“All except the Knee.”
“The Knee is clear, and even to scale, yes. Yet it lacks the detail of this area.”
“This was drawn by a six-year-old!”
“A talented one, enamored of maps, perfectly capable of drawing an accurate one, who knew precisely what she was doing.”
“This was not where Tol—” She bit her lip. “This was not where I was meant to go.”
“Then indeed our ways must part. I am where I was going.”
He sat back, relaxed his shoulders, laced his fingers loosely between his legs. She got up, leaving the map, moving to lean beside the door.
“What will you do here?” she asked.
“Keep looking. I’ll start at this hill, where Kara’s drawn in a circle of trees. Woodhill, they call it. Appropriate.”
“Why there?”
“How did Kara know there was forest on that hill? It’s not on any of your menders’ maps; they don’t detail terrain that closely in this leg. Yet there’s forest on Boothill and Pointhill, too, and she didn’t illustrate those.”
“You were already leaving the holding when she showed you the map. You already knew where you would go.”
“I had two choices. The Strong Leg or the Haunch. Her map intrigued me enough to choose the Strong Leg first.”
“Why the Haunch?”
“Because the reckoners are drawn there. But they’re looking in the wrong place, too, if Pelkin even knows to look at all.”
“Looking for what?”
He got up, rising fluidly from the knees, and moved to the door. [259] It brought him to within a pace of her. “If it’s there, I’ll let you know by sunset,” he said. Then he glanced at the window, and grinned. “That gives you most of an afternoon with the room to yourself! Perhaps that keeper is due a break. The slim hips, the fair hair, the stoic demeanor ... he’d be a nut worth cracking, wouldn’t you say?”
She swore at him, and he left the room laughing. “I’ll be sure to knock!” he sang from the stairs.
The room was stifling. She rolled the map back into her carrybelt, then went down into the common room, left the inn. Adaon was nowhere in sight. Old folks sitting on the porch were talking about illness coming to Lowhill again. She was a mender; there would be something she could do. She started off to fetch a pack of herbs and dressings from the farrier’s and offer aid. But the symptoms sounded familiar. She turned back. She asked the old folk for details. It was Rikka paralytic fever, though in Rikka they called it Ella’s seizure and here they called it the fire palsy. It had moved around Maur Lengra since winter. Highly contagious during first onset, then inert from the fever stage through death, which occurred in perhaps a third of the cases. Her menders had not yet found a reliable treatment when she left the holding. “Got old by staying away from trouble like that,” one of the men said. “Best you do the same.”
He was right. She had to live long enough to find Tolivar’s treasure, to see Kara into womanhood. She would not get through the quarantine cordon; and there was nothing she could do, no information she could add to what they knew. Hating herself, relieved, guilty, she went back into the inn with a vague notion of getting just pleasantly tipsy. At least the drink here wasn’t watered; tending drip pits expended more effort than just serving the stuff full strength, and poisoning customers was generally bad for trade. Listening to the innkeeper gossip with an idle taverner from down the road, she managed one cup of hard pear cider before the dark absurdities of rumor turned her stomach. Khinish killing people of light in their beds, runners stealing children ... the only plausible news was of a terrible new sickness running down rivers from Fist to Belt, and it only made her frustrated that she was not in her holding, receiving reports, coordinating a response.
She walked up the stairs and back into the stifling room, took out Kara’s sedgeweave, and sat heavily on the bed. She was still staring at the map when the light from the sunrise-facing window was no longer enough to see by.
Three hard raps came on the door, and she jerked nearly out of her skin.
[260] “Ho inside!” came a lusty voice. “Unsheath that blade, now, and tuck it away. ...”
“Oh, just come in, Adaon,” Dabrena said, coarse and irritable.
He opened the door slowly, peered around it, then entered and shut it behind him. “Was he that quick? No cuddle after? No juice in him for a second round? There’s no flush to your cheeks. ...”
“You couldn’t tell in this light. How did you fare?”
“There’s a glade, but it’s guarded. I couldn’t get in. I’ll have to petition their alderfolk. Naturally I’ll argue them into granting admittance. They’ll grant anything, to get rid of me.”
“Guarded?”
He crooked a smile at her and leaned against the door. “Makes you think there might be something there after all, doesn’t it? But it’s their boneyard, their hauntwood. They’ve had trouble with thieving, someone taking the objects the bonefolk leave. So they’ve posted bladed keepers.”
A place they carried their dead so that the bonefolk would come, just as in the holding they carried them to a special chamber. Not uncommon, in populous places. The bonefolk would not come if the living were near.
A forest of the dead. A forest of haunts.
But Tolivar was from the Knee. ...
Still, who knew where the dead might roam? Some would say he should have been unable to leave the rock he died in.
And who knew what the dead might tell each other. ...
“We can still get in.”
He cocked a brow at the plural, but didn’t comment. “I couldn’t sneak in through the woods, I make far too much noise.”
“There’s another way.”
“Show me.”
“We’ll have to wait till full dark.”
Nodding thoughtfully, he said, “Supper first, then?”
“Not a good idea.”
After a disgusted, despairing groan he produced an exaggerated retching sound.
Now it was her turn to nod. “There’s been a run of paralytic fever in Lowhill. They’ll be carting dead out tonight.”
“And us with them. Charming.” He crossed to his bed, lay down supine, and laced his fingers under his head. “Tell me, then: How long have you been keeping celibate?”
She closed her eyes. “You and I, Adaon, have very different notions of how to amuse ourselves.”
He wiggled in delight and crossed his legs at the ankle. “We [261] certainly do! You could have had three keepers in the time I was away!”
“I was referring to conversation that passes the time during an enforced wait. For example: What made you become a seeker?”
“Burning, restless curiosity and a tendency to grow quickly bored. We had this conversation at midday. Is it the loss of the first freedom? Afraid to come with child?”
“I have a child.”
“She’s a beautiful child! Make more of her! Go wild, bed anyone you fancy.”
“You, for instance?”
He made a rude noise. “Anyone you like. What’s to stop you? You’re a mender, surely you know there are ways of preventing—”
“Eiden’s spleen, Adaon, it’s not that. Just leave it, will you?”
“Perhaps you couldn’t be parted from the girl long enough to have any fun.”
“Tread carefully there.”
“Or perhaps there was no one you fancied.”
It was almost completely dark in the small room now. The window was a portal on indigo, the poisoned river rushing two stories below it. Adaon, when he sat up, was like a shade rising from its resting place. She remembered her vision of him in the holding, the stunted reversal of a boneman. He leaned forward, legging the chest out of the way. In his dark skin, in the gloaming, the whites of his eyes were lurid under the pale shadows of brow.
“You have to want something, Dabrena,” he said softly.
“Your overtures stop here.”
“I’m not suggesting that it be
me. I’m not suggesting that it be that kind of pleasure. But there has to be pleasure. Not just the cold iron of responsibility and abstinence.”
“And what pleasure do you take, Adaon?”
The white of his grin opened below the whites of his eyes, then winked out as he rose and turned for the door. “Right now? Tormenting you. In a few breaths, hugging the dead. Are you sure they’re not contagious?”
They awaited the cart in the dark by the side of the Knee Road, crouched by a wilted hedgerow.
“How will we get on it?”
“Run behind, grab on, jump in.”
“They’ll hear us.”
“Not over the sound of the team. Not if we do it right.”
[262] “Suppose there are outriders with lanterns?”
“Then we give it up and find another way.”
“We might have to stay till daybreak.”
“That will delay the bonefolk.”
“I might need to have a good look round.”
“And two perfectly good beds back in that inn.”
“We don’t need a bed.”
“Don’t try to exploit this.”
“It was your idea.”
“I won’t shift you in a boneyard.”
“It would keep us warm.”
“It’s sweltering out.”
“Don’t talk like that, I’m getting aroused.”
“Looking at vegetables gets you aroused.”
“Come to think of it, it does. Say ‘lentil’ for me. Just once. Please.”
Heartache silenced her. She had bantered with harvesters this way once; it had been she accosting them with ribald insults and encouragements. She had bantered with vocates this way once. She had bedded every pretty boy she fancied. Now handsome, muscular keepers held no allure, and it took the turn of a moon to leverage a laugh from her.
What have you done to yourself, Dabrena?
It was a jolting, nightmarish ride. The corpses were shrouded, but they hadn’t been washed; the odors of their illness clung to them, and the one on Dabrena’s side was still warm. The driver passed the keepers’ post with only somber acknowledgment, and no one looked within. They hopped out just as the wagon slowed but before it stopped and silence could fall. The glade was shrouded in fog; they didn’t have to move far to stay concealed.
There seemed nothing remarkable about the place. It smelled like a wood, it felt like a wood.
“Well?” Dabrena whispered, after the driver and her helper had laid the bodies out and turned the team and the wagon had rattled off. It didn’t take two oxen or a wagon that size to cart five bodies. They’d had more before, and expected more tonight.
She felt Adaon shake his head, and she settled in for a long night in the rough.
Another wagonload arrived at what might have been midnight, though she had no way of telling except that it felt she’d slept for a long time. She jolted awake at the sound and lifted her head from [263] Adaon’s shoulder, glad to miss any leer or smirk in the dark. The driver and her helper murmured in consternation to find the five bodies still there. “Why don’t they come?” Dabrena heard one say. “Tell the keepers to stand farther off.”
She woke again at dawn sprawled half across Adaon, another wistful reminder of her vocate days, and raised herself before he woke as well. Fog and ground damp had soaked into her. She scooped a squirming insect off her neck and shook out her hair. The dead were still there, eight of them wrapped in their shrouds, unmolested by the wildlife. It hadn’t been so bad a night as the old folks on the inn’s porch had feared. She prodded Adaon. He was tough as the proverbial log. It was light enough to see, though too misty to see much except for some astonishing broad trees, and she wanted to be out of here as soon as he’d had his look round.
He came to after a harder jab, groggy, as if returning from some far realm, and looked as though he had no idea what he was doing flat on the ground. When he saw who was leaning over him, he sat up suddenly, backpedaling through wet bracken, and held his hands up as if to placate her.
She made a face and held her finger to her lips, then gestured around the glade: Go on, have your look.
With the brisk nod of someone making a show of being awake when he was not, the seeker crept off on hands and knees into the roiling fog, as if he were feeling the ground for some sign the earth would give him of its nature.
There was a soft crackle to her left, and then the prick of a blade tip in her shoulder. “So you’re why they didn’t come.”
She raised her head slowly, taking in muscled calves, hard thighs, a cocked hip. She continued upward past a broad chest to the impish features of a chestnut-haired keeper—features arranged into a sternness that did not suit them. “Are you all this handsome?” she said. Her voice sounded dreamy and dull in the fog, thick with sleep.
“Get up,” he replied, and called across the obscured clearing, “I’ve got your explanation over here, Onlorin.”
Dabrena obeyed him, steadying herself on the trunk of an ancient, hollowed yew. She felt unbalanced—drunk on mist and mysteries. It hadn’t occurred to her that getting out of here would mean getting caught, but once it did, she was irrationally pleased. She would distract the keepers while Adaon crawled and groped for ... whatever he was crawling and groping for.
“What are you doing here?” the keeper said.
“I was sleeping,” she said.
“By yourself in a spirit wood.”
[264] A sadness swept through her. “I was hoping for Tolivar,” she said. “But he didn’t come.”
“A tryst?” the keeper said, utterly disgusted.
A tryst. She started to laugh, and then sobered. “More of a quest.” Best not mention treasure, they’d have her up for thievery then.
“She’s some kind of seeker from the sound of it,” he called again to Onlorin, who grunted from his invisible position. To Dabrena he said, “This is a serious matter. You’ve kept the bonefolk off, dishonored our dead. I don’t know what restitution you can make for something like this, but that’s for the alderfolk to decide.” With a hand on her back, his blade held low in the other hand, he pressed her along the tree line toward where she supposed the road was. She went willingly, then stopped and turned. “I would have bedded you, you know.”
“What?”
She shook her head at his exasperation. This was important. “I would have bedded you once. But then the baby came, and Tolivar went, and none of that mattered anymore. I had to grow up.”
“You have a ways to go, from what I can see.” He called to Onlorin again to cover his position, and acknowledgment came back through the mist. Dabrena let herself be herded and did not turn or speak again until there was a thud and an oath and a rustle and another oath from the glade behind them, and the second keeper came out of the mist with Adaon by the collar. “Look what I tripped over,” he said.
“Is this your Tolivar?” Dabrena’s keeper asked.
“No,” she said, and sighed. “He’s Adaon. He’s alive.”
“All right,” the first keeper said, gratingly patient. He took Adaon in hand. “I’ll take the two of them back to the ...”
A queasy vibration undulated below their feet, and passed.
The keepers stared at each other. Adaon stared at the ground. Dabrena stared at the trees.
The birds had gone silent.
It came again, like a wave passing deep in the earth. This time it stuttered, as if snagged on something, and wrenched to the side, staggering all four of them.
Adaon swept Dabrena with him as he broke into a trot down the sloped, curving road. The keepers shouted after them and started to pursue, but the earth wrenched back the other way, and they all reeled.
Adaon kept his hold on Dabrena, caught a hazel trunk with the other arm, and hung on until it passed. They made the main road before the next small quake, but that one knocked them into a ditch. [265] By the time they scrabbled out of it, the keepers were running past them. Ignoring them—just trying
to get back to town.
“What is it?” Dabrena said, her head swept clear by incipient panic.
“It’s a quake.”
“They don’t have quakes here.”
“They do now. Hang on.”
She hung on to the ground, going to hands and knees in a bid for stability. But the ground shook her off, and she’d rolled two jarring threfts down cartwheel ruts before the shake subsided. The earth itself could not be trusted.
“If it gets any worse, some of these trees are going to fall.” She sat up as Adaon came down next to her in a crouch. “Did we do this? Did we do this by chasing the bonefolk off?”
“Of course not,” he said, unconvincingly.
“What did you find? Anything?”
“No.” He gathered her against him as another ripple went through the ground, vertigo made tangible. It was less this time. “That was an aftershock, I think.”
Dabrena shrugged free. “We’ve got to get the horses, get out of here.”
“I can’t leave Gir Doegre yet. This is where it is. I just don’t know how to prove it.”
The billows of mist took on a greenish tinge, then went white again, and thinned. “They’ve come,” Dabrena said.
“And gone,” said Adaon. “Let’s go back. It’s wider there, less chance of treefall striking us.”
They climbed back up the slope, swayed only briefly by a mild aftershock. The glade was cleared of its dead. Small handleless iron tools were left where they had lain, and a circle of counting stones on a string, shining wet. The fog was not so heavy now, more a passage of tattered mists on currents of air they couldn’t feel. The day was already laden with heat. Dabrena’s wet clothes were heavy on her body, though the tunic was a summer linen and the hose a light, breathable knit of silk and flax.
“What did you think you’d find?” she asked Adaon.
He walked the periphery, testing the curve or levelness of the ground, examining the growth pattern of yews and hazel and bonewood, peering through them to the younger stonewood and ironwood that dominated the rest of the hill. “A shape,” he said. “A sense. A flatness. A newer place, I suppose, though I may have had it backward. And there’s no telling how many nonneds of years it’s been. Plenty of time for a grassy mound to become an aging forest. They [266] haven’t tended this wood, just left it alone in the midst of a forest they cut. That’s not healthy for it in the end, though they did keep the stonewoods from overshadowing it.”
The Binder's Road (The Sequel to 'Illumination') Page 33