Black wisps gathered in his fingers. Needing no more than a dab of blood, he picked a shallow scab on the back of his hand, waited for the small red bubble to rise, then touched his blood to the bones. Like rain on a window, shadowy nether slid from his hands to the body. Claws twitched. As if drawn by a string, a loose femur drew to the hip. The creature stood, swaying. It might have been a rat, once. A squirrel. Now, it was a silent automaton, and if Dante closed his eyes, he could see through its perspective instead. He nodded in the direction Mourn had gone minutes earlier. The creature turned and dashed away in a spray of leaves.
Dante called Blays from down the hill. "We'll stay a mile behind him. He'll never know we're here."
"Next time, I demand a plan with less walking. Like sitting around being fed roast pork."
"I'm not sure how that forwards the cause of norren independence."
Blays shrugged. "They can figure that out for themselves."
The creature raced along the forest floor, skidding through leaves, leaping over roots and dips, unhampered by the need to breathe or rest or slow for treacherous footing. Within minutes, it—and by extension Dante—could hear the norren threading through the brush with surprising grace. He and Blays began their pursuit.
Mist drifted between the hard-barked pines, thinning the further they got from the river. After a couple miles of woods, the forest dissipated in favor of grassy hills, the draws and folds furred by spicy-smelling pines. The light of a half-moon drenched the trailless earth. Dante's breath rolled from his mouth in thin clouds. His nose and ears numbed while sweat dampened his underclothes, which were already a good week in need of a wash.
Mourn didn't take his first break until dawn took its first pink glance at the east. Blays sat, blear-eyed, scowling at the block of bread Dante had taken along in case they didn't wind up returning straight to town after the meet.
"This stuff's hard as a brick," he said, spraying crumbs. "Tastes like one, too."
"Yet you're eating it. Remind me not to invite you to my house."
"What's that hairy jerk doing now?"
Dante closed his eyes. More than a mile away, the creature watched from beneath a bush while Mourn pried the bark from a fallen log and ate the pale grubs beneath. "Enjoying a pan of bacon. I think I can smell it—crisp meat, smoking fat."
"Gods damn it."
Mourn rose, then crouched beside a body of water that was more puddle than pond. "The wine looks good, too."
"At least tell me he looks sleepy." Blays stretched out his leg, massaging his calf with his thumbs. "I've had a few hours to think here. Which, for one thing, is a few hours we're not spending getting swords into the hands of villagers. For another, what's the point of chasing after the world's greatest bow when the whole idea is to avoid war?"
"Every day we're down here is a gamble. If the wrong person gets wind that we're arming the norren and brings that to the palace in Setteven, how long before the entire Gaskan Empire is marching on the Norren Territories? Three seconds?" Dante crunched into a bit of bread, chewing thickly. "Now what if we have a bow that can drop their towers as fast as you drop your trousers? Won't that give them second thoughts?"
"And you really think this thing exists?"
"A bow that can win a war by itself? What are you, an idiot?"
Blays threw up his hands. "If this is a joke, then so is the fist I'm about to put through your teeth."
Dante pulled his mind from the creature's, where Mourn was chopping long, straight branches and leaning them against the low crotch of a tree. "I just think it's worth sacrificing a couple days to confirm it doesn't exist. At least we'll have finally seen the Clan of the Nine Pines for ourselves."
"I heard they once killed an entire Setteven troop over the suggestion they start paying taxes."
"Donn told me they give their children knives as soon as they can stand. Accidentally cutting themselves is part of the process of learning to use one."
"Well, we've got to get those guys on board. King Moddegan's army doesn't stand a chance against the knife-babies." Blays blew into his hands. "I'll give it two more days. Past that, and I will begin shrieking until you admit your mistake."
Two days later—two long, cold, relentless days of aching feet, stiff fingers, and dwindling bread that didn't taste good even when his belly was empty—and Dante was ready to turn back himself. Mourn's course kept his resolve from dissolving completely: the norren was headed straight into nowhere. An eastern course into grassy hills and patchy woods too removed from the roads to see any signs of people besides the occasional hermit or roving tribe. Desolate and windy. A person could spend weeks combing these lands without finding a trace of the people he was after.
That afternoon, Mourn and his undead pursuit entered a wall of trees whose small green buds were just beginning to displace the stubborn, brittle leaves still hanging from the branches. Deep shadows pooled the ground. Mourn walked noiselessly, hardly stirring the crackly blanket of leaves. After spending a good portion of the last few years learning to do the same, Dante envied the large man's effortless skill.
Yet with the sun a hand's-breadth from the hills, its light fading from the soil like a summer rain, Mourn suddenly began scuffling his feet, tramping through great beds of leaves as if shouting his name to the world. Ahead, a quiet blue lake winked between the trees. Above its shallow, grainy banks, Mourn was greeted by a trio of tall, stone-faced norren.
"Found them," Dante murmured.
"How many?"
"Um." He stopped, ordering the distant skeleton to take a quick jaunt. Men and women sat around fires, hauled wood, reeled in nets from the shore. "Fifty. Maybe more."
"I have a thought," Blays said. "If these people are as brutal as they all say, is it wise for two strangers to burst in on their secret forest lair?"
"Good question," rumbled a voice to the left.
Adrenaline bloomed from Dante's solar plexus. He dropped into a low stance, drawing his sword with his right and the nether with his left. Blays whipped out his blades with a leathery hiss. Twenty feet away, a man stepped from the trees, young enough that his beard only climbed halfway up his cheeks, but still a foot too tall to be mistaken for a human. A cleaver-like blade hung from his hand, the weapon as oversized as his bearish body.
"We're not enemies," Dante said.
"The clan will be here to judge that in a minute."
Dante flicked his eyes closed. At the camp, men and women grabbed up swords and bows and raced into the woods, backtracking Mourn's route. He ordered the creature to follow them back. He reopened his eyes on the lone norren. "How did you alert them?"
"Josun Joh watches out for us all."
"Tell them to bring steak," Blays said. "I'm starving."
He put away his swords, a motion so smooth it was like watching a feat of actual magic. Dante, unable to draw his blade without glancing at the handle first, left his out. He didn't say another word until Mourn arrived in the dusk with a dozen other norren, each dressed in the same supple deer-leather and silver ear piercings. Surprise, confusion, and anger battled for control of Mourn's heavy eyebrows.
"Hi, Mourn," Dante said. "We followed you."
"I would have seen you from a mile away."
"That's why we stayed two miles behind."
The other warriors regarded Dante with blank eyes, thick swords held before them. Dante had guided the dead watcher into some shrubs behind him. He blinked, glimpsing a silent woman stalking straight for him, a knife gleaming in her hand. Without turning, Dante knocked her to the ground with a club of nether, forceful enough to rattle her plate without cracking it.
"I am Dante Galand, council member of the Sealed Citadel of Narashtovik. We're here for the cause of norren independence."
"I'm a guy in the forest," said a middle-aged norren whose left cheek was nearly beardless for all the scars. "And you are a long way from Narashtovik."
"Consider it a sign of our sincerity," Blays said.
; "'Sincerity'? You have strange words for 'trespassing,' strangers."
Slowly as a stalking cat, Dante drew his lowered blade across the back of his left hand. The cold metal bit into his skin, replaced by the warmth of a fresh wound and the hot blood dripping from the edge of his palm. Nether flocked to the fluid in swerving twists of darkness.
"You know why we're here," he said. "With that bow, we could guarantee Setteven wouldn't dare set foot in the territories."
"There is a problem," the scarred man said.
"A problem the severity of which depends greatly on your perspective," said a female norren, no shorter than the males yet significantly less hirsute. Her eyes were as orange as a harvest moon. "From your perspective, it is not so auspicious at all."
The scarred man waved the point of his ponderous sword at knee-level, as if it were too heavy to lift without great cause. "Strangers who come to the Clan of the Nine Pines are required to leave as ash on the wind."
A dozen norren lifted their weapons. Further back among the trees, others nocked arrows, sighting down the shafts.
"Why does everything have to be a fight with you?" Blays said sidelong. He bared his teeth and raised his blades. Dante summoned the nether to him in a great and hungry rush.
For months, he had spent his free hours practicing the creation of lights and illusions—bending the nether into gigantic patterns, letters, and symbols that could be seen and interpreted from miles away. If some of Narashtovik's priests and monks were placed along the border, they could fling up the signs at the first sight of Gaskan troops. Other scouts could then recreate the signs with fires and mirrors, passing the information deeper and deeper into the territories. Enough of these signalmen in the right locations, and in the span of hours, crucial news could be transmitted hundreds of miles to Narashtovik and the territories. Those in the path of the coming storm would be given precious extra days of warning.
This was the theory. In practice, men and women able to bend the energy of ether and nether were somewhat too rare to exile to mountaintops across the countryside. Yet the potential of this notion compelled Dante to look past the impracticalities, and he'd spent many nights, when he wasn't too bone-tired to do anything at all, turning the darkness of the nether inside-out, painting the air with blazing red letters spelling "BLAYS IS DUMB" or with crude animations of the blond man getting repeatedly whacked on the head by a succession of hammers. It was a challenging task, more subtle than skewering an enemy with a sudden spike of raw energy, and at first his concentration had been unable to sustain a moving image with any level of clarity for more than scant seconds. Yet he kept at it. Recently, he'd been able to illustrate whole (if short) stories above his head while grinning norren bards chanted the poems his pictures matched.
He hoped it would be enough.
With the clan's warriors closing in, he dispelled the creature that had dogged Mourn for two straight days. A light bloomed amidst the darkened treetops. The norren tipped back their heads, eyes narrowed. At first the image in the sky was nothing more than simple color, silvery yet soft to the eye, but it quickly took on the shape of a young boy: black-haired, blue-eyed, his features, even at the age of five, sharp enough to skin a pear.
High in the air, the glowing boy toddled through windy fields, overturning rocks at the edges of streams. By candlelight, a middle-aged man wearing a cassock and a kindly if impatient smile ran his finger along lines from a book of fairy stories. The next moment, the boy grew chest-high on the man, reciting unheard words from a book three times thicker. The boy grew taller yet; his dark hair flowed from his head, lengthening until it suddenly queued behind his head. By night, he walked down an overgrown lane—around him, green outlines suggested dense trees—where, in the basement of a ruined temple, he found a black book whose cover bore a stark white tree.
The image shifted again; the young man sat at a library table, reading and rereading the book's opening pages. The scene leapt to a city street, cobbles and a flickering torch. A blond-haired boy stood beside the black-haired one, sword drawn against two armed and faceless men. The dark-haired boy, face twisted in terror, threw up his hand in a theatrical gesture. The group disappeared in a globe of darkness. When the scene returned to light, the two attackers lay dead.
The images came fast—an old man lecturing the young man from inside a tomb, the blond boy with a noose around his neck, then racing away on horseback. The two boys riding north through the outlines of snowy mountains. Arriving at Narashtovik, the dead city, a sketch of ruins and a high citadel at its center. A stark-faced woman lectured from a cathedral podium; at the fringes of the crowd, the boys failed to fire their bows. But then they were inside the citadel where the woman lived and ruled; and then stood on a snowy march with her priests and soldiers, who battled rebels in a dark wood before arriving beneath the boughs of a monstrous white tree, its heavy limbs grown of sleek and solid bone.
Light flashed beneath the tree; chanting faces summoned a black door; the old man reappeared in a scrum of bloody chaos. When it cleared, the woman was dead alongside dozens of others. The image pushed in on the dark-haired boy's face, closer and closer, his blue eyes frozen on something far away, more cold and forlorn than that icy hill.
He meant to do more—their return to the hills of the territories, the grain they'd delivered to the village on Clearlake Hill, their pursuit of the men who'd slaughtered a norren wagon train—but his strength faltered. The illusion vanished. Dante dropped to one knee, panting. The norren looked down, blinking. Several dropped back a step.
"There," Dante said. "We're no longer strangers."
The scarred man glanced at the orange-eyed woman, then back to Dante. "Can you do more than find loopholes and paint pretty pictures?"
"Yes." Dante let out a shaking breath; his head throbbed, overwhelmed. He blinked the blurriness from his blue eyes, swept sweaty black hair from his forehead. "Come at me, and I'll reduce you to the Clan of the Three or Four Pines before you bring me down."
The woman gave the scarred man a small nod. "Why don't we take a walk to camp."
They led the way, distancing themselves to speak in soft, rumbling tones. Blays elbowed him in the ribs.
"I look much better than that."
"At least I omitted the warts," Dante said.
"Did you actually think that would have any chance of working?"
"It seemed smarter than fighting. I don't think a dead body can tell me where its bow is no matter how long I yell at it."
Leaves crunched underfoot, smelling of sap and must. The afterimage of his work lingered in Dante's eyes, silvery flecks that flashed whenever he blinked. A pair of norren followed them on either side, two more at their back. Blays did nothing to disguise his stare. The norren paid them no mind. Woodsmoke sifted through the budding branches.
They were directed to a patch of clear, bare earth not far from where the lake lapped softly on the muddy shore. The scarred man was named Orlen, the orange-eyed woman Vee. They disappeared inside a leather yurt to continue their conversation while Arlo, the young norren who'd detained Dante and Blays in the woods, brought out fried trout and raw greens. Blays swallowed the crackly tail, then dug into the sweet, steaming white meat with bare fingers, plucking out ribs.
"This entire trip is now worth it," he declared. "Even if we die, my ghost will agree."
Dante dug his thumbnail against the scraps of green onion in his teeth. "I think we've reached the point where if they wanted to kill us, they'd kill us."
"Maybe we're being fattened."
"They're nomads, not cannibals."
"Maybe they're branching out."
Around them, the norren ate their own meals, stopping at the end to rip off the heads of cooked fish to suck out the eyes, then flinging the bony remainder into the lake.
"Imagine those fish are you," Dante said.
Orlen and Vee emerged from the yurt and approached the main bonfire. Without a word, ten others joined them. The rest of the
clan didn't look up, continuing to pick their teeth with fish bones and mend the nets they'd pulled from the lake. Dante raised his brows at Blays and joined the norren at the welcome heat of the bonfire. Orlen stared at them without blinking, even when the shifting wind drove stinging smoke into his eyes.
"I don't know what you've heard about us," the scarred chieftain said finally. "Likely you have heard several things. When a thing is unknown like our clan, people will rush to fill the void of knowledge with whatever stories they like best."
"We understand you want the same thing we do," Dante said. "An independent norren state free of tribute to or dependence on the nation of Gask."
"Vague enough to be a diplomat," Vee said. "Watch out for his promises."
Dante scowled over the fire. "We know your clan has a long history of resistance against the capital. That's all we know. We've heard you possess a weapon called the Quivering Bow. If it does what rumor says it does, I think it could be a critical piece in forestalling a war—or in winning one, if the nobles at Setteven decide they've had enough of what's gone on down here."
Orlen inclined his head. "The bow. Yes."
"Then it's real?"
"It has been a relic of the Clan of the Nine Pines for so long none of us actually knows how we got it."
Vee folded her large hands. "Perhaps it was strung with the guts of patriarch Boh's first son. Or maybe we stole it from lesser people who weren't worthy of it."
Dante's head tingled. "It can do what its name says, then. Shake down walls."
"If you know how to use it," Orlen said. "And if you will use it to help free our people, you may have it, because what greater purpose could it serve? But there is a problem with it."
The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy Page 48