Watersmeet (15 page)

“I don’t need rest,” he said, that familiar superiority back in his tone, the hunger back around his eyes.

Abisina shifted her weight. It was time to speak.

“My mother said the pass to Watersmeet could be found at the entrance to the Obrun Mines, between Mount Sumus and Mount Arduus.” She tried to sound confident, as if pronouncing the key to a confounding riddle.

“Sumus and Arduus?”

“That’s what she said. Aren’t they the names of those mountains?” Abisina asked, her show of confidence rapidly evaporating. She peered up at the slopes bathed in the light of the rising sun, their summits swathed in mist.

“Dwarves don’t name mountains,” Haret grunted. “What matters is what’s under them. What else?” he demanded.

“What else?” Abisina echoed nervously.

“What else did your mother say?”

“W-Well, there’s more once we get through, but that was all she said about the pass.”

“But that tells us nothing, human! I knew
where
the Mines were! I need to know
how
to get through them!”

“Between Mount Sumus and Mount Arduus. Doesn’t that mean something to you, as a
dwarf
?” Abisina said stubbornly, but inside her heart sank. She had hoped the names of the mountains held some clue Haret might recognize—though Hoysta, and now Haret, told her that dwarves don’t name mountains.

“Tell me everything,” Haret said through clenched teeth.

“Maybe we should rest first. Wait for the—” Abisina was cut off by a bellow of “Human!”

She gave up. She had no choice. . . . “She said that I would find Watersmeet at the meeting of three rivers.”

“Three rivers,” Haret repeated. “What else?”

“That’s all.”

“You must have forgotten something,” he insisted.

“I haven’t forgotten. That’s all.”

“Then your mother must have forgotten!”

“She didn’t!” Abisina shouted back as she fought tears. These were some of the last words her mother ever spoke to her! She knew every syllable.

Haret shook his head fiercely. The two patches of beard on the sides of his face twitched.

Then he exploded. “I trusted you! Do you have any idea what this cost me—what this cost my grandmother—coming here? You were supposed to be the answer!” His voice broke as he threw his bag on the ground and strode back down the road, away from Abisina.

She did not follow him.
Let him go
, she thought.

But after a while, she picked up his bag and stowed it with hers inside the entrance to the Mines. She sat in the darkness where she couldn’t be seen by any roaming centaurs, but where she could keep watch for Haret’s return. The bees buzzed around the wildflowers growing between the cracks in the paving stones, and she longed to be out in the warmth of the sun. There had been no centaur tracks or abandoned fires since the Cairn—no minotaur tracks either—but even with her bow, she wouldn’t risk it.

Especially after we just told anything in hearing distance where we are.

Abisina had been up all night, but she stayed awake, staring down the road, hoping to see Haret climbing back up to her. He wouldn’t
really
give up on the passage, would he? Surely he would come back, and together they could figure out what to do.

The sun hung low on the western horizon when Abisina left the archway. There was still no sign of Haret. But she let hunger absorb her attention. She hadn’t eaten since the night before. In the twilight, she searched for supper on the slopes of one of the mountains (she didn’t know which was Sumus and which was Arduus). The footing was tricky among the shifting rock slides, but she managed to find a few edible plants in the tufts of grass and weeds. It wasn’t a feast, but it would be nice to have some fresh greens after days of eating nothing but smoked deer meat. Abisina took water from the carrier and rinsed her share of leaves, waiting for Haret to grunt and reprimand her for washing off the best part. But the mountainside remained silent.

She arranged the greens in two piles—washed for her, unwashed for Haret—pulled out the deer meat and a few nuts, and sat back to wait. Her head was light with hunger, but she refused to eat alone. It would be an admission that Haret was not coming back.

She sat against the arch and tried to keep her mind blank. But thoughts surfaced like moths drawn to a dangerous light.
Can we find Watersmeet? Does it even exist? And what if I have to find it alone?

And then, he was there.

“Gone and ruined supper again, I see,” Haret noted as he threw down a load of firewood and some long strips of reddish-yellow bark.

Abisina said nothing but couldn’t hide her smile.

“I found more slippery elm,” he said, ignoring the relief on her face. “It makes a tolerable gruel. But it will take a while to prepare. So eat.” Haret had already helped himself to the greens and spoke the last with a dandelion leaf poking out of his mouth.

Abisina dug into her supper.

When they finished, Haret set about building a fire. They hadn’t had one since they left the cave by the Cairn. “What about centaurs?” she asked.

“Not around here.”

With supper eaten and the fire prepared, Abisina’s hopes rose. Now they could figure out what to do. But Haret’s next words froze her.

“It’s time to tell me everything. Why you left your village. How your mother came by the necklace—if this part of your story is true—and how she knows Watersmeet. No lies, human.”

“I’ve told you no lies!” Abisina insisted.

Haret snorted. “Tell me everything,” he repeated. “I’ve brought you this far; you owe me that at least.”

Abisina bit her tongue to keep from flinging back, “I owe you nothing!” She did owe him; she could not have gotten here on her own. She hesitated, not knowing where to begin, but at Haret’s “I knew it! Plotting lies!” she launched into her story.

She began with Vranille, Sina saving her life but her being outcast—“So human!” Haret muttered—and the arrival of Charach. As she described that lurid scene in the burial ground, Haret sat up straighter. Somehow, Abisina told Haret about the fire, about the cries of the villagers, about the bodies. Her voice didn’t even shake. But when she got to the sudden wind and snow, Haret jerked so violently that Abisina broke off.

“No, no. Keep going.”

“That’s when I found the necklace. The wind blew away all the ash”—Abisina winced—“and there it was, on the altar.”

Haret frowned. “But where did your mother
get
the necklace?”

“From my father. I told you that.”

“But
who
was your father?”

“We’ve been through this. My mother told me he was from Watersmeet,” she said wearily.

“You don’t look like the typical human, you know, with your coloring and those eyes, and—well, you’ve shown yourself to have some bit of ingenuity and courage, which aren’t exactly human qualities. You couldn’t be, er, part dwarf?”

“No!” Abisina spat.

“Oh—and that would be so terrible!” Haret snapped back.

Abisina flushed. “It’s not that. It’s just—”

But Haret didn’t let her continue. “I don’t understand the instructions!” he said in frustration. “According to your mother, the passage is at the entrance to the Mines. But my family has been searching there for ages. There must be fifty different tunnels dug in there.” He pointed to the darkness of the Mines behind them. “No—eighty! And most are filled with the skeletons of one of my—”

Haret shook himself and continued. “My ancestors have dug and dug in search of the passage, but they’ve come up with nothing. Every tunnel ends against that rock, that infernal rock that breaks tools like twigs! When you appeared with Obrium, I thought—but how could you know what a dwarf could not? We are bred of the Earth, bred of stone! If anyone were to find this passage, a dwarf would. All I’ve learned from you are the names of these mountains—useless.”

Haret got up from the fire and walked into the mine entrance, disappearing in the darkness. Abisina also left the fire, walking a few steps down the road; then she turned and stared up at the peaks, dark against the starry sky. The moon had risen, the thin crescent visible between the two mountains, its light glinting off the snow on the summits.

Abisina stared at the spot where the slopes of the two mountains met. “If anyone were to find this passage, a dwarf would.”
But I am supposed to find it now.

Abisina headed back to the fire. She hadn’t thought about what it would cost Haret to go to the Mines; she had thought only of how he could get her to Watersmeet. She settled on the hard ground, her head on her sack, waiting for sleep to come. Her mother had always said that wisdom came in the morning, but as Abisina drifted off, these seemed like more empty words.

She woke with Haret standing over her. As her eyes fluttered open, he sprang back. The pendant on her chest felt heavy with Haret’s stare. His eyes looked hollow, haunted. “I leave at twilight,” he said bleakly. “I’ve dug all night in the one promising place in the archway—and once again hit the hard, black rock that has bedeviled my family for generations. I will sleep for the day and then head home, never to visit this cursed place again. I swore to my grandmother that I would look after you. I will take you back to her, safely. If you don’t want to return, I consider my obligation fulfilled.”

“So
you’re
giving up,” Abisina said. “One night of digging. That’s it.”

“It’s not one night!” Haret shouted. “It’s been hundreds of nights! Don’t you see, human? My family has been driven beyond the edge of madness hunting for Obrium. I swore I wouldn’t become like that. Not after my parents . . . Then I saw your necklace, heard ‘Watersmeet,’ and I became like all of them—thinking of nothing but that mythic metal. But your passage, like all the other hints and clues and hopes we’ve chased, is only a chimera.” He clenched his fists. “I leave tonight.”

But Abisina was staring past Haret. “My passage,” she murmured. “My
passage
. Wait, Haret! That’s it!” She leapt up and grabbed his arm, dragging him under the archway and onto the road, pink in the early dawn.

“Leave me!” Haret cried, pulling away.

“But that’s it, Haret! Passage! You’ve been saying ‘passage’ all this time, but my mother said ‘pass’!”

“Pass, passage, what does it matter?”

“It does matter! You’ve been thinking about this like a dwarf!”

“I
am
a dwarf!”

“Yes, but my father was not. He didn’t go
under
the mountains; he went
over
them!” Abisina pointed to the meeting of the slopes of Sumus and Arduus, the rocky peaks stark against the clear sky.

“Over the mountains?”

“Yes!” Abisina nearly danced with joy. “Don’t you see? Thinking about mines and tunnels and dwarfish things, you assumed that the only way to get to the other side of the Obruns was to go under them. But that isn’t the only way! There’s a
pass
between these mountains, a notch of some kind that we can climb to and then down the other side—to Watersmeet!”

“You don’t know what you’re saying. Look at the height of them, the rock faces! There’s no way over those mountains.”

“Humans have climbed mountains before,” Abisina heard herself say, though she could hardly keep up with the speed of her own thoughts. “‘Vran led the people down the Mountains Eternal.’” She repeated the line chanted so many times by the Elders; the words chilled her, but she rushed on. “Why can’t we do it again?”

Haret straightened his shoulders. “I am a dwarf. I’ll not follow Vran.”

Abisina’s face clouded for a moment. But then she remembered her mother’s words. “It’s not Vran we’re following. It’s something else. My mother told me the night before—she told me that what Vran did was miraculous, but he was a man, and miracles come from beyond mere men. Hoysta tried to say this, too,” she added quietly, thinking of the old dwarf’s gentle words at their parting. “She said that no good had come from our hate—the dwarves and the humans. But some good might come from our friendship. And that’s what’s happening now, Haret. You have to trust me.”

She had caught his attention. The bitterness left his face as he considered her words. “Is it possible? All these years we’ve searched—” Haret rubbed his beard. “I don’t know, human. I know nothing of going—up.”

“You said yourself, the pass cannot be in the Mines or your ancestors would have found it. But my father told my mother it
is
here—between Sumus and Arduus.”

“We don’t even know if that’s what those mountains are called!” Haret looked at the steep slopes warily.

“They must be,” she said.
The instructions seem so clear now.

Unconvinced, Haret stared again at the peaks, his face shadowed by the same fear that had haunted Hoysta when she stood at the mouth of her cave.

“We have to try. We’ve come this far,” Abisina said firmly.

By midmorning, they’d refilled their water sacks, gathered a few more handfuls of greens, and tied up a small bundle of firewood. Before leaving the Mines, Haret stood alone in the archway, staring toward the abandoned shafts, holding a clod of dirt in his cupped hands.