The Crown of Hollow Stars: Flight Through The Blackwood

The third root tried to trip Sera before dawn, and she caught herself on the second. She did not bother to whisper a curse at it. She had stopped bothering with curses two days ago, somewhere past the river where her master should have been walking beside her and was not.

"Ahead." Caelan's voice came low from the gloom ahead of her, the single word careful, unadorned. His sword was drawn. He had not sheathed it since the road gave up being a road. "Root across the path. Knee height. Go right."

She went right. Her boot found a stone turning under moss and she let her weight settle onto it, listening to the small grunts of the ragged line behind her. A tap on the arm. Pim, giving her room. A heavier tread. Brother Aldred, the only Brother of the Silver Order still moving under his own power. Then old Maren, leaning on Aldred's shoulder. Then silence that was not silence but the breathing of nine refugees trying not to breathe too loud.

"Ahead," Caelan said again, and again she followed.

The Blackwood had a way of swallowing sounds and giving back different ones. A branch cracked somewhere to the west and the crack rose up and curled back and came at them from the opposite direction. She knew it was only a branch. She made herself know it. The stars did not reach through this canopy. Dead reckoning had to come from somewhere else.

She went on. The way the moss grew thicker on a trunk meant north. A scar on bark where the rot ate in from the east. A flicker of pale fungus, always south because south held the bog. She had learned it in a different wood with a different sky, and now she unrolled it like a thread in her hands, patient, careful, while her master lay behind her on a hill two days back, under a cairn that Aldred had built in the dark.

Left. Straight. Right around the fallen trunk, where the ants had eaten the heart out of it and a child could fall through into a brown smelling nothing.

"Straight," Caelan said. "Hold straight. There's a clearing in forty paces."

He was wrong. She had counted. It was fifty. She let him be wrong. He needed to be right about something, and the only things left for him to be right about were roots and clearings and small honest distances.

She should not have looked at him. She looked.

The sword moved in his right hand with a small oscillation that was not the sword's idea. His left hand reached out and touched bark as he passed, an apology or a steadying. He was flinching before every trunk, a tightening of his shoulders that he rolled off as soon as it settled, and the rolling was almost worse than the flinch. His eyes went left, right, up into the canopy, back to the path. He was reading the wood the way she did. He was reading it worse.

"Pim," she murmured without turning. "Pass word. Stop for water when we reach the fern bank."

"Right." The boy's whisper came from just behind her elbow. He did not ask why. He had stopped asking why three days ago, on the night the watchtower fell, and had begun instead to be useful, which was its own kind of answer. She felt his hand find her sleeve and squeeze once, brief, before he ghosted past her on the left to carry the order down the line.

Caelan had heard her. She saw his head tilt, a fraction. Then he resumed his pacing, his shoulders tight under his coat, the blade drawing a faint line of reflected grey from somewhere above where a slim crack in the canopy admitted a color that was not yet morning.

She watched him for three strides, and that was the mistake.

He did not speak aloud. She was sure of it. His lips did not move where she could see. But as he passed a leaning elder, his left hand brushed the trunk and then his jaw went tight and he said something she did not catch, and she knew, with the certainty she had for moss and fungus and rot-scar, that the words were not in any tongue she had heard spoken by a living mouth since her childhood lessons in the scriptorium.

Old Aedyric. The tongue her master had refused to teach her. The tongue the great rolls in the library were written in, the ones no one in the Order would translate, the ones that smelled of dust and old grief even through glass cases. Caelan was saying something to himself in old Aedyric, and he thought no one heard because no one alive should have been able to place the cadence.

She placed the cadence.

It helped, a little, that she did not understand every word. What she caught was small, soft, and bleak. A kind of address. A kind of question. A name, twice, that was not hers and not any present, spoken under his breath to bark and to the wood.

She did not call out to him. She did not pretend she had seen nothing. She made a mark of it in her mind, where she kept the few private things she allowed herself, and walked on.

The fern bank came under their feet. The smell of it rose up, green and wet and a little sour, a relief from the deeper rot the wood had been offering. Aldred lowered Maren onto a moss-padded shelf of root, and the old woman made a sound that was neither word nor sigh but somewhere between.

Sera knelt and took her waterskin from her hip and held it to Maren's lips. Maren drank, a careful sip, then another, then turned her head away.

"Tell me where we are, girl."

"Five miles west of the standing stone, Maren. The path down to the Beck should open on our left in another mile. Two days to Thornwell if we keep."

"Two days," Maren repeated. "Thornwell. And what is at Thornwell that was not at our own hearths?"

"Other people, perhaps. Different hearths. The Order has friends in Thornwell."

"You sound like Dunmore."

Sera's hand tightened on the waterskin. She made it relax. She made her voice do something that was almost a laugh.

"He taught me everything I know about sounding like him. I only wish he had taught me something more useful to do with it." She uncorked the waterskin and drank herself, two swallows, then three. The water had a taste of the leather it sat in and underneath that the taste of copper, faintly, the way fear sometimes makes the back of the mouth taste.

She capped it and stood. The clearing smelled of ferns and old rain. She turned her head and found Caelan at the edge of it, his sword still out, his eyes still working the wood, and his mouth resting now at last in the small private line of a man who had stopped speaking to himself without quite realizing he had stopped.

He caught her looking. He always caught her looking. He did not color, exactly. A shift went through his jaw and his chin came down a quarter inch and the sword steadied in his grip.

"We should push on," he said. "The fern bank holds sound. They'll have heard us stop."

"Who is they?" Pim asked from somewhere behind her left shoulder, with the kind of innocence that was not innocent at all.

Caelan's eyes moved to the boy. There was a flicker in them, the soft concern he kept trying to bury under duty.

"The ones behind us, lad. Whoever they are."

"There are no ones behind us. There's no path behind us. There's just wood."

"That is what makes me afraid."

Pim considered this with the seriousness of a small boy practicing to be a man. Then he nodded, once, as if a thing had been explained and found insufficient and stored for later objection.

Sera shouldered the waterskin. She looked once more at the fern bank, at the pale faces of the refugees in it, at Maren's hand reaching up to catch Aldred's sleeve, at the bruise-colored sky overhead, at Caelan with his sword, at Pim with his shoulders set.

"Pim," she said. "Take point with Caelan. Watch his left. He is good at right."

Pim's grin was quick and a little wild. He moved past her and took up the position, half a step behind Caelan's shoulder, a small dark shape in the gloom. Caelan did not look down at him, but his left hand opened once, briefly, and then closed again on the hilt of his sword, and the path opened ahead of them, and Sera turned and walked back along the line to count nine heads and begin again.

The Blackwood thinned as they climbed, but the trees grew no kinder for it. The trunks twisted sideways at angles that hurt the eye, and their bark peeled in long pale strips like dead skin, and somewhere above a rook went on coughing its hoarse alarm into a sky that had not yet decided whether to rain or simply stay the color of a bruise.

Pim kept his place half a step behind Caelan's left shoulder. He had decided this was his post, the way he decided most things, by announcing it and then not moving. His pack of ravens wheeled overhead in a loose black knot, and from time to time one of them dipped low enough that he could hear its thinking, which was always rude and never helpful.

He watched Sera ahead of him, where she walked at the head of the line. She moved like someone trying not to be noticed, and that was funny because Sera Voss, when she wanted, could move like a dropped coin in a quiet room. The fern bank had been her idea. The pausing every quarter hour to count nine heads had been her idea. The waterskin at her hip and the short sword at her hip and the way she walked at the front so that whatever came out of the wood came at her first, all of that had been Sera.

She had not spoken much since the fire.

Pim knew about silence. He had been raised in it, in alleys that taught you to make yourself small and quick and to keep your mouth shut, and he had unlearned that lesson only slowly and badly. Silence on Sera was different. Hers was a working silence. She was thinking something through, and he could tell because her right hand kept opening and closing at her side, fingers curling in against her palm and then out again, as if she were rehearsing a grip on something she did not want to hold.

It made him uneasy. He did not know why yet.

Caelan stopped at the crest of a low rise and raised one hand. The line stopped. The refugees stopped. Maren, who had been walking with her hand in Aldred's, stopped and pulled her hand back into her own sleeve as if she had been caught.

"Water," Caelan said quietly. "Five minutes. Then we go down into the cut. There is a stream at the bottom."

Pim slid down off the rise on his backside, hissing at the cold of the wet moss through his trousers. The others arranged themselves in the lee of a fallen trunk that was more lichen than wood. Sera did not sit. She stood a few paces off, looking out at the way the path bent down between two shoulders of black rock, and the wind moved the loose hair across her face and she did not push it back.

Pim got up and dusted himself and went and stood beside her. He knew when to be small and he knew when to be present. This, he thought, was a moment for present.

"Your hands are cold," he said.

"They are fine."

"They are not. They are the color of fish bellies."

"Pim."

"I am making an observation."

"You are making a nuisance."

That was more like her. He rocked on his heels, considering, and the words were out of his mouth before he had finished deciding whether to say them.

"I saw it, in the fire."

She did not turn. "Saw what."

"Your arm. When the roof came down. The light under your sleeve."

The wind filled the small silence that followed. Down the slope, Maren was coaxing a mouthful of water into Aldred, and somewhere one of the ravens was complaining about the cold in a tone Pim privately agreed with.

"There was no light," Sera said.

"There was. Under the linen. Like a coal, but moving. Like a thing breathing."

She turned on him then, and her eyes were the color of the sky just before it broke, and her hand came up and cracked across his cheek hard enough to ring in his ear. His head snapped sideways. He tasted copper where his tooth had cut the inside of his lip.

He did not step back. He stood very still, the way you stand when you are deciding whether to cry and have decided not to.

"You do not say that," she said, low. "Not here. Not to me. Not ever."

"I saw it."

"You saw a fire. You saw a sleeve. You saw whatever a boy sees when he is half asleep and frightened."

"I was not asleep."

"Then you were mistaken."

He looked at her. He was small for his age, and he had a face that was easy to discount, all sharp angles and dirt, but his eyes were old in a way that did not match the rest of him.

"I was not mistaken," he said. "I know what I saw."

Something moved in her face. Not anger. Something underneath anger, something that looked almost like grief, and then it was gone and she shouldered past him and started down the slope toward the cut without looking back.

Pim touched his cheek. It was hot. His lip was hot. He put his tongue to it and the copper came again, bright and specific.

"Lad." Caelan was beside him, suddenly, without having seemed to walk there. "Walk with me."

"I am meant to watch your left."

"My left will manage. Come."

They walked a few paces down the slope behind the line. Caelan did not ask what had happened. He did not need to. Pim could feel the question in him, the patient way he held the shape of it without pushing.

"She hit me," Pim said. He did not say it sadly. He said it the way you report the weather.

"I saw."

"Good. Then you know I am not making it up."

"I know you are not making it up."

Pim walked another few paces. Below, Sera had reached the stream and was kneeling to refill the waterskin, and her back was very straight and her shoulders were very still.

"She is frightened," Pim said. "Not of me. Of the thing I saw."

"Yes."

"What is it, Caelan?"

Caelan was quiet for a long moment. His jaw worked the way it did when he was choosing between a true thing and a kind one.

"I do not know," he said at last. "But I think it is something she did not choose to have."

Pim thought about that. He thought about the alley he had grown up in, and the way the older boys had sometimes laughed at him for the way he could feel what the ravens felt, and the way he had learned to keep his mouth shut because keeping your mouth shut was how you kept your teeth.

"She hits harder than she looks," he said.

"That is often the way with her."

"It still hurt."

"It was meant to."

Pim considered this and found it fair. They walked on down the slope.

The cut ran between two shoulders of rock that rose up like the walls of a hall without a roof. The stream at the bottom was narrow and quick and dark, and it made a sound like someone talking under their breath. Sera had stopped at the place where the path dipped to cross it, and she was standing very still, the waterskin still in her hand, and she was not moving.

Pim knew stillness. He knew the way the air went flat just before something happened. He felt it now, a wrongness in the bones of his feet, a prickling up the back of his neck.

"Caelan," he said, very quietly.

"I see them."

Two figures, on the far side of the stream, where the path bent up between the rocks. They wore no color that Pim could see. Their faces were pale in the gloom, and their eyes caught what little light there was and held it the way a cat's eyes do, and they were not moving either. They had been waiting.

Hollow. Pim knew the look. He had been hunted by the look since he was six years old.

One of them smiled.

Sera's hand came up. It was not a decision. It was the thing her body did when her mind had already stopped working. Her palm came up and her fingers spread, and out of her palm, from somewhere under the skin, from somewhere under the linen sleeve, a flare of heat came that made the air between her and the nearer scout go white at the edges, the way the air goes white above a forge.

The nearer scout screamed. The scream was not a long one. The heat took him across the chest and he fell backward into the stream, and the stream hissed where he hit it, and the smell that came up was the smell of a smithy on a busy day, of iron and hair and something sweeter underneath that Pim did not have a name for.

The second scout turned to run. He did not run far. Sera's hand was still up, and her eyes were wide and her mouth was a thin line, and she did not seem to be aiming so much as unable to stop. A second flare went past Pim's ear close enough to lift the hair at his temple, and it struck the second scout between the shoulder blades and he fell forward onto his face and did not move again.

The sound the stream made filled the cut. Pim's ears rang. One of his ravens screamed above him, and another answered, and a third came down hard on his shoulder and dug its claws in and would not let go.

Sera lowered her hand. Her sleeve was smoldering at the cuff. She did not seem to notice. She was looking at the place in the stream where the first scout had fallen, and her face was the face of someone who has opened a door they meant to leave shut.

The refugees behind them had gone very quiet. Maren had pulled Aldred behind her and was holding him with both hands against her chest. Somewhere a child was making a small continuous sound that was not a word.

Sera turned. She looked at Caelan. She looked at Pim.

Pim looked back at her. His cheek was hot where she had hit him. His ear was ringing. His raven was digging its claws into his shoulder hard enough to draw blood.

"Sera," he said. He did not know what came after it.

She put her hand over her mouth. She bent at the waist and then went down on one knee in the wet moss by the stream, and the hand she had used was still smoking, faintly, in the cold air of the cut.

The smoke from Sera's sleeve thinned and went. The wet moss smoked too, where her knee had pressed it. Pim could hear her breathing in short, careful pulls, the way he had seen Old Brennan breathe after he had fallen from the granary roof and broken two ribs and would not let anyone fetch a healer because he could not afford one.

Caelan reached her first. He went down on one knee in the stream and put his hand on her shoulder, and she did not flinch, and she did not lean into him either. She stayed where she was, looking at the water.

"Sera," Caelan said. His voice was low and steady and not quite steady enough. "Sera, we have to move."

"I know," she said, into her hand.

"Can you walk?"

"I know," she said again, and it meant yes, and it meant leave me a moment, and Caelan understood both and stood up and held his hand out to her.

She took it. She stood. Her face was the color of old tallow, but her hand when it closed on his was sure.

Pim turned to the refugees. Maren had Aldred behind her and the boy was crying in the small steady way that meant he would not stop for some time. Old Edda was sitting on a stone with her basket in her lap and her hands folded on top of it as if she were at a wake. The young mother, Bel, was on her knees in the wet, trying to get the wounded man to drink from her flask, and he was turning his face away from it.

"They're coming," Pim said. He said it loud enough that everyone looked at him. "Anyone else who says stop is a liar, and anyone who wants to die can stay and explain it to the next lot. Move."

He said it in the voice he used on the streets when a drunk had cornered him, when he had learned that if you sounded like you owned the alley the drunk would believe you. It worked on Maren. She lifted her head and nodded once, sharply, and gathered Aldred up against her hip. Old Edda got to her feet without a word. Bel got the wounded man's arm over her shoulder and pulled him up and he made a sound through his teeth but he stood.

Pim pointed up the cut. Sera was already moving, and Caelan was beside her, and they went first because someone had to go first and it could not be the children.

The Blackwood closed over them again. The trees did not care what had happened in the stream. They stood in their rows and let the light through in long pale blades, and the moss drank the blood and the birds began to come back, one by one, hopping along the branches to see what had been left for them.

Pim kept count of the ravens. Three had come down to him. A fourth was high above the canopy, moving with the group, and a fifth was somewhere behind them, circling. He could feel them the way he felt his own hands, even when he could not see them. He sent the one behind them back along the path to watch, and the others he held close, working them through the trees ahead in a slow wide pattern, looking for shapes that were not trees.

The wound in Caelan's side had soaked through the binding Pim had made. Pim could see it from three paces back, the dark spreading on the linen, the way Caelan favored the left leg now, the way his breathing had gone shallow and deliberate. He had taken a knife thrust in the gully. He had said it was a scratch.

Pim had seen men die of scratches. He did not say this to Caelan. He said it, silently, to the raven on his shoulder, and the raven turned its head and looked at him with one bright eye as if it understood and did not care.

An hour passed. Maybe more. The light changed and the smell changed and the sound of the stream fell behind them, and at last Sera raised her hand and stopped at the lip of a small clearing, and there it was.

The hunter's lodge sat in a scoop of ground where two ridges met, half-dug into the hill so that the back wall was stone and the front was timber blackened by old fires. The roof had been thatched once and was now mostly moss. The door hung on one leather hinge. There was no smoke from the chimney.

Sera went in first. She held up her hand the way she had learned to do in the Order, and a small cold light gathered in her palm, and by it Pim saw a single room with a stone hearth, a low pallet against the back wall, a scarred table, and a rack of pegs along one beam from which hung nothing. There was a smell of old ash and older damp and, underneath, the faint ghost of woodsmoke, which meant someone had been here not long ago but not recently.

"It's empty," Sera said.

Caelan came in after her, and he made it as far as the table before his hand found the edge of it and his knees decided for him. He sat down on the floor with his back against the table leg and let his head fall back against the wood, and his face in the cold light was the gray of wet slate.

Pim put the ravens on watch, two in the trees above the clearing and one on the chimney pot, and then he went back inside and shut the door behind him. He was glad of the door. He had not known he would be glad of a door until he had one.

Maren and Bel got the wounded man onto the pallet. Old Edda went to the hearth and began, without being asked, to clear out the old ash and lay a small careful fire from the wood Sera had thought to bring from the last rest. The flames came up thin and blue at first and then settled into something warmer, and the room smelled of pine and damp stone and the iron tang of Caelan's blood.

"Show me," Sera said, kneeling beside him.

Caelan looked at her. He did not say anything for a moment. Then he lifted the edge of his shirt, and the binding came away with it, and Sera made a small sound through her nose and did not say what they both knew.

The cut was longer than Pim had thought. It ran from the lowest rib down toward the hip, and the edges of it were swollen and hot-looking even in the cold light, and when Sera pressed just beside it with two fingers Caelan's breath stopped in his chest and did not start again until she took her hand away.

"It needs closing," Sera said. "Properly."

"There's a needle and thread in my pack," Caelan said. "The side pocket. I was a field surgeon's mate for six months, before the Order took me."

Sera went still. Pim went still.

"Surgeon's mate," Sera said.

Caelan did not look at her. He was looking at the fire.

"I was not honest with you," he said. "When I said I had come to the academy straight from my father's house. I had not. I had enlisted with the Silver Order field corps at sixteen. I served under Captain Lethbridge in the eastern campaigns. I was there when we held the bridge at Tarn Ford, and I was there when we burned the village at Harrow Cross because the order came down and we followed it." He swallowed. "I deserted the morning after Harrow Cross. I walked into the nearest chapter house and told them I was a penitent and I wanted to take the oath, and they believed me, or they chose to believe me, because the Order needs bodies. They put me in the academy. They put me under Master Dunmore. I have been your equal and your ally for two years on the strength of a lie."

The fire cracked. Old Edda had stopped moving and was holding her hand over the pot she was about to set on the hook.

Sera was very still. Her face in the firelight was hard to read.

"Why are you telling me this now?" she asked.

"Because there is a needle in my pack and a thread and a small bottle of willow spirits, and if you are to use them on me I would rather you knew what you were sewing shut." He lifted his gaze to hers at last. "And because I am tired of carrying it alone, and you have just killed two men in a stream, and I think we are past the place where we can pretend to be what we were."

Sera looked at him for a long time. Then she nodded once, and got up, and went to his pack, and brought the needle and thread and the bottle back to him.

She poured the willow spirits over the wound without warning. Caelan's hand closed around the leg of the table and his jaw locked and a sound came out of him that he did not mean to let out. Sera did not apologize. She threaded the needle in the cold light of her palm, and she bent, and she began.

Pim sat against the wall with his knees drawn up and his arms folded over them, and he watched. He had sewn his own leg once, after a dog got him in the alley behind the chandler's, and the stitches had held well enough, and he was interested to see how someone who had been taught would do it.

Sera had not been taught. She worked slowly and she worked cleanly, and each stitch pulled the edges of the wound together with a small neat motion, and after the first three Caelan stopped gripping the table and began to breathe again.

While Sera worked, Pim's eyes went back, as eyes do, to the pack on the floor. The side pocket gaped where she had taken the bottle from. Something inside the pack was folded and visible, a corner of cloth, pale where the rest was dark with road dust.

He did not mean to look. He looked.

"Sera," he said, before he thought about whether to say it.

She did not stop stitching.

"There's something in his pack you should see."

Her hands paused. Caelan's eyes opened.

Pim got up and crossed the floor and knelt by the pack and drew the cloth out carefully by its corner. It was a banner, folded small, the size of a prayer book. When he shook it out the firelight caught on it, and he felt the hair on his arms stand up one by one, the way it did when a raven came too close to his ear.

Three sigils, broken across the middle. Three rings, snapped. The same shapes that were marked on the back of the map Sera kept folded against her skin. The same shapes he had seen once, scratched into the wall of a cellar in Old Brennan's house, where Old Brennan had told him never to go and Pim had gone anyway because he was seven and no one told him where to go.

He held the banner up. Sera's hand had stopped. The needle was still in the wound. Caelan was looking at the cloth and his face was a face Pim had not seen on him before, a face of someone who had hoped to be allowed to keep one small thing hidden.

"That is my father's," Caelan said.

Sera drew the needle the rest of the way through. She did not tie it off.

"Tell me," she said.