Chapter 1
The Long Way Around
We had made a terrible mistake.
I felt it in every beat of Akarra’s wings, in every white-clouded breath that rushed back to sting my face with ice crystals, every tear drawn out on the knife-blade of the wind. The storm was getting stronger. Snow was falling thick and fast, though falling was no longer the right word. Falling implied verticality. This snow drove toward us with single-minded horizontal fury, Tekari-like in its efforts to unseat Alastair and me. Worst of all, it was getting dark. I gripped Alastair’s waist with fingers I could no longer feel and squinted over his shoulder. Through ice-rimed eyelashes I could just make out the ground far beneath in patches of white and dirty gray where the snow had scraped its frozen claws over the Barrens of the Old Wilds. Still no trees in sight. Or hills or mountains or landmarks or anything. We were lost.
“Alastair, we have to turn back!” I shouted. The wind spun my voice away. I tried again, pulling down my scarf and clumsily waving one hand in the hopes he would see it.
He turned a little. The length of cloth wound around his mouth and chin was frosted with snow. “Can’t land here,” he shouted back, each word fighting its way through the wind. “Not . . . cover . . . shelter . . . wait.”
Wait for what? I wanted to scream, though I knew it was useless. The storm had long since swallowed our bearings, and landing in weather like this would be a near death sentence, dragon companion notwithstanding. No shelter, no wood for a fire, with night falling and our food stores already low, and no guarantee we’d be able to get in the air again if the Tekari of the Old Wilds found us, we had no choice but to keep going. No storm could go on forever.
But then, no dragon could either. Ice glistened on Akarra’s scales, her saddle, and the edges of her wings. We no longer flew straight but dipped and swayed with every draft, and in the lull between gusts I heard her labored breathing. It had been a long time since she’d had a proper meal. It’d been a long time since any of us had eaten. I closed my eyes and pressed my forehead against Alastair’s back. Janna have mercy, why did we do this?
The gods didn’t answer. They didn’t need to. It had been almost two days since we flew from Morianton on the shores of Lake Meera, chasing the Wydrick-ghastradi and his valkyrie mount. His words from the tavern still burned in my ears, vicious, poisonous, louder than the howling of the storm. “The summons comes for the House of Edan Daired and old things will be called into account. The ledger will be brought forth, and when all Arle kneels before our master, then you’ll know I’ve won.”
All through the night we’d flown after him, blindly, furiously, Akarra’s dragonfire burning through the swirling snowflakes like the avenging sword of Mikla himself.
It was a sword that proved blunted and faithless in our foolish hands. The first rays of dawn had found us in the mountain pass west of Lake Meera, illuminating the whole lake valley and the Old Wilds beyond. At Alastair’s command Akarra landed, breaking the crust of snow that spread all around us in a smooth white blanket, unmarked by any sign of Wydrick or his valkyrie.
“We’ve lost them,” I said.
Alastair’s voice came muffled from beneath his scarf, the single word short and sharp as the wind. “Yes.”
“What now, khela?” Akarra asked. “The ghastradi warn of a war that is coming, we are many leagues from our allies, and you”—she looked over her shoulder at the empty scabbard on Alastair’s back—“have no sword.”
We’d tried, even in our haste, to find a sword for Alastair in Morianton, but our bad luck had held. The blacksmith had nothing beyond a hunting axe, and the local regiment of Rangers had made themselves scarce since the flight of their captain. Alastair had fairly thrown a pair of silver dragonbacks at the blacksmith in return for the axe. It was a crude thing, bereft of the razor-edged elegance of Alastair’s Orordrin-wrought blade, which was now sunk in the depths of Lake Meera, but still better than nothing. Or so I’d thought. That little delay had cost us our quarry.
Akarra must have seen our dark looks at the mention of weapons. “Do we return to the town?” she’d asked.
I looked behind us. Watery sunlight poured from cracks in the overcast sky without warming anything. Far below us the waters of Lake Meera caught it like a wintery mirror, shattered on its northern shore by the promontory and battlements of Castle Selwyn. Save for the steward Mòrag and a handful of servants, the castle was empty now, bereft of its mistress after the madness of its vanished lord. I thought of what else it held, intangible but no less real: grief and silence and the hollow condolences of the midwife. We’d left nothing behind there but heartache and loss.
I turned from the lake and looked out over the pass, toward the Old Wilds. The horizon stretched in a solemn gray line farther than I could see, any landmarks lost in the haze of distance. Clouds like leaden curtains were already gathering in the south.
Alastair shook the snow from his cloak. “We need to regroup and take council. If Wydrick was sent to Lake Meera to recruit allies for the coming war, then we need to do the same.”
I’d agreed, trying not to think of the kind of allies Wydrick had tried to recruit. An ancient vengeful spirit from the Old Wastes, a creature that thrived on fears and drove children to their deaths, a shadow of a shadow of the first darkness that fell upon the world. I thanked the gods the Green Lady had fled in the end, but that was still little comfort. We had no idea if Wydrick had succeeded with other creatures like her, or what on earth we could do if he had.
“Akarra, how far is An-Edannathair?” Alastair asked.
“Edan’s Crest? You want to speak to the Vehryshi?”
“Your people may know more about the ghastradi than human lore can tell,” he said. “Where they came from, whom they serve. They may even know how to kill them.”
The dread weight of his words and their unspoken corollary settled over me like a snowdrift. And if they didn’t know? Or worse, if the ghastradi couldn’t be killed at all?
“I’ve never heard tales of the ghast-ridden in the eyries, Alastair,” Akarra said at last.
“Other dragons might have.”
She shifted beneath us and studied the sky. A few snowflakes settled on her back and evaporated in a hiss of steam. “The peaks of An-Edannathair are many leagues’ flight south and west, and I don’t like the look of those clouds.”
“It won’t be any easier taking the eastern route back through the mountains,” I offered, thinking of Rookwood and the Vesh ambush we’d escaped on our way to Castle Selwyn. “I agree with Alastair. If there’s a chance we’ll find answers with the dragons, we should take it.”
“Very well. But the wind is shifting, khela, Aliza. It’ll be hard going, and we’ll have to take it in stages. You’d both best wrap up.”
We’d obeyed, hunkering down in our fur-lined cloaks as she caught the updraft and soared out over the pass, toward the Dragonsmoor Mountains and home.
The snow started soon after that. It hadn’t seemed dangerous at first: stronger winds, a few snowflakes, a deepening chill, but nothing life-threatening. Akarra predicted the storm would move east, spending its wrath on the mountains surrounding Lake Meera and the Langloch and leaving us a clear path through the Old Wilds.