Soulwoven (39 page)

Cole jerked back. The wood just missed his nose.

Something in him snapped.

“Piece of shit!” he shouted. He punched the door as hard as he could. It didn’t break the first time, so he reared back and kicked it when it swung around again, and its hinges sheared. The piece of wood flew a few feet into the rain-filled street beyond and clattered to a halt.

Cole clenched his fists tightly enough that he could feel the circulation dying in them. A part of him wanted to find something else to tear off the walls or smash against the floor until it shattered into splinters.

Brown John had taken him in the first time he’d run to Thieves’ Rise to avoid his father’s fists. Brown John had taught him the dagger, given him his first knife, and never asked anything in return other than his company. The man had been bigger than life, and warmer than the rest of the sad, angry faces in the Rise. John’s place had been there for him almost his whole life, and suddenly it was gone and empty and broken.

He felt a cold hand on his shoulder and heard his brother’s voice for the first time in days.

“Come on, Cole. Let’s go home.”

Litnig sounded tired.

Cole led the others over the broken fragments of Brown John’s door and into the wet streets beyond. He almost hoped someone would try to rob them. He felt like a fight.

The streets passed by him in a blur. Landmarks he’d been waiting for weeks to see flowed past unheralded: pubs, street signs, fountains, markets—all of them gray and rain-drowned and worthless.

A quiet voice beside him asked, “They were your friends?”

Cole slowed. He remembered a dozen whispered promises of everything he’d show Dil when they reached the city.

His anger melted down and cooled into a thin slick of shame.

“Yeah.
They taught me a lot.”

He could feel Dil hovering just off his shoulder. The rain seemed a softer thing, the wind’s teeth not quite so cold,
the
day not quite so black. He spotted light and faces in a corner pub that he’d thought empty just a moment before.

Dil wrapped a hand around his. “Who were they?”

Cole stopped walking, put his arms around her, and squeezed.

And as they moved on, he told her about Brown John and his partner Glass-chin Jack, about Three-fingered Dick and Shane the Mace and his boy Red Will. As he told her the stories, he pointed out the places in which they’d occurred: the corner where Shane had earned his nickname by filching a mace right off a nobleman’s belt; the market where Dick had stolen the apples as a boy that had lost him his fingers; the alleys where Cole had chased rats with Red Will after Litnig and Ryse had decided it was too childish a game for them.

He talked and he talked and he talked, and before he knew it, the sagging front timbers of the only home he’d ever known stood in front of him.

The door of his house swung open. A short, skinny figure filled its shadow. A worried face he’d never imagined he’d miss so much stumbled into the rain.

A moment later, there were tears in his eyes, and he didn’t bother even to pretend that they were raindrops.

FORTY-THREE

Len sat in a green chair of faded velvet, watching the flames of a fire crackle in a warm hearth. A glass of whisky rested on an end table next to him. His feet rested on a soft ottoman. The children were upstairs, asleep or on their way to it. The air was warm, pine-scented, and thick.

He allowed himself the brief luxury of closing his eyes and relaxing.

The night reminded him of a past of comfort and happiness. Of a time when his own children had slept upstairs, and he had sat comfortably in his parlor and talked long into the night with his wife, with his love, with his Lena—

“Lord Heramsun?”

His eyes snapped open. A slim, dark-haired human woman stood in front of him in a tan frock. Her face was pale. Her eyes were red and sunken. Her hands wrung together incessantly.

She was not his Lena.

“Mrs. Jin,” he grumbled, “I have asked you not to call me that.”

She nodded, hesitantly, and turned to poke the fire. It had been clear to him since he had been introduced to her that she was not accustomed to dealing with foreigners, or even adult males.

That afternoon, she had staggered out of her home like a necromancer’s puppet before throwing herself first upon Litnig and then upon Cole. She had wailed like a newborn the whole time, and only the sight of the boy prince had shocked her into silence long enough for them to drag her inside.

The story her boys had told her was simple: Quay had been in danger, hounded by assassins. He had trusted Cole with his life, and Cole had trusted Litnig. They had been staying on the move to keep him safe. They were not going to be home for long, and she was to keep their visit secret, even from their father.

Torin Jin, luckily, was outside the city on business.

Lena had bought the story with wide-eyed acceptance, but Len had seen in her narrow face the look of a woman shrewder than she let on who did not want to risk alienating her children. He thought it likely she believed them less than they thought.

A cough upstairs reminded him of Ryse. The girl was still incoherent, but Len had noticed improvement in her skin tone once she was warm and dry and indoors. Her fever might break that night, if they were lucky.

And if her fever breaks, perhaps she will tell us what she saw in that tree. And why Litnig will not speak, and why she will not touch him.

“My boys.”

The words startled him. The dying echoes of them sang quietly in the air between him, the fire, and the woman who had spoken them. There was a core of strength in them—one that hinted at a vein of iron running somewhere in the will of their speaker.

Lena stared at the fire and crumpled the front of her dress in her hands.

“What are they really up to?”

Len rubbed his chin, reached across his body for the whisky, and took a sip. Her question was a harder one than he had expected it to be, but he answered it truthfully, as best he could.

“More than you can understand.
More than I, perhaps, can understand.”

She blinked at him and collapsed into a chair.

He felt sorry for her. What she had been through over the past months—not knowing whether her children were safe or in danger, happy or sad, well fed or starving—was a nightmarish burden to bear, and one they seemed not to appreciate.

It was also one he knew all too well.

But Len had never been a great comforter.

The fire popped and wheezed on its iron grate, and Len looked at Lena Jin again and wondered what
her
story was. She was pretty, maybe forty at the oldest, probably closer to thirty-five.
Young to have a child as old as Litnig.
She looked like no woman of West Eldanian or Nutharian blood he had ever seen. He assumed she had come from the east, somewhere past Foltir, and he wondered where Torin Jin had found her, and whether she was happy.

“
Your
youngest,” he grunted. “Your youngest has found
himself
a girl. She is a fine one. You should be happy for him.”

She nodded. Her hands never relaxed their grip on her frock.

“I am,” she said softly.

“
Your
eldest—”

She leaned forward, and Len stopped speaking.

There was something haunted and fearful in her eyes.

Len let another sip of the whisky burn down his throat and watched her. The veins in her neck fluttered. Her eyes bulged. Her knuckles paled steadily toward white.

He lowered his voice. “There is something about him, Lena, isn’t there?”

She unclenched her hands from her skirts and smoothed them. Her eyes drifted toward the staircase that reached upward into darkness by the hearth.

Len set his glass down and whispered, “What is it?”

The woman’s skin paled. Her hands shook. Her lips quivered.

Len was almost sorry for pushing her.

But that boy had survived wounds that should have killed him.
Twice.
And something about him had scared his friend the soulweaver so badly that she wouldn’t let him near her when she was even semiconscious. Litnig was growing more and more sullen every day to boot, and damn if Len would ignore it. Damn if he would turn a blind eye and assume the boy would pull out of it. Damn if he would let him go the way of D’Orin Threi.

Len let Lena Jin sit and stew, and he waited for her to tell him what he needed to know.

Her eyes wandered to the fire. She touched a silver disc that hung from a chain around her neck. “He was the answer to a prayer—given to us to protect, to raise,
to
cherish—”

“These are the burdens of any parent, Lena.”

“No, they are not!” she snapped. She turned on him quick as a snake, green eyes narrow and hunted. “Litnig is different,” she spat. “Litnig is special.”

Len did not flinch. Lena Jin’s breath wheezed in and out of her like it was being pulled from without, and he watched her calm down. The fire popped. The rain hissed over the city outside.

Lena smiled, then frowned, then smiled again. “You know,” she whispered, “for a long time, I thought he would be normal?”

Len said nothing.
Come on, woman—
he urged.
Out with it.
What burden have you been living with? What burden have you dumped on me?

“It wasn’t my fault. I was young and lonely, and he was crying—crying in the rain—”

“Len!
Mrs. Jin!”

Dil’s voice, from the second floor.

Len gripped the sides of his armchair so hard he thought they might snap.
Go on! Go on!
his
mind shouted, even as he heard the girl from Lurathen flying down the stairs.

Lena Jin shut her mouth and wiped her eyes.

Dil burst bright and breathless into the room. The girl laid one hand on the wall and beamed. “Ryse is awake!”

Len could only watch while Lena Jin rose on unsteady feet, smiled thinly, and walked away.

FORTY-FOUR

Ryse sat in bed on the second floor of the Jin family home. The
bed, and the room around it, were
Litnig’s.

The window she’d snuck through two months before winked at her from the wall. The heavy, dark wardrobe she’d once hidden in from his mother stood sullen and unmoving in a corner. The hole he’d made in the thatch above his bed for her childhood treasures was still there. The spot beneath the window where she’d later given them to him and Cole was unchanged.

She sipped a cup of warm tea and wiggled her toes under Litnig’s blankets.

Litnig himself still hadn’t come by to see her.
Neither had Quay or Len.
Cole had, but he’d seemed nervous and uncomfortable. He’d sat on the floor and refused to meet her eyes or speak beyond answering her questions.

And then he’d asked, “What did you see inside that tree?” and she’d lied to him and said she didn’t remember.

After that, he’d stared for a long time at the wall, and then he’d stood up and made a flimsy excuse for leaving.

She felt sick for lying to him.

But how could she tell him what his brother really was?

She touched the naked, stubbly space on her face where her eyebrows had been. Her hair was singed too, but things could’ve been much worse. It would’ve taken enormous power to weave a fireball the size of a house.
Power that was arrayed against them.
Power that for some reason had run away from them.

For some reason.

She knew the reason.

It had to be Litnig.

Among the Duennin…only there…

She shivered when she thought of Reif’s words and the memories that went with them. Four of the six heart dragons were broken. The Duennin were real and walking the waking world beside her.

She felt very, very alone.

The Temple wouldn’t help her. She’d learned that on the night the Heart Dragons of Mennaia had been broken, though she still wasn’t sure why they wanted to keep the destruction a secret. She didn’t want to bear the burden of Litnig’s identity alone, but she had no one to share it with. Quay was cold, practical, calculating—as likely to kill Litnig in his sleep as help her keep an eye on him. Cole wouldn’t believe her. Dil was too flighty, Len too self-absorbed.

And Litnig himself would break under the knowledge. He wanted to be a hero. She shuddered to think what hearing he was a monster might do to him.

That left only a necromancer who might understand without condemning, who might be able to watch impartially, and who might have the power to help her stop Litnig if he became one of the mindless killing machines from the legends.

But Leramis wasn’t there.

And she’d promised Litnig that she wouldn’t tell him anything.

And he was the last person in the world she wanted to rely on.

She sipped her tea in silence, and eventually, she lay down and tried to sleep.

Time passed hazily. Ryse tossed and turned without ever really feeling asleep or awake, and at some point she became aware that the shadows on Litnig’s wall had taken the shape of Eldan City. Temple Hill filled the plaster near the ceiling. Palace Hill sat on its right, Sentinel on its left. The Slums, Thieves’ Rise, the Demesne, and the Eldwater all occupied their places. Near the city center, she could pick out Litnig and Cole’s home.

The River of Souls blinked in and out of her vision. It did that sometimes, when she was exhausted and caught between sleep and waking.

In Ryse’s tired mind, the lights of the River became Eldan City’s inhabitants, living in the shadow metropolis on the wall. One of them flitted from the Jin household and danced eastward. It was beautiful, and fragile in a way she hadn’t expected, like a flame-colored piece of spun glass. She wanted to reach out and hold it.

The little eldritch passed over the river toward Palace Hill, and she lost it. The shadows twisted. A deep, octopine blackness formed in Thieves’ Rise and pushed the lights away. It crawled toward the center of the city.
Toward the Jin house.