Partisan - Book II

The Hunted and the Hunter

Sunlight, bright, clear sunlight streams through the cracks and fissures of the tree, hemorrhaging through the pale, charred bark, oozing around the naked limbs. It stands now, a husk, and Ben thinks about the time before, when it was alive. He doesn't think the leaves were green—he's always imagined them a pale yellow, bleeding with a hue so vibrant it doesn't feel real. The hole in the trunk's center gapes like a sore.

Keesark falls as he watches the tree. The birds tell them when the smoke plumes from the capitol's ruin; they whisper as it collapses. A patched, bloodstained friend collects it all, murmuring it in the shifting shadows behind Ben. The boy's bruises have not yet faded from around his neck, but most of the ones who come to Ben are damaged so. Even now, a whole slew of them wait, down beneath these roots. Feuilles has trapped them below the earth, far from metal, in thin air where fire cannot thrive.

Fear, Ben thinks, parts furious, parts amused because of course that simpering prick is afraid; of course he would do exactly what Ben needs him to do.

We will set them free.

The light slowly starts to run red, fracturing as shadows settle on the bark, turning it ashen, gray. There's so much yet to do.

"After we get out of here we'll sail down the coast to Solveig. Have you ever been to Tazdahur? ... We'll go there, to a small place tucked back into a corner of the city. We'll take a couple of days for ourselves."

It's an old promise, yellowed and frayed, and it visits him here, a ghostly companion that sits beside him, unseen by anyone else.

"I want to tell you something. Ben, I—"

"We've established contact."

He turns to Meg, who is running her hand through her tufted hair, still unused to its shortness. A small sacrifice for anonymity.

"Good," he answers, and his gaze strays back to the tree. There are still so many secrets burrowed underneath its bark, laid dormant with time and preciousness. He wonders what it would yield if he pulled it back, what might lie beneath the skin that could tell him the path forward.

"Skilling is not a one-way street. The more you control elements, the more they can control you." He told her that once, on a dark city street, amidst the twinkling lights. In every collision, every clash, there is a mixing, a fracturing and a transfer between opposing parties. The injured imbued with bits of the aggressor; the hunter imbued with bits of the hunted. Change.

I kept a ghost of her; she kept a ghost of me.

Meg sits next to him, where the old memory had been, and leans forward.

"If Sofo has fallen we need to move fast," she says. "The faithful there are going to need all the help they can get. Before someone like Ruben can get back in."

He nods.

"We'll go," he says and he concedes, standing and turning away from the tree. "But let's collect some new friends first, shall we?"

"Aye," says Iaves, and he shifts the coil of rope from his pack to his shoulder. "Everyone's ready."

Ben pulls out his knife, twirling it in his hand before flinging it out. The guards are slow, they only awaken to the danger when the blade hits the trunk, the signal signed. They die quickly as the earth cracks open at these three strangers' feet, shifting and sieving at the will of Meg's outstretched hand.

The rope is latched around the leg of a stone bench and Iaves descends, Meg holding tight around his back. Ben hears them make contact with the ground below, sees the rope shake three times, and then he picks it up too.

He spares one last look at the old tree, that great Tree of Solveig.

"We are meant for great things, Allayria."

He descends.

A/N: Oh, Feuilles, we all knew your dickishness would cause problems.

Chapter notes: Ben recounts the story of Pang Sing and the tree in Paragon's "Removing the Linchpin;" he tells Allayria about two-way Skilling in"Sensory Creatures;" and his Solveig promise, her almost admission of being the Paragon, and his assertion that they are meant for greatness are all from "A Dream of Sunlight."

Update news: I'm going to be away from my laptop this upcoming weekend; my plan is to get at least my Friday chapter out Tues/Wednesday, so keep an eye out for it. We're only 3(!) chapters away from the end of Partisan.