Soulwoven

Chapter Nineteen

~19~

Litnig Jin lay down, let his head sink into a warm pillow, and closed his eyes. The mattress beneath him had the soft, crunchy buoyancy of new straw. The savory scent of grilling sausages mingled with the florid smell of spring pouring through an open window near his head. His stomach was full and content, but he felt restless.

He opened his eyes and stared at the wall. The afternoon light cast pale shadows on it through the curtains over the window.

Litnig wanted to sleep, but more than that, he wanted the dream. It had been over a week since he’d had it, and he missed it—missed the excitement that came with it, the rush of trying to figure it out. It was important. He knew that with all his soul, but he still couldn’t figure out why.

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, buried his face in the pillow and let the scent of spring fill his mind. He tried to envision the disc, the clouds, the statues he had taken to calling “walkers”—

Nothing happened. He could imagine them, but it wasn’t real. He wasn’t there with them.

His leg slipped off the bed, and for a moment he felt like he was falling.

His eyes snapped open. His foot hit the floor and bounced. There was something to the falling—it was a necessary part of the dream, as if his consciousness was moving from wherever it normally resided to someplace else.

He focused on that and shut his eyes. The sensations of the world grew distant. The voices of the bustling city beyond the window quieted. Litnig’s limbs melted into the bed, and the fuzzy, inconstant spots of light he saw through his eyelids merged and melded into a soft, pink curtain. He became one with the world, or one apart from the world. He wasn’t sure which—wasn’t sure it even mattered.

His head started to spin, and he passed through the pink and in his mind’s eye saw himself strolling through the night sky, suspended over blackness. He walked upon a glassy, invisible floor, working ever closer to a black horizon where the stars ceased and he saw only darkness.

When he reached the edge, he didn’t stop. He didn’t even slow down. He just stepped into the void.

And he fell into the dream.

He didn’t fall for long. The disc rushed up from the black, and his body pivoted on its own and set him lightly down on his feet. His legs cushioned the blow as easily as if he weighed nothing at all.

The disc was unchanged. The squat Aleani walker and the tall, skinny one sat cross-legged next to the ashen pillars that bound their dark replicas. Their eyes were closed, their arms draped over their knees as though they were meditating. He could feel a vitality running through the disc, like it was humming for him. Like it was alive.

Litnig headed toward the Aleani walker. The light that leaked from it was pulsing softly, slowly, enticingly. He heard the shush-shush of his own breathing, felt warm air on the hairs of his arms.

The walker didn’t move. Its white dreadlocks flowed over its shoulders and into its lap.The thick, stony wrinkles of its clothes were as immobile as a statue’s. Its hands rested palm up on its knees, and its brows were creased and troubled. Woven into its dreadlocks were dozens of intricately carved beads.

Another lay by its foot.

Litnig picked it up. The bead was warm and smooth, like marble that had sat all day in the summer sun. Broad, straight-lined characters had been carved upon it.

He felt as if it belonged to him.

The bead grew warm between Litnig’s fingers, and a pleasant, soft feeling flooded his body. He closed his eyes. His sensations grew hazy and dim, and then a series of images filled his mind in slow, placid succession. Memories. Aleani memories.

The walker’s memories.

He lived them as they paraded through his mind, but he also stood apart from them and watched, as if a third party to his own life.

A stern-faced Aleaness yelled his name in anger and swung a broom at his face. He felt the crack of its connection, stumbled, hid hot tears behind his arms and scurried beneath a table. The image faded, and then he was clutching at her skirts while his hollow-eyed father herded a pair of oxen onto a small, ragged trail. Years passed. He grew tall and strong. His hair hung long and unbound, blew in the wind atop bright cliffs in the setting sun. Others processed below him with bells and dresses and dance and song. His first love, a chocolate-skinned, black-haired flamebonnet of an Aleaness, walked in the center of them, right out of his life.

Ryse? he thought, but the thought was outside of him, alien, not a part of the memory. He bit the skin from his thumb and sucked the blood and spat it out, and he swore an oath on it never to be timid in love again.

He left home, sent sheep trotting over green hills with a whistle and a yell and a stout staff, walked through the streets of cities he did not know and cursed humans twice his size who scarcely noticed him. In the midst of that throng of strangers, he saw a face he recognized, bright and warm and welcoming, and he remembered a forbidden desire. He lay in the feather bed of a foreign inn with a girl whose touch had been withheld from him. Her hands were soft on the skin of his back, her curls light on his face, her words velvet in his ear.

In the dead of winter not six months later, he awoke choking, surrounded by harsh orange light, hot air, and gray, acrid smoke. The timbers of his home hissed and spit with flame, and he blundered through crackling heat into the cold outdoors. A sharp, thick pain tore through his gut. His legs went out from under him. He looked down and saw an arrow, spotted blood in the snow. He gasped, and something came down above him with a crash, and that was all he knew.

Litnig opened his eyes. The bead had grown ice-cold in his hand. He could still feel the arrow in his gut. His heart thumped with heavy adrenaline, and the clouds of darkness beyond the disc swirled and spun themselves into tall black figures.

The Aleani walker opened its eyes. There was a deep, unsettled sadness in them, mixed with an undercurrent of long frustration and jealousy. Litnig recalled his feelings when Ryse had spoken with the soulweaver in the tree and felt the blood rise to his cheeks.

Compared to all that, the walker’s gaze seemed to say, What do you have to complain about?

It uncrossed its legs, leaned forward, and pressed Litnig’s forehead to the disc.

He woke to heavy darkness in the room he had gone to sleep in. His bed was still soft. His veins pulsed with a strange mixture of calmness and anxiety, sureness and fear. His brother snored across the room.

What—he wondered, but there was no point in asking the full question, even of himself. He didn’t know what the dream meant, nor the memories. He still couldn’t guess at what the walkers were, why they took such interest in him, or why he felt so close to them and why they never spoke.

A light flared in the hallway. A moment later, Quay Eldani stood wreathed in yellow and orange lamplight in the entrance of Litnig’s room.

“Wake up,” Quay said. The shadows on his face were deep and unnerving. “It’s time to go.”

Litnig looked out the window. The moon hadn’t risen yet. It was almost pitch black outside. “Isn’t—”

“We’re not taking the road,” Quay said.

Cole sat up. Litnig watched his brother and Quay stare at each other in the dim light.

And then Len appeared in the hallway behind the prince.

“A necromancer was spotted in the city two days ago,” the Aleani said. “We must take the tunnels.”

A cold weight settled in Litnig’s chest.

“Is that safe?” he heard his brother ask.

“It’s fast,” Quay said. His eyes were hard and dark as coal. “And safe enough.”

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