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The way was not always easy. There were hills in the forest, and twice they came to steep ravines that had to be circumnavigated. Oliver was sure that Frost could have found his own way across without much trouble . . . he wasn’t sure how it worked, if the winter man could just become a gust of snow without a storm to work with, but in any case he knew he was holding Frost back. Yet the winter man said nothing, only kept walking, continuing doggedly to the east.
They crossed through a clearing. On the far side was a thick grove of tall shrubs that seemed their own forest in the midst of the larger growth. Oliver pressed on. He was about to forge through the shrubbery when Frost whispered his name, a chill little bit of voice that touched his ears like a breeze.
Oliver paused and glanced at him.
The winter man crooked a finger and beckoned him to follow. “We’ll go around,” he whispered.
With a furrowed brow, Oliver pointed to the greenery. “They’re just shrubs. ”
Frost arched an icy brow. “Nothing is ‘just’ anything here. You are far from home, Oliver, in a place whose customs and people you know astonishingly little about. I am a poor guide, I fear, but the best you can hope for. If you wish to survive—”
“All right, all right, I get it,” Oliver said, chastened. He followed Frost and they strode north across the clearing until they could go around that particular grove of shrubs. Only when they had entered the forest again did he speak up.
“Aren’t you going to tell me?”
“What is it I am supposed to tell you?” Frost asked.
“We went around. I’d like to know why. ”
The winter man was several paces ahead and he glanced over his shoulder, mist fogging from his eyes. “You saw shrubs. ”
“How could I have missed them?”
“Yet they were not shrubs. They were Betikhan. ”
“Betty-who?”
Frost laughed softly and turned his attention back to blazing a path ahead. “Savage nature spirits. Before the creation of the Veil I believe they hailed from the part of the world you call India. Betikhan are benevolent creatures unless they are disturbed. Then they can be quite vicious. ”
Oliver ducked beneath a low branch and caught the toe of his shoe on an exposed root. He stumbled and caught himself quickly, surprising himself by laughing.
“Vicious shrubbery?”
His only warning was the chiming of icicles as Frost spun on him. The winter man bared needle teeth and a gust of frigid breath blew from his mouth. That blue mist crystallized around his eyes and then fell as a small dusting of snowflakes to the ground. Terror seized Oliver and he stood rigid, as though Frost had frozen him there. His breath caught in his throat, the cold air of the winter man searing his lips.
The fury in those eyes filled him with fear and shame.
“There is nothing at all humorous in our situation,” Frost rasped. “In this world you will be surrounded by things that in your own would seem harmless. Make that presumption of anything here, and it could be the death of both of us. ”
He did not wait for a reply, but turned and continued on. For several moments Oliver only stood watching after him, remembering how to breathe. At last he hurried to catch up. For an instant he thought he had lost track of Frost in amongst the trees, but then caught sight of the gleam of moonlight on ice.
Something rustled in the underbrush off to his right. Already on edge, Oliver spun to seek it out and saw a long, slender fox in amongst some ivy. Its eyes gleamed and its fur was the color of rust in the light of the moon. For several seconds he stared at it and it returned the intensity of his regard, but Oliver was aware that Frost was gaining distance and at last he tore his gaze away and dashed through the trees after the winter man. He glanced back once, but the fox was gone.
“All right,” he said quietly as he caught up. “I understand. As much as I understand any of this, I guess. I’ve been . . . uprooted. I’m lost. Do you understand? Lost in so many ways. All my life I’ve known all too well exactly what was going to happen to me tomorrow. Now . . . I don’t have the first idea what’ll happen in the next five minutes. All I do know is that I don’t want to die. And that I have to get home. ”
Even as he said this last, there was regret in his heart. Did he really have to? But the answer was yes. Whatever became of his life, he couldn’t just leave Julianna without explanation, couldn’t disappear on his sister forever. He would not hurt them like that. Oliver wasn’t sure what he had to go home to, but he cared too much for them to stay away forever.
Unless you die, he thought. But he put that thought into a mental box with all of the other unpleasant things that had come into his head since the impossible had taken over his life.
“So, explain it to me,” he went on, trailing Frost by a few paces, trying to get abreast of him, to look into his eyes. “You’ve told me very little about this place. About the Veil. But we’ve obviously got nothing but time here. So talk to me. Please. ”
CHAPTER 4
Oliver and the winter man walked on for a time with the request hanging in the air between them. Talk to me, Oliver had said. They came to a ridge of rocky ground that rose up from the forest floor like the spine of some massive beast. It would have provided a good view of the area around them and a path free of trees, but Frost stayed in the lee of the ridge and kept on to the east, and Oliver could do nothing but follow.
The winter man glanced up into the branches, and then surveyed the woods around them. He slowed a moment, peering off into the undergrowth, and Oliver wondered what he might have seen that could have unnerved him. But the thought was brushed aside when Frost looked over his shoulder and even slowed his gait enough so that they were walking side by side. The winter man’s pale blue eyes seemed to shine with an inner light. Oliver thought it was probably just the moon, but it occurred to him that in this world he could not be sure of anything.
“To begin, you must assume that everything is real,” said the winter man. “Every story, every fairy tale, every myth and legend. Of course, not all of them are, and most of the stories you know are only versions of the truth, tainted by the storytellers over the course of centuries and millennia. ”
Something rustled in the brush off to the left again and this time both Frost and Oliver turned to glance in that direction for several seconds. They continued on, however, and Oliver found himself studying the darkest places in the forest far more carefully, mindful of the tension in the winter man. The Falconer could not follow them this quickly, according to what Frost had said, but from his behavior it seemed this was little comfort.
“You’ve said as much before,” Oliver replied. “So there’s the real world, and all of the old legends are sort of walled up behind the Veil, but—”
Icy mist fumed from the winter man’s nostrils and his brows knitted. “The ‘real world’? That is precisely the sort of thinking that you must abandon. In the Once Upon a Time that starts so many of your stories, people understood that the magical and unusual existed just beside the mundane and the human, on the periphery of awareness. Then the world became more civilized. . . . ”
Frost sneered the word.
“Industry grew and cities overran the world. The human cultures became more organized and the creatures of legend were demystified. Some hid away in caves and rivers and secret cities of their own— lost cities, to your history— but others were hunted. Destroyed. Your kind was no longer afraid of the dark, or not enough for our protection. Humanity had lost its respect for magic and shadow, and that was dangerous to us.
“So we left. ”
Oliver glanced sidelong at Frost. There was such finality in those words that the winter man made it sound so possible, so real. Yet he was having difficulty imagining any of it, even in spite of the evidence all around them. He shook his head.
“Just like that?”
“Many of the tribes of legend, human and otherwise, have magicians amongst them. The most powe
rful of them gathered together and wove a spell that took years to complete. With their combined sorcery they created the Veil as a wall to separate our last sanctuaries from the mundane world. It is more and less than a wall, however. It will be easy for you to think of two worlds, layered one upon another, existing side by side, each imperceptible to the citizens of the other. ”
All of this Oliver had gathered previously, at least in a general way, but one thing Frost had said stunned him.
“ ‘Human and otherwise’? You talked before about the Lost Ones, but I’m having trouble with that. There are humans here?”
The winter man smiled softly, perhaps a bit condescendingly, as they continued to walk along the bottom of that ridge. “How many humans have mysteriously disappeared over the ages? And not only individuals. How many cities have been emptied of their populations, or perhaps disappeared entirely, down to the last stone? Entire civilizations are considered ‘lost’ by the mundane world. ”
So astonished was he that Oliver barely took note of the change in the topography of the ridge, of the gray-white arches that emerged from the mossy earth. Flittering glints of light caught his gaze and he glanced up to see fireflies darting to and fro in the air above the ridge, and in amongst the trees. He took all of this in but only with a part of his conscious mind. The rest was trying to digest what Frost had said.
“Are you . . . do you mean the Mayans? The Aztecs?”
Frost nodded. “And many others. Most of the legendary creatures— the faeries and boggarts and giants— live in the wild still, as is their preference. Humans make up a large part of the population of the Two Kingdoms— Atlanteans most of all. Though with their divergent evolution, some argue the Atlanteans are not really human. ”
That was enough to stop Oliver in his tracks. The winter man went on several steps before realizing he had fallen behind, and turned to face him. A dozen replies came into Oliver’s head, all of them amounting to roughly the same thing— a scowl and some utterance of disbelief. Atlantis? He was supposed to believe that there had once been an Atlantis, and that no one had ever found any conclusive evidence of its existence?
But that was wrong, wasn’t it? There were plenty of scholars who had theorized the existence and history of Atlantis, as well as its location. It was only that society did not take them seriously. And that was the purpose of the Veil. That was its magic. To keep secrets.
Oliver let himself fall back against the ridge and stared up at the moonlight streaming through the trees, trying to catch his breath, get his bearings. Exhaustion was a factor, but he knew that it was far more than that. He pressed his eyes tightly closed and wondered if when he opened them he would be staring at the ceiling of his bedroom.
Don’t be stupid, he thought.
Then he whispered it aloud to himself.
He could hear the sounds of this mystical forest and feel the light breeze on his skin. The earth was rough under him but it smelled richly of soil and flora. The feeling of surreality tried to take hold of him again but he shook it off. Doubt was a luxury he could not afford.
His eyes snapped open and he sat up, glancing around. There was another of those gray-white arches sticking from the ridge only inches from him, and this close, he saw immediately that it was bone. Oliver jumped up and stumbled away from the ridge and then turned to stare at it with new perspective. Its shape took on new meaning in his mind, and those bones . . . he’d thought of the ridge as a spine before, and those were the ribs. They had been walking alongside the funereal mound of some gigantic, ancient beast.
“Oliver?”
The winter man gazed curiously at him, head tilted birdlike to one side, icicle hair swaying in the breeze. Frost clearly did not know what to make of him.
With a gesture, he urged the winter man to speak. “Maybe that’s enough history for now. Just tell me about the Falconer. You said you were one of the Borderkind. I get that. How many of you are there? How many of these Hunters are after you . . . after us, do you think? And who sent them? If someone’s trying to kill me, I should know who they are. ”
Frost frowned once more, glancing over his shoulder and peering into the deeper forest. When he turned to Oliver that icy mist was spilling from his eyes again. The night had turned humid and grown warmer, and as he spoke the moisture in the air formed ice crystals and drifted to the ground. His expression was grave.
“The Falconer is a Hunter. It no longer matters what he was in the history of legend. When the Two Kingdoms were at war with each other they employed Hunters. These assassins have never been content with peace and it would be a simple matter to compel them to kill again. I had heard that several Borderkind had been killed. Word of the murder of Julenisse reached me not long before my last journey to your world. Merrows and Selkies have been killed as well, but horrifying as that was, I’d thought perhaps it had been done for their skins.
“Most of the Lost and the legendary hate the Borderkind because we are the only ones with the ability to travel through the Veil without a Door. The Lost Ones, the humans, I’ve already told you, can never cross back. Once they’ve been touched by the magic in the Veil, they cannot pass back through, even using a Door. The other beings here, the legendary, could cross over, but the Doors are usually well guarded and it requires special authority to pass through. ”
Oliver frowned. “So, whoever sent the Hunters after the Borderkind, they’re either really clever, or they’ve got some serious authority. ”
Frost nodded, troubled. “True. ”
“What I still don’t understand is, why can the Borderkind cross?”
“It goes back to the creation of the Veil,” Frost said. “At the time, there was great debate on whether some of us should be given that privilege. It was decided that those who desired that freedom could retain it, but only if there were enough people in your world who still talked about us, who still had a glimmer of belief in their hearts for us. There are hundreds of Borderkind, but there will never be any others. Only those who became Borderkind at the time of the Veil’s creation.