Ragtooth stayed with us most of the time, trotting along at my side or even running ahead of us, as if scouting out the path. I was nervous here—we all were—expecting at any moment that a witch would rise up out of the shadows and pounce. But the sight of the fox’s tawny tail bobbing up and down brought me back to myself. If Ragtooth, with his fox senses, was not troubled by anything, why should I be?
The forest at this elevation was a scattering of trees that only occasionally thickened into groves. These we had to pick our way through single file. The ground was a soft carpet of pine needles. There were patches of melting snow here and there, and the ground was muddy. The long, fluted peak of Mount Chening loomed over us, and beyond that, glimpsed only occasionally in the distance, was the peak of Raksha.
Clouds wrapped around it like many-layered shawls, but I knew it was there. I had never seen anything so enormous—it seemed higher than the stars themselves. Even a glimpse took my breath away—and terrified me to the core.
What have I done? Yet with the terror, there was excitement, which turned the fear into something almost pleasurable. It was a strange emotion that filled me with jangly energy, and I sometimes jogged ahead of the others, delighting in the simple pleasure of movement. Some of the darkness that had plagued my dreams since our battle with the fiangul seemed to lift, and I marveled at how far I had come. Few humans had laid eyes on the landscape before us. I spun around, taking in every angle, feeling every inch a daring explorer.
This is it, I thought. This is all I want.
It took four days to cross the forest, as we were detoured around unexpected gullies and deep streams that the yak couldn’t ford (“tedious,” Mingma had written, in his usual dry tone). We tried to keep to our northward course as much as possible, but ended up backtracking repeatedly. Another day was spent traversing a field of towering boulders that had been deposited, long ago, by a retreating glacier. That night we pitched our tents at the edge of a pointed outcropping that overlooked Phaomzu Valley and the Nightwood beyond it. We were not two weeks out from Azmiri, and yet the village seemed a world away.
We made only a small fire. Our position was too exposed—there was no telling what could be watching us from the valley below. We crowded around the flames—apart from Norbu, who sat by his tent, hunched over his talismans, and River, who had wandered off somewhere. The sunlight drained from the sky, leaving a trail of orange and pink above the towering mountains. The few trees loomed out of the uneven ground, arms outstretched in what seemed like a sinister gesture of welcome.
I hunched as close to the fire as I could get, as if it could protect me against not only the cold, but my own fear. My gaze kept drifting up, up, to the snow-streaked heights. To Raksha. All but the very peak was hidden behind Mount Chening, but some of the clouds had cleared, revealing a snowy triangle that gleamed golden from the sunset.
We were almost there. Another three days, I estimated, and we would be setting up base camp. The thought made me want to whoop with excitement and sob with terror at the same time.
Tem sat beside me, treating his feet with salve. We were all blistered and bruised by now, some worse than others. Aimo needed daily healing charms for her swollen feet. Dargye’s toenails were blackened and loose, and when he removed his boots there was an awful squelching sound from the blood that pooled at his toes. Neither made any complaint, but I could see the pain written on their faces at the end of each day.
“It’s hard to imagine,” Tem said, gazing at the sky, “that there was ever a city up there.”
I rubbed my hands over the flames. “If it’s even true. How could people survive at that elevation?”
“Witches aren’t people,” Dargye said. Aimo, sitting beside him, seemed to flinch.
“Actually, according to the shamans, they’re half-human,” Tem said. “Descendants of an ancient nomadic tribe from beyond the Drakkar Mountains and elemental spirits—cousins of the fire demons. Only these elementals were not shaped from fire, but shadow.” He paused. “Darkness itself.”
Aimo shivered. I shook my head. Tem’s knowledge of shamanic lore far outweighed my own. Part of my apprenticeship to Chirri involved hours poring over the ancient shamanic scrolls held in my father’s library. The first time Tem accompanied me there, I had to drag him away. While I bored quickly of ancient history and magical theory, Tem drank it in like a sun-scorched forest does the first autumn rains. As I continued to struggle with magic, Tem took to reading over the passages Chirri assigned to me and relaying the important points in words that made sense. Chirri had seemed suspicious of my suddenly improved comprehension, though she made no comment.
Dargye shrugged. “What difference does it make? They’re monsters. They probably don’t need to breathe. Or eat, or sleep. Who knows?”
“That’s nonsense,” I scoffed. “Azmiri fought the witches when they set fire to the village. They can be harmed. They can be killed.”
“They can also transform into animals and fold themselves into shadow,” Dargye snapped. “How can we know what’s impossible for them?”
“I wish I knew more about this lost city,” Tem said, stirring the fire with a stick. Little sparks rose from the wood. “What are we going to find when we reach the summit? The scrolls aren’t specific.”
That Tem would know of the witch city didn’t surprise me. “What do they say?”
“That it exists”—he coughed—“though its location is unknown. The ancient shamans called it the ‘sky city’—they thought the witches built it in the clouds, far above the human realm, that it floated from place to place.”
I pictured a glittering city suspended in the sky. “Why did they abandon it?”
“No one knows. It was a very long time ago—centuries, long before the Empire had even begun to take shape. One scroll suggests that the witches grew interested in humans, and they came down from the sky to spy on us. Another claims that a power struggle between their rulers led to a bloody war, and the survivors fled back to Earth to escape the vengeful spirits who haunted them. Whatever the reason, they never returned to the sky city, choosing to dwell instead in the Nightwood—only it wasn’t called that back then.”
I nodded. I knew that at one time, the great forest had stretched from the plains east of the Aryas—where it was now confined—all the way to the lands that now held the Three Cities. But the Empire had cleared great swaths of it, and today only a few stands of trees remained west of the mountains. It was said that the Nightwood had not always been a wasted, fearsome place, but the witches had imbued it with their dark magic in the centuries they dwelled there, and when the emperor bound their powers, some part of the Nightwood had sickened, twisting in on itself. Now it was a place even birds feared.