[This takes place after 'The Ranger and the Bull-Toad' and before 'A Different Kind of Help.' If you count the number of EM dashes I use...avert your eyes and pretend you didn't.]
The people of the Trév Gallorg had looked at Therdis as though she had sprouted wings and a tail when she raised the question of whether any of them had tried scaling the mountains to the south. The answers she received ranged from bewilderment at her folly to consternation at her flippancy about their superstitions. Such a thing was not done, they said. It was too dangerous, claimed some, and others warned of a curse that fell upon those who wandered into the mountains. In the end, only two would agree to accompany her flight of fancy – Heulyn, who would do anything for someone to listen to him talk, and Ligach, who had recently broken off her betrothal to one of the chieftain’s sons and was more than glad to make herself scarce. No one gathered to wish them well as they left Aughaire in the dull light of an early morning, for no one expected to see them return.
The climb itself is less of a climb and more of a scramble – the ‘mountains’ are jagged but not impossibly sheer in most places, and Therdis is surprised to find that the higher they go, the more she finds scrubby, weedy plants clinging to the barren rock. The air grows cleaner along the ascent, and although their camp-sites are cold and damp, the strenuousness of the trek is almost pleasant. Heulyn’s incessant whining about the wetness of his feet and Ligach’s grunted responses fade into the back of her mind, which grows emptier and stiller with every aching upward step.
The ‘summit’ of the mountain range, when it finally arrives after two days of trekking ever-southward, is unremarkable – more a point of no return than a peak, for it drops sharply downward to create the sheer cliffs that ever-menaced the Rangers of the North Downs. Heulyn almost walks over the edge without stopping to look at his feet, and Therdis grabs him by the collar to haul him back. She kicks a pebble over the edge, listening to it clatter and then fade away.
“Is that it?” Heulyn asks. “I thought it would be…something. More.”
As though the land itself felt it had something to prove, the constant fog breaks suddenly, pierced by beams of golden sunset. Far below lies a faint green – a forested land stretching out where the blasted volcanic rock became fertile soil. Even Heulyn and Ligach in their clothes of drab, ugly gray, seem transfigured by the wash of warm light, tendrils of mist-soaked hair making haloes around their pale faces. Therdis wonders if she looks the same, if in the right light she might look whole and unburdened and not the hollow, broken thing she has become. If there was enough light in the world to fill up that seething void. If there was anyone who would ever care to look for it in her, who would be willing to see in her what she saw in the way the sharpness of the volcanic rock smoothed out into forest, the way even the broken land of Angmar could not help but become something softer and kinder where the sun hit it, proof that it was not yet ruined beyond saving.
Even the wind dies, and in the silence the sound of birdsong comes echoing up the side of the mountain, as faint as a dream just after one has woken in the first quiet moments of a warm spring day where reality feels soft to the touch. She has not heard the sound in so long that she is not sure whether she is imagining it. For a moment, she feels that the whole mountain reverberates slightly, that if she were to reach out, the beams of light would hum like lute-strings under her touch. Some urge compels her to sing, to add a single note to what strikes her as a great song into which she has stumbled unaware, trees and rocks and clouds and scrubby grass and chattering companions all separate tones in a chord so vast and complex that it instead wrenches a sob from a part of her she had thought had been entirely lost to Zôrzagar’s torments. When the clouds return, covering the mountain-slope in fog and rain once more, it comes as a relief, the sudden outpour of emotion as painful as using an atrophied muscle too quickly.
Heulyn and Ligach suggest that the trio camp at the top of the mountain, visibly hoping to see the sun come out again in the morning, but Therdis refuses. To stay too long would risk the sacredness of the moment. To try and grasp it more securely was to lose it entirely. She knows without knowing how that if she should stay, the mountain and the trees and the sun would feel like a mockery, a thing just outside her reach that she had held once, but held no longer. The thought of the lands that had once been her home fills Therdis with a swift dread – no, she realizes, not quite dread, but sorrow. It is beautiful, but it is not for her. Not anymore. And yet she cannot entirely flee it, because with sorrow comes memory, and with memory comes acknowledgement of all she has lost, and acknowledgement is a barbed shaft not so easily excised from one’s heart.
The group is quiet as they scramble back down, the air filling with the familiar stench of sulfur. Even Heulyn has nothing to say, the oppressive darkness of Angmar suddenly weighing more heavily now that he had seen even a glimmer of a world outside of it. When they return to Aughaire no one asks them about their expedition. It is not the way of the Trév Gallorg to wonder about what lies outside the mountains which hem them in. Such a curiosity would only lead to discontent.
The sound of birdsong haunts Therdis’ dreams and then seeps into every waking moment, in the silence where there should be the buzzing of insects and the rustle of trees. She cannot shove away the memories now — like a thorn lodged in her foot that aches whenever pressure falls upon it, everything begins to remind her of what had come before. Heulyn’s face begins to look like Halfaeron’s, and Ligach’s curt replies to sound like Rhona’s, until she feels positively insane with the flood of recollections. She half expects to see her father in the flickering shadows of torch-light, or her first horse among the tubby ponies picketed with the aurochs.
She leaves Aughaire the same way she had arrived — in the dark of night and without warning. When they discover her empty tent, the elders shake their heads and frown, making their rituals to ward off the curse that had fallen upon her lest it come for them as well. That, they say among themselves, is why they do not send scouts over the mountains, lest the urge to wander take them. Their wards were not enough to save Heulyn and Ligach, who left shortly after Therdis and would never return. No one spoke of their departure, for to speak of it was to acknowledge that they had seen something worth leaving for. Where they wandered and what they saw was theirs alone to tell.
Therdis was seen in Angmar no more, though for a time Trév Gallorg scouts reported that there were fewer Wargs stalking the pass from the North Downs through the Ram Duath. Those who wandered farther to the south in pursuit of their quarry would claim to have heard the whistling of a songbird, though none had ever lived among those barren rocks before.
