by Claire Luana
Kai continued to hack with her blade. The tree hissed and screamed as its bark burned, an unearthly sound that reverberated painfully in Kai’s ears. Daarco’s arm came free as the tree recoiled from her strikes.
All the trees in the clearing had come alive now, furiously pounding at them with limbs and sharp needles. She could hear the trees’ buzzing, angry voices calling in a language she didn’t understand.
“Try to hold them off and give us some room,” Kai called breathlessly. “We’re getting him free.” Even while her body moved, her mind was scrambling and fumbling for moonlight. It had to be there. If she just reached far enough…
Hiro and Colum tightened the defensive circle around them, hacking at the branches, trying to keep them from interfering with Emi and Kai’s desperate rescue attempt.
Quitsu and Ryu snarled and snapped at the branches, but with no weapons but their fangs and claws, they weren’t much help.
Emi had locked arms with Daarco now and was pulling him free of the tree’s clutches inch by inch, all the while sending gouts of flames into its roots. The fire was spreading quickly, lapping with an insatiable thirst up the roots that held Daarco.
The heat of the fire poured over Kai and pops of pitch exploded, splattering her with hot sap.
“Hurry,” Kai gasped, redoubling her efforts. They didn’t have much time.
“Don’t let me go,” Daarco gasped to Emi, clinging to her and the ground, fighting the crushing grip of the tree.
“I won’t,” she groaned.
Kai chopped with her sword again and at last made a final cut through the root.
The tree wailed a keening, angry sound and smashed Kai flat across the chest with a huge limb. She flew across the clearing, smacking into another tree and crumpling to the ground.
Time seemed to slow as she looked up from the forest floor, gasping for the breath that had abandoned her. The scene was grim. Emi and Daarco lay on the ground, tree branches pummeling them while Emi projected a roiling dome of fire above them as a shield. Colum whacked the limbs that came at him with his whirling staff, but sweat poured from him, and his movements were slowing. And Hiro—a tall tree had Hiro by his ankle and was swinging him, smashing him to the ground in violent thwacks. Ryu snarled at a tangle of vines that had wrapped around his hindquarters, bearing him to the ground.
Kai’s breath came back in a rush of pain. She coughed and moaned in shivering breaths, sure her ribs were crushed beyond all hope. The roiling voices of the trees washed through her mind, filling her head with indecipherable cries that blended into the swirling mass of her terror. She couldn’t moonburn.
Her friends still fought furiously, but she could see that the forest was winning.
No, she thought. Not like this. There had to be something she could do.
She closed her eyes and reached farther with her spirit, deeper, into spaces she had never dreamed to go. There was something there. Not the cool quicksilver of moonlight, but something else. She reached for it. As she did, the voices of the trees intensified, pulsing through her head with such force that the pain left her temporarily breathless. The words were foreign, but the tone was clear. The trees were telling them to leave. That the forest was sacred. They were unwelcome intruders.
Seizing on her momentary distraction, a tendril of ivy snaked out and pulled her feet from under her, wrapping up her legs in a split second. She slammed against the ground. No!
As her agonized thought burst free, the trees paused for a moment.
Kai felt their power thrumming through her, their voices and anger like her own heartbeat. The life of the forest, as if it were her own. Pulsing, primal energy, just out of her reach. But she could feel it. No! she thought. This has to stop!
The trees shuddered again, hesitating briefly, but it wasn’t enough.
Abandoning all reason, Kai rallied her will and plunged it into the unknown power. The handprint on her chest flared to life, emanating a bright white light. She was through, she had done it, and now her qi grappled with a raging torrent of elemental power. An underground aquifer of life-giving energy that powered the rise of the sun, the wane of the moon, the sudden burst of a spring rain, the first heartbeat of a new calf. This—this was the stuff of creation. She struggled with the wildness of it; pulling it into her qi was like trying to fill a cup from a waterfall. But drop by drop, she collected it, and it filled her with a power that she had never known.
“Stop!” she cried to the forest, and pure white light burst from the scar, ripped from her like her heart torn from her chest.
The white hot fire swept past her friends, striking the trees, sending them to a shuddering stop. Their leafy foes recoiled branches and vines, unwinding from her battered companions, until in a flutter of leaves, they stilled.
Kai felt the power slip away and the bright light dimmed and died, leaving only the white of the fog and the washed out image of the forest.
Kai let herself slump back to the ground, drained and hollow. They were safe. For now.
Emi had her arms wrapped tightly around Daarco, who was partially collapsed on top of her. They seemed content to stay that way for a minute.
“You just had to…take a piss in this clearing,” Emi managed, dropping her head to the ground.
Hiro started to laugh, a wheezing hacking sound that betrayed the pain he was in.
Laughter filled the clearing as their relief and exhaustion mingled into macabre humor.
Kai laid back, clutching her aching ribs as tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. She couldn’t feel the moonlight. What had she become?
Hiro couldn’t identify a part of his body that didn’t ache. His head pounded like a taiko drum and his neck felt like it was being stabbed with a hot poker. He had been thrown around by that damn tree like a rag doll. He prodded a tooth with his tongue and grimaced when it wiggled precariously. At least it was still attached. For now.
The rest of their group didn’t look much better.
Kai clutched her ribs and moved gingerly as they limped back to camp. The strange handprint on her chest glistened dully on her skin, only scar tissue once again. Daarco had his arm around Emi and was leaning on her for support as his legs had been badly bruised by the vice-like tree roots. Emi herself had blood dribbling from a dozen cuts and was covered in dirt and soot. Colum and the seishen were the only ones that seemed to have come through relatively unscathed.
As soon as they reached the cluster of trees where they had left their packs, they collapsed into the dirt.
“Is it safe to stay here?” Kai asked, her voice breathy with pain.
“Aye. I think you took care of those trees with your light explosion,” Colum said.
“Do you think they have…friends?” Emi asked.
Hiro let out a wheezing laugh despite himself. The thought of trees forming ranks like a gang of street thugs seemed ridiculous. Though the idea of trees attacking in the first place would have seemed ridiculous just ten minutes prior. So perhaps he shouldn’t have discounted the possibility.
“I think we’re safe for now,” Colum said. “Let’s rest and…regroup”—he motioned to their various wounds—“but we set a watch tonight.”
“We can watch,” Quitsu said. “Ryu and I. We don’t really sleep.”
“Good,” Emi said. “I don’t think I’d be good for much right now.” Her skin was sallow and she had deep blue smudges under her eyes. She had burned a lot of moonlight defending against the trees.
“You should eat, Emi,” Hiro told her, tossing her a package of dried meat from his pack before collapsing on his bedroll. “Replenish your strength.”
Kai fished in her pack for the small medical kit she had brought, herbs and wraps and a needle and gut. She was quiet and her eyes were wide and glassy, as if she was staring beyond whatever was before her. But her healer’s training took over, and she tended to the group’s wounds efficiently. She saw to Emi first, giving her friend leaves to chew to dull the pain, and the
n stitching the worst of Emi’s gashes with quick, neat stitches.
Hiro watched Kai as she worked, his chest tight with worry. Questions swirled in his mind. Whose handprint was that? And what in the gods’ names was that white light? Why was Kai moving like a sleepwalker, drifting through the motions? What had she seen?
Kai smeared some salve on Emi’s cut and then turned to Daarco.
“No moonburner magic for me,” Daarco said, his voice gravely from screaming. He scooted away from Kai, wincing at the movement.
“Daarco, you can hardly move,” Hiro began, but Emi cut him off with a look. Apparently, she had taken on Daarco as her charge. She stood and towered over him, hands on her hips. She nudged his leg with the toe of her boot and he hissed.
“Kai is one of the best healers in Miina, or Kita for that matter,” Emi said. “You would be so lucky. You could have Hiro bumble over you once the sun comes up, but he has the healing ability of a boulder. You can hardly walk right now, and we aren’t going to leave your sorry ass here, as much as we’d like to. Let Kai look at you.”
Daarco glared at her fiercely but finally nodded, giving his assent.
Hiro watched Daarco’s face as Kai tended to him, feeling the bruises along his legs, wrapping one of his ankles. Eventually, Daarco closed his eyes, his face almost serene in its exhaustion. Hiro had worried for many years that his friend was beyond saving, too caught up in the maze of his own hatred to ever find his way back to his old self. Hiro thought of those times now, desperate to distract himself from the questions he wanted to shout at Kai.
Hiro remembered how they used to play Burning Wars, fighting an epic battle all around the castle, stopping and picking it up again day by day. Daarco played the moonburner, insisting that Hiro, as prince, had to be a sunburner. Being the moonburner was more fun, anyway, little Daarco had said, because you got to be unpredictable.
Daarco’s father, Ashtan, or “Ash” to his close friends and family, had laughed at his son, ruffling his hair. “The only thing predictable about your strategy should be its unpredictability,” he had said. “Be creative.”
And so Daarco had been. He’d set ambushes for Hiro when he’d left his lessons, falling upon him from above after training, or springing out from under the dining room table. They had giggled until they fell over every time Daarco had managed to get one over on Hiro. Which was fairly often. There was nowhere in the castle that Hiro had been safe. And he wouldn’t have had it any other way.
Hiro thought wistfully of the afternoons he had shared with Ashtan and Daarco, when Ashtan taught them to fish and hunt. He had never minded Hiro sharing their private father-son moments, seeming to recognize that if not for sharing theirs, Hiro would have no such moments himself.
And Hiro remembered when Ashtan came home for the last time, the day he lost his surrogate father and his friend in an instant. General Geisa’s moonburners had raided the camp and command center for the sunburner forces, pummeling the camp with endless streams of fire and lightning. Ashtan had died in his command tent, trying to scramble a defense from his sleepy soldiers. The men who were left had delivered the news, together with Ashtan’s body wrapped in a red cloak.
Hiro would never forget the burnt flesh of Ashtan’s face, barely recognizable after the fire had taken its toll. But even more so, he remembered the sound that Daarco had made. A keening, inhuman wail that chilled Hiro to the bone. When Daarco had been pulled from his father’s body, he’d seemed a stranger. His eyes had been cold and his face had been angry.
They had been eleven years old—but Daarco’s childhood had ended that day. He’d never ambushed Hiro again. He’d thrown himself into training, making himself a living weapon. Bent on one purpose. To destroy moonburners. Ryu had found Hiro just a month later, softening the terrible loneliness that had been left in the wake of his friend’s transformation.
Ryu looked at him and then Daarco. There was understanding in his amber eyes.
“Maybe there’s hope,” Hiro murmured, burying his hand in Ryu’s thick golden mane.
“There is always hope,” Ryu said.
CHAPTER 17
Hiro didn’t realize he had fallen asleep until Colum kicked his boot.
“You’ve been sleepin’ for two hours. We should get movin.’”
A groan escaped Hiro’s lips as he got to his feet. The brief reprieve had only given his aches time to settle in. But despite the pain, Hiro was eager to move on. The clearing where the forest had come alive was too close for comfort. Though it had lain still the last few hours, Hiro couldn’t help but wonder what magic lingered there. It was best to keep moving.
Kai walked as stiffly as Hiro did, her thoughts clearly fixed on some distant worry. Or perhaps her worries were closer than he realized.
“Kai,” he said softly, falling into step beside her, “are you all right?”
She let out a harsh laugh. “No, I don’t think I am.”
He risked putting a hand on her shoulder, though this Kai seemed as unpredictable as a wild horse.
She finally turned to look at him, and tears shone in her hazel eyes. “I can’t moonburn,” she whispered.
Hiro missed a step, stumbling. “What?” he hissed.
Kai bit her lip, looking at Emi and Daarco, who walked a few paces ahead of them. She lowered her voice. “I think it’s been…since I was sick. With everything going on, I hadn’t tried moonburning. Until last night—when I was in the spirit world.”
“The spirit world?”
Kai shared her tale of Hamaio and the tengu who had overtaken the spirit world, as well as Hamaio’s musings about the cause of the handprint.
“This keeps getting stranger and stranger,” Hiro said.
“I thought it was the spirit world that was keeping me from accessing moonlight. But when the trees attacked, I couldn’t…I couldn’t reach it.”
The anguish in Kai’s voice twisted his heart. He imagined being blocked from burning sunlight, its sweet honeyed flames that soothed and inflamed his soul in turn. He couldn’t stop himself from shuddering. Who would he be if he weren’t a sunburner?
“You were able to burn that white light though,” Hiro said. “It’s more powerful than moonlight, isn’t it? It’s like the power that is released when we combine our sun and moonlight.”
Kai nodded. “I can feel it even now. I’m standing on a raging riverbank. Trying to pull some of its water…It’s hard not to be swept away.”
“But you can pull from it?”
Kai nodded. “Yes. I couldn’t figure out how to at first, but now that I have… I think I have free access to it.”
“And this has something to do with the handprint?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know!” Kai moaned. “What’s happening to me?”
“Hey,” Hiro said, pulling her to a stop and taking her smooth face in his hands. The freckles sprinkled across her nose like a dusting of spices stood out in the eerie half-light of the forest. “We’ll figure this out—together. We’ll find out what’s happened to you, and you will moonburn again. But in the meantime, perhaps this extra power is a gift.”
“A gift?” she asked, her voice small.
“We face powerful enemies. We don’t know what the tengu are capable of. But now, you have gained an incredible new power. With this white light, you are a greater threat than ten moonburners put together.”
A small smile appeared at that. “A gift,” she mused.
“Come on.” He released her. “We shouldn’t fall too far behind.”
The mood was somber and quiet when they stopped hours later. The strangeness of the forest seemed to settle over them like a weight with its monochrome grays and greens, its unnatural stillness where there should be birds and squirrels and insects.
Despite his exhaustion, Hiro tossed and turned in his bedroll, unable to find a position where his ribs didn’t ache against the hard ground.
Hiro found himself watching Kai, tracing the contours of her angelic sleeping form
with his eyes. Quitsu was curled into her chest and she had her body wrapped around him protectively. A lock of her silver hair had fallen across her smooth face. What was happening to her?
In the corner of his eye, he caught movement in the mist. He blinked and focused on the whiteness curling above her. Was it a trick of his imagination? But no…there was…a hand. A dark hand with long, sinister fingers and wicked curving nails. A hand that was curling over Kai’s shoulder.
Hiro reached for his sword slowly, trying not to betray himself with his movement.
The mist revealed a bony, unnatural limb attached to the hand connected to a grotesque body by flaps of black membranous flesh. Even this preview didn’t prepare Hiro for the rest of what he saw. A face of nightmares, of horrors, emerged from this mist. Its hollow eye sockets were dark caverns over a gaping, wide maw filled with razor-sharp teeth.
As Hiro stared in shock and horror, it went for Kai’s exposed throat.
Hiro scrambled from his cloak, unsheathing his sword with a ring of steel. He would be too late!
But Colum was there in an instant, slashing at the beast with a curved blade. It reared back with an unearthly hiss.
Their camp was up in an instant, Kai scrambling away, dagger clenched in her fist, Ryu and Quitsu snarling, Emi and Daarco on their feet, weapons in hand. The creature retreated, eyes wary, knowing that it was outnumbered.
But then another dropped from the trees, raking its claws down Emi’s back, bearing her to the ground.
She let out an anguished scream.
Daarco roared with anger, burning a river of fire towards the creature, tossing it back from Emi. It scrambled to its feet and launched itself at him, jaws wide, teeth flashing.
The other creature took advantage of the distraction and attacked Kai and Colum.
With a powerful pounce, Ryu knocked the second creature off Daarco and ripped its throat out. Hiro surged forward and stabbed the creature’s heart…or at least where its heart should have been. Did it have a heart? Black liquid oozed and bubbled from the wounds as it screamed in pain.
