The Long Way Around

One branch to keep one fire, carried the long way round while the rest of the world went dark.

Under Ygva's eye they settled the errand: down into Grithmaar Deep after the great thing Mollthain had left there, the beast tangled up with the ruin of Jamal's home. Sylvie wore her circlet openly, the one marked to the god-king Otheidas, and Ygva let it pass. They wanted a Blessed Branch to carry back and wake a dead pyre — but a branch burned at a pyre cannot be taken back, Ygva said, and she would not spend one lightly. So Heyou traded her the pinecone-seeds gathered at the burnt tree, and she gave one branch off the Caranthalis Altar on the promise that they would replace it if her growing of the seeds came to nothing. Heyou phased the branch into the Living Fortress with his Phasing Vambraces, to carry it unseen.

Among the relics Draz turned up a blunderbuss, and he and Heyou set to making shot for it. Ygva offered to make them spectral and send them straight through the rock to Grithmaar Deep; they had stops to make first, and declined. So Valghast bore them up through the hole in the sky and over to the waterfall, out of the tunnels — a cut stair ran down from an old temple near Tern's Watch to the cavern's approach, she told them — and Valghast would wait, and she would find Sylvie in dreams. Their road was set: take back the Living Fortress, carry the branch to Drosven's Gate and light its pyre, then go down into Grithmaar Deep. Heyou took the reins of the Fortress for the surface, and they hid the marks the witch had cut into them, that no one take them for heretics.

At Verrow's Span the refugees had steadied, and some fifteen had gone on toward Tern's Watch to spread the weight. Janzi had kept the Askavir's body untouched for them; they took what would serve — claws, beak, chosen feathers, the eyes — and left the rest to the town for its trouble. Heyou forged a dagger from one of the claws with Jamal at the stone. They rested twice over, long, and worked at small things: Sylvie turned Heyou's scarf into socks and set to knitting Draz a sweater to hide his mark, and Draz drew close to his great-aunt Lila and her far-ranging grandchild Bufa, who knew the ruins and the holdout places and might one day guide them.

Sylvie meditated over her necklace of glassy stones, and the dreams came. In the first she stood on her old mountain cleft at sunset, and Ygva was there, and two she had once worked the stone beside and fallen out with; and Ygva told her the seat of stone they had shared still stood, and could be called back, if she could remember how. In the second she fell upward through the dark, struck something hard, and came out into daylight — blue sky, green country — and kept rising.

They weighed three roads and chose to retrace the mountains, and to keep well clear of Thistleglass. Draz went to Tamber and tried to draw her into the work of bringing the old gods back down; she would not have it, and named it dangerous, and set herself against it in her teaching. So Sylvie took Draz aside at the fire, and with the moon and the dread heavy in her, made him swear the whole thing to silence.

The road wore on under carved ledges and runes until a blizzard came down on them. Sylvie threw a Push that sent a snowdrift clean through a tunnel to clear the way; Heyou drove the Living Fortress on through the night while the cold took its toll; and at dawn Jamal put heart back in them, and Sylvie ringed the Fortress in a Wall of Flame to thaw them out. They made camp near an old titan-face ruin outside Ulmira's Step, out of sight of the town.

Heyou told them of Borek — a flashy Dimmers man hung with rings, who claimed to hold an essence of Heyou and had once wanted Askavir eggs in trade — and they laid a plan: Draz to hold him talking at the common table while Heyou and Sylvie went invisible toward his rooms after Heyou's missing parts. And off on his own, Jamal found a great moose-like beast, fungus grown in terraces down its flanks and an arrow in its foreleg; he came on it in silence and slipped the Guardian's collar round its neck — the mount that would answer, in time, to You Bastard. What would come of the branch, of the secrets they carried, and of the dark under Grithmaar Deep, none of them yet knew.