by Tim Pratt
“How’s your view, Hrym?” Merihim called.
“Unless Bannerman has the wit to keep the tree trunk between himself and me, I should be able to see him coming.”
“We’ll post a guard on the other side of the tree, just to be safe,” Merihim said. “I think we’re reasonably secure, though.”
The Specialist circled the great tree, peering at the trunk. “This tree is dying,” he said. “If not already dead. It’s infected with a peculiar sort of blight. These greasy black patches on the trunk? I’ve never seen their like before. They seem almost like … flesh.” He leaned forward, sniffed, then turned his head away. “Bah. That’s foul. Like a sewer full of corpses.” He twiddled a finger in his ear, which Rodrick had come to realize indicated deep thought on his part; it was still disturbing to watch, though, especially when the Specialist did it while cooking. “I read something about a dark blight that infects some trees, deep in the Fangwood, but only in Nirmathas, on the other side of the river. I’ve never heard of it happening here—”
High up in the tree, something moved, sending more leaves falling down. A high-pitched, strangely echoing, somehow inhuman voice tittered, like something from a nightmare about a deranged child.
“Oh.” The Specialist turned his face upward. “That’s not good at all.”
8
THE DEEP WOODS
The thing in the tree tittered again.
“What is that?” Merihim said. Prinn whispered in her ear. She frowned. “Some kind of fey? A dryad? But do dryads continue to live in dying trees?”
“We should move away, quickly.” The Specialist joined words to action, and the others followed after him—except for Rodrick, who stood looking at Hrym embedded in the tree branch above. Rodrick was about six feet tall; Hrym was about four feet long. The space between them was less than a yard. If he reached up, and jumped …
His fingers brushed the edge of Hrym’s hilt but couldn’t quite close on it.
“Rodrick, come on!” Merihim shouted.
“Not without Hrym!”
“Dryads have to stay within three hundred yards of their trees!” the Specialist shouted. “Which means we should get about three hundred and ten yards away!”
“So it’s a dryad,” Rodrick muttered. Why was everyone panicking? Dryads were supposed to be quite beautiful, and less murderous than their cousins the nereids. In fact, now that Rodrick thought about it, dryads were probably one of the few good reasons to wander around in forests. Who didn’t like a woman with flowers in her hair?
A humanoid figure emerged from the tree trunk, as if stepping through a waterfall made of bark. She looked more or less like a woman, albeit one with skin made of wood, but she wasn’t beautiful, and she didn’t have flowers in her hair. She did have great blooms of mold in her hair, and also on her face, and liberally splotching the rest of her petite form. Black thorns protruded from her skin all over her body, and when she smiled, her teeth were thorns, too. She reached out with long briar-patch fingers and Rodrick stumbled backward. How did you hurt the fey? Fire? No, cold iron—which he’d always ignored in the shops because it was twice as expensive as regular iron, and anyway, steel knives held their edges better.
There was a loud crack from above, and an immense irregular block of ice with Hrym at its center landed on top of the blighted dryad’s head, driving her to her knees, or whatever dryads had instead of knees. The thick icy shell Hrym had spun around himself cracked apart on impact, and the sword shouted, “Pick me up!”
Rodrick dove for the weapon just as the dryad rose swaying to her feet, snatching up Hrym from the chunks of ice and rolling away. He got to his feet in time to see the dryad come at him, claws extended.
The Specialist shouted unintelligibly, then flung something underhand at the tree. A great burst of flame and smoke exploded, and the dryad screamed, spinning on one foot to stare at the burning trunk of her tree. The fire climbed up the immense fir, the dry dead and dying branches bursting into fiery torches. The dryad rushed toward the Specialist, but Rodrick blasted her in the back with a cone of ice, freezing her in place.
Merihim and Prinn approached—now that the danger was past, Rodrick thought—and stood staring at the frozen dryad and the burning tree. “Do you want to put that out?” Merihim pointed at the flaming branches overhead. “I’d rather not burn down the whole Fangwood.”
The fire was already guttering out as it reached the higher branches, recently dampened by the rain, but Rodrick shrugged and walked around the tree, pointing Hrym upward and spraying ice. The wood groaned, sounding eerily like a moaning old man, as the temperature suddenly shifted.
A pall of smoke drifted over the clearing as dusk began to fall. Eldra walked around the outskirts, trying to calm the horses, who’d reacted to the fire with varying degrees of panic, only Merihim’s warhorse standing entirely unperturbed.
The Specialist tapped a fingernail against the sheet of ice covering the dryad’s face. “Fascinating. I’ve heard of blighted fey, but never seen one. They’re said to be corrupted by demonic influences, you know, some lord of parasites and fungi exerting influence in our plane of existence.”
“This was a trap,” Merihim announced. “There’s no way Bannerman camped here peacefully in the shadow of that tree all night. He left the signs of a camp, knowing his pursuers would pause here, and be attacked.” She smiled. “I like this man. His mind works the way mine does.” She nodded toward the dryad. “Is she—it—secure? I don’t want her melting and getting free in the night.”
“Hrym’s ice is more durable than most,” Rodrick said. “I don’t know if dryads need to breathe, but if they do … she isn’t doing much breathing in there. She’ll be frozen long enough for us to get well away, at least.”
Merihim shook her head. “If we keep moving into the forest, in the dark, who knows what other ambushes we might blunder into? There’s no safer place to rest than in the middle of a trap that’s already been sprung. I say we keep camp here. We’ll just watch our frozen friend.”
“Oh, good. Sleeping in a clearing full of smoke, beneath a half-burned tree infected with demonic mushrooms, will be very restful.”
Merihim shrugged. “You can take first watch with Hrym, if you aren’t feeling sleepy.”
Rodrick opened his mouth, but couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t seem childish, churlish, or pointlessly contrary, so he just shrugged.
The Specialist squatted, squinting through a milky expanse of ice at the dryad’s hands. “Did you know that sometimes when you see a vast field of mushrooms, they aren’t really hundreds of individual growths, but actually a single organism, linked by a sprawling underground root system called a mycelium?”
“I did not know that,” Rodrick said. “I feel so much less ignorant now.”
“You aren’t suggesting this dryad could be linked to other blighted fey?” Merihim said.
The Specialist shrugged. “Why not? If so, I suspect that such creatures can sense one another—that, in a way, they are parts of a single organism, just as a vast field of mushrooms or forest of aspen trees share a single root system. But as long as this is the only corrupted tree in the vicinity—”
Rodrick had, once or twice in the past, heard horses scream, and as a result, he recognized the sound instantly. Eldra’s pretty white high-stepper howled as it sank to the ground, and though the fog of smoke made it hard to see, there seemed to be two or three pale, human-sized creatures attacking it, and other figures emerging from the trees in the same direction.
“Run!” the Specialist shouted.
“Kill them!” Merihim shouted.
“My horse!” Eldra shouted.
Rodrick swung Hrym around, intending to blast the approaching fey and the fallen horse both—the latter was doomed anyway—but Merihim was in the way. He was tempted to let loose a blast regardless, but worried Prinn would set upon him if he hurt Merihim, even “accidentally.” The Specialist looped around to the west, bringin
g objects the size of apples out of his bag—more firebombs? But he didn’t have a clear line of attack, either, because Eldra was shrieking in fury and hurling knives at the fey attacking her horse. Prinn ran off into the trees to the east, where there were no fey at all, and Rodrick wondered if he was fleeing or circling around to ambush their attackers.
He didn’t get to wonder for long, though, because two dryads rushed at him, their white-bark bodies splotched with fungus, their snarling mouths and outstretched hands bristling with thorns.
Hrym had a great many powers that could aid in escape, which was Rodrick’s preferred method for dealing with conflict. He could summon a freezing fog to blind his enemies, and make the ground so slippery the dryads would have trouble walking, let alone pursuing. But those environmental attacks would work against his allies, too, and Temple was unlikely to greet him warmly if he returned with news that the other Volunteers had died.
Hrym got tired of waiting for instructions and flung yard-long spikes of ice at the approaching dryads. The icicles pierced them through the chest and abdomen, respectively, but they didn’t slow down in the slightest. Tree spirits didn’t have the same sort of internal organs humans did, apparently. Rodrick stumbled backward, swinging Hrym toward their thorny feet, freezing them in ice.
Before he could fully encase the blighted fey in ice, though, three more dryads were upon him, so close he was reduced to using Hrym as a sword, swinging wildly and without finesse. He knew a few showy sword flourishes, suitable for impressing watchers on a parade ground, but when it came to practical fencing skills he’d never learned more than the bare minimum necessary to avoid cutting off his own feet—and even those skills tended to leave him when he panicked in the heat of battle.
Hrym was a magical blade, though, so even wild swings were successful in lopping off blighted limbs, sealing the edges of the wounds in ice, and making the fey monsters howl as the frost climbed across their bodies, transforming them into statues of themselves. Rodrick spun, arm extended, and Hrym’s blade passed easily through the two dryads frozen by their feet, their upper bodies falling to the ground. Like chopping firewood, Rodrick thought wildly. At least there wasn’t blood from the slaughter, just sap and slime from the burst fungi.
He turned, trying to see if he could help anywhere else, but the clearing was a scene of madness. Eldra had run out of knives and was slashing at dryads with her folded parasol, which had bizarrely sprouted a foot-long silver blade from the tip. The Specialist was loping around, tossing objects that exploded in gouts of flame or sprays of acid, maiming and infuriating and occasionally even killing the dryads. Merihim rode her warhorse, the great stallion rearing up to smash the fey down with its hooves. Prinn emerged from the forest, carrying a severed dryad head in each hand, dangling by their mossy hair. He tossed them onto the flaming corpse of another dryad the Specialist had struck directly, then leapt, a blade in each hand, to take down the fey closing in around Eldra.
“I think we’re winning,” Hrym said.
Rodrick nodded tiredly and staggered around the clearing, lopping the heads off any fallen dryads that showed signs of life. After a while he looked around and didn’t see any more of the fey moving. Night had fully fallen by then, though the burning remnants of dryads still lit the clearing, and filled the air with a fungal stench. Eldra sat slumped with her back against the central tree. The Specialist knelt in the grass sorting through his pack, muttering to himself. Prinn collected fey corpses and tossed them onto what was becoming a reeking bonfire. He dragged Eldra’s horse over, too—there were blackened blotches on its white hide as the fungi spread on its dead flesh—and it began burning as well, which didn’t improve the overall scent of the clearing. It was only after staring dully at the burning horse for a moment that Rodrick realized the titanic strength Prinn must possess in order to drag the beast single-handed.
Merihim touched Rodrick’s shoulder, and he turned his head, blinking at her. “That was terrible,” he said.
She nodded, her usual smirk gone, face grim. “Yes. Let’s have a family meeting.”
Rodrick went to the central tree and sat beside Eldra, who smiled at him weakly. A smear of soot smudged her cheek, and he reached out unthinkingly to wipe it away. Her hand shot out and grabbed his wrist in a shockingly strong grip.
He winced. “Sorry. You’ve got some dirt on your cheek there.”
Her sharp gaze softened, and she released him. “Go ahead.”
Rodrick wiped at her cheek with the edge of his sleeve, then laughed hollowly. “That would work better if my clothes weren’t filthy. Sorry about that.”
She shrugged. “I’ve been dirtier.”
The Specialist closed up his pack with a sigh. “I used up most of my supplies in that battle. If we have to fight again, I won’t be quite as useful.”
Prinn walked over and squatted in the grass some distance away and just sat, unmoving as a gargoyle. Merihim stood looking down at them all, her arms crossed, and then sighed heavily. “I blame myself.”
That’s a good start, Rodrick thought.
“We’re supposed to work as a team, but we’re not a team yet. So when trouble came, we all fought individually, with no thought about coordination. The fact that all of us are still alive, and all these mushroom maidens are dead, proves we’re pretty formidable individually. But imagine if we’d worked together? How could things have gone differently?”
Rodrick frowned. He’d avoided schooling as much as possible, and this felt very much like a teacher quizzing her students.
The Specialist spoke up. “If Rodrick and I had stood back to back, flinging ice and fire outward from a fixed position, we could have destroyed most of the blighted fey as they initially approached. As it was, neither of us had clear lines of attack—we couldn’t strike effectively without risking hurting the rest of you.”
Rodrick nodded. That was true enough.
“I should have done as Prinn did,” Eldra said. “Slipped into the trees and tried to take any stragglers unawares. My skills aren’t as well suited to frontal assaults.”
Merihim nodded. “Very good. I propose that, in the future, if we find ourselves under attack, Rodrick and the Specialist form the front line, and Prinn and Eldra make sure we aren’t flanked or attacked from behind.”
“Where will you be in this scenario?” Rodrick said.
“Where a general should be: in a position to see the battle as a whole, and make adjustments to our strategy as necessary.”
Rodrick grunted. Oh, to be a general. He’d never aspired to be infantry. Then again, being in charge of others in the midst of an attack didn’t appeal to him, either. He was more of a deserter by nature.
Merihim went on. “It seems obvious now we were led into a trap, following trail signs deliberately created to bring us to a place where we were likely to be ambushed. We might as well have blundered into a pit full of spikes. Bannerman could be out there, waiting for us, even watching us, and if so, I’m sure he enjoyed the show.” Rodrick looked at Merihim’s wrist, where the glowing bracelet should have been, but it was gone. Interesting. “We’ll take precautions,” she said. “Two of us will be on guard while the others sleep, with a shift change halfway through the night. I don’t like the idea of sleeping beside a campfire made of fey corpses, but at least in this clearing we can see danger coming. Tomorrow, when we proceed, we’ll go on a lot more cautiously. All right?”
“You’re in charge,” Rodrick said. “So I suppose it must be.” He yawned. “I’ll take first watch.”
“I’ll join you,” Eldra said.
Merihim nodded. “That’s fine. Wake me and the Specialist in the small hours.”
“What about Prinn?” Rodrick looked around, realizing the man had slipped away at some point.
Merihim’s haughty smirk was back. “Prinn has his own mission. Don’t worry about him. He’ll rejoin us in the morning.”
9
AN ISLAND IN A LAKE
Rodrick’s watc
h passed uneventfully. He jammed Hrym point-first into the dirt on one side of the clearing, and he and Eldra sat together on the other side of the great tree, watching the west. He’d hoped for a few stolen kisses, but when he made an attempt she put her hand on his chin and turned his face away. “Really, Rodrick. I’ve just seen my horse set upon by monsters, and then burned. The air still stinks of burning horsehair. There’s a time and place for romance, and this is neither.”
She was willing to chat with him, though, and that helped keep them both awake. He probed her in his usual ways, trying to find out about her background, her upbringing, her social class, her connections—all the levers and buttons and soft spots that were so crucial to learning how to manipulate a person. She was adept at turning his questions back on him, deflecting without seeming to do so, and giving airy and amusing answers that nevertheless failed to provide any real substance. He did ferret out that she’d been trained at the Conservatory of Jalmeray, the elite school for diplomats, musicians, and courtesans, which Rodrick suspected was secretly a training institute for Vudrani spies—their graduates went on to serve foreign kings and queens and tyrants all over the Inner Sea, after all. He shared that theory with Eldra, who chuckled musically. “If that’s the case, I never got the class on spycraft. I left the school a bit earlier than most, though, to seek my fortune.”
“Oh?” Rodrick said. “Did you find it?”
“Let’s just say I haven’t stopped looking yet.”
The hours passed companionably. Against all his instincts, Rodrick found himself liking Eldra. He knew intellectually that she was probably using him, cultivating an air of mystery and then letting a few little details drop so that he could feel like her special confidante. She was grooming him, so that, if the time came, he would move just a bit faster to save her, or that he would prioritize protecting her over, say, Merihim or the Specialist. (He couldn’t imagine going out of his way to save Prinn; then again, he couldn’t imagine Prinn needing him to.)
