“You went in the river,” Brack said. “We found you kneeling in it.”
“Kneeling in it.”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
Juoth stood up. Looked at Brack for a moment, his eyes like flint. Then he turned and walked off in the darkness in the direction of the path. They could hear him walking in the loose stones for a while and then they couldn't hear him anymore and Brack imagined him sitting there in the half dark and wondered what thoughts turned in his head like the boy's hands and did not know.
“Why'd you do it?” Brack said.
“Why'd I do what?”
“You know what you did.”
“I'm telling you I don't.”
“I don't care what you're telling me.”
The boy looked away and then back at his sister and Brack knew and had known but wanted him to say it and to see if he was telling the truth when he said he didn't know. He couldn't imagine it worked that fast but it might and that was important. So he waited and eventually the boy met his eyes.
“It didn't even work.”
“You don't know that.”
“Look at her.”
“I am looking at her. What is it supposed to do and where'd you learn it?”
The boy looked up the path where Juoth had gone. “Is he afraid of me?”
“I don't know. I've only known him a short time myself. But he doesn't want to believe in it.”
“But he does.”
“Yes.”
“It's,” the boy said. Then stopped. Licked his lips and turned toward the fire. Closing his eyes as if he couldn't say it to anyone else but knew he had to and so could only say it if he wasn't looking at anyone and it was just him behind his eyes and maybe the whole world gone from before him. “It's supposed to bring her back.”
“To bring her back to life?”
“If it works.”
Brack was quiet and went and took up another log from the stack of them and put it on the fire. Moving it carefully so that it sat across the others that were there and formed a bridge. The fire licking up greedily at the sides. The smoke rising and no fear now of the dragon for if it was coming to the fire it would have come already. He watched the log catch and put another crosswise over it and then went back and sat down again.
“You think it will work?”
The boy shrugged and his shoulders looked very small. “I read it in a book. I don't know if I did it right. It wasn't hard.”
“Magic never is. It's very, very easy. You just have to know what's asked. Follow those things, and in that order. You did it correctly.”
“How do you know?”
“I saw you. If you could have seen yourself, you'd know. Did you really forget?”
“It's like a dream. You know it but it's not solid. I remember it a little.”
“But less now than when you first woke.”
“A bit.”
It was already happening and Brack knew he could not stop it and he did not know if the boy knew what it would do to him or not, but there was no point in telling him now, for the thing was done. When a man was dying with an arrow in his heart or his throat cut out you didn't tell him he was dying and the boy was not dying but it was the same. He watched him and the boy was very stiff and Brack thought he knew and had done it anyway.
“Can I still come with you to the city?” the boy said. “Will you still take us?”
“Can I?”
“I don't know what you mean.”
“I mean if I take you, am I going to wish I hadn't?”
“No.”
The boy couldn't tell him that and know it but Brack looked at him and felt like it was true all the same. They were only a few days' ride out now and he did not know how much time he had but he felt it would be enough.
He held out his hand, palm up, the dark leather glove wet below the place where the fingers were cut off. He hadn't known he'd been clenching his hands but he could now feel the ache in them. “Give me your knife.”
The boy took it out of his belt and handed it across. He had not cleaned the blood and it was dried on the blade and Brack put it into his own belt. A short blade, maybe a hunter's knife. Made for gutting a whitetail in the forest and nothing more, but he'd seen the highwayman and it was enough.
“I'll take you to the city,” Brack said. “And your sister. When we get there, you're on your own. I want nothing more to do with this.”
“That's fine.”
“Damn right it is.”
The fire was burning up now and the new logs were ablaze. Tongues of flame rising from the corners of the wood and the logs blackened around them and the bed of embers below. The wind came through the tops of the oaks and shook loose a shower of leaves and they fell in a small scattering into the field and one came down and spun and flicked on the updraft and settled its battered parchment on top of the fire. The edges curling and then the glow from the inside out as the center burned and soon it was nothing but ash.
Juoth came back after a time and would not speak to the boy and they mounted the horses with the dead girl on behind him and rolled in the blanket and the boy with Brack and they rode out as the fire died in their wake. The trail now moving down through the meager forest of rawboned trees and the horses picking their way over rocks enshrouded in lichen. Smaller rocks pushing through the moss and needles of the trail, roots breaking the ground. It was slow going but the horses were surefooted and they went down a long way until they came to a meadow.
In the meadow were two rams and each standing and looking at the other and neither looking at the men on horseback. One pawed and they both lowered their heads and ran hard and long and came together. It was a sound like a rock splitting. The rams both stumbled and shook their heads with the heavy spiraled horns and looked at one another and without turning began to walk backward until they stood again at a slightly greater distance. Each eyeing the other. Then one pawed and they ran again.
They went up the side of the meadow where a thin waterfall came over the cliff and dismounted to drink and looked down at the rams where they still fought and then remounted and rode off and never had the rams acknowledged them, so intent were they each on the other's destruction. For a long time they could hear them striking as they went and always that same heartbeat to the sound.
As the day drew to a close they rode in the falling dusk and the horses streaked with dirt and Brack felt the boy moving behind him. Shifting as if to look again at his sister. He had done this many times and Brack did not think much of it and then the boy said:
“We were coming out of the sea with golden sails. The wind was behind us and we could see the other ship sinking on the horizon and we didn't turn back.”
Brack closed his eyes. Thinking of an old man in Gadilion and a cup in his hand. Meager coins rattling within. Then he opened his eyes again and the trail stretched out before them through a stand of birches. The ends of the branches were dead, perhaps beset by plague or beetle, and all about the roots of the trees lay their own branches where they'd broken and fallen in the wind. Below the leaves still green and above withered and that death moving down to the roots.
“When was it?” he said.
“What?” the boy said.
“When did you sail?”
The boy was quiet then. Brack waited for some time for him to answer and he did not and after enough time had gone by, he knew he never would. They continued on and Brack felt him move again to look at his sister and then it was getting too dark for the horses to see the trail and so they came to a place where that trail widened and pulled the horses into the clearing. No fires here but plenty of wood and a good place to see both in front and behind.