“That is truly fascinating,” Blays said.
“I thought it was.”
“So they splashed a little noble blood around. Peasants do dumb stuff and get killed for it all the time. Why did the whole kingdom have to fight a war?”
“It wasn’t just in the Basin,” Dante went on. He bit his teeth together. He’d read hundreds of pages on this stuff back in the books in Bressel. How could he distill all that work into something Blays would get? “It was everywhere. It was really popular, probably because its members were saying things that hadn’t been said in a long time but used to be really important. You know Carvahal, right?”
Blays made a blasphemous appeal to the sky. “I’m not three years old, Dante.”
“I was just asking. So Carvahal took the fire from the north star and brought it to us and was exiled from the Belt of the heavens for it by Taim, right. That’s the story you hear when you’re a little kid. Well, these Arawn guys, they say Carvahal didn’t originally oversee the pole-fire, that his half-brother Arawn was its keeper. He gave Carvahal the fire, but they say Carvahal locked him up behind the wall beyond the stars so he could have the credit. Then he brought the fire to Eric the Draconat, etc., etc.”
Blays nodded like he was paying any kind of attention. He planted his staff and lowered himself onto a lichen-fuzzed rock.
“Let’s sit down over there.” Dante nodded to the trees on the right that looked just like the trees to the left, as well as the trees ahead and behind them. “At the pond.”
“What pond?”
“Can’t you smell it?”
“No,” Blays said, but he stood and waited for Dante to lead the way. He did, ear cocked for the blackbirds, and he had to cut back once but then it was there, barely more than a stone’s throw across but maybe five times as long. Blays gave him a look, snapping a reed from its banks.
“The birds,” Dante said, after a blackbird had called. “They like the water.”
“Right.” Blays dropped down on a rock near its edge and wriggled off his boots. He skimmed the tip of the reed over the placid waters. Dante watched the gray missiles of trout drifting near the banks. The flies were thicker here and the surface rippled with the rings of breaching fish. The water did smell good, now that he was on it, damp grass and clean mud, that way stones smell when water’s always drying from their smooth faces.
“The important thing is, Arawn was the one who guarded the north star,” Dante went on.
“So what?”
“So what? From a theological perspective that’s huge! It undermines the legitimacy of Taim and Gashen and all the twelve houses of the heavens! If Arawn was the keeper of its fire, then he was pretty much the big chief. Worse yet, if he meant to hand his secrets down to mankind, that means he’s the one who deserves our devotion, not Carvahal, and if they got something that big wrong, how can we trust anything they say at all?”
“Yeah, but it’s all just stories.” Blays moved to his knees and overturned a stone. Pale pink worms wagged their tails in the last of the sunlight before sinking into the murk. “They’re not real.”
“Doesn’t their belief in the gods make them real?”
“No,” he said, “it makes them stupid.”
“I guess everyone in the world’s stupid, then.” Dante dropped his eyes to the waters around the reeds. Now and then a trout weaved through their stalks, nibbling at the seeds and bugs caught in the net of plants. “It doesn’t matter if they’re stories. The priests tell the stories that will make the people eat out of their hands and the kings have power because they have the authority to say which priests are right. They don’t like it when the stories that give them all this control are threatened.”
“You know who you sound like right now?” Blays said, grinning up at him. “The guys back at the arms house I was with after they’d been drinking all night. The kings this, the priests that. Everyone’s stupid but them. Then they sleep it off and when they wake up they’re back out selling their blades for pennies and getting turned down nine times out of ten even then.”
“I’m not saying I thought it up.” He threw a pebble at the water near the point of Blays’ reed. A shadow of a fish darted into the deep. “I’m just trying to explain why people get so mad when you start talking about this stuff.”
“Lyle Almighty, get on with it.”
“So Arawn gave us the fire,” Dante said.
“You’ve said that five times,” Blays sighed. Dante glared at him. The boy sat three-quarters turned, but when he ducked his chin Dante could see he was smiling.
“The histories of the Third Scour paint him as a bloodthirsty death-god. That’s how they explain the revolts, that Arawn ordered the serfs to kill the lords and the guards and the followers of all the other temples to satisfy his own need for blood. But see, I don’t think that’s right. In the Cycle—the book—it mentions Arawn a lot and he never talks about wanting people dead. In fact, he’s not very interested in us at all. I mean, everyone dies eventually, right? If you’re an immortal god, who cares if a soul finds you in the stars today or twenty years from now? Even if he wanted to build an army, and I don’t see anything to support that either, it’s not like he’s in a hurry to do it before he dies of old age.”
Blays plopped a rock into the waters. “I’m going to be seeing Arawn myself pretty fast if you don’t quit being so boring.”
“Well, does that make sense to you? That a god would be in a rush about a thing like that?”
“Of course not. But we’re the image of the gods, aren’t we? So obviously they think like us. That must mean they’re pricks like us, too. Who wants to wait fifty years when you can snap your fingers and poof, you’ve got an army of the dead? For that matter,” Blays said, tapping Dante’s chest as he built up steam, “if they’re so high and mighty, how are we supposed to guess what they’re thinking? We’re probably like ants to them. Can ants understand what we’re thinking?”
“That’s different.”
“How is it any different at all?”
“It just is,” Dante shrugged. He groped around for his place. “So whatever Arawn was, nobody else liked him anymore, what with the dangerous belief your standing in this brief wick doesn’t mean hell-all to the one that comes after, and once things got so crazy in Collen the counter-army practically conscripted itself. They smithied up a few thousand pikes for the rabble and promised the land to the nobles and off they went. Needless to say all the heretics in Collen were killed. That only stirred up the ones everywhere else all the worse, but to make a long story slightly less long, they were all killed too. The traditionalist armies burnt their temples and their books, beheaded the priests who renounced and quartered the ones who didn’t. That’s where the Fellgate came from.”
Blays dropped his jaw. “What, those little black knobs are their heads?”
“Yeah,” Dante laughed. “Look like old apples, don’t they?”
“And they get to spend the rest of their years watching the asses of horses ponce down the street.”
“And the thing is, they were wrong. They lied about Arawn, and when his followers objected, some of them were killed, and then when they tried to fight back, all of them were killed. It’s like people care more about preserving their power than serving the truth.”
Blays bobbed his head. “The powers that be wouldn’t be the powers that be if they didn’t.”
“Yeah.” Dante grinned a moment, then realized just what he was grinning at and made his face go serious. “I took the book from one of the ruined temples of Arawn.”
“Ah,” Blays said, nodding sagely. “The kind of crime where it’s a race to see who can hang you first.”
“The best kind.”
“You’d better hurry up and become an invincible wizard, then.”
“I don’t know how,” Dante flushed. “I wish I’d had more time in Bressel before they found me.”
“And I wish I had a princess in her skivvies. In fact, forget the s
kivvies.” Blays chuffed at himself, then looked down. “Actually, I want to see some damn food, then eat it. What’ve you got?” He reached again for the pack.
“Let’s catch some fish. Before it gets too dark.”
“Great idea,” he said, standing and contemplating the pond. “Where’s the hooks?”
Dante got to his feet. “Can’t you sort of stab them?”
“Yeah.” Blays whipped out his sword and the metal rang in the quiet. He brandished it at the banks. “Come on, you cowardly fish! Come up on dry land and fight like a man!” He slashed the waters, sending droplets hissing. “I missed!”
“Well maybe if you actually tried.”
“I thought you were Nature Boy,” Blays said, flipping water at him with the weapon’s point. Dante shrank back. “Can’t you whittle up some bones or something? Lure them out with the song of the sea?”
“If I catch any you can’t eat them,” Dante said, unsheathing his own sword. He trailed the bank, eyes on the lurking shadows.
“A challenge!” He heard mud slurping and jumped when the rock Blays had thrown catapulted into the pond. He spat water from his face.
“You ass!” He brushed uselessly at his soaked doublet.
“I’ll catch twice your stupid fish,” Blays said. He turned on his heel and stalked the opposite way. Dante hurried to a tall stand of reeds some thirty feet down. Within moments his eyes set on a trout hovering in the shallows. He lunged at it with his sword and fell to his knees in the water. He splashed back ashore, checking to see if Blays had seen, but the kid was occupied with his own prey. He scared away a second fish, then a third before he moved further along the shores, and it wasn’t until it was so dark he was beginning to see fish where they weren’t there that he drew back his sword after a strike and found a trout speared on its tip.
“I hope you enjoy your carrots,” he said a few minutes later when he found Blays at the far point of the pond.
“Screw your carrots,” Blays said, displaying his sword over a stomped-down basket of grass. In the gloom he saw the silver bodies of three cleaned fish. A wind riffled the waters, stirred the dry leaves of the trees against each other. They retreated into the woods where a fire wouldn’t be seen from the clearing at the pond and bit into the crackle-skinned fish while they were still so hot they burned their mouths.
* * *
For days they stayed at the pond, content to fish with branch-cut spears in the morning and the evening, scrubbing around for plants in the woods when the noon sun drove the trout into deeper waters, sometimes swimming, sometimes crashing around the undergrowth until their trousers were thick with burrs, running around for the simple sake of running around. Most days Blays went off for an hour or more in his own explorations while Dante plunged into the Cycle. Without references and histories and his own footnotes, he feared he couldn’t grasp more than the surface of what he read, but the further he pressed the more he understood. His progress was slow as ever; he was often forced to flip back to earlier sections, interrupted by the frequent need to forage for things to fill a stomach that seemed to empty every couple hours at the book, but he was building toward a new peak. He could feel it in the hollows of his bones.
When Blays got back from his solo trips Dante shut the book and came at the boy with sword in hand. He learned the delicate mechanics of the parry and riposte, to watch the hips of his opponent to know where he was going, to use his footwork to create the balance that would be the difference in who died on whose blade. Dante didn’t know much, but he could tell Blays was better than he should be at fifteen and a half. He had a natural grace, a quickness to his wrists that never let his blade stray too far to leave himself open. Compared to that, Dante’s relative clumsiness with the sticks they used for their full-contact duels was a constant frustration that filled him with a shame he hadn’t felt since the night at the temple. He’d carried that feeling for as long as he could remember, that solitude, that sense that whatever he did was being judged by things he couldn’t see. Before he’d met Blays he would have given up swordplay the moment he realized he wasn’t any good at it. He was aware of his foolishness now, that Blays had to hold back to keep from disarming him the moment they began, but he sparred on until his arms were so noodly he could hardly lift them above his shoulders. The memory of the temple began to fade, lurking beyond the edges of his sight.
“Not great,” Blays said, bending over to plant his hands on his knees after one of their sessions, “but maybe you’ll keep them from killing you long enough for me to run away.”
“Not fair. That’s what I hired you for.”
Dante went to bed exhausted, rose with the dawn and read through the pink filter of sunlight. The days were mild. The frost stayed gone for a week, then reappeared in their sleep without warning, waking Dante a half dozen times. Each time he woke he pulled his knees tighter to his chest or added another tent of branches to the fire. He got up for good a half hour before dawn, cold and tired and sore, and he watched the flames blacken the thin kindling they cut each day, the odd hunks of wood they sometimes found sunk in the dirt, the wet fibers of which crackled like crumpling paper and spat smoldering knots of embers their way. All the wood would be too wet before long. A pre-morning breeze kicked up, bearing the smells of damp leaves and the stark cut of cold. The snows could come at any time. They’d be early if they showed today, and he thought the air would stay warm enough when it was mixed with sunlight and hard work, but it was there, biding behind the mountains, marching from the north.
He’d spent time in the wilds around the village before, but mainly in the summer, and when he tried to think about where they’d go when the snows came his mind turned its face from his worries. Years later, when Blays was gone and so was his youth, he’d look to this time as a beacon, the single span of his life after the warm haze of childhood that he could remember without the twin shadows of doubt and regret. These couple weeks in the woods would hold the weight of entire seasons of the years before and after; when he thought of these days, allowing himself the memory like an old dog getting up to bark at a fox he’d once chased, he thought of the yellow touch of sunlight through the trees, tasted the sweet, clean flesh of lake trout caught that day, heard the twitter of blackbirds and the laughter of two boys, saw Blays’ sword flashing before it crashed against his own.
A snake in every garden, the death of every pet. A day when one wakes to find his parents are gone. The bitter tail to those memories, all those years later, after the gray passage of decades, after everything had changed. There would have been a way to make things different, if he’d known enough to make them run to far-off lands and so avoid the treason and bloodshed and heartache to come, but then that would come at the cost of the man he’d become. He’d close the memories like a book, an irrelevant story from a place that no longer existed. There was no room for looking back on what couldn’t be undone.
* * *
When they saw what he’d done they clapped Jack Hand (as he came to be known) in thirty pounds of chains and locked him in the lowest level of the oubliette, where he was to be kept until his eldest brother’s hourglass ran dry, which was said to be fed by the sands of the endless Mandal Desert. He lived in darkness, fed once a day, nipped by lice and by rats. Before enacting his imprisonment they took the index finger from each hand—one finger for each of his brothers’ wives. There had been calls for more drastic justice, but royal blood was royal blood, which was more than could be said for the wives of his brothers, and not lightly spilled.
Dante looked up and wondered whether it were all right to laugh at history, and more specifically a history of the killing of women. The Cycle had taken a strange turn, abandoning the lumbering attempts to explain the skies and the encyclopedic catalogue of names and kings for digressive stories. Not that he’d read many of the Second Classical authors that had prospered in Gask centuries before, but that’s what its tone reminded him of. It read with a certain ironic distance, not so stiflingl
y self-serious as the recent works he’d absorbed back in Bressel. He hadn’t known books could be written in anything but the artless blunder of the holy books, the juvenile wit of romances and adventures, or the overelaborate posing of poetry and history—these last of which frustrated him most of all, seemingly written more with the intent of intimidating whoever opened them than to say anything—and he read on with half a smile and the small but sharp fear this new tone was an aberration, something that would disappear as soon as the story was over.
Jack Hand’s cell was as dark as the caves under the earth. They’d intended it as punishment. He recalled the things he’d learned, dwelled on the last few hours with the bodies. He hailed the shadows to slay the rats and plague the lice and sooner than legendary even by the spongy standards of dungeons, could mean little other later they no longer swarmed his cell. After a while he likely went mad, though the lack of observers and Jack Hand’s own questionable temperament render the status of his mind a matter of philosophy rather than fact. Who knows how we’d act, locked away, locked alone. The mind is a vast place and its hungers far sharper than the body’s.
The mind is a vast place and the black of his world was vaster. He drew that darkness, shaped it, and when, three years later, they opened his cell because the growing stink, reportedly than its occupant had died and was rapidly being converted to the kind of brown sludge kept only at bay by the continual intake of breath, his captors were met by a chattering horde of rats.
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