Just as abruptly I regained my faculties to see Ramiro pull the man off me and hurl him through the air into an aeterna bush. I heard branches rending, heard the man cry out in a strange mixture of pain and triumph. Then he stood amidst the blue evergreen branches, his pale hand illumined by the opals in the brooch he was clutching.
I rose to my knees and yelled as Ramiro turned toward the thief in an ungainly, bearlike crouch. At that moment, another Plainsman leapt atop his back, and then another, so that the big man struggled for a moment beneath the weight of two of the enemy.
Whooping again, my attacker spun toward the darkness of the woods, and he might have escaped easily, taking the opals with him. But he gave a final turn and a final shout which gave my brother the chance to act. Hurtling through the air, Alfric wrapped his arms about the stunned Plainsman, and the two of them tumbled into branches and water as suddenly and as heavily as a felled oak.
By now I was standing and, after a brief glance to see that Dannelle was unharmed and attended to, rushed to my brother's aid. The Plainsmen atop Ramiro were getting the worst of it by now, but I could figure on no help from the big man for a least a moment or two.
Hurdling a downed Plainsman and a winded Oliver and skirting an old maple stump, I crashed through the aeterna bush and stumbled into the brawl in front of me…
… just as the Plainsman's knife slipped between my brother's ribs.
Chapter IX
It was midmorning the next I knew. I lay beneath the oak tree in the clearing, its branches drooping heavy with last night's rain. The woods around me were charged in a strange half-light, the unsettled gray of dawn.
I looked at the brooch, clutched tightly in my hand, as though all power of memory lay in the dark gems. It is a hard thing when you try to save one brother and lose the other one in the bargain.
I had reached Alfric's side as the Plainsman broke from his grasp and ran off through the trees. Carefully I groped through the shadows and the standing water, finding my brother wet and ruined amidst broken branches and torn cloth and leather.
"Galen, I was not running away. Not this time."
"I know that. Rest now, Alfric. Rest."
The sound of the conflict faded. Ramiro, I found out later, had gained balance and advantage against our attackers. The retreating Plainsmen were no doubt lucky that their pursuer was so large and ungainly, else they would have had too much to answer for there in the night-dappled woods.
"Rest now, Alfric! Ramiro and Dannelle will be over here directly, and so will Oliver with the horses, and then we'll see to patching you up and-"
"This is dreadful, Galen. Dreadful."
"I know," I whispered. The brooch glittered on the wet ground by Alfric's body, saved from the Plainsmen by his reckless heroism. As I spoke to my brother, the light went out of the gems.
"Rest now," I said. "Rest now."
Which is what they tell me I was saying over him when they joined us. Ramiro covered him up in those last moments, so he did not die cold, and Dannelle cradled me like an infant, she said, though she said it with no ridicule but with a deep and brokenhearted pity for me and for Alfric and for this whole botched trip into twilight. She knelt beside me, helping Ramiro, who poured something strong down me from a little flask, something I could not or would not taste, but only felt its warmth passing into me as the tears left me and I slept for a long while, clutching the stones won and made more valuable by my brother's blood.
The sky cleared just as we reached the foothills of the Vingaard Mountains.
The downpour had been so long and so terribly intense that it had virtually drowned the highlands. Shrubbery and small trees lay bent over, and the grass was matted and brown.
I hated to think how things looked down on the plains.
The air that was left behind when the rain lifted was not fresh and cleansed, like you find after a sudden, brief summer thunderstorm that washes away all dust and dirt. Instead, what was left was a cold and dead landscape smelling of rotten vegetation and small drowned things.
It was as though a week of rain had passed us from high summer to the borders of winter.
We climbed, and I looked down and behind me at the road we were leaving. Looked behind me in remorse, for my brother lay somewhere in that rain-washed country, in the makeshift grave we had made for him, under a cairn of stones and under the kind words of Sir Ramiro of the Maw and the singing of Dannelle and of Oliver, whose voice was young and yet to change. Unfathomably, my brother lay in the wet soil, untouched by light or air or the best of my intentions. He had followed my command, my leadership and visions, which had brought him to that last place below me. Somehow the death of Alfric, which often I had thought would not affect me one way or the other, which sometimes I had thought I would even welcome, had left me nothing but this long ride, these shadows, and a trail that narrowed and narrowed ahead of us as we passed from the highlands into the sparse country of the foothills. It was indeed dreadful.
Dannelle and Ramiro tried, I think, but they were little consolation. My thoughts were not on them or on the journey ahead of us, but on how death had caught Alfric just short of changing. Had he been given one more month, even another week, who knew but that the strange turn of intentions I had seen-those moments of honesty and loyalty so fleeting and faint that I feared I imagined them-might well have amounted to something like knighthood or brotherhood.
As it was, not even my memories of Alfric could fashion him lovely: His blackmails at the moathouse and on the walls of Castle di Caela, the times he had manhandled me in the cellars of my father, strangled me in swamp and topiary garden, strung me up in the dark rooms of Castle di Caela, and nearly drowned me in the moat. How he had broken oaths and fine glassware, started brawls then run from them, lied to Father and Bayard and me and Robert di Caela, tried to seduce Dannelle and Enid and threatened them when his charms had failed. All in all, it was a shadowy history of abusing horse and servant and younger brothers, betraying the trust of comrades and superiors. Still, I found myself searching through memory for something remarkable, something that distinguished and redeemed this brother. I came up with Brithelm's turnips.
When we were growing up, my father had prized and savored turnips, and because his father had put every nonpoisonous root in Coastlund on a supper plate, then, by the gods, like fare was good enough for his sons.
Unfortunately, Brithelm had discovered at an early age that his innate love for nature did not extend to turnips. There were the long standoffs familiar to any family, when the child refuses to eat what the parent sets forth. However, Pathwardens are congenitally stubborn, and the struggles between Brithelm and Father took on proportions of terrible length and venom. Many mornings I found the two of them facedown in dinner plates, where they had waited out one another not from the previous night's supper, mind you, but from a confrontation two or even three nights old. The servants learned to work around them.
I do not know why Alfric decided to keep the peace on this matter. It was out of character in a brother who delighted in setting the whole family against one another. Perhaps it was only that Alfric coveted the same turnips his brother would leave on a plate until the Cataclysm came again. Perhaps it was a glimmer of kindness.
Indeed, as I thought about it there in the rising foothills, I could not recall clearly whether it was Alfric who scraped the turnips from Brithelm's plate and wolfed them down while Father was not looking. Other images came to my memory-perhaps a dog under the table, or a fold in the hem of Brithelm's robe that Father never checked for wandering tubers. I could not remember clearly for, after all, I had been scarcely three or four years old at the time, and not too concerned with those events that did not involve me.