Soulwoven: Exile

Chapter 28

~28~

Twenty-seven days before the destruction of Nutharion City

Litnig woke up with cold feet. His eyes burned. His arms ached. His calves felt cramped and tight, and a pit of unease writhed deep in his stomach, like a bed of snakes roiling endlessly. He rolled over, half asleep, and felt for the warmth of Maia's back with one arm.

His fingers grazed the slickness of ice.

Litnig opened his eyes. In the night, the cavern under the glacier echoed with the dripping of water, the cracking of ice, the rush of the unending gray river. From the shallow cup of his bed hole, he saw starlight through the frozen grotto's mouth.

Half the furs in the bed hole he shared with Maia were gone.

So was she.

"Maia?" he called.

Nothing.

Litnig sat up, pulled on a worn pair of deerskin moccasins, and stood. It took only a gentle pull at the River of Souls to ignite small spheres of light up and down the little cavern around him. The ice brightened in orange. Near the river, the forge stood dark and abandoned, its anvil quiet beside it. The flat space by the water where Maia had trained him was empty. By the mouth of the glacier, the hump of supplies they shared looked diminished.

She's gone, said his mind, but he didn't want to believe it. Maia had been acting strangely for a week. Every once in a while, he'd caught her looking somber, as though she was dreading something. He'd guessed that it was their departure from the glacier. Together.

Apparently, he'd guessed wrong.

A drop of ice water fell onto his head, but he scarcely felt it. His hair had grown shaggy and wild. An unkempt beard covered his face in places where before he'd always been careful to shave. His body felt strong and taut, and he was more free than he'd ever been in his life.

Yet his heart ached, and his fingers yearned for Maia.

He walked to the edge of the cavern and stood with his hand on a dirty chunk of ice. Below him the long gray-shadow sides of the valley beckoned. The stars swung above his head in clouds of thousands. In their grand, silent cacophony he recognized only the Abyss, hanging like an empty octopus of blue and black in the crowded eastern sky.

"Maia!" he called again, louder the second time, as big and as strong as his voice could make the name. The sound echoed from rock to rock, peak to peak, ice to gravel.

He saw a flash of gray down the valley.

"Maia!" he shouted again, and he flew after it, feet racing over dark paths, scrambling over sharp rocks and leaping gullies, following the river as it flowed out of the mountains and away from the ice and back into the world. The grayness stopped moving, a swatch of color at the side of a boulder. Her shoulder perhaps, or her leg...

But when he raced around the boulder and came face-to-face with the shape, he found only a marmot. It disappeared into the rocks with an indignant shriek.

Heart pounding, lungs heaving, he searched the night with wide eyes and found nothing.

"Come back," he whispered.

But Maia didn't return.

#

For six days, Litnig stayed under the glacier. For six days, he searched for a message hidden in the rocks, the ice, the supplies. Maia's touch was everywhere—in one place she'd laughed with him, in another scolded him or told him stories, hurt him, healed him, smiled and taught him to cook—but he found nothing. The sword they'd forged together lay in a scabbard she'd sewn for it, three and a half feet long from tip to pommel, four inches wide at the haft, sharp as a razor on the cutting edge.

It pained him to look too long at it.

Early on the morning of the twenty-first of Twelfthmonth, he dressed in warm furs, put the moccasins on his feet, hoisted his sword and what supplies he could carry, and set off down the valley. The sky was filled with layer on layer of gray, churning clouds. Mist covered the rocky skin of the mountains like a living thing, surging back and forth in the wind, swirling over the river and the rocks, and over him. He felt numb and purposeless, a weapon without a wielder. When he looked at the crumbling castle of blue-white ice that had watched him grow for two months, he found it difficult to breathe.

He turned and walked away.

By early afternoon, Litnig had reached the bottom of the valley, where the mountains gave way to a wide plateau covered in tall golden grasses. The clouds had quit the sky, leaving a depthless dome of warm blue behind. The sun shone big and bright, and he set down his sword and his supplies and basked in its warmth. He'd forgotten, in the mists of the valley and the world underneath the ice, how wide the heavens could be.

He wondered how much else he'd forgotten as well.

Cole, he thought. Ryse. He remembered a hundred variations of their faces. Warm and laughing, dark and angry, pained and desperate. The golden flatlands beckoned. So did the green and brown of a second range of mountains beyond. He heard birdsong on the wind, saw insects in the grass, smelled the sweet scent of early autumn dampness. It would be an eight-day walk to Du Fenlan, though he'd reach the first Aleani villages again in two.

His brother was gone forever; Litnig had accepted that during his months under the ice. Cole had fallen too far from shore. Even with Dil's help swimming, he wouldn't have survived the cold.

The fall still haunted his nightmares. He'd woken weeping and screaming his brother's name more than once.

But Ryse—

Wait for me, Ryse, he thought.

Litnig stepped into the grass and began to walk. The feathery tips of the stalks swept across his legs.

He had a feeling he would never return to the space beneath the ice.

But scarcely a day would go by that he didn't treadthere for at least a moment in his mind.