“You say that, but in truth you want me to do it. You want to see him impaled and hear him call out. Don’t you?”
It took her a moment to answer. She did not know why she hesitated. She was not considering different answers. There was only one. But it was hard to push out. “No,” she finally said, “I don’t.”
“Boy,” Hanish shouted, “raise up your hand!”
The boy did not understand. Hanish lowered his bow and showed what he meant with his own hand. The boy mirrored the posture. Hanish told him to spread his fingers, and then to hold them apart, with spaces between them. “Good, now hold very still.” He lifted his bow to sight again.
“Just stop it!” Corinn said, more a whisper than the shout she intended.
He shot. The boy did not flinch, which was a good thing as the arrow passed between his middle and forefinger. It sailed on past him and hid itself in the grass somewhere behind him. Just like that, it was done.
“Was there a point to be made with that or not?” Hanish asked, lowering his bow. “You decide.” He spun and moved away, dropping the weapon to the ground after a few steps.
Corinn watched him go. She watched his form as it entered the forest of pale-barked trees, the leaves above applauding him with shimmering enthusiasm. He was right about her, she thought. She felt the truth breach the surface of her consciousness and stare her in the face. There was a part of her that had wanted him to shoot the boy. Why she had wanted it she could not say. Just to prove that it could be done? To prove that the boy’s apparent goodness was protection against nothing? Just to watch a pinpoint of suffering launched through the air, dealt from one person to another with a simple release of the fingers? To see proof of Hanish’s cruelty? Perhaps that was it. To see it proven with her own eyes. Her stomach knotted at the thought, at the feeling of aversion, intertwined as it was with attraction. What was Hanish doing to her?
With effort, she pulled her eyes from the trees and touched on the boy, who still stood in exactly the same spot. He had lowered his hand, but he stood as if unsure whether something else would be asked of him. It was good that she had not asked him his name.
Back at the lodge and wrapped up in her thoughts, she was surprised when Peter, the head servant, appeared beside her in one of the stairwells. He came at her like an attacker, pouncing from where he must have lain in wait for her. “Princess,” he said, “you’re not the girl I remember.” He paused inches from her. She had not been so close to him yet during the visit and never alone with him. His eyebrows twitched with an emotion she could not fathom. She nearly shouted out.
“Your father,” he said, “would have been proud at how tall you stand. I heard of your fate, but I didn’t believe it until I saw you arrive here.” For a moment he looked overcome with misery. “When will he come, Princess? Share with me and we will be ready to join with him. All here are still loyal.”
Corinn snapped, “When will who come?”
“Why, your brother, of course! We all pray to the Giver that Aliver will return soon and with a vengeance that sweeps Hanish Mein from existence.”
CHAPTER
As his horse kicked up the last few feet of the rise to the top of the Methalian Rim, Haleeven Mein could feel the nearness of home again. A breeze braced him and seemed to caress the fissures of his pock-marked visage, looking for signs of familiarity. The scent of the land was moist and fetid, rank with the boggy rot of the lower Mein summer. He dismounted and bent to the ground. He grasped the turf in his fists and whispered a prayer of thanks to his nephew. Hanish had given him a great gift by allowing him to see his home again for the first time in years. Better yet, he had returned to begin the transport that would lead to his ancestors finally winning the release they deserved. There were aspects of his mission that he had misgivings about, but he tried not to think of these things much. Instead, he swore that he would see to his ancestors’ wishes.
The world before him was damp with spring. Layers of snow had melted and still continued to do so beneath the tentative warmth of the slanting sun. In this area of the plateau the earth was a thick blubber of living peat. Sopping as a drenched sponge, it squelched underfoot. Haleeven, the company of mounted soldiers around him, and the long train of plodding conscripts behind them had to stay on established paths, where the earth had been packed to hardness. The air thrummed with newly awakened insect life, tiny things that seemed to like nothing better than pasting themselves to the whites of people’s eyes. They flew headlong into mouths and up through inhaling nostrils. And they bit as well.
Haleeven looked about him at blood-spotted faces. He saw several men cover their mouths with bits of fabric. Others swatted their flesh, smearing their own blood from the insects’ burst bellies. Haleeven tried to be impervious to the discomfort. He let the welts emerge unmolested on his exposed skin and let his eyes convey his disdain for those of lesser discipline. He did not even bother to look back at the foreign laborers, miserable lot that they were. He knew they would likely drop in number as they marched, prey to fevers carried by the insects.
A few days of northerly travel and he watched the ridges of the Black Mountains lacerate their way up out of the horizon. Gusty winds skimmed down their heights and buffeted man and horse, blowing the insect hordes into sidelong oblivion. A little farther on they rode upon the firmer plains of the central plateau, a place of tundralike grasslands, home to reindeer and wolves, foxes and white bears, and to the arctic oxen the Meins had domesticated long ago. The landscape was largely empty of these creatures at present, but Haleeven knew they were there somewhere, out of sight, just over the horizon. Had he the time, or had leisure been appropriate at all, he would have kicked his mount into a run and lost himself in the wilds that had shaped his race.
Tahalian. Haleeven surprised himself in realizing he at least partially looked upon his home fortress with the eyes of a foreigner. The place looked like a creature long dead, like the corpse of a ragged beast, trapped years before within a cage of massive pines, ripped and debarked and stained. Half covered in snow, not a sprig of green to be seen, a gray-brown hovel, dug in defiance of a land that had never smiled upon it: such was Tahalian.
Haleeven entered the gates to a modest, though grateful, welcome. Hanish’s second cousin, a young man named Hayvar, served as regent in the fortress. He was a handsome youth, though thin framed, possessing tremulous eyes unusual for a race that preferred a look of outward calm in all circumstances. He had barely loosened his embrace before he was peppering Haleeven with queries. How was Hanish? Had he truly readied a chamber for the ancestors on Acacia? What was that island really like? Was it the bounty the returning soldiers always claimed? Were the women all olive skinned, with oval faces and large eyes?
“I’m happy,” he said, “that I’ll finally get to see for myself. I’ll be returning with you. Hanish has agreed to it. I’ve had a note from him to that effect. He wants all of us there to see the curse lifted.”
The young man seemed too anxious, Haleeven thought, to leave his homeland, even if the reason was worthy. But he was young. He had felt deprived of his place in the world’s drama. Had not the soldiers who sailed with Hanish or marched with Maeander left hungry to see the land below the plateau? Hayvar was no different. Had he not been but a boy when the war began, he would have left years before.