Soulwoven (12 page)

But in the world outside the city, his mind didn’t seem to work nearly as quickly.

He felt a little relieved when Dil walked away from him. She seemed neither the hunter nor the deer anymore. She’d become something else entirely, and he couldn’t quite wrap his head around her.

He was just beginning to recover from his embarrassment when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He jerked his head up and found Litnig grinning at him.

“Something got your tongue?”

His brother squatted and slid out of his pack straps. Cole rolled his neck, kept his eyes on the smoky city below.

“I guess.” He lifted his arm, caught a whiff of his own scent, and winced. “It’s like she knows what I’m going to say before I say it—even the things I should be smart enough not to say.”

“That would be—what, about three words a day?”

Cole aimed a half-hearted swipe at his brother’s head, and Litnig ducked under it.

“Aw, c’mon, Cole.”
Litnig smiled. “I would say that’s a lucky find.”

“Oh yeah?”

The smile faded. Litnig looked back down the hill, where Ryse, Quay, and Len were winding upward like tired pack mules. The sun gleamed to the west.
“Yeah.”
He paused, then ran a hand over his head and sighed. “Just be careful with your heart.”

There was a moment of quiet. Cole shifted uneasily on his pack. Litnig was the one who always had the answers. Litnig was the one who did the comforting. When Lit was lost—well—there’d rarely been much Cole could do about it.

Feet crunched on gravel behind him, and a moment later Dil appeared at the corner of his vision. She watched the progress of Ryse, Quay, and Len with one leg forward, her hands on her hips, her lips pursed. She looked every inch the professional guide. Every inch someone who’d been surviving on her own since childhood.

That last thought rolled around in Cole’s head for a while, wrong somehow.

It took him a second, but when he figured out why, a broad, uncontrollable smile spread over his face.

Dil turned around and caught him grinning at her.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said. Quay had asked what her parents would think of her leaving, and she’d told him they were dead.

She hadn’t said a word about her grandfather.

He couldn’t keep the smile down. All of a sudden, he shared a secret with her, and stupid as the thought was, he really wanted her to know what he knew.

She’d put one over on Quay too. He liked that.

Her eyebrows drew down. Her nose wrinkled. She wanted to know what he was thinking—he could feel it.

Loud breathing floated over his shoulder, and he turned and saw Quay cresting the ridge. The prince’s lips were pressed tightly together. His face was covered in sweat, and he was looking right at them.

Dil blushed like she hadn’t wanted anyone to catch her staring at Cole, like she knew what it looked like and it struck too close to home. Cole bit his tongue and turned away and rode the swell of his heart, faced a silly grin off into the rising sun and exhaled slowly. Quay asked a question. Dil said something about the woods, and Cole closed his eyes and lost track of the conversation.

Until he heard Quay
say
, “About your parents. I’m sorry,” and the song in his heart died on the wind.

Cole’s eyes shot open. Quay’s face, for once, had grown soft. The prince had lost family too, though it had been to the plague itself, not the riots that followed. Cole remembered his pain, remembered the change it had wreaked in his personality.

Cole jumped to his feet and cleared his throat, clapped imaginary dust from his hands and placed them on his hips. He faced the forest like he was Dim Dilby the Soulprince, staring down the pirate king.

“Right!” he said too loudly, and Quay and Dil stopped looking at each other and at their pasts. They looked at him instead, and he was glad for it. “Shall we?”

Dil turned north. There was a question in her eyes again, and he was glad for that as well.

“The crossing’s a few miles from here,” she said.

A grunt and loud breathing behind Cole announced the arrival of Len, and Cole winced. He hadn’t meant to try to leave without the Aleani, but he was sure that wasn’t what it would look like to him.

Dil’s eyes stayed on the forest. “The way’s well-kept,” she said, “but still—I hope you all can climb?”

TWELVE

Within a few hundred feet of entering the forest of Lurathen, Litnig felt blind.

His eyes still worked—he could see mottled light shining on the smooth silver trunks of the wood, could track the shadows playing over the forest floor—but all he could find in any direction were the trees, stretching on and on over small rises and little streams into forever. He lost his sense of direction, swatted nervously at small biting flies while the pool of sweat on his back grew thicker and slicker. Birds sang above him. Leaves rustled on the path below. The earthy scent of decaying vegetation filled his nostrils.

He had to admit that the trees were beautiful. They stretched to vast heights, taller than the scrubby things he’d seen out on the plains east of Eldan City or even the massive oaks in the royal Demesne. Some of them were so tall their tops were hidden by the leaves of smaller trees, others so thick that it would have taken two long-limbed men holding hands to reach around them. They smelled good too; the air was perfumed with a sweet, flowery odor that reminded him of a scent his mother sometimes wore.

They made him uncomfortable all the same. He’d grown used to being able to see for miles over the plains, used to smelling what was coming on the wind.

The trees pressed in around him. He jumped at shadows. His feet caught on roots and stumps and rocks and threatened to topple him. They still had miles to go, and he already felt antsy enough for an army.

He slapped a branch out of his face and grimaced.

He’d had his dream again the previous night.

The gray disc had been almost the same as he’d left it. The dark statue had been sleeping on its pillar, the chains still intact,
the
cloudlike darkness flowing angrily around the disc’s periphery.

But when he’d awoken in the disc’s center, two more white statues had been standing over him.

One of them had been skinny and wasted looking, with sunken eyes and spiky, bright hair. It had worn patched, baggy pants that flared around the knees but fit tightly around its waist and ankles. When it stared at him, with flat, blank eyes, Litnig had felt a dull ache in his chest.
Sadness, maybe.
Old pain.

The other statue had been short and heavyset and undeniably Aleani. Its marble skin had been a darker, creamy shade of white, its brows thick and low. Long dreadlocks bedecked with wide beads had reached to its back and swung from side to side as it moved. As he’d watched it, Litnig had felt a vague sense of shame, a guilt that he couldn’t place but that had been there in his heart for as long as he could remember.

He had learned two things in the dream that night: First, there were dark statues corresponding to each of the new white ones on the disc. They were chained to the other
pillars,
their faces turned away, their eyes closed and downcast.

Second, he had learned how to wake up.

Litnig had been tired, closed his eyes,
lain
down on the disc to rest. He’d had the immediate sensation of falling.

When he’d opened his eyes again, he’d seen only the darkness of the tent he shared with Len.

A shred of excitement ran over his skin. Twice, he’d left the dream when his head touched the disc and his eyes closed. He had the feeling that if he wanted to, he could leave it that way anytime. And if he could leave the dream at will, maybe there was a way to enter it as well. And if he could do that, given enough time maybe he could figure out what in Yenor’s name it meant.

His friends’ backs rose and fell ahead of him. His feet bumped and scrambled over and through and on top of thick roots and dead leaves and soft earth.

A branch evaded his hands and poked him in the eye.

He heard Cole laugh behind him and cursed quietly. The deer paths rustled beneath him in the spotted morning light.

About midmorning, Litnig found himself standing in front of a small springapple tree that dripped with fruits in a spot of sunlight. The apples were small and full and yellow-green, mostly ripe, and he knew at first sight that they would be sweetly sour and delicious.

Dil had called a break near the wall, told them they weren’t far from the crossing, and they had stopped to have a bite to eat.

Litnig plucked an apple from its branch. His father’s voice stretched out from his past, told him to try the smallest and the largest fruits on the tree, to tap the outsides of the apples, that the ones that felt hollow would taste best. He remembered the feeling of large, scarred hands guiding his own.

Torin Jin had never been a great father. He’d roared and he’d struck and he’d rarely had time for his boys.

But the odd days that he’d seemed to care had been among the best of Litnig’s life.

For a moment, with his hand on the smooth skin of a springapple and the scent of his mother’s perfume in his nose, Litnig felt very far from home and very alone.

He took a bite of the apple and sighed, then picked another.

A few minutes later, Dil told them it was time to get moving again.

And as the sun rose higher behind the leafy screen of the forest top, Litnig followed the others deeper and deeper into the woods.

THIRTEEN

Ryse craned her neck back until it hurt. A barrel-shaped silver tree so wide three men would barely be able to reach around it towered into the sky in front of her. The sun’s light, diminished under the thick canopy, felt pleasant on her skin. The great tree and those around it were branchless near their bases, and a breeze circulated freely around her through the forest understory. The leaves were soft beneath her booted feet. Her heart beat fast and happy.

As she’d grown up, climbing had been the great escape of her life as well as a survival skill. She’d spent days racing up and down the ramshackle buildings of the slums, or sneaking out into the rest of the city to climb high on stone perches, above the stench, above her place, where she could see the world and its beauty. It was one of only a few things she’d really missed during her early years in the Academy, but until she’d climbed the drainpipe of the Jins’ neighbors a week and a half earlier, she hadn’t thought much of it in years.

The climb in front of her would be an easy ascent, but a long one. There were wide steps, spaced a foot or so apart like the rungs of a ladder, hewn in a long vertical line into the trunk of the tree. Ryse was glad for that, in a way. She still wore her robe, and she had a pack on her back. Not ideal for the kind of acrobatics she’d once loved.

In front of her, Dil was saying something to Len. The Aleani stared ice at the girl, walked purposefully to the tree, and started climbing. Ryse frowned. Len remained an enigma to her. He had an air of command about him, almost like Quay, but he’d shared little of his past.

She wondered where exactly he came from, and why he was hunting his necromancer.

Ryse filed into line behind the others and struggled to keep her enthusiasm in check.
To climb is to be free,
she’d once told a friend, and it was still true. Cole glanced at her and rolled his eyes as they queued for the steps. She smiled.
He
remembered. Once, the two of them had raced up an outcrop on Sentinel Hill and she’d beat him to the top by a full three minutes.
He
remembered what climbing meant to her, she was sure.

He began working his way up the tree before her, and she let him go five or six feet before she grabbed hold of the first step and started up. Len was almost thirty feet off the ground by then, and Dil hung a few feet below him. Litnig and Quay were still earthbound.

The flesh of the tree was soft, warm, and vibrant. It felt unusually alive, almost as if it had a mind of its own and was watching as she climbed. Sixty feet up, she was forced to stop and rest by Cole above her. He’d dug his hands into the steps and was pressed against the trunk of the tree, panting.

Ryse was breathing hard herself, and she inhaled deeply. The tree’s scent was sweet. She closed her eyes and felt almost instinctively for the flow of the River.

Her eyebrows twitched.

The River was acting strangely.

The flow through the forest had been calm and steady all morning, but around the tree it swirled in a rush, building into a standing wave of thousands of souls on one side and then spilling around it in torrents when the volume grew too great. The effect was a lot like the way the River responded to a powerful soulweaver. Ryse had never seen a tree, or anything but a human for that matter, cause an eddy like it.

When she opened her eyes again, she found that her chin had fallen to her chest and she was looking down. Her muscles jerked her closer to the tree. Below her, she could see Litnig and Quay, still climbing. The view was dizzying, but she loved that feeling, loved the rush that came with vertigo.

She smiled sheepishly. Cole’s feet were gone above her head. He was nearing the top of the steps, which disappeared when they reached the branches that formed the crown of the tree. Ryse could see a square platform built high in those branches, and a rope bridge as well, swinging over the wall to a matching platform on the other side. It wouldn’t be much longer to the top. Len had probably already reached it.

Her curiosity about the tree grew as she climbed. She could sense the River building and releasing, building and releasing. The eddy centered on a point near the top of the tree.
A single focus, like that of a human soul.

Ryse reached for the next step and grasped air. A hand shot out and grabbed her wrist, and then she was looking into the concerned face of Dilanthia Lonecliff, who was squatting between two branches above her. Ryse smiled apologetically, and Dil helped her onto the branches and pointed out the path up to the platform. The tree’s limbs were wide and strong and steady, almost like a staircase. Len was clambering onto the platform already. Cole was just behind. Ryse set off in their wake, leaving Dil behind to help Litnig and Quay.