Soulwoven

Chapter Thirteen

~13~

Ryse Lethien craned her neck back until it hurt. A barrel-shaped, silver tree so wide three men would barely be able to reach around it towered into the sky in front of her. The sun’s light, diminished under the thick canopy above, felt pleasant on her skin. The great tree and those around it were branchless near their bases, and a breeze circulated freely around her through the forest understory. The leaves were soft beneath her booted feet. Her heart beat fast and happy.

Growing up, climbing had been the great escape of her life as well as a survival skill. She had spent days racing up and down the ramshackle buildings of the slums, or sneaking out into the rest of the city to climb high on stone perches, above the stench, above her place, where she could see the world and its beauty. It was one of only a few things she had truly missed in the Academy, but until she’d climbed the drainpipe of the Jins’ neighbors a week and a half earlier, she hadn’t thought much of it in years.

The climb in front of her would be an easy ascent, but a long one. There were wide steps, spaced a foot or so apart like the rungs of a ladder, hewn in a long vertical line into the trunk of the tree. Ryse was glad for that, in a way. She still wore her robe, and she had a pack on her back. Not ideal for the kind of acrobatics she had once craved.

In front of her, Dil was saying something to Len. The Aleani stared ice at the girl, walked purposefully to the tree, and started climbing. Ryse frowned. Len remained an enigma to her. He had an air of command about him, almost like Quay, but he’d shared little of his past with them.

She wondered where exactly he came from, and why he was hunting his necromancer.

Ryse filed into line behind the others and struggled to keep her enthusiasm in check. To climb is to be free, she had once told a friend, and it was still true. Cole glanced at her as they queued for the steps and rolled his eyes. She smiled. He remembered. Once, the two of them had raced up an outcrop on Sentinel Hill and she had beat him to the top by a full three minutes. He remembered what climbing meant to her, she was sure.

He began working his way up the tree before her, and she let him go five or six feet before she grabbed hold of the first step and started up. Len was almost thirty feet off the ground by then, and Dil hung a few feet below him. Litnig and Quay were still earthbound.

The flesh of the tree was soft, warm, and vibrant. It felt unusually alive, almost as if it had a mind of its own and was watching as she climbed. Sixty feet up, she was forced to stop and rest by Cole above her. He had dug his hands into the steps and was pressed close against the trunk of the tree, panting.

Ryse was breathing hard herself, and she inhaled deeply. The tree’s scent was sweet—so sweet that many women she had known in Eldan City wore its essence. She closed her eyes and felt almost instinctively for the flow of the River.

Her eyebrows twitched.

The River was acting strangely.

The flow through the forest had been calm and steady all morning, but around the tree it swirled in a rush, building into a standing wave of thousands of souls on one side and then spilling around it in torrents when the volume grew too great. The effect was similar to the way the River responded to a powerful soulweaver. Ryse had never seen a tree, or anything but a human for that matter, cause an eddy like it.

When she opened her eyes again, she found that her chin had fallen to her chest and she was looking down. Her muscles jerked her closer to the tree. Below her, she could see Litnig and Quay, still climbing. The view was dizzying, but she loved that feeling, loved the rush that came with vertigo.

She smiled sheepishly. Cole’s feet were gone above her head. A look up showed him nearing the top of the steps, which disappeared when they reached the branches that formed the crown of the tree. Ryse could see a square platform built high in those branches, and a rope bridge as well, swinging over the wall to a matching platform on the other side. It wouldn’t be much longer to the top. Len had probably already reached it.