Bramble

WALKING WITH THE hunter was like stalking deer. Bramble had to move stealthily but also quickly. The hunter was entirely silent; no footfall, no rustle of grass or branches. Bramble had roamed the woods all her life, but still, inevitably, she brushed aside grass stems which sighed, or occasionally placed her foot on a twig which groaned under her. Each time, the hunter flicked her a look that was impossible to decipher. Scorn? Disbelief? Astonishment?

They moved through the darkening Forest so fast they were almost running. Her skills came back to her, but she would never equal the hunter in stealth. It seemed to realize this and slowed its pace, just a little.

Bramble knew they were traveling further north, but she asked no questions. She had taken the leap and was in midair; she just hoped there was firm footing on the other side.

As the night grew darker, the hunter realized that Bramble was having more trouble following it. “Soon,” it promised, and went more slowly. They came, after a while, to a space where a huge tree grew. Some kind of conifer, that was all she could tell in the darkness, but enormous, its trunk larger around than Gorham’s house in Pless. Much larger. The tree looked almost as wide as the Pless Moot Hall, and its upper branches disappeared into the stars. As they ducked down to pass under its branches the faint light disappeared altogether. Bramble stood still, her head just below its lowest limbs, lost in a sighing black that moved around her as the wind soughed.

She wanted to ask where they were, but knew it was a foolish question. They were in the Forest, they were underneath an old tree. Any other answer was a human answer, one the hunter would not know.

“Come,” it said. It took her by the arm and led her to the trunk of the tree, a journey that took some minutes.

They stood between huge writhing roots and the hunter said, “Do you remember where you want to go?”

“Um . . .” Bramble thought about it. She had to be very clear about this. “I remember it in the past.”

“Soooo,” the hunter said, and listened to the Forest. “Do you remember it clearly? Tell it to the Forest.”

“It’s a cave,” Bramble said. “In the Western Mountains. A cave with drawings on the wall from long, long ago.”

The hunter sniffed. “All times are long ago,” it said. “But we cannot go to a cave. That is the domain of the stone-eaters. I cannot take you there.”

“But —”

It ignored her interruption. “Do you remember outside the cave?”

The memory flooded back: being in Red’s body, watching Acton ride up the slope toward the cave. Watching him disappear into the trees. Into what had been the Forest, in those days when the Forest had covered the whole country. The hunter hissed with satisfaction.

“So. You remember. The Forest remembers. It will take you there. The journey will take much time and no time.”

“How?”

“The Forest remembers. We will go to your memory and then come back to your moment, this moment you are tied to so strongly.”

Bramble half understood, but only half. I’m still in midair, she thought. She felt, immediately, the exhilaration of the chase. The hunter smiled, showing sharp teeth, as though it too felt the surge of excitement.

“Put your hand on the tree, prey,” it said. “Its roots go back far. Very far.”

Bramble reached out and placed her palm on the crinkled bark. Just as before starting a chase, all her senses seemed more alert. She felt the faint breeze on her cheek, heard owls and, high above, a flock of smaller birds. The small songbirds were migrating to their summer breeding grounds. They always flew at night, to avoid the hawks: black caps, warblers, swallows. Their wings flurried the night air, there were so many of them. Bramble could feel the tiny shiver along the tree as the owl launched itself from the upper branches in pursuit of the flock. Was it possible that she had really felt that? The night shifted and seethed around her, full of life. She could smell something: cedar? A strong, heady scent that dizzied her.

“Take a step forward,” said the hunter. She did, and it was broad day.

She stared at the hunter. It leaned casually against the tree, its elegant bones jutting in the wrong places. She had been right, it was a kind of cedar tree, although a type she had never seen before. Her instinct told her never to show weakness to the hunter, so she disguised her disorientation.

“I thought cedars needed warm places to grow,” she said.

The hunter shrugged. “Not this one.”

They stepped away from the trunk. More than the light had changed. The tree seemed much smaller. It was, surely, only a young tree. Even allowing for the magnifying effects of night, Bramble was sure it had been huge before.

“We’re in the past,” she said.

“Not in your past yet,” the hunter said reprovingly, as though she had been stupid. “There are more steps to that memory. Come.”

It set off through the Forest at a slower pace than the night before. Almost strolling. “No hurry now,” it said.

“Why not?” Bramble was concerned that the question might sound like a weakness, but she had to know. The whole point of this was that she didn’t have any time to waste.

It listened to the Forest, and lost the disdainful look on its face, as though it had been chastised. “We travel in the past,” it said as though explaining to a child. “So no time is lost in your moment. Then we return to your moment. I told you.”

Bramble wondered how far back they had come. A hundred years? Five hundred? She felt light-hearted and light-headed. There was no task waiting for her here, and no grief. Maryrose was not yet dead. There was no one being slaughtered — at least, not more than there had always been, as the warlords extended their territory. The thought sobered her. She had seen too much death recently to be flippant about it, even five hundred years in the past.

The hunter slipped through the Forest and Bramble took off her boots and followed it, barefoot as it was barefoot, treading where it trod, trying to see with its eyes. There was no difference between this Forest and the one they had been in last night. It renewed itself eternally and time, to it, Bramble realized, was a matter of concentration, of where it put its attention. There was no present, no past, perhaps no future. Just the Forest.

The sense of timelessness was a gift from the Forest, she thought, as keeping the mosquitoes away had been a gift from the Lake. A gift to the Kill Reborn. Bramble wondered fleetingly if they would have done as much for Beck, if he had made the same journey. Then she thought, with a little satisfaction: the hunter would have killed Beck. She knew that she had been saved from fear because she had already been dead, had experienced the death-in-life for so long before becoming the Kill Reborn. Beck would not have had that toughening, and he would have feared, and died. It was all the roan’s doing.

For the first time since his death, she could think of him with simple gratitude untouched by guilt. Perhaps seeing his death reflected in the eyes of the Well of Secrets was responsible, but she thought it more likely because of all the death she had seen, all the grief she had shared, while watching Acton’s life. Everyone dies. What matters is the life shared beforehand.

But, just as she had learned acceptance through living other people’s grief, she had also learned fear. Her body had learned what it felt like to be afraid; had learned how fine the line was between excitement and terror. So here she was, with a creature not human, who yearned to kill her, who needed in some way to kill her, in a landscape full of wolf and bear and sudden dangers, in a past she had no way of escaping. Her body wanted to be afraid, as Elric had been afraid, as Baluch had, waiting for Sebbi to die. But she refused. To understand fear was a good thing. The knowledge might make her kinder, she thought. But to let it fill her, let it take over, would lead to more than death at the hunter’s knife. It would mean losing herself, the self that would survive death and go on to rebirth.

So she looked at the unfamiliar Forest, at the undergrowth which could conceal anything, and laughed, and the hunter laughed with her, a deep belly laugh.

The days went past as they walked the Forest, and Bramble let them go without counting them. They had not come back exactly in the year; it was full summer, and the best time to be wandering under the green shade.

They stopped occasionally to find food for Bramble. The hunter didn’t seem to need food, only a sip of blood from each creature it killed, but it did need that, although not, perhaps, the way she needed to drink. It showed her how to stand so still that the deer would come up and surround her and she could reach out and plunge her knife into a throat.

“A moment,” it said. “Just pause a moment for the fear to come before you thrust. Then you will be cleansed.”

But she wasn’t cleansed, just the opposite, so she left that to the hunter, after the first time, because it seemed calmer, happier, after a kill. Although it might be covered in blood afterward, the blood vanished immediately, with a little shiver in the light so that the hunter became momentarily hard to see. A ripple in time? Bramble wondered, but didn’t comment on anything except the excellence of the hunt.

“It is my purpose,” it said simply, gutting and butchering the carcase of a fallow deer for her with swift, beautiful strokes of its black rock knife.

She asked it no questions about its name, or its life, or anything not directly related to their path. The need to know would be seen as a weakness, she was sure. An indication of fear. She remembered too well the feeling of its knife at her throat. Then, she hadn’t been afraid; now, she had a task to complete, which made it harder to face death without regret. She owed it to Acton to find his bones. Let him be a hero in death the way he had wanted to be in life but wasn’t, quite.

Although she guarded always against showing any fear, Bramble was happier than she could remember being except for when she was racing the roan. This was where she belonged.

She found blueberries and raspberries as they walked, collected greens and wild carrots and onions, found tiny, sweet plums and small black cherries. The hunter could find anything Bramble wanted, but she was determined to feed herself. She had done it hundreds of times before, after all. As the days went past, the hunter seemed to acquire some respect for her knowledge of plants. They seemed irrelevant to it; not needing to eat anything except death, plants were known but not important.

The hunter did not need to eat, but it did need sleep, as she did. At night they found soft grass to cradle them. Bramble offered to share her blanket, but the hunter refused. “Cold and hot are the same,” it said, lying easily on its side.

Bramble watched it sleep and saw that it simply closed its eyes and was still, stiller than any human sleeper. Although that stillness was strange, it was real, and she was reassured by it. The hunter was not tricking her into vulnerability. She closed her own eyes and fell into slumber as easily as it had.

Four days after they left the tree — or was it five? Bramble couldn’t remember, and was warmed by the thought that it didn’t matter — they arrived at a ridge, and Bramble realized that they were looking down into what would become Golden Valley. The valley was wild, still, although the bottom was studded with the poplars that still grew there. But the rest of the valley was pure Forest.

She smiled at the sight. “I like this time,” she said.

The hunter gave a small puff of laughter. “All time is the same,” it said, shaking its head at her.

They traveled through the Valley for some days, then headed west from the bluff at its mouth, going southwest on a long diagonal that would bring them to the foot of the Western Mountains, near where Actonston would lie. On a cloudy day which threatened storm, in a sparser, drier section of the Forest that favored pines and larches, they found themselves at the edge of a cleared area of ground that led down to a farmhouse by the side of a river. It looked primitive. Not like the solid timber halls of Acton’s time, nor the stonemasonry of her own. This farmhouse was slab construction, flung up in a hurry in summer to make sure there would be shelter by the time winter came. A short line of skinny cows was heading for a shed which no doubt doubled as the milking barn. In a pen near the barn, a scurry of calves bellowed for their mothers.

They stood looking down on the scene in silence. From a distance, the sound of axe blows cut through the late afternoon. The hunter and she both winced, then looked at each other in a kind of comradeship.

“Come,” it said. “There are too many humans here.”

It led her through the edges of the Forest toward the mountains, until they could no longer hear the axe or the lowing of the cows. The hunter went into a deep defile in the hillside, a narrow valley that raised its sides high above their heads in minutes. At the end of the valley, where it could gather all the water that run off the hillside, stood a lone chestnut tree, dominating the valley.

“Its roots do not go far enough, but it will take us some way,” the hunter said. “This is a good place of remembrance, this. The tree remembers strongly.”

This time, the step forward, hand on the bark of the tree, took her to early, early morning, a winter morning which lay ice still, frost covering the ground, tiny icicles edging each bare branch. Bramble looked up. The chestnut branches were dark against the pale, cloudless sky. As she watched, the sun crested the rim of the valley and lit the tree: each icicle flashed rainbows of colors, the whole tree flickered with brilliant light, with sparks and flames and ripples of cold fire.

This is what rebirth must feel like, Bramble thought. Shivering, she stood transfixed until, only a few moments later, the sun had warmed the icicles enough so that droplets hit her face and shocked her out of the reverie. She turned to the hunter, who was watching her with approval and a slight unease, as though her appreciation of the tree worried him somehow.

“Come,” it said, “we must cross the river.”

Unnervingly, although her breath was making steam, the hunter’s did not, as though its breath was as cold as the air. She tried to remember the moment when its knife had been at her throat. She had been close enough to feel its breath, but she didn’t remember feeling it at all.

Bramble fished her boots out of her saddlebags. Barefoot was all very well for the hunter, who seemed not to notice the cold, but frostbite was something she’d rather avoid. She wrapped her blanket around her shoulders as well, but even so she was very cold. She followed the hunter across snow dotted with the tracks of hare, followed by fox tracks.

The hunter chuckled. “The fox seeks its prey. Good luck, little brother.”

She smiled, too, until she saw that the hunter left no tracks in the snow, although she saw its feet sink in. It saw her looking back at the single line of footprints in the powdery snow.

“I am here, in truth,” it assured her. “I just allow the snow to remember what it was before I passed. I will show you.”

It took a few steps and suddenly there were tracks behind it. Then it turned and waited, and the snow smoothed itself out. Bramble couldn’t see any movement of snowflakes; it was just, suddenly, as though the tracks had never existed. It was a much smaller manipulation of time than the one which had brought her back to this moment, but it unsettled her more, because it was done so casually. As though time was infinitely malleable.

She needed to control her upset immediately, before the hunter sensed it and saw it as fear. She grabbed for the first thing she could think of: Acton. If time was so malleable, did that mean she could journey back again? Change things? Stop Red plunging that knife down, and up again? She shivered, and it was not just the chill air. What if he lived? What if he lived while she was there? Her heart beat faster at the thought. She could guide him; warn him. If she went back far enough, she could even prevent Hawk’s massacre of Swef’s steading, and the resettlement from over the mountains would have been peaceful. She longed for that; remembered the lightness and joy she had felt when she had thought that the invasion was not going to happen.

But like a shadow over the too-bright, snow-covered landscape, the memory of Dotta’s warning came back. She had said that if Acton didn’t invade, others would. Nothing could save the Domains . . .

“How far back can you take me?” she asked the hunter as they trudged down the slope to the frozen river.

“Far.”

She left it at that, but she kept thinking about it; wondering which was the right moment to go back to. Where could she do the most good? It kept her mind off the cold.

In this time, the steading they had seen did not exist; the Forest reached all the way to the river. They crossed by sliding on the ice like children, laughing and falling and making faces at the water sprites who stared up, impotent and hungry, from beneath the ice. These moments of gaiety came on and off to the hunter, and its laughter was infectious.

It led her through several more seasons, finding places of remembrance every few days. One was a vast holly thicket, which seemed exactly the same in the earlier time. Another, a shaded clearing full of mushrooms.

“They go deep,” the hunter said, smiling.

Although she left her boots off unless it was very cold, by the time they came to the mushroom glade the soles were almost worn through. They had traveled a very long way, and not by the shortest route. The hunter diverted them often; to hunt, to investigate the health of a herd of deer, sometimes simply to see something it considered significant, although there was no pattern to what was important: a single leaf, a spring, a small grouping of rocks. It never took her near a black rock altar, and she didn’t ask why not, but she noticed that the gods left her alone. The whole journey was free of their presence; she felt liberated and forsaken at the same time.