Oath Breaker

by Michelle Paver; Geoff Taylor

  She was dizzyingly high up. No boughs below, and too far to jump. Trying not to jar her knee, she thrust aside branches. They sprang back in her face as if to say,We helped you once--don't push your luck.Then she saw Torak.

  He was almost level with her, having cleared the top of the ladder and climbed onto one of the oak's outstretched arms. He didn't see her, he was straining to push the ladder away, while Thiazzi, still on it, held firm to both ladder and tree.

  It was a battle Torak couldn't win. Renn watched helplessly as Thiazzi pulled himself onto a branch and reached around the bole of the tree. Torak dodged--and caught sight of Renn.

  His mouth shaped her name as he took in her predicament: trapped, no way to get down. Thiazzi

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  darted around the other side to grab him. Torak dodged, seized the ladder, and heaved. Renn saw the pine trunk tilt toward her and crash into the yew, striking it halfway up the trunk. Torak had given her a way down.

  It nearly cost him his life. As he reached for the next branch, Thiazzi lunged. Torak swung himself out of the way an instant too late, and Thiazzi's blade caught his thigh. Snarling in pain, he stamped on Thiazzi's wrist and sent the knife flying.

  An empty victory. Renn could see that he didn't have a chance. The Soul-Eater didn't need weapons, he would climb after Torak till he reached the uppermost branch, and then ...

  She tore her gaze away. She couldn't help him from here, she had to get down.

  The pine-trunk ladder was too far below, she'd have to jump onto it. Twisting around, she lowered herself over the edge till she was hanging by her hands, and let go. The pine shuddered as she struck it with her good foot, but it held. She didn't bother with the notches, she simply slid, scraping her hands and landing in a blaze of agony on her injured knee. When she looked, Torak was gone.

  No--there he was, clinging to the oak's tapering bole. The Soul-Eater was gaining on him. Renn saw Thiazzi stretch to grab Torak's leg. He missed by a finger. Torak was nearly at the crown, where the tree branched for the

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  last time. Renn saw him dark against the stormy sky, turning his head, wondering what to do. She pictured the Oak Mage seizing him by the ankle, hurling him screaming to his death.

  Setting her teeth, she crawled toward the fire, dragging her bad leg. She grabbed a pine knot full of tree-blood, fiercely ablaze. She crawled toward the oak. "Torak!" Her voice came out as a reedy gasp."Torak!"she yelled."Catch!"

  His head whipped around.

  Kneeling on her good leg, Renn drew back her arm to take aim. This had to be the finest throw of her life.

  The burning brand spun through the air in a flurry of sparks--and Torak caught it.

  Hanging on with his free hand, he lashed out at Thiazzi. The Soul-Eater dodged behind the bole of the oak--reached around--and would have grabbed Torak's foot if his clan-creature wreath hadn't snagged on a branch, jerking him back. He tore it off, raining acorns and mistletoe, but clutching the fire-opal pouch to his breast. That gave Torak a moment to scramble higher. He reached the crown and edged onto the sturdiest branch. It sagged beneath him. He made a swipe with the brand. The Oak Mage struck it a blow with his fist that nearly broke Torak's wrist and sent the brand flying. Time

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  stopped as Torak watched his last chance spin in a trail of sparks and thud to earth.

  Thiazzi was exultant."I am the Master!"he roared.

  But as he bellowed his triumph, the breath of the Forest blew a spark into the tangle of his hair. Torak saw it catch. The Oak Mage did not. Desperately, Torak tried to distract him. "You'll never be Master," he taunted. "Even if you kill me, you'll never get what you want!"

  "And what's that?" sneered the Oak Mage, climbing closer.

  "What you killed my kinsman for: the fire-opal."

  "But I have it!" Gloating, Thiazzi brandished the pouch.

  A bolt of black feathers shot from the sky and Rek made a grab for it, but the Oak Mage brushed her aside with a sweep of his arm.

  The laughter froze on his lips as a shadow slid over him. The eagle owl scythed the air with silent wings, swung her talons forward, and ripped the pouch from his hand. Howling in fury, he reached for her, but she was gone, winging her way toward the High Mountains.

  Now Thiazzi's howl became a scream, for the fire had taken hold, and it was hungry. Clawing at his mane, his beard, his clothes, he faltered--lost his balance--and fell. High in the oak, Torak saw the Soul-Eater lying

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  lifeless on the roots. He saw a throng of Deep Forest hunters emerge from the hollies, break through the ring of thorns, and surround the corpse. Then the clouds burst and the rain lashed down, quenching the flames and sending up plumes of bitter smoke; and the Forest gave a vast, shuddering sigh, having purged itself of the evil which had threatened its green heart.

  Rain streamed down Torak's face as he climbed to safety, but he scarcely noticed. He was shaking with fatigue, yet strangely numb. He couldn't even feel the wound in

  his thigh.

  his thigh. Jumping to earth, he staggered to Renn, who was slumped by the ruins of the fire. Kneeling beside her, he gripped her shoulders. "Are you hurt? Did he hurt you?"

  She shook her head, but she was white as bone, and her eyes were shadowed with a darkness Thiazzi had created. She opened her mouth to say something; then her face worked and she twisted away from him. The nape of her neck was smooth and defenseless. He put his arms around her and pulled her close. As they clung together, the medicine horn at his hip began to hum. Raising his head, he saw Wolf standing between the Great Yew and the Great Oak, his eyes glowing with the amber light of the guide.Watch,he told Torak.It comes....

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  From nowhere, a fierce wind swept through the sacred grove, whipping branches but making no sound. The sun rent the clouds, the great trees blazed so green that it hurt to look, but Torak could not avert his eyes. The humming of the horn was deep inside him, thrilling through his bones. The world splintered and fell away. He couldn't hear the sizzle of embers or the hiss of rain. He couldn't smell the smoke, or feel Renn in his arms.

  In the drifting haze between the oak and the yew stood a tall man. His face was dark against the dazzling sky, and his long hair floated in the voiceless wind. From his head rose the antlers of a stag.

  With a cry, Torak covered his eyes with his hand.

  When he dared look again, the vision was gone, and there was Wolf, his pack-brother, wagging his tail and bounding toward him through the rain. 269

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  When Torak woke up, he didn't know where he was. He lay beneath a mantle of warm hare fur. Green sunlight shone through a spruce-bough roof. He smelled woodsmoke, and heard the sounds of a camp: the crackle of a fire, the little grinding crunches of someone sharpening a knife.

  Then it started coming back. Kneeling with Renn in the sacred grove. The Deep Forest clans crowding around; someone pressing his knife into his hands. The journey to camp, on foot and in a dugout. A woman sewing up the wound in his thigh, another poulticing Renn's knee. A

  270 honeyed drink which made him drowsy, then--nothing.

  Shutting his eyes, he curled into a ball. There was a faint ache in his chest, as if something were trying to get out, and he had a gnawing feeling of apprehension. Thiazzi was dead; but Eostra had the fire-opal. And he and Renn were at the mercy of the Deep Forest clans.

  When he emerged from the shelter, he found a throng of people waiting. They bowed low. He did not bow back. Two days before, they'd been baying for his blood. To his surprise, he spotted Durrain and the Red Deer among them, with a few Willow and Boar Clan, but no Ravens. Where was Renn? He was about to ask when the Forest Horse Leader made an even deeper bow, and bade him come to the scarlet tree and wait.

  Wait for what? he wondered. Around him the Deep Forest clans stared in unnerving silence.

  It was a huge relief to see Renn hobbling toward him on crutches. "Do you know," she said in an undertone, "you
've slept a whole day and a night? I had to prod you to make sure you were still alive." Her voice was brisk, but he saw that something was wrong, although she wasn't yet ready to tell him.

  "Everyone keeps bowing," he said under his breath.

  "Nothing you can do about that," she replied. "You rode the sacred mare and fought the Soul-Eater.Andthe Great Oak is coming into leaf. They're saying you made it happen."

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  He didn't want to talk of that, so he asked about her knee, and she shrugged and said it could be worse. He asked why Durrain was here, and Renn told him that the Deep Forest clans had rejected the Way as fiercely as they'd adopted it, and that they no longer scorned the Red Deer, who'd never followed it at all. "And the Aurochs are so ashamed of having been tricked by a Soul-Eater that they mean to punish themselves with lots more scars. And nobody's going to attack the Open Forest."

  "Is that why the Boars and Willows are here too?"

  Her shoulders rose, and she stabbed the earth with her crutch. "Fin-Kedinn sent them," she said in a taut voice. "He had a struggle preventing Gaup and his clan from attacking, but in the end he persuaded them to send only their Leader: to talk, not fight. The Willows and Boars came with them for support."

  "And Fin-Kedinn?" Torak said quickly.

  She chewed her lip. "Fever. He was too ill to come. That was a few days ago. No one's heard anything since."

  There was nothing he could say to make that better, but he was about to try when the crowd parted and two Auroch hunters approached, dragging the ash-haired woman between them.

  They released her and she stood swaying, peering at Torak with lashless eyes.

  The Forest Horse Leader forced her to her knees at

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  the point of her spear and addressed the throng. "Here is the sinner we caught near our camp!" she cried. "She confessed. She was the one who released the great

  fire." She bowed to Torak, her horsetail sweeping the ground. "It's for you to decide punishment."

  fire." She bowed to Torak, her horsetail sweeping the ground. "It's for you to decide punishment."

  "Me?" said Torak. "But--if anyone, it should be Durrain." He glanced at the Red Deer Mage, but she remained inscrutable. "Durrain says you must do it," said the Leader. "All the clans agree. You saved the Forest. Decide the sinner's fate."

  Torak regarded the prisoner, who was watching him intently. This woman had tried to burn him alive. And yet he felt only pity. "The Master is dead," he told her. "You do know that, don't you?"

  "How I envy him," she said with weary longing. "He knew the fire at last." Suddenly, she smiled at Torak, baring her broken teeth. "But you--you are blessed! The fire let you live! I will submit to your judgement."

  Beside him, Renn stirred. "It was you," she said to the woman. "You put the sleeping-potion in their water."

  The woman twisted her dry red hands. "The fire let him live! They had no right to kill him."

  Angry murmurs from the crowd, and the Forest Horse Leader shook her spear. "Speak the word," she told Torak, "and she dies."

  Torak looked from the vengeful green face to the ash

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  haired woman. "Leave her alone," he said. There was a storm of protest.

  "But she drugged us!" cried the Forest Horse Leader. "She released the great fire! Shemustbe punished!" Torak turned on her. "Are you wiser than the Forest?" "Of course not! But--"

  "Then this is how it will be! The Red Deer will keep watch on her always, and she will swear never to release the fire again." He met the Leader's gaze and held it, and at last she lowered her spear.

  "It shall be as you say," she muttered.

  "Ah," breathed the crowd.

  Durrain stood motionless, observing Torak.

  Suddenly he wanted to be rid of them all, these wild-eyed people with their caked heads and scarlet trees.

  As he pushed through the crowd, Renn hobbled after him. "Torak, wait!"

  He turned.

  "You did the right thing," she said.

  "They don't know that," he said in disgust. "They'll let her live because I told them to. Not because it's right."

  "That won't matter to her."

  "Well, it matters to me."

  He left her and headed out of camp. He didn't care where he went, just as long as it was away from the Deep Forest clans.

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  He hadn't gone far before the wound in his thigh began to hurt, so he flung himself down on the riverbank and watched the Blackwater glide by. The ache in his chest was worse, and he wanted Wolf, but Wolf didn't come, and he didn't have the heart to howl.

  He sensed someone behind him, and turned to see Durrain. "Go away," he growled.

  She came closer and sat down.

  He tore off a dock leaf and started shredding it along the veins.

  "Your decision was wise," she said. "We will watch her well." She paused. "We didn't know how far her wits had wandered. We were wrong to give her so much freedom. We--made a mistake."

  Torak wished Renn could have heard that.

  "She sinned," Durrain went on, "but it's wise to leave vengeance to the Forest." She turned to Torak, and he felt the force of her gaze. "You understand this now. It was something your mother always knew."

  Torak went still. "My mother? But--you said you couldn't tell me anything about her."

  She gave him her thin smile. "You were bent on revenge. You weren't ready to hear." Tilting her head, she studied the shifting leaves above her. "You were born in the Great Yew," she said. "When your mother felt her time come, she went to the sacred grove to seek the Forest's protection for her child. She went into the Great Yew. 275

  You were born there. She buried your navel cord in its embrace. Then she and the Wolf Mage fled south. Later, when she knew her death was near, she sent him to find me, so she could tell the things she couldn't tell him."

  She held out her hand, and a spotted moth settled on her palm. "The night you were born, the World Spirit came to her in a vision. He decreed that you must fight all your life to undo the evil which the Wolf Mage had helped create. She was frightened. She begged the World Spirit to help her child fulfill so hard a destiny. He said he would make you a spirit walker--but that you must then be clanless, for no clan should be so much stronger than the others." She watched the moth flutter away. "And he decreed that this gift must cost your mother her life."

  he decreed that this gift must cost your mother her life."

  Torak stared at the leaf skeleton in his hands. "To seal the pact, the World Spirit broke off a tine of his antler and gave it to her. She made it into a medicine horn. The day she finished it, she died." A redstart alighted on an alder, wiped its beak on the branch, and flew off.

  "Your father," said Durrain, "left you in the wolf den and went to build her Death Platform. Three moons later, he brought her bones to the sacred grove and put them to rest in the Great Yew."

  Torak cast the leaf skeleton on the water and watched it carried away. The Great Yew. His birth tree. His mother's death tree.

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  He thought of his father, setting pegs in its ancient flanks to help his mate climb in when she was ready to give birth; then bringing back her bones and laying them to rest, along with her knife: the knife which, many summers later, had saved Renn's life.

  On the other side of the river, a troop of ducklings followed their mother down the bank. Torak saw them without seeing them. He was clanlessbecausehe was a spirit walker. His mother had chosen to make him so, at the cost of her life.

  A painful anger kindled within him. She could have lived, but she'd chosen to die. She had done it for him; but she'd left him behind.

  Unsteadily, he got to his feet. "I never wanted this."

  Durrain made to speak, but he motioned her back. "I neverwantedit!" he shouted.

  Blindly, he ran through the Forest. He kept running till his thigh hurt too much to go on.

  He found himself in a green glade netted with sunlight, whe
re swallows swooped and butterflies flitted over windflowers. Beautiful, he thought. And his dead would never see it.

  As he sank to his knees in the grass, he thought of his mother and his father and Bale. The pain in his chest became as sharp as flint. For so long he had clung to his need for vengeance. Now it was gone, and there was nothing left but grief. A lump seemed to work loose

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  under his breastbone, and he cried out. He went on crying: loud, heaving, jerky sobs. Crying for his dead, who had left him behind.

  Renn lay in her sleeping-sack, staring into the dark. Her thoughts went hopelessly around and around. Fin-Kedinn had made her bow. Thiazzi had broken it. FinKedinn was sick. The bow was an omen. Fin-Kedinn was dead.

  Eventually, she could bear it no longer. Grabbing her crutches, she hobbled from the shelter.

  It was middle-night, and the camp was quiet. She made her way to a fire and lowered herself onto a log, where she sat watching the sparks fly up to die in the sky. Where was Torak? How could he do this? Running off without telling her, when she was desperate to get back to the Open Forest.

  Some time later, he limped into camp. He saw her and came to sit by her fire. He looked drained, and his eyelashes were spiky, as if he'd been crying. Renn hardened her heart. "Where have you been?" she said accusingly.

  He glowered at the fire. "I want to get out of here. Back to the Open Forest."

  "Me too! If you hadn't gone off like that, we'd be on our way."

  With a stick he stabbed the embers. "I hate being a

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  spirit walker. It feels like a curse."

  "You are what you are," she said unsympathetically. "Besides, some good comes out of it."

  "What good? Tell me what good ever came out of it?"

  She bridled. "When you were a baby, in the wolf den. It's because you're a spirit walker that you learned wolf talk. Which let you make friends with Wolf. There. That's good, isn't it?"

  He went on glowering. "But it's not just wolf talk, that's the thing. When you spirit walk--I think it leaves marks on your souls."