Through a narrow gap between two boulders, he slid sideways and dropped into a crouch. He needed to settle things with Nolo and question the only other witness to the night’s doings. Relieved by the absence of spirits and other weirdness, Sarn listened for his masters’ voices. Were they looking for him yet?
Every tree Nolo had passed with caution. He’d expected them to get up and move at any moment, but none of them had. They’d stood sentinel as usual. Still, he’d kept his eyes on them. Without the Kid and his magical ability to reckon in a dense tangle, he’d twice lost his way.
Nolo stumbled out of the forest. Tension drained from his body as he stepped onto the gravel path winding around the menhirs. The peaceful moment shattered when Gregori rounded a standing stone and almost collided with him.
“Where’s the Kid?” Gregori skidded to a halt, and his friend's worried eyes raked the undergrowth, searching for Sarn.
“He needed space. Where’s Jerlo? I need to talk to him.” Nolo scanned the meadow, but the commander must have retired from the field because he failed to spot him anywhere.
“What did he need ‘space’ from? What did you find out there?” His friend and fellow Ranger regarded him as if he’d grown a second head or a serrated tail.
Nolo performed a quick body check. One never knew what weirdness the forest might conjure up moment by moment. “What I said, it was bad in there.” The sort of bad he needed to discuss with the commander before it became public knowledge.
“What exactly does ‘bad’ mean when applied to a quasi-intelligent bunch of weeds? Are we about to see another example of their—mobility? Because the first time was jarring enough, no one needs a repeat.” Gregori crossed powerful arms over his barrel chest. The man was all muscle but sharp too.
“I don’t think so. Their mobility had a legitimate cause.”
“Which was?”
“For my ears only until I say otherwise,” Jerlo snapped as he appeared to Gregori’s left.
Their boss’ sudden appearance startled them even though their compact commander tended to pop up when and where least expected. It was his modus operandi and according to rumor, his raison d’être.
Jerlo stood five-foot-nothing in boots and weighed one hundred twenty pounds soaking wet. But his small frame housed a tactical genius. Jerlo gave Gregori a look. And the bodybuilder reacted as if he’d recalled an assignment and hurried to carry it out. Once he was out of earshot, Jerlo nodded to his second.
Nolo launched into his tale keeping to the facts ending with, “one group robbed the other. They angered the forest, and it retaliated. Someone must have found the bodies and taken their valuables. When I arrived, there was nothing left worth stealing.”
“So, you think the first group you found robbed and killed the second group. And then the forest killed the first group?”
Nolo nodded.
Jerlo inclined his head. “Well, it’s in keeping with what we know of the forest. It follows a strict ‘live and let live’ policy unless blood's shed within its confines. Break the rules, and you get what we saw. I'd still like to know why it snatched Sarn.”
“So would I.” The abduction troubled Nolo but not the deaths. They had an explanation. Shayari was ninety percent enchanted forestry, and those trees killed fools with extreme prejudice. But the kidnapping of Sarn had no rationale. It violated the forest’s three rules. Solving it had to take priority.
“Do you have a theory?”
“The way the forest zeroed in on him—it had to have sensed him. And there’s more. I haven't told you the most disturbing part of this.” Nolo grimaced not wanting to recall, the Queen of All Trees. The memory of her probing, eyeless stare made him shudder.
Some creatures should stay mythic, not trot themselves out to interfere in young lives. And why pick Sarn? Too much about the Kid lay shrouded in questions thanks to the close-mouthed wraith.
“Oh no?” Jerlo raised a brow, and it merged with the halo of frizz covering his head.
“The Queen of All Trees—she showed up and—” Nolo opened and closed his hands unable to find words to explain the bizarre episode. “She almost snatched the Kid. I couldn’t have stopped her if she had.”
The report jolted Jerlo into action. His dark eyes took on a strange shine. “Where is Sarn now?”
Nolo shook his head ignoring the commander’s question. Shivering, he still felt her eyeless gaze boring into him. But he saw no sign of her. Shaking his head, he resumed his report. “She looked through me. It was the strangest experience of my life.”
“Where is he? Where is Sarn?”
“The deaths affected him. He ran off likely to be sick. He looked pretty green, but I expect him back any moment.”
In fact, Nolo had expected to find the Kid propped against a boulder radiating bad attitude. His absence alarmed Nolo. The night’s doings must have disturbed the laconic brat more than he’d realized.
“You don’t know where he is?”
“He’s not here?”
“No. I haven’t seen the Kid since you tore off after him. By the way, whatever you did to pacify the forest, you have my thanks.”
Nolo shook his head. “I didn’t do anything.”
Jerlo’s eyes sharpened on his second. “You think the Kid did.”
Nolo nodded and tried to articulate the theory he’d constructed while trekking back here. He pointed to the oak trees looming over them. “They wanted him to see it. I don’t know why. The instant he did, the earth split open, and all the bodies tumbled down into a grave the forest had made for them. Afterward, the trees closed the hole and stood still as if nothing had happened. They had wiped out all the evidence.”
So even if the deaths had rated an investigation, Nolo could do nothing about them. No one was alive to be prosecuted, making an inquiry unnecessary. The motive was clear. And the forest had destroyed the trail of the hypothetical thief, so the case was closed. Nolo disliked the situation, but he could see no way to change it.
Jerlo’s eyes jerked to the left. Nolo followed his boss’ gaze and relaxed. Sarn stood there, silent as usual. Wherever he’d gone, he’d gotten filthy in the process. The light from his eyes picked up the reflective dust coating his person.
Sarn looked like what he was—a walking, talking contradiction. The right side of his face was too perfect. It was the face sculptors reserved for angels or dead heroes. A scar ran in a jagged line from hairline to jaw marring the left side of the Kid's face. It was a gift from a psychopath.
Right now, no attitude, bad or otherwise, manifested. The Kid stood there cloaked and cowled with nothing but his radiant eyes visible. Their glow dyed a strip of his pale face as green as his eyes. The brat was six-and-a-half-feet of shadows, secrets, and silence. It made the Kid one tough nut to crack and four years of whacking away at his reserve had failed to yield a single chink.
“Where have you been?” Jerlo followed up his question with a good glare.
Sarn said nothing. His luminous gaze remained fixed on a point a foot-and-a-half above the commander’s head. Nolo watched the Kid tense up, and lock in his silence. The idiot intended to ignore the question, damn him.
Sarn had an iron will, and so did their commander. If not prevented, they would lock horns in a contest of wills. The brat never gave ground, not even when he skirted too close to insubordination. And the threat of a whipping rolled right off the stupid Kid. But give him a direct order, and his magic forced him to comply.
But direct orders robbed the Kid of his free will thus turning him into an automaton. It was an unfortunate consequence of promising to obey Lord Joranth Nalshira. His Lordship had then handed Sarn, and his promise of obedience, off to Jerlo. The brat fought it but his magic, or the accidental compulsion, always won, and the Kid hated it.
Above all, Nolo had to avoid invoking that compulsion. And right now, Jerlo was as determined to get an answer as Sarn was to avoid giving one. In about thirty seconds, th
e commander would demand a reply and Sarn would have to cough one up.
But the brat was rangy and light enough to manhandle when his stubbornness got the better of him. Nolo seized Sarn by his upper arm. “Give me a minute to sort this out,” Nolo said to Jerlo as he towed the brat out of earshot. The Kid had better have a good reason for vanishing.
“Let go of me.” Sarn wrenched his arm free and glowered down at Nolo. He was a half-foot taller than Death’s Marksman, and he put those precious inches to good use.
“You have to give me something. You can’t disappear and say nothing about it. I need a reason.”
“Why didn’t they know the three rules?”
“What?” The segue threw Nolo for a loop.
“Why didn’t they know the rules? Everyone knows them. You can’t live in Shayari and be ignorant of them. Not if you intend to survive long.”
The question had gnawed at Sarn on his trip to the surface. Why had the boy died? And why had his ghost chased him through the Lower Quarters? There was something more to this than a simple case of hikers breaking the rules.
Sarn paced as he waited for Nolo to answer his original question, but the Black Ranger just folded his arms and waited. Sarn gnashed his teeth in frustration as he resumed working the problem through.
What had the child done to incite the first group to murder? Why had the forest failed to protect the boy? The forest’s three rules safeguarded children under its boughs, but not this child.
Why had the forest allowed the boy’s death? Was there something wrong with the boy? How could there be? The boy couldn’t have been more than eight years old. Since when had life become grounds for murder? What had motivated the murderers? They must have known their lives would be forfeit. Why had the forest bothered to exact revenge for the boy’s death? It had allowed the killing to happen.
The forest was enchanted and required to follow its edicts. What was the penalty for breaking such an edict? Sarn put that line of questioning aside for now. He needed to understand the cause before he untangled the effect. “Well? Why? You must have a theory.”
“I’m not sure they were ignorant of the rules.”
Sarn propped himself against a boulder and waited for his master to elaborate.
“They may have thought the rules were rubbish.” Nolo shrugged. “The forest is strange, yes, but it’s not usually so mobile. I haven’t seen anything like what we witnessed in all the time I’ve lived here. Maybe they thought the rules were an old wives’ tale and took their chances.” Nolo chopped a hand through the air closing the issue. “This is off topic. You still haven’t told me where you went and what you’ve been doing.”
Flabbergasted, Sarn stood there and blinked for a full minute. Was he the only one who saw the magic in the trees? It ran in rivers of emerald light up and down their trunks and snaked across the ground connecting them in a spider’s web of power and awareness. His master must have seen branches shift into steps, nuts or fruit falling to take the edge off hunger, roots flattening out of the way—all proving the forest was awake and aware.
Other people must have experienced it too. The forest covered most of Shayari. It was impossible to travel anywhere without encountering the forest’s peculiar brand of intelligence. A memory ghosted by of a flat plain crowded with spires on a strip of treeless land bordering a river.
“A place of towers—” he said without meaning too as he slid down a menhir and pressed his fingers into his eyes. Memories were seeds on the wind, and they swirled out of reach. Each one flashed with images of a life, unlike the one he lived now.
In them, a child around his son’s age clung to him. It was Miren, of course. Sarn recognized his half-brother’s features in the boy’s face. In one scene, he carried his brother on his back as he ran through twisting alleys pursued by someone. Pain had stabbed his ear, cutting his hearing in half. Pushing the memories away, he regarded Nolo.
“What is it?” Nolo crouched down in front of Sarn as his brain re-engaged.
“Shayari has cities. I mean other than Jacora, the capital.” And home of his heroes, the Guardians—if only they were here. They’d know how to help a ghost and whether his death would spawn any further unpleasantness.
“Yes, they’re located in craters where the enchanted forest refuses to grow. There are two large ones, Jacora you know, and Renthalia, and a bunch of smaller ones.”
Sarn let his hands fall from his face to his lap. He’d once lived in one of those cities. “We’re not near any cities. Are we?” Sarn wanted the answer to be no.
Nolo shook his head. “No, not near in any sense of the word. It’s a month’s journey to Jacora by foot if they cooperate.” Nolo nodded to the trees surrounding them. “Shorter by river, though. Fifteen days I think by boat if it makes no stops along the way and the weather’s favorable. The other cities are much further away. You don't realize how vast Shayari is until you try to go somewhere.”
“You don’t think they came from a city.” Well now, neither did Sarn. A bunch of fools could never reach here if they disregarded such life-saving rules.
“I don’t know. But you’re avoiding the question, and I still need an answer.” Nolo fixed him with the look.
Sarn shook it off. “If they aren’t from the city, and they didn’t grow up in a mountain stronghold, what else is there? Just the Branchers right and they know the rules. They live in the forest.”
Something Sarn found unfathomable. Why would anyone want to make his home in an enchanted tree’s branches? What if the tree took to wandering? There goes the village. He shuddered. But the Branchers existed, and they had many treetop communities scattered all over Shayari.
Sarn pushed to his feet, and Nolo copied him. Once he was vertical, he recalled another group making Shayari its home—the Wanderers. They lived out of wagons and traveled about the country exchanging news and goods. The tight-knit group never settled for more than a fortnight in any one place, and they had to be well-versed in the rules.
Nolo compressed his lips together but remained quiet and troubled.
“Is there something else?”
His master's silence answered the question. There was something, but the Black Ranger refused to discuss it.
“Who else is there?” Sarn paced. City folk, Branchers, mountain folk, the Wanderers—he faced his master. “They came from outside—from beyond Shayari’s borders. But how—Kaydran Ironwood shut the border centuries ago. There’s a magic wall or something keeping everyone out and us in.”
“It keeps most people out, yes, but it does allow some people to cross—those who mean Shayari, and her people no harm.”
“How do you know?” The answer was obvious, and it slapped Sarn upside the head making his eyes bulge. He approached his master, agog at, and yet drawn to the idea of immigrants in his land.
“You came from out there? How? Where?” Sarn gestured west toward the distant border.
“You answer my question, and I’ll answer yours. Where did you go when you ran off?”
Sarn turned his back on Nolo and let his silence speak for him.
“A confidence for a confidence—you have to give me something. I don’t think you realize how serious this is. Jerlo could have you flogged for dereliction of duty until your back is a bloody ruin. Give me something—anything—to explain your sudden departure.”
Stuck in a no-win situation, Sarn shook his head and remained silent. The thing lighting his eyes also prevented him from lying, but if he mentioned his son’s existence, he risked losing the boy. A flogging was a small price to pay for custody of the child who brightened his days. He bit his lip to keep the truth prisoned behind his teeth and tasted blood.
Nolo refused to give up on him. “Were you sick?”
Sarn shook his head refusing to speak. One word could undo everything his silence safeguarded.
Nolo searched for another reason. “Did you check on your brother?”
Sar
n nodded. Since his primary reason for his visit below ground had nothing to do with Miren, he bit down hard on the urge to speak. But the truth struggled to break free, slicing the inside of his mouth as he fought to let the partial lie stand. Sarn mashed his lips into a thin line to keep from screaming.
“Alright, why didn’t you say so? It's a reason I can understand, and one Jerlo can work with. How is your brother?”
“Fine," Sarn said, his voice issuing in a hoarse whisper as he struggled to find words. "I surprised him. He hadn't expected to see me before dawn.” Which was true, so the magic retracted its blades. He swallowed the metallic taste of blood wishing for a sip of water.
“You came back, though I’m curious about why.”
Sarn shrugged. “I gave my word. I had to come back.”
No one, including his own brother, had thought he’d keep said promise. He'd indentured himself at sixteen to free Miren from the cycle of poverty and had lived up to its terms no matter what. Why was everyone waiting for him to shirk it?
“What about the border?” Sarn asked, unwilling to let the subject drop.
“What about it?”
“Why would anyone want to come here?” What could make a magical wonderland sound like a nice place to live? Sarn studied the Black Ranger’s face seeking signs of foreignness but found none. Shayarins came in all colors from coal back to subterranean pasty. And Shayari was so damned big every corner of it had a different accent. But outside—Fates above, did the outside world still exist?
“A confidence for a confidence—you know where I went. Tell me what you know about the border. When did you cross it? How did you cross it? What’s out there—”
Nolo chopped his hand through the air cutting off the questions. Turning, he cast blank eyes away from Sarn. As the past weighed on Nolo, an ebony quiver flickered down his back then faded.
“Tell me what you know.”
Nolo shook his head.
Curse Breaker: Books 1-4 (Preview) Page 6
