Chapter 1
Chapter 1.
Landon
Firelight flickered against the icy stones, covering them in glowing swathes of orange and yellow. It cast scattered shadows throughout the cave like encroaching fingers creeping along the walls.
Outside, the wind howled and shrieked. Snow came down in heavy flurries, painting the black of night a soft shade of grey.
Landon turned away from the dark, settling his gaze on the little girl bundled beneath a wolfskin bedroll. She was a few months past seven with curly black hair knotted at the back. Her eyelids drooped with exhaustion, but she forced herself to stay awake, watching the campfire’s flames as they diminished. A bouquet of wilting flowers.
The girl was Leanna. She had her father’s darker complexion and somber eyes, but her mother’s passion and fight. Unlike either of her parents, there was often a smile on her lips. Even in the midst of a snowstorm, as the temperature continued to drop and their chances of survival withered, she seemed happy.
“Tell me another story about the stars,” she said.
“Maybe in the morning,” Landon returned gently. He brushed his fingers through her tangled hair. “You need rest. We have a long road ahead of us.”
“Long, short. Hard to say in something like this,” said Taryn, their recently acquired traveling companion. A strange girl they’d found in the storm weeks prior. She sat before the fire, her face concealed by a hood. “Maybe there are no more roads left to travel. Maybe it’s all just snow and ice now.”
Landon shot her a hard look. She shrugged and went back to eating. Tough meat Landon had carved from her horse. It’d died not an hour before. Whether it froze or starved first, he couldn’t decide.
How long until they met a similar fate?
“Tell me about my parents,” Leanna begged. “Please!”
“No more for tonight,” Landon insisted. “Sleep now, stories later.”
The girl pushed away her blankets and crossed her arms over her chest. “Stories now, sleep later.”
He met her conviction with a blank, unwavering stare. That was the only way he could deal with her obstinance. The very same shade of stubborn as her mother.
The girl’s demeanor softened. “One more story, and then I’ll go to bed. Promise.”
Promises, he thought, that’s all we have. Promises and debts and a whole heap of loneliness.
With a sigh, he conceded. “Fine. One more, then not another peep out of you for tonight. Understood?”
Enthusiastically, she nodded and crawled back beneath the covers. When he tried to pull them up past her shoulders, she pushed them away again. “Too hot.”
“Impossible,” he said. “It’s cold enough to freeze the spit in your mouth.”
“Too hot!” she retorted.
Near the entrance, Taryn laughed around a mouthful of horse meat. “The girl’s right, y’know. She’s not like us. She burns hot at her core. Radiates like the sun.”
Again, his glacial gaze forced her into a mocking silence. It was hard enough to get Leanna to sleep without someone constantly distracting her.
“Do you want to hear more about the stars,” he asked, “or about your parents?”
The girl needn’t even consider it. “My parents!”
“Alright, your parents it is.” Landon leaned back against the rocky walls and thought. “Well, your father was one of the strongest men I’ve ever known. He could hack down a full-grown oak in less than four swings of an axe. And he did it without breaking a sweat.” Landon allowed himself a small smile. “I remember your father being perhaps the most serious person in the realm. Solemn to no end. But despite it all, he had love the likes you could not imagine.”
“And my mother?” Leanna asked.
“I was getting there,” he said. But in truth, the girl’s mother was much harder to talk about. “I remember your mother very well. Sharp and cutting like a blade. Fierce as a roaring inferno beneath all that ice. Ungodly passionate about the people closest to her. And she was smart. Adept at everything she put her mind to. A natural survivor.”
“Was she mean?”
“She could be,” he confessed. “Only if you deserved it, though.”
“And she was pretty?”
“Beautiful. Extremely beautiful. Deadly too.” He mulled this over a moment. “I’d say she was like a thorned rose, but she hated it when people made the comparison. Usually punched them for it. Hit me a couple of times when I was younger. Not too hard. And only on the arm.”
Subconsciously, Landon reached beneath his wolfskin cloak to the pouch on his belt. He removed a pair of melted goggles and held them into the light of the fire, turning them over and over in his hands. The leather was frayed with smudges of black. The spectacles beneath were cracked and dusted over.
“Your parents were good at heart,” he said ruefully. “They helped people. Protected the innocent against monsters. Refused to fight for a cause beneath their standing, and in the end, it cost them their lives…”
I cost them their lives, he thought.
When he looked up from the goggles, he found the little girl asleep. He placed the spectacles back into their pouch and stood, stretching his sore limbs. The cold seeped through his rawhide armor and into his flesh, erecting a wave of gooseflesh across his body. How she could refuse blankets was nothing short of absurd.
“You sound like you miss them,” Taryn said as he joined her at the fire.
She was maybe a few years older than him, somewhere in her mid-twenties. Wrapped beneath a cloak of deer skin and fox fur, it was hard to discern her size, but he imagined she must’ve been slender considering the hollow of her cheeks.
Beneath her hood, dark brown hair hung past her shoulders. She was olive-skinned with a prominent brow that was somewhere between studious and concerned, opposed by the nonchalant smile on her lips. The shower of freckles swept across her face was oddly redolent of the snowstorm outside.
He settled against the wall opposite her and closed his eyes. His stomach growled, but he was too tired to eat.
“You must’ve been close,” she continued. Reluctantly, he opened his eyes. “With her parents, I mean.”
“Maybe,” was all he said.
She frowned for a moment and tried another approach. “You make decent horse, y’know.”
“That’s because there is no right way to cook it. Might as well boil my boots and have that for dinner. It’s all the damn same.”
“Could do better at taking compliments though.”
“Maybe.”
He extended his legs until his feet sat at the edge of the campfire. Slowly, ice thawed from his bones, returning a sense of feeling to them. His head rested lazily on his shoulder, turned toward the mouth of the cave, watching the snow blanket the land. Inch after inch. Each layer another he would have to trudge through when morning came.
In the faint firelight, his hair was so blond it appeared almost white. It sat shaggy and thick on his head, sweeping down across his eyes. His face, hard at the jaw, was pale and dour. The same could be said about his eyes, a dull bluish tinge that remained untouched by light or warmth.
“It’s not looking good out there,” Taryn said, glancing out at the storm.
“Hasn’t looked good in almost a week, but we’ll get through.”
“Do you actually believe that?”
I have to, he thought. “Of course.”
She snorted. “You’re not a very good liar.”
“That’s ’cause I don’t like lying.”
“Then why do you do it?”
“Because sometimes a lie does more good than the truth.”
She ripped another piece of meat from the skewer. It was tough and required incessant chewing. Almost like trying to eat a piece of bark. He might’ve laughed if not for the severity of their situation.
“How long until we cook the other one?” she asked, gesturing to the horse at the entrance. A black stallion with ribs pressing against its skin. An empty expression on its long face.
“Might last us another day or so,” he said. “We’ll cook it when it dies.”
“I’ll have to be careful. Elsewise, I’ll get addicted to this stuff.”
“We make it through this,” he said, “I’ll buy you the fattest horse I can find. You’ll eat for weeks. If you can call that eating.”
She scoffed. “We’ll make it.”
He lifted his head, a look of awe in his eyes. “I can’t tell if you’re lying or not.”
“That’s because I’m not dog awful at it like you,” she said. “And just so you know, I’m not lying.”
If she wasn’t lying, then she was a fool. That, or she knew something he didn’t.
“You know, it’s funny,” said Taryn. “You act like someone who wants nothing more than to be alone.”
“Is that so?”
“But if that were the truth you wouldn’t be lugging around almost five stones in that cute little basket on your back.”
“Her legs get tired.”
“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
Taryn smiled. “You don’t want to be alone. No one does.”
“Not even you?”
“Not even me.”
Somehow, he found the strength to grab the last skewer from the fire and tear at the unseasoned horse meat. It was bitter and foul, but it would keep him alive a little while longer.
He couldn’t afford to die now. In fact, he had promised someone long ago that he wouldn’t allow himself to perish until he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that Leanna was safe. An easy promise to make at the time, considering it was a deathbed vow, but now, he was beginning to realize how baseless a folly it truly was.
“Is that what brought you into the mountains?” he asked. “So you could stave off loneliness?”
Taryn tittered. “There are much easier ways to satiate loneliness, but when I see an opportunity present itself, I can’t resist.”
He wondered if it had been a mistake not to pierce her through the chest with his longsword the first time they’d met. There was still time to do so, if he deemed it necessary. She wouldn’t be the first he killed, but she might just be the last.
“If that’s not it,” he said, “what madness compelled you to ride into this storm?”
Before she could answer, there came a soft plodding of galloping horse hooves. Old rickety wheels trundling against the snow. Landon and Taryn watched from the cave’s mouth as a boxy silhouette emerged from the night.
“An answer for another time,” Taryn said quietly, standing.
Landon joined her, reaching for the longsword beneath his cloak. He stepped from the cave into the snowfall, collecting a dusting of white on his shoulders. His blade hissed from its scabbard.
Unlike many others, he wore a baldric as opposed to a casual sword belt. Its leather arms wrapped around his shoulder and hugged his waist for stability. A bit of a process to strap on or remove, but at least he didn’t struggle to get his sword drawn in the heat of the moment.
That had been something of an issue in his younger years.
“Stay in the cave,” he whispered over his shoulder.
“Wonderful idea,” Taryn remarked. “Much warmer in here anyhow.”
Carefully, he inched through the snow. His steel gleamed against the fragments of moonlight peering through the clouds.
The sound of horse hooves grew louder by the second, rousing their sole remaining steed from its sleep. He turned to soothe the beast, but it was already on the run, sprinting into the endless void and consigning itself to death.
“It seems our horse has fled,” Taryn called out to him.
“You don’t say!”
“Was I supposed to stop it?”
“Why didn’t you tie the damn thing up?”
“To what post?”
Before he could reply, the carriage had appeared. It was without a rider or horses. Pulled by some unseen force. When it was about ten feet away, it quickly turned to the right, presenting its side entrance to them.
The carriage came to an abrupt halt, kicking up a faint cloud of smoky snow. The outside was a dark wood material with wrought iron fixings. The edges and window frames were painted gold, and the curtains were a deep red velvet.
Landon held his sword out before him. His breath misted the air. Seconds ticked away as he waited. The coach remained still as the dead. The door on either side frosted shut.
“Who goes there?” he called out.
A lantern sparked to life from inside the cab. The door suddenly sprang open, followed by metal plates unfolding into narrow steps. He approached with caution, peering in through the open doorway.
The inside was outfitted with twin leather seats facing each other. Around the top was a shelf for luggage. There seemed to be a bat insignia painted on the ceiling, but after so many years, its image was beginning to fade.
“Who is it?” Taryn’s voice snuck through his ear, and he leapt away, turning his blade toward her. “Oh, didn’t mean to frighten you? Truth be told, I didn’t think you could be frightened. You put on such a stoic facade, I thought maybe you were half-dead already.”
Her footsteps had been soundless. Or had his heart been beating too loud?
She examined the carriage a moment before climbing inside. When he tried to stop her, she disregarded him with a lazy wave of her hand. “It’s nice. Warm too somehow. Royalty, perhaps.”
He sheathed his weapon and rounded the front. “There are no horses,” he called.
Taryn poked her head out and looked to the front. “Huh…that is interesting. Have you seen the leather on these seats yet? Such an elegant shade of purple.”
“There are no horses.”
“Yes, yes. I heard you the first time.”
“Don’t you find that odd?”
“Extremely odd,” she said mockingly. “No rider either, but I suppose that is less strange to you.”
“Get out from there,” he said.
“Why?”
“Why?” He stared at her, unblinking. “There are no horses pulling this carriage.”
“And monsters lurk in the night.” She leaned against the doorframe, her cloak fluttering in the wind. “If you ask me, we’re short on options. We can stay in the cave and freeze to death, or…”
“Or?”
“Or we can see where the carriage takes us. Hopefully somewhere warmer and far more comfortable than here. Possibly with an abundance of actual food. Not that your cooking hasn’t sufficed.”
He was going mad. This woman was making him insane. Or maybe it was the world itself. A thought for later, if later came.
“There are no horses,” he said again, enunciating every word carefully. “There is nothing to pull this carriage.”
“The carriage drives itself. Quite auspicious considering we no longer have any horses left to offer.”
“Is this a joke to you?”
“Does it seem like I’m laughing?”
“It seems like you’re willfully ignorant of what’s happening.”
She considered this. “Seems like you’re being willfully ignorant about our current predicament. Like I said: we can stay and die, or we can let the magical carriage take us away from this pit of despair…and maybe not die. If we’re taking a vote on the matter, I say we go where certain death is not.” Taryn paused a moment and added, “I also think we should give Leanna a vote.”
Only because she would side with you, he thought.
Ever since they’d met the strange woman, Leanna had developed an unusual fondness for her. Perhaps some maternal desire that was greatly lacking for the last seven years of her life.
“Fine, we’ll take the carriage,” he said. “But neither one of us sleeps during the trip. We need to be awake and alert for whatever might come.”
“Deal!”
