The boundary stones rose from the heath like broken teeth, their weathered faces carved with sigils no living hand had traced in a hundred years. Cassian pulled his mare to a halt at the crest of the low ridge and watched the last sliver of sun bleed orange across the moor. Below him, the Veil waited. He could taste it on the back of his tongue, copper and ash, the way a storm tastes before it breaks.
"Cheerful place," he murmured.
Sir Fenric did not respond. The old knight sat his bay gelding like a man carved from the same granite as the stones, his scarred hands loose on the reins, his eyes moving in slow arcs across the landscape. He had not spoken more than six words in the last hour. The campaign up from the lowlands had been a long one, and Fenric rationed his breath the way a soldier rations water.
Cassian pulled the cracked leather journal from his saddlebag and flipped it open to the page he'd been working on for the past three days. His charcoal sketch of the boundary line was wrong. He knew it was wrong. The Veil did not hold a clean edge; it bled, and bled again, and the maps he'd been drawing for Lord Cresswell's table told nothing of that truth.
He closed the journal and stuffed it back.
"There." Fenric's voice came low and flat. The knight lifted one gauntleted hand and pointed toward a shallow fold in the moor where a shepherd's cottage crouched against a stand of dead hawthorn. Smoke should have risen from its chimney. At this hour, with the cold settling into the bone of the land, every hearth on the moors should have been lit.
No smoke rose.
"What do you see?" Cassian asked, though he already knew.
"Something that wants us to come closer."
Cassian grinned despite himself. "You do so know how to charm a man, Fenric."
"I know how to keep one breathing." The knight swung down from his saddle, his boots hitting the wet grass with a heavy thud. He unbuckled the leather strap that kept his longsword bound and drew it in one practiced motion. The steel caught the dying light. "We go on foot from here. The horses will not like it."
"Won't like what?"
Fenric did not answer. He started down the slope, and after a breath, Cassian followed.
The air thickened as they descended. Cassian felt it first in his lungs, a pressure like the moment before a fever breaks, and then along the back of his neck where the fine hairs lifted. The mare above them let out a low, rolling whinny. Then the bay answered it. Then both horses were screaming, a sound that tore up from their throats raw and shapeless, the kind of noise no trained animal made unless something had reached into the root of its instinct and twisted.
"Stay with me," Fenric said.
"I had planned a leisurely stroll, actually."
The knight shot him a look that could have peeled bark from a tree.
The cottage door hung from a single rusted hinge. The wood around the handle had been clawed from the inside, deep gouges running through the grain in long, ragged furrows. Inside, the floor was swept clean. The table was set with two bowls of stew, gone cold and filmed over with grey. A pair of woolen stockings hung by the hearth to dry, still warm to the touch when Cassian brushed them with his fingers.
The bodies were in the corner.
A man and a woman, seated upright against the wall as though they had only paused to rest. Their eyes were closed. Their hands were folded in their laps. No wound marked them. No bruise darkened their skin. They looked, in the half-light that crept through the broken door, like a pair of stone effigies on a tomb.
Cassian crouched and held his hand above the woman's mouth. Nothing. Not even the faintest stir of air.
"They're not dead," he said, and was surprised by the steadiness of his own voice.
Fenric stood with his back to the door, sword raised, scanning the shadows that pooled in the corners of the room. "Explain."
"I don't think I can. Not properly." Cassian reached out and pressed two fingers to the man's throat. The skin was warm. Warmer than it should have been, given the chill of the cottage. The pulse beneath his fingers was slow, so slow he had to count his own heartbeats three times before he caught the faint throb of the man's. "There's something in them. Something that has stopped them, the way a spider stops a fly. They breathe. They bleed. But they are not themselves anymore."
The old knight's jaw worked beneath the steel of his half-coif. "Cresswell's letter said the Veil had been thinning for months. That the boundary villages were the first to suffer. I thought he meant madness. Plague, perhaps."
"No." Cassian rose slowly. He did not like the way the air moved in this room. It moved in the wrong places, curled around his ankles like a living thing, like water finding its level. "This is not a sickness. This is hunger."
The word sat between them, heavy and unwelcome.
Fenric crossed the room in three long strides and crouched before the seated man. He studied the face with the dispassionate efficiency of a man who had counted too many dead to bother with grief over strangers. After a long moment he reached out and turned the man's head to one side. A thin black line traced the skin just beneath the jaw, a mark like a hairline crack in porcelain.
"I've seen this before," Fenric said quietly.
Cassian waited. The horses screamed again outside, their terror a thin, high note that set Cassian's teeth on edge. Somewhere in the thatch above them, something small scratched and went still.
"The northern campaign," Fenric continued. "The last winter before we broke. There was a village on the march to Held's Ford. We rode in at dawn. Every soul seated, every soul warm, every soul gone." He released the man's head and stood, his hand white-knuckled on his sword. "We never found what took them. The priests said it was a mercy we didn't."
"You think the Veil is doing this?"
"I think whatever lives behind the Veil is learning how to reach through."
Cassian looked again at the woman. Her face was peaceful. Almost smiling. He thought of his sister, ten years dead now, who had smiled in her final fever as though she were watching something beautiful that he could not see. He had not thought of her in months. The cottage had dragged the memory up like a fish hook.
He turned away.
"What do we do with them?"
Fenric sheathed his sword. The motion was slow, deliberate, the gesture of a man putting away a tool he knew would not help. "We do not have the authority. We do not have the men. We have a fast horse between us and Lord Cresswell's hall, and we have three days to ride."
"You want to leave them."
"I want to report what we have found to a man who can raise a proper response. I want a priest. I want a mage. I want a firing line." The knight's voice was iron. "What I do not want is to die on a shepherd's floor because I stayed to mourn strangers I cannot save."
Cassian looked back at the bodies. The woman's hand still rested on her knee, the fingers curled gently inward. A wedding band, green with age, circled the third finger. Beside her, the man's hand lay open, palm up, as though waiting to receive something.
"You are not wrong," Cassian said.
"I am never wrong. It is one of my worst qualities."
Something moved in the rafters. Cassian's hand went to his belt knife before he caught himself. It was only a bird, a small grey thing that had nested in the thatch and now stirred at the disturbance of the men's boots. It did not fly. It sat on the beam above the woman's head and turned one round black eye down upon them, and Cassian felt the weight of that gaze like a thumb pressed into the hollow of his throat.
They left the cottage in silence. The door creaked once on its single hinge and then hung still. The horses had quieted, though their ears remained pinned flat against their skulls, and the whites of their eyes rolled as Cassian took the mare's bridle in his hand. He did not mount. He stood for a moment with his forehead pressed to the horse's neck, breathing in the warm hay smell of her, and let the moor wind scour the wrongness from his lungs.
Fenric stood beside him, patient as a stone.
"Cresswell will want a map," Cassian said at last.
"Give him one."
"It will not be honest."
"Make it honest enough."
The knight swung up into his saddle with the careful economy of a man who no longer trusted his knees. He gathered the reins and looked once more at the cottage, at the dark smear of the doorway against the pale stone, at the thin column of nothing where smoke should have been. His face was unreadable.
"Ride close," he said. "And if I fall, do not stop."
Cassian mounted. The mare shuddered under him, then stilled. Above them, the first star had kindled in a sky the color of a bruise, and beyond the boundary stones, the Veil breathed.
He turned the horse south and rode.
The wind died first.
One moment it had been tugging at their cloaks, that low moor wind that smelled of peat and wet stone. The next, nothing. The mare stopped mid-stride and stood trembling, her breath coming in sharp white plumes that did not dissipate but hung in the air like torn silk.
Cassian felt it before he saw it. A pressure behind his eyes. A taste like old iron at the back of his throat. He had mapped places where the air felt thin, where compasses spun and birds refused to nest, but he had never stood inside one. Not like this. Not with the wrongness pressing in from every side at once.
"Fenric."
"I see it."
Ahead of them, perhaps two hundred yards down the slope, the road bent around a stand of dead rowan trees. Beyond the rowans, where the sky should have been deepening to violet with the coming dusk, the light had gone wrong. It bent. It folded in on itself like cloth being wrung, and from the center of that fold, something pulled free.
Not stepped out. Pulled. As if the world were a sheet and a hand had reached up through it from beneath.
"Move," Fenric said, and his voice had lost its patience. "Move now, lad."
But the mare would not move. Her hooves had rooted to the frozen grass, and when Cassian kicked she simply bucked once, hard, nearly unseating him. He grabbed her mane and held.
Then the horn sounded.
It came from the south, three short blasts and one long, the old pattern of the King's Guard calling a perimeter. Out of the fold of land behind the rowans, riders appeared. Six of them, then ten, their cloaks the same grey as the sky, their lances tipped with steel that caught no light. They formed a line across the road in seconds, horses stamping, shields unslung, and Cassian heard the iron clatter of men bracing for a blow.
"Ashcroft." Fenric had wheeled his own mount and was riding back toward the rowans, toward the wrongness, and for one stupid heartbeat Cassian thought the knight meant to flee. Then he understood. Fenric was riding to join the shield wall. "Stay behind the line. Draw your blade and do not let it past you."
"A blade against what?"
"The only kind we have."
The thing came through the fold and stood upon the road.
It had been a man once. Perhaps. The shape was right, two arms, two legs, a head upon a neck, but the proportions had slipped sideways by a hand's breadth. Its skin was the color of skimmed milk, and through it, visible as through dirty glass, Cassian could see the road, the dead rowans, the rim of the last sun behind the hills. It had no face. Where the features should have been there was only a shallow depression, smooth and wet, and from that depression came a sound that was not a sound. A pressure. A hunger. The mare screamed and reared and Cassian hit the ground hard, his shoulder taking the brunt, his sword still somehow in his hand.
The soldiers lowered their lances.
The wraith walked into them.
It did not fight. There was nothing to fight. The first soldier's spear passed through its chest as though the spear were smoke, and the wraith's hand came up and laid itself, gently as a lover, against the man's gorget. The soldier dropped. No wound. No blood. Just a sudden slackness in his limbs, and then he was on the ground, and the wraith was past him, and moving toward the next.
"Close the line." Fenric's roar cracked across the hillside. "Hold, damn you, hold."
They held. They had to. The second man took the touch on his shield arm and fell without a sound, his weapon clattering onto the frozen grass. The third turned his horse and tried to ride, and the wraith did not chase him. It only turned its faceless head, slowly, and the horse stopped, and the man stopped, and both of them stood as though waiting for a command that would never come.
Cassian got to his knees. The cold had gotten into him already, the moor cold, the deeper cold, the kind that lived in the spaces between stars. His fingers had gone white around the sword's grip. He could not feel his feet.
The wraith had reached the fourth soldier. It paused there, as if curious. Its head tilted at an angle that no neck should allow, and from that shallow depression a thin sound emerged, like wind passing through a cracked bone. The soldier's lance lowered itself from his grip. His shield slipped from his arm. He stood with his hands at his sides, waiting.
"Ashcroft." Fenric was suddenly beside him, his horse blown, his face grey under the grime. "When it comes for me, you ride. Do you hear me? You ride south and you do not stop and you do not look back."
"I am not leaving you, Fenric."
"You are not leaving me. You are carrying word to the King. There is a difference."
"Feels the same from where I am standing."
"South. Promise me."
The wraith had finished with the fourth soldier. It drifted toward the fifth, and the fifth, a young man with a yellow moustache and terrified eyes, swung his blade at it. The blade passed through. The wraith's hand found his chest, and the young man folded in the middle like a paper man, and did not rise again.
Five down. Five left. And the wraith was learning something. Its steps had grown faster, more certain, as though each soldier it took gave it a little more purchase on the world. The depression where its face should have been had deepened, and from it, faintly, came the smell of wet iron. Of a hearth gone out.
"Fenric."
"South."
"I cannot."
"Then we die here, lad, and the realm loses its mapmaker. Choose."
The wraith turned.
It had been moving toward the sixth soldier, the one furthest from Cassian. Now, with the slow deliberation of a man choosing a wine at supper, it turned its head and looked at him. Not with eyes. With the depression. With the absence where the eyes should have been. And Cassian felt the cold reach across the distance between them and press against the skin of his throat.
He did not run.
He lifted his sword, which was absurd, which was suicide, which was the only thing he had, and he stepped forward. The cold came in a wave then, a tide, and his breath stopped in his chest as though his lungs had forgotten their purpose. The world went white. He heard Fenric shout his name, but the shout was far away, coming from the bottom of a well.
The wraith's hand found his chest.
It did not burn. That was the wrong word. What it did was cold so deep it had forgotten what cold meant, cold that went past the skin and the muscle and the bone and laid itself against something that was not quite the heart but lived near it. Cassian saw, for one long second, the inside of the cottage they had left. The woman's face. The grey bird on the beam. The bowl of broth gone black. Then he saw nothing, and the nothing had teeth.
He came back to himself on his back in the grass, with Fenric's hand under his head and the knight's voice in his ear saying something he could not parse. The sky above him was the color of a wound. The wraith was gone. The soldiers were stirring, some of them, though three did not stir at all.
Across his chest, laid diagonally from the left shoulder to the right hip, a line of frost had formed upon his coat. The fabric had not torn. Beneath it, his flesh had not broken. But where the line ran, the skin had gone the white of old paper, and the cold there was not leaving. It had settled into him like a tenant who meant to stay.
"Fenric," he managed. His voice came out in a rasp. "Fenric, I can feel it."
"Quiet, lad. Save it."
"How many?"
"Three dead. The rest waking. You, I do not know about you."
The knight's hand was on his shoulder now, hard enough to bruise, and through that pressure Cassian felt the old man's fear, never spoken, only gripped. He tried to smile. It hurt. Everything hurt, and yet the hurt was strangely distant, as though it belonged to someone he had once met.
"Tell me you have it mapped," Fenric said. "Tell me you have this stretch of road mapped, because Cresswell will want it before dawn."
"Fenric."
"Before dawn, Ashcroft. I am not burying another good man in a foreign field."
Cassian closed his eyes. The cold in his chest pulsed once, like a second heart, and the world tilted sideways, and the last thing he saw before the dark took him was the line of soldiers standing up out of the grass like men rising from their own graves.
The binding began in the back of a cart that had no springs, which meant every rut in the road arrived at Cassian's spine like a fist. Someone had torn a strip from a soldier's surcoat and another from a horse blanket, and the two were wrapped together into a pad that smelled of horse sweat and woodsmoke. Fenric himself pressed it down over the white line, hard, with both palms flat, and the cold beneath fought him for ownership of the skin.
"Hold still, damn you."
"I am holding still. The cart is not."
"The cart can go hang."
Cassian wanted to laugh. The laugh came out as a wheeze. His chest had gone numb in the way a limb goes numb after sleeping on it too long, except that beneath the numbness there was a pulse, slow and deliberate, and every time the cart hit a rut the pulse answered, a deep throb like a bell struck somewhere far inside him. He could not tell if the cold was spreading or if he was simply noticing more of it now. The pad grew wet. He chose not to think about what it was wet with, because there was no blood where the frost had passed. Whatever wept through the cloth was colder than blood should be, and thicker, and smelled faintly of iron and pine resin and nothing at all, all at once.
"Talk to me," Fenric said. "You are going to sleep and I have told you, I am not burying another good man."
"I thought you liked the quiet."
"I do. I will enjoy it after you are dead and buried proper. Until then, talk."
Cassian tried. The road. The road would do. "There is a place," he said. "On the chart. The only marked shelter between here and the capital that the Veil has not swallowed." His voice kept slipping away from him, like a dog off its leash. "I marked it myself. Last autumn. A shrine, Fenric. Old shrine. The kind with the moss on the roof and the door that does not quite shut."
"And how far."
"I do not know." He had to admit it. His head had gone to wool. "I marked the distance but I cannot find the number. It is in here somewhere." He lifted a hand a few inches off his chest and let it fall. Fenric caught the wrist and put it back down without a word.
A sergeant up at the cart's head, a man named Burrell with a jaw like a brick, called down without turning. "The scout reports a track turning west at the next valley, sir. Timber track. If the shrine lies west of the ridge as the cartographer says, we can take it."
"How far in miles."
"Hard to say. Three, perhaps four. The track is rough."
"Four miles." Fenric said it like a curse. "We ride for four miles with that thing on our backs and a wounded man in the cart."
"Sir."
"I have heard you, Burrell. Drive on. And for the love of every saint we have left, do not break a wheel."
The cart lurched forward. Someone, somewhere behind them, began to sing a low hymn in a voice that shook. Then another voice joined it, and then a third, raggedly, and the hymn became a kind of rope the soldiers tied themselves to in the dark. Cassian listened to it with half an ear. The hymn was one he had heard at his grandmother's knee, about a candle carried through a storm. He had never paid it much mind. It sounded different now. It sounded like a thing one said to the dark, hoping the dark would answer kindly.
He closed his eyes, and the dark answered in its own fashion.
When he opened them again, the cart had stopped and Fenric was standing over him with his visor up and his face pale under the moon.
"We have reached the track. I am going to lift you onto a horse. You are going to sit in front of the saddle and you are not going to fall off, because if you fall off I will leave you in the road and that will be the end of Cassian Ashcroft."
"You would not."
"No. I would not. But you do not know that, and the not knowing will keep you awake."
They lifted him. He felt their hands under his arms and knees, six hands, no fewer, because he had stopped being able to hold any weight of his own. The horse was a bay gelding with a kind eye and a name he could not catch. Fenric put him up in front of the saddle and wrapped his own cloak around him, which smelled of old leather and the lavender soap the old knight had used since Cassian had known him. He was a ridiculous man in that one small regard, and Cassian had teased him about it for years. Now he pressed his face into the cloak and breathed it in and said nothing.
The column moved. West, up the timber track, into country he had drawn on parchment by candlelight, every line of it now a thing of mud and root and the slap of branches against steel helms.
He drifted.
In one drift, Isolde was sitting beside him at a hearth that did not exist, telling him he was a fool and that the wraith had a name, only she would not say it. He reached for her hand. He found Fenric's gauntlet instead, and Fenric was saying, "Stay with me, lad," and the world came back in pieces, the moon, the trees, the slow grind of hooves on wet earth.
In another, Cresswell stood at his desk in Marlowe, sliding a quill from one hand to the other, and his voice was flat. "You will map the northern corridor, Ashcroft. You will go where my other cartographers will not, and you will bring me back what I require, and you will do it without complaint, because the alternative is a cell, and the cell has no window, and you do not care for cells, I think."
"I do not care for cells, my lord."
"Then we understand each other. You leave at dawn."
Cresswell had not told him what was in the corridor. Cresswell had not told him why the corridor had become a graveyard of small parties over the last eighteen months, parties of which no member had returned, or returned only as something not quite a man. Cresswell had given him a purse and a sealed letter and a horse and the cold good wishes of a man who had already decided to forget him. Cassian had taken the purse and the letter and the horse, and he had gone, because the alternative was the cell, and Cresswell had been right. He did not care for cells.
The letter had been opened and resealed so often that the wax no longer held. Inside, the king's hand had written a single sentence in the careful script of a man who had been taught penmanship before he had been taught cruelty. The Veil is thin here. Do not let it speak to you. Aldric had known, then. Aldric had known what waited at the edge of the corridor, and he had sent a disgraced younger son to look at it and had not sent a knight to guard him, because knights were harder to replace than disgraced younger sons.
The horse stopped. Cassian heard the creak of leather and the quiet, professional sounds of a column deciding to halt. Fenric's voice came from somewhere overhead. "The shrine, Ashcroft. Is this it. Look."
He opened his eyes. The trees had thinned. Before them, on a shelf of stone above a stream, stood a building no taller than a man, with a roof of moss and a door of grey wood, and a small bell in a low porch that the wind moved, so that it rang by itself, faintly, the way a bell rings at a funeral when no one is left to pull the rope. Behind the shrine the hill rose darkly. Above the hill the sky was wrong. The stars above the ridge were dim, as though a thumb were laid over them, and through the dimness there ran a faint hairline of light, silver against black, like a crack in the bowl of the night.
"Yes," Cassian said. His voice was barely a breath. "That is it."
"Then we have you there in ten minutes, lad. Hold on."
He did not hold on. The column moved and he did not hold on, but the cloak held him, and the man behind him held the cloak, and so he arrived at the shrine the way a parcel arrives, carried without ceremony by hands he would not remember in the morning. The door gave under Fenric's shoulder. Inside, the shrine smelled of cold stone and damp and the ghost of tallow. There was a bench. There was a low altar. There was, set into the wall behind the altar, a panel of pale wood, and on the wood a shape had been carved, very old, very worn, of two hands pressed together palm to palm with a thin line between them. The Veil. The old name for it, in the north, was the Door Between, and the shrine had been built where the Door was thinnest, so that priests could stand on one side and listen to what breathed on the other, and pray.
Outside, the wraith screamed.
The sound came down the timber track like a thrown stone. It was not the shriek of any beast he had ever heard, nor of any man. It was the sound a throat would make if a throat were made of glass and someone dragged a bow across its rim. The soldiers outside answered with the clatter of steel and the nervous stamping of horses. Inside, the bell in the porch began to ring in earnest, though no one touched it. The rope swung in a wind that had not entered the doorway. The pale panel on the wall began to glow, faintly, along the carved line between the two hands.
Fenric shut the door. He set the bar across it. He came to the bench and lifted Cassian onto it with a grunt, and the grunt was the most honest sound Cassian had heard all night.
"Fenric."
"Here."
"It is screaming."
"Yes."
"I can hear the Veil screaming behind it."
"Yes. Be still."
The cold in his chest lifted its head and answered. A thin silver crack ran down the centre of the pale panel, and through the crack came a sound that was not a scream and not a voice and not a whisper, but something older than all three, the way the sea is older than the word for it. Cassian heard his own name in it. Not called, not exactly. More like the name had always been inside the sound, waiting for him to listen.
He pressed his hand over the frost on his chest. The cold pressed back.
"Stay with me, Ashcroft."
"I am here."
"Then stay here."
Outside, the wraith screamed again, and again, and the column held its ground in the dark, and the shrine held its ground on the hill, and the Veil hummed behind its carved panel like a held breath, and Cassian lay on the bench with the cloak over him and the lavender in his nose and Fenric's hand on his shoulder, and he did not sleep, and he did not wake, and the night passed over him like a great slow wing, and morning, when at last it came, came grey.