“Another mobbing?” she asks under her breath.
“I don’t know,” Achamian peers through the fingers of their blind, searching the cavities between gnarled trunks and bands of sunlight. “Those cries. Something is different …”
Enough!
“The boy?” she asks.
“Has survived far worse than this, I’m sure.”
Nevertheless, she peers into the canopy, sorting between branches that elbow rather than wend. Ever since returning to K?niüri she has noticed an oddness to the trees, an arthritic angularity, as if they would sooner raise fists than leaves to the sky. She can see nothing of the boy, though she was certain she knew which tree he had climbed.
A mucoid hiss draws her eyes back to the forest floor. She follows Achamian’s squint.
She cannot believe it at first. She observes without breath or thought.
A man on a horse. A man on a horse follows the Sranc …
Little more than a silhouette at a glance, leaning back against a high cantle, swaying to his mount’s tedious gait. Then a glimpse of wild black hair, a lancer’s shield across his horse’s rump. His arms are bare—this is how she knows what he is. It seems she sees the scars before the skin.
“Seju!” Achamian curses under his breath.
Neither of them speak. They track the Scylvendi horseman through the glare and gloom, watch him pass from obscurity into plain sight, then back into interleaving obscurity.
“Sweet Sejenus!” Achamian finally hisses.
“What should we do?” she asks.
The old Wizard slumps backward into the earthen recess, as if finally overrun by relentless ill-fortune.
“Should we run? Climb back into the Demua?”
He smears a palm across his forehead, thoughtless of the filth.
The angularity has seized her once again, that unerring need she has come to identify as motherhood.
“What, Akka?”
“Give me a blasted moment, girl!” he cries under his breath.
“We don’t have a—” she begins, but a sudden realization tosses the thought to oblivion.
Akka calls after her in alarm, far more loudly than he should. She silences him with a backward frown, then nimbly floats across the forest floor, ducking from tree to tree. She pauses twice, thinking that she hears thunder beneath her breath. In the surrounding obscurity another Sranc screeches at some insult. The sound is wet with nearness. She clenches her teeth about a hammering heart. At last she finds the tree the boy had climbed. She walks about it, alternately peering upward and casting glances over her shoulder. She sees him, as motionless as barked wood, watching her without expression. She calls him down with a violent wave of her hand. He gazes southward rather than reply, his head queerly bent. “Come!” she dares call.
The boy flies down the great elm like nothing human, legs and arms hooked about space. He thumps to a crouch on the humus. Before she can even acknowledge him, he has her arm in his crabbed hand. He yanks her back toward the old Wizard violently, his strength unlikely, his manner ruthless. The thunder is louder now. Panic pricks her from behind, sparks her stumbling gait. She sees the fallen tree, overthrown at the socket. She glimpses Achamian’s wild-bearded face watching through the blind of early-autumn weeds. The rumble climbs, a thrumming monotone, then breaks, as if a bladder overcome, becoming a cacophony of pounding hooves and equine complaints. She runs as if perpetually falling over her belly, always catching herself, always almost …
We are caught, a corner of her soul notes—one too weary not to be wry.
But the boy thinks otherwise. He yanks her, bruising iron in his claw grip, racing full bore. She crashes through the screen of weeds, into stinging gloom, a confusion of limbs, muck, and loam.
“Seju!” Achamian cries under his breath. “What were yo—”
The cacophony towers as if above them. Instinct brings her to her feet, leaning to peer at their pursuers—at the identity of their fate. But the boy has her again, pins her down, his odour sour for lack of bathing, yet sweet for youth. Paralysis. And they are in the belly of the thunder, the three huddled side by side, riven, dark save for a dragon’s claw of light across her belly. Rifling shadows. Pounding hooves. Huffing snorts and pinched indignations. Intimations are all they need.
Scylvendi. The dread People of War range the dead lands of K?niüri.
Please.
Afterward she will wonder just when her every thought became a prayer.
Because of the toppled tree, the riders give their overgrown cavity a wide berth. What seems like a watch passes, lying curled and rigid. Only the boy is perfectly motionless.
Then the thunder climbs ahead of them, and the inability to discriminate wraps the whole once again.
They lie in its receding, rumbling wake, drawing breath in the earthen gloom.