Dragonoak (52 page)

“Wait!”
I called out. “My horse, I left him halfway up the mountain. I need
to go back! What if the soldiers have him?”

“If the
soldiers have Charley then there's nothing you or I can do about
that,” Kidira said bluntly, not slowing her pace. I ground to a
halt in protest, and as if no longer able to hear my footsteps
following her, Kidira said, “But I very much doubt that the
soldiers would go to the lengths required in order to guide a horse
down the mountains when they're clearly so very distracted by their
hunt for you. The pane will find him, sooner rather than later.
Enough of them will recognise him.”

I
frowned at her back, not wanting to relax, to believe that it would
really be alright, but softened regardless. I took wide strides in
order to catch up with Kidira, wishing I could bring myself to turn
and run back up the mountain path without feeling as though I was
plummeting again at the mere thought.

Dawn
painted the sky an angry, muted shade of red and I prepared for the
elements to turn against us. When it was as light as it was going
to get, I pulled the hood back and shook my head, dried blood
clumped in my messy hair. I wasn't going to contest the sun, wasn't
going to stand out to anyone tracking us from a
distance.

The
mountains and their valleys weren't at all as I'd imagined them to
be as a child. The ground wasn't dry and barren, the air wasn't
bitterly cold, and my surroundings came to me in more shades than
stone grey; there was a wealth of life there, more than I'd been
able to catch a glimpse of from Kyrindval. The grass grew tall and
wild flowers tangled with it, and deer sprang about in the
distance, ears perking at the sound of us passing through. There
were a thousand insects trying to scream over each other, and it
didn't take more than a few minutes for us to catch a
rabbit.

We
skinned it, cooked it, ate and moved on. I managed to keep the meal
down without gagging; my body was already used to itself, even if I
wasn't. Kidira and I continued to march between the mountains, down
sloping valleys and up sharp inclines, rocks tumbling out from
beneath our feet. It was peaceful out there. Conversation came by
way of laboured breathing and the calls of birds above served to
emphasize the calm and quiet of the place. There weren't any other
humans around for miles, and there was warmth to be found in the
shadows of mountains.

I'd been
wrong about the weather.

But all
the while, I was overly aware of where we were heading and what
awaited us. I was anxious, but none of my muscles tensed and my
chest hadn't tightened; there was nothing I could shake out,
nothing for me to focus on.

The wall
came into view. A valley a mile-wide stood between us and the
Bloodless Lands, space between the mountains filled in by my
ancestors hundreds upon hundreds of years ago. The scale and age of
it were the only impressive things about the wall. From a distance,
I could tell how crudely it had been put together. It was more a
pile of rocks than any wall I'd ever seen, as if meant to serve as
more of a warning than an actual obstacle.

“Why did
you pull me off that rock?” I asked when we stopped by a stream to
refill Kidira's waterskin. “I mean, you must've known what I was,
otherwise you wouldn't have bothered.”

“I knew
what you were because Claire told me what you were,” she said,
handing over the waterskin.

Which
didn't answer my question. I kept my eyes on her as I drank, having
softened, hours ago, at the thought of her saving Claire. But now,
all I could think about was the first time I went to Orinhal, and
how the necromancer had been dragged from his home.

“So you
saved me because of Claire? Is that it?”

She met my gaze and stepped towards me, saying, “I saved you
because you were clearly not dead, not completely. You were
suffering
and I saw how
best to put an end to that.”

Kidira
took the waterskin from me but didn't break eye-contact. I expected
her to say something more. Expected her to shout, to put me in my
place, but she just waited. Waited for me to say whatever it was
that was driving me to clench my hands into fists and grit my teeth
at her.

“But you—you're asking me to go into the Bloodless Lands with
you and I don't even know
why
! Maybe you just want to...” I
paused, throwing my hands out to the sides. Kidira didn't flinch,
didn't step back. She seemed patient, if anything. “The first time
I went to Orinhal, they took a necromancer from his home because
of
you,
and you
made a spectacle of his execution for the Agadians
...”

“Why is
it so very important to you that I am some manner of monster?”
Kidira asked. “I save your life and instead of thanking me, you
demand to know what my ulterior motives are. Kouris has had your
ear for too long.”

I
would've told her all about burning necromancers, if not for her
comment about Kouris. It seemed more pressing, somehow, that she
had spent all this time thinking Kouris had turned against her. I
let my own frustration slip away in favour of defending Kouris, and
doing that only brought anger around in turn.

“Kouris has
never
said a bad word about you,” I said, and it drew a
stony silence out of Kidira unlike anything I'd said before. I
flinched at the thought of what was swirling behind her eyes and so
said, as quietly as I could without murmuring, “... thank you for
pulling me off that rock.”

Because
I'd still be there, if not for her. I'd still be blacking out and
coming to, a little more aware of my surroundings each time; maybe
I would've been able to pull myself off the rock within day, but I
doubted my mind would've recovered as it barely had. Kidira turned
with a sharp nod but all I could think of was the necromancer tied
to a post, burnt over and over until only ash remained; all because
the woman before me had willed it so.

I didn't
ask her why she'd done it. No explanation could've excused her
actions.

We
carried on towards the wall. I had divided the last few years
equally between the ocean and sand and had trouble finding my
footing on steep, rocky inclines. More than once Kidira turned to
me, offering out her hand to help hoist me up, and each time I took
it, looking away from her as I did so. I didn't want to resent
Kidira, but I didn't want to fall into the trap of trusting her,
either. The fact that Kouris and Akela loved her did nothing to
sway my thoughts. So many of us had loved Katja, and that had done
nothing to shield me, in the end.

We stood
side-by-side at the foot of the wall, and without turning to me,
Kidira said, “What you said earlier, about Kouris—is it true? Did
they really execute her?”

“Yes,” I
said, and knew I needed to say no more. Kidira was looking down at
her open hands again, fingers curling, very slightly, towards her
palms. As if she was seeing something she'd once held.

She
cleared her throat and I looked towards her. Her eyes focused on
her surroundings as she returned to the present, staring up at the
rubble that passed for a wall. Throughout the fifteen hundred years
that had been and gone since the end of the War, moss had grown
atop the rocks and creeping vines and gnarled tree trunks had
twisted free from between the chunks of wall in search of sunlight.
Birds had made their nests there, and a handful of goats had beaten
us to it. They were already halfway up the wall, chewing
contentedly on leaves.

I
squinted up at the top, but the sun rested along the edge of the
wall, brighter than I was. The glare punched holes of light into my
vision that I had to blink away, but I was certain that nothing
grew or lived upon the top of the wall.

Kidira
went ahead, leaving me to follow her lead. We could walk across the
wall in places, hop from one rock to the next as easily as taking a
single step on solid ground, but in other parts the moss had made
the rocks slippery. We clung to low-hanging branches and gripped
onto rocks above, Kidira never looking back at me in the same way I
never looked back at the ground below. The rocks made my hands
dusty in places, dug into my palms in others; I expected that
Kidira's feet and hands were being torn as mine were but didn't
dare to offer to heal her.

The thought of the Bloodless Lands awaiting us behind the
rock kept me in a trance, kept me moving. I could feel it. What's
more, I could
hear
it; it sounded like every note Kondo-Kana hadn't sung to me.
As we neared the top, I reached behind myself, making sure Claire's
dragon-bone knife was still there. Tracing my nails across the
grooves of the pattern, I meant to conquer the last stretch of the
climb, meant to pull myself up across that last layer of rock, but
Kidira took hold of my shoulder, stopping me.

“Rowan,”
she said calmly and clearly, looking right at me. I pushed myself
back against the last of the rocks keeping me out of the Bloodless
Land, terrified, for the first time, that I'd look down and
wouldn't be able to help but return to the ground. “Rowan, I am
going to ask a lot of you. I am going to ask to you be strong, to
be what others cannot, to be brave—”

My mind screamed
jump! jump!
and Kidira put a hand on my shoulder, grasp firm
but not tight.

“But
especially to be brave,” she added in more of a murmur than
anything else. “Do you understand? I won't stop you from turning
back, from heading to Kyrindval.”

Head
back to Kyrindval. Take the easy way out. Never know what was in
the Bloodless Lands, never know what Kidira needed of me. Have
fallen all this way for nothing, have run my heart through just
because I could.

“I've
come this far,” I said. “Might as well keep going.”

Kidira
didn't wait for hesitation to take its place upon my expression,
nor did she ask me if I was certain. She carried on to the top of
the wall, eyes fixed on the rocks as she climbed into the Bloodless
Lands.

I
should've faltered, but my hands were grasping at the rocks, even
as I told myself that I was woefully unprepared for what I was
about to see. The destruction that hollowed out half a continent,
three entire countries, was certain to have left scars scorched
across the landscape; there would be crumbled ruins, angry read
marks across the ground, and beyond all that, emptiness.

When I
pulled myself up over that last rock, emptiness was what I
saw.

Cities
and cities of emptiness.

My eyes
scanned the horizon and I took it all in without processing any of
it. The Bloodless Lands were pristine. From a distance, I saw
spires and towers rising towards the sky, twisted into bizarre
shapes, but far from warped; the architecture was strange to my
eyes, familiar but all at once removed from anything I'd seen
before. Nothing had cracked or crumbled; it was as though the
cities had been frozen in time when they'd fallen out of
memory.

If
darkness and shadow had fallen across the Bloodless Lands, they
would've been perfect. If night could claim the Bloodless Lands for
its own, I could've been fooled into thinking there was life there.
All I saw before me was pure, brilliant white, as though the light
that surged through me had been made solid, tangible. I'd seen it
before; the rocks I'd fallen to had been drenched in it, the floor
of Katja's apartment had been riddled with the same, and before,
the bridge of Isin's castle had cracked with the first signs of
it.

A single
person was responsible for this. A person like me.

I had
died, I had been tortured, and yet the emptiness had not spread
much further than my arms could reach. I couldn't fathom what
Kondo-Kana had been forced to endure throughout the war. What had
driven her to this.

Kidira
climbed down, back to the Bloodless Lands. I went on ahead, leaping
from one rock to the next with no sense of caution, making each
jump purely because I didn't think it through, because I let
adrenaline push me down, down. I landed hard on the stretch of dirt
that hadn't been touched by the corruption or cleansing that had
taken the Bloodless Lands and charged off the very edge of it,
where the ground abruptly turned white.

“Do
not
stare into it,” Kidira called from behind me.

“It's
fine,” I murmured, unable to take my eyes off it. “Kondo-Kana
said...”

I
crouched down, hands pressing to the border of the Bloodless Lands.
It felt—it felt like nothing. I should've been touching dirt. The
dry, untouched ground shifted beneath the toes of my boots as I
knelt, but all that was white refused to shift. It wasn't made up
of individual grains anymore. I ran my fingers across it and knew
that every tree, every building and every book that had been whited
out would feel the same.

Kidira
grabbed my shoulder, pulling me back.

“We don't have time to waste,” she said, not letting go until
I was on my feet. She was looking away from the Bloodless Lands,
blindfold wrapped around her forehead, pulled down over her left
eye, ensuring that nothing of the Bloodless Lands slipped into her
vision. “
Now
,”
Kidira snapped, and I realised that my feet were being
uncooperative, body trying to drift into the Bloodless Lands. There
were answers out there, I knew it. All that silence had to be
burying something.