“But the shorthand language they used to carve those things died out with the worship. And good riddance, too. It apparently drove those who knew it mad.” Valdrek fingered one of the rings in his beard, thoughtful. “It was only the first generation who knew how to decode it. The rest of us have left it alone.”
The barmaid came with drinks. Kayu passed one of hers to Raffe. Fife shared his with Lyra when she held out a hand.
Red could’ve used one herself, but it felt like whatever they were headed for would require her mind to be at full capacity.
Valdrek took a long drink, leaving foam in his beard when he lifted the tankard away. “So yes, Wolf, I know the carving you refer to. But no, I don’t know what it means.”
“I do.”
The man across the table finally looked up from his cards. His expression wavered somewhere between clarity and confusion, like he hadn’t meant to speak up. Pale hair fell across a white brow, eyes dark.
It took her a moment, but Red finally remembered where she’d seen him before. “Bormain.”
Chapter Seventeen
Red
The last time Red had seen Bormain, he’d been raving with shadow-sickness and halfway rotted, chained up beneath Asheyla’s shop across the square. Even after she and Eammon had healed him, he’d been pale and waxen, still looking half a corpse.
He’d recovered since then, and well. Now Bormain looked like a healthy young man, none the worse for wear after his brush with something far more awful than death.
“That’s me.” He nodded, almost sheepish. “Um, thank you. By the way. And I’m…” A swallow down a tight throat; he looked pained. “I’m sorry for anything I said while I was sick. I know I—I said some unkind things, according to others, and I didn’t—”
“Don’t worry about it.” The poor man looked so ashamed, and Red knew what it was like to try stringing that into words. She gave him a slight, reassuring smile. “No need for apologies.”
Eammon didn’t seem as surprised by Bormain’s transformation as Red was. Apparently, he’d known the man well enough before being shadow-sickened to recognize him now. The Wolf leaned forward, all business. “So you know what the carving means?”
Bormain shrugged, like Eammon’s attention made him slightly nervous. “I think so,” he said, picking at the edges of his playing cards. “Ever since I was shadow-sick, I’ve been able to read some of the… the stranger carvings, for lack of a better term. So if your key-grove is one of those, it stands to reason I should be able to read it, too.”
Valdrek still sat with one hip propped up on the table, but every line of his body had gone stiff. He looked at Bormain with an odd mix of grief and wariness. “You didn’t tell me that, boy.”
Another stilted shrug from Bormain. “I’ve been enough of a burden,” he murmured. “And it’s nothing, really. They give me a headache sometimes, but I can mostly ignore them.”
Silence. Eammon’s eyes flickered to Red’s, both of them making the tandem decision to stay out of this moment.
A decision Kayu did not take part in. “Makes sense. In my experience, hiding your weaknesses is the only way to survive. Someone will take advantage of them, if you don’t.” She drained her tankard, then signaled for another. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes overbright—the alcohol already at work. “Kings and shadows, it’s been ages since I had a good beer.”
A frisson of unease raced over the back of Red’s neck. The statement felt like one more piece in Kayu’s puzzle, but she still didn’t have enough to fit them into a cogent picture.
The next beer came. Kayu drained it. Across the table, Fife’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline.
Raffe leaned closer to Bormain, ignoring Kayu’s drinking habits. “What kinds of things have you read in the other carvings?”
A reasonable enough question—if the runic marks were to record messages from the Old Ones in the Shadowlands, there could be helpful information there, no matter how obscure they might be—but Bormain paled. He glanced down at his cards again, as if they were easier to look at than Raffe’s face.
“Nothing worth repeating,” he said finally. Something that tried to be a rueful grin twitched at his mouth, but it looked more like a spasm. “It isn’t anything helpful. At least, not that I can tell. But I spend most of the time trying to block them out.” He shook his head. “They aren’t… they don’t seem like things that our minds are meant to follow, if that makes sense. It hurts to try to comprehend them, and even when I can, they’re awful.”
Red thought of godlike monsters, of things far from human in an upside-down prison world, and what something like that might try to communicate to those worshipping with suffering and blood. She swallowed.
“Are you sure you want to try reading the grove carvings, then?” This from Eammon, oddly gentle, though his face was still hard lines.
Bormain nodded. “I owe you.” Then, gathering up his cards, “And I’ve seen the carving you speak of before. It’s less… less jagged than the others. Doesn’t seem like it’s meant only to hurt.” He stood. “I remember where it is.”
Eammon looked again to Red, brows drawn into a question.
In any other circumstance, Red would’ve been apprehensive. Bormain might look healed, but he’d been ravaged by shadow-rot only a short while ago, and something about that experience had changed him irrevocably. This might be nothing more than feverish ravings from his time spent drowning in darkness. Even if he really could read the markings from the long-dead Old One worshippers, it was no guarantee it’d be anything about the Heart Tree.
But, as she’d told Eammon, beggars couldn’t be choosers. And she’d do all the begging she had to for Neve.
Lyra was the linchpin. She looked from Bormain to Red, gave a tiny nod. “I can’t sense any shadow on him,” she said, matter-of-fact, not trying to hide her words from Bormain. A slight smile. “And I haven’t quite lost the touch for it, even without a Bargainer’s Mark.”
Red swept her hand toward Bormain. “Lead the way, then.”
They left the city, all of them trailing conspicuously behind Bormain—Valdrek up ahead, speaking in low, friendly tones with Lyra and Fife, Kayu and Raffe in the middle, and Red and Eammon bringing up the rear. The villagers watched them curiously, but none asked what they were doing. The Edge was used to Wilderwood strangeness.
Once Lear cranked the gate open for them again, Bormain swung left, toward the rolling hills in the north instead of toward the Wilderwood. Even knowing how things had changed, knowing that the forest’s roots wouldn’t hold them back, Red’s hand still tightened on Eammon’s as they turned behind the wall.
He relaxed into her touch, as if the tensing of her hand reminded him that things were different now. Eammon looked down at her. “Feel anything?”
Red shook her head. The forest woven through her didn’t stir beyond a fluttering leaf, a blooming flower. “Seems like we really can go anywhere.”
Thoughtfulness darkened Eammon’s eyes. The same thing in both their heads—here was concrete proof they could leave the forest without any ill effect. They could travel to the Rylt.