Soulwoven

by Jeff Seymour

  “I asked you whether he’s a soulweaver,” Quay said.

  She blinked.

  “Is he?”

  “No,” she said slowly. It was a strange question for him to ask, especially since the Aleani had left.

  “Then we’ll take him,” Quay said.

  And she understood in a flash what Quay and the Aleani had been talking about, and she and Litnig and Cole were all speaking at once.

  “My prince—”

  “Quay—”

  “But he—”

  Quay stood to his full height, and she snapped her mouth shut. Even short as he was, the prince managed to look down on her, on all of them. His gaze was withering and condescending, and she was suddenly very aware of just whom she was speaking to. She wanted to kneel again, to apologize, but he had forbidden it. The most she could do was incline her head and listen as he spoke just loudly enough to be heard over the rain.

  “If he is not a soulweaver, he is less dangerous with us than away from us. Whether he recognizes me yet or not, he is smart, and that is a problem.”

  Ryse lifted her head and found a tightness in Quay’s jaw and something that looked like worry in his eyes.

  “If he sells us out,” the prince continued, “we will never reach the city gates.” His hand rested on the pommel of one of his swords. “If he is honest, he could be a great help. Either way, now that he has seen us, I want him close.”

  There was silence next to her, and she wished she could wet her dry mouth, ease the knots that plagued her stomach. The prince nodded to Litnig and Cole. “You two will watch him as we sleep.”

  She heard Cole sigh.

  “And me?” she asked.

  The thunder in the prince’s eyes rolled over her.

  “You will not leave my sight,” he said.

  A moment later, Cole had passed beyond them and into the rain. The fire smoked and cracked and hissed. Cole returned with the Aleani, and they sat on the benches around the fire. The others all spoke, but the mood was somber and thick with mistrust. Rain spattered against the leaky thatch roof in fits.

  Ryse didn’t speak. Ryse stared at the fire in silence, and in that silence she felt very, very alone.

  NINE

  Len’s eyes snapped open. The air smelled of smoke. Cold mud stank beneath him, and he could see the colorless gray of the sky just before dawn through a ragged old curtain in front of his eyes. The sleep sounds of human children drifted gently through the air from his left.

  I am coming.

  He touched two fingers to his forehead to soothe a sudden ache. Twice in three days he had seen the dragon’s face, heard its voice. And these children said that the Heart Dragons of Mennaia had been destroyed.

  Dark, such dreams, such rumors.

  The tangy, metallic smell of the axes near his head gave him comfort. The thinly runed blades and the worn smoothness of their grips had been his companions for thirty years. They had made good company.

  Now he was saddling himself with a bunch of human children.

  That fact did not bother him.

  The reason he was doing it did.

  They would not be much use. Maybe the one with the swords on his hip and the eye of a nobleman, maybe the soulweaver, but the others were unimpressive. They would slow him down.

  But the little one reminds you of Raest, doesn’t he? And the girl of Maegan.

  Len had learned to recognize his own foolishness years ago. He had yet to learn how to fully control it.

  A small skin of water sat next to his bedroll. He straightened up and squeezed its chilly contents over his head, gently scrubbed his face and beard clean while the curtain grew lighter with the coming dawn. The children had given him an idea of where D’Orin Threi might be headed. They would draw attention away from him once they reached Aleana. And, unless Yon and Chesa had changed during his years away, the fenuan would be glad he had brought them when he arrived.

  Surely, that was enough to justify traveling with them.

  Len’s arms felt heavy, and he stood and stretched, working his way from the muscles in his forearms through his shoulders, then down his back to his feet and up again through his neck. There was just enough left in his skin of water to provide him one swig for breakfast. It was the last of the clean stuff—the last he had brought in from outside the city.

  After placing the skin atop his bedroll, he swept past the curtain and found the boy they called Cole wrapped in a gray blanket in the alley a few paces away. The brown-haired human was facing his direction with his chin on his chest, fast asleep. As Len watched, the boy twitched and shivered and clutched his blanket.

  Len frowned. You’re getting old, Heramsun, he told himself, and he sat to wait for sunrise.

  The sun was up within a quarter of an hour, and the boy woke when its first red light struck his face. Len sat in front of him, eating a bowl of potted meat and vegetables he had purchased from the Red Fist the night before. The boy yawned, stretched, seemed perplexed by the blanket around his shoulders.

  Then his body jerked forward. His eyes raced to Len’s and settled there.

  Len nodded brusquely and grunted, “Good morning.”

  The rest of the children appeared shortly. As the sun rose higher above Sentinel Hill and wrapped the slums in red light and long shadows, they packed their gear under the direction of the one they called Quay. The boy had an imperious attitude about him, and Len had pegged him as nobility. He wondered if the other children were sworn to his service, retainers of some kind. “My prince,” he thought he had heard one of them say.

  But they’re all so young.

  The slums came alive around them as the sun came up. The mud beneath Len’s feet started to dry. The soft, damp scent of the Eldwater by night was replaced by the fetid stench of its banks by day, and other humans began to stir in the shadows. The children looked nervous, even Quay.

  The boy named Cole led them out of the slums before the sun had been up an hour. Len walked north in the midst of the children, his axes hanging from his waist and his pack resting without complaint on shoulders that had grown hard and strong over long years. The slums melted into the white houses of the merchant district. The muddy curve of the Eldwater guided them west as it passed below the rich, round lump of Temple Hill. The route the children had set worked steadily toward Northgate and the highroad that would take them to the Windplain, to the city of Lurathen, and then to the border beyond.

  It was near the gaudy monstrosity the Eldanians called the Fishbridge that Len noticed they were being followed.

  Their tail was easy to spot amongst the finely dressed merchants and dully clothed burghers around them. The man was gray-cloaked and hooded, and he wore the blue insignia of the Twelfthmen of the Eldanian Temple on his arm.

  Len’s eyes lingered on the flame-haired soulweaver named Ryse. Her robe of white was still hidden by her cloak. The night before, in the rain, that had seemed reasonable. In the growing heat of a fine spring day, that was no longer the case.

  But the tail they had picked up swished harmlessly along at a distance, and Len said nothing.

  The Twelfthman was still behind them when they rounded Sentinel Hill and came upon the mammoth, cream-colored wall that separated Eldan City from the outside world. The wall stood taller than the four-story buildings around it, and it was as broad as two ox carts set side to side. Its stones were fat blocks three feet tall and five wide, quarried, Len had been told, from hills a day’s ride to the northwest. The Eldwater ran under it at the small fortification the Eldanians called Northgate.

  The eponymous gate was square, and wide enough for both the river and the road called the Iron Highway to pass beneath it. Long lines of darkly clad Eldanians had formed on either side of the gate. Len spotted the flash of coin moving from traveler to guard in the crenellated shadows of the gate towers. He frowned then and knew that the rumors of war would come true.

  He pivoted as if stretching as he and the children approached the gate,
and when he did, he found himself looking directly into the eyes of their pursuer.

  It was the first time there had been light on the face under the hood, and Len was surprised by the youth he saw there. The Twelfthman was no older than the children. His gaze was a startling blue, his hair black as ravenfeather. His skin stretched around his eyes in a way that made them look wiser than the rest of him, like he had lived deeply in his short years.

  When their eyes met, the Twelfthman did not flinch, did not blink. He simply stared at Len until the Aleani had turned back around.

  Len touched a blue bead that hung in the dreadlocks near his right ear. He had been under the eyes of the Temple of Eldan’s greatest servants before, but this was the first time their attention had ever truly worried him. He had agreed to help the children before fully understanding every implication of that promise. He did not want to have to break it. Certainly not so soon.

  When he came up from his stretch, the Twelfthman was gone.

  The tall boy Litnig paid their way through the gate, and Len and the children passed unquestioned under its shadowy arch into the pale white dust of the highway beyond. It was not until nearly a hundred yards later, as he craned his neck to look back at the walls behind him, that Len saw the Twelfthman again.

  The gray figure stood atop the left tower of the Northgate, one foot on the ramparts, peering after them like the Eye of Yenor itself. He did not move as they walked. Eventually, Len could no longer distinguish him from the wall.

  In spite of the heat, Len shivered.

  Other humans passed around them while they were still in sight of the city. The children kept silent, their eyes on the road. For long minutes, Len thought of little but the Twelfthman, until his feet had brought him far enough from the city that its dangers seemed remote, and his awareness broadened.

  He found the countryside of Eldan resplendent in the rich spring sun. Green fields in the first low stages of crop growth hummed healthily to either side of the highway. Pink and yellow flowers, just beginning to open, graced the dark faces of the hedges in tiny loops. The pleasant scent of fertile earth was everywhere.

  The two brothers led the group. The girl walked behind them.

  And the one named Quay hovered in Len’s shadow, pressing him forward faster than necessary.

  “Patience, princeling,” Len grumbled. “We will not reach Du Fenlan in a day.”

  The children stopped. Their faces grew pale. The group had distanced itself from other walkers on the road, but the one named Cole looked nervously around them nonetheless.

  “How did you know?” whispered the tall one in front.

  For a moment, Len was confused.

  And then several things he knew about the royal family of Eldan fell into place, and the import of the boy’s words, following upon his own, hit him.

  A hand landed hard and cold on Len’s shoulder. The boy Quay’s voice followed close in his ear. He was sure the boy’s other hand would be on a sword hilt.

  “Can you keep a secret, Len Heramsun?” he whispered.

  Len said nothing. A group of travelers had just come over a rise ahead of them. Quay’s grip on his shoulder came from a weak angle, and the boy would need to step back before either of his swords could fully clear its sheath. In three moves, Len could have dumped him on his back.

  It should have been amusing. It would have made most Aleani inardran laugh until their beads shook out.

  But Len did not dwell on the absurdity of the boy prince’s posturing. He thought instead of a moment in his past, when an Aleani dressed in black had smiled sickeningly and asked him much the same question.

  Len plucked Quay’s hand from his shoulder and walked forward until his way was barred by the biggest child. The Aleani looked up into a frightened face blurred by the sun and could not care what had scared it, could only snarl, “Brechuab al, boy! Yes, I can keep a secret!”

  He pushed past the hulking boy and walked around the frozen feet of the other children. Some part of him still registered that the sky was blue, the insects hummed, the world looked green and verdant.

  But Len Heramsun was not there. He was in the blackened basement of a house of stone and blood, face-to-face with a leering monster who had taken everything from those who loved it most, and his world was dark with guilt.

  TEN

  After seven days, the long plateau of the Westplain finally yielded before Cole’s tired feet. He stood on the high white stripe of the Windroad, next to the shallow babble of a river. To his left, a line of hills marched into dark blue haze. The sweet scent of baking bread on a light breeze tickled his nose, and ahead at the bottom of a valley beckoned the first real civilization he’d seen in a week.

  His brother’s brown-cloaked, moving back soon blocked out the view.

  The sun was close to its zenith. Already, Cole was farther from home than he’d ever been in his life, and every step on the unforgiving highroad was an agony. His legs burned. Muscles in his butt and back he hadn’t known existed groaned and ached. He was covered in sweat and grime and feeling more or less like leaving Eldan City had been the biggest mistake of his life.

  He drew a ball of phlegm into his mouth and spat it, watching Quay balefully as the prince marched ahead of him, chin up, shoulders back, posture so rigid Cole could’ve broken a board on him.

  He was saved further thought by his chest bumping into something. He looked down and found Len Heramsun glaring at him over his shoulder.

  “Keep your eyes where you’re going, boy,” the Aleani said. “Don’t make me tell you again.”

  The sun glinted off the sweat on Len’s smooth forehead, and Cole found his temper swelling. He hadn’t walked out of his father’s house just to get called “boy” by some thrice-damned old Aleani even smaller than he was. He knew Len was dangerous, knew he’d lose to him in a fight unless he could outrun him. But still—

  “Or what?” he asked.

  The Aleani moved quick as a serpent. His fingers closed around Cole’s ear and yanked it down to the level of his leathery face.

  “One of these days, boy,” the Aleani whispered, “you’ll cross the line and find yourself wishing you’d learned to keep a civil tongue in your head.”

  Len tugged down further, just an inch, and Cole had to take a step to keep his balance. The Aleani let go and walked away.

  Cole’s heart pounded. His jaw clenched. He wanted nothing more in the world than to run after Len and hit him in the back of the head so hard he’d never so much as look at him wrong in the future.

  Instead, he rubbed his stinging ear and took deep breaths.

  We have to be better than him, his brother had said to him, nursing a fat lip and a swollen forehead one night when the raging wind outside had seemed like a gentle breeze compared to their father.

  It was still true.

  Cole fell into line and slouched toward the mishmash of whitewashed houses and brown streets that formed the city of Lurathen. It looked about half the size of Eldan City at the most, and it lay in a river valley between the hill Cole stood upon and a larger one to the north. From the top of the latter hill, a great forest stretched to one horizon. Opposite it, the river turned and ran south along the edge of the massive wall that marked the western border of Eldan. The water gleamed in the rising sun.

  Cole missed his mother. When he’d been a child, she’d taken him to see the Eldwater every year at sunrise on the summer solstice. The muddy flow had turned red as a snake. He’d loved it.

  His mind tried to take him back through a parade of memories, and he pushed them away.

  Quiet. I’m leaving all that, he told himself.

  A breeze whistled over his head.

  The wall beyond the city was twice as high as the buildings below it and made of some stone that lent it an otherworldly sea-green color. It was rumored to be even thicker than the walls around Eldan City, but from his perch atop the hill, Cole could still see over it into the country beyond. Into Nutharion.

>   It looked no different than the hill he stood upon.

  He shook his head, and he wondered, really, whether he was leaving anything at all.

  An hour and a half later, Cole was walking with his brother under the watchful presence of the wall in the streets of West Lurathen. The others were waiting with Quay in a shady glen outside of town, safely hidden from the road. Litnig was buying supplies, and Cole was supposed to find a guide into Nutharion.

  With rumors of a war on. In a city he’d never been to before.

  He smirked. When he’d asked Quay if the prince wanted him to find Eld the Dragonslayer while he was at it, all he’d gotten in return was a glare.

  The sun flashed over the turquoise hulk of the wall above him. Birds whistled mindlessly from somewhere in the thatch-roofed houses nearby. And Cole hiked his pack up a little higher on his back and pressed on through the hot, dusty alleys of Lurathen.

  He’d figure something out. He always did. And even if it wasn’t exactly what Quay was hoping for, the prince would put up with it.

  He always did.

  Lurathen was a far cry from Eldan City. Its dirt streets spat up dust that clung to Cole’s clothes, and instead of drains and sewers it had a system of deep gutters filled with vile-smelling brown muck. Big beams crossed and recrossed the white facades of its buildings, and its roofs were made of wooden shingles or thatch. Carts creaked as they passed around him. Their drivers whistled and clicked and called to horses and mules. The city shimmered in the heat, but it didn’t stink like Eldan City, even near the gutters.

  Its people, Eldan’s westerners, were different too. Lighter skinned than Cole was used to, dark browed and hook nosed and grinning. They looked at him and smiled when they passed, and even the shadiest of them had nothing useful to tell him. Every time he asked about Nutharion and the border, no matter how furtive his question, all he got was a history lesson.

  It was under the brightly colored awning of a fruit merchant, while Litnig was engaged in an intense debate with the proprietor over the merit of his springmelons, that Cole finally struck paydirt.