the mistakes that I’d made, I had no right to claim that I knew her. Or to ask anything more of her than she had already given.
“Do you think she’s coming back?” I asked him.
He didn’t answer.
chapter 31
I felt the river before I felt the Ark. We’d emerged from the forest onto the open grasslands, and I could sense the water’s movement within the stillness of the plain. Piper pointed to the east, and the mountain range that squatted across the horizon. From the Ark painting, I could recognize the distinctive peak of Broken Mountain, and the plateau of Mount Alsop.
Within a few hours of riding, I began to feel the Ark itself. It was an aberration in the earth. Ahead of us, beneath the plain, I could sense the obstinate hardness that was neither soil nor stone. And within this buried carapace was air, where earth should be.
I could feel, too, the soldiers massed there. I heard Xander’s voice: noises in the maze of bones. The whole Ark hummed. If I’d had any doubts that the Council had discovered the Ark, I had none now. It was a hive, ready to swarm.
A few miles from the river, we tethered the horses in a copse. I was reluctant to leave them like that: there was no water other than a few shallow puddles, half-frozen, and I didn’t know how long we would be gone for. But it was too risky to set them free, where they could be noticed by the soldiers. “And we might need them again,” said Piper. I noted the might; we were both thinking the same thing: If we come back.
We moved, hunching, through the long grass. Ahead, the plain rose to a broad hill, where trees fought the boulders and stones for a patch of earth. The river curved around the hill from the west. The winter hadn’t caught this river—its dark water was too deep and too fast to freeze.
“Do we need to cross it?” Piper asked, eyeing the flow warily.
I shook my head, and pointed at the hill. “The Ark’s on this side, under there.” I could feel it more clearly than ever. There was metal beneath the hill—I tasted its iron tang. Doors and passageways, a tracery of metal and air under the earth.
I led Piper a little way up the base of the hill, among the trees, toward the point where I could feel one of the passages climb to meet the air. The trace of metal was strong here—I could sense the doors, iron slabs set into the slope.
Before we reached the doors we saw the first soldiers. A covered wagon, pulled by four horses, flanked by eight more riders. Piper and I dropped to a crouch in the snow. The grass was long enough to hide us, but each time one of the soldiers turned to scan the plain I found myself holding my breath. When they passed the curve in the road they were less than thirty yards from us. Close enough that I could see the red beard of the soldier driving the cart, and the rip in the tunic of the last rider, where his sword’s hilt had worn away the fabric.
Then they had passed us. We watched them approach the scar in the hillside where the door must once have been. But there was no door now: just a gouged space, forty yards across, in the earth. At some stage in the last four hundred years, the hill of scree and boulders had engulfed the doorway that I could sense, and claimed it as its own. By the looks of it, it hadn’t been easy for the Council to excavate. To the side was a mound of earth and rocks, some of the boulders as large as a horse. Trees, too, had been uprooted and dragged there, roots groping at the air. The detritus of centuries. In front of the opening, a line of soldiers waited: at least ten of them, a tongue of red peeking from the hill’s open mouth.
For an hour or more we watched the entrance. Soldiers came and went to the wagon, and in and out of the dark chasm, but the watching guards didn’t move from their posts. They weren’t alone, either. Piper pointed out to me the bowman waiting on the hill, twenty yards above the door. She was nearly concealed by the boulders among which she perched. If Piper hadn’t told me what to look for, I might