“And how’s our patient this morning?” Brisack chirruped as he came into the grand bedroom.
“You know how much I hate that,” Mal grumbled.
“Yes, I do. That’s why I say it.” The doctor smiled as he set down his large bag on the side table and picked up the notes lying next to it. “My assistant said you were up very late again, reading. Now, what did we say about that?”
“If you don’t stop that condescending attitude and quit treating me like a child,” Mal whispered, “I’ll have you removed!”
“You and what army?” Brisack chuckled as he put down his assistant’s notes. “While you’re incapacitated, the High General reports to me. You know, he’s actually a rather pleasant man when you aren’t out to undermine him. We worked together quite well uncovering all the ‘truth’ about those two lieutenants. Been a wonderful couple of weeks, I must say, and I thank you profusely for this opportunity.”
“Not one of my best ideas,” Mal muttered.
“Oh, I’m making a list of not your best ideas,” Brisack’s manner shifted sharply. “This isn’t going on it, though. So,” he said in his pleasant way again, “your appetite is returning, your color is better—I suppose I can allow you to resume some of your duties on a limited basis.”
Mal only grunted.
“Come on, Nicko. You know the routine. Wrist.”
Mal kept his arm firmly on the bed until the doctor stepped over and his snapped his fingers. Reluctantly the Chairman lifted his arm.
Instead of taking the proffered arm, the doctor instead grabbed the elaborate silk covers and threw them back with a flourish.
“Ohh . . . Nicko, just how old are you? Seven? Look at this mess!”
Mal groaned angrily as his stacks of notes—and even a quill with a small ink bottle—were discovered hiding in his massive bed which had doubled as his writing desk. The breeze caused by Brisack’s snatching of the blankets sent his piles into disarray, which Mal frantically tried to straighten again. Drops of black ink stained the creamy sheets in random patterns, as if the bed were bleeding blotchy words.
“What did I say about exciting your heart?” Brisack snatched up a stack of pages before Mal could reach them. “Rest, not agitation.”
“This is restful!” Mal said, grabbing at the rest of the pages. “I’m bored to near insanity here.”
“What is this?” Dr. Brisack said, reading one of the parchments he snagged. “Messages? How many have you been sending out anyway?”
“Just a few,” Mal confessed and slouched, already exhausted from his brief morning workout. “Just to give me something to do. Exceptionally dull being laid up, you know. I’ve been thinking, and—”
“I know what you’ve been thinking, Nicko.” Brisack sat down on a chair next to the bed. “When will you learn? The time’s not right, our methods aren’t yet perfected—”
“No, the right man can do it!” Mal insisted, struggling to an upright position and feebly fighting the half dozen pillows behind him. “I’m sure of it. Sonoforen was all noise and no matter. He mistook obnoxiousness for bravery. But Dormin—that boy was thoughtful and clever. He even snuck a visit to his brother over a year ago, and no one ever saw him except one of my Command School spies. He’s our man, Doctor! He has the brains, the motivation, the need—he could do it!”
Brisack shook his head slowly. “You’ve been looking for him, haven’t you? I’ve been intercepting your messages, you know. Two can play at that game. Gadiman’s so penitent and scared he’ll do anything I order. I think he’s still terrified you’re going to die and leave me in charge of the world. And then where will our dear Administrator of Loyalty be?”
Chairman Mal stared at his blankets, frustrated.
“But . . . I’ve been letting the messages go,” Brisack admitted. “If only to give you something to do. You’ve been sending very thorough descriptions of Dormin to every chief of enforcement and fort commander.”
Mal sagged into his pillows which nearly swallowed him. “Yes. So. What of it?”
Brisack picked up his bag and opened it. “And I’ve been receiving the responses.”
Mal tried to sit up again. “You?”
“Remember, I’m in control when you’re not,” Brisack said with such an overly happy grin that it committed a sneer.
“And?!”
Brisack rifled through the stack of pages he pulled out. “Actually, I’ve been watching for a letter from Mrs. Shin. The teacher scripts sent to Edge must have arrived shortly after your glorious failure, but she hasn’t sent a fifth letter. Either she’s too nervous about what happened at the fort or,” the doctor sighed sadly, “you’ve actually drowned the last swimming cat.”
“That was the whole point, Brisack,” Mal stewed, gazing longingly at the pile of papers Brisack held just out of his reach.
Brisack just shrugged. “Was rather looking forward to her response. Now, it’s all going to become dull again . . .”
Mal growled to draw him out of his blank stare at a distant nothing. “What about the messages? Where’s Dormin?”
Brisack shook himself a little and focused on the stack in his hands, shuffling through it. “Trades is still looking, as is Orchards, no one in Sands or Quake, someone in Pools, but far too old, same in Midplain but far too young . . . ah, but then there’s this.”
He held up a message.
“Winds.”
Mal tried vainly to snatch the message from Brisack. “What does it say?!”
“Now, while I do recommend light exercise, this flailing of yours isn’t exactly what I had in mind—”
“Read it!”
Brisack cleared his throat with deliberate slowness. “Young man matching the description, about early to mid-twenties, was seen in Winds during the past year. Nephew of a rector’s wife—”
“Yes, yes! Sonoforen said Dormin was talking with a rector!” Mal was practically salivating. “Could be pretending to be a relative.”
“Nephew of a rector and his wife,” Brisack intoned. “The young man was working as a field laborer and helping to repair the washed out bridge along the Winds River. But, as of a few weeks now, all three of them have been missing. They’re looking again to appease you, but there’s simply no evidence.”
Mal’s face drooped. “Missing?”
Brisack nodded as he continued to summarize the message. “No sign of forced entry or mischief at the house. Chief of enforcement initially surmised that the nephew had taken his aunt and uncle to see the work he was doing on the bridge. There was a minor flash flood in the area after a heavy rainstorm, and perhaps they fell in and were washed away. Their bodies would be out to sea by now.”
Mal fell back into his pillows again. “No, no, tell them to keep searching! Maybe they just went on holiday or something!”
Brisack shook his head as he scanned the message. “They had an extensive garden and many chickens. Whenever they went somewhere even only for a day, they asked a neighbor to keep an eye on their property. The neighbors said no one spoke to them. The three of them just vanished.”
“No, no . . . there must be something more,” Mal said in a stunning display of desperation.
“One of the neighbors did mention that late at night he thought he saw someone entering the house before they were discovered missing. The neighbor was getting in a cat and wasn’t sure of what he’d seen. Then again, there were always people going to the rector’s at odd hours of the night, trying to get advice without anyone knowing. But they have no further leads.”
“So nothing?” Mal whimpered.
Brisack shook his head as he folded the message. “Just assume Dormin is gone, Nicko. I never met the boy, but from what I’ve heard about him, he wasn’t as throne hungry as his brother. It is peculiar, though,” he said, unfolding the message again. “Almost reminds me of . . .”
“Reminds you of what?” Mal asked Brisack when he didn’t complete his sentence.
“A few times,” Brisack whispered, “people h
ave vanished. No chief of enforcement likes to keep records of his failures, but people have gone missing before. Occasionally I’ve been asked to look for clues, or evidence of trauma or blood, but we never found anything suspicious. Only a woman, or a man, or a family suddenly . . . gone. Rumor always was that it was Guarders.”
Mal scoffed. “Someone loses a nugget of gold, or just a sock goes missing from the line, and a Guarder’s always blamed! They’ve always been convenient. Of course now with our abandoning them, the next time something goes missing it just might be Guarders.” He smiled smugly, already recovering from his disappointment about Dormin. “Rather looking forward to this new strategy of ours.”
Brisack didn’t even comment about Mal trying to share credit for their new plan.
“What is it?” Mal asked.
“Where do they go, Nicko?” the doctor whispered. “The people that vanish? They can’t all be washed out to sea. Winds, Waves, Flax—they’re all along the rivers. You think someone would notice the bodies.”
Mal shrugged that off. “People fall into all kinds of things. There was that young man and his girlfriend that fell into one of the larger hot pools last year and died. People have accidents, or maybe committed a crime and run away to another village to not be caught, or maybe a former lover abducts them . . . so many possibilities. And I’m sure a few people actually do fall into the rivers.”
“What if they don’t, Nicko?” Brisack said quietly. “What if there really is someone taking them?”
“For what purpose?” Mal scoffed. “Who would want extra people? Who else is there?”
Brisack leaned forward, bracing himself on his knees. “Nicko, just consider—what if there is someone else out there? What if our men aren’t the only ones in the forests?”
“I’d say you need some bed rest, Dr. Brisack!”
Brisack earnestness remained. “But what if, Nicko? We’re never sure of how many we have anyway. We can’t risk keeping written records, and communications have always been poor—”
“It’s impossible, Doctor! Even if we had someone that’s gone rogue up there, why would they? Impossible!”
“I’m sorry to confess,” Brisack whispered, “that the older I get, the less I think things are impossible.”
---
Dormin, the last son of King Oren, stopped, no longer unable to walk. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think. He could only stare.
Rector and Mrs. Yung chuckled. They’d been anticipating this moment, and they weren’t disappointed. Then again, they never were.
They stood behind the young man, just waiting.
---
At the same moment on that clear, cool Harvest afternoon, Mahrree looked up from her chore of hanging the laundry out to dry. She felt an unexpected urge to look at the mountains—really look at the mountains.
A mistake of Nature. Land should be flat. Everyone knew that.
But why?
She turned her back to the jagged peaks topped with early snow, the boulder field at the base of them that stretched from the east to the west with rock as big as barns, and ignored the mile wide forest that led up to those boulders. So many borders, so many barriers.
But they all refused to be ignored.
She put another cleaned, wet changing cloth on the line and pinned it in place.
The mountains called silently to her.
She flung a pair of long hose over the rope.
The boulders beckoned to her.
She draped her husband’s undershirt next to her son’s sleeping gown.
The forest invited her to turn and notice it again.
She sighed and pivoted north to view the fiercest enemy of the Army of Idumea. No one ever looks at the mountains. They merely glanced at them but never stopped to see the details, to notice the grooves where pine trees grew straight and tall until they reached some invisible border high on the mountain where no more trees grew.
It was the first time Mahrree had ever noticed that.
She also noticed the sunshine glinting on what must have been a trickle of water coming down one side, following the contours of the rock. She saw shrubs that didn’t grow down where she lived, and grasses turning brown in the growing cold, and patches of yellow that may have been late-season flowers, and . . .
---
In his office Perrin, too, felt the sudden need to look up at the peaks that loomed so high his windows couldn’t fully contain them. He stood up from his desk and walked over to the window for a better look. He always watched the forest, but rarely the mountains behind them. But today he did, and his chest unexpectedly burned.
He saw colors he never noticed before, shades of gray, brown, green, white—all of them distinct and separate and more detailed than he ever imagined.
Until that day he never really noticed that the mountains weren’t all just one color. They were as varied and mottled as . . .
As . . .
A good comparison didn’t come to mind. There really wasn’t anything to compare them to. The mountains were their own thing.
And they would be ignored no longer.
---
At Edge’s Inn, Hycymum paused to look out of the kitchen door that abutted the alley, and noticed for the first time the white snow-capped peaks. Snow must come early up there at the top. She never realized before how the snow resembled whipped cream. It almost looked tasty. She turned to go back into the Inn, but found herself stopping to stare again at the mountains.
Why had she never before seen the cream?
---
Down in Idumea High General Shin, accompanying his wife to the carriage, glanced to see why she stopped. Joriana looked toward the faint, hazy blue in the distance where her son and his family lived, and she sighed.
Relf looked north and thought about his grandchildren. Then . . .
“I never noticed that before,” he murmured.
“Noticed what?” his wife asked.
He shook his head in amazement. “You can see the mountains from here! That distant pale purple—”
“The jagged line on the horizon—yes, I see it. Those are the mountains!” Joriana exclaimed in wonder.
Together they stared in silence at the north. It was so obvious now.
“So why did we never see them before?” Relf whispered, almost reverently, almost nervously.
---
In the large orange and red stone Administration building, Chairman Mal, back on the job, shouted at two disappointing Administrators until he turned red in the face.
In the hallway Dr. Brisack stood ready with a bottle of heart tonic, because he heard Nicko’s frantic squeals of, “How can the last son of the king just vanish?! Look harder! I need Dormin!”
Dr. Brisack was also feeling some disappointment. The letter skimmers hadn’t seen anything come in from Mrs. Shin, and each one of them was watching for her distinctive handwriting in order to whisk her letter immediately to the Administrator’s desk. Brisack was beginning to suspect nothing would be coming, and that filled him with growing disillusionment. He thought there was a little bit more to her.
Down the hall, still cloistered in his office, Gadiman pored over pages, writing and writing and hoping no one would knock on his door.
No one ever did.
---
Back up in Edge, Shem Zenos, taking his midday meal break at the fort, stared down into his mug and turned it slowly. He glanced up at the sand clock above the door and smiled at the time. He nodded at nothing, stood up, and walked outside.
He glanced at the mountains, saw immediately what he was looking for, and headed back to his bunk for a nap.
---
And down from the fort, Mahrree continued to stare at the mountains.
“What do you see?” came the panicked voice from over the fence.
Mahrree, startled, looked to her left to see a pair of anxious eyes peering over the wooden fence, mousy brown hair above them shaking slightly.
&nbs
p; “Nothing, Mrs. Hersh. I was just noticing the mountains.”
“Why?” the woman in her late thirties exclaimed, standing a little taller now that there was no immediate danger about to come over the fence.
Mahrree blinked at that. “Why not? Look at them—I mean, really look at them. Fascinating! The crevices, the colors, the foliage—I never before noticed. So mysterious! So intrigue—”
That’s when she saw the look of astonishment on Mrs. Hersh’s peaked face. Mahrree glanced down to make sure she hadn’t suddenly transformed into a rabid wolf. Her neighbor seemed to think she had.
“Why are saying such things?” she hissed.
“Why not?”
“The mountains are . . . are . . . deformed! They’re not natural!” Mrs. Hersh gestured madly at the objects she dared not look at. “Land should be flat! I’m just glad my house faces away from that,” she grimaced. “I keep telling my husband we need to leave, but he says, ‘Just ignore them.’ How long can we ignore them? They’re hideous! Everyone knows that!”
Mahrree took an earnest step forward. “Who first told us they were deformed and hideous? I’ve never been able to find out! Don’t you ever wonder—I mean really wonder—that if everything we claim is true isn’t simply someone else’s opinion? And we’ve repeated it so often that we all accept it’s true? But what if it’s not?”
Mrs. Hersh’s eyes bulged, and she looked uncomfortably at Mahrree’s hand. Mahrree hadn’t realized that she’d been gesturing with Perrin’s underpants. She tossed them behind her into the basket.
That made Mrs. Hersh only slightly more at ease. “Who cares?” she said as threw her hands in the air. “Mountains are dangerous! Stay away! That’s even what your husband says, so why fight it?”
Mahrree took a few more steps to the fence.
Mrs. Hersh took a defensive step away.
“Why fight it? Because what if everything we believe is wrong?”
Mahrree saw her poor neighbor’s eyes glaze over. She knew better than to get into a debate with Mrs. Shin. That was something else everybody ‘knew.’ If Mahrree didn’t break people down by logic, she did so out of sheer persistence. Mrs. Hersh realized too late she’d been dragged into the discussion, and the dread in her eyes demonstrated a frantic desire to escape.
But there was also something else there: a sudden loyalty to her society that demanded no one step out of bounds. “Then we’re wrong together,” Mrs. Hersh decided. “Being united is important,” she said as if realizing she actually believed that. “What everyone thinks together is correct,” she reasoned out loud, “and so if you follow the crowd, you’ll never be wrong.”
Mahrree’s shoulders fell. How can you open someone’s eyes who holds them firmly shut, yet claims she sees just fine?
“It’s like the river,” Mrs. Hersh went on, emboldened by Mahrree’s discouraged silence. “Everything flows downstream. Simply . . . go with that flow. It’s just easier that way.”
Mahrree saw her way back in. “Fish don’t flow downstream.”
“Yes they do.”
“No, they don’t.”
Mrs. Hersh put her hands on her hips. “Why wouldn’t they?”
“Because then there’d be no more fish up here in Edge!” Mahrree pointed out. “I’ve seen them when I’ve taken my students to see the river, and when I’ve dragged my fishing husband home again. Many fish swim in the same spot, fighting the current. A few species even swim upstream, against everything pushing them to the southern ocean.”
Mrs. Hersh pondered for a moment. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why wouldn’t they just go with the flow of the river?”
“Because,” Mahrree tried not to sigh at her neighbor’s inanity, “maybe they don’t like where the river is going! Salty water at the end of it likely kills them.”
Mrs. Hersh squinted. “How would they know about the salty water? Besides, so what? At least they had an easy time getting to it. They’re going die eventually, so might as well go easily instead of fighting the current.”
And right then Mahrree realized, to her horror, that the Administrators had won.
People didn’t need to think for themselves, they only needed to think what everyone else thought. They didn’t need to worry about the color of the sky, because everyone agreed it was only blue. They didn’t need to worry if they were drifting to an irreversible tragedy, as long as they were doing it together, united.
Because as long as everyone else was doing it, you should too. Hold hands and jump off the crevice together, never questioning why.
“I’d rather fight the current,” Mahrree said quietly.
Mrs. Hersh shrugged her shoulders. “You’re a lovely neighbor, Mrs. Shin, always willing to lend an egg, but I truly don’t understand you.”
The debate was over.
Mrs. Hersh glanced at the mountains, shuddered so dramatically she should have been performing in the amphitheater, and marched back to her house.
There was only one thing left for Mahrree to do.
She turned to face the peaks fully. She could see things in any way she wanted to. And to her, the mountains seemed the way they had in her dreams of a large house with weathered gray wood and window boxes filled with herbs.
They were majestic. Powerful. Awe-inspiring.
Beautiful.
And then, for a brief moment, she thought that she could see almost everything in them and beyond. She’d always regarded them as a barrier of some sort, made of tall dead things like the stockade fence that surrounded the fort.
But the mountains were alive.
Even at this distance she could see trees sway as a wind blew past. The yellow specks weren’t flowers, but leaves being blown off of high spindly trees, like tiny flakes. Surely there was even more alive up there. Where did the bears, mountain lions, and wolves that visited the forest, and sometimes the villages, come from?
What else might be there, alive?
She’d asked Perrin about the other side of the mountains over a year ago, but even then she’d never actually looked at them. Now she couldn’t seem to pull her eyes away. She wished she had her husband’s spyglass to peer up into the crevices of the rocky terrain. Surely there would be something peering back at her!
Mahrree’s chest tightened with possibilities. What if . . . what if there was even more than she ever dreamed about?
Her chest tightened even more, but now with dread.
Dreams could be very frightful things. Did she really want to know? Deeply, desperately? Or was it all just a silly romantic notion? True, she went into the forest, but she was so frightened of it she nearly wet her drawers like a two-year-old. Would she really have gone with that woman if circumstances were different?
Maybe it was because the woman had an air about her that told Mahrree she wouldn’t be leaving Edge that Mahrree felt courageous enough to proclaim she would. It’s so easy to be brave when everyone knows you can’t prove it.
And that woman’s words . . .
Despite Mahrree trying to forget what happened that night, her words still bounced in her head. “All I do is save lives.”
So was it the women that preserved and hid other women, while the men killed? What if Mahrree had run into a man instead of a woman that night?
She also finally recalled the words of that gray old man: “May the Creator always bless and preserve this family.”
Mahrree cringed. How arrogant she had been, assuming that nothing would happen to her because of an old man’s wish. Of course she could have been killed! She knew, always, that she was merely a loud coward.
But her husband? Perrin truly was a brave man. And so was his father.
She tried to stop looking at the mountains and boulders and forest where she learned that she was nothing more than a steam vent, pouring out so much heat and stench, yet accomplishing nothing. But still the north continued to captivate her. For some odd reason, it was all just so appealing.
And it w
as all far too confusing. There was simply too much she didn’t know, and that nagged at her. She hated knowing she didn’t know.
She was missing something, very important.
---
Dormin struggled to move, but instead he crumpled to his knees. He wasn’t the first one to do so at that spot. He continued to stare, his mouth slowly dropping open, and his eyes filling with tears.
The Yungs winked at each other.
Dormin tried lamely to gesture, but his arms couldn’t even obey him. He just gaped.
Eventually words stumbled out of his stunned mouth as he stared at the scene in front of him.
“Oh . . . my . . . I . . . just . . . didn’t . . .”
The Yungs laughed.
---
Mahrree felt, for the briefest of moments, a thrust of heat and energy and amazement. It came out of nowhere, filled her completely, and then, just as swiftly as the feeling came, it slipped away.
She hadn’t imagined it; it had been real—so painfully, acutely real. It stopped her in her back garden, as if an invisible hand had slipped into her and yanked her soul. She still felt it, even though it was now only a fast memory.
And the loss of that moment—of that wonder, that fear, that knowledge that so quickly rushed into, and then out again—panged her heart. Something extraordinary was, at that moment, happening somewhere in those mountains.
And she was missing it.
She had to miss it.
She could never leave her husband or her children. They were a family. Without her family, she was merely a fraction of what she should be.
There would come a time for her, the woman had told her. That notion both fascinated and terrified her. When that time would be, she had no idea. For now it was just easier to push aside the worrying yet captivating thought. So until that time . . .
Until then, there was nothing more she could do.
Except . . . the laundry.
She sighed loudly, turned back to the basket on the ground, and forced her arms to go through the motions of hanging her daughter’s dress on the line. Tears of frustration leaked from her eyes, and embarrassed, she brushed them away.
There was nothing more to see, or to know, or to imagine.
Except a strange little thought that floated like a tiny puff of cotton through her mind, so quietly that she nearly missed it, but she caught it at the last moment.
It said, Where—exactly—is your family?
---
“I can’t help it, that story always puts me in the mood for berry pie.”
The two thirteen-year-olds stared at the old woman as she looked thoughtfully into the sky. Pulling weeds in the pumpkin patch had been forgotten hours ago.
“Aren’t either of you hungry?” she asked the teens. “I’m starving. And look—the raspberries are ripe. Surely someone’s mother somewhere has a raspberry pie?” she hinted.
The girl scoffed. “Muggah, you can’t be serious—”
Her cousin Vid jumped in. “Oh Hycy, yes she is. Look at her eyes. Pie eyes.”
Muggah smiled slightly. “Can’t go on without pie. I’m so frail, so needing of sustenance . . .”
“But,” Hycy exclaimed, “You didn’t tell us if Shem—”
“Forget Shem,” Vid cut her off. “She didn’t get to the part when they went to—”
“Ohh,” Muggah sighed loudly and put a hand dramatically to her forehead. “Need pie. No more words until pie. Memories . . . fading . . . only restored by . . . pie.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” Hycy rolled her eyes. Vid nodded in disgusted agreement at the old woman sitting in the garden with them. “We’ll find you pie, all right?” Hycy said.
Muggah winked at them. “Pie for words, then. And don’t worry—the story will still be waiting for you,” she promised as the teenagers stood up and brushed off their clothes.
“And a glass of milk would be nice to go along with it,” she announced as they trudged off. “And a napkin. I’m not a filthy Guarder just sitting out here in the dirt, you know.”
She grinned as they groaned loudly.
Then she looked up at the warm sun and laughed.