The Prince of Ravens Page 10

  Chapter Seven: Knowing Death

  The next few days passed quickly as they traveled on, descending the mountains but still surrounded by dense forest. The journey took a week, and each day, in accordance with their bargain, the Prince was given a new freedom.

  The first day, as promised, the Exiles allowed him to go about the journey without the hood of the over-large, stinky brown cloak. They also removed his gag.

  “That wasn’t part of the deal,” he protested.

  “How else are you going to warn us of impending doom?” the girl said wryly, tone breezy but eyes staring daggers at him.

  “Fair point,” he said, and then, taking himself and her completely by surprise, he smiled his biggest, most winning smile, just to make her angry. It worked – and she whirled around, threw his reins to Tomaz, swearing and cursing all “shadow-born Princes,” before disappearing into the trees.

  The Prince, half expecting Tomaz to dunk him in whatever body of water happened to be closest at hand, eyed the big man warily, but the giant only shrugged.

  “You both take yourselves too seriously,” Tomaz said vaguely, before mounting his stallion and heading in the same direction, the long lead of the Prince’s mount tied to the saddle of his warhorse.

  As the Prince had promised, he made no trouble along the way. All he did, and all he wanted to do, in truth, was look at his surroundings as they traveled through the forest at the same steady, mile-eating pace as all the days before.

  “There’re so many,” he muttered to himself. He was looking at the trees as they passed through the mountain forest, noticing all of the different types of bark, the short trees, the tall trees, the wide trees, the trees with needle-like leaves. Near midday they stopped momentarily while both Tomaz and the girl were out looking around for whatever it was they used to find their way, and the Prince was left alone in a small clearing. Alone, but not truly so, for the Prince knew neither Exile was far enough away that he had any chance at attempting escape.

  So he sat there on his horse, and reveled in the crisp, clear air, so different from the thick haze of Lucien, and made a vow to himself that once he had received his Inheritance he would make time to come back here of his own volition, just to explore.

  “Pine,” rumbled Tomaz.

  The Prince jumped, startled because the big man seemed to have simply materialized behind him. He had no idea how the man, mounted on his enormous charger, could move so silently. It was almost like the way Guardians, the personal guards of the Children and the Empress, moved. At the thought of this bearded, rough-and-tumble giant with the uniform and manners of a Guardian, the Prince couldn’t help but smile.

  Tomaz chuckled and thumped him on the back, thinking they were sharing the same joke, and the Prince would have been knocked off his horse had he not still been tied on. This, of course, only made Tomaz rumble-chuckle harder, sounding for all the world like a swarm of bees, though the Prince’s own smile turned to a grimace.

  “No need to fear, little princeling, it’s only me. Here, look.”

  He pointed a hand the size of the Prince’s head at one of the trees. It was a tall one, and it had wide-flung branches toward the bottom that got smaller and shorter as they ascended. It was the one with green needle-like leaves, and there were quite a few of them around, particularly lining the dirt path they were currently taking.

  “Pine. It’s a pine tree. You can tell by the needle leaves and the smell, as well as the seeds they produce. Pinecones.”

  Tomaz dismounted to walk aside his horse in a swift, easy motion. He swung his arm to the ground, bending quite dexterously at the waist, and picked up a large brown thing; he straightened, and in the same motion tossed the whatever-it-was to the Prince, who caught it easily despite his bonds. At first, he was revolted that the man had given him something that had been on the dirt floor of this forest corridor … and then the revulsion and beginnings of anger evaporated and turned to self-deprecating laughter. The Death Watch had just tried to kill him; he was being held hostage by two of the Exiled Kindred; he was living in a constant state of fatigue and hunger, slept every night on the ground, ate with his hands, and hadn’t bathed in over two weeks; but apparently what really bothered him was that the big man had tossed him something dirty. If he wasn’t careful, by the time he returned to the Fortress he’d be worse than Geofred, who had to have everything cleaned thrice before he’d so much as be in the same room with it.

  He examined the cone: it was a good size, perhaps as large as the Prince’s fist, though it had looked no bigger than a walnut in the big man’s hand. It had some spiny bits that he tried not to handle. He looked back up at Tomaz, eyebrows raised, waiting for the rest of the conversation, the true conversation, to begin, but the big man simply smiled pleasantly at him, waiting for a response. For a long moment, the Prince stared at the big man, and then looked back down at the pinecone blankly. Was the cone a message? He turned it over in his hands. Nothing. No scrap of parchment, no hidden coding or anything of that sort, not that he’d expected the big man to be clever enough to come up with something like that, but then why had he handed him the pinecone under the pretense of …?

  And then, slowly, the realization sank in that the big man was talking about nothing more than pinecones. The Prince had never had any real companions in the Fortress, never had anyone who simply talked to him because they felt like talking to him. The Most High whom he associated with were fed lies and double-talk with their wet-nurses’ milk, and nothing they said or did was ever to be taken at face value. Yet here, in the middle of the wilderness, an outlaw was trying to be friendly by teaching him the name of trees. This wasn’t a prelude to anything … they were just talking. About seeds and … things.

  He looked back at the big man, one eyebrow quirked questioningly.

  “Pine?” the Prince repeated. As he spoke, he watched Tomaz warily, waiting to be mocked for mispronouncing the word or not knowing it to begin with. Such was the way the other Children had taught him when he’d received his earliest lessons on government, industry, and economics.

  “Very good, princeling,” the giant said with a huge smile, for all the world looking like the proud parent of a precocious infant. His large, square white teeth shone from the thicket of his beard as he pointed at another tree, this one taller than all the others.

  “Redwood. You can tell by the quality of the bark as well as the height.”

  “Tomaz!” the girl called from up ahead. “I need your opinion on something!”

  Tomaz reached over and grabbed the reins of the Prince’s horse and tied him to a tree. He then swiftly remounted his charger, the Prince watching stoically, until the big man clapped him on the back.

  “Hopefully soon I won’t have to do that,” he rumbled, and gave the Prince another smile, this one small and conspiratorial.

  “Right,” the Prince responded, with as much of a smile as he could manage.

  The big man rode off in the direction of the girl’s voice, leaving the Prince to stew in his thoughts.

  That night, the Prince went to sleep feeling bold, and excited that his vague plan was working. If they let their guard drop a little more, then by the time they reached Banelyn he’d just walk away. He rolled over and closed his eyes.

  But as soon as he did, a feeling that squirmed in the pit of his stomach like a pod of eels made him queasy, and he was forced to sit up abruptly. He breathed deeply for a moment, and the feeling passed, leaving a strange hollowness in its wake. He lay back down, but sleep did not come to him, and he spent another restless night looking at the stars he never would have seen if he hadn’t been forced out of Lucien.

  As the next few days passed, Tomaz continued to give the Prince impromptu lessons on the various species of flora and fauna they passed throughout the day. After a while, they even began to strike up a strange kind of conversation that involved various barbed comments at one another. The Prince came to realize that this was banter, the kind of friendly
conversation that happened between the servants of the Fortress. It was strange to him, but his stiff and awkward attempts seemed enough for Tomaz, and as time passed, the Prince realized that he liked the big man, and that in another life maybe they would have been good companions. But when he thought that, he felt again the queasiness of that first night, and so he shoved these thoughts aside, reminding himself that he was only using this Exile to make his way back to the Empire.

  He was glad, however, that he and Tomaz were making progress, because his attempts to make contact with the girl were failing miserably.

  His first attempt had been on the third day after the Death Watchman attack, when he noticed the girl trying to lift a log out of the campsite they’d found. Tomaz was out scouting the area, and so she was struggling on her own. The Prince, seeing his opportunity, came forward as far as his bonds would allow.

  “Here, let me help, Eshendai,” the Prince said, reaching out to grab the other end of the log with his tied hands and using the title that Tomaz used in place of her name.

  Her reaction was so sudden and violent that the Prince could never have predicted it. Within the space of a second, he found himself on his back, staring up from the ground into the girl’s face, which was contorted into an ugly mask of righteous anger.

  “Should you wish to live, you will never use that title again,” she hissed. She had drawn one of her daggers, and the steel bit ever so slightly into his neck, causing a burning sensation. He felt a drop of blood crawl across his skin and fall to ground, and suddenly he realized he truly was afraid for his life.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered, not trusting himself to speak normally with the gleaming dagger pressed so fiercely against his throat.

  “Good,” she hissed. In a flash she had pushed herself off of him and disappeared into the trees. She didn’t return for almost an hour, at which time she pretended the Prince did not exist, only speaking to Tomaz briefly before going to bed.

  But he remained determined, and his second chance came soon after.

  It was the first night the Prince was allowed to move around the campfire. True, he wasn’t completely unbound: his hands were still tied together, though far enough apart that he could use them, and his feet were tied as well so that he couldn’t do more than execute a sort of shambling half-walk, but it was progress.

  As soon as he’d been untied from the horse, he’d set about being “helpful.” He hobbled the horses in a nice patch of grass within sight, as he’d seen the Exiles do each night, began to set a ring of stones for a fire, and then untied their packs from the horse he’d been riding and set them down near the ring of stones.

  When the Exiles noticed this, they commented on it to one another when they thought the Prince was out of earshot. He, of course, was very carefully not out of earshot, but he did what he hoped was a decent job of pretending to be so.

  “He’s being helpful,” rumbled Tomaz, “it’s … sure sign … changing.”

  The Prince, even though his back was turned, allowed himself not even the hint of a smile as a thrill of triumph coursed through him. He could risk nothing.

  “No,” he heard the girl respond savagely, “he’s … at worst, conspiring to kill or … in our sleep. At best … imitating us … a trained monkey.”

  The Prince almost faltered in the act of retying a saddlebag as anger, white hot and blinding, roared up into his throat at the insult.

  Imitating them like a trained monkey, am I? I should strike her down -

  No. He calmly tied the bag closed and finished going about the chores that needed doing in order to set up camp for the night, giving no sign that he had overheard a thing. Soon he had everything ready except the fire. He looked around for wood, but there was none, so he was forced to wait for the two Exiles to return. When they did, Tomaz spoke.

  “It‘s been too long since I‘ve had some fresh meat – I’m off to hunt,” he rumbled. He reached onto his charger - the horse allowed only him to load or unload anything from its back, and so the Prince had left the big man’s gear where it was - and pulled out a sling. Before seeing the big man fight, the Prince would have found the sight of the small sling in the hands of the giant quite amusing. Now, he suspected that a stone from that sling in the hands of that man could kill a full grown ox at a hundred paces.

  The girl nodded in response.

  “I’ll get the firewood – I won’t need to go very far, so I can keep an eye on junior here.”

  A thought occurred to the Prince, a dangerous thought, one he probably should have let go lest he risk everything, but his anger spurred him on.

  “I’ll go with you,” he said to the girl, doing his best yet still failing to make this a request and not a command.

  The two Exiles paused, Tomaz in the act of stretching his right arm, the girl about to cross to the Prince and no doubt tie him to a tree so that he wouldn’t run away while she was gone.

  “No,” she said immediately.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I said so.”

  “You sound like my Mother.”

  The comment, completely unplanned on the Prince’s part, silenced her. And then, in a rumbling snort like the sound a volcano must make before it spews forth fire, Tomaz began to laugh so hard he made the forest and mountainside around them ring with sound, bright and clear and rich.

  “TOMAZ!” roared the girl. “Shut up! You’ll give away our position!”

  “I’m surprised they can’t see your swollen pride from here,” the Prince said. The delivery was awkward and flat, and he was relatively sure the joke made no sense, but it was at least effective enough that the girl turned a bright red and Tomaz doubled over, slapping his knees with mirth.

  “Tomaz,” the girl repeated again, growling his name deep in her throat. “I mean it.”

  The giant gave a final trumpeting bellow and then was silent as he wiped a tear from his eye, though he still shook with aftershocks of laughter.

  “Ah, well,” he said, “sorry about that, Eshendai. But I haven’t had a good laugh in a long time.”

  “I don’t care!” she replied harshly. The Prince could tell she was trying to be taken seriously, but the effect was ruined by the beet red color that had spread over her cheeks and down her neck. “We’re trying not to be followed, and we can’t sacrifice that because you feel like having a good laugh!”

  Tomaz shrugged and looked at the Prince.

  “Is there anyone nearby?”

  After a brief instant of confusion, the Prince realized the giant was asking him to check the surrounding area for any signs of life. He paused for only a second, and then realized there was no reason not to. So he reached out through the Talisman, as far as he could, and felt nothing besides the strange static-like background that he was coming to recognize as the muted life of the trees and plants and the simplistic minds of the animals that lived in them. He let the connection slip away, and opened his eyes to find the big man looking at him. It was strange, being in the company of someone who simply took what he could do as a matter of fact, not something to be feared and not something to worship or praise him for.

  “No one for at least a mile,” he replied, “and probably not beyond that either.”

  “You can’t trust him,” the girl said angrily.

  “Yes you can!” the Prince shot back, frustrated. For some reason the fact that she wouldn’t trust him when he was actually telling the truth blew the banked coals of his anger, always burning steadily these days, into a full blaze.

  “You’d kill us in our sleep if you could,” the girl said.

  Something in the Prince snapped. The way she spoke, it was as if death was nothing to him. As if death itself was … nothing.

  “You have no concept of what you speak,” he hissed at her through teeth clenched in a snarl. His vision had gone red around the edges, and his anxiety, frustration and anger had formed into a hard, twisting fist in his gut. He was inexplicably furious.

  “Y
ou know nothing of what it is to kill. You perform the act, but it means nothing – to you it is no more than cutting away an unwanted piece of thread. To you it is no more than dispatching nameless faces. If you knew what I know of death, knew what it is like to be inside a person’s mind as they feel the sword cut through skin and bone and feel their life and mind and body go dark, as the spark that anchors you to this world is smothered and you spin endlessly into space, you would never again speak so lightly of taking a life. I have no desire to know you, and so have no desire to kill you. How many of the Death Watchmen did the two of you kill? Not the constructs, but the soldiers. Twenty did you say? Such a brave Exile. I killed one and nearly lost my mind. I did it out of need, out of the base necessity of continuing to live, and even then I knew him, inside and out, as he died; I knew his hopes and dreams and fears, the way he loved his wife, the pride he had in his children – the glowing hope that, even as the steel cut through him, he would live to see them again, to make them proud by serving the Empire! Death is emptiness, death is taking, death is the end! So stop accusing me of the willingness to do something I understood better at the age of five then you will EVER understand in your ENTIRE LIFE!”

  Somehow during the time he was speaking he had taken several steps toward the girl, who stood rooted to the spot, staring at him with wide-eyed wonder. He took another step and was suddenly breathing in her face, midnight black eyes meeting emerald green. Her hands grasped the hilts of her daggers, but he did not care.

  “Never speak lightly to me of killing. I am the Lord of Death, for my Mother cursed me as such on the day I was born. I know it as you never shall, and my life is tied to it as you should wish yours will never be.”

  He stopped talking, and then took a step back, his anger spent, and suddenly felt awkward and vulnerable, as if he had stripped in front of the Exiles and laid himself bare for all eyes to see.

  She stood there looking at him, eyes round and mouth open in a small “o” of surprise and shock. And then the look passed, her eyes narrowed, and it was as if she had made a decision. A minute or more passed that way, the two of them staring at each other, the Prince watching the wheels turn in her head. Abruptly she broke the contact and turned to call back over her shoulder.

  “Tomaz, I think that - ”

  But the forest behind her was just trees – Tomaz had disappeared. He didn’t know when the big man had left, but the Prince was sure somehow that it was after he had finished speaking. There was a long silence then, as they absorbed Tomaz’ absence, which made as much, if not more, of a statement as anything he could have spoken aloud. He was forcing the girl to deal with what he had already come to understand about the Prince. Slowly, she turned back to him, and as one, they walked over to the tree closest to the campsite. The Prince waited patiently as the girl tied him to the trunk, then sat down as she left to get firewood. He felt a slight pang of regret that he hadn’t remained calm, but was also proud that he had finally said something to which the girl had no response.

  Nearly an hour passed, enough time for the sun to set completely, leaving him alone in the dark, before Tomaz returned with an enormous animal slung over his shoulders, the rack of its antlers nearly large enough to hold the Prince’s entire body. It had four legs and a heavy, deep chest covered in a thick layer of soft gray-brown fur. If the Prince had to guess, he’d say it was an elk or a deer, though since he had never seen one outside of a book he wouldn’t have staked his life on it. One of its eyes was glassy and dead, while the other one was simply missing, a thin trail of blood tracing downward from where it had been. It would appear the Prince had been correct – Tomaz was just as deadly with the sling as he was with his enormous greatsword.

  As he came into the clearing, Tomaz paused. He took in the Prince and then the noticeable lack of a fire and the absence of a certain green-eyed girl.

  “Where is she?” he asked. His voice was gruff, but not unkind.

  “She went to get firewood and never came back,” the Prince replied, keeping his answer simple and direct.

  The big man grunted and then crossed to the ring of stones that made up the fire pit. With a quick shrug, he lifted the antlered creature off of his shoulders and dropped it to the ground, where it landed with a heavy thud. He then crossed to where he had left his greatsword and unsheathed it. Turning, he approached the Prince.

  Shocked, the Prince recoiled from the giant, but he was tethered to the tree and in the end there was nowhere to go. The giant raised the sword and the Prince closed his eyes.

  Something tugged at his wrists, and with it came the snick of taunt fibers being cut, and the Prince was no longer tied to the tree. He opened his eyes just in time to see the sword flash twice more, and the Prince, too shocked to move, felt another tugging sensation on both his hands and his feet, and then the fabric parted and slid off, falling to the ground and leaving him free, completely unbound.

  The giant turned away and sheathed his sword in a single, fluid motion, as effortlessly as the Prince would do up a button.

  “Do you know how to dress an elk?”

  Tomaz spoke while rummaging around in his pack, and the Prince wasn’t sure exactly what he was asking.

  “You mean … put clothes on it? Why would you want to do that? I was under the impression that you intended to eat it.”

  Tomaz snorted and stood up, holding a long, oddly curved knife.

  “Here,” he said, and tossed the knife, unsheathed, to the Prince.

  Alarmed, the Prince caught the knife by the hilt, almost dropping it in surprise.

  “Open the stomach and pull out the insides,” the big man said. “Dig a hole with this,” he tossed the Prince a small wedge-shaped tool, “and throw them in there so we don’t get any wolves looking for handouts. Try not to hit any rocks, it’s a good spade.”

  And with that he turned and left, slinging his sword across his back and moving off in the direction the girl had gone, no doubt following her trail though the Prince could never have said how.

  For a long moment the Prince stood there, unfettered, armed, and alone. He turned his head and saw the two horses cropping the scraggly mountain grass not twenty yards away, and realized he could take one and leave. The Exile’s packs were there, full of supplies. He could take them and go. No doubt the girl’s pack contained the map she’d used, and with that he might be able to chart his own way to Banelyn, and –

  He moved off to the side of the small clearing and began to dig a hole, using the metal triangle – the spade – to pull large clumps of dirt out of the ground. As he worked, he told himself again and again that the only reason he was staying was that no matter how fast or stealthily he ran, the Exiles would catch him again before he left the mountains. He was no woodsman, of that there was no doubt, and he would last barely a day, if that, before they caught him and ruined everything.

  He needed to wait until Banelyn. So he dug the hole, and when it was deep enough, he turned and did his best to follow Tomaz’s instructions, feeling oddly invigorated by the physical activity, even though it made him sweat. But then again, with the way he smelled as it was, and with the multiple layers of grime that covered his Commons clothing, it didn’t really matter.

  “If only Geofred could see me now,” he muttered raggedly, breathing hard as he looked from the hooked knife to the dead animal before him. Or Tiffenal for that matter; the thought of the Fox’s perfectly manicured hands holding the metal triangle – spade, he told you the name so use it – to dig a hole was certainly an amusing picture.

  He bent and stuck the knife into the elk’s stomach, doing his best to map out exactly what his plan of attack was here. As he went about opening the animal’s belly, he found that he wasn’t at all alarmed by the sight of the entrails, nor the smell of the blood or the sounds of the knife. He supposed that after seeing what he’d seen in the lives he’d taken made this seem … somehow mundane. The creature was already dead – working with a body held no horrors for him now. It
was the living he had troubles with.

  Sometime later, the Exiles returned, the girl looking around anxiously until she saw him by the elk. Tomaz bore a slightly exasperated look on his face, and was carrying a load of branches and twigs.

  The only words that were spoken that night were in reference to the elk and the fire. Tomaz finished the job the Prince had begun, which in large part involved pulling out bit’s the Prince had missed, and then skinning the creature, before cutting it into large chunks and then strips and hanging it over the fire. Tomaz showed the Prince how to wash his hands with water from the waterskins and a cake of hard soap to remove the blood.

  That night they ate what Tomaz didn’t decide to smoke and dry – a process the Prince found fascinating. The girl ate only a small amount, while the Prince ate ravenously. He hadn’t gone more than a day without meat in his entire life, and the recent diet of cheese, edible plants, and water had left him sated but never full. Tomaz himself ate nearly half the animal, enormous though it was, and looked as though he stopped himself from eating more.

  When they had finished eating, they all pulled out their blankets and found a patch of ground on which to sleep. The Prince and the girl situated themselves on opposite sides of the fire as Tomaz took the first watch.

  As the Prince lay beneath his blanket trying to find sleep, he wondered why he didn’t feel any sense of triumph. He felt no anger, no remorse, and also no hope. He felt … blank. Empty. Numb, that was perhaps the best way to put it. The only other time he had described the experience of using the Talisman was to his brother Geofred, so that the reaction could be chronicled. He had felt numb then as well, but mostly because he had recently come out of the coma into which the experience had sent him. Now, the numbness came from … he didn’t know what. Was it because he knew Tomaz’s reaction was out of understanding and sympathy? Perhaps because of the way the girl had looked at him, the way her silence showed she too had an idea, however infinitesimal, of what he went through when he used his Mother’s gift? He was unbound … he had played Tomaz into believing in him, and had convinced the girl, however unintentionally, to lower her guard, though he still could not completely say why. He was free to leave when they reached Banelyn, to find the Seeker there and make his way back to his Mother … his Mother who would never have believed in him the way Tomaz did. The way the girl was beginning to.

  She is the Empress, he reminded himself. She knows only right and wrong, as should I. The Talisman is my gift and my burden as one of the Princes of the Realm, and I should wear it with pride. I wear it to serve the Empire and the people who depend upon it. Someday I will be Prince of the Seventh Principality, and I will need to deal with Exiles such as this without pity. They have broken our laws, and turned their backs on civilization. They threaten the lives of the people of Lucien.

  The Prince rolled over and stared at the stars. And suddenly it occurred to him that he didn’t know what it was the girl and the giant had been Exiled for.

  Reasons do not matter. The Empress Exiled them, and all of their Kindred. That is enough for me, and always will be.

  But the words sounded hollow, even in his head.