The White Tree

by Edward W. Robertson

  "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 would 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 r
est. "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.

  Barden itself was no proof. Sown from a god's knuckle; the creation of a human power Dante someday hoped to match; a mystery from before the memory of man. Each seemed equally likely and equally impossible.

  The woods gave way to plains and they stopped in a town for a day for fresh food and a soft bed and rum for Blays' flask. The plains gave way to hills and for two days they rode in a sun so warm they were able to shed their cloaks. The following afternoon a bitter wind blew in a storm of hail and Dante raised his hood and heard it pocking from his cowl. Icy white pebbles bounced on the trail, dashing into quickly-melted splinters. Blays laughed, turned up his face to the light stings of the changed weather. Dante followed suit and took a hailstone to the eye.

  He could build a Barden some day. He knew it in his bones. He knew it the way he knew water would feel wet or that he could pick up a stone and throw it. At times he felt he could plunge both hands into the pale shell of reality and strip it away like sand. It wasn't arrogance. It wasn't destiny. It simply was. If he could stay alive—he tried to tally, briefly, how many had died in the last few months (most of them faceless; a few, like Larrimore, never to be equaled again), but at last it would be a guess, and he wouldn't do the dead the final dishonor of lumping them into a single number, as if, in the end, all that mattered were the quantity—if he could stay alive where so many others hadn't, he knew he would one day peer into those powers behind the hills and the streams, and where he looked, the shadows would move.

  Snow infiltrated the high hills surrounding the Dundens. The horses plodded on. They lit fires by night, cooked the rabbits Dante killed with a simple flash of nether each dusk. He prodded up the meat-flecked skeletons and set them out on watch while they slept under the burning eyes of the stars and whatever gods might call them home. They passed refugees and tradesmen and vagabonds on the roads, but by night his rabbit-guard stood sentry and was not disturbed.

  The hills banked down to the roaring mountain-fed river and they followed its narrow gorge through the mountains. The snow was wet and heavy, but no more than a couple inches deep. The river flowed down to meet the wide calm waters of the Chanset and they descended into bony trees studded with the green buds of fresh growth. The horses churned the mud of the thaw and the wind-tossed rain showers.

  Perhaps Blays had it right. Let the world turn on its own for a while. It had done so before they were born and it would do so after they were gone. For whatever ills it caused, the ambition of the men within it was no less natural then the nether itself. Whatever it was that drove them to do harm was the same need that compelled them to build sky-scratching cathedrals and castle walls twice as thick as a man was tall, to tramp down the roads that spoked through a thousand miles of farmland and wilderness, to gather in villages and towns and cities in the planet-hugging reach of conquest and commerce; the same need that made them grow mile on mile of wind-ruffled wheat, that made men fill libraries with books and books with words, that made them fill their lungs with air and their stomachs with beer; that peopled a poor woman's home with bright-eyed, soot-streaked children who would one day travel from one coast to another, or launch across the shuddering waves far from sight of land, or die before they knew what surrounded them, or rob an ancient temple in the dead of night and pry its secrets from the rubbly stone.

  Trees thrust up around Dante, blotting out the sun. Grass sighed at his ankles and thighs whenever he stepped off the road. Hundreds of pounds of horse rose and fell beneath him. Crows spat at each other in the boughs and were chased away by nattering squirrels. In the undergrowth, mice and rabbits and wolves stirred ankle-deep leaves. Spooked deer caught the boys' scent and crashed away through the brambles. And above them, by day or by night, the wind breathed in the trees. If there had ever been gods in this place, they'd been driven out by the crush of their own creations a long time ago. Arawn, he knew, had not been at the Tree. The Cycle of Arawn had led him through unknown years of man's knowledge. He had thought it would show him its very roots. Instead, in following it to its end, to the endless snowfield beneath the White Tree where he believed he would find a god—an order and a meaning and a hold on
this world—he had found himself simply trapped among mad people doing mad things, had killed one friend and been betrayed by another, one more mote in a blind storm of ash, alone except for Blays, vulnerable except the wrath he'd found in the nether. His silence deepened. Possibly, that was enough.

  After weeks of travel the smoke of Whetton mingled with the dusky sky. Red clouds piled up to the west. The road forked, one branch east toward town, another to the south and Bressel. Dante led his horse east.

  "Where are you going?" Blays said, jerking his head at the other path.

  "Whetton."

  "We're only a couple days out from Bressel."

  "There's no hurry," Dante said. "I want to see what's become of the city."

  Blays bit the skin around his thumbnail. "What if they recognize what's become of us? You do remember our last visit? The local hospitality of rope and high branches?"

  "Last time we were here you looked like a rag wrapped around a stick," Dante said. "Look at you now in your fancy clothes, your hair cut straight."

  Blays eyed him. "There were an awful lot of people in that field. Thousands, if I recall."

  "If anyone gives us any trouble," Dante said, nudging his horse forward, "we'll just point them at our badges. They'll be in no rush to invite more trouble from the north. If that doesn't do it, we'll tell them about how, at great personal risk, we saved their stupid town from war."

  "This will end badly," Blays declared, then rallied to catch up.

  They headed down the road where months ago thousands of citizens had fled fire and battle. Today a shepherd was driving his flock to market and the pair skirted around the grungy blobs of walking wool. The outskirts of the city were hewn in fresh blond wood, offset here and there by the charred-out husks of what remained. The streets were thick with sodden ash and charcoal. The rap of hammers smacked on all sides. Masons and carpenters shouted from scaffolds wrapped around the sharp corners of damaged temples and half-constructed manors, squeezing out a few last minutes of work in the waning daylight. Men and women hurried home from market or the docks, or left the quiet warmth of their hearths for the clamor and company of a public house. Blays' mouth twitched at the signs above the pubs, the painted heads of stags or owls or an anchor tilted on its side.