The Things We Bury

by Kaleb Schad

  Six paces away, the Fletcher left the ground, arcing like a lofted arrow towards him.

  Kick. Again.

  He brought his sword up and blocked the first claw, just as his left foot cleared from under Syla. The second claw scissored into Daveon’s side. He felt his tunic and flesh shred like smoke sliced by a stick. Daveon cried out.

  The Fletcher tucked into a roll as its momentum carried it past Daveon. Back to its feet. Turning.

  Daveon scrambled up and set his feet on the mountain grade. The creature had the high ground. It would come from above and it would leap. A juice of fear and hatred hosed through Daveon, making his arms jelly.

  The Fletcher hissed. This one’s face had been crafted from three different animals, it seemed, thick stitching holding together the snout of a warthog and the cranium of a horse or deer and something unrecognizable. Liquid dripped from the sutures, viscous and sparkling in the fires.

  “Come on!” Daveon screamed.

  The creature lunged, its hind quarters rippling as the muscles fired.

  Daveon breathed. He thought of Rayen charging him as a child, of the expected and the unexpected. The creature would leap. It would expect Daveon to try and duck.

  He thought of Alysha. He saw her beautiful pained face, the twisted betrayal when he told her he was leaving. He never said he was sorry. He hoped Airim would give his ghost a chance to say he was sorry.

  And then the creature was on him. He didn’t duck. He jumped. He ran forward and used Syla as a catapult and threw himself into the air, catching the Fletcher just as it was starting its leap, its front claws still on the ground. He dragged his sword as if he were hoeing a line.

  Don’t let go of the sword. Your sword is your life.

  The blade caught the side of the Fletcher’s face, twisted off of bone, then cut deep into the monster’s thorax. It stuck and Daveon used it like a flagpole to swing around and land on the monster’s back.

  It dropped out of its leap, but its front legs wouldn’t work and it crashed chin first into the ground. They rolled. The slope of the mountain took them and Daveon could feel himself falling faster and faster. The sword broke loose and a separation opened between the two tumbling figures. He didn’t let go of his sword.

  The world was sideways, then upside down. Fire in the sky. Fire under him. Something crashed into his shoulder and he heard something snap, but of himself or of the world, he couldn’t tell.

  The Fletcher hit a tree and wrapped backwards around it, its spine making a sickly crunch.

  Daveon snagged a sage brush and it unloosed itself from the stones. He snagged another and this one held, but his hand didn’t and it sliced deep rivets into his palm. A tree this time, his palms dragging along the bark, but he slowed! His knees hit the stone and he clawed with his left hand and dragged the pommel of his sword with his right and somehow, somehow he stopped.

  He lay there breathing. Everywhere hurt.

  He lifted his head and could see the burning forest, the streaming flames, several hundred paces uphill. Behind him he heard something move and turned and saw Willow and the two foals. They watched him. A parent. Protecting her children, natural and adopted.

  It took everything he had left—more than he had left—to bring his legs under him and stand. He pulled himself up the slope to the Fletcher.

  It still lived. It was wrapped around the tree in an impossible angle and its head was twisted sideways so that one eye peered upwards. Daveon stepped into its vision. The creature blinked at him.

  Daveon raised his sword, held it, making sure the creature could see it, then drove it into the Fletcher’s skull.

  Daveon led Red, Willow and her two foals up to the group of figures near the plateau. He’d found Red when he’d walked down to recover Willow and once he’d taken the old horse, the others followed him.

  Yellow sparks and ash rained down on them, burning leaves and pine needles tumbling along heated drifts.

  Ella had withdrawn and snuffed what flames she could. She now knelt, her eyes closed, hands pressed against the earth, drawing out heat. Daveon could see where the bat creature had slashed her cheek. Red, twisted and burned flesh rose up around the wound. It was the only sign of the great flames she had wielded.

  Daveon counted five of the Airim’s Lances dead. Twenty-two Fletchers and Wallwraiths heaped around. Sir Calner dragged one of his mates out from under his horse and laid him next to the others. It was Sir Yorjan. Half of his face was missing, everything inside jagged and red. So shocking a revelation that Daveon couldn’t understand what he was seeing and looked away, knowing it would forever sear his dreams.

  Syla laid ten paces away. A burning leaf floated in the puddle of her blood. Daveon closed his eyes. He knew it wasn’t the smoke that was making them water.

  “The horses,” Calner said.

  “Most went southwest,” a knight Daveon didn’t know said.

  “I brought back Red, Willow and the two foals,” Daveon said. “And I saw six more just past the ridge a couple hundred yards off.”

  Ella stood and brushed off her hands. A light breeze picked up and pushed off the lingering smoke. She stared down the mountain, to the south. “Look,” she said.

  Calner hissed.

  “How the fuck they get this far?” Sir Ventley said.

  Daveon turned towards what they were seeing. Whatever magic the Wretched had used to bring that thick darkness had lifted and now the moon and stars lit the mountainside and the valley below in a snowy light.

  A lump lodged in his throat when he saw.

  There, wrapping all the way from the Salt Boil Sea across the entire valley and Arrowhead Peak and Dome Mountain to the south of Fisher Pass stretched the bone wall. It was unmistakable. A white line as if the earth had been torn open. A scar of death.

  “No,” Daveon said. It was so close to Fisher Pass. It was so close.

  “If they’re here, nuts on odds they’re at Nove,” another knight, a woman, said. One eye had a gash above it and it had swollen shut so that her mouth curled up from the tension.

  Daveon couldn’t take his eyes from the wall. He knew he was too far away, but he could have sworn he heard the Wretched moving in front of it.

  They’re there. Alysha, Nikolai, Elnis, Miria…all down there. With it…

  Calner coughed and spit pink foam. He reached into his mouth with thumb and two fingers, worked at something and came out with a tooth. He flicked it away from him and spit again. “Get the horses,” he said to Daveon. “It’s worse than we imagined.”

  Daveon looked at Sir Calner and then at the surviving knights, their purple cloaks floating lightly on the heated wind, spattered black with blood, and he knew. He was not one of them. This, all this, was not a thing Daveon had within him. He had tried, twice now, and he knew. He had been wrong. All his life, he had been wrong. How was it possible to live as many summers as he had and not know oneself? His own wife had known him better than he had known himself. But maybe that was marriage. Maybe that was what it meant to be two parts of one whole. To have a person, a half of yourself to look at you and reflect back the parts that were powerful and the parts that were weak and to know that both parts, all parts, were okay. Were loved. She hadn’t been holding him back. She and the kids. All this time. She had been the other foot walking, taking its turn to hold the weight of the world with him. And he’d left her. He’d left her and his children and taught them what a coward does.

  He’d run off, chasing forgiveness for a sin he now knew had never been a sin in the first place, and in so doing, had maybe committed a greater one. His family. Down there.

  He looked up the slope to the plateau they’d just come down from. He unbuckled the purple cloak and held it out to Sir Calner.

  The knight studied it and then Daveon.

  “Not an option,” Calner said.

  “I can’t. I’m not…this isn’t me.”

  “Balls to that,” Ventley said. “I saw you take that Fletcher. Your ne
ighbors weren’t wrong. I thought they were, but they weren’t. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Daveon shook his head. “My family. They need me.”

  “If we don’t get these horses to the lines and to Nove, it won’t matter. Your family, my family, everyone’s family. It won’t matter.”

  “Then, I’m dying with mine. I can’t…I can’t let them die alone.”

  Calner bunched his fists and stepped forward.

  “You leave, you leave on foot, you fucking—”

  Ella stepped up and put a hand to Calner’s arm. He stopped and looked at her. She walked forward, soft, slow steps and stopped in front of Daveon. She held his eyes and turned her head, as if examining him, looking from eye to eye, reading his face.

  “This hurts, doesn’t it?” she said.

  He looked at Syla’s body, her neck wrapped in black blood. He looked down at the valley, at the white line reaching across it. He nodded.

  “You left something down there, didn’t you?” she said.

  The wall had moved. Already from up here, he could see it had covered a mile or more.

  “Yeah, my family.”

  “No. Something else.”

  Daveon frowned down at her.

  “Your fire,” she said.

  “My fire?”

  “Maybe it was from your family. You had it when you were there, with them, when you were arguing with Sir Calner before leaving to be able to save them, and you had it in our cellar at Lindisfarne, but I’ve been watching and you didn’t have it earlier tonight as we rode. But now, I think you’ve maybe found it.”

  “They’re down there, Ella,” he whispered, his voice choked. “Alone.”

  “Airim needs healers. He needs proper Daughters, but he also needs destroyers, people who burn the infected to ashes because it’s out of those ashes that new hopes rise.” She waved her hand at the Airim’s Lances around them, touched Daveon’s chest. “He needs people like us, Daveon Therentell.”

  Calner said, “Ella, we could really use his—”

  She held her hand up to him without taking her eyes from Daveon.

  “This hurts for a reason. Your dead horse. Your guilt. His love is not gentle, but it is powerful. This is a gift, Daveon. This is Airim’s gift to you.”

  She was right. He had left something behind. He’d been leaving it behind ever since he’d gotten it, certain that his family were the reason he couldn’t be great, certain that nothing he ever did could be great when he’d already done something so horrible. And now he’d led his horse to her death and left his family to theirs.

  He felt new tears streaming down his cheeks. “I cursed him, Ella. I cursed him for them and for mocking me, but he wasn’t mocking me. How can he forgive me? This whole time…”

  Ella walked over to Yorjan’s piebald and guided it back to Daveon. He still held Red’s lead rope. She took his Airim’s Lance cloak and traded him the piebald’s reins. The horse looked at Daveon.

  “Two of them, Ella?” Calner said. “We’re going to need those—”

  “He needs them more. Three kids and two adults can’t ride on one horse,” she said. She stared at him. “Take your fire home, Daveon. And burn anything that stands in your way.”

  THE BONE WALL

  BOOK FOUR

  59

  Anaz could see the light from her chamber like a beacon, high above him. His fingers and toes arced and hunted for the tiniest chink or hole he could grip. Whether his strength came from the hsing-li or desperation, he couldn’t tell.

  Climbing a tower in the dark for a girl. This was something he’d done before. If he were looking for signs that he were falling back into the same traps as before, this would be one.

  But he wasn’t looking for signs. Maybe he’d misunderstood what the hsing-li had been trying to teach him. Maybe this kind of trap couldn’t be avoided. Maybe he was wrong and Isabell was right. Life was the trap.

  Lelana had said there were two guards on Isabell’s door and that she hadn’t alerted them when she left. Smart. Anaz pulled his eyes just above the casing of the window.

  Isabell was on her bed. Flickering torches in the sconces. A fire hissed in the hearth, its light sawing at the night. A vanity along the far wall, a Cormyr rug. Her bedposts had been hacked to pieces by an axe or a sword or something sharp. A chalice spilled onto the floor next to the bed. Nobody else in the room.

  He lifted himself up to the window. Quietly, quietly, he stepped into Lady Isabell’s room. His heart thundered and he knew it wasn’t from the climb.

  His ears hurt for listening. The hsing-li pulling every scratch, every shuffle of the guards outside her door.

  He ran to her side and knelt next to her. Her hands were laced over her chest, a beautiful white dress wrapped around her, spilling off the side of the bed. A wedding dress. She wore a wedding dress. Her brown hair flooded around her head as if she floated in a pool. Her skin was nearly as white as her dress, waxen and dull. Her lips were slightly parted and he could see the white of her teeth, but they were dry. The lips were dry. She wasn’t breathing.

  He touched three fingers to her throat. Her skin was cool and stiff.

  His heart cracked. She had done this to herself because of him. He had stolen from her the one thing he had always cried after when he had been in his own prison. He had stolen her hope. Her hope and his own, he realized, because seeing her, being here like this, he knew he would never leave her side again.

  He took a deep breath and infused it with as much hsing-li as his body could hold. He battled back what Rot was left inside of him, kept it from her. She’d said she couldn’t catch it, but he wouldn’t risk it.

  And then he kissed her. Her lips were firm, yet pliable. Dry. He breathed into her and poured all of the hsing-li he had within him into this beautiful creature’s dying body.

  And he begged for her life.

  Alysha twisted out of Two Fingers’s grip and put every last ounce of putrid hate into her glare. “You got your money,” she growled.

  “I did not—”

  “Malic, behind—” Taralost shouted.

  Nikolai drove Daveon’s dagger into Malic’s ass, the blade sinking all the way to the hilt, the boy’s small hands wrapped white knuckled around its grip.

  Malic screamed. He spun, much faster than Alysha thought the scrawny man capable of, and hammered a back fist across her son’s face. Nikolai crashed backwards into the dirt, but his grip held tight and the dagger came out with him.

  My boy.

  Run! But she didn’t say it. Couldn’t.

  This was something new altogether. This fear. This terror in her son’s eyes as Malic stood over him and the gripping, crushing dread burying Alysha.

  The others. Elnis and Miria. They were at the corner of the house and the girl stepped out from around the corner and she held a stone in her hand, but it was shaking and her feet wouldn’t move.

  Alysha leaped onto Malic’s back. She raked her nails along his face, up across a cheek, stuttering over his eyelids.

  “Fucking whore!” Malic swore.

  “Run!” Alysha screamed.

  Nikolai jumped to his feet and he was gone, faster than a deer. He clasped Miria’s wrist and tore her back around the house.

  Two Fingers started to run after the boy. Taralost pushed his horse into the half-orc’s path and shook his head.

  Malic reached up and grabbed a fistful of Alysha’s hair, then did something with his shoulder and she found herself flipped head over heels onto her back staring up into the night sky. Malic leaned over her, upside down from her perspective.

  He brought his foot up over her face and she knew he would do it, was going to do it.

  He stomped.

  Everything went black.

  It was working. The thought flicked a thrill through Anaz, but he held himself back. Not too eager. Now was not the time.

  He’d had to split the hsing-li in two; one half waged war against Isabell’s poison, pouring
into her through every breath Anaz pushed into her, the other half waging war against the Rot trying to sneak into her body through him.

  But it was working.

  He broke from Isabell, sucked in a deep breath, held it as it mingled with the hsing-li, then bent over her, pressed his lips to hers and breathed. A sigh. Giving ghosts.

  The hsing-li moved like a river, washing out the Mistress Syrup.

  Again. Lift your head. Breathe in. Breathe out. Pray.

  This time when he pulled his head back he stopped. There. She inhaled. On her own. He waited and held his breath and he couldn’t tell if it was out of tension or to prepare to breathe into her again, but he held it and he waited and he waited.

  She exhaled, then slowly, slowly, pulled another breath in. She was doing it. On her own.

  Her next breath was stronger. Soon, she breathed as if in a deep sleep. Slow and steady.

  She didn’t wake, but she would. And Anaz would be here when she did. He knew this. It wasn’t a decision, or rather, it was a decision he hadn’t realized he was making when he made it, sometime before the climb up her tower, maybe even before he’d heard Lelana calling his name. Yes, when he was perched on the bake house. Sometime then, he’d made the decision and not realized it. That’s why he hadn’t left. Yet, now, in the moment, he knew he had and that it was right. He would be here for her. He would never again not be here.

  It wasn’t a betrayal. He could feel that now. Reyn would smile and nod and he would give her a small kiss goodbye and he knew that would be okay. That it was okay. Inside, the hsing-li seemed to swell as Anaz’s split will stitched itself together.

  He took a deep breath and felt a wholeness he’d not known in seven years. He’d been wrong to hide all these years. He’d thought avoiding being together with others would mean he never had to fear loss, but loss wasn’t something to fear or to avoid. It was as much a blessing of the hsing-li as love and togetherness. The still middle between them was a worse death than the living swing back and forth. Love. Loss. Love. Loss. It was meant to be that way.