“Is that it?” the woman said as the fit eased. “You only say them once and they stop? What happened to Areil and Bendik this time?” She gave Pelufer’s ankle a jerk. “Come on, girl, I asked you a question. I killed someone named Areil and someone named Bendik. Who were they? Are they gone? You only feel them once?”
“No!” Pelufer cried, seeing Elora loom shining over the woman. The man’s carry knife glinted in her hand.
The woman rolled again, bowling Elora’s legs out from under her, then push-hopped through the bracken to the club that lay where Pelufer had dropped it. Twisting her bound hands, she locked palms and fingers around the base of it, and got to her knees. Her ankles were still tied. She couldn’t run. She knelt, brandishing the club.
“I won’t hurt you,” she said. “We’d never have hurt you, you fool girls. Stop trying to kill me.”
Elora had ahold of Pelufer’s shirt and was hauling herself upright. She was looking into the canopy overhead, gauging angles and weights. Tears streaked her face. What Pelufer had done with vines and weak branches, Elora could do with one touch to the trunk of a sound tree.
“No,” Pelufer said. “No, Elora, stop. You don’t have to.” She saw the dim shine of Caille huddled in the shadows. Someone had to go to her.
“I won’t let her kill you,” Elora said, every word an agony.
“It’s all right.” Pelufer didn’t know how to explain. She got up [202] and walked unsteadily toward where the man lay, but she didn’t touch him—not yet. Instead she knelt down by the pack she had half opened. Her hands knew what they would find now, groping past layers of clothes and oddments. She pulled out a long cloth-wrapped object, uncovering one end to reveal a wire-wound grip. Uncovering more, she found the scabbard, and freed enough of the long weapon that its blade gleamed silver in the dappling of hazy moonlight. She stared at the liquid run of half-light along the metal, the shadow of the fuller, the edge so sharp it cut her to look at.
“She was a fighter,” she told Elora. “That’s why she killed. All the people she killed were trying to kill her.”
Elora, pushed past all bearing, let out a string of profanity that would have made their father proud. “You didn’t know that before?”
“I ran away,” Pelufer said, sheathing the blade with a shiver and then looking at the woman. At Risalyn. “I ran away too soon. I should have learned from the spirit wood. If I don’t run right away, if I stay and ... let it ... finish ... I know more.”
“Then you bloody well better touch the other one,” Elora said, “and don’t let go till you know all about him, too.” She got up to fetch Caille. Pelufer only realised that Caille had been shrieking when it stopped.
“How about untying me first?” said Risalyn, laying the club down and offering her wrists.
“Not till we know about him,” Elora said, throwing her a hard trader’s look.
“I can tell you that he hasn’t come to yet,” Risalyn said, “and that you might kill him yet if somebody doesn’t fetch the cloak from his pack and get him warm, at the very least.”
Pelufer leaned over to comply. She was shaking, as much from cold as from the fit of names and what she’d almost done right before that. Things were growing steadily more visible as gray morning crept down through the treetops. Dawn came colder in the Highlands than in Gir Doegre. She laid the man’s cloak across him, then found a coat in his pack, too, and threw it to Elora to put around Caille, though she wanted to keep it for herself.
Then she tucked the cloak around the man.
Only a few names came. She had already said the others in the spirit wood. They didn’t come again. But she held on, and let the memories go through her, the snatches of life embedded in the last intense sensations before death. That’s what the names were: the last burning flares of self, the explosions of spirit as they left the body. When you killed, it left a shadow on you, a burn mark. Where people [203] had died there were burn marks, too, and where the bonefolk had consumed them.
After long breaths, she drew away, and sat with her knees against her chest, hugging her legs. Caille and Elora tried to comfort her, but she shook them off. She didn’t want anyone to touch her right now.
“Well?” said Elora.
“Some died on a blade. They were angry. They were trying to kill him, and they were angry that they got stabbed instead. Some of them—” A whimper came out of her, and she pressed her forehead into her knees, fighting hard not to raise the axe in her mind and cut those limbs off. They were bad ones. “Never mind,” she said. “It’s not important. The others ... most didn’t know that ... it was him.”
Risalyn nodded as if she understood this, and was about to speak when the man’s eyes fluttered open and he arched in pain against his bonds and spoke her name. In response she said, “You’re all right, Yuralon. Your hard head has saved you again.”
He looked from one to the other of the girls, then tried to raise his head to look at Risalyn. His eyes rolled up and his head sank back. It seemed he’d passed out. Then he said, “Someone’s made a gelatin mold of my skull.”
Risalyn grinned and was about to return some banter when Pelufer said suddenly, “They were grateful.”
“What?” Yuralon said sharply, then groaned, then gritted his teeth as if even groaning hurt. “Who?” he managed, with tight care.
“Diandre and Korras,” Pelufer said. “I didn’t feel them in the spirit wood. I didn’t hang on. I should have.”
“What do you mean, they were grateful?” Risalyn said, all humor gone.
“They were relieved. They were happy. Soliri was too, but she didn’t know it was you. But it was, wasn’t it? And Rajulon, and Thandra, and ...”
“What is she on about, Yur?”
The man looked at Pelufer for a long time, and then winced and turned his head away as far as he dared move it. But he said, “Thank you, child. I had hoped ... but there was no way to know. It seemed a kindness. It was meant to be a kindness. Yet one always doubts.”
“They were sick,” Pelufer explained. She looked at Elora. “He was a fighter, too. Those names that came off me in the spirit wood, those were the ...” She had no word for it. “They were harder deaths. Scarier and more sudden. All deaths are sudden, I guess, but those were ...”
“Violent,” Risalyn supplied. “Shocking.”
Pelufer nodded. “Those other ones weren’t. They were quieter. [204] They didn’t burn in as hard. But they’re there. He killed them. Because they were sick. Or hurt. They were in so much pain. They felt so horrible. All they wanted was to go.”
“Mercy killings,” Elora breathed, as if it was the most terrible thing she’d ever considered.
“You don’t know, Elora. You don’t know how those people felt.”
“Maybe they could have been cured!”
The man tried to shake his head, then thought better of it and said, “No. We had done everything we could.”
“You’re not menders,” Elora said. It was an accusation.
“We never said we were,” Risalyn replied. “Not the way you mean. We don’t wear white—not that we would, not in the Strong Leg, anyway. You people have a twisted way of hanging on to tradition.”
Pelufer said nothing, and tried not to look at Elora, but she could feel the shape of her, the anger and the guilt. There was suddenly so much she wanted to say—about workings and people like Mireille, about spirit woods and people like Anifa, about things that everyone took for granted that maybe weren’t the way they thought—but she wouldn’t have known where to begin.
Risalyn said, “But we’re trying to be menders, in a different way. We’ve learned what healing arts we can. We make our way as healers, as we can—doing penance for all the folk we killed, I suppose, though Yuralon takes that harder than I do, as far as I’m concerned we were all trying to kill each other in the magewar and I was just better and faster. But it turned out the sides weren’t as clear-cut as we thought. And it turned out that there are still some folk
running about who are angry at mages for something. We don’t know what. But we’re trying to mend it. And if that means killing folk who kill, better the deed should be on our hands. They’re already stained.”
There had been no sound in the brush. The cowdog sat quietly. The fighters hadn’t looked up. But at those last words from Risalyn, Pelufer felt some shift in the space between the trees behind her, and she twisted around hard. Standing there in silence, blended almost imperceptibly into the tree trunks, was a man perhaps two nines and three, straight-backed and handsome, with black hair and pale skin and eyes the dark blue of the deepest sapphire on a stonemonger’s stall.
“Who are you?” she burst out, and then her sisters and the fighters saw him, too.
He surveyed the downed, trussed fighters and said, “I came to rescue you from them.”
[205] “We don’t need rescuing,” Pelufer said.
“So it seems,” he replied.
“I don’t see a blade on you,” Risalyn said, with a grin that looked like a snarl, just as Elora asked darkly, “How much did you hear?”
“Enough to deduce what your friend Jiondor would not tell me. And I do without blades, for the most part.” He smiled at both of them. Pelufer saw Risalyn cock her head, reevaluating, and she didn’t need to turn to feel Elora melt. He was too beautiful. She would have to be the one to judge him. “Jiondor should be along shortly, with the farmholders who sheltered you,” he went on. “They fell behind me in the dark. Your friend Nolfiander showed us the route as well as he could with a turned ankle, but when I saw the glow up ahead I didn’t need him anymore.”
“He turned that ankle trying to snatch the dog,” Risalyn said with a wider grin. “Brave young fellow. But we were determined to catch you. He came to no harm.”
Pelufer should have been relieved, but she and Elora were both staring at the stranger, all thoughts of scuffles and night chases fled.
“Glow?” Elora said softly.
Pelufer swore under her breath and got to her feet. “That would have been the moonlight,” she said. “There was a break in the clouds.” No one had ever seen Elora or Caille as she had seen them. No one could. If he had ... The thought filled her with more terror than any of them knowing about her knack. Too many people knew, now. It was all right if they knew about her. She could take care of herself. But if he had seen Elora ... if he had seen Caille ...
The man looked at her for a breath, then made his face go gentle and replied, “No doubt.” Turning to Risalyn, he said, “I’d like to know more about these killers you say you’re trailing.”
“Would you, now?” she said, cocking her jaw. “Why don’t you tell us what you’re doing here at all? These girls don’t know you. You’re no friend to them.”
“Nor were you, until some extraordinary events took place. And I can’t help but notice that they have not untied you.”
Pelufer rectified that. She’d rather have Risalyn’s blade arm free, whether this stranger was armed or not. But Risalyn went immediately to tend Yuralon. “Who are you?” Pelufer said again to the stranger.
“My name is Louarn. I’m a crafter, a traveler. Jiondor will vouch for me when he arrives.” He looked around. “They must have lost their way. But the wood isn’t large. Our voices will carry. They won’t be long.”
“You keep changing the subject,” Pelufer said. “Who are you? What do you want with us, or them?”
[206] “I thought they were killers. I thought you had proof of their deeds. I misconstrued the kind of proof you had, as I found out from Jiondor on our journey here—but he did not divulge your secret. Perhaps I can explain it all to you in more comfortable surroundings.”
Pelufer said, “You don’t want them to hear what you have to say. You don’t trust them. They don’t trust you. Jiondor’s not here. Nolfi’s not here. You could have said anything to them. Why did Jiondor come? Maybe he didn’t. Maybe you’re lying.” By the time she finished, her own words had scared her. Time to go, Elora, she thought. Time to go! But Elora was tired and melty, and Caille was exhausted, and she couldn’t make this decision by herself, and Elora didn’t want to run anymore. Maybe Jiondor would come ...
“Here,” the stranger said. “Take my hands. Let me prove myself. What can I do to you, one man alone? Your bladed friend would skewer me in a heartbeat—see, she’s strapped on her weapon, she’s ready to spring to your defense. My name is Louarn. I’m a crafter. I’ve harmed no one. I’m trying to find folk who may be doing harm. It’s a perilous search. I do not trust easily. Neither do you. I understand that. You sense haunts, do you not? You sense those whom a killer has killed. I have not killed. Take my hands. See for yourself.”
Pelufer nearly growled in frustration, but with the secret out, it was all there was to do. She could not gauge him from his stance, let alone his voice; he seemed calm, blameless, earnest, but there was a craftedness to it, as if he was a created thing, a fashioned seeming. And if he could see ...
There was more to him than there appeared to be. But at least she could satisfy herself that he had no deaths on him.
She walked up and placed her hands in his.
And felt the bubbles rise inside, felt her belly roil, her mouth open. Saw his eyes go wide. Felt his hands twitch, then grip hers hard. She couldn’t have let go; she was stuck to him, lint to rubbed wool in winter, a tongue to a frozen iron bar.
Then the names came.
Pass through.
He came into the world on a wail of bereavement and slammed into a wall of cold. He fell, curled into a ball, and rocked himself, whimpering. After a time, the whimpers subsided. He sat up. The forest was wrong. The smells were wrong, the colors were wrong. Blue sky beyond green leaves. Air brushed against him like a living thing. There had been no moving air where he had come from.
He examined his body. His limbs were long and ungainly in relation to his trunk, but looked too short. His hands and feet were too large for them. There was hair at chest and crotch, downy along forearms and shins and thighs, a patchy stubble at chin and cheek, a tousled mass at the top of his head. He fingered the cartilage at his ears, the bone of his nose. He had not become what he had hoped to be.
Yet he was whatever he was. He got up, and set off through the wood.
He was empty. He knew that feeling. Hunger. He filled his belly with peaberries and sheepherd’s lettuce and his mouth with the taste of tart sugar and gall. He drank deep of icy runoff. Light angled down through the trees like spears, then was swallowed by shadow. He dug a hole in bracken and humus and slept covered in fir boughs. When the light returned, he found a woodsman’s shack. He ate moldy flatbread, and belted baggy, musty cloth on himself for a second skin to keep off the cold. He gathered cones and seeds and kindling from the forest and brought them back to the shack. Rain came, fragrant and soothing. The light went. He made a fire in the small round [208] iron stove, boiled acorns into a paste, smeared it into his mouth with his fingers. He slept wrapped in coarse blankets and dust, then swept the shack out and scattered a layer of green needles on the floor. The next day, he foraged farther. He came to the edge of a field. He saw people there, shaped like himself. He wondered what they could tell him about this unfamiliar world that he seemed to know without knowing it. But he stayed clear, kept to the forest’s edge, moved on silent bare feet through the underbrush. He returned to his shack empty-handed and with his heart beating hard, and lay down to sleep hungry.
Moments later he startled awake because he had begun to dream. He didn’t remember dreaming before. In the crooked half-light between worlds, he’d glimpsed a blackness, a cobbled-together thing like an assemblage of old sticks. He thought it spoke to him, one word, which he tasted on his own lips as his body spasmed back into the waking world:
Tchatichoch.
Danger.
He heard it like an echo in the shack, though the dull flat wooden walls would reflect no sound of dreams; he heard it echo in the resonant chamber of his skull and knew that he had sp
oken aloud.
Danger. Dreams were a danger. There was danger in dreams.
He must not dream.
He tried and failed to sleep dreamless. The dream always darkened, took on shape, opened into a realm of its own, fraught with significance and power. Deep, ineffable forest lurked along the byways of sleep. He trained himself to wake each time the darkness threatened. Though maddened with weariness, he did not give up. After a threeday he began to dream while waking. Things moved among the trees, along the ground, at the edges of vision. Things that were not there. Dream-things, impinging on the realm of waking. In the middle of a task, his eyes would slide closed, and the black stick thing would clatter toward him.
After a nineday, he learned that those snatches of sleep were enough. He sat wrapped in his blanket on the doorsill in moonlight and watched the movement of leaf shadow on the ground. When he heard the clattering stick figure approach, he jerked awake, and looked for repetition in the curds of cloud crossing the moon, in the shadowed valleys of the moon’s silver disk. In place of dreams he gave his mind pattern. The striations in an old oak’s bark. The twists and curls of a complicated knot. Spirals he carved on stone with the frisson of doing a forbidden thing. He would lose himself in waking vision, following the spiral, tracing the furrows ...
He wove puzzles, braiding twig and stem and vine into intricate workings to trick the eye and capture the mind. He studied the construction of the shack, how the woodsman had made it, how the nails and pinery worked. With a whittling knife and an old axe and other spare tools, he built another [209] shack on its model, hardly aware of what he did but emerging from the dream with a memory of making in his hands, a sturdy construct to admire.
He must find other models. He must have more to occupy his famished mind. That was the only way to keep the dreams away. Or to replace them.
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 26