The Burning White (62 page)

“What is it?” Kip asked.

“Not snakeskin, nor any reptile known in these lands. I came here not to obey her but hoping she might tell me more. Perhaps this was some new animal to hunt, to test myself against. Perhaps I might lose my taste for hunting men. But it’s not done that. I’m like a wolf that takes one lamb and then cannot help but raid for sheep, no matter the dangers.” He fingered that leather band around his bicep, but Kip was too far away to see anything strange about it. “By the time I came, I was too late. Another village massacred while I was gone hunting.”

“Like your home village was. But Apple Grove this time,” Kip guessed.

Daimhin nodded bloody guilt.

“Why’d he do this?” Kip asked. Taking a village’s livestock, burning a few huts to halt resistance, taking a few men or women, Kip could understand why an invader would do those . . . but this? Both recklessly insane and secretive.

An invader doesn’t want its massacres to be secret. No one’s intimidated by a massacre they never learn about.

“
He
didn’t,” Daimhin said. “If by him you mean the White King. I tracked those who did this. They didn’t come from the White King’s camp, and these men hid from the White King’s patrols both coming and going. It was only twenty men, but some of them were drafters, and all were armed with good muskets. The villagers scattered at first, but then they recognized the leader. He’d been raised here among them. But after enough of them came back into town, he seized them, and he demanded those in hiding or at outlying farms come in. Started killing people until they did. Made promises of safe passage. Lies, naturally.”

“You didn’t learn all that from their tracks,” Kip said.

“On their way back to their boats on the coast, these
arrachtaigh
, these monsters, came across a Blood Robe patrol and had to hide. One of them got separated from the others. Got lost. I found him. We talked.”

Kip didn’t bother to ask if that man was still alive.

“Can you tell me anything else about them?” Kip asked.

“Height and weight for most of them, a few would just be guesses. They call themselves Lightguards, came on some type of boat they called a sea chariot. Second-in-command walks with a crutch.”

“Aram,” Ben-hadad said from behind Kip. “That sonuvabitch.”

“Commander was a young man named Guile,” Daimhin said. “I didn’t ask many more questions. There were kids dying.”

Kip’s stomach sank. “Zymun.”

No one protested that surely he wouldn’t do such a thing.

“Why?” Cruxer asked.

“Zymun was raised here, right? Maybe it was a childhood grudge?” Tisis asked. “But why kill everyone else? He can’t have hated
everyone
.”

“I think once people saw him for what he was, they may well have all hated him,” Cruxer said. “He’s certainly capable of hating all of them.”

“The massacre was to cover up whatever he came here to accomplish,” Kip said.

“You think he met with the White King?” Tisis asked.

“Definitely possible. Maybe he was seen, and decided—” Kip started.

“No tracks that way,” Daimhin said. “They might have taken their boats, I suppose, but there’s a good road straight to the old city. He would have known about it if he grew up here. I don’t think he came to meet with the wights.”

“And they hid from the Blood Robe patrol,” Ben-hadad said. “I don’t think he was making an alliance with the White King, as convenient as that would be for us to expose.”

Kip said, “Whatever he did here, he killed everyone in this village in such a way that we would think the White King ordered it, if we found out about it at all. By leaving the houses standing, refugees from elsewhere can move right in, and squatters don’t often dig too deeply into why the houses they’ve moved into are empty.”

“Nor do they appreciate when others ask where the original owners are,” Big Leo said. “So they do the covering up for you.”

“That’s why he didn’t let his men steal any jewelry,” Kip said. “He didn’t want them to keep any evidence of their crimes.”

It was all . . . pretty clever, actually. Zymun was stupidly impulsive at times, but he was smart enough to realize he could disappear for three or four days and turn up saying he’d been in brothels, and everyone would believe it. A massacre, this far away? No one would even think to connect him to it. A year or two ago, it would have been impossible. It still would be, except that he had access to skimmers.

“But why not kill the children?” Winsen asked. “Why add the risk of letting them live?”

“Some of the men must’ve balked at it,” Tisis said. “Many men will barter with evil, when they must. ‘We’ll kill the men, sure, but not the women. Fine, the women too, but not the kids. They can’t even speak. They’re no danger to us.’ The Lightguard’s rife with thugs and criminals, but they’re not all . . . Zymun.”

“That’s the Lightguard for ya,” Ben-hadad said, “willing to butcher helpless men, women, and children, but they draw the line at toddlers. Moral fucking paragons.”

“We should kill all of them,” Cruxer said. Fair as Cruxer was, there was nothing soft in him toward evil.

Kip had known Zymun was a snake, but his wanting to kill Kip so he could be assured of his own position had at least seemed understandable, if cruelly calculating and cold. Their grandfather was cruelly calculating and cold, too.

Murdering several hundred people . . . for what? . . . was a different thing entirely.

Kip couldn’t imagine Andross Guile doing that.

“The babies died,” Daimhin said with a voice like a swimmer in the great ocean seeing no land in sight, no ships, breath short, one last confession on his lips.

It brought Kip back to the present.

“Fourteen babies they didn’t kill, but I couldn’t save them. Not one. I couldn’t find milk. No cow nor horse nor pig nor goat in the time I dared to be away. I went in to the camp followers who haven’t yet left Azuria, tried to hire a wet nurse. They’d heard of me, though, from the Blood Robes. They feared me. They raised the hue and cry, said I was there to steal their women, tried to kill me.

“I came back. I could never go far again. I cut up food. The babies couldn’t take it. I chewed up food, gave them little bits. They spat it up. They didn’t even all die in my arms. There were too many dying for me to even give them that. I thought of giving them the black mercy, but I held out hope that someone would come at the last minute. The Third Eye had sent me to stop the massacre, but I’d failed. I hoped maybe she’d sent someone else to save the children.” He took a deep breath. “But maybe I was the last hope. Or maybe the others failed, too.”

His voice rolled across a vast distance, a messenger telling the facts, but tears rolled, blood and water mixing on his cheek.

“I was so happy when the crying stopped. Not relieved, mind you.
Happy
. I wept with joy. What kind of a horror could be ‘happy’—”

“That’s not joy,” Kip interrupted. “That’s a breakdown.” The words kind of slipped out, but he also let them.

“Bugger off. You don’t know me,” Daimhin said, eyes coming to hard focus.

“Yes I do,” Kip said. “The day you took your first stag, your hands were shaking so hard that when you cleaned it, your knife punctured its intestines. Your father never told anyone. He didn’t want to shame you in front of the village. But you were ashamed, and your secret shame spurred you to become a better hunter. You expect perfection of yourself, and it’s always been your shame that makes you redouble your efforts. It’s brought you to heights unimaginable to other men . . . but it broke you here.”

Kip could feel his Mighty getting tense even before he saw the white-knuckled grip Daimhin had on his obsidian knife.

Shame is a gorgon. Before you grab her serpentine hair to drag her into the light, remember what her hair
is
.

“Forgive me,” Kip said. “I know you, but you don’t know me. I shouldn’t have spoken so.” Except it had been on purpose, and the truth lay wriggling in the light like a rainbow trout thumping about the bottom of the boat, gasping in the air when it so wanted to breathe safe water. “The cutting. Tell me about it.”

He knew it was an old pagan ritual way of mourning the dead, but Daragh the Coward had cut himself as bravado and as a mask. The same action might mean something very different in Daimhin Web.

The young man was on a jagged edge, looking as if he wasn’t sure if he should attack Kip or throw himself at his feet or bolt into the forest. Instead, defeated, he sulked. “One for each one dead.”

“But not too deep,” Kip said. The hunter knew exactly how deeply to cut to cause a scar without impeding function.

“I have promises to keep,” Daimhin said, as if it were simple.

“To the other children,” Kip said, understanding him. “You’ve been taking care of them.”

“Not well,” Daimhin spat.

“You’ve made a vow that you’ll take care of them forever.” Kip had thought that the murderers had left the food. It had been Daimhin. “A penance?”

“I made them orphans,” Daimhin said.

Came too late to stop them being made orphans by others. It was very different.

There had to be thirty children here. And this boy—maybe twenty years old? maybe years short of that—hunter and legend though he was, this
boy
was going to be their mother and father? It was insane.

And yet, war makes insanity a necessity.

“One might suggest . . .” Kip said. Then he wasn’t sure if he should go on. But he bulled ahead. Drag it all into the light. Let the light sort it out, the evil and the good, and the good that had made its concessions to weakness and fallibility and human foibles. “If the Third Eye could see the future, wouldn’t she have known you wouldn’t make it in time to help, even if she asked? Maybe this wasn’t your fault at all.”

“She did ask,” Daimhin Web said. As if it were simple.

“If she asked knowing you’d say no, is it really your fault?”

“She
did
ask,” Daimhin said.

“Why would she ask if she knew he wouldn’t get here in time?” Cruxer asked quietly, aggrieved. As if the Third Eye had piled guilt atop a boy too sensitive to hold its weight. Hard as he was, and as starkly as he liked to see the world separated into sheep and goats, at times Cruxer could show deep compassion. He could see that Daimhin the Hunter would never be only a hunter any longer. Cruxer, who’d been catapulted from an old life by his guilt over a death he couldn’t stop, Cruxer understood.

If they made it through this damned war, Kip hoped to see that understanding, compassionate side of his dear friend flourish.

Tisis said quietly, “I think sometimes we can all see the future coming, and we can’t help but act, even when we know it’s too little or too late, too feeble. Sometimes we act even though we know it will mean our death,” she said, locking her jade-green eyes with Kip’s. “I don’t think that makes us fools. I think it makes us great.”

And you’re staying with me, Kip thought. Does that make you a fool, or great, or both?

But Kip tore his eyes away from his remarkable bride, who was as undeserved as sunshine on a winter morning.

He saw perhaps the real reason for the Third Eye to send Daimhin: if she’d told him there were orphans for him to care for, he wouldn’t have come. What were orphans to a hunter? But by lying, by telling him there was a massacre he could stop, she could save these orphans as Daimhin revealed a mettle he himself hadn’t known he possessed.

After all, like everyone else, prophets can lie.

“Tell me about this, this clearing, that plinth,” Kip said instead. “You came here for a reason. Or was it merely for the quiet?”

“Ha!” Daimhin said. But he breathed and looked at the sun for a time, and spun his hellstone knife and sheathed it, and jumped off the plinth with the grace of an artist whose body is his brush.

He turned and bowed to the plinth with a gravity that might have been mockery. He was a broken man indeed, teetering at the edge of madness.

“Seven groves, in seven lands,” he said. “Apple, pear, fig, pomegranate, olive, orange, and atasifusta. Blood Forest, Ruthgar, Paria, Abornea, Ilyta, Tyrea, and Atash. Seven cities, seven mirrors, seven colored lenses. They were first meant to be a perfect circle, but compromises were made, so they became a circle as lopsided as our politics. This one had to be this close to the coast because treaties with the pygmies forbade the Tyrean Empire deeper access to the woods.”

A prohibition that obviously hadn’t stuck. Not that that was the point right now.

Daimhin said, “My forefathers were the keepers of this sacred grove, once upon a time. My father brought me here to visit once. Kind of a pilgrimage in our family, though we haven’t lived here for generations. I came here hoping . . . for their understanding? Their forgiveness? Their wisdom? Ha. They failed, too, after all, and let us all be scattered into the deep forest. I hoped . . .” He snorted. “Maybe it was just for the quiet, after all.”

“There was a city here, then?” Kip asked.

“Apple Grove was always small. I think most of the grove cities were. All were close or within a direct line of sight to great cities—Azuria, here, for one. They were intended to be isolated from the city’s politics. As if such a thing is possible. But at least it is harder to capture two fortified positions than just one. It didn’t work as intended, of course. The fort on Ruic Head was constructed solely to house Ru’s Great Mirror, but Satrapah Naveen later moved the Great Mirror into Ru itself to show her power.”

Kip hadn’t been thinking in terms of the ancients when he’d been there, but it was true, the fort of Ruic Head was far too large for what the Chromeria thought it had been. The fort had thick timber walls, but it had been built on stone foundations. Before the relatively recent advent of cannons that could shoot great distances into the bay, there was no function for a fort there. A simple lookout tower would have sufficed. Maybe a lighthouse. There hadn’t been need for an entire fort.

Which was interesting history and all, but if there were big mirrors in all these groves, where was the mirror that had been
here
?