by Molly Gloss
The buck’s eyes were round and clear. They made the boy think of someone else, though he could not find the face or the name.
He reached out his hand. The buck came and chewed at the fingers gently with small milk teeth. He had not been long away from his mother. In those wide brown eyes, Vren saw the deer’s aloneness. He touched the deer’s head, rubbing between the small, fuzzy horn-bumps.
Bloom, he thought, giving that name as a growing-up gift to the yearling. He remembered that he himself may have been alone once, but he could not remember any mother, nor the face of anyone else he might once have lost.
“It’s a bright, beautiful Shadow you have brought me,” the man said, in a thin whisper so the deer, Bloom, was not startled.
The man stood just beside Vren now. His hand was on the boy’s arm with that good, warm touch, and Vren, at the man’s words, felt light and soaring, like a water-sweet seed on the wind.
Then there was something at the edge of the boy’s sight—a little movement, a small hushed breath of sound—and all the lightness went out of him suddenly, so that he felt heavy and sinking. A cottony grayness seemed to fill his eyes and his mouth, but for one moment he knew a clear and sharp alarm. He opened his mouth to say some word of warning to Bloom. The sound came out too slowly. By then it seemed to be only a small cry of confusion.
When he searched the grayness for the deer’s trustful eyes, he saw his own small, dark reflection in the eyes of the man beside him.
• • •
A fen-fox came to the edge of some trees and looked at the boy. Vren heard the sound the man made, his “Ah . . .” of surprise and pleasure. The fen-fox was uncommonly shy. Probably the man had not, before this, ever seen the long burning-gold hair of that animal, its small fine face, great copper-colored eyes.
The boy remembered that he had befriended a fox like this once, or more than once. Slowly a sadness rose up in his chest, but it had no shape and no name, and in a moment it drifted out of him like smoke.
He squatted on the ground, with his hands resting open on his knees. The man did that too. Then, not moving at all and not speaking, together they waited for the fen-fox.
The boy thought of saying some word in the animal’s own language. He was sure, if he opened his mouth, he could bring out the short, high bark of a fen-fox. But the fen had already left the trees and come a little way toward them, hearing some message that was silent, so Vren only waited, in wordless friendship.
The fox drew near to him. Her long, narrow nose touched the boy’s hand. Then she put her nose close to his face, blowing warm wet breath against his skin, and he felt again something familiar, like sorrow. After a moment, the fen’s rough tongue came out and brushed the boy’s chin—and Vren remembered suddenly, all in a rush, the other time when he had lain grieving in the darkness below the falls of the Ash River, and another fen-fox had soundlessly spoken his name.
Something—the startled movement he made then, or the way his heart tightened up suddenly—something made the fen’s eyes jump wide, and in the same moment she was gone, bounding away in long leaps across the grass and into the trees.
The man let out a word of anger. It was a sharp loud sound that echoed off the trees. There was one bright moment afterward. Vren saw the man’s hard angry face, and his hand—the thin metal knife he held tightly in his fingers.
• • •
It seemed to Vren now, when he was with the man, that the space they stood in was very small. He could see it was circled about with wooly grayness that went out into black. Sometimes, standing in that small clear center, he could now hear the whispers of the gray no-time place, and it was hard to hear any animal’s voice above that.
Now sometimes when Vren and the man stood together waiting, no animal came. Sometimes a snake would come, or a tree-toad, or a dragon lizard. The man wanted the red deer and the otter, but perhaps Vren had forgotten those languages. Or perhaps those animals now refused his friendship. The boy would stand impatiently waiting where he thought the deer might come, or he would open his mouth to call out in the squeaking sounds of the otter. But no deer came to where he waited, and nothing came from his mouth except the small, human sounds of his own voice.
In the man’s eyes, when Vren looked for himself there, sometimes now he saw a small boy standing upside down. Or he saw himself standing alone, in darkness that seemed to go inward forever.
• • •
Without remembering that he had closed his eyes, Vren opened them. The man’s voice whispered inside his head. The boy followed the voice through a shapeless darkness to where the man waited for him, sitting in a small, clear circle, inside the stone walls of a house. There was a light there, from no windows, but from the air itself. The boy could see the light reflected in the man’s huge black eyes. It made the back of his head begin to tingle.
“Tell it to get away,” the man said.
Vren had not heard it until now: a wolf’s long, high howling from the nearby woodland. Then he could smell the man’s fear burning inside the closed little room.
The wolf’s voice only made the boy feel dimly unhappy. He said, “They sing a song like that, sometimes, to the stars.”
The man’s eyes grew very small, and the boy felt himself growing smaller too. “Tell it to get away,” the man said again, in a rough, purring voice.
The boy had no memory now of the language wolves spoke, but he thought he remembered songs he himself had sent up into black skies. He put back his head and sang. No wolf’s voice came from his mouth—he had only a boy’s voice, after all—but he sang a high wailing star-song, a song without language at all.
There was a bright, clear silence afterward. Slowly the man began to smile, a smile that widened his eyes and sent the boy dizzily down inside them as he had not done in a while. But the wolf had not gone. His claws came scratching at the bottom of the door, his nose snuffling there, and the man’s fear made the air in the room smell suddenly sharp.
The boy felt he had grown Shadowless. He could only stand and dully watch while the wolf splintered through the door. For a moment he saw the wolf clearly—the red ruff standing up along the shoulders, the long yellow teeth—and he smelled on its body old blood and sour breath of fever. He felt, or saw, the quick burst of the man’s fear, too, and at that moment all the light left the inside of the house. It became as black as if Vren had no eyes, as if even his empty eye sockets had been filled up with blackness.
He heard a voice that could have been the man’s, but it was only a high wordless whine inside his head, and the boy could not find his way to it.
The wolf’s teeth closed in the hair at the back of his neck. He was not afraid of the wolf. But he folded up and tried to crawl away blindly along the ground. He was afraid that, inside the wolf’s mouth, he was lost. For in this blackness there would be no finding his way down again into the Shadowed eyes of the spellbinder.
8
Broken Pieces
HE WOKE IN darkness. It was cold, and his body ached as if he had fallen out of his high lookout tree into the shallows of the White Stone River. There was a small movement at his side, and he remembered something of teeth and blood and dark dream shapes. But this beside him was only . . . Trim.
He began to shake. He burrowed his face against the wolf’s great chest, but even so, he could not stop the shaking.
“Vren,” the woman said in a quiet way; and when he saw that Shel was there too, he began to cry.
“I thought you were dead,” he said, now that it was not true.
He could not see her face clearly in the darkness, but he saw her lift her shoulders a little. She said, “When I came out below the falls, there was a big piece of the boat ahead of me on the water, and I caught hold of that and went downstream with it. Then when the wolf came near, I took hold of him by the neck and we got out of the water together.” She may have smiled. There was the sound of a smile in her voice. “I followed the wolf some of the time,” she said gently. �
�And some of the time he followed me. And we are here now.”
Vren wanted to say again that he had thought them dead. He wanted Shel to know what terrible days those had been. “I found a torn part of your cloak,” he said.
The woman was silent. Then for a second time, but in a different voice, she said, “We are here now,” and he knew that these had been terrible days for them all.
They lay together, the three of them, among the twisted black trunks of bare trees. The trees gave them no shelter. They only made thin lines against the sky, like cracks in a clay bowl. There was no sound at all, here, not even a bit of wind to rub together the twigs of the trees. It was a strange, silent country, colorless and dead-seeming.
The boy did not ask what this place was—why or how they had come here—but in a little while he had to ask, “Have we come far enough away from him?” because he could not yet quit shaking.
In the darkness he could see Shel’s face watching him. She answered slowly, telling more than he had asked, perhaps to keep from saying yes or no. “We stopped near his camp without knowing it,” she said. “And when the wolf cried, and you answered, I could not hold him. He went off into the trees, and I followed him as best I could, through the darkness. He had already brought you down to the edge of the camp when I came. So I carried you myself, into the ironwood. It is a dead place, and it seemed he might not want to follow us here. We went as far as we could. Until your weight was too heavy for either of us.”
It made him ashamed, imagining himself carried like a sack of rocks, in Trim’s mouth and across the old woman’s shoulders, and suddenly more ashamed, remembering the woman’s Shadow-sight.
He had seen her once touch an empty house and then tell him of the people who had been there—even the shapes of their Shadows. Vren knew that, touching him, carrying him as she had, she might already know of Bloom the young red deer, of the spotted tayfish and the fen-fox and the spellbinder’s long metal knife. She might have seen the gray, whispering no-time place, and the boy’s reflection in the darkness of the spellbinder’s eyes. If she had looked inward, all the way to the center of the boy’s heart, she would know, as he did, what it was that made the spellbinder’s Shadow so black. She would know that Vren, when he was with the spellbinder, had felt, for a little while, powerful and unashamed.
In the darkness, in guilt, he looked toward her. She was watching him. But in that dim light he could not see what was in her face.
They waited out the night, gathered close to one another for warmth and for courage in this cold, silent place. Vren did not sleep. He lay still, listening for the spellbinder, until the silence itself became a kind of sound—the long holding of someone’s breath.
Only slowly did he begin to think of Rusche.
It made him feel feverish and sick, imagining himself and Rusche together in the camp of the spellbinder, not seeing, not knowing one another. He wondered if the wolf could drag a man as big as Rusche down into the ironwood. If not that, how would he get Rusche away? Or should he try at all? For he could not stop shaking.
• • •
In daylight he saw that Trim was thin and weak. His black coat was dull, and the red ruff along his shoulders had gone dark, like muddy leaves. There was a long, scabbed wound along the curve of one hip, and another above an eye. He looked too ill to have dragged even a boy downhill from the stone house.
Vren looked dismally at Shel. “He is so thin and sick,” he said.
The woman made a very small smile. “He and I were not the two who had been friends,” she said, as if it were a reason. Then the boy understood. Shel said, “He slept and licked his wounds and ate grass, and he would not give me much notice. Twice I made a paste, from spidersweb and bloodroot, but whenever I came up close to him he . . . made a sound. And would not let me help him. A few times I caught mice. If I left a mouse near him and went away, sometimes he would take it. But most of that time I think he went hungry.”
Vren was ashamed for her to know that he had wanted to send Trim, alone, to bring Rusche out of the spellbinder’s camp. He touched the wolf’s shoulder in apology.
Then, with only a little bravery, he asked, “Do you know the way back through the ironwood?”
He had remembered, by now, travelers’ telling of an ironwood forest along one edge of the UnderReach, and so he knew what this place was. More than once, when he was younger, he had thought of going through the ironwood forest, or across white mountains, arriving Shadowless on the other side, at some other place. And during this long, sleepless night he had begun to think of it again, to think of going on into the ironwood without Rusche. But in the daylight now, and in guilt, he pretended he was not very afraid. He remembered that he had, after all, given warning to the fen-fox, and from the little hope in that, he drew a little courage.
Shel gave him a straight, long look, until he felt her eyes touching the inside of him. She must have seen his several secrets, but she only made a little sound, like a sigh. And then, slowly and in silence, she set off through the trees, leading Vren back toward the spellbinder’s camp.
• • •
It began to snow a little as they reached the edge of the ironwood. Flakes of dry snow fell through the bare limbs of the trees and disappeared into the leaf-mold. They tried to move as quietly as the snow. They set each foot down with care on the spongy ground. The last little way, where there was a scrubby underwood, they squirmed on elbows and knees below the brush.
The camp was gone. There was only flattened grass to show where the bark shelters had stood. A stony hill, grown with small hemmin trees, rose tall and untenanted, and behind that other wooded hills and a distant white line of mountains. The snow fell and melted among the little trees and the rocks.
“But—there was a pinleaf tree and a spring,” Vren said, in confusion.
Shel gave him a small, gentle look. “That place is days from here. There have been a dozen camps since that one, I think. He stays only a little while in one place. When he has used up the wood and fouled the water and stripped all the berries and the small, sweet leaves close at hand, he simply moves his camp.” She glanced at Vren. “And he took in another person after you, a woman who mends broken things with a touch. I found her empty house, in the trunk of a hollow teba tree, between the river and the ironwood.”
Alone in the gray whispering place, it had seemed to Vren there was no passing of time. The small, bright moments he spent with the spellbinder he remembered now as if they were all one piece, like small round nutshells strung together to make a single necklace. It had seemed to him that he had been in that place only a little while—a day, or less than that. It was a cold, cold feeling, finding all those days and places lost to his memory. Quickly the coldness settled at the center of his chest, making a weight as hard and brittle as ice.
Shel must not have seen it in his face. She stood and started up the hill without waiting for him. In a moment he made himself go up too. He was afraid to have her look back and see him still lying there, frozen.
They walked round the empty campsite with Trim, scouting out the trail to follow away from that place. In the grass, Shel found a clay bottle, broken in small pieces. Vren thought, if she touched a piece, maybe her Shadow-sight would be able to tell them the way to go. But he saw a slow dread come into her face, and she only stood and looked at the shards a moment and did not stoop to pick one up.
Vren felt he had not looked at her carefully until now. Without her great elk-hide cloak, he saw how very small she was. Her legs were short and bowed, and the hair at the back of her head was thin and yellowish and tangled. She did not walk in a bold, quick way, but slowly, sliding her feet through the grass. As he watched her, he began to feel at once more afraid—and more comforted.
The spellbinder’s trail led them toward the far white mountains. Trim limped on a hind foot, and Vren himself moved stiffly and weakly, like the two people he remembered seeing in the spellbinder’s camp, before he was taken. He saw, by hi
s own bony wrists, that he had grown thin and pale in the lost days he had spent with the spellbinder. So they rested every little way, and often they took time to dig pinisap roots with a stick. They chewed the tough parts themselves, and fed the sticky inner sap to Trim.
Snow fell all day. The tiny, dry flakes disappeared as they touched the ground, but the air felt very cold. Vren wore his torn teba cape, and Shel had pulled a stiff cattail mat around her shoulders, but those clothes let the coldness through. When they sat to rest or to eat, they huddled close to one another, and stood again soon to go on.
Before dark, from the shoulder of a hill, they had an unexpected sight of distant figures moving in an unsteady line through the trees. From so far, there was no seeing faces, but they could see two of the people together pulling a sled, and a man riding on the sled as a sick person might—and Vren was pierced with sudden fear. That one, surely, would be the spellbinder. It would be foods and wooden cooking bowls and tools the others carried on their shoulders and in their arms—things taken from all of their houses.
Vren stood still, watching them. He remembered a weight he had pulled or carried across a gray landscape. And after all of them had gone out of sight, he stood stiffly where he was. He felt, if he moved, he might fall and be shattered.
Perhaps Shel felt something of that, too. She stood silently, hunching her shoulders, staring at the place where those people had disappeared. Finally, she said, “What can we do?” in a quiet, flat voice that frightened him. It made him think suddenly of her face in the moments before they went over the falls of the Ash River.
Since this morning, when Shel had stood small and old and afraid, looking down at the broken pieces of clay bottle, Vren had imagined her speaking in just that way, in a voice that said he should not go further. She would say, There is no hope in it, and then finally he would be able to turn around and look for a path home. Shel might even go with him. He would not follow the spellbinder, would not look for Rusche any longer.