Subtle as poisoners, they approach glittering Hightop, jewel of the Eastern Ranges. The natural stone of the mountain peak is dark; the city adorns it like an elaborate concentric crown of dramatically pale imported stone. No architectural line is straight if it can be a gentle, elegant curve; no surface, edge or corner is without some tasteful detail, some carved texture, some geometric bas-relief, an ornamental buttress, or simply some showcased natural streak of colour in the stone itself.
No human city, she thinks, has or can ever achieve such unity of expression; but the centuries of labour enshrined here have taken place under the selfsame hands and minds from start to present, an aesthetic sense not just singular but enshrined within the same specific persons — and presumably, given the lack of variation, few of those.
She thinks of the history lessons, of the times this very city has been razed because its masters refuse to flex to the begging of a world ages younger than they; and cannot help but see in its white spires, even just for a moment, the terrible grasp of a skeletal hand.
Poetry, she thinks, poetry and judgement she's in no way earned to pass on another people's problems; the terrible risks of so much time in the company of the rangers.
"Captain," Longeye says cautiously, as they lurk in an ever-scarcer copse. "We can go in there by skulking, or we can go in there by the gates — if they've not thought to forbid it — but it's about time to set ourselves to one or the other."
"Aye," Taelin says, eyes on the pale city, voice distant. "Much proceeding from the if, Longeye."
"Much proceeding from the skulking, should we be discovered," she returns.
"Aye."
They contemplate the city for a silent while longer, and then he slowly turns to face everyone. "I favour the gates," he says simply. "The Stormcrow set upon us on the excuse of treachery; I'd not spend a second lending credence. But it's a risk, and I'd not make you walk that way with me if you doubt the wisdom."
His rangers will have poetry and bravery for him, and would walk into an inferno without complaint in his steps. Pepperidge speaks quickly, to not lose her nerve to do so; to be heard before they say whatever she might but with greater beauty, and leave her redundant. It feels important to not simply be present, but to make clear that she is making as active a choice as they.
"If they have orders to put us to the sword, it's the same steel in the dark or in the open. I'll take the gates with you, Captain."
Longeye makes a strangled noise. "Where did you find her, again?" she says to Lilli, the first flash of her usual good humour all day. "Do they make more like her, please?"
"There's no other like her anywhere I know," Lilli says, and touches her hand. "And it's a fortunate day; I need not choose between my cousin, my conscience, nor my wolf."
"We walk together," Longeye agrees, touching the ranger pin that fastens her grey-green hood, in the cadence of someone echoing an oath.
"Aye," says Tiny.
"The Professor wolf said what I was going to," Princess sighs, smoothing his cloak. "What about you?"
"Oh, aye," Spuds replies good-naturedly. "After all that, I'm going to say that I'm sneaking into the city through some back way or sewer by myself, for sure, aren't I? Of course I'm coming, Captain."
"I thank you," Taelin says sombrely. "I thank you all. Professor, I'd be remiss if I didn't say, despite your words, that this is likely to be the death of us; you need not march to that with we sorry few soldiers."
"Soldiers, poets, and friends," Pepperidge says, as lightly yet firmly as she can manage, and Lilli's hand finds hers again, twines together their fingers, and holds fast.
The ranger captain inclines his head. "Hightop," he says softly, "runs to a calendar set in stone before any of our births. If I have the day aright, then we wait for dawn; and that will see us to a day of public audience with the very Fürsten themselves. We walk into the city through the front gates, we walk the streets as ordinary petitioners, and, fortune willing, we walk straight into their presence."
"Such convenient timing," Pepperidge cannot help but say, heavy with irony, touching the pouch at her waist that weighs as it ever did, but feels heavier every time her mind dwells on it.
"Aye," Taelin agrees, equally wry. "In perfect time to do as the ghost would have us do. Makes you feel so comfortable that your destiny's your own, does it not?"
Up close, the city is starkly clean and impeccably unified, still, in its detail. Nobody stops them, roadstained, tense and weary as they are; hoods drawn low, they make their way through the pale-walled streets.
Everyone here is beautiful, Pepperidge thinks, slunk deep in her own hood and desperate to remain unobtrusive — and nobody is smiling. She moves as much like one of the rangers as she knows how, feeling like an obvious betrayal of their presence and purpose with every step. And yet there is no alarm sounded, no accusation, nor even particular attention so far as she can tell; they are simply more people in a city of them.
Instead of easing her tension, it underlines it with a vague, sick dread.
They pass beneath a series of ornamental arches, and Pepperidge cannot shake the feeling of being drawn into nested mouths, devoured over and over, pressed deeper into the close interior coils of something pitiless and older than stones.
The final maw stands with massive doors flung wide; not exactly a building so much as just a doorway, the dull osseous lustre of the city's construction grafted directly onto black rockface, framing a chill gullet in the mountain's own flesh.
"There's a great chamber, the great chamber, within the mountain," Lilli murmurs sideways to her. "The petitioner's dais, an island in the centre of the bottomless sacred pool. Around the water, an amphitheatre of public seating, that the Fürsten's dealings may be seen to happen in the people's sight. And on a balcony overlooking, our great lords themselves." She pulls her cloak a little tighter around her. "I've never seen it," she adds, voice a little tight, "only read of it. Hightop I've seen, but this I'd never felt the need...."
"Why beneath the earth like this?" Pepperidge longs to take her hand, stilled by the terror of some unknown panopticonic propriety.
"Foresighted proof against the city's complete sack by one's angry lessers." It lacks the bite that the words suggest is intended; Lilli sounds diminished, too, by the crushing weight all around them, the sheer terrible magnitude of history concentrated in the seat of the Fürsten.
There is, finally, a challenge: the routine, indifferent state-your-business of a guard at his task — a routine, indifferent task, the only spice in its monotony the small power to terrorise passers-by. "From the far crofts," Taelin says easily. "Oh, a cadet branch, the name would mean nothing here — simply showing faces and making ourselves known to the annals, you see, that our Fürsten can see us clear in our obedience to them."
It hangs in the momentary balance; the expanded scope of the lowest of the Fürstens' city guard to harass, when such is exercised over a dishevelled clutch of country folk, weighed against his low expectations of their entertainment value. Pepperidge watches the sway of lamplight over mail lacquered black and ivory, and consciously directs her breathing to remain as steady as she can.
"To the left," he says, bored and bored of them, and they pass beyond him; deeper into the city's cold and vaulted core, where the monumental passageway repeatedly bi- and trifurcates and coils away in darkness. The way for petitioners is lined with lanterns, and other ways barred by guard or simple barriers of draped cord, or simply by their own forbidding unlightedness.
They move in silence, save for Taelin taking advantage of a deserted corridor to murmur, "There will usually be a wait; plenty here in petitioner's shoes, even if they're given short hearing. Fret not, Professor, you're simply someone's frail aunt, and you dare not loosen your cloak for fear of the cold making its way into you. Stay steady."
"Mercy," she mutters. "An aunt, now?"
"Oh, simply treat anyone who looks your way as a very wicked student who thinks to outwit you," Lilli assures her.
"As if they're a wayward elf disrupting my lectures?" Pepperidge suggests sweetly, which is instantly a mistake.
"Mercy!" Taelin says. "We've brought a monster to Hightop to steal all our womenfolk!"
"Oh no," Longeye purrs, nudges Lilli, and waggles an eyebrow.
"Enough, thank you!" Pepperidge says, and there's a pause just long enough for her to think they're quashed.
And then: "Oh, she's so stern," Longeye whispers loudly, and feigns a swoon.
"Gentles," the Professor says, drawing herself up, "if you want to play the naughty schoolgirl to me...you have to fight the poet for the privilege."
Spuds theatrically grabs at Longeye. "It's not worth it!" he exclaims. "She'll rip your tongue out!"
"You can't break the hearts of every easy lay from here to the cliffs of Dunnoon like that!" Princess adds, snagging her other arm.
"Not so loud," Taelin says, and they still.
"Sorry, Captain," Longeye murmurs.
"You will be, if the guards get interested." He holds a hand up to hush any further apology, listening, but there's no answering commotion. "Enough fun at the poet's blushing expense, then."
"I'm not blushing!" Lilli says, cheeks nonetheless pinked.
"Everyone hush," Pepperidge reminds them, and waits for the rangers to reorganise themselves before adding, brow quirked, "To the cliffs of Dunnoon, eh?"
She has no idea where that might be.
"Lies," Longeye returns softly, grinning. "...At least twice as far."
They move easier after that, Hightop less oppressive on them, until they arrive in a long gallery coiled beneath the amphitheatre's seats, rumbling with movement and distant voices above, narrow horizontal slits looking over black water. The pool and its island might simply have been a wet cave, once; now both are perfectly circular, with perfectly sheer sides of worked stone, coldly lit by radiant crystalline fixtures. The petitioners' queueing gallery wraps it in an almost complete circle; the end they've entered fed only by the corridor, the far end ending in a T-junction when it's bent back nearly to meeting itself. One leg of that junction is the single-file bridge leading to the water-encircled islet; the other leads back into the bowels of the mountain, parallel to their arrival, the way that petitioners are ejected from the Fürstens' presence once their time is deemed spent.
"There's usually a wait," Taelin murmurs, perturbed. The gallery's viewing slits — almost invisible from the angles above, the public seating — are all in view of each other, across the chamber; the only petitioners preceding them are just setting foot onto the bridge, heading into their own audience.
"Such coincidence, again," Pepperidge notes quietly, and her tension returns, increased. Omen upon omen, the path unravelled before them to speed their way to an appointment that some force beyond them desires them to keep.
"Well, let's hurry along." He sounds grim. "If they eject the poor fools ahead of us summarily, we don't want to tarry following them."
She hears nothing of what the prior petitioners ask or declare, before the elven lords, her own heart too loud in her ears as they lope swiftly around the gallery. She scarce hears Taelin, quietly and briskly saying, "I go first. Then you, Longeye, you, Princess; the Professor, the poet, Spuds, Tiny," but they gently tug her into the proper order, without hesitation, as if they understand.
No doubt, she dimly thinks, they do: for all that it doesn't truly compare, they must before have had to marshal dismal green recruits through their first real fighting.
Those before them are retreating from the island-dais, back across the bridge. They exchange no greetings as they pass, look neither left nor right nor acknowledge the rangers. Pepperidge catches a glimpse only, of a dutifully impassive face beginning to crumble, in this somewhat-privacy, to tears.
"Heyo, my darlings," the ranger captain says, quiet but firm. "Stay steady; it's us."
And it is, indeed, them; all across the narrow bridge, a curved span of white stone without wall or railing, Pepperidge's blood beating in her ears hard enough to hurt. Above, illuminated in such as way as to float against the dark of the ceiling beyond, a balcony with a low railing, behind which are the Fürsten, knife-sharp, blank-faced, seemingly paler than even the stone of their city, as though time has robbed them of all their own blood and expression.
"Honoured Fürsten!" Taelin spreads his arms and dips a bow to the panel of ancient elves. His voice is loud, clear, and tranquil. "I bring greetings from the croft of the Fist o' Ribs, your ancient kin and humble servants!"
Around her, she can feel her rangers standing taut as bowstrings. They all entirely expect to die here, she realises anew; have marched here in a fey spirit of high, wild bravado, to do so accusing the Ecclesiarch's murderers in their seat of total power.
A strange end, for an unremarkable professor from a human university, she reflects for a second, and feels the bulk of the Heart hanging at her waist. Dare she hope it aids them again?
Not a thing of use, you see, Amaranth? Merely a thing that is.
But they fear it, all of them. And maybe, with sufficient bravado, that will be enough.
"You know that my clan, of old, set exile upon ourselves. That we sit in our halls and consider our omens, and come not to Hightop, nor concern ourselves with the world. And still we don't! For an omen came, so vast and clear and strange, that not knowing what it meant, our Ecclesiarch sought you, Fürsten, to lay it at your feet and seek your wisdom."
The Fürsten might as well be statues, ancient beyond reckon, bleached of all pigment, impassive studies in power and uninterest — but the onlookers sway to his words. Pepperidge wonders, with a start, where Taelin stands in line for the Ecclesiarch's heavy helm.
"And on the road we met Hightop rangers, under the wing of the Stormcrow, who says that Hightop seeks sedition in the far crofts! Can such a thing be?" Taelin casts a bright, baiting incredulity upon them, casting rhetorically for the answer from the crowd to left and right before turning the question to the Fürsten directly. "Is such the Stormcrow's mission from you, Fürsten?"
One elven lord, whetted by centuries to blade-edge creases and sunken, staring eyes, raises and dismissively waves a bored hand. "The Stormcrow does our will, child," he confirms.
There is no theatrical gesture, no sweep of his cloak; one moment Taelin is rhetorically poised, the next he is a quivering pillar of naked rage, honour in hand, pointed in deadly accusation.
"Murderers!" he screams, and the crowd stirs and rumbles. "Your Stormcrow slaughtered us upon the road, for sport! My clan, my croft — we, we who could no more take against you than we could shed our limbs and crawl beneath the earth to live as worms! Our Ecclesiarch is dead! I name you kinslayers!"
The Fürsten continue their lizard, sneering stares. Against the rising babble of the onlookers, their spokesman lifts a hand again, indicates to the armed guards laced throughout the place, and makes an easily interpreted gesture: kill them.
As her rangers fatalistically draw their honour, Pepperidge desperately steps forward, in front of Taelin, and flings back her hood.
A wave of shocked silence ripples across the chamber, followed by a redoubled roar of elven voices.
"Fürsten!" Pepperidge bellows, pitching her voice to silence a full-scale classroom riot. "See the omen for which you slew the Ecclesiarch!" As some tiny splinter of her mind takes a wondering moment to admire the chamber's acoustics, she plucks it from her belt without looking, thrusts it aloft. "Behold the return of the Heart!"
They crack. Like the crowd, some of the beautiful ancient lords flinch back from it; some jolt to their feet; some join the cacophony of shouting.
And the deep black water in the sacred pool begins to boil.
"May you never sleep!" Taelin roars at them, as the impulse to flee abruptly sets into the crowd. "I will hunt you down and end you! I will sow your crofts with salt! I will — "
Pepperidge tears alarmed eyes from the clouds of steam belching from the pool, as a tremble runs through the floor. She grabs for his arm. Something tickles at her mind.
"Taelin. Taelin!" In the misty maybe-realm the clan ghost had led them through, the Stormcrow's force had been symbolised with fire. "Hightop, this peak — please tell me this is not a volcano."
He halts in his ranting to look at her, wide-eyed. Then at the Heart. At the juddering floor.
"Run!" he decides frantically, flapping his arms to herd them all ahead of him. "Run, run, run!"
On a far hillside, after sundown, Taelin digs a wineskin from his pack. Laughing hysterically, tears in his eyes, he toasts the distant roaring glare of Hightop's eruption.
"I swear, Professor!" he cries. "From this day, you are of my people. One of my clan, one of my croft, one of my rangers! I name you Amaranth Heart-Bearer, witness and prophet of the third burning of Hightop! What say you?"
The others huddle in the lee of a rocky outcrop, loathe to light a campfire for fear of attracting other refugees of the city's destruction. Atop it, she turns her face to the peak's red glare, and holds her hand out for the wine.
"Lilli warned me that the ghost omens wars," she recalls, and takes a swig. "I think, if I'm to to be one of your rangers, Captain — you had best teach me how to fight."
