Chapter 35: The Village Above the Clouds

They let him walk on the third day.

It was a very short walk. Mother Osha stood over him with her arms folded and her silver horns gleaming while he swung his legs carefully over the edge of the hammock, and Pim hovered at her elbow with the wooden spoon, and Veyra leaned in the doorway with an expression of studied indifference. He took four steps. His knees shook. Then his side flared up in a long, bright ribbon of pain, and he caught the edge of the table with both hands and stood there, breathing, while Osha said nothing, in a way that conveyed a great deal.

“Again tomorrow,” she said, when he had made it back. “Eight steps.”

“I can do eight steps,” said Pim.

“You are six. Everyone can do eight steps.”

By the fifth day, he could walk to the door, and by the seventh, with Veyra’s arm under his, he could walk out of it.

The light was so bright that he had to put up a hand.

Veilrest was a village built on a cloud.

It was the only way to describe it. It stood on a high, narrow, wind-polished shoulder of mountain, where the grey rock fell away on every side into a sea of white mist, and the only thing that could be seen of the world below was the tops of the tallest trees, poking up through the cloud like the masts of drowned ships. The village itself clung to the shoulder like a swallow’s nest. There were houses, perhaps a hundred, grown rather than built, great vaulted domes of living root and pale gold wood, each one as smooth as a seashell, with round windows and curling eaves and roofs shingled in overlapping silver leaves. Rope bridges swung between them. Hanging gardens trailed from every balcony. Great paper lanterns, shaped like moths and moons and stars, drifted at the ends of long poles, and as the mist rolled past they glowed a soft, pale gold.

There were people everywhere.

They were all like Veyra. Not the same, no two of them the same, but of one kind: tall and slender, with skin in every shade from the palest lilac to the deep dark violet of a plum, and hair in every shade of green from sage to jade to moss. Their horns were as various as faces. Some had tiny nubs, some two long curved spirals, some a whole crown of slender branching antlers that gleamed in the sun. They wore the same simple garments of leaf and bark and fine pale hide, and they went about their business with a calm, unhurried grace, and every one of them stopped to look at him.

Not rudely. Not unkindly. But thoroughly.

A woman drawing water at a well looked up, and her bucket hung motionless in the air. A man mending a rope bridge turned his head. A little boy on a high balcony dropped an entire basket of peaches and did not notice. Two old women sitting on a bench with their knitting leaned together and whispered, and one of them put her hand to her mouth. And all around, as the word went from house to house, the soft, bright, curious murmur of the village swelled, until it seemed that every window had grown a face.

“Do not mind them,” said Veyra, at his shoulder. “They have not seen a stranger in nine years.”

“Nine?”

“The last was a trader from the lowlands. He was lost. He wept when he saw the bridges.” Her eyes were amused. “You are doing better.”

“I haven’t seen the bridges yet.”

“Oh,” said Veyra. “You will.”

She led him across three of them.

The first was a plank bridge no wider than a plank, with a single frayed rope for a rail. The second was a swaying thing of woven vine that bounced under every step. The third was a long, thin, dizzying span of silver cable, a hundred feet above a drop that vanished into cloud, and by the time they reached the other side, Fel was clinging to the nearest post with both hands and swearing in an unbroken, low, heartfelt stream, and Veyra was leaning on the rail with her arms crossed, watching him with every sign of deep contentment.

“Very graceful,” she said.

“I hate you.”

“You are on your feet. That is more than I expected.”

“You expected me to fall?”

“I expected you to cry.” She said it without cruelty. “The last one did.”

He glared at her. She looked back at him with perfect calm, and after a moment, to his own astonishment, he began to laugh. It hurt his ribs. It hurt his side. He leaned against the post and laughed until his eyes watered, and Veyra, who had been waiting for it, smiled at last. It was a small, sharp, dazzling thing, and it changed her whole face.

Stolen novel; please report.

“There,” she said. “That is better. You look less like a corpse.”

“Thanks.”

“Eat.”

She pulled something wrapped in a leaf from the pouch at her hip and pressed it into his hand. It was a flat round cake of some brown grain, baked with berries, still faintly warm. It tasted of honey and toasted nuts and woodsmoke, and he ate the whole thing in four bites, standing on a mountaintop above the clouds, with a girl who had saved his life watching him as if he were a particularly interesting animal.

They found a stone bench at the edge of the village, where the cliff dropped away and the whole white sea lay open beneath them. Veyra sat. After a moment, Fel sat beside her.

For a while neither of them spoke.

“Tell me about the sky,” she said.

He had known it was coming. He had been dreading it for a week. He picked at a thread on his borrowed sleeve.

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Try the truth. It is usually the shortest.”

“I don’t know the truth.” He heard his own voice rise, and made himself lower it. “I was fighting. In a place very far from here. At least, I think it was far. I was… there was a flash. A light. It came out of my sword, and then everything went white, and when I woke up I was in the forest at the bottom of your mountain with the sun cooking my skin, and I didn’t recognize anything. Not the trees. Not the animals. Not the sky.”

“The sky?”

“It’s wrong.” He gestured helplessly. “It’s the right color. It’s the right shape. But it’s wrong. It’s too… close. I can’t explain it.”

Veyra was silent. She had turned her head, and she was looking at him with an odd, intent, quiet expression, as though he had said something that made a piece of a puzzle slide into place.

“A light,” she said slowly. “From your sword.”

“Yes.”

“The golden one?”

He hesitated. Then, because he was too tired to lie, he nodded.

“I have been hunting the Weeping Forest since I was eleven,” said Veyra. “I know every tree between here and the river. I know the cry of every bird. I have never seen the sky turn white. The elders say they have never seen it either, not in all the years of the village. Some of them think the Mother is angry. Some of them think a god has died.” She paused. “Some of them think you are the god.”

“I’m not…”

“I know,” said Veyra, with an air of faint regret. “A god would have noticed the frog.”

He opened his mouth. Shut it. Opened it again.

“You’re very funny,” he said.

“I am told it is my best feature.” She leaned back on her hands. “I will tell you what I think, Fel. I think you are a boy who has been through something terrible, and who does not understand where he is, and who is more afraid than he lets anyone see. I think the elders will want to ask you a great many questions, and that you will not like the answers. And I think that if you tell them the truth as you understand it, they will believe you, because I do.” She looked at him sidelong. “Mostly.”

“Mostly?”

“You said Fel. Is it short for something?”

“Felanor.”

“Felanor.” She tried the name over, rolling the syllables. It sounded strange in her mouth, long and bright, like a note from a flute. “It is a good name. It sounds like a word for something that has fallen.”

His chest went tight.

Fallen Heir. Fallen Star.

“It does,” he said quietly.

She looked at him for a long moment more. Then she stood, brushed the dust from her leggings, and held out a hand. It was a long, slim, strong hand, callused at the fingertips from the bowstring, and he took it, and she hauled him to his feet as if he weighed nothing at all.

“Come,” she said. “They are expecting you at the Hall. We will go tomorrow. Tonight, you will eat a real dinner, and sleep in a real bed, and for once in your life, you will not think about anything.”

“That seems unlikely.”

“I know.” She started back across the bridge. “I said it anyway.”

That night, Fel ate more than he had eaten in his life.

There was a long table in the house of Osha’s daughter, under a ceiling hung with paper stars, and it was loaded with food: a whole roasted bird glazed in honey, a bowl of smoked mountain trout, a heap of glossy purple tubers fried in butter, a pile of flat bread still steaming, a tureen of cloudberry porridge, a dish of tiny pickled mushrooms that Pim insisted he try and that tasted, to his astonishment, divine. There were a dozen people at the table. All of them watched him eat. None of them spoke until he had finished his third helping, and then they all spoke at once.

They asked him everything. Where he was from. How old he was. What it was like to fall out of the sky. Whether it was true that he had killed a frog with his bare hands. A very old man with a crown of antlers wanted to know whether the people where he came from still said their prayers to the Mother, and a plump young woman with a baby on her hip wanted to know whether he was married, and Pim, wedged in at his elbow with a mouth full of peaches, wanted to know if he had any more funny hair.

He answered as best he could. He found that he did not mind it. There was something in the warm, noisy, clumsy generosity of it that reminded him, painfully, of a crooked inn in the Shallow Gallows, and a long wooden bar, and a woman laughing at the far end of it with her hair down.

He kept his smile until he got back to his room.

Then he shut the door, and leaned against it, and slid down to the floor.

Try it, said a small, cold voice in the back of his mind. Just once. Quietly. See if it still works.

He did not want to. He was afraid of what he would find. But he was more afraid of not knowing, and so he took Falling Star from the rack by the door, slid it half out of its scabbard, and held the hilt in both hands in the lamplight.

The ruby was dark.

“Silence,” he whispered.

Nothing.

He tried again, and then once more, a little louder, and then, because he could not help it, he put every last scrap of himself into the word and said it like a prayer. The lamp did not flicker. The room did not hush. Somewhere outside, a wind chime tinkled, and the world went on.

He put the black sword back in its scabbard. His hands were shaking.

He took up the golden saber and held it close to his chest. It was warm, the same quiet warmth it had always had, like a hand in the dark. He closed his eyes. He thought of the Hall, and the serpent, and the faces he had lost. He thought of Tori. He thought of the light.

“Krashing Fyr,” he said.

The saber lay in his hands, plain and gleaming and silent.

He sat on the floor of a stranger’s house, above the clouds, and he did not cry. He had done enough of that. He only held both his swords in his lap, and looked at the ceiling, and thought, with a slow, awful clarity:

Whatever I am here, I’m not that.

Then he put them away, and lay down on the narrow bed, and listened to the bells until he slept.