Cold-Forged Flame Read online

  “There’s a mountain near the center of the island,” Therdiad says, “and a cave somewhere in it. That’s where you’ll find the cauldron.”

  So she isn’t traveling entirely blind. Just mostly. She studies the island as they approach, but can’t see much through the mist. Should the sun have risen yet? She has no sense of the time. It seems brighter than it should be, but not like dawn. There’s no glow on the horizon, either.

  Therdiad stops rowing a little way out from shore. She eyes the gap between. “You can’t take me the rest of the way?” The water here is preternaturally calm, waves no more than ripples a few inches high. There’s no risk of damage to the boat, unless there are sharp rocks she can’t see below the surface.

  “Sorry,” Therdiad says. “It isn’t safe for me.”

  But it’s safe for me? Of course not. She’s just the one they decided to send into danger. The hook tugs and she sighs, swinging one leg over the edge of the boat.

  Therdiad’s voice stops her. “What you said. Calling the Cruais a coward.”

  When she looks back, he’s biting his lip. “Others did try,” he says. “Not the Cruais, it’s true. But that’s because others volunteered. Men and women who were eager to help.”

  If any of them had succeeded, she wouldn’t be here. “How many of them lived to come home?”

  He’s clearly regretting having said anything. Therdiad picks at a rough spot on his palm and says, “One.”

  She could ask how many tried . . . but what would be the point? “That’s the most inspiring farewell speech I can remember,” she says, and drops into the cold water.

  By the time she makes it to shore, Therdiad is already a vague shadow in the distance, the sound of his oars muffled by the fog. It occurs to her, far too late, to wonder how she’s supposed to get off the island once she obtains this blood they’ve sent her for.

  That unanswered question doesn’t bother her as much as it should. Even though she knows she’s been forced into this—even though she figures she’s going to die—she’s in a better mood than she was at first. It’s obscurely satisfying, knowing there’s a mountain somewhere with a cave, a cauldron in that cave, blood in that cauldron, and she will find them. Her feet are itching to get started.

  And itching in a literal sense, from the salt water and grit. She finds a stone big enough to sit on and pulls off her boots, letting her feet dry while she takes a look around.

  There isn’t much to see yet, not with the light still so dim. On one side, water and mist; on the other, cliffs; in between lies this rocky beach. Rivulets of water trail off the cliffs in various spots, which prove to be fresh when she tastes them. She uses them to rinse the salt from her skin, washing out the inside of her boots. The leather will be wet for a long time, but there’s no helping that.

  She hasn’t paid much attention to her own clothing before now. It’s simple stuff: black boots, black breeches made of sturdy canvas, and a black shirt without sleeves or collar. Nothing like what the Cruais’s people wore, with their tunics and drapes of brightly patterned wool. She doesn’t think they put these clothes on her; the fabric feels well-worn and comfortable, the boots already shaped to her feet. Which means . . . what? That she had them before? Whenever “before” was.

  The stones of the beach are sharp enough under her feet that she puts the boots back on, even though they’re still damp, and begins her search. The cliffs, she thinks, can be climbed—but it won’t be easy, and she doesn’t much relish the thought of shredding her hands on them. She heads off in a clockwise direction, looking for a gully or the end of the cliffs, some place where they give way to easier terrain.

  She walks for long enough to draw two conclusions. First, while the sun may be rising somewhere, it isn’t here—and may never be. And second, there is no end to the cliffs.

  “You knew it wouldn’t be easy,” she mutters to herself, giving the cliffs a baleful look. She isn’t positive she’s made a full circuit of the island yet, because she didn’t think to mark her starting point. Assuming that would have done any good. But she’s seen enough to be pretty sure there’s no point in continuing to search. It’s the cliffs, or nothing.

  They’re going to tear her hands bloody if she doesn’t find some way to protect herself. She contemplates her shirt, then shakes her head. Wrapping her hands in that would require her to find or break a rock to cut with, and enough fabric to really protect her hands would leave her without much of a shirt to wear.

  The only other thing out here is seaweed. Fortunately, there’s plenty of that, and it comes in convenient strips. She finds some above the current waterline, still wet enough to be supple—nothing here is dry, really—but not too slick. It tastes of brine when she uses her teeth to pull the knots closed. She eyes the wrappings dubiously, curling her hands into experimental fists. The seaweed will play merry hell with her grip.

  But she doesn’t have anything better, and so she approaches the cliff and looks for her first handhold.

  She’s barely off the ground when she decides the wrappings were a terrible idea. She couldn’t pull the strips tight enough to keep them from sliding, and now they shift every time her weight moves. When she grips harder to compensate, the stone cuts into the soft mass, and pretty soon she’s got bits of seaweed dangling from her palms like thick, salty hair. She tries to sweep them under her hand the next time she reaches for a hold, just to get as much use out of the padding as she can before it’s reduced to mere decoration: that turns out to be a mistake. Her grip fails, and she falls.

  The good news is that she hasn’t gotten very high. The bad news is that she’s high enough for landing to hurt.

  The stones of the beach roll out from under her feet as she hits, dumping her onto her ass. She bites her tongue when her head snaps back, and tastes a hint of blood. Once she’s got her breath back, she spits to one side and tears what remains of the seaweed off her hands. Fuck. That went even worse than you expected.

  Her fall teaches her one thing, at least. The Cruais’s command may drive her onward . . . but it doesn’t protect her from failure. If she makes a bad decision, gets herself killed, that binding will not save her.

  It’s anger as much as the compulsion that sends her back to her feet. Wiping her hands on her shirt, she glares at the cliff. “Let’s try this again.”

  This time the going isn’t that bad—at first. The mist and rivulets of water render the stone slippery, but without the seaweed making things worse, she can cope. The cliff face is broken enough to provide her with a variety of handholds. She moves crabwise up a diagonal, following a striation in the rock. But the jagged stones that provide her with edges to grip also tear at her skin just like she imagined, no matter how carefully she settles her fingers. Her feet can’t take as much of her weight as she’d like; the boots are clumsy, and if she descends and takes them off, she’ll be walking on bleeding feet the rest of the way. She’d rather sacrifice her hands.

  The last few lengths are the worst, because by then her grip is slick with blood. One failure and she’ll fall again, this time from a much higher point. She laughs bitterly at a tiny fern growing in front of her eyes. “If I’m going to fall, then I damn well hope I’m high enough to die when I hit the ground. None of this bullshit about lying there with broken legs until I die of exposure.”

  The fern doesn’t respond. She clenches her teeth and climbs on, until she reaches the top.

  Up there, the ground is smooth and padded with moss. She rolls onto her back, breathing hard, every muscle in her body going limp. Her hands ache steadily, pain radiating up her arms. The moss might work as a bandage, if she tears thin strips off her shirt to bind the pads in place. She didn’t think to bring a rock to cut the fabric, though.

  When her breath has steadied, she sits up and finds that where her hands had been, the moss is now red with blood. Genuinely red: the sky above her is clear, the moon’s crescent sliver near the horizon—the wrong horizon, she thinks—but even in that
monochrome light, the stain is vivid with color. And when she touches it, that color comes up in her fingers: a long strip of red cloth.

  She stares at it, unblinking. The fabric is long and thin, and not raw; someone has stitched it into a sash. It wasn’t there when she collapsed.

  A swift glance around reveals no one. Not that anybody could have put that under her hands without her noticing—but she has to look anyway.

  The sensible thing to do would be to take a stone from top of the cliffs and use it to cut the sash up for bandages. There are two problems with that, though. The first is that the cliffs are gone: to her left, the ground now descends in an easy series of moss-covered boulders to the shore not far below.

  The second is that she doesn’t want to destroy her sash. She catches herself thinking of it that way: not the sash, but her sash. Which, she supposes, is only fair. If this is what her blood turned into, then it belongs to her.

  She rises to her feet, still holding the fabric in her bloody hands. The feeling of lightning is back, dancing along her veins. Without ever making a conscious decision, she finds herself tying the sash around her waist, leaving the ends to hang free. Her hands form the knot as if they’ve done this before, countless times, and for a moment there’s a flicker: an ephemeral breath of memory, a sense that this is how she always dresses, except it’s incomplete. She feels the absence of long sleeves, leather cuffs around her wrists, a weight at her hip.

  Her breath comes faster. It’s safer if you don’t remember.

  So Therdiad claims, and the Cruais. But can she believe them?

  It’s too late now, regardless; the flicker is gone. All she knows is that the sash feels right—as much as anything can feel right on this island, where cliffs vanish while her back is turned and the moon will never set.

  She’s beginning to understand why only one of the Cruais’s people survived.

  From here she can see the mountain. It’s hard to judge distance—and if the cliffs are anything to go by, she can’t assume the mountain will stay put. There’s a forest in the way, too, and she knows that once she gets under its branches, keeping oriented won’t be easy. No point looking for a path, though. The forest isn’t likely to be any more helpful than the cliffs were.

  She sets off across the soft, spongy ground, with an easy, regular stride that feels like she’s used to walking long distances. At least the forest doesn’t run away: soon enough she passes underneath the first branches, ducking when they’re low enough to clip her in the head.

  Even in their shadow, there’s more light than there should be, and before long she has the creeping feeling that the forest is watching her. Now that she knows the land can change, she can’t take anything for granted. This is more than just a landscape; it’s a test, one that’s either self-aware or controlled by someone else. Presumably the Lhian—unless the island itself is the Lhian. But no amount of guessing will tell her what the Lhian wants. Apart from making life difficult for visitors.

  It’s hard going, though at least the forest doesn’t make her bleed. The ground here is uneven, and choked with underbrush, growing more thickly than she thinks it should when the tree canopy is so dense. Low vines tangle her feet; fallen, half-rotted branches crack under her weight and throw her off balance. Without anything better to guide her, she seeks out the slopes, on the principle that she’ll have to go uphill eventually if she wants to climb the mountain, and she might as well start now. Her feet chafe inside her damp boots, but she doesn’t bother looking to see if she has blisters. Whether she does or not, she has to keep walking.

  She doesn’t tire.

  Her pulse beats strongly and her breath comes fast, but her energy doesn’t flag. It’s as if time doesn’t exist here. There’s no real way to tell if she’s making progress; she’s definitely gone a long distance, but may or may not be any closer to her goal. After a while it becomes strange, dreamlike: she might be going in circles, for all she can tell, caught in an endless loop, passing the same trees and stones over and over and over again.

  No. The Lhian can put obstacles in her path—cliffs, trackless forests—and they might mislead or even kill her, but they can’t stop her from moving forward. The certainty of that is so disorienting that she halts, putting one raw hand on the trunk of a tree, holding on to it as if it’s the only thing keeping her from floating away.

  How do I know these things?

  She isn’t sure she wants the answer to that question.

  Part of her does. That part wants to spit in the face of Therdiad and the Cruais, tell them where they can shove their insistence that she’s better off ignorant. So what if knowing will make things worse? It isn’t like her current state is anything to treasure. And at least knowing would fill this void inside her, the feeling that she has somehow lost the core of her soul. Even if it turns out that what she’s lost isn’t anything she wants back.

  The other part of her is getting all too creative, imagining what might happen if she remembers. At least this, right now, is something she can endure. What if the alternative turns out to be too much?

  “Fuck that,” she mutters, digging her bloody fingers into the rough bark of the tree. Then she lifts her head and addresses the forest. “And fuck you, too, Lhian. Whoever you are. Whatever you are. For all I know, you’re messing with my head right now.”

  Nothing answers. She snarls and walks on.

  Until the ground gives way without warning, and she goes ass over shoulders down a slope she never saw coming. Even as she’s slamming into one stone after another, she thinks, Of course you won’t play fair. Then she comes to a sprawling halt, limbs flung out in all directions across the ground.

  The air is cold enough now for her breath to fog it, and she feels hoarfrost on the grass beneath her fingers. No branches block the sky above; it’s patchy with clouds, and a full moon shines ice-white through the gaps, its beams slicing down like blades.

  She stares up at the moon and considers laughing. The entire thing is a game, and it’s rigged from the start. Why even bother playing?

  Because she’s bound to, with a chain she can’t break.

  And because the only way out is through.

  When she rolls over and rises to her knees, she finds she’s in a small valley. A stream trickles along its length, fringed with ice. There’s no sign of the bay, but she’s made a little progress toward the mountain’s peak. At this rate, it should only take me another six or seven eternities to get there.

  The thought is barely complete when she sees movement out of the corner of her eye.

  What happens then is instinct. She spins to face whatever is approaching, feet braced to meet the oncoming target, and her hand coming down as if to slash. It doesn’t matter that she has no weapon: this isn’t a conscious action, a rational answer to the fact that something is coming toward her at speed. It’s habit, soul-deep, an awareness that this is what she should do, what she always does, what it is in her nature to do.

  And when her hand does comes down, a blade follows the arc.

  It cuts through the thing rushing at her. She doesn’t have any name for what she faces: she doesn’t even have time to think about what it is. The creature is terror and threat, and it is not alone. They’re all around her, coming out of nowhere, because the Lhian does not play by any decent rules. And she discovers that this is something she knows, whirling in their midst with a sabre in her hand, not sure if she’ll survive but damned if she’ll go down without a fight. She’s done this before, other creatures, other battles, and in the distant, empty reaches of her memory she knows what it feels like to die. The thought of it doesn’t particularly frighten her. If anything, death seems familiar.

  But she doesn’t die. The things she’s fighting have the shape of people, but they’re something else—dreams gone wrong, maybe. One of them rushes at her, and she feels a faint, distant echo of shattering pain, the agony of love betrayed. When she cuts it down, another one replaces it: great works forgotten and fa
llen into dust. But if she ever achieved some great work, if she was ever in love, she doesn’t remember it. Is this what the Cruais meant, and Therdiad? The snarling creatures can’t get their claws into her because there’s nothing to grab, no memory of either the good or its inevitable end. She laughs as they fall to her blade. The only ones hurt by hope are those who believe in it.

  She almost cuts the stranger in half, too. Caught up in the battle, she doesn’t know when he first appeared; she just knows that one of the things moving in the shifting moonlight is different, a real person among all the broken dreams. He’s got a pair of knives, and sinks them into the back of something that used to be the steadfast loyalty of a friend, before that warmth turned cold.

  The help is useful, and so she leaves him for last.

  When every one of the twisted things has fallen, she turns on him. But maybe he expected that, because he drops to his knees, releasing the knives and raising his empty hands in a gesture reminiscent of the Cruais’s. Her cut parts the air above his head. “Peace! I’m not one of them.”

  “I can see that,” she snaps, blade held ready. “What are you?”

  He risks a glance upward, trying to catch her gaze. “Just a man. Someone else trying to reach the cave of the Lhian.”

  It gives her pause. When she looks at him—sees him as a person, rather than a threat—he seems ordinary enough. Different from the Cruais’s people: his skin is a shade darker than her own, his hair equally black, but loosely curled. He’s wearing a leather vest instead of a tunic and draped wrap, and the prickling of his skin says he feels the cold more than she does. He speaks with an accent, too, and it makes her suddenly aware of the language she’s speaking as a language. One of many in the world—because there is a world beyond this island, and the ring of stones where her memories begin.