“She is going to survive, I think,” I told the others, relief coloring my voice.
“What did she mean about something shining?” Wynne asked. “She must have seen something below.”
“A trick of the light, perhaps,” I said. “Quartz or mica in the stones. Or…” A sudden, unlikely hope surged through me then, and I scuttled back to the cliff to look for myself.
Orya was already halfway down to the debris strewn riverbed, to my surprise.
“What are you doing?” I shouted, scanning the ravine floor for whatever it was Tenille had seen.
“Tenille saw somethin’ while you were liftin’ her,” Orya answered. “Thought I’d have a look.”
“Where is it?” I could make nothing out amid the stones.
Orya leaned precariously back from the cliff and pointed to a spot near the bottom of the pile of rubble. “Looks like metal.”
I saw it then, a bright reflective glint between stones that shone for just a moment as the sun hit it through the clouds. Closing my eyes, I said a silent prayer to the Mother and the Father.
If something good comes of this disaster
, I promised,
I will be devout for the rest of my days.
When I looked again, Orya was nearly at the bottom of the ravine. She dropped the last several feet and strode to the base of the stone pile, crouching down where I had seen the metallic gleam.
When she grasped the first stone to move it aside, she paused.
“This ain’t no stone.” She held the smooth yellow-white object up for me to see. Even from so far away, I recognized the vague shape of a human skull. “There’s a mess of bones here.”
Morbid as it was, my first reaction was elation. “Orya, you need to find that metal. I must know what it is.”
Wynne sensed my excitement. “You think this is what we’ve been looking for, don’t you?”
I nodded slowly, almost scared to admit it for fear of angering some capricious luck spirit. “Those bones could have been hidden here for a very long time,” I said. “Buried in a rockslide, concealed for years until the pile was disturbed enough to reveal them. The Scribers would have found no sign of them when they searched.”
At that moment, Orya’s voice rang out from below. “Mother’s teats, I can’t believe it. Look at this, Scriber.”
In her extended hand, she held a long, thin metal object. Despite the distance, I could tell what it was instantly: a tarnished silver scroll case.
We had found the Lost Prince.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Prince Willyn was not a smart man. He badly wanted to be a Scriber, but none of the six Schools would give him his pin. Even for the King’s son, no Master could justify rewarding such poor performance on exams, or such general ignorance.
And yet, it appears that he came closer to finding the Archives than anyone else for some three hundred years. This is, to say the least, somewhat embarrassing for the Scribers.
— From the personal journals of Dennon Lark
Willyn’s scroll case held another page from Prince Fyrril’s journal, dated a month after the one we had found in Three Rivers.
Adello sends word from Three Rivers, though he risks discovery in doing so. The voices are stronger than ever, he says—the sorcery has claimed many of the nobles, most of the officers in the Army. He begs to return to my side. I sent him a final message today, telling him of my plans; telling him that he must remain there, that if he and his songs do not survive, all our efforts are wasted.
We cannot hold here. Father and Oryn have brought the entire Army to Ryndport, leaving the rest of the Kingsland at the mercy of the rebels. And these walls were not made to hold back a siege. The storms have halted shipping, and our supplies dwindle. The city will fall within the week if we continue to fight. I have ordered a surrender at dawn tomorrow, and instructed the people not to resist when Father takes the city. I hope that will be enough to spare their lives when he realizes I am gone.
My men and I sail for the Salt Mountains tonight under cover of darkness. I am on the verge of understanding this sorcery, I think—the words of the Sages must hold the secret, though I fear whatever truths I may find come far too late. I know where I can hide the books when I am done. There is a small cave, in a valley that I discovered years ago while hunting with the Whiteclaw Clan.
I hope that whoever finds them can do more than I have.
On the reverse side, the entirety of the page was given to a hand-drawn map of the Salt Mountains. There was no uncertainty here, no hidden meaning or clues to be sought in song. The map showed the way to the last undiscovered remnants of the Archives.
Bryndine ran her finger along the route Fyrril had marked five hundred years before. “If we travel north along the ridge where you found the Prince and then east when the ravine ends, this valley should be no more than two days away.”
It had taken us hours to carry Tenille back to the camp through the difficult terrain of the mountains. When evening fell and we had not yet returned, Bryndine and the others had come looking for us; with their help, we had arrived back at camp shortly before midnight. After a moment of silence for Kaelyn, most of the company had retired for the night. Those of us still awake—Bryndine and I, Wynne and Deanyn, and of course Sylla—sat by the fire, examining the page that had led Prince Willyn to his death.
“Prince Willyn was barely a day from the place when the landslide took him,” I said, hardly able to believe it. “Of all the people to come so close…”
“Why did he not just tell the Scribers?” Wynne asked. “I thought he wanted his pin, wouldn’t this have helped?”
I shook my head. “He wanted his pin once, but he left the Academy on… poor terms. He was angry with the Scribers. Perhaps he wanted to embarrass them by finding what they couldn’t.”
“That is… sad.” Wynne’s eyes were full of pity for the long dead Prince. “If the Scribers had given him just a bit of respect, these books might have been found two hundred years ago.”
“If he had earned more respect, they might have given it to him,” I countered, feeling an impulsive need to defend the Scribers of Willyn’s time despite my poor relations with so many of their current number. “Willyn did not deserve a pin, by all accounts.”
“Almost hard to believe, for a man who thought it a good idea to run off into the mountains without telling anyone,” Deanyn said, absently tossing a twig into the fire. I grinned at her across the flames, and the corner of her mouth twitched upwards, ruining her deadpan expression.
Wynne did not smile. “I suppose,” she said. “It still seems sad.” It occurred to me that she might have related to the Prince’s plight—she had wanted to be a Scriber herself, and had been disappointed.
“We cannot change what happened to him,” Bryndine said seriously. “But we must act quickly if we wish to succeed where Prince Willyn failed. The snows have already begun. We will set out tomorrow. A small group, I think—no more than four, including you and I, Scriber.”
“Are you sure you don’t want more than three people to look after Dennon?” Deanyn asked. “He’s trouble, that one. Gets in barfights, argues with the clergy.”
Bryndine ignored the joke. “The fewer of us there are, the faster we can move, and with less risk of disturbing the mountain and causing another slide.”
Breaking her long, glowering silence, Sylla said, “I’m coming with you.”
Deanyn laughed. “Ah, that solves the problem then. She’ll just kill him within the first hour.”
Sylla only narrowed her eyes at Deanyn and kept silent. My stomach clenched tightly. I smiled and forced a chuckle to cover my fear, but knowing what I did about Sylla, Deanyn’s jest felt more like prophecy.
“We should bring Orya too,” I suggested. “She climbs like a spider. We may need her.”
Bryndine nodded. “That is it, then. You and I, Sylla and Orya. We’ll leave at first light. Deanyn, you have the first watch. Rylene will relieve you in two hours.” She handed Fyrril’s page back to me and stood. “Get some rest, Scriber,” she said as she headed for her tent. “You will need it.” Wynne and Sylla followed her to the sleeping tents, leaving Deanyn and I alone by the fire.
I was about to retire myself when I glanced down at the map Fyrril had drawn, and noticed something that made me snort with amusement.
“Is something funny?” Deanyn asked.
“More ironic than funny.” I held up the map. “Waymark is directly south of us. No more than a week’s travel from here, if I’m reading this correctly. I spent years telling the villagers Willyn never passed through there.” Perhaps I should have been embarrassed by my mistake, but somehow it seemed fitting.
Deanyn grinned. “You, wrong about something? By the Divide, how can this be?”
“Your faith in me is overwhelming,” I said, laughing. “It’s too much for me. I’m going to sleep.”
Rolling the map up and placing it back in its tarnished case, I pushed myself to my feet. Bryndine was right; it had been a difficult day, and I needed a good night’s rest. I did not want to be tired and irritable in the morning—making Sylla angry was an easy way to get myself killed.
Deanyn, apparently, could sense my unease. “Don’t worry too much about Sylla,” she said. “I was only joking before. She’s a fierce guard dog, but a tame one. She’ll bark, but she won’t bite unless the Captain lets her.”
“I know,” I said, though I was not half as certain as Deanyn sounded. Sylla had accused me several times of risking their lives for nothing—if we did not find the books, if they had been moved or destroyed in the last five hundred years, how would she react? By putting a sword through me, I suspected. It would be understandable, really. If it came to that, I might fall on her sword myself.
Deanyn could not hear my doubts, though, so she only nodded and said, “Good. Sleep well then.”
As I ducked into my small tent, I heard her voice again.
“Dennon?”
I turned to face her. “What is it?”
There was real concern in her eyes. “Promise me you’ll keep yourself alive. I’d consider it a personal favor.”
Somewhat touched, I gave her a tired smile. “I will,” I said. “Believe me, no one wants that more than I do.”
She nodded. “I will hold you to it.” She waved me into the tent, and when I crawled under my scratchy woollen blanket, I fell asleep almost instantly.
* * *
Travelling alongside Sylla, with so few companions to distract attention, was difficult to bear. Everything I did seemed to raise her ire; I could not so much as take a step without her snapping at me for making too much noise.
“Unless you want to bring every snowcat on the slopes down on us, you had better step quieter, Scriber,” she would say, though no one had seen so much as a paw-print for the entire week we had been searching the mountains.
Though I had promised myself I would not antagonize the woman, I found it difficult to take her abuse silently. But when I offered a retort, it always met the same response—she simply laid her hand on the hilt of her sword, and I bit back any further insults and retreated.
Orya, at least, was better company. Not even Sylla’s dour presence was able to repress her buoyant and frequently obscene spirit, so I did not lack for conversation. Bryndine, surprisingly, was also a good travelling companion—our relationship was approaching something like friendship, or at least mutual respect. During most of our earlier travels, she had talked more with the women than with me, but that day, she reminded me that she had spent time at the Academy by engaging in discussion on an impressive variety of scholarly subjects.
There were some slight snowfalls throughout the day, never lasting long, but enough to leave a thin white coat on the ground, and to make me nervous. Though we were moving at a decent pace, and could in theory reach Fyrril’s cave and rejoin the others in as few as three more days, a single heavy snow could make the return trip near impossible.
By nightfall, we had reached the end of the ravine where the slide had happened. The ravine disappeared gradually, sloping upward until the steep cliffs relaxed into a gentle bowl, and eventually into two relatively level banks of bare stone surrounding the shallow stream all the way up to its source in the mountainside to the north. The weak flow of water did not come close to filling the entire riverbed—though it undoubtedly would in the spring, after the snowmelt—but it was clear and clean, and more than enough to fill our waterskins. We made our camp there that night.
We ate a short meal around the fire, then pitched our small canvas tents to keep the snow out while we slept. When the time came to determine the order of the watch, I offered to take a shift myself. With the full company, it was never necessary, but given that there were only four of us, it seemed selfish not to do my part.
Sylla laughed darkly at my temerity. “I don’t think so, Scriber. I’d like to live through the night. What would you do if something came? A history lesson won’t fend off a snowcat.”
I scowled at her. “I would wake the rest of you if I saw something,” I said. “I just thought you three might like a bit more sleep. Can you ever forgive such a terrible mistake?”
Sylla leaned forward with menace in her eyes, and again my fear overpowered my indignation. At some point during the night, she would be keeping watch alone while I slept; I would be at her mercy. I cast my eyes back towards the fire and shut my mouth.
“There is no need to be rude, Sylla,” Bryndine said. “Scriber Dennon, your offer is appreciated, but we have trained for situations like this. Better you get a full night’s sleep.”
In the end, they determined that Bryndine would take first watch, then Sylla, then Orya. Orya and I took to our bedrolls; Sylla claimed that she did not yet feel like sleeping and remained by the fire with Bryndine.
Moments after she laid down, Orya’s loud snoring rumbled in my ears. I envied her the ease with which she found her rest. Even without the noise of her snores I would not have been able to sleep. Instead I lay awake, imagining our small party trapped in the mountains by a sudden snowfall, slowly succumbing to the cold.