Page 57 of The Second Death of Locke
fourteen
IT WAS NOT ANeasy thing, to cross the mountains at the turn of the season. Grey kept her hands in her coat as often as possible until Kier finally relented and made each of them tiny magelights, one for each hand, pulling from her constantly to keep them from getting frostbitten. They stopped every few hours to warm up their feet or eat or let Pigeon rest or graze at the increasingly infrequent patches of mountain grass and moss. Four days they spent in the mountains, sleeping in short spurts, huddled together on a double layer of bedrolls with three more pulled tight over the top. At night, the wind screamed so loud that she couldn’t tell the difference between waking and her nightmares. She often woke tangled in Kier’s arms, in Kier’s coat, her legs entwined with Brit’s or Sela’s, to find the captain’s eyes open and staring into the night.
“Stop worrying,” she murmured to him every time, but he only sighed and stroked her hair until she went back to sleep. Between hours of sleep, they took their watch shifts, pacing and frigid, forcing themselves through exercises to keep their circulation going.
As they walked through the mountains, Grey did her best to teach Sela. “I want you to imagine it as a ball of yarn,” she said, as her own mother had told her. “Find a thread and tie it to Brit, and letit unspool little by little. Not like a ball you throw—a thread, Sela. That’s all they need.” They practiced until Sela was able to connect to the mage without any directional nudging from Grey. She was a weak well at most, but she was a well. Just being an unbound well made her more useful than Grey herself, a fail-safe if they needed one.
Closer and closer they drew to the other side of the mountains, until Grey realized that they’d spent most of the afternoon going downhill instead of up. As evening fell in earnest, she hurried her footsteps, moving around Eron, then Pigeon, to catch up with Kier. “Where are we?”
He pulled out the map and said, “Aloducan peaks, crossing east.”
“Kier,” she said, fully accepting that her tone had slipped into whininess. She didn’t think she could identify the unmarked Aloducan peaks on the map if they stabbed her in the chest. He only sighed and pointed at their location with a brief tap. She traced her finger over it, examining the space between there and Grislar, and something like hope swelled in her chest.
“What are you thinking about our next move?”
He cast his eyes skyward. The clouds were steely gray, heavy with the promise of fresh snow. Grey was tired of the stuff, but at least the hard-packed frozen ground was better than mud. “I’ll defer to you on this,” he said. “I think we need to send letters from the next village we come to. We’re about five days out, and I need that time.”
Five days. The thought was nearly incomprehensible.
“Let’s camp here,” he said, louder, so they all could hear him. He nodded toward a sheltered patch of grass a few feet off the path.
Grey set herself up on a rock, laying her kit out as Eron began preparing the food. “Brit,” she called. “The big day has arrived.”
The mage came over, a smile creeping across their lips. “Time to take the stitches out?”
Grey nodded. When she had her workstation set up and had cleaned her hands, Brit removed their shirt, shivering in the cold, and stretched out. Kier positioned himself nearby, ready to help if needed.
Grey focused on her work, humming just a little as she did. There was quiet contentment around the camp—it took Grey a second to realize that Eron was telling stories as he worked.
“That’s not how I heard it,” Ola protested.
“You’re from the southwest. They can’t be correct,” Eron retorted.
“And what do farmers know of folk tales, then?”
Grey had no idea what they were talking about. She finished up and applied more salve to Brit’s wounds, then bandages. The mage dressed and Grey took off her own coat, then her shirt, wincing at the cold of the wind. Kier moved to sit next to her, taking her arm in his hands. She forced herself to pay attention to Eron for a distraction, if nothing else, as Kier started his work.
“They say that magic is a gift from the gods,” Eron said grandly. “That all gods came down, and chose a nation, and blessed it as they saw fit. And here in Idistra, we were blessed most of all, by our own gods: for we are never forced to endure alone.”
“Bullshit,” Ola said. She was sitting on a rock, stroking Pigeon’s nose. Sela sat at her feet, her head on the well’s lap. “No one says that.”
“Well, then you explain it.”
“In Lindan,” Sela said, “they think magic is a responsibility, and it must be learned.”
“Good thing we aren’t Lindle,” Brit muttered. “Eron, you’d be fucked.”
“I don’thaveto feed you,” Eron said. “And besides—I can use Arkunish magic, and my father left me some of his spellstones.”
“Do they work here?” Kier asked, genuinely interested. He had always loved knowing as much as he could about how other systems of magic functioned.
“Not well,” Eron admitted. “And anyway, not to say too much about my father, but he only left me the shitty ones. They’re very specialized. So I suppose I’m really useful, but only if you have a drain blockage, or a thread that keeps snagging.”
“Alas,” Kier said. “I do not.”
Brushing past this, Sela said, “And in Ruskaya, did you know that the magicians are demons?”
Kier snorted. Grey looked up at him, at the careful concentration on his face. “To be fair,” she said quietly, “some would accuse you of… demonic qualities.”
