet another deathless soul. The old man who’d burned away the snow was sitting aside another monstrous charger behind them. His eyes were closed, and his head and hands were scraped with a dozen small cuts and bruises, but there he was, no ghostly vapour around him, solid as an oak. Very much alive.

Nobody should have survived a fall into that torrent. Those rocks. What nature of man was he?

‘Still not sending Marthella out to speak to me in person, Braithe?’ LacCulloch called as we drew to a stop three horse-lengths away.

‘Somehow I doubt you’d be sitting so cordial if I had,’ Braithe said. ‘This has gone on long enough.’

‘You must be getting pretty hungry in there,’ LacCulloch said. In a display that spoke of forward planning, his bannerman took a piece of meat from a sack at his belt and bit off a chunk. I had to admit, it had the desired effect and my stomach tightened painfully.

‘Our beliefs feed our souls,’ Braithe said. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

‘Your beliefs are written in grave dust,’ LacCulloch snapped.

‘No,’ Braithe said. ‘You’ve been misled by a fever-driven mind. There is no finger of the grave upon the sisters, and no evil in their hearts. Sister Marthella speaks only the wisdom she reads in the colours. I cannot permit harm to come to them.’

‘So you intend to sit here forever?’

‘No,’ Braithe said. ‘Help is on its way. What do you want?’

‘I’ve nothing more to say to you,’ LacCulloch said. ‘They do.’

I pulled my hood up to cover my face. The old man looked asleep in his saddle, but I’d seen him catch an arrow, had seen him melt the snow. That he’d also survived the fall into the river left me chilled. If he recognised me, my silence could become a noose of my own making. I’d lied to Braithe. I shuddered even at imagined fury.

The young man in red tried to speak, and his voice emerged as a squeak. He cleared his throat.

‘We are here on business of Redwinter,’ he said. Despite his girth, he seemed like a child among these growling men. Even so, mention of Redwinter made Braithe and his men shift in their saddles. ‘You are harbouring a criminal, who must be returned to us at once.’

‘Sister Marthella is no criminal,’ Braithe said, and I sank further into my saddle. Braithe had been right, though he couldn’t have known it. Coming out here had been a mistake.

‘We have no interest in your soothsayers,’ the young man said. He looked about as certain of his place here as a hen in a fox’s den. He glanced back at the older man, who remained immobile, breathing slowly. ‘We are here for Hazia LacFroome. She is an apprentice of Redwinter, and wanted for the gravest of crimes.’

‘You’re Draoihn?’ Braithe asked.

‘I am Novice Ovitus LacNaithe,’ the young man said. ‘This is my uncle, Ulovar LacNaithe, Draoihn of the Fourth Gate and van of Clan LacNaithe. We have pursued her all the way from Harranir.’

An icy chill dripped down my back as if an icicle were forming between my shoulder blades. I felt the world spinning away from me, as though I rose up, up and above it from a great height, staring down at the impossible juncture I had brought us to. I had sought to help. To show mercy.

What had I done?

If the young man was telling the truth, then I’d loosed an arrow at one of the most powerful men in the kingdom. Harran was not the wealthiest nation. Too much weak soil, too much rock and wind. Too cold. A client kingdom of our great southern neighbour, Brannlant, Harran was lesser in wealth, in culture, in most of everything. But LacNaithe was an old clan, with roots that twined down to the bedrock of the land, and within the clanlands few could challenge her for influence, or for power. The young man’s proclamation had a similar effect on Braithe and his men. Dealing with a small-clan highland thail like LacCulloch was one thing. Refusing a command from LacNaithe was another.

‘What do you require, Van LacNaithe?’ Braithe said quietly.

‘We’ve no part to play in this sad quarrel,’ the young man, Ovitus, said. ‘I hope for all concerned that there is a happy resolution to be had. But Hazia LacFroome must be delivered to us.’

‘If she’s moved, she’ll die,’ I said. The words were out before I could stop them. Ovitus looked pained.

‘I don’t want her to die,’ he said. ‘She’s my friend.’

The old man, Ulovar LacNaithe, van of his clan, stirred, his eyes still closed. ‘Then you must take us to her.’

Something changed in Braithe at that moment. I’d seen it in him the day before. He would not be commanded. Had he always burned with this desire for authority? What a little taste of power does to a man, I thought.

‘No,’ Braithe said. Ulovar’s eyes opened a tiny fraction.

‘No?’

‘No.’ His hands were hard on his reins. Ready to pull his horse around, ready to ride hard if he had to.

The old man’s eyes closed again.

‘Please,’ Ovitus said. ‘We’ve no wish for violence—’

‘If she is not brought to me within the hour, your gates will fall,’ Ulovar growled, ‘and what befalls you and your people will be on your own heads. Bring her to me. Alive if possible. Dead if needs be.’

‘I’ve heard enough,’ Braithe said. He glared at LacCulloch. ‘These imposter Draoihn were a bold move. But it takes more than a red coat to prove a man’s from Redwinter. Try to take our gates if you can. You’ll not find your reception to your liking.’

He sawed on the reins, bringing a snort of pain from his horse. I wheeled Ivy around as well, my heart pulsing a fearsome beat in my chest. We heeled the horses to a canter as we headed back into Dalnesse.

The moment we were off the horses I grabbed Braithe’s sleeve.

‘We have to get out of here,’ I said. ‘All of us. He’s not bluffing. Those men are Draoihn.’

‘I know,’ Braithe said. There was a wild, angry light in his eyes.

‘Shouldn’t we give them what they want?’ one of his men asked.

‘I’ll not give them shit,’ Braithe snapped. ‘I’m captain here, aren’t I? I saw a Draoihn in action once. He took five men apart like they were nothing. I’ll not let them pass a foot inside our walls.’

‘And if he breaks the gates?’

‘The Draoihn may be deadly warriors,’ Braithe snorted, ‘but they’re still men. He comes anywhere near us and he’ll meet a rain no red coat will hold back.’ He gestured to his men. ‘Make sure the bows are strung and the arrows close to hand. Just in case they try something stupid.’

‘Aye, Captain,’ his men chorused.

‘Arrows won’t stop them,’ I said.

‘Are you questioning me?’ Braithe snapped, anger turning his pale cheeks as red as his beard. For a moment I thought he was going to strike me again. He controlled himself, brought a big, colour-dancing smile onto his face. ‘We’re blessed by the sisters. There’s nothing to fear.’ He raised his voice to address the worried folk all around. ‘The colours shine for us, do they not?’

‘The colours shine!’ they chorused back. I looked around in horror at the smiles, the beaming faces. This morning they’d been dancing, shouting the names of rainbow hues as they did every morning. It had all seemed funny when I first joined them, and then after a while I’d seen what they took from it. Community, a sense of belonging. The colour dance gave them a place in the world, and the sooth-sisters gave them a focus. But it was only words. I had seen real magic beneath the pines. I had seen a man who could snap arrows from the air and turn snow to steam. They didn’t understand what they were dealing with.

I begged Braithe to listen. In my desperation I even told him what I’d seen, but he shrugged me off. Dismissed me as he would a panicking child. Maybe I’d never been more to him than that. I was helpless, voiceless among them. He didn’t want it to be true.

‘You were never really a believer, Raine,’ he said sadly. ‘But these people are. They look up to me. I can’t let them down.’

‘We have to get out of here. All of us.’

He shrugged.

‘The Light Above provides the colours of the world for us to dance. We’ll dance them the way she intends.’

‘You want them to come,’ I said. ‘You want to fight.’ As I said the words we both knew I was right.

He strode away, ordering men to the walls. He’d found his place among these people, as I’d never found mine. They looked to him to lead them, and he would. He’d lead them straight into their caskets.

I sank back against the wall, as the wind tossed a skitter of fallen leaves through the air before me. I saw the pillars of my life flutter away on the same cold wind. The people here had been good to me. Had helped me, when I needed somewhere to turn. Had welcomed me though I had nothing to offer, asked little of me and given much. I wasn’t truly one of them. Braithe was right about that. But I thought I had been happy among them. Thought I had found somewhere I could belong.

I was crying when Braithe looked back at me, and I saw myself as he saw me. A girl in a woman’s body.

Just a child after all.

5

The sooth-sisters read an augury in the blood of a weasel. I don’t know where they’d got a weasel from, but everyone gathered as they oohed and aahed over a bowl of its blood.

‘The portents are good,’ Sister Marthella said, pleased by what she saw. ‘Lies have been told. We, the faithful who serve the Light Above in all her colours, shall be raised on high.’

Beaming smiles all round. Stupid faces with grins writ large, friendly slaps on the back. The sisters’ faithful followers went back to their tasks with the relief that comes from believing absolute horseshit at a deep, resonating level.

I couldn’t have looked much better than the weasel. My eyes stung, and my upper lip was raw from sniffling, but that didn’t matter now. I felt more adrift, more apart from these people than any simple difference in belief could have achieved. As that gulf between us had widened, I saw them all spread out before me like distant places on a map. Places I had visited but could never be home. I had to go, I realised. Not just because LacCulloch had warriors, and Draoihn, but because my departure was inevitable. What pretty deceptions I had worked upon myself, to wear the colours of another person’s life.

I stopped Lochlan as he headed to the wall. He brandished his dirk, with its bark-twine-wrapped hilt before him like a ward against evil, drawing strength from it.

‘Come with me,’ I said. ‘Please.’

‘Braithe said I have to stand watch on the wall,’ Lochlan said.

‘Never mind Braithe,’ I said angrily. ‘It’s all over, don’t you see it? Dalnesse won’t protect us. LacCulloch has Draoihn among his men. Do you know what that means?’

‘But they aren’t on LacCulloch’s side,’ Lochlan argued. ‘That’s what Braithe said. They don’t care about us.’

Lochlan looked very young to me then. He still believed, I thought. Still saw a road stretching out before him, a pilgrimage of fate that would continue beyond the next few hours or days with these people. He didn’t see that it was over. I couldn’t blame him. I had barely stepped from the path myself.

‘Braithe isn’t thinking clearly,’ I said gently. ‘He thinks he can find a way through this on a ship built of his own making. People are calling him Captain, filling his sails. But he’s just a landlocked sailor who fancies the log he’s sitting on is a ship. And he’s going to sink us all.’

‘He has led us well this far,’ Lochlan said. So desperate to believe. So in awe of a man who knew more of sails and seas than he did swords and strategy.

‘I wish I could believe you,’ I said. ‘I want to believe you. But if Braithe’s cousins are all he says—will raise men to rescue us all—then why has he spent these years travelling with the sisters? Why would the Brannish overrule Niven LacCulloch? The Brannish don’t care for us either, Lochlan. Nobody does.’

Lochlan looked at me as though I were a limping rabbit, struggling to hop away from a child’s caring hands.

‘I know he shouldn’t have hit you, Raine,’ he said. He hesitated for a moment, maybe drew more strength from the hilt of his knife. ‘That was wrong of him. If you were my woman, I wouldn’t hit you.’

I shrugged that aside. I felt the sting of humiliation in the stiff, swollen lump over my cheekbone.

‘That doesn’t matter now,’ I said. ‘Get your things ready, and take them down to the crypts. If everything goes south, then I want you to head out through the tunnel. Maybe you can climb down and swim across. Don’t think about fighting them. We can’t fight them. We don’t have the people, or the weapons. Or the magic, if it comes to that.’

‘The sisters have magic,’ Lochlan said. He tried to reach out to me, but I shrugged him off.

‘Not this kind of magic,’ I said. ‘Please. Trust me.’

‘You have to have faith, Raine,’ Lochlan said. ‘I’m sorry. I need to stand watch on the wall.’ He turned and walked away, then stopped and looked back. ‘He shouldn’t have hit you, Raine. But you need to watch what you’re saying.’

I stood there, numb, for a while. I couldn’t even convince Lochlan. I’d never felt so powerless, so alone.

This was what it all came to in the end. The community I’d chosen to be part of. Mama had told me that I was nobody to anybody but her, and she’d been right. I’d left her cruel words, her resentment, her bitterness, but four years later her words drifted around me like circling crows. I had done what I could, had told the truth. Only my words were worth nothing to them, and I was worth less.

Out beyond the walls, I heard the sound of drums. Very distant, very faint. A repeating beat, soft and gentle. Dhum, dhum, dhum. A chill passed through me. Drums I’d heard before. My thoughts seemed to be falling into the same rhythm, words falling on the beats. Everything seemed very clear, very bright. Shades of pink and yellow on the followers’ shirts were glaring, almost painful to the eye. Everything was too loud. Footsteps on the ramparts above could have been hands clapping beside my ears. A massive headache was sure to follow.

I moved quickly, gathering what I could. Not much to show for the time I’d spent with the faithful. I’d lived alongside these people for four years, cooking for them, pitching tents, darning stockings and feeding horses. Writing letters for them, looking at bills of sale to ensure they weren’t being swindled. Dancing their stupid colours, which wasn’t even a dance, it was just throwing yourself about and wailing. For the last year, sharing Braithe’s bed. I’d made myself useful. But I still wasn’t one of them. I didn’t believe, and I never had.

Dhum, dhum, dhum.

That, I believed in.

I entered Hazia’s sickroom. The fire was dying, but the room held a thick, sweet-smelling heat. The young woman sat on the edge of the bed, sheened with sweat, her dark hair hanging lank around her face. The sisters had bandaged her side, but stains had forced themselves through, yellow and red. The smell was sickening.

‘You need to lie down,’ I said.

‘No,’ Hazia whispered. ‘They’re coming. Don’t you feel it? The Third Gate is open. Ulovar is working something.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Where is it?’ Hazia said. She looked around, her eyes wild. ‘Where is it?’

‘Where’s what?’

‘The page,’ she said. ‘I carried it all this way. To bring it back, where it belongs. Where is it? What have you done with it?’

I’d left the seemingly indestructible sheet of paper in the room I shared with Braithe.

‘We need to get out of here,’ I said. ‘They’re coming for you. You need to dress.’

‘I don’t care about that,’ Hazia said. She bared her teeth, and her fingernails gouged at the bedframe. ‘Get me. The page.’

‘Has everyone gone mad?’ I demanded. ‘What does an old piece of paper matter? They’re going to kill you, Hazia. We can still get out. The way we got in.’ And then maybe find another way to cross the mountain river. Maybe somehow get this sick, dying woman somewhere that she could heal. Maybe evade the Draoihn until we got clear. It was a lot of maybes, but I was damned if I was going to let them ride in here and murder her in a bed.

Hazia reached out and grabbed my wrist, her grip painful, squeezing my bones.

‘Bring it to me. And take me to the crypt,’ she hissed.

‘The crypt?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Don’t you hear it calling?’

‘We have to go through the crypts,’ I said. Down to the crypt, follow the old monk’s ghost back to the underground stream, and out. But we’d need warm clothing first. Fur-lined hoods, heavy coats, something that might keep us alive if we were caught without shelter overnight or if the snow began to fall. There would be no trails out there. ‘I’ll get it for you,’ I said. ‘Just wait here. Put some clothes on and wait for me.’

I fetched the page, tucking it into my coat, then crossed the monastery’s yard to the supply wagon. I found spare clothing, colourful shirts for new worshippers, winter coats and cloaks. No boots or shoes. I bundled what I could in a sack, tied the end off with thin rope. Made a good knot, a seafarer’s knot that Braithe had taught me. Was I really going to do this? Leave him? Leave my few friends? The trumpet sounded up on the wall. Three clear blasts. Kella had been a court musician before she’d joined the sisters, and her notes were bright and clean.

Atop the wall the watchers looked aghast.

‘What’s going on?’ I yelled, but they weren’t listening, too busy wrapped up in what they saw. ‘Damn it.’ I took the stairs two at a time.

LacCulloch’s men were charging us, on their highland horses, snow flying as the horses ploughed up the road.

‘Ready bows! Ready bows!’ Braithe yelled. His cloak streamed out behind him in the high mountain wind.

‘What are they doing?’ I shouted as the drumming of hooves beat through the earth. The sound of four hundred iron-shod hooves resounded from the mountainsides.

‘They’ve gone mad,’ Braithe muttered. ‘Mad.’ He shook his head. He plucked the string of his bow, felt the thrum. He shouted along the wall, ‘Wait until you can’t miss!’ I heard a bite of joy in his voice, fearless behind his high stone walls. I saw Lochlan trying to string his hunting bow, a bow he’d only ever used to shoot crows on a farm whose name I couldn’t remember. The string slipped from the horn nock, his fingers sweaty. There were only twenty men and women on the walls. Limited ammunition. The sisters had close to fifty followers, but some were old, some were children, others were just milling about below, unsure what to do.

The riders stormed onwards, swords and axes held to the shoulder, spears ready. No ladders, no ram, nothing they could use to storm the gate. For a single moment I understood Braithe’s confidence. He’d been a sailor, heaving lines and loading cargo. A man who took orders. Here he was lord of the wall, and his enemies were going to smash themselves against it like a ship running aground.

Dhum, dhum, DHUM.

A great throb of force shook the wall, as if a hammer had fallen against it. I staggered, grabbed the parapet. A huge crack ran through the great double-gates. A second crunch rippled through them and on into the wall, and Lochlan fell back onto his arse. The gates collapsed outwards, hinges shorn away, crashing into the churned snow like toppled giants.

‘Light Above,’ Braithe whispered. He turned towards the horsemen rushing towards the breach, his eyes wild, and his bow fell from his hands.

I ran for the stairs, stumbling and falling to one knee as I made it to the courtyard floor. I launched up from my other foot, raced across the courtyard, fumbling my bow from my back as the horsemen began to pour into the yard, shields raised above their heads. A handful of bowstrings thrummed, arrows hammering into the wood. One rider cried out as the tip punched through to gash the arm beneath.

The horsemen saw the scattering people, and they went after them, or leapt from their horses and ran for the stairs. These weren’t farmhands and musicians who’d played at stick-and-shield as children. They were sworn-swords and clan riders, men and women who had made violence their life’s work, and the followers’ terror was euphoric to them. One of the riders hurled his spear, taking a colour-shirted man in the chest. An old woman was too stunned to move as an axe struck her down. They swarmed up the stairs and onto the monastery’s walls to reach her defenders, spreading across the compound like flame.

I burst into the sickroom.

Hazia stood over the body of Sister Anthra, a red knife in her hand and another woman’s blood across her bandages, looking like some wild thing of the Night Below, black-nailed, tear-streaked, her whole body shaking.

She surged towards me, grabbing me by the hair and throwing me back against the wall.

‘Where is it?’ she shrieked hoarsely. ‘Give it to me.’

The knife blade pressed cold against my neck. Panic welled through me.

‘It’s here,’ I gasped. ‘Here, take it.’

She relented, drawing the knife back.

I reached into my coat and pulled out the page of indecipherable writing. Hazia’s eyes flashed, and I read the maddened, murderous intent there. She lunged at me, but I moved faster, dragging the page down, and the knife blade stuck hard into it, thudding against my winter coat with bruising force. I flailed a fist at her as she tried to tear the page from me with one hand even as she tried to drive the knife home with the other. I slapped at her face, and then balled my fist with a snarl and drove it against the wound in her side.

Hazia recoiled with a howl, lashing out with the knife, slicing across my face. The page slid from my hand. The madwoman clutched it against her chest like it was a child.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered in a hoarse, reedy voice. ‘Tell them I’m sorry. I don’t have a choice.’

She staggered over Sister Anthra’s wide-eyed, throat-cut corpse and out through another door. My knees gave way and I slumped to the floor as the terror thrummed through me like a clamouring gong. Everyone was trying to kill me. Everyone would be dead soon. Lochlan, Braithe, Sister Marthella, and all the rest of these simple, innocent people.

A wispy, green-tinged Sister Anthra stood up, scratching at a boil on her back. The ghost went about the room, trying to find something she’d lost. She smiled as she lifted nothing at all, and then her shade dissolved into nothing.

I staggered out into a day alive with screams and the din of battle. Ghosts swayed among the living, confused, blundering through people. Ghosts of people that I knew, people that I’d danced the colours beside. People I’d called friends, people who’d fed me, people whose children I’d played with. Children I’d bounced on my knee.

‘Hide!’ a man roared at me, Farlan, one of Braithe’s friends and a former soldier, Fergus alongside him, no less hardy and wielding a spear. ‘Raine, run for your life!’

A voice boomed like thunder and along the narrow alley.

‘Where is she?’

Van Ulovar LacNaithe, the heavyset old Draoihn, faced us, his sword resting on his shoulder, clean and bright in the light of fires that had sprung up across the yard.

‘Stay back!’ Farlan yelled, and Fergus levelled his spear.

‘I only want the girl,’ Ulovar said, and his voice shook dust from the shale roofs of the buildings around him. He pointed his sword at me. ‘Bow-woman. Take me to her.’

Farlan and Fergus charged him. Farlan had fought in the bloody Kwendish civil wars, and I’d seen Fergus end more than one bar fight with a knockout punch. Ulovar was old, and he was heavy, and they were young and had him two to one. Then his sword cut the darkness, one, two, and both of my friends were dead, and he was striding towards me. Farlan’s ghost didn’t know his body had fallen, carried on fighting, swinging a sword that wasn’t there as Ulovar strode through him.

I fumbled for the bow on my shoulder, but he closed the distance in a burst of speed far too swift for a man, any man, and his sword struck it from my hand.

‘Don’t make me hurt you,’ he roared, and his voice carried beyond the air it filled, beyond sound into the thunderous beat of the drum in my mind. The point of his sword came level to my eye. ‘Where is the woman you helped over the bridge?’

‘She went mad,’ I said. ‘She’s going to the crypts.’

Ulovar seized me by the arm as the younger Draoihn skidded around the corner, ducking under one hand as something arrow-shaped flashed overhead.

‘Show me.’

6

Into the sept, through the ancient trapdoor and down into the dark below.

There was no light, but the young Draoihn, Ovitus, drew out a glass sphere and shook it. Motes of steel-blue cadanum awoke inside, spilling bluish light along row after row of sarcophagi. I was shaking as screams drifted down from above.

‘What’s down here?’ Ulovar said.

‘There’s a way out,’ I said. ‘Back to the river.’

‘That’s not where she’s going. She was coming here. Whatever she wants, it’s here.’

‘There’s nothing here but the dead,’ I said. ‘Nothing but tombs.’

‘Then that’s what she wants,’ Ulovar said. He released my arm. ‘The dead.’

I needed to get out of here. I needed to find Lochlan and make sure he got away. But how was I going to do that? He might have been dead already. They all might have been dead already. Out of nowhere, the Draoihn had become my best chance of getting out of here alive. Every choice I had made had led to disaster. If I’d not tried to find the mountain path, if I’d not brought Hazia back here, if I’d not told my secret to Sister Marthella. It was all my fault. All of it.

The thought was too much to take in.

We hurried through the ancient crypts, splashing through overflow from the stream. Even that sound was too loud for me, and the cool cadanum light shone like noonday sun. Drums hammered in my skull, too loud, rattling my teeth. I was thankful that the sounds of battle and the piteous wailing of the ghosts faded as we descended further into the depths.

‘Light Above, Uncle. She’s in Eio,’ Ovitus said.

‘I can hear that,’ Ulovar said. ‘She’s been exposed to something that’s woken it in her. Keep her with us.’

The young man gave me an apologetic look as he nodded me to follow alongside them.

‘I’m terribly sorry, miss,’ he said. ‘If you can possibly stop that sound in your head? The one that sounds like thunder.’

‘I don’t know what’s happening,’ I gasped. A piercing, stiletto-thrust pain was slowly driving itself into the front of my skull. I pressed a hand to my skull, clenching my eyes against the brightness.

Ahead, the floodwater ended, and the light revealed wet footprints turning right, onwards between carved pillars. Crude gargoyles leered down at us.

‘What am I doing?’ I said.

‘You hear this sound?’ Ovitus asked, pulling me along and beginning to tap his fingers against my arm, a slow, deliberate beat. The rhythm followed the beat of my headache.

‘That’s not me,’ I gasped.

‘It’s you,’ he said. ‘Light Above, you don’t even know what you’re doing. You’re moving in and out of a trance.’

‘I am not in a trance,’ I said firmly.

‘You are,’ he said. ‘You’ve passed the First Gate.’

‘There’s no time,’ Ulovar called from ahead. ‘Bring the damn light!’

Ovitus hurried after him, and rather than be left behind in the dark, I followed. I tried to concentrate on the rhythm, but it wasn’t the only one. Steady, powerful beats pulsed from Ulovar, discordant, breaking-crockery clatter from Ovitus.

A louder crash sounded ahead, rending metal. Ulovar and Ovitus rushed on, and I chased after them into a burial chamber. Doors had stood here before, doors of long-rusted iron, but they lay fallen, twisted and bent.

A wave of something cold, uncertain and very old quested out towards us. The cadanum light spread, uncovering things which had lain undisturbed for hundreds of years. Maybe thousands. The air was brittle, tainted.

Across the chamber, five ornate sarcophagi of black, light-drinking stone ringed the chamber’s single occupant. Hazia stood behind a dragon-carved lectern. Blood and pus slicked her side, and her hands trembled as she held that page before her.

‘Five guardians,’ Hazia said. Her voice was barely more than a whisper. ‘Five souls to watch over that which was bound. But even the dead will die, given time.’

‘Put it down, Hazia,’ Ulovar said. His base growl had softened. ‘Whatever you took from the Blackwell, it has taken your mind. This is not you. Let me help you.’

Five guardians. Each of their likenesses was carved into the stone sarcophagi. A proud man in armour. A woman, robed and crowned. A hunter with a dog at his feet. Ulovar took a step towards Hazia, his hand outstretched. Foulness emanated from the book that lay open on the lectern, an uncleanness that radiated out to touch skin, and teeth and eyes.

‘No,’ Hazia said. ‘I hear him. I hear him in my bones. He runs through me like love. Imagine being bound here. Imagine being starved of light and air and love for seven hundred years.’

‘You can still come back, Hazia,’ Ulovar said. ‘You don’t have to do this.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘It’s already done.’

She pressed the torn page down onto the book, and a sound resonated through the crypts like the turning of a key in a lock, as heavy as time. The ceiling shuddered, masonry dust showering from the stonework, through the air. She spoke a single name.

‘Ciuthach!’

There is a moment, when someone comes bearing news of a death in the family, that you see it in their face before they speak. You know the words that they are about to say are immense, and will change something, something that we mortals have never learned to accept as part of the natural order. A moment of hesitation, twined with the messenger’s desperate need to press the awful truth into your reality. I had seen it many times. I saw it in Hazia’s eyes now, as she looked at me, the mania that had driven her knife hand faded away, crumbling like old plaster to reveal what was built beneath.

Hazia shattered from within, her body erupting across the room in a riot of darkness and flickering light as a pulse of force emanated from her, and then I was flying through the air, through the dark, slamming back into one of the ancient black sarcophagi. The carved figure shattered like glass, shards of sharp, gleaming black stone raining down around me, rainbow hues playing across every surface. Ovitus crumpled as his head cracked against a wall.

Ulovar alone stood against the gale of howling, fetid air that blasted from the open pages of the book.

A deep, dark presence opened one ancient eye and looked at us. Darkness and light twisted together, a riot of flickering energy where Hazia’s blood still misted the air. I felt the weight of a mind opening, a mind that had been chained all these long centuries, and a voice whispered itself through the cracks in my being.

I am returned.

I saw him. Saw the occupant of this room, standing proud in bright bronze scales. His hair flowed like a mane of rippling fire and polished silver, pale skin stretched tight across features that seemed spaced too wide, and he carried a long spear that dripped, dark and hissing. Something about him was human, but something was not. Changed, modified, a creature of war. Enemies came to him, and he fought. Sweeps of the long-bladed spear felled foe after foe. He ripped into bodies. He ripped into minds. He battled, surrounded, an impossible stand. And there it came, the blow that felled him, the bright sword punching into his chest, driving him down, down onto the rock. It didn’t kill him. Couldn’t kill him. He fought and bit as his assailants surrounded him, words too large to hear ringing in the air, unseen forces twisting, binding. He struggled, pinned to the white stone as they forced a book against his chest, and his spirit shuddered as it was torn from his body.

He was glorious. He should have been a king, should have been free to serve his queen. And his ancient enemies had bound him to the pages of a book.

The vision broke as bones and debris toppled from the broken sarcophagus behind me, smacking me in the head. A splay of bone and tattered cloth, choking dust and the broken boards of an ancient shield clattered around me. I rolled as a rusted sword clanged to the ground, got whacked again by a midnight-blue recurved bow. As I scraped tomb dust from my eyes, a yellowed old skull grinned up at me.

‘It’s coming,’ Ulovar said.

A shadow figure began to coalesce in the maelstrom of energy. A tall man. Pale hair. This ancient warrior king had been bound here, watched over by the very people who’d killed him. Watching, holding, intent on ensuring that his name would never be spoken again. Because they knew what would happen if it was. And through the visions that had barraged my shuddering mind, I knew what would happen too. And it was happening.

Panic rose in me.

‘You do not belong here,’ Ulovar growled. Hazia’s blood dripped from his face as somehow he steeled himself against the pulsing force emanating from the book. His jaw was set hard as rock.

‘I see the world,’ a deep voice said, the sound of ashes being scraped from stone. The shadow body filled out in pulses of shadow, overly lithe and overly tall, banded with scales that caught the light of the fallen lamp.

‘You’ve seen enough,’ Ulovar growled. ‘You have no place in our world, demon of the past. You are dead and you will remain that way.’ He began to mutter a quiet, insistent prayer.

‘I am not bound by your mortal law, Draiohn,’ the thing that had been Ciuthach laughed. ‘I feel your power. A mere four Gates? Do the Draoihn send their children against me now? I served Hallenae the Riven Queen for more than a century. You cannot begin to imagine what I have achieved. I have summoned beings you would think of as gods and commanded them to my bidding. In my time we would have thought you unworthy even to carry a sword.’

Ulovar thrust his point forwards, staring down the length of the blade.

‘And in my time, you are nothing but a blot on a page.’

And then it hit.

A single, mind-crushing wave bore down on me. It struck from above, the side, all around, a blanket of lead, driving me to my knees. My palms smacked against the flagstones, skin splitting. The breath was torn from my lungs; my vision blurred into swarming dots, a snowstorm of swirling flies obscuring everything.

A titanic drum-beat boomed directly from within Ciuthach’s darkness, unleashed, thundering out into the world. In the centre of it, Ciuthach stood upright, uncaring of the forces he had unleashed. His bent back clicked, cracked, straightened as he stood tall in the world, rising as if he emerged from a glacier, cold and inexorable. Amber eyes burned through the tempest, pits of savage fire.

Ovitus groaned as he tried to lift his face from the ground, blood on his brow. But Ulovar remained standing, rooted in place as black wind raged around him, his sword point thrust against the ground, hands gripping the hilt to steady himself. Somehow he kept his footing against the onslaught, though sweat ran from his face in streams. His shoulders trembled.

‘You will not prevail,’ he managed to whisper, but even that cost him. He gasped and faltered, going down onto one knee. ‘You are weak now. You will be contained.’

‘Pride was ever the Draoihn’s undoing.’ Ciuthach’s whispers floated directly into my mind on furnace heat. Mocking. ‘What was clouded becomes clear. What was lost has been born anew. I have been waiting for you, you see.’ He began to stroll forward. ‘Your forebears could not destroy me, only bind me. Your essence will guide me towards the final gate’s opening.’

That wave of oppression swept out again, a billowing cascade of invisible stone driving me down onto my belly. Ulovar’s shoulders trembled, the strength it took him to remain on one knee incalculable. As Ciuthach advanced, a black-bladed spear dragged behind him, lazily, carving a furrow through the dirt. There was a vast weight to his overlong body, his footsteps echoing in more worlds than ours alone. Only fifteen paces from Ulovar now. He would take his head. And then mine, and Ovitus’s, and those of everybody else that stood in its path.

Ovitus had passed out. Or died. Drums thundered through my head, my body. The creature from the tomb cracked yellowed lips into a smile.

‘You will know your place,’ Ciuthach said.

I couldn’t even speak, but the echo of Braithe’s words stirred the embers in my gut to a blaze. No more lying down. No more being used by those that thought they were above me. No more being struck down. No. More.

I forced myself up, arms spasming as I gained my elbows and knees. Like forcing myself through rock. The steady beat radiated from Ciuthach, dhum-dhum-dhum, dhum-dhum-dhum. I focused on that, tried to ignore the exhaustion that threatened my limbs just for moving. I could barely steady my head to look at the deathless creature.

Ulovar raised his sword a few inches, then drove it down into the ground. A gout of fire roared up from the earth around Ciuthach, his grave-dry clothes flaring to ash. Unseen forces unleashed around him, blasting, burning. But he merely leered, or maybe that was just the effect of the skin being drawn so tight across his jaw. A volley of stone shards exploded from the earth, bouncing from skin.

The rhythm of the creature’s life hammered in my head, DHUM-DHUM-DHUM, DHUM-DHUM-DHUM, as if it were trying to smash my skull open from the inside.

I fumbled around me, grasping among the tomb detritus. An ancient sword hilt found my hand, but the blade had long rusted, broken where it had fallen.

Ulovar tried to raise one hand from his sword hilt, fingers clawing forward. Blood burst from his nose, running down his face in thick, twin streams of crimson, over his mouth, through his beard. His eyes bulged in their sockets, veins rising into stark relief. Lips peeled back, he forced his hand upwards. The struggle roared in every line of his frame, the desperation in his eyes as he battled the creature’s will with his own. Some wordless cry strangled forth from his lips, and then it was gone. His hand slapped back down onto the cross guard of his sword; his head sank forwards. He tried again, raised his head only long enough to spray more blood from his mouth, bloody tears streaming from his eyes, before he crumpled. Fury raged in his eyes, fury and self-loathing at his defeat and vanquished pride.

Ciuthach continued to walk slowly forwards, hand stretched out in cruel mockery of Ulovar’s attempts. His unchanging, burning eyes seemed to usher down into pits of molten stone, but his slow, dragging steps told me it was an effort to emit this terror-field. He wanted us to think it all-powerful. Its confidence demanded that we accept we were beaten.

I was not beaten. Not by Braithe’s careless anger. Not by Hazia’s knife. And not by some fecking corpse. A silent scream of hatred rang through my head. My fists clenched tight. I was no Draoihn; the creature had dismissed me. I was a little thing before it, a nothing, a nobody. I’d been nobody to Braithe. Nobody to anybody.

No more.

No.

More.

My fingers found the bow stave. As I touched it, the impossible, silvery gleam of a string took form, bending the limbs into shape. I forced my fingers to touch it and found an arrow there. Like it had been there for centuries, waiting for my hand to find it. Pain sizzled across every muscle, a low and simmering burn. That effort alone sapped at what little energy I had. I had to keep going. I had to fight, but by the Light Above and all the colours I didn’t believe in, nothing had ever been harder.

Raise. The. Bow.

Draw. The. Arrow.

The shaft was white wood, inscribed with bronze. White dots filled my vision, clouding in the periphery. The dark blizzard blinded me. Pain ran rampant through my head, pounding behind my eyes, cracking at my temples, hammering the back of my skull.

I struggled to raise my arms as my sight faded. Even as I dragged the bow upright and put tension on the string, I was losing the Draoihn and the creature to a distant haze. I only had one chance. What little strength I had was fading; I would only be able to draw once. It wouldn’t even matter. I couldn’t hit him blind.

Dhum-dhum-dhum, dhum-dhum-dhum.

Only I didn’t need to see him. I focused on that rhythm, the drumming sound in my mind. Beside it, I sensed Ulovar’s slower, pulsing waves of un-sound. I let my hands move on their own, finding their way to aim for that triple-chambered heart which I could feel as clearly as I felt the stone beneath my knees, the cold, hard grip of entombed air around me, and before my strength could abandon me for the last time, I drew. I roared.

‘Ciuthach!’

The bow boomed, lightning flared and the arrow sped away, released into a grey haze.

Light flooded the world, the distortion was banished and all became clear. I blinked for a moment, falling forward as the pressure released me. Ciuthach staggered, the force of the arrow nearly knocking him from his feet, spear raised high but the shaft jutting starkly from the side of his head. Flaming lava erupted in jets, casting back the twisting shadows. Ulovar sagged forward, blood running from his face, his eyes. Ciuthach rocked, regained his balance despite the arrow through his brain, and made to bring the spear down in the arc that would end us all.

Ulovar’s arm lashed out, and a rope of brilliant lightning-fire burst forth. It lasted only half a heartbeat, a dozen coils of blue-white energy connecting Ulovar’s hand to Ciuthach’s chest. The demon was blasted from his feet, but instead of being hurled back, he rose two feet into the air, suspended, limbs convulsing.

Tap-tap-tap, the sound came again, but this time it was not the beat of a mind, but the thud of Ulovar’s feet. He sped across the intervening yards, and his blade turned from yellow to red to white, blurring the air with heat as he drove its point into the nightmare’s chest.

Fire rushed along the blade and into the creature, blazed into him. Ciuthach screeched, three voices binding together, rolling over each other in shuddering, hell-wrought anguish. He glowed with inner light, cracks running through blackened and charred skin as though he held a molten core. And then Ulovar tore the sword free and cut Ciuthach’s head from his shoulders.

Silence.

Ulovar stood stock-still, framed for a moment in the pale blue light, face manic, blood-coated, and then slowly toppled sideways to the ground, crashing to the earth like a felled oak. Ciuthach remained upright, feet planted on the ground once more. But his body had turned grey, chalky. Stone. No. Ash. And then the body collapsed, into nothing.

Dust, blowing on unfelt wind.

‘It should not be possible,’ Ciuthach said. I stared at the severed head. Charred. Blackened. ‘I served the Riven Queen. I am Sarathi.’ The dead thing’s amber eyes moved slowly in the sockets as if at a great effort. Perhaps it was. He looked at me, and instead of blazing pits of fire, I saw childlike terror. ‘It has been so long,’ the head complained, triple voiced and whining. ‘It’s not fair. You should have joined us, child of the grave. To reach the final gateway…’

I shuddered, climbed to my feet. The oppressive power was gone, leaving an emptiness that felt as unnatural. Something wet landed on my hand. Blood, dripping from my eyes.

‘Honestly,’ I said, ‘I’m tired of old men telling me what I’ve done wrong.’

I drove Ovitus’s sword down into Ciuthach’s forehead with a crunch of splitting bone. The glow in its eyes died away, and a moment later, it crumbled into ash as well.

Everything seemed dead. The world had turned to corpses and ash, and I was alone, the last person standing in the world of the dead.

Order Daughter of Redwinter now!

ALSO BY ED MCDONALD

Blackwing

Ravencry

Crowfall

About the Author

Ed McDonald is the author of the Raven’s Mark and Redwinter Chronicles series of novels. He studied Ancient History and Archaeology at the University of Birmingham, and Medieval History at Birkbeck College, University of London. Ed is passionate about fantasy tabletop roleplay games and has studied medieval swordsmanship since 2013. He currently lives with his partner, author Catriona Ward, in London, England. You can sign up for email updates here.

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

DAUGHTER OF REDWINTER

Copyright © 2022 by ECM Creative, Ltd.

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First Edition: 2022

eISBN 9781250880048

First eBook edition: 2022

Contents

1. Title Page

2. Copyright Notice

3. Chapter 1

4. Chapter 2

5. Chapter 3

6. Chapter 4

7. Chapter 5

8. Chapter 6

9. Also by Ed McDonald

10. About the Author

11. Copyright