EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (330 page)

“Ever get the sense we’re being watched?” Robert asked the next afternoon. They’d crested the saddle of a hill and paused to gaze out on all the ones yet ahead of them. Blays took the break to scare some food from his packs.

“Sometimes,” Dante blurted, then waited for Robert to volunteer more.

“Me too. But this time I think we really are.”

“Oh?”

“Can’t be, though. There’s nowhere to move without being seen.” Robert gestured to the open rises of snow. Trees lined the folds of the hills and sometimes sat in clusters at their base, but mostly it was empty, easy travel and easier sight.

“Have you seen anyone?” Dante craned his neck. It looked as barren as ever. He pushed back his hood, felt the cold breeze on his cheeks and nose and ears.

“Maybe.” He pushed his brows together. “Ah, who knows. Been so long since I’ve seen anyone but you two winguses I’m probably imagining things.”

Robert motioned them on. Somehow Dante had stopped feeling the cold. He recognized its presence, knew if he’d appeared here after a week in the relatively balmy offshore breezes of Bressel he’d be shaking like an epileptic, but for now the chill no longer hurt. They rode downhill and were enfolded in the soft swell of the land. They rode uphill and were bracketed by mountains to the west and south, huge things of blue and white beneath the tight tarp of gray clouds. When Dante dismounted he imagined his shoulders were still rocking to the gentle bounce of his horse. There was no proper road, as such, nothing paved or even rutted, just any number of dirt trails that joined and forked every few hours, but Robert checked Cally’s map often, squinting at the course of the sun and, at night, at the particular dial of the stars. A river glinted to their west and over the course of a day it swung to intersect their path. The ground angled down to meet it and they cut through the snowy grass to drink fresh water and fill their skins with the cold mountain runoff. Dante spotted a bulge in the bank that created an eddy where fish might rest, but they had no poles, couldn’t spear them from the shallows like he and Blays had done at the pond. They’d made good time on the day and Robert suggested they set up here and enjoy the rest of the afternoon. Dante and Blays shrugged off their second shirts (it was still cold, but between the sunshine and the running around they doubted they’d need them) and ranged down the river’s banks, eyes sharp for the deep purple of janberries. Dante judged they had about an hour of sunlight left. It was the first honest free time they’d had since they’d left Gabe and his defense of Shay, the first time they’d had that wasn’t spent riding or throwing together a shelter or hugging themselves and trying to remember what a fire felt like, and they ran beside the river, tagging each other with pine cones, cutting reedy branches and dueling in the late afternoon. Blays twirled his branch beneath Dante’s with a smooth turn of his wrist and pressed its springy tip against Dante’s heart.

“Yield, you menace!”

“Never!” Dante said, cocking his elbow to strike at Blays’ neck, and Blays rammed his stick forward. It bent against cloak and doublet, then snapped two-thirds down its length. Dante waggled his weapon. “Ah ha! You’re unarmed!”

“And you’re minus one heart,” Blays said, throwing what was left of his stick at Dante’s feet. Dante turned toward the river and slung his like a spear. It disappeared into the waters, then bobbed back to the surface, straightening in the current. Blays jogged up the bank a ways and called Dante over to a janberry bush crouched against the foot of a pine. The purple berries were small and hard and sour, never truly in season, but it was good to taste anything fresh. All the food in their saddlebags was as dry as licking paper. They ate all they picked, then gathered a handful each for Robert, popping a few in their mouths as they backtracked toward the camp.

They climbed a short ridge and saw Robert on his hands and knees in the grassy snow peering across the waters. The boys froze and leaned into the nearest tree, following Robert’s gaze. All Dante saw on the other banks was a few squat pines surrounded by bushes. He had a word half-formed when one of the bushes moved.

Norren. Four, make that five of them, swords at their belts, bows slung over their massive shoulders. Staring right back at them. Robert motioned for them to get down. Blays made a long face at Dante and Dante shrugged. The river washed between the two groups. Not quite a bowshot across, and the weapons the norren carried looked as tall and potent as the men who wore them. Blays crammed the rest of his janberries into his mouth, then hesitantly raised a juice-stained hand.

The norren stood as stolid as the hills behind them. Dante reached out for the nether, awaiting their move. One of them lifted a hand and waved back. Another dropped its eyes to whatever he’d been examining in the dirt and poked at it with a long staff. Their voices rumbled over the water. They talked a while, gesturing upriver, then turned as one and walked on.

“What was that all about?” Blays said. He spit out a stem.

“Looked like hunters,” Dante said. They started toward Robert, who was already striding their way down the shore.

“Next time try not to bumble right into the war party,” he said, glaring between them.

“Well you could have said something,” Blays said.

“Yes, I really should have just shouted’Watch out! There’s some men over there that could probably kill and rob you if they wanted to bother!’ Would that have done it?”

“What about a signal? Whistling like a bird?” Dante said.

“What about you look around once in a while?” Robert said, poking him in the chest. “We’re five hundred miles from home. You’ve never stepped foot here and I’ve only been here twice, neither of which was recent. Things are different now. If you don’t keep your eyes open, you could be killed, you can’t just be goofing around. Have some gods-damned sense.”

There was a long silence. “I brought you some janberries,” Dante said. He held out his berry-stuffed hand. “Blays ate all his.”

Robert closed his eyes and sighed. He grabbed a few from Dante’s palm and lobbed them into his mouth.

“Sour,” he said.

“They’re janberries.”

“I know janberries are sour. I was just saying.” Robert ate a few more, face slackening as he munched. “May as well follow the river for now. Should be the Lagaganset, if I’m reading the map right. Find a town eventually, pick up some fresh food, then find a road straight to Narashtovik.”

“Plus plenty of janberries on the way,” Blays said, tipping his chin at another bush a short ways down the bank.

“Just keep your stupid eyes open,” Robert said, shaking his head. “Those norren were tracking deer, looked like. Water attracts all kinds of men and beasts. Probably see more of them before we see any chimney smoke.”

Blays gazed into the current. “Laga...Lagagaga...what the hell was it?”

“The river. Call it the river.”

“Right.”

The norren-sightings increased their frequency the further they penetrated into the territories of the north. Blocky silhouettes on dawn ridges. Silent hunters crouched along streambeds, eyes gleaming from the thicket of their beards, tracking deer and elk through the snow. Sometimes Dante saw tracks so big it looked like two drunk children had been falling down every four feet. He tied the set of horns Gabe had given him to a length of leather string and draped it over his neck. They saw men, too: a single-sailed boat coasting down the river one afternoon, the twists of farmhouse smoke out on the flat expanse of the basin, a pair of raggedy travelers on foot who gave them one look before cutting away from the river into open land. It snowed one noon, adding a couple inches to the two or three already on the ground, going mushy and soggy once the sun broke back through the clouds.

Villages began sprouting up every ten-odd miles. Farming, fishing, the smoke of smithies. They’d pass two or three a day. Not yet wanting for food, desiring no contact with the locals, they toured around, cutting through the lightly-treed fields and fallow farmlands. The ground got lower and the snow got thinner until one day it gave out altogether. For the first time in two weeks they were able to light a fire. The boys leaned so close their damp clothes and blankets steamed. Dante doused his bread in water and let it warm until it wouldn’t crunch between his teeth for once. In the mountains and the hills they’d sometimes slept without keeping a watch, but in these lowlands, with the spark of their camp visible for miles in the night, they split shifts between watch and sleep. The nights were coming on the longest of the year and even with three hours of guard duty spent sitting with their backs to the fire or pacing around the rim of light they’d wake before dawn, fixing breakfast, chatting idly, waiting for the ground to grow gray enough for the horses to see.

“That spire there,” Robert said the day they saw their first real town in these lands, pointing to the tall, dark finger of a temple sprouting from the middle of the city. “I’ve been there. Almost twenty years ago, but I was there.”

“Does that mean we should go around?” Blays said, giving Dante a smirk.

“What? Of course not. Anyone who’d remember that’s probably dead by now.” Robert rubbed his beard. “Or wouldn’t recognize my face, at least. I’m sure they’ve forgotten.”

“Oh,” Blays said.

From a few miles out it looked the same as the cities of the south. From half again as close it smelled the same. Once they drew near enough for the buildings to resolve from grayish lumps to individual structures, Dante could see some of the outlying houses seemed to be roofed with sod. Not even the poorest houses were thatched, like he’d always seen in the outer ring of Bressel or down by the docks; these homes were roofed with steeply piled dirt or tight-set planks or overlapped tiles of shale. The nobler manors and wares-houses were set from firm, chunky, mortared stone. It looked like a city that would last a thousand years after its last occupant had died.

“Looks all right to me,” Dante said.

“Wait a minute, I’m sure it will get horrible soon enough.” Robert took the lead toward the town.

“I mean, no fires. No fighting. No hordes of armed men. Where are Arawn’s faithful?”

“Maybe it’s already over,” Blays said.

Robert rubbed his mouth. “Could be it hasn’t started.”

“But this is much closer to Narashtovik,” Dante said. “That’s where Samarand and her council lives. Things should be ten times as crazy up here. What’s going on?”

Robert shrugged, then gave him a sharp look. “Don’t go asking any questions.”

“They’ll know we’re foreigners anyway.”

“But they don’t know we’re
stupid
foreigners.”

“They won’t think I’m stupid!”

“I do,” Blays said.

“Yes, they will.” Robert ticked the numbers off on his fingers. “First they’ll think you’re stupid because your accent’s bad or you can’t even speak the language and you dress funny. Smell, too. Second they’ll think you’re stupid because you don’t know the things that everyone knows.’Why isn’t your city burning to the ground?’ you’ll ask, and they’ll look at you like you just tried to eat a loaf of bread through your asshole.”

“That’s what’s stupid,” Dante said. “They’d be stupid to think that.”

“Well, why don’t you just educate them as to the error of their ways, because that’s how people think everywhere. Go on. You’re not in any hurry, are you?”

“Fine.”

“I thought we were in a hurry,” Blays said.

“We are,” Dante said. “Quit dawdling.”

They rode into town. Other than the sturdier buildings, the occasional presence of norren rather than neeling, and the foreign language—Gaskan, Dante presumed, since for the last few hundred miles they’d been in Gask and its territories, as far as anyone could be said to rule over the worthless lands around the Dunden Mountains—it didn’t feel that much different. He’d never really paid attention to the traders and travelers who’d spoke Gaskan back in Bressel, but with an ear cocked toward the tongue he started to think he was going mad. It was a thicker, more imperative-sounding tongue, but it sounded just enough like Mallish to make him think he could catch about every tenth word, if only they wouldn’t speak so maddeningly fast. With a jolt, he realized he understood one of their words, and not from his native tongue, but from the
Cycle
: to release or unlock.

“
They
dress funny,” Blays said, nodding to a couple men wearing long, open-bottomed clothes that struck Dante as some kind of fur-lined dress. Robert sighed. He took the lead and headed for the market, where they wandered around until they found a merchant who spoke enough Mallish to sell them some fresh bread and dried meats and could barter with Robert over a couple bottles of wine. Eventually they reached some kind of agreement and Robert cradled his bottles and smiled out on the bustle of the market, the cries of the sellers and the guarded eyes of the buyers. Not all the smells here were bad, either. For every whiff of old fish there was one of cinnamon, for every sulfurous blast of hide-tanning there was the sweet, sagey lilt of lan leaves.

“Don’t suppose we can spare a day or two here,” Robert said.

“No,” Dante said.