He looked around. The camp slept on peacefully. The fires burned steadily, fed by the watch guards.
“I dreamed that I was … not myself,” he said. “Someone called to me-”
“He’s waiting,” Ilvani said. “We have to go.”
“Where?” Ashok stood up, fastened his cloak, and checked his weapons. Ilvani was already walking north out of the camp. She removed a crystal sphere from her pouch, spoke a word, and shook it. Reddish gold light filled the sphere and illuminated the night. Ashok untied the nightmare’s reins and led the stallion after her.
“The flock is short one blade,” the witch said. “Always alone, always left behind. Not tonight and not ever again. Maybe Daruk’s song did serve a purpose.”
“Daruk’s song? Stop-Ilvani, wait. What am I walking into?”
She looked back at him over her shoulder. “A ride you’ll never forget,” she said. “Are you afraid?”
He shook his head.
She scowled. “Then stop making sounds. Come with me, so we can all be at peace tonight.”
He followed her without another word, but he unlooped his chain from his belt and held it taut between his hands. The wind wafted snow crystals across the open ground and into their faces. Soon Ashok’s exposed skin was numb from the cold.
This lack of feeling unnerved him and made him feel displaced from his flesh. They couldn’t be away from the fire too long. The cold was becoming dangerous out here on the deep open plain, and Tuva was right about the snow blindness. A more violent wind could make a seasoned tracker lose his way and freeze to death.
They reached a dip in the land-the remnants of a dry streambed. Boulders and dead brush had filled the streambed long ago. Ilvani went down on her knees and moved aside one of the lighter stones.
“This is the hard part,” she said. “It may not work.”
“What won’t work?” Ashok kneeled beside her. “If we stay in the snow like this for very long, we won’t be able to walk back to camp.”
Ilvani closed her eyes. She seemed to be concentrating on something very hard. She set the sphere in the snow and removed the glove from her left hand. She held her hand up in the air between them.
At first, Ashok didn’t comprehend what she meant by the gesture, but then she looked down at his hands. He let go of his chain and took his gloves off. He raised his right hand but hesitated with his palm an inch from hers.
With a quick, striking movement, she grabbed his hand. Only then did Ashok realize her other hand rested on the stones, the remnants of what looked like a funeral cairn.
Energy pulsed through his body. Ashok’s heart stuttered, but he kept hold of her hand. The blowing snow froze in her hair, making stiff rods around her face. Her lips were blue as she spoke the words of a chant. The pulse came again, and Ashok had to close his eyes against the force of it even as he reveled in the awakening. The sensation was like plunging his frozen body into scalding water. He came alive again. He opened his eyes and tilted his face to the sky to savor the moment, though he did not understand its purpose.
By the light of Ilvani’s sphere, he saw the rider.
The human lay slumped across his horse, his arms dangling aside his head. Blood streamed from an arrow wound in his horse’s flank. The beast took a step forward and collapsed, dumping its rider in the snow.
Ashok pulled away from Ilvani and jumped to his feet. He ran to the man’s side, but he didn’t immediately see a wound. He brushed aside the human’s dark hair to examine his head and feel for a life beat at his neck.
The man opened his eyes and spoke at the same time Ashok felt the dead, hollow space where his heart should have been beating.
“Palum,” he said, “have you come to take me to the army?”
Ashok breathed in and out, harsh breaths that formed steam clouds. It took every bit of discipline he’d ever learned not to hurl the dead thing away from him and draw his chain to attack. The quavering in its voice stopped him. The thing that had no heartbeat looked at him with such imploring dead eyes that Ashok couldn’t look away.
“Have you?” The man spoke again, but his words changed to a language Ashok had never heard before.
“You must answer him,” Ilvani said. “We have to go soon, or they’ll be on the move.”
“I don’t understand him,” Ashok said. “I don’t understand any of this. That thing shouldn’t be talking. It should be in the ground.”
“He is,” Ilvani said. She laid her hand against the gravestones. “He sleeps, but he’s not at rest. Two worlds fade into one. Didn’t you hear him call to you?”
“I heard-” Ashok looked at the dead man’s face, though it unsettled him greatly. The face did look vaguely familiar, and then he remembered his vision, the man who’d reached out his hand before some distant battle.
“I’m Palum,” Ashok said. The dead man looked at him and for whatever reason saw his friend’s face. When Ashok said the name, the dead man’s eyes filled with tears.
“I thought … you would leave me behind,” the man said. The language had reverted to Common. “I rode all night to be here, but the brigands were waiting. I managed to evade them, but it was a hard fight.”
“You were victorious,” Ashok said. “Yet your horse-”
“Is here,” Ilvani said. She stood up and took the nightmare’s reins. The stallion watched the witch’s movements but allowed her to lead him to Ashok’s side. “You can ride together.”
The man looked up at the nightmare with an odd expression. “The horse is not … I don’t see it.…”
“It’s all right,” Ashok said. He draped the man’s arm over his shoulder and looked to Ilvani. She nodded, so he lifted the man to his feet and half carried him to the disguised nightmare. The stallion did not react to the dead man, so Ashok placed him across the nightmare’s back and mounted in front of him. The man’s hands came around his waist in a weak grip. Ashok held on to his arm and guided the nightmare with his legs.
“Where are we going?” Ashok asked Ilvani.
She pointed to the north. “Ride fast but not far. You’ll make it in time. I’ll meet you on the other side.”
The man turned to look at Ilvani. “Thank you,” he said.
“Hold on tightly,” she said. “You’re almost there.”
“You heard her,” Ashok whispered to the nightmare, and dug in with his heels. “Let’s see where the ride takes us.”
The nightmare took off across the snow-covered expanse. The wind turned fierce and drowned out all sound. Ashok could barely see through the blowing snow to keep them pointed north. He had to trust the nightmare to lead them. He felt the heat of the creature’s body and took comfort from that buried fire. They could use it if they had to. Would Ilvani be so warm, walking the plain alone? He had to trust her, too, the same way he trusted that the man clutching him was not some dead yet animated abomination.
You wanted to walk in Ilvani’s world, Ashok told himself. This might be your one chance to know the world as she knows it.
When he felt the man’s voice at his ear, a voice with no breath behind it, Ashok gritted his teeth against the wrongness, the need to lash out and destroy.
“Who are you?” the man asked.
Ashok searched his memory for the name the man had called him. “Palum,” he said.
“That’s right. I thought.… Just now, I thought you were someone else. We will fight together, you and I?”
“Yes,” Ashok said. To a battle that was already lost. If the man was one of the Tuigan from Daruk’s song, he had no idea that his invasion failed and his people were defeated. All he knew was that he could not bear to be left behind.
“It would be safer for you to stay here,” Ashok said. He thought the spirit didn’t hear him above the wind, but he answered.
“To be safe is to lose my soul,” he said. “I am a warrior. I must fight.”
Ashok felt a chill that had nothing to do with the biting wind pass through him. The man spoke like a shadar- kai. “You’re human,” Ashok said. “You could be anything you wanted.”
“No. My fate was decided from birth. I will follow its course and be proud.”
“I’m carrying you to your death,” Ashok whispered. Maybe that was Ashok’s fate-the rider of nightmares, the bringer of death.
The land angled upward. The nightmare fought its way up a steep hill overlooking a broad valley. Ashok
