Every step hard and echoing and then lost. The rushing of the water now louder and in the air that faint feeling of mist. Everything in cloud and a perpetual wetness.
They passed a man at the crest of the bridge. Walking along in robes dark and heavy and his eyes downcast and nothing on his back and no animal to be seen. He did not look up as they went by and the boy tried to hail him and still he did not look. He was not armed and carried nothing. He stopped as they went by and stood at the edge of the bridge looking the way they'd come and Brack looked back twice as they rode and both times he stood in the same place.
A man now carved of stone. The world and its weight all about him. Perhaps only with that drop below him that weight negated or somehow less.
They came to the far side of the bridge and back to the land and the horses stepped upon it eagerly and they continued on. Brack looked again and could no longer see the man. Thinking about how all this country lay in some sort of silence and wondering what brought it to that. How maybe when a road died all that was left were the dead and the dead did not speak even as they traversed the forgotten pathways of the earth like some grim cartographers seeking always not to cut out for themselves new maps but to force the world itself into agreeance with the old.
It would be a day's climb to the top of the next mountain and Brack pulled the horse up as the ground began to rise again beneath them. Turning to look. The day now in mid afternoon and still with much light but they would not reach the summit and he was thinking perhaps they should camp now and climb it entire in the morning when Juoth said:
“We have to bury her.”
The boy got off the horse so fast he nearly fell and in his hand suddenly a knife and Brack called out but had hardly spoken when Juoth turned and leapt from the saddle, pushing with the leg still in the stirrup, and came down on the boy. Lashing out as he hit and the knife glinting and turning in the air and skittering then in the dirt and the boy's cry as both fell to that hardpacked earth and Juoth with his own blade in his gloved hand and pressed to the boy's throat.
“You have something to say?” Juoth said.
The boy worked his jaw and did not speak and his skin as white now as his sister's. Juoth held him for a moment more and the boy closed his eyes and only then did the islander get off of him and let him stand.
“You ever come at me with a knife again and it'll be the last thing you do,” he said. “Not all men are like the one you killed in the river.”
The boy raised his chin and in his eyes danced fear and pride and determination and he said: “You're not burying her.”
“I'm not?”
“You're not.”
Juoth scowled and turned to the blanket with the dead girl's body in it and he pointed at it with the knife. “You smell it, boy? Don't tell me you don't smell it.”
The boy was silent.
“You know what we have to do.”
Brack leaned forward on the saddle and looked up at the rise and thought of her face the way he remembered it and closed his eyes for a long time and then thought also of Kayhi's face and both knew what he was and hated himself for it and opened his eyes again. “We won't bury her,” he said.
Juoth looked at him. “We have to.”
“I said we'd take them to the city and we'll take them to the city.”
“She won't make it that far.”
“She'll make it,” the boy said.
They stood all three looking at one another and then Juoth grunted and shook his head and mounted his horse. Not looking at the boy again or stopping him when he bent to get his knife. Putting his heels into the horse and sitting far forward and away from the body and starting the climb. Brack watched him go and held out his hand and after a moment the boy gave him the second knife and climbed back up and then they followed.
It was late that night or early morning sitting in the darkness without a fire and the boy standing a ways off and looking toward the lights of the city far down in the plains that Juoth came over and sat in the pale moonlight and looked at Brack.
“I'm sorry,” Brack said. “But I told him.”
“I know what you told him.”
“It's only days now.”
“If the weather holds.”
“It'll be all right.”
Juoth took his knife out and began to move it between his fingers and looked at the boy and back again. Off in the night the calling of some bird Brack hadn't heard in he did not know how long and he knew it really was the plains again. Thinking of other times coming through them both alone and with companies and once with an unquenchable fire at their backs that they could only outrun and pushing the horses for days in the heavy smoke before they found a river and crossed it and there collapsed in exhaustion.
“I know why you don't want to carry her,” Brack said. “But there are other things to worry about.”
“Maybe we make the boy carry her.”
“It's more than that.”
Juoth tipped his head, his voice dropping. Looking again toward the boy and back. “With him?”
“It's what he told me,” Brack said. “The whole story about him and his sister. It was all a lie.”
“All of it?”
“All of it.”
“How do you know?”
“I've been in these mountains a long time and there aren't that many towns I haven't heard of and I haven't heard of any he named. Haven't heard of a plague cutting through the mountains. Or people burning their towns and running. None of it. It's all just built so we can't go back and check it. Towns we've never been to where now everyone's dead and his family too and the whole thing. He and that girl and the man they killed the only ones who can back that story up and two thirds of them dead as well.”
“You think it's too convenient.”
“In my experience if you think it is, it is.”
Juoth held up the knife and began to stand. “Then let's just be done with him here. You know he's a liar and we know he killed that man and maybe he killed his damn sister, too. Either way we leave him and we ride on and that's the end of it.”
Brack shook his head. “You saw his eyes.”
“That doesn't make a difference.”
“Everything makes a difference.”
“So what, we bring him? Knowing all that we know, we bring him.”
Brack nodded. Thinking of the kid lunging and how fast his knife was gone and Juoth on top of him. A boy and not a warrior. Perhaps able to kill another man when the situation presented itself but only if that man was just like him and also older. He was like the men in the village taking up their picks and axes to fight a dragon and none knowing that they carried nothing but kindling to a furnace for none knew what it was to fight a dragon or how quickly he would devour and destroy.
“I don't think he'll try it again and it won't matter if he does,” Brack said. “We'll just do what we said and we'll bring him and leave him in the city where someone else can watch him. Then it ends.”
“Does it.”
“It does.”
“You always stick to your word like this?”
“You knew my grandfather,” Brack said. Grinning slightly in the half light. “And you already called me a damn mule.”
“Then I guess I don't have anyone to blame but myself.”
“I guess you don't.”
The boy stood looking out for a long time and then went back to where he'd laid the body of his sister and Brack watched him the whole time and when at last a cloud came swiftly over the moon they were all three asleep and around them the world moving in its shadows and depths and turning forever as the night spun on.