The only bird of its kind fell from the sky with an arrow in each eye, and its heart still burned with the last light of a god. The witch came to claim it. She left without it.
They stayed some days at Verrow's Span, and each went about their own business while the village kept its. Heyou asked, quietly, after the Dimmers, and the locals had no love for them — the last pair to come through, they said, had taken a short walk off a high bridge — so he kept his own counsel. Jamal lost a drinking contest to simiah who poured themselves short, and went under the table. Sylvie sat with Tamber over her runes and learned what the Rune of the Moon meant: false hope, and the paralysis of a mind that will not move — the mark of Tlellic, god of predation and the Long Night — and that the Askavir, the great bird, might be that god's mount, or familiar, or the god himself worn as a shape.
An elder of the village looked at the candle-flame birthmark on Draz — the shock of white, the raised skin — and knew him for her great-nephew, not seen since he was an infant. She told him the rest of it plainly: his mother was dead; his father and his twin siblings had gone west toward the Amber Reach; and Draz himself had been given up on purpose in a hard season, the twins kept and he left to the Wilds, where something had found him and raised him. Heyou, creeping up to startle him, heard all of it instead, and said nothing.
Then thirty refugees came in from Dolm's Break to the west, hauling carts, doubling the town in an afternoon. Their pyre had gone out, they said, and Umbral beasts had come into the streets, and they had run with a rear-guard and no plan past running. Among them Heyou marked a tall katari with an eye-patch — a freelance hand who had worked with the Dimmers before — and did not trust the coincidence. Before he could weigh it a shadow crossed the settlement, and the locals fell into a drilled routine while the refugees scattered, and the Askavir came down out of the sky for them. Sylvie cast Tether and pinned it, and it came to ground on a rope bridge that split under it and dropped it to a lower ledge.
It turned on her and beat its wings and gusted her off her platform. Draz put an arrow in its eye; it broke the tether and climbed and took a refugee in its talons, and Jamal ran in and smashed the talon with his hammer and made it let go. It bit another refugee in half and caught up one of the townsfolk and dropped them into open air. A wyrm climbed the stone column toward the fight. Sylvie timed a Fireball to break as the bird dove and the wyrm rose, and caught them both, and Draz put his second arrow through the other eye and into its brain, and the burning bird spiraled down and struck the plaza and thrashed itself dead. Sylvie slipped the wyrm's foul breath and drew life out of it to close her own hurts; Heyou came in from above and dropped a lit bottle down its throat, and it swallowed and burst from within.
The bird was thirty feet at the shoulder, near ninety across the wings. Sylvie felt Splendor coming off it — the light she had carried once, torn out of her with her heart — and she cut into the breast and reached the heart, and it was saturated with that same power, the light once thought the gods' alone; the shot-out eyes held it too. She set herself to draw the essence out of it, and it was like putting a cup to a breaking dam; she stopped. The heart gave off a warmth she knew, like the far light of a sacred pyre, like safety.
Then Ygva came up the mountain on a second, quieter wyrm, with a grim pyromancer beside her — a skeleton crowned in a burning skull — and said, You beat me to my quarry. Heyou went invisible and took her from behind with a chokehold; Sylvie loosed the Voice of Dread at her and Ygva gave it back, and the two of them stood locked in it; Draz fired. Without turning, Ygva asked after Heyou's metal arms, and then tore them off and beat him with them — and the arms crawled back through the air and set themselves on again. The grim pyromancer threw fire into Sylvie's face; Jamal swung and missed as it drifted out over the drop and back. Sylvie tried a Fireball with the heart in her hands, and its light fouled the working, and the spell died. Ygva sent vines that struck Jamal and closed on Sylvie and the heart and dragged them in, and wrenched the heart loose while Sylvie's Fireball broke against her face and did nothing — killing an Askavir was not enough to call the gods down, she said, but its bones might serve. She did not see Heyou take the heart back out of her hand and vanish with it. Jamal struck the grim pyromancer as it moved, and the robes fell empty, and the skull went out.
Ygva found Tamber watching from the height, and they traded the only words they had for each other — sister, and apostate. She stepped onto the wyrm and told Sylvie she would be back when she was ready to use that heart, and went, and turned incorporeal so Draz's last arrow passed clean through her, and slid down the mountain and was gone. Draz wanted to run her down while she bled; Heyou said she knew more than they did, and there were dead pyres and a doubled town to answer for first, and a heart to make use of — a forged one, he said, packed with ichor from the Askavir's ruined eye, to pass in her hand for the real. Tamber told them what she knew of the witch: they had been initiates together at the Celsian Athenaeum, far west, and Ygva had been cast out for depletion — draining a thing's whole essence to fuel her work, which is not the Celsians' way — and there were techniques of the full initiation that Ygva had never been given, and Tamber had. Draz's kin would keep the great bird's bones against their return. The heart was theirs, and Sylvie was afraid to touch it; Heyou was an arm the worse; the pyres kept going out; and the witch had only gone to wait.