Soulwoven: Exile (Soulwoven #2)

by Jeff Seymour

  He made the mistake of moving, and his head swam deep from the wine.

  The woman had been on his mind all evening. The wine had been a very misguided attempt to purge his memories of her and of Len at the same time.

  He’d seen her while walking through the bazaar that led to the upper city. She’d been tall, stocky and athletic, her hair silver tinged with blue and her eyes a misty gray like his. A silver leotard had clung to her body, and a tripartite plumed headdress had bobbed atop her head. A gymnast with some troupe of performers, he’d thought. She’d been balancing on her forearms when he passed her, her back bent, her legs swaying over her head, a blue ball balanced perfectly between her feet.

  Litnig had stared at her. She’d looked back and smiled.

  And he’d heard his heart, just like he’d been told he would. It had beat faster and louder, even as the escort swept him past her, even as the woman’s eyes left his and he lost sight of her in the crowd.

  His heart was still thumping, and the drums outside were keeping time with it.

  I don’t belong here, Litnig thought.

  Close on the idea’s heels came the question that had plagued him since the beach: Do I leave now? Is it time?

  Can I do it?

  He sat up and placed his head in his hands. The world slid from right to left and back again. He hadn’t slept more than a few hours a night in weeks. He’d seen his reflection that afternoon—sallow, red-eyed, less and less every day like the boy he’d once been. He fell back against his pillows and dug his knuckles into the sides of his head. His father’s—

  Not my father. Kain.

  —Kain’s words echoed in his head. The stuffiness of Len’s house threatened to smother him. His brother was gone. He had no good reasons to stay with the others. Not with Ryse who looked at him like he was a monster. Not with Leramis who’d stolen her from him. Not with Tsu’min, who’d never cared for any of them, and not with Quay either. They didn’t need him. Didn’t want him. Wouldn’t even look him in the eye.

  You don’t look yourself in the eye, said his heart, but he ignored it.

  The breeze ruffled over him, and his skin prickled. He looked over the city and listened to his heart and the drums, shut his eyes and wanted to scream.

  A moment later his feet landed on the smooth tile of the floor, and he stood and braced one arm against the stone wall. The sheets fell away from his body and left him naked except for his undergarments. He staggered to a brass basin in the corner and splashed water onto his face.

  Time to go, said his mind.

  Questions like Where? seemed irrelevant.

  Len’s house was silent and still as Litnig left his room. He felt, for one mad moment, as though he was inside Len’s dead body and the Aleani was watching him, steering him, exiling him for being what he was.

  His feet tracked a swaying, snake-bit path through dusky moonbeams in silence.

  The rotunda was empty when he reached it. He saw stars beyond and smelled fresh, open air outside. He hadn’t dressed. It didn’t matter.

  He crept from Len’s home into the night.

  As the cool air found its way deeper into his chest, his head cleared. He didn’t sway quite so much. His feet padded surely over the stones. He found himself leaning forward, walking faster, then jogging, then running full speed into the night, sprinting carelessly down the streets of a city that wasn’t his and never would be. The drums pounded in his ears. His heart pounded in his chest. The wine left his head and coursed through his veins and made him feel strong, warm, alive. His muscles sang, and there was nothing but him and the wind and the stone and the stars and the rhythm of his breath and the drums. In, out, in, bang, bang, bang, faster and faster until word and action blurred. He ran toward the beat until the wide-open space of the Aleani bazaar yawned before him.

  And then he was no longer alone.

  The woman stood in the center of the square, staring in his direction. Her headdress was gone. In its place her hair whipped in the breeze.

  Her fingers were tucked around the shaft of a man-high spear. A gray cloak flapped behind her.

  Litnig stopped running. His heart thundered. His veins pulsed.

  The drums stopped. The ghost of a cheer echoed somewhere in the city below.

  The woman wore a leather vest lined with the fleece of a sheep. Dark trousers hugged her legs. Thick boots that laced up the shins sheathed her feet. Her weight rested on her left hip. A few strands of hair blew over her face.

  It looked ageless, that face. Young and old at the same time, like Tsu’min’s.

  Litnig’s soles felt raw and swollen against the flagstones. His shins and knees throbbed from pounding on the rock. He no longer felt the elation of running away. He felt cold. On edge. Excited and lost, but at the same time sure he was in the right place.

  The right place for what? a part of him asked, but he didn’t know.

  “You took so long to come,” the woman said.

  Litnig licked his lips and searched for a response. No words came.

  The woman rolled her head from side to side and smiled at him like he was a child. “Ay-iya,” she said. “So long wasted, and we have so little time.”

  Two big bags, stuffed to their necks, sat at her feet. A carpet of stars filled a blue-black sky behind her. The massive outline of the Warrior, the largest of the thirty-seven constellations, plunged toward the western horizon.

  The woman picked up one of the sacks. The muscles in her arm bunched as she tossed it to him, and he knew it would be heavy. He was right. Thirty pounds at least.

  “Who are you?” he asked. The wind tugged at his scalp. The bag in his hands looked stained with prior travel.

  The woman tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. Her eyes stayed fixed on him. “Maia,” she said. She gestured to the sack with her elbow. “You’ll find clothing in there. You may wish to put it on. It’s cold where we’re going.”

  Litnig fumbled with the drawstring at its top. He expected to turn around. He expected to say something about his friends, his duty, his family, his people.

  Instead, he opened the bag and pulled out clothes that looked as if they’d been made for his body. He shrugged on a shirt, then a jacket, then trousers that fit perfectly—leather lined with a warm, soft fleece that soothed his skin. The marketplace remained deserted. The festivities that had haunted him from Len’s house seemed to be over. He heard only the wind, wending low and lonely through the valley.

  He found no boots in the bag.

  “My feet—”

  “Will learn,” Maia finished. She held out her hand to him, open-palmed, as one would beckon a child or a lover. “Come.”

  He took her hand. It was warm, strong, heavy with life. She met his eyes and shook her head, smiling, then led him west across the market, toward the River Deru and the valley and the mountains beyond. The whole sky seemed to rotate around them. He looked back at the twinkling lights on the ridge, just once.

  My life will never be the same, he thought.

  Maia just smiled.

  “Who sent you?” he asked, and she laughed—a loud, undulating whip that echoed off the hills and through the empty spaces.

  “Ay-iya, Litnig Eshati,” she said, and she squeezed his hand. “You don’t even ask the right questions yet.”

  NINE

  Ninety-six days before the destruction of Emeth’il

  The jade bead felt cold and slick between Tsu’min’s fingers. His lungs burned. A sheen of sweat struggled against the smoothness of his shirt. The stars wheeled overhead, and he raced over rough, shard-flecked stones between the darkened buildings of Du Fenlan. The River of Souls swirled in his eyes, and he siphoned a stream from it into his legs, his arms, his torso—using the strength of the River to augment his own.

  For all that, by the time he reached the Cherdtspach, Litnig was gone.

  He cursed.

  Tsu’min crossed the empty expanse of the market and leaped onto the homes and shops below
. The faint eddies in the River that marked Litnig’s passing ebbed into straggling wisps that grew harder to track. Tsu’min jumped from rooftop to gravel-covered rooftop, rushing down, down, from terrace to terrace into the deep valley of the River Deru. The buildings had changed since he’d been there with Mi’ame, but their layout hadn’t.

  He’d been outwitted. Litnig was the only reason he’d stayed with the human children so long and the only reason he hadn’t yet returned to his homeland. The Duennin who’d released the dragon wanted something from the boy, and that meant he was important.

  Tsu’min cursed again.

  If Litnig was gone, then a key piece in maintaining the safety of the world had passed beyond his grasp.

  Not passed, been taken. Litnig’s eddy was being erased, eased into the natural flow of the River so subtly that Tsu’min couldn’t track the process. Whoever was with him was clever and powerful.

  Calm, he told himself. The rooftops slipped by. Like the River. Calm and implacable.

  He had a backup plan. He always had a backup plan. Even if the boy and his brother could no longer be watched, the prince and the soulweaver remained within reach. The ties that bound the little group of children Tsu’min had come across in the woods were fraying, but they were strong. The children would return to one another if it was in their power to do so. Tsu’min had seen it happen before.

  And when Litnig Jin returned from wherever he was going, Tsu’min and his compatriots would find him again.

  By the time Tsu’min reached the Deru, Litnig’s eddy had disappeared. The hundreds of thousands of tiny lights in the River of Souls floated slowly above the waters, as though the Duennin had never passed by.

  Tsu’min took a long, deep breath.

  The Aleani had built a broad, manicured avenue that wound beside the Deru’s gleaming surface. The river splashed gently against it as it rolled north from the deep mountains.

  And as he watched the swells of the river, the memories rolled over him. High laughter tinkled in his mind. A gentle voice called from his past, smiling, teasing, pulling him back.

  This place, he thought. The currents of the Deru shone silver. The wind by the waters carried the rich, green scent of the Fenlan river valley. The farms outside the walls would be bleached by the moonlight, the mountains that cradled them purple, lumpen silhouettes in the night. The water splashed by, just as it had when he’d walked on the banks of the Deru at Mi’ame’s side.

  Stop, he told his mind.

  It did, but the rush of the memory still sang in his veins. His chest heaved and his heart thumped. Mi’ame’s jade bead remained in his hand, cold and slick and ancient.

  Tsu’min looked up from the river.

  The constellation of the Warrior hung huge on the western horizon. Litnig would be headed that direction, but Tsu’min couldn’t guess to where or with whom.

  And that infuriated him.

  Tsu’min had become a calm person by long exertion. I haven’t failed, he told himself. Not yet.

  But visions of his lost love danced in his mind, and he gripped the jade bead so tightly it left a purple dent in the skin of his hand.

  ***

  By the time Tsu’min returned to the home of Lena Heramsun, the dent in his palm had faded. His legs burned. His arms felt heavy. The sweat on his body had dried, and the cool mountain breeze no longer chilled him so deeply.

  Leramis Hentworth and Ryse Lethien were waiting for him.

  They were robed in faded black and tattered white respectively, and they leaned on a stone railing at the outer edge of the Heramsuns’ rotunda. They watched as he walked, and they didn’t speak until he reached them.

  “Litnig’s gone then?” Leramis asked.

  Tsu’min nodded.

  “Do you know where?” The words—Ryse’s—floated on a skin of relief and disappointment, guilt and loss, worry so thick that Tsu’min couldn’t tell where one feeling stopped and the next began.

  He shook his head. A last bead of cold sweat ran from his scalp down his temple, and he listened to the turning of the world. The Aleani city had settled down to sleep. The birds had quieted. So had the rats. Every so often a marmot squeaked in the rocks. That was all.

  “Do you think he’ll be all right?” Ryse asked. She was sweaty as well, had clearly chased after Litnig some way herself before giving up and returning.

  How many times had some child asked him and Mi’ame that of another?

  Briefly, he forgot that Litnig was Duennin and the world was at stake. He felt closer to Mi’ame than he had in centuries, and he simply said, “Yes.”

  He left Leramis and Ryse to ponder that word beneath the stars. The orange glow of Lena Heramsun’s home welcomed him back. The Aleani Assembly was convening the next day. He’d been asked to speak before it.

  He knew what Tsu’min Nar’oth would say at that convocation. He knew what the person he’d once been would have said, and what Mi’ame would have said as well.

  He didn’t yet know whose words he would use.

  But between his fingers, the jade bead had grown warm.

  TEN

  Ninety-four days before the destruction of Eldan City

  Quay felt, for the first time in a long time, utterly inferior.

  And he couldn’t put his finger on why.

  “There is only one option,” Tsu’min said. He spoke in Aleani, but an interpreter repeated his words for Quay’s benefit.

  The prince stood next to Tsu’min on the stage of an amphitheater, under the sun and the wind and the earthy scent of a mountain morning. The three hundred and twelve Aleani who possessed seats in the General Assembly sat on stone benches before him. Old flagstones, slick with moss and the footsteps of a thousand years of history, lay under his feet. Behind him, King Alphaestus and Queen Ereldite each sat on one of the backless stools the Aleani favored, robed and crowned, watching the community of their peers react to the plans presented.

  Behind them, a long, steep path wound dizzyingly into Du Fenlan.

  Quay sweated.

  “You must leave your cities,” Tsu’min said. His hair flashed in the morning sun, and a deep blue shoulder wrap hung elegantly from his torso. He stood calmly, as though it didn’t unnerve him in the least to speak to the most powerful Aleani in the world at the seat of their power. As though to him that seat was nothing of the sort. “The dragon will destroy all life, starting in the places in which life is most concentrated. If you wish to survive, you must dilute yourselves.”

  Tsu’min went on, his voice swelling in the mountain air.

  His plan didn’t sit well with Quay. It would allow Sherduan to rampage until the Sh’ma could find a way to summon its opposite—a white dragon that no one but them clearly remembered.

  Let the world burn, Tsu’min seemed to say, until we are ready to save it.

  But it was in the cities that the people of the world were strongest, and the cities might be defended. Eldan had the underground labyrinth of the Catacombs to fall back on, and fortresses had been built into its three hills over the centuries. Du Fenlan, he was certain, would have underground fortifications as well. Maybe partial evacuations would prove necessary, but complete abandonment?

  These were their homes.

  And where would they go? A hundred thousand people couldn’t just descend on the villages of Eldan in a wave. It would be chaos.

  The Aleani assemblors didn’t seem to like Tsu’min’s plan either. Light-skinned or dark-skinned, blond or black-haired, faces tattooed or bearded or bare, they looked uncomfortable, displeased, sometimes angry. Quay studied their robes—pure white, red-gold, sky blue, rich purple. Lena had explained the politics of the assembly to him: four colors, four clans. In times of crisis, each assemblor would vote by clan.

  They let Tsu’min speak. Their body language grew darker. The sun rose higher.

  Quay did his best not to fidget. Dig in, dig deep. His plan was simple, and it was more likely to win the assembly’s support.

&n
bsp; Something about it gnawed at him nonetheless.

  Tsu’min finished speaking.

  King Alphaestus’s voice boomed behind him.

  The words were in Aleani, but the interpreter repeated them in Eldanian, just loud enough for Quay to hear.

  “The thrones recognize the right of Ereus, Speaker for Phaeon, to address the Assembly.”

  One of the Aleani in blue rose. He was light-skinned and brown-haired, and he wore dreadlocks that reached to his back. His voice tumbled forth like a rockslide. He dissembled, and he rambled, and after translating for a minute or more the interpreter said, “Phaeon does not approve of the plan put forth by Tsu’min Nar’oth.”

  The brown-haired speaker in blue sat, placed his hands on his knees, and stroked his moustache.

  Another Aleani, female and bronze-skinned and blonde, rose and spoke for the white robes and said much the same thing. The speaker for the red robes said nothing.

  Quay stood in the sun and sweated and watched.

  What’s wrong? he wondered. Dig in, dig deep, draw out the Duennin. It’s a good plan. It plays to our strengths.

  Still, his stomach churned. He’d been up too late speaking with Lena, and his mind didn’t feel clear enough for the task at hand.

  “The throne now recognizes the right of Lena, Speaker for Heramsun, to address the Assembly,” barked the interpreter.

  Lena rose smoothly from within a sea of purple robes. Her children sat behind her, and though Quay tried to read their faces, he couldn’t. It was strange to hear her words, watch the reactions of the Assembly, and only then hear the translation, but he followed as well as he could.

  “Cousins.” A murmur.

  “We are faced with an unusual problem. It demands an unusual response.” Sidelong glances. Twisted mouths.

  “If we abandon the cities, we abandon our greatest strengths.” Lena’s eyes landed on Quay, and for a moment he thought she was going to help him.

  He swallowed dryly.

  “But if the stories of those who have seen the dragon are to be believed, it is an unparalleled force of destruction. If we remain in the cities, we may not be able to defend them from it. And if we are crushed there, what hope will we have elsewhere?”