Chapter 40
Five days without proper sky.
When the wind came right, Ivan could hear it moving through the pines below and along the high stone.
The Northern Ridge rose in long, dark ranks beyond the narrow opening, their crowns white with old snow, their shoulders swallowed by cloud.
Here and there, the pass opened just enough to show him a sliver of sky, pale and distant and thin as watered milk, before the rock closed around it again.
It was not quite a cage, but it was not freedom either. More like being held in the fist of the mountain and allowed, now and then, to glimpse what lay beyond the knuckles.
The days had begun to arrange themselves by small indignities.
Bryn’s dressings changed with clockwork regularity, her mouth settling into that flat line she wore when she was thinking something she had not yet decided to say aloud.
Ivan had studied that expression enough by now to know the news was either bad or complicated, and in his experience the two were rarely separate things.
The meals came. The water tasted faintly of mountain, as though the rock itself were slowly dissolving into him. Overhead, Draoth-light pulsed low and indifferent to his opinion of the arrangement.
Five days.
Ivan had a functional relationship with discomfort.
It was one of the few things in his life that had never disappointed him—discomfort always did exactly what it promised, which was more than he could say for most things.
The tunnels he could manage. The dark he could manage.
The not-knowing was the variable he couldn’t account for, and Ivan had a long-standing and deeply personal hatred of variables he couldn’t account for.
So he thought.
There was little else to do inside a mountain. The dark, the cold, the low, constant hum of ancient Draoth in the rock around him—older than the stolen, twisted kind that ran through rings and cracked and ran dry—woven into the mountain the way blood was woven into a body.
Osin had spent the better part of a decade trying to breach these mountains.
Had thrown men at the wards, Draoth at the wards, resources and strategy and escalating desperation at the wards, and had met the same result every time.
The ridge didn’t hold because of military strength alone; it held because of what was braided into it.
Epona’s love, the remnants called it.
He had heard the phrase a hundred times in intelligence reports and dismissed it as poetry. But here, inside the mountain, with the hush of it pressing close and that ancient current moving through the rock around him, he was forced to revise the judgment.
It was not merely poetry.
Or else it was, and true with it.
The ancient Sídhe had once lived here in the north, before the great sundering scattered them south and east and, in time, into humankind’s grasp.
Their descendants—the remnants, careful and half-blooded and stubborn in the way old wounds made people stubborn—still held what was left.
And somewhere inside the bones of the mountain, there was a passage Osin, with all his will and all his resources, had never managed to find.
Ivan was now one of very few outside Vredia who knew such a passage existed.
Though the Vredians did not give the knowledge up freely.
They had taken his senses at the entrance.
A ward, cast across their eyes and ears until they were through the first passage.
Ivan had accepted this with equanimity. Sybil had accepted it with a stillness that meant she was cataloging every detail she could still access and filing it away for later.
Tristan had accepted it by walking directly into a low-hanging rock shelf the moment the ward went up, making a sound that echoed through the passage for what felt like an eternity before announcing to no one in particular that he was fine.
Ivan had kept his face admirably blank.
Now, after hours of trudging on an empty stomach, another base room finally appeared.
The tunnel widened into a low carved chamber, broad enough to breathe in, with half-burned torches still lit in iron brackets and wax hardened beneath them.
Stone shelves lined two walls, fitted with rolled blankets and pallets cut into the rock, while crates, sealed jars, and stacked provisions filled the far side with the orderly thoroughness of men who had planned this stop well in advance.
Two dozen bedrolls had been laid out and left behind in varying states of haste. Packs sat where they had been dropped. On one shelf, beside an empty flask, a half-eaten heel of bread had been forgotten.
Others had come through before them.
Ivan watched Dominic take in the room with a single sweep, and something in the set of his shoulders eased, if only by a fraction.
“They left us food,” Dario said.
Yoni made a low sound in his throat. “Surprised they left us anything at all.”
“They’re your men,” Bryn said, already moving toward the supply cache.
“Which is how I know.”
Bryn started toward Ivan with the medical kit, and Yoni rolled his eyes before settling onto a pallet, while Ivan sat on a crate and let her come.
There was nothing productive in resisting Bryn.
That was a lesson he had learned early and been forced to relearn often.
She unwound the bandaging at his side, inspected the wound beneath, and made a noise that was not quite approval but did not yet warrant alarm.
“The bleeding’s stopped,” she said. “No infection. Try not to do anything interesting for the next twelve hours.”
“Noted,” Ivan said.
Bryn went to the Sídhe next, where Gideon had laid him out on a pallet near the wall.
She knelt beside him and examined him, her hands moving with the same practiced certainty as ever—wrist, throat, the rise and fall of his chest. At last, she pressed two fingers to his sternum and held them there, waiting, as if some answer might yet come through bone.
Then she sat back on her heels.
“No change.”
Sybil appeared at Bryn’s shoulder the way she always did—present before you registered the approach. She looked down at the Sídhe, then across the room at Dominic, who stood watching with his arms crossed. A moment passed. He nodded.
She crouched and placed her hand flat against the Sídhe’s chest. No one spoke. Even Tristan, leaning against the wall nearby, let the air stand undisturbed.
At length, she lifted her hand.
“No spell,” she said. “Nothing cast on him from outside.” Her eyes lingered on the still figure before her. “Whatever this is, it’s coming from within.”
Bryn looked up. “Depletion,” she said. “That’s been my thought from the start. But it’s total. I’ve never seen a Sídhe run so dry. They don’t, as a rule.”
Sybil’s gaze dropped again to the man on the pallet.
“Once we’re on old Sídhe ground,” she said slowly, “it may help. There’s ancient Draoth in this mountain.
I can feel it in the rock.” Her fingers curled lightly against her palm, as though she could still sense it there. “If anything can reach him…”
She trailed off. Her eyes dropped briefly to her hand.
“It’s the only thing I can think of.”
She didn’t look convinced by it herself, Ivan noted. As did everyone else in the room.
After that, they ate. Dried meat, hard cheese, and a flat, dense bread Ivan didn’t recognize—preserved, slightly sweet, with a texture that suggested it had been engineered for exactly this kind of situation. He ate two portions before he’d registered doing it.
Across the room, Yoni unrolled his bedroll beside Bryn’s. Ivan watched over the rim of his water flask as Bryn looked at the bedroll. Looked at Yoni. Picked up her own, moved it three feet to the left, and lay down facing the wall.
Yoni sat very still, his hands loose in his lap, looking at the empty stone beside him.
Ivan pressed his lips together. The snort came out anyway.
Yoni’s head turned, eyes flashing. “You have something to say.”
“Not a single thing,” Ivan said.
“I once had a dream,” Tristan announced from somewhere behind him, “that I crossed the sky on the back of a bird. A very large bird. I kept trying to tell people about it, and no one would listen.” He paused. “I still think about it.”
From somewhere beyond the chamber, the wind gave a long, thin moan through the pass.
Across the room, Dominic shook his head slowly at his boots.
Gideon had closed his eyes. Dario made a small sound that contained an entire philosophy of resignation.
Yoni’s gaze held Ivan’s for another moment, then moved to Tristan, then slid away entirely, in the manner of a man deciding some things were not worth the energy.
Ivan glanced back over his shoulder. Tristan met the look with perfect innocence and smiled—that same smile he had been deploying since they were nine years old, always at the precise moment it became impossible not to be grateful for him.
Or exhausted by him.
Usually both.
He huffed once through his nose.
The room settled—breaths deepening, voices tapering off, torches turned low.
Ivan lay back on his pallet and stared up at the ceiling.
The last time the three of them had shared a room, they’d had a plan.
Since then, the world had done what it always did with plans.
Now here they were: inside a mountain in the north, with a Vredian prince, an unconscious Sídhe, and five people who would once have preferred Ivan dead.
He was glad they were here.
Sybil turned onto her side.
Her gaze moved over him as if she were reading damage from a page only she could see. She had always looked at the world that way. It had unsettled most of their family when they were young. The stillness of it. The feeling of being known in pieces before one had spoken.
It had never unsettled him.
Without warning, Sybil caught the hem of his shirt and yanked it up.
Ivan yelped. “Gods damn it, Sybil.”