Ruin and Rising (The Grisha Trilogy)(70)

“Here?” I asked. We’d passed nothing but empty mountains for miles.

We stayed alert, searching for signs of what might have come before, hoping to see etched symbols, maybe the little altars we’d seen carved into the rock closer to Dva Stolba, eager for some kind of proof that we were on the right path. But the only lesson in the stones seemed to be that cities rose and fell and were forgotten. You live in a single moment. I live in a thousand. I might live long enough to see Os Alta turn to dust. Or maybe I’d turn my power back on myself and end it all before then. What would life be like when the people I loved were gone? When there were no mysteries left?

We followed the road to where it just seemed to end, buried in a slump of fallen rock covered in grass and yellow wildflowers. We scrambled over it, and when we reached the top, a sliver of ice crept into my bones.

It was as if the color had been leached out of the landscape. The field before us was gray grass. A black ridge stretched along the horizon, covered in trees, their bark smooth and glossy as polished slate, their angular branches free of leaves. But the eerie thing was the way they grew, in perfect, regular lines, equidistant, as if they had each been planted with infinite care.

“That looks wrong,” said Harshaw.

“They’re soldier trees,” said Mal. “It’s just the way they grow, like they’re keeping ranks.”

“That’s not the only reason,” said Tolya. “This is the ashwood. The gateway to the Cera Huo.”

Mal took out his map. “I don’t see it.”

“It’s a story. There was a massacre here.”

“A battle?” I asked.

“No. A Shu battalion was brought here by their enemies. They were prisoners of war.”

“Which enemies?” asked Harshaw.

Tolya shrugged. “Ravkan, Fjerdan, maybe other Shu. This was old days.”

“What happened to them?”

“They starved, and when the hunger became too great, they turned on each other. It’s said the last man standing planted a tree for each of his fallen brethren. And now they wait for travelers to pass too close to their branches, so they can claim a final meal.”

“Lovely,” grumbled Zoya. “Remind me to never ask you for a bedtime story.”

“It’s just a legend,” Mal said. “I’ve seen those trees near Balakirev.”

“Growing like that?” Harshaw asked.

“Not … exactly.”

I eyed the shadows in the grove. The trees did look like a regiment marching toward us. I’d heard similar stories about the woods near Duva, that in the long winters, the trees would snatch up girls to eat. Superstition, I told myself, but I didn’t want to take another step toward that hillside.

“Look!” said Harshaw.

I followed his gaze. There, amid the deep shadows of the trees, something white was moving, a fluttering shape that rose and fell, slipping between the branches.

“There’s another,” I gasped, pointing to where a whorl of white shimmered, then disappeared into nothing.

“It can’t be,” said Mal.

Another shape appeared between the trees, then another.

“I do not like this,” said Harshaw. “I do not like this at all.”

“Oh, for Saints’ sake,” sneered Zoya. “You really are peasants.”

She lifted her hands, and a massive gust of wind tore up the mountain. The white shapes seemed to retreat. Then Zoya hooked her arms, and they rushed at us in a moaning white cloud.

“Zoya—”

“Relax,” she said.

I threw up my arms to ward off whatever horrible thing Zoya had brought down on us. The cloud exploded. It burst into harmless flakes that drifted to the ground around us.

“Ash?” I reached out to catch some of it on my fingers. It was fine and white, the color of chalk.

“It’s just some kind of weather phenomenon,” Zoya said, sending the ashes rising again in lazy spirals. We looked back up the hill. The white clouds continued to move in shifts and gusts, but now that we knew what they were, they seemed slightly less sinister. “You didn’t really think they were ghosts, did you?”

I blushed and Tolya cleared his throat. Zoya rolled her eyes and strode toward the hill. “I am surrounded by fools.”

“They looked spooky,” Mal said to me with a shrug.

“They still do,” I muttered.

All the way up the rise, weird little blasts of wind struck us, hot and then cold. No matter what Zoya said, the grove was an eerie place. I steered clear of the trees’ grasping branches and tried to ignore the gooseflesh puckering my arms. Every time a white whorl rose up near us, I jumped and Oncat hissed from Harshaw’s shoulder.

When we finally crested the hill, we saw that the trees marched all the way into the valley, though here their branches were lush with purple leaves, their ranks spreading over the landscape below like the folds of a Fabrikator’s robe. But that wasn’t what stopped us in our tracks.

Ahead of us stood a towering cliff. It looked less a part of the mountains than like the wall of a giant’s stronghold. It was dark and massive, nearly flat at the top, the rock the heavy gray of iron. A tangle of dead trees had been blown against its base. The cliff was split down the middle by a roaring waterfall that fed a pool so clear we could see the rocks at the bottom. The lake stretched almost the length of the valley, surrounded by blooming soldier trees, then seemed to disappear belowground.