Chapter 29: Harthos the Steady
"Could you explain precisely what you mean by 'waiting for us'?" Bran pressed, curiosity overriding any impulse towards caution. Oren, eager to silence him, delivered a swift swat to Bran's shoulder, yet Bran merely shot his brother a brief, rueful glance before returning his gaze to Harthos, intent upon hearing the answer.
"How long have you been waiting here?" Tavik inquired, his tone laced with suspicion yet underpinned by curiosity, all the while wondering how he could have failed to notice they were under observation.
Harthos cast his gaze over the group, his scrutiny so acute that each of them instinctively looked away. "I have crossed between worlds," he began, his words measured and assured, "summoned at my Chieftain's behest, for it was decided you required a skilled guide." His attention settled at last on Tavik. For a fleeting moment, Tavik met the Burrowback's eyes before his composure faltered and he found himself studying his boots. "Your tracking ability is as sharp as ever, lad," Harthos remarked quietly, offering Tavik a nod of respectful acknowledgement.
Oren began to voice his thoughts, yet Harthos fixed him with a measured stare, the silence between them weighted and expectant. Rather than speaking, Harthos extended one broad arm to encompass the clearing, inviting consideration rather than confrontation. "My journey to reach you has been arduous," he said, his voice steady and resonant, "and I perceive your own travels have not been without their share of hardship. There is tension amongst you, of that I am certain. Will you share bread with me, so that we may speak frankly about the way ahead, and the Burrowback's territory that lies beyond the Eldertree?"
Before anyone could muster a response, Harthos stepped into the clearing, moving to its centre, where the gentle spring sunlight gathered in a quiet pool on the forest floor. He was taller than any of them had fully reckoned with from the treeline's shadow. He stood over seven feet, broad and deep-chested, and when he raised both arms wide and began to turn, slowly and with great deliberateness, he seemed to fill the space around him entirely. His face was turned upward, and there was nothing of performance in the gesture, only the quality of someone completing an act of great consequence.
As he turned, a circle appeared at the clearing's outermost boundary, pressing itself into the soil and moss and leaf-litter as though it had been sleeping there all along and had only needed the right invitation to rise. It did not trace itself in stages; it arrived, the whole circumference at once, enclosing the entire clearing within its ring. Then, without Harthos ceasing his slow rotation, two lines crossed the circle's interior and quartered it, and each of the four sections gathered itself into something distinct. One quarter deepened into rich moss, so densely green it seemed almost luminous, scattered with clusters of small red mushrooms whose caps gleamed like coals. Another held dry bracken in copper and amber and rust, layered over dark, iron-scented earth. The third section was pale stone: smooth, river-washed, reflecting the sky. The fourth breathed something barely visible, a silver luminescence threaded through the grass in patterns fine as frost, shifting as the light moved through the canopy overhead.
Oren, Tavik, Bran and Nix stood at the circle's edge and regarded him in reverent silence.
Standing at the heart of the circle, Harthos lowered his arms, his gaze returning to the four boys. "Come, step within the ring," he invited, his words calm yet resolute. "Let us pause here, gather ourselves, and contemplate our journey ahead together."
Bran, compelled by an instinct he could neither name nor resist, was the first to move. He gravitated towards the moss quarter, his feet carrying him across the ring's boundary before his mind had quite finished the decision, and the moment he stepped onto the deep green, his heels sank in, and the forest knew him entirely. It was not a gradual thing. It was immediate and complete, as though something vast and patient had been waiting precisely for the weight of his particular footstep and had exhaled at last. The smell of bruised leaf and wet earth and something older than both rose up around him like a tide coming in. He looked back at his brothers and cousin, eyes wide, quite unable to produce a single word that was adequate to what he was feeling.
Drawn each by their own current, Oren, Tavik and Nix moved towards the quarters that answered them. None of them looked as though they had decided to. Tavik's boots found the bracken, and something in his frame released without his permission, the constant vigilant readiness in his shoulders shifting to a stillness that was not the stillness of a warrior but of the earth itself. Oren stepped amongst the pale stones and stood with the crown of light at his temples burning slow and clear, the elvish magic in him neither stirring nor suppressing but simply being, deep and undisturbed as a root system in winter. Nix crossed to the silver quarter, and his runes brightened at once, pulsing through the faint, shifting luminescence as though in conversation with it, his ears sweeping forward, his whole body carrying that quality of acute, absorbed attention he wore when he was perceiving something the others could not reach.
The four of them looked back at each other across the white heart of the circle where Harthos stood, and the air between them was alive with something that had no name yet, but that none of them felt any inclination to disturb.
Harthos looked at each of them in turn from his great height, unhurried.
"It is right," he said, "that new beginnings are marked by breaking bread with the youngest first."
He turned to face Bran, and from the worn satchel at his side, he drew a small seed loaf. He held it on his open palm and raised it above his head towards the canopy, a slow, deliberate offering to the forest overhead, the gesture patient and complete. Then he lowered his hand and held the loaf out towards Bran across the distance between them.
Bran was standing rather a long way from Harthos. He looked at the bread, then at his own outstretched palm, and then the small loaf simply rose from Harthos's hand and came to him, moving through the warm spring air in a steady, unhurried line until it settled into Bran's palm with a weight that surprised him. The moment it arrived, the forest surged in deep green around him: not violently, but with great fullness, the moss-colour and shadow-green swirling up from the ground in slow spirals about his body before threading into the loaf itself, which grew heavy and warm and intensely present in his hand, as though it had absorbed something of this place and meant to give it to him. The scent of it was overwhelming, bread still warm from a fire, something sweet beneath it, something earthy beneath that. Bran looked up at the quiet, twinkling eyes of Harthos and then, because there was clearly nothing else to be done, he took a bite.
He had to close his eyes.
It was not simply flavour. It moved through him like light through water, nourishing something in him that he had not known was wanting, filling out the spaces behind his ribs and beneath his thoughts and along his bones. He chewed very slowly and with great seriousness, and when he at last opened his eyes and looked around at his wide-eyed brothers and cousin, there was only one word that covered the matter.
"Goodness," Bran said.
Harthos took his time with each of the others, drawing a fresh small loaf for each and repeating the same slow ceremony, the same upward offering to the canopy, the same lowering of the hand, the same floating journey of the bread across the circle. As Harthos turned to face each boy in turn, each quarter of the circle seemed to respond, deepening in colour and scent and presence as if the forest were drawing close to listen, or to give. The bracken rustled at Tavik's feet in still air when his bread arrived, and whatever went through his face in the moment of eating was private, and Bran studied the moss. Oren stood afterwards with the crown of light at his temples steadied to something deep and unhurried. Nix held his loaf in both hands for a moment before raising it, and his runes ran through several colours in quick succession as he ate, settling at last to their usual green, and afterwards he was more still than before, in the way he went still when something had found its proper place inside him.
When it was done, Harthos stepped from the circle's heart to its inner edge and looked at them all.
"Come close," he said. "Come and sit with me."
They came in from their four quarters and settled in a close circle beside Harthos, cross-legged on the grass, their arms and shoulders pressing lightly against one another. Bran was the smallest, his slight frame fitted between Nix on one side and the warm, solid form of Tavik on the other. Oren sat, looking curiously around at them all, then at Harthos, seated with them.
Now that they were all seated, Bran found himself really seeing Harthos as if for the first time and peered curiously at the spiny back of the Burrowback.
The long pale spines that rose along Harthos's back were not merely spines. Nestled between them, tucked into the spaces where the spines thickened and forked, were tiny towers. They were the size of an apple, each one, perhaps two or three, with walls no wider than a finger, but perfectly formed: small pointed rooftops, minute arched windows, stone so fine it might have been carved from a single thorn. And from within each tiny tower, light glowed warmly, amber-gold and steady, like the light of candles burning in a room where someone is quietly at home.
Bran stared. He could not stop staring. One tower sat between two spines slightly to the left, and it had three windows, each one lit, and the warmth of the light within it was so domestic and so completely unexpected that something turned over in his chest. He thought of asking, but did not know where to begin. He thought of pointing and could not bring himself to interrupt whatever was happening. He sat with his mouth very slightly open and looked at the little glowing towers in Harthos's spines and wondered, in the specific, helpless way of someone who has just discovered a question too large and too marvellous to immediately ask, what on earth Burrowbacks actually were.
The questions that had been gathering since the first sight of Harthos in the treeline's shadow were still present, crowding forward in all four of them, visible in the bright attentive faces that surrounded him in the inner circle. Harthos seemed to sense this and smiled before he spoke.
"It is customary for Burrowbacks to break bread when meeting others along the path," he said, "and to break bread with fellow travellers is always a sacred occasion." His eyes moved to each of them in turn, patient and warm. "Now," he said, "let us speak of the road ahead."
