The Skeleth

Chapter 9

Ellí held a finger to her mouth. "Quiet. Stand right there, Edmund. Don't move. Watch my eyes."

Edmund could find himself looking nowhere else. Ellí's blue eye dilated, until the iris was a tiny strip of clouded sky encircling night. Her brown eye contracted to a pinpoint, a shaded forest where he might wander and lose himself forever.

Ellí reached into the sack slung at her belt. She drew forth dust—it glittered as she threw it high into the air. "ALL FLOWS, NOTHING STAYS. I PUT MY HAND INTO THE STREAM."

Edmund looked up. The dust arced and began to fall.

"BY MY WILL I TURN THE CURRENT." Ellí's voice took on a vibration that Edmund felt in his belly. "BY MY WILL THE FERMENT CURLS. ALL FLOWS, NOTHING STAYS. I PUT MY HAND INTO THE STREAM."

Edmund shuddered. He gaped. The bits of dust hung in the air. At first they seemed utterly still—but they descended, ever so slowly, their turning edges glinting, reflecting a light whose source he could not see.

"We can speak freely now," said Ellí. "No one can hear us here." The glittering dust turned and turned, stars winking on and off around her head.

Edmund felt as though a whisper and a shout would sound just the same. "Where are we?"

Ellí's voice seemed to come from behind him, even though she stood in front of him. "We are under the Sign of Obscurity."

Shadows—voices, presences—moved through the edges of Edmund's world. He felt a thrum beneath his feet. "I don't understand."

"Edmund, listen to me." Ellí's hair slipped free from the net that bound it. It cascaded around her face as though it had a will to move and flow, every strand of it a different shade, blown by a wind that Edmund could not feel. "Lord Wolland means to start a war. Indeed, he has already started it."

Edmund hissed. "A war? Then what is he doing in Elverain?"

"Every war needs allies."

The hairs on Edmund's arms stood up and stayed raised.

"Lord Wolland means to make war and he means to win." Ellí held a hand to her forehead, the palm over her blue eye, her face contorted as though in pain. "He has made a bargain to secure the aid of creatures that once came near to exterminating every man, woman and child in the north. He is in the service of the Nethergrim, and he does not even know it."

A trembling dread filled Edmund at the mention of the Nethergrim's name. He tensed and came to understand that he was waiting for the Voice to intrude upon his thoughts, even there under the Sign of Obscurity. "Why are you telling me all this?" he said. "What do you need me for, and how did you even know my name when we first met?"

"I'm telling you because I hope that you will help me." Ellí drew in a long breath through pursed lips and took her hand away from her face. "I need you because you thwarted the Nethergrim once already, and no wizard in centuries has been able to do that, no matter how well trained. I know your name because the wizard who taught me everything I know whispered it when she thought I was not listening." The blue in her eye had dilated to nothing, leaving a glassy void.

Edmund turned his head. He was nearly sure that he had heard the sound of his own voice in the distance, shouting or maybe screaming. He shuddered but tried not to let his fear show.

"The creatures whose power Wolland seeks are called the Skeleth, in the language that is mother to the tongue we are speaking now." Ellí picked up her skirts and turned to leave, and Edmund found himself following her, out through what might have been the doorway through which they had entered. "From what my teacher found in the archives of the Chancery down in the Tithe, the Skeleth threw down whole kingdoms into ruins in ages past. They serve the Nethergrim, killing and ravaging without remorse and without end, and if the legends are right, they cannot be defeated in battle."

A heavy tread broke the silence of the passage outside. "I swear I heard something! Ulf—hey, Ulf, get over here!"

Edmund leapt back from the threshold in fright. He looked wildly about him, but the low cellar chamber had only one door.

A young, tall castle guard poked his head into the cramped cellar chamber where Edmund and Ellí had hid themselves. Excuses for what they were doing down there raced through Edmund's mind.

"Be calm." Ellí put her hand on Edmund's arm. "Calm, now. Stay with me. They won't be able to see us."

An older guard, sallow-cheeked and balding, stepped in behind the first. He raised a torch, flooding the room with light. "What are you talking about, Gammel? There's no one here."

Edmund recoiled. He stood within arm's reach of the two guards, so close to the torch that he could feel the heat of its flame upon his face. The tall one turned to look right at him—his face took on hollow, frightening shapes—and turned away again, poking through the sacks and stores along the wall.

"The guard is nothing. He does not matter." Ellí did not even try to whisper. "Stay calm, and feel nothing."

Edmund fought down his fear. He glanced at Ellí. "Why can't they see us?"

"Their eyes see, but their minds ignore the sight." Ellí stepped out of the way of the path of the tall guard's search. "Their ears hear, but the sound means nothing to them."

Gammel pawed through barrels and sacks, walking right past Edmund again and again. "I heard something before, I swear I did! It's one of those Wollanders, I'll bet, snooping about the place."

"To do what, report to their lord on the state of our cheese supplies?" Ulf turned and left, bringing the torch with him. "I've had just about enough of you for one night."

Gammel shook his head, looking right at Edmund, then shrugged and followed his companion out.

"I've seen a spell like this before, but from the other side." Edmund caught up to Ellí on her way out of the cellar behind the guards. "I don't remember the dust, though."

"Every wizard makes her spells in her own way," said Ellí. "She finds her own balance and pays her own cost."

"What's the cost of your spell?"

"You have much to learn of our ways." Ellí winked at Edmund with the brown eye. "It's not polite to ask that sort of thing."

Edmund emerged behind Ellí into the courtyard of the castle. Echoes fled wide of him, and the night sky above seemed to ring and shake with the meter of his steps. He felt a shiver, fear and delight run together. "Can you teach me how to do it?"

Ellí smiled at him, though the ever-shifting visions of her spell smeared it out into toothy trails. "I'm just an apprentice myself, but if you would like to learn from me, I would be happy to teach you what I know."

Edmund had dreamed almost as many dreams about learning magic as he had about kissing Katherine. In most of those dreams, though, the teacher was a stern old master whose grudging respect was only slowly earned, not a friendly, lively girl scarcely older than he was himself. He could hardly believe his luck.

The browning remains of Lady Isabeau's garden seemed to curl and twist into the sky. A guard walked the parapet above the courtyard, and another coughed from atop the turrets of the keep, but they seemed to walk on empty trails into another world, and showed no sign that they had noticed Edmund and Ellí passing beneath their gaze.

The longer Edmund stayed within the spell, the easier it became to distinguish between the sights of his own world and the fragmented visions that trailed around them. He hurried himself to walk abreast with Ellí. "So where are we going?"

"Your lord Aelfric comes from an ancient family, older than the kingdom itself, in fact." Ellí ascended the narrow stairs that led up to the raised, narrow door of the keep. "All the legends tell me that when the Skeleth were last summoned, they ravaged someplace nearby to here. Lord Aelfric keeps a library, books he has inherited from his forefathers down through countless generations. If there are records left of what happened the last time the Skeleth were raised, they will be there."

"But that's in Lord Aelfric's private chambers!" Edmund recoiled from the empty sound of his own voice, and dropped to a whisper. "We can't just go in there!"

"We must," said Ellí. "The fate of all the north might depend on it." She did not pause at the door of the keep, and the guard posted there spared neither her nor Edmund a glance. Edmund felt a nagging tug of conscience, but Ellí swept on inside without an instant's hesitation, and he was not about to lose his new teacher so quickly.

The great hall roared with another night of noisy feasting. Edmund followed Ellí on tiptoes around the benches and past the hearth, taking care to avoid tripping over anyone on his way behind the tapestries at the back of the room. The narrow passage beyond led to a set of stairs that he took two at a time. When he reached the top, he pushed the door wide to enter the hallway above. Servants slept on rush mats in alcoves along the passage, huddled in pairs for warmth outside the bedrooms of the great folk they served.

Edmund turned back to Ellí and found a gleam in her blue eye that matched the thrill he felt. "I must admit—this is fun."

Ellí gave him a wink; he found her prettier on the brown-eyed side, somehow. "This is where I will need your help the most. I can't keep up this spell for much longer, so we should find what we need as quickly as we can. Start with the oldest stuff first."

"Right." Edmund guessed at which door to try and got it right the second time. "In here." He ushered Ellí into Lord Aelfric's private study and closed the door behind them.

"Look at all of this!" Ellí grabbed a pile of scrolls from the shelves and started flipping through the dirty, half-ruined pages. "There are scholars down in the Tithe who would kill for half of what's on this shelf alone. Would you light those candles for me?"

Edmund reached for the flint and tinder, lit the candles impaled upon the pewter holder, and dragged them close. He knelt at the bottom shelf and started searching. The words, glyphs and drawings under his fingers tempted and teased at him, seeming to crawl back and forth across the page beneath the swirling shadows of the spell. Ancient legends passed before his eyes, tales of the deaths of kings he had never even heard about, accounts of travels to places he had never known existed.

"Many centuries ago, after the fall of the Gatherers and the collapse of the great Dhanic empire, a wandering tribe crossed over the mountains from the west." Ellí spoke softly as she searched the highest shelf, her skirts swaying and dangling by Edmund's hands. "They found the remains of the old empire easy pickings, so they marched here in ever greater numbers, looking first for plunder, then for conquest."

Edmund picked up a book, then placed it aside—tax records. "Who were they?"

Ellí reached down to poke at Edmund's hair. "From all I have read, they looked a lot like you do. They were the old Pael, and we are speaking the child of their language."

Edmund pulled out a rather torn and tatty book from the shelf. He had to turn it facedown to hold it, for the stiff leather binding only remained on the front. The back side of the book was nothing but a ragged, ruined page, the ancient stitching along the edges coming out in fraying loops.

Edmund set the book on the thick oaken council table and turned through a few pages. "Ellí. Here."

Ellí bent to look. "This is it! Oh, well done, Edmund!" She read along in breathless fascination: "There came three kings, three brothers, three kinsmen of the Pael: Ricimer, Thodimund and Childeric the Fair; an axe-king, a sword-king and a king of tall spear. The brothers marched for mastery across the north, each taking for his queen a maiden sister of the Dhanu. Each king built a tower for his queen, a Pael tower by a Dhanu stone."

Edmund leaned in over the table. "Wait, go back. Read that last part again." He listened, then wanted to jump into the air from excitement. "There's a broken-down old castle on a hill beside my village. One of its towers is older and taller than the others, and it's next to a standing stone that looks older still."

Ellí's brown eye twinkled in delight. "And you wondered why I might need your help."

Edmund felt a blush creep up around his ears.

Ellí placed her hands on the book with an air of reverence. "This is the Paelandabok, the work of unknown hands in the dark years before the making of your kingdom. Bits and pieces of it survived as quotations in the works of other authors, but I don't think anyone outside Lord Aelfric's family has seen the original in centuries." She followed the closely scrawled text onto the other page: "A tower by the riverbend for the Queen of the Wheels, one within the mountain vale for the Queen of the Heart, and one in the fairest of the lands between water and wood for the Queen of the Thrice-Opened Eye."

Edmund leaned in to look at the words as Ellí read them. "No one remembers any of this, anymore. It's our own history, and we don't even remember it."

"Forgotten history is often repeated." Ellí picked up the Paelandabok and handed it to Edmund. "Go to the tower near your village. Find out what you can."

"Me?" said Edmund. "Just me?"

"Once my spell ends, I'll be under watch again." Ellí gave Edmund a pleading look, just as she had done out on the moors. "Edmund, it's up to you."

Edmund looked at the Paelandabok, then at Ellí. A sinking feeling came over him. "And we're taking the book. We're stealing a precious, irreplaceable book."

Ellí nodded her head. "I'm afraid we must."

"Come on, then." Edmund sighed. "It's not as though I've never done it before." He reached for the handle to the door—then leapt away again.

Ellí rose from her chair. "Edmund, what is it?"

"Hear that?" Edmund pushed Ellí back into the corner of the chamber. "Someone's coming!"

Stealthy footsteps shuffled to the threshold. Even though Ellí's spell still held, Edmund found himself pressing back toward the wall. The door swung slowly wide without a creak, and someone stepped into the room.

Edmund nearly dropped the book in his hands.

"Isn't that your friend?" Ellí stepped wide to let the newcomer pass on by. "The serving maid?"

Katherine wore her ill-fitting workdress, and the candlelight showed her dark around the eyes, the hollowness swollen by the shadowed whirl of Ellí's spell. She peered about her in wary confusion at the burning candles on the table, coiled and ready to bolt. She went back to the door and listened, and then with a look of tight fear on her face that made Edmund want to pop from the shadows and announce himself, she crept to the other end of the table and sat down in Lord Aelfric's carved and cushioned chair.

Ellí nudged Edmund. "Has that girl lost her mind? What is she doing here?"

The fire lit along the curve of Katherine's chin and sparked in the depths of her eyes. She pawed through the pile of parchments set in front of Lord Aelfric's place at the table, then pulled one out and set it before her. She leaned on one arm, staring down at it, then tucked back a strand of hair behind her ear, and Edmund saw the look of rising horror on her face.

Edmund came near to Katherine, passing around behind the backs of the chairs. She held a single scroll of parchment, elegantly scribed and fixed with a waxen seal. Her dark eyes scanned the words, once and then again.

Ellí nudged her way up beside Edmund. "What is that she's got? What does it say?"

Katherine put down the scroll, pale to her lips. She picked it up again, turning it to the light of the candle. Edmund read it over her shoulder:

From Edgar, Baron Wolland, to his most noble and excellent peer Aelfric, Baron Elverain, greetings, health and honor,

The Stag has been flushed from cover. The Duke of Westry sits in chains beneath the Spire at Paladon. Your name is whispered in council, amongst others whom His Grace the King has long suspected of treachery. Your rigid loyalties have cost you, as I have always told you that they would.

In the name of our long friendship, I extend one chance to you, one hope before the stroke that will fell not just you, but your legacy. I shall soon depart to visit your lands, traveling by an unexpected route. We will use the distraction of a tourney as a reason for my visit. When the time is right, I will ask you for something. You will give me what I want.

I offer you one chance only. Seize my hand—or fall, and young Harold shall fall with you. The king will not be merciful to traitors this time.

Do not think too long on this. I do not have the luxury of patience.

Given under my signet, from my castle at Norn, upon the quarter day of Woodmoon, in the fifteenth year of the reign of His Grace our glorious King,

Edgar

By the way, if there is anyone who knows what you have been plotting these last few years, I would keep a close eye on him.