Chapter 59: The North Road

Nell was awake when he climbed through her window. She was always awake now, at night. He was beginning to suspect she had stopped sleeping before midnight on the day he fell and simply never started again.

"You’re leaving." She said it before he had both feet on the floor.

He stopped by the window. "How do you know?"

"You’ve got boots on. Real ones." She looked him over from her bed, the fur-lined boots, the heavy cloak, the bundle on his back. "And you look like you look when you’re going to do something stupid."

He sat down heavily on the edge of her bed.

"Professor Crane is going to move you to the Academy infirmary. The Headmaster wants the healers to study your arm every day. You’ll have a real bed and a whole window, and nobody will be allowed in without her seal."

Nell’s eyes went wide. "A whole window?"

"A whole window."

She considered that very seriously, and then her face closed again. "How long are you going for?"

"Two months. Maybe less."

"Where?"

"North."

He watched her decide whether to ask why, and decide not to.

He took the letter out of his coat, folded twice and sealed with candle wax, with Mira’s name on the outside.

"If I’m not back by the time the first snow comes down to the river, give this to Mira."

Nell didn’t take it. She looked at it in his hand, then at him.

"You promised you’d tell her soon," she whispered. "Not not-yet. Soon."

"I know."

"So you’re breaking it."

"Yes."

Nell was quiet. Then she took the letter and slid it carefully under her pillow, like something she was afraid to lose.

"I knew you would." She didn’t sound angry. She sounded older than twelve. "You always do."

She reached under her blankets, pulled something out and pushed it into his hands. It was the farmer’s book with no cover, the one she had been reading since before the summer, its pages soft and grey from being turned so many times.

"Take it. You need something to read. It’s boring up there, probably."

"Nell, this is yours."

"I’ve read it four times." She lay back on her pillow. "The cow still hasn’t done anything. You can tell me if it does."

He put the book inside his coat, against his chest, over the cold along his ribs.

"I’ll tell you. I promise!"

They left Highcrest the next night like thieves. They didn’t use the North Gate, where the guards would see two hooded strangers walking out into the dark. They used the crack in the north wall beside the old tannery, the one every child in the lower city knew about, and squeezed through it with their packs held over their heads.

On the other side, the road was waiting.

Aren had seen the North Road from the top of the Academy hill, a pale line winding away over the farmland into the hills, toward the dark smudge of forest on the horizon. He had never walked it. In his whole life in this world, he had never been farther from the river than the Old Quarry.

They walked it now, in the dark, while Highcrest grew smaller behind them. The farms ended and the road climbed steadily into the hills. By the second night the city was only a faint orange glow at the edge of the sky, and then it was gone.

’Goodbye, Highcrest. Try not to burn down while I’m away.’

On the third night, they reached the forest.

It was nothing like the grey forest of the Training Rift, because it was real, and it was very old. Black pines stood close together on both sides of the road, their trunks so thick that four men holding hands couldn’t have circled them, and their branches met overhead. Under them the dark was so deep that even Roderick slowed down.

It smelled of resin and cold earth and something wild and old that Aren had no name for. The air was colder than anything he had felt outside the Abyss, and his breath came out in white clouds.

"Something lives in here." Roderick kept his voice low on the fourth night. "A lot of somethings."

"How do you know?"

"No birds." Roderick was walking very carefully, cloak pulled tight, eyes moving through the dark between the trees. "Forests this old have birds. Owls, at night. Something’s eaten them, or scared them all off."

They walked on cautiously. The road ran straight through the black pines, pale under the starlight that came down through the branches. Nothing moved.

Then something did.

Aren felt it before he saw it, a pressure rather than a sound. It was the same thing he had felt in Rook’s warehouse when Rook stood up, and in the Academy courtyard while the Royal Knights rode past, only much heavier. It came through the trees from somewhere to the left of the road, slow and steady, like the weight of deep water on his chest.

Roderick grabbed his arm and pulled him off the road into the ditch on the right, under the low branches of a fallen pine. They lay flat in the frozen leaves and held their breath.

Something came out of the trees.

It was a deer, or at least that was the only word Aren had for it. But it was as tall as a house at the shoulder, and its body was bark instead of fur, old grey cracked bark covered in moss, as if a dead oak had stood up and decided to walk. Its legs were long and thin as young trees. Its antlers spread out wide as the road, branching again and again into a hundred points, and from every point hung a small blue flame, burning without smoke like lanterns on a tree.

It walked slowly and silently across the road in front of them. Its hooves made no sound on the frozen earth.

Where it walked, the grass turned white with frost, and the great black pines it passed on the far side of the road went grey. Their needles faded and fell all at once, quietly, like snow.

[Hollow Stag. Rank B.]

Aren lay with his face pressed into the frozen leaves.

Rank B, two full ranks above him. He remembered Sir Bram in front of the Measure, Rank C, with fourteen hundred strength. This was something else entirely. This was the kind of thing the Royal Knights rode out in groups of fifty to kill, and it was walking across the North Road alone in the dark, like a farmer crossing his own field.

’Don’t look over here. I’m a leaf! I’m a very boring leaf.’

The deer stopped in the middle of the road.

It turned its huge head slowly, and the blue lanterns on its antlers swung. Its eyes were two black holes, deep as wells, and they moved across the trees and the road and the ditch where two dead men lay pressed into the leaves.

They didn’t stop.

The monster turned away and walked on into the trees on the other side, and the pressure went with it, fading slowly, until there was only the cold and the dark and the grey dead pines where it had passed.

They lay there long after it was gone.

"That was a B," Roderick breathed at last.

"How do you know?"

"Because we’re still alive, and it didn’t even notice us."

They walked faster after that, and talked less. Every time a branch cracked in the cold, they stopped and listened. Aren fed the cold in his side every night on whatever he could find, a frozen beetle, the hardness of a stone, and every night it seemed hungrier. Feed it well in the cold places, the Faceless Merchant had said. It will be hungrier there than you expect.

They walked by night and slept by day, Roderick under his cloak in the deepest shade they could find. Aren barely slept. He went a little way into the trees and trained until his arms shook. Three New Moons into the trunk of a frozen pine, feed the cold, three more. The Moonlit Step between the trees, over roots and under low branches, until he could cross a clearing without leaving a print in the frost. And under all of it, the slow ache in the middle of his bones that never quite stopped.

[New Moon. Mastery: 52% → 54%.][Moonlit Step. Mastery: 37% → 38%.][Rank D: Bone Tempering. 9% → 14%.]

On the sixth night, they came out of the forest.

The road ran on across rough grey moorland covered in frost, rising slowly toward the north. Far away, at the very edge of the sky, a dark jagged line stood black against the stars. The iron mountains.

They had walked perhaps a mile across the moor when they found the wagons.

There were four of them, pulled off the side of the road at strange angles, as if they had stopped in a hurry. It was a merchant caravan. Two had been burned. The other two had been emptied, their canvas covers slashed and their crates broken open and thrown into the frost. There were no horses, and there were no people.

There were crows.

They weren’t flying or eating. They had been nailed. Six of them, black and stiff, nailed by their wings to a tall wooden post at the side of the road in a neat row, one above the other. Under them, carved into the wood with a knife, was a single word.

TOLL.

Roderick looked at the post.

"Bandits."

Aren nodded slowly. He was looking past the wagons and the post, across the grey moor toward a line of low hills in the east. A thin line of smoke was rising straight up from the nearest hill into the still cold air.

A campfire.

And then, from the frost-covered heather at the side of the road behind them, a voice spoke. It was rough and amused and in no hurry at all.

"Evening, travelers. You’ll be wanting to pay the toll."