The horses navigated the steep trails easily and by early afternoon they were in the highest hills. The chill in the air sharpened, and soon they heard the rush and froth of the Ardos¸, which split from the Herodis and flowed into the Zaratan Sea. The river’s deep-carven chasm marked the border between Selafai and Sarkany.
The village of Valcov straddled the divide, comfortable in the centuries of peace between its parent nations. Sarkany was more concerned with the Ordozh raiders in the north and Iskar to the south, and Selafai’s longest grudge was with Assar across the sea.
Townsfolk eyed them curiously as they rode past the sprawling stone-and-timber wall that enfolded the clustered stone-and-timber buildings. They passed fields of turnips and cabbage and winter wheat, and smelled sheep and goats before they neared the pens. When the wind shifted Savedra caught the greater stench of a tannery and mill smoke; the clatter and rasp of lumber-working echoed in the distance.
The center of town smelled more invitingly of a bakery and cooking from the tavern. They watered the horses and tethered them in front of the inn; Savedra, Ashlin, and Cahal went in while Iancu vanished quietly to search for information. As quietly as a stranger in a small town could ask questions, anyway.
“Try not to steal any honey,” Savedra told Ashlin as they entered the tavern.
Her stomach rumbled at the smell of meat and herbs, and she ordered ale and venison pies in badly accented Sarken, pretending not to notice how the conversation in
the low dim-lit room faltered around them. She paid with a silver griffin and received Sarken pennies in change. Dull silver glinted amid the copper—a thin, uneven coin engraved with an owl on one side and crude letters on the other. She knew it from Iancu’s stories, too—a striga, or witch-coin. If she were a sorceress or a disguised spirit the silver would burn her fingers or glow at her touch. It stayed cool and slick, and she caught the tavern keeper’s eye as she sorted it from the rest of the change, thanking him and tucking it into her inner breast pocket. Courtesy for offered luck, instead of outrage at the implied insult. The man had the grace to blush, and was very solicitous in refilling their mugs afterward.
The pies were filled with meat and berries and thyme, sharp and bittersweet and rich with iron. They ate quickly, and Savedra sopped the last of the sauce off the notched wooden plates. With her stomach quiet, the ache in her thighs and back became more noticeable—another mug of ale might have helped, but she had to get back on the horse eventually.
The light spilling across the threshold changed before Iancu returned, deepening to a watery honey. The bartender had begun shooting them pointed glances, and Savedra was about to succumb to a third mug of ale to placate him when Iancu’s shadow fell through the doorway. A young woman waited for him outside, and another awkward stillness rippled through the room as the patrons saw her.
“I’ve found someone to help us,” Iancu said, stooping over the table to speak softly. “Apparently there’s only one woman left in Valcov who can.”
They left Cahal behind to watch the horses and
followed the dark-eyed woman. She didn’t offer her name or any other conversation as she led them to the far side of town. Her black braids were held back in a kerchief, but beads still rattled as she walked; her embroidered skirts rasped with her purposeful stride. She must have been years younger than Savedra, perhaps no more than twenty, but the villagers stepped aside for her in the street with hasty nods. Was she a witch like Varis’s mystery guest?
They stopped at a small house on the outskirts of town, where buildings gave way to fields. Smoke trickled from the chimney and the shutters were open to the breeze. The woman stopped in front of the open door, waving them in and saying something to Iancu that sounded like a warning. Her voice rasped, as with long disuse.
“Her grandmother may help us,” Iancu said. “We are bid be solicitous of her poor health.”
The house was a single open room, the curtained bed the only privacy it offered. A spinning wheel stood beneath one window, surrounded by brushes and baskets of uncarded wool and a fat butter-colored cat who eyed a coil of yarn. Charms hung from the rafters, strings of leaves and beads and coins that rustled and chimed in the breeze. The room smelled of herbs and wool and camphor. In a much-mended rocking chair beside the hearth sat an old woman.
She was frail and stooped, skin creased and thin over once-strong bones and cheeks sunken with missing teeth. One side of her face drooped like hot wax, and her left arm folded unmoving in her lap. A cane leaned against the wall within reach of her chair.
She studied them with one canny dark eye—the other veiled by its creased-paper lid—while Iancu asked his
questions. Savedra knew enough Sarken for courtesies and bad directions, but not enough to follow his low urgent tone. When the woman replied her voice was slurred and slow and even less comprehensible. She dabbed her mouth constantly with a handkerchief to keep from drooling. They spoke for several moments, not quite an argument. The woman tried to shake her head, but it was more a feeble twitch.
“
Vau roc
,” Iancu said, several times. Please.
Finally the woman made an angry slashing gesture with her right hand. At first Savedra feared she was throwing them out, but then she began to speak.
“I remember,” Iancu translated softly, keeping pace with her muttered Sarken. “I remember Phaedra Darvulia, and sometimes I think remembering is what broke my body and my magic. I would trade these memories for my health, but not even gods make such bargains.”
Ashlin sank to her knees and Savedra followed, sitting cross-legged on the creaking floorboards like children.
“It was like a minstrel’s story,” Iancu continued. “A beautiful girl went riding in the woods and became lost. A handsome hunter rescued her and took her home, and they fell in love. Bells rang in the castle and the village on their wedding day, and bright ribbons flew from the battlements of Carnavas. The women wore flowers in their hair as the bride and groom rode by.
“The girl was a witch, and perhaps a little mad—prone to black moods and wild frenzies—but she and her march-lord husband loved each other, and the village loved her in turn. She often spent the winters in the south with her own people, and the mountains were all the colder without her.
“What happened next no one can say for certain. Raiders came. Some say from the north, some from the east; some say they were demons of the frozen wind. I say they came from the south, but I’m the only one who remembers it so. Wherever they came from, whatever they were, their weapons were sharp enough. When villagers came to the castle days later they found only frozen corpses. The lord lay dead in his hall, stabbed through the heart and his sword in his hand. The servants had been rounded up and slaughtered like sheep. Of the lady there was no sign, but her library and workrooms were destroyed. The villagers searched the woods and riverbanks for her but found no trace, though some claimed to have seen blood on the rocks below the castle ramparts.
“We buried the lord and his people, but the castle became home to ghosts and hungry spirits, more than the village witchwives could dispel. Demon birds circled the towers, and many thought them the lady’s pets driven mad by her death. The Sarken king sent no new lord to hold it, and the Selafaïns staked no claim, so villagers circled it with salt and wards and left it to molder in its grief.”
She fell silent, mopping her chin and frowning lopsidedly. Her chair creaked and clacked as she rocked, and wood fell in the hearth with a flurry of sparks. Dust motes danced and settled in the slanting light. After a long moment she spoke again, the words even more muffled now by the handkerchief.
“The forgetting came not long after, like a fog over the mountains. The castle stands, and everyone remembers the lord, but no one remembers the name of his wife.”
Her gaze, distant with memory, sharpened again as she squinted at Iancu. He nodded to her question, then
glanced at Savedra. “She asks if we mean to go there. I assume we do.”
Visiting a haunted ruin at twilight didn’t seem the best idea, but Savedra nodded anyway. She reached for her purse, but the woman made another dismissive gesture.
“She says that she’s done us no favors,” Iancu said. “But her granddaughter will show us the trail. And that we should hurry.”
“Thank you,” Savedra said, scrambling to her feet. The woman only shook her head.
The sun hovered a finger’s width over the serrated teeth of the Varagas, already peach-red and swollen. The young witch pointed them toward the road that led to the castle and turned away when their feet were on it, vanishing back into the village.
Valcov lay on a small plateau; past the edge of town the road dropped away and valleys and ridges fell like wrinkled cloth, the tangled skirts of the mountains soaring sharp and cold to their right. Somewhere north and west the Varagas gave way to gentle hills and fields which in turn rolled toward the sea, but from this vantage there was only stone and trees and snow high on the peaks, and the wide crush of sky.
The castle Carnavas brooded on the edge of a cliff, overlooking Valcov from one side and the icy rush of the Ardos¸ from the other. It would have been a forbidding place in any light, but as dusk crawled from the roots of the mountains, it was all too easy to imagine the specters stirring in empty halls. Dark shapes wheeled against the sky, vanishing into the towers; birds home to roost for the night.
“This is as close as we go tonight,” Iancu said. Not even
Ashlin argued. But they stood and stared, shivering as the evening chill chewed through layers of cloth, caught in the ruin’s spell. The last of the daylight lined the western sky with apricot.
“Tomorrow,” Savedra said. The steadiness of her voice surprised her. But they’d come this far, and they certainly weren’t about to ride back to Evharis in the dark.
With a glance between them they turned away, hurrying back to the warmth and walls of the inn.
That night Savedra and Ashlin lay back to back in their shared bed. It was a small inn, and they could forsake luxuries for a night. Iancu and Cahal shared the room across the hall.
“What do you think?” Savedra asked, the words muffled by the pillow. The bedding smelled of down must, and the pungent straw beneath the featherbed.
“It’s an interesting puzzle. Your whole family is interesting.” The last she said so dryly that Savedra elbowed her in the ribs.
“None of that,” the princess said with a laugh. “They’ll charge us extra if we have a pillow fight.”
Savedra chuckled. She’d never shared a bed with anyone but Nikos, not since she was too old to sleep with her mother or her nurse after a bad dream. Lovers, yes, but not the quiet—or in this case creaking with every shifted arm—warmth of another body. Ashlin had no sisters, and Savedra wondered if she’d ever had to share. After a drowsing moment, she asked.
“My brother used to crawl into bed with me when he was scared, in case monsters snuck into the room,” said the princess. “I had more weapons at hand than our nurse.”
The bed frame creaked as she rolled over and her breath brushed warm across Savedra’s shoulder. “On cold nights my riders and I would sleep like puppies, as many in the tent as would fit. Cahal, by the way, snores like a pig and steals the blankets besides. You smell nicer than any of them. And there was one season—” Her voice broke. “I had a lover.”
Savedra had known it, of course, but the words were so soft and rushed, so stripped of all Ashlin’s usual prickles and armor, that her breath caught in her throat.
“Only for the autumn. Then I was called back to Yselin, and the betrothal moved forward, and…. Well, you know the rest of that.” She sighed. “It was nice while it lasted.”
Fabric rustled and Savedra felt a gentle tug on her hair—Ashlin’s fingers twining in her braids. The sensation prickled her skin. When Savedra raised her face from the pillow she smelled her: garlic and wine from supper, herbal soap and weapon oil, and under that the sweeter musk of her skin.
“I envy you, you know. The bond, if not the man.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
Bedding rustled and she imagined Ashlin’s shrug. “It’s not your fault. I could have run away and become a mercenary. It isn’t all bad—I do like Erisinian food.” She tugged gently on one braid. “How did you end up with hair like this, anyway? I’ve seen your parents.”
Savedra accepted the graceless change of subject gladly. “My mother likes to blame the Iskari on my father’s side of the family.” She smiled into the dark, remembering her mother’s quiet profanity as yet another delicate sandalwood comb broke in her hair. “My father always reminds her of her own Assari grandmother.”
They lay in silence while wind whispered around the eaves and the inn creaked and sighed softly to itself. Finally Ashlin’s breath roughened and her hands rested, still tangled in Savedra’s hair. By the time Savedra slept, the princess was curled warm against her back.
She woke the next morning huddled in a ball and stinging with gooseflesh. Ashlin stood before the open window, silhouetted against a lead-and-rose sky. She turned when Savedra stirred, grinning like a child. “Get up,” she said. “It’s snowing.”
They left for the castle at daybreak. No one warned them away or tried to stop them, though from the way the innkeeper shook his head he thought the mission was folly. He pressed charms on them as they left—cords strung with beads of wood and tarnished silver—and a small pouch that settled like sand against Savedra’s palm. Salt, from the smell, and anise or fennel. She thanked the man in mangled Sarken.