INA AND I STUMBLED OUT INTO THE FOREST AS QUICKLY as we could, coughing all the while. Though a plume of smoke blotted out the exact location of the sun, the temperature told me that we’d overslept.
“Something feels wrong,” I said. In my Sight the life in the valley ebbed away, a soft counterpoint to the violence of the flames. The absence of life was a wound in the landscape, a dim spot where once there had been brightness.
“No!” Ina took off down the trail toward the vista, sliding though the mud and slush.
I raced after her, coughing, not certain whether smoke or fear stole more of my breath. Ina skidded to a halt at the edge of the cliff. Seconds later, she fell to her knees on the rocky ground, screaming.
Shifting clouds of smoke blew away to reveal the valley in flames. The largest building in Amalska had already been reduced to scorched bones—the hall where the entire town must have gathered this morning for the community meeting. A train of eight large wagons dotted the main road of the village, the first one already trundling out of town.
Bandits.
They must have raided at daybreak. It was already almost over.
I caught the edge of Ina’s cloak as she leaped to her feet and tried to bolt for the trail.
“Stop,” I cried. “There’s nothing we can do!” If we went to the village now, we’d only be targets, whether for the chaos of the flames or the cruelty of the bandits. I didn’t want to make the long climb down before we were certain all of them had left and another wave would not be coming.
She fought me for only a moment, until the last of the meeting hall collapsed, sending a dark cloud of smoke bursting into the sky. No one who had been in that building could have survived. We sank back to the ground and huddled together, our eyes blurring with tears.
If only we had wakened sooner. If only there had been some way to stop the bandits.
The shadow god had surely taken the village.
“I hate him.” She choked out the words. “He could have sent fighters. He could have done something. Anything! Why didn’t he help us?”
I didn’t have to ask to know she spoke of the boar king. She was right. He should have been able to help. What was the point of having a monarch with powerful magic at his disposal if he didn’t use it to protect his people?
I murmured words of comfort to her, knowing they were empty but sure that silence would be worse. She clung to me until the last of the bandits’ carts departed with their spoils, just as the sun hit its height in the sky, glowing an angry red through the haze.
“I have to go back,” she said after the wagons had disappeared into the pass. “Someone must have survived. My parents . . . they knew this could happen. They planned for this. There are places they could have hidden.”
My stomach twisted. I couldn’t tell her the truth: Amalska was a dead place. Normally the valley was bright with life, softly glowing in my Sight, the villagers’ mortal magic and manifests resonating with mine like a distant echo. Now I sensed nothing—only a void.
“I’ll come with you,” I said. Miriel’s rules about me staying away from the villagers were meaningless now.
I followed Ina down the trail, my heart leaping into my throat every time her step faltered near the edge or the wind whipped at our backs. I racked my mind for words of comfort she might need when faced with the destruction below, but what comfort are words to someone who has lost everything? I had lost everything, too. Without the village, I no longer had a purpose. My dreams of ever being part of the community had burned as surely as everything else. All I had left was Ina. I had to protect her, to keep her close.
The flames had already begun to dwindle by the time we reached the valley floor, though a column of smoke still rose from the meeting hall. The houses surrounding it had also burned, leaving little but charred rubble and the reek of blackened flesh behind. The muddy river tumbled through town in a song of sorrow. I shivered in spite of the mild afternoon air. In the face of this destruction, it felt more like a cruelty than a kindness.
Ina ran toward her parents’ house, which still stood intact on the near side of the river. I knew we’d find it empty. I stepped through the door she’d left hanging open. The house still smelled like a home. A place where at any moment smiling people might come through the door, eager to share a meal and their hopes for the coming spring. My throat tightened until I could barely breathe. The most important things in the world—a family and a home—had been taken from Ina.
Though the bandits had left the kitchen untidy in their haste to take anything useful, a kettle of water still stood ready to be heated. Dough sat rising in a warm spot next to the oven, overflowing from its dish and collapsing upon itself. Ina rushed through the four small rooms, even checking the loft, her breathing fast, her hands trembling. I helped her push aside a shelf that covered a trapdoor in the floor, but a lantern shone down into the secret cavern illuminated only shelves of preserves, spices, and dried meat. I retreated to the front door and watched helplessly as she began to come to terms with what I already knew. They were gone. Everyone had been at the meeting hall for the weekly tithe.
After closing the trapdoor, she fell into my arms.
“How could this happen?” She sobbed into my shoulder.
I held her wordlessly, my heart breaking. What were we going to do now?
“Maybe they got away,” she said, her head jerking up. “Someone else will know. Someone must have survived.” She pulled away and took off out the door.
Wide, muddy wagon-wheel tracks showed that the bandits had continued north, no doubt headed for the next city on the trade route. I trailed behind as Ina hurried among the other houses of the village, which were silent in the way that only dead things are. She combed through people’s homes in a panic. Objects the bandits hadn’t taken littered the rooms—everything from books to wool-stuffed sleeping mats to barrels of pickling vinegar.
Waves of horror crashed through me as we approached the meeting hall. Burned corpses littered the ground, bodies twisted into unnatural configurations where they had fallen. I choked on the stench of charred meat and scorched hair. Not a single body showed signs of life. Ina stopped over one and covered her face with her hands. Her breath came shallowly.
Resting over the corpse’s exposed organs lay a silver belt buckle tarnished by fire—an intricate design of looping branches and leaves framing a leaping stag.
I numbly led Ina away from Garen’s body.
By the time the sun had begun to edge toward the western hills, it was clear that the bandits had left no one and nothing. Our desperate search for survivors ended in front of the smoldering remains of the meeting hall. In the fading twilight, I could now barely make out the outlines of bodies amidst the rubble. Ina crumpled onto a stone bench chiseled into aspects of all Six Gods—fire, wind, earth, water, shadow, and spirit. Not one of them had watched over Amalska today.
“What did my people do to deserve this?” she asked, her voice hollow.
I tried to say more, to offer her some explanation, but the words caught in my throat. My chest felt like it was caving in. No potion could bring back the dead. I couldn’t rewrite the past without sacrificing my life, and there were no guarantees it would even go right. Miriel’s loss ached more keenly than ever. Perhaps she would have known what to do.
Images of the villagers I’d known and loved raced through my mind—an older couple who had always brought me honey candies when I was still a child; a young woman whose breech baby I’d helped Miriel deliver one stormy autumn night; and most of all the children, who hid behind their parents, cautiously peeking at the “witch” while their parents bartered with me for tinctures at the vista. I dropped to my knees, taking perverse satisfaction in the discomfort of the chilly mud and the cold that seeped into my bones.
After a while, Ina knelt and bowed her head alongside me. I spoke the prayer of the shadow god over and over, but it brought no solace. Even as I stole melodies from the wind and the water to sing vespers of comfort, the hole of loss continued to deepen. I stayed in place even as my knees grew stiff, even as the breeze grew cold and biting when the sun slowly sank over the hills. When it finally touched the tips of the mountains, the hazy sky turned red as blood. Shadows closed in on us.
Ina did not speak until the first stars glimmered in the sky, barely visible through the clearing smoke.
“I can’t let them die in vain,” she said. “I know what to do.” The certainty in her voice was cool and detached, a turnabout from her earlier tears.
A spark of fear kindled in my stomach.
“What?” I said, my voice coming out like a croak.
“My manifest will be my revenge.” Ina got up and walked off with purpose, leaving me to clamber to my feet on unsteady legs.
“Wait!” I called, but she had already disappeared into the night. Though I had spent most of my life alone on the mountain, somehow the solitude of this moment was more total, the shadows darker, the sky more empty. Embers glowed in the rubble, still sending up tendrils of smoke that scratched at my nose and throat.
“Ina!” I called.
Only the distant hoot of an owl answered me as dread climbed up my spine with clawed hands.
I hurried through the town, shouting Ina’s name. Then something pulled at me—a strengthening current of magic, insistent and deep. The flow of power tugged me nearly all the way back to the base of the trail leading up my mountain.
Up ahead, a flame guttered in the wind.
Ina had lit a candle to begin the summoning of her manifest. She sat on a rocky expanse of ground, chanting over the flame. Power gathered around her like a whirlpool. This was the old manifest, the blood rite, and it was too late to stop her now. If I interrupted the ritual, it could backfire on her and irreparably damage her mind and soul.
“No,” I whispered, anguish strangling my voice. When I’d written her manifest in my blood, this wasn’t what I’d imagined.
Her eyes were closed, her cheeks pale. She shouldn’t have attempted to do something like this with her emotions running so high. It required strength and serenity to summon an animal and merge with its spirit, even if she had been doing it with a god to guide her. By the time I reached her, she had disappeared into a trance. The flickering candle flame reflected in the glassy darkness of her dilated eyes.
Power unspooled from her, reaching tendrils far into the sky and up the mountain. My hands shook, though whether with cold or fear I was no longer certain. The only certain thing was the way the wind rushed past my cheeks and whipped at my hair, yet the flame of her summoning candle steadied.
Ina’s eyes slowly began to focus again as something appeared out of the darkness. It gathered before her like living smoke. Huge white wings fluttered into view, followed by serpentine eyes that caught and reflected the candle flame in their icy depths.
She had called the dragon.
She would die.