Chapter 432: Hollin's End

The light was still there at dawn.

It had not moved. It had not gone out. It sat at the far end of the valley, a single steady point against the black line of the forest, held out toward the mountains as though whoever was holding it had not set it down all night.

Perhaps they hadn't.

Tavros stood beside me at the edge of the saddle and looked at it for a long time.

“Two hundred miles,” he said.

“Two hundred and eleven.”

“Folded.” He shook his head slowly. “I've crossed a hundred valleys. I've never seen one that looked like it was lying to me.”

Kaedra came up on my other side with her bow unstrung across her back. She narrowed her eyes at the road below.

“There's something wrong with the snow,” she said.

I looked.

At first, I saw nothing. Snow on the hillside. Snow on the valley floor. The faint line of the road winding through it.

Then I saw what she meant.

The road did not run straight. It looked straight. From up here, it looked like a single clean line from the base of the pass to the forest at the far end.

But the shadows were wrong.

Every few miles, the shadows on the snow bent. Folded back on themselves, the way a ribbon folds when you twist it. As though the road went forward and also, somehow, back.

“He folded it,” Merek said quietly from behind us.

He was in human form again, pale and shivering. He had spent the night curled at the center of our camp as a wolf, and the change back had left him shaking.

“Halemar's gift,” Merek said. “Before you freed him. Othellos had him fold this road so that anyone walking it would walk forever.”

Nobody spoke.

“That's why nobody walks it,” Tavros said finally. “Not because there's nothing on the other side. Because nobody who tried ever reached it.”

We went down anyway.

There was nothing else to do. We had not climbed a mountain to stand on top of it.

The descent was easier than the climb. Steeper, but the snow was firmer on the eastern face, packed hard by the wind. By midday we had reached the valley floor.

The first shelter stood at the base of the pass.

It was larger than the ones on the climb. A proper building, or the bones of one. Four stone walls, roofless now, with a doorway facing the road and a carved lantern above it so worn that I could only find it by running my fingers over the stone.

Inside, a trough. Frozen. Cracked down the middle.

A lamp hook in the wall. Empty.

Merek broke the ice in the trough. There was water underneath. Very cold. Very still.

Tavros hung his own lamp on the hook. The last of his oil.

Kaedra lit it.

I put my hand on the frozen floor.

“It's Uriah,” I said. “We're in the valley.”

The warmth came faster this time.

Not much. But faster.

“I feel you,” the Keeper said. Her voice was still faint. Still distant. But clearer than it had been on the mountain. “This was a waystation once. Travelers rested here before the climb. There were beds. A fire. Someone kept it.” A pause. “I don't remember who.”

“We'll find out,” I said.

“Uriah.” Her voice changed. Grew careful. “The road ahead is folded. Badly. You'll walk, and you'll think you're making progress, and you'll find yourself back here.”

“How do we stop that?”

“Light the shelters,” she said. “Every one. Each lamp pins the road in place. Like a nail in a folded cloth.” A pause. “But you don't have enough oil.”

Tavros, beside me, looked at his empty flask.

He did not say anything.

He did not need to.

We walked.

The road was exactly as the Keeper had said.

For the first hour, it was easy. Snow underfoot, the forest ahead, the mountains behind. Kaedra walked in front with her bow strung. Nyxa walked behind, where I could almost never see her. Merek walked in wolf form ahead of everyone, nose down, reading the snow.

After the first hour, the second shelter appeared.

Smaller. A low wall and a single standing stone with a lantern carved into it.

We had no oil.

I had Lirien's lantern, and one candle stub left.

I looked at it.

Then at the road ahead.

Then I put the lantern back in my pack.

“Not yet,” I said.

Melody looked at me.

“We have one candle,” I said. “And two hundred miles. If I use it now, we'll have nothing when we get there.”

Melody nodded slowly.

We walked on.

An hour later, the third shelter appeared.

Then the fourth.

Then, at the end of the fourth hour, the first shelter. The large one at the base of the pass. Four roofless walls and a lamp burning on the hook inside.

We were back where we started.

Tavros sat down in the snow.

He did not say anything for a long time. He only looked at the lamp burning on the wall of the waystation, and then back at the road, and then at the lamp again.

“Four hours,” he said finally. “Four hours of walking. And we're here.”

“The Keeper warned us,” Kaedra said.

“I know she warned us.” Tavros put his face in his hands. “I'm the god of passes. Of mountain roads. Of finding the way through.” His voice was muffled. “I've never been lost in my life.”

Nobody said anything.

Merek, in wolf form, lay down in the snow beside him and pressed his shoulder against Tavros's knee.

After a while, Tavros lowered his hands.

“The shelters,” he said. “We need to light them. Every one.”

“We don't have oil,” Melody said.

“Then we find oil.”

“Where?”

Tavros looked down the valley.

At the road. At the forest. At the distant light at the far end, still burning, still held out toward the mountains.

“Someone's been keeping a lamp lit down there for three years,” he said slowly. “That's a lot of oil.”

Nyxa found the village.

She did not tell us she was going. She simply was not there one moment, and then, an hour later, she was standing beside the waystation fire with snow on her shoulders and an expression I had not seen on her face before.

“There are people,” she said.

Everyone turned.

“In the forest. North of the road. Half a mile in.” Nyxa's voice was quiet, the way it always was. “A village. Small. Eight houses. Smoke from three chimneys.”

“Folded?” Tavros asked.

Nyxa shook her head.

“No. That's the strange thing.” She frowned. “The road is folded. The village isn't. When I stepped off the road into the trees, the fold stopped. I walked straight to it.”

Tavros stood up.

“The fold's only on the road,” he said slowly. “Not the land around it.”

“Then we walk beside the road,” Kaedra said. “Not on it.”

Tavros shook his head.

“The forest's too thick. And the snow's deeper off the road.” He looked toward the trees where Nyxa had come from. “But a village means people. And people who live in a country this cold have oil.”

Hollin's End sat in a clearing in the forest, exactly where Nyxa had said.

Eight houses. Stone walls. Turf roofs heavy with snow. A well in the middle of the clearing with a wooden cover. Woodpiles stacked high against every wall.

Smoke from three chimneys.

As we came out of the trees, a door opened in the nearest house.

A woman stood in it. Old. Gray-haired. Wrapped in a heavy shawl. She held a lantern in one hand.

She looked at us.

At six strangers coming out of the forest in winter. At a wolf. At a woman with a bow. At a man with a glowing mark on his palm that I had not thought to cover.

She did not raise the alarm.

She did not slam the door.

She stared at us for a long time.

Then she said, in a voice cracked with age and disuse:

“You came over the mountains.”

“Yes.”

“Nobody comes over the mountains.”

“We did.”

The old woman lowered her lantern.

Her face crumpled.

“Then the world's still there,” she whispered. “On the other side. We thought—” She stopped. “We thought it had ended.”

Her name was Gwen.

She was seventy-three years old. She had lived in Hollin's End her entire life. So had everyone else in the village. There were nineteen of them now. There had been sixty, once, when Gwen was a girl.

Nobody had come over the mountains in forty years.

“The road stopped working,” Gwen said.

She had brought us into her house. A low room with a fire in the hearth and dried herbs hanging from the beams. Three other villagers had come to stand in the doorway, staring at us with the expressions of people who had not seen a stranger in their adult lives.

“My father walked it,” Gwen said. “When I was small. Over the mountains to the river country to trade wool. Twice a year.” She looked into the fire. “Then one autumn he didn't come back. And the next spring, some of the young men went to look for him, and they didn't come back either.”

“The fold,” Tavros said quietly.

Gwen looked at him.

“Is that what it is?”

“Someone twisted the road,” Tavros said. “So that anyone who walks it walks in circles.”

Gwen was silent for a long time.

“We thought it was a curse,” she said finally. “Or that the mountains had shifted. Or that the world beyond them had simply ended, and the road went nowhere.” She looked at the fire. “The young people stopped trying to leave. The old people stopped talking about the other side. We stayed. We kept our sheep. We kept our fires.” Her voice dropped. “We kept the lamps.”

“Lamps?” I asked.

Gwen looked up at me.

“On the shelters,” she said. “Along the road. My grandmother kept them. Her mother before her. Every winter, someone from Hollin's End would walk the road as far as they could and light the shelter lamps. So travelers would know.”

“But the road was folded.”

“We didn't know that,” Gwen said. “We only knew that every year, we could walk less of it before we found ourselves back at the waystation. So every year, we lit fewer lamps.” She closed her eyes. “The last year I went, I was thirty. I lit the waystation lamp and the next shelter. Then I walked for a day and found myself back at the waystation again.” Her voice cracked. “After that, I stopped going.”

The silence in the little house was very long.

Then Melody spoke.

“The light,” she said. “At the end of the valley. By the forest.”

Gwen's eyes opened.

“You've seen it.”

“Last night. From the top of the pass.”

Gwen looked at the villagers in the doorway.

They looked at each other.

“The stone house,” one of them said. A man, perhaps fifty, with a heavy beard. “Past the end of the road. Where the forest starts.”

“It wasn't there when I was young,” Gwen said. “It was built—” She frowned. “Forty years ago? Perhaps a little less. Strangers came over the mountains, the last strangers we ever saw. They built it in a summer. Then they left.”

“And someone lives there?”

“A woman,” Gwen said. “Three winters now. She came the same way the house did. Strangers brought her. In a closed cart.” Her voice dropped. “And they left a man to keep her.”

His name was Bram.

He came down to Hollin's End once a month to trade for food. Flour. Salt. Lamp oil. He paid in silver coins none of the villagers had ever seen before. He did not talk much.

“He's not unkind,” Gwen said. “That's the strange thing. He's quiet. He keeps to himself. But when old Tomas's roof fell in last winter, Bram came down and helped rebuild it without being asked.”

“And the woman?”

“We've never seen her,” Gwen said. “Only her lamp. Every night. In the window.” She looked down. “Bram says she's ill. That she has a sickness that makes her dangerous to others. That he keeps her there to protect us.”

“Do you believe him?”

Gwen was quiet for a long moment.

“I believed him the first year,” she said. “The second year, I started to wonder why a sick woman would keep a lamp in her window every night. Why she'd hold it up toward the mountains.” She looked at me. “The third year, I stopped believing him. But by then, what could I do? He's the only person in forty years who's come from the other side. Who else would I tell?”

I told them about Lirien.

Not all of it. Not the courtyard or the hall or the gods in cages. Only the parts that mattered.

A four-year-old girl, taken from her mother. A mother taken somewhere else. A message sent across a mountain range, two words long.

When I finished, Gwen was crying.

So was the bearded man in the doorway.

“Her daughter,” Gwen whispered. “She's been holding up that lamp for her daughter.”

“Yes.”

“Every night. For three years.”

“Yes.”

Gwen wiped her eyes with the corner of her shawl.

Then she stood up.

She went to a cupboard in the corner of the room and opened it. Inside, stacked neatly on the shelves, were jars. Dozens of them. Sealed with wax.

Lamp oil.

“My grandmother made it,” Gwen said. “From sheep fat. Every year. For the shelter lamps.” She looked at the jars. “We stopped using it when we stopped walking the road. But we never stopped making it.”

She turned around.

“How many shelters are there?” she asked. “Between here and the stone house?”

Tavros counted on his fingers.

“Forty-one,” he said. “If the road's as long as Halemar says.”

Gwen looked at the jars.

Then at the villagers in the doorway.

“Then we'll need everyone,” she said.

They came.

Not all nineteen. Some were too old. Some were too young. But eleven of them put on their heaviest coats and filled their packs with jars of lamp oil and came out into the snow to walk a road they had not walked in decades.

Gwen led them.

She was seventy-three years old and walked with a stick. Melody offered to carry her pack. Gwen refused.

“My grandmother walked this road when she was eighty,” she said. “I'll walk it at seventy-three.”

We went back to the waystation.

The lamp Tavros had hung there was still burning.

Gwen stood in the doorway of the roofless building for a long time, looking at it.

“I lit this one,” she said quietly. “Forty-three years ago. It was the last one I ever lit.”

She set down her stick.

She took a jar of oil from her pack and refilled the lamp.

Then she knelt on the frozen floor of the waystation, the way I had knelt, and put her bare hand flat on the stone.

“It's Gwen,” she said. “From Hollin's End. I'm sorry I stopped coming.”

The warmth came up through the floor.

Not faint this time.

Strong. Strong enough that every villager standing in the doorway felt it through their boots and stepped back in surprise.

“Gwen,” the Keeper said. “Gwen of Hollin's End. Your grandmother was Mairi. She sang the hymn every time she lit this lamp. Badly. She knew it was badly. She sang it anyway.”

Gwen made a sound that was half laugh and half sob.

“She did,” she whispered. “She did. She was terrible.”

“She was wonderful,” the Keeper said gently. “I've missed her. I've missed all of you.”

We lit the second shelter an hour later.

The third an hour after that.

The road did not fold back on us.

By the end of the first day, we had lit nine shelters. By the end of the second, twenty-two.

The villagers took turns. At each shelter, one of them would refill the lamp, or hang a new one, and kneel and say their name. And each time, the Keeper answered. She knew all of them. Their grandparents. Their great-grandparents. The ones who had walked the road and the ones who had stopped.

And each time, the road behind us grew shorter.

I could feel it. So could Tavros. On the first day, every mile had felt like three. By the afternoon of the second, every mile felt like two.

By the evening of the second day, it felt like a mile.

“It's remembering,” Tavros said, standing beside the twenty-second shelter with the lamp burning on its hook. “The road. It's remembering how long it's supposed to be.”

He looked back toward the mountains.

The valley no longer looked endless. It looked like a valley. Long, yes. But a valley with a beginning and an end and a road through the middle of it.

And every few miles, a lamp.

“Two hundred and eleven,” Tavros said quietly. “I believe it now.”

On the third day, we reached the forest.

The road ran straight into the trees and disappeared. The last shelter stood at the edge of the forest. Forty-first. A small stone hut with a carved lantern above the door, almost perfectly preserved.

Gwen lit it herself.

She knelt on the threshold and put her hand on the stone and said her name.

And the Keeper said, very softly:

“The house is a quarter mile ahead. Through the trees.”

Gwen looked up.

“She's there?”

“She's there,” the Keeper said. “At the window. With her lamp. She's been watching the road for two nights. Ever since the first shelter was lit.” A pause. “She's seen every lamp come on. One by one. All the way down the valley.”

Gwen's eyes filled.

“She knows someone's coming.”

“She knows,” the Keeper said. “She's been holding up her lamp all day. Her arm's very tired. She won't put it down.”

The villagers stayed at the forty-first shelter.

That was Gwen's decision. Not mine.

“You don't need eleven sheep farmers at that door,” she said. “You need the girl's message. And whoever's going to carry it.” She looked at me. “That's you.”

She put her hand on my arm.

“And Bram,” she said quietly. “Whatever he is. Whatever he's done. He rebuilt Tomas's roof.”

“I'll remember,” I said.

We walked into the forest.

Tavros. Kaedra. Nyxa. Merek, in human form, walking beside me. Melody.

The trees closed in around us. Old pines, heavy with snow. The path between them was narrow but clear, as though someone walked it regularly.

Once a month, I thought. Down to Hollin's End for flour and salt and lamp oil.

Then the trees opened.

The house stood in a small clearing at the end of the path.

Stone. Two stories. A slate roof. A chimney with a thin line of smoke rising from it.

A door.

And a window.

The window was on the upper floor, facing west, toward the mountains. It was small and square, with heavy glass set deep into the stone.

Behind the glass stood a woman.

She was thin. Dark-haired, though the hair was going gray at the temples. She wore a plain gray dress and a shawl around her shoulders.

And she was holding a lamp.

Up. Out. Toward the mountains.

Her arm was shaking.

She saw us.

Her face changed.

The lamp dipped. Then rose again. Higher.

I could not hear her through the glass. But I could see her mouth moving.

Two words.

Over and over.

I looked at the door.

It was ordinary. Heavy oak. Iron hinges. An iron handle.

And burned into the wood, at the height of my eyes, a mark.

A door, drawn closed.

With a line through it.

I did not touch it.

I knew what would happen if I did. Vaust had told me. A door that does not open from either side. Not with a key. Not with force. Not with any god's gift.

Only the person who sealed it.

I took Lirien's lantern from my pack.

The candle stub was still inside. I had carried it two hundred and eleven miles without lighting it.

I lit it now.

The small flame flickered in the cold air of the clearing.

I held it up.

Out. Toward the window.

Toward the woman behind the glass, holding her own lamp out toward me.

Her face crumpled.

She pressed her free hand flat against the glass.

I could see her mouth moving again. Not two words now. More. I could not hear them. I did not need to.

I knew what she was saying.

Lirien.

A door opened behind us.

Not the front door. A side door. The woodshed, built against the north wall of the house.

A man stepped out.

He was tall and heavy-shouldered and gray-bearded. He wore a thick wool coat and carried an axe in one hand, the blade resting against his shoulder.

He looked at us.

Six strangers in his clearing. A wolf-man. An archer. A woman in black. A god of mountain passes. A rabbit-eared woman with a sword at her hip.

And me.

Holding a small stone lantern up toward the window.

His eyes went to the lantern.

Then to the window.

Then to the Crown glowing on my palm.

His face did not change.

But his grip on the axe tightened.

“Nobody comes up this road,” Bram said.

His voice was very quiet.

“I know,” I said. “We came anyway.”