’Alright.’
’So how do I get in?’
Nothing happened.
Nathan waited, because it seemed reasonable to give it a moment. The screen sat there in the dark showing him the same four lines it had been showing him for the last minute.
"Sea of Souls," he said.
Nothing.
"Open Sea of Souls."
Nothing.
He tried it as a thought instead, which felt less stupid, and got the same result. He tried closing his eyes and reaching for it, whatever reaching for it meant. He tried picturing an ocean, on the theory that the name had to be pointing at something, and got nothing but a very clear mental image of a fish market he’d been to twice.
"Enter."
The screen did not move.
"Enter."
Nathan sat in the fork of a tree sixty feet in the air, bleeding through a bandage made of his own shirt, saying commands out loud to a piece of green light while nothing whatsoever happened.
He heard himself.
’This is what I’ve become in one day.’
He let his head fall back against the trunk.
’Fine. Keep it.’
’I’ll figure it out later.’
He dismissed the screen with a thought, which worked immediately and easily, and he found that irritating too.
The forest went on below him in every direction.
That was the real problem, and he made himself look at it properly. From up here he could see nothing but canopy, black on black under the moon, rolling out further than the light reached on all four sides. No roofs. No smoke. No road, no field, no seam of firelight anywhere along the horizon.
They had not dumped him in the treeline behind the district.
They had taken him a long way in.
’Deep,’ he thought. ’How deep?’
He had no idea. That was the honest answer. He didn’t know which direction the city was, how many miles they’d carried him, or whether the cart they’d used had gone for an hour or for six. He’d been in a sack with his throat open. Nobody had provided him with an itinerary.
’Morning, then.’
At night, this place belonged to whatever had been snarling at him an hour ago. In daylight most of it would sleep, and he’d be able to see further than eight feet, and he could pick a direction and hold it.
’Get out of the trees. Find open ground. Work out where I am from there.’
’Then home.’
The word did something unpleasant in his chest and he moved past it.
Nathan climbed down.
Not all the way. He went about forty feet, until he found a branch that ran out thick and level from the trunk, the kind you could lie along without balancing. It was easily twice the width of the one he’d been sitting on.
’That one’ll hold.’
He wedged his back into the crook where it met the trunk, hooked one leg over, and let his eyes close.
He’d meant to stay half awake.
The Soul Essence had put the warmth back into him, but there was a difference between having your strength returned and not being tired, and Nathan had been thrown by a wolf, torn open four times, and had climbed a tree one-handed. His Stamina was three. He was not built for any of this yet.
He was asleep in under a minute.
CRACK.
Nathan’s eyes opened on grey daylight and the sensation of falling.
He had time to register the branch coming apart under his back and absolutely no time to do anything about it. He went through the canopy in a shower of leaves and small wood, caught one limb across the stomach that folded him in half and knocked the air clean out of him, spun, clipped another with his shoulder, and came off the last one entirely.
He hit the forest floor face first.
The impact went through him from chin to heel. Leaves and black dirt went into his open mouth, packed against his teeth and down the back of his tongue, and he lay there for a second in absolute stillness with his cheek in the mould and one arm folded underneath him.
Then he started coughing.
Nathan pushed himself up onto his elbows and spat, and spat again, and dragged his tongue across his teeth and spat a third time, and there was still dirt in there. There was dirt in his nose. There was a piece of bark down the front of what remained of his tunic and something wet in his hair.
He sat back on his heels.
He looked up at the tree.
Forty feet above him, the thick, safe, sensible branch he had chosen because it would hold his weight was hanging off the trunk in a long white splinter, still swaying.
Nathan stared at it.
"Right," he said.
His voice came out flat and full of grit.
He spat one more time.
’Yesterday morning I had a bed.’
’It wasn’t a good bed. It had a bar across the middle that got you in the back if you rolled over. I want it so badly I could scream.’
’And I’d still be in it, if a man in a crown hadn’t decided he’d rather be certain.’
He got up.
His body informed him, all at once and in great detail, of everything that had happened to it since yesterday. The claw lines across his ribs had gone stiff and pulled when he straightened. His hip was one enormous bruise. His back cracked. And his left forearm, when he flexed the fingers, sent something hot and grinding up to the elbow that made him stop and breathe through his nose for a moment.
He checked the bandage. It had held. The leaves underneath had gone black and the whole thing smelled wrong, but nothing was running out of it.
’Good enough.’
Nathan picked the river stone up out of the leaves where it had fallen with him, shoved it back through his belt, and started walking.
He walked for a long time.
There was no path. There was barely a direction. He had come out of the tree with no idea which way anything was, so he did the only thing that seemed sensible and picked the way the trees looked thinner, and every time the canopy opened up even slightly he turned toward it.
The forest did not make it easy.
Roots came up through the leaf litter at ankle height, hidden, and caught him four separate times. Thorn scrub grew in low sprawling patches he had to go around. Twice he came to ground that dropped away into a gully and had to climb down and up the other side, and the second time his left arm gave out halfway and he finished the climb on his right elbow with his face pressed into the dirt.
The light came down green and dim and told him nothing about where the sun was.
His stomach had stopped growling and started aching instead, a low constant pull under his ribs that got worse when he thought about it, so he tried not to think about it. He had not eaten since the morning before the ceremony. Two days now, near enough.
He passed a bush with small dark berries on it and stood looking at them for a full minute.
’You don’t know what those are.’
’You’d be poisoning yourself in a forest with no water and one working arm.’
He walked on.
By midday, or what he assumed was midday, he had started talking to himself.
"Thinner," he said, pushing through a stand of saplings. "Trees are thinner. That means something. That means the edge of something."
It did not appear to mean the edge of anything.
He kept going anyway, because the alternative was sitting down, and he had a fairly clear sense that if he sat down properly, with his back against something, he was not going to get up again.
Then the light changed.
Nathan stopped.
Ahead of him, through the last few trunks, the green gloom broke up into something pale and open. Real light. Wide light, coming down from directly overhead the way it does when there’s nothing in the way of it.
He went forward faster.
The undergrowth got thicker right at the edge, a solid wall of bramble and low growth all fighting for the light, and he shoved into it and through it with his good arm up over his face while thorns opened new lines across his forearms and neck.
He came out the other side and stopped dead.
Open ground.
A wide slope of grass falling away in front of him, yellow with late summer, and above it an enormous pale sky with the sun sitting well past its highest point. Air moved across it. Actual moving air, with nothing rotting in it.
Nathan stood there and pulled in one breath, and then another, and something in his chest came loose.
’Out.’
’I’m out.’
He wanted to sit down in the grass and stay there for a week.
Then he heard the voices.
They were off to his left, past a stand of trees at the bottom of the slope where the ground flattened out.
Two men. Arguing.
Nathan dropped into a crouch on instinct, which sent a bolt through his hip, and edged along the treeline until he could see.
There was a carriage on a road.
The road was narrow and rutted and clearly little used, but it was a road, cut through the grass and running off around the shoulder of the hill in both directions. The carriage sat on it at an angle, listing hard to one side, and even from here Nathan could see why. The rear left wheel had gone into a rut and come off its pin, and the whole axle had dropped into the dirt.
It was a merchant’s carriage. Covered bed, canvas lashed down over a load, two horses standing in the traces with their heads down and their tails going.
One man was crouched at the broken wheel with his sleeves rolled up. The other was standing over him with his arms spread, and his voice carried up the slope in pieces.
"...told you. I told you at the fork. I said take the upper road."
"The upper road adds a day."
"A day! Oh, a day. Well. We’ve been here since morning, so by my count we’ve saved ourselves nothing at all, and now we’re sat out in the open on the Kestrel road at the end of the season, and if you want to explain to me exactly how—"
"Would you pick up the other end."
"I’m making a point."
"Make it holding the axle."
Nathan crouched in the brambles and watched them.
His first instinct was to stay exactly where he was.
He looked at himself, and it was not a good look. He was barefoot on one side where a boot had come apart in the gully. His tunic was in strips. He was crusted head to foot in dried blood, most of it not his own, with a filthy leaf-packed bandage on one arm and a rock shoved through his belt.
’I look like something that came out of the forest to eat them.’
But they were merchants.
Merchants moved between towns. Merchants knew every road on the map and exactly how far it was to the end of each one, and they were standing next to a wheel they clearly could not fix alone.
’They’d know where I am.’
’They’d know which way the city is.’
His stomach pulled at him again, and he thought about the canvas lashed down over the back of that carriage, and what merchants carried, and what merchants ate on the road.
Nathan pushed himself up out of the brambles.
’Just directions.’
’Ask, get an answer, and go.’
He started down the slope toward them.