Chapter Three
The Westward Road
They left two mornings later, in the dark, the way you leave for a hard thing — early enough that the leaving feels like part of the night and not a true beginning, so that the first grey light finds you already walking and you can pretend you were always walking, that there was no warm hut and no banked fire and no last look back.
Varn did not look back. He’d done his looking the night before, alone, at the wind-beds. There was nothing in the village behind him now that hadn’t already been said its goodbye.
The squad went west.
That surprised him, the first hour, before he understood it. He’d grown up with the high Tarn always to the north, a black line of shoulders against the stars, and up the Tarn had been the words in everyone’s mouth for two days, so his feet had been pointing themselves north in his mind the whole time. But Halgrim led them down out of the valley’s mouth and turned them sharp along the marsh’s edge, into the west, with the rising sun a grey rumour at their backs.
“You don’t climb straight at it,” the old man said, not turning, his breath smoking in the cold. He’d left his hide coat behind for a lighter one of oiled wool, and he moved well, better than a man his age had any right to, his old boots finding the dry ground in the dark by some sense Varn couldn’t see. “The northern face is sheer and it’s mean and it’s where everything that’s ever wanted to eat a man goes to wait for one. You go west, three days, along the skirts of the range where it’s gentler, and you come up at it from the side, through the Whitethroat passes, where the energy runs thin enough that the big things don’t bother to den.” He spat. “Thin energy. That’s what you want, for a first contract. You don’t want to be where the strong ones are. You want to be where the small ones are. And the small ones live where the strong ones can’t be bothered to go.”
So: west.
The marsh gave way to fen, and the fen to a long country of low rolling rises that Varn had never set foot on in his life, though he’d looked at it from the eastern slope a thousand times — the Pelt, they called it, for the way it lay over the land’s bones like the hide of some enormous sleeping animal, all dun and grey-green and rust, rippling when the wind came over it. By full light the frost was burning off it in long low banners of steam, and Varn walked through a world he didn’t know, and made himself learn it.
He learned the whitethroat reed the country was named for — taller than a man, pale at the head where the seeds had gone to silk, and the source, Toller told him in his six-words-a-morning way, of the best arrow-shafts in three valleys, straight and light and hard. “Cut green. Dry slow. Snap fast.” That was the whole of the lesson and it was, Varn suspected, the whole of what Toller had to teach about anything.
He learned the bittergorse that grew in low spiteful clumps on the dry rises, dark and waxy, with a yellow flower that smelled, when Maeve crushed one under his nose, of coconut and burning hair both at once. “Won’t kill you,” she grunted. “Won’t help you either. The thorns go bad in a cut, though, so mind your shins.” She walked like the boar she carried — heavy, certain, unhurried, every step a thing that had decided to happen. Ghest’s energy hung around her faintly even at rest, a thickness in the air at her shoulder, a low animal patience.
He learned the wisp-flax, and that one he learned from Arzan, because nobody else could see it.
They’d stopped at midday in the lee of a rise, in a hollow where a thread of clean water came up cold out of the rock and ran away south through a bed of green so bright it hurt the eye. Arzan had gone very still partway through eating, his head tilting, and then he’d risen without a word and gone to the edge of the green where it met the dun grass, and crouched, and run his clever narrow fingers just above a patch of low silvery growth — not touching it, hovering — with his eyes half-shut and the spiral mark at his throat showing dark above his collar.
“Wisp-flax,” he said, when Varn came to crouch beside him. “Look at it but don’t pick it. Sef would skin me.” It was a low spreading plant, the leaves a pale grey-silver, fine and feathered, and where the light caught them they seemed to hold it a half-breath too long, to glow faintly from inside after the sun had moved on. “It grows where the spirit pools. Thin spots in the world, where the energy comes close to the surface like water under a low field. The wisps love it — the little Anima, the smoke-things, my own kind.” He said my own kind with a small private warmth. “Where you find wisp-flax thick, you’ll find them. Where you find it dead —” he gestured, and Varn saw it now, a patch a little further on where the same silver leaves had gone brown and curled and lightless, “— something came through and ate. Drank the pool dry. A bigger thing, hunting smaller ones.” Arzan’s grin had gone thin. “That’s the kind of reading they sent me for. The flax tells me where it’s safe to look for you a contract — and where something’s already looking for us.”
Varn crouched there a long moment, looking at the bright living silver and the dead brown patch a stone’s throw beyond it, and understood, in a way he hadn’t fully understood at the meadow, what his friend actually carried under his skin. Not strength. Not muscle. A way of seeing the shape of the danger before it had teeth in you. He looked at small narrow Arzan, who couldn’t have wrestled the village’s nine-year-olds, and felt the old protective thing rise in him — and then, for the first time, felt it stand alongside something new, something that was almost the opposite. He sees what I can’t. Out here, he’s worth ten of me.
“Don’t pick it,” Arzan said again, rising, brushing his knees. “Honestly, with you it’s always the picking. You’re like a child in a market.”
“I wasn’t going to pick it.”
“You were thinking about picking it. I could see the thought try to fit through your enormous skull. It was a struggle, but it got there.”
They camped that night in the open, on the dry side of a rise, with no fire.
That was Yrsa’s call, and Halgrim let her make it, which told Varn something about who the old man trusted with what. The smith’s daughter had spent the whole day ranging ahead and to the flanks, up on the high points, her hawk-marked neck tilting, those eyes the village swore could count feathers reading the long grey distances of the Pelt for movement. She came in at dusk, dropping down off the last rise quiet as falling cloth, and said only, “Something’s working the low ground two ridges north. Big. Slow. Hasn’t turned our way. No fire tonight.” And that was that.
They ate cold — strips of smoked goat, the hard dark bread, a handful each of dried tarn-berries that puckered the mouth and were gone too soon — and they sat in the blue dark with their backs to the rise and the great wheel of Odo’s sky turning overhead.
And what a sky it was. Varn had always loved it and never had words for it. Odo wore three moons, and tonight two of them were up: Hett, the big one, a broad pale coin low in the east, and little Sere riding high and small and faintly green, and where their two lights crossed and layered, the shadows on the ground doubled and the grass threw a faint blue-and-green confusion of itself in two directions at once. The stars beyond them were a crushed glitter, thick as marsh-silt, and through the heart of them ran the Spirit-road — the great pale river of light the old ones said was the energy of all the dead and all the Anima that had ever lived, pouring slow across the dark, the thing that fed the world its power. Brennick had told Varn that once. One of the few things he was sure he remembered and hadn’t built up out of wanting. His father, pointing up. That’s where it all comes from, lad. That’s the well. We just drink from it down here.
“You’re quiet,” Arzan said, low, beside him. The others had gone to their hides — Maeve already a snoring barrel-shape, Toller a stillness that might have been sleep and might not, Yrsa up on the rise taking the first watch, a slim dark cutout against the doubled moonlight. “You’re never this quiet. It’s unsettling. Say something stupid so I know you’re alright.”
“My father told me about the Spirit-road. Right there.” Varn lifted his chin at the pale river overhead. “I was small. I don’t remember much. I remember that.”
Arzan was quiet for a moment — the rare quiet, the real one. Then: “Sef says it’s not really the dead. Up there. He says that’s a children’s story.” A pause. “He says it’s better than the dead. He says it’s the living — that everything with spirit in it, every Anima and every person and every wisp in the reeds, every one of us is leaking a little light up into that road all the time, the whole time we’re alive, and what we see up there is just — everyone. Everyone at once. Glowing.” His narrow shoulder pressed against Varn’s huge one, a small warm pressure in the cold. “I like that one better. Your mother and father are up there either way. But I like to think it’s not because they’re gone. I like to think it’s just the bit of them that was always shining anyway.”
Varn didn’t answer. He couldn’t, for a moment. He looked at the Spirit-road pouring slow and pale across the dark between the two moons, and he thought about the soul-stone in its hollow under the wind-bed, grey-green, pulsing, warm to his hands faster than it had any right to be — and he thought, maybe that’s the bit that didn’t go up. Maybe that’s the bit that stayed for me — and he found his throat had closed and his eyes were stinging in the cold, and he was fiercely, wordlessly grateful for the dark and the doubled shadows and the small fierce friend pressed against his side who had said the kind thing and now, mercifully, said nothing more.
After a long while Arzan added, in an entirely different voice: “Also Toller’s not asleep and he’s heard every word of this and we’re going to die of embarrassment in the morning.”
From the dark, Toller said, “Liver was good,” which was, somehow, the most comforting thing anyone could have said, and Varn laughed — wet and rough and surprised out of himself — and the tightness in his chest let go, and the cold blue night closed gently over the five of them and their small cold camp on the skirts of an enormous world.
They walked west again at first light, and the country changed under them as they went.
The Pelt began to break up — the long smooth rises giving way to broken ground, to outcrops of pale stone furred grey-green with rock-tripe, a flat curling lichen that Maeve said you could boil into a gruel that would keep you alive and make you wish it hadn’t. The bittergorse thinned and a new thing took its place on the high stony ground: ghost-thorn, a low twisted shrub bone-white in the bark, leafless this early in the year, its branches grown in tight defensive snarls and its long thorns the translucent pale of fingernails. “Don’t shelter in it,” Halgrim warned, when Varn went to step through a stand of it. “Looks like good cover. It is good cover. That’s the trouble — everything thinks so.” He nodded, and Varn looked closer, and saw the small bones caught in the lower snarls of one bush, the dried husks of mice and shrews and one thing bigger, a hare maybe, all of them snagged and gone to leather, and understood that something lived in the ghost-thorn and let the thorns do its killing for it, and patrolled its larder at its leisure.
Odo, he was learning, had a great many quiet ways to end a man, and most of them looked like shelter.
By the afternoon of the second day the land had risen enough that the air had thinned and cooled and gone clean, and the first true shoulder of the Tarn showed ahead of them through a haze of distance — not the black northern face he’d known all his life, but the western flank, gentler, dun and grey and patched with the dark of high pine, climbing in long steps toward bare rock and, far above, the white. The Whitethroat passes were up there somewhere in the folds of it. And somewhere in the passes, in the thin places where the wisp-flax grew and the small Anima denned and the strong things couldn’t be bothered to go, was the creature Varn would offer his bargain to — the one that would take him into its strength, or take his life, with no middle ground and no almost, because the energy did not permit it.
Arzan stopped, partway up a long stony rise, and went still in the way Varn had learned to watch for. His head tilted. The spiral at his throat showed dark. He lifted one narrow hand and held it out over the ground, palm down, eyes half-shut, as if warming it at a fire that wasn’t there.
“What is it,” Varn said quietly. Behind them Yrsa had gone tense, Maeve had set her feet, Toller’s hand had drifted to his bow without his seeming to decide it. They’d all learned to watch Arzan go still the way you watch a dog’s ears come up.
Arzan was quiet a moment longer. Then he opened his eyes, and they were bright, and the grin that came over his fox-sharp face was the realest Varn had seen since they left Ion — not the paper-thin one, not the joking one, but something hungry and glad underneath it all, his own road opening up in front of him just as Varn’s had opened in the cold by the post.
“The flax goes thick from here up,” Arzan said softly, and his voice had a hush in it like a man in a holy place. “Thicker than I’ve ever felt it. The pool’s close to the surface up there — the spirit’s running shallow, you could near put your hand in it.” He looked up the long rise, toward the dun-and-grey western flank of the mountain and the high folds where the white began. His thumb went, without his noticing, to the mark at his throat. “We’re in the Whitethroat now, Varn. The thin country.” The grin turned, and turned serious, and his bright dark eyes came back down and found Varn’s, and held them. “Somewhere up there, in all that, is the thing you came to meet.”
The wind came down off the high white and over them, cold and clean and smelling of pine and stone and the strange faint mineral tang Varn would only later learn to recognise as the smell of the spirit itself running shallow — and the five of them stood on the long stony rise in the doubled afternoon light, and looked up into the folds of the Tarn, and the Tarn, as it always did, looked back, and said nothing, and kept its things, and waited to find out which of them it would keep.