Heaven's Needle (14 page)

A fine rain was falling by midmorning. The drizzle washed the color from the world, surrounding them in a velvety gray gloom. Bitharn lost all sense of time in the blurred forest. She was startled when the sky began to darken, and more so when the trees thinned ahead. Past them, she could look down on Carden Vale.

It was a small town that had once been a great one. The ruins of its grandeur were still imposing. Smooth stone wharves reached out toward the river, delicate as a lady's fingers, though now they grasped a fistful of mud. A high wall curved around the south end of the valley, shielding the town from invaders. Black spears, tiny as flyspecks from this distance, marched along its parapet.

To the east and west, the Irontooth Mountains stood guard over Carden Vale. A long road crawled from the town to the ruins of Duradh Mal. The road was cracked and broken, shattered like the fortress it served, but the scar it made on the mountainside remained. Dusk hid Duradh Mal from view, but Bitharn fancied she could
feel
its presence, malignant behind its veil of shadow.

North of Carden Vale there were no defenses save a mossy palisade and an earthen wall so eroded that Bitharn could barely tell it was there. More of the palisade's wooden stakes were missing than whole. An unpaved cart road ran through the widest gap, reaching to where the mountains closed in at the valley's end. Miners' picks left pockmarks in those mountains' faces, dimly visible through the misty rain.

Within those walls, the town was a tiny, shrunken thing. Half its houses had been scavenged for stone. Perhaps two hundred stood intact, and of those, many stood on streets that the wilderness had begun to reclaim. Some of the roads were more green than gray. Saplings stretched out of empty windows, while brown threads of winter-bare ivy reached in.

“Where are we to meet her?” Malentir asked.

“By the paupers' pyre, below the dule tree, at midnight.” She pointed to it outside the northern palisade: a sprawling chestnut with pale rings on its limbs where they'd been chafed by hangmen's ropes. Next to it was a wide, shallow pit stained with the ash of countless pyres. The dule tree was not far from the town's walls, but it was far enough to lie well outside their torches' reach after nightfall. “The Spider has a taste for theatrics.”

“She does. But it is a sensible choice. The dule tree is easy for a stranger to find, and these mountain villagers take their hauntings seriously. Anyone who braves the dark to see us will likely take us for ghosts and flee back to their beds … if there is anyone still abroad here.”

There was an odd hint of foreboding in Malentir's last words, Bitharn thought, but she doubted he'd elaborate if she asked, so she merely nodded. Common superstition held that rapists and murderers, denied absolution at death and so forever barred from the Bright Lady's paradise, haunted the sites of their executions. Their souls were condemned to Narsenghal, but on full-moon nights, the stories said, the veil between worlds thinned, and some of them slipped back to lure the living into taking their places in hell.

It was only a story, but she had little doubt that any villager unlucky enough to stumble upon the dule tree on
this
full-moon night would soon be meeting his gods one way or another. She hoped the people of Carden Vale were uncommonly superstitious. It might be all that kept them safe tonight.

Bitharn pulled back into the forest's cover, waiting for night to fall. As the gray sky darkened to inky blue, anxiety crept over her. What if she'd gambled everything on a lie?
What if the Thorns had killed Kelland, and meant to fulfill their bargain with a corpse or a mind-blasted shell of a man? It would satisfy the letter of their promise to return him “unhurt,” but only because he'd be unable to feel anything ever again.

Old doubts, all of them, but they seemed new again as she sat shivering in the rain. Bitharn closed her eyes and tried to pray, but the words felt empty. She'd done all she could. Her prayers would be answered, or not, in hours. Repeating the words wouldn't change anything.

She opened her eyes and stared at the sky. The rain had stopped, but clouds blotted out the moon and stars. It was impossible to tell the hour.

Beside her, Malentir stirred. “She is here.”

“How do you know?”

“I can feel her. We all can.” There was a note of diffidence in his voice, strange in a man so arrogant. “It is a part of how she does what she does. We who share her gifts can … sense the strength of her blessing from afar.”

Bitharn wasn't sure she understood that, but she didn't care. She wanted this over. “Best not keep her waiting.”

“Yes.” The Thornlord stood. He was a shadow of warmth in the night, more felt than seen. “If I do not have the opportunity to tell you later … thank you. For what you did in freeing me from the tower. I know you did not act for my sake, but I am not … unmindful of what it cost you, and not ungrateful. Whatever happens at the dule tree.”

“Do you expect it to be such a disaster?” Bitharn tried to keep her tone light, and failed miserably.

“I expect nothing where my mistress is concerned.” He touched the back of her hand. His fingertips were fever hot. Then he began walking down to Carden Vale, and Bitharn had no choice but to follow.

The darkness did not seem to trouble Malentir, but Bitharn tripped over unseen stones and tree roots all the way down. The more she hurried, the more she stumbled. The descent took so long she began to worry that the Spider would think she'd broken her word and leave without waiting for them to arrive. The new worry tangled up with the old ones, and by the time they reached the bottom she was shaking with fear.

Malentir caught her wrist. His touch had grown even hotter; it felt like he was burning. “Do not be afraid. She has not deceived you.”

“How do you know?” she asked. He let go of her wrist, and did not answer.

A spark of magic, pale as bleached bone, burned between the branches of the dule tree. Two figures stood in its wavering radiance: a thin, dark-haired woman enveloped in a fur-trimmed robe, and a plainly dressed man, shorter and stockier than Kelland, with a soldier's physique. The spell-cast light blanched the man's hair to near white, and his skin was the same color as her own. A sword hilt poked over his shoulder. By his foot, a pile of bags held clothing, food, a shield.

There was no one else. Kelland wasn't there.

Bitharn stopped by the scorched edge of the pauper's pyre, willing her eyes to find a third man. He
had
to be there. He had to. The Thorns could not lie, everyone knew it, the Spider had
promised
—but there were only two people standing beneath the hangman's tree, and neither of them was the Burnt Knight.

She pressed her hands to her mouth, unsure if she wanted to vomit or cry. Versiel's betrayal, Malentir's escape, Parnas' murder … the lies and the deceptions and the griefs. Had it all been for nothing? She'd trampled
her honor through mud and blood and filth, believing it would help him. How great a fool had she been?

“Bitharn?” The voice was rough, unfamiliar. She lifted her head and saw the strange man take a step toward her, his hands raised halfway as if he feared to reach for what he saw. “Bitharn, I … is it really you?”

She wanted to believe. She wanted so desperately to believe. Bitharn hugged her arms around her shoulders, not trusting herself to speak. “Who asks?” she managed at last.

“It's me. Kelland. I—the Spider gave me this face as a disguise. But it's me.”

Her hands were shaking. Her voice was too. “Prove it.”

A tremulous smile softened the stranger's hard features. “Bitharn, it's me. When I was eight years old I tried to play at swordfighting and stole Sir Maugorin's shield and dropped it on my foot. You saw how hard I was trying not to cry, so you made fun of me until I was so mad I forgot. I broke two of my toes that day. They still don't line up straight.”

“I believe you,” she said, and then she was crying, unable to stop it, and somehow he'd come and wrapped her in his arms. The feel of them was different and the scent of him was wrong, but the strength was what she remembered and she buried her face in his chest and she cried.

He held her close, nestling his cheek against her hair. Softly, almost inaudibly, he whispered into her ear: “Bitharn. What have you done?”

She couldn't answer. But she was suddenly aware, again, that they were not alone. Bitharn looked past his shoulder to the Thorns. The Spider was watching them, a little smile curling one corner of her mouth, and Malentir …

Malentir was watching
her,
and there were so many things on his face that Bitharn could not read them all.
Longing and terror, hatred and adoration. He watched the Spider with the look of an apostate priest confronted with his goddess: fearful and resentful and yet strangely vindicated, and above all else there was a twisted, tormented kind of love. The emotions were so nakedly unguarded that Bitharn shivered and turned away, looking back to the Spider …

Who stirred, as if belatedly aware of her student's stare, and took out a pair of silvery bracelets as she went to him. No, not bracelets. Hoops of thorned wire, twisted around and around so that the barbs bit in all directions.

“These are yours,” she said, dangling the barbed bracelets from a crooked finger.

“They are,” he agreed, and pushed back the sleeves from his wrists so that the white scars that ringed each one were visible. Now Bitharn understood how he had gotten all those layered cuts, and she shuddered at the understanding. “Will you replace them?”

“You should never have lost them,” the Spider said. She pushed the bracelets over his hands, scratching his hands and hers so that thin lines of blood welled up from both. Once they encircled his wrists, she drew the wires tight.

“I failed.”

“Yes. Your task remains unfinished.”

“Will you—will you let me try again?”

“Of course,” she said, and rested her fingertips along his jaw as she drew him in for a kiss. It was a long kiss, and though Malentir's striped hair fell forward to hide it, Bitharn saw that the Spider bit him before breaking away. Blood glistened dark and wet on the inside of his lips when she pulled back. The Thornlord stayed silent, breathing hard.

“I would, however, prefer that you not fail again,” the
Spider murmured, stepping back across the pyre pit. Bits of charred bone cracked under her feet. “Please don't disappoint me. I had such high hopes for you.”

“For all of you,” she said to Bitharn, turning to the two Celestians with the same blood-reddened smile, before the darkness folded around her and she was gone.

“Y
ou'll want to have plenty of water,” Colison told them. Behind him, two workmen wrestled another barrel onto a wagon. Their breath plumed white in the frosty morning; sweat stained their tunics despite the chill. “Food too. Fodder for your animals. Things might get a bit dicey up there in the passes.”

“Snow?” Asharre asked.

“That too.”

“What else is there?”

Colison stuffed his hands into their opposite sleeves and chafed his forearms. Embarrassment creased his windburnt face. “Call it … superstition. Not sure I could explain it any other way. Look, you trust me, don't you?”

Asharre nodded slowly. Colison was one of Bassinos' merchant-captains, tasked with guiding caravans of his merchandise from Pelos to the Irontooths in exchange for a stake in the cargo and a share of the profits. He'd been traveling the roads of Ithelas for longer than she'd been
alive. There wasn't a pennyweight of fat on him, and he had more scars than most mercenaries she'd known.

Bald, browned by years under the sun, and hard as old hickory, Colison was not one to be discomfited easily. But he was plainly uncomfortable now.

Colison blew out a breath that misted and hung in the air. “Take my word for it, then. You'll want to have water. A few barrels, at least. We won't be crossing the Black Sands, but now and again it's hard to find good water in those mountains.”

“I'll tell the others.”

The Celestians were at dawn prayers, but when they emerged from the chapel behind Bassinos' house and began loading their own supplies, Asharre repeated Colison's advice. She did not include his mention of superstition.

“I don't see why we can't drink snowmelt,” Heradion grumbled. “Not as if there's any shortage of it where we're headed.”

That was true. The Irontooths were still swathed in winter white. Their slopes shone alabaster halfway down before hardening into flinty gray and vanishing into a mantle of deep green pines. Beautiful, but ominous. This early in the season, the passes were uncertain. A storm could mire them; an avalanche could bury them. They might die, if that happened, but it wouldn't be for lack of water.

She shrugged. “He said there were places where it was hard to find good water. Maybe the mines fouled it.”

“The coal mines are on the other side of Carden Vale,” Heradion pointed out, “and, anyway, I've never heard of a mine fouling snowfall. I don't want to be difficult, but water's heavy and we can carry only so much.”

“If Colison advises it, we should do it,” Evenna said. Her braid was down this morning. It swayed to the small
of her back, blue-black and glossy over a red wool coat. “Bassinos says he knows these mountains better than anyone alive. We're not traveling with the man so we can ignore him.”

“Fine.” Heradion threw up his hands. “I can see you're determined to ride out like proper hayseeds, grass in your hair and all. I'll do what I can to oblige.”

It took a second wagon to hold the barrels of water and bundles of fodder that Colison recommended, and hay was dearer at the end of winter than Asharre liked, but after highsun prayers they were ready to depart. Evenna drove one of the wagons, Heradion the other. They set out after Colison's men, their bullocks and wagons stretched in a rolling line.