There was no path but he found a trail used by deer and others and they took it along for the distance that it went where they already wanted to go. She did not know where they were but did know the general direction in which they traveled. Behind them the castle and far to their right the fields and plains and after that the rising sawtooth of the mountains breaking the world's crust. Beyond even that the towering stone behemoths of the true mountains where black stones rose for miles and dwarfed all below and these monstrous peaks with sheer cliff faces thousands of feet high and glaciers miles upon miles long that no man could cross and snow deeper than the city walls. Snow enough in some places to swallow all that was her kingdom as if it had never existed.
But so far removed were they here in this forest and the heat of midday, walking on this path of dirt and trampled grass where deer nervously stepped with their tails flicking and their black glass eyes wide. Coming to a river that they crossed on stones, then later a deep canyon where they walked along until a fallen tree bridged it. Him going across first and then nodding and her running those four steps in sheer terror. So few steps but below a fall of a hundred feet and the sounds of the water running.
They did not talk as they walked and this was how it always had been between them and she felt herself fall years back in her own life. To other trips and campaigns and worlds that they'd traveled. Some in danger and some in luxury. Another life, one she had almost forgotten she'd lived.
A life that had ended, she realized then, walking through a wide field of moss with a lone tree standing in the middle, a heavy trunk so far around it looked like a guard tower and great swaying branches holding an immense canopy. She had been thrown into that dungeon with her husband as the boy took the throne and she had fought to live even as he had died. Fought bitterly and with everything she had. Finding then the resiliency that she had within her to continue her life at all costs, to hold nothing back and to demand with every breath simply to live. Some streak in her of iron will.
And yet she had not lived, not as she was. The warrior she had been and the queen she had become, both dead. That life ended. Now walking with a man from that life she felt the difference keenly and knew how dead it was. Buried in the earth under the castle.
Her body alive, but living now a second life. A life that she did not know what it was and would have to find out for herself. A world she did not know.
Perhaps she had died before, she thought. Perhaps pieces of her died every time she moved from one point to another and perhaps it was that way for everyone. Life really no more than the whittling and shaping of a body, a soul. And with that whittling all excess lost. Those parts dead and gone and something new revealed beneath that moved until it too was cut and transformed into something else. This pattern for time eternal, until death claimed it.
They made camp that night on the edge of the forest. It was cold as the night came on but they did not make a fire because of the light and they looked out from the treeline over a wide plain with roads running in it and far off the lights of a small city. A lantern bobbing in the night as someone worked his way slowly along down toward the river. Fireflies in the tall grass. Once the dark and running form of a wolf, low and silent, sweeping across the world to some end unknown.
Before them the foothills rising. These heavily forested in a different type of tree. No longer the towering oaks and tangled branches. Instead everything of short cedar and spruce, the paths between them carpeted with red needles. Here and there the white of a birch. The soil too thin in this rising land of rock and stone to support anything larger. A place where in winter the snow clung to every bow in heavy coats but here before the winter the soft scent of the trees on the air and the warm soil and somewhere far off a fire burning.
He had some dried meat with him and fruit and he took these out and set them on his bag and looked at them and took up some and handed it to her. Both of them sitting next to a long tree recently fallen, the trunk not yet decayed. Maybe a tree grown too close to where the soil thinned out, she thought, trying to break the boundaries of the deep forest and only finding as it grew too tall for support that it had asked for the impossible as the wind swirled and rose.
She sat rubbing her scabbed wrists where he'd helped her take off the shackles and closed her eyes, thinking of those chains buried in the mud as she'd pushed them down with her boot, then opened her eyes again and took a bite and it was better than she'd imagined. So long she'd been down there and this meager food a feast and all the world changed. What could all be in it she did not know and she did not think anyone did. A meaninglessness in that and also the great and intrinsic heart of the world.
He ate in silence for a moment and when he spoke in the dark he did not look at her.
“What do you want me to do?”
She stopped eating and looked at him and still he did not turn. She could see the whites of his eyes in the coming moonlight. “I thought you said I was foolish. Insane.”
“You thought right.”
“And now?”
“I still think it.”
“You still think it.”
He looked at her then and his face was calm, relaxed. A man who had seen so much that nothing he saw now struck him as anything that could not be believed or defeated. The world emptied for him of its secrets. Or so he thought.
“I'll do what you want,” he said. “I don't have to like it.”
“Tell me what you think.”
“That we should do?”
“Yes.”
He took another bite, chewed. Thought. Turning it in his mind so much that it was on his face. Then he said: “If he wants a war, he's the only one. They always are. Those in charge waging war with others' lives. He'll make them want it, but they don't now. If we remove him, the war ends.” He shrugged. “It's not like other wars, where there's something at stake and no choice. Someone invades and you protect your home. It's just a war for him and what he wants. As long as he's the only one who truly wants it, he's the key.”
It was treason to say and she looked at him and wondered how many others had said the same about her at times and if all rulers had to live knowing such things were spoken about them. Or if somewhere there was a ruler everyone wanted to live. And what that land was like.
“Just us,” she said.
“It wouldn't be easy.”
“It couldn't be done.”
“Anything can be done,” he said.
She looked out into the night. The lantern moving down the road was gone now. Either extinguished or inside the city walls. She listened for the wolf to see if he would call at the moon but he was silent.
“It's too much of a risk,” she said. “Too easy to fail.”
“How?”
“Any of a thousand ways. A guard sees us and we're captured. We can't get to him. Archers shoot us from the walls. We get in and he's not in the city. The guards kill us in the attack. You know the ways.”
“Then we plan for it.”
“But you can't plan for everything. A loose board on a stairway creaks and a guard looks and it's all over before it begins.” She shook her head. “I can't risk that. I can't do something that will fail.”
“Anything can fail.”
“You just said anything can be done.”
He laughed. “It can. Anything can be done and anything can fail.”
She bit down on the meat and it was good but tough. Tearing it sideways with her teeth. Feeling it stretch and then rip. The salt of it. The sinews. Chewing it there in the dark, her jaw working. Finally swallowing and feeling it still in her jaw.