Page 74 of Beyond the Shadowed Earth
“‘I dare not show my face before him.’
“‘If you do not ask, you will never know,’ Raiva told him. ‘I have known the One’s mercy; I have seen his heart. You need not fear him.’
“But Tuer couldn’t hear her. ‘I must atone for the life I took. I must restore Tahn to Endahr. I will find his soul, Lady of the Wood. I will bring him back.’
“‘Tahn’s soul has been at peace these many centuries. It is folly to seek him. It is evil to drag him away from his rest.’
“‘It is what I must do. It is the punishment I deserve.’
“Raiva sighed, because she knew she could not sway him, but she took his hand in hers and kissed his brow. ‘Then do what you must do, my lord, but make haste. The light in the wood will be dimmer in your absence.’
“And then he turned and went up into his mountain. He never came back.”
The snap of the fire sounded overloud as Morin stopped talking. Eda stared at him across the flames, her discomfort sharpening to anger. Shewaslike Tuer. There was little difference between them. And now here she was, seeking that very mountain, seeking to drive a knife into his heart. Isn’t that all Ileem had wished to do? To end her cruelty, her mistakes, as she intended to end Tuer’s, Rudion whispering in both of their ears?
“What’s wrong?” said Morin.
She jerked her eyes away. “You’re right. I’ve never heard that story. But it doesn’t make me think better of Tuer than I did before.”
“You forgot the ending,” Tainir admonished her brother. Golden sparks were dancing all around her face and her shoulders. She raised her hands to reveal more flecks of light cupped in her palms. She blew on them, gently, and they drifted up into the night like so many fireflies.
“What’s the ending?” asked Eda. Pain pulsed through her.
“After a year of waiting in her wood, Raiva went into Tuer’s Mountain. She went after him.”
“But not even she could save him,” Eda guessed. Her eyes found Morin’s of their own accord, and this time, she didn’t look away.
Tainir lowered her hands to her lap again, and the sparks around her faded. “So it would seem.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
THE SPIRITS WERE HUNTING THEM.
Every day the stain on the horizon grew larger, and the wind from the east brought with it the stench of rotting things. Sometimes, from the corner of her eye, Eda thought she saw Rudion: his flaming crown, his jagged teeth, his dark-feathered wings. Yet every time she turned her head, there was nothing beside her but empty air.
The days fell into a rhythm: flying most of the morning, with a break midday for the ayrrah—and the humans—to hunt and eat. Then flying in the afternoon and making camp just before sunset. It was always Tainir who went hunting, always Morin and Eda who stayed behind. She felt perpetually awkward around him when they were alone—she didn’t know what to make of him, and more importantly didn’t know whathemade ofher.So she talked to him about little things. Unimportant things. Just to fill the silence until Tainir came back, her eyes straying always to that stain on the horizon, in constant dread of dark wings and bone swords filling the sky.
Every time they stopped, Morin marked their progress on one particular well-worn map, showing Eda where they were, how far they’d flown.
“When did your mother become a cartographer?” she asked him on the fourth day. The ayrrah had put them down for the night on the very tops of enormous pines, and they’d had a long climb down to the forest floor. There was sap in Eda’s hair, and she’d scraped both arms on the rough bark. She felt a little safer, under the cover of the trees.
“My mother could draw before she could talk,” he told her, brushing pine needles from his trousers as he knelt to make a fire. “My father said she was born with a pen in her hand.”
Eda helped him arrange the wood, then struck a match and set it to the kindling. “What about you?”
“The year I turned seven I contracted a terrible fever and was confined indoors for months. I was restless, so my mother let me try her pencils and paints. I’d had no interest in them before, too busy climbing rocks and learning to speak to the ayrrah. She showed me how she sketched her maps, traced the outline with thick black ink, filled them in with watercolors. It fascinated me, and I discovered a talent for it. On my next birthday, my mother gave me a beautiful set of colored pencils she’d sent for all the way from Pehlain. I used them so sparingly I still have a few of the stubs somewhere back home.”
“You miss her so much,” said Eda across the crackling flames. “I’m sorry.”
“I can’t believe she’s gone. I can’t believe she just … fell.”
“Is that how she died?”
He shuddered. “Her back was broken. Her neck, too. She must have fallen.”
Eda read the truth in his face, and her heart wrenched. “You dug her grave. Alone.”
“I didn’t want Tainir to see.” He bowed his head into his hands, his shaking shoulders the only evidence he was crying.
