Chapter 18 : EIRA - The Northern Road (Again)76Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ7bKU1u5ice
The village was dead before they reached it.
Eira knew the signs. She'd been reading them since she was old enough to hold a bow—the way the smoke rose too thin and too black, the way the silence pressed against the trees like a held breath, the way the birds had stopped singing. The wrong-sense prickled at the back of her neck, the same way it had when the Lament came, the same way it had when Laena's body washed ashore with sea lavender in her hands. Something bad had happened here. Something worse than bad.
"Stop," she said.
Vail pulled his horse up beside her. His face was grey with exhaustion—he still hadn't slept, despite her orders—but his eyes were sharp. "What is it?"
"Smoke. Too dark. Too thin. And there's no sound. No dogs. No voices. A village this size should be making noise."
Liska reined in the cart, her flask halfway to her lips. She lowered it without drinking. "Fuck. You think it's the plague?"
"I think we should find out before we ride any closer." Eira dismounted, her boots sinking into the crusted snow. Her hand went to her obsidian knife—habit, now, as natural as breathing. "Father, with me. The rest of you, stay here. If we're not back in an hour, assume the worst."
"The worst being what, exactly?" Sersha asked. Her missing ear was a pale scar in the grey light, and her hand was on her sword.
"The worst being a mad god. Or Yska's puppets. Or something we don't have a name for yet." Eira looked at Vail. "Keep the cart ready to move. If we come running, don't wait. Just go."
"I'm not leaving you."
"You're not leaving me. You're protecting the equipment. The siphon. The god-death residue. The things we need to kill Yska." She met his eyes. "That's an order, Prince. You said you were trying to be human. This is what humans do. They trust each other."
Vail held her gaze for a long moment. Then he nodded, a short, sharp motion. "One hour. If you're not back by then, I'm coming after you."
"Fair enough." She turned to her father. "Ready?"
Eirik was already off his horse, his hunting knife in his hand. He didn't speak. He didn't need to. His face was the same stone it had been since Frostwake, since Laena, since the Lament. He'd lost his wife, his niece, his village. He wasn't going to lose his daughter. Not without a fight.
They walked into the trees.
The village was called Broken Ford, according to the map. It was a small settlement—maybe thirty longhouses, a fish-smoking shed, a god-post at the centre of the common ground. The god-post was the first thing Eira saw when they emerged from the treeline. It was snapped in half, the driftwood pale and splintered, the spiral carvings cracked along fault lines that oozed something dark. The ichor had frozen in the cold, black icicles hanging from the broken wood like frozen blood.
The bodies were everywhere.
They lay in the snow where they'd fallen—men, women, children, livestock. A milk cow sprawled on its side, its udder bloated and purple, its eyes pecked out by crows that had fled when whatever happened happened. An old man slumped against the wall of a longhouse, his mouth open, his hands raised as if to ward something off. A young woman face-down in the snow, her skirts rucked up around her hips, her bare legs blue-white. Someone had tried to run. Someone had tried to hide. It hadn't mattered.
"What killed them?" Eirik asked. His voice was steady, but his knuckles were white on his knife.
"I don't know. Look at the wounds." Eira knelt beside the old man's body. His face was untouched, peaceful almost, but his chest—his chest was caved in. Not stabbed. Not slashed. Crushed. As if something enormous had stepped on him. "The Lament did this at Frostwake. The same kind of damage. A god walked through here."
"Which god?"
"The stone-watcher." She stood, looking toward the far end of the village. A shape loomed there, grey and motionless, half-hidden by the drifting snow. "It's still here."
The stone-watcher was a small god, as gods went—maybe twelve feet tall, hunched and broad, its body carved from the same grey granite as the mountain behind the village. It had been a boundary guardian, Eira guessed. The kind of god that protected crossroads and marked territory. The kind of god that was supposed to be too small to go mad.
It was kneeling in the snow, its head bowed, its stone hands pressed flat against the ground. It looked like it was praying. But its eyes were open—two deep hollows, black and empty—and its mouth was moving. A low, grinding mutter that vibrated in Eira's teeth. The same sound the Lament had made. The same fractured, stolen words, stitched together without sense.
"...the bride wore grey wool and her hands were cold cold cold but the salmon run was good that year and I buried my son on the hill..."
"Gods," Eirik breathed. "It's still killing them."
"No. Look at the bodies. They've been dead for hours. It's just... talking. Remembering. It doesn't know what it did."
The stone-watcher's head turned toward them. The movement was slow, grinding, the sound of rock scraping rock. Its hollow eyes fixed on Eira, and its mouth opened wider, and a voice came out that wasn't its own.
"...the cold was the first word, and the cold will be the last... the girl who wounded one... she carries the key..."
"Yska," Eira said. "It's speaking with Yska's voice. Like Sigrid. Like the patients in the ward."
The stone-watcher rose. The ground shook with the weight of it, and the broken god-post creaked and swayed. It took a step toward them, its stone hands opening, its mouth still muttering.
"...find the girl... find the key... open the door..."
"Eira," her father said, his voice tight. "We need to go."
"Not yet." She drew her obsidian knife. The blade was cold in her hand, cold in a way that had nothing to do with the weather. "It's still in there. The god. The real one. Buried under Yska's voice. I can feel it."
"You can't save it."
"I can try."
She stepped forward, raising the knife. The stone-watcher's hollow eyes tracked her, and its mouth kept moving, and the voice kept pouring out—Yska's voice, patient and hungry. But underneath it, buried deep, Eira could feel something else. A flicker of the god that had been. A fragment of the guardian that had protected this village before the plague took it.
She slashed the blade across her left palm. The wound was still fresh from the crow-warden, the stitches pulling, the infection barely healed. Fresh blood welled up, hot and red, dripping onto the snow.
"Take this," she said. "Not Yska. You. The stone-watcher. The guardian. Take this and remember what you were."
She pushed the memory forward. Not her mother's death—not this time. Something smaller. Something sweeter. The memory of Aren learning to walk. His small, unsteady steps across the longhouse floor. The way he'd laughed when he fell. The way she'd caught him before he hit the ground.
The stone-watcher stopped. Its mouth closed. Its hollow eyes flickered—black to grey, grey to something almost clear. For a single, trembling moment, the god that had been looked out at her.
"...thank you," it whispered. Its own voice. Not Yska's. Its own.
Then it crumbled. The stone cracked along fault lines that had been hidden under the ichor, and the god collapsed inward, its body shattering into a pile of grey rubble. The ground shook once, and then there was silence.
Eira stood over the rubble, her bleeding hand dripping onto the snow. Her chest was heaving, and her eyes were wet, and she didn't know if she'd saved the god or just helped it die. Maybe there was no difference anymore. Maybe mercy was just another kind of killing.
"Eira." Her father's hand was on her shoulder. "We need to keep moving. There might be more of them."
"There aren't. The village is dead. The god is dead. Yska's already moved on." She wiped the blood from her knife and sheathed it. "But someone's still here. I can feel it."
She walked past the rubble, toward the far end of the village. The longhouses here were smaller, poorer—fishermen's huts, hunters' cabins, the kind of dwellings that belonged to people who'd never had much and now had nothing. She stopped in front of one that was still intact, its door hanging open, its interior dark.
A sound came from inside. Small. Faint. A whimper.
Eira stepped through the door.
The interior was dim and cold, lit only by the grey light through the cracks in the walls. A fire had burned down to embers in the hearth, and a pot of something that might have been stew had frozen solid. In the corner, a crib. Rough-hewn wood, patched blankets, a mobile of carved fish dangling from the ceiling.
And inside the crib, a baby.
It was small—maybe six months old, Eira guessed, its face pinched and pale, its fists clenched. It was crying, a thin, exhausted sound that barely carried. It had been crying for hours. It had been alone for hours. But it was alive. It was alive, and it was untouched, and that was impossible.
"Eira." Her father was behind her, his voice low. "The god—the stone-watcher—it killed everyone in the village. Every man, woman, and child. But it didn't touch this one. Why?"
"Because it couldn't." Eira lifted the baby from the crib. It was cold—too cold—but its heart was beating, and its lungs were working, and its small, dark eyes blinked up at her with something that might have been recognition. "The baby hasn't tithed. It has no memories to feed on. Yska can't touch it."
"How do you know?"
"Because the Lament didn't touch Aren. It crushed everything in its path, but it didn't touch him. He was too young. The covenant marked everyone who gave memories. The covenant marked everyone except infants."
She wrapped the baby in a blanket from the crib and held it against her chest. Its crying quieted, and its small body pressed against her, warm and fragile and impossibly alive. She thought about Aren—his small hands, his wet bedsheets, his silence that was worse than screaming. She thought about the boy at the tithe ceremony in the capital, his face slack, his mother's guilt. She thought about her own mother, grey and still on the birthing bed, and the weight of Aren in her six-year-old arms.
"If we can stop the tithes," she said, "maybe Yska starves. It only feeds on memories that were given. It can't take. It can only receive. That's the weakness. That's the flaw in the prison. Yska doesn't take memories. It's given them. For five hundred years, we've been feeding it willingly."
"Then we need to tell the Prince."
"Yes." She carried the baby out of the hut, into the grey light, past the rubble of the stone-watcher and the bodies in the snow. "We also need milk. And blankets. And somewhere safe to leave this child before we march into the Frostwood."
Her father looked at her, his face unreadable. "You're keeping it."
"I'm not leaving it to die. That's what the old world would have done. The covenant world. The world that fed its children to gods and called it protection." She held the baby tighter. "I'm building a new world. One where we don't sacrifice the innocent."
"That's a lot to carry."
"I've been carrying heavy things since I was six. This one's light."
They found milk in the village's only surviving goat, a scrawny, shivering animal that had hidden in the fish-smoking shed when the stone-watcher came. Eirik milked it while Eira fed the baby with a rag dipped in the warm liquid. The baby drank greedily, its small mouth working, its dark eyes never leaving Eira's face.
Liska found them there. She'd ignored the order to stay with the cart—of course she had—and she stood in the doorway of the hut with her flask in one hand and her surgeon's kit in the other. "You found a baby."
"We found a baby."
"In a village full of corpses. With a mad god kneeling in the snow."
"The god's dead. The baby's alive. And I think I know how to kill Yska."
Liska took a long swallow from her flask. "Fuck. Of course you do. You've been here an hour, and you've already solved the plague." She crossed the room and knelt beside Eira, her sharp eyes examining the baby. "Healthy. Hungry, but healthy. No signs of the plague. No black ichor. No white eyes. No muttering."
"Because it hasn't tithed. Yska only feeds on memories that were given. The covenant marked everyone who participated in the tithes. The baby is clean. Aren is clean. Everyone under the age of first tithe is clean." Eira looked up at her. "If we can stop the tithes—if we can starve Yska of new memories—it might weaken. It might be vulnerable."
"That's a theory."
"It's a good theory."
"It's a fucking excellent theory." Liska sat back on her heels. "But it doesn't solve the immediate problem. Yska's already strong. It's been feeding for five centuries. Starving it now is like trying to starve a bear that's already eaten a whole village. It might work eventually, but not before it eats you."
"Then we need to hurt it directly. With memories it can't digest. With pain tied to love and loss. The same thing I did to the Lament, but stronger. Harder. Something that doesn't just wake it up—something that makes it recoil."
"Your mother's death."
"Not just my mother's death. Everyone's. Everyone in our group has a memory that hurts. My father has my mother's death, too—he was there, he saw it, he screamed. Vail has his mother's death, even if he can't feel it. You have something. Sersha has something. Torrin must have something. We all have something. And if we feed them to Yska all at once—a flood of pain, a flood of grief—it might be enough."
"Or it might just wake Yska up more. Like you did with the Lament."
"Then we need to find the prison first. We need to understand what we're dealing with before we start feeding it memories. Sigrid is ahead of us—she's been walking north for days. She might already be there. And the Lament is there too, waiting."
Liska was quiet for a moment. Then she took another swallow from her flask and offered it to Eira. "You're seventeen years old. You shouldn't have to carry this."
"I've been carrying heavy things since I was six. This one's just a different shape." She took the flask and drank. The brandy burned going down, a clean, sharp pain that cut through the cold. "We should get back to the others. Vail will be worrying."
"Vail's always worrying. It's his primary function." Liska stood, brushing snow from her knees. "What about the baby? We can't take it with us."
"No. But there's a waystation a few hours south. We passed it on the road. It's empty, but it's got walls and a hearth. We'll leave the baby there with supplies. Someone will find it—there are still travellers on the north road, even now. Someone will take it in."
"Or it'll die."
"Or it'll die," Eira agreed. "But it'll die warm and fed. That's more than it would have had if we'd left it here."
She wrapped the baby tighter and carried it out into the grey light. The snow had started again, light flakes drifting down from a sky the colour of old iron. The bodies lay where they'd fallen. The rubble of the stone-watcher was already dusted with white. The goat bleated from the fish-smoking shed, and Eirik led it out on a rope.
"Taking the goat," he said. "For the milk."
"Good. We'll need it for the baby." Eira looked at him. "We're stopping at the waystation on the way back. Leaving the baby there. It's the best we can do."
"I know. You don't have to explain."
"I'm not explaining. I'm just... saying it. Out loud. So it's real."
Her father put his hand on her shoulder. His face was still stone, but his eyes were wet. "Your mother would be proud of you. Taking in strays. Saving babies. Killing gods."
"She'd be furious. She always said I took on too much."
"She said that because she loved you. Because she didn't want you to break." He squeezed her shoulder. "You didn't break. You're still here. Still fighting. That's all any parent wants."
Eira didn't answer. She couldn't. The words were stuck in her throat, lodged there like a splinter of ice. She just held the baby tighter and walked toward the horses, toward the cart, toward Vail and Sersha and Torrin and the long road north.
They reached the waystation at dusk. It was empty, as Eira had known it would be—the same one they'd passed on the journey south, the same one where the wounded soldier had died with a ruined jaw and a message about the cold. She built a fire in the hearth while Liska fed the baby the last of the goat's milk. Eirik milked the goat again, filling a clay jar for the morning. Sersha and Torrin stood watch at the door.
Vail sat in the corner, his back against the stone wall, his grey eyes fixed on nothing. He'd been quiet since they'd returned. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that meant his mind was working, turning over pieces of the puzzle, looking for the pattern.
"A baby," he said, finally. "You found a baby in a village full of corpses."
"Yes."
"And you realised it hadn't tithed. That Yska couldn't touch it."
"Yes."
"That's—" He stopped. His hands, those steady hands that never shook, were trembling. "That's brilliant. That's the missing piece. The plague doesn't spread like a disease. It spreads through the covenant. Through the tithes. Every person who's ever given a memory is marked. Every person who hasn't is clean."
"Which means Aren is clean," Eira said. "And the baby is clean. And anyone who's never tithed is clean. That's maybe one in ten people. Children. Outcasts. The godless clans in the far north who refused the covenant."
"The clans." Vail's eyes sharpened. "They're still there. They've been there for centuries. The covenant tried to bring them in, but they refused. They said the gods were parasites. They said the tithes were a trap."
"They were right."
"They were right, and we burned them as heretics." He stood, his exhaustion seeming to fall away. "If we survive this—if we kill Yska—we need to find the clans. They know something. They've known something for five hundred years."
"First we kill Yska. Then we worry about the clans."
"Agreed." He walked to the fire, his shadow long on the stone walls. "We leave the baby here at dawn. Supplies for three days. A note explaining what happened. There's a village a day's walk east—they'll find it. They'll take it in."
"And if they don't?"
"Then we've done what we can. That's all anyone can do."
Eira looked at the baby, sleeping now in a makeshift cradle of blankets. Its face was peaceful, its small fists unclenched. It had no idea what it had survived. It had no idea what was coming.
"All right," she said. "At dawn we ride north. And we don't stop until we find the prison."
The fire crackled. The wind moaned. Outside, the snow kept falling.76Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡCL8KhJ2jZj
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