Chapter Seven Knowing Death
The next few days passed quickly as they traveled through the mountains still surrounded by dense forest. This next leg of the journey took a week, and each day, in accordance with their bargain, the Prince was given a new freedom.
The first day, as promised, the Exiles allowed him to go about the journey with the hood of the over-large, fetid brown cloak lowered.
They also removed his gag.
“That wasn’t part of the deal,” he protested.
“How else are you going to warn us of impending doom?” the girl asked, tone breezy but eyes staring daggers at him.
“Fair point,” he said, and then, taking himself and her completely by surprise, he smiled his biggest, most winning smile, just to make her angry.
It worked. She whirled around, threw his reins to Tomaz, swearing and cursing all “shadow-born Princes,” and disappeared into the trees.
The Prince, half expecting Tomaz to dunk him in whatever body of water happened to be closest at hand, eyed the big man warily, but the giant only shrugged.
“You both take yourselves too seriously,” he said vaguely, before mounting his stallion and following in the same direction, the long lead of the Prince’s mount now tied to the saddle of his charger.
As the Prince had promised, he made no trouble along the way. All he did, and all he wanted to do, in truth, was look at his surroundings as they traveled through the forest.
“There’re so many,” he muttered to himself.
He was looking at the trees, noticing all of the different types of bark, the short trees, the tall trees, the wide trees, the trees with needle-like leaves.
Near midday they stopped briefly, and both Tomaz and the girl went out looking for whatever it was they used to find their way, leaving the Prince alone in a small clearing.
Alone, but not truly so, for the Prince knew neither Exile was far enough away that he had any chance of escape.
So he sat there on his horse and reveled in the crisp, clear air, so different from the thick haze of Lucien, and made a vow to himself that once he had received his Inheritance he would make time to come back here of his own volition, just to explore.
“Pine,” rumbled Tomaz.
The Prince jumped, startled. The big man seemed to have simply materialized behind him.
He had no idea how Tomaz, at least when he wasn’t mounted on his enormous charger, could move so silently.
It was almost like the way Guardians, the personal guards of the Children and the Empress, moved.
At the thought of this bearded, rough-and-tumble giant with the uniform and manners of a Guardian, the Prince couldn’t help but smile.
Tomaz chuckled and thumped him on the back, thinking they were sharing the same joke, and the Prince would have been knocked off his horse had he not still been tied on.
This, of course, only made Tomaz rumble-chuckle harder, sounding for all the world like a swarm of bees, though the Prince’s own smile turned to a grimace.
“No need to fear, little princeling, it’s only me. Here, look.”
He pointed a hand the size of the Prince’s head at one of the trees. It was a tall one, and it had wide-flung branches toward the bottom that got smaller and shorter as they ascended. It was the one with green needle-like leaves, and there were quite a few of them around.
“Pine. It’s a pine tree. You can tell by the needle leaves and the smell, as well as the seeds they produce. Pinecones.”
Tomaz swung his arm to the ground, bending quite dexterously at the waist, and picked up a large brown thing.
He straightened and in the same motion tossed the whatever-it-was to the Prince, who caught it easily despite his bonds.
At first, he was revolted that the man had given him something that had been on the dirt floor of this forest corridor…
and then the revulsion and beginnings of anger evaporated and turned to rueful laughter.
The Death Watch had tried to kill him; he was being held hostage by two of the Exiled Kindred; he was living in a constant state of fatigue and hunger; he slept every night on the ground, ate with his hands, and hadn’t bathed in over two weeks.
But apparently what really bothered him was that the big man had tossed him something dirty.
If he wasn’t careful, by the time he returned to the Fortress he’d be worse than Geofred, who had to have everything cleaned thrice before he’d so much as be in the same room with it.
He examined the cone. It was a decent size, perhaps as large as the Prince’s fist, though it had looked no bigger than a walnut in the big man’s hand. It had some spiny bits that he tried not to handle.
He looked back up at Tomaz, eyebrows raised, waiting for the rest of the conversation, the true conversation, to begin, but the big man simply smiled pleasantly at him, waiting for a response.
For a long moment, the Prince stared at the big man, and then looked back down at the pinecone blankly.
Was the cone a message? He turned it over in his hands.
Nothing. No scrap of parchment, no hidden coding or anything of that sort.
Not that he’d expected the big man to be clever enough to come up with something like that, but then why had he handed him the pinecone under the pretense of… ?
And then, slowly, the realization sank in that the big man was talking about nothing more than pinecones.
The Prince had never had any real companions in the Fortress, never had anyone who simply wanted to talk to him because they felt like talking to him.
The Most High whom he associated with were fed lies and double-talk with their wet-nurses’ milk, and nothing they said or did was ever to be taken at face value.
Anyone else was beneath his station, aside from his brothers and sisters who were even worse than the Most High.
Yet here, in the middle of the wilderness, an outlaw was trying to be friendly by teaching him the names of trees.
This wasn’t a prelude to anything; they were just talking. About seeds and… things.
He looked back at the big man, one eyebrow quirked questioningly.
“Pine?” he asked. He watched Tomaz warily, waiting to be mocked for mispronouncing the word or not knowing it to begin with. Such was the way the other Children and the Visigony had taught him government, industry, and economics.
“Very good, princeling,” the giant said with a huge smile, for all the world looking like the proud parent of a precocious infant. His large, square white teeth shone from the thicket of his beard as he pointed at another tree, this one taller than all the others.
“Redwood. You can tell by the quality of the bark as well as the height.”
“Tomaz!” the girl called from up ahead. “I need your opinion on something!”
Tomaz reached over and grabbed the reins of the Prince’s horse, unhooked them from the black charger’s saddle, and roped them to a tree trunk. He then swiftly remounted his charger, the Prince watching stoically until the big man clapped him on the back.
“Hopefully soon I won’t have to do that,” he rumbled, and gave the Prince another smile, this one small and conspiratorial.
“Right,” the Prince responded, with as much of a smile as he could manage.
The big man rode off in the direction of the girl’s voice, leaving the Prince to stew in his thoughts.
That night, he went to sleep feeling bold and excited that his plan was working. If they let their guard drop a little more, then by the time they reached Banelyn he’d just walk away. He rolled over and closed his eyes.
But as soon as he did, a feeling that squirmed in the pit of his stomach like a pod of eels made him queasy, and he was forced to sit up abruptly.
He breathed deeply for a moment, and the feeling passed, leaving a strange hollowness in its wake.
He lay back down, but sleep did not come to him, and he spent another restless night looking at the stars he never would have seen if he hadn’t been forced out of Lucien.
As the next few days passed, Tomaz continued to give the Prince impromptu lessons on the various species of flora and fauna they passed throughout the day.
After a while, they even began to strike up a strange kind of conversation that involved various barbed comments at one another.
The Prince came to realize that this was banter, the kind of friendly conversation that happened between the servants of the Fortress.
It was strange to him, but his stiff and awkward attempts seemed enough for Tomaz, and as time passed, the Prince realized that he liked the big man, and that in another life maybe they would have been good companions.
But when he thought that, he felt again the queasiness of that first night, and so he shoved those thoughts aside, reminding himself that he was only using this Exile to make his way back to the Empire.
He was glad, however, that he and Tomaz were making progress, because his attempts to make any kind of amiable connection with the girl were failing miserably.
His first attempt had been on the third day after the Death Watchman attack, when he’d noticed the girl trying to lift a log out of the campsite they’d found.
Tomaz was out scouting the area, and so she was struggling on her own.
The Prince, seeing his opportunity, came forward as far as his bonds would allow.
“Here, let me help, eshendai,” he said, reaching out to grab the other end of the log with his tied hands, using the title that Tomaz used in place of her name.
Her reaction was so sudden and violent that he would never have predicted it. Within the space of a second, he found himself on his back, staring up from the ground into the girl’s face, which was contorted into an ugly mask of righteous anger.