Page 11 of The Thrice-Bound Fool

Then both of them gasped like they had been shown a terrible secret, perhaps something unthinkable about the very nature of creation. Their eyes widened. They trembled. Their noses ran blood. I had the idea those spiky letters had run up their noses and gouged their brainmeat like fishhooks. Ylda fell first, making a sound like a suppressed squeal with her final outbreath. Cheeky looked at me, betrayed, then grabbed her head and made a pain-face. This was the face she wore into her death. She slumped against Ylda.

“Samnyr pipe them off someplace better,” I said and shut the book. I had thought showing them the lethal script of the Murder Alphabet might be more merciful than a throat-cutting. But I doubt it was. I hope never to learn whatever they knew in that last moment.

Outside, Dalgatha crarked, and I know it was my guilt that made it sound like disapproval, but that is what it sounded like.

Galva cranked the bear trap mostly open, and I settled that awful fucking book in between its jaws. It jumped when Galva let go, and then it hissed long and slow, like a snake promising to strike when it could.

In the morning, after the brigands we dragged outside were buried under fresh snowfall; after Galva slept her war corvid back in its tattoo; after a patchy sleep through which I started several times, dreaming my nose was running blood and I couldn’t stop shaking, we took a look around at the haven we were both reluctant to leave. Plenty of warm furs. A firepit with holes above it for venting smoke. Hanging lamps for burning whatever kind of oil you cared to put in them—from the smell, yak oil was a popular choice. An impressive store of salted meat and dried fruit. Keshite rugs once worth a small fortune now faded and threadbare, their delicate birds and flowers veiled by ground-in soil. A fair assortment of bows and crossbows, though no one of them seemed to have many quarrels or arrows sized right for it.

“What if we stay here?” Galva said. “For the winter. Would this give you time to read and translate the book?”

“They’ll find me.”

“Can your Takers Guild kill you more dead than those mountains can?”

“It’s not the killing I’m worried about. It’s the being kept alive while praying for death. Whatever the Thrall Mountains do to us, it won’t be that.”

She nodded. She knew. She had just been including me in her process of thinking things through. This was a new development. I smiled at her. We put on our snowshoes and stepped out of the cave, into the lightening snow.

I took out the half-stone pendant Norrigal had given me in Edth, the one that always pulled toward its other half, which she carried. She was so far away now, if she was in Norholt, as I suspected, that I doubted the charm would still work. In Edth, it had pulled so hard toward its twin that it pointed horizontally on the end of its cord, tugging at my hand. But across the whole continent of Manreach? I dangled the pendant.

“What is that? The stone from the witch?” Galva said.

“Yah.”

“Good idea.”

“If it works.”

But it just lay there, still as Grandpa’s pizzle.

Then I remembered my witchlet putting the stone in her mouth first.

Thgotta morm up.

I breathed a plume of breath on it, then another, then stuck it on my black tongue, closed my mouth around it. Made myself count to twenty. Took it out again and held it up.

At first, nothing.

Then it spun gently, just a little.

Then Grandma must have put on a pair of red stockings for Grandpa, because the stone pulled as light as a mouse whisker, then a little harder. It raised just a smidgeon toward what I had been fairly sure was east, the way we had come from.

“Well,” I said. “Looks like all we know and love in the world is back that way. So let’s march away from it and farther into these big, killing rocks.”

5Hoooooo, Hoooooo!

We left, snowshoeing into the flurries, leading the miserable donkey who had no snowshoes, all of us cold from crown to heel. I was from Galtia, a frigid country, not so big on snows, but rich in miserable rain and babby-killing underdoor drafts. Galva, on the other hand, grew up on the brown hills of Ispanthia, with sun on the silvery olive leaves and half the year as warm as bread from the oven. She wasn’t the sort to complain, but she wore an expression on her face that was something between an injured frog and the shovel that injured it.

I began to notice I was having a hard time trudging uphill. As I said, I was fit, but there’s fit on the lowlands, fit on the highlands, and fit on a mountain. The air was getting scarcer, and we were both slowing down.

“Maybe,” I gulped at one point. “Maybe if we pace ourselves.”

I took a look behind us, thought I saw only snow and rocks.

“I am pacing myself. Do you see me running?”

“Maybe if we pace ourselves more. My ankles aren’t used to these shoes.”