“I just didn’t know a woman was their leader,” Dante said. He resolved to stop interrupting.
“Samarand,” Cally said. “She’s not terribly old, though all you young people look alike to me. She’s a wretched firebrand. Always going on about how Arawn’s faithful have let themselves be pushed from their proper place at the table. I think if she were to stop rushing around exhorting violence and mayhem, the moderate elements would snap out of their collective nightmare and go back to grinding the radicals beneath their heels, as is just and proper.”
“Fascinating,” Dante said. “I won’t do it.”
Cally’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”
“I’m not a dog of war, either. I’m not going to travel ten thousand miles to kill some woman on your say-so. Do you have any idea how insane this sounds? You don’t, do you? This sounds reasonable to you. No way.”
“First off, it’s barely a thousand miles. Second, you must have killed a dozen men by now.”
“That was completely different.”
“Was it? It seems to me a dead man’s a dead man no matter why he’s dead.”
“We were defending our lives,” Dante said. He clutched his copy of the Cycle to his chest. “I shouldn’t have to apologize for that.”
“Will you apologize when this war kills thousands, then?” Cally said, leaning in again. The old man looked like he should stink like a dock, but Dante was constantly surprised to find he had no odor at all, even when he was practically spitting in his face. “If Samarand lives, thousands will die. How will you split that hair to wash your hands of guilt? What if she was going to kill a million people instead? The entire world? Would you do something then?”
“Stop it,” Dante said. He stood up and faced Cally, meeting the man’s age-honed glare with his own raw outrage. “Find someone else. This mess is none of my concern.”
He started back for his room. He didn’t know where he would go if not Narashtovik, but he’d begun to understand just how large the world was once you’d learned to face the fear of leaving everything you knew behind. There were way too many kingdoms, baronies, chiefdoms, and rogue cities out there for all knowledge of the Cycle to be confined to Narashtovik. He was only sixteen. It galled him to have to wait a single day to read the rest, let alone however many months or years it would take him to track down a Mallish translation on his own (or, he supposed with an inward groan, to learn whatever foreign language it might have been translated into), but if nothing else, a period of far-flung wandering would give the Arawnites some time to forget him, to stop hunting him through the towns and the wilds and go back to their own business.
“Barden is real,” Cally said from behind him. Dante closed his eyes, hand on the handle to his room.
“A huge tree grown out of bone is real.”
“Yes.”
“Sprouted from Taim’s severed knuckle and watered from his gushing heart.”
“I’m a few eons too young to know that,” Cally said. “Nor do I know whether’its limbs bear the waters above the world while its roots rest in the waters beneath the world,’ as the book would have it. But I have looked on it.”
Dante turned, then, knowing it for a ploy, but unable to stop his pulse from thumping till he could feel it in his chest and in his ears.
“What was it like?”
Cally started to speak, then shook his head. “Looking on it was like living in a world without light and air.” His eyes drifted from Dante’s, lids wrinkled so hard his eyelashes fluttered. The old man pulled his lips back from his teeth. He suddenly looked immeasurably older than his 60-odd years, as old as a wind-scoured mountainside, ages older than all the years of man. “I’ve seen many things I’d call miracles if I didn’t have the training to know how to do them myself. But if the gods left a single fingerprint on our world, it was in the White Tree.”
“The book says it’s north of Narashtovik.”
“Just over a hundred miles.” Cally stood there, arms dangling down his sides, hands coarse and spotty and useless, as if nothing existed beyond the walls of his skull.
“Is that supposed to make me agree to kill a woman I hadn’t heard of till two minutes ago?”
“That’s for you to decide.” Cally’s eyes snapped to his, some of their former light restored. “If you won’t, maybe I’ll find another way. Maybe I won’t. But if you want to see the White Tree for yourself, the road leads through Narashtovik.”
* * *
Dante caught Blays before he disappeared the following morning and arranged to have lunch with him down by the clearing with the stream that ran a couple hundred yards from Cally’s forgotten old shrine. Hours later, they sat down in the tall grass in that cool November light, listening to the stream gurgle through the rocks. It was the first time since their arrival they’d been by themselves, free of Cally and Robert bossing them around and making jokes and story references Dante almost but couldn’t quite understand. As he and Blays swore and laughed at each other’s insults, Dante realized he always acted differently when he was around the adults, as if he had to be his smartest and most sophisticated or else they’d stop listening to him altogether, and it was some time before he could make himself interrupt their breezy mood with what he’d come here to say to Blays in the first place.
“Something’s going on out there,” Dante said after a short lull following the laughter that had followed an unbelievably obscene joke from Blays.
Blays cocked his head. “I don’t hear anything.”
“I mean, out there,” Dante said, gesturing his palms up away from each other to take in the woods and the sky. “Something violent.”
“If you’re talking about life,” Blays said with light annoyance, “that started a long time ago.” He bit into the leg of a rabbit he and Robert had caught the day before. Dante shook his head and tried to look serious.
“There’s going to be a Fourth Scour or something. Cally says we might be able to help him stop it.”
“And you trust Cally?”
“You don’t?” Dante said with honest surprise. Blays shrugged at him. “It’s not just him,” Dante went on. “I don’t know what you heard while you were in the clink, but it was all over the streets. There’s riots down in Bressel. Other places, too. People are getting hurt.”
“City people riot over everything,” Blays said. He plucked some grass and tossed it at Dante one blade at a time. “One day they’re rioting over how it’s too hot. The next day they’re back in the streets about how it’s not too hot enough.”
“We’d have to go to Narashtovik. It’s on the north coast of Gask.”
“That far?” Blays examined him. “Do you want to go?”
“I don’t know,” Dante said, and found that though those words hid a sea of desires and doubt, they were nonetheless true. “Do you?”
Blays took a last bite from his drumstick and lobbed it into the fast, shallow waters of the stream.
“Whatever you want,” he said. “If you think we need to go, we’ll go.”
Dante nodded. “If we’re going, we should leave tomorrow. Waiting will just make things worse.”
“I’ll tell Robert.”
“Think he’ll take it okay?”
“I think he’ll come with us,” Blays said, and Dante could only nod again, silenced by an emotion he couldn’t grasp and wouldn’t want to put into words. Blays popped up, brushed grass from his legs and dirt from his seat. “Don’t tell him I told you, but he thinks you’re on to something.” He laughed, ruffling his own hair. “He wants to hop onboard your wagon before it rolls off for the land of mead and honey-haired women.”
“This needs to stop,” Dante said, then laughed too. “I’m serious.”
He went back to the shrine and started packing. With little else to do and possessing the brand of spirit that couldn’t devote a whole day to any one thing, Blays and Robert had hunted more meat than the four of them had been able to keep up with. Most of it was salting in the cella
r, the rest was hanging from a lattice of branches they’d arranged to soak up the smoke from the outdoor firepit and that so far hadn’t been molested by a passing bear. Dante gathered up as much as he thought wouldn’t spoil on the trip (the nights had been flirting with freezing, giving his guess a lot of leeway) and stuffed into a sack the meat and some of the breads and vegetables Cally had smuggled in from the city twice a month. He gathered his things, his candles and books and papers and knives, and leaned them inside his bedroom door. In the morning, he’d be able to leave as soon as they’d eaten. Cally bumped into him as he was making a final scan of the temple, sized him up, and offered him a slight, solemn nod.
At dinner they ate a great haunch of the boar Robert had brought in days before and drank stream water so cold it stung Dante’s teeth. The other three shared a bottle of wine Cally dredged up from the cellar, then a second, then Robert slugged down most of a third. Dante sipped from the same glass all night, rising only when Blays and Robert staggered off to their respective rooms to sleep it off.
“This is the right choice,” Cally said then.
“So you say.”
“I won’t pretend to know how to measure the value of one life against another. But there are times when it’s easier than others.”
“A few weeks ago I didn’t know about any of this,” Dante said. He rubbed his eyes. “It still doesn’t feel real.”
“The legends make it sound grand to be swept into causes you have no part in, but in truth it’s grim and it’s unfair and it wears you down.” Cally stood and moved around the table to put a hand on Dante’s shoulder. The skin of his fingers was a lusterless white, flaky from the dry air. Dante didn’t move. “Take comfort you won’t be alone out there. And that, whatever happens, you’re doing something that will keep all these people down here safe.”
Though he didn’t expect to find any rest in his immediate future, Dante managed to fall asleep in little more than an hour after he laid down. They rose shortly after dawn, gathered up the sacks Dante’d packed, slung them over the three draft horses they’d stolen the day of the Execution That Wasn’t and since bought saddles for through the anonymous agents Cally used as go-betweens for his needs. They took up their weapons and their trinkets and their charms. Cally took an old sword from the shrine’s walls and gave it to Dante, deflecting his protests with the advice there’s nothing more dependable than a sharp hunk of metal. They ate a light, quick meal, then sat in the saddle in the cold morning light outside the shrine, saying their thanks and goodbyes to the old man.
“One last thing,” Cally said when they’d hit that final silence between when they’d said everything they needed and when they were ready to ride off. He fumbled in his robes, then produced a wax-sealed letter. “It’s for an old friend of mine. He’s a monk by name of Gabe. You’ll find him in the monastery of Mennok in the town of Shay. It’s pretty much on your route.”
Dante took it from him and tucked it under his doublet. His gloom from the previous night had evaporated with the daylight and the knowledge they were on their way to somewhere he’d never imagined he’d see. There was a big horse underneath him. The air smelled like damp earth and was lightly cold from a rain during the night, but he knew he’d warm up once they started moving. He was glad, for the moment, to be who and where he was.
“Can’t you just fly it to him on the wings of a talking crow?” he said down to the old man.
“Good gods. Just get him the damn letter.”
“I’m beginning to doubt you can do anything at all.”
“Shut up,” Cally mused. He scratched the thick gray beard on his cheek. “Don’t leave town before he’s read it. He may be some help. He used to be a fairly useful man.” He bit his lip. “If he hasn’t died, of course. It’s been a while.”
“We’ll die of old age ourselves if we don’t head out soon,” Blays said. Robert chuckled.
“Then get the hell out,” Cally said. “I’ll finally be able to read in peace without it sounding like a war outside my window.”
“We’ll miss you too, old goat,” Blays called over his shoulder as they started into the woods. Dante turned in the saddle and waved to the old man. Cally held up his time-gnarled palm and watched them go. A cloud passed over the sun, throwing him into shadow. Dante cupped his hands to his mouth and quacked.
9
Twelve hundred miles, Dante figured. Between winding roads and the detour to Shay, they could count on twelve hundred miles of travel. Honestly, it sounded insane. It sounded like the kind of trip you started off expecting to lose a third of your men along the way. He shifted his seat, trying to get used to the horse beneath him. The way it bumped, the way its muscles rose with more strength than his entire body. Twelve hundred miles of getting jostled around by this monster. Pilgrims and caravans would take a season to cover that much ground. Robert had looked at the horses and the route and projected they could do it in six weeks of steady travel—not counting snow.
Snow could change everything. None had stuck around Whetton yet, meaning they could count on the first two hundred miles to be clear at that moment. The slow rise of the plains could be completely different; so could the weather in the valley in the five-odd days it would take to reach those plains. The valley almost always saw snow at some point, though some years the Lower Chanset didn’t get dusted until the full thrall of January. Already it was late November. Unless they could gallop so fast they turned back time, there would be snow by the time they reached the north. In that sense, it wasn’t worth thinking about: it wasn’t a matter of if, but when, and whether they walked or rode hell for leather, they would see snow before it was through. All they had to worry about was reaching the pass through the Dunden Mountains before it got snowed in.
Cally’s shrine was about twenty miles west of Whetton. They traveled northeast, meaning to intercept the northern road a safe distance above town and follow it as far as they could into the mountains. They rode with no particular hurry, both to give Dante and to a lesser extent Blays the chance to learn how their horses reacted to their commands before trying anything fancy (like moving faster than a walk). Dante had done some riding back at Cally’s, but by and large the ways of a horse were as foreign to him as those of the neeling.
Twelve hundred miles. Plenty of time to figure out just how crazy all this was.
He pulled his cloak around his shoulders. It had grown thinner and more ragged since the night he’d stolen it off the body in Bressel, poorly mended and open to the wind. They’d need sturdier clothes. Take care of it all in Shay: Cally’s friend, nice thick cloaks and blankets, fresh food, maybe even a night in a real bed.
Blackbirds and robins and crows twittered and coughed. Squirrels and rabbits and larger things crackled among the fallen leaves. The sun swung up into the sky and pierced through the bare branches, warming their bodies. They didn’t talk much. No sense throwing out their voices on the first day.
“Good to be out of that place, huh?” Robert said after an hour or so.
“I was starting to get the stir-crazies,” Blays said.
“Something off about the old man.” Robert let the sunlight fall on his upturned face. “Appreciate his help, but I won’t miss him.”
“He helped more than you know,” Dante said.
“No doubt about that. Just not my sort of company.”
A stream crossed their path two-odd miles on and they dropped down to drink and let their horses do the same. Dante watched Robert walk up to the stream and stoop to scoop water into his mouth.
“You don’t walk funny,” he said. Blays and Robert exchanged a look and a laugh. Fine. Dante drank, flexing his fingers against the cold.
“It’s just a name,” Robert said.
“Pretty weird one.”
They stretched their legs, then got back in the saddle. Robert spent a few minutes rubbing his beard.
“I’m thirty-some years old now,” he said to no apparent cue. “Couldn’t say for sure. Split t
he difference and call it 35. Back when I was a young man, a couple years your elder, I’d been at the pub long enough to be feeling right when I stood up to go tap my private keg and found my right leg was completely numb. Been sitting on it a while, I guess, and when I tried to walk it just dragged along behind me. Couldn’t feel a damn thing.” He chuckled, running his fingers through his beard. “Earlier that night I’d thrown some lip at a man I’d just met. One of those loud, boastful men who’s always watching to make sure everyone’s watching him as he goes on about the strength of his arm and the speed of his blade and how big the tits on the last one he banged. The kind you want to stave in their head just to shut them up. I’d just offered my opinion on the likelihood of a canine presence in his maternal lineage, but him being that kind of man and all, he didn’t see the restraint I’d employed to keep our differences purely verbal.
“Well, fellow sees me stand up, or more rightly hobble up, between the booze and my leg, and then limp around the room trying to get back the feeling. He sees his chance: not only am I drunk, but evidently I’m lame. Chance to take back his honor without sticking out his neck. Even a man fundamentally scared inside as him thinks he can best a lamed drunk.
“He comes up and at once I see the murder in his eyes. Spend enough time at pub and you develop an eye for that pretty quick. Anyway, without a word I’ve drawn my sword and he’s drawn his and we’re squaring off. He’s dancing this way and that, right and left, taking pokes at me, trying to get me off my balance. I’ve got half a mind to what he’s up to by then and bide my time, letting my leg wake back up. Drunk as I was I knew I wasn’t in any real danger. He was decent at best, but I was good. Damn good.
“Doesn’t take long before my leg’s tingling and just a few seconds after that it’s hurting a bit but I knew I could move it just fine. I kept up the act, shuffling around the same spot, letting him build his spirit, and soon enough he’s taking this big swing meant to open my defense for his backstroke. I jump aside like quicksilver on a griddle and strike for his heart.”
Magic, Myth & Majesty: 7 Fantasy Novels Page 74
