The wind off the Hollowfen cut through Marek Halloran's cloak like a blade honed on a wet stone, and he hunched his shoulders against it as he climbed. His boots found the rungs of the frozen watchtower by memory, each iron bar crusted with frost so thick his fingers stuck to the metal if he held on too long. The cold smelled of peat and stagnant water, a sour, vegetal reek that rose from the marshes below and clung to everything in Ashenvale Keep. Above him, the night sky churned with low clouds, and the half-moon gave just enough pale light to see the lattice of the ancient tower.
The boundary lanterns lined the topmost platform, twelve iron frames set at intervals around the circular railing. Each lantern held a reservoir of oil and a wick that had burned, according to Old Tomas's histories, for three hundred years without faltering. The flames were supposed to be yellow-orange, steady, warm. They were supposed to keep the mist from rolling up the slopes of the Keep and smothering the villages in the valley below. Marek's father had lit them every night for thirty years. His grandfather before him. His great-grandfather before that. And now, at sixteen, with his father buried under a frost-hardened cairn on the eastern hill, Marek Halloran carried the taper and the flint.
His breath fogged in front of him. He reached the platform, swung his legs over the railing, and stood. The wind tried to push him sideways. He set his jaw and walked to the first lantern.
It had gone out. The wick was a black thread inside the iron cradle, the oil slick and cold. He crouched, sheltering the taper with his cupped palm, and struck the flint. A spark jumped. The taper caught. He touched it to the wick, and the flame bloomed yellow, then deepened to orange. The lantern frame began to radiate its faint, familiar warmth. He moved to the second. The third. The fourth. Each one came to life under his hands with the patience of a ritual performed ten thousand times.
At the seventh lantern he paused. The wick was already lit, but the color was wrong.
The flame burned an unnatural violet, a deep, bruised purple that pulsed like a bruise under skin. It did not flicker the way fire should. It throbbed. The light it cast on the iron frame was colder than the moonlight, and where it touched the stones of the platform, a thin rime of frost spread outward in a slow, deliberate pattern, as if something beneath the stone were exhaling. Marek crouched beside it. He did not touch it. The heat that should have come off the iron did not come. Instead, the metal hummed, faintly, at a pitch he felt in his back teeth rather than heard.
He stayed there, the taper still smoking between his fingers, and watched the violet flame breathe. He had seen the boundary lanterns burn since he was small enough to be carried up the rungs on his father's shoulders. He had seen them in storms, in fog so thick the platform disappeared beneath him, in the strange green twilight that preceded the worst of the Hollowfen's moods. He had never seen this. Old Tomas had written about stranger things in the margins of his histories, things that slipped through from the deeper fens when the wards faltered, but Marek had always treated those as the old man's fancies.
A drop of condensation slid down the iron frame and fell onto the back of his hand. It stung. He jerked his hand back, looked at the drop. It was not water. It was darker, viscous, and where it sat on his skin it left a small, circular welt that throbbed in time with the flame. He wiped it on his cloak, and the cloth smoked faintly where the drop touched it.
Marek stood. The violet lantern threw his shadow long across the stones, and the shadow did not move when he did. It stayed where it was, stretched toward the railing, and its outline was wrong. Too narrow at the shoulders. Too long in the arms. He watched it for three heartbeats. Then the wind shifted, the taper flame guttered, and when he looked again the shadow was only his own.
He finished lighting the remaining lanterns by rote, moving from frame to frame with the taper in his left hand and his right hand tucked against his chest to keep the numb fingers warm. The yellow flames sprang up obediently. The violet one continued to pulse at the seventh station, indifferent to the company it kept. By the time he returned to it, the other eleven lanterns had steadied, and their combined glow should have driven back any lingering wisps of fen mist. Instead, the violet flame seemed to drink the light around it. The neighboring yellow flames dimmed when he passed between them, as if the air itself had thickened.
He crouched beside it again. The hum was louder now, or perhaps he had stopped hearing the wind. He studied the wick. The thread was not charring. It was the same black thread it had been a moment ago, untouched by fire. The violet light came from somewhere else. It came from inside the oil.
Marek reached for the small leather-bound book he kept in his belt pouch, the one in which he recorded the lantern watch, the weather, the movements of the mist. He opened it to the current page, uncapped the stub of pencil, and wrote in the careful, slanted hand his father had taught him: Seventh lantern relit, third hour past moonrise. Flame color violet. Wick unburnt. Oil source unknown. Shadow irregular. He paused, then added: Do not touch.
A sound came from below, faint, from somewhere near the base of the tower. It might have been the wind finding a crack in the stonework. It might have been something heavier, dragging itself across frozen ground. Marek straightened and looked over the railing. The courtyard of the Keep was a pale wash of moonlight and lantern-glow. The stable door hung ajar. The woodpile by the kitchen entrance had toppled, half its logs spilled across the flagstones. He could not see anyone.
The violet flame pulsed. He felt it in his chest this time, a slow, sourceless throb that matched his own heartbeat and then, for a few strange seconds, pulled ahead of it. He pressed his fist against his sternum and waited for the rhythm to settle. When he lowered his hand, the taper had burned down to a stub. He pinched it out and tucked the dead end into his pouch.
He had two choices. He could descend now, report what he had seen, and let whoever still kept the records at the Keep decide what it meant. Or he could stay, watch the violet flame through the rest of his shift, and learn something himself. His father had always said that the lanterns told the watcher what they needed to tell, but only if the watcher was patient enough to listen.
Marek sat on the cold stones beside the seventh lantern, pulled his cloak tight, and waited.
A draft curled up the stairwell, bringing with it the smell of damp stone and something older, like iron left out in the rain. Marek rose from where he had been sitting, his knees protesting the cold that had seeped into them through the slate. The seventh lantern's dead stub went into his pouch alongside its fellows, and he took the lamp in his right hand.
He had descended halfway when he heard the voice.
"You missed the third."
He stopped. The words had come from somewhere below, somewhere near the bend in the stair where the wall thickened and the lamplight guttered. They were spoken in a tone that suggested the speaker had been waiting for some time and had only just decided to break the silence.
He knew that voice. It had the clipped cadence of someone trained to bark orders, and the particular flatness that came from years of swallowing softer words. His sister had always spoken like she was bracing for a blow.
"Mother sent me," Brenna said, before he had even rounded the corner. "She said you'd forget the third and the fourth if she didn't send someone to remind you. She was right about the third, at least."
The stairwell opened onto a small landing where the Keep's northern wall met the western. A bench had been set into the alcove, and on it sat Brenna, her boots up on a crate, a half-eaten apple in one hand and his father's old journal in the other.
"You weren't supposed to be here," Marek said.
"No," she agreed, taking a bite. "I wasn't."
The lamplight caught the planes of her face. She had their father's jaw, heavy and square, and their mother's eyes, dark and quick. Her hair had been cut short since the last time he had seen her, hacked off at the jawline in a way that suggested a sword rather than scissors. She wore the leather coat he remembered, patched at the elbows, and a blade at her hip that was not the one he had given her.
"Marek," she said, around a mouthful of apple.
"Brenna."
"Have you eaten?"
"No."
"Then you're an idiot, and so is she, for sending you up here without supper." She held out the apple. "Take it. I've had three already."
He did not take it. Instead, he lowered himself onto the bench beside her, leaving a careful distance. The journal in her lap was closed, but her thumb held the place, and he could see the corner of a page marked with a small, careful fold.
"Mother," he said, "sent you to remind me about the third lantern."
"I told you."
"And she told you to bring the journal."
The thumb on the page stilled.
"She told me," Brenna said carefully, "that the journal ought to be returned to the family. That it had no business being in the Keep's records anymore, since Father had been dead eight years and the Council had moved on to other preoccupations. She said she wanted it back."
"And?"
"And I told her that the journal wasn't her concern. That it was mine, because Father had left it to me, and that I had already made arrangements." She looked at him, then away, at the wall opposite. "She didn't like that."
"No."
"She said you'd talk sense into me."
Marek was quiet. The draft from below had found the lamp's flame and was making it lean. He cupped his hand around the glass to keep it steady, and the warmth of it was a small comfort against the chill that had settled into the stairwell.
"Talk sense," he repeated. "About what?"
Brenna closed the journal and held it against her chest, the way a child holds a doll. The gesture was so unlike her that he almost laughed, and then, looking at her face in the lamplight, he did not laugh at all.
"About Thornwall," she said.
The word dropped between them like a stone into still water. Marek felt the cold of the stairwell return to him, deeper than before. He kept his hand around the lamp.
"Thornwall," he said, "is a ruin. There is no road to it. There is no road anywhere near it, and even if there were, there is nothing there to find."
"That's what the Council says."
"That's what Father said. In the same journal you're holding."
"He said it was dangerous. He didn't say it wasn't there."
"He said the mage-road had been broken for two hundred years, and that anyone who tried to follow it would be swallowed by the Ash."
"He said he had heard stories of it from his grandfather, who had heard stories from his. He said the records were fragmentary. He didn't say he had proof."
Marek turned the lamp in his hand, watching the flame. It threw their shadows long against the stairwell wall, his own broad and indistinct, hers leaner, sharper at the edges.
"You want to go to Thornwall," he said. It was not a question.
"I want to see what's there."
"You want to see what's there. With the sword at your hip and the journal in your hand and no idea what you'll be walking into."
"I have some idea."
"You have half a journal, a story you've heard from a drunk in the Hanged Man, and the stubbornness of our mother, which, as far as I'm concerned, is the least useful of the three."
She did not rise to it. He had expected her to. The Brenna he remembered, the one who had ridden out seven years ago with a stolen horse and a borrowed blade, would have come back at him with teeth. This one sat on the bench and looked at the journal in her lap as if she were weighing it.
"The drunk in the Hanged Man," she said quietly, "was a cartographer. He had been part of the survey, twenty years ago. The one Father was never meant to know about. He said the survey found a passage that went under the wall and came up in the vale beyond. He said the passage was old, older than the wall, and that the surveyors had mapped it as far as the second ring before they turned back. He said the second ring was where the Surveyor-General lost his son."
"I know the story."
"Do you know what happened to the cartographer?"
"I expect he died."
"He died three days after he told me. They said it was his heart."
Marek looked at her. The lamplight was steady now. The draft had died, or changed direction, or found some other crack to whisper through. The stairwell was very quiet.
"You're going anyway," he said.
"I was going anyway. I'm asking if you're coming with me."
He did not answer at once. He thought of the violet flame in the seventh lantern, of the dead stub of taper in his pouch, of the records in the Keep that he had spent eight years learning to keep and seven years learning to mistrust. He thought of his father's name, which the Council had struck from the rolls of the Guard, and of the village his father had refused to burn, which still stood, and of the people in it who still spoke his father's name with the kind of quiet that was not entirely gratitude.
He thought of Thornwall, and of the Ash, and of what his father had written in the journal, in the careful hand that he could still recognize: I have seen the second ring from the wall. There is a road. There is no road.
"I'm not coming with you," he said.
Brenna nodded, slowly, as if she had expected this and had already begun the work of accepting it.
"I thought you'd say that," she said.
"Have you told Mother?"
"I told her I was going to the Hanged Man."
"She'll know you're lying."
"She always knows I'm lying." Brenna's mouth quirked. "That's why I bother."
She stood, slinging her pack from where it had been resting against the wall. The journal went into the pack, wrapped in a cloth, and the pack went onto her back. She buckled the strap across her chest with the efficiency of long practice, and then she paused, one hand on the newel post at the top of the descending stairs.
"I'll be at Old Tomas's by morning," she said. "If you change your mind."
"I won't."
"I know." She looked at him over her shoulder. "But if you do, don't come alone. The road past the bridge is watched. The Council has eyes on it, and they don't like what they don't control. Bring someone who can fight, or don't come at all."
"Brenna."
"Yes."
"Be careful of the Ash."
The words came out before he had meant them to. He had not known he was going to say them. They sat between them, strange and heavy, like a borrowed coat that did not quite fit.
Brenna looked at him for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, and descended the stairs, her boots quiet on the stone. He listened until the sound of her faded, and then he listened to the silence after, and then he listened to the draft, which had returned, and which moved past him like a long breath let out by someone who had been holding it for a very long time.
He sat down again on the bench. The lamp was in his hand. The flame leaned.
In the courtyard below, the stable door was still ajar. The woodpile had not righted itself. The moon had moved a finger's width across the sky, and the shadows had moved with it. Somewhere in the village, a dog barked once and was quiet. Somewhere beyond the village, beyond the wall, beyond the broken country that no longer had a name, the Ash lay in wait, and the road that was not a road waited with it.
Marek sat on the bench in the cold stairwell of the Keep, and he watched the lamp, and he thought of his sister, and he did not move.
The moon slid past the broken gable of the Keep and the stairwell dimmed by another shade. Marek had stopped counting his breaths. The lamp in his hand had stopped flickering too, the flame gone low and blue, and the smell of the oil had turned acrid, like tallow that had burned too long in a church no one remembered.
Then the horn sounded.
It came from the village below, from the watchtower at the gate, and it was the long note, the one that meant the Howling had begun. It was a thin, rusted sound, like a nail drawn across slate, and it was followed almost at once by a second note from the eastern tower, and then a third from the river tower, and the three notes braided together into a sound that had no name in any language Marek knew. He had heard it since he was a boy. It had never been a sound. It had always been a feeling, a pressure that settled into the chest like a stone placed there by a careful hand.
He rose. The spear was on the bench where he had left it, and he took it up. The wood was cold and rough in his grip, and the silver head was cold too, colder than the air, and the cold traveled up his arm and into his shoulder and settled there.
He went down the stairs. The draft pressed past him as he descended, moving upward now, climbing toward the broken gable, and it carried with it a faint and oily smell that had not been in the stairwell a moment before. He paused at the base of the stair and looked into the courtyard, and for a breath he could not see the lantern from where he stood, and the village below was dark, and the horn was sounding still.
Then the lantern appeared at the window of the eastern wall, a yellow smear against the dark, and the village was visible again, and Marek went out through the door beneath the stair.
The courtyard was the same. The pile of wood still lay where it had fallen. The door of the stable was still ajar. The moon was where the moon had been, a finger's width lower. The only new thing was the sound of the horn, and the feeling in the air, which had thickened, and which pressed against the skin like the closeness before a storm.
He went to the lantern first. He took the matches from under the sill where his father had always kept them, in the small tin box that was pitted with rust, and he struck one against the striker's strip. The match flared. He held it to the wick. The wick took, and the flame rose, small and blue at first, then yellow, and the glass of the lantern was warm against his palm as he steadied it, and the smell of the oil was the smell of the Keep.
The horn sounded again, the long note, and was answered from the towers. Marek stood for a moment under the lantern and looked out over the village. The cottages were dark. The inn was dark. The chapel was dark. The street that ran down to the gate was empty. The gate itself was a deeper dark against the dark of the wall, and beyond it the wall, and beyond the wall the fields, and beyond the fields the broken country.
He went down the street toward the gate. His boots were loud on the cobbles, the only loud thing in the village, and the horn sounded a third time, and he felt the note in his teeth.
At the gate, the watchman was already at his post. He was a young man, the son of the farrier, and his name was Edric, and he held the watch-horn in one hand and the watch-spear in the other, and his face was white in the moonlight. He looked at Marek as Marek came up the ladder to the platform, and he did not speak.
"Hold the horn," Marek said.
Edric gave it to him. Marek put it to his lips. The note came out thin and unsure, the note of a man who had not blown a horn in many years, but it carried. It carried across the wall and down the river and into the broken country, and the three towers answered it, and the four notes hung in the air like a net thrown over the dark.
He lowered the horn. The wind from the east had stopped. The air was still. The stillness was wrong.
Marek looked out over the wall. The fields beyond were silver with moonlight. The river was a thread of silver. The tree line at the edge of the village was a dark smudge against the sky, and beyond the tree line the broken country rose in low humps, the graves of houses, the bones of walls, and the Ash that lay in the low places between.
Something moved.
It was at the edge of the tree line, low to the ground, and it moved in a way that was not the way of any animal he knew. It did not run. It flowed, like water poured from a cracked vessel, and it was low, and it was broad, and where its body passed the moonlight seemed to bend around it, so that it left a dark wake, a shadow deeper than the shadow of the trees.
Then it stopped. It lifted what might have been a head, and Marek saw the eyes.
There were too many of them. He could not count them. They were arranged in no pattern he could name, and they did not blink, and they were a pale, watery silver, the silver of the spear, and they were fixed on the wall.
On the lantern.
The lantern had gone out.
Marek did not know when it had gone out. He had lit it in the courtyard and left it burning. The flame had been yellow and steady when he turned away. Now the glass was dark, and the wick was dark, and the smell of oil had gone out of the air, and in the stillness the smell that replaced it was the smell of wet stone and something else, something sweet and rotten, like fruit left too long in a closed room.
The lantern had gone out, and the thing at the tree line had moved past it, and was moving now through the field, and was coming toward the wall.
"Hold the gate," Marek said to Edric.
He did not wait to see if the boy obeyed. He took the spear, his father's spear, the spear with the silver head, and he went down the ladder, and he went through the postern door at the base of the wall, and he stepped out into the field.
The grass was wet. The cold of it came through his boots. The moon was high enough to see by, and the thing was close enough to see, and what he saw was worse than he had feared.
It was low. It was broad. It had no shape he could put a name to, and its body was the color of wet ash, the color of the Ash itself, and it moved by means he could not see, flowing across the grass without seeming to touch it, and the eyes, the many eyes, were set in no face, and they did not blink, and they were all fixed on him now.
He had not lit the lantern. He had done that. He had lit the lantern in the courtyard and left it burning. It was burning when he walked away. He had heard the horn from the gate and had not looked back. He had come down the street and up the ladder and across the platform, and the lantern had been burning when he left the courtyard. It had been burning.
But it was not burning now. The glass was dark. The wick was dark. And the thing was past it, and was coming, and he was in the field alone with the spear.
He set his feet. He lifted the spear. The silver head caught the moonlight and held it, and the thing stopped.
It stopped, but it did not retreat. It stopped, and the eyes regarded him, all of them, and there was a sound, a low and wet sound, like the sound of something being drawn through mud, and the smell of the sweet rot grew stronger, and Marek felt the cold travel up his arm again from the silver, and this time it did not stop at his shoulder. It went into his chest. It went into his teeth. It went into the place behind his eyes where the pressure of the horn had settled, and it filled that place, and the place was no longer empty.
The thing moved. It flowed toward him. He did not wait. He stepped forward, and he thrust, and the spear went into the body of the thing, and the body of the thing gave way, and the spear went in to the shaft, and the silver head was buried in the wet ash of it, and the cold traveled up the shaft and into his hand.
His hand was cut. He did not know when. He had gripped the shaft too hard, or the silver had cut him as it went by, and the blood was warm on his palm, and where the blood touched the silver it glowed. It glowed a faint and steady blue, the blue of a flame that has just been lit, and the glow traveled down the shaft and into the body of the thing, and the thing made the wet sound again, louder this time, and the eyes, all of them, turned toward the glow.
Marek wrenched the spear free. He thrust again. The spear went in, and the glow followed, and the thing shuddered, and the eyes blinked. All of them blinked, at once, and the sound it made was a sound he had heard before. He had heard it in the field by the Ash, in the small hours, when the wind dropped. It was the sound the Ash made when the wind dropped, and he had not known until then what made it.
He thrust a third time. The spear went into the place where the body was thickest, and the glow went with it, and the body of the thing came apart. It came apart the way ash comes apart when a hand closes on it. It fell inward, and the eyes went dark one by one, and the last one to go was the largest, set low in the body, and it was fixed on him, and it did not blink, and then it was dark.
The body was ash. It was ash on the grass, and the wind that had been still rose and took it, and the ash scattered, and there was nothing left but the grass, and the moonlight, and the smell of wet stone that was already fading.
Marek stood in the field. The spear was in his hand. His palm was bleeding, and the blood was already slowing, and the blue glow had faded from the silver. The silver was silver again, and cold again, and the cold was in his hand, and the cold would be in his hand for a long time, but the glow had shown him something he had not known.
He looked back at the wall. The lantern at the eastern gate was dark. He had not lit it. He had lit the lantern in the courtyard and left it burning, and it had gone out, and the thing had come past it, and he had killed the thing with the spear, and his blood had made the silver glow.
He went back to the postern. He went up the ladder. Edric was on the platform, and the boy's face was white, and the boy held the horn and did not speak.
"The lantern at the eastern gate," Marek said. "It is out."
"I know," Edric said. "I saw it go out."
"Go down. Bring me the ladder from the stable. I will light it again."
He did not wait. He took the matches from his pocket, the small tin box, and he went down the ladder and across the courtyard to the eastern wall, and the lantern was there, dark in its iron bracket, and he lit it again, and the flame rose, and the glass was warm, and the village was visible below, the cottages and the inn and the chapel and the street, and the street was empty, and the gate was closed, and the thing was ash on the field.
He stood under the lantern and looked at his hand. The cut was already closing. The blood had dried. The silver of the spear was still cold, and the cold was still in his hand, and he thought of his father, and he thought of the wound in the wood of the shaft, and he thought of the lamp that had gone out, and he thought of the words Brenna had said.
Be careful of the Ash.
The horn sounded from the watchtower. The long note, and the three towers answered, and the four notes braided together, and the Howling was over, and the village was quiet, and Marek stood under the lantern he had lit twice, and he did not move, and the flame leaned, and the night went on.