Soulwoven (22 page)

Litnig bowled into them without slowing. He heard shouts and a splash, and then he fell, and then they were gone and so was the light. His back and shoulders and neck were in the water, but the deadcarry was stuck. He twisted and bunched his legs and pushed against hard, slick rock while the world shook. Something stretched and gave.

He didn’t realize it was the deadcarry’s harness and not its frame until it was too late. The leather broke. The icy fist of the river closed over his head.

The world gave one last, terrible shake, and then Len was gone.

TWENTY-THREE

The river wrapped its icy arms around Cole.

He flailed and he strained and he kicked until his elbow hit flesh and Quay let go of his arms, and then he was thrashing freely in the freezing water. It was in his ears, his clothes, his nose, his eyes…

You bastard!
he
wanted to scream.
You arrogant fucking bastard!

He opened his eyes and saw only blackness, and then his eyeballs screamed against the cold and he squeezed them shut. He was moving fast, and the cold was numbing his chest, his arms and legs, every inch of him. Tiny pinpricks of ice crawled over his scalp and down his neck.

He clawed desperately toward what he thought was the top of the river. His hands scraped rock, bounced off, skidded and skipped and bled along the stone.

There’s no air. There’s no air there’s no air there’s no air.

Cole hammered his fists against the rock and fought the urge to breathe. He lost feeling in his hands and face. His chest felt like it was going to burst.

Air,
he begged.
Just air.
Just a little bit to breathe.
Just enough to stay alive.

For the first time in his life, he was helping with something that might do some good for the world. Not for himself or his family or his friends, but for everyone. He deserved that much in return—just air, just a breath.

He got nothing.

Cole’s head swam. Every beat of his heart pounded in his chest. White spots danced in his eyes. His lungs burned. He couldn’t feel his feet.

Air.
Please, just air. Yenor’s eye, I want to live!

His hands broke free of the water.

Cole flailed his way up to the surface behind them. Light and shadow danced before him on the fast-moving surface of the river. Ahead, an arc of blinding white stretched from left to right like a wound in the darkness.

He sucked down sweet, damp air in greedy gasps. His ears burned. His head ached. His heart fluttered.

A cave,
he thought.
No way. No fucking way.

Quay had been right.

The gash of light grew closer, wider, brighter, and then Cole rolled and tumbled out of the cave and into dazzling sunlight. The scent of pine filled the air.

You have to swim,
his mind prodded.
You have to swim for shore.

His body was shaky and slow to respond. The whole world was a blur of bright light and cold, frothy water. He got his legs to kick, forced one arm to reach forward and pull back, then the other.

Then he smashed into a rock hard enough to force the air from his lungs.

The river closed over his head again. He turned a somersault. His face dragged along pebbles and stone.

The bottom,
he thought.
The river’s shallow here.

He clawed for the surface again and managed to put his feet down. They caught on a rock and stopped, but the rest of his body kept moving. He flipped over a second time.

Too fast,
said his mind.
You’re moving too fast.

When he got his head above the surface again, he forced his eyes open and saw blurry shadows in the brightness around him. The river was twenty or thirty feet wide. There were large lumps that looked like mountains to either side. Narrow, slanting plains filled the valley in between, and ahead, there was a line where the darkness of land disappeared into light.

Another rock almost caught him. He twisted away from it, got sucked into an eddy and tumbled. He needed to make the shore. If he could just make the shore—

The world dropped out from under him.

The strong stream of the river separated into tiny droplets before his eyes. Wind roared in his ears.
His rubbery arms pinwheeled impotently under the bright blue sky.

He didn’t scream, didn’t shout, didn’t do anything but breathe and curse wildly in his head as he fell fifteen feet, thirty, more—farther than he had in the tunnels. Farther than he had in his life.

He hit the water again shoulders first. The impact jarred his spine, his head,
his
teeth.

But the surface gave way. He tossed and turned in icy circles, and then he drifted, free at last of the current. His arms and legs felt like dead weights. He couldn’t flex his fingers or his toes. He was going to drown—going to—

Swim,
said his mind, and like a corpse on strings, he did. His legs kicked. His arms reached. He pulled water past him through one stroke, two strokes,
three
. The world swirled. His head buzzed. He wasn’t sure which direction was up until his head broke the plane of the water and he blinked his eyes free of it.

He was floating in the center of a wide, calm pool. The waterfall thundered at one end of it. A line of sticks and logs crossed it at the other.

A dam.

Floating near it was a triangular shape he vaguely recognized.

Swim,
said his mind again, and he forced himself into motion once more.

He angled for the thing bobbing at the edge of the dam. The triangle’s frame was fashioned out of dark, straight rods tied with leather. A blanket was stretched across its surface.

Cole reached the dam just to the left of the triangle and wormed his way out of the water. Sharp sticks jabbed into his stomach, but they were warm with the heat of the day. The sun shone on his back.

He crawled farther up and curled into the fetal position. In a minute, he told himself, he’d be warm again. And he’d get sensation back in his legs and his arms and his toes. His head felt like it had been squeezed between the jaws of a frost-covered vise.

Len,
whispered his mind. He didn’t remember why.

Len.

He only wanted to sleep in the sun.
To be warm.
To be safe.

Len!

He opened his eyes. The horseshoe-shaped waterfall he’d caromed over poured over tall gray cliffs into an indigo pool on the upstream side of the dam. On the downstream side, sticks and logs and mud stretched down for twelve or fifteen feet. Enough water trickled over and through them that the river formed again on the other side.

A line of pine trees topped the cliffs. Two white-capped peaks rose behind and to either side of them. Closer by, the water lapped at the edge of a grainy beach fringed by dark, heavy spruce.

The deadcarry bobbed on the water below him, caught on the sticks of the dam.

Tied to its front was an ashen-skinned, blue-lipped Len Heramsun.

The Aleani’s face was frozen in a wincing mask. His dreadlocks splayed around him in the water like the legs of a drowning spider.

Cole blinked. He listened to the waterfall roar. He sucked in a deep, heavy breath.

Len’s teeth were chattering.

Impossible,
he thought, but he checked himself. Nothing seemed impossible anymore.

Move,
whispered his mind. He squirmed on his belly to the deadcarry and squared his feet on the slippery sticks of the dam. His hands and arms twitched and shivered, but he pulled the triangle of wood and cloth out of the water all the same.

When he was done, he sat next to it, panting and rubbing his arms with stiff hands.

“Boy,” he heard. He thought it was his mind again.

“Boy.”

The voice was gravelly, rasping,
hoarse
. “Boy!”

Cole looked down.

Len’s eyes were open. His breath rattled in his chest. His hands looked dead and swollen, but they were clenching and unclenching on the soaked blanket.

“Let me free,” he said.

Cole rubbed his arms some more. Birds chirped in the trees above.

Len Heramsun looked old. His face was closer to gray than its normal hue, and he coughed up water and struggled feebly against his bonds. For the first time since Cole had met him, there was no fight in his brown eyes, no disdain,
no
superiority.

“Please,” the Aleani said.

Memories tumbled in Cole’s mind.
His father yelling at him, hitting him.
Len snarling at him, yanking on his ear.
Bloody noses, black eyes, frozen fingers, endless shouting matches.

Boy,
they called him.

He wished it was his father there in the deadcarry, begging for his life.

We have to be better than him.

Cole fumbled drunkenly with the knots that Dil had tied in the darkness under the mountains.

His body warmed as he worked. The sun was bright and strong. It was already mid-spring, and it was only the water that was so cold. Still, in the end he had to pull out the dagger that had survived his trip through the underground and cut Len free.

The Aleani didn’t say a word while Cole was working, not even when the blade was inches from his throat and shaking in Cole’s weak grip. Len’s eyes were quiet and calm, like the tops of wheat stalks after a summer storm. He stared into the sky and didn’t shiver, didn’t flinch.

Cole finished and flopped onto the warmth of the sticks. He felt like he could sleep for a thousand years and not miss waking.

“Thank you,” Len said.

Cole blinked up at him. The Aleani had sat up. His skin was already regaining its old color. His clothes were soaked and ragged, and there were red marks on his arms where he’d been tied to the deadcarry, but he looked Cole in the eye and extended a big, dripping hand to him.

Trees rustled nearby in the breeze. The sky behind Len’s back was blue and cloudless.

Cole grasped Len’s hand. The Aleani’s palm felt warm and soft. As he squeezed Cole’s fingers, Len inclined his head to Cole ever so slightly.

“If it is within my strength, I will repay my debt,” Len said. He withdrew his hand from Cole’s and pressed a fist to his chest.

Cole swallowed. No one had ever honored him like that.

His cheeks felt warm. He returned Len’s gesture and stretched his cramping hand.

The Aleani turned back to the waterfall.

“Where are the others?” Len asked.

The warmth in Cole’s cheeks evaporated. He forgot about his hand and whipped back to look at the cliff and the waterfall that was thundering over it. Aside from the spray of the falls and the shaking of the pines, he saw nothing. The world spun. He dug his legs into the sticks of the dam, and the pain kept him focused.

Please,
he thought. His eyes scanned the cliff edge.

Please.

H
e saw a shape moving in the trees.
And another, peeking over the edge of the cliffs as if searching for something.

Cole staggered on jellylike legs to his feet, shouted a wordless halloo, and waved both arms in the air. The motion nearly sent him back into the water.

Len pulled him to the surface of the dam.

“Easy,” the Aleani grunted. “They will have seen you.”

The shadows stopped moving, and Litnig’s voice called back, “Cole? Is that you?”

Cole’s arms shook. His lips quivered.

And then there was water in his eyes that came from within.

An hour later, Cole was seated in his undergarments on a patch of pebbly, multi-colored sand, warming himself and drying his clothes with the others as the sun plunged toward tall
blue mountains
. He and Len had scrambled off the dam, and the others had followed a path hewn into the side of the cliffs. They’d met on the warm shore of the pond beneath the falls.

Cole rubbed his side and wiggled his toes. His ribs were sore, in part from the rocks he’d bashed into and in part from the one-armed, bone-crunching hug that Litnig had given him when he’d reached the beach. Dil was sitting next to him, her hand resting lightly on his atop the sand, her eyes wide and far away. Every once in a while, she smiled at him, but he could see the memories of the mountains moldering in her eyes. He wanted to put an arm around her and help them fade, and he wondered why he was afraid to.

On Cole’s other side, Len Heramsun sat in peaceful silence. No one had questioned him—not about his recovery, nor about the worms. To Cole, the questions seemed pointless.
Idle things to be asked on some day far in the future, when everything was behind them.

For the present, it was enough just to be alive.

Litnig, Quay, and Ryse sat close to the water. Cole’s brother cradled his broken arm. Quay looked silent and thoughtful. Ryse had her eyes closed and her chin on her chest.

Cole knew he owed them an apology.
Especially Ryse.
They would’ve died thrice over in the tunnels without her, and in the end he’d nearly gotten her killed trying to get him to save himself.

The soulweaver sat with her arms draped across her legs. Her hair was frizzed and curled on her back. Her skin showed a dozen cuts and bruises, and there were deep bags beneath her eyes.

Cole rolled a pebble between his fingers. He didn’t know how he would find the words. It would take him months, years—

Ryse picked her head up as he looked at her. She opened her eyes and smiled at him, like she had when they were kids.

The words came.

Thank you,
he mouthed.

She nodded and closed her eyes again.

Cole owed Quay an apology too. He looked over and met his friend’s eyes. They were hard and unforgiving and focused on the setting sun, but when they saw Cole, they softened a little. Quay raised his eyebrows, ever so slightly, as if to ask,
Are you all right?

Cole nodded.
Ever so slightly.
Shrugged his shoulders.
Ever so slightly.