The White Tree

by Edward W. Robertson

  "We'll circle around," Blays whispered. "If it looks clear, we'll grab our stuff. If you see or hear anything, freeze on the spot."

  Dante nodded, glad to follow Blays' steps. The kid hunched down and advanced around their camp, pausing every twenty or thirty feet to cock his head to the silence. When they'd made more than half a circle around it he hunkered down for a minute, lips a white line. Dante culled small comfort in the fact horses were noisy by nature, always snorting and whickering at each other like big hairy idiots. They couldn't take two steps in the dense forest floor without sounding like something falling down a mountain.

  Blays tapped him on the shoulder and they stole straight for their gear. He saw no sign the ground here had been disturbed by anyone but themselves. They gathered weapons and vegetables, wordless, wrapping the two half-eaten fish from the night before in fresh-fallen leaves. Dante grabbed a stray book and that was all it took to be ready to move.

  They drew back, Blays leading them direct away from the pond sitting a tenth-mile to the east. They moved quickly but without panic, feet crumpling leaves but not crashing them; still, Blays would halt them every couple minutes to crouch beside a trunk and listen to the forest. It was early morning yet, the sun bright without being warm. The season had begun to shorten its track through the sky, but it would be light another eight hours, maybe nine, and the thought of going on like this for hours on end made Dante want to lie down then and there.

  "There's no way they tracked us from Bressel," Blays said at one of their halts. "They'd have been on us in two days, not two weeks."

  "We don't know it was them," Dante said, looking behind them.

  "No one else has any reason to be out here."

  "Other people exist, you know."

  "Don't be a fool." Blays' voice had jumped and he bugged his eyes and brought it back to a whisper. "It could be fox hunters. It could be vagabonds, though that would raise the interesting question of how the hell they got their hands on horses. Even if they were those things, it wouldn't make us any safer. There's no law here."

  "Just us," Dante said, clenching his teeth. "How does anyone get anywhere when everything's this screwed up?"

  "By being so nasty mere sight of them makes everyone else run away. Let's go."

  Despite living in the woods for weeks, he hadn't truly noticed how many animals shared the land. Every crunch of leaves or sudden shrill cry made his neck go tight. The air was cool, almost cold, but he was tickled by icy lines of sweat down his ribs. Blays walked with his back bent, leaning forward and hurrying along like his nose weighed two hundred pounds and only constant motion could keep him from toppling. Dante urged the sun on, outraged that something so big could be so slow. Hours passed. His feet got sore but he found he wasn't tired, not after the last few weeks of fake swordfights and stomping around the pathless woods. The back of his mouth tasted like the dry, sour aftertaste of cranberries. His head felt thick, fuzzy and no more substantial than puffwood seeds, and when he took his eyes off the ground and held his hand in front of his face he saw that it was shaking.

  Noon. The sun came straight down and lay against his skin without warmth. He kept his eyes on the beat of his feet. There was no wind and when he saw the ripple of the shadows of the leaves his foot almost missed the earth. With a few more days of reading and concentration, he thought he would be able to do more with them than see them. He hadn't had those days, though. All he could depend on, if things fell apart, was his blade and his training. He trusted the steel, at least.

  He nudged Blays toward the subdued trickle of a stream and they knelt at its edge and drank away the sweat of the journey. He shrugged his pack from one shoulder, meaning to eat some carrots, then froze and listened to the language of the woods.

  "Get back," he whispered.

  "What is it?" Blays' hand went to his sword. Dante shook his head and retreated along the route they'd taken, breaking after thirty feet to head away from the stream. He pulled Blays down under a thick bush and closed his eyes, trying to hush his breath. Blays made as if to speak and stopped at the snap of twigs from the direction they'd just left. He pressed himself lower to the dirt.

  "They crossed the stream," they heard, a harsh, deep voice that rumbled through the air. Dante raised his head a couple inches, but the trees were too thick to see anything but branches. "What've you got?"

  "Not far off. I can feel them." The second voice was high but faint. Dante heard more words but couldn't differentiate them, then: "It's too close to tell."

  "Let's take a damn break," said a third man. "Haven't eaten since sunup."

  "We can catch them now," the first one said. "They're close."

  "We can catch them just as easy without starving to death in the meantime. They're on foot."

  The discussion dropped to a mutter of details. He strained his ears, made out the words "trail" and "book" and "carry the bodies." They went silent a minute later, and after another minute Blays caught Dante's eye and gestured north, away. Dante raised a finger to his own mouth. A few seconds later a horse blew air past its mouth. He thought he could smell its animal sweat over the gaminess of his own.

  Hooves splashed through the stream a few minutes later. Dante waited, eyes closed and mind wide, but he felt nothing. With a prickle to his neck he realized he was disappointed.

  "We should head back," he whispered. "Toward the river."

  "Could be others searching that way."

  "I don't think so. We can cut northeast. Find a town."

  "What good will a town do us?" Blays said.

  "Keep us from getting killed in the woods like dogs? Come on." He got to his feet with exaggerated care, arms held to either side. He didn't know how long the stream would delay the riders and he led the way this time, setting a pace so fast his trailing foot sometimes left the ground before his first had fallen. The leaves clicked together in the afternoon breeze and he couldn't keep himself from hastening to a jog. They covered three or four miles before his wind gave out and they dragged themselves beneath another umbrella of undergrowth. Not for the first time, he wished one of his books had a close-scale map of the land around them; he knew there would be people around the river, that's what rivers were for, but they could easily cut ten miles of north-south travel if they only knew where they were. He kneaded his back where the pack had bounced against it.

  "They were following us," Blays said. His voice was above a whisper but still soft enough not to carry.

  "No kidding." Dante pulled his knees to his chest and rested his head against them.

  "I mean, they were trailing us. Like hounds. The one who sounded like a fairy said he could sense us."

  "He can."

  "How is that even possible?"

  "Don't ask me."

  "Come on," Blays said, poking him in the side. "You study these things."

  "The key word is 'study,'" Dante said, narrowing his eyes. "I don't know how to doanything."

  "This is hopeless. If they can pick up a trail that's weeks old, they can follow us to the ends of the earth."

  "No they can't. They lost us for a few weeks there. We can walk on rocks instead of dirt. Whenever we find a stream we'll wade down it a ways rather than cutting straight across."

  "That'll just slow us down."

  "It'll slow their woodsman even more." Dante got to his knees, readied himself to stand. "I don't think the one who said he can sense us can tell any more than that we're near. If he could, we'd already be dead."

  "But we can't hide when they've got him and a tracker," Blays said, wrapping his fingers around the hilt of his sword. "That leaves running and fighting. I'm getting sick of my legs having all the say. My arms are getting restless, they're asking 'When do I get to do my part?'"

  "Tell your arms to stow it."

  "We can ambush them. Like in the alley."

  "No," Dante said, then felt foolish at his own authority. "We're not prepared. These ones are more dangerous than the others."

 
"This is cowardly," Blays said, but he stood.

  Dante's face went hot. "Better yellow than red."

  Branches lashed their faces. Mud sucked at their boots. Roots reached up with gnarled fingers, scrabbling for their toes. Their feet were stubbed and sore and sweaty. Their packs chafed their shoulders. Dante did all he could think to make his passage look weird—walking on just his toes for a hundred yards until his calves gave out; striding longer with one leg than the other; sometimes, when Blays was ahead and distracted with making the trail, he'd hop on one foot for eight or ten bounces before he was afraid Blays would hear the odd rhythm and look back. He had no idea whether it would help. He doubted it would do more than make the hunter laugh. What else could he do? Turn their blood to fire inside their veins? Conjure a demon to drag them down to hell? Maybe he could just make the entire world blow up while he was at it. He trudged on.

  A few miles further another stream blocked their way and they waded till the waters sluiced by just under the tops of their boots. They followed it upstream a couple hundred yards until it bent back toward the west, then clambered up the bank. Dante's feet felt like stones. They couldn't do another crossing, he thought. Their boots wouldn't dry before dark.

  Their time in the woods had taught them to walk it with minimal noise and they halted together when they heard the slow but steady steps among the leaves. Something heavy, many-legged. They ducked behind an ivy-wrapped stone and listened to the steps grow nearer. When he saw the branches approaching Dante thought, for one crazy moment, the trees had taken life and were walking around on their roots, and then the tan sweep of the buck's head cleared the brush and he ached for a bow. But they'd have no time to clean it, no strength to carry all that meat, and they let out their breath and hurried on. They continued through the afternoon, rested in the twilight, then walked a couple hours in the weak moonlight, guided by the bright northern wink of Jorus, which he'd come to think of as the Millstar. Just as he thought his legs would give out beneath him Blays stopped short, squatting down and planting his hands on his knees.

  "That's all I've got in me. One more step and I'm going to fall on my face."

  "We've made good time," Dante said, plopping down beside him. "Should find a town tomorrow."

  "How far off from the river?"

  "Fifteen miles? Twenty? I've never been this far north."

  "Me neither." Blays laughed for the first time that day. "I'd never left Bressel."

  "You never saw the sea?" Dante said, tucking his cloak around him.

  "Well yeah. Never any further than that, though."

  They thought their private thoughts. Dante's heart thudded when Blays reached for the pack, but he emerged with the leaf-wrapped fish and a handful of withering mushrooms. He passed Dante one of the fish. "May as well eat these. Won't need to save anything if we'll hit town tomorrow."

  "Yeah." They ate their largest meal in days and sipped from the water skins. Exhaustion hit him before he was full. He could feel the puffiness in his eyelids, the discontent in his muscles that would mean full-fledged aches in the morning. Without speaking they both knew the insanity of lighting a fire, and instead pawed leaves over their legs and torsos, to hide and to insulate.

  "It's the book," Blays said, and Dante realized he'd been asleep.

  "Huh?"

  "They're following the book."

  Dante opened his eyes. He reached into the folds of his cloak, felt the leathery cover of the book where he kept it wrapped beside his face.

  "Leave it, if you like," he said around the lump in his throat. "I won't."

  Blays didn't respond. Dante lifted his head to see if the boy had been talking in his sleep.

  "I don't run from my problems," Blays said at last. "Well. Not if I can help it."

  "We'll outrun them to town. When they get there, they won't find us, we'll find them."

  "That's a different tune than you were singing earlier," the boy said. "I can't tell if that's the kind of optimism that's like to take them by surprise or the kind that gets us killed."

  "If you die," Dante said, closing his eyes, "what's it matter anyway?"

  "I assume it will hurt," Blays said. Dante didn't know whether to laugh or curse or learn to pray. How had it all ended so suddenly? How did this violence keep finding him? If the nether drove them to it, and if the nether lurked behind all things, where in the wide realms of man could he go where it couldn't follow?

  4

  He woke up. That was a good thing. It meant he hadn't been killed in his sleep.

  He stood and wished he had. Leaves fell from the folds of his cloak, rustling like distant water, and Blays stirred. Dante's calves and lower back felt like someone had been tugging on both ends of them all night. He stretched out, gingerly, closing his eyes. After the initial shock, and as long as he didn't move, the ache was almost pleasant. The sun hadn't yet lumbered over the fields of the east but the stars on that side of the sky were growing faint in the deep blue. Through a gap in the trees the six stars of Taim's hourglass were just above the horizon. Autumn was slipping away. He sat back down, shivering a bit, giving Blays a little longer before they picked up where they'd left off.

  The world was shadow. In the moment of that thought his senses seemed to fade—the hesitant predawn birdsong became muffled, the fuzzy shapes of the last of the night grew darker, less distinct. His own breath galed in his ears. He reached out for those shadows, extending both his hand and his mind. They didn't come and somehow he knew that was right. He tried again, slitting his eyes until he saw more eyelash than forest, counting the seconds between his deep and steady inhalations. Somehow he expected the slivers of darkness to be cold but the only way he knew they were sinking into his skin was through sight and a dull, far-off feel for its travel, the way you can finally see the sun move when it hits the horizon, or how the moon and fixed stars seem to have jumped whenever you look to the skies of the night. The pain faded from his limbs then; a bright red bramble scratch on his left hand went pink and then to the rusty brown of an old scab. He picked it away with his thumbnail and beneath it the skin was fresh. He closed his eyes and thought if the opposite desire of his mind would cause the opposite change to his flesh.

  "What time is it?" Blays asked, rousing him. The nether—naming it for what it was—shuddered back into normal shadow.

  "Just before dawn."

  "Time for unreasonable men to be on their way," Blays muttered.

  They packed up and lit out. Leaves spun to the forest floor. Dante let Blays lead. He wouldn't know how fast to travel if his legs still burned like they had when he'd woken. Birds chirruped in the treetops like nothing were different. He walked with a stillness of thought, feeling light, feeling holy, the calm in the center of a storm of all this life.

  He'd stopped pretending like he didn't understand what was happening to him. He'd imagined it would take longer, in fact. That he'd need a teacher or a guide. That he'd need to meditate or pray to be handed the way. He didn't know how the book was showing him the way, only that it was. Dante watched the back of Blays' head bob as he stepped over fallen branches or ducked under live ones. He'd learn faster if he didn't have to watch himself, to keep what he was learning hidden. He needed practice, but couldn't get it when proof of his ability would turn the boy to silence and sidelong glances when he thought Dante wasn't looking. Blays had become something like a friend since the days in the woods had shown him Dante was nothing but an average kid. He didn't want to lose that. He'd had friends before, but not many, and he'd left them all behind the day he'd left the village. He missed them, in an abstract way, knowing they were gone to him and he would never see them again.

  He began to forget himself. Little tricks as he walked. Concentrating on the shadows until they curled around his finger. Putting a dark globe on the toe of his boot and seeing how long he could make it keep up with his steps. Thinking on the men he'd read about in the Cycle and the thrill they must have felt when they reached out with their
hand and made the world change. They were no longer so unimaginable, so distant and alien; Stathus the Wise and Linagan, Jack Hand and Kerry Cooper—he wished he could meet them and hear their words for himself.

  "Stream up ahead," Blays murmured, and Dante jumped.

  "Okay."

  "It should turn into the river."

  "That's what streams do, become rivers," Dante said, tucking his chin against his chest and peering into the crossed boughs of the trees to the east, as if looking hard enough would summon up the gray waters of the Chanset.

  "We could follow it, I mean," he said, shrugging off Dante's tone.

  "That's an idea. Can't follow our tracks if there aren't any."

  "Let's cross it, head upstream a bit, and double back."

  A couple hundred yards on the other side they turned around, retracing their path as closely as they could. The stream was shallow, fast, and strong, widening abruptly from ten feet across to twenty or thirty of ankle-deep flow, then constricting again, just as quickly, at the next elbow in its path. Its banks were dug deep—if they ducked they couldn't be seen unless someone were watching right from the lip—and its bed was a carpet of rocks, as smooth as if they'd been sanded, some as small as robins' eggs, others sturdy and immobile as the heads of bulls. Big floods in the spring carved it deep, no doubt. They walked on dry rocks at its edge for a while, throwing out their arms for balance, stones thocking together under their weight. The rush of water washed away the sounds of the woods and they spoke, when at all, in raised tones that would have carried like seeds on a breeze if they'd been above the banks. At the bends in its path the banks narrowed on them until the stony beds were buried in cold water that yanked at their ankles with the strength of a man. They slowed at these times, keeping a hand on the wall of dirt to their right or the shoulder of whoever was leading the way.