Giving the tracker a wide berth, Tahn rushed to Sutter’s side. His friend sat huddled, wheezing, his hands working ineffectually at his throat. Lifting his wet cloak, Tahn wiped Sutter’s face and helped him lie back on the ground.
“Slowly, breathe slowly,” he instructed.
Sutter shook his head, gulping air. His neck was already purpling from the attack, dark blood suffusing the skin. Tahn began taking exaggerated breaths in a slow, steady rhythm to help Sutter regulate himself. After several moments, they both calmed, lying wet and bloodied in the shade of a river tree just strides from the dead tracker.
When the pounding of their hearts subsided beneath the sound of the river, Tahn looked at his friend, whose eyes seemed lost in the nearness of his own death. “Would it be too much to ask you to find that balsam root now? I’m kind of sore.”
Sutter rolled his head over to look at his friend. “Foot still bothering you, is it?” Neither laughed. “That creature wasn’t interested in me, Tahn.”
“Not until you picked up that sword of yours.” Tahn spoke in a grateful tone.
Sutter shook his head. “Even after I knocked it off you, it just turned back.” His eyes darkened momentarily. “What does the Bourne want with you?”
Patience, child, I’ve no intention of killing you. Just breaking your spirit before taking you back.
Suddenly, Tahn realized what peril his friends had placed themselves in, but he still had no answer for Sutter’s question. They were all Sheason secrets. But the tracker’s words took root in his heart like a weed nourished on doubt and fear and nightmare.
“I don’t know,” he finally answered. “Maybe we’ll find out at Recityv.”
Sutter studied Tahn’s face for several moments, his eyes moving over every feature as if he’d never seen Tahn before. Then he propped himself up, grimacing with the effort. “We’d better get moving. Where there’s one, there may be more. I can’t promise to save you more than once a day.”
While his friend looked for more balsam, Tahn filled the waterskins and gathered the horses. Sutter quickly mashed his harvested roots into a paste, which he and Tahn spread liberally over their abrasions and cuts, wrapping them with strips of cloth. They grinned at the similarity they bore to each other with their necks thickly swaddled. Sutter applied poultices to cuts across both of his forearms. Tahn took some of the paste under his tongue, sucking the bittersweet juice to ease the throbbing in his foot.
Before setting out, they dragged the tracker to the river and cast it facedown in the shallows. Tahn fell to his knees beside the body, the panicked feeling of not being able to breathe still aching in his chest. He dropped his bow and looked toward Sutter, who stood over the Given, a grimace twisting his lips.
In sudden anger, Sutter raised his sword and brought it down on the lifeless form with a mindless scream. Bloodied water erupted from the blow as the body bobbed from the attack, sending ripples outward. Then Sutter fell to his knees as well. Water splashed up on his pale face; a mixture of shock and fear tensed his features.
“It’s dead,” he proclaimed in a loud voice. “It’s dead.” The second time he whispered.
Sutter was in shock. Tahn didn’t think there was a root his friend could dig for that. This whole business was mad.
Then Sutter pushed the shape from the shallows into the deeper water, where the current began to pull it downriver. Tahn watched as the tracker floated away into the scarlet-tinged water of sunset. Soon, the lump might have been nothing more than a fallen log pulled from the shore during a heavy rain. After another moment, the body was gone, swept south and away.
“I didn’t hear it coming,” Tahn said.
Sutter continued to watch the river where the figure had disappeared. He shook his head. “It didn’t make a sound. Even in the river its steps were silent.” His hands and arms shook, trembling from cold and fright and weariness, the blade in his hands dangling in the water. “We were lucky. I’ve never come so close to my earth.”
Tahn followed his gaze. “Part lucky, part brave.”
Sutter shook his head again. “Instinct. Survival.”
“That, too,” Tahn admitted. “But we got the best of it the way we always beat Maxon Drell or Fig Sholeer: One fighter can’t concentrate on two men.”
“Yeah, but you were under a long time. I thought you drowned for sure.”
“Me?” Tahn said with mock confidence. “I was just letting you test that sword of yours.”
Sutter turned back to Tahn, and the two shared nervous laughter in the waning light of day.
When quiet returned, Sutter looked Tahn in the eye. “You know what I thought about?”
Tahn didn’t understand the question.
“When I thought it might kill us. When I thought this was truly the end.” A pained look drew Sutter’s eyes and mouth taut. “I thought of that root farm. I thought of Father and Mother, and that they must think they failed somehow in making me feel loved. And when I thought it, part of me wanted to kill that thing so I could go back and tell them the truth.” He stopped, swallowing back emotion. “But part of me wondered if dying today…”
Tahn looked out at the river, letting the admission pass without comment or judgment.
But his friend had struck a chord. “You know what I thought about?”
Sutter wiped moist eyes and shook his head.
“I thought about my parents’ funerals. The sound of the earth covering them over one shovel at a time. I also thought of Wendra, and how I wasn’t there to protect her when she was raped.” Tahn shook his head in gentle self-reproof. “But then I saw her happiness at the coming of her child. She’s all the family I have left, and it was good to hear her sing again.” Emotion thickened in his own throat. “Then I thought about the loss of her baby.”
And Tahn finally shared a secret of his own, the very old compulsion to utter those words before he could release a single arrow. He shared how it had kept him from his own sister’s defense in her time of greatest need. And when he was done, he hung his head and wept. Because now she was lost to him in a world preyed upon by Quiet, and she was too far away, Skies knew where, for him to make it right. His own fears and needs had taken him away from her when she needed him most, again.
Tahn looked up at his friend, who sat wet and bleeding beside him, a gift sword laid across his knees, less than a day removed from Bourne poison in his blood, and caring for little more than the feelings of two people who had taught him to farm the dirt.
And that little more, other than the bluster of his adventuresome spirit, was Tahn.
Maybe they each had a bit more family than they’d counted.
It was not a secret, but it didn’t need to be said, either.
Under a crimson and violet sky, they led their horses north, taking a course just inside the river tree line, each carrying his weapon in hand. A few hours later, they returned to the river and found a shallow cave in the high bank from which the water had receded. They made camp there, eating a cold meal to avoid the smell of fire on the wind, too weary even to jest. Alternating their watch, they finally slept.
* * *
Images from his flight from the mist spun in his dreams like bits of flotsam in a river eddy. Under it all was the vague dream of scorched earth feeling both bruised by an endless, savage sun and touched by the unwholesome taint of the Bourne. And a faceless man teaching him how to aim … When Tahn awoke from his troubled slumber, the stars still held their places in the heavens.
Despite his exhaustion, Tahn remained awake and stared into the firmament in the moments before the land began to awake from its hibernation.
A dull ache reminded him of his foot and the friend who had gone to sleep just a few strides away. They might have been on a hunting trip, going as far east as the Ruleigh Hills or even the Aela River, ignoring the admonitions of Balatin and Filmoere. They might have spoken of the girls who had recently made the Change, even of Wendra, and laughed about their inability to grow f
ull beards. Tahn might chastise Sutter endlessly about his dirty fingernails, knowing how he longed to do something he deemed important. And Sutter would surely have chided him about being a loner, spending all his time in the trees, and smelling a bit too much like the game he hunted. They would have spent hours in the ponds near Gehard’s Ridge, each trying to hold the other underwater. When night came, the smell of duck roasting over a fire of mesquite or cedar would have soothed their tired bodies and enlivened their senses. And just before sleep claimed them, they would have spoken honestly of their fears and hopes, and the future would have followed them into their dreams beneath the calls of loons upon the ponds and bright stars winking through the boughs.
Tahn’s foot twinged, reminding him that on this night, he and Sutter were far from the ponds and the Hollows. And the future was upon them, carrying them forward. Quietgiven had come south into the land and nipped at their heels. The tales of the reader, the books of the sodalist, were no longer entertaining stories. Sheason and Far and Sedagin were real, as real as the League, as real as the Bar’dyn. Never mind all that! Concentrate on this moment! On what comes next. The self-reproach somehow brought the old forgotten scent of parched wood to him.
Tahn pushed away his reverie and propped himself up on his elbows. He looked east and wondered if the greater light would ever cease its cycle, and why each day he felt compelled to pause and consider the dawn. Maybe it was more than mere solace. Strangely, it occurred to him that the pure and singular moment of sunrise was his truest friend. No guile, no pretense, new life, new light, and all the possibilities that came when first the sun met the sky.
The smell of ozone came to him as dew rose from the ground. The comforting reassurance of the fragrance eased into him, and Tahn closed his eyes to envision the dawn. The moment stretched out as he watched in his mind’s eye the path of the greater light. Suddenly, the image flooded with red. The sun shone a bloody hue, and the mountains, clouds, treetops, everything in his mind turned scarlet. Then the world ignited, the air burning and the rocks melting into rivers of blood. The sun shimmered crimson and sable, flickering like a man blinking blood from his eyes. Tahn began to choke, the horror in his mind making it hard to breathe. He could not open his eyes, could not free himself from the images in his head.
Strangled pleas gurgled from his throat, as he thought that he might die here, now. And with the thought of his own mortality came the desperate desire to see Wendra. She was now his only family, and the pit of his stomach seemed to fall with the troubling thought that he would never see her again. Then hands were on his shoulders, shaking him. Words cascaded down to him as though spoken from very far away.
“Tahn, wake up!”
But he was awake. He tried to say so, only his swollen tongue would not obey.
Hands slapped his face, but the vision held. His heart thumped in his ears and behind his eyes, the rhythm slowing, growing louder, like the single, great beat they’d heard in the mist. Then stillness. The scarlet sun faded, and Tahn could no longer summon the name of his sister.
“Will and Sky!” he screamed. But the sound of it echoed small and only in his head.
A hand struck his back, batting him. Soon after, water splashed his face. But the sensations were distant and soft the way a bird’s wing sounds across a lake, or the cry of a loon comes muffled by the cloak of night. Like sounds over the ponds at Gehard’s Ridge … and Tahn remembered with a rush of regret and stark understanding that he and Sutter were alone, fleeing the Bar’dyn. That he’d stepped into the spine-root. He began to feel very heavy, as though the energy to move or think escaped him.
“No!” he howled.
“Tahn! Breathe!” he heard, and thought he knew the voice, but could not place it.
He gasped a breath as if he was that loon on a Gehard pond, surfacing from a long dive, and a painful rush of air seared his lungs. He panted as a jumble of fiery colors streaked through his mind. In their wake a solitary disk of light hung in a blue sky. He opened his eyes and stared into Sutter’s worried face.
“What happened? Are you all right?”
Tahn stared at his friend without answering. When his breathing returned to normal, he again felt the throbbing in his foot.
“That must have been some dream you were having,” Sutter said. “I hope there was a girl in it, at least.”
Tahn looked over his friend’s shoulder at the break of dawn on the horizon. He hoped there were answers in Recityv. He hoped they reached Recityv. He hadn’t yet passed from melura to adulthood, and he had never felt further from it.
They started north again in the early light of day. Mist rose from the river, edging into the trees around them. The damp chilled them both and slowed their progress. Everywhere he looked, Tahn encountered moss growing from rocks and bark, in places hanging like drapes from branches and smothering the brush at his feet. Gradually, the sun burned the mist from the air. Tahn and Sutter kept a companionable silence, the memory of their recent assault making them both cautious.
They followed the river north for two days, finding a few abandoned homes built along the shallow coves in the bank, but otherwise not encountering even a hint of man until the afternoon of the third day, when something curious fell from the sky and settled on Tahn’s cheek. He wiped at it, and drew back a finger smeared with ash. Thinking nothing of it, they rode onward. But soon flakes of black and grey were falling with some regularity.
Sutter held out a hand to catch a wafting speck. When it fell into his palm, he proffered his hand to Tahn in question. It could mean only one thing: forest fire.
“Perhaps we’re near Recityv,” Sutter offered.
“I doubt it,” Tahn answered.
Sutter nodded. “Then let’s stay near the river. My neck is too sore to fight today.” He smiled weakly.
Ignoring him, Tahn cautiously maneuvered Jole in the direction of the smell.
“Of course,” Sutter said with a shrug, falling in behind him.
Soon the smell of fire filled the air, but what burned was something more than wood, more even than the premature burning of trees still green with life. The forest itself felt pregnant with the terrible consequence of things forever destroyed, the way a few years earlier the last of the singing trees had been harvested from their grove in the Hollows, leaving the land there naked and silent. Tahn remembered the auction conducted beside the sighting stones to fetch a high price for the famed wood—money to pay a debtor whose name no one in the Hollows seemed to know. Tahn had visited the grove later, as a woodsman, and sat upon the dusty ground where bare roots no longer fed a sheaf of leaves above. The specter of the last felled singing tree clung there like a revenant. In this distant wood, thick with the smell of burnt ash, the same feeling hung thick and smothering as a death pall.
Judging the direction, Tahn turned west from the river, and climbed the wooded hill that rose from the river valley. Ascending higher, the ground grew increasingly carpeted with soot and ash, the rain of spent embers coming like a strange, quiet storm. Tahn checked his fletching, and urged his mount upward through a tight bank of spruce.
Immediately on the other side, blackened trees stripped of foliage spired like bony fingers. Some still smoldered, smoke lifting lazily to the sky. The ground was charred with intricate patterns of burnt needles like tight embroidery. But the number of burnt trees did not explain the fall of ash that piled now at their feet, the flakes continuing to descend softly around them.
Tahn dismounted and tethered Jole to a nearby tree. Sutter slid to the ground and came in step, holding his sword with both hands. Pulling his bow to half draw, Tahn crept forward. As he skulked around the scorched remains, his skin began to tingle. The very air felt charged. Scarcely thirty strides from the first burnt tree, they emerged into a small semicircular clearing. Sutter’s eyes widened as Tahn whispered denial.
Ahead, the face of a short granite cliff hung in graceful, molten waves, as though a banner sagging where it had lost its mooring. S
team issued from pockets of the liquefied rock, sending tendrils of smoke up against the blackened face of the escarpment.
“Earth and dust,” Sutter muttered. “What makes rock run like honey from a hive?”
Unconsciously relaxing his draw, Tahn quickly surveyed the ground, searching for something specific. To their right, a circle of earth glinted dully in the light filtered through the ash-laden sky. Tahn’s heart fluttered in his chest. He took four long strides and bent to brush ash from the glazen surface. At the center of the black glass ring, two holes burrowed into the earth, holes the size of a man’s hand. Surveying the rest of the clearing, Tahn noticed several more dark rings, some larger than others, some at the center of depressions in the level clearing around them.
Brushing ash from his hands, Tahn stood, again pulling his bow to half draw, and continued forward. Dark ripples in the cliff hung like stone curtains, and appeared to seal a doorway into the granite where an obvious footpath ended at a puddle of cooling rock.
“That’ll do.” The strange voice rang out over the clearing and startled Tahn, causing him to fumble his arrow from its rest.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Heresy
A lone candle lit the home of the weathered man. He sat at his table in its glow, the silence and emptiness of his home wrapping about him. His hands still bore the dirt of his ward’s grave—the lad buried in the soil of the barren land, adding yet another layer of remove from the world beyond.
In his dirty hands he held a charm the boy had always carried with him, the remnant of the child he had been—a token left to him by a mother he had never known. The lad had never worn it, but still had never been without it. Maybe it harkened to some hope he had of reunion, or perhaps was a reminder of the neglect that had brought him to the weathered man to begin with.
Whatever the reason, the boy had never shared it, nor had the man asked.
But now he turned it over and over in fingers soiled with the boy’s final earth, and thought about choices and death. He thought about his many wards. And he thought about the land of his soul, as barren now, he imagined, as the soil beyond his door.
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