Soulwoven (34 page)

Once, the Aleani had told her, Mansend had been a mountain village. Then the dragon had drowned the kingdom of Mennennar beneath the waves, and the little settlement had found itself on the edge of a new sea and grown big fast.

It’s just a story,
she told herself, but it was an easy one to believe. The city streets were haphazard and chaotic. The hill underneath them slanted up toward the ridge around it as if the harbor had been carved by an enormous impact.

Quay issued a quiet command, and Dil moved into the city. The prince’s words had been softer since the Lost Ones’ attack, but he was still Quay, and he was still driving them onward. He meant for them to march fast and hard, rejoin the Iron Highway, and then retrace the route by which they’d come west in the first place. He’d said he wanted to return to Eldan City.

He hadn’t said why, but Dil didn’t much care.

Home.

The road would take them past Lurathen. If she was lucky, she’d feel the warm, craggy embrace of her grandfather again. So many times, she’d been sure she was going to die without telling him goodbye, or even where she’d gone.

Cole’s shoulders bobbed up and down in front of her. She wanted to grab his arm and explain to him again how much it meant to her to go home.

But he already knew. She’d told him. And he’d smiled sadly and said that he was glad she was going home too, and she’d wondered why his words had seemed so cold and far away.

Cole slowed until he was walking next to her. Her heart rose.

“What do you make of those two in black?” he whispered.

Her heart sank again. She followed Cole’s gaze and saw that fifty yards or so ahead of them, two men in black robes were lounging casually on a pile of crates. One of them was short, pale, and skinny. The other was tall and broad-shouldered. Their sleeves were rolled up. Their cowls were tossed back. They made no effort to conceal themselves.

Dil’s stomach squirmed.

“Necromancers, I bet,” she whispered back.

One of the men looked their way. He nudged his companion, and the two of them stood from the boxes and stepped into the crowd. Dil lost sight of them in the brightly colored mélange, then found them again, lost them and found them.

Every time she saw them, they’d worked their way a little closer.

Cole whistled. The others bunched around them, and Leramis said something, and suddenly Quay and the soulweavers and Litnig were all talking at once.

Dil looked forward again. The crowds surged. The black-robed men drew closer. Leramis pushed past her and walked toward them.

The Second River whispered
Use me
in the back of Dil’s mind. A bead of sweat trickled down her face. Her fingers twitched. Her bow would be worthless in the crowd, but—

I can help,
she thought.
If it comes to it, I can help.

The men didn’t come for them.

Leramis met them a few yards from the party. They gestured toward the docks. Leramis looked back apologetically.

And then he marched away.

Litnig spat. Cole frowned. Quay shook his head. The three boys looked angrily at Leramis’s retreating back.

The swell of a thousand strangers pressed against Dil in the hot southern sun.

And the girl from Lurathen wished desperately for the simple familiarity of home.

When dusk fell that night, Dil set up a new, cedar-scented tent a dozen miles north of Mansend. Quay had chosen a cleft filled with dewy sweetgrass and edged by a thick line of birch trees as the party’s campsite. A heavy raft of cloud obscured what was left of the sun’s light. A damp, cool wind blew out of the north and spoke of rain.

Dil’s legs were sore. So were her back and her thighs, but she welcomed the weariness as a happy side effect of walking. Once her tent was up, she took off her boots and set her tired feet in the cool, wet grass. She wriggled her toes into the soil. The sweet air filled her nostrils. The breeze tickled the back of her neck. She opened her ears, her heart,
her
lungs—

And a man’s voice rumbled, “He knows
everything.
”

Litnig towered over Quay next to the beginnings of a fire.

The prince was chewing on a stalk of sweetgrass and striking his flint over a bed of downy tinder. He responded too quietly for Dil to understand him.

Litnig’s frown deepened.

A slug of unease wormed its way through Dil’s guts. She heard only snippets of Litnig’s conversation with the prince, but she could read the two boys’ body language like the tracks of a hind. Quay crouched in calm composure. Litnig was tense with bitter anger.

That anger was new, and it frightened her.

They’re not boys,
she thought.
Not really. They’re men.

She wondered when she would start to feel like a woman.

Quay’s voice rose. “Taking Leramis on was the best option we were presented with,” he said.
“Same as with Len, same as with Dil.”
He snapped handfuls of small sticks and tossed them in the fire. “Whether you like that or not, you have to live with it.”

Litnig growled something in response.

The prince looked up at him. “You owe that necromancer your life. No one made you cross that ship with Ryse. No one made you lose your concentration. He saved you from your own mistakes. Deal with it.”

Quay turned his back on Litnig.

Dil hugged her knees and watched.

Litnig’s hands closed into fists. His chest barreled in and out like an enormous bellows. Dil worried that he would grab Quay and rip a hole in the fabric of their party that would never mend.

The prince squatted in front of him and added fuel to the flames as if nothing had happened.

And Litnig licked his lips, spat in the grass, and walked into the woods without another word.

It wasn’t until later that Dil realized Litnig had been arguing not with his brother, not with Ryse, not even with her or with Len, but with
Quay
—Quay who’d once seemed so untouchable.
Quay whom they had all followed so blindly.
Quay who was Prince of Eldan.

It wasn’t until much later that she wondered why that bothered her so deeply.

Something hard and sharp jabbed into her rib cage. Her hair stood on end. She sprang to her feet and twisted to face the object.

It retracted on its own, and a soft voice asked, “What’s the first rule of the
inardran,
girl?”

Len stood in the grass she’d had her back to, tapping a hook-shaped stick lightly on his palm.

She sighed. The Aleani had been giving her lessons on his fighting style since he’d regained his strength. It was a gesture made out of kindness, she knew. He was misreading the source of her nervousness in a way she was happy to encourage.

All the same, she didn’t want his lessons.

She could channel the Second River. She didn’t need Len to teach her how to fight.

“Always know what is happening behind you,” he said, and he came slashing with his stick.

She moved backward and circled away.

There was a part of her that was beginning to question whether she had anything to be ashamed of.
Whether the past could just be the past.
Whether the people she was with might be different than most.

What in the name of Yenor are you so afraid of?
it
asked.

That part of her grew every day. Eventually, she knew, she would face it.

But not yet.

“When you spin—” Len said, and suddenly there was a stick in his other hand and he was whirling back and forth, coming at her from two directions at once. Her feet flew across the grass. Her arms wheeled for balance. She dodged, ducked, and weaved, waiting for an opportunity to hit him back bare-handed. “You must learn to see what lies behind you. Measure the space between yourself and your nearest enemy. Know how long it will take them to cross it.
Spin back again before that time has elapsed.”

Dil felt droplets of sweat on her face. Her breathing grew quicker. The Second River called for her to grasp it, to borrow its strength, to roar and to soar and to be
free
above all else—

“That is the secret of the
inardran,
” Len said. “That is what will keep you alive.”

He feinted low, and she jerked away only to find that his other stick was already heading for her neck. It hit her just beneath the jawline.

The world blurred. She lost her balance. The ground rushed up to meet
her,
and she rolled away from Len and started to scramble to her feet.

And then she stopped.

Breathe,
she told herself.
Just breathe.
The grass and the soil slid wet and soft between her fingers. The trees rustled sweet and fragrant above her head. If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine she was
back
home, away from Len Heramsun, away from her fears, away from everything.

“Hey!” she heard.

She snapped her eyes open and found Cole storming toward her and Len through the grass. Lines of anger were stamped on his once-so-kind face.

He looked unnervingly like his brother.

“It’s all right, Cole,” she said. She lifted her head and rubbed the shallow cut that had formed beneath her jaw.

Cole shut his mouth and stopped partway to them.

Len walked past him toward the tents.

The wind riffled over Dil’s back. The sun had disappeared completely. The high grass whispered coldly against her face, her sides, and her legs. She rose to her feet.

Cole ran a hand through his hair. He looked exhausted.

“What—” he began, but she shook her head. Her hand found his and pulled it out of his hair. She led him toward the tents before he could ask any more questions.

“It’s all right,” she said again, and she squeezed his hand and rubbed her neck and wondered why that was so.

The bruise on Dil’s neck deepened and colored and lightened and healed through eight more days in the Nutharian sun. She and the others walked over wide roads and dirt paths, past hills and valleys and over wide, flat plains. The grains waved. Her memories of the
Rokwet
grew blessedly dimmer. By the time she stepped into the dappled shade on the Nutharian side of the Forest of Lurathen, her bruise was mostly gone and she was feeling almost normal again.

The flowery summer scents of her childhood washed over her. Soft moss and gnarled roots hugged her feet. Birdsong she’d known her whole life rang out bright and welcoming over her head.

Her body felt light, free, and at ease, and she practically flew up the Lesser Ildar and over Smugglers’ Bridge and the turquoise wall it crossed. She was halfway to the steps down the other side before Quay commanded her to stop.

She halted at the edge of the wide wooden platform in the crown of the Great Ildar. Her heart raced. Happy freedom soared in her soul. She hung with one hand on a branch and felt the tree sway in the wind beneath her.

Ryse stepped to the silver trunk of the Great Ildar and pressed her hands against it.

She wants to talk to the soulweaver,
Dil realized.
The one who lives in the tree.

Ryse’s eyes began to glow. So did the trunk. The sun shone thickly through the canopy above. The wall shimmered. The leaves whispered and sang.

Dil got a creeping, sick sense of déjà vu.

Quay and Len and Litnig sat in the center of the platform. Ryse stood by the tree. Cole stared down at the wall from the platform’s edge.

Everyone was almost exactly where she or he had been a month and a half before.

But everything was different.

Cole’s arms had grown thicker. Lines of care creased the skin by his mouth. He wasn’t just a sweet, funny boy she’d met in a market but a complicated young man she’d fought beside and slept beside and laughed with and confided in. Litnig wasn’t a grumpy older brother but an angry, frightened man-child with dark rings under his eyes. Ryse wasn’t a dashing older sister and friend-to-be but a lost, confused half-girl half-woman playing with forces Dil only partly understood. Quay had stopped being a godlike prince out of the stories and become an unforgivingly pragmatic leader. Len had ceased to be an exotic being from the far west and turned into someone who’d abandoned his family and his people for reasons Dil still didn’t understand.

And
she
had changed. She could watch the Great Ildar glow without wonder. She’d seen the cities of Nutharion, the mountains of Aleana, the depths of the underground and the endless vastness of the sea. She had stood toe to toe with giant worms and Lost Ones and necromancers. She had
lived,
she realized.
Lived more in a month and a half than many did in their entire lives.

But her heart still felt empty.

And somewhere in the depths of her, she knew why.

Gentle fingers grasped her shoulder. A hand touched her waist.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?” asked Cole.

She turned. The sun shone bright and golden behind him. Vivid green shadows floated on his forehead. His eyes were clearer than they’d looked in days, but his face was scrunched up as if he felt sick to his stomach. His fingers were cold on her skin.

Something’s wrong,
said Dil’s heart.

Cole pulled her to a corner of the faded platform. The wood beneath them creaked. The tree swayed.

He wrapped both of her hands in his and leaned forward so that their foreheads touched.

For a while, he just stood there. Dil smelled the apples and cheese of their lunch on his breath. She heard the murmurs of the others on the breeze. She felt their movements through the platform as it shifted.

“Dil, I think—I want—I think,” he huffed. His hands were shaking. “Maybe you should stay in Lurathen.”

Just like that.

Her lips went numb. A flood of thoughts—he didn’t want her; he’d never wanted her; he’d tried her out and found her lacking, and now he was going to abandon her—tried to force their way into her mind.

She didn’t let them.

This was Cole. And she’d decided long ago to trust him.