All Woven With Ivy

Chapter One

Somewhere in Esk, there is a funeral. The mourning bell ripples through the university archives, and Zanthi holds her aether lantern higher, as if the fall of golden light can keep the sound at bay. She’s never liked the weeping toll of the funerary bell, but she can’t deny it’s fitting. She is deep in the cold earth below the city, amongst all the buried things, with a tunnel as dark as the underworld before her.

The bell rings on, and Zanthi does not move. She has a decision to make. 

She’s at the turning of the path, the furthest she’s ever been in the archives, and further than the other archivists ever go. Beyond the boundaries carefully marked by aether lanterns, there is a vast warren of tunnels, unmapped and unlit. The archives hold many forgotten records and a good few curses in the darkness, and that is reason enough for most to avoid entering. Rumours, too, of a strange, fey beast buried in the depths of the passages, but she’s a practical sort. Superstitions don’t scare her, and she has long since figured she’s already cursed enough for no new curses to stick. 

What scares her is the thought of what lies upstairs, the news and gossip that flows faster than aetherlight. They’ll already be retelling the disaster of her morning’s presentation. If she goes back up to the vault, people will look. She doesn’t want to be seen by the archivists, or by the other students. Or by Theron. 

The hook of failure is still in her chest. It had nestled in as she’d been standing in front of the Luminary board, her careful, practised words on her lips, and all those solemn, bored faces staring at her. Silent. Scornful. She doesn’t know how to be rid of it.

And so, she’d fled underground, because she knows she’ll see no pitying faces here. 

There is nothing around her but damp and river mud still reeking from the spring floods. The River Lune lies above the passage, still rushing with storm-swell and snowmelt. But the floods have receded. This should be traversable. There might be a flooded way or two, though. There might be a collapsed wall. Or it might all collapse while she’s in there, crossing beneath the river.

But she’s spent four long years familiarising herself with the dark, with the old hollows and tumbled chambers that lie within the boundaries of the known archives. She’s spent whole days here, longer than the mandated two-hour limits, and never once has she felt the creeping disorientation that addles the senses. If anyone is ever able to delve deep enough to cross beneath the river, then it will be Zanthi. 

And now, having failed to entice even a single mentor to be interested in sponsoring her studies, Zanthi has no reason not to do so. What can the university do now? Throw her out? Without a mentor, she’ll be out by the end of the month.

Unless, of course, she goes and gets work as a research clerk for the Crown. Zanthi might have suffered many indignities in her time at the university, might have been called a wraith and a witch and a night-sprite, but she won’t sink so low as to be an unrobed researcher.

Better to be expelled, honestly.

Here, Zanthi is beyond those worries. She is beyond any mortal dominion. The passages are old, older than the university. Older than Esk, maybe. Older than the Crown. That sort of thinking is why her study proposal was rejected by the Luminary board. High claims with no proof, they said. Anti-Crown sentiment. Heresy.

Cowards. It’s all so clearly ancient. The stones here are worn down in sloping grooves made not by water, but by many, many years of people passing through. Anyone with eyes can see it. Anyone with a working mind would wonder who and why and when. The Luminary board, clearly, has no working minds at all between them, because they had taken one look at her proposal and denied her further study.

For the last two years, Zanthi has been working on a theory. It is a loose-woven thing, more gaps and holes than it is anything substantial, but the mystery has devoured her. She had thought… Well, she had thought others might see the value of uncovering unknown history, but clearly not.

Since Zanthi had first read a collection of founding myths from all the crest cities in the archipelago and found Esk missing from the pages, she has been searching for a hint of that history. Esk, as far as recorded history is concerned, sprang up, wealthy and prosperous under the hands of the first Crown. Before the Crown conquered the natural upwelling of magical aether-energy they called the Well, Esk did not exist.

Esk’s Well is not the only aether well in the archipelago, but it is the strongest by far. It is the most potent. And it is the only one not connected to a god-myth or guardian spirit. Zanthi has barely started in her academic career, but she sees the gap in the pattern as well as any historian might. A skipped thread in the weaving of stories.

A secret is buried deep in the beginnings of Esk, and everyone is content to have forgotten it. Zanthi is determined to know what it is. And if she is to be cast out from her academic robes, then this will be her last chance to confirm her suspicions about the deep archives.

That is why she is standing here, at the river tunnel.

She just can’t bring herself to go down it.

The broken shard of white chalk sticks to her fingers. She always carries it when she’s in the archives, but she’s never needed to rely on it like she’ll need it now. Beyond the river tunnel, the paths could lead anywhere. She marks the wall at the mouth of the passage, a small, sharp dash of white that disappears into the dark as soon as she moves beyond it and takes her light with her. 

The river tunnel is low, a curtain of water dripping from the ceiling. She pulls up the hood of her cloak. It’s her favourite cloak, the woollen fabric woven with a rosemary-leaf pattern. It had been a gift from her brothers when she’d first started her studies in the archives, and it’s always kept her warm.

The chill seeps through now, though. Each breath slicks her mouth with water, leaving it tasting of mud, and the river echoes haunt her footsteps. The stone roof sinks down and the echoes shatter all around. She grips her lantern, barely breathing, until the ground slopes up again. Up, leaving the sound of the river behind her.

And then, as if she had traversed further than a single passage, everything is different.

The plain, worn stonework of the archives is gone. The stone here is all ruined grandeur, better suited to the House of the Crown than the deep earth. It ripples under dust and soil, the faintest smudge of what it once must have been. Time and damp have worn it down to almost nothing.

She leaves a dash of a chalk mark and, gathering her courage, strides on. 

Her lantern holds steady, a golden shield of light against the shadows. She marks the wall at the forking of the path, and then again when her passage melds with another. The ruined ornamentation continues, and she follows it. She should have brought a drawing kit, something to record it with.

Her feet fall into the ancient grooves of the tilted flagstones, walking where others had once walked. Surely, the university knew this lay just beyond their domain. And still, they make her out to be a fool and a fancy-seeker for wanting to explore it. Despite the dark, despite the chill, a hard pit of fury burns in her.

She turns into a passage braced by arched columns, stopping for a moment to admire it, and wonder at the ghost of what it must have been. The cold sinks through her, heavier than she’s ever felt it. How deep is she? She must be under the artisan’s quarter of Esk, or perhaps the Old Town. There is no way to know.

Ahead, the stonework ripples as if something is hiding. Curious, she presses a palm to the wall, and the grime gives way with a burst of stone-and-water scent. Underneath is pale stone, grooved against her fingers.

Carvings. Friezes. An endless scroll of figures carved into the stone walls, stretching out into the dark ahead of her.

She wipes at the stone. A stylised face in profile stares out at her, half-crumbled with age, with one shadowed eye. It looks at her like she’s somewhere she shouldn’t be. And beside it, the remains of another. And another. 

When she stands back, her sleeve damp with grime and wet, and holds her lantern high, she sees it for what it is. A procession of dancers, maybe. The damage of age is too severe for her to pick out any details other than in part. A foot, a basket of tangled foliage. 

She hardly notices her feet carrying her forward. The broken figures move in the aetherlight, flickering like ghosts, and she follows them like someone wisp-spelled. The carvings disappear into ruined stone and then, a mere four steps further down, leap back into form, beckoning her on. Disappear. Reappear. The path splits and splits again.

Ahead, a carved hand, still clinging to the wall. A sprig of a strange plant bearing fruit. A pattern like fish scales, carved into the wall, over and over and over. A ribboned foot, outstretched in a leap, though the rest of the dancer is gone.

And then, nothing. Only plain walls.

She stumbles back, swinging the lantern in a seeking arc. Nothing. Plain walls all around. She runs her tongue against her lips, and tastes damp. Has she gone back towards the river? But no. She’s been forging upwards this whole time.

Back down the passage, she reaches the last turning. There is no chalk mark. A chill claws up her back. Surely, she’d remembered to mark the way? She looks at her hand, her fingers white with dust. She is not holding her chalk.

When had she dropped it?

The lantern light catches the broken remnants of fingers carved in the wet stone, and the relief is like a roaring flood. She can follow the frieze back the way she came. She only needs to chase the dancers down in reverse.

She does so for a while, searching for chalk marks and finding only damp walls. Sometimes, she finds gouged marks at passage corners, as if some lost explorer marked their way through the labyrinth long ago. She finds less and less of the frieze remnants until she must admit to herself that she’s lost them altogether. And then she takes a wrong turn, and the path ends in a crumbled cave-in of old earth and stone. She backtracks, turns the other way, and finds another, and another.

The unease latches in deep when she finds the stairs, and she knows she is not following her old trail at all. She is lost. Now, there is a drumming beat inside her, as loud as festival drums. It’s her own heart, louder and louder, as she pushes into the darkness as if it is chasing her. All she wants is a way out. 

Down, her thoughts tug. Down, and you’ll reach the river.

But her path refuses to turn down. It pulls her further in, further up, until the passage tumbles back into the arched procession way, and the friezes are there once more, flickering in the golden light.

“Oh, thank the gods,” she breathes, and then she looks up, and her words fade to dust on her lips.

Above her is the most finely preserved frieze yet. For the first time, she sees a face. A woman, with hair tangled like creeping vines, a strong, lovely nose, and a beautiful face. All of her is there, graceful body arched in a weightless pose, right down to her ankles. There is nothing to clothe her but a wreath of ivy woven through her hair. 

It seems, with all the shadows leaping up the walls, that the woman is casting a gaze down on her. Imperious, but not unkind. Her arm is outstretched. She is pointing.

Zanthi forgets she is lost. She turns to see that the passage splits. One path goes on, into the darkness, the other ends in a shadow-soaked tumble of rubble. Which is the frieze pointing at? Is the end of the procession in the shadows, or collapsed under rock?

She could never sleep again if she turned her back now.

The lantern light sways drunkenly as she strides ahead. In the flash of gold, she sees a gap halfway up the heap of stone that blocks the caved-in passage. When she sets her face to it, a breeze kisses her cheek. Living air, warm and inviting.

This, then, is a way out.

She squeezes through the gap, tumbling into shadows, and reaches back for her lantern. In the moment before she grasps it, she hears the funeral bell again. It is faint and faded, an echo trapped in the rolling passages of the archives, and it sets all her nerves on edge.

She slides down the rubble heap in a shower of dust. It makes the aetherlight milky and dull until she shakes the glass clear, and she hurries on. The darkness shifts even darker, and the hollowed groove of a path breaks into uneven stairs. As Zanthi lifts her lantern higher, trying to see ahead, the light gutters and dies. 

She curses, loud.

The minutes stretch, the blackness thickens. The stairs go on and on, endless, and she has a horrid, quavering thought that perhaps she’s climbed all the way to the heights of Esk, that maybe she’ll emerge into the House of the Crown.

Forget heresy, if that’s the case. They might skip straight to treason. 

Her boots collide with solid wood. A door. It squeaks open, but it’s a quiet sort of squeak, as if it’s doing its very best to whisper. The velvet gleam of twilight greets her and the fear-splinters melt from her chest. 

Air. Light. Safe.

She clips her useless lantern to her satchel, then eases the door shut behind her. She’s in a hedge. It’s a lovely, fragrant sort of place, with sweet-scented flowers vining through the glossy, dark leaves of a hawthorn tree. There’s enough of a gap she can squeeze through, and then she’s stumbling into a forest. No, a garden.

No, the Gardens, she realises. The Old Gardens.

No wonder her aether lantern had died. 

The House would have been a worse place to intrude upon, but only barely. Only Esk’s best and finest are graced with an invitation inside the hallowed grounds of the Gardens. She is firmly neither. If she’s caught trespassing in such a place, Theron will never recover from the shame of it. 

But she is, for the moment, unnoticed. She can’t be in the main pleasure grounds, the place that hosts society parties, musical performances, and social bathing. It’s too quiet, even for a spring night. There are no performers, none of the garlanded ‘nightingales’ that staff the grounds. No bathers. Only drifting steam and silence. 

She must be in the older, sacred grounds. Objectively, that is worse. Practically, it means she has a chance of escaping her predicament unseen. She only needs to find an outer wall, and a gate through it, and she’ll be safely back in the streets of Esk.

Why had the frieze pointed her here? Because she has little doubt that this is where that carven procession led. The sacred springs of Esk, as much Esk’s lifeblood as the Well.

And, she realises, perhaps she finally has proof of something older than the Well and the Crown. She takes a heady breath of sweet-scented air and calms her thoughts. An old frieze and a pointing figure are no proof of anything, not on their own.

But it’s a start. She must get home so she can write down everything she remembers, before the memory is dulled.

Each step stirs up the earthy scent of the mossy ground. It smells the same as the water in the remedial baths by the river—all wet stone and soil and a gentle, sweet scent that reminds her of steeping tea leaves or river rushes in the summer. It is a scent that any Esk-born person associates with rest and healing. The Casca family presides over the sacred healing springs,  second only to the Crown and the Heirs in the vast social hierarchy of power and play that Zanthi does her very best to avoid. They would be dangerous enemies to have if they found her where she oughtn’t be.

She’s barely had that thought when she stumbles through a mossy thicket and right into trouble.

In the thicket is a pool, and in the pool is a man. An oil lantern sits on the moss nearby, flickering gold. It gives a wholly inconvenient light.

His dark hair is curling in the damp, clinging to his brow and neck. His eyes are closed, head tipped back. He’s got a lovely, strong nose, and she sees his ears are pinched with gold, and then she notices his mouth, slack and soft.

And then she looks away, because he is very much naked. She is quite sure that bathers in the pools should wear bathing shifts, but she supposes this man thought he was alone. She tries to leave him alone, but the soil crunches beneath her boots and the man looks up.

He blinks at her.

“You are not supposed to be here,” he says. His voice is low, lilting. It’s really very pretty, in an entirely awful way. She supposes he’s a nightingale. She hopes he’s a nightingale, because the alternative is too awful to bear thinking about.

“I took a wrong turn,” she says, because she’s always found just forging on to be a formidable option when she’s in the wrong. “I don’t suppose you know the way out?” 

His eyes are as green as the deep moss that clings around the pool. She notices because she is trying her very best to not look away from his face. 

The water is rather clear, is all. 

He leans back again, lifting a hand to point through the trees. The water runs down his arm, pattering to the moss with the sound of rain. 

“Straight ahead, if you are set on leaving,” he says. Then, silken. “Might I tempt you to stay?”

Zanthi stares. He smiles. 

“No, thank you,” she says, almost on instinct. It comes out sharp. She hurries on, refusing to look his way again. Even through the drape of her rosemary-patterned cloak, his gaze feels heavy on her until the dark falls thick between them.