The brambles released her on the third morning, or what she counted as morning by the thin grey light seeping through the canopy. Maren Blackthorn sat her mare on a ridge where the Thornwild ended in a ragged seam, the trees clutching at the sky with broken fingers of blackthorn and ash. Below her, Seravelle lay open like a torn page, its hills and hollows spread out under a sky the color of old pewter.
She had ridden for the better part of a week to reach this edge, sleeping in hollows and thickets, speaking to no one. The mare, a dappled grey she had named Grief for want of a kinder thought, had carried her without complaint through miles of tangled undergrowth where the path was more memory than ground. Now the path was gone entirely, and Maren could see why.
The border had been a fence of oak posts and iron when she last crossed it. Riders had passed through it in those days, merchants, tax men, the occasional noble with his retinue and his self-important banner. She remembered the clatter of the gate, the bored tollkeeper scratching his ear as he waved her through. Now nothing remained except a scatter of rust-stained stumps poking from a ditch filled with rainwater the color of weak tea, and beyond them, the slow rise of the Blackthorn lands under a low and colourless sky.
She urged the mare forward. The animal picked her way down the slope, hooves slipping on wet clay, and Maren felt the moment her homeland took her back. A change in the air, perhaps, or only the change in herself. The Thornwild had its own smell: wet leaf mould, the green rot of things decomposing, the faint mineral tang of bog water. Seravelle smelled of woodsmoke and turned earth and something older, something her body remembered before her mind could name it. Her throat tightened.
Three years. She had told herself she was leaving for three years, no more. Three years was a proper penance. Three years was what her mother had demanded in the letter Maren had burned without reading aloud, the letter she kept folded against her chest beneath her travelling coat, the letter whose words she had never repeated to anyone. Three years in the Thornwild, wandering the edges of the world, learning nothing, forgetting nothing. And now the three years were done, and she had come home to a country she did not recognise.
The first body hung from a wayside cross two miles beyond the broken border. Maren did not stop. She had seen too many such crosses in the Thornwild, set up by countryfolk hoping to ward off the bandits and deserters that had flooded the greenwood after the war. This one was fresher than the others, the rope still holding a faint sheen of grease, the figure inside it wrapped in a cloak she thought she recognised. She made herself look, and then she made herself keep moving.
The mare huffed beneath her, sensing her unease. Maren laid a hand on the animal's neck and felt the heat of it through the sweat-dark hair, the steady hammer of the pulse. Alive. Something was still alive. She pressed her heels gently and they went on.
By midday the rain began, soft and persistent, the kind that soaked a rider to the skin without ever seeming to fall. Maren pulled her hood lower and bent her head against it, watching the road unspool through her mare's ears. The road was barely a road now. Ruts had filled with water, the verges had been churned by hooves and boots, and once she had to swing wide to avoid the blackened wreck of a supply wagon tilted into a ditch with its axle snapped like a bone.
She thought of her father. She tried not to, and failed, as she had failed every day for three years. Cael Blackthorn had been a hard man with soft hands, the hands of a man who had held books before he held a sword, and who had only learned to hold a sword when the holding of books became dangerous. She had been a child when he taught her the shapes of letters, a girl when he sent her to apprentice with the scribes of Highmere, a woman when he rode out one autumn morning with his household guard and did not ride back. They had sent her his gauntlet, and the gauntlet had still held the warmth of a hand, which she had not been able to bear to touch.
The mare stumbled, recovered, and Maren blinked the memory away.
The Blackthorn estate announced itself first by smell. She caught it on the wet air long before she saw anything, a char so deep it had soaked into the soil itself, the ghost of timber and thatch and the contents of a larder gone up in one great hungry night. She slowed the mare. The road climbed a low rise crowned with beeches, and at the top of the rise the beeches gave way to a stretch of parkland that had once been lawn, then gravel, then ash.
The house had been of moderate size. Two storeys of grey stone, a slate roof, a walled kitchen garden, a stable block, a dovecote that had been her grandfather's pride. Maren had grown up running through these spaces with ink-stained fingers and her mother's voice chasing her to wash before supper. Now there was nothing but the foundation stones, drawn together by their own weight, and the great central chimney standing like a broken tooth above the ruin. The rain hissed on the cold stones. Somewhere a crow called, and another answered from a great distance.
She dismounted. Her legs were stiff, her knees reluctant to straighten after so many hours in the saddle. She stood for a moment with one hand on the mare's withers, breathing, looking. The grimoire in her saddlebag seemed to shift against her hip, though she knew it was only her imagination. It had no weight to speak of, that book. It had been a weight in other ways, ever since her father's man had pressed it into her hands the night before she fled into the Thornwild, with no word of explanation except a name she did not recognise.
She had carried it for three years and never opened it past the first page. The first page was blank.
The wind came down from the hills and stirred the ash at her feet. Maren let go of the mare and walked forward, slowly, as if the ground might give way beneath her. Each step crunched. She did not know what she had expected to feel, coming back. Vengeance, perhaps. Sorrow. Some clear and ringing thing she could name and set down. Instead she felt only the slow dull ache of confirmation, the same ache one feels when a wound that has been bandaged for years is finally unwrapped and found to be exactly as bad as feared.
She crossed what had been the great hall. She knew it by the position of the chimney and the shape of the hearthstone, cracked now down the middle, a great black river of soot running from its seam. The floor had been of oak boards; the boards had burned to a memory. She found the cellars only by the smell of damp and the depression in the ground, and she skirted them carefully because the ground was treacherous.
In the stable yard the mounting block still stood, half its stones tumbled, the iron ring at its top gone rusty. She paused there and laid her palm against the stone. Cold. Her mother had stood on this block to mount her palfrey, her skirts gathered in one hand, her face set in that expression Maren could never quite read, amusement or resignation or the private calculation of a woman who had married into a family she did not love. Her mother had not been at the house when it burned. Her mother had been somewhere else. Maren had never learned where, and the letter against her chest did not say.
She moved on.
The sword was at the heart of the ruin. She saw it from a distance and knew what it was before she could make out any detail, the way one knows the shape of a familiar thing by its absence or its silhouette. It stood upright in the middle of what had been the formal garden, thrust into the ashes with the hilt toward the sky, and around it the ground had been swept clean in a perfect circle, as if someone had knelt there and laboured for hours to clear away every charred fragment of stone and timber and bone.
Maren stopped. The rain fell through her hood and down the back of her neck. She stood very still, and her breath came in small white clouds she did not watch.
Her father's sword had been a longsword of Ashfell make, the hilt bound in dark leather, the pommel worked into the shape of a crow with folded wings. It had hung above the mantel in the great hall for as long as she could remember, and she had been forbidden to touch it. Her father had taken it down only twice in her life. Once when the levy was called and he rode out with his guard, and once when he rode out the morning he did not return. The sword that stood before her was the same sword, but it had been broken. The blade had been snapped a hand's width above the crossguard, and the upper portion had been driven into the earth beside the lower, so that the weapon stood like a small iron cross among the ashes.
She walked forward. Her boots left prints in the fine grey powder. The crow on the pommel had lost one eye, and the surviving eye seemed to watch her as she came. She reached out and laid her hand on the leather grip, and the grip was cold, and it did not move, and she stood there with her fingers curled around her father's sword and her father's ashes at her feet and she did not weep, because the part of her that had been able to weep had been burned out three years ago in a different fire, in a different ruin, in a grief she had carried into the greenwood and had not yet set down.
The crow in the pommel looked at her with its one good eye. Maren looked back.
"You should not have come back," she said aloud, in the measured voice she had learned in the Thornwild, the voice that did not tremble. "You knew what waited here." She paused, and her thumb moved across the broken leather. "You came anyway."
The rain went on falling. Somewhere in the dead beeches the crow called again, and she listened, and she stayed where she was, with her hand on the sword and her homeland in ruins at her feet, and the sound of the rain on the ash was the only answer she received.
She stayed until the rain thinned to mist, and the mist thinned to a kind of greyness that was almost dry. Then she loosed her fingers from the broken grip, one by one, and the cold came back into her hand as if she had been holding winter itself. She flexed the fingers once, twice, and the joints cracked softly in the silence. The crow on the pommel watched her with its single eye as she stepped back.
"I will come back for you," she said. "When I have need of iron."
She did not say when she would have need of iron. She did not say whether she would come back at all. The sword stayed where it stood, a small dark shape against the lighter ash, and she turned away from it and walked back the way she had come, through the dead beeches and into the greenwood.
The forest took her in like a river takes a dropped stone. She moved along the path she had marked on the inward journey, the blazes she had cut into the bark with the hatchet she carried, and the greenwood closed over her head, and the smell of ash faded and was replaced by the wet green smell of moss and pine and the particular cold of running water somewhere near. She walked for the rest of that day and through the night that followed, and slept for four hours in a hollow beneath an oak, with her back against the roots and her satchel under her head and her hand on the hatchet, and the forbidden book inside the satchel pressed its strange weight against her shoulderblade as if it wished her to know it was there.
By the second dawn she had crossed the ridge and begun the long descent toward the south. The country opened out beneath her, and she saw it for what it was now. Once it had been a patchwork of fields and orchards, dotted with hamlets, threaded with the silver of small rivers. Now it was a single brown and grey expanse, broken here and there by the dark teeth of unharvested copses, and the rivers ran where they pleased because no one was left to mend the banks. Smoke did not rise from anywhere. The roads were empty. The only living things she saw in the whole of that long day were a kestrel hanging motionless above a hedge, and a thin fox that watched her from a ditch and then was gone.
She had not eaten since the morning she had entered the greenwood. In her satchel she had a heel of bread, hard as a stone, and a twist of salt pork wrapped in a cabbage leaf, and she chewed a strip of the pork as she walked and let the salt sit on her tongue until it stung, and did not think about the taste of it.
It was near dusk of the third day when she came to the border village.
She knew it was a border village because she had seen its like before, in the first year of the ruin. The houses were built of the same dark stone as the hills behind them, low and mean and meant to keep out weather rather than welcome strangers. There had been twelve of them once, perhaps, ranged along a single street that ran down to a ford. There was a smithy. There had been a smithy. There was a tavern. There had been a tavern. The street itself was still there, a tongue of mud and broken cobble that ended at the ford, but the houses were roofless and the smithy had no door and the tavern had collapsed into its own cellar, and the silence that lay over the whole place was so thick she could feel it against her face like a damp cloth.
She stood at the edge of the village and listened. Nothing. No dogs. No creak of an unsettled shutter. The wind moved through the empty doorways and made a small hollow sound, as if the village were breathing through a broken tooth.
She went in.
She moved carefully along the street, her hand on the hatchet, her eyes on every shadow. The first house had been a byre, she thought, from the shape of the trough that lay on its side in the doorway. The second had been a dwelling, and there were the remains of a bedstead and a small painted box that might have held a child's toys. The third was the smithy. Inside it the great bellows had rotted to a heap of leather and rust, and the anvil still stood on its block, and beside the anvil lay a hammer with a broken haft, and on the anvil, in a scatter of old nails, lay a single horseshoe that no one had come to claim.
She left the smithy and went on. At the upper end of the street, where the village narrowed against the slope of the hill, there was a building larger than the rest, and she knew before she reached it what it was. A chapel. The door had been taken off its hinges and lay flat on the threshold, half-buried in dead leaves. Above the lintel, in carved letters that the weather had almost effaced, she could still make out the words SAINT URIEN OF THE FORD. Patron of travellers, she thought. Patron of the inns of the road. Patron of those who crossed water. She stepped over the fallen door and went in.
Inside it was darker than the street, and colder. The pews had been pulled from their places and lay in a jumble against the walls, as if someone had been looking for something beneath them, or as if the village had been gathered here in its last extremity and had not had time to put things back. The east window was gone, and the pale grey light came through it and lay on the flagstones in a single wide stripe, and in that stripe she saw the altar.
The altar was of a single stone, square and heavy, and it stood on a step of its own at the east end of the chapel. It was the kind of altar that had been hewn in the old days, before the chapels of the lowlands grew pretty, and it had the look of something that had been put there rather than built. She went up to it and laid her hand on it, and the stone was cold and dry under her palm.
At first she saw nothing. The top of the altar was bare, and the front of it was plain, and she was about to turn away when she noticed that the dust on the top had been disturbed. There was a handprint in the dust, a right hand, fingers spread, and beside it a second mark, and a third, as if someone had leaned on the altar and then stepped back, and then come again. She crouched, and brought her face close to the stone, and squinted in the grey light.
Then she saw.
The marks were not in the dust. They were in the stone. Someone had taken a chisel, or the broken edge of a file, and had carved letters into the altar, shallow and patient, and had then smeared the carving with ash and dust so that it would not catch the eye. She took the cuff of her coat and wiped the surface clean, and the letters came up out of the dark stone as if they had only been waiting to be seen.
She read them aloud, in a whisper, because the chapel was that kind of place.
TO M. WHO WILL COME LOOKING. THE SWAN HAS FLOWN BUT IS NOT FALLEN. THE DAUGHTER LIVES, AND THE KINGDOM LIVES IN HER. THE CROWN IS NOT YET LOST. YOUR FATHER WAS THE SWORD-MARSHAL OF SERAVELLE. HE WAS TAKEN IN THE FIELD AT THE HOLVER BRIDGE AND CARRIED IN IRON TO THE CAPITAL. CHANCELLOR CASSIEL RAVENSBOURNE ORDERED THE EXECUTION WITH HIS OWN MOUTH. THE MARSHAL DIED UNDER THE IRON TREE IN THE SECOND COURT OF THE CITADEL, AND THEY LET THE PEOPLE WATCH. THE HOLLOW VERGE IS NOT SEALED. GO THERE WHEN YOU HAVE READ THIS. BURN THIS LETTER AFTER YOU HAVE READ IT. V.
She read it twice. She read it a third time. Her lips moved over the words, and her breath came out in a thin white line, and the light from the empty window fell across her hands and across the carved stone and did not warm either.
She stood up. Her knees were stiff, and the cold of the flagstones had gone through her, and she did not feel either of these things. She was looking at the letters, and the letters were looking back at her in their patient chiseled way, and behind the letters she could see the thing they pointed at, the shape of it, the weight of it, and it was so heavy that for a moment she could not breathe.
The Sword-Marshal of Seravelle. Her father had been a farrier's son from a town so small it did not appear on the great maps. He had come up through the ranks because he had a way with a blade and a longer way with a horse, and he had been given his command by the old king himself, the king before the king who had been the last, and he had held the bridge at Holver for three days against the Harrowmark van and had been taken alive because a captain who owed him a debt would not shoot him in the back. She had known that much. She had not known the rest. She had not known that he had been carried in iron to the capital. She had not known that Cassiel Ravensbourne had spoken the order himself. She had not known that he had been made to die under a tree of iron in a court of stone, in front of the people he had spent his life defending.
She put her hand on the altar and the other hand on her mouth, and she stood there in the grey light, and the chapel was silent, and the village was silent, and somewhere far off a crow called once and then was silent too.
She thought of the broken sword in the ash at home, and she thought of the crow on the pommel with its one good eye, and she thought of the hand that had carved these letters, the patient hand of someone who had known where she would come looking and had left the message waiting.
She did not know yet who V. was. She thought she did. There was a name that came into her mind, and she pushed it away, because if she said the name aloud in that empty chapel she might break something that she could not mend.
She straightened. She took the sleeve of her coat again and wiped the carving clean of any dust that remained, and then she set her satchel down and unrolled it on the floor of the chapel, and she took from it a twist of oiled cloth, and inside the cloth a small flask of the kind of lamp-oil a scribe uses for the slow burning of vellum, and she poured a little of it on the altar and a little on the carved face, and she took the flint from her belt and struck it, and a spark fell, and the oil caught, and a small blue flame crawled across the letters.
She watched the letters burn.
She watched V. burn last, and she thought of the hand again, and she thought, I will find you. I will find you before the end, whatever the end is.
The flame went out. The chapel was darker than it had been, and colder. She shouldered her satchel and turned to the door, and as she passed the threshold she stopped, because on the lintel, on the inside of the lintel, where she would not have seen it from the street, there was another mark. A single letter, cut deep, the way a woodsman blazes a tree. V.
She touched it with her fingertip. The cut was fresh. The pale wood of the cut was not yet darkened by weather. Whoever had carved the letter on the altar had stood here after, and had carved this, and had then gone out into the rain or the mist, and the village had been empty since.
She stepped out of the chapel, and the wind met her, and she turned her face to the south, where the Hollow Verge lay somewhere in the dark hills beyond the ford, and the light was going, and she had not yet decided what she would do, and the decision pressed against her ribs like a second heart.
She began to walk.
south from the chapel was little more than a track, and the mist had thickened until the hedgerows were suggestions of darker dark against the dark. Maren walked with her head down and her satchel against her hip, and the broken blade of her father's sword was a cold weight against her spine where she had lashed it with a strip of leather from the chapel's broken altar rail. She had not meant to take it from the wall. She had only meant to look at it, one last time, before she decided what she would do. But her hands had known before her mind did, and the leather had parted from the nail with a small dry sound, and the blade had come away in her hands with the scabbard still attached, cracked and rotted at the seam, and she had slung it across her back without ceremony, and now it rode between her shoulders like a second spine.
She came to the ford at moonrise. The water was high from the day's rain, and it ran black over the stones, and she could hear it before she could see it, a low continuous sound like someone speaking in a language just beyond her hearing. On the far bank, under a thorn tree that had grown crooked from the wind, a roan horse stood with its head down and its ears forward, watching her. It was not her horse. It had no saddle. It had a rope halter knotted at the jaw, the kind a drover uses, and its ribs showed beneath a coat the colour of autumn bracken. Maren stopped at the water's edge and looked at it, and the horse looked at her, and for a long moment neither of them moved.
"If you are a gift," she said, "I will take you. If you are a test, I will take you anyway."
She crossed the ford with her boots in her hands and her satchel held above her head, and the water was colder than she expected, a cold that climbed her calves and settled in her knees, and when she stepped onto the far bank her teeth were chattering and her fingers were white. The roan did not bolt. It turned its head and watched her come, and when she held out her hand it breathed into her palm, a warm soft gust that smelled of wet grass and old sweat. She pressed her forehead to its muzzle for a moment, just a moment, and the horse's breath stirred her hair, and then she found the stirrup leather that had been looped over the saddle horn of some forgotten rider, and she used it as a lead, and she walked.
She walked until the track widened into a road, and then she walked until the road forked, and then she stopped.
The left fork ran southeast, toward the hills and the Hollow Verge and the place where the chapel's letter had been cut into the lintel. The right fork ran south and west, along the river, toward the lowlands and the distant smudge of she had seen from the chapel tower, the city she had refused to name. Caerwynn. The occupied capital. The place where her father's banner had hung from the gatehouse until the Ashfall, and where it hung no longer.
Maren stood at the fork with the roan's lead in her hand and the broken blade cold against her back, and she thought of the hand on the altar, the hand with the ring, the hand that had not been her father's. She thought of the letter V. She thought of the princess whose name she had only learned in the last year, from a smuggled broadsheet that had passed through three hands before it reached the Blackthorn kitchen: Aelith Seraine, last of the Seraine line, vanished on the night of the Ashfall, presumed dead, presumed buried in one of the mass graves outside the city walls. Maren had read the broadsheet and folded it and put it in the fire, and she had not spoken of it, and she had not been able to stop thinking of it since.
The roan shifted its weight and blew. Maren looked at it.
"I am going south," she said. "To Caerwynn. To the city. To find a princess who is probably dead, for a queen who is almost certainly dead, on a sword that is broken. And I do not know why I am telling you this, because you are a horse."
The horse did not answer. Maren took the right fork.
She walked until the road hardened and the hedgerows fell away and the land opened into the dark plains of the river valley, and then she stopped again, and this time she took the broken blade from her back and laid it across her palms. The scabbard was rotted and the leather wrappings were slack, and the blade itself was sheared three inches above the hilt, a clean break that had healed into rust. Her father had carried this sword for thirty years. He had carried it into the Ashfall, and he had not carried it out, and she had taken it from the wall of the chapel in the village where he had last been seen alive, and she had carried it for seven years without unsheathing it, because she did not want to see the break, because the break was the moment he stopped being a soldier and became a memory.
She knelt in the road. The roan stood over her like a patient witness. She drew the blade from the rotted scabbard, and the steel was dark with tarnish but the edge was still there, still bright enough to catch the moonlight. She held it across her palms, the broken end toward her heart, and she bowed her head until her forehead nearly touched the rust.
"I, Maren Blackthorn, daughter of Callum Blackthorn and Aine Blackthorn, of the broken house and the broken name," she said, and her voice was small in the dark, "do swear on this blade, which is my father's and is broken, that I will go to Caerwynn. That I will find the princess Aelith Seraine if she lives, and if she does not live I will find what remains of her. That I will not turn aside for any danger that is less than death, and that if death comes for me I will meet it standing, with this blade in my hand if I can, and with this blade in my heart if I cannot."
She paused. The wind moved in the grass beside the road, and the roan stamped once.
"I swear it," she said. "By the river and the road. By the letter V. By the hand I saw. By my mother's name, which she gave me before she gave me breath. I swear it, and I will not unswear it, and if I break it may the blade mend and cut me with its own edge."
She kissed the rust. It tasted of old iron and river water. She slid the blade back into the scabbard, and the scabbard held, barely, and she stood, and she took the leather strip from her belt and she bound the sword across her back, high and tight, the hilt rising above her left shoulder and the broken tip resting against her right hip. Then she took her mother's traveling cloak from the satchel and shook it out and swung it over her shoulders, and the cloak fell around her like a second skin, dark grey wool smelling of cedar and the cold pantry where it had been stored, and the sword disappeared beneath it, hidden, the shape of it only a faint ridge against the cloth.
She led the roan to a fence post at the roadside and climbed onto its back with nothing but the halter rope to hold, and the horse stood steady beneath her, and she turned its head to the south, and she pressed her heels to its sides.
The roan moved.
They went at a walk first, because the road was uncertain and the horse was thin and Maren did not know its stride. Then, as the road straightened and the footing firmed, she let the pace increase to a trot, and the trot jarred through her hips and up into her teeth, and she bore it because she had to, because the night was not getting younger and the city was not getting closer. The moon rose higher and the mist fell away behind them, and the land opened out into the great plain of the Seravelle heartland, and somewhere ahead, beyond the dark folds of the hills, the spires of Caerwynn caught the moonlight like the points of broken swords.
She rode for an hour, and the road was empty. She rode for two, and a fox crossed ahead of them and stood in the lantern-light of the moon and watched them pass. She rode for three, and the roan began to tire, and she slowed to a walk and let it blow, and she herself was tired in a way that had nothing to do with her body. The oath sat on her shoulders like a physical weight. She could feel it between her shoulder blades where the broken blade rode, and she could feel it in her mouth where the words still tasted of iron.
She thought of the V. She thought of the hand. She thought of the broadsheet, and the name Aelith Seraine, and the way her mother had cried the night she had burned it, quietly, in the kitchen, with her hands over her face and her shoulders shaking, and Maren had not known then why her mother was crying, and she had been afraid to ask, and she had never asked, and now her mother was dead and the question was buried with her.
The road crested a low rise, and below her the plain stretched away to the south, and at the horizon, where the sky met the land in a line of darker dark, she saw the first lights of Caerwynn. They were small and far away, and they flickered in the haze of distance, and they did not look like the lights of a city at peace. They looked like the lights of a city that was holding its breath.
Maren stopped the roan at the crest and sat for a moment in the silence. The wind had died. The only sound was the horse's breathing and the faint creak of leather, and the faint, very faint, sound of bells from somewhere ahead, the curfew bells of the occupied city, ringing the hour.
She touched the hilt of the broken blade beneath her mother's cloak. The leather was warm from her body. The oath was still on her tongue.
"South, then," she said, to the horse, to the dark, to the V she carried in her memory. "South, and on, and until the end."
She pressed her heels, and the roan moved, and the lights of Caerwynn grew slowly larger against the sky, and the bells went on ringing, and the night went on, and Maren Blackthorn rode toward the city her father had died to defend, on a broken sword and a borrowed horse, under a vow she could never unsay.