Forestborn

by Elayne Audrey Becker

  “Gerar?” I whisper, my headache searing as lightning bolts.

  Jol’s mouth pinches a fraction. “Do not play stupid with me. I know who you are; I can see it in your face. And I know your home is in Telyan. You have been traveling with Gerar’s eldest son, have you not?” He frowns. “Unfriendly sort of man.”

  “That’s because he sees right through you,” I spit.

  “Good,” he says with a twist of a smile. “We’re finally getting somewhere.”

  I writhe in his grasp, but the knife point only presses harder. “You know nothing.”

  “I know plenty.” A few strands of hair have fallen across his face in the struggle. “I received word two weeks ago that the prince was traveling with two shifters. My ambassador encountered a Royal Guard with quite a lot to say. And then, of course, there was the girl who looked so remarkably like Mariella. Who is she, I wonder, another bastard child from mother dearest?” His voice breaks a little on the words, undercutting the viciousness. I can recognize the subtle sorrow threatening to break through as easily as my own. “A lot can happen in two weeks, you know.”

  I flip through the pages of my memory with unbridled desperation, feeling the mouse fur now cushioning my back. Two weeks ago, we were in Grovewood. The ambassador. The inn.

  One of the Royal Guards?

  “That Gerar is consorting with magical people, even after the terms I laid out for him, is no great surprise to me.” A small smile mars his face. “Though I did warn him of the consequences.”

  Say something, my mind is begging me. But I’m truly at a loss for how to escape this. In the wake of Jol’s ultimatum, King Gerar’s actions are as good as a slap to the face. We were ordered to keep Jol from finding out, but instead, we have forced his hand. And back in Telyan, King Gerar and his advisers all believe we still have time.

  I have to warn them.

  “But consorting with my blood and withholding their identity from me, despite the centuries-long peace treaties between our kingdoms?” Jol clicks his tongue as if disappointed. “Why, one might even call that treason. Tell me, which one of you has he been grooming for my throne?”

  I shove him hard in the chest, and whether it’s because he allowed it or anger has given me heightened strength, he stumbles back a pace or two and lowers the knife.

  “No one is plotting against you,” I say urgently, my mind reeling. “If King Gerar ever guessed at my lineage, he didn’t tell me.” And then, from whatever part of me snagged on the hitch in his voice: “You don’t have to choose this path. Let me help you.”

  He studies me a long while and laughs once, a low and humorless sound. “Consider your options, brother,” he murmurs, eliciting cold shivers down my spine. “I am not so heartless as to leave you without a choice. You can renounce your ties to Telyan and join me back at court, where you may, in time, prove yourself worthy of my trust. Your sister, too, if she likes.” He chews on the words as if debating adding more. “Or, the two of you can side with your southern patron, and I will send him his usurpers’ heads in a parcel.” He pauses, considering. “Then again, perhaps Gerar will be dead before you make up your mind. After all, there is a Prediction to consider.”

  I launch toward him in fury, but he must have seen it coming, because he’s already shouting for reinforcements. The door slams open and soldiers file in, forming a barrier between me and my half brother.

  “Choose wisely,” Jol says, backing away until he’s nearly at the door. “And if you breathe a word of what we discussed to anyone on this base, then their deaths and those of your travel companions will be on your conscience. All it will take is one word from me.” He smiles. “You have three days.”

  I run for the exit, but someone throws his arms around my torso and forces me back from the door. “Jol!” I shout, but he’s already gone.

  My captor shoves me so hard my back collides with the wall. Again. “The next time you address His Majesty so informally, I’ll cut out your tongue, beast.”

  With that, the soldiers disperse, and I am left alone in the room.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  I ram my body into the door. I down the glass of water and shatter it, attempting to use the shards as lock picks. All my efforts yield are bloody fingers, and I sink to the floor, pressing my stinging hands into my shirt. When the shirt stains through and the bleeding doesn’t stop, I forego my prior caution and shift to lynx, where I’m able to lick the wounds until the blood clots. I have no choice.

  A lot can happen in two weeks.

  He’s going to launch an attack. Now, when Telyan isn’t prepared. He thinks King Gerar is, what, plotting with me or Helos to take his throne? And he knows that the three of us have been traveling together; even now, soldiers may be scouring the woods for Weslyn and me. I reassume my brother’s form and crouch against the wall, racking my brain for a way to escape.

  I can’t stop thinking about the betrayal. Jol must have been mobilizing ever since one of the Royal Guards … I rifle through the potential traitors. Naethan, Ansley, Carolette, and Dom. The latter two seem more likely, but then again, maybe the most skillful turncoat is the one I’d least expect. Though aren’t the first two Wes’s childhood friends?

  I clench my jaws together, hard. Yena was right. These humans always search for danger in me when they should be looking at one another.

  Throughout the next several hours, soldiers burst through the door at regular intervals; I can’t figure out the reason for these surprise entries beyond preventing me from sleeping. When the first group enters, I consider shifting to lynx and throwing myself at them, but I cannot imagine I would get very far. I could try to escape once more as a mouse, but they’d scour the corridor the moment they saw the room was empty, and it probably wouldn’t be difficult to spot my fleeing figure. I need a smarter plan than that. So I keep still while they clear away the glass without comment, and the rest of the water arrives in wooden bowls.

  The same man with the shaking hands brings me every tray of food. His face bears only the suggestion of wrinkles—he looks about the age Father was before men like these murdered him. I wonder if sustaining a high priority prisoner is considered an honor or a punishment at this compound, but either way, the sight of his nerves and his uniform begins to rile me. I’m the imprisoned one here, not him.

  “Care to switch places?” I taunt on his third visit, aching from the effort of maintaining Helos’s borrowed form. He nearly drops the meal in front of me. “The service is pretty good, I hear.”

  “Silence,” barks one of the soldiers by the door.

  It would be easy, so easy, to tell them my suspicions about Jol’s magical parentage. But I can’t yet bring myself to have their deaths on my conscience, not if there’s another way.

  “Won’t even look at me,” I say instead, addressing only the tray bearer. “Too scared? Ashamed of what you do here, maybe?” His step falters midway across the room. “Look at me,” I dare him.

  He does, and in that moment, I’m not sure which of us manages to act more alarmed. His irises change, brown to blue, before settling back into their original color.

  I saw it. I don’t know how it’s possible, or how long he hopes to hide it, but I show him I know his secret the best way I can.

  I shift to assume his form, but with blue eyes instead of brown.

  “Filth!” he screeches, stumbling backward. One of the others draws his sword. “I’ll cut out your eyes! I’ll break your neck, I’ll—”

  “What is the meaning of this?” Jol demands, soaring into the room as gracefully as a falcon.

  The man snaps to attention so quickly, it’s a marvel he does not break. “Your Majesty,” he exhales, wringing his hands like a sodden dishcloth. “I—”

  “Have no business hurling threats at my guest. Remove yourself from my sight.”

  His guest. I nearly gag. The man collapses into a hasty bow before walking backward to the door. When he meets my gaze a final time, I smile at him.

 
; The remaining soldiers yank his gaping form into the corridor and shut the door behind them.

  “Have you decided on my offer?” Jol asks, helping himself to his chair.

  I nearly laugh in his face. An Eradain soldier with magic in his blood, right at the heart of their prison. A king with magic in his blood, at the seat of their government. The layers of deception and hypocrisy at play are astounding.

  “What kind of life would await me in Eradain?” I reply, deeming it wise to pretend I’m actually considering it. “Why should I believe you wouldn’t just kill me there?”

  He appraises me thoughtfully. “I see no reason to waste talent unnecessarily, should you prove to have any of value.”

  “It’s a business transaction, then.”

  He smiles. “If you are searching for sentimentality, I’m afraid I will have to disappoint you. In my experience, it does not get you very far.”

  “King Gerar would disagree,” I can’t help but add.

  “Oh, I don’t doubt that,” he says, seriously. “And look at where working with him has gotten you.”

  I glare at him through narrowed eyes.

  “I will get you a new attendant,” Jol says, rising abruptly and heading for the door. “You have two days left.”

  True to his word, the tray bearer doesn’t return. Every so often, however, Jol reenters the room, asking if I will accept his offer. Each time I deflect, and he departs seemingly unbothered. No sign of knives or more brutal tactics ever since that first meeting, and I still can’t figure out why.

  The only thing I have to mark the passing time is the mounting strain in my body. The ache in my head is blossoming into body-wide discomfort. First as knots in my back, then pinches along the lining of my stomach. Cords tightening inside my calves, and pinpricks jabbing the soles of my feet. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to maintain Helos’s form; pretty soon, my two days of borrowed matter will be up. At least by then, the boys will hopefully have had the sense to obey my orders and run far away from here.

  By Jol’s fourth visit, I’m close to fainting. Lack of proper sleep and holding borrowed matter has rendered me nearly incapacitated, but the thought of Wes and Helos going free has me desperate to buy them as much of a lead as possible. I remain in Helos’s form.

  By Jol’s fifth visit, my body has betrayed me at last.

  He makes it only a couple of steps into the room before halting. “What is this?”

  Breathing rather heavily, there’s little explanation I can offer him beyond the obvious. My hair falls in waves just past my shoulders, and my hands rest limply in my lap. In my natural form once more.

  The sight arrests Jol where he stands. He seems to undergo a kind of transformation; his eyes are splayed wide, his fists are balled, and despite the distance between us, I could swear he’s started to shake.

  “You,” he whispers, and I don’t know whether he means I’m his half sister, not brother, or whether he’s simply seeing the ghost of his mother.

  “She left me, too, you know,” I say. “Before your father murdered her.”

  For the first time since meeting him, Jol appears incapable of responding.

  “I know what that feels like,” I continue. “But you have nothing to prove.”

  This, at last, stirs him into anger. “You know nothing of me or my life,” he hisses, and there’s a hint of emotion in the words. Defiance. Or loneliness.

  “Then tell me.”

  He exhales slowly. “Does this mean you accept my offer?”

  In the silence that follows, whatever sliver of him may have begun warming to me slams shut. His expression returns to one of cool indifference. Detached.

  “You still believe there is value in sentimentality,” he observes. “I see now I will have to break you of that notion, if you choose to live and wish to survive at my court.”

  My pulse accelerates. “Jol—”

  “Commander!”

  The vile man enters the room a heartbeat later, along with three other soldiers. His lips curl into a sneer when he sees me. “Your Majesty?”

  Jol straightens and places his hands behind his back, his eyes never leaving mine. “Put her in the shed.” The commander becomes near gleeful, until Jol specifies, “Alive.”

  Someone’s jaw drops a little, but no one objects. Instead, I’m hauled roughly to my feet and dragged back through the corridors and out into the open air, trying to make sense of my surroundings. I tilt my head to the sky and could swear I catch a glimpse of black circling overhead.

  I force my attention back to eye level. The shed. I saw the logs and diagrams, the experiments they perform here. Please don’t let the shed be that. I’m still appealing to fortune when we reach the squat, concrete building near the watchtower.

  A soldier throws open the door and covers her mouth with a fist.

  The stench hits me before the sight.

  Horror-struck, I yank against my captors’ hold. Attempt to kick them in the groin. Scratch, bite, break. None of it works, but it does earn me another punch to the gut. I clench my teeth at the impact.

  “Don’t forget, shifter, I have plenty of techniques at my disposal,” the commander murmurs close to my ear, when we’re standing at the precipice. “A finger broken, perhaps, or a toenail removed. Don’t worry,” he adds, noting the look on my face. “None of it would kill you.”

  A moment later I’m tossed through the opening and into a nightmare. Into the “shed,” whose floor is covered wall to wall with corpses.

  The impact of landing might be the worst sensation I have ever felt.

  “Don’t bother trying to beat down the door,” the commander cautions in a carrying voice, across the exit’s threshold. “If you do, we’ll have crossbows at the ready.”

  He slams the door shut, casting me into near-total darkness, save for the murky light from a few slitted windows scattered throughout.

  Corpses. Corpses everywhere, from all different people and animals. Empty eyes and stacked limbs and decaying flesh. The stench of rot scalds the back of my throat, crawling into my lungs, so thick I can practically sink my teeth into it. Resting only an arm’s length away is the missing forest walker, her body clear as glass, save for the smudged edges. Hastily, I stumble barefoot toward the door, tripping, shrieking, choking on sobs as the bodies roll beneath me.

  I’m desperate not to vomit, not to tarnish these lost souls any more than they already have been, but there’s no help for it. I retch and retch.

  “Let me out!” I scream when I’ve emptied my guts, any pretense of composure completely impossible. No one answers, and my body is too drained to offer escape in the form of an animal. I tip my head to the ceiling and look for an opening of any kind, one I can fly through once I have recovered enough strength. There’s nothing.

  I’m shaking so violently it’s a miracle I haven’t stripped the skin from my bones. There’s nowhere to stand, nowhere to sit, nowhere to exist that isn’t on top of someone; the bodies cover the ground completely. I press my fists against the metal door and struggle to calm my hiccupping breaths. I need to think. I need to breathe. But I can’t. I can’t think of anything other than the victims beneath my feet, the ones who can no longer breathe, the ones whose lives were stolen from them.

  And for what? Because they were born with magic in their blood? Because they failed whatever tests were forced upon them? Because they weren’t human?

  It’s all wrong. The executions. The biases. This campaign to empty the land and destroy the magic within, as if that could possibly justify preventing another Rupturing.

  At last, something pushes past my horror and disgust. The sob in my throat breaks through, and then I’m crying. Proper, hysterical crying, a mess of tears and snot and swelling, whether from sorrow or fury I don’t know. It occurs to me that this could have been Helos, how close that was to becoming reality, and I cry even harder. Cry and scream and scream some more.

  I think of Simeon, ramming his elbow between my
ribs at Castle Roanin. I think of Dom, declaring me a monster, and Seraline’s sister making the symbol to ward off bad fortune.

  And suddenly, I’m not angry at my mother for abandoning Helos and me, for choosing to flee and save herself. I’m angry at those men with their black-fletched arrows who forced her to choose in the first place.

  The knowledge is a revelation, along with everything else. My mother had a life before she had us. She had a husband and a son and a home of palace walls. Weslyn told us once that Jol’s mother—my mother—left Oraes before she was killed, but he never said how long she managed to live in hiding. She must have fled to Caela Ridge and given birth to Helos and me a few years later.

  And before that, she was a queen. A queen.

  What does that make Helos and me?

  A threat, it seems, in Jol’s mind.

  There’s so much I need to ask her, so many gaps in the story that only she can fill. And she’s gone. Murdered like the rest of the forestborn in this room, with no ability to think or speak or act or know anything, ever again.

  But I’m still breathing.

  This is the thought that grants me clarity as the day drags on. The door is the only way out, and that way is being watched. So I’ll have to find another one.

  I take a breath and face the room once more.

  There’s an opening built into the wall opposite mine, an arch made of brick that recedes into shadow. It may lead to nothing, but it’s a start. After steeling myself another moment, I walk slowly, agonizingly, across the room, shifting the bodies out of my path to the extent that I’m able.

  When I reach the arch, I find it stretches back far enough for me to take several steps in, if I can work up the courage to cross the soot-covered floor without shoes. I hesitate, then bend a little and take a step forward. A sharp point jabs the sole of my foot, and I bite back a cry, lifting my leg to brush away the debris. They’re shards of bone.