The darkness was complete then and Brack watched the horses. They would know if the dragon was coming and they would try to run and perhaps it would save them. Perhaps not, but they had nothing else. They sat for a long time and Juoth sang softly some song of the Island Kingdoms and the boy watched him with rapt attention and the song wound a mournful tale through the hills. When it was done the boy lay down on the flat ground near his sister and put his hands under his head and looked at the sky where the stars were breaking and the dark expanse covered in them.
It was some time later in the deep night that Brack woke and for a moment did not know where he was and then remembered and lay very still to hear that which had woken him. The fire down to nothing but red embers, the stars covered now in cloud. The boy talking in the darkness. Brack rolled slowly and looked and he was gone from where he'd slept and so was the blanket and his sister's body.
Chapter Twelve
He stood slowly and listened and he did not know the words the boy was saying. Some tongue foreign or perhaps lost. A language now dead in the world but for the few who carried it and to what end he knew not. Juoth was lying there in the dark with his eyes open and Brack nodded to him and he stood also and they walked to the voice.
The boy was not far off and kneeling in a shallow stream. The water moving slow and quiet below them over smooth stones. Dark as pitch, the only light from the moon breaking at times through the cloud cover. His sister's hair flowed all out around her head like some veil or burial shroud pulled back and she floated on the surface of the water as if her very bones and flesh and waterlogged skin held no weight at all. The boy kneeling beside her and both hands on her forehead and covering her eyes. The skin of both stark white against the darkness when the moon fell.
Juoth moved to step from the trees and toward them, but Brack reached and put a hand on his chest.
The boy spoke into the wind and it was as if in his throat burned the very embers of the fire. Stolen in the night and placed between his lips as some delicacy of another world, then swallowed and now lodged there in his throat, twisting and burning and blistering the flesh, devouring his words and giving each utterance a guttural sound. A wicked and lost language. Even with the meanings of the words unknown, filled with a hatred and depth.
They stood and watched him for time unknown. In later days Brack would remember and think it had been but a minute before the boy turned his head to them and his eyes were on fire. Other times he would think it was hours, the night somehow suspended and lashed where it was, the moon hanging in its movements and waiting for this thing to be done. He would turn both over in his mind and he could never sort one from the other or decide which to trust and eventually he stopped trying.
For all that had mattered then was the boy's sneering face, his lips drawn back over his teeth. His eyes burning orbs, no smoke or flame moving out and up his flesh, but all contained like fire raging in a globe of glass or ice. Swirling around on itself. Iris and pupil lost in the inferno. Impossible to know what he saw or if all vision was stripped from him.
Even at that distance, Brack could feel the heat coming off of him.
And then he blinked, and his eyes were black. The color of coal or soot or night itself. All light lost and suddenly a great darkness in the thin forest. A stream of tar moving under a moonless sky, the clouds sweeping back across as if protecting the heavens themselves from what this was.
Not a sound in that darkness.
Then again the boy blinked, and the darkness was gone. His eyes were normal, just white orbs with the pupils dilated. The moon back to cast his face in harsh relief. His own skin and his sister's not that different, both like poured wax. He looked at them for a moment and breathed once long and heavy and then fell forward, slowly, and splashed face down in the running water.
They went forward and pulled him out and his sister also. Both in their sodden clothing. The boy did not make a sound and when Brack rolled him on his back and laid him by the fire his eyes were back in his head and all white. They stripped him of shirt and pants and Juoth gathered wood and got the fire up again and burning hot.
A risk here in the night, a signal to the beast that could be turning silently in that dark air, but without it the boy would die. It was warmer on the road and in the lower country but not as warm as it would be in the plains, at this elevation, and the water had been very cold. They laid his clothes out next to him and Brack gathered heavier wood to keep the fire going and then they sat down and watched it burn and for a long time neither one said anything. Checking the boy at intervals to make sure he was still breathing.
Then Juoth said: “What do you think?”
“About what?”
“Should we ride?”
He looked at the horses and then the boy and the girl's body. It would not be hard to mount up and leave them here and if the boy woke and wanted to go on as he had been going, so be it. And if not then he was already dead and it made no difference.
“No,” he said.
“Why?”
“You can leave if you want.”
“I didn't say I was leaving. I asked you why.”
“And I'm telling you you can leave.”
“And I'm telling you what I asked.”
Brack pursed his lips, looked away in the direction of the city. Kayhi perhaps waiting for him there if she had made it through the pass. Perhaps dead in that snow but he didn't think so and if she was then he'd already lost her and it didn't matter. And then he looked back at the boy and tried not to think of him with his eyes on fire and he looked at the dead sister and swallowed what he felt coming and shook his head.
“I don't know,” he said.
“You always make decisions you don't know why you made them?”
“I make decisions for a lot of reasons and that's one of them.”
Juoth was silent and Brack thought he would stand and curse him or rise in silence and go to his own horse and leave, but he did not. He looked at him for a long moment and then tipped his head back and laughed. Sighed. Shook his own head as if mocking him and said:
“You're a hell of a lot like your grandfather, you know that? Stubborn as a damn mule.”
Brack smiled and watched the fire warm the boy and wondered when he would come back and said: “People always did say we shared a lot. Especially when he was younger.”
It was two hours later when the boy woke gasping and sat up straight and gasped again and held his knees and then looked at them with wide eyes. The sun was rising behind the mountain and neither of them had slept and when he sat up Juoth put his hand on his knife but did not draw it. Brack did not move but just watched him and especially the eyes and what was in them.
The boy blinked a few times and worked his jaw and then looked at his sister's body. Reached out and put a hand on her arm and took it back and sat staring and then turned back to them.
“What happened?” he said.
“You tell me,” Brack said.
“I'm asking you.”
“I know you are.”
The boy half started to reach again for his sister and then did not. He was looking down at his hands and he looked like he was trying to figure something out and could not put it together but could feel it or the shadow of what it was. Turning his hands over and over. Finally he put them in the dirt and looked back up and he looked afraid.
“I don't know. I don't know.”
“What do you know?”
He licked his lips and tried to stand and grimaced and sat back against that tree, the trunk old now and rotting from the inside. “I remember waking up in the night. Going down to the river. Then nothing else. Just right now.” He reached out and touched the bottoms of his pants where they had not been close enough to the fire to dry and he pinched them between his fingers. “What happened to my pants?”