Her hands went to her antlers. New growth met her touch in the form of fresh, tender tines, easily seven inches long, with three points. Deer shed their antlers each year, only adding tines after a shed; she didn’t quite understand what it meant, for a Kelthi to grow additional tines. It seemed that they only grew when she had strong symptoms of the Heat.
She hurried to the little mirror over the washbasin and caught her breath. Where the antlers met her scalp, soft velvet still clung, flaking at the edges. A streak of blood marked her hairline.
She filled the basin with water from the jug on the floor and dipped a towel in the water. Rubbing at the velvet, she worked carefully until it peeled away in red smears. It didn’t hurt; if anything, it felt like release. She did this by instinct; she’d never let her antlers grow so large, the draught stopping this growth in its tracks. But she’d seen deer in rut, and young bucks with their growing tines, rubbing velvet off on surrounding trees.
She was just another animal, like them.
When the velvet was gone, she was surprised to see the bone wasn’t ivory, but a pale blue.
She poured the remaining water over her hair. The cold shocked her into a soft gasp.
The door creaked open. Mallow stepped inside, hair wind-tossed, a grin tugging faintly at his mouth. He carried two steaming mugs and a paper bundle.
“Up already?” he said, setting the bundle on the table. “I was going to surprise you.”
“You did.” She stood up straight and pushed her dripping hair from her face.
“Pastries,” he said, as though presenting treasure. “Sweetened. Don’t tell the Spire.”
She smiled. “You bribed the innkeeper?”
“I’m persuasive when I’m hungry.” His eyes flicked to her antlers, and his grin deepened. “And anyway, seems we’ve got to feed our growing Kelthi. I was wondering when that velvet would rub off.”
He handed her a mug, and their fingers brushed. Even that small touch sent a pleasant shock through her; not a wildfire, but something steady. The Heat hadn’t vanished. It lingered under her skin like a creature pacing its cage, no longer ravenous, but watchful. A hunger with its eyes open.
He brought a flaky pastry from the bag and handed it to her. “I think that one is… blackberry?”
“Oh,” she said. “Are there any others?”
“Not a fan of blackberry, eh? Let me see.” After a moment, he pulled out another. “How about apple?”
She grinned. “Perfect.”
They ate by the window, tearing the flaky bread into pieces, laughing over nothing. Mallow told her what must have been only a half-true story about stealing honey from a tavern roof as a boy, and she nearly choked trying not to laugh. The air shimmered between them, as though the world had briefly forgiven her.
When the laughter quieted, he drew his battered book onto one knee and uncorked a small bottle of ink. “Alright, Sister. I need you to tell me everything about this draught you used to take. Anything you can remember – flavors, ingredients, smells.”
She told him everything she knew – the taste of licorice root and fen bark and fennel, the slippery feeling of it going down her throat, even the color, a ruddy brown. He thought over his notes for a time when she was finished. “I might have some luck with this,” he said finally. “Let’s head out, shall we? We’ll stop at the herbalist on our way out of town.”
When she went to put on her cowl, her antlers protruded in such a patently obvious way that Mallow laughed. “Ah, that’s not going to work for you anymore, Little Hooves.”
Still, she did her best to tuck her ears beneath it.
Outside, the morning had sharpened to cold clarity. The frost melted from the eaves, dripping steadily into the mud, but clouds gathered thick in the east. She knew an incoming storm when she saw one.
Mallow fell into step beside her, mood still light.
“Where to first?” she asked.
“Stablemaster owes me directions,” he said. “And I’d rather not test Lord Balthir’s hospitality by lingering too long.”
They turned toward the square, their breath clouding in the air. The sounds of the village were just beginning, with buckets at the well, the call of a butcher, a door creaking open. It all felt ordinary, almost peaceful.
She heard them before she saw them. The ring of swordbells.
She whipped her head about.
Across the far road, a column of riders cut through the fog. Their armor caught the morning light, glinting gold and royal blue. At their head rode two men on white horses, their banners unfurled: the stylized hand of the Dagorlind, sunburst bright against blue, a bell pinched between thumb and forefinger.
Brighthand guards.
Lain stopped dead. Her blood ran cold, the afterglow of warmth vanishing like breath from glass. The riders slowed at the edge of the square, speaking quietly to the villagers who’d stopped there. A broad-shouldered man with his helmet off was scanning faces.
Mallow’s hand closed around her arm. His voice was low, all trace of humor gone. “Don’t look at them.”
Behind the front riders came a third figure in gray leather, unhelmed, his long hair bound in a single braid. He wore no sigil. His eyes were pale as clouded glass, unfocused and terrible.
“Mallow,” she whispered. “They’ve brought a tracker.”
Mallow followed her gaze. “What?”
“Every Dagorlind gives them a drop of blood. They can find anyone with it.”
His grip tightened. He turned her down the nearest alley, boots sinking in thawing mud. Behind them, the square filled with voices of villagers calling greetings, the metallic jingle of reins.
“I’ve seen one before,” Mallow grimly. “They’re Veinwrights.”
“What? The Dagorlind would never –” but she stopped, realizing how foolish that sounded now.
“And they’d never have a Kelthi Bellborn either. I’ve met a Tracker trained on Kelthi blood. They’ll search every road. If he can track by scent –”
“He can,” Lain whispered. “By the serpent’s breath, he’ll smell the Heat on me.”
One of the riders laughed, sharp and close.
They ducked behind a cart stacked high with chopped wood. Mallow glanced once over his shoulder. “They’ll ask about you. We need to move before they learn we were here.”
She nodded. “Where?”
“Balthir’s men are still quartered on the north side. If anyone can slow them down, it’s them.”
They moved fast. The road curved away from the square, narrowing between sheds and shuttered stalls. Lain’s breath came in bursts. Every hoofbeat against packed earth seemed too loud. When they reached the edge of the stables, voices rose ahead of men calling, the clank of harness rings.
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Captain Kovac was there, overseeing the loading of a supply wagon. He turned at the sound of their approach. His expression changed instantly: surprise, then wariness. “Ren,” he said. “Something wrong?”
Mallow didn’t waste a beat. “Brighthand patrol. Two banners.”
That wiped the smile from the captain’s face. “Saints’ blood. Here?”
“They’re asking questions in the square.” Mallow cast a quick glance toward the street behind them. “We need to be gone before they start checking inns.”
Kovac’s gaze landed on Lain, her cowl shadowing her face. Something darkened in his expression. “What exactly have you dragged into my camp, Ren?”
“She’s no danger to you,” Mallow said quickly. “But she’s the reason they’re here. If you want to do something useful for Balthir, you’ll help us vanish before the Brighthand connects us.”
Kovac’s brow furrowed. “And why would I do that?”
Mallow stepped closer, lowering his voice. “Because Morgan’s cause can’t afford attention from the Spire. Not yet.”
That gave the captain pause. He studied Mallow for a long, measuring second. “So it’s true, then?”
Mallow’s tone was dry, but his eyes didn’t leave the captain’s. “You owe me for Varric Pass, Kovac. I’m cashing it in.”
The older man’s jaw tightened. After a beat, he nodded toward the open gate. “There’s a path along the river. It’ll take you north to the pines. I’ll send two men to stir up the Brighthand if they come sniffing this way.”
“Thank you,” Mallow said.
“Don’t thank me,” Kovac muttered. “If they find out I stalled them, I’ll be the one strung up. Go. And for god’s sake, keep your damn Kelthi friend out of sight.”
Lain’s stomach twisted at the words, but Mallow only gave a short nod.
Kovac turned to bark orders, his voice rising over the din: “You two! Mount up! Patrol east road.”
Mallow tugged Lain’s sleeve. “This way.”
They cut through the back of the stables, the smell of hay sweet and thick in the air. Hooves clattered behind them as a pair of Balthir’s men rode out to intercept the Brighthands. Lain risked a glance over her shoulder and caught sight of the blue banners flashing between rooftops.
“Run,” Mallow said.
They bolted for the treeline beyond the last of the houses. Shouts erupted behind them, boots and metal clashing on cobblestone. Cold wind tore through her cloak as they ran. The trees ahead looked impossibly far.
“Keep moving,” Mallow hissed.
They plunged into the woods, boots crunching through the hard crunch of snow. Branches whipped past. Lain’s lungs burned; every breath felt like it scraped ice down her throat. The ground sloped upward, the snow deepening, and soon they clawed their way up a bank where meltwater gleamed beneath the surface. Her hooves slipped once, twice, before she caught the frozen roots of a pine and hauled herself up.
“Here!” Mallow called. Ahead, the trees opened to a narrow gorge where the river had once carved its way through stone. Now the water was sealed beneath a sheet of thick ice, its surface filmed with snow. At its head stood a frozen waterfall, tall as a tower, blue-white and glittering. Beneath the ice, the thawing current moaned in a hollow voice that rose and fell like a dreamer caught in sleep.
Lain stopped, staring. “It’s beautiful.”
“Climb.”
They scrambled for the ledge beside the fall, boots and hooves scrabbling for purchase. The air was thin and sharp. Ice cracked away in jagged chunks under their weight to crash to the riverbed below. Behind them, shouts rang out, followed by the hiss of a bowstring.
An arrow struck the ice near her hoof, fracturing it in a spiderweb of white. Another whistled past her ear.
“Mallow!”
“Keep climbing!” He reached down, caught her wrist, and pulled her up the last few feet to the ledge.
The Brighthand riders broke through the trees below, their armor flaring gold against the gloom. The sound of the serpent’s emblem banners snapping in the wind made her blood run cold.
They were trapped.
Lain looked down at the river far below. She saw the tracker, his pale face and gray armor against a backdrop of harsh snow. She could not be sure of it, but he seemed to meet her eye.
The ice groaned again, the sound resonating through her bones. For an instant she remembered this river, further downstream, the place where she had stilled the flood and saved the farmer. She could feel that thread waiting, thin but alive beneath her feet.
Her bell was in her hand before she’d even thought to draw it.
Mallow turned toward her, recognition flaring. “Lain, don’t –”
She struck the bell once, clear and bright. The sound cut through the gorge like a shovel through loamy soil.
Something answered.
It wasn’t the Underserpent. It was something nearby, buried in the soil, one brow raising in consternation at being woken before the thaw.
But it was curious, too, and friendly, and it chuffed as if waving her on to continue so it might resume its peaceful slumber.
She began to sing.
River sleeping, wake and rise,
Break the chains of frost and stone.
Carry ruin, carry life
Take me where your heart has flown.
The waterfall shuddered. Cracks bloomed outward from the heart of the ice, crawling like veins through glass. The moaning deepened to a roar. Mallow caught her arm, pulling her back as the ledge quivered beneath them.
“Lain!”
She hardly heard him. The song had hold of her now, moving through her ribs, answering from that thing that slept in the nearby earth.
The first sheet of ice broke loose, splintering into shards that caught the weak light and threw it in all directions. The sound was deafening. The river burst free in a rush of black water, swallowing the frozen layers one by one until the entire fall collapsed in a thundering cascade.
A shape pitched out of the trees below, a man on a gray horse, bracing for the slope. He’d been one of the Brighthand riders; she saw a flash of metal at his elbow as the horse slipped where the bank gave. The horse’s legs flew, found nothing, and the animal keeled with an astonished cry into the water, taking the rider with him.
Lain’s throat tightened so hard she couldn’t breathe. The man’s body slammed into the water and the river took him. The white shoulders of the river swallowed him. His hand flailed high once, twice, the fingers like a small complaint in the middle of the chaos. The current tore him under. He did not come up again.
“Lain! Get back!”
She moved because Mallow said it, because muscle obeyed a clearer command than her mind. Mallow’s arms hauled her back, his weight dragging her from the breaking ledge. She slid on wet rock; splinters of ice bit her skin. Mallow’s fingers were hard in her cloak. He did not look at her, only over the river where men and horses and splintered ice were a tumbled and terrible thing.
“Someone –” Lain started, and the words she meant to say – I’m sorry, it was my song, I woke the water – came out as noise. She felt so small inside the canyon.
Downriver, a villager who had been working at the bank when the first crack had spidered blew a horn, lunging toward the place the man had gone under with a rope in his hands. He was quickly joined by others who’d been working the shoreline. Dead trees and debris came free of the bank, these turning ferociously in the yellow-tinged roil, the water foaming. The horse bobbed to the surface, its head exploding from the spray, its forelegs careening from the water in one desperate attempt to break free of the current. She knew what it was like to swim so equipped, and when the felled tree rolled over the horse and bore it down she knew in her lungs what that felt like, too.
Lain froze.
She was a fawn again. A little deer staring down the hunter’s bow.
She was bound in the woods with Darrin’s sword at her throat.
Mallow put a hand on her chin, turning her so she would meet his eyes. His face had shifted into a thing she did not want to see: it was a rigid shape of fear and calculation, and suddenly she understood that whatever innocence he once saw in her was no longer expressed on his features. The look he gave her now was one of an equal. She never thought such a thing would be horrifying, but seeing it now on him, she would’ve undone the world to take it back.
“You did what you had to,” he said, voice unsteady.
She tasted metal. In the press of Mallow’s grip she felt the bell in her hand, heavy and stupid and small as sin. Her fingers closed around it. She had called the river back, and the river had answered with a monster.
A shout rose near the far bank. Someone had managed to snag a boot that stuck out of a roiling funnel – then another shout, and then silence. The men had formed a desperate line with ropes; young hands worked to pull, slipping and cursing. A horse reared and slipped in the mud; a Brighthand rider rolled and scrambled to his feet, throat bright with alarm. But the one who had gone down in the first thump of ice did not reappear. The river would keep him.
Lain pressed the bell to her mouth as if she might reverse its singing note. She wanted nothing more than to vomit, picturing the song as a bit of flesh lodged in her throat she could expel, with enough pressure.
“Did you see him?” she whispered.
Mallow’s hand tightened, then loosed. He let go of her jaw the way a man lets go of a blade he’s been holding at the ready.
“We have to go,” he said.
She felt the edges of what her power could do. The knowledge burned through her like a hot coal. The song was still inside her, caught in her throat, a suffocating force.
Mallow steered her away, up the path that would take them from the water, but she kept her eye upon it, waiting for something she could not make right.