The Ember Beneath the Mountain: Through The Whisperwood

The first bones of the Whisperwood appeared as a thinning in the fog. Aldric raised one scarred hand, and the column behind him went still.

For a long moment there was nothing but the hush of mountain air pressing against pine and the distant complaint of a raven somewhere above the canopy. Then, as the three of them watched, a curl of mist drew itself between two sentinel oaks, and within its pale folds a voice spoke.

It was not a voice any of them recognized. It was a woman's, low and unhurried, with the particular cadence of a market seller calling prices across a crowded street.

"Three for a copper, two for a silver, good folk, step closer now."

The sound was so clear that Wren's head turned, her quill hand twitching at her belt as though she might have been expected to copy it down. Maeve's fingers found her ashwood pendant and held it.

The trees.

The old thing Maeve's grandmother Eira had warned about came back to Aldric in pieces: the way the wood swallowed grief and gave back voices, the way a man could walk in certain of his name and walk out answering to strangers. He had promised himself, two decades past, that no child of his would set foot past the first marker stones.

Life, it seemed, had other plans.

"We go through," he said, and his voice came out low and rough, the mountain burr he had tried so hard to soften in council chambers thickening around the edges. "Single file. Wren, behind me. Maeve, watch our backs."

"And if the wood tries to talk to us?" Wren asked, and there was a brittle quip somewhere underneath the words that she swallowed before it could escape. "If it gets, you know. Persuasive."

Aldric did not answer her with words. He simply started walking.

The first oaks gave way to older growth, the canopy thickening above until the sun became a suggestion, a memory of warmth rather than the thing itself. The undergrowth shifted as they passed: bright rowan saplings crowded close on either side of the path, their pale bark seeming to lean inward, and somewhere beneath the bracken the soft carpet of last autumn's leaves whispered under their boots.

A half-hour in, the first fragment returned.

It came from a birch to their left, the words spilling out like water from a cracked jug.

"Tell her I waited. Tell her I would have waited longer. I had the rope ready and a lamp in the window. Tell her."

Aldric's stride did not falter. Beside him, Maeve's breath caught, just once, and he saw her lips move around what might have been a prayer or might have been a curse. He kept his gaze fixed on the path.

"Do not listen to the content," he said, low enough that the words were meant for them alone. "Listen to the wood. The wood will tell you when it is playing tricks and when it has nothing left to say."

"How can you tell the difference?" Wren's voice came from behind him, smaller now than it had been on the trail.

"By the silence that follows."

For a stretch, the wood obliged him. They walked in quiet, only the soft crush of their boots and the occasional far-off complaint of a raven to mark the passing of time. Wren kept her eyes on the path with the fixed attention of a child trying not to look at the thing under the bed. Maeve's gaze drifted, the way a healer's gaze drifts, taking in what she could: the wound patterns in the bark, the place where a lightning strike had peeled a strip of silver from a nearby trunk, the dark comma of dried sap on a low branch where something had bled and not healed.

Then the wood spoke again, and this time the voice was a man's, young, with the lilting accent of the southern valleys.

"I told her it would be quick. I told her not to be afraid. I told her she wouldn't feel a thing."

Wren made a small sound in her throat. Aldric heard it and heard, too, the way her pace quickened until she was almost at his shoulder.

"Wren."

"I am fine." The words came out in a single tight knot. "It is just. The phrasing. It is a very specific phrasing."

"It is nothing the wood has not heard a thousand times."

"That does not make it better."

"No," Aldric said. "It does not."

They walked on, and the wood settled into a longer silence, as if satisfied with what it had stirred. The path wound between trunks that grew older and stranger the deeper they went, until Aldric began to recognize the way the roots humped up from the earth like the knuckles of buried hands. He had been through this wood twice before, once at his father's side and once alone, and both times he had felt the same crawling attention along the back of his neck.

Something in the Whisperwood was watching them.

It had been watching every traveler since the first settler had died here, he supposed, though he did not allow himself the comfort of the thought. The dead did not watch. The dead simply repeated, on and on, until the wood itself grew tired of their voices.

He had told his wife, on the night she had died, that he would keep the ember safe until their daughter was grown and the borders were quiet. He had not told her, because he had not known, that the borders would never be quiet again, or that the daughter she had borne him would be taken by a winter fever before her third winter, or that the ember would still be here, patient as a held breath, when his beard had gone fully grey.

Some things, he thought, the wood would have liked to have heard him say.

Maeve, who had been walking in silence for some time, slowed until she was level with him. The ashwood pendant swung gently against her chest, and he saw that her fingers, when she removed them from it, had gone pale at the tips.

"My grandmother used to say that the trees in this wood were older than the hold itself," she offered, and her voice had the soft lilt of the western vales, the warmth of peat smoke and slow-burning fires. "She said they were here before the first stones were laid, and that they would be here after the last stone fell."

"Your grandmother," Aldric said, "said many things."

"She did."

"Most of them, I took with a grain of salt."

"Aye, I imagine you did." Maeve's mouth curved at the corner. "And yet here you are, walking through her wood, with her granddaughter at your side and no idea what waits on the other side."

"I have an idea."

"Then you have more than I do, my lord."

Ahead, the path narrowed between two ancient yews whose roots had grown together in a single knotted arch. Wren, who had been studying the way the bark peeled in long curling strips, looked up with the expression of someone who has just realized that the joke was on her all along.

"Should we, ah." She gestured at the arch. "Duck, or. Is there a passage that goes around?"

"Through," Aldric said.

"And if the trees decide to close?"

"Then we will have an interesting story to tell."

"I do not want an interesting story." Wren's voice had gone thin and bright, the way a wire goes thin and bright before it snaps. "I want to be uninteresting. I want to be forgettable. I want to walk through this wood and have nothing interesting happen to me at all."

Maeve laughed, low and brief. "There is a charm for that, girl. Walk under a ladder and a black cat at the same time."

"Maeve," Aldric said.

"I am only teasing her."

"You are doing more than that."

Maeve inclined her head, a small concession. Her gaze lingered on Wren for a moment, taking in the tension in her jaw and the way her fingers had gone white around the strap of her satchel, and something in her expression softened.

"We will be through the wood by dusk," she said, more gently. "The path is not long, and the old voices thin out the closer you get to the far edge."

"And what waits on the far edge?"

Maeve and Aldric exchanged a look.

"A problem," Aldric said, after a moment, "that we will worry about when we reach it."

He ducked beneath the arch of roots, and the wood swallowed them.

The air inside was colder than the air outside, in the way that deep cellars are colder than the kitchens above them. Wren felt the change first as a prickle along her forearms, then as a weight across her shoulders, as though someone had laid a damp cloak across her without her noticing.

She kept her eyes on Aldric's broad back and tried, as she had been taught in the lowland schools of the scribing art, to record what she saw in neutral terms. Path: descending. Canopy: complete. Light: filtered through leaves of indeterminate species. Companions: one old lord who did not like her, one hedge-witch who did.

She had been writing her observations in the small leather-bound journal she kept at her belt, copying them in the cipher her master had taught her, when the wood spoke again.

It came from a rowan to her right, the words clear as a bell struck in an empty room.

"You promised," the tree said, in a young man's voice, the vowels worn smooth by some southern dialect. "You promised you would come back. You said you would come back. You said."

Wren's hand froze over the page.

The voice went on, cycling through the same handful of phrases, each one a little more frayed than the last, the way a rope frays when it is pulled too tight against a stone. Wren realized, after a moment, that she had been holding her breath, and that when she let it out it came out in a thin whistle that she was almost certain the wood had heard.

She looked up. Aldric had stopped walking and was looking back at her, his expression unreadable in the dim light.

"It was a long time ago," he said.

"How can you tell?"

"Because he is using the wrong words."

Wren blinked. "The wrong words?"

"The ones who died recently use the words of the living. The ones who have been here a long time use only the words the wood remembers." He nodded, once, toward the rowan. "That young man has been here a long time."

"How long?"

"Long enough that he has forgotten what he was waiting for."

The wood gave a sound then, not quite a sigh and not quite a creak, somewhere between the two. Maeve, who had been listening with her head tilted, made a small noise in her throat.

"The wood is tired," she said.

"Tired?"

"Of its own grief." Maeve's fingers found her pendant again. "It has held so much of it, over the years, that it has begun to fold it back on itself. That is why the voices thin out near the far edge. There is nothing left of them to give."

Aldric looked at her for a long moment. Then he turned and started along it again, his pace a little slower than before.

They walked in silence for a time, and the wood seemed to draw breath around them, listening.

Then, from a holly to their left, a new voice spoke up. It was an old woman's voice, cracked and low, with the particular rhythm of a story being told to a child.

"And when the great lord came to the wood, he carried his grief in his left pocket and his duty in his right. And the wood said to him, which will you set down first? And the great lord said, neither. And the wood said, then you will carry them both until you fall. And the great lord."

The voice stopped.

Maeve's hand had gone to the bark of the holly. Her fingers rested there for a long moment, then drew back as though the wood had burned her.

"My grandmother," she said, very quietly. "That was my grandmother's voice."

Aldric stopped walking.

He turned, slowly, and looked at her. The look went on a beat longer than it needed to, and in that beat Wren saw something pass between them that she did not have a name for.

"Eira came through here," Aldric said. It was not a question.

"Aye." Maeve's voice was soft. "She came through here, when she was a girl, on her way to serve your house. She told me once that the wood had spoken to her, and that she had answered."

"What did the wood say?"

"That she had set her grief down too early." Maeve's gaze drifted to the path ahead. "And that she would have to go back for it, one day, when the great lord came to fetch her."

Wren looked from one of them to the other.

"I feel," she said, after a moment, "as though I have walked into the middle of someone else's story."

"You have," Aldric said. He started walking again, his pace a little slower, a little more deliberate. "Stay close. The wood will start speaking to you, soon, if it has not already."

"It has not."

"Then it will."

The path began, very gradually, to climb. The canopy thinned a little, and the light, when it came through, had the long amber slant of late afternoon. Wren felt her shoulders loosen, just slightly, at the thought of the far edge.

Then, from a yew to her left, a voice spoke her name.

"Wren Halloway."

It was her own voice. The exact pitch, the exact cadence, the exact little catch on the second syllable of her surname that she had never been able to train out.

"Wren Halloway, you should not be here."

She stopped walking.

Aldric, a few paces ahead, stopped as well. He did not turn around.

"Do not answer it," he said.

"But." Wren's voice came out smaller than she had meant it to. "It knows my name."

"The wood knows many things. It does not know what to do with any of them."

The wood, in her own voice, said, "Wren Halloway, you are not supposed to be here. You are supposed to be at your desk. You are supposed to be copying the ledgers. You are supposed to be."

"Walk," Aldric said. "Now."

Wren walked.

The wood kept speaking, in her voice, cycling through every anxious thought she had ever had about her place in the world. It knew the cadence of her doubts. It knew the precise shade of her worry. She kept her eyes on Aldric's back and tried to remember, as her master had taught her, to transcribe only what she could verify.

She could not verify any of this.

Maeve fell in beside her, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. The hedge-witch's hand found Wren's elbow and squeezed, once, briefly, before letting go.

"It is only the wood," Maeve said. "It has no idea who you are. It is using your voice because it is the voice it has closest to hand."

"I know."

"Then why are you shaking?"

Wren realized, after a moment, that she was.

"Because," she said, "it is using the right words."

Maeve's hand found her elbow again, and this time it did not let go.

The wood, in her own voice, said, "Wren Halloway, you are not supposed to be here. You are supposed to be at your desk. You are supposed to be copying the ledgers. You are supposed to be."

"Walk," Aldric said. "Now."

Wren walked.

The wood kept speaking, in her voice, cycling through every anxious thought she had ever had about her place in the world. It knew the cadence of her doubts. It knew the precise shade of her worry. She kept her eyes on Aldric's back and tried to remember, as her master had taught her, to transcribe only what she could verify.

She could not verify any of this.

Maeve fell in beside her, close enough that their shoulders almost touched. The hedge-witch's hand found Wren's elbow and squeezed, once, briefly, before letting go.

"It is only the wood," Maeve said. "It has no idea who you are. It is using your voice because it is the voice it has closest to hand."

"I know."

"Then why are you shaking?"

Wren realized, after a moment, that she was.

"Because," she said, "it is using the right words."

Maeve's hand found her elbow again, and this time it did not let go.

They walked for what felt like an hour, though the angle of the light through the canopy did not change. Wren counted her steps, then stopped counting when the number climbed past four hundred and the trees ahead of her began to repeat. The same split trunk appeared on her left for the third time, its heartwood dark and wet as a wound.

She did not mention it. Aldric had not slowed.

The smell of the wood had changed, somewhere in the last quarter hour. The green, living scent of moss and birch sap had thinned, replaced by something older and less pleasant, the iron-and-rot perfume of a place where blood had dried into the soil and never quite washed away. Wren tasted copper at the back of her throat, though she had not bitten her cheek.

Maeve felt it too. The hedge-witch's fingers tightened on Wren's arm, and her lips moved in a small, silent word that Wren could not read.

"Stop," Aldric said.

He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. Wren stopped, and Maeve stopped, and for a long moment the only sound was the wood breathing around them, a low exhalation of wind through the upper boughs.

"There," Aldric said, quieter.

He was pointing, with the blade of his axe, toward a stand of birches on the right of the path. Between the white trunks, half-propped against a fallen log, a figure sat slumped in a way that Wren's first glance read as a scarecrow, and her second glance read as a man.

He was elven. Wren knew this by the ears, which were long and tapered where they emerged from the matted fall of his dark hair, and by the way his legs were folded under him, at an angle that would have cramped a human's joints past bearing. He wore the green and brown of a deep-wood ranger, the leather cracked and dark with what might have been mud. The longbow across his knees had a broken upper limb. A short sword, elven-wrought, jutted from the earth beside him, point down, as though he had planted it there to keep from falling over.

He was very still. The stillness of a thing that no longer has the strength to pretend it is moving.

"Aldric Vance," the elf said. His voice was a cracked thing, a dry leaf skittering over stone, but the accent beneath it was of the old forests, formal and distant. "I had hoped I would die before saying that name to a stranger. The wood is full of strangers now, and I am out of friends to consult."

Aldric lowered his axe, slowly, and rested the head of it on the ground. "Who sent you, Caelith Veyr?"

The elf smiled. It was not a pleasant expression. It pulled at a wound on his face that Wren had not noticed until that moment, a long gash across the cheekbone, sealed with a blackened crust that was not quite a scab.

"No one sent me. My father does not send children to do the work of men, and I am no longer a child, though he pretends otherwise. I came on my own. I came to warn you."

"Warn me of what?"

Caelith Veyr lifted one hand. The fingers would not fully extend. They trembled as he held them up, showing them to Aldric, and Wren saw that the tips of three of them were black to the first knuckle, the skin shrunken and dead-looking as though they had been held too long in a candle flame.

"Of him," Caelith said. "The pale knight. He has taken the Ember of Vael, and he has taken the Ember of the Marsh, and he has taken three lesser shards that I will not name, because their names are not for any ear but his. He is hunting. He hunts those who carry the embers, or who have touched them, or who are even rumored to have touched them. He is systematic, Lord Vance. He is thorough. And he is close."

Maeve stepped forward, drawing Wren with her, and crouched beside the elf. She did not touch him. She studied his hand, his face, the angle of his head against the log, with the careful attention of a woman counting the cost of a thing.

"Can you walk?" she asked.

"Can I walk," Caelith repeated. "An interesting question. I can take three steps before my legs will no longer hold me. I can take them very well, if I am given a wall to lean on. But the pale knight does not give his quarry walls."

Maeve looked up at Aldric. The look said what neither of them spoke aloud, that they could not leave him here, and they could not take him with them, and the morning was not yet half spent.

Aldric crossed to the fallen log and lowered himself onto it, his back to the elf, his axe across his knees. He did not look at Caelith. He looked at the trees, at the path, at the thin slant of light that was the only proof the sun was still above them.

"Tell me about the knight," he said. "Tell me his face, his armor, his horse if he has one. Tell me what he asked you, and what you told him."

Caelith laughed. The laugh turned into a cough, and the cough turned into a silence that Wren read as the careful management of pain.

"I will tell you what I can," he said, when the silence had passed. "For a price."

"There is no price," Aldric said, not turning around. "I do not trade with the Veyr. Your family has not been honest with mine since before my grandfather took the hold."

"Then your grandfather was a fool," Caelith said, and there was no malice in it, only a sort of tired accuracy. "And his grandfather before him, and his before that. But I am not my family, Lord Vance. I am what my family has made of me, which is a tool, and a broken one at that. I will tell you about the knight because it suits me to tell you. I will not ask for anything in return except to be permitted to die in a place where the wood is not listening."

"The wood is always listening," Maeve said, quietly.

"Yes," Caelith said. "That is the trouble with woods."

Wren sat down on the path, because her legs had decided for her that standing was no longer a thing she wished to do. The forest floor was damp beneath her. She could feel the cold of it through her skirts. She folded her hands in her lap to keep them from trembling, and she listened.

Caelith Veyr spoke in short, careful sentences, as though each word cost him something he could not spare. The pale knight rode a grey destrier, he said, with no markings on its tack, and the knight himself wore plate armor the color of old bone, without device or sigil. He did not give his name. He did not give any name. He asked his questions, and he received his answers, and where the answers were not given, he took them anyway, and the taking left a mark on the air that Caelith could still feel against his skin, a pressure, a presence.

"He is not a man," Caelith said. "I do not know what he is. He speaks the common tongue with the accent of somewhere I have never been, and he has not eaten in my presence, and he has not slept. He moves as the dead move, when the dead have a purpose. He is hunting your House, Lord Vance. I do not know why. I only know that he has killed four of the smaller embers already, and that he is on a road that bends in this direction."

"Four," Aldric said.

"Four that I know of. There may be more. The shards do not announce themselves when they are extinguished. They simply go out, and the world is a little colder for it, and no one notices until the crops fail."

Maeve had moved during the telling. She had a small leather wallet open on her knee, and she was grinding something in a stone cup with the end of a stick. The smell of it reached Wren a moment later, sharp and herbal, the green scent of a poultice made for wounds that would not close of their own accord.

"Give me your hand," Maeve said, to Caelith. "The blackened one. I will not make it better, but I will make it slower."

"Why?"

"Because the wood is listening, and I would rather it did not hear you die in my presence. I am stubborn about such things."

Caelith extended the hand. Maeve worked in silence, her fingers deft and careful, the poultice going on in thin layers, then a wrapping of clean linen from a pocket in her coat. The elf watched her with the same distant attention he had given the trees, and when she was done he flexed the hand once, twice, and looked at her as though he had not expected to see it move.

"I am in your debt," he said.

"You are not," Maeve said. "You are in my inconvenience, which is a different thing entirely."

Caelith made a sound that might have been a laugh, in a throat that had forgotten how to make one. Then he reached into the inner pocket of his coat, and drew out a small object wrapped in a leaf, and held it out, not to Maeve, but to Aldric.

"Take it," he said. "I will not need it where I am going, and you will."

Aldric turned, finally, and looked at the elf. His face, which had been set in the careful blankness of a man who did not intend to be surprised, shifted by a degree. Not shock. Recognition. The look of a man who had seen a thing before, in another hand, in another year, and had hoped never to see it again.

He took the leaf-wrapped object and unfolded it without speaking. Inside was a whistle, carved from a single length of bone, no longer than his thumb. It was old. The carving on it was old, the sinuous interlocking lines of a script Wren did not recognize, the kind of script that had no letters because the people who wrote it had not needed them. A warm breath moved through the wood as Aldric uncovered it, faint and directionless, as though the bone remembered a living throat.

"My grandmother made that," Aldric said.

"Yes," Caelith said. "Eira. Before she left your service. Before she went to live with my father's enemies. Before my father broke her mind apart looking for what she would not give him. It is the last of the three, Lord Vance. I have carried it for six years, waiting for a reason to use it. The pale knight is that reason. Blow it, when you are ready, and the wood will answer. I cannot promise you what answer you will get. The wood is not reliable. But it will answer."

Aldric closed his hand around the whistle. The bone disappeared into his fist, and for a moment Wren thought she saw a faint light between his fingers, the color of a hearth at the end of a long day. Then his hand closed fully, and the light was gone, and he was just an old man sitting on a log, holding a small thing.

"Why did you bring it to me?" Aldric asked. "Why not keep it. Why not use it yourself, to buy your way clear of him."

"Because," Caelith said, and for the first time his voice was not careful, not measured, not the clipped aristocratic diction of the Veyr. It was the voice of a young man who had been very tired for a very long time, and was now, at last, being given permission to stop. "Because I have been running from my family's work for six years, and I am tired, and the knight is three days behind me, and I would rather the whistle go to a man who will use it for a thing that is not his family's hunger. I would rather it go to a man who might, in some small way, undo what the Veyr have done."

He looked at Aldric. The look was steady, and unblinking, and very young.

"Use it well, Lord Vance."

Aldric put the whistle into the inner pocket of his coat, the one over his heart, and did not speak. Maeve bowed her head. Wren, sitting on the cold ground with her hands folded, found that there were tears on her face, and did not know when they had arrived there, and did not wipe them away.

Caelith Veyr closed his eyes. He folded his hands in his lap, the wrapped one on top of the unwrapped, and he settled himself against the log with the careful dignity of a man who had been taught, from childhood, how to die well.

The wood was silent around them. The trees, for once, did not breathe. The light through the canopy was the color of old parchment, and the air tasted of iron and birch and the faint, sweet thread of a thing that had been burning for a very long time, far away, in a hold on a mountainside that none of them might ever see again.

The merchant's body lay where it had fallen, undisturbed by any hand, but the cart was gone. Track marks ran south along the old goat path, and the broken harness strap had been coiled neatly and left upon the cairn. Someone had taken the cart, and the small mule that had drawn it, and had left the dead man with a courtesy.

That courtesy was the coldest thing Aldric had seen in forty years of cold weather.

Maeve knelt by the cart's empty track and pressed her fingers to the mud. "Wheels," she said softly. "The hand that held them was shaking. See how the ruts wobble. Whoever took the cart was no driver. A child, perhaps. Or a man newly woken from a wound."

Wren moved along the cart path south, and after fifty paces she stopped. The trees had opened into a small clearing, and in the center of the clearing a man sat upon a fallen trunk with his back to them, and he was humming a lowland song that Aldric's mother had used to sing, in the kitchen, in the years before the keep.

He was a thin man, dark-haired, in the remains of what had once been a lord's house-jacket. His hands, when he turned, were slender and precise, and he did not flinch at the sight of them. "I am Glain," he said, "of the household of Veyr Malachai. I was the cart-driver of the man you found. I was told to drive, and to say nothing, and I said nothing for two years, and when my lord was killed I took the cart because it was the only thing left I knew how to do with my hands."

He looked at Caelith Veyr, who had gone very still.

"I knew your father, young lord. I drove him twice, to the high moors, when he went to bind what should not have been bound. I said nothing then. I say something now because my lord is dead and there is no one left to forbid me."

Aldric stepped into the clearing. "What did Veyr Malachai bind upon the high moors?"

Glain's gaze did not waver. "There is a place above the treeline, a half-day's walk to the great north, where the snow never lies either, even in summer. There are stones there, set in a ring, older than the hold. Your family knew of them, Lord Vance. Your great-grandmother made a pact with them. She was the last of your line to keep it. After her, the Veyr came, and the Veyr were hungry, and the pact was broken, and the stones began to weep."

Maeve's face had gone pale. "The black tears," she said, very softly. "I have seen them on the moors, in summer. I thought they were tar."

"They are not tar, mistress." Glain looked at his own slender hands. "They are what the stones weep when the pact is broken. They are what the Veyr have been bottling, for thirty years, to sell to the lowland courts who do not know what they are buying. The pact was for the holding of the ember. The ember is the heart of the mountain. When the Veyr bottled the tears, they began to pull at the heart. They have been pulling for thirty years. The mountain has been answering for thirty years. That is why the birds have fallen silent."

The wood was silent around them. The trees did not breathe.

Caelith Veyr had sat down upon a stone, and his wrapped hand was in his lap, and his face was the face of a young man who had been given a thing he did not want and could not put down. "I did not know," he said, to no one, to the clearing, to the cold air. "I knew my father was ambitious. I knew he was cruel. I did not know the mountain was a thing that could be pulled at, like a tooth."

"It can be pulled at, young lord." Glain's voice was very even. "It has been pulled at. The ember is loose in its bed. If the pact is not renewed, the ember will rise, and the mountain will open, and the hold will fall, and all the lowland towns that the Veyr have sold their bottled tears to will burn in their cellars."

Aldric felt the whistle against his chest. It was not warm. It was not cold. It was a thing that waited, as a key waits, or as a question waits to be answered.

He looked at Maeve. He looked at Wren. He looked at Caelith Veyr, who had closed his eyes again, and at Glain, who was watching him with the patience of a man who had delivered his message and was now content to be dismissed.

"The pact was my great-grandmother's," Aldric said. "I have none of her blood in me save my own, and I am an old man. Will the stones accept me?"

Glain shook his head. "The stones do not accept blood, Lord Vance. They accept only a hand that knows the old words, and a heart that is not hungry. Your great-grandmother had both. The Veyr had neither. The Drust twins, in the hold below, have one of them. The whistle in your pocket holds the other."

Aldric put his hand against his chest. He felt the shape of the whistle through the cloth, and the shape of his own ribs beneath, and the slow beat of his heart against the palm.

"I am an old man," he said again. "I am tired. I have held the border for forty years, and I have not been a good lord, and I have not been a kind father, and I have not been any of the things that the holding of a pact requires."

Maeve stepped forward. "Aldric." Her voice was very soft. "You do not have to be any of those things. You only have to be the man who carries the whistle to the stones, and who knows the old words when he gets there."

"I do not know the old words."

"Eira knew them." Maeve's eyes were bright. "Eira taught them to me. Eira taught them to every healer in the Rowan line, for seven generations, though we did not know why. I know the words, Aldric. I will walk with you to the stones."

Wren stood up from the cart track. "I am coming with you," she said, in her flat lowland voice. "I am coming because I carried a coded ledger for two years without knowing what was in it, and I owe the people of the lowland towns a sight of what was being done to them."

Caelith Veyr opened his eyes. "And I," he said, "am coming because the Veyr broke the pact, and the Veyr must be the ones to beg the stones to accept it again. I am not my father. I will not be my father. I will kneel upon the snow and say the words my father would not say, and if the stones do not accept me, then I will die upon the snow, and the debt will be paid in part."

Glain inclined his head. "I will take the cart back to the hold, Lord Vance. I will tell Iola and Sythara that you go north. I will tell them to mind the borders. I will tell them the knight is three days behind, and that they must hold the pass for the three days it takes you to reach the stones."

Aldric looked at the wood around them. The wood was silent. The light through the canopy was the color of old parchment, and the air tasted of iron and birch and the faint, sweet thread of a thing that had been burning for a very long time, far away, in a hold on a mountainside that none of them might ever see again.

He turned north. The trees, at last, parted for him, and the path rose before him like a thing that had been waiting.

They walked north. The wood grew older around them. The birches gave way to rowans, and the rowans to bare rock, and the bare rock to the long grey sweep of the high moors, where the snow lay in patches even in the heart of summer. The wind came down from the high places, and it tasted of stone and of the thin, cold thread of a thing that had been weeping for thirty years.

Caelith Veyr walked beside Aldric in silence, his wrapped hand in his pocket, his face turned to the north. Maeve walked behind them, her lips moving in the old words, the words of the Rowan line, the words that Eira had taught her in a kitchen in the village when Maeve had been a girl of nine and had not known why the words mattered. Wren walked beside Maeve, and after a time she began to mouth them too, though she did not know the lowland tongue they came from, and did not know what they meant, and only knew that the saying of them was a kind of prayer.

The stones rose before them at last. They were set in a ring, seven of them, taller than a man, of a black stone that was not the black of obsidian, nor the black of iron, but a deeper black, a black that seemed to drink the light. They were wet, even in the dry air of the high moors, and the wetness was not water, and it was not tar. It was thicker than water, and darker than tar, and it wept, slowly, from a seam in each stone that ran from the crown to the ground.

Maeve stopped at the edge of the ring. Her face was white. "The tears," she said. "The black tears of the stones."

Aldric stepped into the ring. The ground beneath his boots was warm, though the air was cold, and the warmth was not the warmth of a hearth, nor the warmth of the sun. It was the warmth of a thing that had been banked for a very long time, and that knew it was being approached.

He took the whistle from his pocket. It lay in his palm, a small thing of pale wood and tarnished silver, and it did not warm, and it did not glow. It waited.

He put it to his lips.

He did not know what note to blow. He had never been taught. He had never, in forty years of holding the ember secret, thought to ask what note the whistle was tuned to, or whether it had been tuned at all. He had thought of it as a key. He had thought of it as a thing that would open a door when the door was ready to be opened.

He blew, softly, the note that Eira had taught Maeve, the note of the Rowan line, the note that was not a note at all but a shape in the air.

The stones answered.

The seam in each stone widened, and the black tears flowed faster, and the warmth in the ground rose, and the air above the ring took on a faint, sweet thread of a smell that Aldric had not smelled since his great-grandmother's kitchen, a smell of rowan and of iron and of a thing that burned without consuming.

The ember rose.