INTO THE MISTLANDS

We left on a Tuesday, in a stolen cart, with a letter of leave forged in the Dean's hand.

I will not say it was a clean departure. The Gauntlet's recess is a formal affair, with a lottery for the draw of the next round and a ceremony of dismissal, and I had skipped both. Josie covered for me. She told the Marshal's clerk that I was ill. She told the Relay's press liaison that I had a family emergency. When pressed, she told a reporter from the Ravenport Courier that I had retreated to a monastery to find myself, and that I would emerge in six months with a vow of silence and a taste for goat's milk.

That one, I was told, ran on the front page.

I traveled light: a pack, a bedroll, Ashbrand at my hip, Hawk's old short-barrel, and a sack of dried meat. Nimbus rode on the seat beside me, wrapped in my spare coat, glaring at the countryside. The Shade sat on the tailgate, facing backward, with his hands on his knees, and gave a running commentary on every cow we passed.

We took the Ember-Rail north for two days, on a branch line nobody used, and then a steam-ferry across a gray lake, and then a rattling coach up a road that grew narrower, and rougher, and more neglected with every mile. On the fourth day the road ended in a landslip and a village of eleven houses, and a man with a single tooth sold us two mules at an obscene price.

On the fifth day we crossed into the Mistlands.

…

There is no border. I should say that. People imagine one, a wall or a line or a post, because it is a thing human beings do. But the Mistlands do not announce themselves. The edge of them is a gradual thing, a slow thickening of the air, a softening of the colors, a quiet gentle deadening of sound, as of a house in which someone has just died.

I noticed it first in the birds. They stopped singing. I noticed it next in my breath, which began to cloud, though the day was warm. Then the landscape began to dissolve. Trees became suggestions. The hills ahead grew soft and pale, then paler, and a low rolling white tide came pouring over them and swallowed the world.

By noon the mule's ears were the farthest thing I could see.

"This is a bad place," said Nimbus. He had burrowed into my coat until only his eyes showed. "I do not like how it smells."

"What does it smell of?"

"Of things that are not there."

I laughed, and the mist swallowed the sound.

…

The Mistlands were the country of the Gold Sigil. That was the first thing the Shade explained, riding at my side with his mantle trailing in the fog. In the early days of the Republic the highest-ranked mages had retreated there, to a region of such density of Mana that the air itself was alive with it. A Gold, he said, could live in those mists for decades. A Silver could survive a few weeks. A Bronze, unprepared, would be dead in an afternoon.

"Then why have I not been?"

"Because you have the Heart. The Heart does not drink Mana. It consumes it. The mist cannot overfill you." A pause. "This is the first and only time I will call your condition convenient."

"And the relic?"

"The Argent Relic." He turned his face toward me. In the white light he was a figure carved from pale stone. "Do you know what the Sigil is?"

"A mark. A rank. A brand."

"It is a vessel. A container. When a mage gains a Sigil she is not made stronger. She is made larger. The mark on your wrist is the rim of a cup, and the cup has a fixed volume. Iron is a thimble. Bronze is a mug. Silver is a pitcher." He gestured at the mist. "Gold is a cistern. But you cannot simply fill a cistern from a mug. You need to be remade."

"By the Relic."

"By the Relic. It is an old thing, a Silver-age artifact, built by the Founders' artificers to extend the vessel. It stretches the cup. It makes room." His tone was dry. "You have the Heart, which is a river. At present you are channeling a river through a mug. It will not hold. You have felt it already. The ache in your chest after the Field. The nosebleeds."

I had, in fact, noticed.

"And if I did not take it?"

"You would burst."

"I see."

"I am not exaggerating. Not much."

…

He taught me, in the white silence, to see.

It was called Ash Sight. The Doctrine described it as a trick of the Cinder: the ability to sense the heat of a living thing at a distance, a faint red glow of Mana that clung to every creature like a halo. In the clear air of the plain it was nearly useless. In the mist it was a lifeline.

"Close your eyes," said the Shade.

I did.

"Now breathe in. Slowly. Hold it." A pause. "Let the Cinder rise to your eyes. Not to the front of them. To the back. Behind the eye, where it meets the skull."

I did my best. I felt a prickle behind my eyes, a rising warmth. The mule shifted its feet under me. I opened my eyes.

The mist was still there. The world was still white. But in the white, faintly, there were colors: pale smears of red and amber, flickering like candle flames behind frosted glass. A large one, low to the ground, beside me. That was the mule. A small hot one on my shoulder. That was Nimbus. And beyond, at a distance, a tall dim shape of silvery gray, shot with veins of faint flame, which I knew to be the Shade.

I laughed. I could not help it. It was, quite simply, one of the most beautiful things I'd ever seen.

"Again," said the Shade, but there was something in the voice.

We went on.

…

On the sixth night the mist began to speak.

I should say show. It does not speak. But as the dark came down, a deeper dark, soft and thick and strange, I began to see things at the edge of the firelight. We had camped in the lee of a standing stone, an enormous lump of black basalt furred with lichen. I had made a small fire from the mules' dung. The flames were low, blue and spitting.

I was cooking beans when I saw my father.

He was standing at the edge of the light, just beyond the reach of the heat. He was in his shirtsleeves, as I had always remembered him, with a smear of oil on his forearm and a screwdriver tucked behind one ear. He was looking at me. He was not smiling, exactly, but there was a tender crease at the corner of his eye.

"Tam," he said.

I put down the spoon.

I did not move. I knew what it was. The Shade had warned me. The Mist takes the dead out of your heart and sets them in front of you. It is not malevolent. It is merely hungry. If you answer, it will keep you.

"Tam. Come here, girl."

He had been dead for eight years. Three in the first life and five in the second, if one counted by the odd arithmetic that I now used. I had loved him more than anything. I had been fifteen at his funeral. Hawk had put the screwdrivers in my hands and said, Call it even.

My eyes stung.

"Go away," I said.

"Tam."

"I know what you are. You are a fog. You are a lump of vapor with a good memory." My voice shook. "Go away."

He stepped closer. The light touched his face. He looked puzzled, hurt, tired.

"You never came to the grave," said my father.

I flinched.

"You went East. You never came back. I waited." He looked at his hands. "You said you'd be a great mage. You said you'd make the family proud. And I waited. And the Fairchild girl came with a letter, and said you had married, and I—"

"Stop."

"—I did not hear from you for five years."

"Stop," I said, and Nimbus cried out, and the Shade said sharply, "Tamsin."

I was on my feet. I did not remember rising. The beans were in the fire, spitting. My hand was on Ashbrand. The mist was pressing close, soft and cold as breath, and my father's face hung in it, pale, anguished, crumpling. He held out his hand.

I thought: If I take it, it will be warm.

I thought: It will be the last thing I feel.

And that was the thought that undid it. I had thought it before, once, in a stadium. It was a thought I knew very well. It was the thought of the dying: a hand, a hand, a hand to hold.

I let go of Ashbrand.

I sat down by the fire again.

"I did not come back," I said, aloud. My voice was low and flat. "That is true. I was a coward, and a fool, and I trusted the wrong person. I have no excuse. I don't want one." I looked at the shape in the mist. "But I'm not going to be kept by a ghost. I have things to do. I'm sorry, Papa."

The figure did not move.

"I'll come to the grave," I said. "When I'm done."

The mist trembled. For a moment the face seemed to waver and soften. Then, as a breath fades from a windowpane, it thinned, and was gone.

I sat there for a long time with my hands shaking. After a while the Shade said, quietly, "That was well done."

"It was not."

"It was the hardest of them. The ones that reproach you."

"Is it going to happen again?"

"Probably." A silence. "But you have done it once. The second is easier."

I looked into the fire. I thought of the Menagerie. I did not mean to. It rose in me unbidden, vivid and black: the sand, the jaws, the roar, the taste of salt and iron. For an instant I was there again, small and screaming, and the box was above me, white with watchers.

I shut my eyes. I breathed it down, slow and cold. I opened them.

"I'm all right," I said.

"I know."

"It's only a memory."

"It is only a memory," the Shade agreed. And then, after a pause that had a different weight in it, "But it is yours. And you are still here."

…

On the eighth morning, the sky cleared enough to show a sun the color of a pearl.

I woke stiff and cold, with a crust of frost on my blanket. Nimbus had wound himself around my neck like a collar. The mules were gone; they had pulled up their pegs in the night and wandered off, and I did not blame them. I packed the bedroll. I ate the last of the jerky. I was staring into a gully, wondering where in the white blank we were, when Nimbus raised his head and hissed.

"Wraiths."

I looked up.

They came out of the mist like the tide coming in. Pale, translucent, drifting, a dozen at first and then a score. They were roughly the shape of people, with tattered robes and long trailing sleeves, and where their faces should have been there was a sort of ragged whirling void. They made no sound. They moved with a slow, deliberate flow, spreading out in a half-ring across the gully.

"Mist Wraiths," said the Shade. "Gold-adjacent. The remnants of the sorcerers who died here. They hunger for the living."

"How many?"

"Twenty-six."

"And their weakness?"

"They are made entirely of structure. They hold their shapes by a series of knots." The pale eyes glinted. "I need not say more."

I smiled.

I drew Ashbrand and set my back to the rock, and as the first of the Wraiths floated toward me, its sleeves lifted, I felt the Field open around me like a flower. Warmth spread. The mist hissed and recoiled. I had never fought in it before. It felt like standing in a river of warm milk.

I was ready.

Then, from the other side of the gully, farther away, muffled by the white, I heard something that was not a Wraith.

Footsteps. Steady, human, unhurried. Boots on stone, in a rhythm I knew, from a thousand parade grounds. Several sets, in step. And a low voice, very distant, calling a rhythm.

I stopped.

The Wraiths hung in the air, waiting.

Out of the white, slowly, as a ship comes out of a fog, there rose the outline of a man. And another. And another. Dark shapes. Cloaked. Armed.

"Not monsters," said Nimbus softly. "Men."