The owl glided in a circle above our heads, then soared serenely toward the heart of the wilderness. Instinct affirmed that refuge was near, though perhaps not so directly across the flats.
“This way,” I said to the three who had just arrived at my elbow heaving and coughing, their collected breath enfolding us in fog. I pointed to the wing-spread owl. “She’ll lead us to safety.”
I slid down the last few quercae of the steep embankment and struck out across the flats. In our weakened condition, a shorter distance likely outweighed the increased danger of exposure. Voushanti and the others trudged after, well behind me.
Fifty paces into the wilderness, I heard…or perhaps only felt…an unsettling noise beneath my feet. Instinct screamed warning. I motioned the others to halt so my dulled senses might register the sound, and I cupped my lifeless fingers over my nose and mouth, breathing out my last warmth to thaw my nostrils. Then I inhaled slowly, felt, tasted, and listened, as my father and grandfather had tried to teach me when I was small.
Water. Mud. Rot.
Appalled, I dropped to my knees and speared my hands through the snow and into the cold muck that lay just below. Dead trees. Rotted marsh grass. Burrowed frogs, cold and still. Old droppings and tufts of animal hair caught on buried willows. A harper’s distant song…Ever so faintly, the sounds, the smells, and the land’s retained memory seeped through the winter’s blanket. And nowhere did I find my guide thread. Fool! Blasted mindless idiot!
Dulled with cold and yearning for finer magic, I had forsaken my own path to follow the owl. And the Danae, who had no use for humankind, had brought us here.
“Stop! Go back!” I shouted hoarsely, peering at the treacherous landscape through the darkening night. I knew exactly where we were. How could my sense of distance be so far askew? It seemed impossible we could be so far south, but I had traveled here before. “Step not one quat outside our tracks. This is bogland.”
“What of you?” shouted Voushanti, wind blunting the edges of his words. “We have ropes—”
“I’ll be all right. Go around, stay on the side slope, head straight southward…that way. Only two quellae to Gillarine. Hurry!”
Thank all gods, the three were in no mind to argue. Voushanti’s beard and eyebrows were frosted pure white as if he had aged fifty years in an hour, and Philo and Melkire might have been but four glazed eyes in unfleshed skulls. They were in no state to fight anyone.
I watched until they had made it back to solid ground safely and vanished in the thickening snowfall. Then I shoved magic through my buried fingers and sought a path deeper into the bog. The trickster owl had vanished, leaving me no choice but to twist its vicious cleverness to my own purpose.
The route fixed firmly in my mind, I wiped my frozen, muddy hands, bundled them in my cloak, and set out across the snow-draped fens. The falling snow would blur my footsteps and mask the inadequacies of my spellworking long enough to close the trap—a snare I believed had been set for every human abroad this night, pursuers and pursued.
An irregular mound, well into the heart of the bogland, provided enough substance and variety for my purposes: a leafless willow, a sheep’s leg bone, a rotted branch, a charred stick. I structured two spells, one to serve deception, one to serve fear. Then I waited, stomping my sore feet and flapping my aching arms to keep my blood moving. Dawn was near—as much of it as I was like to see with the weather closing in.
As the moments slid by in abject silence, fear nagged that I had miscalculated yet again. I could scarce muster the strength to shake the clinging snow from my cloak. While I became another stupid beast rotting in the bog, the Harrowers would follow Voushanti straight to my friends.
“Aaaagh!” I yelled in inarticulate fury, yanking my hair to force blood to my head. “Come find me! Any of you…come do what you will! Show me your face if you dare!”
My grandfather had warned me. Such torment as the Danae had wrought on him displayed a cruelty colder than this cursed winter. So whence came my sentimental folly that because they were beautiful and magical and caused my knees to grow weak with unfounded yearning, they had a benevolent interest in me? Perhaps the one writ with dragons had invited me into the aspen grove the better to destroy my mind.
Anger kept me living. I shivered and coughed and honed my spells, determined they would be sufficient to end this wretched journey.
They came in the purple gloom that passed for sunrise. Harrowers flowed over the ridge like a tidal surge, cries hoarse with triumph and fury when they spotted me in the open. I noted with grim satisfaction that they had dropped at least a quarter of their numbers since I’d seen them last. At their head rode the dog-faced man, his orange scarf flying, the glow of his hands like a bilious sun leading their way.
I fell to my knees and fed magic into my mound of sticks and bones, recalling the appearance of my departed companions to shape the illusions of harried travelers, stopped to succor a fallen comrade.
The yowling Harrowers swept onto the flats without pause, and even the shouts of the first to flounder did not slow the rest. When the yellow glow failed—snuffed by mud or fear—their triumph turned to dismay.
Weary and mind-numbed, they did not think to stay calm and press through the muck to seek firmer ground. Rather, weighed down with mail coats and supply sacks and weapons, burdened with legends of bogwights and sucking ponds and trickster Danae, they felt their feet sinking and their clothes waterlogged, and they panicked, as I had gambled they would. I touched the charred stick and set wispy tendrils of flame adrift from my hand until the cold numbed my fingers and I could conjure no more of them. The gloomy landscape was dotted with winking flames, and the men in the bog started screaming.
Half of the Harrowers killed each other, trying to use their comrades for stepping-stones. Others drowned quickly, pulled down by panicked horses or tangled in dead vines and rotted trees swept down from the mountains in long-ago floods. Some wandered, crying for help in the neck-deep mud, climbing on hillocks only to have them sink under their weight. After a while I could only hear them, for the blizzard rose in full fury, and human eyes could not penetrate past the length of my arm. The cold and the mud would finish them. The memory of Luviar butchered, of Nestor and Boreas condemned to slow agony, of tar-clogged wells and villages burned to ash, crushed what glimmers of mercy blossomed in my soul. These gatzi would have ridden my friends to ground.
I huddled on my islet in the center of the bogland, a driftwood club ready should one of the lost find his way to me. Only when my ears assured me that neither man nor beast roamed the upland banks did I press my hands into the muck to seek the path back to firm ground.
I jerked them right out again, then bent double and retched bile until stomach, chest, and throat were raw. The terrors of dying men and beasts permeated the pools and hillocks, and I could not find my way. I sank to the ground, buried my face in my frozen cloak, and begged the earth’s forgiveness for the horror I had wrought.
Chapter 32
Valen fiend heart! The mocking cry stung like a tutor’s rod on cold knuckles. Cold…what wasn’t cold? The world, all life, and certainly every part of me was frozen. No one ever listened when I said how I hated the cold.
I trudged onward. One step. Then a rest. Another step. Hip-high drifts covered the path that would take me away from the treacherous bog. Perhaps the insulting name, a relic from childhood, etched itself so vividly in my imagination because I longed so fiercely to believe that another living person existed in this wintry desolation.
Fiend heart… Soon I’d be imagining I heard iron skull or lead wit or gatzi prick, though the damnable girl would lob that last stone only outside adults’ hearing. I smiled…more of a grimace, I imagined, as I could not feel my face. Lassa, please be real.