—Final letter of King Delamore to his general

Adelina Amouteru

Gray clouds blanket the skies the next morning, clear warnings of snow, stretching as far as the horizon. As Maeve leads two riders out ahead to check our path, I sit with Magiano, chewing on strips of dried meat and hard bread. Around a nearby fire, Raffaele sits with his cloak gathered tightly about him, talking in low voices with Lucent. Teren sits alone, ignoring us all.

Magiano is in a dark mood, no doubt brought on by the cold and gloom. Without his joy, I find myself fending off the whispers in my head more than ever, struggling to stay sane. You will lose yourselves in the snow and wilds, they are saying. You will never return. Beside me, Violetta lies unconscious, shivering uncontrollably, under a pile of furs and blankets. Hard as it is to see her like this, I am glad that she is shivering. It tells me that she is still alive. I reach out and rest my hand on the furs.

“At this rate,” Magiano mutters, pulling me out of the depths of my thoughts, “we won’t see blue sky again until we leave this place.” He turns his eyes to the sky and utters a loud, mournful sigh. “What I wouldn’t give for a little Merroutas warmth and gaiety.”

Maeve and her riders return as we are finishing our breakfast. “The paths are covered with ice,” she says as we load our packs onto our horses. She catches Lucent’s eyes for a moment, and something unspoken passes between them. “But they are otherwise clear. The snow breakers have already been through.” I notice the queen touch Lucent’s boot briefly before heading to her own mount. There is a new closeness between them.

Nearby, Magiano and Raffaele help me secure Violetta on a stretcher behind two of Maeve’s horses. She stirs restlessly as we go, murmuring something that I can’t understand. Her markings look darker now, almost black, as if Moritas were slowly claiming her body for the Underworld. I grit my teeth at the sight.

Magiano watches me as I stand beside Violetta’s stretcher. “She’ll make it,” he says, placing a hand on my arm, but I can hear the doubt in his voice.

As we near the paths that lead into the first mountains, the narrowness of the valleys starts to funnel the wind, so it bites our cheeks and cuts through every gap in our clothing. I tie my hood down tight over my head and try to pull my cloak higher to cover the lower half of my face. Even then, my breath freezes against the cloth, creating a patch of white frost. With the wind come the whispers, howling against my ears with every blast. Their words are such a jumble, I can’t understand what they’re saying, but they send my heart racing until my shoulders sag from exhaustion. Now and then, I think I see dark silhouettes standing in the crevices of the mountains, watching us with sightless eyes. I can only see them in the edges of my vision—when I turn my head, they vanish.

Magiano continues to frown at the sky. “Is it just me, or is the sky turning darker?” He nods up at the clouds. “The clouds aren’t growing any thicker—it just seems as if the day were passing more rapidly than it should.”

I glance up too. He’s right. What should be the light of a midday sun hidden behind clouds looks instead like the sun is already setting. The shadows in the valley deepen as we go, stretching around us in muted shapes as the mountain ranges around us turn steeper. The path beneath our horses’ hooves crunches with frost and ice.

I lose track of how many hours we travel in this strange twilight. We all stay quiet. I ride behind Violetta’s stretcher so I can keep her in my sights. Now and then, her eyes open, gray and uneasy, but they never seem to focus on anything or anyone. It is as if she has already gone somewhere else.

She’s still here, I tell myself. But the whispers in my mind now sound like they are the wind, drowning out my thoughts, and my exhaustion and worry settle into a frenetic beating in my heart. This must be the way the origin’s pull is affecting me.

That night, a night that seems to fall prematurely, we stop in a hollow that shelters us partly from the elements. The wind is furious in this narrow pass, making it impossible for us to pitch a proper camp. Our horses are listless too, huddled together for warmth close to the fire we’ve built.

“The early twilight will come more frequently in the days ahead,” Raffaele says as we all gather around him. He draws one curved line through the dirt with a stick, then notes several spots along it, including our location. “We are getting closer.” He points to a spot at the top of the path, nestled between two mountains. “The Dark of Night.”

Raffaele speaks with calm and grace, as he always does, but even his voice seems to carry underneath it a current of doubt. My hand lingers on top of the furs blanketing Violetta, who stirs uneasily in her fevered sleep. We are headed toward a realm known only in legends and folktales. What will happen when we arrive?

“The laws of our world may bend and stretch there,” Raffaele says after a moment. “Things may not be as they appear. We’ll need to be careful.” At this, he glances my way. “I feel the pull of this place. Can you?”

I nod. Around me, the others do the same. My gaze wanders to where Teren sits a short distance away, his cloak undone, seemingly oblivious to the cold. He is methodically sharpening his sword and knives. My whispers are growing stronger, while an air of darkness seems to hover around Magiano. Violetta is fading, and Raffaele’s senses are being overwhelmed by threads of energy from every direction. What must Teren feel here, so close to the origin? Will this journey drive him even closer to madness?

Before we settle in to rest for the night, I ask Maeve to set up extra sentries around Teren. Even then, I still find myself waking at odd hours and looking in Teren’s direction, wondering whether I will see him snap.