Soulwoven

by Jeff Seymour

  The older girl had been friendly, kind, understanding. They all had, in the end. Even the Aleani.

  Dil’s stomach fluttered under the cramps, and the dew left cold streaks on her legs as she strode back toward the tents.

  Finally, she was leaving Lurathen.

  The grass rustled around her thighs as she crossed from the trees back into camp. She spotted Cole standing over a smoky fire in the predawn light, watching the edge of the glade. As she came out of it, he turned quickly away and slipped in the wet grass.

  In spite of the moonherb filling her mouth, she laughed.

  She had the cityfolk out of camp by dawn, just as Lurathen was beginning to rise. With the five of them strung out behind her like ducklings, she walked through the quiet, wide-avenued outskirts of town and up a path cut into the steep, dirt-clad face of Woodguide Hill. Her cramps diminished into a dull ache. Her body warmed as her muscles woke up with the walking. It was going to be a good day. She could feel it.

  Two hours after sunrise, she stopped at the top of the hill to check on the party’s progress. She’d been so pleased all morning that her cheeks were beginning to ache from smiling, but as she looked out from the top of the hill, she caught a glimpse of the sun rising over the valley of Lurathen and sobered.

  The faded roofs and lazy smoke of the city looked like a painting, all smudges and faded colors and motes of dust suspended in yellow light. Looking back at the nest of streets and houses that had dominated her entire life, she hesitated. Harlunn’s wall glimmered in the sunlight. Easthill and the Waterfront spat dark smoke skyward from their workshops and foundries. Wallwalk and The Gate crawled with people, and dozens of long pennants snapped in the wind atop the tall keeps of Redpath and Graydawn.

  A part of her whispered, This place will never be the same for you.

  Absentmindedly, Dil reached for a round pendant of gray stone that hung from her neck. She rubbed her thumb over a groove hollowed out in one side of it, traced its spidery network of scars and scratches with her fingers.

  She was still holding it when the first of the cityfolk reached the top of the hill. His face was covered in sweat, his chest heaving, his tongue practically lolling from his mouth. He flopped down hard on his pack next to her, rolled over so he faced the sky, and said something. She nodded without really paying attention. Her heart was growing heavier as the sun rose.

  The city boy got louder.

  “Dil? What’s that?”

  She blushed and looked down at a sweaty Cole Jin. He was pointing at her necklace.

  “A gift,” she said, and she tucked it back into her shirt. It felt heavy and cool against her skin, her anchor in times of turmoil.

  Cole shucked his pack off and stood. He took a deep breath, then reached for his toes and stretched. “From—?”

  “My grandfather,” she said curtly. Cole straightened and rubbed his head. The sun flashed through his hair.

  And then words fell out of her mouth before she had time to think about whether she should say them.

  “He raised me.”

  A moment’s pause.

  “Is he—?” Cole let the question hang half-spoken in the warming air, but she could guess what it was.

  “Alive?” she asked.

  He nodded dumbly.

  “Yes. He’ll understand.”

  I think, she added to herself. Her eyes drifted east to the hills and cliffs outside of town, to home, and a pang of regret flared briefly in her heart. It had been her grandfather who’d filled her head with stories of the outside world, and it was his travels that had lit a fire in her to pursue her own. But still—

  Be careful of strangers, he’d told her, lean and savage long ago in the deep shadows of home. Do not let them learn—

  “—what you are,” her mind finished.

  Her eyes flicked back to Cole. He was resting on his pack with his hands tented over his stomach and a happy smile on his face. She wouldn’t have told the others about her grandfather, but Cole, somehow, she trusted. He was young, like her. He was the runt of his pack, like her. And he’d stuck up for her, looked out for her. Not many people had done that in her life. She ran her fingers over the pendant again.

  A moment of quiet passed, and she heard Cole sigh contentedly. The sweat on his face glistened in the rising sun. His hair was stuck to his forehead.

  She smiled.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” she asked.

  His head bobbed in agreement.

  “This is my spot,” she said. “When I was a kid, I came up here almost every morning.”

  She looked back over the city and felt a queasy twinge of homesickness.

  Remember this, she told herself. Remember this sunrise, forever.

  Comfortable silence hung in the air. The sun crept higher by inches. The wall shimmered and shone.

  Cole, still lying down, craned his head toward her and shaded his eyes with one hand. “If you don’t mind, how, ah—”

  He stopped. His mouth hung half-open, and his face had frozen in an awkward, oops sort of expression, as if he wished he hadn’t said anything. He had the tone of polite terror people always did when they asked about her parents.

  Her heart went cold. An unpleasant memory stirred, full of fire and anger and flight.

  “I lost them in the riots ten years ago,” she said.

  The shamefaced look of apology that wrapped Cole’s face was enough to soften her heart without him saying a word. The memory blew away like a nightmare on the morning breeze. She breathed easy, squatted down and laid a hand on his shoulder. His skin was warm and wet beneath the cloth of his shirt.

  “Don’t worry about it, all right?” she said.

  He nodded, and she stretched her arms and went to walk the path ahead.

  ***

  Cole’s pride stung. His heart pounded. He was sure his cheeks were bright red, though he could no longer say whether it was from the walk or from talking to Dil.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid, he told himself.

  He’d felt out of his element ever since he’d left Eldan City. There, he knew the rules, knew the streets, knew the air and the sounds and the smells and the sights. He was used to feeling quick on his feet, being able to put two and two together faster than anyone else around him.

  But in the world outside the city, his mind didn’t seem to work nearly as quickly.

  He felt a little relieved when Dil walked away from him. She seemed neither the hunter nor the deer anymore. She’d become something else entirely, and he couldn’t quite wrap his head around her.

  He was just beginning to recover from his embarrassment when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He jerked his head up and found Litnig grinning at him.

  “Something got your tongue?”

  His brother squatted and slid out of his pack straps. Cole rolled his neck, kept his eyes on the smoky city below.

  “I guess.” He lifted his arm, caught a whiff of his own scent, and winced. “It’s like she knows what I’m going to say before I say it—even the things I should be smart enough not to say.”

  “That would be—what, about three words a day?”

  Cole aimed a half-hearted swipe at his brother’s head, and Litnig ducked under it.

  “Aw, c’mon, Cole.” Litnig smiled. “I would say that’s a lucky find.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  The smile faded. Litnig looked back down the hill, where Ryse, Quay, and Len were winding upward like tired pack mules. The sun gleamed to the west. “Yeah.” He paused, then ran a hand over his head and sighed. “Just be careful with your heart.”

  There was a moment of quiet. Cole shifted uneasily on his pack. Litnig was the one who always had the answers. Litnig was the one who did the comforting. When Lit was lost—well—there’d rarely been much Cole could do about it.

  Feet crunched on gravel behind him, and a moment later Dil appeared at the corner of his vision. She watched the progress of Ryse, Quay, and Len with one leg forward, her hands on her hips
, her lips pursed. She looked every inch the professional guide. Every inch someone who’d been surviving on her own since childhood.

  That last thought rolled around in Cole’s head for a while, wrong somehow.

  It took him a second, but when he figured out why, a broad, uncontrollable smile spread over his face.

  Dil turned around and caught him grinning at her.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. Quay had asked what her parents would think of her leaving, and she’d told him they were dead.

  She hadn’t said a word about her grandfather.

  He couldn’t keep the smile down. All of a sudden, he shared a secret with her, and stupid as the thought was, he really wanted her to know what he knew.

  She’d put one over on Quay too. He liked that.

  Her eyebrows drew down. Her nose wrinkled. She wanted to know what he was thinking—he could feel it.

  Loud breathing floated over his shoulder, and he turned and saw Quay cresting the ridge. The prince’s lips were pressed tightly together. His face was covered in sweat, and he was looking right at them.

  Dil blushed like she hadn’t wanted anyone to catch her staring at Cole, like she knew what it looked like and it struck too close to home. Cole bit his tongue and turned away and rode the swell of his heart, faced a silly grin off into the rising sun and exhaled slowly. Quay asked a question. Dil said something about the woods, and Cole closed his eyes and lost track of the conversation.

  Until he heard Quay say, “About your parents. I’m sorry,” and the song in his heart died on the wind.

  Cole’s eyes shot open. Quay’s face, for once, had grown soft. The prince had lost family too, though it had been to the plague itself, not the riots that followed. Cole remembered his pain, remembered the change it had wreaked in his personality.

  Cole jumped to his feet and cleared his throat, clapped imaginary dust from his hands and placed them on his hips. He faced the forest like he was Dim Dilby the Soulprince, staring down the pirate king.

  “Right!” he said too loudly, and Quay and Dil stopped looking at each other and at their pasts. They looked at him instead, and he was glad for it. “Shall we?”

  Dil turned north. There was a question in her eyes again, and he was glad for that as well.

  “The crossing’s a few miles from here,” she said.

  A grunt and loud breathing behind Cole announced the arrival of Len, and Cole winced. He hadn’t meant to try to leave without the Aleani, but he was sure that wasn’t what it would look like to him.

  Dil’s eyes stayed on the forest. “The way’s well-kept,” she said, “but still—I hope you all can climb?”

  TWELVE

  Within a few hundred feet of entering the forest of Lurathen, Litnig felt blind.

  His eyes still worked—he could see mottled light shining on the smooth silver trunks of the wood, could track the shadows playing over the forest floor—but all he could find in any direction were the trees, stretching on and on over small rises and little streams into forever. He lost his sense of direction, swatted nervously at small biting flies while the pool of sweat on his back grew thicker and slicker. Birds sang above him. Leaves rustled on the path below. The earthy scent of decaying vegetation filled his nostrils.

  He had to admit that the trees were beautiful. They stretched to vast heights, taller than the scrubby things he’d seen out on the plains east of Eldan City or even the massive oaks in the royal Demesne. Some of them were so tall their tops were hidden by the leaves of smaller trees, others so thick that it would have taken two long-limbed men holding hands to reach around them. They smelled good too; the air was perfumed with a sweet, flowery odor that reminded him of a scent his mother sometimes wore.

  They made him uncomfortable all the same. He’d grown used to being able to see for miles over the plains, used to smelling what was coming on the wind.

  The trees pressed in around him. He jumped at shadows. His feet caught on roots and stumps and rocks and threatened to topple him. They still had miles to go, and he already felt antsy enough for an army.

  He slapped a branch out of his face and grimaced.

  He’d had his dream again the previous night.

  The gray disc had been almost the same as he’d left it. The dark statue had been sleeping on its pillar, the chains still intact, the cloudlike darkness flowing angrily around the disc’s periphery.

  But when he’d awoken in the disc’s center, two more white statues had been standing over him.

  One of them had been skinny and wasted looking, with sunken eyes and spiky, bright hair. It had worn patched, baggy pants that flared around the knees but fit tightly around its waist and ankles. When it stared at him, with flat, blank eyes, Litnig had felt a dull ache in his chest. Sadness, maybe. Old pain.

  The other statue had been short and heavyset and undeniably Aleani. Its marble skin had been a darker, creamy shade of white, its brows thick and low. Long dreadlocks bedecked with wide beads had reached to its back and swung from side to side as it moved. As he’d watched it, Litnig had felt a vague sense of shame, a guilt that he couldn’t place but that had been there in his heart for as long as he could remember.

  He had learned two things in the dream that night: First, there were dark statues corresponding to each of the new white ones on the disc. They were chained to the other pillars, their faces turned away, their eyes closed and downcast.

  Second, he had learned how to wake up.

  Litnig had been tired, closed his eyes, lain down on the disc to rest. He’d had the immediate sensation of falling.

  When he’d opened his eyes again, he’d seen only the darkness of the tent he shared with Len.

  A shred of excitement ran over his skin. Twice, he’d left the dream when his head touched the disc and his eyes closed. He had the feeling that if he wanted to, he could leave it that way anytime. And if he could leave the dream at will, maybe there was a way to enter it as well. And if he could do that, given enough time maybe he could figure out what in Yenor’s name it meant.

  His friends’ backs rose and fell ahead of him. His feet bumped and scrambled over and through and on top of thick roots and dead leaves and soft earth.

  A branch evaded his hands and poked him in the eye.

  He heard Cole laugh behind him and cursed quietly. The deer paths rustled beneath him in the spotted morning light.

  About midmorning, Litnig found himself standing in front of a small springapple tree that dripped with fruits in a spot of sunlight. The apples were small and full and yellow-green, mostly ripe, and he knew at first sight that they would be sweetly sour and delicious.

  Dil had called a break near the wall, told them they weren’t far from the crossing, and they had stopped to have a bite to eat.

  Litnig plucked an apple from its branch. His father’s voice stretched out from his past, told him to try the smallest and the largest fruits on the tree, to tap the outsides of the apples, that the ones that felt hollow would taste best. He remembered the feeling of large, scarred hands guiding his own.

  Torin Jin had never been a great father. He’d roared and he’d struck and he’d rarely had time for his boys.

  But the odd days that he’d seemed to care had been among the best of Litnig’s life.

  For a moment, with his hand on the smooth skin of a springapple and the scent of his mother’s perfume in his nose, Litnig felt very far from home and very alone.

  He took a bite of the apple and sighed, then picked another.

  A few minutes later, Dil told them it was time to get moving again.

  And as the sun rose higher behind the leafy screen of the forest top, Litnig followed the others deeper and deeper into the woods.

  THIRTEEN

  Ryse craned her neck back until it hurt. A barrel-shaped silver tree so wide three men would barely be able to reach around it towered into the sky in front of her. The sun’s light, diminished under the thick canopy, felt pleasan
t on her skin. The great tree and those around it were branchless near their bases, and a breeze circulated freely around her through the forest understory. The leaves were soft beneath her booted feet. Her heart beat fast and happy.

  As she’d grown up, climbing had been the great escape of her life as well as a survival skill. She’d spent days racing up and down the ramshackle buildings of the slums, or sneaking out into the rest of the city to climb high on stone perches, above the stench, above her place, where she could see the world and its beauty. It was one of only a few things she’d really missed during her early years in the Academy, but until she’d climbed the drainpipe of the Jins’ neighbors a week and a half earlier, she hadn’t thought much of it in years.

  The climb in front of her would be an easy ascent, but a long one. There were wide steps, spaced a foot or so apart like the rungs of a ladder, hewn in a long vertical line into the trunk of the tree. Ryse was glad for that, in a way. She still wore her robe, and she had a pack on her back. Not ideal for the kind of acrobatics she’d once loved.

  In front of her, Dil was saying something to Len. The Aleani stared ice at the girl, walked purposefully to the tree, and started climbing. Ryse frowned. Len remained an enigma to her. He had an air of command about him, almost like Quay, but he’d shared little of his past.

  She wondered where exactly he came from, and why he was hunting his necromancer.

  Ryse filed into line behind the others and struggled to keep her enthusiasm in check. To climb is to be free, she’d once told a friend, and it was still true. Cole glanced at her and rolled his eyes as they queued for the steps. She smiled. He remembered. Once, the two of them had raced up an outcrop on Sentinel Hill and she’d beat him to the top by a full three minutes. He remembered what climbing meant to her, she was sure.

  He began working his way up the tree before her, and she let him go five or six feet before she grabbed hold of the first step and started up. Len was almost thirty feet off the ground by then, and Dil hung a few feet below him. Litnig and Quay were still earthbound.