He shrugged beneath the blanket. “I can’t explain it. We just — we don’t treat our women the same way we do our men.”
“That’s stupid,” said Kitai. “Just as it is stupid for us to pursue the trial. If neither of us comes back with the Blessing, the trial is inconclusive. They’ll wait until a new moon and hold it again. You will be Doroga’s guest until then, valleyboy. You will be safe.”
Tavi frowned and swallowed, thinking. Part of him had all but let out a shout of relief. He could get out of this bizarre chasm with its alien creatures and return to the world above. It wasn’t a friendly one, among the Marat, but it was living, and he would at least be kept alive and unharmed until the next trial. He could survive.
But the new moon wouldn’t be for weeks. The Marat would move long before then, attack Garrison and then the steadholts in the valley beyond, including his own home. For a moment, Tavi’s imagination conjured up an image of returning to Bernardholt to find it deserted, thick with the stench of rotten meat and burned hair; to open one of the swinging gates and see a cloud of carrion crows hurtle into the air, leaving the bodies of people he had known his whole life ravaged and unrecognizable on the cold earth. His aunt. His uncle. Frederic, Beritte, Old Bitte, and so many others.
His legs started shaking — not with cold, but with the sudden realization that he could not turn his back on them now. If returning with that stupid mushroom meant that he would gain his family even a better chance to survive what was coming, then he could do nothing less than everything in his power to retrieve it. He couldn’t back down now, he couldn’t run now, even though it meant he might go into mortal danger.
He might wind up like that crow, sealed into the croach, devoured alive. For a moment, the pale, colored eyes of the Keepers haunted his mind. There had been so many of them. There still were, gathered all around the now-guttering fire, crawling mindlessly over one another in all directions, their long, knobby legs falling feather-light onto the surface of the croach. Their leathery shells made squeaking sounds as they crowded close, rubbed against one another. And they smelled. Something pungent and acrid and inexplicably alien. Even as he realized that he could smell them, Tavi felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle up, and his shivering increased in reaction.
“I have to go,” Tavi said.
“You’ll die,” Kitai said, simply. “It cannot be done.”
She shrugged and said, “It is your life to waste. Look at you. You are shaking hard enough to rattle your teeth.” But her odd, opalescent eyes stayed on him, intent, curious. She didn’t speak the question, but Tavi all but heard her ask: Why?
He took a shuddering breath. “It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter that I’m afraid. I have to get that mushroom and get out again. It’s the only thing I can do to help my family.”
Kitai stared at him in silence for a long moment. Then she nodded once, an expression of comprehension coming over her features. “Now I understand, valleyboy,” she said, quiet. She looked around them and said, “I do not wish to die. My family is not at stake. Freedom from my sire is useless to me if I am dead.”
Tavi chewed on his lip, thinking. Then he said, “Kitai, is there any reason that we can’t both get the Blessing? What happens if we both get back with it at the same time?”
Kitai frowned. “Then it will be assumed that The One tells us there is merit in either side’s argument,” she said. “The headman will be free to decide on his own.”
“Wait,” Tavi said, his heart pounding faster. “You mean that you’d get out from under your father, and he would be free to lead your people away from the battle with mine?”
Kitai blinked at Tavi and then smiled, slowly. “By The One, yes. That was his plan all along.” She blinked her abruptly shining eyes several times and said fiercely, “The problem is that Doroga does not seem to be clever. No wonder my mother loved him.”
“Then we work together,” Tavi said. He offered the girl his hand. She glanced down at his hand, frowned at him, and then mimicked the gesture. Her hand was slim, hot, strong. Tavi shook and said, “It means we agree to work together.”
“Very well,” Kitai said. “What do you think we should do?”
Tavi shot a glance back to the Keepers, who were slowly, randomly dispersing again, crawling away in different directions and at different speeds.
“I have a plan.”
An hour later, Tavi, covered with the soaked and chilly blanket, moved in silence over the smooth surface of the croach, his pace never varying. He kept count to himself as he walked, one pace per count. He was near five hundred. A Keeper walked perhaps ten feet in front of him, on a slow and steady pace toward the great tree at the center of the chasm. Tavi had followed it for several minutes without it turning to look at him or giving any indication that it sensed his presence. He had become more confident that he had determined how the things would detect him. So long as he was careful to be quiet and moved smoothly, he was effectively invisible.
The enormous tree loomed closer and closer, though the more Tavi could see of it, the less certain he was that tree was the right word to describe it.
Though the rest of the forest was covered in a sheath of the greenly glowing croach, this one tree, smooth sided, branchless, straight, was only covered to a height of ten or fifteen feet. The trunk was enormous, fully as big around as Bernardholt’s walls. It didn’t look like it had any bark at all—just smooth wood that reached up to a height of more than a hundred feet before ending in round, irregular edges, as though the tree had been snapped off by some giant hand, then had its rough edges smoothed by time.
At the base of the tree, there was a cavernous opening, a sloped and irregular triangle where the trunk parted, allowing entrance to the interior. Tavi paused and watched the Keeper he had been following. It paced slowly into the tree’s interior, and as it passed within, another Keeper moved out on the other side of the opening, as though it were a tunnel in the causeway.
Tavi stopped for a few moments and watched. Shortly, the Keeper he’d been following or another like it came out of the tree in exactly the same place. Still another came creeping in from another direction and entered the tree in exactly the same manner as the first, emerging again a few moments later.
The Keepers must have been taking something into the tree. But what? Something small, if they were just scuttling in and out, like ants in and out of their hills. Food? Water? What did they carry?