“Reminds you of what?” Mal asked Brisack when he didn’t complete his sentence.
“A few times,” Brisack whispered, “people have 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 in the cases I investigated 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 their 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 have 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!” Mal sneered.
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 took her husband’s undershirt and draped it next to her son’s sleeping gown.
The forest invited her to turn and notice it again.
She sighed, then pivoted to face north to take in the fiercest enemy of the Army of Idumea. No one ever looks at the mountains, she knew. 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 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, suddenly felt the 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.