Soulwoven (23 page)

In the palace, you learned to say a lot without saying anything. It wasn’t the first time Cole had been in a situation where Quay needed to act like the merchant’s son was unimportant.

In those situations, a nod and a shrug and a wag of the eyebrows were sometimes apology enough all around.

“Do you know where we are?” Quay asked after the moment passed. He was looking at Len.

“About forty-five minutes’ walk southwest of Du Fenlan,” the Aleani murmured. He had closed his eyes, looked half-asleep.

“Can we reach it tonight?”

“No,” Len said. “The gates close at sundown, and they don’t open again until sunrise.”

Quay said something else, and Len shook his head.

Cole
lay
down on the sand and shut his eyes, glad he wouldn’t have to go anywhere at least until morning. One of the others mumbled something about firewood. Someone’s joints cracked as he or she stood up.

“You’re shivering,” Dil said.

It was true. He was, a little. But he felt too tired to do anything about it.

Dil curled up next to him and pressed her body against his side. “Here,” she said.

Her fingers twined themselves in his. He remembered whipping the blankets from his lap in Janestown, and the blood rushed to his face.

Dil’s hair tickled his shoulder. She squeezed his hand.

He squeezed back. He wanted to stay awake and savor the feeling of lying close to her, but he didn’t think he stood much of a chance.

TWENTY-FOUR

Some time later, Cole became aware that he was standing on a vast plain. The soil was barren and muddy, and marred by unruly clods of earth like it had been churned beneath thousands of frantic feet. His daggers were in his hands, and he was fighting, cutting through a horde of shadowy man-sized shapes that bled away like chalk in the rain when he touched them.

He was searching for something, or someone, and he felt vaguely sick to his stomach.

Cole’s feet shot out from under him, and he was ripped out of the melee and dragged into the air. He dangled upside-down for a moment above the field. His arms flailed.

There was a bright flash below.

The field cleared. The sun shot in a long arc from west to east and turned the sky from blue to red to purple to black. The stars winked to life and faded. Cole thought for a moment that he saw three comets swirling around an empty space in the firmament, surrounded by a circle of luminous dots.

The sun rose again. People gathered around a wide, deep hole in the ground. Several figures in black forced their way through the crowd, carrying biers upon which bodies rested under white shrouds.

Cole’s awareness floated closer to the shrouded figures on the biers. At times there were four, at others five or six. Some of them seemed to fade in and out of existence as he approached, but three were fixed. He could see the contours of their faces.

He knew what he’d lost, and he plunged toward the earth with his heart screaming.

His eyes snapped open, and he sat up. A campfire sputtered smoke into his eyes. The shadowy mountains were just where he’d left them that afternoon. The pebbles of the beach were soft and cool beneath him, and a carpet of stars covered the sky beyond the smoke.

Cole turned his back to the flames, took deep breaths, and told himself that it had just been a dream.

The smoke changed direction, and Cole faced the fire again. His brother sat on the other side of the flames, staring into the coals. He looked as if he hadn’t even noticed Cole wake up.

Dil, still fast asleep beside Cole, rubbed against his leg. He could feel her breathing.

The panic that had wrenched him awake melted and was replaced by something different, something new. When he looked at Dil—at the way her hair curled around her face, at the downy fuzz on her arms, at the curve of her nose and her neck—he felt like he was on the cusp of some new world, and that she would take him there if he could just hold on.

A gust of wind froze the sweat on his neck, and he shivered and lay down beside her again. She nuzzled into his chest. Her breathing calmed his. The fire warmed his skin, and he began to feel tired again.

Before he gave himself up to sleep a second time, Cole wrapped both arms around her. A warm, calm feeling spread from his chest over his whole body.

She wriggled closer to him, and he closed his eyes and felt her fingers wrap around his own.

***

Dil hunted lions beneath an amber sky in a forest of violet spruce. A fragrant carpet of needles flew by beneath her feet. She leaped streams, tore through bushes,
ran
with the spirit of a tiger in her soul and a spear in her hand.

The cats she chased were beautiful creatures—one as black as sable and the other white as snow. Solid knots of muscle undulated like dancing ropes beneath their coats. She wasn’t sure where she was, or why she was hunting them, or even whether she was going to kill them when she caught up. She hoped not.

She drew closer and closer, jumped over fallen logs and raced under low branches until the cats
were
almost within reach.

She burst into a grassy clearing filled with light.

The brightness hurt her eyes, and she shielded them with her arm as she stepped forward. She felt warm and comfortable—beloved, as though her grandfather’s arms were around her. A voice spoke softly in her ear. It was kind in its inflection.

You have my deepest apologies,
it said, and Dil wondered for what.

The voice paused. When it returned, it was filled with admiration.
What you do will be forever remembered by the world
.

She had the sensation of a hand stroking her hair.

The light began to fade, and she thought she saw a man walking into the forest. He wore a cloak decorated with a strange, swirling insignia, white on red.

The light disappeared.

The two cats she’d been hunting sat at the edge of the clearing, watching her. The amber sky darkened. The spruce lost their violet hue.

Dil held out her hands, and the cats walked forward.

She awoke a moment later and felt Cole’s arms around her.

Her breath seized in her throat. His body was bigger than she remembered, and stronger. She couldn’t move. She felt too hot, and suddenly it was too much, too quickly. She wasn’t ready. She dug her fingers into the dirt and stared at the fire, eyes wide, heart racing.

A loud growl split the night.

It was followed after a long, rhythmic moment by another, then another, blaring and innocent and graceless. Dil’s breath came back. Her body relaxed.

Cole, apparently, snored.

Loudly.

And that reminded her of who he was, and why she’d lain down next to him in the first place, and he became much less frightening.

Another snore.
Dil fought the urge to laugh.

She noticed Litnig peering at her across the crackling campfire. The trees whispered mindlessly over his head. His eyes held a haunted, questioning look. She smiled at him.

Tiredly, he smiled back.

Dil’s fingers were tangled in Cole’s, and she squeezed and leaned into his chest. She hadn’t slept so close to anyone since childhood. It was nice. His body felt soothing against hers. The fire was pleasantly warm on her face. She heard the comforting noises of small animals scurrying in the woods, of birds in the trees, of wind and of sky and of forest.

She didn’t want to fall back asleep. She just lay there, enjoying the night, until her mind did it for her.

***

On the other side of the fire, Len stood with Litnig and another young man on a vast, empty moor of gray dust and long shadows. The night sky hung cloudless and infinite above him. The ground yielded softly beneath his feet.

The two humans turned their heads skyward, and Len followed their eyes. There was something lurking in the darkness overhead—a shadow deeper than the rest, heavy and black and ominous.

It moved toward them.

The nameless youth raised his hands, and the shadow slowed to a stop. For a moment, it held still.

The boy faltered.

He closed his eyes. His cheeks twitched. His lips warped into a painful grimace. The shadow began to move downward again—slowly at first, but with increasing speed. The youth opened his eyes and looked at Litnig with cold, calm surety.

As the shadow grew closer, he disappeared.

Len’s guts squirmed. The thing in the stars was
wrong.
Not evil, but a force more primordial than that—a deeper darkness.
A hole in the world that sought to suck all of existence into itself and grind it into oblivion.
Len raised his arms to ward it off, but they would not stay above his head.

The shadow grew closer, heavier, deeper, until it filled the sky. Len felt himself being pulled into its embrace. His body and soul bulged and split.

Litnig raised his hands.

The shadow ground to a halt above their heads. Len heard a tremendous
crack
from Litnig’s direction. There was a flash of light, and then the shadow exploded into a thousand thousand shards of itself—a million little patches of darkness that fled to the spaces between the stars and hid there, no longer dangerous, no longer powerful.

Len smelled lightning and burnt flesh. He heard a sizzling sound from Litnig’s direction.

He did not turn to face it.

The Aleani awoke soon after, bothered by a rock in the small of his back. Next to him, Litnig stared silently into the flames.

Len squinted at the young man and rubbed his chin. The blood of the Dreamseers did not run strong in the Heramsun family, but it ran deep, in a thin stream left by a few ancestors long ago. Len had dreamed strange things before.

He had never been good at unraveling their meanings.

Clouds rolled over the sky. The stars were half-obscured. The moon, slipping toward the horizon, made a thin circle of light against the gray. Len watched it move.

And then he turned over to sleep once more.

***

Flames licked at the logs that Litnig fed to them, and the young man thought of Ryse.

She was stretched out near the fire across from him, her hands pillowed under her head, her robe covering her bruises and scrapes again. The smoke blew gently over her, as though it didn’t want to disturb her sleep. The moon caught the white of her robe and made it glow.

She sighed and shifted, and Litnig’s heart twisted around itself. The feelings he’d had for her as a child had died, and he could feel the seed of some new emotion in their place—something half-formed, waiting for him to give it shape. He couldn’t figure out what he wanted her to be.
Maybe a best friend.
Maybe a sister.
Maybe something
deeper,
or some amalgamation of the three.

He was even less sure what she wanted from him.

He missed his mother. She’d taught him most of what was good in him—shown him a path to manhood that didn’t run through the rage and violence of his father’s tantrums. He’d never asked her about Ryse though. He’d been embarrassed to.

That was beginning to feel like a mistake.

Litnig looked back at the flames. They rose and fell in random harmonies, blue near the shifting orange of the coals, then red and yellow like sun-ripened corn rimmed by charcoal as they licked the darkened sky. His joints felt loose and easy, his muscles gently sore. His arm didn’t hurt at all, unless he moved it.

He found great peace in staring at the fire. He’d felt so much pressure since leaving home—he’d been trying to take care of Cole, and to take care of Ryse, and to stay on Quay’s good side and keep an eye on Len.

And maybe hardest of all, he’d been trying to live up to his idea of himself.

In the face of that, he found a certain satisfaction in watching a stack of wood turn into a pile of ash. The wind would scatter the ash. It would fuel the growth of new trees to fill the voids left by the deaths of the old. So reminded of life’s great loop, he felt like no matter what he did, he could never truly fail.

He took a deep breath of fire-warmed air and forgot the others. For a moment, he was alone with his thoughts, and he didn’t need to be strong—not for Cole, not for Ryse, not even for himself.

For a moment, he felt free.

Then he heard a sharp
snap
from the woods behind him, and Quay emerged at his side from the darkness beyond the firelight.

He just went to pass water,
Litnig reminded himself, but it didn’t stop his heart from pounding.

The fire cracked and spit. Its smoke drifted past Quay into the trees. A crow called in the distance.

After a moment, Quay nodded toward the cloud-hidden moon and said quietly, “You ought to get some sleep.” His legs bent gracefully underneath him. He sat cross-legged next to Litnig and held his palms before the fire. His swords hung at his belt.

A shiver ran down Litnig’s spine.

“Can’t sleep,” he muttered.

Quay looked at him, frowned, and turned back to the flames. The prince didn’t lie down to sleep. He sat with his back as straight as a rod and looked into the fire with an intensity that Litnig didn’t understand.

Then he spoke.

“When I close my eyes, Litnig Jin,” he said, “I have visions of the dragon.”

Quay stared at the fire like he wished he could shape it or extinguish it or stoke it with his will alone. Like he wished he could do the same to the whole world.

“Sometimes, I see it laying waste to my father’s armies. Sometimes, I see it tearing Eldan City to pieces. Sometimes it simply hangs in the air and smiles at me.”

Quay’s face betrayed no fear, but the emotion sparked on its own in Litnig’s heart and grew with every word the prince said.

Why’s he saying this?
Litnig wondered.
Why talk to me? Why now? Why here?

And deeper, more insistent than the rest:

Why has everyone seen the dragon but me?

“I do not feel the need to eat, or sleep, or rest,” Quay said, but Litnig’s heart was thundering with that last question and he had no ears for the prince’s words. Ryse had seen the dragon. Cole and Len, he was fairly certain, had seen it too. He didn’t know about Dil, but now Quay—