Soulwoven (17 page)

“What?” he said indignantly. He crossed his legs beneath the blankets.

“Nothing, it’s just—” She laughed again. “It’s just so silly—I mean we’ve spent all this time together, traveled all this way, and we’re so embarrassed about something so…”

He watched the trembling of her cheeks and the softness of her smile lines, and a tightness in his chest eased and he laughed too, sort of.
A little laugh.
One that broke the tension, anyway.
The white light of the moon and the orange light of the lamp met halfway on Dil’s face.

“Call me when you’re dressed, and I’ll take a look at your blisters, all right?”

He nodded, and when she left he sighed and scratched himself and laughed a little more easily.

Three hours later, Cole’s blisters had been lanced and he’d somehow gotten his feet back into his boots and his pack on his shoulders. He walked slowly along a cold, wide road into the hills north of Janestown, praying that his legs would loosen up like Dil had said they would.

Just another mile.
Just another mile and they’ll get warm, and it won’t hurt so much.

The lights of Janestown twinkled behind him against the shine of the moon. The road had angled upward, and ahead he could see the high reaches of the mountains stretching for miles and miles. Sometime that night, they would cross the border between Nutharion and Aleana. Sometime that night, he would leave human lands.

He shivered. Len Heramsun’s broad back led the way in the moonlight. The Aleani’s axes hung naked and shining from his waist. Len watched the mountains as if he expected them to fall on them, or the rocks to leap up and roll over him the moment he re-entered the land of his birth.

It wasn’t a reassuring sight.

They climbed higher and higher, following the moon into a notch between two misshapen and lumpy mountains. Large boulders surrounded them. The peaks hung dark and steep and crumbling above.

When he reached the top of the notch, Cole spotted a wide, rich river valley stretching out into the northern distance.

He saw the fire-lights of villages, cottages, homesteads—a tapestry of farmland colors muted in the night. The fields were dotted with the white backs of sheep milling quietly through dark pastures. He saw stars and high, wispy clouds. A huge black peak in the distance dominated the horizon.

“Is this—” he began, but a loud, long wail cut him off. At first, he thought it was coming from the peak to his left, but the sound soon filled the entirety of the notch, bouncing from rock to rock until it seemed to come from everywhere at once. The noise had an undertone like that of a bass horn, and Cole could hear a shrill, otherworldly screech on top. He froze. His hands drifted to his daggers. The others tensed up as well.

“Relax,” said Len’s voice from the front. “It’s just the mountain cats. They will not bother us.”

Cole looked at Litnig, then at Ryse, then at Quay, then at Dil. The prince’s hands left his sword hilts. Litnig’s returned to his pack straps. Dil thrust her face happily into the wind. Ryse just looked exhausted.

Len led them past the broken boulders of the notch and started down the path to the valley below.

“Len,” Cole asked as they descended, “is this—?”

“Yes,” the Aleani replied shortly. The moonlight glistened on the dark skin of his neck. “This is my home.”

EIGHTEEN

The children at Len’s back reminded him
of his own
.

There was no point in denying it any longer. He could feel them seeping into the vacancies in his heart where Raest and Maegan ought to have been, filling holes in him he’d kept carefully empty for so many years. He felt as if, were he to let himself, he might come to enjoy the feeling.

So he made very sure not to let himself.

He had a duty to perform, and when he was finished, he would return to the family he had abandoned and seek
their
love. He would not be distracted by a gaggle of human children.

Or so he told himself, at any rate.

He said little as they crossed into the Du Hardt river valley. The western sky lightened from black to purple to gray to blue. The road, old and familiar beneath his feet, leveled out and widened as it descended. A small, cheerful brook ran beside it. Birds in flowered hedges chirped the coming of the dawn, and as soon as the light had grown strong enough to see by, his people appeared in the fields and called out to him in the language of his forefathers.

Len did not respond.

His heart felt as heavy as a leaden mold.

The green strip into which he was descending, wedged between two lines of high, craggy peaks and boxed in by a towering volcano to the north, was the valley he had grown up in. The land had seen his clanfathers build one of the most powerful houses in Aleana. Len knew its villages by name. He could recall the surnames of many of the farmers, herdsmen, and crofters who lived in them. A part of him wanted to smile.

But he could not do that.

Not yet.

Can you keep a secret?

The sun grew high and hot. Crickets and grasshoppers hummed in the fields. Len and the children stopped and rested, stopped and ate, stopped and rested. The split peak of Du Hardt, rising like a broken fist from the northern end of the valley, grew larger. When the shadow of the eastern valley wall reached them in the evening, Len called a stop and set up camp in a fallow field by the road. The girl from Lurathen managed to pull two trout from the brook, and he cooked them with roots and mushrooms for supper.

The next day brought them closer and closer to Du Hardt. By noon, he could see the mountain’s summit glinting in the sun.

“Obsidian,” Len told the children when they asked him what caused the phenomenon.
“On the walls of the city.
You will see it soon enough.”

The prince Quay and the boy Cole argued about whether to take the tunnels beneath the mountains or the overland roads to Du Fenlan. Len stayed out of the discussion. The younger boy was being irrational—allowing his fear of the dark, close spaces under the earth to cloud his judgment. The fastest route to Du Fenlan ran underland. The prince would take it, whether his advisor wanted to or not. Len had already seen it in his eyes.

The road turned up the mountain, and Len tried not to think of the large stone manse that sat near its summit with his family name engraved upon its gates. To think of the manse was to invite thoughts of the cellar beneath it, where he had found his father’s blood splashed over the gray stones.

Can you keep a secret?

A few hours later, Len stood in front of the shining volcano-glass walls of Du Hardt itself. The fortifications were thirty feet high and twelve thick at the base, though only the last few inches of them were covered in the obsidian that Du Hardt was famous for.

Len’s family had made its fortune controlling the obsidian trade. There were deep veins of the glassy substance buried in the sides of Du Hardt, and it traded well for heavy gold and copper from the other Aleani cities.

The children craned their necks to look up at the wall.

Len kept his eyes on the gate. Two guards stood within it. They were shorter than him, but they bore halberds and wore mail, and their brown doublets showed the split-peak emblem of his clan. More importantly, their eyes looked sharp. His wife had clearly been handling security well without him.

Do not think of her,
he told himself.
Not yet.

It would be best if he could convince the guards not to mention his presence to whomever his wife had left in charge while she and their children attended the spring session of the Aleani Assembly in Du Fenlan.

He strode forward. The human children trailed behind him like uncertain eaglets.

Like
his own
children had, long, long ago.

The guards stepped toward him as he approached. Len did not recognize the one on the left, who had a tattoo of an eagle on his right cheek and beadless dreadlocks that barely reached his neck. But the other, whose dreadlocks carried flecks of auburn and whose knuckles were puckered with white scars, had served in the clan’s guard during Len’s time as clan head.

“Sun chelan,”
Len called as he approached, and they spoke in the language of his forefathers.

“Sun chelan,”
the scarred-knuckle guard replied. “Clan Heramsun welcomes you to Du Hardt. We will need your names for—” The guard stopped as Len drew closer. His eyes narrowed.

The wind licked the scalp of the mountain between them—bare rock under Len’s feet, scrubby heather to the right and left of the road. The guard closed his eyes, opened them again.

“
Fenuani
Heramsun. I have a message for you.”

A rock settled in the pit of Len’s stomach. The guard would know his story. He would have opinions of his own on whether Len had been right to abandon his clan. He took a moment to weigh his reply, and in the end he settled on the truth. “I did not come to hear messages,” he said, and he watched the younger guard look confusedly at the older.

The older guard’s frown deepened. “It is from your daughter,
fenuani.
She has made the same request of us every day since she was old enough to do so.”

Len’s heart twisted. When he’d left, Maegan had been little more than a green-eyed toddler, rarely far from the arms of her mother or nurse.

“Still,” he ground out. He straightened his back and stood tall. He had been born to command, and he had not abandoned the authority that came with that, even when he had abandoned his clan. “I will not hear it.”

The guard scowled. “You are welcome in this city then, Son of Yenor,” he said. It was the traditional offer of hospitality to a stranger. “I will mark your name in the book of my clanfathers.”

Len bowed his head and let his dreadlocks swing in front of his face. The guard took the names of the children and noted them in iron ink on the pages of a heavy leather ledger.

That should have been all there was to it, but as the children walked through the gate, the guard laid his hand softly on Len’s shoulder.

“My orders,
fenuani,
have been the same for years. I will not disobey them, even for you.”

Len stopped. The children moved forward ahead of him, into the bright sun of a fine day on the top of the mountain.

“Your daughter asks you to stop and visit her,
fenuani.
No more.”

A strangled noise escaped from Len’s throat. The bright sights of the city in front of him blurred.

The guard’s voice grew softer. “You taught me much of the ways of the
inardran, fenuani,
” he said. His hand left Len’s shoulder. “I do not mean to be unkind. Tell me. How goes the search for your son?”

Son.
The word thundered in Len’s head like the echoes of a hammerfall in a close valley. For a moment, he could not speak.

“Poorly,” he said at last.

The guard seemed to have expected as much. “A black-robed Aleani was seen in the city two nights past. Two soulweavers reported a disturbance in the River around the same time. Its source was never found.”

Len’s throat felt dry and ashy.

“Good luck,
fenuani,
” the guard said.

Len stepped shakily into the city of his birth.

Du Hardt’s wide terraces and stone buildings gleamed enchantingly. The city filled a V-shaped crater between one half of its namesake mountain’s split peak and the other. Steam belched from the borehole that led underground in its center. Handcarts filled with boxes and barrels rolled along ruts in the cobblestone streets, pulled by burly, sweating Aleani.

The eastern half of the city lay in the shadow of the looming crater walls, as it always had and always would. Len’s people bustled around him in heavy clothes of blue and gray and earthy brown. They wore gold rings in their ears and clay beads in their hair. Their cheeks bore clan tattoos that he remembered like the faces of old friends.

In the midst of them, the human children were waiting.

And Len Heramsun went to them.

NINETEEN

Litnig lay down, let his head sink into a warm pillow, and closed his eyes. The mattress beneath him had the soft, crunchy buoyancy of new straw. The savory scent of grilling sausages mingled with the florid smell of spring pouring through an open window near his head. His stomach was full and content, but he felt restless.

He opened his eyes and stared at the wall. The afternoon light cast pale shadows on it through the curtains over the window.

Litnig wanted to sleep, but more than that, he wanted the dream. It had been over a week since he’d had it, and he missed it—missed the excitement that came with it, the rush of trying to figure it out. It was important. He knew that with all his soul, but he couldn’t figure out why.

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, buried his face in the pillow and let the scent of spring fill his mind. He tried to envision the disc, the clouds,
the
statues he had taken to calling “walkers—”

Nothing happened. He could imagine them, but it wasn’t real. He wasn’t there with them.

His leg slipped off the bed, and for a moment he felt like he was falling.

His eyes snapped open. His foot hit the floor and bounced. There was something to the falling—it was a necessary part of the dream, as if his consciousness was moving from wherever it normally resided to someplace else.

He focused on that and shut his eyes. The sensations of the world grew distant. The voices of the bustling city beyond the window quieted. Litnig’s limbs melted into the bed, and the fuzzy, inconstant spots of light he saw through his eyelids merged and melded into a soft pink curtain. He became one with the world, or one apart from the world. He wasn’t sure which—wasn’t sure it even mattered.

His head started to spin, and he passed through the pink and in his mind’s eye saw himself strolling through the night sky, suspended over blackness. He walked upon a glassy, invisible floor, working ever closer to a black horizon where the stars ceased and he saw only darkness.

When he reached the edge, he didn’t stop. He didn’t even slow down. He just stepped into the void.