He didn’t approach her again that night, didn’t attempt to pick up the threads of their conversation.
Her heart cracked. She’d wanted him to.
By the morning, the snow had stopped. The three of them trudged on up the mountain in an eerie hush, and Eda couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching them. Morin hadn’t spoken a word to her since they woke up. She tried to tell herself that’s what she wanted, but that was a lie. What she wanted was for him to take her arm, to walk beside her, a solid, steady presence. Peace. Strength. But she knew that was not what the gods had for her. That was not what she had for herself.
Tainir kept up a constant stream of ancient Words as they walked, gold glints pouring from her lips. Morin’s fingers went constantly to the horn on the cord at his throat. Eda knew he must feel vulnerable, without his ayrrah to call on anymore. She kept her own hand wrapped around the hilt of the Itan priestess’s dagger.
As they climbed higher, lights began to flash in the distance, glimmering on and off in shades of blue and violet and green, like lamps lit and then instantly blown out. A jarring music rose on the wind, eerie and high and tangled with screams.
Morin’s jaw tightened, and Tainir’s face blanched with fear; they saw the lights, heard the awful music, too.
They went on, shoving through rock and snow, struggling ever upward. The wind tore at Eda’s hood, slipped under her collar and shot icy, grasping fingers down her neck.
And then she looked up and Niren was peering at her from around a curve in the trail, the hem of her white gown whispering over bare toes.
Eda screamed and stopped short.
Instantly Morin’s hands were on her shoulders, his eyes frantically searching hers. “Are you hurt?”
She pointed ahead of them, but Niren’s ghost had vanished. The lights winked on and off, the music and screaming jangled in her ears.
“Who did you see?” Morin smoothed his thumbs over her cheeks, his touch tethering her to the mountain.
“I saw my sister.” The words were ash in her throat.
Morin nodded. “I’ve seen my mother around every turn in the trail for the last hour.”
“I’ve been seeing Father,” said Tainir beside them, her voice cracking. “Their souls are waiting. They’ve nowhere to go.”
Eda tried to breathe, tried to steel herself for what came next. “Then we must be close. We must be close to Tuer’s Mountain and the door to the Circle of the Dead.”
Morin nodded, his hands still touching her face. “Let’s go find him. Let’s go find Tuer.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
ASTRANGE MOOD SEEMED TO SEIZE ALL THREEof them. They climbed on, up and up, faster and faster. Eda understood now that every time Morin drew a sharp breath or Tainir’s jaw hardened, that they were seeing their dead, just as she was seeing hers: Niren, around nearly every bend in the trail. Her parents, flushed with fever. Rescarin, his fingerless hands dripping blood onto the snow. The Emperor, peering at her with sightless eyes, as poison dribbled from the corner of his mouth.
The lights grew brighter on the mountain ahead, sparking to life and no longer winking out, like impossible, multicolored lanterns suspended in thin air. The music rose to a jangling cacophony, and Eda knew it for what it was: a thousand voices singing all at once, every one a different melody, every one adhering to a different time. It was beautiful, and it was horrible, and it seemed strange that it could be both at once.
Night fell behind the clouds, darkness hemming in. There was no discussion of whether or not to make camp; Eda, Morin, and Tainir just kept desperately, frantically climbing.
And then, without warning, they reached the top of the peak, stepping up into what felt like the sky itself, the music and the lights suddenly vanishing. The clouds had broken apart enough to show a sliver of stars, and the three of them stopped and stared, panting and shivering in the frigid wind.
“There’s nothing here.” Tainir’s voice sounded deafening in the silence. “There’s … there’snothing.”
She was right. Beyond the peak there was no stretch of snowy mountain winding downward again. There was only a dark kind of blankness. Like they really had climbed all the way to the edge of the world.
Eda shrugged out of her pack, letting it thud into the snow. She walked slowly toward the blankness, one hand outstretched. She’d only taken a dozen paces when she knocked against something cold and hard. She touched it with both hands, peering into the dark. Morin and Tainir crunched through the snow, coming up behind her.
“Ice,” said Eda. “It’s a gods-damned wall ofice.”
She dropped to the ground in a fit of laughter, her whole body shaking. She laughed until she cried, while Morin and Tainir stood staring at the translucent wall in sober, stoic silence.
When Eda grew calm again, Morin flopped down beside her, hugging his knees to his chest.
“We should make camp,” said Tainir. “Decide what to do in the morning.”
They spread out their bedrolls and crouched on them miserably. There was no wood on the barren peak, and so no possibility of a fire. Tainir didn’t offer to go hunting, but Eda didn’t even really feel all that hungry. There was a hollowness inside of her, an ache. Nothing more.
