TWENTY-NINE

WITH MY OBJECT in sight I was a model prisoner, meek and uncomplaining. After two days Roshi relented and unbound my hands. We dallied by a streamlet that morning, scrubbing the odours of travel and hardship from our clothes.

Conscious of the inevitable pursuit, Roshi had us moving again within an hour. I nudged and drifted west every chance I found. Roshi was too sharp-eyed a navigator to let us drift too much off her course, however, and by the third night I had achieved little.

That night, the dream took me.

After a dinner of pork jerky and water warm and musty from too long in a bladder, I slumped by the fire, staring into its depths, wondering how I’d ever get back home. Worry over me and the implications of my disappearance would be gnawing at Dieter, though no doubt he’d be hiding it. I massaged my wrists, which were still sore from the ropes.

The flames lay heavy on my eyelids, drawing down sleep. My chin drooped, and by increments I slid sideways until I settled on the ground. Heat from the fire bathed me, narrowing the world to a snapping glow of shifting reds.

At first, when an image of banked embers lapped closer and swam into focus, I thought I was waking and blinked. But there was no moment of blankness – for I had no eyelids to blink with, just as I had no limbs to move. Behind the steady red glow of the embers was a room, not a forest. And the room was familiar, for I had run my finger across every seam in those hearthstones, and buried my hands in the uneven lay of the rug’s pile. I had curled up on the couch too many times to count. Dieter lay on it now, one hand absently drawing shapes in the carpet, the other resting across his belly as he stared at the ceiling.

‘Matilde,’ he said, turning and looking deep into the fire, pinning me with his gaze. Stillness radiated out from our locked gazes, smoothing away the flutter at the room’s edge. The embers glowed brighter, burning my cheeks and brow, stinging tears from my eyes. I tasted charcoal and ash but I couldn’t look away.

‘There.’ He swung his legs off the couch and sat up with his forearms braced on his knees, his hands hanging between them. ‘That’s better. I’d offer you some wine, my dear, but I think it might make you more uncomfortable than not, right now.’

Relief swelled in me like a spring tide, a sweet chill bubbling up my throat and quenching my anxiety. How did you find me? What sorcery is this, that you can seek me out in my sleep? I’m scarce two days’ ride south of you – bring me home! The words tumbled through my mind, but none escaped my lips.

‘Gerlach told me you’d fled,’ he said – casually, conversationally – as if none of it mattered. ‘Do you know, I actually believed him. All your mutterings about the quiet life, all your meekness. I thought you’d given up.’

No! Roshi knocked me out and strung me up on a pony like a sack of meal, I wanted to say, but silence glued my tongue to the roof of my mouth.

‘Yet here you are,’ Dieter said. ‘In my hearth. Spying on me.’

Pain lanced through me like Roshi’s poison, the flames snapping and flaring around me, the embers glowing cherry red in Dieter’s hearth.

He leaned closer, his eyes pits of shadow in his face. ‘What is it you need to know, Matilde, that you come to my room in the middle of the night? Mine is not the only hearth banked with a living glow; mine won’t show you the drightens, or the numbers of our force.’

I willed all my strength to speak, but the struggle was in vain.

He frowned. ‘Don’t go yet, Matilde,’ he said, even as a hand jostled my shoulder, cooling and banishing the flames. Dieter’s voice faded, tinny with increasing distance. ‘We’ve much still to discuss.’

Darkness surrounded me, disorienting me, but the hand jostled and anchored me. I followed it like a lifeline to air, swimming up through the black depths.

Roshi’s face emerged in a shiver and ripple, as though I was breaking the surface of water. Weariness bruised her dark eyes.

‘Dieter!’

The trapped cry escaped me at last, but it was to Roshi and the campsite I cried, not the stone hearth and my husband.

‘Anything you want to share, cousin?’ said Roshi.

‘A bad dream,’ I replied, dragging myself up off the hard ground, every joint aching, stiff from absorbing the earth’s chill. The flames of my dream had left me weak.

The explanation didn’t satisfy her. She gave me a heavy-lidded stare and turned away, every line of her back tense and watchful. ‘Try not to shout during them,’ she said over her shoulder. ‘You’ll bring Dieter’s men or the Iltheans down on us.’

Fine by me, either way, though this time I said nothing by choice.

The dream stayed with me all day. Had Dieter found me, or had I found him? Either way, the fire had been the key. If the link had been forged once, it could be again.

That night I tried to replicate the details of the previous night as best I remembered them. I sat eastward of the fire, roughly four feet away from it, and I stared into its depths until I slid onto the ground and into sleep.

I woke stiff and cold and aching, a crick in my neck and my left leg and foot numb. The disappointment at my failure was as sharp as blood in my mouth. It took three more nights, three more failed attempts, before I once again forged the link.

The terrain had forced us further west than Roshi would have liked, and she worried about the Ilthean army. Increasingly, the look she turned on me was tight-lipped and pinch-eyed. Fear was edging her ever closer to confronting me, to blaming me for our detour. I kept my mouth shut and avoided her eye; the longer I could postpone an argument, the closer I drew to the army.

When I slept that night, the fire was waiting for me. Once again I followed the trail, the link between my fire and his which brought me through the darkness and into his hearth.

This time he stood with his back to me. My vision of him had barely focused before he turned and looked into the fire, his gaze striking through the depths of the flames to find me. ‘Matilde. I’ve a present for you.’

Prepared for the struggle to speak, I willed myself to overcome it. My heartbeat pounded in my ears and strained my brow until I feared the skin might burst. But still I produced no sound.

Dieter gave me a puzzled look. ‘Are you trying to speak, Matte? Is that why you keep gaping at me?’ he said, regarding me more closely, amusement making his eyes sparkle from their shadowed depths. ‘Ah, I see. This is Roshi’s doing.’

Hope flared bright in me.

‘Didn’t she teach you how to talk?’ he said, his laughter dashing my hopes like a slap of cold water. ‘Rash, Matte, spying on me when you don’t know your arcana. I could turn them against you.’

At a flick of his fingers the flames soared bright and hot. Sweat burst from my skin and I whimpered – but I doubt he heard it.

He let the flames die back and I sucked in a great lungful of cool air. A figure lurked behind him, seated on the couch.

‘I warned you, Matilde,’ said Dieter, all his mirth chased away like clouds scattered before a curling wind. ‘Do you remember? One wrong move, I said.’

A chill stopped the breath in my lungs. One wrong move against me, and I’ll finish what I started at Aestival.

‘I was prepared to simply let it go,’ he said, then paused, reconsidering. ‘Actually, no. I wasn’t. But I was prepared to wait. I had more pressing concerns, after all, than to chase a runaway. Except now you’re in my fireplace, plotting against me once more.’

He held up a small glass vial and tipped it left to right. The dark fluid inside left faint pink smears on the glass as it moved. My blood.

‘I found the perfect use for it,’ he said, then looked over his shoulder, lifting one hand in a summoning gesture. The figure behind him rose and stepped forward, brown head twisted to keep heavy-lidded eyes fixed on Dieter at all times.

At first I thought it a man, a great, beautiful man, with skin as dark as the loam and eyes black and bright as sloes. But no hair marred the sweep of his head, not even eyebrows. In their place he had heavy ridges, as if shaped by a careful thumb. He wore black trews and one of Dieter’s white shirts, unlaced at the throat. His feet were bare.

‘Well?’ Dieter raised an eyebrow in challenge. ‘How do you like him?’

The flames and the panic had confused my vision. The stranger’s skin wasn’t completely unmarred: his brow bore three marks as familiar as the hollows of my heart, inked in black that sparked with red and blue and green highlights. I remembered the gritty, slick taste of the bloodstones as Dieter scribed those same symbols on my own brow.

Emet.

The stranger was a construct. Not a girl bound by the rules of one, this was a true golem. A creature made of clay and arcana and – I swallowed, hard – blood. My blood.

‘I’ve named him Clay,’ said Dieter, his grin wolf-like. ‘He has only the one task, Matte: to find you.’

Clay swung his head to stare into the fire too, and his eyes fixed on me. Abrupt and unpractised, a grin split his face. Not any grin – Dieter’s. Dieter’s with great white slabs of teeth and a tongue behind them red as a beating heart.

‘Matilde.’ His voice was like boulders shifting, like rocks rolled along a streambed by the current. ‘I’ll find you. I’ll carve out your heart.’

When I swung a disbelieving look at Dieter, he nodded. ‘I warned you – remember?’

I flailed backward and the room drifted away, shrinking and fading.

‘Don’t go,’ Dieter called mockingly.

But the golem had a different message: ‘I’m coming to find you, little queen.’