The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,194

a thousand times, blossoming from green to grave, from bower to bier, leafy souls soaking the soil and feeding the tree again, like a cannibal hungry for the fruit of his own body.

Kip sat still, staring up at him. The old young man looked at him with the patience of the zephyrs chewing a mountain down, a quick form with a slow intent. The blood obscuring his left eye reminded Kip of the Parian tradition of the eye of mercy and the eye of justice, the good eye and the evil.

With the shedding of blood comes blindness.

And slowly, Kip’s mimicry became imitation, and imitation became communion. Communion not with each other, but each settling into the cold embrace of time and their mortality, separate souls in the night, but the same night, different journeys to the same end.

And then, as the blood dried on the young man’s obsidian blade and on his face, he became slowly familiar.

A swirl of the wind brought the young ancient’s wild scent to Kip’s nose, and suddenly Kip was gripped by blank, black fear. He was sitting before one of the most dangerous men in history.

Voice raw, Kip said, “Greetings, Sealgaire na Scian, Daimhin Web.”

Daimhin’s chest stopped in midbreath. Then, in a rocky voice like a man waking from a too-long slumber, “She said you would know me, Guile.”

Like a rusty lock cracking open at the key that was Daimhin’s name spoken aloud, Kip remembered the man’s card, all of it: touching the white stag with his very hand, the village braggart who disbelieved him, the unrequited love, the hunt, then coming home to the village burned to the ground by the White King’s outriders.

After that came the memories in blood: the hunting of men, dressing them like wild game, hung upside down, skinned and drained of blood to be found by their comrades outside their very tents. He remembered a dozen cruel games invented to terrorize the invading Blood Robes.

Who was the woman who’d told him of Kip coming?

“The Third Eye,” Kip said.

“She sent her message with this. It’s some leather I’ve never encountered.” Daimhin gestured to the armband he wore above his bicep. “It intrigued me more than her words. Arrogant, I thought her. She claimed to see the future. But how dare she tell me what to do? I have become a god of vengeance, a spirit of the forest. She bade me come here. To stop this. Then she begged. Words as wind to twist my will.”

“What is it?” Kip asked.

“Not snakeskin, nor any reptile known in these lands. I came here not to obey her but hoping she might tell me more. Perhaps this was some new animal to hunt, to test myself against. Perhaps I might lose my taste for hunting men. But it’s not done that. I’m like a wolf that takes one lamb and then cannot help but raid for sheep, no matter the dangers.” He fingered that leather band around his bicep, but Kip was too far away to see anything strange about it. “By the time I came, I was too late. Another village massacred while I was gone hunting.”

“Like your home village was. But Apple Grove this time,” Kip guessed.

Daimhin nodded bloody guilt.

“Why’d he do this?” Kip asked. Taking a village’s livestock, burning a few huts to halt resistance, taking a few men or women, Kip could understand why an invader would do those . . . but this? Both recklessly insane and secretive.

An invader doesn’t want its massacres to be secret. No one’s intimidated by a massacre they never learn about.

“He didn’t,” Daimhin said. “If by him you mean the White King. I tracked those who did this. They didn’t come from the White King’s camp, and these men hid from the White King’s patrols both coming and going. It was only twenty men, but some of them were drafters, and all were armed with good muskets. The villagers scattered at first, but then they recognized the leader. He’d been raised here among them. But after enough of them came back into town, he seized them, and he demanded those in hiding or at outlying farms come in. Started killing people until they did. Made promises of safe passage. Lies, naturally.”

“You didn’t learn all that from their tracks,” Kip said.

“On their way back to their boats on the coast, these arrachtaigh, these monsters, came across a Blood Robe patrol and had to hide. One of them got separated from the others. Got lost.