Chapter 51: Steam and Smoke

They found the warrant in the giant’s pouch.

Thara pulled it out while the others were still catching their breath, a thick fold of cream-colored parchment, stained and creased, sealed with a lump of green wax in the shape of a moth. She read it by the glow of Fel’s palm, turning it over and over with a frown.

“It names us,” she said. “All four. And look, here. Alive if convenient. Otherwise, the head.” She sniffed. “They didn’t even say which head. Rude.”

“Give it to me.”

Veyra read it twice, slowly. Then she folded it, tucked it into her belt, and said nothing more about it. But Fel saw the muscle in her jaw, and he did not ask.

They did not stay. They left the Black Ledger Company where it lay, a heap of stone, a statue of flour, a long white shape in the sand, and walked on through the dusk, out of the far end of the Weeper’s Gap and into the broken country beyond. Nobody talked. Brannoch carried Thara on his back when she began to limp. Veyra took the lead. Old Clatter shambled behind them like a tired mule, humming a low, comforting, mournful note, and every so often Fel would feel a large, warm, chitinous nose nudge against his back, as if to make sure he was still there.

They walked for three hours. By the time the stars came out, they were so tired that they could hardly stand.

It was Thara who found the cave.

She had gone ahead to scout, limping, with her hatchets in her belt and a stub of candle in her fist, and when she came back, her face was lit with an expression of such delight that Fel thought she might have found a treasure.

“You are not going to believe this,” she said.

It lay behind a waterfall.

The fall itself was small, a thin silver veil that dropped thirty feet from a mossy ledge into a ring of ferns. But behind it, hidden by the curtain of water, the rock curved inward into a high, round cavern, and in the cavern, glowing softly in the dark, lay a pool.

It was wide. It was perfectly round. The rock around it was smooth and pale and warm underfoot, and the whole chamber was thick with a soft white mist that rose from the water in lazy curls. Strips of blue-green moss grew along the walls and gave off a faint, steady glow, like lanterns. The air smelled of minerals and wet stone. And when Fel knelt and dipped a hand in the pool, it was hot.

Hot. Comfortably, impossibly, gloriously hot.

“Oh,” he said, in a small voice.

“Told you.”

“It’s a spring.”

“It’s a miracle.”

“Mm,” said Brannoch, who was already unlacing his boots.

There was a short, ferocious silence.

Then Veyra, who had been standing at the cave mouth with her arms crossed, cleared her throat.

“Rules,” she said.

“Oh, come on.”

“Rules. We are four, and there is one pool. I am too tired to build another. So.” She held up a finger. “Shirts on. All of you. I do not care if they are wet. I do not care if they are cold. We bathe in our shifts, or in our undershirts, or in whatever else you may have that will stay on your body.”

“Obviously.”

“Two.” A second finger. “Eyes up. Fel, that means you.”

“I wasn’t going to…”

“Three.” A third finger. “Brannoch does not sing.”

The big man turned his head, slowly. He looked wounded.

“I only sing a little.”

“You sing like a bear in a well.”

“Mm.”

“Four,” said Veyra with finality. “Thara does not touch anything that does not belong to her.”

“That’s not a rule, that’s a slander.”

It was the best thing that had ever happened to him.

Fel sank into the water up to his chin, in his undershirt and trousers, and the heat closed around him like a hand. It went into his shoulders. It went into his ribs. It went into the long, aching knots in his thighs that had been there since the Gorge, and unwound them one by one. He heard a groan. It was his own. He leaned his head back against the smooth rock, and closed his eyes, and for the first time in a month, the whole world went quiet.

Across the pool, Thara had submerged to her nose and was blowing bubbles. Brannoch sat in the shallows with his arms folded and his antlers dripping, wearing a tiny, absurd, white linen undershirt that did not come close to covering him. Steam coiled around his head. He looked like a mountain with a cold.

“You look like a very large pudding,” said Thara.

“I am.”

“An old pudding.”

“A wise pudding.”

Fel laughed. He could not stop himself. It came out in a snort, and then a wheeze, and then he was laughing so hard that he slid under the water entirely, and came up coughing, with his hair plastered across his eyes.

“There he is,” said Thara fondly. “Our hero. Almost drowned in a puddle.”

“It’s a very hot puddle.”

At that moment, something very large entered the cave.

It was Old Clatter. He had been standing outside, pretending not to listen, and the sound of laughter had finally broken his resolve. He came ambling through the veil of water with his horns lowered and his wings half open, humming happily, and stopped at the edge of the pool. His great golden eyes took in the steam. He cocked his head.

“No,” said Veyra.

The beetle hummed.

“No. Clatter. No. There is not enough room.”

He stepped into the pool.

The wave hit them like a wall. Water exploded out of the basin in a roaring sheet, up the sides of the cave and across the floor, soaking everything, and the pool level dropped by a foot. Brannoch vanished entirely. Thara shrieked. Fel, who had not had time to brace, was flung bodily across the water and slammed into the side of the pool with a tremendous splash. When he surfaced, spluttering, Old Clatter had settled in the center of the basin like a king on a throne, up to his shoulders in steaming water, with his eyes half closed and an expression of profound beetle bliss.

He let out a long, rumbling, contented sigh.

Nobody said anything.

Then, from somewhere near the waterfall, Veyra began to laugh.

It started low. It built, bit by bit, until she had to hold on to the rock. She laughed with her head thrown back and her hair coming loose, and the sound rang off the walls of the cave like a bell, wild and free and utterly unguarded. Thara joined in. Then Brannoch, whose deep rough chuckle shook the water. And finally Fel, helplessly, with tears in his eyes.

It went on for a very long time.

When it finally died down, they lay in the water in a loose ring, too weak to move.

The beetle had turned out to be a surprisingly good sport. After a certain amount of cajoling, he had consented to lie down in the shallows on the far side, with only his back and horns above water, like a small, shiny island. Thara had curled up against his shell. Brannoch had propped his chin on the stone and was snoring gently.

And Fel floated on his back in the middle, watching the steam curl up toward the glowing moss.

It was only then, with the cave quiet and the fighting far behind him, that he happened to turn his head.

Veyra was at the edge of the pool.

She had not stayed in the center with the rest of them. She had drifted, in the way that she did, to the quiet rim of the water, where a ledge of smooth stone made a natural seat. She sat there with her arms folded on the rock and her chin resting on them, in a plain linen shift, with her long wet hair hanging loose down her back. For once, she had taken off her scarf. Her horns gleamed like polished jet. The glow of the moss caught the water on her shoulders and turned it to a net of pale green light, and she was looking up at the ceiling with a faraway, peaceful expression that he had never seen on her face before.

She looked, he thought, like something out of the old songs. Like the spirit of the place. Like something that had been here long before the first man and would be here long after the last.

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He forgot, for a moment, that he was supposed to be doing anything at all.

It was a very odd sensation. It was not hunger, or fear, or pain. It was a sort of great, quiet, stunned stillness, as if the whole world had paused in its turning to look at a single thing.

Oh, he thought.

Oh, no.

“You are staring.”

He jerked. Water went up his nose.

“I was not.”

“You were.”

“I was looking at the moss.”

“The moss is behind you.”

“I was looking at the moss behind you.”

Veyra turned her head. Her violet eyes, in the steam, were bright and amused and altogether too knowing. The corner of her mouth curved, slowly.

“Is it very interesting?”

“It’s… it’s a good moss.”

“Mm.”

“It’s very green.”

“I had noticed that.”

He sank a little lower in the water, until it covered his burning ears. She laughed, a soft, low laugh that went right through him, and then, to his horror and delight, she slipped from her ledge and came wading across the pool toward him, with the water streaming from her shoulders and her braid coming undone.

She stopped an arm’s length away.

“Fel.”

“Yes?”

“I am going to say something, and I want you to promise that you will not make it strange.”

“I promise.”

“Thank you for tonight.” She said it quietly. “For the flour. For the branch. For not letting that stone creature carry you away without a fight.” She tilted her head. “I was afraid.”

He blinked. “You?”

“I do not often say it. I was afraid that I would not reach you in time.” Her fingers brushed the surface of the water. “I did not like that very much.”

Something in his chest gave a hard, strange, painful thump.

“I’m all right,” he said.

“I see that.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Good,” said Veyra. “Because I would be very cross.”

She was close. Close enough that he could see the water on her lashes, and the faint pale freckles on the bridge of her nose, and the way her pupils had widened in the dim light. For one long moment neither of them moved. The steam curled between them. Somewhere across the pool, Thara gave a loud, theatrical cough.

Veyra stepped back.

“We should talk about tomorrow,” she said, in an entirely normal voice, and turned around.

Fel stayed where he was, with his heart hammering, and waited for his face to stop burning.

They talked about it for an hour.

They sat in a line along the shallow end, with their arms on the stone and their feet dangling in the warm water, and passed around a wedge of hard cheese and a skin of the dye-works wine. The steam hung over them like a canopy. The beetle snored.

“One day,” said Veyra. “Perhaps a little less, if we do not stop. The Gap puts us on the north side of the king’s cordon. From here the road is clear. We will reach Veilrest by nightfall tomorrow.”

“If nobody else tries to eat us.”

“Mm.”

“And then?” said Fel.

She was quiet for a moment.

“Then we tell Seluine what happened. All of it. The tower, the Wise One, the bounty.” She drew a long breath. “And then we decide what to do.”

“What can we do?”

“We can go to Dun Vurrim.”

“The forge.” He said it slowly. “To fix my swords.”

“To find out what is wrong with them. To find out what is wrong with you.” She did not look at him. “Corvane was a traitor, a madman, and a very rude host. But he was not wrong about the dwarves. If anyone can read what is in your blades, it is the smiths of the Hold.”

“And the king?”

“The king wants us dead.”

“He wants me dead. Because he thinks I killed his brother.”

“He wants all of us dead.” Her voice was steady. “Because we were in the room.”

There was a long silence.

Fel looked at his hands. They were pale and wrinkled from the hot water. The ring in his palm glowed a faint, steady white, and there was a thin thread of black, unbroken, running from the edge of it down his wrist.

“The guards read Seluine’s letter,” he said.

Nobody answered.

“At the door of the tower. I saw them. They broke the seal. They read it for a long time.” He looked up. “It had her name on it. And it said where we were from.”

Veyra had gone very still.

“The king will know,” she said softly. “He will know where we came from.”

“Yes.”

“Veilrest.”

“We should go now,” said Fel. His voice had risen. “We should go right now, we should…”

“Fel.”

“We can’t just sit here! If they know where…”

“Fel.” She put a hand on his arm. It was warm, and steady, and it did not tremble. “It is a seven-day ride from Sorticia to Veilrest. The king’s soldiers would have to cross the entire country. They would have to climb the mountain. We have taken the fastest road in the kingdom, and we have taken it in six days.” She shook her head slowly. “Even if he sent his riders the moment we fled, they could not have reached it before us.”

“You’re sure?”

“I am sure.”

“You said it would take them…”

“I know what I said,” said Veyra. “I am telling you that we are all exhausted. If we ride through the night, we will fall off the beetle. If we sleep until dawn, we will arrive tomorrow with our wits about us.” She looked around the circle of tired faces. “We rest here. We leave at first light.”

Brannoch nodded. Thara nodded.

Fel hesitated. Then, slowly, he nodded too.

It was the wrong decision. It was the sort of decision that, afterward, none of them would be able to forgive.

But in the warm glow of the cave, with the water lapping at their feet and the moss shining on the walls, it seemed very reasonable indeed.

They left at dawn.

It was a bright, cold, windy morning, the sort that makes the world look washed clean, and the road to Veilrest wound up through the foothills in a long white ribbon. The beetle was in a splendid mood. He took every slope at a run, humming at the top of his voice, and the air smelled of pine and snow.

By midday they had climbed above the trees.

The country had changed. The forest had thinned to scrub, and the scrub had given way to bare rock and tufts of yellow grass. The air was thin, and clear, and sharp as glass. The peaks stood against the sky like the teeth of some enormous animal, and the road clung to their sides in a series of dizzying switchbacks that hung over drops that made Fel’s stomach turn.

They stopped at noon, at a little cairn on a ridge, to rest the beetle.

Brannoch and Thara were arguing, in low voices, about the precisely correct way to cook a hare. Old Clatter was grazing, with great delicacy, on a patch of mountain lichen. And Veyra, who had been standing at the edge of the ridge with her hands on her hips and her face to the wind, glanced over her shoulder.

“Come.”

He came.

They walked along the ridge together, away from the others, until the road curved out of sight behind a shoulder of rock. Below them the whole country lay spread like a map, a rumpled green carpet of hills and valleys, shining here and there with the thread of a river, and far, far to the south, on the very edge of the world, a tiny white glimmer that might have been Sorticia.

She sat down on a flat boulder. After a moment, he sat beside her.

For a while they said nothing. The wind pulled at her braid. A hawk was turning on the air currents, high above, and its cry carried over the rocks.

“Do you know what I want?” said Veyra.

It was so unexpected that he turned to look at her.

“What?”

“Out of life.” She did not look at him. She was watching the hawk. “I have been thinking about it since the cave. It is a ridiculous question. I do not often ask it.”

“What do you want?”

“A house.” She smiled, a little crookedly. “A small one. By a lake. With a porch, and a door that sticks, and a very large dog. I would like to wake up in the morning and not have to be anywhere. I would like to hunt when I wished to hunt, and not when someone told me. I would like…” She hesitated. “To see the sea.”

“You’ve never seen the sea?”

“There is no sea in Delvishion. The mountains stop it.” She shrugged. “I have read about it. A great flat blue floor that goes on forever, and the water is salt, and there are creatures in it the size of houses. I do not believe it. I think someone made it up.” Her eyes were bright. “But I would like to find out.”

He was quiet.

“I haven’t seen it either,” he said at last.

“No?”

“I’ve only seen mountains and cities. And the inside of a very large number of cellars.” He smiled. “I always thought it would be… I don’t know. Loud.”

“Loud.”

“Waves. They crash, don’t they?”

“I would imagine so.”

“I’d like to hear it.”

She turned her head. Her eyes held his, and for a moment he forgot where he was.

“What if,” she said slowly, “it all went wrong?”

“What?”

“What if we did not go back to Veilrest. What if we turned around at the next bend and went the other way. Away from the king, away from the dwarves, away from the swords and the ring and the poster. What if we simply… kept going. For the rest of our lives.” She drew her knees up. “What would we do?”

It was a game. He understood that. She was not asking it seriously. But something in her voice made him answer as though she were.

“We’d need a wagon,” he said.

“A wagon.”

“A big one. With a roof. And Clatter pulling it.”

“He would hate that.”

“He’d love it. He’d have an audience.” He grinned. “We’d go from town to town. You’d hunt, and sell the skins. I’d do the haggling.”

“You are terrible at haggling.”

“I’m excellent at haggling. I got a gloveright to knock two hundred brills off a set of wire fingers.”

“That was a miracle.”

“That was talent.” He leaned back on his hands. “Brannoch could be the muscle. Thara could do the cards. She’d cheat, and then she’d lose the money, and we’d have to do it again.”

“And we would never pay for anything.”

“Never.”

“And one day,” said Veyra, “we would come to the end of the road.”

“And there’d be a sea.”

“And it would be loud.”

“And it’d be too big. And we wouldn’t know what to do with it.”

“So we would sit on the shore,” she said, “and watch it.”

“For a very long time.”

“Yes.”

They sat together in the wind, side by side, with the whole world below them. After a while, she shifted. Her hand, which had been resting on the stone between them, moved a few inches, and found his, and curled around it.

It was a small thing. It was nothing. But her hand was warm and rough and strong, and it fitted in his as if it had always been made for it, and neither of them said a word.

He did not feel any need to.

They were within a few hours of Veilrest when Veyra began to talk.

It was nothing she had planned. It simply came out of her, in the late afternoon, when the beetle had slowed to a steady, rolling stride and the light had gone long and golden over the peaks. She had been quiet since the ridge. Now she sat on the front bench with the reins loose in her fingers, and as the road wound higher, she began to smile, and then to speak, in a quick, warm, eager rush that he had never heard from her.

“Osha will be furious,” she said. “She will say that I have lost weight. She says it every time. She will put a bowl of porridge in front of me that is the size of my head, and stand there with her arms folded until I have finished it. And she will pretend that she has not been awake every night since I left.”

“She’s sweet on you.”

“She is sweet on everyone. She just hides it very badly.” Veyra laughed. “And Pim. Oh, Pim. She will have grown a foot. She will have cut her own hair again, and it will be crooked. She will run at Fel from across the square and knock him flat, and then she will demand to know where her knife is.”

“She’s got the knife,” said Fel.

“Then she will demand to know why you have not written.”

“I don’t know how to write.”

“She will teach you.” Veyra’s eyes were bright. “And Seluine will be pretending not to be glad to see us. She will make a speech about duty. She will say something very dry. And then she will look at you, Fel, and she will say nothing, and her eyes will be shining like a girl’s.” She shook her head. “And old Thelo with his antlers. And Marren, and that dreadful baby of hers. Tiko. He bit me the last time I held him.” She sighed happily. “I did not think I would miss it so much.”

Behind her, Brannoch gave a deep, contented hum. Thara was lying flat on her back on the roof of the saddle with her boots in the air.

“I miss Osha’s pie,” she said dreamily. “The one with the little blue berries. I’d kill for it.”

“You would kill for anything.”

“I would kill for pie.”

“Veyra,” said Fel.

She turned.

“Thank you,” he said. “For bringing me back.”

She looked at him. Her face softened. Then she reached out and, very briefly, squeezed his arm.

“You are welcome home,” she said.

He had no answer to that.

They rode on in silence.

The road climbed. The shadows lengthened. The light turned from gold to amber, and the first stars appeared over the peaks. The wind died. The air grew very still. A single bird called, somewhere far above them, and stopped.

And then Brannoch sat up.

“Smoke.”

Nobody moved.

He was pointing, with one huge finger, over the shoulder of the nearest ridge. Fel followed the line of his arm. At first he saw nothing. The sky was a deepening violet. The mountains were black. And then, rising slowly from behind the rocks, he saw it: a thin dark column, as straight as a pillar, climbing into the twilight.

Another rose beside it. And another.

“It’s a… it’ll be a feast,” said Thara. Her voice had gone high and strange. “It’s a festival. They burn the, the, the festival fires…”

“It is not the season.”

Veyra had stood up. Her face had drained of color. The reins fell from her fingers.

“That is Veilrest.”