The White Tree (31 page)

Crags climbed on all sides. He felt like he was walking in the bottom of a bowl. The clouds had lifted from the pass itself, but still streaked by so low Gabe probably could have stretched up and touched them. It started snowing again and he blinked against the freezing bite of the flakes against his face. His eyes grew watery; beneath his collar his nose was running.

Robert called something over his shoulder and the wind snatched it away. Dante cupped a hand to his ear and shook his head. Robert drew up and leaned over.

"I said that's the crest up ahead!"

It all looked the same to Dante. Snowy and rocky and cold. Obscured by walls of wind-driven snow. The shallower drifts were back down to a mere foot deep, he saw. They rode on.

He thought reaching the top of the pass would be inspiring, triumphant, but when they got there all he saw was more snow and a carpet of clouds in the valley to the right. The dark lump of Robert's horse leading the way looked like an anonymous stranger lost in the nowhere. Snow continued to batter his face. He'd always thought it fell out of the bottoms of the clouds, but here he was inside one and the snow was still falling. He tipped back his head to try to get a glimpse at the clouds above but all he saw was close-pressed gray.

Dante's horse slipped then and he grabbed wildly for a hold on the saddle. Hundreds of pounds of bones and guts and flesh struggled beneath him. The horse bucked its front shoulders and Dante heard Blays cry out as the world tumbled on its head and he threw out his arms and crumped facefirst into a snowbank. He kicked his legs and fell back on his ass.

"You all right?" Blays shouted.

"It's cold!" he said, shaking snow from his chest and arms, wiping his hood over the slush melting on his nose and cheeks. His gloves were soaked and his hands stung like they'd been struck. He put a foot in the stirrup and the horse took a step forward and he had to hop along and hang onto the saddle to keep from falling again. Dante patted the beast, mumbling baby words he hoped the others couldn't hear, then hauled himself up.

"Soft landing," he shouted into the wind. Robert's hood whipped around his face as he considered Dante. Then the man turned and continued on.

Robert slackened his pace, letting his horse feel its way through the drifts and the slippery descent. Dante had been gripped by a slow kind of terror on the way up the pass, but as the day drew on he found himself increasingly distracted from the imminence of his death on these rocks. What would Narashtovik look like? Would it be one big fortress to ward off the constant sieges? Would its buildings look like monstrous tombs? How would he find Samarand? Would she be like its queen, gazing down on the snow-wrapped city from the safety of her towers, or would she be like Cally, an underground figure, emerging from hiding only to meet with the others of her order? When he found her, how would he kill her—leaping from the secret of a dark alley to slip a knife in her spine, or meeting her in open single combat, like all the stories of two foes meeting in all the legends of the world? He realized he didn't know a thing about the dead city other than it wasn't really peopled by the dead. Why hadn't he asked Cally more? Would it have helped? Was there any sense in trying to plan before he was there to see Narashtovik with his own two eyes?

His horse slipped again, leg jolting, and without thinking Dante yanked the reins close to his body. The horse stopped short. He took a deep breath, fighting the rushing wind that wanted to tear it from his mouth. He turned his head away from the gales. Stay in the moment. There were hundreds of miles ahead of them yet. There would be time to brood when a misstep wouldn't send him plummeting into a frozen abyss.

He hurried to catch the couple steps he'd lost to Robert, face flushed with a vein-flooding rage. What was wrong with him? Why was he so afraid of the cold and the heights? Robert was managing just fine. Blays wasn't complaining. Either he'd die or he wouldn't. There was no in-between and either way he wouldn't have to worry. He was so sick of the mantle of panic he let himself feel whenever he faced the slightest trouble. It was disgusting. It was commonplace and it was weak. He spit into the swirling snow. It was time to become something more than the sum of his emotions.

Robert slogged along and Dante slogged behind him. He made his mind go quiet and endured. It was impossible to tell how much time was passing. Light continued to fight its way through the mist and the snow, but who knew how much was left. He hummed to himself, having heard you couldn't feel fear when you were humming. Blays didn't seem to notice. He made himself recall from memory entire passages from the
Cycle of Arawn
: the opening verse, "The stars shimmered on the waters and for thirty years Arawn took their measure. As he held the nail of the north, Taim jostled his shoulder and all came loose: and down came the waters to drown out the land"; near the end of the first chapter, "And Arawn said to Van, father of Eric Draconat, 'Make no sacrifice, for it shall all be mine in time'"; much later, when Arawn had disappeared as an active force and the tome turned to kings and priests, "Gil Gal-El rode seven times around the keep, shaking his sword and naming the seven bodies of the heavens, and at the seventh circle the keep fell and the king was no more." Fragments, half-remembered stories, scores of names. Again he forgot the trail.

It had stopped snowing at some point. The stuff on the ground was deeper than it had been at the wind-scoured gap at the peak of the pass, now swallowing the horses to their knees, but it no longer lashed Dante's face. The mists began to lift; sometimes he could see the green smears of snow-bent pines a couple hundred yards away. And then it was gone and he could see the entire trail twisting its way along the side of the mountain, and the skies rose until the clouds hung not on his face but a thousand feet above, and to his right, in the valley between the bodies of the mountains, he could see a long, silent lake, its waters cobalt and shining sapphire and at times a creamy, scintillating green he'd never seen in all the world. His breath caught.

"What kind of sorcery are we heading into?" he said to Robert. The wind had dropped to a strong breeze and he no longer had to shout to compete with its moaning grief.

"That's just glacier water, you ninny," Robert said, but his gaze fixed on it while his shoulders stayed in swing with the rhythm of his horse. "It's nothing special."

"Do you see that?" Blays said behind him.

"Yeah."

"It looks like burning glass."

Dante nodded, eyes clinging to the shelf of ice above the lake, ice that was white at its cap, blue as a frozen summer sky in its middle, that same otherworldly green at its feet. The wind hushed and all he could hear was the snow as it crumpled and squeaked under the horses' hooves. The air was cold and clean in his lungs. They followed a curve in the trail and a wedge of rock and pines occluded the aching blue lake. Dante kept glancing back, glancing to where the valley should be, wanting one more glimpse of the hidden waters.

Robert pushed them on till the light ceased gleaming from all that white snow to be stolen by the westerly peaks. They were still in the mountains proper, as far as Dante could tell, but the cold was less stunning, the wind less biting. Robert spied a broad, flat break in the pass a few minutes downhill and took them there, tying the horses to the pines that would offer them some shelter. He started to scoop away the knee-deep snow with his gloved hands, just enough space to lie down in; when they did, Dante saw, their bodies would be hidden from sight and wind. He and Blays pitched in, sweeping away the snow with their boots, grateful for an excuse to flex their numb, sodden toes. It was nearly dark by the time they finished. Robert straightened his back and considered their work.

"There, that wasn't so bad, was it?" he said. "Nobody died? Fell off a cliff? Froze to death?"

"There's still time," Blays said, wiping his nose.

"Hard part's over. Tomorrow we'll get back down in the hills. Might not even be snowy."

"It's the north," Dante said.

"So what?" Robert clapped his hands together. "It's just the north, not another world. You boys need to get out more. Besides, mountains make the weather act screwy, you never know what it's like back in reasonable elevations."

"Couldn't these people have started their little rebellion in the summer?" Blays mumbled. "Would that be too much to ask?" He rummaged through the saddlebags, picking out some food. He tossed the heavy wad of Dante's blanket at his chest. "Catch."

Dante caught it and almost fell back into the snow. It had frozen or something. Thick to begin with, it now weighed ten or fifteen pounds. He stretched up his arms and tried to roll it open, frowning when it drooped to but a slightly less creased position, then shook it hard, sending ice particles flying into the last of the light.

"This stinks," he said.

"Ah, it's not that bad," Robert said through a mouthful of cheese. "At least we've got blankets. Think how bad it would be if we were up here naked."

"Why would we be up here naked?" Blays said.

"But just think if we were."

"There's no possible reason we would ever be up here naked."

Robert shrugged and took another bite. "I'm just saying. Some years it's snowed in six weeks ago. We've been lucky."

"Huzzah," Blays said. He wrapped himself in a couple blankets and stared out on the snowfields, on the black of the trees and the gray of the unlit snow. The clouds parted and a three-quarter moon washed over the valley with pale rays.

"Doesn't that make it all worthwhile?" Robert said, scratching his beard and smiling.

"No," Blays said.

"I'm cold," Dante said.

"Lyle on the rack. Then go to sleep. You may hate this day, but you'll be able to remember the story twenty years from now. Assuming the gods suffer a collective collapse of reason and decide to extend your whining lives that long."

Robert got up and stamped around the campsite, patting the horses, touching the pine needles. Dante hugged his blankets around him and wiggled his fingers and toes. After a while they stopped hurting.

By noon the next day they'd dropped out of the mountains and into an endless sea of white-coated hills. The snow was shallow, though, no more than three inches, sometimes disappearing entirely in the places where the sun shone unshadowed for most of the day. Compared to the trudge through the pass, the horses all but flew as they walked. They saw no one before the sun had set and they took shelter in the hollow of a draw. No riders, no farmers, no trails of smoke and civilization. The day after was just as empty. It was as if the snows had wiped away the world. They crossed a ridge and to their right a circle of great gray stone blocks stood like the grave markers of all things. Dante pulled his cloak tighter around his shoulders. After that moment he couldn't shake the sense they were being watched, that there were eyes in the trees or the dark creases between hills, but he knew that was foolish, people had better things to do than spy on them all day, things like keeping themselves alive or getting the hell out of these wastelands. Still, it stuck with him. That uneasy creep of a presence among the isolation. He didn't mention it, not wanting to look like a scared little child, and so he just walked on, one more hour, one more day, that much closer to the dead city.

"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.