The Blackfens drank the last of the daylight in slow, oily swallows. Mist rose from the stagnant water in ribbons that curled and dissolved against the dying sky, carrying with them the sweet rot of drowned things and the mineral tang of bog iron. Somewhere far off, a night-heron screamed its single, broken note. Closer, the water itself made its smaller sounds: the wet pop of methane bubbles surfacing, the low groan of peat giving way beneath its own weight, the soft suck of mud against bare skin.
Aelis Vorath stood knee-deep in the muck, a creel of trap-caught eels strapped across his back, and watched his sister Maren work a snare line at the edge of a half-sunken willowsnag. She was fifteen, two years older, and she moved through the fen the way the fen moved through itself: slowly, with patience, with the certainty of something that belonged here.
"Third one tonight," Maren murmured, hauling a wire loop closed with her wrist. An eel the color of tarnished silver thrashed once against her forearm and went still. She slid it into a sack without looking at it. "Father will want the heads split before morning."
"Father," Aelis repeated, tasting the word as though it were something caught between his teeth. Their father, Vorath of the Black Line, had been three years dead in exile. Maren still spoke of him as though he might be waiting at the edge of any clearing, patient as a heron.
Maren glanced up. Her eyes were pale grey, the color of fen water under cloud, and they missed nothing. "Hold the line steady," she said. "You are letting it drag."
He adjusted his grip on the braided marsh-cord. The fibers bit into his palm. The water around his legs was warm where it touched his skin, colder where it pooled in the folds of his trousers, and it carried a faint tremor he could feel through the soles of his bare feet, as though something vast were turning over in its sleep far beneath the peat. He had felt that tremor all his life. He had never mentioned it to anyone.
The Hungering Voice, nestled somewhere behind the soft plate of his skull where thought met bone, purred.
Little fish, little fish, swimming in the dark, what do you taste in the water? What do you taste?
Aelis's jaw tightened. He did not answer it. Answering fed it. He had learned this the hard way, in the first weeks after the thing had crawled out of the drowned shrine at Mire's Edge and into the wet cathedral of his mind.
Sweet brother, sweet sister, sweet little fishes in the dark. The deep ones are stirring. The deep ones can taste you back.
"Aelis." Maren's voice cut through the whisper like a knife through net. "The line."
He hauled the cord taut. Something tugged from the other end, heavier than an eel, heavier than anything that ought to have taken the bait.
The willowsnag groaned.
It had stood in that spot for years, a dead thing pretending to be alive, its bark sloughing away in long pale strips that the fen-folk wove into prayer-mats for the drowned gods. Aelis had carved their names into its trunk when he was small, all the names of the Vorath line, so that something would remember them if the waters rose. Now the snag leaned, slowly, as though something beneath it had shifted its weight. Water slid down its bark in a dark sheet.
The tremor in the floor of the fen deepened.
"Maren," Aelis said. His voice came out smaller than he wanted it to.
"I feel it." She was already backing toward him, the eel-sack forgotten. Her hand went to the hilt of the long knife at her belt, a reflex, a comfort. They both knew the knife was useless against whatever lived in the deep bogs. Their mother had told them so often enough, in the long evenings when the fire guttered and the mist crept close to the cabin walls. Stay out of the still pools. Stay out of the water after dark. If the fen turns, you run. You do not look back. You do not stop to be brave.
The water around the snag began to rise.
Not the slow, patient rise of the tide. This was something being lifted, pressed upward from below by a presence that had no business being there. A dome of black water swelled where the snag had stood, lifting the dead trunk with it, and through the curve of that dome something pale pressed upward against the surface. It was the color of bone left too long in a bog, a yellowish white that seemed to drink the dim light rather than reflect it. It moved with a slow, blind deliberation.
Aelis saw, with the terrible clarity of someone who would remember this for the rest of his life, that the pale shape had no eyes. Where eyes should have been there were only shallow pits, sealed over with a translucent membrane that pulsed faintly in time with something deeper than a heartbeat. The shape had a mouth, though. The mouth was very wide, and very quiet.
Maren grabbed his arm. Her fingers dug into the muscle above his elbow hard enough to bruise.
"Run," she said. "Aelis. Run now. Do not look back."
He ran.
Behind him, the pale shape broke the surface of the fen with a sound like a wet sheet being torn. The mist recoiled from it. The night-heron screamed again, closer now, a single broken syllable of warning. He heard Maren's footsteps behind him for three strides, four, five, and then he heard a different sound: a short, sharp intake of breath, the sound of someone who has stepped into water that was not there a moment before, and the water has come up over their head.
He stopped.
He should not have stopped. Every lesson his mother had ever taught him told him not to stop. He stopped anyway, because Maren was his sister, because she was all the family he had left in the world, because somewhere in his chest there was still a stubborn, foolish knot that believed he could do something about the things that took people from him.
He turned.
In the grey half-light of the drowned evening he could just make her out. She was waist-deep in the fen, which had been knee-deep a moment ago, and the pale shape was rising behind her with the slow inevitability of a tide that had been waiting centuries for this particular shore. Maren's knife was in her hand. She had dropped the eel-sack. Her pale hair clung to her face in dark strands, and her grey eyes were wide, and she was looking not at the thing behind her but at him.
"Go," she said. The word came out calm. Too calm. The calm of someone who had already made a decision. "Find the old road. Find the drowned gate. Get inside the walls before the bell rings. Aelis. Go."
The pale thing surged.
Aelis saw the mouth open, saw the rows of pale, needle-thin teeth that no human jaw could have accommodated, saw the dark gullet behind them flex and widen like the throat of something swallowing sky. He saw his sister's back arch as the water around her convulsed, saw her knife flash once, twice, saw the pale shape shudder as the blade found some purchase in its unnatural flesh. Then the water closed over her head, and the shape folded itself around her the way a fist folds around a candle flame, and the fen went still.
The stillness lasted a long moment.
Aelis stood in the knee-deep water at the edge of the place where his sister had been, and the water was warm around his legs, and somewhere far off a night-heron had stopped screaming, and the Hungering Voice in his head was very, very quiet.
Then the Voice spoke, in a whisper like water sliding over bone.
She tasted of salt, little fish. She tasted of grief. The deep ones do not like the taste of grief. It is too close to their own.
"Shut up," Aelis whispered. His voice cracked on the second syllable. He did not realize he had spoken aloud until the word had already left his mouth, and by then it was too late to take it back.
Sweet brother, the Voice crooned, the deep ones are awake now. They are awake, and they are hungry, and you are standing in their water with nothing between you and them but a pair of wet trousers and a stubborn little heart. Run, little fish. Run into the dark. The dark will keep you safe. The dark keeps everything.
He ran.
The drowned road to Old Velmar was a thing his mother had warned him against ever since he could remember. It ran along the spine of a long, low causeway that the old folk had raised above the fen in the days before the Usurpation, when the Mireborn Crown had still sat upon a living brow and the bog-priests had still been something other than leeches with vestments. The causeway had held for a hundred years after the Crown fell. Now it broke the surface in long, weed-furred segments, and between the segments the fen poured through like a slow, dark flood, and beneath the surface the drowned arches of the old city waited for anyone foolish enough to step off the road and into the water.
Aelis did not step off the road. He ran along the broken segments of causeway until his lungs burned and his bare feet were bleeding from the sharp edges of weed-cut brick, and behind him the fen followed in its slow way, rising and falling as it pleased, carrying with it the faint impression of something pale and patient that had decided, for now, to let him go.
The drowned gate of Old Velmar rose out of the water like a broken tooth.
It had been a gate once, in the days before the Usurpation. Now it was a single leaning arch of pitted basalt, its keystone missing, its iron hinges long since dissolved into orange streaks that ran down the stone and into the water. Through the arch Aelis could see the dark mass of the old city rising out of the fen: collapsed towers, half-submerged walls, the dark domes of buildings whose upper stories still caught what little light remained in the sky. The Hungering Voice stirred.
In, little fish. In, in, in. The deep ones cannot follow you inside the walls. The walls remember the old songs. The walls remember how to keep the dark out.
"How do you know that," Aelis said, between breaths. "How do you know what the walls remember."
The Voice was here, little fish. The Voice was here before the walls. The Voice was here before the fen. The Voice remembers everything, because the Voice was there when everything forgot.
He stepped through the arch.
The water on the inside of the gate was shallow, barely covering the cobbles of the old street, but it carried a different smell: cold stone, and the dry dust of broken plaster, and something older, something that smelled like the inside of a tomb that had been sealed for a very long time and had only recently been opened. The mist that clung to the outer fen did not pass the gate. On this side of the arch the air was clear, and the silence had a different quality, the silence of a place that had been listening for a long time and had finally heard something worth hearing.
Aelis stood in the middle of the drowned street and tried to catch his breath.
He had left Maren behind. He had left her in the water, in the mouth of something that had no eyes and no mercy, and he had run. The Hungering Voice had told him to run, and he had run, and now he was alive and she was not, and somewhere in the architecture of his guilt there was a door that he knew he would spend the rest of his life trying to close.
Little fish, the Voice whispered, somewhere behind the soft plate of his skull. Little fish, do not cry. The deep ones are listening. The deep ones always listen when one of their own is taken from them.
"I am not one of yours," Aelis whispered. His voice came out hoarse, scraped raw by the run and by something else. "I am not one of yours."
Oh, sweet brother, the Voice crooned, and the croon was so soft, and so patient, that it was almost a lullaby. Oh, sweet brother. You have been one of ours since the night you opened the shrine at Mire's Edge. You have been one of ours since the night you asked us in. We have always been here, little fish. We have always been waiting.
The water on the street began to rise.
The water on the street did not rise. It remembered rising. The distinction mattered, and Aelis forced himself to attend to it, the way Maren had taught him to attend to a sentence that was trying to lie. A verb's true tense, she had said, more than once, is the one the writer cannot bring herself to feel. Aelis had rolled his eyes at the lesson, then. He did not roll them now. The water was a memory of rising, a held breath in the body of the bog, and the bog was waiting for him to exhale.
He walked.
The drowned street curved ahead of him, the cobbles slick and humped with a slow green nap. The buildings on either side had the soft, melted look of things that had been standing in the rain for a hundred years without anyone to scold them for it. Their doors hung open like mouths. Their windows were dark. Aelis did not look into the windows. He had learned, in the years since the shrine at Mire's Edge, that windows were where the worst things kept their eyes.
Little fish, the Voice said. Little fish, where are you going? There is nothing ahead of you, little fish. There is only more street, and more street, and then a wall, and then the street that has been waiting behind the wall for someone to walk down it. We have seen all the streets. We have eaten the feet of everyone who ever walked them.
"Then why do you keep talking to me?" Aelis muttered. "If I am going to walk to a wall, you can save your breath."
Oh, the Voice said, delighted. Oh, the little fish has teeth today. The little fish has been practicing.
Aelis did not answer. He counted his steps instead, an old habit, a way of keeping the world in pieces small enough to carry. One, two, three. The cobbles were uneven. Four, five. The mist thinned at the edges of a square. Six.
The square was not empty.
In the center of the square there was a temple. Or what had been a temple, once, before whatever had happened to this place had happened to it. The roof had caved in on the left side, and a tree had grown up through the nave, pale bark and pale leaves, the color of drowned skin. The right side of the building still stood, though, and the door was shut, and the stone above the door was carved with a sigil that Aelis had not seen since the night he had first opened the shrine at Mire's Edge.
The sigil of the Vorathii.
He stopped in the middle of the square. The water was up to his ankles. He had not noticed when that had happened. His boots were full of it, and the cold of it had climbed his shins and was now working on his knees, and he stood there and stared at the sigil and did not move for a long time.
Go in, the Voice said.
"No."
Go in, little fish. Go in and see what your grandmother left for you.
"I don't have a grandmother."
Oh, the Voice said, and the word was a smile. Oh, but you do. You have a great many grandmothers. You have a great many grandfathers. You have a whole country of them, little fish, and they are all waiting for you inside.
Aelis walked toward the door. He did not decide to walk toward the door. His body decided for him, the way it had decided, years ago, in the dark of the shrine, when the Hungering Voice had first spoken his name. His hand found the iron ring of the door. The iron was warm. It was the warmest thing he had touched since he had left Maren in the water, and the warmth of it went into his palm and up his arm and settled somewhere behind his ribs, and he pushed the door open and stepped inside.
The inside of the temple was dry. That was the first thing he noticed. After half a league of water up to his knees, his shins, his thighs, the dry air of the temple hit his skin like a slap. He stood in the doorway, breathing, and the breathing was almost a sob, and he did not let it become a sob. He had not let himself sob since the shrine at Mire's Edge. He had not let himself sob since the night he had learned what he was, and what had been done to him, and what he had agreed, in the dark, to become.
The temple was small. A nave, a chancel, a few stone benches. The tree had come up through the floor on the left side, and its roots had pried the flagstones apart, and the pale bark climbed the wall and disappeared into the hole in the roof. The right side of the building was intact, and against the right wall there was a stone plinth, and on the plinth there was a thing covered in a cloth.
Aelis crossed the nave. His boots, which had been full of water, were suddenly dry. He did not look down. He did not want to see what had become of the water. He reached the plinth. The cloth was rotted through in places, and where it had rotted he could see the thing underneath, and the thing underneath was a shard of black iron, and the black iron was pulsing.
It was pulsing in a rhythm that was not his own.
Aelis's heart was in his throat. He could feel it there, a small, panicked animal. The pulse of the iron was slower than his heart. Slower, and steadier, and it was the steadiness of it that was the worst, because the steadiness implied a will behind it, and a will implied an intention, and an intention implied a hand reaching out of the iron to cup his chin and turn his face toward whatever the iron wanted him to see.
Touch it, the Voice said.
"No."
Touch it, little fish. It has been waiting for you. It has been waiting for you since before your mother was born. It has been waiting for you since the night the Crown was shattered and the long drowning began. Touch it, and it will tell you who you are.
"I know who I am."
Oh, sweet brother. You do not. You have been told a story, little fish, and the story is a coat, and the coat is too small for you, and you have been wearing it anyway because it is the only coat anyone has ever given you. Take it off. Take it off and see what is underneath.
Aelis reached out and touched the iron.
The pulse of the iron met the pulse of his heart somewhere in the middle of his chest, and for a moment the two rhythms were at war, and then they were not at war, and then they were the same rhythm, and then the rhythm was the rhythm of the iron, and his heart was beating in time with the iron, and the iron was beating in time with his heart, and the Voice spoke, and the Voice was not behind the soft plate of his skull anymore.
The Voice was everywhere.
Aelis, the Voice said, and the Voice was the bog, and the bog was the Voice, and the bog was older than the bog. Aelis. Aelis. Aelis. We have so much to tell you. We have been saving it up. We have been saving it up since the night your great-grandmother opened her legs in the water and your grandmother was born with the salt already in her blood. You are the last of us, Aelis. You are the last of the Vorathii. You are the heir of the Mireborn Empire that ruled this place before the Long Drowning, before the Usurpation, before the Crown was broken and the bogs were given to the thing that lives in the bogs. You are the heir. You are the heir. You are the heir.
"I am a scribe," Aelis said. His voice came out thin, and far away, and he did not recognize it. "I was trained to copy ledgers. I was trained to mend torn deeds. I was trained to keep my head down and not be noticed."
You were trained to be a leash, the Voice said. You were trained to be a leash for the thing that your sister is carrying in her chest. You were trained to be the muzzle on the dog that your family has been keeping on a rope since the night the Crown was broken. You were not trained to be a scribe, Aelis. You were trained to be a coffin.
Aelis pulled his hand back from the iron.
The pulse of the iron stayed in his palm. It climbed his wrist. It was in his elbow, his shoulder, the side of his neck, behind his ear. He could feel the bog now, not as a place outside him but as a place inside him, a second body made of water and patience, and the body of the bog was vast, and the body of the bog was old, and the body of the bog had been waiting for him for a very long time.
Go back, the Voice said, coaxing. Go back to your sister. Go back and take the Crown from her. Go back and put it on. Go back and be what you were born to be. The bogs will follow you, Aelis. The drowned will follow you. The thing in the deep water will follow you. We will all follow you, little fish, if you will only say yes.
"No," Aelis whispered.
The temple was silent. The tree in the nave did not move. The cloth on the plinth hung in rotted folds, and the shard of black iron pulsed, and pulsed, and pulsed, and Aelis stood in front of it with his hand at his side and the bog inside his chest, and he did not say yes, and he did not say no, and the Voice laughed, somewhere in the architecture of his skull, and the laugh was the laugh of something that had been waiting a very long time and was content, now, to wait a little longer.
He dreamed, and in the dream his sister was alive.
Maren stood at the mouth of the cave with her boots muddy and her road-coat heavy with rain, and she was younger than he remembered her, younger than she had been when she came to the exile-cottage on the hill, and she was saying his name the way she used to say it when he was small and had wandered too far into the bracken. Aelis. That was all. Just his name. She said it like she had been saying it for a long time and would go on saying it for a long time yet, and the cave behind her was full of a warm amber light that smelled of cedar and of the cook-fire at the cottage, and Aelis walked toward her, and his feet did not hurt, and his hands were clean.
He woke.
The bog had closed over his body to the chin.
He felt it before he opened his eyes. The cold of it, the weight. The way the water held him like a hand pressed flat against his chest, the peat-dark and tasting of iron and of something sweeter underneath, something vegetable and rotten. He opened his eyes and saw the sky. It was the color of a bruise, low and greenish, and the sun was somewhere behind the clouds but did not commit to showing itself. His arms were out of the water. They had been lashed to a pole, and the pole ran across his chest and over his shoulders and on to other wrists on either side of him, and when he turned his head, slowly, because his neck hurt, he saw that he was not alone.
There were other children. A line of them, lashed to the same pole. Some were smaller than he was. One was a girl who might have been his age, with matted red hair and a face so still it might have been carved from the same peat as the bog itself. Another was a boy, younger, with the rickets-swollen wrists of a child who had been fed on thin gruel and river-water. The boy was crying, very quietly, the way an animal cries when it has learned that sound does not bring help. None of them looked at Aelis. None of them looked at anything. They had the look of children who had been in the bog a long time and had stopped expecting to be anywhere else.
Aelis tried to breathe and the water pressed against his throat. He tried to move his legs and found that they were sunk into the bottom of whatever he lay in, into the peat itself, and the peat held them like a mouth holding a bone. His left hand could close but his right hand could not, because his right hand was still tangled in the iron shard, and the shard was warm now, and pulsing, and the pulse went up his arm and met the pulse that had never really left him, and the bog in his chest leaned toward the bog outside his chest, and for one terrible moment the two became the same thing.
Be still, the Voice said from inside the warmth. Be still and feel. This is what you were born to.
Aelis was still.
The procession, if it could be called a procession, moved without hurry. The pole was being carried by something he could not see, something low in the water that walked with a slow, deliberate gait, like a man crossing a river and testing each stone before he set his weight down. The thing did not breathe audibly. It did not grunt or splash. The only sound it made was the soft, wet sound of peat being pressed down by a great weight, and that sound was rhythmic, and Aelis found his own breath falling into the rhythm of it without meaning to, and he had to fight to keep his chest from rising and falling in time with the steps of the thing that was carrying him.
Hours passed, or what felt like hours. The light did not change. The sky stayed the color of a bruise. The bog stayed the same, and the children stayed the same, and the pole stayed across Aelis's chest, and his right hand stayed tangled in the warm shard, and the Voice stayed in his chest saying nothing now, just present, like a passenger in a carriage who had decided to enjoy the view.
Then a sound came across the water that was different.
It was a horn. Low, sweet, badly tuned, like a herdsman's horn played by someone who had been taught the fingering but not the breath. The note went on for a long time, wavering, and then it stopped, and the silence after it was the silence of something that had been listening for the horn and was now satisfied.
The thing carrying the pole stopped walking.
Aelis heard voices. Many voices, low, in the Wetlands drawl he had been raised to recognize. Words like flank and bight and tithe , and underneath them a smoother voice, oilier, the kind of voice that wrapped itself around a sentence the way a hand wraps around a cup it intends to drink from slowly.
"Well, well, well," the smooth voice said, very close now. "What have we brought up from the deep lane?"
A shadow fell across Aelis's face. He had to tip his head back to see who it was, because the shadow was standing in something that raised him well above the waterline. A palanquin, he realized after a moment. The man stood on a palanquin, and the palanquin was borne on the shoulders of four of the low, heavy things that Aelis could not quite bring himself to look at directly, and the man himself was, in the language of his father's household, which was the language of insults so precise they could wound without drawing blood, a very great quantity of flesh poured into a very small quantity of robe.
He was bald. His scalp was the pale, mottled pink of a slug, and his face was a study in soft, wet abundance. His chin folded over his collar. His cheeks folded over his chin. His lips were thick and dark, and when he smiled the smile began somewhere in the folds of his neck and only arrived at his mouth after a delay, like a rumor reaching the provinces. His eyes were small and black and wet, and they were moving across the line of children with the unhurried attention of a man at market choosing produce.
"Brannoc," one of the bearers said, low. "The last of the tide-run. Twelve in all. Two are Mire-born. The rest are river-stock."
"Two," Brannoc said, tasting the number. "Only two. The Crown has been hungry this half-year. The marsh-lords have been niggardly. The marsh-lords," he added, in a tone of fond grievance, "are no longer worth the breath one spends on them. But two. That is something. That is a beginning."
He crouched, which was a complicated business for a man of his girth, and the palanquin groaned under him as he lowered himself to the level of Aelis's face. Aelis could smell him now. He smelled of a perfume so heavy it was almost a solid, the kind of perfume that is used to mask a worse smell, and underneath the perfume was the smell of the bog itself, as though Brannoc had been marinated in it.
"And which of you," Brannoc said, addressing the children generally, "has brought me a true piece of the Crown today?"
His gaze moved down the line. It paused on the red-haired girl. It paused on the boy with the swollen wrists. It arrived at Aelis, and stayed.
"Oh," Brannoc said softly. "Oh, you are a Vorath. I can smell it on you. That particular sourness. That particular guilt. I knew your father, child. I sat with him at the long table the night before the Crown went on. I drank with him. He had a habit of licking his lips when he was afraid. I noticed it then. I notice it in you now."
Aelis did not lick his lips. He kept his mouth closed. He kept his eyes on Brannoc's eyes, and the Voice in his chest was silent, and that silence was worse than the laughter had been, because it meant the Voice was paying attention.
Brannoc smiled at him. The smile arrived at his mouth eventually.
"You have been in the water," Brannoc said, conversationally, as though they were meeting at a reception. "You have been in the water and you have not drowned. Most children in the water drown, child. Most children in the water come up looking like wax, and we give them to the reeds, and the reeds are grateful, and the Crown is not fed. But you, child. You have come up looking like a Vorath. That is interesting. That is worth the price of a goat, at least. Perhaps the price of a bull, if the Crown is satisfied when it tastes you."
He reached out one soft, ring-laden hand and took Aelis's chin between thumb and forefinger, and turned Aelis's face toward the light, and Aelis let him, because his neck would not have obeyed him if he had told it to resist.
"Open," Brannoc said.
Aelis did not open.
Brannoc laughed, very softly, the way a man laughs at a small animal that has tried to bite him.
"The pride," he said, almost tenderly. "The Vorath pride. I have missed it. There is no pride in the marsh-lords, child. There is no pride in the river-stock. They have been broken so long they have forgotten they were ever anything else. But the Vorath were always the last to bend. That is why the Crown wanted them. That is why the Crown," and here he leaned closer, and his perfume was so strong Aelis could taste it, "wanted you."
He let go of Aelis's chin and stood, and the palanquin groaned again, and he turned to one of the bearers.
"Shackles," he said. "The good ones. The Vorath ones. And put them in a cart of the carriage, not in the pole-barge. I would like to talk with this one on the way to the Citadel. I find the prospect of a Vorath in conversation quite, quite cheering."
Aelis did not struggle when they took him from the water. He had no strength to struggle, and besides, the Voice in his chest was a steady warm weight now, and the weight did not care about shackles. The bearers laid him on a board of the cart, and the cart smelled of old iron and of something else, something older, and the children already in the cart made room for him without looking at him, the way prisoners make room for a new prisoner, and Aelis lay on his back and stared up at the sky and felt the bog drain out of him in slow, thick streams from the folds of his clothes, and the shard in his hand stayed warm.
They put shackles on him. The good ones, as Brannoc had ordered. They were of bog-iron, and they closed around his wrists with a small, wet sound, and the bog-iron knew the shard in his hand, and the shard knew the bog-iron, and the two spoke to each other in a language Aelis could feel in the marrow of his arms.
Then the cart began to move, and Brannoc's palanquin drew up alongside it, and Brannoc smiled down at Aelis as a man smiles at a fish he has just landed and intends to keep alive for a while.
"Now," Brannoc said, "you will tell me everything."
He settled the folds of his robe around him like a man settling into an armchair, and the procession moved on, and the bog closed over the place where they had been, and the sky stayed the color of a bruise, and somewhere far away, in a cave that smelled of cedar and of old smoke, Maren Vorath woke from a dream of her brother and did not know yet that she would never see him again.