The sun had begun to sink in the time that it took for the path to widen. Not that it mattered. A stretch of clouds had smothered the eastern sky by then, denying them winter daylight. How cruel, Peter thought, that even their privilege of walking abreast should be something of a letdown. They'd somehow survived the terrible ledge, but the course ahead suddenly seemed even bleaker than it had when they'd first set out. The craterous laps were devouring them.
At least he wasn't alone. After several hours of shimmying and thinking he'd fall to his death, the questions he'd amassed were being answered, and it was almost enough to make up for the rest. Peter rolled a massive feather between his finger and thumb— a souvenir from the midnight altercation he'd slept through. Ethos watched and walked alongside him, waiting for a reaction.
Peter asked, "You get why this is bad, right?"
Ethos tried to smile. "Yeah."
"I'm actually kind of surprised that you told me."
Ethos glanced at the clouds. A couple of crows were circling, avoiding the downdraft. His eyes followed them. "We're being watched," he said. "It felt wrong to keep it private."
"Do you want this feather back?"
"No."
Peter sent it quill-first into the void. "What did she say after he took off?"
Ethos looked at his feet, hands in his pockets. The hours in the Throat had made him inexplicably serious. "She asked about you," he said. "She thinks you have northern blood, but I don't really care if you do or not. North is just a direction to me."
Peter stopped him a little bit harder than intended. "You just said you saw this guy shove Kacha into the dirt," he said. "In what kind of deranged universe would the two of you just take it in stride and start talking about where I came from?"
Ethos didn't seem startled. He hadn't even taken the hands out of his pockets, like he'd expected to be snapped at. "Yeah, okay," he said. "Other stuff happened."
"But you won't tell me what?"
He shrugged and started down the path again. "I will if you explain to me why nobody can know where your mother's been all these years."
Peter followed at his heels. "That's not fair."
"I'm genuinely curious." He was dusting off a grape when Peter fell into step alongside him. "You get crabby whenever I bring her up. Naturally it would interest me."
"She and I got in a fight, is all."
"About what?"
Peter scowled, loath to revisit the whole stupid debacle. "There's an onion farm on the south side of Nahga," he said. "We get on real well with the folks who own it, and I started going steady with one of their daughters. Mom chewed me out when I broke it off."
"Why'd you break it off?"
"Because she deserved it."
"You don't sound very distraught."
"Aye, well, I'm not, and I hope she leads a blissful life with the wrank little Baggot Street prick," he sulked. "It was what it was, way I see it. No loss to either of us in the end."
"I get it. People can be nice to look at."
"Close enough."
"Like Kacha."
"Kacha?"
"You don't think she's beautiful?"
"She's a crookback, Ethos."
"You're just hard to please." He finished cleaning his grape. Grudgingly, like he'd been prompted, he extended it to Peter. "Here," he said. "You can have it."
"I don't want your pity grape."
Ethos didn't seem to care either way. He lobbed it into his mouth and asked, "How could your mom still be mad at you after hearing about what your onion lady did?"
"It wasn't like that exactly."
"Then what was it like?"
Peter scratched at his jaw, felt need for a scraping. "I always stress out when dad leaves port," he said. "I mean, we all do in our own ways, but mom…" He calmed, recalling her angry confusion. His hand fell. "I didn't want to tell her what happened," he confessed. "Pride, I guess. Either way, I ended up saying some pretty harsh things when she pushed for details."
"How harsh?"
"Harsh enough to make her open some old wounds," Peter said, rather morosely. "There's nothing better than a mother to remind us of what shitty human beings we are. They remember all of the stuff that takes us years to forget."
"You're not a shitty human being."
"Shows what you know."
"I'll bet your mom doesn't think so, either."
The clouds opened up. It wasn't a pleasant sort of rain, not by a stretch— it was vicious and biting, eager to enter the parts of Peter's clothes that he'd really rather it wouldn't. He flipped up his collar and made a gyratory gesture at Ethos. "Turn around," he instructed. "Let me get at the oilskin in your bag."
Ethos faced west, thumbs hooked on shoulder straps. "Do you get along with your father?"
"For the most part," Peter replied, rummaging. "Lena takes after him."
"Does he know what your mom's hiding?"
Peter shouldered rainwater out of his eyes, elbow-deep in clutter. "I don't see how you can find anything in here," he said, of the mess. "You've got a line of tackle that's knotted on— oi, where'd you get a tinderbox? Did I give you this to you?"
"We've had it since Makai. Don't change the subject."
Peter yanked the weather gear free. "Whatever went down between mom and the capital happened a long time before I came into the world," he said. "Lena and I have an unspoken agreement to leave the whole mess alone." He shook out the heavy fabric and added, "You can turn back now."
He did. "That doesn't sound like something you'd do."
Peter feigned partial deafness to the last. He donned the oilskin and led the way, boots muddied. "I held up my end," he said, calling back. "Make good on yours."
"I don't believe you left it alone. You're curious by nature."
A pace ahead, Peter turned quickly enough to make him jump. "Now, listen here," he said. "I'll be your guide if it's all that I'm good for, but I can't do my job if you have me running around blind everywhere. You don't get to dictate what I'm qualified to know."
"Is this what you and Kacha were whispering about in the narrows?"
"Kacha," Peter spat. "Do you have any idea how humiliating it is that some random old fossil knows more about what's going on than I do?"
Ethos gave him a look. "You're turning this into something it's not."
"Aye, paranoid invalid that I am." Peter pointed, not at Ethos, not at himself, but in some arbitrary direction, to the Faraway Places they had yet to cover. "You're ignoring a lot of things out there that require your attention," he said. "I need to know you'll have my back if it hits us all at once."
Easily, he replied, "I have your back, Peter."
"Do you?"
He shrugged again. "Sure."
"Then tell me why Kacha behaves so disturbingly around you."
Ethos smirked brightly, like he'd forgotten. "She thinks I'm charming."
"That's not what I'm talking about."
But Ethos knew that already. It was clear as day. The intelligence in his eyes was shining, so often concealed and disguised as childishness. "Shima found me left for dead," he said. "I'd been discarded in the wilds like a deformed infant."
Peter asked, "So what?"
"I'm not anyone important, Peter."
"Then why would they bother tracking you?"
Ethos had no answer to that. After a moment, he sighed. "I don't know," he admitted. "I'm sure I'll find out eventually. No point stewing in it."
A dissatisfying answer, as always. Peter might have pressured him further, but a familiar wrinkle was forming in his brow. "Did you at least ask Kacha about the headaches?"
"No." Ethos felt for his canteen. "It's bad enough you went and told her," he said, partway serious, maybe even bitter about it. "My problems aren't yours to share. Nosy rafter-biter."
"But she knew things," Peter upheld. "Much as I suffered the surly hag, she could've shed light on whatever it is that's wrong with you. It could be hereditary."
"Everybody gets headaches sometimes."
"Not like this, they don't."
"On what grounds? It's a headache."
"On the grounds of you being a godling or birdfolk or whatever." Peter waited in vain for some kind of retort, so he pressed, "Admit that I'm right, if nothing else."
"You've invented a deeper problem here that doesn't exist." Ethos turned the canteen in his hands, eyes going low. "We're wasting time."
"Curse all if there's anyone dafter than you."
"Curse whatever you want, Peter. It's what you're best at."
"I'd curse the dirt behind your ears if I thought it'd get you to listen."
The smile crept back. Ethos glanced up from his canteen. "You'd curse the dirt behind my ears if you thought it'd get you a sandwich."
Patience thinning, Peter resisted another bout of his relentless, mindless banter. "It's not just you who this sucks for," he snapped. "I'm the one who has to stand around like a complete idiot and pretend like you're taking a piss or something, like it's not completely obvious that you're coughing up lunch somewhere. But if you're too chickenshit to ask your crazy grandmother about it, then maybe you deserve to have that useless halfwit skull of yours boil your brain into head cheese."
Peter had surprised him. Genuinely. Hard to do. And while Ethos was always quick to smooth over, he'd cracked the window wide enough to allow a glimpse behind the smile. He had nothing, Peter realized. Ethos had nothing at all to come back at him with.
The crows croaked above them, still circling, presumably, afeared of the Throat's wretched intake of breath, and a surviving respect for personal boundaries advised Peter to scowl elsewhere. The rainy ovation was a paltry reward. "Forget it," he muttered. "You win or whatever."
Ethos didn't gloat. He didn't do much at all.
Peter glanced. "Say something."
"What's head cheese?"
"Say something that isn't stupid."
Ethos smiled, thinly this time, and the rain shifted into a comparatively pleasant snowfall. "Just trying to lighten the mood," he said. "Don't let it fool you into thinking that I'm not at all concerned about this obsession you have with my health." His itinerant eyes went high. "But we really should go before they notice us."
"Before who notices us?"
The last shred of dusk slipped out of the pit, and the illusion of privacy shattered around them. In Peter's distracted state, Redbeard's Throat had been pervaded by a languid, tideless traffic of perished Wyndemere denizens. They swarmed overhead, gleaming, churning, and every shadow alive in the pit stirred and fled in all directions. The crater walls danced with light.
Peter stared, sound of mind as a sack of spuds.
Ethos said his name. "Let's go."
"They look like jellyfish."
"You're not listening to me."
One coasted near, and Peter promptly lost himself in the weightless, dusty fabric of it. It cackled at his open bewilderment and uttered a string of stunning intellect.
"It's speaking," Peter whispered. "They all are."
Ethos said, "It's the old tongue."
The nondescript tension in his voice begged Peter's interest. Ethos had gone stiff; his eyes jumped from the ground when Peter asked, "What are they saying?"
"Nothing worth repeating."
"Born liar."
Ethos drank from the canteen. By the time he'd corked it and tucked it away, the troubled look to him had gone. "Follow me if you want the details about last night," he said. "We can break once we've reached the grotto."
"It must be bad if you'd rather let me in on your tryst with the hag."
He pushed back his hood. His hair had gone flat, so he mussed it, annoyed. "I'm going," he said, and he turned away. "Feel free to join me when you're done being a jackass."
Peter easily could have shouted something after him. Something childish. Crude. He'd like to have said he'd matured on the road and resisted the impulse by sheer force of will, but credit went by right to the spirits. The cyclone was pulsing with breathtaking movement, orchestrated like starlings in flight, synchronously wheeling and drawing together. A flock of a single mind.
The drove passed by, too invested in its pursuit to bother with him. Peter tore his gaze away at the notion of a heading, whereupon he found quite tragically that, despite the lengths to which Ethos had gone for the sake of discretion, despite his caution, the eerie admirers were resolved to impart a deluge of their silver-tongued riddles, bathing his corner of the pit in light.
Peter caught up without trying to. Long legs. "They seem fond of you."
"The reverse, actually." Ethos was glaring ahead, shoulders drawn. He twitched away from a wisp by his ear. "Enough," he hissed at it, flashing teeth. "Back off."
Peter's fingertips rasped along the rock face, a measure for balance as he studied the swarming, lustrous shoal. Contemptible, he thought, the nightly miasma, to be sent from the next world with no aim other than to seek out and pester the living. The incomprehensible thrum of voices paid homage to his cerebral floundering.
Then, suddenly: "Kacha knows who my birth parents are."
Peter glanced, thrown by the turn. "How?"
"I don't know. I snapped at her."
"Why'd you do that?"
"Reflex, I think," he replied. "You probably have it, too, Peter— the voice that warns us when a jump is too far, or when something's not safe to eat." He gave an uneasy shrug. "Mine became loud when she brought it up. Survival instinct, I guess you'd call it."
"So you snapped at her because you were afraid of what she knew?"
"I'm not afraid of anything. I snapped at her for a whole bunch of reasons."
He didn't continue. Peter asked, "How'd it play out?"
Ethos kneaded hard at his forehead. "She apologized and held me a while. It was nice until she said that my mother would mangle me if given the chance." He smiled a little too miserably at that particular detail. "Well, maybe not in so many words."
"What about your dad?"
"I get the feeling he died a long time ago."
Peter took a breath. "That's heavy," he said. "I don't really know what to say."
"I'd prefer it if you didn't say anything." In dissonant unison, the freewheeling souls exploded in laughter. To them, Ethos grumbled, "Yeah, well, nobody asked for your opinion."
"What do they want?"
"To be pests, seems like."
"Can they understand what we're saying?"
Ethos hadn't heard him. He was stopped on the path a few paces back, snarling in tongues at the joyful swarm. The spirits drew close to listen at first, but it wasn't all that long before they'd returned to their wily, winsome ways. The exchange was a pungent soup of unintelligible, hostile remarks: clever laughter from above, seething fury from below. It sounded like Ethos had found himself the victim of an exclusive, primordial joke.
Calling his name was a futile endeavor. After learning that much, Peter yanked him away with just enough force to warrant his livid attention. "Unless you tell me what's going on, this bickering with the dead thing has to stop," he said, and he pushed Ethos down the path. "Keep moving."
Ethos scowled back a little. "Don't shove me."
The subsequent stretch of silence was laced by their tireless, inescapable audience, and the winds that had howled so fervently at first slowly began to still until even the fall of snow seemed airier than the dead, tumbling about, buoyant. Time was a difficult thing to measure there, where light and dark collided so starkly, but while Peter couldn't have said with much certainty how long they went without speaking to one another, when he finally stole a glimpse of Ethos (who, unsurprisingly, had assumed an exceedingly gloomy disposition), it was the hooded, drained look to his eyes that made it seem as if they'd been slopping through a lifetime of the wintry, tedious mire.
Peter cleared his throat. "Buck up," he said. "You'll drive all the rats from the barns and the bilges looking like that. They'll string you up for witchcraft."
Without heart, Ethos said, "Funny."
Such seriousness in his eyes. "It's okay to be disappointed about your parents," Peter said. "I figure you must be."
"That's part of it."
"What's the other part?"
Ethos sighed. "I wish you were a little less intrusive."
Peter glared sideways at him. "I'm trying to be nice, Ethos. Don't be an ass."
Caught, Ethos sighed again. He seemed too tired to bother defending himself. "The guy from last night," he said. "Kacha knew him pretty well, I think. It sounded like a complicated history."
Silence followed. Peter sent him a narrow look. "I know there's more," he said. "I'm assuming you at least got a name out of him."
"You'll laugh."
"I won't, I promise."
"You will. She called him Pathos."
A promise was a promise, but Peter couldn't hold back a smile. It earned him a glower, of course, but seeing Ethos all up in arms just made it more amusing. "Sorry," Peter chuckled. "They're not quite creative, these people of yours. A brother, maybe?"
Ethos shrugged and shook off a dusting of snow. "He'll turn up again before we reach Oldden," he muttered. "Something about a witness."
"Were you eavesdropping?"
"Trying to, more like."
"That's bad form."
"I know what it is."
"Was Kacha feeding him information?"
"No. She loves me somehow." Ethos smiled, and it was easily the most genuine expression of joy that Peter had seen him make. But then, little by little, his subtle elation melted under scrutiny. In gentle confusion, he asked, "What is it?"
"Do you love her back?"
"I hardly even know her, Peter." Ethos suddenly took a quiet oath. It was one of the more harmless ones, but the controlled frustration in his voice conveyed plenty. Hand at his head, he quickly waved off Peter's kneejerk reaction. "I'm fine," he promised. "Don't look at me like that."
"It's bad, huh. Warn me when you think you might york."
"Why, so you can pretend like I'm taking a piss?"
"Aye, that's why." They both managed to smile a bit, but the conversation was doomed to stagger, beset by the cold and the things that whispered. They set a course down the slope. "It's just me, you know," Peter said. "You don't always have to lie about stuff. I'll shoot you straight."
"Do you think I'm like this because I don't trust you?"
Peter breathed into his hands. "You're imperfect," he said. "We all are. It's no secret. We're all stupid and insecure and privately gassy and needing some help in one form or another. If anything's meaningless here, it's the effort you put into convincing everyone that you're different."
Without looking, Ethos grunted, "I wish you kept your gas private."
"Do you get what I'm saying?"
"Yes, yes, Peter the wise."
His blatant disinterest left something to be desired. "Friends allow for the occasional privilege of selfishness," he replied. "That's how it works. You don't keep score, you don't begrudge, and you sure as hell don't act like you're fine when the contrary's stamped right into your face." Peter nudged him, got him to glance. "As scary as this whole thing with you is, the fact that you don't want to talk about it scares me even more. Be reasonable."
Ethos sort of smiled at that. It was quick to fade. "It's nice and all that you're willing to help me get to Oldden, but let's not unnecessarily sabotage your future," he said. "Returning home might not even be an option if you insist on involving yourself more than you have to. Remember that."
"We don't even know who's behind the fire."
"Gladius might. It's a start."
Peter slowed in confusion. "King Gladius? Why?"
Ahead, Ethos stopped. His brow was drawn in mild surprise when he turned. "He was there," he said, blandly, as if at old news. "One of the four. If anyone knows, it's probably him."
"You never told me that, Ethos."
"My mistake."
"Ballsch. Pinworm." But Peter sighed in spite of himself, wearied by the enterprise. "And what if he's the one who did it?" he asked. "What then? Will you kill him?"
"Well, he'll have saved me the trouble of tracking some other guy down." Ethos laughed a little at his own joke. But he stopped himself quickly, like he hadn't meant to. "And I'm flattered," he mused, sounding decidedly less than so. "You think I can best someone like King Gladius?"
Peter hadn't thought about it. "Then what's the plan, exactly?"
Ethos took on a strange disposition. There was a certain unwell quality to it, as if something awful might have occurred to him. "I don't know."
"You're fixing to die."
"I didn't say that."
"Shima would be furious."
"Shima's dead."
"She'd tell you to live and let live, same as Kacha."
"She's dead, Peter." The low rage in his voice was staggering. Ethos was glaring, really glaring at him. It was a new expression, a face meant for foes. "She's dead, like the rest of them," he said. "Don't throw her name around like it's nothing."
"It's wrong to resent the world for what happened."
"The world and everything in it can burn to the ground for all I care."
"Like yours did?" Instantly, he regretted the sharp return. Ethos was an open wound. "I shouldn't have said that," Peter grumbled. "Sorry."
Ethos stared until a spirit broke the silence with an irreverent, cooed suggestion. The rest promptly burst into laughter. They'd been revolving overhead throughout the miserable descent, but now they moved faster, voices bouncing about in the darkness, ablaze through the viscous butter of night, flailing, laughing, shouting, screaming.
Ethos covered his ears, head bent, as if it would do much of anything. He crouched and hunched forward. "Shut up," he said. "Everyone just shut up."
But hatred was pouring out of the dead; vile, slick with anguish. They hadn't exactly been subtle in exhibiting their fierce dislike for the woodling, but this went far beyond natural aversion. This was loathing. This was personal. As always, Peter was missing something important.
Pulse rising, Peter looked around before hunkering down beside Ethos. "Get up," he instructed, too nervous to be polite about it. "The snow's starting to stick."
"Just back off for a second."
Peter took his arm, urging it back to life. "We can't stop here."
More laughter, from above. More contemptuous suggestions. Half-risen, Ethos shook Peter off and stumbled away, kicking rocks at his heels. He looked at the swarm, eyes bright, and made the single most cheerless sound of amusement there was. The muddy earth buckled beneath his feet.
Peter swore and lunged for him as the edge of the path gave way. He managed to snag the strap of a bag, but the sudden weight all at once was too much. He went down, hard. The ground caught the side of his face. He clawed around with his free hand, ripping up dirt, until he dug in and brought it all to an excruciating stop. His right arm was hung in unfair torment, fingers strangled, shoulder aflame.
The dead cackled. One of them derisively sashayed near to coddle his distress. Peter dispersed it with a cough, but it instantly reassembled, spitting out curses and insults. Someone said his name. Ethos, he knew. "Climb up," Peter rasped. "Lose the bags, if you have to."
Ethos just answered in that obsolete language of his.