The White Tree (11 page)

"Like scared little kids?" Dante said, giving him a look.

"Exactly like that," Blays grinned.

"But we're not little kids."

"What do you bet he
thinks
we are? If you're strong, you're supposed to fake being weak. It's like the first rule of the field."

"Um," Dante said, wrapping his head around that. "He's still on horseback. He'll murder us."

"That's where you come in." Blays lifted himself a couple inches and started backing on elbows and hips into the protection of the trees. Dante did the same. When they could no longer see the rider and the river showed in faint flashes behind the wall of reddening leaves, they got up and drew closer, placing their feet in the forest carpet like the first steps onto the uncertain ice of a pond. After what felt longer than an hour's march, Blays put a hand on Dante's shoulder and snuck forward to where the trees thinned, peeking around a bole.

"Still there," he breathed when he got back. "Grab a couple rocks."

"Rocks aren't going to make any difference."

"Every little advantage," Blays said, then bit down hard to stop a laugh when he saw the look on Dante's face. "You never know. Might get lucky."

"I bet." Dante rolled his eyes and scooped up two smooth stones, heavy for how well they fit his palm. He followed Blays toward the river. Insane, he thought. All this chasing had driven them insane. Knowing this was the smart play did nothing to slow his charging heart, to dry the dampness under his arms.

"Ready?"

"I guess."

"Go," Blays whispered, then ran out on the bank and began shrieking for his mother. Dante followed him, body tight with panic when he saw the rider not a hundred feet downstream. He heard him actually laugh, then ran harder at the thunder of hooves in the grass. Within moments the rider had halved the distance between them. He whipped his sword from his back and crouched in the saddle, lining the two boys in his sights. Dante tripped, flailing his arms for balance, and his screams were real.

"Now!" Blays yelled, but the stumble had stolen Dante's focus on the nether. He reached out again, the edges of his mind roaring like the wind. "Now, you son of a bitch!"

The rider raised his sword. Light flashed over Dante's eyes. He could see the sod leaping from the horse's strides. He stopped and turned, laughing in horror, and when he imagined he could feel the horse's hot breath he flung out his hand and the beast's head disappeared in a ball of blackness. A stone hurled past his shoulder and the rider swiped at it as his mount locked its legs and skidded on the damp grass. One of its front legs buckled and then it was down, sliding and rolling in the grass, the snap of its bones and the suddenly scared curses of its rider as he leapt free and collapsed to the ground. The boys charged then: Dante threw both rocks with all his strength, missing the first and clipping the man's shoulder with the second; Blays' blade bobbed beside him and Dante tore loose his own and they were on the downed man before he'd found his feet.

"You tricky shits!" he screamed. He struck from his knees, a fierce blow Dante blocked but which sent him staggering. The man's eyes were bright with some feral emotion when Blays' counter cut off his left hand. He swung wildly, forcing the boy to fall back, then reeled to his feet. Dante stepped forward and swung his weapon with both hands. The man deflected it, but his motion threw off an already poor balance and Blays' stroke broke his ribs like the staves of a barrel. He fell to his knees, propping himself up with his bleeding stump. He opened his mouth and spit hung in strands. His elbow quivered as he raised the point of his blade at the two boys. Dante's backhand strike knocked it from his hand. Blays aimed a final blow at the soft stretch of his neck. It didn't fall cleanly, but when he pulled back his sword the body dropped and didn't move.

Blays laughed, a hollow thing. Dante didn't join him.

"The others can't be far," Blays said.

"We can hide his body." Dante slid his sword into its sheath. The man's wide wounds steamed in the chill air.

"Not the
horse
."

"Then we'll run," Dante said. He found a small coinpurse and added it to his pocket. The horse was thrashing on the earth, legs shaking each time it tried to rise and the bones wouldn't hold. Its great glassy eyes rolled in its skull. Dante looked to Blays.

"I can't," Blays stated.

"There's a bow," Dante said, pointing. "Take it."

"What if it kicks me?"

"It couldn't kick through a broken board," he said, and when he went for more words he found half-digested carrots instead. He leaned over and spat them into the grass.

"He was looking for us to have gone south," Blays said, turning away from Dante's gurgles. He shouldered the bow and a half-full quiver. "There must be a town that way."

"Whetton," Dante said, the sour taste of his stomach on his tongue. He spat again. "We can go faster on the bank."

"Can't risk it." Blays headed back up the bank. "Let's stick to the forest's edge."

Dante disagreed but found himself light on the guts to speak up. They broke back into the trill of birdsong and the rattle of wind-shaken leaves and made a brisk trot south. Within seconds Dante was shivering without stop.

"That wasn't how I'd imagined it would be," he said once his blood had calmed.

"You think about killing people a lot?" Blays said, smiling faintly.

"Sometimes," he smiled back. It didn't last. "On his knees like that."

"Don't feel sorry for him. He was all set to trample us into the grass."

"But it was so...savage," Dante said, and Blays shrugged. It was worse than the other times. It felt like a regression, like an act of a man he didn't know. He had no illusions fights were supposed to be fair. If the one with the tracker had been even, he without his horse and them without surprise, he expected it would have ended with a few pounds of steel through his heart. Yet he couldn't shake the feeling what they'd done had been unnatural, that somewhere the gods were watching them and their judgment would be harsh.

"We'd be dead except that spell," Blays said softly a moment later.

"Yeah."

"Were you scared?"

"No," he said, running faster. "A little. When I tripped."

"I just about dropped a pile in my breeches," Blays said, chortling so hard he had to sputter out the words. "Then the look on his face when you blinded his horse! Gods!"

Dante chuckled weakly. It had looked otherworldly, the black ball where there should have been a head, the rider throwing his hands over his head like a man falling through the false floor of a wildcat trap.

"You have a strange sense of humor."

"He'd have laughed too if he could see it." Blays giggled. Dante joined him, feeling outside himself. Their nervous energy gave out after a mile or so and they slowed to a stroll to catch their breath. Dante clasped his hands behind his head to ward off the stitch in his side.

"They're not going to miss our tracks after that," he said, gazing into the woods. "Not even with their woodsman dead."

"I figured that's why we were running away," Blays said.

"The nearest town could be twenty miles from here. They're on horseback."

"So what?"

"So what? So they'll find us and kill us!"

Blays rolled his eyes. "So what do you want to do about it?"

"I don't know!" Dante said, startled at the pitch of his own voice. He thought he was angry with Blays for being so cavalier, but after a quarter mile of silent seething he'd reached the same conclusion as the boy. They couldn't hide. They had no horses. Returning to the woods would do no good when the temple men had already found them once. All they could do was run and hope. The trees thinned and he saw a stream of smoke rising from a fraction of a mile down the bank. For a moment he let himself think their luck had turned, that it would be the outskirts of a town, maybe even Whetton, but it was a single house on the river's edge. The land rolled empty beyond it.

"Wait," he said. "That smoke."

"What about it?" Blays yawned.

"There'll be a boat."

"Smoke means
fire
."

"At the house where they have the fire, you dunce. You don't live in a river and not have a boat."

"Oh," Blays said. "Sure. If we cross over, they'd have to waste time finding a ferry."

"The current's fast," Dante said, frowning, picking at this new thread. "If we row hard, they'd have to be riding pell-mell to keep up. We can reach town ahead of them."

They looked at each other. "Ambush," Blays said.

"Nater," Dante agreed, one of those words you repeat without a clue where it came from.

"Yeah," the boy said, licking his lips. "That's it. We take them out of the mix and that gives us time to think up what the hell we do next. If we can't figure out what to do before they send the next guys, maybe we deserve to eat it."

Dante crouched in the bushes of the forest's fringe. Nothing but open grass north and south.

"Can you run?"

"Let's do this thing."

They cut right down the shallow slope of the grassy band and then the steep rocky banks until their boots touched water. The house lay straight ahead. It was a small thing, clearly no more than a couple rooms, and as they got closer Dante grew afraid they'd found the one fisherman in the wide world who didn't own a boat. They drew to a quick walk at a couple hundred yards off, ears sharp for footsteps, for shouts, any sign of its owners other than the white wisps of smoke. At a hundred yards he could smell it strongly, the sweet smoky scent of dry heat and crisp winter. His eyes locked to the hut as they fell into its shadow. The bank stretched out in a tiny spit right before the hut and as they crested the moist earth he heard the hollow slap of water on a hull.

"Nice deduction, Sage Pratus," Blays muttered, regarding the rowboat moored in the miniature bay beneath the house. A light wind blew in from the north. It smelled like the weather were turning.

"Think it's safe?"

"Does it matter?" Blays said, tromping down to the two-person skiff. Its timbers were bleached with the wear of water and sunshine, and above the waterline the wood was fuzzy to the touch. Blays knocked near the top of its hull and one of the beams actually rattled. "What's holding it together? The power of prayer?"

"They take this thing out?" Dante hissed, glancing at the river. "I wouldn't trust it in a puddle."

"River looks okay," Blays said, grabbing hold of the unraveling rope at its fore and following it to a stake a few feet up the bank. "Get in."

"Lyle's balls," he swore, then edged up through the water and rolled himself inside. It was decently broad and didn't threaten to show its belly at the addition of his weight, but he didn't like the way it rolled on the current. Blays freed the rope and swung the boat up sidelong to the shore, then wiggled his rear like a cat before it makes a leap and hurled himself in behind Dante. The boat flapped around like a man who's just stubbed his toe and Dante threw himself flat against its bottom. "You ass!"

"I'm no sailor," Blays said. "Now I'm the captain here. Grab a damn oar."

"Are you sure you wouldn't rather finish drowning me?"

"I think I hear someone coming," Blays said, cocking his ear and shoving them off.

"Where?" Dante whispered, ducking down and taking up an oar. He dipped it smoothly into the water.

"Well, that got you rowing." He smiled at himself and picked up the other oar. Dante glared at him over his shoulder, then pressed his fingers to his temples.

"Row on the other side, you idiot."

"I said I'm not a sailor," Blays spat back. "Doesn't sound really carry on the water?"

"One reason among many you should shut the hell up."

Blays muttered to himself. They pointed the nose downstream and paddled out into the current. From forty or fifty feet off, the bank rushed by like they were running on the water. The blade of Dante's oar spun whirlpools and clouds of bubbles into the light chop of the gray waters. Each time he lifted it clear a stream of water spattered away from the oar. Blacks and blues shimmered beneath the silvery surface, a hint at the vastness of its depths.

"Whose idea was this?" Blays asked. In five minutes of travel the hut was already little more than a dark blot upstream, further than the opposite shore. "It was a good one."

"You sound surprised," Dante said. He let his paddle skim the surface for a moment, arching his back to flex the kinks from his shoulders. He thought about calling to the nether, soothing his muscles, but let it be. Rowing wouldn't kill him.

The breeze was very faint, buffering him around the ears with only the occasional gust, but back in the woods the heads of the trees were swaying. Brown leaves tore loose and fluttered south, hanging nearly motionless with regards to the boat. For perhaps the first time in his life Dante wished he knew more about mathematics.

Waves beat gently on the sides of the boat in glorps and burbles. The two paddles swished rhythmically. The trees on the banks fell away, replaced by fields of black-brown dirt and old yellow wheat stalks shorn of their heads. Now and then a house stood up alone in the farmland. After a while Dante's knees cramped under him and he squirmed into a cross-legged stance. When he grew hot he shed his cloak. A few miles down, the Chanset bent to their left. Following its curve, they saw it widen further yet, and beyond the broad gray bulge of waters, no more than three miles away—twenty minutes, he figured, if they kept to their strokes—the welcome smoke and low-slung spires of what had to be Whetton. Dante looked back and laughed at Blays.

"Let's pull up before we hit town," Blays said. "It'll look weird, paddling right up to the docks in this thing."

"I'm sure we could come up with something," Dante said, but a mile upstream they angled it into shore on a sandy beach and disembarked into the shallows. He picked up the rope from inside the bow (as far as the rowboat could be said to have one) and carried it to shore. "There's nowhere to tie it up."

"Who cares?"

"We should at least drag it aground," he said, holding the rope in both hands. "Maybe it will treat someone else as well."