A consuming fire, p.8
A Consuming Fire, page 8
The guard retreated.
The trapdoor slammed back in place.
Muffled voices took stock, and faded away.
Anya buried her face in Midge’s tangled fur and waited for her pulse to slow. She stayed a long time in the dark of the crypt, and when at last restlessness forced her to risk going aboveground, the sun was high overhead. Taking a moment to get her bearings, she cast about herself, looking for her pack.
And remembered with a sinking feeling that the thief had been wearing it, when they arrived at the ruined sanctum.
“It was heavy enough that there’s no chance he just forgot,” she said dryly to Midge. “Mercy, I hate it out here. And I’m half starved. I don’t suppose you could go catch a rabbit?”
Midge cocked her head to one side and panted, a doggish grin on her mottled face.
“No, I didn’t expect so,” Anya said. “And I’m sure finding the high road for us is right out. We’ll just have to head north, then. Can’t go far wrong like that.”
Squaring her shoulders, she took a moment to get her bearings before setting off, with Midge bounding along at her side.
* * *
Hours later, it had grown fully dark once more, but Anya could not bring herself to stop walking. The raw skin across her back stung and burned as her woolspun shirt chafed it. Every muscle in her protested at the dogged trudging onward, and her eyes were gritty for want of sleep. But she was haunted by Ilva, haunted by the burned child she’d seen at Sarum’s cathedral, haunted by her memories of Willem and Sylvie and Philomena and every other Weatherell girl who’d walked this way before. Ghosts drove her on, and she could not bear to stop.
She might have walked the night through, crossing over rolling hills and wooded valleys and wheat fields lying silver in the moonlight, had Midge not stopped her. At the bottom of a dell where a little stream laughed between quaking aspens and silver birches, the dog let out a short bark and hurried off. A moment later she was back, plumy tail waving like a flag, obviously eager for Anya to look at whatever it was she’d discovered.
“Oh, all right,” Anya sighed. “I suppose you deserve to be humored.”
With some reluctance, she followed Midge around one of the massive boulders that littered the valley—this one taller than Anya and twice as wide.
On the other side, she found herself face to face with Tieran the thief.
He sat cross-legged, a small, nearly smokeless campfire between them. Tieran wore Anya’s oilskin coat—an oversized one Ilva had set out from Weatherell with, which Anya had pieced together herself and painstakingly given an inordinate number of pockets. In daylight, it was far too warm for the coat, but it was a comfort by night or in rain, and doubly so to Anya because it had been her sister’s.
Next to him, Tieran had Anya’s pack. From the branches of an aspen, he’d hung her traveling charm, made from the bones of a long-forgotten Weatherell girl. He held a half-eaten winter apple in one hand and a piece of waybread in the other. And when Anya rounded the boulder, he did not even have the good grace to seem ashamed. Instead, he gave her a narrow look.
“You been following me, Anya Astraea?”
Anya met his stare with the righteous indignation of someone certain that she occupied the moral high ground. “You stole my things.”
Tieran shrugged. “Not my fault you don’t keep your wits about you.”
Anya opened and shut her mouth, then shook her head at him. “That’s just—why would you rescue me, then rob me and run off half a day later? You’re very inconsistent!”
Midge sat down next to the fire, halfway between the two of them. Tongue lolling out, she glanced back and forth, as if pleased to have reunited such troublesome charges, and to have her small, self-appointed flock back together again.
Tieran said nothing to Anya. Instead, he shifted himself about to lean back on his elbows and took a loud bite of winter apple.
“I have my wits in good order now,” Anya continued frostily. “And I expect you to return my belongings.”
Tieran squinted up at her. “You don’t have anything in order. Look like you’re about to fall over. Sit down, Weatherell girl. Have an apple.”
Marching over to him, Anya scooped up her pack and dropped down to sit with it clutched tight. Midge, in turn, sidled over to Tieran and stared longingly at the waybread he held.
“Be good,” Tieran warned as he held the waybread out. To her credit, Midge took the offering with great delicacy, before bolting it down in one piece.
For a moment, an exquisitely awkward silence fell over the small camp. The thief looked everywhere but at Anya, while Anya stared resolutely at him.
“Why did you do that?” she asked at last. “Why did you come get me clear of the Elect and those guards, whoever they are?”
Tieran shrugged again, and a wave of irritation washed over Anya. Well, if he really wanted to be unforthcoming, she’d simply treat him the way she’d done with Ilva, whenever Ilva was in the wrong.
Anya resumed her pointed and wordless staring, which obviously unnerved the thief.
“Don’t like being beholden to no one,” he said eventually. “That’s why I done it. But now we’re evened out. You done me a good turn with that village Arbiter and I got you out of the way station and clear of Lord Nevis’s guards—the guard only want you to spite the Elect, Lord Nevis and them are at each other’s throats these days. Since we’re back on the same footing again, it’s all right for me to steal from you.”
He was an odd and thorny puzzle, this thief, but he knew far more of the world beyond the wood than Anya did. And if she’d learned anything over the past two days, it was that out of the forest, she was also out of her element. She could use some help.
She could use a guide.
When Ilva had sought to do wrong or to bend someone to her will, it had always been the product of impulse. Never one to waste much time on forethought, she plunged into mischief with no plan, but no malice, either, transparent in her desires despite the ease with which she lied. Anya, for all she hated deception, was more opaque. More circumspect. With her needle-sharp conscience, she’d learned to pick her battles. To save her lies for when it counted. To plot out her misdeeds with care.
She chose each of her words carefully now, weighing the balance of truth and deceit in each of them.
“We’re not really even, though, are we?” she said. She let her eyes drift to the fire, giving the thief space. Let him think. Let him breathe. Let him squirm under the weight of her half-truths. “You heard me, back in that village where they wanted to take your hand. My mother was a Weatherell girl. She lost both her hands to the god of the mountain. My sister, Ilva, was a Weatherell girl too. She went to the mountain in spring and died for her trouble, which is why I’ve got to go now. My family’s been torn apart for the sake of Albion—I’ve been torn apart for the sake of Albion, before ever laying eyes on the god. But I’m going to give more still to buy peace for you and everyone else on this blighted island, so we’ll never be even, Tieran of Stull. Not if you spend your entire life trying to make up the debt.”
Tieran shifted uncomfortably, and Anya could feel the weight of his regard as he truly saw her for the first time. Let him look. Let him take her in, small and lost and harboring perilous fire, plagued by guilt and the ghost of her broken sister and already half broken herself.
“Sorry about your family,” he said, with characteristic sullenness. “Sorry about stealing your things, too. Suppose you’re wanting this back.”
He began to shrug out of the oilskin coat, and Anya held up a hand. “No. Keep it for now. I’m a Weatherell girl—I can ask anyone for another and they’ll give it to me without a second thought. But I don’t expect you’ve been given much, or done many favors in life.”
When Anya glanced over at him, Tieran met her gaze and did not look away.
“Don’t suppose I have,” he muttered. There was something in his sly hazel eyes as he pulled the coat tighter about himself—a hesitance, an uncertainty—that pained Anya.
“Well, it’s yours,” she said. “And that’s regardless of how you answer what I’m about to ask.”
At once, the thief’s unguarded look was replaced by suspicion.
“I want you to take me north,” Anya said. “I think you’d be just the right person to help. I’d like to turn up on the high roads often enough that the Elect know I’m still on my way and still doing my duty, but keep out of their reach for the most part. And out of reach of those guards, until I know what it is they want with me. I just… don’t want another incident like Sarum.”
“Whyever not?” Tieran asked. “Should’ve thought any girl would love to be pulled off the street by grayrobes, tied to a bed, and stuck full of needles and ink, all without so much as a by your leave.”
Anya let out a short laugh, but winced as her stomach twisted. “I hated that.”
“Course you did,” Tieran said. For a moment, an almost sympathetic expression crossed his sharp, calculating face. “Anybody would.”
Anya let his admission linger between them for a moment, knowing she was a heartbeat away from winning her first victory in the world beyond the wood.
“So you’ll come with me then?” she said quietly.
“Not the right sort of person for this,” Tieran answered with reluctance. “For trusting, or for heading out with on the road. Don’t think I’m going to do anything but let you down. Thing is, I was born leaving, Anya Astraea, and the first words out of my mouth were a lie. I’m not fit company for someone good. Someone like you.”
The guilt that fueled her ate away at Anya’s insides, corrosive and galling. But she could hardly tell Tieran the truth—that she was no true sacrifice. That she’d never wanted to be one. Instead, she was a heretic and a liar.
“You’re wrong,” she told the thief. “You’re just who I need.”
EIGHT Shorn Threads
Tieran was gone.
Anya sat up groggily beside the smoking ashes of last night’s fire. The sun was fully up, birds sang in the trees with aggressive good cheer, and the thief had vanished. He’d left the pack at least, and Midge sat impatiently at Anya’s feet, staring down toward the stream. On instinct, Anya reached beneath her bedroll for the makeshift bone knife that was her last piece of Ilva. She’d set it aside surreptitiously the night before but wasn’t sure if anything got past the thief.
That was missing too.
Fury surged through her, sweeping from head to toe. She’d rather have lost anything else. She’d have suffered the fear and indignity the Elect subjected her to a hundred times before she gave up her last bit of her sister. If she caught the thief, she’d have words for him. More than words, she’d kill him if she got a chance, she’d—
“Here,” Tieran’s voice said from behind Anya. “You ground the blade down all wrong.”
Turning to face him, Anya froze.
“What—what did you do to yourself?” she managed after a moment.
Tieran stood before her, sopping wet from the waist up, his clothes damply sticking to him. With one hand, he held out her bone knife. But though he still wore the same shape, he looked entirely different—his filthy, matted brown hair had been shorn off, cut right to the scalp, and there were a dozen places where he’d accidentally nicked himself or sheared away patches of skin.
Anya’s face burned and she fixed her gaze on Midge. In Weatherell, girls who might someday serve as a sacrifice were kept strictly separate from the village’s boys most of the time. They saw each other in public and at community gatherings, but that was all. And a Weatherell boy would never have dreamed of appearing before a girl soaked to the skin.
Or at least, would never have dreamed of doing so in front of Anya. Ilva and some of the other girls had had their share of misadventures in the forest, with the boys and with each other, but none of it had ever appealed to Anya.
“You getting sick?” Tieran asked in his blunt way. “You look poorly.”
“I’m in a hurry,” Anya snapped. “We’re wasting time, and every moment counts. We can’t afford to stop for… this.”
She waved a hand in his general direction, then scrambled to her feet, finding it impossible to take back the bone knife Tieran held out without actually looking at him. Clean, and with his matted hair gone, there was a new intensity about the thief—an internal edge made manifest, visible in the stubborn line of his jaw and the gleam of his eyes and the hunger-lean shape of his body.
“Fixed that for you,” Tieran said, as Anya snatched her knife back with poor grace. “Sharpened it properly this time. If I get a chance, I’ll show you how to look after a blade.”
“How’d you even know I had it? Or get it from me?” Anya asked as she slipped the knife through her slit pocket and into the makeshift sheath she wore strapped to her thigh.
Tieran stared longingly at a half-eaten piece of waybread, lying forgotten on Anya’s bedroll. “Can tell when someone’s got a blade hidden on them. And I took it while you were sleeping. You sleep like someone who’s been safe all her life, Anya Astraea.”
Letting out an irritable sigh, Anya handed over the waybread and Tieran crammed it into his mouth. He watched as Anya meticulously packed her bedroll but made a disapproving noise when she moved to lift the pack.
“Shouldn’t carry that today,” he said. “Not after I had it yesterday. I’ll do it.”
Anya raised an eyebrow. “You’ve as good as said you’ll disappear at some point, and last time you did, you took my things with you. So I’ll be the one to carry the pack.”
“Suit yourself,” Tieran said with one of his habitual shrugs. “Only I did this”—he gestured to his shorn and mangled head—“on account of that cell I spent the night in before you found me. Place was full of crawlers—lice, fleas, I don’t like to think what else. Since I had the pack yesterday…”
His silence spoke volumes, and Anya shuddered, taking a quick step back and automatically brushing at her arms.
“Why didn’t you just change yourself to deal with it, instead of butchering your own scalp?” she asked.
Heaving the pack up and onto his shoulders, Tieran fussed over the straps. “Not that simple. I can’t just pick one piece to change and not the rest, and if I do make a change, it’s awfully hard to hold on to until I get used to the shape.”
“Does it hurt?” Anya said curiously. “Changing, I mean?”
She thought of how he’d looked, both in the alley after his trial and when he’d gone back to his own shape after impersonating Roger. It had seemed like a hardship to him. Like something to be avoided whenever possible.
“Not the changing itself. But the stopping it, yeah. That hurts.”
“I’m sorry.”
Tieran sniffed. “Don’t be. I’m used to it.”
Anya glanced over at him. He had his eyes fixed on the ground and on his ragged boots, which were more patches than shoe leather.
“Were your parents the same?”
“No. Neither of them were much like me.”
“Well, thank you for what you did back at the way station,” Anya told him. “I should have said it earlier, and I know it would have been easier to just leave me with those people.”
Tieran scuffed one foot against the ground and flushed, scowling to himself. “Wasn’t nothing. Just don’t like being beholden, that’s all.”
Anya couldn’t help but smile at his discomfort. “Well, you’ll be the least beholden person in Albion, once you get me to Bane Nevis. Are we ready?”
Midge got to her feet at the word, tail wagging cheerfully, but Tieran shook his head.
“No, we’re not. You got both the Elect and Lord Nevis’s guard out there looking for you. Maybe you don’t know what that means, being from Weatherell, but they’re at each other’s throats more often than not now, Nevis and the grayrobes. He wants their power and sooner or later, I expect he’ll try to take it. But the Elect won’t give it up unless all of Albion lies in ruins. They’re not fighting in earnest yet, just circling each other, trying to sort out weak spots.
“You’re a weak spot, Weatherell girl. The Elect need you and so Nevis wants you. I dunno how far he’d go to get you on his side—the thing people like about your sort is that you choose. You decide to be a sacrifice, and so it lets everyone else feel like they haven’t got blood on their hands. Nevis is no fool. He’ll try to make you choose him, instead of what you’re bent on, so that it seems like the righteous path. How he means to convince you, though, I couldn’t say.”
Anya narrowed her eyes, surprised to have heard so many words at once from the prickly thief. “You seem to know an awful lot about all this.”
“I listen,” Tieran said flatly. “I pay attention. That’s all. But you’ll be badgered from here to the god’s mountain if you’re wearing that red collar. With it, you’re an invitation to anyone you see. Without it, you’re ordinary. No one special. You ought to take it off, if you really want to escape notice.”
Anya’s hand flew to her throat. She’d never considered removing the crimson band—it would make life simpler, to be sure, but it was, as Tieran said, the unmistakable mark of a Weatherell girl. Ilva had worn hers all the way to Bane Nevis and back. As had Willem, and everyone else who went before.
Removing the collar would truly feel as if she had set herself on a different path than them. Between the half-finished prayer inked onto her back and a half-worn band, she would be a strange and profane thing indeed.
“It’s sewn on,” she said quickly, before she could change her mind. “You’ll have to cut it off.”
She turned her back to Tieran and he stepped closer. She could feel him behind her, the shift of his weight, the stir of air on the back of her neck, the smell of river water. His nearness put her off-center, and she fell perfectly still.
