17
He wasn’t surprised.
Ever after, when Odosse remembered that terrible morning after the storm, and all that was wrought on that day, the image that came to her first and strongest was the glint of Brys’ cat-green eyes as he woke to the early gray light of a snow-bound dawn. And his utter lack of surprise.
“Wistan’s dead,” she repeated, thinking he hadn’t heard.
Brys nodded. A moment later he got up, muttering a halfhearted curse against the chill, and started a low fire burning in their cooking-lantern. His coal-black hair stood up on one side where he’d been sleeping, and he raked his fingers through it to push it back down.
“Then we’ve a choice,” he said, splashing water from a skin into the lantern’s kettle, “or you do, anyway.”
“What’s that?”
“Whether it was Wistan who died last night, or Aubry.”
Odosse blinked in confusion. She glanced nervously at her bed, where Aubry was still squalling with scarcely a pause for breath between wails. Beside his red-faced vigor the dead child looked like a wax doll. “Wistan, of course.”
“You miss my point. You know that. I know that. But no one else does. Everyone who knew and loved Wistan in this world is dead. So ask yourself: Is it better for you, and for him, if the child who survives this morning is Wistan, or Aubry?”
It took a moment for his meaning to sink in. Odosse’s eyes widened when it did. “That’s monstrous.”
She wasn’t sure whether she meant Brys’ suggestion or her own temptation to take it. Wistan was dead because she had refused the price to heal him; how could she think of using that death for her gain? Wouldn’t that make her … Odosse floundered for the right word. Not a murderer, no, but not much better. A profiteer from pain.
Wasn’t that what she would be? Deeply unsettled, Odosse moved back to her bed and took Aubry into her lap, rocking her son to quiet his cries.
“It’s practical,” Brys replied. The kettle was whistling; he dropped a hinged metal sachet into the top and left it to simmer. The gentle fragrance of rose hips and oranges rose into the air, soothing Odosse’s nerves. “The boy was sick long enough. I’m surprised you didn’t think of it yourself.”
“It isn’t right,” she insisted, although she wasn’t sure why.
“Think on it,” Brys urged. He handed her a cup. She expected tea, but instead it held a splash of some amber spirit so raw it burned her nostrils. Odosse sipped hesitantly, and coughed as liquid fire seared down her throat. But she drank the rest, determined to find what comfort she could in its heat.
She didn’t feel any more enlightened when she reached the dregs, nor when they broke camp after a light meal of tea and stale, slightly crushed raisin cakes, the last of the things she’d taken from Mathas’ bakery. It was with a sense of vague relief that she watched Brys collapse the tent and pack the tight-rolled canvas back on his horse; walking was a strain she understood, and it would give her time alone with her thoughts.
Odosse understood, or thought she did, why Brys wanted her to make the switch. A dead baby was far less valuable to him than a live one. Delivering the de Marsts’ grandson and the heir to Bulls’ March would make him a fortune; delivering a small corpse would only make him a fool. Wistan’s body was worthless, even to his grandparents, unless they could deliver it with proof of who had killed the others and why. She didn’t think Brys had that yet. His only hope of profit was coming up with a live child and painting himself as the baby’s savior.
All guesswork, that, but she didn’t think she was too far wrong. What puzzled her was why Brys wanted her cooperation—surely any infant of the right age would do as well; it didn’t have to be Aubry—and, more than that, why she was so hesitant to give it.
She shouldered her pack and tucked Aubry under her cloak. It felt strange to have Wistan missing on the other side; oddly unbalanced, and yet easier, too, to walk without that burden and that worry. No sooner did the thought occur than Odosse felt guilty for having it.
She carried Wistan, wrapped in a shroud of blankets, in her arms. It wouldn’t be long. Only until they found a good place for his pyre. That his face was bared to the cold didn’t matter anymore. Nothing could hurt him now.
The storm had spent its wrath overnight. By midday there were only a few lonely flakes blowing on the wind; by twilight the sky was gray but clear. All around them the world was a frozen marvel of snow-cloaked hills and bent, leafless trees caught in crystal. White-bellied bluecrests and black-capped chickadees huddled in the branches, and by that Odosse knew the cold would continue. When they felt warmth coming, those birds scattered and sang; when the freeze was hard on them, they flocked silent in the trees. The storm was quiet but not past.
They saw no other travelers, and Brys kept his bow strung and close to hand, for no one but the desperate would be abroad so far from any town.
Brys refused to let her build a pyre. Burning the body was proper to honor the dead child and see his soul safely to Celestia’s realm—it was what any anointed soul deserved—but the sellsword would hear nothing of it. They were out of Bayarn Wood, and gathering enough wood would have meant taking an axe to one of the gnarled, ice-sheathed trees that grew on the hills by the road. Building even a child-sized pyre would be an afternoon’s work, and Brys was adamant that sentimentality was no excuse for delay.
“He’s dead,” he told her flatly when she asked. “Nothing you do is going to change that, and he’s not likely to care about anything else.”
“Then what do you want me to do? Just throw him by the side of the road?”
“Might as well. Less work for the foxes to find him that way.”
“How can you be so callous?” Odosse demanded, near tears. She’d fed this child, nurtured him, held him close while he slept. His death was … not her fault, perhaps, but her failure. Wistan had been loved, once; he’d been anointed to the sun and lived under Celestia’s light. He deserved a decent funeral.
But her companion remained unmoved. “It’s better for him, and better for us, than burying him under a pile of rocks. No Thorn ever made a puppet of a corpse that was in a fox’s belly.” Brys stopped and looked at her, his face stone-hard through the white mist of his breath. “Sentiments are wasted on the dead. The sooner you learn that, the better. Do what’s practical, not what some mawkish solaros told you was nice. Nice means nothing. Nice is a waste of effort, and wasted effort means you’re dead. Let go of it and move on.”
“It’s not nothing. It’s what keeps us human,” Odosse mumbled, but he had already turned away and did not hear.
In the end she left Wistan under a tree near the road, although she did it with what small ceremony she could muster. She bundled him in rabbit furs so that he might be warmer in the next world than he’d been in this one, and tucked a coin into his mouth to pay the Last Bridge’s toll. Finally she drew out the tiny blue vial that she’d bought from the charm-crafter’s cottage, a lifetime ago, and pried it open to anoint the cold wispy-haired head with fragrant oil.
“As we are born in light, so we return to light,” Odosse whispered as the oil trickled down over Wistan’s eyelids like slow dark tears. She couldn’t remember the rest of the Pyre Prayer. There hadn’t been many funerals in her life. Not many deaths, until Willowfield’s, and then there was no one to say prayers for them all.
The scent of the oil was spicy and sweet, not quite right for a pyre but not right for perfume, either. It made her think of flowers blooming over a crypt, somewhere far to the east where they laid their dead in catacombs instead of giving them the purity of fire. There was a foulness under the fragrance, and yet it did not seem a contradiction but a necessary counterpoint. Odosse shivered, in part from the cold, and closed Wistan’s tiny stiff hand around the empty bottle.
Once she had paid a handful of pennies, and dreamed of being beautiful, so that Aubry might have a chance of becoming a great man. The real price for that was higher. Much higher. She understood that now.
Still shivering, Odosse packed snow over Wistan’s body to shield him from passing eyes. She cut a stub of candle no taller than her thumb and set that in the snow mound to guide him to the Bright Lady’s ever-golden lands.
Brys didn’t comment on her absence when she returned. He’d been busy setting up their tent on the lee side of a thinly forested hill. Nearby his blanketed horse was eating the last of their oats. The snow was lighter there, most of it caught on the hill’s windward face.
There wasn’t much deadwood among the small twisted trees, but Odosse picked up enough to build a tiny fire, and chopped a few low-lying branches to round out the blaze. She worked fast, to make up for the time she’d spent praying, and started beans boiling once the fire was strong enough. Then she took a splint from their fire and went back to light Wistan’s candle, cupping the fragile flame to shield it from the wind until it took.
She didn’t believe the candle would last all night, as would have been proper. The wind would snuff it, or melting snow would drown it, or a wandering scavenger would knock it over while digging Wistan out. But she had to give him the symbol. She had to do that much.
By the time Brys came over it was full dark. He still had his bow strung, and laid his sheathed sword across his lap as he waited for the beans to finish cooking.
“Don’t like the feel of this night,” he muttered.
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“I thought I saw something moving across the hills earlier today. Following us. It was gone when I looked again, but … maybe I’m imagining things.” Brys shrugged. He didn’t sound convinced, and he kept a hand on the weapon’s hilt, his eyes roving through the darkness beyond their fire.
“Oh.” Odosse looked down at her son’s round face, gilded by the ruddy light, and held him close against her breast. She took a deep breath. This was her son. If he was to be a great man—if he was to be anything more than a baker girl’s bastard—he needed her courage. She’d done what she could for Wistan. It was time for the living to move on. Without guilt, if she could. And if not, then with strength enough to master it.
“Brys,” she said, “I’ve decided. It wasn’t Wistan who died last night. It was Aubry.”
He glanced at her and nodded. “What changed your mind?”
Odosse shrugged. She didn’t have the words to capture what had shifted in her heart. She only knew that, as she’d bent to light the stub of candle that was to help Wistan find his way across the Last Bridge, something had jarred loose in her soul.
If she let the world know that Wistan had died, then whoever had tried to kill him in that chapel would have won. Whoever had murdered his parents, and slaughtered her village, would win. The thought sparked anger in her, but defiance wasn’t what had changed her mind.
It was love. And guilt, and grief, tangled together in a knot she couldn’t begin to unravel.
It was her fault he’d died. She couldn’t be as heartless as Brys was. Maybe Wistan would have lived if she could; then she might not have balked at giving up an imagined child for his sake. But love could be a weakness as readily as a strength. The sellsword was right about that. Love had given her the strength to carry Wistan this far, and it had made her too weak to pay the price for his life in the end.
Odosse didn’t know whether it was strength or weakness that moved her now. But she knew it was love: for Aubry, and the life he might have; for Wistan, and the one he had lost. She hoped that she might raise her son into a man who would do honor to Wistan’s memory. She had to try, at least. They both owed him that.
“I don’t know,” she told him.
Brys raised an eyebrow, but what he might have said next she would never know. He held up his hand for silence and took a half step toward the shadows, and in that moment the night exploded around them.
It happened too quickly for Odosse to follow. One instant she was sitting by the fire, cradling her son in peace; the next they were beset by creatures out of some hellish story, and Aubry was screaming and Brys swearing as he yanked out his sword, and she was too panicked to move.
Their attackers were like nothing she had ever seen or imagined. There were two, she thought, but in the shadows and confusion she wasn’t even sure of that. They had the look of things that had once been human but were twisted into monstrosity, as the souls of sinners were said to be in Narsenghal. They seemed taller than men, and faster. Their hairless flesh was the grayish white of old marble and just as hard; their mouths were hideous fissures lined with clasping, gory-gummed teeth far too long to be real.
Brys was right between them, sword drawn and ready, before Odosse understood what had happened. He had no shield; instead he pulled a burning branch from the fire, flames leaping in a smoky web between the charred fork of its limbs, and swept that at one of the beasts to force it back as he dealt with the other. She caught the swirl of his cloak as he spun, and snow fountaining around his feet, and she saw the monstrous thing he’d attacked shriek and flinch away from him with a long tattered slash laid open across its chest. She hadn’t seen the sword move.
The inside of the creature’s body was withered and fibrous; all its organs were wrapped up in thick strands like a sickly pink cocoon. There wasn’t any blood. It all seemed to be happening very fast and yet very slow, as if she were recalling frozen moments from an otherwise blurry dream.
“Run!” Brys shouted as he pressed his attack.
Run where? Odosse wanted to shout back, but her throat was clenched so tight that she could hardly breathe, much less force any sound through. Aubry was wailing loud enough for both of them.
Both milky-eyed monsters raised their heads at the baby’s cry. One hissed through its mangled mouth, and they loped toward her, their heads bobbing in a forward-tilted, oddly birdlike gait. They darted wide around Brys, one to each side, and although he swept at the wounded one with fire and steel, it dodged away, inhumanly quick. His sword whistled through the air; the fiery branch scattered cinders in a sizzling arc over the snow.
The beasts reached out for Aubry as they came, and by the flickering firelight Odosse saw their bony fingers clutching at the air, curved talons scoring bloodless grooves in their palms as they clenched gaunt fists around nothing.
She stumbled to her feet and backed away, putting the fire between them and herself. Her mouth was dry with fear and her heart fluttered frantically in her chest, a little bird trying desperately to escape. She didn’t have a weapon; she didn’t even have a knife.
The monsters split up around the fire, one coming at her from either side. They moved slowly, warily, clawed hands raised and twitching. Every time she turned toward one of them, it would dart its head forward like a striking snake’s, hissing to make her leap into the other’s claws.
Brys came up behind the one on her right, moving with extraordinary quiet for such a big man—or maybe it was only because of Aubry’s screams that she couldn’t hear him. He had thrown the burning branch aside; she hadn’t noticed when. As the monster thrust its head at Odosse in another rattling hiss, Brys lunged. His sword took it cleanly through the back, punching straight through the heart. She saw the tip come out of its chest, the steel bright and gleaming without a drop of blood to dull its shine.
They were already dead. Of course. How could steel kill something already dead?
The wounded one shrieked and writhed on Brys’ sword. Its voice was a thin shrill whine, almost too high-pitched for hearing, that cut at her ears like a vibrating knife. Brys locked both hands around his sword’s hilt, twisting it grimly to widen the hole.
The other monster, seeing its companion wounded, sprang for Odosse. She stooped and snatched up the kettle from the fire with her bare hand and swung it clumsily at the creature’s head. The hot metal seared her palm but she didn’t care, couldn’t care; the pain was far away, as if it were happening to someone else. Beans and broth sprayed across the ground like a drunkard’s vomit. She felt Aubry flinch against her breast. Then the kettle slammed into the monster’s face and she heard bone crack under the metal and the angry hiss of scorched flesh, and let go. There was a red line swelling across her palm. Some of the skin was gone.
The monster she’d hit was staggering, screaming. One of its eyes was a melted ruin, crushed beyond recognition; the other was fixed on her, wild with hatred and hunger. Half its mouth had been smashed by the kettle, and its jagged teeth were torn through the flesh of its cheek like a hillside of storm-broken stumps. But there was enough left to kill her.
Odosse kept backing away. She was near the limit of the firelight now and was rapidly losing her vision; she’d sat so long by the flames that she’d lost her eyes for the dark. The monster chasing her didn’t seem hindered. Its good eye stayed locked on the baby in her arm, while the melted one ran down its face in jellied rivulets.
It leapt. And Odosse, still retreating, slipped on a rock under the snow and fell.
The air left her in a rush as she hit the ground. She kicked furiously and blindly at the monster, screaming words without sense, trying to shield Aubry with her own body. Its breath had no scent but cold when it snarled in response.
Claws tore through her thick woolen cloak as if it were flimsy as onionskin. Something more frigid than the wind sliced along Odosse’s back, and her flesh froze down to the marrow of her bones where that touch passed. She expected to feel blood, warm and wet, but there was only an endless chill.
Then its body hit hers flat, striking the breath from her lungs. The next instant it was gone.
Odosse looked up slowly. Her left eye was swelling shut; she couldn’t recall why. Aubry was still in her arms, wailing loud enough to shake the moon, and she sent a swift prayer of thanks to the Bright Lady that her son was not hurt, that he could still scream with such force in his lungs.
The monster was sprawled on the snowy ground barely a step away. It was headless but still writhing, scratching madly at the earth while Brys stood over it with a boot on its back and hacked off its limbs one by one. He was bleeding badly from a wound on his calf; the top of his boot flapped wetly in three torn stripes.
She sat up. Her shoulder throbbed, and her palm hurt, but nothing else was registering yet. Her back felt cold and oddly stiff, as though she’d spent a long day hauling firewood. Her cloak were spattered with blood where the creature had ripped through the wool. Odosse reached back and touched the numb spot. Her hand came away sticky with blood. There wasn’t as much as she’d feared. But it was cold, as her back had been when she’d touched it, and the doubtful light made it glisten like black snowmelt on her hand.
The other monster was lying on the far side of the fire, a great hole rent in its chest. Its head had rolled into the crook of an outstretched arm. Dead, it looked more human than not.
She was so cold. Odosse gathered up her torn cloak and wrapped it closer around herself and Aubry. She moved away from the corpse Brys was dismembering, edging nearer to the fire with a wary glance at the creature that lay inert beside it.
“What happened?” she asked. Her voice was a hoarse croak. “What were they?”
“Ghaole,” Brys replied. He came back to the fire, wiping off his sword, though there was still no blood on the blade. His face was very white and his jaw was knotted with pain. “Tools of the Thorns. Corpses of men they killed and brought back with false life. We have to go. We need to travel while we still can.”
“But you’re hurt.”
A rough rasping sound escaped him. It took Odosse a moment to realize that he was laughing: at her, at himself, she couldn’t tell. “I am. And it’ll get worse. I was trying to avoid that; the touch of the ghaole carries ice-fever. But I had to kick that one off you, and it grabbed me when I did … so I hope you’re ready to take care of the horse along with your baby, in case I can’t.”
“It scratched me too,” she told him.
“Then I hope you’ll last longer than I will, or we’re all dead,” he said.
BRYS LOST CONSCIOUSNESS BEFORE DAWN.
He’d tied himself to the saddle, looping the ropes around himself where he could and telling Odosse how to tie them where he couldn’t. She bound the tent awkwardly on top. There was nowhere else to put it, and they could hardly leave their only shelter behind, so she tied the tangle of wet canvas and loose poles over the man and tried to convince herself that it had some value as a shield against the wind.
Then she took the nameless horse’s reins and led it into the night. Not south, not anymore. Odosse couldn’t see the road through the snow, and reaching Karchel’s Tower was a fool’s dream now. There was no way they could make Seawatch before one or both of them fell to the ghaole ice-fever.
She turned them east instead. East and north and east again, back into Bayarn Wood, on a course angled through the trees that should take them to Bulls’ March.
Odosse had never seen the castle herself. She’d never been so deep inside Oakharn. And she was not blind to Brys’ suspicions; it was possible, even likely, that the young lord of Bulls’ March had known about the attack that killed her village and Wistan’s parents. He could be working in concert with the Thorns. If that was so, every step taken toward his castle brought them closer to danger. She knew that.
But she also knew that Blessed Andalya was at Bulls’ March, waiting for old Lord Ossaric to die, and that the Blessed’s prayers were the only thing that might keep the ice-fever from stilling their hearts. Their hope of survival lay in that castle. And it was nearer, by far, than Karchel’s Tower.
One road held certain death. The other held only the chance. It wasn’t a hard choice.
For hours she talked to Brys about inconsequential things. It wasn’t a conversation, really; she just wanted the reassurance of a human voice in the dark, and the knowledge that he was still awake, still with her, despite the ice-fever. Odosse talked about her life in Willowfield, circling around the great buried pain of her grief without touching it. When she had exhausted the limits of her own experience, she retold the stories of Sir Auberand and the Winter Queen. Sad stories, but brave ones, all of them.
Somewhere between midnight and dawn Brys stopped answering. Odosse slowed enough to put her hand on his wrist, underneath the fluttering mess of the tent she’d strapped over the man. His skin felt like ice; the heartbeat was sluggish and weak.
But it was there, so she walked on, ignoring the numbness that spread from the small of her back. And she kept telling her stories, whether to herself or Aubry or the horse she didn’t know. The tales became a litany in the night, a way for her to measure her steps and draw some hope from legend when she had forgotten what it looked like in life.
The first hint of dawn found them beneath the eaves of Bayarn Wood. She could see the dying glimmer of the River Kings’ Road ahead. By daybreak they were well into the trees, and the horse’s hooves were loud on the road’s ancient, snow-dusted stone.
Still they saw no other living soul, and Odosse was so weary that her sight blurred between steps. She couldn’t feel her legs, only a suffocating chill from her chest down. Every step was a greater effort than the last.
Finally she could no longer force herself onward. Her legs were trembling uncontrollably. She couldn’t feel them, but she could look down and see her feet shaking as she tried to drag each one forward. Her right ankle twisted beneath her and she stumbled to one knee, and once she was down she could not get back up.
“I’m sorry,” Odosse mumbled to no one in particular. The words were thick on her tongue.
She pulled Aubry awkwardly into her lap, curling her body around him to give him what warmth she still could. Her son was quiet, having exhausted his cries earlier in the night. He gazed up at her with wide solemn eyes and batted at her nose with a pudgy fist. Odosse found herself crying, absurdly, warm tears trickling down her numb cheeks. She couldn’t seem to move her hands to wipe the tears away.
The horse nosed at her shoulder and blew out a cloud of white mist. Odosse couldn’t reach up to pat it, either, and after a moment the animal ambled away, continuing down the road with Brys on its back and tent poles dangling off its flanks. She heard the stone clicking under its hooves and watched its bundled silhouette recede between the trees. Then it was gone, and she was alone with her son in the wood, just as she’d been when Willowfield died.
Time passed. Hours, perhaps, or moments; Odosse had no way of knowing. A fox crept from the underbrush and looked at her and vanished again, a flash of vibrant russet in a world of brown and white. The numbness spread through her body until she couldn’t feel anything and couldn’t even turn her head back to the road. Her eyes were at once dry and sheeted with tears she couldn’t blink away. Aubry’s face became a pink blur. Somehow that hurt worst of all, that she should die without being able to see him.
And then, unexpectedly, the creak of harness reached her ears, and with it the clop of hooves and the chuffing of horses ridden hard on a cold morning. Male voices spoke a rough unfamiliar tongue over her head. Gloved hands came down to lift her up; she saw them, couldn’t feel them. Someone took Aubry away, and Odosse couldn’t force a protest through her numbed lips. She heard her son crying again.
A face came into her view. She couldn’t make out details; her eyes wouldn’t focus. She could only see a cloak of white fur, pale hair, a vivid dark scar on a cheek.
“Who are you?” the blur demanded. “What befell you on the road, and why are you here?”
But Odosse couldn’t answer. She couldn’t say anything at all.