Daughter of Redwinter

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. We might yet get out of this alive.

Someone—or something—had got her pretty good, judging by all that blood. Another 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 said 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 away 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. A slate-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 forwards 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 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