“Larrimore was a good man,” he started. His voice sounded thin, false. The eyes of all the men who watched him were already glazed. His cheeks burned. He thrust out his chin and looked past them all, past the condolences and aphorisms he’d heard repeated here and at a half dozen other funerals, stared through the poets’ words for dead lords and ladies and all the singers’ sad songs until all that was left was a burn beneath his sternum and a cold anger behind his eyes and then he was speaking before he had a chance to weigh his words inside his head.
“I think he’d laugh at us here,” he said, glaring over the heads of the crowd. “Make sport of our sober words and somber faces. He was fearless in that way. Unstained by the harsh opinion of others. Yet he treated every man as his equal, even when they were just a boy. Perhaps if we had more like him the judgments we pass would be more aligned with the stars where he now rests.” Dante stared at the snow at his feet, searching for more words, but realized that was enough. “Goodbye, Larrimore.”
A few of the men uttered agreements. Cally said a few standard words of closure and then the men dispersed from the mass to smaller groups, talking and laughing in quiet, gentle voices.
“He’d have liked that,” Blays said, coming up to Dante’s side.
“He’d have made fun of me for it.” Dante walked to the wagon that carried Larrimore’s stone and spoke for a while with the men who’d borne it. They found a clear patch beside the sepulcher where his body lay with the others and hacked at the hard ground with spades until they could lower in the marker’s broad base. They firmed it in place with the overturned dirt, stamping the soil flat. By the time they’d finished most of the mourners had started back down the hill toward the Citadel. Cally stood beside Dante and gazed down with him at the gravestone.
“That’s disrespectful,” he said softly. “The jaws of a dragon?”
Dante smiled tightly. “Only if you didn’t know him.”
“Hm. I suppose I’ll trust your judgment.”
Snowflakes began to coast down through the sky. Blays pulled his cloak tighter around his body. He put his hand on Dante’s shoulder. He smiled at the marker, then they too turned and started back toward their home, leaving the dead to theirs.
* * *
Dante turned seventeen. He sat through meetings of policy and doctrine, met with Nak to resume his language lessons, attended the fortnightly sermons Cally’d made himself responsible for giving at the cathedral across the street from their closed gates. Winter carried on. Dante hadn’t realized how much administration went into running the place and had to fight to keep up with all the communiques with distant monks and their tangled questions of scripture, the delicate politics of the courtiers from the capital, the ambassadors from small-fish baronies and earldoms looking for support from the ancient authority of the dead city. Days spun by. Sometimes Dante went sunup to sundown without seeing Blays, who spent equal time investigating Narashtovik’s pubs as he did drilling with the soldiers.
After six weeks the first of the rebels and refugees began to trickle in from the lands they’d left in Mallon. Dante, as a southlander, was assigned to clear their passage with the guards of the Pridegate and establish their housing in the more recently abandoned quarters therein. They arrived with dirt-streaked faces and travel-torn clothes, some with the stumps of their limbs hanging in slings, others bearing illness and disease their war-weakened bodies had been unable to resist, or blue-black toes suffered in the frosts of the mountains. He asked Nak’s aid and requisitioned some of the younger initiates to help him, overseeing their treatment of the wounded and the infirm. Two dozen or more arrived each day and he called out to the nether to heal what he could. Those he and his aides couldn’t make whole were deposited in a new cemetery cleared at the edge of the woods on the southern border of the city. They weren’t happy times, but for once they weren’t bitter times, either. In some small way, Dante thought, he was making up for all the things he’d done between Bressel and Barden.
Blays started to go along with him, speaking to those refugees strong and willing enough to swap stories and news of their homeland. Whetton had been retaken by King Charles, they told him; the renegades had deserted the forests outside Bressel; a lasting treaty had been established in the Collen Basin between the Arawnites and the clergy of the other sects. The dead had been buried and a few new temples bearing the symbol of Barden had been burnt to cinders. Those who arrived a month after the first refugees spoke of a lasting peace, a return to the relative order of the political jockeying between the aging nobles and the growing guilds of Bressel, to the same minor sparks and threats that had always existed between the wide kingdom of Mallon and the lesser-settled territories in its west and south. Blays began to wander off when Dante attended to the ceaseless treatment of the ill, staying gone until the evening, sometimes not returning till the next day’s noon. As time softened Dante’s mood, it seemed to stir up Blays’ in a way that was too active for melancholy and too pensive for wanderlust. He talked little, even when they found the time to drink together. Dante didn’t know what to do. If it were him, he’d want the space to work it out for himself. He let Blays be. The sick kept coming, scores per day, and he lost himself restoring them to health, countering the name of the dead city one man at a time.
* * *
“Let’s go up top,” Blays said to Dante at the conclusion of a council session concerning the feelers toward independence that kept arriving from the norren territories around the foothills of the Dundens. Being recognized by Narashtovik would all but guarantee their freedom in the capital.
“There were more refugees this morning,” Dante said, tugging the collar of his cloak straight. “They need me.”
“Just for a moment. The city doesn’t look so nasty from up there.”
“Fine. Just for a moment.”
Dante left the council chambers and walked with Blays down the hall to the cramped stairway that led to the peak of the keep. The stairs spiraled so tightly he always feared he’d get halfway up and meet someone on their way down, then have to find a way to turn himself around, climb back down to the landing, and start all over again. They met no one else, though, and emerged into the wood-roofed battlement alone. Blays walked past where the roofing stopped, out into the open wind, and leaned himself against a crenel. The city spread out beneath them.
“Snow’s starting to melt,” Blays said.
“I think we’re going to send a force to guard the passes soon,” Dante said. “King Charles must know this city played some part in everything that’s happened.”
Blays nodded absently. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I want to go back to Bressel.”
“That’s not a bad idea, either. We should probably try to reestablish diplomatic channels before anything else can start up.”
“Not like that.”
“What, suddenly you can read the king’s mind?”
“That’s not what I mean.” Blays stared down hard on the rooftops: black on the south faces, where the sun hit all day, and white on the north faces, where the snow lay in shadow. “I mean, I want to live there again.”
“What?”
“It’s something about this place,” Blays said, gesturing at the walled yard of the Citadel, then the disrepair of the buildings in the outer half of the city. “I just want to leave it for a while.”
“Okay,” Dante said. His brain felt numb. He rested his elbows in the gap between two merlons and blinked down at Narashtovik. “When?”
“Soon. Two weeks at most.”
“I thought you meant months from now, at least.” Dante stared at his own hands. He’d only known Blays a few months, but he couldn’t imagine one of them traveling somewhere without the other. Blays wanted to leave? “We’ve got wealth here,” he said. “Respect. We’re doing good things—saving the casualties of Samarand’s war. The city’s starting to come back to life.”
“They don’t need us for that.”
“People wo
uld die without us!”
“No they wouldn’t,” Blays said. “You and Nak have trained enough acolytes to do the job. They wouldn’t miss you if you left for Bressel for a while. They certainly don’t need me.”
“Do you even remember what Bressel was like?”
“I lived there all my life.”
“Well, did I ever tell you about the time I tried to talk myself into eating rats?” Dante said in a tone that reminded himself of Larrimore’s. “The only thing that stopped me was the shame of being seen roasting them in the common room.”
Blays snorted. “It was never like that for me.”
“And what will it be like now? What’s so great about Bressel?”
“I don’t know!” Blays shook his head. He dislodged himself from the wall and glared past Dante’s shoulder. “I just want to live for a while in a place where people aren’t always looking at me like I might kill them for jostling me. I want to go to a public house where I still have to buy my own drinks. Meet a few women who won’t make puns about’unbuckling’ me. The people here don’t treat us like men, they treat us like caged tigers—they all want to get close to us, to touch us to prove to their friends that they’re not afraid. Maybe that’s all right with you, but I’m sick of it.”
“They’re just grateful,” Dante said. “When they hear’Blays Buckler and Dante Galand,’ they’re not expecting we’re a couple of kids.”
“I don’t care what they’re expecting. Whatever they think I am, I’m not.” Blays turned back to the crenels and gazed down into the narrow streets. “I’m leaving, Dante. I’ve meant to for a long time. I just hadn’t figured it out yet.”
“Fine. Leave, then.” Dante shoved Blays in the shoulder. “Did you hear me?”
“Yeah.” Blays met his eyes and for the first time in weeks Dante saw nothing of the malaise that had dwelled in them for so long. He meant it. He didn’t want to leave Dante behind, but he would if he had to. What was making Dante so adamant to stay, then? Being recognized for once? Feared, even? In part, maybe. But while he hadn’t yet mastered Larrimore’s total disdain for the opinions of his peers, nor was Dante ruled by them. Blays was right about the refugees, too—the monks and acolytes were enough to save those able to be saved. But it wasn’t just that Dante wanted to make some kind of repentance, either. At heart, knowing only what he had at the time, he wouldn’t have undone any of the choices he’d made along the way.
It was much deeper than that. Narashtovik remained the one place in the world that could teach him all the things he still didn’t know. In a flash of instinct he would have overruled with logic a few months earlier, he realized if he let that need keep him here while he let Blays wander his own path, he’d be no different than Cally, no better than the motives that had led Samarand to cause so much confusion in the south. If he spent a year or three off in the world, he’d still have decades in which to hone his power.
“You really want to go?” Dante said.
“I have to.”
“All right,” Dante said. “Maybe it’s time for me to follow you for a while.”
Blays’ eyebrows flickered. “You mean that?”
“I’ll ask Cally to sanction the trip. Send us as delegates to the halls of Bressel.”
“I don’t want to just say some pretty words to princes and then come right back.”
“We’ve done enough for now, haven’t we?” Dante shrugged. “Isn’t it time we dissipated for a while?”
“Long past, I think,” Blays said. He grinned slowly, as if he didn’t trust himself to rediscover the expression. Dante laughed through his nose.
“No changing your mind. Once I ask Cally, there’s no turning back.”
“You just worry about what you’ll tell him.”
“I’ll tell him whatever I please,” Dante said. “He knows I’ll kill him if he ever tries to control me again.”
“Yeah right,” Blays said. “He probably makes you change his diapers. That’s how you got on the council, isn’t it?”
“You’re the one who needs them,” Dante said. He lunged at Blays, faking like he were going to knock him off the roof. Blays gasped, then tackled him to the stones. Below them, the city continued to unthaw.
* * *
Cally nodded when Dante made his case for the trip to Bressel. He leaned back in his chair and considered the boy.
“I’ve been meaning to send someone official. I suppose you’d do better at it than someone who can’t speak the language without sounding like they’re coughing up a cat. Let me scare up an escort.”
“No,” Dante said. “Just me and Blays.”
Cally closed one eye. “Without a lot of retainers around to make you look important, they might not take you as seriously as you deserve.”
“Going without guards and circumstance will just be the better to convince them we mean what we say.”
Cally started to say something else, then sighed instead. “How long do you plan to be gone?”
“I don’t know. A while.”
“Even a leisurely pace and a few weeks indulging in the largesse of the courts should have you back here by summer’s end.”
“We’ll be there longer than that. Maybe we’ll head back before the passes grow treacherous. I can’t say right now.”
“Why don’t we drop the pretense this is a negotiation,” Cally said, rolling his eyes. “Yes. Fine. Do as you please. Maybe you’ll take all the pandemonium with you. If you do down there what you did up here, a year from now we could all be feasting in the palace of Bressel.”
“Yeah.” Dante gazed on the old man and found he didn’t fear him. His anger and hatred had burned down, too, become cold things, some of which looked solid but would fall apart at a touch, like charred-out logs the morning after a bonfire. “I know why you lied to me. You wanted to be important again. You wanted to have men have to listen to you again.”
“I had some notion about stopping a war as well. Try to remember to include that part when you write the history.”
“Why did Gabe repeat your little story, though?” Dante said, ignoring the rest. “Did you trick him, too? Gabe wouldn’t care who was leading the council. He was above that.”
Cally snorted. His brows lifted and pinched together, as if Dante were making a joke, then he leaned back in his chair and stared at the boy for a long time.
“We’re going to win norren independence,” Cally said. “When I plotted out that angle for Gabe’s eyes, he snapped from his brooding with a speed that approached the alarming.”
Dante blinked. “The capital isn’t going to like that.”
“Yes, but if you take a moment to consider the matter closely, you might see the capital’s divine wisdom is a bit clouded by the belief the norren should do what they say because they can kill them if they don’t.” Cally waved a hand at him. “Head back to Bressel, then. Stay a while. But try to spare a moment between now and your return to think about how on earth we’re going to fulfill our promise to our good friend Gabe.”
Dante and Blays left alone on horseback two weeks later to the day, packs full, affairs ordered, details of the diplomatic end resolved. Dante had been burdened down with letters of introduction and various hints toward treaties written in Cally’s hand. He’d left the rib of Barden with Cally for study—he hadn’t thought of it in weeks, busy as he was—with orders to forge it into a sword, if at all possible, which Cally denounced as perverse and ostentatious but said he’d see to all the same. Cally made no mention of the book Dante never let from his sight and so he’d decided to take it with him once more. Other than essentials, Blays carried little more than his sword, his single-sapphired badge that marked him as Dante’s second, and an empty flask which he claimed would never pass in sight of a settlement without being filled.
Larrimore’s old badge winked at the throat of Dante’s cloak as they emerged from the shadow of the keep. The streets were slushy, muddy at the edges. Water trickled between the cobbles. The guard at
the Pridegate waved to them as they walked through. Dante waved back, then turned his face to the tumbled blocks of the city fringes. It would take the arrival of ten times as many refugees as had arrived so far to run out of space in the vacant houses between Ingate and Pridegate. Tens of thousands could come before the slums beyond the Pridegate got filled.
The scent of pines began to overwhelm those of human waste. It was early spring. Cool breezes had started to thaw the lowlands, but fresh snow appeared once or twice a week before shrinking back each afternoon. They took an unhurried route along the main roads to the Riverway, the lowest pass through the Dundens. It would add a hundred miles to their journey, but for once, neither of them cared about their speed. Blays grinned as the city disappeared behind them and the dark woods rose up around them up.
“Careful,” he warned. “There may be bad men about.”
“Whatever will we do?” Dante said. He drew his sword and pointed it down the road. “Perhaps Blayschopper will defend us from those miserable souls.”
“And Robertslayer beside it.”
They laughed, slashing the air a few times, then put the weapons away, embarrassed somehow, almost guilty, as if the blades had seen too many dead men to be waved as a joke. The road rolled before them. They began to remember the prevalence of birdsong, the rhythm of clomping hooves, the rush of wind in waist-high grass and pines unbent by snow. They joked a little, talked of what they’d do in Bressel once they’d had their talks with the local officials, but mostly they rode in silence, drifting in their own thoughts.
They had stopped a war—delayed it, more likely, to another age—and that had cost lives of its own, a few of whom Dante’d even liked. To his eyes, the Arawnites were no different or more dangerous than any other sect. Back in Mallon, they would worship in secret again, or be maimed and killed for their heresy. At the foot of the White Tree, he’d been convinced they’d been one right word away from looking on the god’s face, but his certainty had dimmed in the passing of days, a feeling as lost as a spent breath.
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