Page 33 of The Second Death of Locke

fourteen

I T WAS NOT AN easy thing, to cross the mountains at the turn of the season.

Grey kept her hands in her coat as often as possible until Kier finally relented and made each of them tiny magelights, one for each hand, pulling from her constantly to keep them from getting frostbitten.

They stopped every few hours to warm up their feet or eat or let Pigeon rest or graze at the increasingly infrequent patches of mountain grass and moss.

Four days they spent in the mountains, sleeping in short spurts, huddled together on a double layer of bedrolls with three more pulled tight over the top.

At night, the wind screamed so loud that she couldn’t tell the difference between waking and her nightmares.

She often woke tangled in Kier’s arms, in Kier’s coat, her legs entwined with Brit’s or Sela’s, to find the captain’s eyes open and staring into the night.

“Stop worrying,” she murmured to him every time, but he only sighed and stroked her hair until she went back to sleep. Between hours of sleep, they took their watch shifts, pacing and frigid, forcing themselves through exercises to keep their circulation going.

As they walked through the mountains, Grey did her best to teach Sela.

“I want you to imagine it as a ball of yarn,” she said, as her own mother had told her.

“Find a thread and tie it to Brit, and let it unspool little by little. Not like a ball you throw—a thread, Sela. That’s all they need.

” They practiced until Sela was able to connect to the mage without any directional nudging from Grey.

She was a weak well at most, but she was a well.

Just being an unbound well made her more useful than Grey herself, a fail-safe if they needed one.

Closer and closer they drew to the other side of the mountains, until Grey realized that they’d spent most of the afternoon going downhill instead of up. As evening fell in earnest, she hurried her footsteps, moving around Eron, then Pigeon, to catch up with Kier. “Where are we?”

He pulled out the map and said, “Aloducan peaks, crossing east.”

“Kier,” she said, fully accepting that her tone had slipped into whininess.

She didn’t think she could identify the unmarked Aloducan peaks on the map if they stabbed her in the chest. He only sighed and pointed at their location with a brief tap.

She traced her finger over it, examining the space between there and Grislar, and something like hope swelled in her chest.

“What are you thinking about our next move?”

He cast his eyes skyward. The clouds were steely gray, heavy with the promise of fresh snow.

Grey was tired of the stuff, but at least the hard-packed frozen ground was better than mud.

“I’ll defer to you on this,” he said. “I think we need to send letters from the next village we come to. We’re about five days out, and I need that time. ”

Five days. The thought was nearly incomprehensible.

“Let’s camp here,” he said, louder, so they all could hear him. He nodded toward a sheltered patch of grass a few feet off the path.

Grey set herself up on a rock, laying her kit out as Eron began preparing the food. “Brit,” she called. “The big day has arrived.”

The mage came over, a smile creeping across their lips. “Time to take the stitches out?”

Grey nodded. When she had her workstation set up and had cleaned her hands, Brit removed their shirt, shivering in the cold, and stretched out. Kier positioned himself nearby, ready to help if needed.

Grey focused on her work, humming just a little as she did. There was quiet contentment around the camp—it took Grey a second to realize that Eron was telling stories as he worked.

“That’s not how I heard it,” Ola protested.

“You’re from the southwest. They can’t be correct,” Eron retorted.

“And what do farmers know of folk tales, then?”

Grey had no idea what they were talking about.

She finished up and applied more salve to Brit’s wounds, then bandages.

The mage dressed and Grey took off her own coat, then her shirt, wincing at the cold of the wind.

Kier moved to sit next to her, taking her arm in his hands.

She forced herself to pay attention to Eron for a distraction, if nothing else, as Kier started his work.

“They say that magic is a gift from the gods,” Eron said grandly. “That all gods came down, and chose a nation, and blessed it as they saw fit. And here in Idistra, we were blessed most of all, by our own gods: for we are never forced to endure alone.”

“Bullshit,” Ola said. She was sitting on a rock, stroking Pigeon’s nose. Sela sat at her feet, her head on the well’s lap. “No one says that.”

“Well, then you explain it.”

“In Lindan,” Sela said, “they think magic is a responsibility, and it must be learned.”

“Good thing we aren’t Lindle,” Brit muttered. “Eron, you’d be fucked.”

“I don’t have to feed you,” Eron said. “And besides—I can use Arkunish magic, and my father left me some of his spellstones.”

“Do they work here?” Kier asked, genuinely interested. He had always loved knowing as much as he could about how other systems of magic functioned.

“Not well,” Eron admitted. “And anyway, not to say too much about my father, but he only left me the shitty ones. They’re very specialized. So I suppose I’m really useful, but only if you have a drain blockage, or a thread that keeps snagging.”

“Alas,” Kier said. “I do not.”

Brushing past this, Sela said, “And in Ruskaya, did you know that the magicians are demons?”

Kier snorted. Grey looked up at him, at the careful concentration on his face. “To be fair,” she said quietly, “some would accuse you of… demonic qualities.”

He smirked, finishing the last stitch. Grey directed him to apply a salve and wrap the healing wound as the others bickered over the relative merits of other types of magic.

“Captain,” Eron said when he saw they were getting up. For a second, Grey thought he was talking to Kier, but he was looking at her. “You grew up on the coast. Tell us, what were the stories there? Where did they say our magic comes from?”

“Oh. Um.” Grey chewed on her nail. She knew the stories she believed, the variations they used to tell around the fire at night on Locke. She glanced at Kier, but he only gave her a smile. Bastard.

She accepted the bowl Eron handed her, pausing to let it warm her hands as she settled in next to Brit. Kier took a spot across the magelight from her, closer to Eron.

“Surely you heard some stories growing up,” Eron said, tucking into his food.

Grey pushed her spoon around. “Well, they say that this land existed before we did, don’t they?

Hundreds of years ago, when no one lived here—actually no one; it was an island of sheep—there was a ship lost in the sea.

It bore explorers from what is now Lindan, where magic is freer.

Looser. But when they landed, they found that they were so far from home that the magic did not come as it once had.

” She paused, looking up. “Have you heard this one before?”

Ola wrinkled her nose. “I think so?”

Brit and Eron shook their heads.

Grey chewed her lip, but she continued. “Now, after a hard winter, only two explorers remained. But they were out of food, and though they’d retreated to a small isle for protection and made a home for themselves, they could not live another winter there alone.

So one suggested she could go searching the mainland, close by, to find provisions.

The other woman feared she would never come back for her.

So in the night, she stole her heart, and with it, her magic.

The intrepid explorer went in search of food, and found it, but she did not feel whole—and she could not perform any magic on her own.

When she returned to the isle with her provisions, she was delighted to find that her magic had returned, but only when she remained with her lover and betrayer.

And for that reason, we need both: one to love, and one to betray. ”

There was quiet for a long moment. She knew Kier was looking at her, but she did not look back until he cleared his throat and said, “I think I know a different version of that.”

“Gods, I hope so,” Ola muttered. “That was bleak.”

“In the version I heard, she gave her heart freely, as a promise to return.”

Grey felt her cheeks warm. She looked up, meeting Kier’s gaze. “Who told you that version?”

“Mom,” he said.

“Hopeless romantic.”

He shook his head, but he couldn’t hide his smile—the dimples of his cheeks were dark in the dying light of evening.

Mom had heard that version from Imarta, Grey knew, who had heard it from Grey herself.

And both versions were passed from Grey’s own mother, who decided which version she would tell based on how well behaved Grey and her brother had been that day.

There were other stories after that, but Grey didn’t participate in the telling.

It was too easy to slip, to say something she wasn’t supposed to know.

That night, when she and Kier went on watch, she looked out into the valley below and thought of the remains of the temple that went down with Locke, dedicated to the goddesses of love and betrayal—or of love and devotion, depending on who was there to make an offering.

Retarik, Locke’s goddess of forgiveness, was also the goddess of devotion, the first of the named mages.

She hadn’t thought about the temple of Retarik, she realized, in many years. It was partially intentional, since the temple had been repurposed into a festival hall—the very same hall where the Isle had met its end.

Even that made her sad: there were so many things on Locke, so many details, and she was the only one to hold them, to go on remembering when everything else was lost.