Page 69 of A Song of Ash and Moonlight

“I’m not,” I said at once, “and you haven’t. And don’t be sorry, I just…”

Freyda, Mara’s falcon, swooped down from the trees and over our heads to dive into the brush. I was glad for the distraction of her rustling with whatever she’d caught for lunch. It gave me a precious moment to think.

“I don’t know what things are between us now,” I said at last. “To have…done such things with you, and now to be out in the world as we were before—it feels wrong somehow. It feels like everything should be different, and itis, but it’s also strangely the same, and I don’t know how to reconcile that. I don’t know how to talk to you,really, and part of me—the nervous part—doesn’t want to, but at the same time, all I want todois talk to you, and…and other things.”

I hadn’t meant to say so much. My heart pounded with relief, and with fear of how he might respond, both at once. How foolish I must have sounded to him, how inexperienced. But when I dared to look over at him, he was smiling. He was watching the trees ahead of us, riding his horse with the sort of natural ease only an Anointed wilder possessed, and he was smiling—a small thing, half hidden by his dark beard. A spot of sunlight pushed through the trees to illuminate the warm crinkles around his eyes.

“Other things?” he repeated softly, with a sly sideways glance.

I smiled down at my hands, my heart fluttering. “Other things,” I said, even softer.

“There will be time for that, and for everything else,” he replied. Then he reached out for my hand, and I grabbed on, grateful for the warm anchor of his fingers wrapping around mine. “Right now,” he added, “I’m just glad to be with you. Brave Farrin, in the forest light.”

Then he raised my hand to his mouth and kissed my fingers, brushed his lips across my knuckles.

After that, we rode in silence once more, but it was simple and sweet, like the quiet right after waking, before the day begins. My worries had, for the moment, been smoothed out by the touch of Ryder’s hand, by the warmth of his voice and his gaze, and I found myself wondering if this was what it meant to feel at ease in the world, to feel at ease in one’s own body. It was a feeling I was unused to. I closed my eyes and let the forest air wash over me. I breathed carefully, thinly; I didn’t want the feeling to fade.

***

That night, as the late hours crept toward the wee morning ones, I awoke to find Talan crawling out of the tent.

“We’re close,” he whispered, for we were all awake now. His dark eyes glinted with a faint light, the source of which I couldn’t place, and as I sat up, I could feel at once that he was right: wewereclose to something new and strange. The forest beyond us was dead quiet—no night noises of animals, no mountain breeze through the pines. When I ducked out of the tent myself, I was shocked to see snow falling from a sky thick with storms. A low rumble sounded in the distance—thunder, rolling quietly—and every few seconds, a bolt of lightning flashed on the horizon, dimly illuminating the bulbous shapes of the clouds, the spindly treetops.

We swiftly packed up camp in silence. Watchful Freyda sat on a low branch nearby, her crown feathers ruffled and her yellow eyes glaring into the forest beyond, searching for enemies. When Mara whistled low to her, she glided over to perch on my sister’s shoulder and chirped quietly into her hair—a strange language of bird and Rose, born of the Mist.

Ryder was listening carefully.

“What’s she saying?” I whispered.

“Something about a great wall in the trees. A black place where nothing lives.” He glanced at Talan. “Sound familiar?”

“I suppose a bird might describe it that way, yes,” Talan replied, the worry in his eyes at odds with the calm silk of his voice. “Beyond the ward magic I can’t cross, I can sense only a sort of void. A massive nothingness, or else the ward magic is creating the illusion of size.”

“I don’t understand,” Gemma said nervously. She looked young and pale in the dim storm light, her dark hood drawn up tight over her head. “When we made camp, we didn’t feel any of this, and the sky was clear.”

“Storms come and go,” I pointed out.

“Whatever this place is could have ward magic that isn’t entirely stationary,” Gareth added, scribbling in a notebook he’d pulled fromhis coat pocket. Observations, I assumed—the weather, the wind, the sensation of something cold and forbidding in the air. A presence I felt as clearly as if I’d trespassed into a locked room.Turn around, it said.Go no farther.

Shivering, I wished I could obey and take everyone else with me.

“Ward magic thatmoves?” Gemma said, incredulous.

“To further disguise the thing it’s meant to protect,” Gareth explained. “If you can’t reliably plot the ward magic, you can’t know the size or shape or nature of the thing it’s hiding.”

Mara nodded, listening. “I’ve certainly encountered such barriers while on patrol in the Mist. Remnants of Olden magic or traps laid by Olden creatures, hoping to catch curious humans.”

“That explains why I had such difficulty mapping what I found,” Talan said, but before he could say more, a wave of frigid air rippled past us, so icy cold that it was like tiny dagger points raking across my skin. The force of it was physical, a giant, frozen hand pushing me, pushing all of us, back where we came from.

The horses, already uneasy, tossed their heads and pawed at the earth, trying to run, but their leads held them fast to the trees. Ryder went to each of them, murmuring words of comfort, then unfastened their leads and turned them loose. They took off, all their saddlebags still on the ground, full of our supplies.

“I’ll find them easily enough when we come back,” Ryder said, “but there’s no sense in leaving them tied up and terrified. And they’ll be useless to ride through something like this.”

“Then let’s go find this thing, whatever it is,” I said tensely. The sight of the horses tearing off into the forest, away from whatever strange magic had crept close as we slept, left me even colder than the whistling air. I clutched a wooden staff Mara had brought from the priory; the familiar weight of it in my hands, so similar to the one I’d used when training with Ryder, was a comfort.

We walked for what felt like hours, Talan making quiet note of every landmark we passed, assuring us that we were on the right path. The cold grew increasingly worse, the snow falling in fast, teeming swirls, and the clouds were so thick that not even the midday sun managed to break through and warm us.

“We’ll have to turn back soon,” Ryder called out from the rear of our caravan. “We’re not equipped for weather much worse than this.”

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