Cinnabar Shadows

"Don't worry."

Zvain had finished drinking. Orekel drank next, with Ruari's permission, then Ruari himself drank his fill. When he'd finished, water was still bubbling in the hollow, faster than they could drink it down. It spilled over the top and seeped across the soles of his sandals while Mahtra stood and stared.

"You better drink," Ruari advised. "I can't do that again until sundown, and we don't have anything to carry water in."

The boy and the dwarf didn't need a second invitation, but Ruari stayed on the opposite side of the hollow, his fists propped against his hips.

"After all this time, Mahtra—after all we've been through —do you truly think we're going to laugh or run away screaming?"

"You might," she replied with that smooth honesty that left more questions than answers in Ruari's mind.

The half-elf shook his head and lowered his arms. "Have it your way, then," he said and started walking. He'd gone several paces when she called out:

"Wait!"

Ruari turned around as she lowered her hands from the back of her head, bringing the mask with them. The mask was a good idea, he decided immediately. Her face was so unusual, he couldn't keep from staring. Mahtra had no nose to speak of, just two dark curves matched against each other. She didn't have much of a chin, either, or lips. Her mouth was tiny—about the right size for those red beads she liked so much—and lined with teeth he could see from where he stood. Yet for all its strangeness, Mahtra's face wasn't deformed. With her eyes and skin, an ordinary human face would have been deformed. Mahtra's face was her own.

"Different," Ruari acknowledged aloud. "Maybe different enough to warrant a mask—but it's your face—the face that belongs to the rest of you."

"Ugly," she retorted, and he saw that her mouth did not shape her voice and words.

"No—Pavek's..." He sighed and began again. "Pavek was ugly."

"Akashia said no. She said he wasn't an ugly man."

Another sigh. "Kashi said that, did she?" It was too late to consider what Kashi might have meant. "What did she say about me?"

"Nothing. Nothing at all—but we weren't talking about you."

"Take your time," he said to Mantra, rubbing his forearm, though that wasn't the part of him that hurt. "I'll wait just up here. We can let the other two get a bit ahead."

Ruari found himself a rock that gave Mahtra her privacy and him a good view of Zvain and Orekel as they continued up the gap. He took out Pavek's knife, and wondered whose black hair had been braided around the hilt. Not Kashi's. Not anyone Ruari had ever heard Pavek mention. Maybe they would have gotten their affections straightened out if they'd had the time; maybe not. One thing for certain: he'd made a fool of himself trying to capture Kashi's attention and affection when Pavek had already secured it.

Mahtra reappeared with her mask in place, and together they continued up the gap, easily catching up with Zvain and Orekel. The sun came around in the middle of the afternoon, baking their bodies into numb silence. The three lowlanders—who'd never seen a mountain up close, much less climbed one—thought the gap would never end, but it did as the sun was setting. As green faded to black, they got their first look at a verdant forest that stretched ahead of them as far as they could see.

For Ruari, the sight was a waking dream. Telhami's grove in Quraite remembered forests and offered the hope that a forest might return. This—this vastness that was everything the barren Tablelands had ceased to be, was Telhami's hopes fulfilled, Quraite's promise kept. He would have sat there staring at it all night, except the mountain cooled faster than the barrens did, and he was shivering before he knew it.

It wasn't long until they were huddled together against the rocks, trying to keep warm and not succeeding. Orekel said it was too dangerous to descend the mountain without sunlight to show them the way. There was nothing with which to build a fire and though Ruari's druidry could wring water and a bland but nutritious paste out of the cooling air, he knew no spell that would provide them with warmth.

Pavek might have known such a spell. Pavek claimed to have memorized as many of the spellcraft scrolls as he'd been able to read in the Urik city archives. But it seemed more likely that no one in the long history of the parchec tablelands had bothered to formulate a spell for heat, so they took turns in the middle of their huddle. When dawn reached over the mountain crest, it found them stiff, sore, and still weary.

The descent into the forest was harder on their legs than yesterday's climb through the gap had been. Ruari discovered new muscles along his shins and across the tops of his feet. It would have been easier if his body had simply gone numb, but he felt every step from his heel to the base of his skull. He had no idea how the other three were doing; his world began and ended with the aches of his body.

When Orekel asked to see the map, Ruari dug it out of his sleeve without a second thought.

"Son, this here, this here's not a map, son."

"I never said it was," Ruari countered, smiling wearily and looking for something to sit on that wouldn't be impossible to get up from afterward.

Ruari eased himself onto the trunk of a fallen tree. He wished he didn't hurt so much. The forest was a miraculous place—the promise every druid made in his grove fulfilled to the greatest imaginable measure. There were birds and insects to complement the trees, and gray-bottomed clouds in the distance bearing the promise of real, not magic-induced, rain. The land quivered and crawled with riotous life, more life in a handful of moist, crumbly dirt than in a day's walking across the barren Tablelands.

And Ruari couldn't appreciate it. Not only did he hurt too much, he wasn't here to immerse himself in druidry. He'd come to the forest to find a black tree, to find Kakzim and bring him to justice. For Pavek. All for Pavek, because it was Kakzim's fault that Pavek was dead. He'd take Kakzim's head back to Urik and hurl it at Hamanu's palace. Then he'd go home to Urik and plant a tree for his friend.

"Son—" Orekel tugged on his sleeve. "Son, I say we have a problem."

"You can't help us," Ruari said slowly. "That's the problem, isn't it? You can't find the black tree. All that talk in Ject about halfling treasure you hadn't brought out because you'd gotten 'tempted,' that was just wind in the air. You're no different than Mady: you thought we had a map we weren't smart enough to keep or follow."

Orekel removed his cap. "You put a mite too fine a point on things, son. The black tree, she's in this forest, and she's got treasure trove buried 'neath her roots. She's not two-day's walk from here, and that's a fact. But this here—" He held out the map. "Now, you don't rightly speak Halfling, so you're not likely to read it much either. So, you got to believe me, son, this here's not a map to the black tree; it's more a map to your place, I reckon, to Urik—that's where you come from, now, isn't it?"

Ruari tried to remember if he or Zvain or Mahtra had mentioned Urik since they'd met the dwarf, but his memory refused to cooperate. Maybe they had and Orekel was playing them for fools, or maybe he could read those marks, one of which spelled Urik. Either way, Ruari was too tired for deception.

"Around Urik, yes."

"Always best to be honest, son," Orekel advised, and suddenly his eyes seemed much sharper, his movements, crisper. "Now, maybe we can solve our problem—you being a druid and all—maybe you don't need a map to find the black tree. Like as not, you can just kneel down on the ground the way you did up on the crest and mumble a few words that'll show you the way."

Ruari said no with a shake of his head.