Excerpt

She had already paid the innkeeper for the horse's stabling, so she left coins for the room and a tip for the chambermaid, took a deep draught of water from the ewer, and then fiddled with the catch on the window until it creaked open with a gust of cold air.

The glory of the evening caught in her throat, her eyes, ice crystals dancing in the moonlight.

Pali flung out the carpet with the snap and twist that caused the magic to waken. It hovered just below her waist, the scent of her sister's jasmine and neroli perfume, the scent of the desert, the scent of magic, full in her nose, her mouth, her heart.

The last time she had flown it had been her journey home from that last, unsuccessful quest, when she had flown seven days and seven nights into the Sea of Stars, and a year and a day back.

She stroked the carpet, as if it were a horse, and like a horse it shuddered and leaned into her hand, quivering with eagerness for the flight before it.

Down below there was a cry and a shout of laughter, as someone in the taproom cried out a joke.

They did not know—could not know—that only a floor above them there was a song, a hero out of legend, a moment of magic such as had hardly ever been seen, this side of the mountains and this side of the Fall of Astandalas.

She flung her bag over her shoulder on the strap made for the purpose and slid onto the carpet, her sword angled out flat against the weave, and laid her palms on the symbols that would guide and direct her flight.

With a sinuous ripple, firm and supportive against her crossed legs, the carpet rose and passed through the window. Pali caught the window as she went and shut it behind her, the latch falling into place with a quiet, assured, snick.

It was not particularly late. Lights still shone in many of the houses in the little village where she'd found the inn. There were fewer as she followed the valley into the mountains, as woodsmen were like farmers, and went to bed with the sun.

The road was easily visible in the moonlight. Pali guided the carpet to sweep up at about the height she was accustomed to from horseback. The woods were dark, black and grey, the snow a strange luminous colour somewhere between blue and white.

She reached the end of the cleared road, where the snow was still banked several feet high. Pali paused there, feeling the cold wind off the mountain against her face, aware she was at a threshold.

And then she laughed to herself, tapped the carpet with a firm hand, and lifted up into the untrod lands.

***

[...]

The moon was high and there was a three-way crossroads ahead, and the snow sleek and silver below her.

The carpet was nearly as alive to her touch, her mood, as a living horse. For all that it had hung quietly, quiescent, on a wall for the past fifteen years, before that Pali had flown it seven days and seven nights into (and a year and an endless day back out of) the Sea of Stars above the Abyss, where things and ideas took on shapes and voices and sometimes even souls of their own.

"Away then, lovely one," she said to the carpet, and gave it the equivalent of free rein.

It leapt forward, swooping down so that its dangling tassels scored faint lines in the snow, kicking up a wake of powdery crystals behind her to hang in the air and twinkle like fairy dust. Pali laughed aloud, her voice chiming silver against the white stones, the silver snow, the black sky, the moon high above, impersonal and yet, Pali knew, quite possibly watching.

Up in a wave upon a wave of the air, catching some invisible current, intangible but for the way the fabric shaped itself against the air. The trees sighed and shivered with their passing, the pines' boughs singing over the rush of the air in her ears.

Pali sat cross-legged, her boot-heels under each knee, her hands resting in her lap, the hilt of the sword in her hand, her sash comforting at her waist. The veils across her face should have felt odd, unfamiliar, foreign; they did not.

She could have been any age. When she was not yet twenty she had ridden far to the north, to the land of those who lived under the Crown of Heaven, taking the bones of the Blue Wind's first wife back to her people. She had arrived at the edge of the northern spring, when snow lay in dirty skeins and the tundra was blossoming, insects in clouds around her like a coming sandstorm. The ground had been so wet, she remembered, moss squelching in the narrow rim between sky and permafrost.

That had been an alien land, as featureless to her eyes as the sandy desert was to a stranger's. Yet the tundra had its ways and its secrets, open as it seemed; and the blood of that people ran in Pali's own veins, for her great-grandmother, coming down from cutting down the false sun out of the sky, had met her great-grandfather coming up with the lantern holding the true sun in in his hands.

Pali stroked the hilt of her sword, her great-grandmother's sword, as the carpet wove through a thicket of twisted evergreens, leaped over a field of boulders, huge and mutely significant in their stark shadows and white caps of snow, and came suddenly up to a steep clamber.

The carpet did not zigzag up this cliff: it turned vertically, and Pali had to bite her lip and trust her sister's work, her sister's wisdom, her sister's skill—

She did not fall, not though the carpet tilted so the blood rushed into her head as she tried not to clench her jaw.

She did not fall.

The carpet flung itself over the top of that headwall into a cirque, like someone had taken a scoop out of the mountain—Pali was sure she had not seen this when she had ridden up through the alpine summer, the sound of cowbells never far away—there were yodellers in these mountains, calling from field to field at the waning of the day.

She did not have long to wonder if she had mistaken her way, or allowed the carpet to take the wrong fork, for suddenly they were skimming the edge of the cirque, like a spoon around the curve of a bowl, and the carpet took the shoulder of the mountain at a vast and impossible speed, and there before her was spread a vast and impossible world.

The Moon's Country had been full of flowers: white lilies and asphodels, huge clouds of starry virgin's bower, carpets of lily-of-the-valley, white bluebells. All white flowers, in a land whose springy turf must have been green in the daylight, but which Pali always remembered as the dim grey of twilight, when the fireflies hung their tiny lanterns in the thorn brakes along the road that dreaming poets had built.

Here the mountains raised high white peaks, white snow and whiter stone against the bleached-black sky, all their edges etched with black ink.

(She had looked down into the Abyss. It had been an endless fall of stars until even they were swallowed in a velvety darkness. She had never previously understood why someone might find it appealing; after that journey, that flight out, that flight back, she had known why it was feared.)

Below her the snow was pristine, ripples and knife-edged drifts shaped by the endless mountain wind. The carpet played with the snow cast up by the wind, dancing with its own shadow. There were hardly any trees up here, and what there were were all wiry and twisted things huddling in the lees of great rocks or rough-edged stream beds.

Many of the trees had ribbons tied to their branches, pale and glimmering in the moonlight, strips of shadows on the snow. One of the trees had bells hung on it, long strands of silver-chiming bells of the sort they used for horse-harnesses in Lind.

The wide heath of the saddle between the three mountains crested and then sank down into a shallow bowl with the crossroads at its heart.

Pali noted the wooden refuge on the farther side of the crossroads standing stone. That marked the path down into Fiellan, she knew; the Linder road went north and east from here.

The carpet carried Pali nearly due north towards the standing stone, a grey megalith of a stone that was not the native limestone of these mountains. It stood nearly foursquare, roughly shaped to the four directions despite there having always been only three roads meeting here.

There was no one and nothing in sight but for the moon full overhead and the standing stone and the dark rectangular bulk of the refuge ahead of her. When Pali reached the standing stone she drew the carpet to a halt.

The wind had dropped. With herself still, her breath was the loudest sound. She breathed shallowly, meditatively, controlling her heart and her attention.

She had been to such places before, on less significant moments than midnight under a full moon.

There was nothing to meet her.

No wind blew from Faerie. No ghost rose from the crossroads. No stranger knight came thundering up with his visor down and lance readied.

She was disappointed.

Disappointed: and then angry, for this was not the heart of Astandalas in the days of its glory (its bloated and decadent end), when adventure had to be prodded out of it like someone winkling a snake out of its hole.

She only had ten days, and even with the carpet it would probably take a full day to get to Yrchester—

Nine days was plenty long enough for an adventure. And was she not, after all, Pali Avramapul?

Pali smiled, and stood up, balancing at first awkwardly—she had not stood upon the carpet often, though she had practiced, of course she had practiced, just in case.

She balanced her weight, and felt the carpet firm and responsive beneath her feet through the soles of her boots. Her boots were well made, leather moulded to her feet by long use in the fencing salle.

One breath, two. The carpet shifted as she shifted her weight, lifting up, ducking down, feinting left, feinting right.

Pali drew her great-grandmother's sword with the stately hiss that had never failed to bring joy to her heart. She drew it when a moment was significant. Never in jest, or idleness.

"A first quest, for glory," she said, looking down the northern road into Lind.

She drew her dagger from her sash with her left hand. It was a solid weight in her hand, the leather hilt easily held even with her gloved hand, the folded steel catching the moonlight. Masseo had made her that dagger with iron ore he had smelted from a fallen star.

"A second quest, for knowledge," she said, whirling the carpet around the standing stone so she faced the road back to Chare. The snow stretched out across the high moorland of the pass, shaped only by the wind save for those places here and there where the carpet had trailed its tassels onto the surface, marking the powder with a touch as delicate as an owl's wings.

Pali bent her knees, barely thought her direction, and the carpet continued the circuit until she faced the unknown and untrodden road down to Fiellan.

She raised her hands, crescent sword and star-iron dagger, high up to the wind, the sky, the mountains. "And the third quest, for … dzēren."

Dzēren. A cup brimful of peace, joy, quietude, plenitude. She had never sought it, never wanted it, and yet—

And yet that was the third quest, the one left undone, never undertaken.

There was no one there to meet her, but the wind blowing ice crystals into her eyes, tugging at her veils.

Pali bared her teeth to the wind, the moon sailing high above, the stars in their multitudes and the snow immeasurably beautiful below them, and she moved from opening stance to the movements of the shēhen the Warriors of the Mountains had called the Great Challenge.

Under her feet the flying carpet her sister had woven moved like a well-trained horse, at once ground and mount for her motions, the fabric supporting her like an extension of her own will.

Once around the standing stone; twice; a third time.

Pali moved, her sword-hand singing, her dagger-hand percussion, her feet dancing, the wind her dancing-partner. A night wind, a mountain wind, an icy winter wind for all that it bore the faint promise of spring in the fragrance of distant flowers.

The moon crested the zenith, and there before her were three figures.

Pali stopped, sword and dagger in the fifth position, the Guard.

Three hooded robes hung in the air before her. Their hems did not touch the snow, and no feet descended below the cloth; their hoods did not cover their faces, but faces there were not.

One the gleaming white of the snow all around them.

One the shining black of the vault of the heavens between the stars.

One silver as the stars, the ice crystals, the moon's secret hollows.

Pali smiled, and lifted her sword and dagger once more to the opening of the Great Challenge.

"Do you come to meet me?" she asked, her voice low and rich.

The three figures looked at each other, shadow-blank in the hollows of their hoods. When they spoke their voices came in eerie unison.

"Do you not fear us?"

Pali smiled again, and shifted her feet into the proper opening. The carpet was eager as her finest horse would have been before a battle.

"If you are men or the ghosts of men, what have I to fear? If you are demons or of the fairy folk, I have fought worse. If you are gods—" She could do nothing more than spread her sword and dagger wide, her smile sharp as the wind for all they could not see it below her veils. "I have slain gods before."

They were silent. Only the wind whistled around them, the snow hissing like sand.

Finally they said, "And if we are none of those?"

"If you are the Fates or the Sovereigns of Time or the messengers of the Silent Ones," Pali replied, "then I salute you."

And so she did, for she had never been stingy in courtesy.

One heartbeat, two, three; and for a moment Pali could smell both charnel-house reek and the flowery scent she knew from the further reaches of the Sea of Stars, when she had flown seven days and seven nights after Fitzroy Angursell before turning back to the mortal lands.

For a moment she could almost see visages in the mist within their hoods. Stars glimmered there, eyes deep and mournful, deep as the Abyss falling away from the light.

"We shall not fight you tonight," they said at last, and disappeared as silently as they had come.

Pali sheathed her sword in some disappointment, but the air seemed to require something more of her, after her challenge had met such an initially promising response as that, and so she removed her glove to prick her thumb with the point of her star-iron dagger.

Masseo had made that dagger, and she knew the runes etched on the blade, hidden under the wire-bound hilt.

She then lifted the knife high and plunged it deep into the standing stone. "When it is time for the challenge to be met," she said to the wind, the snow, the stars, the moon, the mountains, the mysteries, "you will know how to find me."