Fire held back the cold, and the cold held back the dead. At Drosven’s Gate, the fire failed first.
Four kept vigil at the Sacred Pyre of Drosven’s Gate — Sylvie Cerridwen, once a sorcerer, now a wizard working spells from tomes and the light of Splendor; Heyou, salvaged wood and metal behind a skull-faced plate; Jamal the dwarf Slayer; and Draz the simiah ranger. Then the fire went out. Not banked, not smothered — snuffed, the way a candle is pinched, and a dark the town had forgotten walked into the plaza. Beneath the broken ground beside the square, something stirred that the fire had kept sleeping. It came up through the cracked earth: a chitinous thing the size of a bus, and after it two gelatinous horrors, drawn to the cold like the rest.
Heyou took an acid graze and was gone into shadow before it could cost him more. Jamal did not move; he swung, and his warhammer sent a ripple of dark through the plaza with every blow. A jelly rose to swallow him. He met it, and it burst, and its bile ate at his armor and his skin, and still he stood. Sylvie broke another against a wall with a single hard word — stunned, not slain. From the dead embers Draz loosed an arrow through a splitting nucleus and stilled both halves before they could knit; Heyou came back for the rest with his daggers, that nothing might crawl away and rise again. The chitinous thing sank and surfaced and sank until Jamal and Heyou caught it between them and tore it past mending. Then the plaza was quiet, and the Sacred Pyre gave only smoke.
Jamal asked how such a pyre was lit again. It was not, Sylvie said — not by common fire, which gives heat and nothing more. It wanted a Blessed Branch; without one, the magic would not return. Draz gave the colder truth: the things they had killed would not stay dead unless burned, and cut apart, they came back. He knew the shape of a dead pyre. He had come the long way to Drosven’s Gate — up out of Vireth Hollow in the southeast, where ribbits and fungril and a few simiah like himself still lived, and through Larrow on the road. Larrow had been a hub of trade once. Its pyre failed, and no branch came, and it could not be lit again; and so it emptied — some fleeing, some staying to die in the cold. Drosven’s Gate stood a single night from the same end.
Two places, Sylvie knew, might hold a Blessed Branch: the high mountains past Ulmira’s Step, near her own Stoneheart Peaks, where the giants were said to guard a stash — or Thistleglass, and its fairies. She chose the mountains. She did not hide that it was the fairies she trusted least. They would see the town made safe, and then go. The people had already fled; the party took what the empty stalls and ale-casks would give, and Heyou lifted a few extra handfuls of gold from the bar besides. It was autumn, going to winter. Under the high cloud that had roofed the world for years now, they began the climb — four days, or nine — into a cold that never eased and a dry wind that never wholly stilled.
The higher they went, the quieter it became, until the birds were left below, and the air was hollowed of sound. Then one shadow crossed the whole of the trail at once. The Askavir — a titan-raptor, the only one of its kind, greater than any mountain bird by an order of magnitude. Sylvie knew it only by likeness. In the Stoneheart Peaks, a chosen few of her people were marked in childhood for the Eyrie, and went to live higher up, and rode the great birds, carrying word across a land the Umbra had cut to pieces. This was no bird of the Eyrie. It was larger, and it was alone. She read it as she would a mount, and judged it patrolled and did not hunt. In that much she was right. In little that came after would she be so fortunate.
Draz left the road for a stand of trees, and found they were awake. The wood took him — roots pulling him under, a second trunk closing on Heyou as he tried to pass unseen. One tree spoke for the grove and asked penitence for the trespass. Its kin were blighted, it said: moving still, but their minds dulled, their selves worn thin, caught between the living and the dead. Sylvie gave them what she could — reaching down to the heart of the earth that had once been her power, a slow heartbeat waking in her — and the trees said their roots felt stronger, and let the two men go. From them she learned what a Blessed Branch is. Not a made thing. A rarity of the high crags, where some hardy scrub-tree will now and again bear a single branch of blue flowers — sometimes streaked crimson — where all its others are white and orange. Found by chance, like a four-leaf clover, and only near the peaks.
Somewhere on the road Sylvie turned a card. She always turned the Moon; this time it came reversed, and it troubled her, for it turned her back toward the peaks where she had lost her power and never since returned. To spend the miles, Heyou spoke of Ugg and Grug, two giant brothers who had been muscle for a rival crew — one near ten and a half feet, the other a bare nine, four eyes between them. He could cheat Ugg blind at cards; Grug he never once fooled. His own syndicate, he let slip, had worked the cliff-carved port of Salthewn. They passed a titan long dead in the face of a cliff — a jaw whose teeth stood five and six feet high, a shoulder still wearing folded plate — and other armor rusting half-buried along the trail, until they came over a ridge and saw the stone stairs of Ulmira’s Step, and the broken palisades of the town beyond.