Выбрать главу

As he leaned farther back to find a more comfortable position, he discovered Chap watching him intently.

Osha looked away.

* * *

Chuillyon hid in the darker night shadows outside the stable and watched as the wagon rolled away. The dwarf sat up on the bench with the undead while the young would-be Shé’ith, the girl, and both majay-hì were piled in among several chests and sacks of supplies.

What had brought this unlikely group together and brought them here? And why?

He had to know.

He could give them a head start and purchase a horse to follow at a safe distance. This might yield their final destination, at least. But at a distance, he might learn nothing of them or their goals or how such a strange collection of people had drawn together in the first place.

He could go to Chârmun and travel again to Calm Seatt, for though unknown to most, a child of Chârmun grew in the courtyard of its third and now royal castle. From there, he could make a reasonably quick visit to an old friend.

Cinder-Shard might have a few pieces to this strange puzzle.

But Chuillyon had dealt with Ore-Locks and Chane Andraso before. They had even stayed at the Lhoin’na guild branch once—along with Wynn Hygeorht and the charcoal majay-hì. Both the undead and the young stonewalker were tight-lipped and functioned on their own agendas. A trip to Cinder-Shard might prove a waste of valuable time. He might know exactly what Ore-Locks was doing here ... and he might not.

Also, in the end, it was the two younger foreigners who bothered Chuillyon the most. Those two were more likely the crux of this odd puzzle.

One had been welcomed by the Shé’ith without any of the traditional petitions and preliminary testing. The other had been taken in by that annoying, renegade priestess of outdated practice, who had been a thorn under Chuillyon’s robe for decades. Vreuvillä despised the Lhoin’na sage’s guild and all those associated with it. She viewed them as having used Chârmun to give themselves a place of importance in the world. She sneered at the orders of the sages, at their need for ranks and titles.

Why had Vreuvillä accepted the foreign girl?

Chuillyon sighed in frustration; the answer would not be found in Calm Seatt.

That left only his earlier original notion: to visit the world’s far side to snoop upon his people’s backward cousins, the an’Cróan. Those two younger ones had to have come from there.

So he headed off again through the city. He knew the way to Chârmun so well that he paid little attention to his path, but once he drew close, the night was dark enough in the thickened forest that he risked pulling out a small cold-lamp crystal.

He should have given it back to the guild when he was stripped of his rank and cast out ... and he had, actually. That he had an extra one, well, it was not his fault if no one asked about that.

Rubbing it lightly in his hands, he held it loosely in a grip to let only a little of its light escape. If Vreuvillä or her pack were about, he certainly did not need such complications. There had been enough already.

Something stood out in the canopy above him.

Tawny vines as thick as his wrist wove their way through the high canopy, some paralleling his path. They were smooth, perhaps glistening from moisture, but he could see a grain in them like that of polished wood.

As he stepped onward, more vines twisted above him, growing broader and thicker the farther he went. Smaller ones appeared here and there, branching off the larger ones. All were woven into the upper reaches of the trees. Soon, they did not glisten as much as faintly glow, as if catching the radiance of the moon hidden from sight farther above.

He used the soft light of these vines to lead him, for he knew they came from where he now traveled. Branches, trunks, and bearded moss were like black silhouettes between himself and a nearing illumination inside the forest itself.

Chuillyon finally stepped out into a broad clearing and idly slipped the crystal away out of sight. Overhead, the forest still roofed the space, but the clearing was covered in a mossy carpet. And there at its center was his old friend.

Chârmun’s massive roots split the turf in mounds, some of which would be almost waist high near its immense trunk. Its great bulk was the size of a small tower, and though completely bare of bark, it was not grayed like dead wood. The soft glow seen in the vines and its branches lit the entire clearing with shimmering light.

It was alive ... because in some ways it was life itself.

“Oh, so good to see you again, as always,” he said softly.

He headed toward the great trunk, as he had done many times before.

“Time for another outing, if you do not mind,” he added with a faint smile.

When he was close enough to touch Chârmun, he pulled his plain robe around himself and began to lower his large hood over his eyes. Still pinching the edge of his hood, he froze in place, staring.

Some new growth to replace the old was to be expected, but such so very rarely had leaves—not on Chârmun. And that was what he stared at now: a new small sprout with leaves. He had not seen such in fifty-seven years, and that last one he had planted in a secret place of the courtyard in the Calm Seatt’s third and largest castle.

Chuillyon released the pinch of his hood. He dropped his hand at his side with a moan.

“Do you not have enough children?” he asked in exasperation. “And where am I to hide this one?”

Chuillyon looked up into the canopy above as if searching for a sign. Finally lowering his eyes, he shook his head, muttering like a petulant child ... of some seventy-plus years. Still no sign of an answer came.

“Very well, be that way!”

He knew this meant he was to take no action yet, so he left the new sprout on the branch where it grew.

“At some point, you will let me know—one way or another—where this one is supposed to go.”

It was not a question, though there was no reply.

“And people say I am devious.”

With that, Chuillyon thought of the child of Chârmun half a world away in the land of the an’Cróan. He reached out and placed his fingertips like a feather’s touch upon the glimmering tree’s trunk.

* * *

After settling Magiere in their tent to rest, Leesil stepped out and crouched before his pack left just outside. Ghassan and Brot’an stood whispering near their own tent, but both glanced his way in a pause. He ignored them and peeked back into his own tent where Wynn was tending Magiere by the light of a cold-lamp crystal.

Magiere was not injured or ill, but her strange collapse and disorientation bothered everyone, especially him. Normally, quelling her rage and hunger was a challenge. Whatever had happened to her near that massacre had flushed them from her.

Before leaving the Suman capital, he’d hidden a pouch of spiced tea in his pack. He hadn’t touched it as yet, for water was too precious to lose any in boiling. But Magiere liked spiced tea, and he wasn’t certain what else to do for her comfort.

Digging deep into the pack, he tried to find the pouch, and his hand brushed something else. About to ignore this object, he took hold to push it aside, and stalled. Then, he drew it out.

The narrow tube slightly wider than his thumb had no seams at all, as if fashioned from a single piece of wood. It was rounded at its closed bottom end, and its top was sealed with an unadorned pewter cap. The whole of it was barely as long as his forearm, and what it held ...

Back in the Elven Territories on the eastern continent, Magiere had been placed on trial before the council of the an’Cróan clan elders. Most Aged Father had denounced her as an undead. To speak on her behalf, as an outsider and half-blood at that, Leesil had to prove he was an an’Cróan.