At the eastern gate she hesitated, as if waiting for a chime that never came. The Brighthand didn’t stop. The guards at the gate watched her with quiet curiosity; Unsung Sisters did not routinely leave the city, as far as Lain knew. Her Brighthand showed the gate guards their seal and a bit of rolled parchment, likely signed by High Glinnel Seli. They opened the doors without question. The hinges complained in argument against the ice.
Beyond lay the world.
The air was sharper, unfiltered by incense. The wind carried new scents to her: cold pine, iron, the faint sweetness of rot beneath wet snow. The ground itself looked strange: uneven, alive, every footprint filling with silver frost. She’d thought the world would feel holier outside the walls, nearer the wyrm’s vastness, but instead it felt indifferent, wordless.
She looked back once. The Spire rose over the sleeping city, its upper windows catching the weak dawn light, gleaming like steel half-buried in fog.
One of the Brighthand turned, noticing her pause.
She carried on with them.
The gate closed behind them with a hollow thud.
It wasn’t long before the voice of the wyrm began to fade. She’d been told she’d be without it, but knowing so and feeling so were starkly different experiences, and what she felt now was an ache. It felt as though something had scooped the air from her chest, leaving her hollow and open to the cold. She hummed a little, softly, thinking she might hear the wyrm hum back, but once they reached the ice-silvered pines, the sharp, thin air left her no return of note at all.
This was part of her exile. Part of her punishment. She had been granted the voice of the Underserpent as a gift; now she would have to earn it back.
Snow gathered in the grooves of their boots, clinging to the hems of their cloaks. When she tried to speak – asking how much farther, whether they meant to rest – they answered only in short, flat syllables.
“Far enough,” one said.
They rode the silence north until the sun stood high and pale. By midday, the wind came hard from the west, cutting through cloak and wool. The Brighthand turned off the road toward a stone arch that marked a covered waystation: four pillars, a slanted roof, and a trough half-filled with frozen water. She imagined the Dagorlind building this as a shelter for pilgrims. The carvings on the pillars were of bells and coiled serpents, worn smooth by years of wind and snow.
They ducked inside, grateful for the break in the wind. The older Brighthand – Darrin, she’d heard the other call him – slung his pack down with a grunt. He unstrapped a satchel and drew out cold bread, dried meat, and a wedge of hard cheese. The younger, Thomas, drank from his canteen. They moved with the ease of habit, spreading their rations on a bit of cloth: bread gone hard as stone, slices of smoked fish, dried fruit dark as blood.
Lain sat near the wall. The cold crept through the fabric of her robes and numbed her fingers. Her tail was stiff with cold, but that feeling wasn’t entirely unpleasant. She watched Thomas wipe his mouth, then throw his hood back for long enough to adjust his padded arming cap, and a smatter of hair escaped from beneath it. At the moment he looked boyish, now that he was eating, and she wondered when he last spoke sweetly to a girl, or if he ever danced at pubs – she’d heard the Ivathi did that, took hands, spun each other through music. What would it be like, to take the hand of someone so anointed?
She shook her head. She shouldn’t be thinking like this.
She thought of the small packet of licorice root powder in her pack; the draught she was supposed to take with hot water, twice a day.
Her stomach tightened. They had no fire nor kettle. Only the trough, its surface locked in ice.
She could still smell the faint sweetness of the licorice through the waxed cloth. The thought made her throat ache. Without it, she could already feel her body turning inward: her pulse heavy, her skin too sensitive to the touch of the cold. It wasn’t unbearable yet, but she knew the signs. By nightfall the Heat would rise in earnest, and the boyish Brighthand with his anointed hands would have to be avoided at all costs.
She folded the packet shut and returned it to the pack. At the inn, she promised herself. As soon as there’s water. She tried to focus on the sound of Darrin breaking bread.
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“Best eat,” he said shortly. “We won’t stop again till dusk.”
“Thank you,” she murmured. She drew out her provisions. The bread was dry enough to scrape the inside of her mouth. She took a careful bite of cheese and found her hands shaking.
They ate in silence for a long while. The only sound was the wind moving through the broken arch. Thomas watched the horizon while he chewed. Darrin’s right hand, bare and gleaming faintly with its sheen of consecration, rested on his knee, scarred like a thing that recalled too much.
At last Lain said softly, “You’ve both served long with the Order?”
Darrin nodded. “Most of my life.”
Thomas’s reply came sharper. “Long enough.”
She hesitated, unsure whether to ask more. “It must be difficult, being so far from home.”
“Home?” Thomas said, as though testing the word. “Ivath is home enough.”
Darrin glanced at him. “When we’re there.”
Lain studied the frost collecting along the edge of her cloak. She scraped at it with a fingernail. “I lived all my life inside the Spire. I didn’t know the air could smell like this.”
That earned a flicker of curiosity from Darrin. “Like what?”
“I think… empty? But not clean. All the air inside the Spire smells of incense.” She wondered, briefly, why she would tell them this. “It’s strange to think of a world that doesn’t need blessing.”
Thomas snorted. “Everything needs blessing. Some of it just doesn’t deserve it.”
Lain looked up, startled by the bitterness in his tone. He caught her glance and looked away, uncomfortable with his own words. Darrin said nothing, but the corner of his mouth tightened, as if he’d heard this argument before.
“What are your names?” She already knew the answer, but she thought it polite to ask, and it seemed the safest ground she could find.
“Darrin,” the older one said after a pause.
“Thomas,” the younger muttered.
She expected them to ask her for her own name, but they didn’t.
The wind shifted, carrying a fine dust of snow into the shelter. Thomas pulled his cloak tighter. “You should eat faster, Sister. The day won’t wait.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Eat anyway,” Darrin said, softer. “You’ll need your strength.”
His voice held something almost kind. It was the first warm thing she’d heard all day.
They finished the meal in silence. When the others stood to shoulder their packs, Darrin lingered a moment, gazing out toward the white expanse of road.
“You’ve never left the Spire before,” he said.
“No.”
He nodded slowly. “The first time you cross the gate, it feels like the world’s too big for breathing.”
“It does,” she said.
“After a while,” he went on, “It gets smaller again. Or you stop noticing the space between things.”
Thomas shifted impatiently. “We should move.”
Darrin’s eyes stayed on the horizon. “When I was your age,” he said, almost to himself, “I thought the world ended where the Spire’s shadow fell.” He turned, catching Lain’s gaze. “I learned otherwise the day we purged your village of Wyrmrot.”
The words hit with the bluntness of the confession. Thomas stiffened, looking from one to another.
“You were there?” Lain whispered.
Darrin’s jaw worked once before he answered. “Yes.”
“Did you know Elder Tanel?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
A long silence settled between them. Wind hissed through the broken roof.
She looked at him for a long moment.
Thomas muttered a prayer too low to make out, adjusting his sword belt as if to ward off the weight of the air.
Lain pulled the bell from her pocket, unbinding the bone clapper. She held it out to Darrin. She couldn’t say why.
He looked curiously from her to the bell and back again, then took it in his hand, examining it. He gave a quiet huff. “Only the Kelthi make bells with this serpent shape. It’s easy to mark. It’s this gold latticework, here.” He pointed it out to her, part of the spiraling snake. He gave it a shake. The chime was crystalline, remarkably sweet. The quality of the ache inside her at its sound was unlike the way her Tuning responded to any bell she’d ever heard. She grasped at her cloak, breath snagging.
Darrin glanced up at her with a raised eyebrow. For a horrible moment, she thought he would keep the bell, having mistaken it for a gift, or worse, to destroy it – she could see it in his hand, a wanting, a tension.
But then he held it out to her. She bound the clapper and returned it to her pocket.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“So am I.”
When they set out again, Darrin took the lead. Thomas fell behind to watch the road behind them. Lain walked between them, her pulse loud in her ears, that bell chiming in her head as if it had never stopped ringing. Or perhaps it was the sound of the small bells of their swords, whispering judgement with every step.
The draught was still sealed and useless in her pack. The warmth in her blood rose past comfort, like a fever waking. Every step toward their destination felt heavier, brighter, as if the world itself had tilted toward Heat.