Chapter 11: The City of the White Tree

They buried the boy.

It was Fel’s idea, and nobody argued. Brannoch dug the grave with the butt of his spear, three feet deep in the soft ground beside the stream, and Veyra said something in the old language that Fel did not understand, and Thara, who had spent most of the afternoon making jokes, stood with her hands folded and her face closed and did not speak at all. The boy’s bark mask lay on the earth beside him. Fel picked it up and turned it over. Inside, in tiny careful letters, someone had burned a name.

Dev.

He put it in the grave.

They camped that night a mile down the road, in a hollow beside a quiet pool. Old Clatter curled around them like a wall. A small fire burned. Thara and Brannoch had gone out to check the perimeter, and Fel, who had not eaten, sat by himself on a fallen log with his hands hanging between his knees, staring at nothing.

She came and sat beside him.

She did not speak. She had taken off her cloak, and in the firelight her skin was the deep soft violet of a twilight sky, and her pale green braid hung loose over one shoulder. She had a clay mug in each hand. She held one out to him, and after a moment he took it.

It was hot, and sweet, and tasted of honey and some bitter herb.

“Drink.”

“I’m not…”

“I did not ask if you were.”

He drank.

They sat for a while. The fire popped. Out in the dark, an owl called, and something answered it from far away.

“He was just a kid,” said Fel.

“Yes.”

“He had a name inside his mask. His mother burned it in. Or he did. Somebody did. And I just…” He stopped. His throat was tight. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m saying this. It’s stupid. He was going to kill you.”

“It is not stupid.”

“He was going to kill you, and I…”

“Fel.” Her voice was low and even. “Look at me.”

He looked.

She was very close. He had not noticed. Her violet eyes held the firelight like glass, and in them there was no pity, no horror, no anything he had braced himself for. There was only a calm, level, quiet understanding that went down and down.

“I killed my first man when I was fourteen,” said Veyra. “He was a trader from the lowlands who had tried to steal a child from the village. I put an arrow through his throat from forty paces. I was very proud of it for a day.” She turned the mug in her hands. “Then I could not eat for a week. I could not sleep. I saw his face in the water when I drank. Osha sat with me every night until it passed. She said that anyone who does not feel it is not a hunter. They are only an animal that has learned to use a bow.”

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“Does it go away?”

“No.” She said it gently. “But it gets lighter. You carry it better. You learn that the weight is the part of you that is still alive.”

He did not say anything. He did not trust himself to. He only looked at the fire, and felt something very small and very tight begin, slowly, to loosen.

After a while he realized that her shoulder was pressed against his.

It was a small thing. It was nothing. They were sitting on a log, in the cold, and she was warm. But he was suddenly very aware of the exact place where her arm lay along his, and of the smell of pine and mint, and of the fact that he had no idea what to do with his hands.

“You were not entirely useless today,” said Veyra.

“Gee, thanks.”

“I mean it. You hooked a man’s leg with a sword you cannot use, with two broken ribs and a hole in your belly, and you saved my life.” The corner of her mouth curved. “I have seen grown hunters who could not do that with both lungs.”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“It is also the only nice thing I have ever said to you.”

“I’m counting it.”

“Count it carefully,” said Veyra. “I do not intend to say it again.”

She was looking at the fire. But she did not move her shoulder, and neither did he. And for a little while, in the quiet, in the warm pool of firelight, neither of them said anything at all.

They came to Sorticia on the seventh day.

Fel saw it first as a glow. It rose above the dark line of the forest at dusk, a pale, shimmering, silver-white radiance that hung in the sky like a second moon. As they came out of the trees, the road widened, and the ground rose, and the light grew until it filled the whole west, and then Old Clatter climbed to the crest of a low hill and stopped.

Nobody spoke.

It lay in the valley below, vast and silent and incredibly beautiful.

The city of Sorticia was built on seven hills, and each hill was crowned with a ring of white stone walls, one inside another, like the petals of a great stone flower. Terraced gardens climbed the slopes between them. Aqueducts ran like silver threads. A hundred towers rose out of the mist, slender and delicate, with roofs of copper and silver leaf, and bridges of pale glass flashed between them like frozen lightning. Banners of green and white hung from every wall. A great river wound through the center, spanned by arches, and on its banks, thousands of lights were just beginning to wake.

And at the very heart of the city, rising from the central hill, stood the Tree.

It was immense. Up close, it was larger than a mountain. Its roots sank through the city like the veins of a god, splitting streets and lifting buildings, and its trunk, which was pale grey and ridged as deep as a cliff face, rose into the clouds. Its branches covered the sky. Every leaf shone pure, shimmering, moonlit white, and the light fell from them like snow, across the roofs and towers and gardens, until the whole city glowed.

“Ishalune,” said Veyra, softly. “The White Tree. The Mother of the Delvish.”

Fel could not speak. He had seen the Citadel of Vows, and the Sanctum of Claws, and the great living city of Tohei. But he had never seen anything that looked so much like a dream.

“It’s bigger every time,” said Thara.

“It is the same size,” said Brannoch.

“It feels bigger.”

Old Clatter let out a long, low, contented hum. The sun slid below the hills. In the last light, a flight of white birds rose from the highest branches of the Tree and wheeled out over the valley in a great slow wheel, and Fel felt something swell in his chest that he had not felt for a long time. It was not happiness. It was not hope. It was only the plain, stubborn, astonished sense that he was still alive, and that the world, for all its horrors, was very large.

Tori, he thought. You’d have wanted to see this.

He wiped his face with the back of his hand.

“Come,” said Veyra. “We should find an inn before the gates close.” She touched the reins, and the beetle began to move down the hill, toward the great white walls and the waiting lights. “And, Fel.”

“Yes?”

She did not look at him. A faint, unreadable smile played on her mouth.

“Try not to look like you are from the mountains.”

“I am from the mountains.”

“You are from a hole in the sky,” said Veyra. “But we will work on it.”