The White Tree (6 page)

"What are you doing?"

"We're going to need money."

"That's sick," Blays said, backing up a step.

"You're the one that just killed him," he said, but Blays made no move to help. Dante hurried through the pockets, fishing for coin, then rifled through the clothing of the two other corpses. It wasn't a fortune, but it would last long enough if they were careful. After a moment of staring he pulled off the least bloody cloak and swung it over his shoulders.

"His cloak, too?" Blays wrinkled his nose. "What are you, a ghoul?"

"We need to leave. Now." Dante stood and headed for the other end of the alley, refusing to let himself run. His legs were shaky and weak beneath him. The whole thing had taken less than two minutes. Ninety-odd seconds for three dead bodies and a wall of darkness he couldn't explain. The looted sword bounced against the side of his left knee and he hoisted his belt over his waist. He tipped his head to the stars, trying to regain his direction. In the weeks he'd lived in Bressel he'd learned no more than a smattering of its streets (he had the sense you could live there all your life without knowing more than a single district) and had never gotten the hang of which way was which. He picked out the seven-starred bow of Mallius pointing the way to Jorus, the north star, and led Blays west at the next intersection, away from the direction of the docks. They moved down a broad street and passed cloaked men, armed men, men on horseback, ragged men missing ears or noses and clutching flasks. The unlicensed sword felt like a beacon on his hip. He put it out of his mind. For now their only worry was putting some distance between themselves and the bodies.

"What are you?" Blays asked, and Dante felt his bones try to leap out of his skin. They crossed Fare Street, Bressel's old outer boundary, and the cobbles gave way to dirt.

"I'm fine."

"Did you hear me?"

"I'm a sixteen-year-old man," Dante said flatly.

"Most men I know can't blot out the stars."

"They're there now, aren't they?" Dante said, waving at the whorls of constellations. Blays grunted and bumped into Dante's shoulder. He gripped Dante's collar, steadying himself, and Dante leaned into the boy's weight. He felt blood seeping through his sleeve. "Shut up and sit down. I can bind those up."

Blays didn't say anything, just seated himself on the dirt road and stared at the wooden walls of the rickety two-story rowhouses that didn't look any older than ten or twenty years. Dante cut strips from the bottom of his new cloak and pulled them tight around the boy's forearm. What he really needed was stitches, but Dante had forgotten his needle and thread back at the room. The gash across Blays' ribs was bleeding more but wasn't so deep. He let a strip of cloth soak up some blood so it would stick to Blays' skin, then wrapped another long piece around it.

"I didn't see him hit you," Dante said.

"Big surprise," Blays said. Dante frowned, knotting the cloth over Blays' shoulder. The kid was off somewhere else, working something over when he should have his eyes out for the watch or other pursuit. Dante didn't think it had anything to do with the shock of battle or Blays' loss of blood. He wanted to say he'd had no control over the darkness, which was true; he wanted to say he had no idea where it had come from, which might not be. The way it blacked out like ink and then flickered away when Dante's emotions had changed reminded him exactly of a passage around the twentieth page of the
Cycle
when Stathus the Wise, facing six armed warriors, had encased them and himself in a lightless sphere and slain five of them one by one. The last of them then struck Stathus and clouded his mind with fear, causing the sphere to fade at once—a coincidence of patent ridiculousness, since it had said nothing about how Stathus had gone about dropping them in darkness in the first place. All Dante'd done was try not to drop a load in his trousers. There was no way the mere act of reading the book had somehow limbered up his mind to the point where he could do things like Stathus.

What had it been, then? Trick of the light? Widespread hysterical blindness, like the kind he'd read afflicted soldiers on the eve of a battle so they couldn't fight? The first signs of a degenerative and apparently infectious ocular condition, or a priest watching from the windows, drunk, using parlor tricks to toy with them? Lunar eclipse? Any of those was about as likely as father Taim strolling down from his constellation and shaking Dante's hand. The one explanation that fit was he'd done something without knowing how he did it and that was no explanation at all; as wrong as Blays was to suspect him, Dante knew he was equally powerless to tell him why.

They passed from the low, half-mud half-fieldstone houses inside the Westgate to the low, half-mud half-fieldstone houses outside the Westgate. This whole range of city looked like it had been built within the last five years. The roofs were mudcaked reeds, the doors flimsy things, firelight visible in the gaps of their frames. Blays' feet swept over the rinds and pebbles in the roadway.

"Tired?" Dante asked.

Blays shrugged. "We can't exactly stop here."

He nodded, conceding the point. "We could rest a minute, though."

"Why?" Blays met Dante's eyes for the first time since the fight. Something dark lingered in his face. His lips curled. "You too worn out to keep going?"

"I'm fine," Dante said, feeling the dullness in his knees, the burn in the backs of his thighs. "It's just a couple miles to the woods. We should be all right there for the night."

"Then we'll stop when it's safe."

He had thought there would be some triumph if they survived their first skirmish, but instead of standing back to back against a shared danger, it had made Blays hate him. The wind kicked up, dragging leaves and trade papers and a few forgotten scraps of cloth past their feet. Graying things he was glad not to recognize moldered in the gutters. Since the time Dante'd left the village of his birth he'd enjoyed his solitude, his total freedom. Other people only intruded on his ability to learn. If Blays was going to part his company because he was as scared as a little girl about whatever Dante'd done when Dante himself didn't know what that thing was, he wouldn't mark it as a loss.

Open fields showed between the houses after another half mile. Within two more minutes the last of what could be said to be the city had been replaced by brittle cornstalks and the puzzled moans of cows. The city fires died away and overhead a thousand stars pricked out from the black curtain. A god was there, if the
Cycle of Arawn
could be believed, turning the stone, milling the substance that changed men's hearts to darkness.

3

They rose with the dawn and ate a cold breakfast in colder silence. They'd slept back to back, Dante's stolen cloak thrown over them both, and when Blays stirred Dante felt him freeze with a jerk before jumping up and jogging some ten yards off. Face buried under the cloak, Dante heard Blays slapping his arms, his face, working up the circulation. Dante sat up, glared at the sunlight filtering through the leaves. His legs hurt. So did his hand, where that merc had nearly torn away his knife and his fingers along with it. Most of the flies had died in the first snap of frost earlier that week, but the ones that remained found the two of them and sizzled fatly in the breezeless morning. He tossed his head when they landed on his neck, waving halfheartedly at their stupid black bodies, imagining every buzz was a bee about to sting him.

Blays wandered off as soon as he saw Dante was up, mumbling something about having seen some mushrooms, and Dante waited till he'd merged with the trees to open his pack and then the book. He thought the words would feel different, that the act of reading them after the night before would fill him with some deep and nameless force, but there it was, the same old clean black hand of a meticulous scribe recounting legends and troubles of succession no one'd cared about since the moment the last man who'd known those heroes and kings had died. Dante found it interesting, in its way, was somewhat mystified to be confronted with hard evidence life had been going on for so many hundreds of years, but none of that vague awe explained how he'd been able to summon the darkness. Leaves crackled and he plopped the book shut and stowed it, watching the treeline.

"Found a few," Blays said, emerging and holding out a double handful of mushrooms with smooth pink-gray caps and pleated black undersides.

Dante twisted his mouth. "You'll die if you eat those."

"Right," Blays said, and when he lifted one to his mouth Dante bolted up and hit his wrist hard enough to sting them both. Mushrooms flew to all sides.

"It's poison." He nudged one with his toe, then crushed it into the dirt. "Probably wouldn't
kill
you, but you'd barf up anything else you put down with it."

"Pardon me for not wanting to starve. We can't all be from the middle of nowhere," Blays said, but he dumped the couple he was still holding into the leaves and kicked them away. He brushed his hands clean on the front of his trousers and looked up at the angle of the sun. "Wasting light."

"I can teach you those things." Dante bent over and slung his cloak and his pack over his shoulders.

"I just want to get the hell out of here." Blays started off and kept a couple steps ahead. For a while they just walked. They'd made about five miles from the city before they'd gone to sleep, Dante figured, though they'd been traveling in the dead of night without a road, so who the hell could tell. Blays kept a quick pace through the sparse grass and falling leaves. Not too smart, Dante thought, not when he'd lost some blood the night before and there was no chance they were still being followed. He kept his mouth shut. He had the impression Blays wasn't in a talking mood.

They broke off for camp before the sun had finished cradling itself in the mountains. Dante gathered up some tinder, meaning to risk a fire. He doubted the temple men would figure out he'd left the city for another few days. They could spend weeks combing Bressel before they could be certain. He and Blays were off the trails in open country; there was no rhyme to their course other than a vague northerly direction so they wouldn't lose total track of the river. Three more days like today and they could be a hundred miles away. Their trail, as he saw it, was cold from the moment they'd left the men dead in the alley.

"Cold again," Blays said, shifting the night-facing side of his body toward the fire. His thick straight nose threw a broad shadow over the far side of his face. He prodded the dirt with a twig, snapping off a couple inches at a time and tossing them into the flames.

"Yeah."

"It hasn't bled since this afternoon," Blays said after a moment, peeling back a half inch of the strip of cloth over his left arm.

"That's good. Does it look red?"

"No." He sniffed. "What about you?"

"I wasn't hurt." Dante watched tiny flakes of ash sail into the smoke and the heat. "Just bruises."

"I see." He broke the twig in two and dropped it into the fire. "Isn't there a bark you can chew to make it hurt less?"

"It's not the bark," Dante said, "you just can't feel pain when you're chewing." Blays waggled his jaw and Dante put a hand over his own mouth. "I can't believe you believed that."

Blays looked away. "Shut up. I'm not a physician."

"There is a tree like that," Dante said, squelching his laughter. "I'll find some tomorrow if you want."

"I'm going to sleep."

Dante watched him stretch out on the ground, back to the fire, and wondered if he should apologize when it was Blays who couldn't appreciate a joke. Before he'd made up his mind, the boy was breathing deep and easy. Dante stayed up a while, letting his eyes drift over the branches of the forest, but for however hard he tried he couldn't make the black speck come back.

Blays stayed silent the next day, but he kept close by, didn't range ahead or disappear into the woods when they sat to eat or rest. The bread ran out at noon. They found a linberry bush, but the berries were fat, wrinkly, an overripe maroon. They took a break at late afternoon, hunkering down in the tall grass of a clearing. Tomorrow they'd head dead east, Dante thought, toward the river. Find a town. From there, Blays could leave and Dante could—do something. Hitch a boat downriver and make for the coast below Bressel, maybe. Sail for Albardin in the Western Territories. It wasn't as big as Bressel, but it would be a port town, lots of weird lore from foreign lands, and plenty far from the eyes of the temple men.

"It's working," Blays said, a hunk of bark sticking from his lips. "Tastes like shit."

"It's bark."

"Animals eat it, don't they? Don't they have tongues?"

"You can't trust animals. They eat their own vomit."

"Dogs, maybe. I've seen dogs eat things from both ends of cats. " Blays spat flecks of wood, wiped them from his tongue. "But that's why they're dogs."

"You're eating bark. What does that make you?"

"I'm not
eating
it."

"Chewing it up, then. That's even more like a dog." Dante bit the skin around his thumbnail, tasted blood. "Are you ever going to show me how to use this stupid sword? Or am I just carrying it around to impress all the girls out here?"

"Go stick it in a goose," Blays said, stretching out in the grass. The bark wiggled in his mouth.

"I don't think that would be fun for either of us." Dante leaned back on his elbows. He tried to picture a map of the lands north of Bressel. Whetton was up there somewhere, it was decent-sized. Not that it mattered where they ended up. If they followed the Chanset long enough, they'd find somewhere with some people.

"Hold it while we're walking."

"What does that even—? What would your mother think of you saying that?"

"My mom's dead. And I'm talking about the sword, idiot," Blays said, the bark between his lips jumping with his words. "Carry it in your hand. Swing it around. Get a feel for it. A sword doesn't react like a knife. It's heavy, it takes a while to respond to whatever it is you're trying to get it to do, and you've got to learn to account for that."