The White Tree by Edward W. Robertson Read Free Book Online Page B

knotting the cloth over Blays' shoulder. The kid was off somewhere else, working something over when he should have his eyes out for the watch or other pursuit. Dante didn't think it had anything to do with the shock of battle or Blays' loss of blood. He wanted to say he'd had no control over the darkness, which was true; he wanted to say he had no idea where it had come from, which might not be. The way it blacked out like ink and then flickered away when Dante's emotions had changed reminded him exactly of a passage around the twentieth page of the Cycle when Stathus the Wise, facing six armed warriors, had encased them and himself in a lightless sphere and slain five of them one by one. The last of them then struck Stathus and clouded his mind with fear, causing the sphere to fade at once—a coincidence of patent ridiculousness, since it had said nothing about how Stathus had gone about dropping them in darkness in the first place. All Dante'd done was try not to drop a load in his trousers. There was no way the mere act of reading the book had somehow limbered up his mind to the point where he could do things like Stathus.
    What had it been, then? Trick of the light? Widespread hysterical blindness, like the kind he'd read afflicted soldiers on the eve of a battle so they couldn't fight? The first signs of a degenerative and apparently infectious ocular condition, or a priest watching from the windows, drunk, using parlor tricks to toy with them? Lunar eclipse? Any of those was about as likely as father Taim strolling down from his constellation and shaking Dante's hand. The one explanation that fit was he'd done something without knowing how he did it and that was no explanation at all; as wrong as Blays was to suspect him, Dante knew he was equally powerless to tell him why.
    They passed from the low, half-mud half-fieldstone houses inside the Westgate to the low, half-mud half-fieldstone houses outside the Westgate. This whole range of city looked like it had been built within the last five years. The roofs were mudcaked reeds, the doors flimsy things, firelight visible in the gaps of their frames. Blays' feet swept over the rinds and pebbles in the roadway.
    "Tired?" Dante asked.
    Blays shrugged. "We can't exactly stop here."
    He nodded, conceding the point. "We could rest a minute, though."
    "Why?" Blays met Dante's eyes for the first time since the fight. Something dark lingered in his face. His lips curled. "You too worn out to keep going?"
    "I'm fine," Dante said, feeling the dullness in his knees, the burn in the backs of his thighs. "It's just a couple miles to the woods. We should be all right there for the night."
    "Then we'll stop when it's safe."
    He had thought there would be some triumph if they survived their first skirmish, but instead of standing back to back against a shared danger, it had made Blays hate him. The wind kicked up, dragging leaves and trade papers and a few forgotten scraps of cloth past their feet. Graying things he was glad not to recognize moldered in the gutters. Since the time Dante'd left the village of his birth he'd enjoyed his solitude, his total freedom. Other people only intruded on his ability to learn. If Blays was going to part his company because he was as scared as a little girl about whatever Dante'd done when Dante himself didn't know what that thing was, he wouldn't mark it as a loss.
    Open fields showed between the houses after another half mile. Within two more minutes the last of what could be said to be the city had been replaced by brittle cornstalks and the puzzled moans of cows. The city fires died away and overhead a thousand stars pricked out from the black curtain. A god was there, if the Cycle of Arawn could be believed, turning the stone, milling the substance that changed men's hearts to darkness.

3
    They rose with the dawn and ate a cold breakfast in colder silence. They'd slept back to back, Dante's stolen cloak thrown over them both, and when Blays