“But she never went home?”
“Says she likes it way better in Yavarid. She sends these dinkies back home that say how well she’s doing at court, so her parents are happy to have her stay. I imagine they’re expecting an invitation to her wedding any day now.”
Frederick’s eyes went wide. “They’re more likely to be invited to a knighting ceremony.”
Elayne perked up and turned to him with a grin, then caught herself. “Don’t make fun,” she hissed, hoping Rosalind wouldn’t hear.
“I’m not making fun.” Frederick pulled the meat from the fire, blowing out a charred corner. “She’s really quite good, and a fast learner. Not to mention with her size she could take on a lot of the smaller men with ease.”
Elayne’s mouth was pulled into a tight frown. Her natural desire to yell at him was at odds with what he’d actually said. “Do you mean it?”
“Of course!” He took a bite from one skewer and offered her the other.
With a long look over it, she took the stick. “Can you make it happen?”
“Well,”—his eyes flicked away—“I don’t know about that.”
She stood. “I thought so.” And stomped over to Rosalind, waking her to join in the meal.
As the day wore on, the group traipsed further into the wood. The forest was different now, though Elayne didn’t exactly notice when it changed, but the leaves were a bluer shade of green here, the trees significantly thicker and taller, and the sounds were like echoes of originals from years past. When there was a scurry somewhere off in the bushes, she could not tell from where it came, and when she thought she saw a creature, it turned out to be a shadow, even when she knew it had moved. She had not, she realized further, actually seen a living thing for some time despite the plethora of birds and squirrels and even deer when they were in the thinner wood off the main road. Perhaps they were hiding in the brush, unseen in the thickness that grew around them, narrowing the road and blocking out the sun, but it was, in a word, odd.
But that was how old forests were: the older they got, the less similar to human memory they were. And then when they got even older, well, the elves would even have a hard time keeping track of what a forest should be like. And of course forests, in general, were much, much older than elves or even the beings who came before them.
“Are we close?” Rosalind asked as if she read Elayne’s apprehensive thoughts. They’d dismounted and were leading the horses down the narrowing, disused path.
“Should be.” Frederick pushed up a low-hanging branch for his horse to duck under. “This seems vaguely familiar.”
“Vaguely?” Elayne stepped over the jutting root of a tree, glad for her shorter dress now. “Where exactly are the Trizians, Frederick?”
He cleared his throat. “In the Trizian Wood, of course.”
“You’re not sure exactly where?” She heard her voice rise, then reigned it in, something telling her to stay quiet.
“Well, last time I was here Sir Legosen was with us, and he was able to—well? He talked to the trees, I think, and found the enclave.”
Rosalind’s voice cracked, “Legosen isn’t here now.”
“Yeah,”—Frederick glanced back at them—“but we have Elayne.”
Elayne blanched. “And?”
“You’re at least half an elf.” He stopped. “Can’t you talk to the trees too?”
She stopped as well, tightening her grip on her horse’s reins. Was he really depending on her to find the Trizians? She couldn’t even contact her mother’s clan in Apos’phia, let alone some complete strangers out in the wild wood. She searched his face for a sign of a joke, but when she found none she felt the color drain from her own. “You want me,”—she strained to keep the exasperation out of her voice and failed—“to talk to the trees?”
He nodded back at her as if it were just that simple. She looked to Rosalind for help, but her friend only grinned encouragingly as if Elayne regularly gossiped with maples. “Bix?” She looked down to the kobold who was keeping pace at Rosalind’s feet, her last, little, green bastion of hope. “In all your reading did you ever come across an elf who could talk to trees?”
He blinked up at her through his magnifying lenses. “Well, it’s been widely speculated upon, of course, as elves draw their magic from nature and their relationship with flora is quite unique, but I fear elves aren’t particularly forthcoming with the specifics of their crafts, and of even the elven writings I’ve had access to, I don’t recall any explicit language or—”
“You see?” She pursed her lips and looked back at Frederick.
“But!” Bix paced beside her on the narrow path. “There was an entry I read in—oh, what was it—The Chronicling of Zaynthua perhaps? A tale of an elf who traveled without ever touching the ground, the branches bending to carry him from tree to tree. He was about four hundred and seventy-two years old though, and still spry as a kit, so far outside the standard elven lifespan. I can’t say I have a lot of faith in the validity of that claim.”
Elayne crossed her arms. “Should we just wait here for the next four hundred and fiftyish years to see if I absorb tree-vian from standing about then?”
“Well, it might not be the best plan, but it’s our only plan.” Frederick crossed his arms as well as if this were somehow Elayne’s fault.
She looked again at Rosalind, but the girl was only nodding more now. She had always been keener on Elayne’s elven background, encouraging her to use magic more often and at a capacity she wasn’t comfortable with, than she herself was.
“I don’t know how to do that!” she shouted then immediately regretted it. “I’m as much a human as an elf, you know.”
“Come on, just try it.” Frederick was looking at her like he was offering a bitter, soggy vegetable to a child.
She wanted to yell again, but it was no use. It was more likely they would continue urging for the next four centuries than to come up with something new, and so to avoid hearing any of that, Elayne instead looked up at the branches crossing overhead and sighed in a defeated, oh-all-right-I-suppose-so sort of way.
Beyond the thick leaves, there were flecks of deepening sky. It was much later than she thought, and her stomach flipped. How had they not noticed how much time had passed? She looked out into the wood again, noting it was much darker than even a second earlier when she had been contemplating the lack of creatures. She swallowed and closed her eyes.
There was a slight breeze, even in the midst of the tightly packed brush, and she focused on that, feeling it against her face and hearing it rustle the leaves. Or, no—was that the leaves themselves, whispering to her in a language ancient and foreign? The stirring in the branches shifted, and her long ears pricked up. Did she somehow know these words intimately from a dark, long-forgotten crevasse in her soul? What on Maw were they saying?
Dumbass.
Elayne snorted and popped her eyes open. It was utterly ridiculous; leaves didn’t have mouths, and if they did they’d certainly let you know when you stepped on them! “You guys, it’s not working.”
Looks varying from concerned to more concerned stared back at her.
“Perhaps you should convene with the tree?” Bix suggested.
“Excuse me?”
He made a small gesture with his hand. “Touch one.”
Elayne grunted, but in spite of herself flopped a hand against the closest tree. The trunk was rough and dry, as she expected. She wiggled her fingers to sit deeper into the cracks of the bark, watching the tendons over her knuckles strain as she pressed. She remembered something, from long ago, her mother telling her that everything had a heart, and her mind briefly considered the crystal hanging around her neck. Again, she closed her eyes and listened to the soft shuffling of wind in the leaves. Maybe there was something there, deeper. She listened hard.
When the tree failed to speak again—or Elayne failed to hear it—she opened her eyes, but this time when she went to complain, her voice caught in her thr
oat. The bark was moving, scraping against her fingertips and enveloping them.
In one quick movement, she ripped her hand away, catching her skin. Cursing, she rubbed at the spot then examined it. Blood bubbled up across her palm in tiny dots. She looked wide-eyed at the tree, horrified to see a smear of red where her hand had been, and stumbled back away from it.
Her back bumped into another tree on the narrow path, and instantly she felt tiny pricks of pain all down her body and jumped away with a screech.
“What happened?” Frederick dropped his horse’s lead and closed the short distance between them.
“The tree.” Elayne showed him her hand.
“You cut yourself?” He cocked his head and looked at her as if she were complaining of a broken nail.
“No, you ass, look!” She grabbed his wrist and slapped his hand against the trunk.
When she released him, he pulled back his hand, shaking it, then examined his palm. “I don’t see—” A look crawled over his face then that told her he too was bleeding. “Sharp bark,” he sputtered, “It happens sometimes, like nettles. They cut you, but you can’t see it.”
Elayne wasn’t convinced. He hadn’t seen the bark move. She looked back up at the branches overhead, perhaps a bit lower this time.
Rosalind gasped then, and the others jumped, but she quickly began laughing at herself. “Just a snake,” she told them, “Slithered right past my boot!”
Elayne’s stomach flipped. This was not right. She glanced up past Frederick’s horse to the path ahead, narrow and overgrown as was the way back. “If we keep going this way will we just go deeper into the forest?”
Frederick nodded. “Another two or three days we should be on the other side, so really we’re already in the Trizian Wood. That is, provided we’re still headed north.”
“Aren’t we?”
“The path should take us there, yes.”
She looked down again at the cleared space below their feet. It had been worn by travelers before them, but when was the last time it had been traveled?
Elayne took a breath. As much as she hated to admit it, Frederick was experienced with this sort of thing and likely right: nettles were climbing up the trees, and this was just a flourishing forest. The Trizian elves lived here, somewhere, and despite that they didn’t know the specifics, elves were undeniably at one with nature, so she should at least be at half of one with it. She managed a mostly unconvincing grin at the others. “Okay, let me try one more time, all right?”
Elayne knelt down and placed her hand flatly on the ground. Maybe it wasn’t about the trees, she thought, but the forest as a whole, and everything that grew had at least this in common. The dirt was cool under her fingers, and if she dug them down, wet. It was actually quite pleasant when she closed her eyes, this feeling, whether from a childhood memory or another memory, ancient and dormant and ancestral.
Her mother had said everything has a heart, but there was more. She listened. A horse shook its mane, Frederick shifted his stance, another breeze blew through the leaves, a whisper, faint but distinct. It hid somewhere below the forest floor or perhaps deep in the rings of the trees, but it was there, separate from the wind and separate from her own mind. Everything has a heart, Cressyda said, but not every heart can be reached.
She strained to focus on that whisper, her own heart quickening, digging her fingers in just that much more, squeezing her eyes even tighter, until finally the whisper rang clear: Dinner.
CHAPTER 10
Elayne’s eyes flew open as something slick wrapped around her wrist. A vine, thick and brilliantly green, was crawling up her arm with a speed that no plant ought to have. She wrenched her hand away with a yelp, but it immediately constricted, pulling her back. In one quick motion, Frederick unsheathed his sword and slashed through the vine, and it fell lax around Elayne’s arm. She scrambled to her feet, flinging away what was left of the tendril. “It wants to eat us!”
“What does?” Rosalind’s eyes were narrowed as she scanned the trees.
“Everything!”
Bix’s nasally voice pierced the forest. His little body flopped forward, knocked off his feet and dragged toward the brush. Rosalind dropped to her knees, grabbing the kobold’s arms, but a thick, brown vine slithered up and over her shoulder, pulling her toward the darkness as well.
Elayne threw her arms around Rosalind’s waist, digging her heals into the earth. Something in the brush snapped, and they fell back a step, but were still ensnared. Frederick sliced at the remaining tendrils, and the three toppled backwards.
“What in the godless gorge?” Frederick’s eyes were wild. “I don’t remember this at all!”
“Oh, gods.” Elayne helped to clear the now droopy flora from around Bix’s ankles. “Did I say something wrong and piss them off?” She was looking back and forth to the plants on either side of the trail. They were coming closer.
“Come on, mount up!” Frederick instructed, running to his horse and climbing atop. “Stay low!”
Elayne scurried up onto her steed’s back, and he burst into a gallop behind Frederick, vines snapping in his wake. The forest came at them fast as they traveled, and Elayne couldn’t help but think they were only climbing deeper into the belly of the very thing that wanted to make a meal of them. When she glanced back to Rosalind and Bix, she saw that the trail back had gone dark as the greenery closed in behind them, as if it might catch and swallow them up on the way.
There was a crack out in the forest then, and she looked ahead to see an absolute behemoth of a tree uprooting itself just ahead as if the ground were giving it up. The trunk began to fall, catching on the vines and branches of other trees and taking them down as it went. Frederick’s horse did not stop but only sped toward it, and just before the trunk landed, skidded across the path, dipping underneath.
Elayne screamed, pulling herself against her horse’s neck, and he took to the sky, shooting them above the fallen trunk and slamming into the ground on its other side. She was nearly thrown as they landed, but held fast, and they took off again behind Frederick through the darkening wood.
Then Frederick’s mare came to a sudden halt, rearing up and dancing backward on hind legs. Elayne managed to stay atop her horse as they skidded to a stop as well but felt the gust as Bix was projected past her. She watched the little kobold sail by with horror, but then relief when Frederick reached out, just catching Bix by his collar before he was swallowed up by the wall of vines that had appeared before them.
For a moment, they stopped and breathed. The horses nervously pawed at the ground, surrounded by shifting flora on all sides, the tendrils snaking over one another, the sounds of them straining to grow at ungodly rates. There was nowhere left to run.
Frederick pulled out his sword once more and slashed at the greenery from atop his horse as it nervously threw its head and danced away from the wall of shrubs. Leaves only regrew from where they were lopped off. The knight took his hilt in two hands and then an orange flame sprouted from the metal as he conjured pure fire up and down the blade. She watched as the vines were singed as it was swung, but his horse wouldn’t keep still, and the foliage was too wet to catch for long.
Elayne took a breath and slid down from her horse, bumping into the others in the tight space they occupied. She brought her hands together, palm to palm, already feeling heat there. It was chaotic, more so than what she remembered, but her memories of magic were murky at best anyway.
She stepped in front of the others, blocking out the nervous whinnying, the grunts and cries of her comrades, and focused on that feeling, hot and angry and wild. The stone around her neck vibrated against her skin. It was ready, even if she was not.
Elayne threw her hands out in front of her, and they were enveloped in a violet, crackling haze. The vines shrank back as the gauzy aether flowed out of her and licked toward the sky, sudden and untamed. The earthen wall glowed purple, and she grit her teeth as she forced the boundary to grow. A freezing wave str
eaked through Elayne, and for a moment she thought this was wrong, it should be hot, it should be charring everything and even her skin should be on fire, but nothing burned. Instead, the leaves curled back and away, and the stems withered and fell to the ground, husks of what they once were.
Her arms trembled and her next breath came in ragged and half-empty. The sounds around her were muffled, and a dark halo was beginning to close in on her vision. Elayne slipped forward, her knees giving out, but the earth came up to catch her, and she felt suspended there, weakly holding up her arms in a last effort to keep the violet flames alight. And then there was nothing.
The light that came back was blinding, a figure within it looking down on her. Elayne felt fuzzy, and was thankful she could not form words, as the only one that came to her would have been blurted out stupidly. Still, her mind asked the question, Mom?
“Well, that certainly was something.” The voice was the monotone drone of an elf—Elayne could now see clearly—who held in her face the nonchalant stoicism of a being that did not stand before a group who had almost been digested by a shrubbery.
Elayne pushed herself up onto an elbow. There were a few shriveled vines, hanging limply from grey, dry branches scattered around them. They were not burned, but it was as if they had been severed from their roots and left to dry out in a hundred years of brutal high summer sun. She poked at a leaf, and it disintegrated to ash at her touch. She recoiled, blinking at Rosalind who knelt beside her, the woman unable to look away from where the earthen wall had once been.
“Duchess?” The elf’s voice reminded her of her presence. “It is an honor. I am Iowen.”
Elayne attempted to scramble to her feet, all sense of decorum flooding back into her. “Iowen.” She tripped over herself as both Rosalind and Frederick’s hands attempted to steady her. She recognized the elven representative’s name from the letter she had received a few years prior. Elves were hard to forget in many ways, and their handwriting even made an impression.
“Please.” Iowen held up a hand, blinking misty grey eyes. “Formalities are not necessary considering the circumstances.” Elayne still struggled to curtsy, and the elf gave her a small nod of recognition. “Perhaps I should be apologizing,” she said, looking down a long, slender nose at the dried-out leaves on the ground. “My enchantments were almost your undoing.”
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