Davin stood for a moment feeling his head swirl as he tried to figure out how to get out of this without having to get into a confrontation with Bode. He couldn’t think. Niam looked like cornered bobcat, and Davin knew if he didn’t do something about his friend, there was going to be a confrontation. He couldn’t help shake the feeling that the tree hanging above him was on the verge of collapsing.
“I don’t like it,” he said with a sigh. “But we have to go talk to them.”
“With something like that, Bode could hurt a lot of people without even thinking about what he had or what he was doing.”
“I think it’s more the other way around,” Davin countered.
“You think the boxes will hurt them, don’t you?” Maerillus asked.
Niam’s eyes grew large as the thought sunk in. Suddenly the tone in his voice went from alarmed to light and breezy. “Oh. You were right to begin with. Let’s get back home and leave them to it, then. It’s dinnertime. I’m all for mutton myself. You?” As he said this, he looked wistfully back toward the end of the camp where the road home began. Then his voice turned hard and cold. “Who cares if he gets hurt? He deserves it, Davin!”
The venom in his friend’s voice took Davin aback.
From the camp, gales of laughter turned to petulant hectoring. Bode was unhappy about something, and one of his followers was getting the worst end of it. Davin looked in that direction. Niam did too, and there was a light in his eyes that Davin did not like. He saw the waterwheel turning inside his friend’s head and feared what it might dredge up.
Bracing himself, Davin turned to face Niam and said sternly, “Now that we know that those things in the camp are corrupted, we are responsible for Bode and those fools. They’ve got no idea what’s waiting for them. And for that matter, neither do we.”
Niam looked away angrily and kicked a dried ball of horse manure. That glint in his eyes still didn’t fade. “Let’s go and take care of this, then,” he said.
He said it almost too eagerly.
Davin’s next words stopped him.
“I think you should go back around to the road we came in on and wait for us there.”
“What?” Niam and Maerillus asked at the same time.
“I know that look in his eyes,” Davin hastily explained to Maerillus.
“But if something goes down, we’ll need him with us,” Maerillus insisted. Davin could see the tension gnawing at him. Whenever Maerillus grew nervous or agitated his face became flat and expressionless. Right now he looked as emotive as a stone statue.
Before Niam could get a word in, Davin raised a hand to silence everyone and kept talking. “If I have to, I will talk to Bode. But if Niam is there, they’ll go at one another like two rabid dogs. Besides, we may need to listen to them first. Maybe we’ll learn more about what happened here.”
Niam looked furious. “I don’t like this, Davin,” he said indignantly. “I deserve to go.”
“You deserve to be left alone by people like him. That’s what you deserve. This isn’t a day for revenge,” he told him bluntly. “And I can see in your eyes that’s what you want.”
Perhaps it was the hard edge in his voice, but Niam backed down after a few more protests. That was good. As Niam mellowed by small degrees, Davin set him off in the direction of the woods and the road that waited to take them home. As they watched him go, Maerillus turned to Davin and said, “That was too easy.”
“At least he’s going,” Davin told him. He felt as if a hundred different currents were tugging at him from a hundred different directions: Niam. Bode. The Boxes. The feeling that something was about to go wrong. Jort’s death. The mysterious Voice. And that didn’t name them all.
“Yeah. But I’ve seen Niam like that, too. And I’d almost rather have him nearby so we can keep an eye on him,” Maerillus said in his wiser-if-more-cautious voice.
“Maybe,” Davin said. “But what’s done is done.
“Maybe,” Maerillus echoed him.
And somewhere above him, he felt the trunk of the great tree leaning over him begin to loosen at the roots. Any moment now, it was going to fall.