“You do this?” Brack said. His voice quiet, the sword heavy on his back. His feet wide and his arms folded, still a distance of two strides between them.
The man shook his head and looked back at her and said something and Brack could not tell what it was. His voice was gone. A dull rasp in his throat and nothing more.
“Look,” Juoth said from atop the horse. Pointing with the gloved hand.
The other man lay in the weeds up along the bank. His throat cut and the whole front of him soaked in blood and the flesh a deep and sickly red. His hands lay on his chest and were coated in blood as if he'd died trying to hold its flow within his body. He did not have on a shirt nor pants but just his underclothes and they were stained and ruined. There were two more cuts on his face but they had not mattered as his life slipped between his fingers and he fell. This also done quickly for there was not a mark on the man sitting with the woman's head in his lap.
Brack knew how it had happened and he did not ask and walked forward and knelt by the man. “Did you know him?” he said.
“No.” His voice still rough but able to be heard at this distance. “Met him down in Canntal. He was selling a horse for food and asked if he could go with us through the pass. Said it was safer that way in case there were thieves. We've been traveling with him now a week, eight days. I don't know.”
“A week.”
The man nodded. He had not let go of the girl and he would not.
Brack looked down at her and could not tell her age. Perhaps once she had been beautiful with her slight build and long hair but now the whiteness stole her body and made her an ancient thing, a crone with two hundred years and a withered form. He looked away again.
“Your wife?”
The man shook his head. “My sister.”
He had not expected that and all at once he thought of Kayhi as she came up to him on the wall, calm and strong and terrified. Telling him of the men and the progress. Kissing her forehead and sending her down to the cities and thinking even then that he shouldn't have done it but not knowing what else to do or the hell it all would become and now it was done.
“You can ride with us,” he said.
The man shook his head. “I can't leave her.”
Brack spoke softly. “We can bury her. If you still want to go through the pass, ride with us.”
“I won't.”
“It'll be weeks walking.”
“I won't bury her.”
“And what will you do instead?”
The man looked off down the river the way they were going. Where the land rose up and curved again into the cedars. Moving toward the higher pass where they would go through. “I have to bring her.”
Brack looked up at Juoth and the other man said nothing. His face unreadable.
“We can't bring her,” he said.
The man sat and looked at him. Brack did not see the knife and did not know his thoughts but knew he was thinking of meeting the other man who had been selling his horse. In whatever place that man now inhabited. That other side of life. He let him take the time he needed to run it through and then he stood.
“All right,” Brack said. “All right.”
The man looked back at him and his eyes were lost but in them was something moving and it was desperate and frantic and Brack did not like it but he could think of nothing but Kayhi and in things like that there was only the illusion of choice and nothing real.
They rode with the man behind him and the girl rolled in a blanket and lashed on the horse behind Juoth. It was the only way and they knew it and hated it and rode all the same. The young man looking over at her all the time and saying something to himself again and again and Brack trying not to listen for there were some things he did not want to know.
The river curved up and then they lost it through the rocks and the road split away and climbed toward a worn peak. Loose stone and shale beneath the horses' hooves and once they got down and walked them, all slipping in the stones, until moss and roots took hold and they could ride again. When they came out on the top of that peak it was not the summit but they could see it from there and they stood the horses for a time in the sun and looked out about them. The mountain now a long thin plain running away in rises and valleys and the river far down below and sparkling in the sun and the forest slipped away and down below a great distance.
A thin finger of black smoke rose back the way they'd come. Slightly twisted as it moved toward the clouds. Three vultures circled it on the air and hung there, those false birds of prey that were cowards and worse. Brack looked at them and thought of the farmer and his family and could not know and cursed anyway and looked away.
“It could be anything,” Juoth said.
“This your first day riding with me?”
“Could be a barn burning down. A field being cleared. Any damn thing.”
“Could be.” He spit the words and scowled and thought even then he could smell the smoke and everything in it.
“Don't make things that aren't there. What we have is enough.”
“There's a difference between making and knowing.”
“I know there is.”
“Well.”
“Well what?”
“Well this is the difference. This right here.”
“I don't think it is.”
They rode down a little way into the valley and made their camp in a copse where two trees had fallen one atop the other, each as high as Brack's waist even lying down, forming a windblock and the wall of the camp. Others had been there in times past and there were the remains of three fires, each older than the last, and who knew how many built atop each other on each spot. The camp was meager and they had little and soon Juoth had one of the fires going again and he was cooking and the young man was taking his dead sister off the horse.
Brack rose and held her thin body and the man nodded at him and worked the knot loose.
“She was older than you,” Brack said.
“I'm no boy.”
“I didn't say you were.”
“I'll be twenty in the spring. She'll be twenty-six.”
Brack noted how he said it and did not say anything. The boy got the knot loose and pulled the rope through itself and cursed and licked his finger where it was shot through with rope splinters and wiped his hand on his pants and pulled the rope again. It came all the way off and he took her by the feet and Brack by the shoulders and they set her on the ground. Near the logs where nothing would come to her in the night without first passing them.
“What's your name?” Brack said.
“Varin,” the boy said. Offering nothing for his sister.
They tied and watered the horses with the bags they'd filled in the river and set them to grazing on the far side of the camp and Brack looked once to see if the smoke was still rising and it was too dark to tell and this camp too low. All about the trees stretching and the sun on the far side of the mountain and everything here in shadow. In this hollow where they hid like animals from all the world offered.
Juoth had shot a rabbit with his bow and he had it on a spit over the fire and they sat and watched it while it cooked. The fat snapping as it hissed in the flames. Brack closed his eyes and opened them again. When it was done Juoth took it down and cut it into pieces and threw two to each of them and they ate and it was too hot and very good.