Brothers of the Wind by Tad Williams

Author:Tad Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2021-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Part Three

The White Walls

We did not learn of it for some time, but the mortal prince Cormach survived that dreadful day. He was badly hurt, with broken legs and other injuries, but he lived on to a good old age and led his people well, although after Serpent’s Vale he always walked with a limp.

Ineluki carried the mortally injured Hakatri as swiftly as he could out of Serpent’s Vale and back to Birch Hill, the closest settlement of my master’s people.

Lord Dunyadi’s house Snowdrift did not have the array of healers that lived in Asu’a, but it would have taken days of riding to reach them. As luck would have it, though, one very wise healer lived at Snowdrift. His name was Geniki, and he was old enough to have treated the terrible burns caused by dragon’s blood before—although, as he himself admitted upon seeing my master, never with such dreadful injuries. By the time I arrived Geniki had already put Hakatri to sleep with a powerful draught of kei-vishaa and called for some of Dunyadi’s retainers to make their way into the mountain heights nearby in search of snow. Frantic and unable to do anything else to help his brother, Ineluki rode with them, and by nightfall they had brought back several washing tubs packed with the year’s last snow. Lord Dunyadi gave up his own bath so that my master could lie in it while the healer packed the snow around him. Lord Hakatri still breathed, but I could guess nothing else about his condition.

I sat with him that way for two days. I could not even hold his hand or touch him, though I ached to, because even the lightest brush of fingers on his skin—even those places that showed no mark of being burned—made him moan and writhe. He did not speak, except for once when he suddenly awakened, tried to sit up but could not, and said very clearly, “Again and again she peers behind the veil. The cold ones outside are taking notice.” He mumbled a few more words after that but I could make nothing of them, then he lapsed back into insensibility again.

I have never wept so much, not even when I was a child. I was certain it was only a matter of hours, days at the most, before my master died.

On the third day after Hakatri had been put into his snow-bath, Lord Dunyadi’s daughter Himuna came to my master’s bedside. Her manner was calm and her words measured, but her sadness at Hakatri’s suffering was evident. “How fares your lord today, Armiger Pamon?” she asked me.

“I wish I could tell you he seemed better, my lady, but I see no improvement,” I admitted. Himuna was Birch Hill’s chief celebrant—not the sort who wanted foolish optimism. “He cries out in his sleep betimes, as though he dreamed the worm’s attack again, but he says many other things that make no sense at all.”

“None of us can guess what your master might be seeing,” she told me.

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