They walked east and he let Udinny take the walknut. She took a childlike satisfaction in throwing it into the air and seeing it come down pointing north each time.
“This feels like I should have it in my hand,” she laughed, throwing it again.
The journey was far easier than the walk that had brought them to the boughry. It felt as if the forest breathed around them, opening up and letting them travel with as little disturbance as possible. The child slept, his breathing soft and regular as he lay on the floating travois. Udinny and Cahan passed across the soft carpet of cloudtree needles in comfortable silence. As they walked, Cahan became more and more certain that they were being followed and indeed, as time passed, their followers began to show themselves. Rootlings, peeking out from bushes then vanishing behind them. Cahan turned to reassure Udinny that he sensed no threat from them, only curiosity, but she had seen the rootlings and was smiling at them.
“They are gentle souls, are they not, Cahan?” she said. He nodded, and they continued onwards followed by a train of rootlings as the light moved across the sky and the forest dimmed. “I see light, ahead,” said the monk, pointing eastward. He looked and could see a faint glimmer, like the moment the light began to emerge but was still well below the horizon.
“A break in the canopy,” said Udinny as they moved through the gloom.
“Seems so,” said Cahan, though this was not the same as the one they had seen before. Where that had been painfully bright, this one was more diffused. Nearer to it, the light was cut and sliced into beams, shooting through the forest. Cahan began to understand what he was seeing. There was something massive and sharp, huge and black, and from a distance it almost appeared furred. Its true size only started to become apparent as they walked on and it barely got any bigger. “Treefall,” he said, more to himself than to Udinny, though she answered, and her voice held all the many colours of wonder.
“I thought, from the base of them I understood the size, but I did not.”
She was right, it was something that defied all logic. Cahan had seen a fallen centre spire, in the city of Storspire; so huge it had brought down two of the outer spires as it fell. When it had happened he did not know, and the spire was little more than a skeleton when he saw it. But still, it had a size that he found difficult to understand. The cloudtrees dwarfed it. Even the tallest spire did not vanish from sight. The true, immense, mind-breaking size was brought home when they were near enough that they could see the wall of darkwood blocking their path was as tall as ten or eleven people on each other’s shoulders. From it sprouted smaller, though still massive, branches.
“It is huge, Cahan,” shouted Udinny and she began to run towards it. “I had never imagined that a tree could be so massive!” He watched her running and only as they approached did he realise the truth.
“Udinny!” he shouted, and she came to a stop. Her body dwarfed by the giant wall of black wood, still a good half-hour walk away. “This is not the cloudtree!” He saw the puzzled look on her face, then the disappointment. He let her feel it, but only for a moment. “That is only a branch from it.” It was hard then, not to laugh at her expression as she tried to understand how vast the actual tree could be that had shed such a massive piece of wood. “It must have fallen off the main trunk when it came down.”
“But,” she turned back to the branch, then back to him. “How can that be? Nothing can be so huge.”
“A cloudtree is, Udinny.”
When they finally reached it, they could see what had given the branch a fuzzy effect from a distance: the pinleaves. He had always imagined the cloudtree needles would be green, dark green like the wide leaves on the bushes that grew on the floor of Wyrdwood, but they were not. He reached up, touching the end of a branch and the silvery green needles that clung on to it. They showed no sign of death, even though he could see where mosses and lichens were growing on the branch, where bushes had taken root around it, and guessed there was at least a year’s growth there, maybe two or three. He marvelled at the life the great tree must hold that it could keep its leaves fresh for so long past death. To the touch the pinleaves were soft and smooth, unlike any other leaf he had come across, and he had spent much time in the forest.
“It is beautiful,” said Udinny, “and sad.”
“Sad?”
“That something so great should die.”
“Everything dies, monk,” and as he said it he thought about the two reborn women – looked around for them but saw no sign – and knew it was not entirely true.
“But that something so great should?” She pulled a leaf from the end of the branch and looked at it, it was as long as her finger. The needles on the forest floor were no longer than Cahan’s nail. “Can you eat them?” she said.
“I have no idea.” Udinny shrugged, then put the leaf in her mouth and bit on it. She struggled to get her teeth into it. When she managed it clearly did not taste to her liking. She pulled it from her mouth and spat out what she had bitten off, it remained attached to the leaf in her hand by long shiny veins.
“Maybe it is better cooked,” she said.
“This must be where we turn, Udinny,” he pointed, away from the branch.
“Do you think a whole tree has come down, Cahan?” said the monk. “The last treefall was generations ago. If a tree has fallen this could make the villagers of Harn rich.”
“Aye, I think a tree may well have fallen,” he said. “All the stories of treefall I have heard start with a found branch, then it is followed back to the trunk. I have heard people say the last treefall took four generations to collect and is what made Jinneng the true power of the south.”
“Well, it may not be that much longer.”
“Treefall up here will be the last nail in the coffin of the south,” he said softly as she walked over to stand by him.
“You do not sound pleased, Cahan Du-Nahere, and you being a son of the north and all. Surely you should be?”
“It will bring Rai. And Rai are a poison,” he said, “and the Cowl-Rai the worst of it. Believe me, I know what they are capable of.” He turned from her and then felt her hand upon his arm.
“What haunts you, Cahan Du-Nahere?”
“Power, Udinny, and what can be done with it.” He took a breath. “But it is not something I would speak of now, I have spent so long not being that which I was raised to be that it is painful to even think of it.”
“What were you raised to be, Cahan Du-Nahere?” said Udinny softly.
“The end, Udinny. I was raised to be the end. To hold power in my hand and sweep those who opposed my god away before me.”
“Ranya?” said the monk, “she would never wish for…”
“No, Udinny, I was raised for Zorir-Who-Walks-in-Fire, by those who yearned to make their will real. You called me Cowl-Rai, as a mark of respect, but I was raised to be terror and death.”
“How did you find Ranya?” said the monk, staring at him.
“The man who tended the gardens of the temple, he spoke to a sad and homesick young boy of a gentler god, and a different way of life.”
“The web of Ranya is fragile, Cahan,” said Udinny softly, “but it is everywhere, and will always find those who need it.”
“It found me,” he said.
“And brought you comfort, if not happiness. Ranya brings us the way, but you must follow it to find what you need.” Something within him wanted to strike the monk for those words. The anger at his core heard what Udinny said as criticism even though he knew they had not meant it. He deserved criticism and held his anger within, denied it the way he denied the power within his cowl. Cahan took a deep breath of the cool forest air. It felt clean and real and it cooled the fire burning.
“No, Udinny, Ranya brought me nothing but strife and misery.” He was holding his hands in fists so tight it hurt his knuckles. He lifted his hand, unclenched his fist. “I was sculpted for violence, Udinny, and Ranya allowed me a way not to become what was intended. Eventually. Though she has brought me no happiness, I try to find solace in the fact I have not wrought the chaos the followers of Zorir wished for.”
“And rather than Zorir, now we have Tarl-an-Gig.” Cahan shrugged, he had no answer. Would he have been better or worse than the Cowl-Rai who rampaged through the south? He did not know, and in the end he did not think it would have mattered. Rai destroyed, it was what they were. To be Cowl-Rai was the same but worse.
“Let us return to Harn,” he told Udinny, “the child should be returned to his mother.” The monk nodded, and she did not ask any more, for which he was glad.
They walked until the gloom switched into night, and then the forest lit their way. It seemed at every bush there were berries and they filled them with energy. Neither he nor Udinny felt a wish, or a need, to stop.
Before the light rose they were in Harnwood. They took a little sleep there, but only a little. They woke to the light and the warmest day for a long time. The path was easy, no roots tripped them or trapvines grabbed their feet. By the late afternoon they were already entering Woodedge.
“Cahan,” said Udinny, “I know the way is easier, but does it seem to you that the distance is also less?” He did not reply as much as grunt; the same thought had been running through his head. “How is that possible?”
“I do not know, but if it is easier on our feet I think it best not to ask.” Udinny stood, her finger against her chin as she thought about it.
“You may be right,” she said, and started off walking again, a new stout stick she had collected along the way swinging in her hand. Woodedge, unlike Wyrdwood and Harnwood, did them no favours. They struggled to pass through the undergrowth the same way they had when they entered it, but he knew Woodedge well and this was a familiar struggle.
“If we camp when the light falls,” he said, “then we will be breaking out of the forest by mid-morning tomorrow, and in Harn by the afternoon.”
“It will be good to sleep in a real bed,” said Udinny as she watched Segur vanishing into the ferns in pursuit of something. Heard the chattering of rootlings hidden by the brush. “And to eat meat not cooked by my feet will be pleasant. One never really gets used to the taste.” Cahan laughed, and Udinny grinned at him. They set off again.
His estimate was a little wrong, it was the afternoon when they finally broke from Woodedge. As they did the child finally stirred, sitting up on his travois.
“Where am I?” he said.
“On your way home, Issofur,” Udinny told him, and pointed towards the shadows of Harn’s walls on the horizon. “Sleep, and we will be there before you know it.”
“It will be good to be home,” said the child, but when he said it, he was looking back at the trees of the wood, not at the walls of his village.