The Simbul's Gift (14 page)

The owl had moved to another branch, closer to the trunk, closer to the ground and him. Relief freed more tears. Bro wiped his eyes until both sleeves were damp and useless, then he stared up at the lightening sky and let his tears flow unhindered.

Zandilar's Dancer folded his legs for a nap as the lavenders of dawn yielded to the brighter colors of sunrise. Bro tried to follow the colt's example but each time he closed his eyes, he found flames and death.
Think of pleasant things before you close your eyes
, Shali had said in the days after Rizcarn's death.
Fawns and flowers for springtime
,
summer berries, autumn leaves, and a warm hearth in winter
. Bro thought of his mother, not her advice. Sleep was farther away than ever.

Dawn became a gray-clouded morning, unseasonably cool but damp and clinging. Dent would call it a day when he worked twice as hard to do half as much …

More numb tears for a man he hadn't loved. Disgusted, Bro threw his shoulders back, cracking his head on the tree trunk. The collision distracted him; he repeated the act until its sheer stupidity made him stop.

His stomach growled; he hadn't eaten since supper a day ago. Shali had made bread soup and simmered it beneath a thick cheese crust. Her son's mouth watered, then his eyes: There'd be no more bread soup, with or without cheese. No more Midwinter puddings laced with nuts and bits of dried fruit. No more dumplings. No more sausage. No more of any of his favorite meals, nor any of the lumpy vegetable porridges in their various shades of green, tan, and orange that he'd never liked.

He felt like a fool, because he was. He felt alone, because he was, as he hadn't been after his father's death. Rizcarn had roamed the forest alone, leaving his wife and son behind. Bro's Yuirwood was a tiny cottage on the edge of the MightyTree community, but still very much a part of it, with a steady stream of aunts, uncles, cousins, and lesser kin looking out for Shali and him whenever his father was gone. He wouldn't have been alone if Shali hadn't taken him out of the Yuirwood.

In Sulalk, Bro had dreamed of returning to the Yuirwood, imagining that he'd follow his father's restless footsteps, when what he truly remembered, truly missed was the company of MightyTree.

“I want to go home,” Bro said aloud, because sound broke the isolation.

Home is gone, his thoughts answered.

“I want what I had.”

It's gone, forever.

Bro sobbed loudly, waking Dancer. The colt stood over him, licking the salt from his cheeks. Bro knotted his fingers behind Dancer's ears and let the colt help him to his feet. There were twigs and leaves in the colt's mane. For a few tearless moments Bro busied himself with grooming,
until he found a tangle that wouldn't yield to finger pressure. He wished for the curry-comb he'd made last winter and Dent's shears, both of which were kept in the barn …

Bro struggled to put anger in front of grief. He trained his thoughts on the Simbul. “All gods curse on her. This is
her
fault!”

But neither the curse nor the anger were strong enough to stanch his tears. He blamed Aglarond's queen and wanted her, too: The Simbul had said she would return and of everyone, she was the only one who could keep her word.

She was the only one who knew where he was.

Bro had left the Yuirwood just once, with his mother after Rizcarn died. He'd followed her; she'd followed a stream from the forest to the grasslands, from the grasslands to Sulalk and Dent. The night Bro rode Dent's mare into the trees, he'd been looking for the stream. He'd seen nothing recognizable then, saw nothing now. Bro had no idea where in the Yuirwood he and Dancer were. And despite his bold assertions about being Cha'Tel'Quessir, the Cha'Tel'Quessir weren't one friendly family.

A lone half-elf could find himself in a world of trouble if he hunted in the wrong part of the forest. Rizcarn had managed, but Rizcarn wasn't like other Cha'Tel'Quessir. Bro's father claimed to be Relkath's messenger and said that the tree god protected him—which made his death, falling out of a tree, all the more pointless.

That last summer before he died, Rizcarn had taken Bro on two of his shorter journeys. What little Bro knew about living free in the Yuirwood, he'd learned during those few days. Mostly he'd learned to carve runes into Relkath's trees.

Remind the trees, Rizcarn said. Help the Yuirwood remember. If the forest forgets, we're all lost.

Rizcarn wouldn't explain what the forest was supposed to remember. He was long on telling someone what to do and short on telling someone why, especially when someone was his son, whom he didn't know very well. And, when Rizcarn did come home, Bro got sent off to stay with his mother's sister. All the childhood tears and tantrums Bro remembered were associated with those visits to his aunt's. Bro had begun to relive childhood events as if
they'd just happened, balancing old hurts against the burden he carried away from Sulalk … trying to balance them, and failing.

Dancer demanded attention, rubbing his head against Bro's chest, flattening Bro's back against the tree until the youth had to scratch the places only fingers could reach. It proved impossible to wallow in memories while nose-to-nose with an animal that depended on him. He scratched, petted, and scratched some more, until the only pain he felt was a pleasant ache in the muscles of his arms.

“You and me, Dancer.” Bro wrapped his arms around the colt's neck. He filled his lungs with the scents of horse sweat and a light forest rain. “Just us. We'll see each other through. Together, we're not alone.”

Dancer nodded vigorously, not agreement, merely behavior Bro had encouraged over Dent's insistence that horses shouldn't be permitted to toss their heavy heads. And a wise insistence at that, when Bro's chin came out second-best in a collision with the colt's long nose. He'd bit his lower lip and the pain, though ultimately trivial, had him hopping on one foot—to Dancer's snorting amusement.

“It's not funny,” Bro insisted. “I'm bleeding!” This was true and it produced a fresh scent that horses, especially young and untrained horses, didn't like.

The colt retreated, stiff-legged and tossing his head again in a way that made it both difficult and dangerous for Bro to grab the rope dangling from his halter. Disaster was averted, but Dancer wanted the rope's full length between himself and his suddenly suspect god.

“We'll find water and I'll wash myself off,” Bro promised, tugging on the rope.

Dancer wasn't reassured, wouldn't cooperate. The search for a stream was a frustrating battle of wills, while a storm formed above them. Bro knelt down and drank his fill beside the colt. Then, because rain was falling and there was no longer a need to rinse his face or shirt, he looked for shelter.

A cave would have been best, but caves were few in the Yuirwood and any one large enough for a horse was likely to be occupied by something not interested in sharing with strangers. That left gullies, underbrush, and young trees with tall neighbors to draw the lightning away. Bro headed
upstream until he found an acceptable spot where he and Dancer could wait in safety, if not comfort.

The storm left them soaked and shivering, though that changed quickly as the sun burned through the thinning clouds. Zandilar's Dancer munched on the bushes that had sheltered them. Bro found a handful of half-ripe berries that did little to end his hunger.

Flooded by rainfall, the nearby stream was out of its banks and choked with debris, including a gopher's bedraggled carcass. Bro hauled it out of the water, said the words of departure and thanksgiving, and asked himself if he was desperate enough to eat raw meat because, though he had steel, he had no flint and even if he'd had both, the dripping Yuirwood offered no tinder.

“She knew,” Bro admitted to Dancer, the carcass, and himself. That quirky smile on the Simbul's lips before she left with Tay-Fay had meant she knew his Cha'Tel'Quessir boasts were hollow. She'd given him a knife and boots but he'd need more if he was going to stay in the Yuirwood—much more if he was going to live free.

Bro examined the knife the Simbul had given him and the silver strand she'd wrapped and knotted around his wrist. The hair was her key for finding him—or so she'd said. And if—a very large
if
—he believed her. The knife was the finest blade he'd ever seen. It was sharp enough to cut wood or flesh and a whetstone set into its sheath would keep it that way. One touch and it would rid him of the silver hair, if the hair was her key.

He'd never heard of magic hair, but he'd heard of magic knives. After what the Simbul had done in Sulalk, Bro wouldn't believe that she carried a plain knife and he assumed she wouldn't tell the truth about it either.

“I should get rid of the boots, too.”

But he needed the boots and he needed the knife, so he left the silver hair knotted around his wrist. That way he'd know if Aglarond's human queen kept her word.

Bro untied Dancer's rope and started up a gentle slope, away from the stream, leaving the carcass behind. He needed flint and tinder, yew wood for a bow and willow withies for arrows. Most of all he needed to know where he was. Sighting on the sun and its shadows, Bro oriented himself then started hiking northward. The Yuirwood was
broader east to west than north to south and, little as Bro wished to admit it, he stood a better chance of getting his questions answered and earning his gear in the humans' Aglarond than he did with his own kind in the forest.

Hunger and weariness claimed their toll. Bro's pace slowed and finally stopped, far from death but too exhausted to take another step.

“I've got to sleep,” he explained to the colt as he looped the rope around a sapling and pulled it tight.

His hands were shaking: through the storm and since, he'd carefully not thought about why he was in the Yuirwood. Before he could sleep, he'd have to close his eyes and he feared the images that would seep out of his memory when he did. The mossy ground roots of a butternut tree formed a ready-made pallet. Bro picked off a few stray twigs, stretched out and quickly stood up again.

Butternut trees with their numerous, spreading branches were Relkath's favorite trees. Rizcarn never passed a butternut tree without carving Relkath's mark into its trunk. This tree was old, if Rizcarn had ever seen it, he would have marked it and Bro would know his father had passed this way. He found what he was looking for on the tree's southern flank.

Bro unsheathed his knife and refreshed his father's carving.

“Remind the trees. Help the Yuirwood remember. Don't let the forest forget.”

It was hard work, even with the Simbul's knife, but not so hard that Bro forgot to clean the knife or tie it securely before he returned to his mossy pallet.

Perhaps Rizcarn had napped in this same place. Bro closed his eyes. He summoned his oldest memories, a summer day when he was younger than Tay-Fay and his father was outside the cottage, carving messages into the trees.

Despite his worrying, Bro's nap was deep and dreamless. He might have slept until sundown, or later, if a band of seelie hadn't noticed him facedown on a forest bed, too peaceful, too tempting for their mischievous natures to resist.

Bro awoke with laughter ringing in his ears and a sliver as long as his middle finger, as thick as a songbird's leg rising from the back of his hand. In the confusion between sleep and wakefulness, he thought the sliver had fallen from the tree and that the tree was somewhere in Sulalk. An instant later, he'd recalled that he wasn't near Sulalk and why. He brushed the barb aside and forgot it as he pounded his fist and screamed silently into the ground.

“Get up!”

“On your feet!”

The voices were shrill, but not childlike, and very close to his ears. The words were clear, but the accents were wrong for either Cha'Tel'Quessir or human Aglarondans.

“Dance! Dance! You're supposed to
dance!”

Dancing was the last thing Bro felt like doing. He lashed out blindly with his fist, striking nothing, though something hit him just above the wrist. Burning pain engulfed his arm, bad enough that he cried aloud. The pain ended as suddenly as it had begun; when he raised his head, he saw the tiny javelin that had caused it. He was under attack from creatures no larger than his hand.

There were at least a score of them screeching and careening against each other, disappearing and reappearing magically in the humid air beneath the butternut tree. Some were winged, some weren't. Some were palm-high, as Bro had expected, but some were larger and brandished weapons that could slice through a finger or an eye. He'd never seen their kind before, though one of his uncles told a tale of the seelie folk who'd haunt and torment a solitary Cha'Tel'Quessir until he went mad and killed himself.

“If you won't dance, then bark like a dog!”

“And croak like a tree frog!”