Sorrow's Peak (Serpent of Time Book 2) (7 page)

She’d never drank so much in her life.

Logren squeezed her fingers before he withdrew and lowered his arm across her shoulders. They walked together with difficulty. She was fairly certain, as they leaned against one another, it was that and that alone which kept them both on their feet as they moved through quiet streets bathed in the strange, ethereal light of the lanterns lining the street and the blood stain of the red moon burning through the clouds.

The sky was overcast and the air smelled like snow, though the subtle warmth of the city assured her the flakes would never fall within the walls of Dunvarak. She could smell it nonetheless, the crispness of it fluttering beneath her nostrils every time they flared outward with the draw of her breath.

“It’s going to snow.” Her voice sounded so loud; maybe it was.

Her brother laughed, a far louder sound than she’d made with her voice, and it echoed against the buildings rising around them with stark precision. The boisterousness of his amusement was becoming a familiar fondness for her, one she would carry with her and refer to in her memory whenever she needed a smile.

“It’s always going to snow here. Great gusts of blustery white battering at our gates like raging trolls, but they never touch us. They never break beyond the magical barriers that protect the city unless the mages want them to.”

“Do they ever want them to?”

“Rarely,” he shrugged. “Mostly they alter temperatures to create rain for the crops and gardens, but even that is so strange and unnatural I don’t even know if it could be called rain. There are fields beyond the wall that are mind-boggling to behold. Rich golden grains growing stubborn and tall despite the cold, and all because of the barriers the mages raise around them.”

“Magic is a strange thing.” She shuddered with the realization, momentarily playing over the hundreds of precautions Master Davin handed down to her and her sister over the years. It was a dark, terrifying power, unfamiliar and peculiar, and yet she knew inside it was the most natural thing in the world. There were beings born with magic flowing through their veins the way the silent wolf lingered beneath her skin, and they could do incredible, impossible things.

“It is what it is,” her brother shrugged her closer. “Without it, we would have died here long ago. It is a cruel land upon which we chose to build our city, and in the beginning we weren’t sure if we would make it out here, but magic made the tundra yield.”

“Do you know any magic?”

“Scarcely enough to start a fire. Don’t have the patience for it.”

“Roggi will one day though,” she thought aloud.

“More than likely. Bren’s been teaching him the fundamentals since he was old enough to take his own steps, and he’ll have the mind for it once he’s learned to sit still and focus.”

“I was taught magic was the bane of our existence,” she confessed. “I was taught so many things that aren’t true.”

“As are we all, I suspect. Life teaches us what’s true. Experience.” He took a few steps ahead of her, his arm drawing her forward with him as he turned right onto a long street paved with pale stones awash with green light. “Come on, we’re almost there.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Someplace wonderful,” he promised. “Someplace beautiful.”

The houses all had a similar look about them, one level, built of wood and stone, roofs thatched with dried rushes. She wondered where they’d gotten the materials to build their city more than once, knew some of it was conjured with magic, but the rest must have come from somewhere. It took mountains of stone to build Dunvarak and the miles upon miles of wall blocking the city from the outside world, entire forests of trees must have fallen to make the wood that framed their homes and buildings. Where had it all come from, and how long had it taken them to build such a solid, thriving place?

He said there were fields somewhere beyond the walls, sustained with the same magic that maintained the city, but each household had a small plot for growing herbs and vegetables, and several of the homes boasted small stables near the back of their plot to house chickens, pigs, goats, sheep and a cow or two for milking.

By all rights, a place like Dunvarak shouldn’t have thrived; it shouldn’t have existed at all, and yet there it was, and it was glorious.

She remembered her brother saying there were just around two-thousand residents in Dunvarak, a number that seemed pitifully small as she tried to imagine what it must have taken to build such a city in the middle of the harsh, unyielding tundra, the amount of labor it surely required to hold such a city aloft. And how many of those residents were children, elderly folk no longer able to contribute hard work to the survival of the city? She’d seen quite a few children during her time there, carefree and dashing through the streets with life and excitement in their steps. They seemed to thrive, as if the harsh reality of the life their parents eked out had no effect on them at all, which in turn suggested life wasn’t as difficult as it should have seemed.

And all because of magic.

How strange and wonderful, she thought. How terrifying and powerful such magic must be.

They approached a gated wall surrounding a broad building with round windows made of colored glass. It stood ominous and tall in the absent moonlight. She lingered at his back while he tinkered with the gate’s lock, producing a set of keys to coax it open. Her gaze fell upon the yard as the silver light of Madra overhead broke through the clouds to illuminate the dark space. Hundreds of stones marked the dew-soaked grass and she found herself drawn toward the wall to study them. Hand perched atop the cold stone, she leaned forward and tilted her head to study the strange field leading to the building. The light grew, clouds moving away from the half-faced moon overhead and she saw they weren’t rocks, but small statues spaced about twelve to fourteen inches apart in long rows stretching all the way to the base of the building behind them.

“What is this place?”

“Llorveth’s temple.” The lock gave way to his fumbling hands and he jammed it into the pocket of his breeches before swinging the gate forward.

“And those statues?”

“We bury the ashes of those who’ve died beneath them so we might revisit and remember them while we yet live.”

Her thoughts immediately turned to Yovenna, the seer who’d welcomed her into Dunvarak and shared details of her destiny with her just the day before. It felt like weeks passed since she and Finn burst into the old woman’s cottage and found her dead in her chair, the light gone from her unseeing eyes, but it had been only hours.

They’d taken her body to the pyre beyond the city walls and set the ashes of her spirit free upon the wind. Would someone see to those ashes when the last ember shuddered out, collect all that remained of the woman and bury her there in front of the temple? Though the time she’d known Yovenna was short, she would never forget the seer, or the visions she’d shared with her. She wanted to have a place to go when she returned from her journey, a place where she could honor the woman who sent her into the unknown with a purpose.

“Will they bring Yovenna here?” she asked, voice hitching through the tightness of her throat like a hiccup. “Her ashes, I mean?”

“They will.”

She only nodded, her head moving in short, quick bobs Logren didn’t even notice. He swung the gate open and it screamed on rusted hinges, the sound echoing through the night like a keening spirit on the wind.

“Good.”

“Come on.”

He edged her forward with a jerk of his head and she followed through the gate, along the pathway to the temple. Eyes scanned the plots, the statues, trying to count how many dead lay buried beneath the cold earth of Dunvarak, but it was dark and her mind was fuzzy even though the night air slapped some of the sense back into her mind. Once more she stood behind him while he fiddled with the lock to the temple, using the keys he still held in his hand. Benefits of being a city-guard, she guessed, ducking back as he grabbed the low-burning torch from the sconce outside and then reached for her hand to tug her inside.

That dim torchlight ate away at the darkness, bite by bite spreading a dirty orange glow to reveal the room to her. Lorelei lifted her head to the ceiling, which the light had yet to reach, and saw beams of moonlight streaming through the stained glass moons positioned overhead. They were just like the moons in the temple in Drekne, though far more glorious to behold in the darkness.

Kierda and Friegla’s light did not reach the windows, as they were hidden behind the clouds above, but Madra’s silver glow spread through them all, illuminating the interior of the temple as her eyes began to adjust to the myriad of soft colors and shapes forming in the darkness.

In the center of the temple was a statue, not unlike the stag in the temple at Drekne, and circles of pews wound around it, enough of them to seat every person in Dunvarak. As she stood at the edge of those pews looking toward the middle of the temple, she felt so small and insignificant, just a single being with so little knowledge and understanding of how the world worked, what the gods expected from her.

She’d been brought up paying homage to Foreln, the father of men, and honoring his divine wives: the Three Ladies who mothered all of humanity. They respected the All-Creator, but Lorelei always felt something more was required of her, she believed other gods demanded her attention. Llorveth haunted her dreams as a child, the moons chasing her through each night as if she were a villain, but she understood those dreams in ways she never had before.

The moons of her nightmares weren’t trying to run her down, they were alerting her to the dormant wolf beneath her skin, and the older she got the more feverish those dreams became. If only she’d understood them better at the time, if someone told her the truth about who she was before her life fell apart, things might have been different.

Only her mother knew, she guessed, and though it pained her to admit it, she understood why her mother held her at a distance, rather than embracing and loving her. She’d always thought the queen to be a meek and simple woman, a frightened little mouse of a creature who didn’t dare speak a word against her husband, and maybe that was exactly who Ygritte was, but Lorelei finally knew why. Aelfric killed the father of her child and made her watch. He destroyed her completely, and every time the woman looked upon her daughter’s face it broke her heart. Lorelei must have reminded Ygritte so much of Rognar she was afraid to love her. Afraid Aelfric would destroy the only thing she had left that reminded her of her brief freedom, of the love she knew with Rognar.

It all made sense, but it didn’t make it any easier to endure. If Lorelei were ever taken, forced to marry Trystay, she would take her own life rather than suffer his rule over her, but then that was easy for someone who’d never known the kind of love Ygritte shared with Rognar, for someone who wasn’t doing whatever it took to ensure her child’s survival.

“Why do they expect so much from us?” she muttered, taking a step past her brother. She cut through a space between the curved benches and made her way toward the statue of their god. Like the statue in Drekne, Llorveth’s horns were broken and she found herself reaching out to touch the furrowed brow beneath the nubs of stone where they should have been.

Llorveth was her god, just as Foreln was. In a sense she guessed he always had been, but never more in her life had she felt that bond with the horned god than she did in that moment. Not even during their exiling from the Edgelands, when the essence of the god filled her with all the answers to the universe for the blink of an eye before leaving her body with little more than a trace of his wisdom, had she felt as strongly as she did in that moment about the bond she shared with the god.

There really was a part of him inside her; she felt it just beneath the surface of her skin, warm and tingling like tiny needles against her bones without the pain. That acknowledgment warmed her stomach, settled the uneasy sourness churning there and making her feel for the briefest of moments that so long as she felt the god inside her, everything was going to be all right.

Logren moved behind her, letting her go as he walked from sconce to sconce, lighting the torches as he went and filling the temple with a dull orange glow. As he worked he seemed to be thinking through his answer to her question.

She was just withdrawing to sit down on the bench in front of the statue when he started toward her, speaking as he walked. “I think they expect from us exactly what we are capable of, no more, no less.”

It wasn’t long before he was there, slipping into the seat beside her and lowering his folded hands between his slightly parted thighs. He stared up at the statue, head tilted in awe, his face softening as if simply sitting there had the power to comfort him and make all his troubles fade away. Lorelei longed for that kind of peace, wished it would fill her the way it seemed to fill him, and though she certainly felt lighter in the temple, there was fear inside her the mere presence of a statue could not quell.

“How do they know what we can handle?” she muttered, shaking her head and returning her gaze to where his eyes rested. “And why is it so much harder for some of us, than it is for others?”

“I don’t think it is like that at all,” he confessed. “I think it just seems that way when you’re on the outside looking in on someone else’s problems, Lorelei. What seems like a mountain to one is little more than a molehill to another. In fact, I know I could never do the task you’ve been given by the gods.”

“Sure you could,” she shrugged. “You’re strong,” she went on, “more than capable.”

“Maybe, but I’m also rash,” he pointed out, “impulsive. I think with my blade first, lashing out long before rational thought reaches my mind. I think that’s why I get so riled up by Vilnjar’s taunts about our father. Rognar was an impulsive man. I know that now. I remember instances that support it as truth, but I don’t always like to accept it. Unfortunately, I inherited that quality from him, and I very rarely think things through as well as I should.”