“I speak the truth,” Fidelias said. “If you are wise, young man, you will listen to the older.”
Atsurak stared at him for several moments in silence. Then he exhaled and said, “The Alerans fight as cowards. Let us force them to the trial of blood before they can prepare their spirits to hide behind. We will attack at dawn.”
Fidelias let out a slow breath and nodded. “Then this celebration is over?”
Atsurak looked at the captive, shivering beneath Fidelias’s hand. “Almost.”
“Please sir,” the girl whispered. “Please help me.”
Fidelias looked down at her and nodded, touching her mouth with his other hand.
Then he broke her neck, the sound sharp in the silence of the hilltop. Her eyes looked up at him in shock for a few seconds. Then went slowly out of focus and empty.
He let the dead girl’s head fall limply back onto the stone and said, to Atsurak, “Now it is over. Be in position when the sun rises.” He walked back across the circle to Aldrick, working to hide the limp.
“Aleran,” snarled Atsurak, his voice heavy, bestial.
Fidelias paused, without turning around.
“I will remember this insult.”
Fidelias nodded. “Just be ready in the morning.” Without looking back, he walked, with Aldrick, back down the hill and toward the litter. Aldrick paced beside him, silent, scowling. Halfway down the hill, Fidelias’s belly rolled violently, out of nowhere, and he had to stop and squat down, weight on his injured feet, his head bowed.
“What is it?” Aldrick asked, his voice quiet and cool.
“My feet hurt,” Fidelias lied.
“Your feet hurt,” Aldrick said, quietly. “Del, you killed that girl.”
Fidelias’s stomach fluttered. “Yes.”
“And it doesn’t even bother you?”
He lied again. “No.”
Aldrick shook his head.
Fidelias took a breath. Then another. He forced his belly back under control and said, “She was dead already, Aldrick. Chances are, she’d just seen her family or friends eaten alive. Right there in front of her. She was next. Even if we had taken her out of there in one piece, she’d seen too much. We just would have had to remove her ourselves.”
“But you killed her.”
“It was the kindest thing I could do.” Fidelias stood up again, his head clearing, slowly.
Aldrick remained quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Great furies. I’ve no stomach for that kind of killing.”
Fidelias nodded. “Don’t let it stop you from doing your duty.”
Aldrick grunted. “You ready?”
“I’m ready,” Fidelias said. They started back down the hill together. “At least we got the Marat moving.” His feet still hurt horribly, but going back down the hill was easier than going up. “Get the men ready. We’ll hit the Knights at Garrison just as we planned on the way here.”
“We’re down to the fighting, then,” Aldrick said.
Fidelias nodded. “I don’t think there are any major obstacles to the mission now.”
CHAPTER 32
Tavi’s teeth chattered together, and he hugged himself beneath his cloak, as he and Fade were shown out of the tent they had been kept in. He wasn’t sure if it was the cold that made him shake, or the sense of raw excitement that filled him, made him eager to move and burn away the chill of the winter in motion.
“M-m-more snow,” Tavi noted, as he crunched along behind the silent form of Doroga. Great white flakes drifted down in a calm, heavy curtain. Already, the snow had gone from a thin coating of ice on the ground, the night before, to a soft, heavy carpet as deep as Tavi’s ankles. He slipped on a thin patch where the ice was barely covered, but Fade reached forward and caught his shoulder until he could regain his balance. “Great.”
Doroga turned back toward them without stopping. “It is,” he said. “The snow and the darkness may help more of the Keepers to sleep.”
Tavi frowned at the Marat headman. “What Keepers?”
“The Keepers of the Silence,” Doroga said.
“What’s that?”
“You will see,” Doroga said. He kept pacing through the snow, until he reached an enormous old bull gargant, placidly chewing its cud. Doroga went to the beast and gave no visible signal, but it knelt in any case and let him use the back of its leg to take a step up and seize the braided cord dangling from the saddle. Doroga swarmed up it easily, and then reached down to help Tavi and Fade up behind him.
Once they were mounted, the gargant hauled itself lazily to its feet, made a ponderous turn, and started rolling forward through the snow. For a time, they rode through the night in silence, and though the warmth of the beast and the riders on either side of him had chased the chill away, Tavi still shook. Excitement then. He felt his mouth stretch into a smile.
“So, this thing we’re supposed to be getting,” Tavi began.
“The Blessing of Night,” Doroga said.
“What is it?”
“A plant. A mushroom. It grows in the heart of the Valley of Silence. Within the great tree.”
“Uh-huh,” Tavi said. “What good is it?”
Doroga blinked and looked back at him. “What good, valleyboy? It is good for everything.”
“Valuable?”
Doroga shook his head. “You do not understand the meaning of the word in this,” he said. “Fever. Poison. Injury. Pain. Even age. It has power over them all. To our people, there is nothing of greater value.”
Tavi whistled. “Do you have any?”
Doroga hesitated. Then shook his head.
“Why not?”
“It grows only there, valleyboy. And only slowly. If we are fortunate, one person returns every year with some of the Blessing.”
“Why don’t you send more people?”
Doroga looked back at him for a moment, then said, “We do.”
Tavi blinked, then swallowed. “So, uh. I guess something happens to the ones who don’t come back?”
“The Keepers,” Doroga said. “Their bite is a deadly venom. But they have a weakness.”
“What weakness?”
“When one falls, the Keepers swarm the fallen. All of them. They will not pursue anyone else until that one has been devoured.”
Tavi gulped.
“This is the trial of my people before The One, valleyboy. It is newly night. You will go into the Valley of Silence and return before dawn.”
“What if we don’t come back before dawn?” Tavi asked.
“Then you will not come back.”
“The Keepers?”
Doroga nodded. “At night, they are slow. Quiet. No one escapes the Valley of Silence while The One fills the sky with light.”
“Great,” Tavi repeated. He took a deep breath. “So where is your son?”
Doroga blinked up at the sky and then back to Tavi. “My what?”
“Kitai. Your son.”
“Ah. My whelp,” Doroga said. He moved his eyes back to the ground before them, expression uncomfortable. “Hashat brings Kitai.”
“He’s not riding with you?”
Doroga remained silent.
“What?” Tavi asked. “Is he fighting with you? Hanging around with the Horse Clan?”
Doroga growled in his throat, and the gargant beneath them let out a rumble that shook Tavi’s teeth.
“Never mind,” Tavi said, quickly. “How far is it to this great tree and back?”