The sundered seal

Chapter Twelve: The journey to the settlements

They left Dawnhollow on the ninth morning, before the sun had cleared the eastern hills.

It had taken that long to arrange. Dorran had argued against it from his sickbed, in a voice so thin that even he seemed embarrassed by it, and Brenna Voss had argued against it more loudly, standing at the foot of his bed with her arms folded and her jaw set. In the end it was Pell the miller who settled the matter, in his heavy, unhurried way.

"Dawnhollow has food for a month and walls for a week," he said. "We cannot outlast this alone. If there are others still standing, we need them, and they will not come for a letter carried by a frightened rider. They will come for the Ascendant."

So the twins went.

They went lightly, because they could fly, and because a cart or a column would have been slaughtered on the roads. Each carried a single pack: dried meat, water skins, a bundle of clean linen, and a sealed scroll bearing the lantern sigil of Dawnhollow. Lyra wore her green cloak and the silver clasp. Kaelen wore a long coat buttoned to the throat, with gloves of soft grey leather over his bandaged hands, and the iron ring on a cord around his neck, where it would not catch the eye.

Before they left, he had freed the last of the five. He had done it in two days instead of one, exactly as he had promised, with Lyra sitting beside him and Ysolde counting his pulse. He had felt the voice stir each time, and each time he had told Lyra plainly, and she had gripped his wrist and said nothing at all, and the voice had gone quiet. It was a small victory. Neither of them mentioned how small.

The only strange thing was the cellar itself. On the night of the vow, Brenna's guards swore that all five prisoners had woken at the same instant, and turned their heads north, and gone utterly still. They had not struggled. They had not hissed. They had simply listened, the way one listens for a footstep in the next room.

Nobody could say what they were listening to.

The land south of Dawnhollow lay quiet under a pale sky.

From above, it looked almost as it always had. The Wren curled through the fields like a silver thread. The hedgerows ran in neat green lines. Here and there a farmhouse stood with its door shut and its chimney cold. But the longer the twins flew, the more the details began to trouble them. The fields were unharvested, the barley standing brown and rotting. The cattle wandered loose, lowing, with no one to milk them. And in the lanes between the farms, they saw the small, patient shapes of the grey creatures, standing quite still in the open with their faces turned to the sky, as though they were waiting for something to fall.

"They are not hunting," Lyra said over the wind. "Look at them. They are watching."

"They are watching us," said Kaelen.

Below, a hundred yellow eyes tracked them across the heavens without a sound. Neither twin spoke again until the creatures were far behind.

They reached Brackwater a little after noon.

It was a river town, larger than Dawnhollow and far older, built on a spit of land where two streams met. Its houses climbed the slope in crooked terraces, and a great timber bridge arched across the water to a market island on the far bank. In happier times it would have been thronged with barges. Now the bridge was drawn up, and the terraces were silent, and a tall barricade of overturned carts and sharpened stakes had been thrown across the landing.

A woman stood atop the barricade, watching them descend.

She was perhaps fifty, with iron-grey hair cropped short and the lean, sunburnt look of a boatman. She carried a long staff tipped with bronze, and the air around her was damp and heavy, as though a storm were gathering close above her head. When the twins landed in the cleared ground before the stakes, she did not lower the staff.

"Name yourselves," she said. "And keep your hands where I can see them."

"Lyra and Kaelen of Dawnhollow," said Lyra, holding her palms out. "We carry a letter from our father, who leads the settlement, and a request for parley."

"Dorran's children." The woman's gaze flicked over them, sharp and unwelcoming. It lingered on Kaelen's gloved hands, and her knuckles whitened on the staff. "I know the name. Maren Teague. I keep the peace here, for what peace is worth. You will forgive me if I do not open the gate."

"We have not been touched," said Lyra. "We carry no sickness."

"You may not. But I have buried forty of my people this week, and I have learned not to trust the word of the healthy." Maren Teague's eyes narrowed. "That one has the look of it, though. The gloves. The eyes. Tell me, girl, is your brother what the rumours say?"

"What do the rumours say?"

"That the Ascendant of Dawnhollow can pull the curse out of the cursed." Her voice was flat. "And that it clings to him afterwards."

Kaelen stepped forward before Lyra could answer.

"It is true," he said. "Both halves of it."

A murmur ran along the barricade. Heads appeared over the stakes, pale faces peering down: boatmen, mothers, an old man with a cudgel. Maren Teague did not move.

"Then you understand why I am afraid," she said quietly.

"I do." Kaelen drew off one glove, slowly, and held out his bare hand. The black threads spiralled up from the wrist and vanished beneath the sleeve. "I will not lie to you. I carry it. But I have carried it for nine days and I am still myself, and I have freed twelve people from it. If you have anyone in your cellars or your sheds who has been taken, I can bring them back."

For a long moment, no one on the barricade spoke. The river chuckled quietly behind them.

Then, from somewhere in the crowd, a woman's voice rose, cracked and trembling.

"My son," she called. "My son is in the boathouse. Please. We could not kill him. We could not."

Maren Teague closed her eyes.

"Lower the bridge," she said. "Let them in."

Kaelen spent the rest of that day in a boathouse that smelled of tar and rotting rope.

There were six of them, bound with chains and plaited cord, half hidden among the stacked hulls. One was the woman's son, a boy of seventeen who had been a ferryman's apprentice. Another was Maren's own sister. He freed three before dusk, and Lyra stood sentinel at his shoulder, counting his breaths and wiping the sweat from his face, and neither of them looked at the black that had begun to climb past his elbows.

He stopped at three. Lyra insisted. When Maren Teague protested, she answered in a voice so cold that the older woman fell silent.

"Two a day was the agreement, and I have already let him break it. The rest will wait."

That night, in the common hall, Maren Teague sat with the twins over a thin fish stew and listened to everything. The seal, the dragon, the grey man in the pasture who could not be killed. When Lyra had finished, the older woman sat motionless for a long while, turning her spoon in the bowl.

"I will send people," she said at last. "Forty fighters, boats and all. Not tomorrow. I cannot strip the town, but within the week. And I will send word to the other river settlements. Some of them will come, some will not." Her mouth tightened. "I cannot promise Valdris."

"Valdris?"

"The Citadel has been closed since the second night." Her gaze moved to the window, and the dark beyond. "Their gates are shut and their banners are down. A boat went upstream four days ago to ask for grain. It did not come back."

The Citadel of Valdris was a mountain of grey stone, and it did not look like a place that welcomed visitors.

They reached it at dawn on the third day, after a night in the air. It rose from a high ridge above the plains, five concentric walls crowned with iron spikes, a hundred towers jutting like broken teeth. From a distance it seemed untouched. But when they came closer, Lyra saw the banners, torn down and trampled, and the scorch marks on the outer wall, and the bodies, dozens of them, hanging from the battlements in long, dark rows.

"They hanged them," she whispered. "Their own people."

"The ones who were bitten," said Kaelen. His voice was dull. "I think they are afraid of the same thing as Maren."

They landed before the great gate and waited.

It was an hour before anything stirred. Then the iron wicket cracked open, and a man stepped out in a black mail shirt, with a captain's red cord on his shoulder. Behind him, along the wall, a hundred crossbows rose in perfect unison.

"State your business," said the captain.

"We are the twins of Dawnhollow," Lyra called. "We have come to speak with your lord."

"Lord Castellan Voll does not receive guests."

"He will receive us."

"He will not." The captain's gaze slid to Kaelen's gloves, and something moved in his expression, a flicker of fear, quickly buried. "We know what you are. The rumour reached us a week ago. A man who carries the curse and walks among the living. You will be shot if you come closer. Go home."

Kaelen opened his mouth, and Lyra caught his arm.

"Wait," she murmured. "Look at the wall."

He looked. There, in the shadow of the third tower, a small figure had appeared among the crossbowmen. A young woman in a grey Ascendant's cloak, with a pale, narrow face and a fall of black hair. She was staring at Kaelen with an expression he could not read, but her hand was moving, slowly, against the stone of the parapet. Tapping. A pattern, short and long.

Lyra caught it before he did. "She is signalling. Come back at dusk. The east postern."

The captain barked an order. The crossbows tightened.

"Very well," Lyra called, with a deliberate show of weary defeat. "We will go. But tell your lord that Veyrath returns within the week, and that when he does, Valdris will wish it had opened its gates."

They rose into the air. Behind them, the gate boomed shut, and the long dark rows swayed gently in the wind.

It was only when they had dropped below the ridge, out of sight of the walls, that Kaelen noticed the shadow.

It lay across the foothills ahead of them, vast and slow, rippling over the grass like cloud. He looked up and saw nothing. The sky was clear. But the shadow did not move away, and the birds in the thickets had all fallen silent, and he felt, at the back of his skull, a faint, familiar cold, like a finger resting lightly on a bone.

"Lyra," he said. "Stop."

She did. They hung in the air together, listening, as the shadow crept closer.

Then a voice, deep and dry and not unkind, rolled out of the empty sky.

"Do not be alarmed, little ones. I have been waiting for you for three days, and I would very much like to talk."