Exile

VIII

Wren slept much longer than she had intended: it was already full daylight by the time she woke. Her eyes ached. Rising out of sleep was like struggling up and out of cloying mud. Her body and mind, still enfeebled by her use of the entelech, wanted no part of it. This was why even the strongest Clevers were so miserly in the use of their powers. It could be a crippling business even when it went well. If it went badly it could be fatal. Or worse.

‘Still alive,’ Wren murmured, addressing the School, the Clade, the entirety of the Hommetic kingdom. The whole world, entelechs and all, in a way.

There were no tracks or trails that Wren could make out as she struggled northwards. She did see an occasional sign of human presence. An old campsite, a few felled trees. Slashes cut into a pine to harvest resin. But no paths, as far as she could tell. That would have been too easy.

Nobody had been able to tell her precisely where Lame Ammenor might be found. The closest she had ever come to directions was ‘Over the Hervent from Hamming Ferry. A couple of days into the wilds from there’.

She followed the narrow valley of a stream into a fold in the hills. Gloomy woods lay across the slopes. She had to rest often. Blisters on her feet broke and bled. Birds she did not know chittered in the trees. Far, far away she heard a wolf howling for a time. No others of its kind answered it, and she wondered what chance she had of finding someone to guide her if even the wolves travelled alone here.

In the afternoon she wearied of the oppressive trees and climbed up onto an open ridge above them. She sat there on the wiry grass, a blanket wrapped around her, and ate shrivelled little brambleberries which she had gathered on the way.

Squinting into the glare of the low sun, she saw something off in the distance, back towards the river, that made her pause. A fleck of blue which moved for a moment among dark trees and then was lost to sight.

She spat half-chewed berries from her mouth, slapped her thigh in frustration. The Clade, across the river. Fanatics and fools, chasing a single errant Clever into the wilderness. It was beyond all wisdom and sense that they should still be coming after her, into this land where there was no food or shelter and where the Huluk Kur roamed. But perhaps other things drove the Clade than wisdom. Very well. Other things than wisdom or sense or caution must drive her too if she was to finally escape the clutches of her past and her fears. She must go higher, faster, away into places even the Clade would not follow her.

Black forests swallowed her up. She stumbled through them without care for the scratches and thumps from branches and coarse trunks. There was no point, to her way of thinking, in trying to hide her trail. She was already weak, already slow. If she delayed, the Clade would be on her in no time. Her best chance was to simply go further than they were willing to go; make herself more trouble than she was worth to catch.

Her body resisted her, the terrain resisted her. It felt, in truth, as if all the world was resisting her. Conspiring to snatch away the faint glimmer of a hopeful future she had glimpsed on the horizon. If the Clade took her now… to have come so close and be brought up short would be unbearable.

So Wren fought her way through the woods, out onto rock slopes, and down into tangled thickets once more. Fell to her knees beside a tumbling stream there among the trees and scooped up water to her mouth. Her hands trembled, putting circles of ripples into the water she cupped in them. She was breathing hard, almost panting, and still could not seem to haul in enough air to put any strength into her limbs. She closed her eyes and listened, hearing nothing but the gurgling of the water and her own rasping breaths. The darkness was restful. She leaned against a tree, just for a moment.

And was snapped awake by the sound of a branch breaking. It was sharp, like the cracking of a whip, and not far away. She rolled around the tree and sheltered behind it, peering out. Nothing moved. No other sound came. She trusted neither the silence nor the stillness, so she waited.

Blue among the trees again. Not distant this time, but close. Close enough that she could make out the pale hair of the man who wore it. He was picking his way through the forest, moving across Wren’s view. Not coming straight for her at least. They had lost her trail perhaps, and now drifted through the dense undergrowth in search of it, or of her.

She breathed out. Would they never stop, these hounds of the School? Would they hunt her all the way to the ice in the north? She could not believe that, and therefore she could not believe that all hope was lost. And if they did, if nothing else would shake them loose, there was still the entelech. She did not want to kill again, but she would if the choice was between that and her own death or incarceration.

The man had disappeared from view. No others came into sight, though she knew they must be here somewhere, not far away. There had been six or seven or eight of them in that boat on the Hervent. Even if not all had come ashore, there would be at least three or four of them hunting her. No one in their right mind would come here on their own. Wren smiled to herself. No one in their right mind except a Clever with nothing left to lose.

She pushed herself away from the tree and went north.

It was not possible to move both silently and invisibly. The woods gave her cover, but betrayed her passage with snapping twigs, crunching needles. When she ventured across open ground there was no sound, but her mind quailed at the exposure. How could anyone fail to see a woman scurrying across these bare slopes?

That was just where they did see her in the end. As she staggered over a hard rock field, her feet pulsing with pain, she heard a single shout some way behind her. She glanced back and saw two of the Clade coming out onto the same wide waste-ground. Not hobbling and struggling as she did, but running. A part of her wanted to weep at the sight. The greater part was not done yet.

The slope steepened and turned. She rounded a rocky outcrop that took her out of her pursuers’ view. Crags above her which could not be climbed. She limped on. Open rock ahead of her, patched with snow, rising to the north. She began to reach for the entelech, bereft of other choices, knowing it might wreck and ravage her in her enfeebled state. Beneath her, down a steep short scree, a hollow choked with little knotted trees and bushes.

She heard footsteps and stones tumbling behind her. They would be around that outcrop and onto her in moments. She stopped, and began to turn. She set her staff to the ground as she did so, pushing herself around with it. Its heel slipped on smooth rock and shot out into space. It took her weight with it and she had neither the strength nor balance to stop herself.

Wren went sliding and rolling down the scree. Stones battered her and tore at her clothes. She careened downwards in a shower of pebbles, plunging towards the thicket of scrub below. The sound was deafening and seemed to hurt as much as the blows to her knees and elbows and back.

She fell amongst wizened pines and thorns that gouged at her face. The impact winded and dizzied her. She stared up through obscuring needles and twigs. Three Clade men were up there at the top of the scree, staring down. They were pointing and exchanging curt words. She did not think they could see her now, but they knew where she was.

There were fragments of bark and stone dust in her mouth. She spat them out, and even that effort hurt. She wanted to move. Her limbs refused. She wanted to call the entelech to her. Her mind and will floundered as precious moments flickered by. The Clade began to descend.

Then the world seemed to blur and shift. A mist passed across it, shapes flowed. At first Wren thought it was her own faltering senses that were tricking her. Then she dimly saw the Clade men hesitating, turning this way and that. It looked as if some thickness of the air had taken hold of their heads and mantled them in mist. She saw one reach out an arm as a man might do in darkness or blindness. Another turned and scrambled back up the scree. He blundered over the loose rocks and began to struggle back the way they had come. All the while, the crags above seemed to ripple and distort. The clouds in the sky rolled and coiled and ran like milk.

This was a Clever, Wren knew. This was an entelech playing across her senses and her mind, just as it did those of the Clade. They had lost her, her fell pursuers. They had lost their grip upon the world itself, for a time at least. She would do the same if she lingered here.

She crawled and crept her way through the undergrowth, heedless now of whatever noise she made. Even that sounded muffled and fluid in her ears. She emerged on the far side of the thicket and went on hands and knees up the slope of the bowl.

Only one of the Clade men was still visible to her by then. He was reeling like a drunken oaf, wandering away over lichen-cloaked rocks. She blinked again and again, as if that might clear the mist from her eyes and the strangeness from the trembling world. It did not entirely. When she looked north though, she could see clearly enough to just make out a far distant figure receding. Ascending into a higher band of trees. Trails of mist reached out from him and they lingered after he was gone from sight. They pointed the way on and up, into the forest.

Wren got stiffly to her feet and set out to follow him and that trail of fading mist. Her feet still hurt. She limped. That seemed fitting, for she was almost certain that, as he had disappeared, the faint, faraway man had been limping too.