Dart glanced after it.
It landed, knee deep in the bone pile. The treacherous footing stumbled its perch. It fell forward. Only then did it seem to note where it was. Its head snapped up, neck taut, a confused bleat escaping.
Then a snarl of roots tangled up out of the bones. It lifted the deerling high and swamped over its body. The animal fought, but the roots penetrated flesh as easily as water. A sharp wail squealed forth, but it ended in one heartbeat as yellow flames sprouted from the deerling’s mouth and nose. More fires spat out from its ears and rear quarters.
Flesh roasted from the inside out, falling to ash as the body was shaken and jerked by the roots. All that was left of the deerling were bones, raining down upon the pile, growing the deadfall.
Aghast, Dart stumbled ahead. Through the darkness, other animals came to the call of the Heartwood. Cries rose all around the immense tree.
“This way,” Yaellin said, finally reaching the far side of the tree. “The others must have herded us here, hoping we’d succumb to the tree.”
“What is it?” Laurelle asked.
“Another ilk-beast. Trees are living creatures, like man or beast. As those who served Chrism drank his blood, so the first god once fed this tree. Its Grace was his to corrupt if and when he chose.”
Dart remembered the blood roots in the tunnel. She risked a glance back toward the horror. She now knew where all that blood had come from, sucked by Grace from the woodland creatures.
Yaellin guided them onward. The howl of the other ilk-beasts had grown silent. Dart found the quiet more disturbing than their hunting cries. Were they lying in wait for an ambush?
For another full bell, they fled through the woods, no end in sight.
“Dawn is not far,” Yaellin said. “We’d best be out of these woods and lost into the streets before the sun shows her face.”
“Why are you helping us?” Dart finally asked. She eyed his cloak of shadows. “Who… who are you really?”
He glanced down to her. He had lowered his cloak’s hood.
His black hair, though, remained enough of a cowl, loose to the shoulder and as dark as the night. The only break was the streak of silver from brow to behind his right ear. “It seems, little Dart, we are half siblings in a way.”
Dart frowned. Though the Hand had clearly saved them, she still felt wary.
“The headmistress of the Conclave was my mother,” he said. “Melinda mir Mar. And you were the little one she rescued and raised so long ago. The little stray sheep hidden among a flock of others.”
Dart shook her head in disbelief.
“It’s true, little sister.” A glimmer of a sad smile graced his face. “All was told to me by my father when I was about your age. He set a duty upon me like no other.”
“What was that?”
“To keep watch over the Godsword.”
“This is what Ser Henri told me,” Kathryn said. She leaned closer to Tylar to keep their words private. The flippercraft’s mekanicals chugged in rhythmic fashion. For a moment, his storm-gray eyes caught her gaze and her breath. She glanced down. “He… he told me once.. a half-moon after you were shipped away. He was deep into his cups, of sour and sanguine a mood. Over you. Over my loss.”
“Your loss?” Tylar asked.
“My loss of you…” she mumbled, speaking a half-truth. She was not ready to speak of the other yet.
He nodded. “I’m sorry.”
The anguish in his words drew her eyes up. “I’m as much to blame. Before the adjudicators, I should’ve been more of a lover, less of a knight.”
“The soothmancers would’ve had the truth out of you either way.”
“But what was the truth?” she said, hating herself for sounding so bitter. “I was so distraught. So shaken by the accusations.” She turned away. “You did come to bed bloody that night. Your sword was found at the home of the murdered cobblers.”
“I know. I barely remember even waking that morning…”
“Castellan Mirra said you were fed a draft of drowsing alchemy. Probably in wine.” Kathryn explained what the former castellan had related to her and Perryl, how Tylar was a pawn in a game of power among factions in Tashijan.
“Ser Henri knew my innocence?” Tylar asked at the end, clearly shaken, his voice hardening. “Even as I was sent away?”
“Do not judge him too harshly. He came to that knowledge late, and to speak it aloud at that time would have exposed too many others. Even Henri’s wardenship would have been threatened, and Argent ser Fields and his Fiery Cross would have assumed the Warden’s Eyrie much earlier.”
Tylar seemed little settled, breathing hard. Kathryn knew this mood. She smelled the heat of his skin. It awakened other unwanted memories, but she shoved these down. “Tylar, if Ser Henri had laid this all out, given you the choice of sacrifice or freedom, which would you have chosen?”
He remained silent, staring out the windows. The craft’s aeroskimmers glowed against the night sky. “It was not just my life in that balance,” he mumbled and turned back to her.
Those eyes again… she felt her heart tremble.
“But perhaps you are right…” He released her, glancing down. “At the end, I may have walked of my own volition onto that slave ship. I was not without guilt. I had dealings with the Gray Traders. I placed myself into position to be that pawn.”
Kathryn heard the pain in his voice, but her heart still echoed with his earlier words: It was not just my life in that balance. What if Tylar had known about the child… or even if Ser Henri had known at that time… would matters have changed? Would decisions have been made differently by all? Tears rose to her eyes. They came so fast, a surprise.
“Kathryn…” Tylar said.
“There is something I must speak to you about,” she finally said, “but not here.” She motioned to the cabin door. She needed to move. Though the others had offered some privacy by surreptitiously glancing elsewhere or murmuring in their own conversation, she still felt exposed.
Standing, she led Tylar out the cabin door. The axis hall of the craft led forward to the captain’s deck and backward to a communal room with a viewing window. Checking to ensure the hallway was free of prying eyes, they headed toward the stern.
Once in the vacant back cabin, Kathryn crossed to the curve of blessed glass that opened onto a vista below. A railing bounded a gallery overlooking the lower window. She grabbed it firmly. Below a small village slid by, lit by a central bonfire.
“What is it?” Tylar asked.
“There is one more thing you must know about those awful days.” She girded herself for what she must say. Tylar must have sensed her distress and placed his hand over hers on the railing. It was too much. She slid her hand away, perhaps jerking it too quickly.
“There was a child,” she said, speaking woodenly, trying to be dispassionate. “Our child.”
“What…?” Tylar stiffened.
“A babe… a son. I was to tell you the night you came drunk-what I thought was drunk-and bloody to our bed.” She shook her head. “Then the guards, pounding on the door in the morning… there was no time to tell.”
“Tell me now,” he said in a low voice, thunderous in its depths.
“The trial… the accusations… my testimony… it was too much.” A sob bubbled out of her. She had been holding it in for half a decade. “I was not strong enough.”
Tears flowed. She felt her knees go weak, her entire form trembling. The night coming back to her in full horror. “I lost the baby… my… our little baby boy.”
She was blind now to the view below. All she could see was so much blood, on her, on the sheets, everywhere. She tried to wash it up, alone in her room, so no one would know. Then more cramping, more blood…
“I was not strong enough,” she sobbed.
Tylar tried to put his arm around her, but she shoved him back.
“Not strong enough… not for you, not for our baby.”
Tylar again pulled her to him, with both arms now, hugging her tight. “No one’s that strong,” he whispered in her ear.