He shook his head to evict the last ghosts of his nightmare. He was in the mountains, in the fog. The wet mist must have put out his fire in the night. His third night—and he still hadn’t found any cinderblack for Mer, his master, the Keeper of Memory.
Cinderblack. Mer had sent him up the mountain to find the dark berries of the cindervine for the priests. They needed the cinderblack for their inks, for the magic that they hoped would help turn the fortunes of war. With it they tattooed sigils of strength and stamina into the flesh of the warriors and their dragon mounts. The science was young but promising; the staying power of the cinderblack inks allowed for greater complexity and nuance.
Daen wasn’t a warrior, he was an acolyte of the temple, and they didn’t fight. Most acolytes assisted the priests who graved the sigils onto the skin of those who fought. They tended their wounds, or delivered them to their pyres on the rare occasion when their bodies made it home. He knew war, if only from a distance, from seeing its aftereffects: the broken, the dismembered, the maimed who’d returned on their dying beasts; the grieving wives and mothers, the wailing children…
Daen’s task as Mer’s acolyte—one of four—was markedly different. As the Keeper of Memory, Mer had dedicated his life to preservation of the city’s long history. Daen studied in Mer’s library, and hoped to be his successor. Already the entire history of Cinvat resided in Daen’s head, after years of hard study and drill and rote memorization. He knew the name of every man who had fallen, every dragon mount that failed to return. He committed every one to memory, scribed each into a record book that he kept with him at all times—
He sat up straighter in panic—where was his record?
Daen untangled the blanket from his legs and jumped to his feet.
His basket nestled in the elbow of a tree root, empty of all but his meager food supply. Foolish! I must have kicked it in my sleep and sent it rolling. His toothscrub and pens lay nearby. The box containing his flint and steel had spilled into a puddle.
A fine Keeper of Memory he would be one day; he couldn’t even keep track of his most important possession! He imagined his master’s scornful rant, felt the sharp crack of the old man’s hand on the back of his head. He was Mer’s best student; he knew that. But he couldn’t lose his first record book in the mountains—his very first personal entry into the great Library of Cinvat. That would be disaster.
He scanned about quickly, shook out his blanket, raked through wet grass with his hands. It wasn’t here. His search became frantic. Not under the bushes, not in the puddle. Could it have landed in his fire? With sinking stomach he poked at it, but the wood wasn’t even completely burned. Surely a piece of the book would remain if it had. At last he picked up his basket, and there between the tree root and a hummock of moss lay the small, leather-bound book. With a sigh of relief, he brushed it off and held it to his chest. When his heart stopped pounding he kissed the book and stuck it in his tunic.
Taking a deep breath, he shrugged off his shame at panicking and acting like a child.
Cinderblack. The very thought of berries made his belly grumble. On Waeges’ Day, the autumnal equinox, there would be autumn berries everywhere—but the cinderblack were rare, and not for eating. He pulled a knotted cloth out of his basket and opened it. Less than half a loaf of his waybread remained, and the cheese was gone. Unhappily, he broke off a small knob of bread and bound the rest up again. Water shouldn’t be hard to come by, but he would wait to drink until he found a stream where he could refill his waterskin.
Daen slid the straps of the basket over his shoulders. It bounced lightly on his back. Too lightly. Don’t return until your basket is full, Mer had told him.
He set out.
This late in the season, cinderblack would be hard to find. He’d found none on the southern exposures of the nearest slopes, so he set a course along a ridge for the next mountain southward, hoping for success on its north face where cooler temperatures and limited light delayed the harvest.
Light glimmered in wan diffusion, the sun little more than a patch in the fog. Soon, Daen realized that he was lost, but he maintained his southern path. Pine trees replaced ash and birch and oak, moss gave way to grass, dirt to stony outcroppings. He knew he’d gained altitude.