Chapter 18- The Thin Place

Iona is a far better liar than I will ever be, which is the only reason why any of this works.

I watch it happen from the shadow of the colonnade, the way she plants herself in Cassius's path with a basket of linens too high to see over, the way she stumbles, the way the whole armful goes spilling across the stone at his boots. I hear her gasp of apology, too loud, too flustered, and I hear the exact cold pause in his voice as he stops. He grumbles something under his breath and stoops to help her gather it. Iona keeps him there, fumbling, apologizing, and beneath the apologies is something else, something that darkens the tips of his ears. I slip past them into the garden while the emperor's spear kneels in a puddle of my bedsheets.

I will thank her later for helping me to meet with Torsten.

Torsten is waiting where the garden ends, in the shade of a whitewashed wall of stacked dry stone, the ivy and bougainvillea grown thick enough to swallow two people talking. He does not waste time. He never does.

“Took you long enough,” he says, by way of greeting. “I feared you would not show.”

“I had to lose Cassius,” I say as I catch my breath. “Where is her letter?” I do not care about anything else. I have carried the want of it like a stone in my chest for a fortnight. “You said, last time, you said she would write. Where is it?”

Something crosses his face that, on a warmer man, I might have called reluctance. “There is no letter, girl.”

I feel a gentle breeze on my skin against the warm sun, which reflects against the white stone. Yet the whole bright afternoon is swallowed by his words the way Theron’s obsidian castle swallows the light.

“What do you mean there is no letter?”

“I mean your mother was too weak to hold the pen,” he says flatly. “The fever is in her chest now. She fails a little more each day. The medicine barely holds her, and is expensive. Your father is not sentimental about his accounts, and weighs expenses against return. At present, the return is poor. I would not let it stay poor for long, if I were you.”

He lets that settle into me like cold water into cloth. “What you sent was worthless, Bree. A grieving man, a dead mother, and more beast attacks. Your father did not send you a thousand miles south to learn the emperor's sentiments. He wants what moves under this court. His plans. His weaknesses. The things a wife learns in the dark. And you have brought him gossip, and meanwhile the vial your mother needs empties by the day.”

“I gave you the thing he grieves,” I say, and my voice does not sound like mine. “That was not gossip. That was the most private thing he owns. He told me about his mother because he trusted me, and I took it and I handed it to you, and you are telling me it was worthless.”

“I am telling you it was not enough.” Torsten pushes off the wall. “Bring me something with teeth, or the medicine stops. Do better, and do it soon, or your mother will not last the season.”

I watch Torsten turn and go, swallowed by the flowering vines, and I am left alone against the white stone with the truth of what I have done. I sold the softest thing my husband owns. I betrayed the one man who ever looked at me like a person and not a defect. And it bought my mother nothing. She is dying anyway, dying while I trade away pieces of a good man's heart, and the trade did not even work.

I do not go back inside.

I cannot.

Behind me the fortress waits, all cold corridors and a husband drawn shut against me. Cassius will find me soon. Iona cannot distract him forever. And to go back in means being the empress again, upright and careful, and I do not have it in me, not with my mother's failing hand and Torsten's arithmetic ringing in my skull. I feel restless. Jittery, and I need to get away, somewhere else. Somewhere that makes me happy.

Before I can really think about it I find myself at the stables. I gently pet Starlight, my horse, as Tomas comes around.

“Your Highness,” he says with a gentle bow as I nod to him.

“I’m taking Starlight out, I’ll be back before dusk.”

He simply nods, and I ride out to the woods. For a moment I can forget everything as I feel the wind against my face. It is only when I begin to recognize the bridle path, to the edge of the old woods, that I am where Theron took me riding before.

My eyes burn then at the memory of it as Torsten’s words ring in my ears.

What have I done? And for what?

Gently, I guide the horse and tie her up to the nearby post. I sit on the stone bench as I stare at the cypress and the umbrella pines which stand against the afternoon light. I was a fool to think this marriage could possibly work.

Who am I kidding?

To think I had hope that I could both lie to him and keep my mother alive. To keep both secrets close and wrapped around my heart like something that could last. I touch the stone bench. Where Theron first told me about his mother; how, for a single moment, I felt close to him. That everything felt possible. I let myself remember it, his mother's love for fashion, his rare laugh, my name in his mouth as he kissed me like it meant something.

I grieve all of it, the mother I am losing and the husband I am betraying, and the longing that aches worse than either, the longing that I wish I could make this work. I wish I could keep them both, my dying mother and this cold impossible man who was starting to feel like mine. But there is no path that is clear to me, and I don't see a way out. Tears spill from my eyes from the ache of it all. The deep pain of losing something you want but could never have.

And that is when I hear it.

Under the wind. Beneath the creak of the pines, a distant ringing of fortress bells. A sound threaded so finely through the song that at first I cannot separate it, a euphonious melody curdling slowly into something melancholy.

I stand up. I need to go near it.

No…. I have to.

That’s when I realize I hear crying, someone is weeping in the trees.

The once beautiful sound morphs into the saddest sound I have ever heard, and it is achingly, impossibly beautiful.

I wander up from the bench towards the tree line. The music pulls at the strings of my heart, turning the grief I feel into music.

“Hello?” I call out to the weeping person.

I think I see a man. Unsure if I should follow, I hear the rhythm of the music begin to pull me in.

“Wait!” I shout, quickly I try to follow him. As I do, the music grows, a crescendo of wrongness that reflects the pain of my heart. This is the sound of someone who understands. Someone who is as tired and as sorrowful as I am. Someone weeping the exact same grief I am too proud and too frightened to weep.

I want to go to it.

I need to go to it.

This song. I want to go to it the way you want to lie down in bed after a hard day and never wake up, the way you want to close your eyes when the world becomes too much.

It is a calling, a balm against the deep sorrow beneath my ribs.

Come, the weeping says, without words. Come, and I will make it quiet. All of it. The noise in your head and the pang of heartache. Come, and I will give you the silence you have been begging the world for since you were a child. No more secrets.

No more selling.

No more failing the ones you love.

Only quiet.

Only rest.

Come.

I step past the tree line. I know, dimly, distantly, that I should not. But the pure relief, the need to get closer, pulls me in, promising me the one thing I have never once been able to buy, earn, or steal, and my feet carry me over the roots and into the dark beneath the pines, toward the sound, toward the promised quiet, and I cannot stop.

The trees thin into a small clearing where the afternoon light pools in through to the center, and the weeping stops.

Quiet. Between one step and the next, gone. There is no more sound. I stand in the sudden silence with my heart slamming in my chest, and I cannot remember why I followed this man in here.

Where is he?

The man who was weeping.

Why did I even follow a stranger into the woods alone, when I know that there is danger that lives in these woods?

The wood is too quiet. Not resting-quiet. It is too still.

I turn to head back, but the path that was there is now gone. Blocked by black trees where no trees once stood, their bark now the brown of cypress or pine but black like the smoke that once plumed from Aodh’s wounds.

Something is very wrong.

Those trees were not there. I know they were not there.

But they are there now.

I turn again and find myself in a round clearing that was not there before, the black trees fallen back into a ring of open ground as I hear a man's voice behind me.

“You are alone, child.”

Startled, I turn and step further into the clearing, away from the tree line. There, just at the edge of sight, a lone shadowy figure stands. It has the silhouette of a man, and is hidden enough among the black trees to remain a quiet stranger, his limbs too long, too tall. I cannot make out the details of him. He is just far enough away to stay hidden.

My heart races, and I try to find my voice.

"Who are you?"

"There you are," it says.

And I know it. The moment it speaks, I know it.

It is the voice. The one that pulls at the edges of my mind. The same human-like voice I hear beneath the bird-like sound of the song, the song I hear before the dark beasts attack. It carries the same deep tones as the melody that lured me into this clearing. A voice that comes from everywhere and nowhere at once, patient, ancient, almost kind, and it sends a cold spike of dread straight up my spine.

“I have been calling you for days,” it says. “Since you laid your small warm hand against my roots and let me taste what you are. I confess I did not believe it, at first. That after so long, after so much careful drowning, there was still a coal of the old fire loose in the world, walking about in a woman's skin.” I see it step closer.

It is too tall. Taller than Theron, taller than any man has a right to be. Too still. Too smooth, carved instead of born, its skin the grey of old ivory, its hair falling black and endless into the dark. And when its eyes open on me, they are not eyes. Only two pits of patient black.

From its brow rises a single horn, pale and spiraled and wrong. Not with my mind, but with a deep whisper in the back of my head.

One of the old ones. Wearing a human-like shape, trying to reach through.

The pits of its eyes move over me, unhurried, cataloguing, the way a scholar reads a ruined text. “Come closer. Let me look at what is left of my kin.”

I cannot move. I cannot speak. The old blood in me is screaming, and that is when I realize I am shaking.

“What are you,” I whisper.

“Before there was time, there was nothing. And before there was nothing, there were the ancients, whom your ancestors called monsters.” It tilts its horned head, almost gentle. “And here is what remains of the thing they made to stop me. Run thin. Watered down through a hundred weak and frightened generations, until this. Until you. A final ember, guttering in a woman's skin, that does not even know it was ever a flame."

"What do you want?" I manage to squeak out as I step further back, into the center of the clearing, trying to put as much distance between me and the creature as I can.

Something like sorrow moves through the patient dark of its voice, and it is worse than any rage. It takes a step toward me, and the light dies where it moves.

“You are a disgrace, child. There is only darkness for you, and only death for your people.”

It lifts one long grey hand.

I try to move, but pain shoots into my head.

I scream. The song I have heard so many times is suddenly deafening. I place my hands over my ears and look up to see the creature suddenly in front of me.

And I know, with a calm more terrible than any fear, that I am going to die here. Here, in the woods where I was last happy. At the hand of a thing older than the empires. No one knows where I am. And the last thing I will ever have done is fail every single person I love.

Tears fall down my eyes, and I feel a wetness come from my ears and onto the palms of my hands as I try to block out the sound.

A guttural roar is heard, but the ringing in my ears finally stops.

I look up to see the creature swat away shadows.

No, not just shadows, but spears. A dozen of them, now turned into two dozen, driving into the space between me and the horned thing with a force that rocks the earth, and the old one recoils, and steps away.

And a voice I know, a voice I would never have expected to be glad to hear in all my life, snarls out of the dark behind me.

“Get away from her!”

Cassius.

He steps into the hollow with his brown eyes blazing and his hands full of shadow, spear after spear condensing out of the air around him and hurling themselves at the horned figure, and he does not look at me, he cannot spare the glance, but he puts himself between us, his own body, the emperor's spymaster who has wanted me caught and gutted since the day I arrived, planting himself in the path of a god to keep me safe.

“I knew you were meeting someone,” he grinds out, giving ground as the old one gathers itself, and lowers to the ground on all four limbs. “I followed you to catch a spy. What the hell even is this?”

“I don’t know how to explain it,” I say, which is the truest thing I have ever said to him.

“So not a friend then?” He flings his hand skyward and a single spear of shadow leaps up out of the melee and bursts, not into nothing, but into a streak of black that arrows away over the trees toward the fortress, fast as a loose hawk.

“Definitely not.” I respond.

This old god snarls and the trees begin to move, trying to attack us with it’s branches. Cassius summons more spears, striking and breaking the black branches in a fury of blows.

“Stay behind me and stay alive, Empress, because if you die out here I will never hear the end of it.”

I pull out the dagger Mikli gave me. It is all I have on me as I try to swipe at any branches that get past Cassius barrage of shadow like spears. I was never trained in combat. I'm clumsy and mostly try to stay behind Cassius, but when branches get past his marriage of spears I strike when I can.

The old one straightens, and regards Cassius the way one regards an insect. “The little male bares his teeth,” it murmurs. “I am beyond strength. I am beyond the might of your people. And I have come for the girl. Do not test me, boy.” It raises its hand again, and this time the dark around us thickens, curdles, and I feel the whole wood surrounding us, hungry, and Cassius's spears begin to fray at the edges as though the night itself is eating them, and I understand we are going to lose.

The temperature drops, and the shadows in the clearing are no longer only Cassius's.

Suddenly I see a slither of something slice through the trees like a whip.

Theron cuts through the black trees and light casts more shadows into the clearing, which he summons into his hand. The creature roars as shadows answer Theron's call and form into a fury of blades and whips that cut down the contaminated bark.

The old one recoils and shimmers against Theron's shadows. With another twist, Theron moves and the light in the clearing grants more shadows which he uses to his advantage. The curl and snap at the horned figure in a fist of absolute black, and for the first time the old one goes still.

“I know you,” Theron says.

His voice is very quiet, and there is something under the cold in it that I have never heard before, a recognition, a dread that runs deeper than the moment, as though some memory older than his own life has woken in his blood. “So my mother was right. After all this time.” The shadows tighten, and the old one strains against them, and cannot break them, not yet, not here. “I will not allow you to take form in the waking world. Not while I still stand.”

The horned thing turns its dark eyes on Theron, and looks almost pleased.

“The keeper's blood,” it breathes. “After so long?” Its gaze slides to me, and its deep voice softens into something that will live behind my eyes for the rest of my life. “We will speak again, little flame. When there is no keeper between us. When the last watch fails. I have waited an age to be free. I can wait for you.”

And then it folds. That is the only word for it, it folds, inward, sideways, into a seam in the air that should not exist, a thin wrong place where the light bends the wrong way, and the seam closes behind it. The rest of the branches are cut down by Cassius and the wood has returned to its browns and greens. It is no longer dark, but ordinary and full of the small sounds of living things, and the song, for the first time in days, goes utterly silent.

The quiet it leaves is enormous.

My legs give out. I sit down hard in the dead needles, shaking, and Theron is there before I have finished falling, his hands running over me, my face, my arms, my throat, checking.

“Are you hurt?”

“No.” I manage to whisper.

“After she gave me the slip I followed her here.” Cassius chides in.

“You were in the woods,” he says, and it is not an accusation, it is barely even a question, it is a man trying to hold a thing too large to hold. “Again. Alone. That could have. Bree. That thing could have—”

“I heard weeping,” I choke out. “It sounded so sad. It promised it would make everything quiet and better.”

Something breaks in his face, and he pulls me against his chest, hard, and holds me there as the sun once high in the sky begins to set. I have no idea how long we were in those woods. How much time may have passed.

But as he hugs me, I hug him back. That's when I realize he is shaking too.

"I'm sorry," I whisper. "For running. For going into the trees—"

"Do not apologize." Theron's hand comes up to my face, and his thumb brushes beneath my eye, and comes away wet, and I realize only then that I am crying. "I will always come after you, Bree. Always. However far you run. Whatever I have to go through to reach you." He tips my forehead to his. "Do you understand me? There is no place you can go and I will not come."

I hug Theron tighter then. Unable to find the words.

“It’s okay, Bree. Let’s get out of here.”

I nod and am not sure when he left, but I see Cassius return with the horses.

“Captain,” I manage.

He does not answer for a long moment. He just hands me the reigns to my horse.

“Are you able to ride on your own?” Theron asks.

“Yeah. I’ll be okay.” I say before turning back to Cassius. “Thank you, for helping to save me.”

When Cassius speaks, his voice is very rough.

“Do not thank me, my lady,” Cassius says slowly, “it doesn’t matter what I thought you were. At the end of the day it is my duty to obey orders.”

Theron nods to Cassius at this as he gets on his horse, followed by Cassius. He then looks back at the woods, then back at me, “perhaps, I have been watching the wrong enemy.”