The Nethergrim (28 page)

Chapter
29

T
here was still much to be managed. Neither triumph over Vithric nor escape from the Nethergrim would make the sides of the mountain any less steep, nor secure a safe passage through the valley below. Edmund waited with his brother at the end of the trail, at the place where they had taken off Indigo’s saddle and tack. He did not even dare to shout his encouragement at the figures making the perilous traverse toward him, lest he startle them and send them tumbling down the mountainside. He learned the names of the kids from Roughy as he helped them up onto the road—Sedmey and her brother Harbert. He found himself saying that he was sorry he had not come sooner; Sedmey silenced him with a kiss on the cheek.

The sun had risen full by the time Katherine came into view, helped by her father as much as he could but still forced to make it through the worst on her own injured legs. Edmund clutched a twig and wrung it until it snapped.

She made it across in safety, though when Edmund reached down for her hand, he found her ashen gray about the face. Her father came up last, looking little better. Edmund let them lie and find their breath, but drew Tom and Geoffrey aside with a look.

“How long a march home, do you think?” He walked them to the edge of the rocks. “Three days?”

“Five at the least.” Tom took a considering glance behind him at their party. “We’ll need water soon. I remember seeing a river down there.”

“I remember seeing a few other things when they dragged us through.” Geoffrey had somewhere scrounged another arrow. “Are you sure it’s safe?”

Edmund turned back to the mountain. He could hear, when he listened closely, the whisper of the Nethergrim. It seemed not so loud as before, but it was everywhere.

“A horse!” Harbert cried out from the edge of the rocks. “There’s a horse coming!”

Geoffrey nocked his arrow. Tom pulled Harbert down into cover. Edmund had not the faintest idea if any spell he tried would work, so he reached for a rock. The horse sprang from the trees at a trot—riderless, pacing up through open country without the slightest show of fear.

Edmund picked his way over to the road. “Indigo!”

John Marshal’s laughter made him sound almost young. “I won’t say I’m surprised.” He helped his daughter to her feet. “That horse never listens to me.”

Edmund knew enough to stand out of Indigo’s path. There could be only one place the horse was going.

“Indigo.” Katherine wrapped her arms around his neck. He put his great gray head over her shoulder, looking almost tame.

“That solves some of our marching problems.” Edmund turned back to Tom and Geoffrey. “And if Indigo survived down there, so can we.”

Geoffrey twirled the arrow in his fingers. “If we go soon, we might get through by sundown.” He held it out to point across the valley. “We could make camp at the foot of the pass, there.”

“It’s a one-day trip over that on foot, give or take.” Edmund tried to locate the source of the thrill he felt. “We’d be well set for the day after.”

“Clear weather tomorrow.” Tom glanced up at the sky, then around him. “Past that there’s no telling. The sooner we’re off high ground, the better.”

Edmund weighed it up. “I can’t see us risking less by waiting. Thornbeasts don’t need to eat the way we do. If it’s down there now, there’s no reason to think it will be gone tomorrow.”

He looked from Tom to Geoffrey, and found them nodding their assent. He knew the thrill for what it was. They had endured—they had prevailed. He knew that he should be afraid of the journey still to come, but could not bring himself to feel it.

“Master Marshal?” He stepped around Indigo’s flank, giving space for Katherine to hop past with the saddle in her arms. “Master Marshal, we’ve been making plans.”

“I know. I heard you.” John Marshal stood away from the children, turned toward the mouth of the mountain.

“Oh.” Edmund waited. “Then—what do you think of them?”

John clapped a hand on his back. “I think you sound like some old friends of mine. Lead on.”

They descended on the road through the first weed and scrub and then on through the scatter of bones. Edmund told the others of Rosie’s last run. It did not surprise him that Katherine cried for her, or even that Tom did—but Geoffrey truly wept, long and open.

“She was a good horse, she really was.” Geoffrey dried his eyes in the elbow of his sleeve. “Me and Miles used to feed her apples sometimes.”

They dug out what remained of the provisions from the saddlebags, and did not halt to debate their course any longer. No matter what might lie in the valley below, be it bolgugs, the thornbeast, or Vithric himself, to linger by the mountain was to starve or die of thirst. Katherine took up each of the kids from Roughy in turn to sit in front of her and rest awhile on Indigo’s broad back. She then offered to Tom, but he said he was happy to walk, while her father protested that he was too heavy to ride double with anyone. Geoffrey declined in his turn, saying he could not possibly shoot his longbow straight from horseback, after which Edmund felt he had no choice but to pass on his chance as well. It seemed terribly unfair—after all he had suffered and done, he thought he had more than earned a lazy mile in the saddle with Katherine’s arms around him, even if her arms were only there to hold the reins.

Their first camp was blustery and cold. There, closer to safety than any of them had been in days or ever thought to be again, they felt in full all that they had saved and lost.

“Why Tilly?” Geoffrey hunched by the fire. He looked up at the kids from Roughy. “Why their little brother? Why them first?”

“They were the youngest; they had the most growing left to do.” Edmund did something he had never done before. He put an arm around his brother’s shoulders. “Geoffrey, there’s something I must tell you.”

He watched his brother’s face crumple as he spoke—they might find their father in his grave when they came home. Geoffrey put his head in his hands, Sedmey and Harbert gave themselves up to sobbing for little Elwy, and even Katherine seemed bowed down in sorrow. It might have turned much worse from there had not John Marshal raised his hand and begun a tale that Edmund would not have believed, save that it was mostly about Edmund’s own deeds. It made him blush—he could hardly hear the words by the end of it, so much did he feel Katherine’s gaze on him. He took his turn to fill in the gaps, making much of John’s steady guidance, and avowing that without Jumble he and John would have been too late to save anyone. Jumble got everyone’s attention for a while after that, so much that he seemed to get confused and retreated to sleep in Tom’s lap.

Edmund proposed they set a watch, just as he imagined the Ten had always done. He volunteered to be first, and sat up to tend the fire wrapped in Indigo’s saddle blanket. He thought for a while that everyone else had fallen asleep, but then John Marshal got to his feet and strode off to sit on a boulder.

“Master Marshal?” Edmund got the feeling he was wanted. He shrugged off the blanket and approached.

John turned half around and nodded. “Sit awhile.”

Edmund sat beside him. “Aren’t you tired?”

The lines crinkled in around John’s eyes. “When you reach my age, you may find sleep a less-than-constant friend.”

Edmund waited. John watched the mountain. Seasons came and went on his face. At last he spoke: “You are only fourteen.”

“Fifteen next summer, Master Marshal.”

John looked back at his sleeping daughter. “Will you guard her? Will you swear to watch over her?”

Edmund found himself expecting it. “You’re not coming home with us.”

“You know as well as I do this has only just begun,” said John. “Vithric’s spell seemed to feed the Nethergrim, somehow, to give it strength and form. I don’t know how it works, but I do know that I cannot allow it to happen again.”

The mountain of the Nethergrim sat silent across the valley. It would have been a blessing to drift awhile in triumph. It would have been a blessing to imagine the world restored.

Edmund tried to make some sense of all that he had learned. “Vithric must have already done the spell once before. He should be over sixty by now, but he didn’t look nearly that old.”

“I was told Vithric died of a wasting disease.” John shifted, then winced, and bound the bandage tight around his injured hand. “He must have faked his death years ago, the first time he started to fall ill. The spell bought him a decade or two of life, and then the sickness started to consume him afresh. As I’m sure it will again, once he has lived through the years of youth he stole from Tilly and the other boy.”

Edmund felt despair eating away at his victory. “Why is the world like this?” He shivered. “Why does it feel so cold, so hard?”

A smile flickered on John’s face, one that was neither happy nor sad. “What would be the worth of goodness, in a world that always rewarded it?”

Edmund turned John’s words over and over in his mind. He wondered for a moment if he would still feel so utterly grown up when he got back home.

“Know what I ask before you agree,” said John. “I charge you to protect my daughter, to stand her friend whether or not she ever returns what you feel. Do not swear unless you understand.”

“I swear it.” Edmund held out his hand. John gripped it in his.

Edmund glanced back at Katherine. “When will you tell her?”

“I’ll let things go as long as I can, let her feel some ease for a while. I’ll try to keep it secret until I have you all down safe in Elverain.”

Edmund could not help but smile. “With respect, Master Marshal, you don’t know your own daughter. She’ll work out what you’re thinking long before that.”

He proved right, though for the next four days John Marshal would not answer Katherine’s ever more worried looks. A fall of sleet came just as they reached the tunnel in the valley beyond, and frightening as the place still was, they felt tempted to stay in its shelter for a while. Tom would not allow it, though—he stepped out to test the wind and returned looking far too grim to be challenged on the subject. The sleet turned to snow by the time they reached the second arch, then to freezing rain on the long descent. They nibbled through the last of the salted meat before they came in view of Upenough, with two days’ march still to go. Tom scrounged some roots, but they tasted so bad that Edmund thought starving the lesser evil. They found John’s severed finger on the floor of the inn. No one knew what to do with it, so they buried it at the side of the road.

The rain let up at the edge of Thicket. They were all wet through, footsore and bedraggled, but the children skipped into the air at the sight of curling smoke from the hearths of the hamlet ahead. There was no trace of food on the wind, but the smell of hay and home fire was enough to set Edmund’s stomach growling.

“Look!” Sedmey fairly shrieked it. “There’s people!”

Folk came out of their houses to stare. Others turned to look in from the pastures—some of them even waved. Edmund felt certain he had never known happiness so pure. The slowly falling fear and rising hope had not prepared him for the moment—field and pasture, hedgerows and cows—home.

“Papa. Papa, don’t you dare.”

Edmund turned to find John Marshal walking over at the verge—bent low, as though the wind blew before him, not behind. Half a furlong ahead a trail branched south just before the road reached the first of the fields.

“Papa, you come home.” Katherine’s voice tore at Edmund. “Don’t you dare turn off this road!”

John raised his head. “I am sorry. Child, I am.”

The children stopped their march to stare at Katherine, then at John, though their first good meal in a week was a matter of yards away.

Geoffrey looked to Edmund. “He’s not coming back?”

“I have been asleep too long,” said John. “I have lived in that dream a man can have, where he thinks if he lives quiet and raises his children well, that the world owes him peace. Now that I better understand what the Nethergrim truly is, I must find the roots of its evil and pull them out while I can.”

Katherine crossed her arms. “Then I go with you.”

“I cannot allow it.”

“Who says you can stop me? I’ve got the horse.”

The children dropped their mouths wide in shock. Katherine and her father stared each other down, looking more alike than Edmund had ever seen them.

John Marshal broke first. “I was wrong to leave you the way I did back in Elverain. If I tell you where I am bound this time, will you be content to wait for me?”

“If you are marching off to some mountain somewhere, then no.”

“I am not. I am going to Tristan. His lands are not so far, Katherine—king’s roads all the way. Do not worry for me.”

Katherine bit her lip. She blinked fast and looked away.

Her father wavered, then seemed to make an effort to master himself. “I will send word, I promise you.”

Katherine scrabbled to the ground. “Then take Indigo.” She offered the reins. “Please, Papa.”

“He is not mine to take.” John gripped her hand. “You are in Lord Aelfric’s care while I am gone. He will not forsake you, whatever happens—he owes me far too much. Look to him, and to your friends, and before you know it, I’ll be home again.”