Summer Bjorn

The story of how a girl who draws birds and trusts people becomes the one the monsters step aside for.

Her betrothed promised his young bride monsters — and he is a man of his word. He will show her every one of them. Even the ones she never expected to see.

Aylin Reinmar is seventeen, and the world smiles at her: an old name, a good match, a courteous fiance, and a rare gift she is quietly proud of. She draws swallows, loves a hard problem, and rides out to see wonders without fear — her betrothed is with her, her father is with her, armed men are with her. To the most terrible place in the world, under the strongest guard anyone could wish for.

Their road leads to the heart of the Hush: a wound in the body of the world, where the air thickens and lies, where the water stands black and remembers what it used to be, and where the only one who stays whole is the one who holds fast to their own name. The Hush is full of monsters — and some monsters walk into it from outside.

They killed me — and rewrote me into something else.

My killer died twice. I killed him. It did not help him: out on the far yards they are already marking the maps with his name.

“Dead Tayvel Sterren. Travels with a retinue. Calls out. Do not answer.”

I could have lived with that. But the dead have long arms: before he rode out he left a letter in the city. To be opened if he did not come back. Inside — a bill: the yard that took me in. The healer who stitched me up. The three who became mine. The blood-price for his death, to be paid by them, by name.

A bill made out to my own people is the one thing I do not forgive.

So it is down for me now, into the city where I was known alive. Where my father asks no questions that have already been paid for. Where the polite ones smile — and smell blood. Where every favour has a price nobody says out loud. I have to lift another man's bill off my people — and reach the second of the two who sold me. Somewhere he cannot call the guard.

I have no name I can say aloud. No voice — it was burned out of me. No right to a mistake either: other people pay for mine.

What I do have is what the Hush taught me.

To read everything through to the end.

The Hush has walked before. Ask at any yard why the pass is called the Third, and watch the face of the one you asked go dark.

For years it lay where it had fallen — and fed them all: the trade, the treasury, the nobility. Whole yards lived on what it gave up, and never asked why it was giving.

Now it is moving again — south, towards the only home I have left.

We are walking out to meet it. Six of us: me, the thing that came out of the Hush and still remembers being human; a mage who spent four centuries taking his sister back from death; the sister, who was never human — and is not dead yet; and my three, who threw away the uniform and, with it, the right to go back.

There is one road to the heart, and it runs straight through Nav. Nav lets everyone pass and takes payment for every crossing: up to nine souls, in cattle. After that, in people.

For centuries the heart called — and they brought it those who had no choice.

I am walking in on my own.