The darkness was complete then and Brack watched the horses. They would know if the dragon was coming and they would try to run and perhaps it would save them. Perhaps not, but they had nothing else. They sat for a long time and Juoth sang softly some song of the Island Kingdoms and the boy watched him with rapt attention and the song wound a mournful tale through the hills. When it was done the boy lay down on the flat ground near his sister and put his hands under his head and looked at the sky where the stars were breaking and the dark expanse covered in them.
It was some time later in the deep night that Brack woke and for a moment did not know where he was and then remembered and lay very still to hear that which had woken him. The fire down to nothing but red embers, the stars covered now in cloud. The boy talking in the darkness. Brack rolled slowly and looked and he was gone from where he'd slept and so was the blanket and his sister's body.
Chapter Twelve
I
He stood slowly and listened and he did not know the words the boy was saying. Some tongue foreign or perhaps lost. A language now dead in the world but for the few who carried it and to what end he knew not. Juoth was lying there in the dark with his eyes open and Brack nodded to him and he stood also and they walked to the voice.
The boy was not far off and kneeling in a shallow stream. The water moving slow and quiet below them over smooth stones. Dark as pitch, the only light from the moon breaking at times through the cloud cover. His sister's hair flowed all out around her head like some veil or burial shroud pulled back and she floated on the surface of the water as if her very bones and flesh and waterlogged skin held no weight at all. The boy kneeling beside her and both hands on her forehead and covering her eyes. The skin of both stark white against the darkness when the moon fell.
Juoth moved to step from the trees and toward them, but Brack reached and put a hand on his chest.
The boy spoke into the wind and it was as if in his throat burned the very embers of the fire. Stolen in the night and placed between his lips as some delicacy of another world, then swallowed and now lodged there in his throat, twisting and burning and blistering the flesh, devouring his words and giving each utterance a guttural sound. A wicked and lost language. Even with the meanings of the words unknown, filled with a hatred and depth.
They stood and watched him for time unknown. In later days Brack would remember and think it had been but a minute before the boy turned his head to them and his eyes were on fire. Other times he would think it was hours, the night somehow suspended and lashed where it was, the moon hanging in its movements and waiting for this thing to be done. He would turn both over in his mind and he could never sort one from the other or decide which to trust and eventually he stopped trying.
For all that had mattered then was the boy's sneering face, his lips drawn back over his teeth. His eyes burning orbs, no smoke or flame moving out and up his flesh, but all contained like fire raging in a globe of glass or ice. Swirling around on itself. Iris and pupil lost in the inferno. Impossible to know what he saw or if all vision was stripped from him.
Even at that distance, Brack could feel the heat coming off of him.
And then he blinked, and his eyes were black. The color of coal or soot or night itself. All light lost and suddenly a great darkness in the thin forest. A stream of tar moving under a moonless sky, the clouds sweeping back across as if protecting the heavens themselves from what this was.
Not a sound in that darkness.
Then again the boy blinked, and the darkness was gone. His eyes were normal, just white orbs with the pupils dilated. The moon back to cast his face in harsh relief. His own skin and his sister's not that different, both like poured wax. He looked at them for a moment and breathed once long and heavy and then fell forward, slowly, and splashed face down in the running water.
They went forward and pulled him out and his sister also. Both in their sodden clothing. The boy did not make a sound and when Brack rolled him on his back and laid him by the fire his eyes were back in his head and all white. They stripped him of shirt and pants and Juoth gathered wood and got the fire up again and burning hot.
A risk here in the night, a signal to the beast that could be turning silently in that dark air, but without it the boy would die. It was warmer on the road and in the lower country but not as warm as it would be in the plains, at this elevation, and the water had been very cold. They laid his clothes out next to him and Brack gathered heavier wood to keep the fire going and then they sat down and watched it burn and for a long time neither one said anything. Checking the boy at intervals to make sure he was still breathing.
Then Juoth said: “What do you think?”
“About what?”
“Should we ride?”
He looked at the horses and then the boy and the girl's body. It would not be hard to mount up and leave them here and if the boy woke and wanted to go on as he had been going, so be it. And if not then he was already dead and it made no difference.
“No,” he said.
“Why?”
“You can leave if you want.”
“I didn't say I was leaving. I asked you why.”
“And I'm telling you you can leave.”
“And I'm telling you what I asked.”
Brack pursed his lips, looked away in the direction of the city. Kayhi perhaps waiting for him there if she had made it through the pass. Perhaps dead in that snow but he didn't think so and if she was then he'd already lost her and it didn't matter. And then he looked back at the boy and tried not to think of him with his eyes on fire and he looked at the dead sister and swallowed what he felt coming and shook his head.
“I don't know,” he said.
“You always make decisions you don't know why you made them?”
“I make decisions for a lot of reasons and that's one of them.”
Juoth was silent and Brack thought he would stand and curse him or rise in silence and go to his own horse and leave, but he did not. He looked at him for a long moment and then tipped his head back and laughed. Sighed. Shook his own head as if mocking him and said:
“You're a hell of a lot like your grandfather, you know that? Stubborn as a damn mule.”
Brack smiled and watched the fire warm the boy and wondered when he would come back and said: “People always did say we shared a lot. Especially when he was younger.”
II
It was two hours later when the boy woke gasping and sat up straight and gasped again and held his knees and then looked at them with wide eyes. The sun was rising behind the mountain and neither of them had slept and when he sat up Juoth put his hand on his knife but did not draw it. Brack did not move but just watched him and especially the eyes and what was in them.
The boy blinked a few times and worked his jaw and then looked at his sister's body. Reached out and put a hand on her arm and took it back and sat staring and then turned back to them.
“What happened?” he said.
“You tell me,” Brack said.
“I'm asking you.”
“I know you are.”
The boy half started to reach again for his sister and then did not. He was looking down at his hands and he looked like he was trying to figure something out and could not put it together but could feel it or the shadow of what it was. Turning his hands over and over. Finally he put them in the dirt and looked back up and he looked afraid.
“I don't know. I don't know.”
“What do you know?”
He licked his lips and tried to stand and grimaced and sat back against that tree, the trunk old now and rotting from the inside. “I remember waking up in the night. Going down to the river. Then nothing else. Just right now.” He reached out and touched the bottoms of his pants where they had not been close enough to the fire to dry and he pinched them between his fingers. “What happened to my pants?”
“You went in the river,” Brack said. “We found you kneeling in it.”
“Kneeling in
it.”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
Juoth stood up. Looked at Brack for a moment, his eyes like flint. Then he turned and walked off in the darkness in the direction of the path. They could hear him walking in the loose stones for a while and then they couldn't hear him anymore and Brack imagined him sitting there in the half dark and wondered what thoughts turned in his head like the boy's hands and did not know.
“Why'd you do it?” Brack said.
“Why'd I do what?”
“You know what you did.”
“I'm telling you I don't.”
“I don't care what you're telling me.”
The boy looked away and then back at his sister and Brack knew and had known but wanted him to say it and to see if he was telling the truth when he said he didn't know. He couldn't imagine it worked that fast but it might and that was important. So he waited and eventually the boy met his eyes.
“It didn't even work.”
“You don't know that.”
“Look at her.”
“I am looking at her. What is it supposed to do and where'd you learn it?”
The boy looked up the path where Juoth had gone. “Is he afraid of me?”
“I don't know. I've only known him a short time myself. But he doesn't want to believe in it.”
“But he does.”
“Yes.”
“It's,” the boy said. Then stopped. Licked his lips and turned toward the fire. Closing his eyes as if he couldn't say it to anyone else but knew he had to and so could only say it if he wasn't looking at anyone and it was just him behind his eyes and maybe the whole world gone from before him. “It's supposed to bring her back.”
“To bring her back to life?”
“If it works.”
Brack was quiet and went and took up another log from the stack of them and put it on the fire. Moving it carefully so that it sat across the others that were there and formed a bridge. The fire licking up greedily at the sides. The smoke rising and no fear now of the dragon for if it was coming to the fire it would have come already. He watched the log catch and put another crosswise over it and then went back and sat down again.
“You think it will work?”
The boy shrugged and his shoulders looked very small. “I read it in a book. I don't know if I did it right. It wasn't hard.”
“Magic never is. It's very, very easy. You just have to know what's asked. Follow those things, and in that order. You did it correctly.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw you. If you could have seen yourself, you'd know. Did you really forget?”
“It's like a dream. You know it but it's not solid. I remember it a little.”
“But less now than when you first woke.”
“A bit.”
It was already happening and Brack knew he could not stop it and he did not know if the boy knew what it would do to him or not, but there was no point in telling him now, for the thing was done. When a man was dying with an arrow in his heart or his throat cut out you didn't tell him he was dying and the boy was not dying but it was the same. He watched him and the boy was very stiff and Brack thought he knew and had done it anyway.
“Can I still come with you to the city?” the boy said. “Will you still take us?”
“Can I?”
“I don't know what you mean.”
“I mean if I take you, am I going to wish I hadn't?”
“No.”
The boy couldn't tell him that and know it but Brack looked at him and felt like it was true all the same. They were only a few days' ride out now and he did not know how much time he had but he felt it would be enough.
He held out his hand, palm up, the dark leather glove wet below the place where the fingers were cut off. He hadn't known he'd been clenching his hands but he could now feel the ache in them. “Give me your knife.”
The boy took it out of his belt and handed it across. He had not cleaned the blood and it was dried on the blade and Brack put it into his own belt. A short blade, maybe a hunter's knife. Made for gutting a whitetail in the forest and nothing more, but he'd seen the highwayman and it was enough.
“I'll take you to the city,” Brack said. “And your sister. When we get there, you're on your own. I want nothing more to do with this.”
“That's fine.”
“Damn right it is.”
The fire was burning up now and the new logs were ablaze. Tongues of flame rising from the corners of the wood and the logs blackened around them and the bed of embers below. The wind came through the tops of the oaks and shook loose a shower of leaves and they fell in a small scattering into the field and one came down and spun and flicked on the updraft and settled its battered parchment on top of the fire. The edges curling and then the glow from the inside out as the center burned and soon it was nothing but ash.
III
Juoth came back after a time and would not speak to the boy and they mounted the horses with the dead girl on behind him and rolled in the blanket and the boy with Brack and they rode out as the fire died in their wake. The trail now moving down through the meager forest of rawboned trees and the horses picking their way over rocks enshrouded in lichen. Smaller rocks pushing through the moss and needles of the trail, roots breaking the ground. It was slow going but the horses were surefooted and they went down a long way until they came to a meadow.
In the meadow were two rams and each standing and looking at the other and neither looking at the men on horseback. One pawed and they both lowered their heads and ran hard and long and came together. It was a sound like a rock splitting. The rams both stumbled and shook their heads with the heavy spiraled horns and looked at one another and without turning began to walk backward until they stood again at a slightly greater distance. Each eyeing the other. Then one pawed and they ran again.
They went up the side of the meadow where a thin waterfall came over the cliff and dismounted to drink and looked down at the rams where they still fought and then remounted and rode off and never had the rams acknowledged them, so intent were they each on the other's destruction. For a long time they could hear them striking as they went and always that same heartbeat to the sound.
IV
As the day drew to a close they rode in the falling dusk and the horses streaked with dirt and Brack felt the boy moving behind him. Shifting as if to look again at his sister. He had done this many times and Brack did not think much of it and then the boy said:
“We were coming out of the sea with golden sails. The wind was behind us and we could see the other ship sinking on the horizon and we didn't turn back.”
Brack closed his eyes. Thinking of an old man in Gadilion and a cup in his hand. Meager coins rattling within. Then he opened his eyes again and the trail stretched out before them through a stand of birches. The ends of the branches were dead, perhaps beset by plague or beetle, and all about the roots of the trees lay their own branches where they'd broken and fallen in the wind. Below the leaves still green and above withered and that death moving down to the roots.
“When was it?” he said.
“What?” the boy said.
“When did you sail?”
The boy was quiet then. Brack waited for some time for him to answer and he did not and after enough time had gone by, he knew he never would. They continued on and Brack felt him move again to look at his sister and then it was getting too dark for the horses to see the trail and so they came to a place where that trail widened and pulled the horses into the clearing. No fires here but plenty of wood and a good place to see both in front and behind.
Juoth got down and they tied the horses and then he unlashed the girl and moved her limp form to the side of the clearing and laid her down. The boy watched this intently and Brack watched the boy. Juoth looked at the girl a long time and then Brack saw that he was smelling the air above her and looking at her and then he shook his head and moved away from her and began to gather wood for
the fire.
Brack still watched the boy and he went and stood beside his sister. Then knelt. Putting a hand on her chest, her forehead. He sat back on his haunches next to her and he stayed there a long time and eventually Brack went to the horse and got down the crossbow and left the camp. Nodding at Juoth as he went.
It was not good forest for deer but it was for rabbit and he took one and then recovered the bolt and took another with the same one. Checked the fletching and found it still intact and put the bolt back after he cleaned it in a stream. Took the boy's knife out and cleaned it too and thought for only a moment of the highwayman's body lying beside the road with blood on his chest and fingers and then used the knife to split the rabbits and take out the entrails. The hair was thin and came off easily and he butchered them and threw aside what was left for the wolves. Far from the camp. Then walked back in with the meat in a bag at his side and found Juoth had the fire going and hot and a spit already made over it.
The boy was sitting still beside his sister and looking down the trail and not seeing it. The glaze over his eyes of some faraway place.
Juoth stood from the fire and came over. Motioned toward the boy with his head. The line of twisted skin there where it would scar and the short hair growing back around it. “He hasn't said a damn thing. Just sat there like that.”
“You talk to him?”
“I tried.”
“He didn't tell you anything about a ship sinking?”
“A ship?”
“A ship going down.”
“Didn't even open his mouth. Just sat there.”
Brack took the rabbit meat from the bag and went over to the fire and started putting it on the spit. It was hard with the pieces and he wished he had kept the rabbits whole to roast them but he knew he'd done the right thing for the wolves and eventually he got them on and moved the spit across the fire so that the heat and smoke would reach them and the flames would not.
“What do you think?” Juoth said.
The Ringed City Chronicles: The Dragon Hunt Page 12