The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,193

wondered at what a world it was where one could hope such a thing. But the hounds smelled no departing tracks for those adults and older children. The people of Apple Grove had been rounded up, forced to give up valuables and jewelry, moved into a field, and slaughtered there. Maybe three hundred of them.

One of Kip’s men found the stolen jewelry, all of it arrayed neatly on a table in one of the houses, as if asking to be taken by whoever came along.

The young children who had been allowed to live had been left with plenty of water and food.

But still. From everything they could tell—the war hounds had trouble with abstracts like units of time, but their handlers could make certain estimates that were confirmed by other trackers and evidence—the massacre had happened three or four weeks ago. These remaining children shouldn’t have still been alive.

Not that all of them were. The war hounds led them to fresh graves. Small ones.

“Someone’s been taking care of them,” Tisis said. “They’re too young to have survived this long by themselves.”

Men and women from Kip’s retinue were trying to comfort the children now, trying to engage them in play. It worked with a few. Others were still too traumatized to do anything more than mechanically chew the food offered them.

“What I’m taking you to see may be the answer to who’s been taking care of the kids,” Winsen said. “Or maybe he was part of the murdering. Hell, maybe both.”

They rode up the main track away from the empty village for a few minutes, and then cut over into farmland, passing through apple orchards that had been tended until recently.

They rode up a hillside orchard to where the top flattened out.

Who massacres a village, doesn’t take any loot, doesn’t burn anything, and kills everyone except the kids too young to speak? Why would the White King hide what he’d done here? He’d massacred other cities and deliberately left people alive to spread the tale.

And why did the name of the town seem familiar? Kip was certain he’d heard it before, but he must not have thought it was important at the time, because he hadn’t locked it in his memory.

“How’d you even think to come way out here?” Kip asked Winsen.

“Big Leo said something about this place from his parents’ traveling days with their troupe. I wanted to get away from the brats’ crying and thought I’d find some quiet out at these ruins. Didn’t expect this.”

They emerged from the orderly rows of trees into a wide clearing. It was almost a perfect circle. Even the great limbs of the old apple trees had been trimmed long, long ago to not intrude into the circle. Younger limbs did intrude, though, telling a tale of uneven husbandry or failing respect for old tradition.

In the center of the grassy circle stood a stone plinth, a few feet across and only as tall as a man. It was no great monument. Oddly, the earth around the base of the plinth was freshly cracked, as if something restless lay beneath it.

On top of the small plinth an adolescent sat cross-legged, hands draped over his knees. He was olive-skinned, with his raven hair in a short ponytail, naked to the waist, stringy rather than merely skinny, a leather band tied around one bicep, and wearing the deerskin trousers of a Blood Forest hunter. But in one relaxed hand he held a hell-stone dagger that was surely worth more than two fistfuls of rubies.

It appeared he’d been using the dagger on himself, for his body was encrusted with blood old and new in shades of scarlet and crimson and brown. He’d striped himself, perhaps in ritual mourning, lines down his forearms, lines on his face. Cuts deep enough to scar but not to maim, with older wounds poulticed but the blood not washed from his skin nor from his cruor-encrusted trousers.

Fresh blood coursed down his forehead into his left eye. The boy didn’t look up as Kip dismounted and came forward. Kip gestured for the others to stay back.

They ignored him; everything about this young hunter spoke death.

Some intuition held Kip back from speaking. He came before the young man and sat on the ground, legs akimbo in deliberate imitation, as if he were a disciple at the foot of his master.

I thought he was young. I was wrong.

The boy had eyes as old as a great oak that has seen the leaves brown and fall