He tried to be good. Lightless kept him safe. He even went back to the ruffles, because they were the only thing to eat where there wasn’t light. The thinsharps weren’t there anymore, but bigthings came again. His mouth filled with spit every time he went near the warm smell.
He got to nine awakes and then lost count, and then he couldn’t stand it anymore.
He crept up, on hands and knees at first as he was used to, then slowly rising to his feet because it hurt his hands, learning how to push himself from one shortfloor to the next. The light grew worse. He put a hand over his eyes and cracked his fingers. There were no bigthing sounds. This might be an asleep, for them. His heart raced faster the closer he got to the warm smell. He felt as cold as stone. He wanted to eat the warm smell and then wrap up in it and sleep safe. A thing that had a smell like that would be very soft.
It came from behind a door. No sounds within. Doors were forbidden if [194] they were outer doors. Only inner doors were allowed. But the smell ... He pressed the handle down and crept through, silent, silent.
“You there!”
The shout stopped his heart in his chest.
He twisted to scoot back the way he had come, but the loose door moved, tangling him up. The door here was smooth and his bare soles slipped instead of digging in. This was a chamber, not a tunnel. He was good at tunnels. He was all sliding and tangled here.
A big hand slapped onto his back and closed on rags and shin. It dragged him farther into the chamber so that another big hand could take his wrist. He had to follow his bent-up arm. It was a tiny scrawny arm in the huge hand of the fat bigthing.
“What do you think you’re playing at, this time of morning?” She bent down to peer into his face. Her cheeks were like rolled dough. Her lips were fat. Her eyes were milky marbles with blue swirls and tiny black holes. He opened his mouth to scream.
“Look at the state of you. Whose child are you? What happened to your hands?”
An answer tried to come out of him. But it couldn’t.
“Come on now, little fellow, who do you belong to?”
There was an answer. There was. He had a thing to say, he knew. But he’d lost it. He’d lost it! Rage rushed up like a great wind from the whisperhole. He snarled and bit and kicked, but when the woman snatched her hand back from his teeth he forgot to run away, and he was biting and punching himself instead.
“Easy, now, easy, for spirits’ sake, love, stop that now.”
He snarled, and sobbed, and tore with his teeth and punched with his fists. But the big woman didn’t hit him, or shout, or make a bright light. She engulfed him. Her thick arms scooped him up and pulled him in so that he sank into the doughy softness of her.
Something warm. Something to go around him. This wasn’t exactly it. But it was close.
It murmured like the whisperhole. It moved in a rocking motion, but didn’t trip and tangle like the door. It surrounded him, but wasn’t cold like a tunnel. It was warm. It felt safe.
After a while, it gave him a soft sweet thing to eat, and then another, and then no more because he’d be sick.
It put something cool on his hands and wrapped them up clean. It hid him from some other bigthings that came. It made them go away. It said hard things to them but nice things to him.
He liked it, even though it made him cry.
Maybe he could stay.
The Knee
Pelufer started awake a moment before she heard Nolfi’s warning.
She was in a bed, not wrapped in blankets in some field. There was a wall at her head, not a hedgerow tree or bush. She was jammed against Elora’s back, with Caille sprawled half across her and the covers kicked into a tangle at their feet. Though the window was shuttered and the air was close, she was in a good solid room under a sturdy roof in the house of Jiondor’s cousin, and until some danger-sense woke her she had thought they might finally be safe.
“Get up!” Nolfi whispered through the window slats. “Wake up, get up. Someone’s turned in from the road.”
Elora stirred and muttered in sleepy protest. Pelufer jumped up to open the shutters, then sorted quickly through the hand-me-downs left for morning wear, tossing the biggest clothes onto Elora. “Who?” she said as Nolfi leaned in the window.
“Two of them. On foot. I couldn’t see any more before I ran back here.”
Nobody else would be making for an offroad farmhouse in the dead of night. Pelufer dragged their travel sack from under the bed. She stuffed in clothes for Caille and threw it to Nolfi.
“Is it morning?” Elora said, tugging blearily at the tunic lying on her, trying to make sense of the dark.
“Get Caille’s shoes on.” Pelufer stripped off her nightshirt and [196] pulled on droopy hose and too-long shirt. “Give her to Nolfi.”
Elora understood, then, and moved quickly.
The farmstead was well back from the road, up a winding path through coppice oaks that made good hiding. They’d arrived at midday, and Pelufer had spent the afternoon exploring furlongs and headlands, fixing an escape route in her mind while Elora, claiming a need for time alone, had sat watch by the path. Pelufer had shown her bolthole to Nolfi just before supper, then took the evening watch while Nolfi napped. Jiondor’s relatives had not questioned their behavior. They were children, and still new here.
Elora passed Caille to Nolfi through the window. Pelufer climbed out after, into the dim light of a half moon diffused through haze. Elora was just behind, with her shoes in her hand. “Put her on my back,” she said to Nolfi, and Caille, who had been working up to sleepy tears, wrapped arms and legs around her and laid her head down to go back to sleep. Elora used to carry her that way all the time. She was too big for it now, but there was no choice. The plan was for Nolfi to stay behind and tell the killers they had gone, so they would not wake or harm Jiondor’s folk.
There wasn’t time. They heard the huffing of a dog straining at a lead, and then the dangerous man and flowery woman emerged from the oak-bordered path into the farmstead’s front yard.
They had tracked them with the cowdog. Seeing how it stayed by Caille in the tavern, the woman must have made its master trade it.
“Get the dog!” Pelufer said, snatching up the travel sack.
“I’ll try,” Nolfi said, and pushed her. “Go!”
They ran, dodging around the side of the house and through the shadows between sheds.
They heard words, a scuffle, an oath, a yelp, an outcry.
“Nolfi ...” Elora moaned.
“Don’t turn,” said Pelufer. Skewed bars of yellow light fell beside them and then away as they raced between vegetable and herb gardens. The relatives had woken, lit a lamp. “Don’t stop.”
Faster even when Elora wasn’t carrying Caille, Pelufer took the lead. She relied on memory and shape-sense to navigate the baulks and gores. She stayed by the hedgerows where she could and avoided the dewpond on its rise. At the end of the farthest field, they crossed a headland, jumped a ditch, and scrambled up a wood bank. At the woods’ edge, Elora took over, She made a way through dense briar and hawthorn that had nearly stopped Pelufer’s exploration; it simply yielded to her, and Pelufer squeezed through in her wake, leaving no sign of their passage. Elora moved quickly through pollard hazel and [197] ash, never tripping on roots, never crashing into trunks in the dark. She could feel the wood, through her skin, through the soles of her feet. Pelufer hung on to Caille’s nightshirt and followed, blind except for Elora’s shine.
“Rest,” Elora said, halfway in. They were in timber trees now, mature ones past time for logging. On the other side the woodland opened again into pasture, and across the pasture was the road Pelufer was aiming for. “She’s too heavy.”
Caille was squirming to get down anyway, jostled from sleep and now frightened and upset. Pelufer tried to calm her and explain things while Elora caught her breath.
Back through the woods, they heard the dog rasping.
Caille’s head came up. “He wants me.
”
“I know,” Pelufer said. “If you touch him, can you make him go home?”
Caille shrugged. Her body felt stubborn and resistant. Pelufer sighed and tried again to explain. Caille refused to understand the danger. She was getting angry at her sisters for being tense and afraid all the time. She hadn’t liked being on the road and she wanted to go back to the farmhouse.
The dog was getting closer. They could hear the killers’ boots crunching through underbrush. Pelufer thrust the sack at Elora and hefted Caille up against the front of her with a grunt. “Ready?”
With Caille’s weight transferred, Elora was as swift and light-footed as Pelufer was heavy and plodding. The woods invigorated her; in the midst of their thriving growth, she came to life, all fear and weariness lifting. Pelufer followed the ruddy shine of her. When she stopped and turned, letting Pelufer catch up, her eyes gleamed like rubies in the darkness.
Pelufer unlocked her hands, deposited Caille, and stood panting for a moment. Then she said, “Elora,” and took a breath.
“What?” Elora couldn’t stop moving. She spun in circles, dancing from tree to tree, her head flung back and her long hair flying coppery around her. She was drunk on living woodland. They had dwelled too long in town and poisoned forests.
She looked the way Pelufer dreamed her mother looked.
“We can’t just keep running. As long as they have the dog and we have Caille, they’ll find us.”
Caille frowned. “No kill,” she said, a sullen warning.
“No, no, I wouldn’t hurt the dog,” Pelufer said, too quickly. “I want you to send him home. But we have to stop the man and the woman for a little while to do it.”
She looked to Elora then, but Elora was full of the night and the [198] forest, and her shining eyes weren’t fixed on the right things.
“You have power here,” she prompted. “You have to use it.”
Elora stopped still, facing the depth of trees. “I have love here,” she said. “It can’t be used the way you want.”
“Fine,” Pelufer said, thinking Pest, pest, stupid pest. “I’ll do it, then. Just stay out the way.” Her sisters and their poxy should-and-shouldn’ts. This was real, this was important ...
She looked up into the branches overhead, and saw what she needed. She was a good climber, and her side teeth were strong. The creepers here were strong enough to hold, but not so strong she couldn’t gnaw through them. She had it set up in a few long breaths. A trader’s solution. Ingenuity. She stationed herself by the base of the tree, and kept telling herself how clever she was so her hands wouldn’t shake so badly.
The dog’s choked panting came first, the scrabble of its feet, followed by the hard tread of boots. They weren’t trying to be stealthy. The dog writhed and tried to bark. The man loosed it. It ran to Caille’s hiding place, then turned and snarled. The killers advanced on the spot, saying they wouldn’t hurt anyone, they only needed some help. Just another step ... one more ...
Pelufer hauled down on the vines with all her weight. A pair of dying branches ripped free and came plummeting down in a whoosh of leaves and twigs. The man and the woman went down under them.
Pelufer hefted a branch she had chosen for a club and braced herself. Either they would get up, or names would come.
With a cry, Elora rushed out to pull the branches off them.
“Elora, you idiot! Get away!”
The woman thrashed free. Elora fell back with a cry. The woman looked around wildly, then lunged for her.
Pelufer swung the club. The blow took the woman in the ear. This time she didn’t get up.
Elora flung herself down between the man and the woman. “Spirits, sweet spirits, don’t let them be dead ...”
“They’re not dead,” Pelufer said, relaxing. Caille would have gone spare if they were, and ... “I’d have felt it.”
“They’re breathing,” Elora said as if she hadn’t heard. She freed their packs and shoved them aside. “Caille, come here. I need you to tell me if they’re all right.”
“Don’t touch them, Caille,” Pelufer said, kneeling by the long pack the woman had been carrying.
“We have to help them,” Elora said. She cleared broken pieces of branch away, her hands lingering a little on the shattered wood, [199] as if its hard flesh could tell her the extent of the damage it had done to the soft human flesh. “Caille ...”
“Don’t touch them, Caille!”
Pelufer’s tone was so sharp and so hard that Caille shrank into herself. She looked from Pelufer to Elora, her shape uncertain in the gloom. The cowdog sat by her, a blur of white head and ruff, its black body blending into the dark.
“We’ll go while we have the chance,” Pelufer said, unbuckling the woman’s pack. Quick, she had to be quick, take what was worth taking and be gone before they woke up.
“We can’t leave them like this.”
“They hurt Nolfi.”
“We’ll make sure they’re all right and then go check on him.”
“We have to go, that’s what all this was for!”
“We can’t just run all the time. We can’t just escape things.”
Pelufer cried out, slamming her hand down on the half-opened pack. “Why not?”
“Because you have to be responsible for what you leave behind you in the world.”
Father’s words again. Father, who’d left a trail of vomit and drink spill through his last years. They’d saved themselves this time. They didn’t need him. They had to get out of here.
Her hand hurt. She looked down at the pack. It was hard enough to hurt her hand when she slammed it. She reached inside, questing through layers of cloth wrappings.
“Those farmers were kind to us. They took us in. We’ll check them and Nolfi and then we’ll take the dog and go.” Elora was pressing leaves to a cut on the man’s head. “If we tie them ...”
“You were willing to run a few breaths ago!”
“I was scared. I was wrong.”
The woods had changed her.
Pelufer set the pack down and picked up the club. A queer, delicious feeling went through her arms into her body.
“Tie them, then,” she said softly.
Pouncing on the compromise, Elora started lashing the tough creepers around their ankles. She didn’t look up. She didn’t see Pelufer’s left hand lock in above her right, testing the resistance of weight against grip.
When the killers were trussed at wrist and ankle, Pelufer said, “Take Caille. Go back to the house. Make her wait while you look. If it’s bad, don’t let her see.”
A low whine started in Caille’s throat, echoed by the dog. Elora, [200] understanding in a rush of horror, took hold of her, trying to shield her. “No.”
“They’ll always find us,” Pelufer said. “They’ll always hurt the people we leave behind. Anyone who helps us.”
“We don’t know that they’ve hurt anyone!”
“Names came off them both. They killed. They both killed.”
“Pel, we have to fix them! We’ll tell someone, there must be keepers somewhere, we’ll tell them—”
“We promised Mamma. We promised Padda, Fixing them would give it away. Telling someone would give it away.”
“Then we’ll give it away! Oh, sweet spirits, Pelufer, put that down, please. We have the dog, they can’t track us anymore ...”
“They’ll find a way.”
“We don’t know what they did!”
“I know what they did.” Ardis, Traig, Areil, Bendik, all dead by the woman’s hand. Deilyn, Niseil, Astael, Sowryn, Vaen, Coenn, Daeriel, Perchis, Vebryn, all dead by the man’s hand.
“No kill,” Caille pleaded. She was crying. Elora was crying. But Elora must have seen some sense in it, because she was holding Caille back. She was crying because she didn’t have any arguments anymore. These people had killed, and they would kill again, and they would never stop tracking them.
“Pelufer,” Elora said, “if you do this, you’ll be
speaking their names for the rest of your life.”
Pelufer thought about that as she raised the club. She had to let it fall almost right away. It was too heavy. But if she swung it, she only had to give it a good wrenching start and its own weight would pull it the rest of the way. She could do this. She could end the threat. She’d always wanted to be a fighter. Fighters killed people. Fighters killed each other. What difference would two more names make? She’d already clubbed the woman once. ...
She was on her knees. She dragged a leg forward to plant a foot, to push herself standing. She might have only moments before they woke. She might not be able to do it if their eyes were open. She had to strike now.
“NO KILL!” Caille screeched, breaking free of Elora, and flung herself on Pelufer. On one knee, Pelufer couldn’t balance against her sister’s barreling impact. She fell beside the woman. Not close enough to touch. But she dropped the club: And the woman woke up. There was no slow awakening. She was dead out, and then she wasn’t.
She rolled toward Pelufer. Pelufer scrambled out of the way, pulling Caille with her, then shoved her sister toward Elora. “Take her! Run!”
[201] The woman’s bound hands closed like a pair of tongs around Pelufer’s ankle. From the edge of her eye Pelufer saw Elora heft their sister and retreat. Darkness swallowed them. She kicked out but couldn’t connect—the woman swerved or ducked her head, she was quicker than any grownup had a right to be. Pelufer flipped over, wrenching her ankle around, but somehow the woman kept hold. Pelufer scrabbled backward. The gnarled roots of an ancient tree came around her like arms. Not fair, not fair—the forest was supposed to help her, she was Elora’s sister! But the tree stopped her backward-crabbing flight, and the woman’s hands would not release her. She couldn’t kick now. Her legs went tingly-numb and limp as the bubbles expanded in her blood and behind her eyes.
“No,” said the woman. “No more running.”
Pelufer could barely hear her over the rush of sound from her own mouth. Efrein, Liya, Istriel ... a dozen names came out of her, and she was retching, choking, and the woman would not let go. She couldn’t kick, she couldn’t struggle, she couldn’t shove or scratch her way free. She couldn’t do anything but let the names go through her, and wait till they stopped, till she could breathe again.
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 25