“It needs to be more than me,” she said. “More than you. So that if we are killed, it can happen without us. It has to be an army. It's the only way to know we can force him to stand down. To do it alone risks the lives of everyone.”
“Marching an army on your own city does something else?”
She looked at him and her eyes were bright and she blinked and looked again. “I have to hope it does,” she said. “I have to hope it does.”
He left the next day with the parchment in a bag at his side. Walking out to the road and not looking back and turning to the city. She watched him go, standing by that great fallen tree that had overstepped its own world and in doing brought about its own end. Only after it had grown to a great height and looked to all the world as if it could never fall. Now a broken thing sheltering those who ran from death and perhaps to it at the same time.
She'd signed the paper and they'd know it. She did not know if they'd believe it or if they'd act as she'd asked them in the letter. If any of them would. But they'd know it and they'd talk and it was all she could do. For she could only cover so much ground and now they could double it and that was something. She did not know how swiftly it all had to be brought to an end and she'd learned that in times like that it was best to assume it was already too late and to act that way and then you could never be wrong.
Even if it was too late and all was already lost.
When he'd disappeared down the road and she could see him no longer she gathered up what little she had and looked again and then turned and went up through the cedar and spruce and into the low mountains on that bed of needles, dried and dead and brittle, where the wolf had run in silence.
Chapter Eighteen
Juoth sat looking at her and she at him. Or at least she looked at something within him. A vacant stare that focused on nothing. Eyes open and blinking slowly and her whole face around them lax. The color still not fully returned. As if in her her heart was but a feather and could move only so and the blood sluggish and hardened in her veins. Thinning now as she warmed. Her light hair hanging down about her shoulders and the thin dress. Lips pale white.
Other than the blinking she did not move. Had not even sat of her own accord but was only now propped up against the pile of blankets and bedrolls because he had set her that way. Unable to look at that dead face with blinking eyes as she lay on her back with her limbs loose.
Her chest rising, falling. A meager tide in perhaps some world other with a moon too small. The thinnest sound of her breathing only when he was close and it was very quiet. If the fire rose at all in the wind he did not hear her and did not know if she breathed.
It was the morning after her awakening and behind them stood the mound of loose dirt piled upon her brother. He had beat out his last with his eyes in his hands, clenching and opening and clenching those fingers. Not saying a word but his jaw working and one hand reaching for her. Tracing across her cheek a thin streak of blood. And when he died Juoth had finally been able to stand and move him away from the fire.
And then he had sat all night staring at this girl. Brack had looked at her a short time and said nothing and gone back to sleep. Risen before dawn and put on his sword and looked at the horse and the city. Juoth had nodded to him.
“Find me,” he'd said.
“I will,” Juoth had said. Looking not at him but at the girl. “I will.”
And Brack had left. The rising of the dead perhaps not of consequence to him or at least a thing he could stomach. Juoth had waited for him to say something about it but he had not and had ridden on toward the city, toward that one thing that devoured his entire world. The smoke still rising there as if it would never cease. Perhaps the earth itself burning in endless torment. The dragon's fire a rage that could never be quenched even when all tinder was gone for it burned the very soil and could turn the whole world to ash if given the time to do so.
A charred world of the dead; a glass sky in which dragons were legion, wheeling on the hot wind of this corpse of a planet.
The eyes were in the air, he thought.
He had not slept himself and had worked all night digging the grave. The endeavor giving him just that much distance from her and all she was and if he was lucky drowning his screaming thoughts in the soil itself and he worked at it until he felt he could not dig anymore and it was not as deep as he wanted but he did not know if that depth existed as a thing that could be reached and so he settled for rolling the mutilated body in and throwing on top of it three boulders. The work of moving them end over end making his legs and chest burn but he knew he'd never sleep another night in his life if he didn't and so he threw them in and heard the bones breaking and then covered it all with dirt. Mounding it under that cold moon until he was a broken man and then sitting again to look at her.
Thinking should he be digging another grave or should he have cast them into the same. So that someday they would be dug up and thought to be lovers and perhaps tales would be written and no one would know the horror that they had truly been.
But he had not.
He spoke to her then and she said nothing. Greeting her in the tongue of the islands and the one here. Trying a word from the mountains he had heard and did not know what it meant.
Slowly she blinked and sat with that stillness about her. He thought perhaps she was holding herself up but then he thought she was still propped like some doll against the bedrolls.
He could kill her, he thought. Any time he liked. He could kill her with his sword and bury her and no one would know for those within any distance of this place shorter than a day's ride had been killed already and what was one more dead among the many? Brack would perhaps ask and he would tell him some story. It would be no more than saying she'd collapsed and died after all.
Died again.
He stood then and looked at the city. They had half the burden now but no horse and it would be a long distance. If they were to do it in a day they would have to start early and walk late and even then they may just be to those burned farms and fields outside of the walls when night fell. But they would not make it that far if they did not start now.
He went to her and stood close and walked around behind to see if she was holding herself up and cursed and spit. Looking once more at the mountains and thinking he had no part with this grandson or anyone else and then he cursed again and reached down and took the girl under the arms.
There was no weight to her and he stood her up and put his arm around her back. She did not move to support herself but her legs seemed to hold slightly and he thought maybe she could walk. He bent to pick up the bedroll and his face brushed that torn and bloodied dress and only then did he realize that the smell of rot was gone.
They walked like two chained in some ancient misery. Perhaps having been cursed by a witch or a god with its dying breath to toil under the sun as one animal forever, the trials of life before them for some past slight they were unable to remember. Walking these two in grass and dirt toward that pillar of smoke and the smell of it in the air always.
He'd left everything he did not carry on his person. The packs and the other bedrolls and all else. Carrying now only his sword and knife and a pouch with money he could not spend in this dead city. He had carried for a time the girl's bedroll under his opposite arm but it had grown too difficult and he'd dropped it after less than an hour. Not looking back as it disappeared into the barren wasteland.