Forestborn

by Elayne Audrey Becker

  “Sir, shall I do another sweep?” I ask hopefully. “I can leave right away.”

  “No.” He waves an idle hand in my direction, and my shoulders droop. “No, I may have something new for you. In the meantime, take the rest of the day off.”

  I open my mouth to ask what he means when Dom reenters the parlor.

  “Your Majesty, it’s nearly eleven. They’re ready to open the gates unless you say otherwise.”

  “Fine, fine.” King Gerar gives another wave of his hand. Then he asks, seemingly to no one in particular, “Where is Finley?”

  “I can fetch him, sir,” I say at once, just as Weslyn finally swivels round. His cold eyes narrow, and I feel a vague sense of victory.

  In contrast, King Gerar has brightened a little. The signs are nearly imperceptible, scarcely more than a smoother brow and a slackening in his jaw, but I’ve learned to look for them whenever Finley’s presence is promised. “Very well.”

  I’m gone before his eldest son can protest.

  In the time it takes me to reach the lofty, brown-stoned northern wing and climb the stairs, the noise from the assembling crowd has grown close enough to permeate the castle’s thick walls. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people ready to flatten the carefully tended lawn with eager footsteps. Anxiety tightens its familiar grip around my chest.

  I round a corner and nearly collide with Finley headlong.

  “Rora!” he exclaims, a broad grin overtaking his slender face. “Not looking for me, I trust?”

  Finley is the total opposite of his two siblings, and wonderfully so, all tangling limbs and frenetic energy. Wispy blond waves of hair fall across a kind face dotted with freckles, the mark of a childhood spent under the sun. Already, I can feel my mask dropping for the first time in two days.

  “Your father sent me to find you.” I run a critical gaze over his wrinkled suit and the half-made tie hanging loose around his neck. “Lowering your standards, I see.”

  “A low blow,” he says, shoving my shoulder before falling into step beside me and fixing the tie. “But possibly deserved.”

  “You promised to at least try,” I remind him.

  “I know.”

  “Today seems a good day to start,” I add, finding the relaxed set of his shoulders far too free from guilt.

  “I had something to attend to,” he says. “Royal duties, you know.”

  I raise an eyebrow. “Don’t lie to me.”

  “Fine. I overslept. Headache—a bit too much to drink last night, I suppose. You know how it is.”

  “Actually, I don’t.”

  “A fact I’m determined to change one day.” Finley trips over a bump in the bloodred runner underfoot, catching himself on the stone wall.

  “Are you … nervous?” I ask, biting back a smile.

  He glares at me sidelong. “Now you’re just being rude.”

  Being with Fin is easy, so much so that I permit my guard to drop more than I should. So by the time we’re nearing the parlor doors, the old dread settles over me all the stronger for its temporary absence. The figures sewn into tapestries along the walls take on new meaning, mocking expressions that seem to warn of the trouble to come. I imagine them reaching for me with greedy hands, wanting to pull and flatten my body until I’m like them—still, silent, and unable to cause any more harm.

  “I’ve just remembered,” Finley exclaims, so suddenly I flinch. “I’m supposed to bring flowers today.”

  I appraise him skeptically. King Gerar didn’t mention any flowers.

  “Come on, or Father will have my head.” And without waiting for an answer, he turns on his heel.

  I glance at the parlor doors, just at the other end of the hall. But I have no intention of returning there without him, so I resign myself to following.

  “Why flowers?” I ask, as he leads me down a winding staircase and past baffled, bowing servants.

  “For Mother, you know. To represent her.”

  “The gardener couldn’t fetch them for you?”

  “It’s more personal this way.”

  To avoid any possible sightings by the crowd now gathering on the grounds’ front lawn, Finley sneaks us out a rear door hidden in the castle’s northern façade, nodding to the curious younger recruits on guard. Hot air dampens my skin in what feels like mere moments as I follow him through the hedgerow garden and groves of red maples, past the groundskeepers’ shed and an old, rarely used carriage house, all the way to a secret door hidden in the outer wall. Creeping ivy and moss-strewn cracks hide the iron key ring from view.

  “Finley,” I warn, the back of my neck prickling.

  “Fine, I lied.” Pulling a heavy key from behind a loose stone, he heaves the door open and gestures for me to step through first. “But you have to admit, the fact that you didn’t catch on sooner proves I was right to do so.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “We both know you were suffocating in there.” Finley closes the latch, then uncrosses my arms with a grin.

  “Have you lost your mind?” I ask with no small measure of sincerity.

  He shrugs and marches straight into the Old Forest.

  “You can’t miss the ceremony,” I persist, even as I fall into step beside him. “It’s the most important day of the year!”

  “No,” he says, his expression sobering. “It’s a day for silly tradition and baseless speculation. You don’t need to suffer through the aftermath this time. You do enough.”

  I bite my lip. “You think it will be the same today?”

  Finley runs a hand through his hair. “It’s been six years. I don’t see why not.”

  “Please tell me you’re not subverting an eight-hundred-year-old tradition on my account.”

  “Come on, Rora. I’m nice, but I’m not that nice.”

  But he is. He’s done so before, deftly extricating me from tense situations under the pretense of needing my assistance, only for me to discover through a later series of gripes and eye rolls that he was meant to be somewhere else.

  As we climb, the crowd’s distant chatter ebbs into the forest’s gentle melody—wind-ruffled leaves over creaking branches, chattering robins and cardinals, screeching insects, and small animals scuffling through briars and dens. At first, I think he’s leading us to his mother’s grave, an ornate headstone erected here in accordance with her will. Today of all days would make particular sense, though he and his family visit often anyway. Well, except his brother; if there’s any truth to kitchen gossip, Weslyn hasn’t set foot in these woods since the day Queen Raenen fell.

  Soon, however, our idle course tracks south, the wrong direction for a grave visit. The ground underfoot grows rougher, wilder, grass giving way to coarse vegetation and dirt-encrusted rocks. Oak trees, beech trees, hickory, elm—a forest ancient and unyielding, giants from a time long lost. Despite my concern for how King Gerar will receive Finley’s absence, I can’t deny the snags in my stomach are unraveling with every breath of wood-scented air.

  The annual tradition of publicly reading the year’s Prediction is almost as old as life on Alemara itself. Nearly eight hundred years ago, after a whisperer named Fendolyn united magical and nonmagical people under a single banner for the first time since magic surfaced on the continent, divisions regarding the line of succession fractured her followers into warring camps.

  Some thought her daughter, Telyan, was the natural heir with her added gift of magic. Others thought it unfair that her son, Eradain, be cast aside simply because no magic ran in his veins. Then Willa Glenweil, one of Fendolyn’s closest advisers challenged both children for the right to rule, for why should the crown be inherited rather than earned?

  To spare the mobs from mutual slaughter, Fendolyn proposed a compromise—Eradain could take the north, Glenweil the middle ground, and Telyan would remain in the south, the land from which her mother ruled. But the giants, fearing the seeds of resentment taking root in humans and wanting no part in future trouble, asked that the c
ontinent instead be split into four, that the wilderness west of the river remain neutral territory no one could claim. All agreed.

  Before departing, as a sign of good will, the giants gifted each of the three new rulers with the continent’s rarest type of bird: a loropin. A bird coveted by most, because a quill made from its feathers will write the truth about the future, but only for the one gifted a feather, and only on each anniversary of the day it was given. Having witnessed the rivalry wrought by jealousy, fear, and anger, the giants urged their gift to be symbolic: a reminder to let truth and logic dictate their reigns, rather than bleak emotion.

  Every year since then, as a show of unity throughout the three realms, each ruler uses their quills to write a message—one which always seems to write itself—and reads it publicly. Always vague words of comfort or warning, rarely comprising more than a sentence, to guide their people in the year to come and to solidify their role as the wielder of truth. And relative peace did hold—until seven years ago today, when for the first time in seven hundred and forty-one years, all three quills yielded the same words for all three rulers: two shifters death.

  Two years later, the day Queen Raenen, her hunting party, and her two eldest children stumbled upon Helos and me squatting in the Old Forest was the day of the Prediction. The third of what would become six consecutive annual readings all producing the same three words. Seven, if today’s reading yields the same. It was the day the first earthquake in nearly eight hundred years shook the land, striking terror into Telyan hearts that the Day of Rupturing which once broke the world might happen again. The day the queen, an expert rider by all accounts, fell from her horse, broke her neck, and died.

  An omen, King Gerar’s advisers saw it. A tragedy portending the end of the Danofer line, the royal bloodline that stretches all the way back to Fendolyn, though the magic in it has faded without a magical marriage in almost two centuries. A sign that an explosion of magic could once again crack the continent apart. And trapped at the center of it all, in their eyes, were my brother and me.

  “Rora,” Finley says, calling my attention back to the present. “As I said, my gesture was not entirely selfless. I thought—now we’re here—you could help me with something.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes, and I think—I’m going to need your help sooner than I realized.”

  I turn in time to see him trip on a root like he did the runner. Only this time, when he straightens, his face looks alarmingly pale.

  “What’s wrong?” I demand as he leans against an oak, breathing heavily. “What do you mean, help?”

  But Finley’s eyes are glazing over, far too fast, the pupils dilating as if he’s concussed. He shakes his head, holds out a hand, clutches mine when I step close to steady him. “I think—”

  “Finley!” I cry, catching him when his knees suddenly give way. I’m dismayed at how easy it is to support his weight, considering he’s only one year younger than I am. Or two, or three. It’s all a guess, really. “Fin, talk to me,” I say, my heart flinging itself wildly against my rib cage as I watch his eyes lose focus once more. His hand loosens its grip on mine, and both of us sink to the forest floor.

  “Let him go,” I beg, bending over the body gone rigid, the heaving chest, the quivering, waxen skin. Alarm bells are screaming through my head, loud as the clock tower tolling the hour, and with them, the tingling in my core returns. Threads of numbness engulf my limbs. Fur along my back, then feathers all over—my body torn between the urge to hide or to flee, far away from this scene I never saw coming. “Please. Not him, too.”

  I ignore the gathering sounds of creaking, groaning wood overhead with a vengeance. Tears are welling in my eyes, but I blink them away and shake my head, refusing to let them fall. Refusing because this day of truth has always been tainted by lies, so what’s one more to add to the tally? In the darkening wood, I set each one before me, all of the lies I reach for when the nightmares, the dirty looks, the hidden scars and endless self-loathing begin to drag me under—that my mother loved me before she left me, that my brother and I are not a curse, that I can be good and selfless and worthy of love in spite of the things I’ve done. I assemble them all, then set one more on the shelf: that my best friend, my only true friend aside from Helos, isn’t dying.

  But the trees around me, leaves and branches straining against their holds, limbs pointing to Finley like a circle of swords—the trees all tell a different story.

  TWO

  It takes several tortured, endless minutes for Finley to come to.

  “Rora?” he croaks, blinking slowly.

  My stomach drops onto the forest floor. “I’m here.”

  Placing one of his arms around my shoulder, I help him into a sitting position. Finley remains quite still for some time, his hands pressed into the leafy ground as the haze gradually recedes from his eyes. His face remains composed as he takes in the ring of trees bending toward him.

  “I see,” is all he says.

  It’s old, the warning that thrums through my blood then. Familiar, how the edges brush my skin. Out, they whisper. Away. “Are you feeling well enough to walk? We should get you home.”

  “Rora.” Finley resists the tug of my hands, his forehead creasing. “Listen.”

  Though I’d give anything not to, I divert my attention to the forest around us, which has long since grown unnaturally quiet. No birds chirping, no leaves hissing in the wind. All of the sound has dropped away.

  “I had to be certain,” Finley murmurs, and my heart hammers at the pitch of his voice, far too loud in the smothering silence. He does not sound surprised.

  “You suspected?”

  “Don’t tell me you did not. You of all people.”

  I press my lips together in a thin line. For four years, I have worked as a spy for King Gerar, traveling throughout Telyan and observing the mood of the populace. Listening for any issues or points of discontent to report back to the crown, and each time wearing a different face—my animal forms may be limited to three, but I can change my human features to match any person I’ve seen before.

  This duty changed a few months ago, when people started falling sick, and it became my job to identify new cases. The illness presents like countless others at the onset: roaming pains, reduced appetite, nausea, fatigue. General enough in its early stages that it’s impossible to detect the magic taking root inside—at least, impossible in human form. My mouse nose can detect the earthy, ash-bitten scent with ease.

  Only, I’m never around Finley in an animal form.

  My fingers curl into fists at my side. As the Fallow Throes progresses, the affliction becomes easy to identify. Aside from a few strange cases in which those who smell of magic develop no symptoms at all, victims fall prone to episodes of delirium, and then there’s the way that nature responds to them. The sway and the silence. The turning point from ordinary symptoms to not, and the sign that patients won’t last the year. After a time, their voices shift higher or lower, cruel distortions of their former selves. Worse, their senses heighten many times over—sharper vision, acute hearing, an awareness of vibration and movement as far as several rooms away. Patients say it’s like a hurricane, far more than any human is built to experience, with a never-ending headache hammering their skulls. The overstimulation drives most to madness even before the final stage: when they lose the power of language, and only nonsense falls from their tongues.

  “Rora,” Finley says with a smile, lifting an eyebrow when I don’t respond. As if I’m the one who deserves to be pitied and not him.

  Finley is surely the least royal-acting royal in all the realms.

  “Come on.” I brush a twig from my dress with shaking hands. “Let’s get out of these woods. You can lean on me for support.”

  “Always one for practicality.”

  This time, I can hear the sadness coloring his voice, and it feels like a needle puncturing my lungs.

  Accepting my outstretched hands without fuss, Finley
wobbles to his feet and hovers in place a moment, pressing the heel of his palm to his temple. With him newly conscious and unsteady on his legs, we can’t manage anything faster than a walk. The pace soon sets my teeth on edge. If Helos were here, he could carry Finley to healers and help much more quickly. But sweet Helos hasn’t been permitted on the castle grounds—or near our friend—in just over a month. Not since Finley lost some of the usual spring in his step, come to think of it.

  Rage boils deep in my belly, turning quickly to fear when I think of how King Gerar and the rest of his court will react to learning his youngest son is—is—

  Even in the far corners of my mind, I can’t bring myself to say it. But other sinister threads worm their way into focus with ease. The terror of being punished, cast out, of my actions forcing Helos and me to move yet again, when the lives we’ve built here in Telyan are as close as we’ve ever come to a stable home and shreds of community. As if I would ever do anything to deliberately hurt Finley. Finley, who studies maps and charts out plans for escape, the architect of infinite, imagined voyages free from constraint. Who chafes at the bindings restricting his lot in life, same as I. The only one aside from Helos who’s dared to love me and not leave.

  The woods ripple around us as we retrace our steps. Chestnuts, oaks, and hickories lean in, then straighten once we’ve moved three or four paces away. It’s a sight better fitted to the Vale of my childhood, that dreaded wilderness west of the river, where magic still thrives in an ever-changing landscape. Not here in a kingdom that’s mostly reduced to human subjects, many magical people having left, and the magic embedded in the land only a shade of its former self.

  Finley loses his footing with a grunt.

  “You’re shaking,” I realize, cursing myself for giving way to distraction. The pocket of silence envelops us still, as if nature is holding its breath.

  He folds his arms across his narrow chest, cradling his elbows in his hands. “I’m all right.”

  “Don’t be absurd. You need medicine.” I chew the inside of my cheek, having hoped we would have more time before the delirium’s aftereffects began. “The grounds will still be packed with people for another hour at least. There’s no way to sneak you in unseen.”