Pepperidge finds herself passed from hand to hand among the elders in a dizzying blur of family yarns and home cooking for several days more, her novelty and mystery redoubled, a fascinating commodity. It is a kind of relief, then, to be back to the hardships of the road.
The Ecclesiarch comes with an entourage of rangers, more senior than those she's travelled with on the long road so far. But as witnesses to the strangenesses on that route, all her prior companions, too, are commanded along with them, and Pepperidge is glad of them. Not least that Lilli need not argue to be included — as she is certain the elf would, to be by her side, without regard for consequence.
The mood is subdued; they travel with the Fist o' Ribs' grim and ancient leader, bearing the renewed burden of the Heart. The carefree foolery of her rangers' earlier travels has been stowed; they make brisk time, putting days and many miles behind them.
Pepperidge does not realise, on another weary afternoon, that the rangers' scouts are signalling; not until the first few bird calls turn into an unnatural flurry. She glances a question at Lilli.
"Someone ahead," Lilli says, head cocked a little. "Fret not, wolf, it's only messengers from Hightop."
Sure enough, it's not long before the trees thin to a clearing in which stand a unit of rangers around a dark-robed figure. Pepperidge would have very recently been scarce able to distinguish one ranger from any other; now she discerns details of boots and the cut of cloaks. These are not her rangers, and not of the croft.
The figure they surround is even less so. She squints, trying to decide how and why this is so, and dimly concludes that the elf holds themselves in a way that's unlike the rangers; a way that's oblivious to the forest around them. She had assumed it an intrinsic elven quality.
She is looking at a city elf.
"Professor," Longeye murmurs at her elbow. "I'm sorry — might I ask you to slow your pace a little? Keep me company at the rear."
Pepperidge obligingly moderates her stride, and turns a thoughtful gaze back to the stranger. "From Hightop," she muses in an undertone. "So from the first of the families to settle here from the West?..and most likely to object to me."
"Ah, there's that mind the poet warns us of," Longeye replies, teeth flashing in a quick smile. "But more, you see, that we know exactly who that is. Your folk see us as magic, every one, and perhaps we are — a little — as naturally as breathing, and taken so much for granted. But some few of us...." The elf chews thoughtfully on her bottom lip. "You see the sky, Professor? How it darkens? That is Yama Singing-Frogs-in-Oxbow. They call her Stormcrow. They call her...many things. And when she wills it, the thunderheads follow her."
Pepperidge tilts her head back and looks at the sky, bruising ugly black.
"Why now?" she asks softly.
"Because she always wills it. Because outside the city, there are none to tell her no." Longeye casts a wary look ahead of them. "Magic and madness are fingers of the same hand, Professor wolf. Be ready, should I tell you to run."
Ahead, Taelin hails the Hightop elves. "Heyo, rangers! Madam sorcerer." He bows extravagantly, if somewhat shallowly. "We travel from the croft of the Fist o' Ribs to your hometown, humble servants of the Fürsten paying our respects."
The Stormcrow laughs. "Respects?" she calls back. "Oh, we know you. Superstitious mumblers, doddery watchmen of an empty vault! Your kin haven't stepped abroad in an age, little ranger captain." There's an edge in her liquid voice, a painful scraping tone like a knifepoint sawing slate. "Strange company you keep, to be abroad in these times!"
"Company, we have none." Taelin remains carefully cordial. "As you say, my kin tread a lonely road this long time past. We go to Hightop to bend knee, share news, share counsel."
Clouds swell over the treetops, smothering the sun entirely. Longeye lets out a nervous curse beneath her breath. "Be ready!" she reiterates tersely.
"Trust that I am!" Pepperidge replies, eyes on the Hightop sorcerer as she stalks a few dramatic steps and poises, glowering.
"The Fürsten are not called upon like gossipy neighbours — they call for you. The Fürsten do not share counsel — they give it. You're abroad for sneaking Termist treachery, mouths dripping sedition." Taelin tries to speak, and she raises her voice over him. "I have the measure of you! And I have the cure!"
"Run," Longeye says urgently, barely before lightning rips from the sky to shatter a tree off to their left. Pepperidge glimpses the black-clad stormcaller's face tilting to the sky in ecstatic fugue, as the rain begins to fall like hammers. She turns, stumbling in instant mud, as elven figures scatter into the dark.
Lightning strikes — one, two, three, like terrible, deafening footfalls, walking in the direction they had come in. Toward the Ecclesiarch, hanging back from the rendezvous in supposed safety.
"Longeye!" she shrieks into the rain's pounding, pointing. She feels an instant fool — the elf has doubtless bounded away like a deer, even now safeguarding her people.
Instead, a voice at her elbow yells back, "I see it!" Longeye, keeping pace, swipes water out of her eyes. "Fret not for him until we're sure of our own lives!"
A gust of wind rattles the trees, driving the rain in sudden new directions. Pepperidge slips and nearly falls, stumbling across a knotted mat of roots before Longeye catches her elbow and steadies her.
"Thank you, thank you," the Professor mutters, brushing her away, and picks up what speed she dares, heading for the Ecclesiarch.
"Professor!" Longeye wails in protest, but dogs her steps, scrambling muddily up the slight slope so recently descended.
The Stormcrow's laughter tinkles faintly on the wind's gusts, and another bright sear of skyfire lunges into the trees ahead, shockingly close. The Ecclesiarch's horse screams, and lightning lashes down again and again.
"The Heart," Pepperidge says aloud, before she's even aware of the idea bursting into her mind. "Longeye, the Heart! She cannot strike the Heart!" Dodging clawing branches, she redoubles her efforts, knees popping and straining against the pull and slide of mud, buffeted by the wind.
Cloaked figures kneel in a huddle when she toils closer; Lilli's pale face looks up, twisted in distress. The Ecclesiarch's mount is bolted, and he lies unmoving beneath a sundered oak. The smell of burnt wood permeates even this rain, and Pepperidge drops to her knees among them.
The Ecclesiarch's breath rattles in him, chest heaving. Shards of blasted tree riddle his body, chest wounds frothing. The rain carries an ebb tide of red away beneath their feet, into the earth. The great helm is crumpled around his head, as if to swallow him in darkness.
"The Heart," Pepperidge chokes in horror. "She cannot strike it direct, even caged within the helm. Let me free it." She meets Lilli's eyes across the dying elf's trembling form. "Let me free it, and pray it can protect us."
Lilli only stares back, shaking in shock.
The professor curses. "Forgive me!" she yells over the storm, and leans over the Ecclesiarch to plunge her hands into the thorny wreck of the helm. Wind-whipped mist boils up around them, and under her seeking palms the Heart throbs once, a beat that shivers through her.
Like a trick of the light, the world seems suddenly both very near and far away. It is both a screaming storm, and terror, and death; and also silent, a distant malicious fire, and a towering antlered shadow.
She stares up at the figure, a silhouette of seething black, fixed and chilled by unseen eyes. Finally she wrenches her gaze away, dropping it to the Ecclesiarch's. The old elf meets her eyes, draws a laboured, bubbling breath; his lips draw back in a savage smile of weird triumph, and he dies.
Weight settles on her. She draws a breath, another, then clambers laboriously to her feet, the Heart cradled before her in cupped palms. The dark spectre is striding away; she swallows, not daring to take her eyes from it to check whether the rangers are with her.
She follows.
"Where are we?"
Pepperidge returns sluggishly to wakefulness. A campfire crackles, and somewhere beyond a stream trickles. The early morning air is fresh and damp.
"Poet, I wish I knew." Taelin sounds exhausted. "I've been downstream a way; this is not a place I know. Perhaps when Princess returns from upstream, you see, I can tell you — perhaps not."
The Professor begins to recall marching until every movement was agony, keeping the receding antlered phantom in sight until her bleary eyes would see no longer. Stumbling, eventually, and simply halting where she fell.
She is curled in a ball in a patch of lush grass, the Heart clutched protectively to her chest. Her attempt to move drags out a strangled groan.
Instantly, Lilli hovers over her. "My wolf!"
"We must not be dead," Pepperidge croaks. "I hurt entirely too much."
Lilli puts a trembling hand on her elbow. The elf looks as battered as she feels — spots of blood are crusted on her skin, and darkness hangs beneath each eye in a pale, pained face.
Stiff and brutally sore, the Professor heaves to a sitting position. "Oh, bumblebee," she murmurs, when she catches her breath. "My poor Lilli...." She haltingly prises her grip open, relinquishing the Heart to her belt pouch once again. No sooner is it stowed than the elf throws herself to a sitting position, scoots sideways until they are pressed together from knee to bicep, and begins to noisily cry into Pepperidge's shoulder.
She wraps herself painfully around the weeping elf, shuddering with abrupt relief at embracing an earthly thing, a flesh and blood person filled with life.
"I'm sorry, Lilli. I'm sorry."
Lilli clutches her tighter. "They killed him," she sobs. "And then you were like someone possessed — I feared to lose you too. That dreadful, dreadful thing...."
"Hush, hush." Pepperidge strokes her back. "The ghost led me, Lilli, so I could bring you to safety. That's all."
The lie sits thick on her tongue; she took the Heart deliberately, the ancient thing that Lilli fears so. The ghost led them, and she doesn't doubt it's true that it did so because they are its, as it is theirs; but she is an intruder, a hubristic interloper. She has meddled in forces beyond mortal ken, and gods help her, she regrets nothing.
The Second Sight, and the power to change shape, the elves say of the Heart-Bearers; and they whisper these strange miracles as if they are curses. Who is she to say that they are not? And who can say what fate might befall her, she that grasped it in human hands?
And yet, and yet...the woman trembling against her lives and breathes, is safe — for now; and that is as vital to the Professor, in this moment, as her own next breath. And if the Heart or the ghost or the elves themselves strike her with some terrible revenge for her presumption, she will bear it as brave as she can.
Princess finally lopes out of the underbrush with scarce a rustle, dropping to a weary crouch by the fire. "Heyo, Captain," he says tiredly. "I know where we are."
He sounds apprehensive.
Taelin gently presses a cup of water into his hands. "Speak," he says softly.
Princess gestures upstream with a lift of his chin. "We're a day from Hightop."
They all still. Tiny curses beneath his breath.
Hightop should be weeks away. No march through the night, no matter how desperate, should bring them here; and furthermore, that it should bring them there, the seat of power of the Fürsten, whose hand felled the Ecclesiarch....
Lilli abruptly laughs, a strained and reedy sound. "Safety," she says ironically. "Well, this I trust from it, at least! It brought us here with purpose — as it always has, in our history. We are charged with duty, cousin."
Taelin, jaw clenched, gracefully inclines his head. "Aye," he bites out. "I had hoped — but I recognise when I am bid."
Everyone falls silent.
"Well," Longeye murmurs finally. "...Fuck, aye?"
A broken laugh rattles around the rangers, dispelling some of the tension.
"I'm sorry," Pepperidge ventures softly, and Lilli's arm around her tightens, but Taelin speaks even swifter than she can.
"Never," he says easily. "A thousand thousand times rather I am charged with the burden of my clan's heritage, than it should turn its eye to you, Professor; 'tis a yoke we were born to."
"I hoped to help," she whispers.
"And look!" He smiles across the fire at her, spreads his hands. "We're none of us murdered, which we assuredly would be, had we stayed. Brave beyond measure, for you to take up the thing."
"That would seem to be a kinder way of calling me a fool."
"Then I owe my life, and the lives of every one of my rangers, and my cousin, to your foolishness. For I swear to you, Professor, I would have died under the Stormcrow's malice sooner than put so much as a finger to the Heart myself." He shakes his head. "No fault of yours that it has a purpose in mind for us."
It has brought them to the Fürstens' doorstep; it needs no genius in elven ways to see that they are here to redress the injustice done to the Fist o' Ribs, the ghost's chosen people. Nor to see that, if the life of the clan's Ecclesiarch was so cheap to the Fürsten, then five rangers, a poet, and a wayward human university lecturer from the lowlands will be not a jot dearer.
She turns her head and presses her lips to Lilli's hair. "I'm sorry," she whispers, even softer and more personally.
"Never," Lilli whispers back. "Never, Amaranth. Sore and sad and afraid I may be, but I am at your side, and that is the finest place I could ask to be."
"Fools together, then," she says, but says it smiling.
