Then they were alone again – their attackers had melted back into the forest, leaving five of their dead. Only one of Joron’s party was down: the man hit by the arrow, Ganrid’s brother, Folis. Joron went to where his sither knelt over him. The arrow had punctured his arm, and he had also taken a blow to the chest. Air bubbled through blood. Ganrid held her brother’s hand tightly, speaking soothing words to him.
She turned to Joron.
“He fought well, D’keeper, even with the arrow in him,” she said quietly. Joron knelt. Folis did not appear frightened or in pain, but his eyes looked very far away, and he surely heard the Hag’s call. Joron took his other hand, and Folis’s face took on a puzzled look.
“D’keeper,” he said, a breath of air leaving him.
“Your sither is right: you fought well.” Joron was not sure whether Folis heard him or not. “I will make sure the shipwife knows how well you fought.”
Folis’s face contorted into a smile, and then he coughed, groaned as if he were being branded, and the life left his eyes.
“Thank you, D’keeper,” said Ganrid and wiped tears from her eyes. “He looked up to the shipwife, was proud to serve Lucky Meas. He will go to the Hag in peace now.”
“We must carry on, Ganrid,” he said. “Your brother is no doubt already warm at her fire.”
“Ey,” she said, “but there’ll be more of the Hag-cursed out there.” She pointed into the forest. “I doubt they’ll attack head on again though. It’ll be arrows from the bushes the rest of the way.”
Joron scanned the plants around them but could see nothing other than gion and varisk, entwined around each other and creaking as they grew.
“Farys,” he said, “get up a gion. See if you can make out how far we have to go. Anzir, they’ll have to lie in wait; they’d make too much noise following us. I want you up front. You’re a fighter and you’re more likely to recognise an ambush than the rest of us.” Anzir nodded. “Keep behind your shields as best you can. We’ll stop cutting the gion too as it makes too much noise; we’ll just have to push our way through. Ganrid and Cruist, stay up front with Anzir and deal with anything too vicious, but if it’s just stings and scrapes from the plants we’ll go through them, ey?”
“Ey, D’keeper,” came the reply.
They waited while Farys climbed and when she shinned down from the gion stalk she pointed landward of Joron.
“Highest peak is that way. No more than an hour’s walk, I’d say.”
“Good, then we should get under way. If any of you lose sight of the rest of us, make a call like Black Orris, and I don’t mean shout, ‘Arse.’” Laughter and Joron’s crew formed up around him.
“I do not need protecting,” he said. “I am here for my share of the danger, just like you all.”
“Kind to say, D’keeper,” said Jilf, the oldest man in the crew, one-eyed and with only one tooth. “But we need your brains, see, and we need the gullaime safe. Right – proper true that is.”
“Of course,” said Joron, who had almost forgotten the creature on his back it was so light.
They pushed on through the jungle. Occasionally Anzir would stop them and listen. Twice she asked Joron to order flights of arrows put into the undergrowth, and the second volley was rewarded with a scream of pain. Farys’s one hour turned into two as they had to make regular stops to regroup or climb the gion and check they headed in the right direction.
Joron wondered how Meas was doing at the tower. A voice in his head said she might be dead and he would be in charge, and wouldn’t it be fine to get back what she had taken from him? But he did not feel any real joy at the idea. Oh, he may be more able now, but another part of him, a larger part, hated himself for wishing death on Meas, and more, he knew they needed her, the ship, the keyshan, the whole crew. And so, what had started as thoughts of how her death may benefit him became worry about what may happen if he did not hurry. If she needed him and he was not there. He became impatient, annoyed at every stop for water, at every delay to find a missing deckchild or climb the gion.
And yet he knew all this must be done.
“You wish for action, D’keeper,” said Farys. “Me too. It is not rightly done this sneaking about, right it ain’t at all.”
He was about to tell her not to be foolish, that he didn’t wish for action at all. Every time he had been into action he had been terrified beyond what he thought possible. But as he opened his mouth to speak he realised that at some level he did wish it, which was strange. It was not the fighting or the killing or the fury that he wanted, but the breaking of this constant tension he had not been truly aware of until now. With every step through the forest he became more sure an arrow was trained on him, more sure Anzir would miss something and they would walk into an ambush. More sure he would let Meas down.
“You are right, Farys,” he said. “I do indeed wish for something to happen.”
“It will, D’keeper. Don’t you fret none, it will.”
And of course it did.
They continued through the forest, making the best speed they could, twisted off course by thickets so dense they could not push through, until eventually they saw more blue sky above them than purple gion. The shorter varisk started to take over, pink leaves shining like open wounds. Anzir held up her hand and beckoned to Joron. When he crouched by her she pushed aside a tangle of vines and pointed.
For the first time in his life, he saw a windspire up close. He had expected it to be like the spine of a ship, a towering, slowly tapering spike that rose from the ground as if it had pierced the land from below, but it was no such thing. It was not white, for a start, but the colour of old and neglected bone, a pale yellowy white. It was also far, far larger than he had imagined. On Bernshulme only the Bern and the lamyard keepers could approach the windspire, and to get to it you must pass through the lamyards. No sane woman or man put themselves among so many gullaime.
So he only knew stories of the windspire, and those stories did it no justice. It rose, maybe ten times the size of a woman, from a thick base which tapered up to a rounded point, but it did not rise straight, it curved outwards so the tip hung four or five paces out from the curcular base. Neither was it solid. It looked more like the bone knife Farys carried, though what looked like carving on the windspire could not be the work of anything human, Joron felt sure of that. It was too intricate and strange and, somehow, wrong, otherwordly. It did not satisfy his sense of symmetry, though it pleased his eye in other ways: the detail, the repetition, the spirals and twisting lines that ran up and around it. In many places it was pierced, so varisk could be glimpsed through it. In other places the decoration was so subtle he only saw the lines because they were slightly darker than the rest of the spire. Nothing grew around it, but the large circle of bare ground which surrounded it did not look artificially cleared. It seemed the windspire required space, and the jungle respected that need.
And it sang.
It was not a loud song, and if they had not stopped in utter silence Joron may never have noticed it. But the windspire definitely had a song, a slow keening sound as beautiful and intricate as any bird’s. For a moment Joron was lost as he looked upon the thing, felt its subtle heat on his face.