Free The Raven's Shadow by Elspeth Cooper Page B

would have had no hesitation in urging Finn on. But there wasn’t. There was only her and the mountain and the blank stare of the snowfield in between.
    Teia nibbled at the chapped skin of her lip. For six days now, she’d led the Lost Ones south because she didn’t know what else to do. They’d climbed too high to linger here, with no game to be had, and by the Eldest she wasn’t prepared to go back down to the plains and become Drwyn’s plaything again, so onwards it had to be. Why was she faltering now?
    A sense of being watched prickled over her mind and she shivered, squinting up and to the right at Tir Malroth’s glittering peak. The glare made her head throb, especially around the scar.
    Take one more step and everything changes , it seemed to say. Take one more step and you can never go back.
    Footsteps crunched through the snow behind her and Isaak appeared, walking up to stand at Finn’s head. The gelding nodded to him and was rewarded with a scratch under the chin.
    ‘Do you feel anything here, Isaak?’ she asked him.
    ‘I feel cold,’ he said, with a show of teeth at his weak joke. Then he squinted out over the snows, leaning on his spear. ‘Yon mountain’s staring at me, if that’s what you mean. Makes the back of my neck itch.’ He hunched his shoulders inside his patched coat as if to escape the stare, then peered up at her from beneath his curly hair. ‘But we had to come this way, right?’
    ‘It’s the only way that’s safe.’
    Lenna’s man dug the heel of his spear into the snow. ‘Begging your pardon, but I can’t say as it looks like a very safe way to me.’
    Teia studied him, his big man’s hands on the spear-haft, the awkward knobby wrists jutting at the cuffs of his coat that said he was still a boy who hadn’t quite finished growing. ‘Do you fear the dead, Isaak? They can’t hurt you.’
    He shrugged, darted a glance from beneath his brows and went back to prodding the snow. ‘I’ve heard stories about folk who’ve gone this way and not come back. They say the spirits here can drive a man mad.’
    She’d heard the same tales herself. The stories were in her blood, told and retold so many times by generations of her ancestors that they were a part of her. When a person died there were rituals to observe, chants to be sung by his sons and brothers, her sisters and daughters, so that the soul found its way to the afterworld. Those with none to mourn them came here. She looked up at the cloven peak of Tir Malroth again. Was that why she felt so daunted? Because she was stepping into a realm where the living had no place?
    ‘You’ll see us safely through, won’t you, Banfaíth?’
    Teia didn’t answer straight away, her eyes still fixed on the mountain’s great forked crown, gleaming silver as a salmon’s tail and all spangled around with blown snow. The thin, ice-clear air made it look close enough to touch. Beyond it, across the wide white saddle and down through the rumpled peaks and ridges on the far side, lay her destination: the Empire. Ancient enemy, even more ancient kin.
    She closed her eyes. Lord Aedon, shelter us all.
    So far still to go. Would they all survive to see it? Isaak and the other bowmen had brought down two more deer before they left the river valley, but without a way to cure the meat they’d had no choice but to gut the carcasses, pack them with snow and hope it would last. At least it was too cold for blowflies. Other provisions were desperately short now; little flour, few beans, some preserved fruit. With snow to melt for water they wouldn’t thirst, but people soon sickened on a diet of naught but meat. And there was no end to their journey in sight.
    ‘Banfaíth?’ asked Isaak anxiously.
    Teia opened her eyes again. ‘Sorry, Isaak,’ she said. ‘I think yon mountain was staring at me, too.’
    Afraid or not, she had no choice but to go on, Haunted Mountain be damned.
    ‘You go first. Use your spear to find out how deep the snow is