The White Tree (7 page)

Dante gave him a look. "Is that how you learned?"

"It was wooden and I was about ten years younger, but otherwise, yeah."

"And then you'll teach me."

Blays shrugged, hands behind his head. "Why don't you go find us some food."

"Why don't you take a dive down a hill," Dante said, but he got to his feet and walked out of the clearing. The light yellowed as he searched, plucking berries, gathering the bland, low-slung fungus that took more time to clean the dirt from its folds than it did to eat. Orange and red leaves drifted from the boughs and settled to the ground in the windless silence. He spooked a grouse, heart bursting at the thrash of its wings. He could try a few snares, but that would mean setting them up, then remembering where they were and checking them later, then the several centuries it'd take to pluck feathers—hours of work when he'd already gotten no thanks for all the other food he'd found them. On the way back to the clearing he saw the green sprigs of wild carrots and pried them from the soil. They had the end of a rind of cheese left, too. Even if Blays ate like a pig it would be enough for dinner and breakfast. The carrots dangled from his left hand and the sword from his right. He whooshed it over the grass, lopping the heads from burrgrass and the brittle, straw-like elkwood where it grew in the damper dirt.

He'd readied a few choice taunts about how Blays would starve the first five minutes he spent on his own, but returned to find the boy sacked out in the grass. A couple hours of daylight left, he guessed. It would hardly be worth it to wake him up and deal with his nonsense. They could walk by night if they had to. Dante tamped down a patch of grass, plunked down. Got out the book.

His constant urge was to read through without stopping, but he knew whatever was between its covers was too important to treat like a fruit pastry, something to be devoured as quickly as possible. It deserved patience, deliberance, the kind of disciplined caution Dante'd never managed in any other part of his life. This, though, this was different. He could nearly recite the first dozen pages by memory. Already he remembered the tales of the first hundred pages like the nursery rhymes that stuck in his head whenever he gave them a foot in the door, like the dry-as-sand history of the royal house the churchman had made him read whenever he came late to supper or didn't sweep the corners. He'd separated the proper names from the words of Narashtovik, teased through their context until he had at least a vague concept of their meaning, and in many cases could readily define them. He no longer had to page back to figure out which displaced brother had slain which usurping regent. Its pages were becoming a part of him. With no other leads on an entry into the world of his desire, he read with no less a goal than branding the book's pages on his mind so brightly he'd remember them to the day his eyes went dim.

After half an hour he glanced up and saw a world drenched in shadows. They flowed like water, pooling on the undersides of leaves, drifting through the air as fine as mist, defying the sunlight that still stretched through the branches. He blinked and his head rushed with the warm, tingly delirium he got when he stood up too fast. Like that, the vision was gone.

Blays' snoring snagged so hard his head jerked. He sat up, rubbing his eyes with his fists.

"How long have I been out?"

"I don't know," Dante said. His voice sounded far away. He cleared his throat. "An hour, maybe."

"Why'd you let me do that? I'll have all night to sleep." Blays bounced to his feet while Dante struggled with a reply. "Let's go. Let's move."

The sun slanted through the trees in buttery bands, that thick yellow light Dante'd only seen on cool autumn days, a light that reminded him of the years when he'd been young. An hour left till dusk, maybe less. He could see but not hear knots of tiny flies bobbing around each other. Dustmotes hung in the windless air. Dante wiped his right eye.

"You did that, you know," Blays said, swinging the walking stick he'd picked up before they'd started back out.

"Did what?" Dante said.

"Made it go dark."

He avoided Blays' eyes, suddenly aware that an entire future depended on what he said next. His pause grew too long to pretend he wasn't lying.

"I couldn't do it again," he tried.

Blays whacked a branch in his way, snapping it clean. "Too bad. It probably saved us."

"Saved me, maybe. You had a chance without it."

Blays grunted. They walked on. "What's in that book, anyway?"

"History and a lot of stories," Dante said, gripping the straps of his back. Blays stopped, tapping Dante on the shin with his stick hard enough to welt.

"Bullshit," he said. "That thing you just said is the product of a cow's ass. You wouldn't be risking your life over a bunch of stories. They wouldn't be trying to kill you to get them back, either, whoever they' is." He reached for the pack and Dante drew away. "What's so damned special about it?"

"I don't know."

"Stop it."

"I don't!" Dante worked the muscles of his jaw, reaching for an explanation he couldn't define. "I heard it was supposed to teach you how to do the things the priests say they can do, throw fire and change the weather and whatever other crazy things, but I haven't read anything that tells you how to do that. So far it's just like the
Ban Naden
of Taim."

Blays snorted. "I don't know anyone who read the
Ban Naden
and then made a whole street go dark."

"Oh yeah? You want to read it and see?" Dante slid the pack from one shoulder.

"No way!" Blays said, jumping back. He narrowed his eyes to bright slits. "You know what I think it is?"

"What do you think it is?"

"I think," he said, raising his blond brows, "it's a spellbook."

"Yeah, that's what it is."

Blays raised a palm. "Well, just look at it! It's got a big old bone tree on the cover. What else could it be?"

"If it's a spellbook, it's the worst damn one I've ever read."

"Just how many
have
you read?"

"There's no such thing." Dante closed his eyes and sighed through his nose. "Have you ever heard of the Third Scour?"

Blays kicked a rock at his feet. "No, I'm a halfwit."

"Then what was it?"

"One of those things where all the people kill each other? What do you call those?"

"It
was
a war," Dante said. "A big one." He paused. From his right he heard the chirr of a redwinged blackbird. Pond nearby, then. Fish. He frowned at himself, glanced back at Blays. "It was a little over a century ago. All the sects of the Celeset sort of banded together to wipe another one out."

"I presume their reasons were perfectly noble."

"Most of the histories I've read say the sect was a death cult that served a god named Arawn. You know, sacrificing babies, no respect for human life, whatever." Dante looked away, feeling stupid. Somehow exposing his knowledge of such boring, dusty histories was like admitting he collected pornographic illustrations of centaurs and mermaids, or saved up his coin for the commemorative daggers of the Explorers Clubb. "Supposedly, since the serfs no longer respected the law of the righteous gods, they stopped listening to the rule of the king. You know, 'this life is short and the next one is long, so who cares what that guy says.' That sort of thing. There were rebellions. The one in the Collen Basin worked—they hanged the count, burnt his wife. But when the cavalry came the renegades didn't have much more than pitchforks and the bows from the manor's armory. The steps of the house were stained so red they painted them crimson to cover it up. If you believe that stuff. That's why the new count established it as his colors."

"That is truly fascinating," Blays said.

"I thought it was."

"So they splashed a little noble blood around. Peasants do dumb stuff and get killed for it all the time. Why did the whole kingdom have to fight a war?"

"It wasn't just in the Basin," Dante went on. He bit his teeth together. He'd read hundreds of pages on this stuff back in the books in Bressel. How could he distill all that work into something Blays would get? "It was everywhere. It was really popular, probably because its members were saying things that hadn't been said in a long time but used to be really important. You know Carvahal, right?"

Blays made a blasphemous appeal to the sky. "I'm not three years old, Dante."

"I was just asking. So Carvahal took the fire from the north star and brought it to us and was exiled from the Belt of the heavens for it by Taim, right. That's the story you hear when you're a little kid. Well, these Arawn guys, they say Carvahal didn't originally oversee the pole-fire, that his half-brother Arawn was its keeper. He gave Carvahal the fire, but they say Carvahal locked him up behind the wall beyond the stars so he could have the credit. Then he brought the fire to Eric the Draconat, etc., etc."

Blays nodded like he was paying any kind of attention. He planted his staff and lowered himself onto a lichen-fuzzed rock.

"Let's sit down over there." Dante nodded to the trees on the right that looked just like the trees to the left, as well as the trees ahead and behind them. "At the pond."

"What pond?"

"Can't you smell it?"

"No," Blays said, but he stood and waited for Dante to lead the way. He did, ear cocked for the blackbirds, and he had to cut back once but then it was there, barely more than a stone's throw across but maybe five times as long. Blays gave him a look, snapping a reed from its banks.

"The birds," Dante said, after a blackbird had called. "They like the water."

"Right." Blays dropped down on a rock near its edge and wriggled off his boots. He skimmed the tip of the reed over the placid waters. Dante watched the gray missiles of trout drifting near the banks. The flies were thicker here and the surface rippled with the rings of breaching fish. The water did smell good, now that he was on it, damp grass and clean mud, that way stones smell when water's always drying from their smooth faces.

"The important thing is, Arawn was the one who guarded the north star," Dante went on.

"So what?"

"So what? From a theological perspective that's huge! It undermines the legitimacy of Taim and Gashen and all the twelve houses of the heavens! If Arawn was the keeper of its fire, then he was pretty much the big chief. Worse yet, if he meant to hand his secrets down to mankind, that means
he's
the one who deserves our devotion, not Carvahal, and if they got something that big wrong, how can we trust anything they say at all?"

"Yeah, but it's all just stories." Blays moved to his knees and overturned a stone. Pale pink worms wagged their tails in the last of the sunlight before sinking into the murk. "They're not
real
."

"Doesn't their belief in the gods make them real?"

"No," he said, "it makes them stupid."

"I guess everyone in the world's stupid, then." Dante dropped his eyes to the waters around the reeds. Now and then a trout weaved through their stalks, nibbling at the seeds and bugs caught in the net of plants. "It doesn't matter if they're stories. The priests tell the stories that will make the people eat out of their hands and the kings have power because they have the authority to say which priests are right. They don't like it when the stories that give them all this control are threatened."

"You know who you sound like right now?" Blays said, grinning up at him. "The guys back at the arms house I was with after they'd been drinking all night. The kings this, the priests that. Everyone's stupid but them. Then they sleep it off and when they wake up they're back out selling their blades for pennies and getting turned down nine times out of ten even then."

"I'm not saying I thought it up." He threw a pebble at the water near the point of Blays' reed. A shadow of a fish darted into the deep. "I'm just trying to explain why people get so mad when you start talking about this stuff."

"Lyle Almighty, get on with it."

"So Arawn gave us the fire," Dante said.

"You've said that five times," Blays sighed. Dante glared at him. The boy sat three-quarters turned, but when he ducked his chin Dante could see he was smiling.

"The histories of the Third Scour paint him as a bloodthirsty death-god. That's how they explain the revolts, that Arawn ordered the serfs to kill the lords and the guards and the followers of all the other temples to satisfy his own need for blood. But see, I don't think that's right. In the
Cycle—
the book—it mentions Arawn a lot and he never talks about wanting people dead. In fact, he's not very interested in us at all. I mean, everyone dies eventually, right? If you're an immortal god, who cares if a soul finds you in the stars today or twenty years from now? Even if he wanted to build an army, and I don't see anything to support that either, it's not like he's in a hurry to do it before he dies of old age."

Blays plopped a rock into the waters. "I'm going to be seeing Arawn myself pretty fast if you don't quit being so boring."

"Well, does that make sense to you? That a god would be in a rush about a thing like that?"

"Of course not. But we're the image of the gods, aren't we? So obviously they think like us. That must mean they're pricks like us, too. Who wants to wait fifty years when you can snap your fingers and poof, you've got an army of the dead? For that matter," Blays said, tapping Dante's chest as he built up steam, "if they're so high and mighty, how are we supposed to guess what they're thinking? We're probably like ants to them. Can ants understand what
we're
thinking?"

"That's different."

"How is it any different at all?"

"It just is," Dante shrugged. He groped around for his place. "So whatever Arawn was, nobody else liked him anymore, what with the dangerous belief your standing in this brief wick doesn't mean hell-all to the one that comes after, and once things got so crazy in Collen the counter-army practically conscripted itself. They smithied up a few thousand pikes for the rabble and promised the land to the nobles and off they went. Needless to say all the heretics in Collen were killed. That only stirred up the ones everywhere else all the worse, but to make a long story slightly less long, they were all killed too. The traditionalist armies burnt their temples and their books, beheaded the priests who renounced and quartered the ones who didn't. That's where the Fellgate came from."