The forbidden glade was so high in the uninhabitable reaches of Cloudbreaker that some snow never melted, its secrets held by the mountain, undisturbed by the seasons. A young man, or maybe a grown boy, paced its perimeter, peering into the dense forest, anticipating ermine against emerald, the flash of her coat amongst trees. He, Fenric, stood more than an exclamation’s distance from the village. A safe distance, far enough to pretend that other place had never been. He craned his neck. Every other time, she had come.

Today of all days couldn’t be the one she missed, either by intent or by fate. He exhaled, kicked some stacked rocks at the glade’s edge. Some dislodged, loosening the structure.

Fifteen years of nothing, and now she’d brought glimpses of an end to the exile brought upon his whole family by his parents. A lifetime of being unfairly punished for their dealings with the explorers. The reason he had to meet Isenra here, on the forbidden path, and not in the open. If she came.

Astonishing even that Isenra had said a word to him, let alone two, let alone three. Then all the rest of it. A breeze whipped up a shiver through the leaves – not uncommon for March on Cloudbreaker.

To choose a life here suddenly seemed like madness. This should only be a place for frozen things and wild animals. He’d never taken the path down, but he knew, he could find it.

He paced. He peered. Could he leave forever, even if she wouldn’t?

In the distance, a pale figure broke from the crush of trees below. Something leapt in his chest. She climbed the incline with ease, though still with a steadying hand on passing trunks. Even those born here never quite made peace with gravity. As she drew closer – nothing else existed.

Chestnut hair spun like eddies when ice melts in summer streams. Eyes ringed in hazel, lichen-bright at the centre. Arms full of mint, thyme, sorrel.

Face to face now, eye to eye, lip to lip – not an inch between them.

She kissed him before saying a word. The cold vanished; fire spread through him. Their mouths caught like kindling, teenagers burning every moment they could steal.

‘How long do we have today?’ she asked.

He only held her. She searched his face.

He thought of lying, gave her the half-truth instead. ‘Maybe forever.’

She pulled them apart, frowning.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Halmar. We fought.’

Fenric had long given up calling his father by anything other than his first name. This, and his herb-gathering trips, were his only freedoms.

‘You always fight,’ she said, slowly.

‘He tried to stop me coming,’ Fenric said. ‘I told him, same as always, I was coming to gather herbs. He said no. Said I took too long, he can’t trust me. Said I’d lost the right.’

‘But,’ she frowned. ‘If you don’t do that, you’re under lock and key.’

She was being literal. Fenric was serving a life sentence for a generation-old crime. The past threw down four walls and a padlock, the only available key on Halmar’s unyielding belt. His parents’ association with the explorers had marked them and the whole family lived as outcasts. ‘We don’t mix with them,’ was all Halmar would say.

If he weren’t afraid of what Halmar would do, he’d have fought him long ago.

Back then, before Isenra, there’d been no point escaping. No friends. No lover. Even the animals kept their distance. Only Isenra didn’t.

He’d been foraging sage, so many months ago, when something had struck his head.

A squirrel, he thought. Or worse. He pressed his hand to the sore spot on his neck and turned. Nothing.

‘Up here!’ she called, laughing as in his fear, he dropped the sage, all of it scattered, lost.

She was perched in the branches, stripped down to her underlayers. He covered his eyes.

‘You’re undressed,’ he’d said.

‘Well,’ she’d said. ‘Let’s see you climb a tree in one of those.’

Her dress lay draped over a hedge, hung like a skin.

She’d pulled it back on when he asked, when she saw she wouldn’t get a sensible word from him until she did.

They lived a stone’s throw apart. Kingdoms, really.

Born the same year, the year of the curse. Months between them. Lifetimes, really.

Isenra loved the wild. She loved adventure. And she loved him too, against all reason. Fenric, son of the wayfinders who had led the strangers up the mountain, then fled, leaving them to their deaths. Here, with her, he was someone else. So he gathered herbs in name only, and she brought him the real thing to carry home.

Instead of staying miles apart, they drew in, closer and closer, until there was no space left between them. She cared nothing for the rules; the secrecy seemed to thrill her. In the brake she’d pull him down, nipping at his ear.

So when Halmar, that day, had slammed his fist on the table, knuckles white, face red, and told Fenric he was forbidden to go, he had no idea what sentence he passed. No idea he was cutting off the only hopeful thread in Fenric’s life: all that made it bearable. His one glimpse of a future.

The Isenra standing before him now was different – nervous, for the first time.

‘Did you … tell him about me?’

Fenric shook his head. ‘Of course not. I just ran.’

‘Did he follow?’ Her eyes flicked to the trees.

‘No. And he won’t walk the cursed path.’

Nobody did, except the two of them. The path to the summit, the place his parents had told them never to tread. That’s where we took them. Keep well away. They never said anything more, but Isenra was more forthcoming. Fifteen years ago, she had told him, after the snow cleared, the villagers went to see what was left of the explorers. They found enough, and left it where it lay.

‘So he said -’ she stripped a leaf between her fingers, line by line. ‘- he said you could never leave again?’

‘Yes.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I don’t think I can go back. I don’t know what he’ll do.’ He met her eyes. ‘Do you know anyone who could help?’

Isenra said nothing. The silence held what both of them knew he was really asking. He had planned nothing. He had only run. He sank onto the stone pile, as if sitting might steady his thoughts. But he’d kicked at it earlier; the base was loose. The weight tilted it sideways and threw him onto the ground, stones scattering around him.

‘What’s that?’ she said quickly, pouncing on the distraction.

At first he thought it was nothing. Then he saw what she meant: a flash of metal between the stones. A small tin, wedged deep. He reached and pulled, and felt the stones shift around it. Of course. A cairn.

The tin was small, palm-sized, its surface pitted with rust, the picture of dried meat still just about visible, language in the explorers’ script. Provisions, once: but not enough to save them. He nearly let it fall, but something in him would not let go.

‘Open it,’ said Isenra.

He glanced at her, wary, but his fingers were already working at the lid. He didn’t know what he expected – something rotten, something barbaric. The silence surrounding the explorers in his home gave no clues as to the nature of their awfulness.

The lid scratched open, iron against iron, breaking open after fifteen winters.

Inside, two oilcloth bundles. One bare, one sealed with wax. He took the sealed one first. On the wax was a profile: a noble face, fine nose, strong jaw. As the wax snapped, the face cracked and split, shattering into red flakes. He undid the cloth to reveal a folder paper.

The hand was cramped, hard to read, words slanting in a language almost his, but not quite – a lingua franca which bound Cloudbreaker with the distant lands of the explorers.

Isenra leaned in but could not read. Fenric may not have had much to thank Halmar for, but he had taught him how to scribe. He read out loud, to her:

‘March 25th, in the year 1844. We are camped at the last place on Cloudbreaker where life is possible. Twelve men, joined by two guides – a man and woman who know the tongues, the plants, the waters. Halmar is stalwart, upright. Vittris –’

He stopped. His mother’s name – and worse, the line that followed.

‘– is possessed of an uncommon knowledge of the natural world. Her intellect and beauty surpasses any more advanced woman. All is well and I am spurred on to the next stage of our discoveries. Expedition Leader, Thoren Alvar.’

Of course, he had known the bare facts. Halmar and his mother had gone with them. But to hear it in another man’s hand, embalmed in praise, a kind of gawping admiration – wrong, unfamiliar, but a pride he did not want to acknowledge. Intellect, beauty, told their own story.

‘Sounds like he loved her,’ Isenra said quietly. ‘That’s not the version the village tells.’

He both did and didn’t want to know.

‘What version?’

‘That he…’ she winced. ‘That he used her.’

That was about as much delicacy as he was going to get from someone he’d met half-dressed in a tree.

His mother, would she have…?

It would explain why she was shunned. Fenric had caught looks from neighbours as they passed their home. Suffused in venom. He reeled: never truly understanding what they had done to deserve such depth of feeling.

He checked the date of the letter again. He counted back the months, from his birth date.

The pieces came together, and fell apart, all at once. His stomach turned.

‘I’m Thoren’s,’ he said. ‘I’m his. That’s why Halmar hates me.’

Leaves shifted overhead. Isenra just gave a small nod of the head. Her lips were parted, as though she was going to speak, but it was only to say – ‘what’s the other paper?’

Fenric tried to grasp the other oilcloth with shaking fingers. This one did not have the honour of a wax seal, and when he revealed the short script, he could see it was faded, written by a more fragile hand, lines making their own uneven descent down the page.

‘April 30th, 1844. Unexpected snowfall cut us off before summit. Betrayed by deep winter. Pass blocked. Vittris and Halmar fled. Eight dead. Mountain has no sustenance. Gods forgive us. Expd. Leader Thoren Alvar.’

Fenric’s breath misted in the air. The leader’s bones might lie only yards from where he sat. The explorers had never been history, or even ghosts. They were silent, but not gone. They were somewhere here, those twelve dead men.

One of whom had begged forgiveness of the gods.

‘They were desperate.’ Isenra’s voice was calm. ‘As desperate as you can be.’

She fixed him with a look. ‘Do you understand what that means?’

Fenric refused the thought. He wanted to close the tin, bury it back under the rocks, let the mountain keep its secrets.

‘My mother. Halmar -’

‘They left. Who knows what kind of guilt they bear,’ said Isenra. ‘But your father,’ she said, wide-eyed. ‘I don’t think there is mercy for him in this life or the next. And it still didn’t save him.’

Why couldn’t these hateful papers have disintegrated, ground themselves into dust, drowned in melted snow and vanished, taking with them the truth of what he was. He’d always felt like he’d been treated unfairly. Punished for his parents’ mistakes, and for their alliances, their cowardice. But now –

He wasn’t born of a tyrant, but of a demon.

How could he ask Isenra to build a life with him? Some things could not be undone. Not when they were scored into the body itself, knife-marks on the bone.

‘Are you horrified by me now?’ he asked. ‘Now that you know?’

Isenra lifted a hand, palm steady, as if to hold the question still in the air. The forest hushed, except for the susurration of the leaves.

Then she smiled.

‘I always knew,’ she said, her hand light on his arm.

‘You knew these things?’

‘Mostly,’ she said. ‘There’s plenty of talk outside your household, you know. Most people believe it. I thought it might only be rumour.’

Her fingers found his. She drew him close.

‘But it’s fascinating, finding that it’s true.’

Her mouth pressed against his, a sudden kiss. He stayed frozen. When she pulled back, she looked at him with adoration: as if he too were a remarkable specimen. She grinned.

‘Now you know everything,’ she said.

The hazel in her eyes had ossified, iris ringed in hard wood.

‘After this, go home. Apologise to Halmar. What the villagers would do to you is worse; I’m sure he has been shielding you. I’ll find a way for us to go on meeting.’

She stroked behind his ear, then leaned in to kiss him, nuzzle him. He felt teeth, sharp on cartilage.

‘I would miss you so,’ she whispered.

Fenric looked beyond her, into the dense forest. Snowflakes began to drift through the branches, settling downhill.

At the same distant spot he had seen Isenra’s ermine flash between the trees, there was movement. A shadow, perhaps – or something more. The forest grew dimmer. No longer emerald, but hunter green.