Chriani nodded, even as he felt himself trying to force thoughts of Kathlan from his mind. Too much fear there. A thing he couldn’t think on yet.
She would be fine. She had to be. He didn’t know what story she’d tell, but he knew there’d be one. She’d called out when she told him to flee, had set up the idea that he was the one who struck down Jeradien. It would look like Kathlan had saved the Aerachi warrior’s life.
Kathlan would lie as much as she needed to, Chriani thought darkly. He had showed her how.
His reflection was pale in the pool as he rose, showing him his shoulder, clear to see. The war-mark there echoing the marks the other Ilvani wore.
The Ilmari, Dargana had said, as if excluding Chriani from their number. As he reached the horse, he felt the expression ring empty in his mind, feeling a distance from it that told him she was right. The threat of being killed for who you were would do that.
The white horse that had borne him was a stallion, strong but compact. Still, Chriani needed an arm from its rider to boost himself to its bare back. He felt as much as heard a flicker of dark laughter drift through the troop. Across the way, Dargana clambered up to her rider’s horse without difficulty. With disbelief, Chriani noted how that horse was among a few in the troop that carried no reins in addition to no saddle. Its rider had her legs high up on the horse’s flanks, her knees and bare feet alone guiding the creature as it shot ahead.
Dargana had no need to hold onto her rider, Chriani saw. He kept his own hands back this time, locked his legs to the horse’s sides. He set his arms to either side of him for balance as they set out again at a run.
The troop stopped once more past dawn for an equally short rest, the horses and their riders all taking water again. The light through the trees was a shadowy haze by now, bright enough to see by. The light disks winked out, disappearing into belt packs before the Ilvani set out again.
Riding on by daylight, Chriani found that his balance improved. So too did his ability to take the measure of the warriors they rode with. Their riding style at least was familiar to him, even in the short time that he had patrolled the frontier. The Ilvani rode as if they were born on horseback, mount and rider sharing one set of senses, a singular focus. No fear in them. Nothing existing outside the space of the vine-swept trails, the towering limni growing in tight ranks, raining down pale sunlight and a drift of green-gold leaves as the horses passed.
Chriani had never seen the Valnirata of the Greatwood outside combat, he realized. Never had the chance to watch them riding except across the long spaces that separated Ilvani and Ilmari as their riders shadowed each other along the frontier. Never seeing them except through the haze of frantic expectation and the hiss of arrows back and forth through the trees.
In their unbridled ease as they rode, in their instinctive sense of control, the Ilvani reminded him of Kathlan. An unwitting observation. A single moment of stray thought, but Chriani felt a pain hammering at his chest, a darkness to his vision. He had to hang on to his rider escort momentarily, fighting to regain his balance as they raced on.
One more stop saw the horses take water and engage in standing rest, but the halt was so brief that Chriani had no time to do anything but stretch his legs. Then just as he was getting to the point when he feared he might fall off the horse from exhaustion, the troop slowed its pace, slipping along a narrow trail that entered a broad glade tufted with pale green grass. The great trees rose up to frame a narrow circle of sky above, the forest around them a shimmering aura of gold and green.
Though the sky was too bright to scan, Chriani guessed that the sun was high in the world above and around them. He was steadier this time as he dismounted, watching as the horses were led to an area of flattened grass near a spring-fed pool. The glade had the look of some kind of tended way station. Thin silver ropes marked the edges of nets strung within a framework of low branches, the Ilvani unfurling them to reveal sacks of feed and forage. This they scattered to the grass, the horses eating as the Ilvani looked them over, rubbed them down with their hands.
With nothing else to do, Chriani sat, feeling the weight of exhaustion push him down as if the ground might be swallowing him. Dargana approached with a silver flask in hand, its sides etched in a bewilderingly complex pattern of leaf-curved lines.
“Mead,” she said as she knelt. By her movements, she was nearly as stiff as Chriani, though she didn’t look as tired.
“From where?” he said.
Dargana nodded toward her own rider where she was gently massaging her horse’s left hock, working it with long fingers. “It’ll give you strength.”
Chriani sipped at the flask and felt an unexpected rush of warmth twist through him. He caught the familiar meadow scent of Ilmari mead in the liquor, but mixed with unfamiliar flavors and fragrances. He drank deeper, feeling the pain in his back lessened, the light around him burning brighter as his fatigue was seemingly drawn away.
One by one, the horses lay down, collapsing to the ground and settling into position for a deep slumber. As they sat down beside and between their mounts, the Ilvani were talking to each other. Whispering in the shimmering silence. More than once, Chriani saw them glance in his and Dargana’s direction.
“Are we prisoners?” he asked quietly.
“We don’t need to be. You want to run, you know as well as they do, there’s nowhere you’ll get to in the wood where they won’t catch you.”
Across from them, Dargana’s escort rose to her feet with a paper-wrapped package in hand. She shared Dargana’s darkness, her eyes black beneath a shroud of tangled hair set with streaks of night-blue. The same color as the edges of her war-mark, wrapping her shoulder and sweeping down to encircle one breast.
She stopped before them, tossing the package to Dargana. The exile nodded as she touched right hand to left shoulder like some gesture of thanks. Chriani wasn’t sure what underlay the exchange, noting only that the Ilvani warrior seemed to be doing her best to ignore him, but he mimicked Dargana’s gesture as best he could.
The Valnirata warrior responded by spitting, catching him on the cheek.
Chriani was on his feet before he realized he was moving, Dargana up just as fast, trying to step in front of him. She was whispering words in the forest tongue, talking too fast for Chriani to catch her meaning. A flash of blue steel erupted as a bloodblade appeared in the warrior’s hand.
“Taelendar!”
The Ilvani who was Chriani’s escort called out from across the glade, his voice shutting the whispered conversations of the other Ilvani to silence. Even the faint wind tracing through the trees above them seemed to slow. Chriani didn’t know the word the Ilvani had spoken, but from the way the warrior snapped to attention and spun around, he guessed it was her name.
Chriani’s rider said nothing else. Just held the angry warrior’s gaze for what seemed like a timeless moment. Chriani’s hands were locked to fists, but he realized it only when he felt Dargana’s hands against his, pushing them down.
The warrior Taelendar swung her bloodblade behind her to sheathe it in its back scabbard. The way she held her hand meant that Chriani got to see the dagger for a long moment before it disappeared within well-worn leather. He was fairly certain that was as she’d intended it.
She stalked back toward the horses, making a wide arc around the clearing as Chriani’s rider stepped forward. He was tall and dark, hair and eyes the grey-black of charcoal ash. Though Chriani had seen the war-mark on the Ilvani’s shoulder for most of their ride, its full effect was visible only from the front. It was in black and grey, a stark shadow where it plunged down and across his chest, encircling breast and navel as a cascade of razor-sharp lines.
“I am Farenna,” the Ilvani said. He spoke the common Ilvalantar, though his accent was sharp, enunciating clearly as if he had guessed at Chriani’s lack of practice with the complex tongue. “I am captain among this troop. You are Chriani, and friend to us. Taelendar is young. She is angry, but you ar
e in no danger. Please, eat and rest.”
“Our thanks,” Dargana said. She made the same gesture as before, but Chriani didn’t follow her lead this time.
“For our security,” Farenna said, “I must search you, friend Chriani.” His tone was even. Almost apologetic.
Chriani felt the absurdity of the statement, standing before the Ilvani half naked and weaponless. “Search me for what…?” he started to say. Then he saw the flare of a blue-white light in Farenna’s hand.
Against the shimmering of that light, the steel ring at Chriani’s finger pulsed with an unnatural warmth. Before he had any chance to react, Farenna was nodding as if he could read something in the ring’s dweomer, the light dancing as he traced his fingers along Chriani’s belt.
Chriani’s hands were locked to fists at his side. Dargana caught his eye, shook her head ever so slightly.
“You have gold within your belt, Ilmari.” Farenna’s hand shifted along the leather as if he was testing it. “I sense the shadow my spell casts against it. Please. Show me.”
The eyes of all the Ilvani were on him, Taelendar standing with arms crossed upon her chest. Carefully, Chriani slipped his fingers to the belt’s hidden pockets. He pulled forth the black ring, his lockpicks. The golden badge, the two talismans. The Ilvani captain touched them all, one by one. But at the sight of the talismans, his hand slowed.
“The hunter’s heart,” he said quietly. Gavalirnon. He plucked one of the talismans from Chriani’s hand. “How do you come by these?”
Chriani made no move to stop him. “I took them off the Ilvani hunting me.” He had no energy in him to even try to lie. No reason to anymore. “The gold disk is Ilmari magic. It masks me to the tracking power of the talismans. That’s why they’re dark.”
He expected more questions but Farenna simply nodded, thoughtful. He returned the hunter’s heart to Chriani’s hand. “My thanks.”
“Where are you taking us?” Chriani asked as the captain turned away toward the horses.
Farenna glanced back. “You must wait for your questions, friend Chriani. As we have waited for you.”
Chriani watched the captain darkly as he paced away. “What does he mean by that?” he asked Dargana.
“Eat,” was all she said. She slipped to the ground and opened the paper-wrapped package, some sort of flatbread revealed within. “You need to rest, and badly. The Ilvani don’t need the sleep you do. They won’t wait for you.”
Chriani felt the weight of his exhaustion hit him again as she said it, but he shrugged. “The horses will be resting a while. I’ll manage what I can.” He broke off a bit of the bread and tasted it, sensing a sweetness like the draught Dargana had shared.
“The horses of the Valnirata rest no longer than their riders do. We’ll be up and gone again before the sun has moved halfway to dusk. Rest every time you can, or they’ll be carrying you in.”
“Carrying me in to where?”
Chriani saw an answer in the exile’s dark eyes, but she said nothing in response.
He ate half the bread in short order, washing it down with more mead and finding his hunger strangely satiated. Dargana shifted away from him when she was done, settling back against the upthrust root of a limni nearly as broad as she was. Chriani heard her breathing deeply, settling into the strange posture of sitting half-sleep that the Ilvani favored.
The trancelike manner of Ilvani rest was no secret among the Ilmari, but Chriani had never actually seen it. He had no idea what specific gifts of their Ilvani parents others of his mixed blood inherited, but the secret of waking sleep wasn’t a thing he had ever known. Not sure why that aspect of his father’s lineage hadn’t been passed down to him. Across the clearing, the riders had gone silent, most of them likewise sitting cross-legged with eyes closed. Farenna and two others were doing a sentry’s walk along the perimeter of the glade.
“You didn’t kill him,” Chriani said to Dargana. “Venry. Last night.” He remembered the lieutenant trying to run the exile down, her hauling him off his horse in the chaos of the Ilvani attack. He hadn’t expected to see the Ilmari get up again.
“I guessed right that he’d claimed my blade. Getting it back was more important.”
“You threatened to kill me once for even having touched a bloodblade. I would have thought him stealing yours would be worth something.”
“The Laneldenari weren’t shooting to kill,” she said. “I assumed they had a reason for that, so I accepted it.”
“I remember you saying you don’t wait on other people’s decisions.”
Dargana’s black eyes held Chriani’s gaze for a long moment before she closed them again.
He found a relatively soft patch of ground, but he also felt a knot of tension in his gut that told him sleep would be impossible. He had no tunic or cover, felt the chill of the breeze and the pain in his back. He was thus surprised to find Dargana calling his name what seemed only moments later. He sat up to see the light had shifted, the haze of the sun slanting in from ahead of him now. The horses were on their feet, the Ilvani rubbing them down again, a few already mounted.
Though Chriani’s head was clearer, the weariness of his body felt as though it had settled in to turn his bones to brittle glass. He stretched as he followed Dargana, excising the trembling from his limbs.
He swung up behind Farenna without assistance this time. The horses set out slow to start as they left the glade and the haze of sunlight behind. Then they plunged into shadow and picked up speed, Chriani sitting straight, staring ahead like all the rest as they pushed deeper into the forest.
Along the narrow tracks of the Greatwood, the Ilvani horses made speed as if they might be riding along the smoothest Brandishear farm road, alternating between a gallop and a jog without ever becoming winded. Over two days of riding, the carontir kept the same schedule of short rests at intervals to drink and stretch, with two longer rests in clearings stocked with food and sweet mead.
That draught seemed like the only thing keeping Chriani on his feet. He would collapse to a dead sleep during those longer rests, once more by light, once by dark, but his exhaustion never truly broke.
By night, they rode within the shimmering veil of the Ilvani’s mage-light. By day, the grey-green light shone dim through the towering screen of branches above them. Birds and insects were the only sounds, obliterated beneath the drumming of the horses’ hooves over trails of moss and loam, but rising each time they stopped. Chriani heard wolves howl more than once, and a single time, a screech something like an owl, but louder than any bird should ever have been able to make.
The call was thin and distant, but even then, the Ilvani showed almost as much alarm as Chriani felt. For a time, they slipped into an outrider formation, four rangers flanking the main body of the troop with bows drawn. Eventually, though, the forest returned to its familiar stillness.
They saw no settlements as they rode, and this lack of signs of life began to weigh on Chriani. No cleared farmsteads, no villages. No woodcutters’ shacks, no tree fort watchtowers. Just the endless expanse of forest, and an emptiness that pressed down on him like all the world might well have disappeared beyond the Ilvani rangers and the endless wall of green.
Midway through the third day since the attack on the Ilmari camp, that changed.
Chriani had heard the tales of the Ilvani cities. It was part of the training that had taken over his life when he unexpectedly made rank and was offered commission in the same day. History and warfare. Battle tactics and best practices in the field. An endless discussion of the mysteries of the Greatwood and the bloodthirsty Valnirata war-clans that dwelled there. Eschewing smaller permanent settlements that couldn’t be defended, the Ilvani were said to center themselves in vast cities impossible to attack or siege. Even if you guessed correctly as to where they were, it would be three days hard riding to reach the nearest of those forest cities from the edge of the Greatwood. And you’d make that journey with the Ilvani fighting you every league of
the way.
All of what Chriani had learned of the interior of the Greatwood in the past year had the feel of legend to it, for the simple reason that no Ilmari had ever seen it. Exiles’ reports alone told the story, along with sparse accounts from seers and scryers among the war-mages of Brandishear and Aerach. Even during the Incursions, the forces of both principalities had avoided pushing into the deep wood. Fearful of what they would find there.
Chriani saw the change first as a light. The forest canopy was still bright above them, his eyes having long grown accustomed to the Greatwood’s ever-present daylight gloom. This was something else, though. Something dead ahead, shimmering like a distant signal fire as the horses surged through the shifting screen of the trees.
He saw the archers next. Darker shadows within those trees, clinging to broad platforms. Those were set against the great trunks of the limni, suspended from thick branches by twisted rope-cables crawling with pale green vines. Bows were nocked and following them as they rode, each rank of sentries they passed replaced by another rank ahead.
The riders crested a rise where the trail broadened, then abruptly ended in a road paved with white stones. These glowed with a pale light, the horses slowing as they came near. Farenna was in the lead, Chriani leaning past him to see as their horse turned sharp into the light, the road ten strides broad and curving away to both sides ahead and behind them. A vast paved circle cut through the forest, the great limni looming to either side.
Within that circle, the city of the Ilvani rose.
From ten paces farther away, it hadn’t been there. Following the trail that should have given him direct line of sight, all Chriani had seen was trees and vines, the shifting shadows that played out across the forest floor as the distant wind shifted through the canopy above. Some manner of magic. An incredibly elaborate illusion. He fought the urge to make the moonsign.
A sea of light played out before him, spreading from the tangled undergrowth up to the first tier of branches standing high over his head. Then it rose even higher, climbing upward in long, swirling strokes like frost against winter glass. It clung and clustered like spiderwebs, radiating out from central points. It hung like drooping nets, parallel lines of green-white radiance that glimmered gently as the horses drew near.
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