THE NIGHT WAS eerily quiet.
After enduring the wrath of the wind for so many days, it was liberating to be free of it, at least temporarily—though the still air was heavy with foreboding. It was as if the great mountain had drawn a deep breath, and this was the moment before the exhalation. The sound of my feet crunching through the dry snow was all there was.
Ragtooth, ahead of me, was silent as a ghost. He did not slow or pause, but led me along the ridge Lusha, River, and I had traversed the previous day. I felt a shiver of fear as I spied the disturbed ground. With all the snow that had fallen since, it was difficult to make out the exact path of the avalanche that had trapped Tem and Mara.
“Are you sure this is right?” I said. Ragtooth, of course, made no reply, nor did he pause even to glance back at me. Gritting my teeth, I followed him. I was limping now; the pain radiating up my legs intensified with each step. The simple act of breaking a path through the loose snow seemed to demand more energy than I had left. In spite of everything, I couldn’t help fantasizing about the warm cave I had left behind, the feel of blankets piled around me. There was a small noise behind me, and I jumped, my thoughts immediately leaping to Mingma and the other ghosts. But it was only the snow settling. We were moving up the mountain now, away from their tunnels. That, at least, was some small comfort.
Past the ridge was a rocky outcropping that melted into the upper spine of the mountain. Ragtooth led me alongside it for a while, beside a ledge that narrowed and narrowed until I was hugging the rock, and then he stopped.
“What?” I stared. “He went this way?”
The fox lifted his leg and begin licking his foot.
The rock face staring back at me was pale, brittle limestone, perhaps two hundred feet high. Past the halfway point, it seemed oddly free of snow and ice. It was not the snow or ice, however, that concerned me—it was the gradual backward arch of the rock, which continued toward a bulge where the snow disappeared altogether. From this bulge I would be suspended, nearly horizontal to the ground thousands of feet below, and travel perhaps fifteen feet in that position until the rock bent back again, after which it seemed to be a reasonable climb to the top of the face.
I sat down, hard.
Ragtooth placed his front paws on my knee, nosing my chuba. I barely noticed. I stared at the rock—ordinary rock, grainy and fragmented. I removed my glove and ran my hand over it to feel its texture. I tilted my head back, back, gazing up at the mountainside.
“This is ridiculous,” I finally muttered. Sitting there wasn’t going to solve anything. I stood up, ready to launch my attempt—
Then promptly fell to my knees and threw up.
This pattern repeated itself over the course of an hour, until I had nothing left in my stomach. I leaned against the rock, gazing at the clouds sweeping over the landscape below, while I swished a lump of snow around in my mouth. Ragtooth had barely moved throughout my convulsions—he merely crouched on a ledge, his tail folded under his chin. Waiting.
I had two options—continue or turn back. The thought of continuing made my stomach churn again. But turning back?
Everything in me recoiled as I imagined walking back down the slope, back to camp, and telling Lusha and Tem that all was lost. Returning to Azmiri with the shapeless, inevitable threat of the witches and their dark powers hanging over the fate of the village. No matter what Lusha said, what had happened with River, and what he would do when he achieved his goal, was my fault. I had led him to Raksha, I had risked my life time and time again to help him. And for what?
Guilt, heavy and cloying, overwhelmed me as I looked back on the days since I had left Azmiri. I had been so consumed with my own success, with impressing River and the emperor, making a name for myself as a great explorer.
How meaningless that seemed now. People had already died because of my choices—how many more lives would be lost?
My mother, I remembered, had once compared guilt to a dagger. You can let it defeat you, she had said, cut you, strike you down. Or you can take it and use it as a weapon against the world.
I drew myself to my feet. Nausea rose again, but I forced it down.
“All right, River,” I said to the wind, “if you made it to the top, I can too.”
Not that this statement made sense. River, for all I knew, had turned himself into a cloud shaped like a mountain goat and floated up the rock. I chewed my lip, tilting my head back. Which route should I take? There were several possibilities. If I chose wrong—
I glanced down at the earth, as distant as a star. Well. I would have a long time to regret it.
As I paced, I tripped over a lump in the snow. I kicked at it, expecting to dislodge a rock. Instead, the lump snapped back, dislodging the snow that covered it. I blinked, my mind failing, for a moment, to understand what my eyes were telling it.
It was a boot.
I stumbled back, tripping over Ragtooth in the process. The scream in my throat died as the fall knocked the wind out of me.
Breathe, I told myself. Breathe. It’s just a body. It can’t hurt you.
My mind worked frantically. The boot was old-fashioned, the leather stitched together in a crosshatch pattern that was rarely used anymore. It was weathered, some of the stitches broken by years of exposure to sun and ice. It was another member of Mingma’s expedition, still here after fifty years on this lonely slope. I was astonished—I hadn’t known that any of those long-ago explorers had made it this far.
The wind rustled over the broken snow, revealing the hem of a familiar, gold-stitched tahrskin chuba.
Mingma’s.
A tear spilled down my cheek. The explorer’s face rose before me—not consumed with bitterness, but the way he had looked when he spoke of his village, lost in a sadness so old it had etched itself across his face like a tracery of scars. He had been young, and brave, and he hadn’t deserved what had happened to him.
I wiped my eyes. I had little time for this—I had to catch up to River. But as I turned from Mingma’s body, I remembered something.
Did you look through it? I ran out of ink, near the end.
I started. The memory was so vivid it was as if the ghost had spoken in my ear. I wrenched open my pack and pulled out Mingma’s maps. With shaking fingers I found the panel that showed the slope I was standing on, then held the thin paper up to the sky. The starlight shone through it.
There. Etched into the malleable parchment, as if with the edge of a fingernail, was a thin, looping scratch. A line—a route, up the side of the mountain.
My vision blurred again. Mingma, like a true explorer, had recorded even his last moments. A character indicating a waypoint was etched onto a ledge above the rock face—he had made it to the top. And then, judging by the position of his body, he had fallen.
Had he been alone? One of his companions had found the body, that was certain—one of the only two survivors, who had retrieved the map and a few of his belongings and fled. But had he been alone when he died?
My hands shaking slightly, I unwrapped Lusha’s scarf from my neck. I placed it over the explorer’s face, which was only faintly visible through the snow, weighted it with rocks and then covered it with more snow. I felt as if I should say something, but I couldn’t find any words. I turned back to the mountain.
I stuffed Ragtooth into my pack and set about arranging my harness. I considered climbing without it, which would have been faster and less fiddly, but Lusha’s cautions still rang in my ears, and with Biter circling above, it felt as if my sister were still watching me. I attached two loops of rope to the harness, wrapping them over my shoulders to keep them out of the way. Then I started to climb.
Almost immediately, my mind cleared. My worries about what was ahead quieted to background noise—all I could see was the mountain. Following Mingma’s route as closely as I could, I reached the overhang. There I hammered an anchor into a crevice in the rock, and attached one of the rope loops to it with a spring hook. I attached the other loop to a second piton a few feet higher, unclipped from the first, and then repeated the process, moving slowly but surely. Now I was surrounded by stars; I could almost feel the night sky pressing into my back. I did not look down. I tried not to think. One wrong move, just one—
I shoved the terror back, over and over, as I moved through the thin, hungry air.
Ten minutes later, my nails cracked and bleeding from gripping the rock, I had cleared the overhang. Biter squawked at me, his wings beating frantically. He settled into nooks and crannies in the rock above, croaking encouragement. Once I reached him, he would take flight again before positioning himself upon an even higher ledge.
An inhuman moan cut through the regular sound of my footfalls. I pressed my body against the rock as a blast of icy wind engulfed me, nearly knocking me off the mountain. It subsided, but I could hear another howl picking up, speeding in my direction. My chest clenched as I realized why this part of the mountain was free of snow—it was battered daily by vicious winds that beat against this side of Raksha like a turbulent river against a stone.
I had to get off this rock face, fast. I was too exhausted to withstand prolonged attacks by the wind. Another gust struck me, swinging my body sideways like a door. The impact knocked the breath out of me, but I held on. Somehow, I forced myself to pick up the pace. Each time the wind struck, I braced myself until it passed, then climbed another few feet. It was exhausting. I barely noticed the passage of time, or the ache in my arms. All I knew was the feeling of the rock against my hands and the sound of my breathing. I was almost startled when I looked up and found that I had almost reached the crest of the rock face. A few moments later, I was hoisting myself onto flat ground, and crawling to the shelter provided by a small boulder.
I sat there for a moment, breathing heavily, my legs dangling over the side of the cliff I had just scaled. The sun would rise within the hour; the horizon was lightening and the stars were beginning to fade. The view was immense, too much for my exhausted brain to take in. I took a drink from my canteen and ate a few bites of dried yak meat. Ragtooth hopped onto my lap and accepted a small piece of cheese. Biter settled next to me, his feathers puffed out against the wind. He turned up his beak at my breakfast, but accepted a drink from the water I poured into the palm of my hand.
Once we had finished our meager meal, I tucked myself against the boulder on that barren ledge, drew my hood over my face, and was instantly asleep.
I woke to sunlight spilling over the horizon. For one disoriented moment, I was convinced I had sleepwalked out of my bed and up to the snowy heights above Azmiri village. Then I blinked, remembered, and started upright so quickly I hit my head.
It was several minutes before I was able to force down my involuntary panic and think clearly. How long had it been since I had left Azmiri? I thought about three weeks, but my muddled brain couldn’t be more specific. The days blended together like farmers’ fields under a carpet of snow.
Rubbing my temple, I took stock. My hands, which I had stupidly failed to tuck inside my chuba before I fell asleep, were cramped with cold, the blood from my cracked nails frozen and crusted. My arms were so tired I could barely feel them, and there was an ache in my side—the side that had slammed into the mountain—that was worryingly sharp, and could mean a broken rib. My throat ached from the cold and the ice crystals I couldn’t help inhaling; every breath felt like swallowing sandpaper. I had no food left, and very little water, and I was no less exhausted for having slept for an hour—it was too cold, the air too thin, for rest to properly revive me. I had slept not because I had wanted to, but because I had been incapable of maintaining consciousness.
All things considered, my chances of making it to the summit of Raksha were not good. The chances of me making it down the mountain again, however, were almost nonexistent. Descending a mountain was always more dangerous than climbing it, and this had never been more true than it was for me now. I couldn’t even imagine tackling the punishing rock face and its violent weather in my current state.
A wave of sadness welled up in me. It wasn’t sadness for myself. It was sadness for Tem and Lusha, who would have to accept, as the hours passed and I didn’t return to camp, that I was never going to return.
Ragtooth nudged my knee, letting out a squeak.
“You’re right,” I said, wiping my eyes. “Let’s not think about it.”
The fox shook himself, stretching. He was shivering with cold, and moved more slowly than usual, but he trotted ahead before I could put him in my pack, thereby lightening my load.
I followed the ledge cautiously, the path underfoot uneven with ice and pebbles. Looming ahead of me was a long, snowy slope, treacherously steep but still walkable. I readied my ax just in case.
Once I had reached the brow of the slope, however, I froze. The ax slipped from my hand, impaling itself in the snow.
“What is that?” I murmured.
Before me lay a long, jagged ridge of spiny rock that punched up through the snow, which misted off the mountainside in the fierce gale. The entire ridge was barely wide enough for a single person to walk along, and in places, it did not even appear wide enough for that. The ground fell away in a miles-long, snowy arc toward the valley on one side, and the lower slopes of Raksha, pierced with boulders that could have been grains of sand, on the other.
I sank to my knees. I could not stop staring at the ridge; I felt as if I could blink and it would be gone, merely a figment of my imagination. After what I had just endured, I had come to this? The mountain was no less than a series of nightmares, each darker than the last.
I looked at Ragtooth. The fox looked back at me. I groaned, my head sinking into my hands.
“How is it possible?” But even as I said it, I began to notice the telltale signs of another person’s presence. The snow along the ridge was rippled in places, as if by footsteps that had not yet been worn by the wind. Close to where I sat, a few threads of rope fiber were caught on the sharp edge of a rock. Someone had traversed the ridge, perhaps only a few hours ago.
“Thanks a lot,” I muttered, following this with a string of curses that I wished with all my heart River could hear.
Gritting my teeth, I lowered myself onto the ridge. Ragtooth was already creeping along ahead of me, his back hunched, his bushy tail flicking back and forth. The wind was even stronger here than on the rock face, pummeling my body as if its sole desire was to push me to my death. My chuba flapped madly, and my hair loosened from its knot and floated around my face, making my vision flicker.
The first few steps were more terrifying than anything I had experienced. I had no fear of heights, but this was not simply a matter of heights. The terrain was treacherous; mounds of snow concealed slippery, uneven rock, or sometimes nothing but crevices and empty air. Each step required calculation and testing—not an easy thing, in my exhausted state. Biter flew ahead, or rather, tried to—the wind buffeted so fiercely that he was often forced to fly far to the side of the ridge.
As furious as I was with River, I couldn’t help marveling at his gumption in even attempting a route like this. River had Azar-at, though. I had nothing but a fox and a raven.
The sun rose higher, and the shadows shrank. As I walked, I didn’t look ahead. I didn’t want to be discouraged by how far I had to go. In some places, the ridge was so thin that it was like walking along a branch. I had to wait for a break between gusts before even attempting these sections, and then dash across them as quickly as I could. This took time—not because of the wind, but because I kept losing my nerve at the last moment, and having to spend several minutes sitting in the snow with my head between my knees.
I had just crossed one of these rock branches, and stood breathing heavily on the other side, when the snow gave way beneath me.
I fell with it—over the side of the ridge.
I swung my ice ax desperately and somehow, somehow, managed to wedge it into a crevice. I hung there, my feet scrabbling uselessly at the snow-blanketed wall of the ridge, as far below me clouds drifted over the landscape.
I found my voice and screamed. I gripped the ax with both hands, my entire body shaking. I dared not look down again. I could not breathe or think. I could feel the distance below me, the skeletal nature of the air at this height.
The wind whistled past my ears. In my delirium, it sounded like Lusha’s voice, low and disapproving. There will be no one around to fix your mistakes, she had said. You’ll have to stop making them.
Somehow, the memory brought me back to my senses. Ragtooth poked his head over the side of the ridge, staring down at me. He was close, so close. I unhooked the smaller ax from my pack, and swung it up over the edge of the ridge. It caught, and I hauled myself up a foot. Enough to dig my hand into the rock, and hook my leg up over the side. I pulled myself back onto the ridge and lay there, facedown, my feet dangling off either side. Ragtooth licked the top of my head, but I did not move. My breath hissed against the snow, and my forehead began to numb. I stayed there for perhaps a quarter hour before I trusted myself to sit up. Biter settled on my shoulder, croaking softly in my ear.
As much as I wanted to remain there, to simply sit reveling in the sound of my heartbeat pounding in my ears, I knew I could not. After a few deep breaths and a sip from my lightening flask of water, I set off again.
The sun was sinking below the horizon by the time I finally reached the end of the ridge and set foot on solid ground again. I squinted at the darkening sky, dazed. I hadn’t even noticed the hours passing, so focused had I been on each step I took.
I thought about continuing, but the terrain was treacherous here—steep and still uncomfortably narrow in places. I didn’t trust myself in the darkness, given the state I was in. As I carried no shelter with me, I had only one option: to make a snow cave.
I chose a spot behind a low ridge of rock and began to pile the snow up against it. Once the pile was large enough, I hollowed it out and clambered inside with my blanket. I didn’t have the energy to build a proper cave, and this one was big enough to accommodate me only if I curled my legs up. I didn’t mind this, however. It was a relief to be sheltered from the vengeful wind and the great and terrible distances, and I was asleep as soon as my eyes closed.
Ragtooth woke me at moonrise. I gazed up at the low roof of my shelter, icy from the melting caused by my breath. I didn’t want to move. My head throbbed. Every inch of my body hurt.
I forced myself to leave the cave. I was so tired that the thought of donning my pack made me want to cry. I placed the kinnika around my neck and tucked them into my chuba. I didn’t know why I bothered. I just knew I couldn’t leave them behind.
Though sunrise was a long way off, the moon was near half-full, and provided enough light for me to see my way. Even the darkest stars shone here, so far from the earth, and their brighter cousins gleamed like tiny suns. I did not hurry. I was too weary for that, so weary that I no longer felt the pain in my feet or the chill in the wind. Biter, balanced on my shoulder now, nipped at my ear whenever I took a careless step or let my focus drift. Finally, I reached the edge of the ridge, with its jagged projections and pitted mounds, and I could see the summit before me. The slope that led to it was gentle, broad, and snowy. Compared to what had preceded it, it was almost a joke. I stepped forward warily, half expecting a chasm to open beneath my feet.
Where was the witch city?
I wondered if it would simply appear in my midst, the world parting like a sheet of fog. I forced my feet to keep moving. I felt half in a dream.
It was a strange feeling, setting off on the last leg of my journey. I had doubted I could come this far under any circumstances, let alone the strange ones I found myself entangled in. I walked on, my boots slicing easily through the dry snow, as the horizon turned from black to indigo to gray. And then I came to a place where the mountain stopped. Where there was nowhere else to go.
I had reached the summit of Raksha.