“You grow primarily kairn grass here?” Edmund was asking.
Haplo stared at the tall, golden stands of grass undulating in the hot vectors blowing from the magma sea. Cadavers, new dead by the looks of them, worked in the fields, busily cutting the grass with curved sickles, stacking it in bundles that other cadavers pitched onto trundling carts.
“The plant is extremely versatile,” Jera said. “It’s flame resistant, thrives on heat, drawing its nutrients from the soil. We use its fibers in almost everything, from this carriage to the clothes we wear to a kind of tea we brew.”
She was, Haplo realized, speaking to people from another world, a people who wouldn’t know kairn grass from paukas. Yet all the while she was talking directly to the prince, who—probably having grown up eating, sleeping, and breathing kairn grass— appeared slightly amazed at being thus edified, but was too polite to say anything.
“Those trees you see growing over there are lanti. They can be found in the wild. We cultivate them. Their blue flowers are known as lanti lace and are highly prized for decoration. Beautiful, aren’t they, Your Highness?”
“It has been some time since I have seen the lanti,” Edmund said, his expression grim. “If any do still grow in the wild, we did not run across them.”
Three thick, stalwart trunks thrust up through the surrounding stands of golden kairn grass. The trunks twined together to form one gigantic braided trunk that soared high up into the air, the tops lost in the mists. The tree’s limbs, thin and fragile, gleaming silver-white, were so intertwined that it appeared impossible to separate one from another. Some of these bore flowers of a soft pale blue color.
As the carriage neared the grove of these trees, Haplo noted that the air smelled sweeter, seemed easier to breathe. He saw, by the dimming of the runes on his skin, that his body was using less magic to maintain itself.
“Yes,” answered Jera, seeming again to understand his unspoken thoughts. “The flowers of the lanti have the unique ability to draw the poisons from the atmosphere and give back pure air in return. That is why the trees are never cut. To kill a lanti is an offense punishable by oblivion. One may pick the blue flowers, however. They are highly valued, particularly by lovers.” She turned a sweet smile on her husband, who squeezed her hand.
“If you took this road,” said Jonathan, pointing to a smaller highway that branched off from the major one on which they traveled, “and you continued on it almost to Rift Ridge, you would reach my family’s estate. I really should be getting back,” he added, looking at the road they were leaving behind with a longing gaze. “The kairn grass is ready to harvest and, although I left Father’s cadaver in charge, sometimes it forgets and then nothing is done.”
“Your father, too, is dead?” Edmund asked.
‘And my elder brother, as well. That is why I’m lord of the manor, although oblivion take me if I ever wanted it or thought I’d come to it. I’m not very responsible, I’m afraid,” Jonathan admitted, referring to his own shortcomings with a cheerful candor that was quite engaging. “Fortunately, I have someone at my side who is.”
“You underestimate yourself,” Jera said crisply. “It comes of being the youngest. He was spoiled as a child, Your Highness. Never made to do anything. Now all that’s changed.”
“No, you don’t spoil me at all,” the duke teased.
“What happened to your father and brother? How did they die?” Edmund asked, thinking undoubtedly of his own recent sorrow.
“Of the same mysterious malady that strikes so many of our people,” Jonathan answered, almost helplessly. “One moment both were hale and filled with life. The next—” He shrugged.
Haplo looked sharply at Alfred. Because for every person brought back untimely to life, another—somewhere—untimely dies.
“What have they done? What have they done?” Alfred’s lips moved in a silent litany.
Haplo, thinking about all he’d seen and heard, was beginning to wonder the same.
*
The carriage left the New Provinces, left behind the tall stands of kairn grass and the lovely, lacy lanti trees. Little by little, the landscape changed.