by S. M. Boyce
Dark, brewing clouds covered the setting sun in the distance, making the evening come much earlier than it should have. The sudden darkness nudged Kara’s eyes back into focus from whatever daydream she’d lost herself to on their boring ride. She sat up straight and looked around. The forest was thicker, now. They stood on a hill. A dozen feet off, the road sloped down and curved.
“A storm is brewing,” the captain said. “This isn’t the best timing, but we should still be all right. There is a lichgate up ahead, just beyond a river up there. There will be an inn of some sort in the human world.”
She hiccupped in her surprise. “We’re going back?”
“We must. We’ll spend the night at the inn. It will be a safer place to stay than out in the woods.”
The heavy clouds on the horizon stretched their way toward them. The sky was riddled with gloom. The darkness spread into the forest, plunging the road into a shadowed cave of leaves and bark as they walked along. The summer evening chilled. Thunder rolled. Gusts nipped at the hair on her arms. Leaves tumbled across Goliath’s hooves, victims of the wind that darted through the tree trunks in spurts of fitful energy. Shivers raced along her neck.
The cool wind pricked her senses, and with her awareness came paranoia. The shadows became ghosts, moving only when they were in her peripheral vision. The guards saw it, too. The entire company flinched one way and then another. Every snapped twig became a threat, every rustle an enemy.
The wind brought the tickle of an oncoming downpour. The trees bent in the gusts, stretching their bases farther than she thought they could move as they became a single unit, swaying in unison through the dusk. The shorter trees’ branches swept the ground. Leaves fell loose and billowed around in small tornadoes, scattering along the forest floor after a few short minutes of life.
Kara urged Goliath along, but had to continuously nudge him forward. The muscles in his neck twitched. Twigs and loose bark crunched beneath his hooves. He lowered his head and flung his ears forward, listening.
“Ready, men.” The captain drew his sword. He kicked his drowng, pushing the creature faster along the road.
The guards followed suit with Kara still in the middle of their circle. She held out her hand and focused her adrenaline into her palm. A lavender flame erupted between her fingers. She didn’t have a sword—not that she knew how to use one or anything—but the fire would work for now.
A thick branch cracked in the distance. Its ripping sinews tore through the growing tension and billowing wind. Kara spun, peeking around the rear soldiers at the sound, but all she could see was an empty forest. The sway of the trees and the whoosh of grasses drowned out all other sound. She wanted to think a tree’s branch had just fallen, but her intuition screamed to her that she should run. There was something here with them.
Goliath pranced, itching to bolt forward. She tugged on his reins, holding him back. A frantically running horse was useless, especially if she was trapped on its back.
A pebble flew at her face like a bullet. She ducked, but it still grazed her temple. She couldn’t tell it was a distraction, hurled to steal her attention from the massive branch coming at the back of her neck. When it hit her, she fell. Goliath reared. She did not feel pain until she awoke.
Kara heard yelling. Agony. Someone screamed. Hooves struck the dirt nearby. She couldn’t see at first. The world was blurred from the rough pounding at the base of her skull. She reached around and patted the wet area. She cringed. It stung. She turned onto her stomach and glanced toward the noise, her gut twisting at what she saw. Her cheeks flushed. She had to swallow hard to contain the bile.
Hillsidians swung and ducked. Light erupted from their hands. Green mists and explosions billowed through the forest. There were much more than just six of them, too; dozens of soldiers fought on the path and more slid in and out of the tree line. Some Hillsidians were still on their mounts, but most fought on foot. Any drowngs not carrying a yakona growled and snapped, barking and tackling whatever wasn’t wearing a green uniform.
But it was what the Hillsidians were fighting that made her queasy.
Stelians flooded every free inch of the path, their gray skin steaming. They towered over the Hillsidians by a good foot or so, their arms as thick as her leg. Their black eyes glistened in the low light. It was hard to believe that Braeden was part of such a frightening race.
A centaur bellowed and ran through the woods, tackling a Hillsidian as he charged. The monster’s feral eyes flitted around, looking at everything and seeing nothing. His hands dripped with dark green blood.
Another Hillsidian fell in front of her, landing on the dirt with a sharp thud. She screamed in surprise. His eyes were fading, his mouth twisted in pain. His body dissolved into flecks of green dust, the gust billowing through his clothes and pulling away bits of ash as he rotted before her eyes. She screamed again.
Something nickered in her ear. She glanced up, ready to bolt, but Goliath nudged her with a quick bump of his nose. The whites of his eyes were visible and his nostrils flared with his deep, panicked breaths, but he lowered his head beneath her hand and waited. His legs and rump trembled. His ears twitched at each new sound from the battle.
She jumped up and slid her foot into the stirrup, pulling herself on to his back even though her body shook as much as his.
There was a snort and a growl. Another centaur eyed her from behind a tree, and both she and Goliath froze. The creature looked her over and sneered, his wicked grin layering his face with deep lines. His pale upper body was splattered with dark green blood that trailed onto the brown fur of his back end. His nose was broken, and red streams of dried blood coursed to his mouth. The wild anger in his eyes choked the air from her lungs. He yelled, but she couldn’t hear it. She couldn’t hear anything. He charged.
Kara kicked Goliath hard in his side, but he wouldn’t move. In fact, she had to kick him several more times before he would actually follow her “Run like hell!” command.
The centaur was only forty feet away by the time Goliath snapped out of his shock and bolted down the road she hoped led to the lichgate. Another roar bellowed from behind, but she couldn’t look. She called on everything she could remember about horses and clutched the saddle with her thighs and knees, leaning forward and letting her horse gallop with all his might down the road.
She turned her head after a few minutes of running to get a view of the trail behind her, but she whimpered at what she saw. Goliath hadn’t gained any kind of lead from the centaur, who was actually gaining on her. But now, the centaur wasn’t alone. Wolves and a dozen Stelians riding drowngs had joined the chase. A teaming host of monsters chased her down the trail.
Goliath charged on. Sweat pooled on his neck. It stuck to her hands as she brushed it, making her grasp on the reins slip. It didn’t really matter, though. She didn’t have much control at this point. She wrapped her fingers into Goliath’s mane and clenched the saddle even tighter with her knees. That horse couldn’t have bucked her off if he’d tried.
They raced along the curving trail. For brief moments, she lost track of the horde behind her, but after each wave of hope that she’d really lost them, they would resurface around the next bend. She prayed the lichgate would be easy to find.
The trees ended. Mountains consumed the close horizon and stretched into the growing night above. And there, plain as day, was the white wooden outline of a lichgate built into the base of one of the nearest cliffs. Water rapids gushed close by, and she gasped after she had a moment to process exactly where those rapids were.
The river stood between her and the lichgate. The broken bits of a bridge appeared along the shore as they drew closer, the fragmented ropes clinging to their rotten posts. The channel was only about eight feet wide, but the sharp rocks and raging water would make swimming or jumping impossible. She pulled a rein to make Goliath turn parallel to the river. They could find another bridge.
He ignored the tug.
She pulled
harder. He yanked the rein back. Her hand flew against his neck. His head centered on the gate. They were only thirty feet from the river.
“No,” she whispered.
He sped up.
Twenty feet.
She clung to his neck.
Ten feet.
She closed her eyes.
Any second now.
He lifted his front hooves and arched his neck. Her stomach flew into her throat. Sweat made her palms slip down the reins. They hung in the air, suspended as the giant horse jumped the gorge. She let out a shaky breath.
Too late to change anything now. Whatever happens, happens.
Goliath landed on the other side with a thud. Her weight returned suddenly to her knees and the balls of her feet. Her head fell hard on his neck.
Kara twisted around in time to see the centaur attempt the jump. He fell on the sharp rocks bordering the edge of the river and split his head on the bank. The rapids washed him away, the water’s white foam marred with the thick, red ribbons of his blood.
Two mounted Stelians jumped after him, unable to stop in time, and also crashed into the sharp rocks on the opposite bank. Their drowngs yelped, their heads cracking against the jagged shore before the riders and mounts alike fell to the same bloody fate as the centaur.
The rest of the host pulled to an abrupt stop on the opposite side, glaring at her with sneering faces that disappeared as she turned to look through the lichgate.
Through the gate was a forest. It was shrouded in a haze, like a coating of foggy glass. The faded green landscape looked foreign on the sheer mountain wall, as if it was painted on the mountainside with creams and pastels, and she could see the wind rustle through the branches beyond the lichgate. Goliath charged toward the gate, jumping again as they barreled through. As they passed, her gut twisted. A sharp blue light blipped in the corner of her eye.
She tensed as they bolted toward whatever was waiting for them on the other side of the lichgate.
Truth
The scene from the other end of the lichgate would have been a staggering one if any human had been lucky enough to witness it.
The forest was calm. A subtle breeze skirted through the trees. A squirrel—a real one—ran along the path, lucking its way across a nut, when it stopped abruptly. It felt the ground, sniffed, and squeaked. A horse erupted from nothing, jumping through an unseen gateway into reality, and the petrified little rodent scampered into the underbrush.
Kara stormed along the path, adrenaline boiling her blood. It made stopping and breathing and thinking all impossible until she forced a shaky breath and leaned back in her seat. Goliath slowed from a canter to a flighty walk, where he snorted and glanced around at every crunched leaf with a fresh desire to bolt. Kara hunched in a similar flight response, but did everything she could to make him walk with long, slow steps.
The forest was almost identical to the one she’d raced away from: the trees still towered above, all of them close together. Years of rotting foliage shifted in the idle wind that crossed the deer trail. The sun was on its last beams of light here, its burning rays glittering through the leaves as the wind pushed through them.
The tree line thinned and a road stretched across her path: a real, asphalt road. She came up to it and stopped, not fully able to believe it even existed. A blue sedan rolled up the drive, puttering toward her as she froze from the shock of seeing something so normal.
The mounted figures of the small Hillsidian army emerged from the trees across the way as the car passed by. One or two of their giant dogs howled at the setting sun, but the young man driving the car was singing along with the stereo while a girl, maybe sixteen, played with her phone. Neither looked up.
The Hillsidians waited for the car to pass before crossing the two-lane road. The captain and five other yakona broke away from the rest and circled Kara, leading her along the side of the street as they had in the forest before the attack. The rest of the band hurried into the woods from which she’d just emerged and disappeared from sight, until she was once again accompanied by only six soldiers.
Captain Demnug walked beside her, his eyebrows furrowed as he scanned the road. His jaw was tight, his shoulders tensed, and she didn’t know how to break the silence.
“What was that?” she finally asked.
“An ambush. Carden’s company was small, so I suspect the demon sent his hordes to scour every inch of Ourea. They did not expect a small army to greet them.”
“Neither did I, but I’m glad they were there. Why were the other Hillsidians hiding?”
The captain paused, but eventually turned to her. “We did not want to alarm you with the possibility of an attack.”
Kara rolled her eyes. “How’d that work out for you?”
She glared into the silent forest, chewing on the thought that the now-motionless trees housed dozens of uniformed soldiers on mutated dog-creatures the people in the sedan hadn’t even noticed. The captain didn’t answer her, so she turned in the awkward silence to look for another car along the empty road.
“Why didn’t the two kids in the car look up? It was almost like they didn’t even see us.”
“We may be riding drowngs while wearing full Hillside uniform, but if they’d glanced over, those humans would probably have seen horses and—what is that terrible fashion called?—jeans. Sometimes, your kind doesn’t see us at all. What a human chooses to see is never all that really is.”
“Amazing,” she said. “I wonder how many giant, two-headed dogs I passed without ever knowing it.”
“Here we are.”
The captain pointed ahead to a large farmhouse with a wrap-around porch that sat at the edge of the road. It had a small gravel parking lot with a few dusty cars and a barn that was leaning on its last, crooked legs. An old, wooden sign out front said The Mountain Ridge Bed & Breakfast in faded red paint.
He pulled to a stop by the porch and dismounted while the rest of the company followed suit. An older woman pushed open the screen door and greeted them with a warm smile. Her curly gray hair framed her oval face and fell over the ruffled sleeves of a red apron that matched her old, faded sign.
“Welcome!” she called over the porch railing. “Do you have a reservation?”
The captain forced a smile. “No ma’am. I was hoping you could house us anyway. Do you have room?”
One of the drowng’s heads nuzzled the woman’s hand as she reached for the captain’s reins, and a light, happy growl curled from its lips. She smiled and patted its nose while its other head—which she didn’t appear to see at all—hugged in close, waiting for an opening so that it could sneak in for a rub. Kara suppressed a laugh.
“There are only four rooms left, but if some of the gentlemen don’t mind sleeping in a bunk bed, I don’t see a problem with it. Anyway, I’ll get your horses fed, so don’t you worry about them. I was just about to start a late dinner, too. Hope you’re hungry.”
“That sounds fine,” the captain said.
Demnug and his men dismounted and headed for the farmhouse, so Kara dismounted as well and handed over Goliath’s reins. The old woman felt the horse’s neck and shoulders, letting out a disappointed sigh when she touched the damp, sweaty hair.
“Goodness,” she said. “Have you been racing, girl?”
“You can call it that,” Kara said with a nervous chuckle.
“Well, I’ll take good care of this big guy. You poor thing. You tired?” The woman patted Goliath’s nose, and he nickered as she walked him away.
The farmhouse’s screen door creaked when Kara pulled it open, and the murmur of men talking bubbled down a thin hallway that was lined with mirrors and old photos. She skirted around an antique end table littered with unopened letters and headed for the kitchen, of which a table and a refrigerator were visible through the narrow doorway at the end of the hall. The Hillsidian guards all sat around the table, talking as they chewed on rolls from a small basket in its center.
The captain leaned a
gainst a counter, lost in thought as he bit large chunks out of a roll of rye bread.
“How did you know there would be a bed and breakfast with a barn right here?” she asked him.
“Yakona take care of the lands around the lichgates,” he said. “Now, that woman has no idea what we are. She can’t see our uniforms or the drowngs, but we will leave her with enough money to last her a while. She will find hidden treasures here and there, and without her ever realizing it, our little blessings will be enough for her to stay and make a happy living helping us.”
“That’s amazing.”
