He knew it was an old pagan ritual way of mourning the dead, but Daragh the Coward had cut himself as bravado and as a mask. The same action might mean something very different in Daimhin Web.
The young man was on a jagged edge, looking as if he wasn’t sure if he should attack Kip or throw himself at his feet or bolt into the forest. Instead, defeated, he sulked. “One for each one dead.”
“But not too deep,” Kip said. The hunter knew exactly how deeply to cut to cause a scar without impeding function.
“I have promises to keep,” Daimhin said, as if it were simple.
“To the other children,” Kip said, understanding him. “You’ve been taking care of them.”
“Not well,” Daimhin spat.
“You’ve made a vow that you’ll take care of them forever.” Kip had thought that the murderers had left the food. It had been Daimhin. “A penance?”
“I made them orphans,” Daimhin said.
Came too late to stop them being made orphans by others. It was very different.
There had to be thirty children here. And this boy—maybe twenty years old? maybe years short of that—hunter and legend though he was, this boy was going to be their mother and father? It was insane.
And yet, war makes insanity a necessity.
“One might suggest . . .” Kip said. Then he wasn’t sure if he should go on. But he bulled ahead. Drag it all into the light. Let the light sort it out, the evil and the good, and the good that had made its concessions to weakness and fallibility and human foibles. “If the Third Eye could see the future, wouldn’t she have known you wouldn’t make it in time to help, even if she asked? Maybe this wasn’t your fault at all.”
“She did ask,” Daimhin Web said. As if it were simple.
“If she asked knowing you’d say no, is it really your fault?”
“She did ask,” Daimhin said.
“Why would she ask if she knew he wouldn’t get here in time?” Cruxer asked quietly, aggrieved. As if the Third Eye had piled guilt atop a boy too sensitive to hold its weight. Hard as he was, and as starkly as he liked to see the world separated into sheep and goats, at times Cruxer could show deep compassion. He could see that Daimhin the Hunter would never be only a hunter any longer. Cruxer, who’d been catapulted from an old life by his guilt over a death he couldn’t stop, Cruxer understood.
If they made it through this damned war, Kip hoped to see that understanding, compassionate side of his dear friend flourish.
Tisis said quietly, “I think sometimes we can all see the future coming, and we can’t help but act, even when we know it’s too little or too late, too feeble. Sometimes we act even though we know it will mean our death,” she said, locking her jade-green eyes with Kip’s. “I don’t think that makes us fools. I think it makes us great.”
And you’re staying with me, Kip thought. Does that make you a fool, or great, or both?
But Kip tore his eyes away from his remarkable bride, who was as undeserved as sunshine on a winter morning.
He saw perhaps the real reason for the Third Eye to send Daimhin: if she’d told him there were orphans for him to care for, he wouldn’t have come. What were orphans to a hunter? But by lying, by telling him there was a massacre he could stop, she could save these orphans as Daimhin revealed a mettle he himself hadn’t known he possessed.
After all, like everyone else, prophets can lie.
“Tell me about this, this clearing, that plinth,” Kip said instead. “You came here for a reason. Or was it merely for the quiet?”
“Ha!” Daimhin said. But he breathed and looked at the sun for a time, and spun his hellstone knife and sheathed it, and jumped off the plinth with the grace of an artist whose body is his brush.
He turned and bowed to the plinth with a gravity that might have been mockery. He was a broken man indeed, teetering at the edge of madness.
“Seven groves, in seven lands,” he said. “Apple, pear, fig, pomegranate, olive, orange, and atasifusta. Blood Forest, Ruthgar, Paria, Abornea, Ilyta, Tyrea, and Atash. Seven cities, seven mirrors, seven colored lenses. They were first meant to be a perfect circle, but compromises were made, so they became a circle as lopsided as our politics. This one had to be this close to the coast because treaties with the pygmies forbade the Tyrean Empire deeper access to the woods.”
A prohibition that obviously hadn’t stuck. Not that that was the point right now.
Daimhin said, “My forefathers were the keepers of this sacred grove, once upon a time. My father brought me here to visit once. Kind of a pilgrimage in our family, though we haven’t lived here for generations. I came here hoping . . . for their understanding? Their forgiveness? Their wisdom? Ha. They failed, too, after all, and let us all be scattered into the deep forest. I hoped . . .” He snorted. “Maybe it was just for the quiet, after all.”
“There was a city here, then?” Kip asked.
“Apple Grove was always small. I think most of the grove cities were. All were close or within a direct line of sight to great cities—Azuria, here, for one. They were intended to be isolated from the city’s politics. As if such a thing is possible. But at least it is harder to capture two fortified positions than just one. It didn’t work as intended, of course. The fort on Ruic Head was constructed solely to house Ru’s Great Mirror, but Satrapah Naveen later moved the Great Mirror into Ru itself to show her power.”
Kip hadn’t been thinking in terms of the ancients when he’d been there, but it was true, the fort of Ruic Head was far too large for what the Chromeria thought it had been. The fort had thick timber walls, but it had been built on stone foundations. Before the relatively recent advent of cannons that could shoot great distances into the bay, there was no function for a fort there. A simple lookout tower would have sufficed. Maybe a lighthouse. There hadn’t been need for an entire fort.
Which was interesting history and all, but if there were big mirrors in all these groves, where was the mirror that had been here?
But Tisis was already going in another direction. “Azuria?” she asked. “I’ve never even heard of a city called that.”
“The pygmies didn’t lose all their wars to the Tyrean Empire,” Daimhin said. “They wiped out the city while it was still being built. Razed it. Crucified everyone in it or fed them to their tygre wolves. My people fled without a fight after that. The ruins of Azuria are over beyond the new wall now, where the White King was. There’s little there now except access to a good harbor.”
“How do you know all this?” Kip asked.
“We deep Foresters keep our traditions alive in our songs, not on corruptible parchments or skins that can be changed.” Daimhin’s face clouded. “Or we did. I wasn’t a singer of the songs and I don’t know all the stories. They’ll die now, I suppose. Already have, maybe, with my village.”
And that’s why you put the stories in books, Kip thought but didn’t say. Books don’t tend to get killed.
But that wasn’t helpful. Nor kind. Nor the point.
Daimhin said, “I thought it was a coincidence that this Seer should contact me and want me to come here. It’s been centuries since my people were here. I feel no connection to this land. I love my forests wild. I am no tender of domesticated trees.”