DREAMS
The same dream came to me, except this time, Hilga was there too. “Find us! Please, Ryber, before it is too late!”`
Two Sisters trapped behind a wall of water.
Two Sisters I could not save.
MEMORIES
I don’t know where to start. The day feels so long and disjointed. So much has happened since I wrote my dreams.
So much has changed.
But “there is no such thing as coincidence” and “there is no changing what is meant to be.” So I must accept this.
“The beginning,” Tanzi would say if she were here. “Start your tale at the beginning.”
Morning prayers it is, then.
I recited them as I always do, and no spirit swifts came for me. As soon as I’d uttered the final word, I scurried up to the telescope.
The Nubrevnans have made such progress, and their wooden scaffolding looks more and more like a proper tower.
They scuttled about even more industriously today, though their pale-haired captain was nowhere in sight. I couldn’t help but wonder where he’d gone.
The storm clouds gathering above the mountains must have spurred the workers on. Black thunderheads were not unusual for this time of year, except that these rolled in from the Northwest.
I’ve never seen a storm come from Arithuania before.
Eventually my eyes burned from the all the squinting, and lightning had begun to flicker. I needed to check on the sheep, not to mention cover the weaker vegetables and fruits.
Ever the dutiful Serving Sister.
That was when it happened. As I turned away from the telescope and toward the stairs, movement caught my eye.
Movement in the scrying pool.
Nothing unusual. I see flickers atop the water all the time. Ripples of sunlight or the Rook’s reflection as he coasts past. I’d already dismissed this particular distraction before my gaze had even locked upon it.
I was wrong, though. For once, it was not sunlight, it was not a reflection.
Shapes were forming on the water. One after the other, elongated figures that grew clearer and larger with each passing boom of my heart. It was as if they walked toward me, people trapped in a rainstorm and reaching for my help.
Before the image had crystallized, I found myself stumbling down the stairs, grasping, clawing for them as desperately as they clawed for me.
Then I was at the pool’s rim and falling to my knees as every single Sightwitch Sister stared at me. There was Trina, there was Birgit, there were Gaellan and Ute and Lachmi.
There was Hilga.
There was Tanzi.
Their mouths worked in unison, saying the same phrase again and again. I couldn’t hear them, but I didn’t need to. I’d heard the words often enough in my dreams.
“Find us,” they said. “Please, Ryber, before it is too late!”
“Where?” I cried. My fingers ached to grab at the water; my legs itched to jump in. “Where are you? How do I find you? How, how, how? Please, Tanz,” I begged, staring at her. Then at Hilga. “Please, tell me how to find you!”
But the Sisters gave me no answers, and in moments, the entire vision had melted away.
I stared, too scared to exhale. Too scared to do anything that might break this moment and keep a second vision from coming.
Surely another vision would come.
Minutes slid past; no second vision showed.
I touched the water then. I punched my fist into the pool and screamed at the stained-glass ceiling overhead. I screamed at Sirmaya, I screamed at the Sisters, and I screamed at myself.
For never had I felt this truth more sharply than in that moment.
A LONE SISTER IS LOST.
Eventually, my throat was too raw to keep shouting. My soul too tired to care. I sank to the stones, curled onto my side, and wept.
Only the storm prompted me to move.
Not the Rook, who tried for an hour to nudge me off the observatory floor. Not my bladder, which had long since moved past discomfort and into misery. Not even my bloodied knees—the result of falling to the stone floor—could wrest me off my spot beside the scrying pool.
The storm, though, was not to be ignored. So bright was the lightning that it seared through my closed eyelids, and so strong was the thunder that it shook through my body with each crash.
This storm was not confined to the sky. The mountain herself was moving.
I pushed myself upright. Stars dotted my vision. Everything hurt. It was in this moment, as the Rook cooed happily that I was finally moving, that a second vision appeared.
Hilga. Alone. Her lips forming new words.
I did not move. I did not breathe. I can’t even gauge how long I sat like that, my gaze fixed on her face—on her mouth, silently working with words I could not discern.
Until she wasn’t silent anymore.
“Twelve turns,” she said, her voice a mere sliver of muted sound. “Twelve turns. Then it will be too late.”
Twelve turns. She meant the hourglass in her office. Each flip sent quicksilver dripping down for exactly one hour.
Which meant I had twelve hours until it would be too late to save my Sisters.
Between one heartbeat and the next, I was on my feet, swaying and almost tripping as I bolted for the door.
The Rules of the Convent could be damned. The Sisters needed me to enter the mountain.
Now all I had to do was figure out how.
LATER
I went about my descent with methodical precision. Tanzi could tease me for it all she wanted after I found her. But I was not going to enter the mountain un-Summoned without having prepared for every possibility.
True, I still did not know how to enter the mountain, but there was a certainty brewing in my gut. Ever since leaving the observatory, I felt sure. I felt alive. I felt right.
This was the path that was meant for me, and I would not go astray.
Though the storm soaked me through as I raced from one place to the next—from the observatory to the Convent to the Crypts and back to the Convent—I had too much to do to care. Icy rain could not slow me. Wind and falling branches could not deter me.
First things first, I found the hourglass in Hilga’s office and flipped it. Quicksilver dripped.
I estimated I’d already lost a quarter of an hour, so I had eleven more flips to get to Tanzi and the others.
I would not waste a moment, but I also would not leave without preparation. The other Sisters might survive a day or two in the mountain, but they had been Summoned.
I was bashing my way in.
With the ghosts’ help, I found records on cave exploration in the upper levels of the Crypts. From these, I learned that warm and waterproof layers were key to my survival. I also read records on travel, so I could estimate how much food (and the best types) to pack. I found Sister Rose’s healer kit under her cot, and then I used a hammer to chip off a Waterwitched purifying stone from the well. Firewitched matches, a lantern, and a cooking pot—everything went into my quickly expanding satchel.
I even explored the guard room, hoping to find a suitable weapon to bring with me. Yet after finally settling on a saber and then slashing it several times through the air, something Sister Lachmi once said swelled in my mind.
“Never carry a weapon you do not know how to use,” I quoted aloud to the Rook, who watched me from atop a suit of armor. “It is more likely to be turned against you than provide any actual defense. Well”—I flung a pointed look at the bird—“I certainly do not know how to use this saber, nor anything else in here. What do you think? Should I go empty-handed?”
The Rook fluffed his feathers in what could only be deemed agreement.
I’d already made up my mind anyway. I had my Sightwitch Sister knife; it would have to be enough.
The last thing I did before forging into the mountain was crawl back up to the telescope and survey the Nubrevnans one last time.
In hindsight, I shouldn’t have checked. It was just an excuse to dally, for part of me—a rather large part—hoped that another vision might appear. Something to show exactly how to enter the mountain.
But no such vision came, and instead, a scene of chaos and death met my eye through the telescope’s lens.
The storm had decimated the Nubrevnans. Their new tower had cracked clean in half, and one of their ships was smashed, while the other two were missing entirely.
“Oh, Sleeper,” I whispered, my hands moving to my throat. “Oh, Sleeper, oh, Sleeper.”
A cyclone had clearly charged through, and there was no missing the corpses laid in a crooked row upon the riverbank—one of which, I thought, had to be the Airwitch captain, for the man was nowhere in sight.
For some reason, this made me sad.
To make it worse, rain still fell. The soldiers and civilians left behind, the ones forced to reassemble this hell-scape, could not even get a funeral pyre lit. Wet smoke huffed into the air where they tried.
I almost abandoned my course to go help. I had food, I had shelter, I had Firewitched matches that could burn through even the toughest of Sirmaya’s storms.
No. The word blasted through my mind, and I rocked back from the telescope. Not only would it break almost every Convent Rule to invite those people behind the glamour, but Tanzi and the Sisters needed me.
“Helping them is not your path right now,” I told myself, fists clenching as I walked stiff-backed away from the telescope, off the ledge, and down to the scrying pool, where my satchel and a waxed-canvas cloak awaited me.
By the Twelve, though, it is impossible to watch suffering and not want to extend a hand.
As I shrugged into my cloak and tightened the satchel’s straps around my shoulders, my chest, my waist, I recited four words: “Firmly gripped upon it.”
Then again as I rang the Summoning bell. “Firmly gripped upon it.”
And again when no answering bell tolled.
Each step I took out of the observatory, then squelching up the mountain path to the Crypts, I said those words.
The Rook flew ahead, a patch of black in a world of gray, until at last we reached the chapel.
I stepped inside; the sound of the storm reared back. No more rain to pelt my hooded head.
The Rook followed me inside, where he settled atop a crooked brick over the Crypts door. He watched while I checked one final time that I had everything I needed.
I was ready.
“You can’t come with me,” I told the Rook as I shook off my sleeves. I was already cold from the rain, and the journey had scarcely begun. “I have no idea what I’ll face in the deeper levels, much less once I’m inside the mountain.”
Assuming you can get inside the mountain at all, said a voice at the back of my brain. I shoved it aside.
“You need to wait up here, Rook—”
He bristled.
“The Rook,” I amended hastily, finally glancing his way. He looked decidedly displeased, his beak turned down and his eyes locked on mine. “Someone has to keep an eye on the Convent while I’m gone.”
I advanced one step toward the door.
He clacked his beak and opened his wings.
I stepped again, and this time he screeched. A clear threat of, “I will dive at you if you do not let me join you.”
“Please, the Rook,” I begged, mimicking Tanzi’s best pity-me face. “You know how much you hate the ghosts—they’ll only be worse in the deeper levels.”
That seemed to give him pause. His wings slumped.
“And there won’t be any sweets for you to eat either. No jam or honey cakes.”
Now he looked mildly appalled.
“Plus, the passages will be so narrow, you probably won’t be able to fly. You’ll have to hop everywhere!”
Finally, his wings furled entirely and his head sank. But rather than feel triumphant, a prickly sadness unwound in my chest.
I would have liked to have his company. Especially since the words A LONE SISTER IS LOST were carved into a wall mere paces behind me.
I gulped, fists clenching, and whispered, “Firmly gripped upon it.”
Then before my courage could falter, I pushed into the Crypts and left the Rook behind.