As day wore into night, Colbey found no sign of the Cardinal Wizards. The natural music of the shattered forest became a lullaby, so unlike the violence his mother had described to soothe him to sleep as a baby. Mar Lon, Colbey, and Khitajrah slept in shifts, without need to discuss a formal watch. And the night slipped past without sight or sound of any Wizard but the guardian of the West.
CHAPTER 29
Gateway
Colbey awakened to the sensation of a new presence. He had heard no sound that did not belong in forest night, and the chilling breeze felt no different than it had moments before. His eyes snapped open, and his ears naturally sifted the air for other noises than the normal orchestrated shrill of insects, the courting squeal of nocturnal meirtrins, and the whirring call of foxes. His hearing still found nothing amiss, but his mental gift told him otherwise. Someone had approached so quietly he had not disturbed Mar Lon on watch.
Colbey probed the area with his mind as well as his eyes, though he knew the effort would cost him vitality. His consciousness touched another fraught with concerns nearly as weighty as his own. He discovered a oneness with the forest, an understanding of nature that could only come from a single source. Recognizing the other as a friend, Colbey instantly withdrew. He would never invade the thoughts of one he trusted. “Arduwyn,” he whispered.
As the hunter responded to his call, Colbey carved movement from darkness. He rose, meeting Arduwyn halfway. “Did you find anything?” He hoped Arduwyn had searched for signs of the Wizards’ and Renshai’s trails as well as for his daughter.
“No.” Arduwyn seemed troubled by his finding, a disappointment that went beyond his missing daughter. His failure encompassed much more. “Not a footprint. Not a single sign of recent passage but our own.” He sighed. “Sylva’s good in the forest, but even I leave enough trail for me to follow.”
Colbey believed the answer obvious, but he put a name to it anyway. “Magic.”
“Do you think they erased their passage?”
“I think they may have left no place from which their passage needed erasing.”
Arduwyn fidgeted. “Do you think they destroyed . . .” He trailed off, motioning toward the missing space that had once defined the Fields of Wrath and much of the surrounding forest.
Colbey guessed the hunter’s concern at once. Whether by intention or accident, the Cardinal Wizards might have murdered Sylva in their efforts to prevent pursuit. He could feel the rising heat of Arduwyn’s anger, intermingled with a hovering grief no vengeance could displace. “I can only guess at what they might have done. There’s no use in that. Until we have evidence otherwise, best to assume the Wizards took Sylva with the others. If she’s alive, we’ll rescue her, too. If she’s dead, there’s nothing we can do for her.”
Arduwyn nodded once, but he seemed unsatisfied. A vast chasm existed between the awareness that worrying served no purpose and suppressing that concern.
Colbey tried to redirect his thoughts. “So you found nothing useful?”
Startled, Arduwyn jerked. Apparently, his mind had far outstripped the conversation. “Only what we saw the night before. A massive piece of ground is missing, and the earth seems to have seamed itself back together.”
Colbey pursed his lips. He had suspected such a thing, though his ignorance of landmarks had made him uncertain of the details. Of all the people he knew, he trusted only Arduwyn to recognize specific pieces of forest and their rightful places on the map.
“And one other thing.”
Colbey came to immediate attention. “What’s that?”
“It’s probably nothing.”
“Right now, we have no place to look. Anything is something.”
Khitajrah slipped up beside Colbey, drawn by the conversation and Arduwyn’s return. Through the darkness, Colbey could see Mar Lon sitting in Mitrian’s doorway, watching. Sterrane’s snores revealed that he still slept, oblivious to his friend’s return.
“When I was a child . . .” Arduwyn lost a sob he had clearly held back for some time. The lapse widened instantly to a wild floodgate of tears. “. . . my father taught me that nature never forms sharp angles or patterns. It’s true, too. In all my years in the forests, I’ve never found so much as a stone with a straight . . .” He choked off the last word, his pain obvious, even without the explanation of thoughts that Colbey alone could read. Arduwyn’s mind seemed unable to shift from his own lessons with Sylva in the woodlands. “There’s a broken tree among the others. Apparently, it cracked at exactly the level of a fork in a tree some distance away, and its higher trunk fell precisely so as to land in that fork. And nothing else got in the way.”
Colbey tried to picture the scene Arduwyn described.
Arduwyn demonstrated by placing both arms rigidly in front of him, then bending them at the elbows so his hands pointed skyward. “Think of these as the two trees.” He indicated his forearms by shaking them once. He spread his left thumb and forefinger to make a fork, then bent the fingers of his right hand only at the last knuckles where they joined the hand. He rested the fingertips into the cleft he had made. “Like this.” The pattern formed a rectangle, with the two long sides representing the tree trunks.
Colbey shrugged, understanding the image yet seeing little significance to it. “I’d think that happens all the time. One tree falling on another.”
“The falling part.” Arduwyn let his arms drop back to his sides. “Trees fall all the time. It’s part of nature’s normal cycle. Just not in parallel lines and perfect, straight angles.”
Colbey took a deep breath, releasing the air slowly through pursed lips. Logic told him this phenomenon bore no relation to the Cardinal Wizards and their kidnapping of the Renshai, yet they had no other leads to follow. As small as the oddity sounded, Arduwyn had noticed it so it required exploration. Besides, the hunter had come back to camp without his horse. Surely, he had left the animal there to mark the place, with the intention of returning soon.
“It’s probably nothing,” Arduwyn reiterated.
“Probably,” Colbey admitted. “But we can’t take that chance. Why don’t you examine this thing more thoroughly? And take someone with you.”
Arduwyn glanced at Khitajrah, and Colbey felt a brief spark of emotion from the hunter that time did not allow him to define. He did catch a flash of anger, tempered by something he touched too fleetingly to name. Arduwyn’s gaze swept to Mar Lon and Sterrane, then back to Colbey. “Who?”
Colbey hesitated, knowing he should go, yet loath to leave the king of Béarn in the path of enemies. The Cardinal Wizards were his problem. He could not afford to have them arrive in his absence, while he stared at tree trunks in the forest.
“Me,” Khitajrah said.
Again, Colbey sensed rising anger from Arduwyn. This time, he also found discomfort as Arduwyn grappled to master other emotions evoked by Khitajrah’s presence. The Renshai kept his response geared toward what he heard, not underlying thoughts and unintentionally radiated feelings. “That makes the most sense. Sterrane can’t go, and I don’t think you’ll pry Mar Lon away from his king now. I should stay in case the Wizards come.”
The sensations wafting from Arduwyn changed drastically. For an instant Colbey caught a full blast of desire. Then, self-hatred rose to squash the seeds of interest. Memories surfaced, of a chaos-influenced Khitajrah offered hospitality and returning only theft, lies, and betrayal. The whole became swallowed in a blanketing mass of bitterness directed against her. Arduwyn gave no sign of the upheaval progressing inside him. Clearly, he saw the wisdom in Colbey’s choice. “Come on, then.” Without further encouragement, Arduwyn faded into the woodlands.
Khitajrah paused to give Colbey’s hand a reassuring squeeze, then she followed the hunter, her thoughts too mild to waft to Colbey’s senses. Clearly, she shared none of Arduwyn’s outrage. By outward appearances, she seemed to relish the opportunity to spend some time with him alone, presumably to right the wrongs she had committed against him.
Colbey considered the situation a few moments longer, glad to forget the dilemma of Renshai and mankind for a time. He sat, back pressed to the mortared stonework of a cottage, seeking signs of Arduwyn’s and Khitajrah’s passage. But he saw nothing. Each moved silently and unseen. Though Khitajrah had learned this skill in the overpopulated cities of the Eastlands, she seemed to have adapted to woodlands during her short stay in the West. Given some time alone together, Arduwyn and Khitajrah might find much in common, if the hunter could forgive the crimes chaos had driven her to commit. Once Arduwyn dropped the barrier that malice had built between them, his attraction to Khitajrah would surely slip through.
Colbey smiled at the irony. Once again, it seemed, the scrawny archer might challenge the wolf. Not since seventeen tribes of Northmen had banded together to annihilate the Renshai had Colbey met anyone so persistently willing to oppose him. Arduwyn’s courage had become apparent from their first meeting, when the hunter had found Colbey’s heritage reason enough to rouse strangers against him. Gradually, they had made their peace, learning to respect one another, though they had never become friends. Repeatedly, Arduwyn had traded gibes with a Renshai toward whom others feared even to glance. He had stolen Colbey’s kill in the Great War and had, through audacity alone, stopped Colbey from mercy-slaying a friend wracked by poison-generated hallucinations.
That last battle, Colbey knew, he should never have surrendered. Arduwyn’s concern had forced Garn to die in withering agony, in the gladiator pit he had long ago escaped. Yet, this time, Colbey wondered if he might not give in again. Despite Freya’s apparent sanctioning of his relationship with Khitajrah and the pleasure of their lovemaking several nights past, something seemed to be missing. In his youth, when he still imagined himself becoming half of a couple, he had never considered a relationship with any woman who could not give him a real challenge in mock combat. Arduwyn and Khitajrah seemed far better suited to one another: close in size and build, far nearer in age, and both as attentive to scenery as to people.
The aristiri settled on a ledge directly over Colbey’s head, whistling trills that played soft harmony beneath the rhythmical constant of Sterrane’s snores.
Colbey leaned back and closed his eyes, trusting wariness to take over where his senses failed. The whole train of thought seemed unnecessary, an abstraction; yet it was not like his mind to consider the trivial. Whatever happened between Arduwyn and Khitajrah, the fates would sanction. Ultimately, the decision rested with Khitajrah. Leaving Mar Lon in charge, Colbey allowed himself to drift back into sleep.
* * *
Arduwyn padded silently through freshly piled leaves and over soil erupted into ridges by the Cardinal Wizards’ magic. Though he did not turn back, he remained aware of Khitajrah’s every movement through the brush. To his surprise, she followed with a grace and caution that made her passage scarcely louder than his own. If she ever became fully acclimated to forest, he grudgingly realized, she might become the quieter of them.
The need to listen for the positioning of another brought back vivid memories of Arduwyn’s excursions with Sylva. His mind threw him back to days when her overzealous attempts to move quietly made her noisier than a racing herd of deer. It had taken months to teach the basics that seemed natural to Arduwyn: the routine process of selecting each footstep to go around or over any object rather than stepping on it, adjusting pace to ground and cover in a way that balanced speed and equilibrium, avoiding or flitting through the most open or densest spaces where showing self or making noise became inevitable, and keeping the eye, ear, and mind attuned to every detail.
Arduwyn’s eye stung. He rubbed at it, and his fingers came away moist. Once the tears became realized, they quickened, and Arduwyn’s thoughts anchored on his daughter’s gentle voice and her calm understanding of the woodlands and their call. Sylva’s mother had always condemned Arduwyn’s escape to nature when life became too difficult for his heart to handle. Her reasons were sound, he knew. Running from problems no more solved them than drinking oneself into oblivion, and it left loved ones to handle their grief alone. Yet, even as a child, Sylva had understood. He envied her ability to face adversity, to assist others through it, and to reserve judgment when others could not manage it as well. Like any child, she had had her moments of deviltry. But, whether in looks, temperament, or behavior, she seemed to have inherited the best both parents had to offer. From me, that wasn’t much.
An image of Sylva formed in Arduwyn’s mind. He pictured her hair, red and silky, the color of his own but with the length and superior texture of Bel’s. He saw her in a moment of joy, her dark eyes alight, cheeks scarlet, and a smile making her entire face seem alive with magic. The vision proved too much. Arduwyn’s control snapped, and he dropped to a crouch on the forest floor. Directed thought abandoned him, leaving only a limp sorrow, and his mind flashed images of his daughter, his wife, and the three children who had become his by marriage until disease had taken two of them.
Khitajrah touched a shoulder tentatively. “Arduwyn?” She shuffled around him, seeking his face, incapable of reading his huddled misery from behind.
Arduwyn buried his face in his hands, unable to control his emotions yet feeling foolish for his lapse. He would not let her see him crying. In some cultures, a man’s tears made him weak and soft, unfit to lead his family. Though Erythanians did not condemn masculine sorrow in that fashion, he still chose to hide his frailty from a woman who had already betrayed him once.
Even without direct visualization of expression, Khitajrah pieced the clues together. She sat beside him, saying nothing.
Arduwyn struggled for control, glad Khitajrah had chosen silence. Any words would have snapped the delicate strands of his growing mastery and embarrassed him as well. The sympathy of a thief and liar would only have rung hollow.
Still quiet, Khitajrah placed an arm around Arduwyn’s shoulders.
The touch jolted Arduwyn. He froze, rigid, the stream of tears halting in an instant. The proper response would not come to him, mentally or physically. He dredged for revulsion, but his heart belittled the attempt, delving instead for the attraction he had buried. It seemed foolish, certain anguish to allow himself to fall for a woman who had and would betray him. Yet the passion existed, beyond his control. Her beauty drew him in, her grace and manner hooked him, and he did not know how long he could battle the stronger, natural instincts that made him want to have her right here in the forest.
Where Arduwyn’s rational mind failed, grief took over. Another wave of images battered him, and the tears began again.
Khitajrah caressed Arduwyn’s shoulder, expressing just enough warmth and caring to ease the pain. Surely, she had had long practice at soothing the bereaved. “Can I help?”
Arduwyn took a cautious breath, wanting his reply to emerge strong, still trying to hide the tears though it had become fruitless. “No,” he managed. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“I might.”
“You wouldn’t.” It was unfair, and Arduwyn knew it. As a widow, she would, at least, have needed to deal with the loss of her husband. As an Easterner, she might well have lost family and friends. He swallowed hard, guilty for his insistence. “My daughter, barely fifteen, is the wife of one of the Renshai. I have reason to believe the Wizards left her. She may have gotten caught in this.” Without looking up, he gestured to the woodland ruins, the trees uprooted and jutting at angles, the ground puckered into unnatural mounds. Verbalization of the problem opened the dam, and the rest came tumbling out. “I lost two of my wife’s three children, whom I loved as my own. Then my wife. And now our only daughter, the last remaining symbol of our love. Sylva means everything to me.”
“I’m sorry,” Khitajrah said, the words trite but her inflection speaking volumes in sympathy. Her voice revealed tears of her own. “I lost two sons and a husband to the war. My last son was killed in a courtroom, defending me from injustice. I do know how you feel. And I know there’s nothing I can sa
y or do to make it easier.” Her touch disappeared, and Arduwyn heard the rustle of her moving closer. “I also know that you’re giving up too soon. You don’t know for sure Sylva’s dead. We may find her yet, and she’ll need you at your best. Sometimes, the world and its forces tempt people with strange things.”
Arduwyn did not understand the last of Khitajrah’s statements, but it seemed to have great meaning for her so he let it rest without questioning. He raised his head, sacrificing dignity to let her join in the sorrow she understood only too well. It was, perhaps, not the worst in the world, and certainly not the only, though it seemed so to Arduwyn. And, for the first time in his life, Arduwyn did not run. He allowed Khitajrah to share his pain.
* * *
The sound of hoofbeats awakened Colbey in an instant, and he scrambled to his feet before the animal topped the rise. Mar Lon rose an instant slower, and even Sterrane’s snoring broke cadence for a moment. Arduwyn’s paint floundered over the ridge; apparently he had, in fact, left it at the landmark he and Khitajrah had gone to examine. Colbey noticed at once that the hunter returned alone. He tensed, concern coursing through him with a suddenness that made him naturally seek a target.
“She’s gone!” Arduwyn shouted, loud enough that even Sterrane sat up sleepily, blinking his eyes against the moonlight.
“What do you mean ‘gone’?” Colbey grabbed up the staff in a stiff hand, realizing that he had kept his fingers curled around its wood throughout the night.
Child of Thunder (Renshai Trilogy) Page 56