The Skeleth (12 page)

“My lady? I've come to tend your fire.” Katherine prised back the door. The sound she had heard was the frantic scratching of pen on parchment. The fire in the hearth burned a bright purple-blue, fueled by a pile of veined, bone-white things that did not look at all like wood. Ellí sat hunched in a chair beside it with a book laid out across her lap, next to a spinning wheel and spools of carded wool. She scrawled across it with a fine quill pen, but did not seem to be looking at her work. Instead, she was shivering, rocking back and forth in a swaying loop, staring into the strangely colored fire.

Katherine entered and shut the door behind her. Ellí breathed in and out with a hissing shudder, like someone slowly freezing to death. A whimper escaped her lips—she came to the end of the page and turned it, then dipped her quill into an inkwell with a trembling hand.

Katherine stole up to the girl's shoulder. She leaned over to look, and could not help but consider the charms of her face. Ellí was neither plain nor pretty, but her brown eye flickered with a fragile warmth. She had a small mouth, set in a trembling bow, her teeth clenched over her lip.

—
seek to rule his mind.
Ellí scrawled in broad strokes across the page, as though racing to catch up with her thoughts:
Tempt him, bring him, draw him in with every lure.

Ellí paused. She moved her hand down a line and wrote again, slower than before and with a rounded, handsome script:
Yes, your eminence. I hear and obey.

Katherine felt her guts churn and tighten.

All else flows apace.
Ellí scribbled fast again.
Your Sisters and Brothers keep to their tasks. Do not fall behind.

Ellí paused a moment. Her lips twitched—half a smile—then she scribbled onward:

And good day to you, Katherine, daughter of John, the former Marshal of Elverain.

Ellí turned her face to Katherine. The effect made Katherine jump—Ellí's other eye, an icy blue, seemed lit up by a completely different intelligence than the brown. The expression on Ellí's face, which had looked like a desperate fragility, seemed revealed as a mask, a ruse—come closer, my dear, so that I might seize you by the neck.

Katherine's vision misted over in rage. She reached back a hand and smacked Ellí across the blue-eyed side of her face, hard enough that the noble young lady spun from her chair and dropped to the floor. Then Katherine raised the skirts of her workdress and kicked at the fire, scattering the strange white sticks. Embers whined, crying out like babies abandoned in the cold.

Ellí rubbed at her cheek. She sat up. “Who . . . what are you doing in here? The servants were told not to—”

Katherine grabbed Ellí by the loose folds of her dress. “Who was that? Who were you speaking to?”

Ellí hissed and struggled. “Unhand me. Let me go, you lowborn wench!”

“Hurt Edmund and I will kill you.” Katherine leaned in close. “I will spill your guts on the ground. Do not think for one moment that I won't.”

Ellí reached into her belt. “A
LL FLOWS, NOTHING
—”

“Enough of that.” Katherine wrenched the girl around and shoved her up against the wall, scattering the dust in her hand across the floor. “Now, you will tell me exactly what you were doing, what Lord Wolland is planning, and who you really serve.”

Ellí's blue eye contracted, the pupil disappearing under inward-crawling veins. “C
OME INSIDE, CHI
LD, COME INSIDE
.” Her voice took on a thousand ringing tones. “S
TEP
WITHIN AND FIND ME
.”

Katherine froze. A vision blotted her sight, shapes forming from the swirl of blue—eyes within eyes, snaking tails entwined and knotting, a mouth of cruel beauty, a spiral turning
ever inward to a point it never reached. A falling, flailing fear clutched at her, the feeling that had pursued her in her dreams every night since her escape from the mountain of the Nethergrim. She fell back shuddering, lost and alone.

She felt a blow to her leg, then another to her face. She staggered and lost her footing, tripped up by her workdress. She only just got out of the way of a flashing thrust; Ellí had a knife out. Katherine sprang back, planting her back foot, her father's lessons at swordplay drawing themselves out so clearly in her mind that she could hear his voice—
when your enemy has a blade but you do not, use everything around you for your defense. Never lose your footing, and wait for the overconfident strike.
She kicked the spinning wheel into Ellí's path, giving herself space to maneuver and a moment to get her bearings. Ellí came at her again, but this time she was ready. She twisted inward with the thrust, rolling out of the way and bringing down her fist on Ellí's forearm.

Ellí dropped the knife and broke away, making a desperate lunge for the door, but Katherine blocked her path. She made a clumsy feint that did not fool Katherine in the least, then backed into the opposite corner of the room, from which the only exit was the stairs that led up onto the roof of the tower. “No one will believe what you saw up here.”

“Edmund will believe me.” Katherine circled the girl, keeping her moving, waiting for her to step the wrong way. She kept watch on the movements of Ellí's body, averting her gaze from the spiraling blue eye.

Ellí grabbed for a skein of wool that lay beside the spinning wheel, then dodged backward and onto the stairs. She
threw it upward while holding on to the loose end. “I
MAKE MY FLIGHT FRO
M A THOUSAND FALLS.”
The thread in her hand drew taut, jerking her with sudden force into the air.

Katherine charged up the stairs, but just missed grabbing hold of the fluttering hem of Ellí's dress. Ellí flew high and away out of reach, off the roof of the tower and into the autumn clouds above. It happened so quickly that the lone guard on the turret, who stood watching the other way, did not even see her go, turning instead to blink in surprise at Katherine.

“You're not supposed to be up here,” he said. “What do you think you're—”

Something fell to strike the roof of the tower between them with a thump. The guard gaped at it, as did Katherine. A goose lay broken and dead upon the stones, and then another fell nearby, bouncing off the battlements and then tumbling down into the courtyard below.

“Father's thunder! What is this?” A voice rose from the courtyard, distracting the guard long enough for Katherine to duck back down the stairs.

“Edmund? Edmund Bale, are you still here?” She hunted around the inner ward of the castle, past servants and grooms standing in awed bunches around every fallen bird. Many of them stared up into the sky, but by then Ellí was long gone amidst the clouds.

G
eoffrey nocked his arrow. “Who's there?” He drew to the ear, staring out at the mossy scatter of stones that were all that remained of the gates. “Who's there?”

After a breathless moment, an answer came. “
Who.
” A winged shape glided past on the wind above the walls. “
Who, who.
”

Edmund dropped his guard and shot his brother a wry look as the owl flew past overhead. “You didn't have to come up here, if you're scared.”

“Shut your face.” Geoffrey relaxed his draw. “You're scared, too.”

Edmund sat down amongst the rubble of the gates. “Hold that torch a bit closer, will you? I can't make out the words.” He used a leaf to brush a caterpillar off the page and found his place in the crawling text:
Each king built a tower for his queen, a Pael tower by a Dhanu stone.

“It's here.” He looked out over the broad valley that sheltered
his village, the curve in the great river Tamber, the moon-touched pastures and fields of home. “It's here, it has to be.” He turned back to examine the Wishing Stone, then the jagged towers of the broken-down old keep around it, hoping to notice something he had never noticed before.

“There's the fire pit, just as we left it.” Geoffrey handed the torch to Edmund and walked over to an ashy depression a few feet from the Wishing Stone. He knelt to pick something up—a girl's shoe. “This is Emma Russet's.”

Edmund scanned the walls. “Has anyone ever been in that tall tower, that you've heard?” He pointed. “That one there, with the funny angles and those markings up the side.”

“I never wanted to see this stupid place again.” Geoffrey let the shoe drop into the grass. “Where's Katherine? Is she going to meet us?”

“Don't be such a baby.” Edmund brought the spitting flame of the torch as close as he dared to the parchment of the
Paelandabok
:—
the covenant was made, the king through his queen, thrice-sighted, thrice-blind. Horse by horse and hero by hero did armies fall before the Skeleth, They Who Crawl Below, they who are seen and yet unseen, form without substance, man and monster both.

“Geoffrey, have you ever heard of something called a Skeleth?” Edmund took up the tattered book and crossed through the overgrown grass beneath the crumbled walls of the old keep. “In the old stories, maybe, or from travelers at the inn?”

“You can't tell me you feel all right up here.” Geoffrey sat with folded arms beside the fire pit. “This is where the bolgugs
caught me and Tilly, and dragged us away to the Nethergrim. Peter Overbourne died just down the hillside, over there.”

“You are not helping me think, Geoffrey.” Edmund raised his torch as he approached the tallest tower. “If all you're going to do is moan and cry about—”

“You cry more than I do, so shut up about it!” Geoffrey leapt up with his fists balled tight.

Edmund recoiled. “I do not!”

“Yes, you do.” Geoffrey jutted out his chin. “You cry in your sleep all the time.”

“Liar! You take that back!” Edmund advanced on his brother, brandishing his torch—and tripped over something in the straggled grass.

“What's this?” He reached down and unwrapped the flappy thing from his foot. He held it up—a wide square of double-stitched cloth, embroidered in a simple peasant pattern and knotted at two corners.

Geoffrey blinked at it—and blinked, then turned away. “Tilly's shawl.” His voice broke. “That was Tilly Miller's.”

Edmund let the shawl flutter to the ground. The last time he had stood within the tumbled walls of the old keep, he had watched a pack of bolgugs drag Geoffrey and Tilly away to the lair of the Nethergrim. He had pursued and persevered and brought Geoffrey home safe again, but Tilly lay withered and dead, unburied in the mountains.

He turned to his brother. “Do I cry that often?”

“Every night.” Geoffrey kept his back to him. “I think you talk to it, in your dreams.”

Edmund's skin prickled and crawled. “Talk to what?”

Geoffrey turned a tear-marked, bitter look on him, then stomped away across the grass.

Edmund set the
Paelandabok
atop his folded cloak and drove his torch into the ground beside the Wishing Stone. He sat down and read on:
Childeric the Fair, king over men, reached his hand for kingship over that which men cannot rule. The iron-hearted king, golden-browed, he raised the most glorious standard ever seen beneath the grand tent of the sun, and yet was he brought low by That which dies and yet lives, That which reigns over all things hateful to men. He was betrayed by That Which Waits Within the Mountain—

A cold, horrible, familiar feeling crept over him.
That Which Waits Within the Mountain
—the Nethergrim, the Voice, the eyes within the smoke.

“I don't see how you can be so sure it's here.” Geoffrey startled Edmund from his unhappy trance. “No one really knows what the ancients were like, or why they did what they did.”

Edmund looked about him at the ragged, ruined walls. “The Pael tower by the Dhanu stone.” He ran his hand over the surface of the Wishing Stone, feeling out the carven symbols weathered nearly smooth by centuries of wind and rain.

Geoffrey's voice echoed from the far corner of the keep. “Here's the bolgugs, just where Katherine dragged them.”

Edmund glanced up to see his brother prodding at what was left of the bolgugs he had blinded with the very first spell he had ever cast, on that night two weeks before—only two weeks? It felt like a lifetime. The bolgugs lay sprawled beside
their crude, ugly weapons. Rain had come to wash their blue-black blood away. Something else had come to pick the flesh from their corpses down to the bones.

“Not so scary now, are you?” Geoffrey stood over the skull of a bolgug. His lip quivered, he trembled—then he seized the heavy, spiked club lying near and started smashing the skull to powder. “
Are you?
”

Edmund turned the
Paelandabok
to better catch the torchlight. “Geoffrey, come over here.” The symbols inked on the next of its pages seemed to match the faded designs on the surface of the stone. He traced out the symbols one by one upon the stone with his finger, while following along with the inscription in the book.

“Folk used to make wishes on that thing.” Geoffrey flopped on the grass next to Edmund. “I wouldn't touch that stupid rock now if you paid me ten gold marks.”

“Listen.” Edmund read the symbols aloud: “One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen. Mind-trust-truth, eyes-trust-lies. After that there is one of the Signs of magic, the Sign of Perception.”

Geoffrey wrinkled his snub nose. “Is that some sort of riddle?”

“I think so,” said Edmund. “The folk who lived here must have wanted to keep their knowledge hidden from the unworthy.”

Geoffrey rummaged through the bundle at Edmund's side. “People have been coming up here for years and years.” He pulled out another torch and lit it from the flame of the first. “I'll bet the oldest folk in Moorvale used to play around these
walls when they were kids, and their parents before them, back to who knows when. If there was anything to find, someone would have found it by now.”

“Don't be so sure.” Edmund read the symbols again: “One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen. The rest of it means something like ‘Trust your thoughts, not your eyes.'”

Geoffrey shrugged off the coil of rope he carried on his shoulder. “All the doors and windows of that tower look like they were bricked up ages ago, which is why no one's ever been inside it that we've ever heard about. How are you going to get in?”

Edmund stared at the blank-faced bricks of the tower. “One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen . . .”

Aha.

Edmund got to his feet. He shut the book—it puffed must into the air. “Here, hold this.”

“Ugh.” Geoffrey scrunched up his freckled face, but he took the
Paelandabok
from Edmund's hands. He beat bits of rot from the pages, then held it as though it could poison him by touch. “What is this thing, anyway?”

“It's a book.” Edmund paced out the distance from stone to tower. “I suppose it's too late to teach you how to read one.”

“I can read, you twit! I mean what sort of book? Where did you get it?”

Edmund returned to his brother. “Ellí helped me find it.”

“Who?”

Edmund looked up at the tower, guessing at the height of his mark. “Didn't you see her? Lady Elísalon—she's traveling with Lord Wolland.”

“Oh, her.” Geoffrey nodded. “Is she a friend?”

“She helped me get that book, didn't she?”

Geoffrey waited, though with little show of patience. “Aren't you going to do a spell, or something?”

“Learning how to be a wizard is more than just making a fire burst. It's thinking, it's figuring things out.” Edmund licked a finger and held it out to gauge the wind. “Didn't Nicky Bird try to climb that tower, back when he was our age?”

“He almost died in the fall,” said Geoffrey. “It's why he limps. He's always said that there was something wrong about that tower, that he should have had a good grip between the bricks, but then, all of a sudden, he didn't.”

Edmund felt a surge of excitement. “Did he ever say how high up he got?”

Geoffrey scratched his head—then pulled out a leaf that had gotten stuck in his mass of curly hair. “He's told the story so many times at the inn, I can almost recite it by heart. Right under that ring of funny carvings, there, just past halfway up.”

Edmund hopped into the air—Geoffrey was pointing exactly where he had hoped he would. He stretched out his hand. “Here, give me your bow.”

Geoffrey held his bow in close to his chest. “What for?”

“Just give it,” said Edmund. “It used to be mine, anyway.”

Geoffrey took a step away, then relented and slapped the bow in Edmund's hands. “Suit yourself, though I can't see what use
you'll
make of it.”

“Oh, you'll see.” Edmund drew back, took aim and let his arrow fly. It sailed up toward the mark—but then it veered sideways and disappeared into the night.

Geoffrey followed an infuriating pause with an even more infuriating look. “Were you maybe trying to hit the tower?”

Edmund snapped out with his drawing hand. “Shut it. Give me another arrow.”

“Why, so you can throw that one away, too? I've only got so many.”

“I said give me an arrow!”

Geoffrey put another arrow in Edmund's hand. “Then mind the wind—it's blowing sharp above the walls. You've got your feet too wide apart, by the way, and you're shanking the arrow with your thumb.”

“Don't tell me how to shoot.” Edmund planted his feet. He tensed up, drew back and let fly. The arrow whistled high into the air, never getting near the tower. Geoffrey had to hop aside to make sure it did not come down on his head.

“You're hopeless,” said Geoffrey. “You couldn't hit the broad side of a mountain.”

Edmund snarled and grabbed an arrow from the quiver on Geoffrey's back. He narrowed in his stance, aimed and let fly. His third arrow sped on an arc that looked as though it would strike right on target—but then it spun sideways and tumbled end over end out of sight.

Geoffrey held out a hand. “Just tell me what you want to hit.”

Edmund sighed and gave his brother back the bow. “The twenty-first brick, counting from the bottom.”

Geoffrey felt behind him for an arrow. “Why the twenty-first?”

“What's one plus one?”

Geoffrey crossed his arms. “Is this some sort of trick?”

“Just answer me,” said Edmund. “What's one plus one?”

“Two, of course.”

“And what's one plus two?”

“Three.”

“Two plus three?”

“Five!” Geoffrey scowled, but then his eyebrows raised. “Oh.”

“And five plus three is eight, and eight plus thirteen is twenty-one.” Edmund pointed up the wall.

“Right, right.” Geoffrey raised his head slowly, counting under his breath: “. . . eighteen, nineteen . . .” He nocked an arrow, drew back and shot, hardly even seeming to take the time to aim. The wind veered the arrow hard, but either by luck or design the gust pushed it right on target. The arrow sped to the spot on the wall that Edmund had marked—and went straight through.

Geoffrey gaped, then let out a
whoop
. “That stone, it's not even there! It's a spell! You knew it was just a spell!”

Edmund turned to him. “Good shot. Really.”

“That was brilliant!” Geoffrey thumped Edmund's shoulder. “You're brilliant! How did you know—”

It occurred to Edmund an instant too late that nothing in the riddle had told him exactly where the door was. The grass split, and the earth gave way beneath him. Geoffrey reached out and seized his collar, but then scrabbled at the yawning edge and fell in behind him. Torches and book, arrows, bow and brothers, all tumbled down and down together.