Dart glanced after it.
It landed, knee deep in the bone pile. The treacherous footing stumbled its perch. It fell forward. Only then did it seem to note where it was. Its head snapped up, neck taut, a confused bleat escaping.
Then a snarl of roots tangled up out of the bones. It lifted the deerling high and swamped over its body. The animal fought, but the roots penetrated flesh as easily as water. A sharp wail squealed forth, but it ended in one heartbeat as yellow flames sprouted from the deerling’s mouth and nose. More fires spat out from its ears and rear quarters.
Flesh roasted from the inside out, falling to ash as the body was shaken and jerked by the roots. All that was left of the deerling were bones, raining down upon the pile, growing the deadfall.
Aghast, Dart stumbled ahead. Through the darkness, other animals came to the call of the Heartwood. Cries rose all around the immense tree.
“This way,” Yaellin said, finally reaching the far side of the tree. “The others must have herded us here, hoping we’d succumb to the tree.”
“What is it?” Laurelle asked.
“Another ilk-beast. Trees are living creatures, like man or beast. As those who served Chrism drank his blood, so the first god once fed this tree. Its Grace was his to corrupt if and when he chose.”
Dart remembered the blood roots in the tunnel. She risked a glance back toward the horror. She now knew where all that blood had come from, sucked by Grace from the woodland creatures.
Yaellin guided them onward. The howl of the other ilk-beasts had grown silent. Dart found the quiet more disturbing than their hunting cries. Were they lying in wait for an ambush?
For another full bell, they fled through the woods, no end in sight.
“Dawn is not far,” Yaellin said. “We’d best be out of these woods and lost into the streets before the sun shows her face.”
“Why are you helping us?” Dart finally asked. She eyed his cloak of shadows. “Who . . . who are you really?”
He glanced down to her. He had lowered his cloak’s hood.
His black hair, though, remained enough of a cowl, loose to the shoulder and as dark as the night. The only break was the streak of silver from brow to behind his right ear. “It seems, little Dart, we are half siblings in a way.”
Dart frowned. Though the Hand had clearly saved them, she still felt wary.
“The headmistress of the Conclave was my mother,” he said. “Melinda mir Mar. And you were the little one she rescued and raised so long ago. The little stray sheep hidden among a flock of others.”
Dart shook her head in disbelief.
“It’s true, little sister.” A glimmer of a sad smile graced his face. “All was told to me by my father when I was about your age. He set a duty upon me like no other.”
“What was that?”
“To keep watch over the Godsword.”
“This is what Ser Henri told me,” Kathryn said. She leaned closer to Tylar to keep their words private. The flippercraft’s mekanicals chugged in rhythmic fashion. For a moment, his storm-gray eyes caught her gaze and her breath. She glanced down. “He . . . he told me once . . . a half-moon after you were shipped away. He was deep into his cups, of sour and sanguine a mood. Over you. Over my loss.”
“Your loss?” Tylar asked.
“My loss of you . . .” she mumbled, speaking a half-truth. She was not ready to speak of the other yet.
He nodded. “I’m sorry.”
The anguish in his words drew her eyes up. “I’m as much to blame. Before the adjudicators, I should’ve been more of a lover, less of a knight.”
“The soothmancers would’ve had the truth out of you either way.”
“But what was the truth?” she said, hating herself for sounding so bitter. “I was so distraught. So shaken by the accusations.” She turned away. “You did come to bed bloody that night. Your sword was found at the home of the murdered cobblers.”
“I know. I barely remember even waking that morning . . .”
“Castellan Mirra said you were fed a draft of drowsing alchemy. Probably in wine.” Kathryn explained what the former castellan had related to her and Perryl, how Tylar was a pawn in a game of power among factions in Tashijan.
“Ser Henri knew my innocence?” Tylar asked at the end, clearly shaken, his voice hardening. “Even as I was sent away?”
“Do not judge him too harshly. He came to that knowledge late, and to speak it aloud at that time would have exposed too many others. Even Henri’s wardenship would have been threatened, and Argent ser Fields and his Fiery Cross would have assumed the Warden’s Eyrie much earlier.”
Tylar seemed little settled, breathing hard. Kathryn knew this mood. She smelled the heat of his skin. It awakened other unwanted memories, but she shoved these down. “Tylar, if Ser Henri had laid this all out, given you the choice of sacrifice or freedom, which would you have chosen?”
He remained silent, staring out the windows. The craft’s aeroskimmers glowed against the night sky. “It was not just my life in that balance,” he mumbled and turned back to her.
Those eyes again . . . she felt her heart tremble.
“But perhaps you are right . . .” He released her, glancing down. “At the end, I may have walked of my own volition onto that slave ship. I was not without guilt. I had dealings with the Gray Traders. I placed myself into position to be that pawn.”
Kathryn heard the pain in his voice, but her heart still echoed with his earlier words: It was not just my life in that balance. What if Tylar had known about the child . . . or even if Ser Henri had known at that time . . . would matters have changed? Would decisions have been made differently by all? Tears rose to her eyes. They came so fast, a surprise.
“Kathryn . . .” Tylar said.
“There is something I must speak to you about,” she finally said, “but not here.” She motioned to the cabin door. She needed to move. Though the others had offered some privacy by surreptitiously glancing elsewhere or murmuring in their own conversation, she still felt exposed.
Standing, she led Tylar out the cabin door. The axis hall of the craft led forward to the captain’s deck and backward to a communal room with a viewing window. Checking to ensure the hallway was free of prying eyes, they headed toward the stern.
Once in the vacant back cabin, Kathryn crossed to the curve of blessed glass that opened onto a vista below. A railing bounded a gallery overlooking the lower window. She grabbed it firmly. Below a small village slid by, lit by a central bonfire.
“What is it?” Tylar asked.
“There is one more thing you must know about those awful days.” She girded herself for what she must say. Tylar must have sensed her distress and placed his hand over hers on the railing. It was too much. She slid her hand away, perhaps jerking it too quickly.
“There was a child,” she said, speaking woodenly, trying to be dispassionate. “Our child.”
“What . . . ?” Tylar stiffened.
“A babe . . . a son. I was to tell you the night you came drunk—what I thought was drunk—and bloody to our bed.” She shook her head. “Then the guards, pounding on the door in the morning . . . there was no time to tell.”
“Tell me now,” he said in a low voice, thunderous in its depths.
“The trial . . . the accusations . . . my testimony . . . it was too much.” A sob bubbled out of her. She had been holding it in for half a decade. “I was not strong enough.”
Tears flowed. She felt her knees go weak, her entire form trembling. The night coming back to her in full horror. “I lost the baby . . . my . . . our little baby boy.”
She was blind now to the view below. All she could see was so much blood, on her, on the sheets, everywhere. She tried to wash it up, alone in her room, so no one would know. Then more cramping, more blood . . .
“I was not strong enough,” she sobbed.
Tylar tried to put his arm around her, but she shoved him back.
“Not strong enough . . . no
t for you, not for our baby.”
Tylar again pulled her to him, with both arms now, hugging her tight. “No one’s that strong,” he whispered in her ear.
She barely heard. She cried into his chest. Words escaped her like frightened birds. “Would you have . . . would you have . . . ?” She choked.
He pulled her tighter. “I wouldn’t have left. Not for anything.”
She nodded into his chest, continuing to sob, but it was less an aching, wrenching thing and more a release. He held her like that for a long time. She let him. Though too much time had passed between them, though they were not the same young man and woman from before, in this moment, they mourned as one, for a baby . . . and a larger part for themselves.
Finally Kathryn found she could breathe. She slowly extracted herself from Tylar’s embrace.
“If I had known . . .” he offered.
Kathryn turned to the window, still blind to the panorama and too tired but knowing there was much still to do. She wiped the last of her tears. “I think that was why Ser Henri told me about Yaellin,” she said slowly. “I don’t even think he ever told Castellan Mirra. I think he sensed the wrong he did to you, to the baby, to the both of us, and sought some peace, sharing his own pain of family lost, of a son born out of wedlock, born out of passion.”
“And this Yaellin was chosen to be a Hand to Chrism?”
“Not exactly.”
“What do you mean?”
“Over many cups of mulled spice wine, Ser Henri told me much. More than he perhaps meant to. But who can say?” Kathryn turned from the rail. “He told me of his love for a woman named Melinda mir Mar, then the headmistress of the Conclave of Chrismferry.”
“I remember her,” Tylar said, surprised. “A tall woman of chestnut hair and comely of feature. She had visited a few times to Tashijan when I was squiring.”
Kathryn nodded. “He was vague on how it all started. He was the warden of Tashijan, she the head of one of Myrillia’s finest schools. The Conclave grounds still holds one of the largest libraries and scholariums. Henri’s interest in alchemy had him visiting its stacks. The two had long talks into the night on a thousand matters large and small. To quote Ser Henri, ‘We were like of mind and spirit.’ ”
Tylar nodded. “Is that not the way it always starts . . .”
Kathryn glanced to him, realizing that once the same words could have described them. But that was long ago. Was it still true? She cleared her throat and continued. “Though Henri didn’t say it aloud, I think what drew them was a shared passion that went beyond lust. Each was burdened by the responsibility to guide and raise the young of Myrillia, both wanting the best for all. And at some point, they crossed that line from close companions to something warmer. They kept their trysts in secret. He visiting her, she him. Then, despite precautions, she grew with child. She bore a son. She never told anyone who the father was. Henri wanted to marry her, but she had refused. It seemed her duty to the Conclave and Myrillia’s future surpassed all else in her heart. But Henri understood. He would not have given up his wardenship either.”
“And the child? Young Yaellin?”
“His mother raised him in the school, even trained him in the ways to serve a god as a Hand. Then when he was old enough, at eleven birth years, she and Henri told him of his parentage. He was angry, lashed out against his mother. Henri ended up taking him back to Tashijan to learn the ways of the Shadowknight.”
“He trained at Tashijan?”
“For three years,” Kathryn answered. “Then something happened. I don’t know what. Even deep in his cups, Ser Henri would not divulge it. Henri and Melinda took a journey together to the hinterlands.”
Tylar glanced sharply at her. “The hinterlands? Why?”
“They had some duty there, something done in utmost secrecy. In the telling, Henri’s face turned dark and shadowed of brow, clearly remembering that journey. A year after returning from their sojourn, Henri returned Yaellin to his mother.”
“Why?”
Kathryn turned to Tylar. “Henri swore me to secrecy on this next matter, but I think it bears telling now. Whatever happened in the hinterlands required Henri and Melinda to commit an act of great heresy.”
“What?”
“Henri took his son, not even marked with his first stripe, and trained him in secret. He then blessed him with alchemies to give him the full Grace of an ordained knight.”
“Yaellin was knighted?”
“In secret. None knew. Henri was skilled enough in alchemies to gift the boy with shadowplay but still keep the gift hidden. After the boy was ready, Henri sent him back to Melinda and the Conclave. He was presented to the next moon ceremony and was chosen by Chrism’s Oracle.”
“Then what did you mean before that he was not exactly chosen?”
Kathryn licked her lips. “They paid to have him chosen.”
Tylar shook his head—not in denial, but in shock that Henri would participate in such deceit. He knew it was not totally uncommon for a rich family to arrange a position for a son or daughter. While an Oracle, blinded by blood alchemies, served as the eyes of his god, such men were not without a will of their own, without their own vices. Including greed. They could sometimes be plied by gold to sway a choosing.
“So Henri bought a position in Chrism’s court for his son,” Tylar said. “A son secretly blessed into knighthood. Why?”
“Like I said before, some secrets Henri would not divulge. All he would say was that his son was set to guard something, to serve as Henri’s eyes and ears at the castillion, a duty that tied back to that journey to the hinterlands.”
“And Henri offered no reason for such a journey or why he had ensconced his son in Chrism’s court?”
“He would speak no further. But now I wonder. If Meeryn’s dying mention of Rivenscryr guides us to Chrism, perhaps Yaellin might know more. We’ll have to hope he gets the raven I sent to him.”
Tylar nodded and turned to face her. “I hope—”
Kathryn heard the characteristic snap of bowstring. The crossbow bolt grazed Tylar’s shoulder and struck the back wall of the flippercraft.
Reacting on instinct, she cast her shadowcloak high, protecting both Tylar and herself. But she was too late. Another two bolts struck Tylar square in the chest, knocking him back. He made a small coughing noise. A third cut his ear, intended for his eye. Her cloak had blocked this killing shot.
From behind them, darkness flowed. Kathryn discerned three shapes, all Shadowknights. One with a sword, flanked by two bearing crossbows.
Tylar had fallen back against the rail, holding himself up by his arms. Feathered bolts sprouted from his chest and shoulder like bloody flowers. His eyes were fixed on the centermost knight, the one with the sword.
“Darjon . . .” he gasped.
At long last, the wall appeared ahead. The end of the Eldergarden. The myrrwood spread to the ancient bricks. Roots dug at the wall’s foundation, while branches shadowed its top.
Dart and Laurelle stumbled up to it, exhausted, worn, bleeding from a thousand scrapes. Dart stared up at the immense wall. How could they climb it?
Laurelle gently started to sob.
Yaellin appeared behind them, sweeping out of the gloom. “They know we escaped the Heartwood. We must not tarry.”
Off in the distance, a howl echoed to them.
Dart wished she could sprout wings and fly. She wanted nothing more than to wing over the walls, past Chrismferry, out of the First Land. Her world, hardly secure and safe before, had never seemed so dark and full of menace.
“To me,” Yaellin said and opened his arms.
Dart allowed Yaellin to hook an arm around her waist. Laurelle did the same. Still, Dart felt strange to have the man holding her. He had been such a source of personal terror and worry for so many days. A tremble of that fear iced her skin. Or maybe it was the sudden intimacy, his fingers digging deep into her chest, mingled with the long night’s terror. It all harkened back to
the horrible day in the rookery. Dart fought against thrashing from Yaellin’s grip. He was not Master Willet.
“Hold fast,” he said.
The cape of his cloak fluttered upward, fringed in shadows. Those shadows found purchase in the pitted, crumbling wall. Yaellin drew them upward, scaling the giant bricks. They flew up the wall with the speed of shadow.
Down below, Pupp glowed in the gloom, a tiny ember. He watched Dart fly away. He raised up on his hind legs, paws on the lowest brick, clearly distressed. While Pupp could pass through almost anything, he had one weakness. Stone. If Dart crossed over the wall, Pupp could not follow. The wall would block him.
“No,” she moaned.
From out of the woods, two forms . . . then a third . . . burst forth, striking the wall with claws and nails. Ilk-beasts. They yowled and sought to climb the stone, but quickly fell back. The wall was too steep and high.
Pupp raced among them, unseen, invisible, insubstantial.
Yaellin reached the wall’s top, perched there a breath, then swung his legs over and descended the far side. As Dart’s view of Pupp vanished, she felt an immediate panic strike her. Always her companion, Pupp had never been far from her side. Her heart thudded heavily in her chest. Her fingers tightened on Yaellin.
They swept down the wall.
Desperate and frantic, Dart’s gaze searched for some answer. The city of Chrismferry spread out before her. Though the skies glowed with dawn, the city was mostly illuminated by the many lamps and torches of the waking city. Its breadth spread to all horizons, split by the silvery shine of the Tigre River. The waterway disappeared under the span of the massive castillion. Closer, Dart spotted the towers of the Conclave. A few lights glowed from its many windows. Her life there seemed another world.
She glanced back up the wall.
Pupp . . .
In moments, Yaellin dropped and landed lightly on the cobbles of High Street. His cloak fell about him in liquid ripples, settling to his shoulders and ankles.
Dart and Laurelle were released.
“What now?” Laurelle asked, teeth chattering slightly. She held her arms snugged tight to her chest. She seemed to have also shrunken into herself, grown smaller.
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