Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (65 page)

Well, you’re in it now, old man. The strangest of the strange. I seem to have more unusual friends than normal ones
.

Once they were finished eating, they rested for a spell. Caenith washed and donned his shirt and took watch over his companions. Macha was soon
slumbering on the bracken, and Thackery attempted to shut his eyes as well. In and out he blinked, seeing claws of foliage above him, or flickers of Macha, as pale and helpless as a white prawn out of water. Flashes of the Wolf as well: vigilant and frowning and staring up through the leaves for Crowes.
Does the man sleep?
pondered Thackery amid his dreary state that was neither sleeping nor waking. Sometimes he almost went out, and he would begin to see a misty woodland that slithered with shadows and had trees thrice as tall as the ones that should be around him. He knew this place, and the innate fear of it startled him awake every time. After a while, he gave up on resting and shuffled around in the leaves like a fussy hen.

“I thought you were tired,” said Caenith, who was crouching nearby in his predatory way, with his hands between his legs and his head cocked.

“Shouldn’t you be?” replied Thackery grumpily.

“I shall sleep when Morigan is found. But we should let her rest until dusk,” declared the Wolf.

Thackery didn’t think on how a man could go without resting for days, not when his own body needed tending. He groaned his way to his feet and stretched. Such cracking and aching he made, though it was possible that he was getting used to their constant exertion, for the pain was not as terrible or as noticeable as he had anticipated. He had been a spry man once, perhaps his body remembered a bit of that. Regardless, he was holding up better than he had predicted at the outset.

Macha suddenly bolted out of her sleep. She was gasping and fish-eyed as if from a nightmare. The Wolf crawled to her, and they whispered ancient Ghaedic to each other; Thackery interpreted the expressions as he could. Nothing the gentle Wolf tried would lull Macha back to slumber, and in a sand Thackery was told to grab his walking stick, for they were to be on their way.

Another hourglass lay between them and the concealment of night, yet with the land darkening, they took greater risks. From the ravine, they hurried across a sward—delayed a bit by Macha’s distraction over the silver butterflies and early nightflies congregating there in clouds like faery creatures. Before the next flock of Crowes whooshed through the clouds, they were down in a muddy cleft, as if the earth had simply cracked and dropped in a spot. They followed this passage until the path rose into more plains, hills,
and forested ravines. The mountains fenced their side as a line of black teeth, hungry and intimidating, and the land ahead appeared endless, disappearing behind a fog as night fell. Yet the three pressed on, if primarily because the Wolf set their stride, and his was determined. Even as the stars winked and shone, Thackery did not ask for rest. With every step nearer to Menos, his concern over Morigan’s fate increased. A day in the Iron City was a lifetime anywhere else and plenty of time to find one’s grave.

Thackery asked once after her welfare, to which the Wolf answered him vaguely and without breaking.

“I felt her once. She was in trouble; now she is not. I think she has found allies.”

Allies?
wondered Thackery, and he was given much to occupy his mind with as his legs churned out steps. If she had discovered people to hide her, that was a promising development; even if friends in Menos were simply folks who hadn’t found a knife to stick you with yet. Night seemed to darken Thackery’s thoughts as well as the land, which sprouted with tanglements, deeper vales, and taller trees. Come the final coat of darkness, the birds surrendered their tweets to the hooting of owls and the growling of vicious hunters. Now and again, these beasts came, ruffling thickets or clawing their ways up trees, yet they never attacked the company. A fortune owed to their guide, no doubt, who stamped fearlessly ahead: kicking his way through bush, snapping back trees, and hacking a trail through the land as if he owned it, as if he were its king. Thackery was no naturalist, though he understood that the Wolf’s scent, and moreover the primality of his presence, was keeping any predators at bay.

Here I walk with monsters, roars and claws and teeth. Here I bow before the lord to offer up my meat
. The grisly lines entered Thackery’s consciousness more than once as he watched the Wolf hewing ahead, and he wasn’t sure where he knew it from or of what greater work it was a part. Another bit of prose from Alabion, perhaps, as those were always rife with references to death and lords.
Alabion!
he thought, and while it wasn’t ideal, perhaps they could arrange for someone in the East to care for Macha. Properly, among the culture of her kind. While they were crossing what looked to be one of the last broad stretches of land before a rising wave of forest, he brought this up with Caenith.

“I think I have a solution, or at least part of one.”

“To what?” the Wolf called back.

Thackery glanced to the child shivering by his side; he had given her his cloak as the chillness of night set in, but it didn’t seem to be enough. He squatted and warmed her shoulders with his hands, and she rewarded him with a tiny smile.

“To our fellow traveler,” said Thackery. “We should return her to Alabion. What better home could there be for a child like her? Would you like that, Macha?”

What Thackery had said was interesting enough to stop the Wolf’s unyielding stride. However, he was already shaking his head as he turned around.

“Do you remember her nightmares this afternoon?” asked the Wolf.

“I do.”

“Macha was dreaming of Alabion.”

“I don’t understand,” replied Thackery.

Quite rightly, the Wolf was annoyed at this conversation and delay, as every speck was teasing doom. Until Macha impulsively ran toward his heat and wrapped her arms—as much as she could manage—around his leg. At last, then, some of the callousness and pain that Caenith had layered upon himself like a scab finally fell off. The Wolf knew that he had been driving himself past what should kill a man. Willing himself to stop only to piss, shite, eat, and then to continue at all costs toward the Iron City. In all the long years of his life, he had never tested his endurance so violently, and a razor of hurt ran through his every nerve with each step forward, as if he tread on a bed of nails. Agony was its own stimulant, and it kept him awake and even transcendentally aware: smelling, hearing, and feeling to extrasensory heights. But these two who traveled with him, with their slow-walking and fragile selves, could not be forgotten, or he was no better than the masters who had taken his Fawn.

Realizing his errors, he unclasped Macha’s cloak and handed it back to Thackery, whose shivering indicated that he needed it just as much. When that was done, he picked up Macha, and she sat sidesaddle on his forearm and eagerly hugged his neck. Thackery tried not to take offense; it wasn’t that she didn’t want to be picked up, it was that she didn’t want to be picked
up by him. Caenith motioned his companion ahead and ambled for a while so that Thackery could take less labored breaths.

“Macha speaks of Alabion as if it is no longer safe,” the Wolf said grimly. “Such is why she and her family fled. The forest changed many centuries ago, after I left it. I hear that she became unkind to those who used magik, and many of the old clans left, as it was the only way they knew to survive. Still, many skin-walkers and the oldest creatures of the woods remained, as they were the least affected. I thought that the change in Alabion’s kindness signaled the fading of my kind: an end to magik. That those who stayed on, those with fangs and natures unfit for the world of man, would drift away like morning mist. I believed my kind to be safe in their silver sanctuary. I was wrong—Macha says that the lords of fang and claw have risen from their gentle decay and bound themselves to the will of a warmother.”

“Warmother?”

“Aye.
Ban Mactyre
, she calls her. The monster in her dreams. A white wolf. Though in her dreams, which I believe are as much memories, the white wolf is often red with blood and dancing as the oldest witches once danced around sacred stones and fires.” Caenith’s eyes sparkled. “I have known a white wolf before, and they are fierce but deeply spiritual creatures. This one, this warmother, sounds mad or possessed of a passion for conquest. If we sent Macha to Alabion, it would be from one terror to the next.”

“Another possibility will present itself. They always do!” Thackery clapped Caenith’s arm—yet again, he forgot the hardness of the man. “Like slapping a stone! By the kings, I need a pair of mittens if we are to be proper friends.”

“Come, friend,” said Caenith, smiling. “I hear the birds of Menos moving west again. We must make those trees within a few sands. Are you up for a sprint?”

“I don’t need you to carry me. Save that for the women and children!” cackled Thackery, and he was off.

Caenith raced after him, and had no trouble overtaking the old man, though he chose to match his gait. Once they reached the shadows of the forest, the warmest of their camaraderie cooled while the coals of it remained. Burning in each man was a spark of unanimity. It fueled their spirits as much as Caenith’s pain did. They climbed through the forest, which grew
ever steeper and as tangled as a yarn of vines and bush. Using only a single hand, Caenith ripped through it all, without waking little Macha, who had fallen asleep again against his grunting flesh. They were each wet with leafy blood and heaving when they came to a summit in the woods on which the trees were few and far between across a hump of mossy bedrock. It offered a sweeping sight of the valley beyond. To Thackery it seemed like they were about to tread into another day of forest, for the fuzzy shadows rolled on and on, so thick that he imagined walking across the canopy. They had left the fields of Canterbury, and the constellations above told him that they were north, quite north. He was not able to say where.

Caenith, however, saw much farther and understood their location better than his companion did. In his sharp sight, Kor’Keth’s range had tumbled down like an old dry stone wall that would no longer keep the cattle in, and the glistening line of water past even that was to their side, while ahead was a day’s hike till they tested themselves against the last leg of their journey. He could see that challenge, too. At the end of the wood, where the land gave itself to rubble, a haphazard arrangement of rock was piled in slanted tiles, which made for a second mountain range, heading east. The whole formation appeared teetering even if it was ancient and fast, and could have been made by a messy giant, for it had the appearance of building blocks left unfinished. Into the dark winding tunnels that ran through that rock maze they would go. Caenith squinted until the stars faded, the forest folded away, and he had only a sliver of sight. A black cloud plumed beyond the Iron Valley: Menos.

Two days at most, until they reached the Iron City. They were nearly there.

II

“Tread carefully,” warned Thackery.

Barring any cautions from the sage, Caenith could feel the prickle of menace and sense the extraordinary dankness of the Iron Valley. An ancient death. That is what he smelled—the powder and must of bones—and sensing deeper and further with his uncanny perceptions, a corruption, too. For
a charcoal stain crept up toppled pillars of gray rock like wicked ivy, dyed the dusty slabs that were tossed about, and infested the greater crags of the range. So dark was the shadow of the valley that it could have been dusk and not the warm day from which they had come. And so strong was the sense of wrongness that Caenith’s iron stomach curdled.

Macha was awake and clinging tightly to Caenith, and he distractedly murmured to her while embroiled in anxieties of his own. Even though there were aspects of the Iron Valley that nudged him with familiarity, nothing was as it should be. When he looked about expecting grand, clear roads, these trails were so overgrown that it was as if no roads had ever been there. Granted, his memory was fuzzy at the best of times, yet he seemed to recall the quarry in which they stood as a great junction. He looked to the monolithic heap, expecting tall rectangular tunnels, and saw none of those, either. Truly, it was as if his memory was deceiving him. He sought an answer from his companion, the man whose idea it had been to take this cursed path.

“What happened here? These were the gates to the South and West. The axis of trade and travel from Menos.”

“Indeed they were,” replied Thackery. “I wouldn’t expect you to be up-to-date with your—what is the term—
slow-walker
histories, so I’ll pardon you not having heard this terrible tale.”

“Terrible tale?”

“Most terrible.”

Thackery waved for Caenith to follow him and began caning his way through the stones like a tired old well-weirder: he seemed to have a path in mind.

“Greed,” announced Thackery. “The curse of Menos. Those who once had nothing, crave everything. Greed is built into our values, bred into our children. For the masters, there is no food or pleasure that can satisfy us; for the slaves, there is an endless craving to be free. We all hunger for something in this world. But Menosians are prey to this vice more than any. You could blame the kings for this, for their refusal to give us mercy in some dead and bygone age over which my people forever hold a grudge, but really, the venality of a Menosian is a
disease
, passed from parent to child. I doubt that the kings’ mercy would have healed any of that. If I were sage and advisor to Magnus back then, I would have told him to let the city starve and fester
with plague, too. Had I the foresight, I might have cast death upon my own people.”