“In the world. And air full of eyes. Have you seen the eyes?”
He did not answer and wouldn't. Putting his hand on the knife at his side and looking at the licking flames. Across the fire Brack slept already and he could see his chest rising and falling and his lips moving. Not an easy sleep. His grandfather had slept the same way and Juoth knew what it looked like and that he would not remember his dreams when he woke.
“Have you seen the eyes?” the boy said again. Almost pleading now. Leaning forward with the rest of the meat uneaten in his hand and reaching for him. Fingers open and nodding his head as if to bring about the response he sought by mere suggestion. “The air is full of them.”
“Go to sleep,” Juoth said.
The boy took this as affirmation and nodded and smiled and it was a horrible thing. His eyes were vacant and his smile didn't reach them and it was as if the boy didn't exist behind them. He dropped his dried meat and it fell in the dirt and he did not pick it up.
Juoth laid down himself and the boy watched him as if learning and then laid also on the ground. No blanket or pillow. His arms straight at his sides, next to the body of his dead sister. Both in this same pose and their heads fallen at an unnatural angle toward the ground. Juoth closed his eyes. Held them for a breath and then opened them. The boy was still looking at him in the night and smiling that fixed and broad smile that did not reach the rest of his face but only stretched the skin.
Then, while he watched, the boy slowly raised both of his own hands. Raising them straight-armed at first and only at last bending the elbows. Moving slowly and not making a sound and all the while looking not at what he did but at Juoth.
“Have you seen the eyes?” the boy said. “The air is full of them.”
And then he reached and plunged his fingers into each socket, two of them together and straight like they were made of steel. Not making a sound the whole time, not to scream or cry out. The wide smile never faltering. He pushed his fingers into the insides of the sockets and there was a wet ripping, sucking sound and blood all in the air and down his hands and face and then he clenched his thumbs and ripped his eyes off at the stalks.
Juoth yelled and tried to rise and fell and then got up. The boy had one eye in each fist and he'd crushed them and his face was a horror of blood and it was pouring into the dirt. He was still smiling and his face as white as pooled candlewax and he was opening and closing his fists. The stalks of his eyes hanging down his cheeks. He was saying something but it wasn't a word.
Juoth grabbed the boy and rolled him over and knew there was nothing to do. The blood already slowing as it only did when there was very little left. He could hear Brack getting up across the fire and the sound of the sword coming out of its sheath and the world buckled beneath his legs. He fell to one knee and caught himself and there was the boy's blood now on his hands and pants and he looked at Brack across the small fire and then back.
The movement of rolling the boy had pulled the blanket from the body of his sister. Her with that thin hair and indistinguishable age, the dead body they'd carried through river and mountain and plain to get to a city now full only of other bodies. Perhaps not even those remaining in the pyre it had become. Bringing the dead to the dead.
He reached with his gloved hand to put the blanket back over her head. He did not know why and it wasn't something done because there was a reason. Except perhaps that the gasping boy at his feet with the ravaged face and his own eyes crushed in his hands was little more than a corpse, and this girl with her thin and blooddrained face was the same. And maybe, maybe he could bear it if it was only one, but he could not see two at the same time and so he reached to cover her again as instinct and self preservation.
And as he did so, the dead girl opened her eyes.
Chapter Seventeen
She slept that night in a tree. Lying in the darkness and a web of branches with the stars bright above her and moving in the air in flittering little jaunts the fireflies with bats swooping among them. She had not been able to hide the horse but had tied it to a tree a half a mile distant and could do nothing but hope that the wolves did not find it and if they did she would walk.
She would know if the wolves found it without having to go back. It would not be the first time she had heard a horse scream in the night and known what it meant. Once along the Caariligan where the river poured down through the stone fields the wolves had gotten to the edge of the camp and taken one down and she'd thought for the first moments of sheer terror as she jolted awake that it was a person screaming in the camp.
By the time they'd run the wolves off the horse had been dead and the blood running down in rivulets along the rock toward the river.
She took a rope from the saddlebag and tied herself to the tree. The place she chose was very high and the bows wide and wound together and she did not think she would fall but she tied herself all the same. Lashing it about her waist and knotting it and then wrapping it around both branches—should one break—and tying it again. It may not prevent the fall but she thought it would hold at least enough to save her if she did.
The forest was very quiet and she lay looking back toward the city.
The flight from those walls had turned out to be nothing at all. The whole way her heart hammering in her chest. Pulling back on the horse lest it run and riding calmly from the gate as if she were no more than some merchant's wife or a merchant herself. Her wares sold and the money in the saddlebag and heading down the road through the Trappers' Gate. She did not turn her head in case the guards were looking and she would never know if she'd slipped out while they'd changed shifts or if they'd watched her and not known it was her or if something else entirely, some other good fortune she could never have planned, covered her escape.
When she reached the trees she had held her pace for five minutes and then bent and put her feet into the horse. Riding hard all evening up along the river plain and into the fields and vineyards heavy with grapes and when she hit the true forest beyond, the Huralon, she'd left the road as she'd been told and slowed the horse and picked her way through the woods itself.
It was a very old forest and thick and in it gnarled trees as old as the city and some behemoths amongst them rising like the towers of the gods. So wide around it would take fifty men with arms linked to circle them, the rough bark like the sheer face of a cliff. No branches to be seen on this lower level and all very straight and rising like spears thrust from the earth. She had stood the horse at the base of one and looked up and it went through the canopy and was gone and she could not see the top.
There were those who could climb them, with ropes and picks, the way they climbed mountains. She had seen once when she was a girl a man who climbed to a hundred feet and then fell screaming and turning in the air, then a lithe girl so adept she climbed after the man and tripled his height and then went beyond and they lost her in the fog and mist and branches and never saw her come down.
She'd ridden in that dark and tangled forest as the night grew deep around her. It had been dusk when she left and she only had the light for a short time and even then it was gray. The boulders looking like beasts hulking there in the dark. Every branch or limb a rider on a horse, coming through the forest toward her. And then even that was gone and she rode through a thick valley in the meager moonlight that fell through the branches, everything in shadow. Pausing to listen to what moved out there and trying not to think of what it was and cursing him for not getting her a sword.
In the end it was that which caused her to stop. It was not the wolves she was afraid of in this forest, but there were worse things than wolves and many things that could kill her, and so she'd come up out of that valley and ridden a half hour more through a sweeping and level area where the trees at last spread out just slightly and she'd found the one to which she tied the horse and then walked to the one she now lay in, looking at that night sky above and far to the east one of those oldest trees rising pale and endless until it was gone.