Heartwood (Tricksters Game) (51 page)

F
OR THREE DAYS, Griane watched Darak sitting by the young tree. He allowed her to change his bandages and spread the ointment of goldenrod and Maker’s mantle on his arms. He ate when she thrust food into his hands, drank when she raised the waterskin to his lips. He even answered when she spoke to him. But he never left the tree. By day, he leaned against it, one hand always touching the trunk. By night, he curled up in the shallow pit between the two roots that had once been Tinnean’s feet. When the nightmares tore him from sleep, he allowed her to hold him, but clutched the roots until the shivering stopped.

Each morning when she woke, she found the dead Tree had dwindled, as if the empty shell knew that it was no longer needed. The same thing was happening to Darak. His spirit was drifting away, and if it drifted too far, she would wake one morning and find him gone as surely as the old Tree.

Prayers, pleading, magical herbs—nothing helped. When she tried telling tales of Tinnean, his pained look silenced her. At dawn of the fourth day, she crouched beside him again.

“We’re low on water.”

He looked up.

“And we’re nearly out of food.”

He blinked as if he couldn’t quite recognize her.

“We still have your snares, of course, but we’ve nothing to bait them with save a few bits of mushrooms and berries. So I think you’d best use your sling.” He peered at her, as if expecting the sling to materialize atop her head. She patted his belt. “There.”

She took his arm and helped him to his feet. He swayed and nearly took them both down. Then he seemed to regain the sense of himself and planted his feet. She released him slowly.

“You’d best be off.”

Darak cast a quick, stricken glance at the tree. She pretended not to see and bent down to retrieve the empty waterskins. “I’ll try that way. You go west. One of us ought to find a stream.” When he made no move to take the skin, she lowered it over his chest. She smiled, too brightly. “I’ll meet you back here before dark.”

With a quick wave, she marched off, crashing among the fallen twigs and branches like a wounded beast. Once she was out of sight, she crouched down and circled back. She was only a little less noisy, but she had never mastered Darak’s gift of walking over dead leaves without making a sound.

He was still standing where she’d left him, his gaze darting between the tree and the direction she had pointed. She held her breath and prayed. He straightened his shoulders, wincing, and lurched west.

All morning she followed him. At first, he staggered through the forest, reeling against tree trunks and stumbling over unseen stones, but soon he regained some of his natural grace. Her healer’s instincts screamed that he was too weak, that it had only been a sennight since the fever had abated. But she knew he had to recover some part of himself or he would never be whole again.

She feared he was wandering aimlessly until he came upon the stream. He freed the sling from his belt and picked up a stone. He cradled it in his palm, staring at the missing fingers of his right hand. Finally, he slipped the loop over his thumb and fitted the stone into the pouch.

He whirled the sling. The release cord slipped from his grasp. The stone rolled through the leaves. He got down on his knees, fumbling for it. Again, he whirled the sling. This time, the stone splashed into the stream. His head drooped. She’d already risen out of her crouch when she saw his shoulders straighten.

He piled stones at his feet. He hurled stone after stone at a boulder on the far side of the stream, adjusting the angle of his stance, the timing of his release. He slung stones overhand. He slung them underhand. He missed every shot.

He abandoned the thumb loop and knotted the sling around his wrist so he could grasp the release cord between his thumb and two remaining fingers. By midmorning, the sweat was running down his face and he was grimacing with pain at each release. It was close to midday before he hit the boulder for the first time. She bit down hard to stifle her cry and tasted blood.

He gathered more stones and kept practicing. Only when he had hit the boulder twenty times in a row did he try for a living target. The first stone soared over the branch, the next smashed into the trunk, drawing an annoyed scolding from the squirrel before it skittered higher into the branches. He moved on, taking aim at a wood pigeon with the same results.

The afternoon was waning when he froze yet again. He stood there for so long that it was all she could do not to jump up and scream at him to take the shot. He bowed his head as if in prayer, but all the while, his hands were moving: stroking the leather thongs, cradling the pouch against his belly while he eased a stone into it.

He whipped back his arm and released. She caught her breath as the stone arced overhead. Only then did she spot the black squirrel. One moment it was turning over an acorn with its nimble paws, the next it was tumbling earthward.

She breathed a prayer of thanks, then sprinted off through the trees. By the time he arrived back in the grove, she was seated on the wolfskin, pretending to examine her supply of roots and herbs. In one hand, he held the bulging waterskin, in the other, the dead squirrel.

“Oh, lovely.” She smiled up at him, her stomach twisting at the thought of eating raw meat. “You did much better than I did. All I found were some dried-up berries and a few hazelnuts.” She hoped he wouldn’t ask to see them, since they existed only in her imagination. “Well, I’ll have this skinned in no time. Maybe tomorrow, we’ll go fishing. We still have your lines and hooks and—”

“Griane.”

“Aye?”

“You’re about as quiet as a charging boar.”

She opened her mouth to deny it, but incriminating heat burned her cheeks. And then he smiled that lop-sided grin of his and it was all she could do to keep from crying and flinging her arms around him and behaving like an utter fool. He flopped down beside her as if his legs could no longer support him. His lips brushed her cheek.

“Thank you.”

She gave up trying and made a fool of herself.

I
N THE GREAT TALES, the hero defeated the evildoer, overcame certain death, and returned home in the blink of an eye with the magical elixir that saved the world from extinction. In the real world, Darak reflected, the hero—such as he was—tried to make his body obey him, keep the heroine from starving, and figure out a way to get home.

“Fellgair must be loving this.” He spat out a trout bone.

Griane looked up from mending his tunic. “What?”

“Us. Sitting here day after day.”

“Sitting here?” She slanted one of her chillier blue-eyed looks at him. “Up at dawn to hunt and fish and fill the waterskins and grub in the earth for roots and mushrooms.” She shuddered. “I will never eat squirrel again.”

“Have some trout, then.” She shook her head. “You need to eat more. You’re skinny as a weasel.”

“Oh, and you’re such a fine figure of a man, huddling there in your mantle and raggedy old breeches with so many holes you’re not even decent anymore.”

He blew out his breath. “I don’t understand it.”

“Well, you’ve been wearing them for—”

“Not the clothes. The priests.”

“What?”

“Lisula. Gortin. Anyone. Has no one in the world noticed that the year has turned?”

She glanced around the grove. “It’s not as if leaves have popped out on all the trees.”

“They could go to the standing stones, couldn’t they?”

Griane gnawed at the thread, severing it with a determined snap of her teeth. “The Freshening is only half a moon away. The priests will come then.”

“Half a moon?” Darak lowered the fish tail. “I must have lost more days than I thought. After Tinnean changed.”

He could say it now without a hitch in his voice or a hesitation before his brother’s name. On their last fishing trip, he had managed to stay away from the grove two nights and return without racing through the trees, sweat-soaked and shaking, as he had that first time.

The pain of Tinnean’s loss still ached, a wound that would never fully heal, no matter how many years went by, no matter how the Tree thrived. Still, it comforted him to stroke the thick, pale trunk, and sometimes—when Griane was sleeping—to talk to his brother.

He looked up and found her watching him, the mending forgotten. She always knew when he drifted. He’d catch the quick look of fear or her teeth gnawing at her upper lip. After all he’d put her through, it was a wonder she had a lip left.

She bent her head over her mending again. “Will you be glad to go home?”

He had been strangely happy this last moon. More than once, he had imagined remaining here. He could still be a hunter—of sorts—and he’d be close to Tinnean always. Griane could gather her green things and fish with him. They could keep each other warm at night. But that wouldn’t be fair to her or to their folk who needed her healing skills.

As for him, any lad of ten could bait a hook or wield a sling. He might have freed the Oak, but a man couldn’t live on that. What use was he with his six fingers and his hideous scars, his body aching each morning like an old man’s and his spirit aching each time Morgath intruded on his memories?

“Darak?”

Damn, he’d been drifting again and scaring her.

“That’s where we belong,” he said. “With our tribe.” Their pack, Wolf would have said.

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

She had the same gift of dragging words out of a man as his mam. He sighed, staring at his hands.

“You might master the bow again.”

She could do that, see right into him and know what was troubling him—even with her eyes on her mending.

“You’d have to learn to draw differently, of course.

I was thinking about carving a … a sort of brace. A piece of wood maybe, or bone, to support your left hand. And you’d need a new bow, something lighter and easier to bend.”

He had carved it from a single piece of ash. Decorated it with talismans to make it strong. Brought down countless deer, two with a single shot through the heart. To discard it now … it would be like setting aside a part of himself.

“Or you could do something else. Be a fisherman.

Or a shepherd. Or a Memory-Keeper.”

“But I’m not a fisherman or a shepherd. And I’m certainly no teller of tales.”

“Tinnean thought so.”

“What?”

“Tell the tale, he said.”

“He didn’t mean me to apprentice myself to Sim.” Even assuming the old man still lived.

“How do you know?”

“Merciful gods. You’re serious.”

“All I’m saying is that you don’t have to be a hunter.”

“But that’s what I am. That’s
who
I am.”

His vehemence startled the Watchers into retreating behind the trees.

“That’s who I was,” he said in a softer voice. “And I want things to be as they were. I know that’s stupid and I know it can never be, but …” He shrugged helplessly. “I can’t help wanting it.”

Her face crumpled. She rose hastily.

“Griane.”

She waved him back, but he kept after her.

“I’m sorry I yelled.”

He took her by the shoulders and made her face him.

Maili had rarely wept. When she did, her cheeks blushed pink and tears had slid down them in slow, beautiful tracks. Griane’s cheeks were blotchy and streaked with tears. Her eyes brimmed with more. Her lips had nearly vanished as she clamped them together to control her sobs. She swiped at her runny nose with the back of her hand and thrust out her chin.

Fierce as a she-wolf and just as fearless. Braver than any woman he’d ever known and more resourceful than any man. Her quick temper had forced him to take a hard look at his shortcomings, while her generous spirit made him strive to be a better man. Once, he would have sworn that she’d make some poor man’s life a misery with her sharp tongue by day and her sharp elbows at night. Since then, he’d learned that silence could inflict deeper wounds than words—and that he could no longer fall asleep without those bony elbows bruising his ribs and that spiky hair tickling his cheek.

Deep within him, his heart paused, then gave one heavy beat as if upon a drum. His quick intake of breath tightened the band constricting his chest. His skin felt raw, as if his flesh had been newly flayed, each nerve exposed.

His hands fell to his sides. He took a step back.

“I’m an awful nag. You’ve said it a hundred times and you’re right.”

She paused. After a moment, he realized he was supposed to say something, but neither his mind nor his mouth could frame the proper response. Her expectant look changed to a scowl.

“And it’s your fault if I do. Nag, I mean. No matter how hard I try, no matter what I do, nothing seems to help.”

He said something then, but it must have been wrong. The scowl shifted to an open-mouthed look of shock.

“It’s not enough. I want you to be happy! I want you to be whole again. Not your hands. You. In your heart and your spirit.”

“It … I think …” Marshaling his thoughts, he managed, “Time.”

“You’re not coming home. Nay, I know what you’ve been thinking. You’re going to stay here and live like a wild thing, and one day you’ll get hurt and there’ll be no one to help you and you’ll just lie there till you die. Or worse, you’ll just sit under the Tree and let yourself waste away and the animals will eat your flesh and gnaw your bones and what’s left will be covered with leaves and snow—”