by K. Ferrin
“If he survives the trauma of what I’ve done to him, he’ll likely live. If infection doesn’t take him.” She was toweling her arms off, studying her handiwork lying on the ground in front of her. “I will be at the river. I need to soak this hand and wash the blood from my clothes.” She glanced up at Ling then, her eyes traveling dispassionately along Ling’s body. “You should too. You don’t want the scent of blood about you when you’re wandering through these woods. He’ll rest easy now; Amalya has seen to that.” She turned and walked away without another word.
Ling crawled back to Navire and rested a hand against his side. His chest rose and fell in a steady rhythm, but he was still unconscious. She looked down at herself and realized Celene was right. Her hands were sticky with drying blood. It carried up both arms and soaked the front of her clothing. She wondered how much blood a dog could lose and still survive. She didn’t ask the question out loud. There are times it is better to not know.
“Go. I’ll watch over him and wash him.” Dreskin touched her shoulder gently for a moment before settling the pot, which he’d filled once again with clean water, over the fire. He knelt beside her and began washing the blood from Navire’s coat, his touch soft and gentle where Celene’s had been rough and business-like.
She watched him for a time, his fingers prodding at blood-matted fur gently, his muscles flexing as he squeezed excess water from freshly rinsed cloth. She climbed to her feet and stumbled away from the firelight in the general direction Celene had taken. She stumbled onto the stream quickly, pulled the stiffened clothing from her body and lay down, letting the cold water wash away the blood that covered her.
Chapter Fourteen
The stars glittered coldly in the clear sky, and Ling wondered if they were as cold to the touch as they appeared. They wavered and shifted as she stared at them from beneath the cool water of the river. She had wedged herself on the bottom; the gurgling sound the water made as it flowed around her was a strange comfort—something that was in short supply lately.
It was a gentle sound, soft and peaceful, so different from the screaming and running that seemed to be the norm for her these days. In her memory, Evelyn did not think of her life as particularly charmed. But from Ling’s perspective it had been just that. Evelyn’s bad days had been isolated incidents, her bad moods shallow and transitory. Her biggest crises had been when her parents forbade her from staying out late or pushed her too hard toward following in their footsteps instead of her own. Her life had been filled with innocent laughter, easy confidence, and love.
Ling’s could not have been more different. From the moment she had discovered what she was she had been hunted. Every peaceful moment had been nothing but a short interlude between increasing levels of terror, and all along the way was a long line of bloodshed and death. Dreskin and Drake were certain she was not a curse, but Ling was equally certain they were wrong. Perhaps she wasn’t a curse in the way she’d originally thought, but it couldn’t be denied that she left a path of destruction in her wake. Perhaps her mother had been right all along; maybe magic was an abomination. Ling seemed to be proof of that.
So many people had come to harm because of her: Witch, the crew of the Crimson Float, Alyssum, maybe Mercer, and now Navire. And Celene, the woman had not only saved Ling’s life on the Courser, but she’d done what she could to save Navire’s as well. And Amalya…
Ling had been openly hostile to Amalya, in full view of Celene and the world. The woman had to suspect by now that Amalya’s fits had been, at least in part, Ling’s doing. But she said nothing of it, not to Ling, not to the others, and she had offered her aid without question as well. Ling had no idea what it was Amalya had done, but she had helped Navire too. She’d thought the girl a dead weight, a risk, but she began to see perhaps she had been wrong about that. Celene and Amalya were good people, generous and kind. Ling was the abomination.
The entire world was crumbling around them. Fariss was very likely heading for, or was already in Meuse, and they had months of travel ahead of them before they even got to Vosh. How long would it take them to find enough navire to provide enough power to seal the breach? What if, after all of this, it didn’t work and the world died anyway?
Ling sat up and scanned the dark landscape around her. She was alone as far as she could see. She had lingered here for a long while; Celene had surely gone back to camp by now. Ling climbed out of the water and washed her clothes, beating them clean against the rocks at the sides of the river before pulling them on. Then she headed back to the wall.
It was impossible to see through the tangle of the Woedenwoud, but it was not far. She got there quickly even though she’d walked wide around the camp.
Drake had offered her an escape once before, and Ling wondered if she should have taken it. She leaned against the rough stone wall, ears tuned for the slightest sound, eyes piercing the darkness, looking for any sign of a golden glimmer in the night. When she felt certain it was clear, she boosted herself up onto the wall, swung her legs over, and dropped once again down on the far side. She thought about Navire, asleep, but so grievously injured she didn’t know if he would ever wake again. The thought of leaving him behind was unbearable, but if he survived, he would be safer with the others than he would ever be with her.
“What is it you think you’ll gain with this?”
Dreskin spoke at a normal pitch, which boomed in the night. Ling jumped, clamping her lips tight on a shout of surprise. “That is none of your concern,” she quipped, turning away from him.
“Do you think you are the only one struggling?” He asked. She heard his feet crunching in the gravel as he moved close. She took several steps forward, away from him. “Alyssum and Fern have watched all of their people die over the last hundred years. Both my parents are dead. My brother too. But we keep going because we have to. Even Fern has come back around to that truth.”
“I have no intention of stopping,” Ling said. “Fariss will die. I’ve vowed that. And I will do whatever I can to seal that breach.”
“So you think you can do it alone.” It wasn’t a question.
“You all are mortal; you have to stop for food, for rest. You can die. I don’t, and I can’t. I don’t want to be the cause of any more suffering, Dreskin. I’ve already brought enough of it.”
She could see his dark form, just a few short strides away from her. He leaned back against the wall. “My parents were born in Marique, and they grew up during one of the most brutal times of this war. Fariss had discovered the secret to draining Mari of their magic by this time, and he wasted no time collecting as much of it as he could. Thousands of Mari went missing, vanishing seemingly into nowhere. My grandparents were both warlocks, and both had taken Mari as lovers. Both of them were there at the creation of that cursed breach. They died along with their Mari partners trying to seal it.
“My parents, barely out of childhood then, took up the fight. Somehow they survived Fariss’s brutality, and years later I was born in a small shack out in the Colli Terra somewhere—I couldn’t tell you where. I doubt even my parents could tell you. We were on the run by then, almost all the Mari dead or vanished, and Fariss had turned his attention to the remaining supporters of their cause. My home was wherever I slept that night. My schooling consisted of fighting as much as reading. My brother and I were raised, from the moment of our births, to be spies, to destroy Fariss. And one by one I have watched everyone in my family die.”
He paused here, lost in thought. Ling could feel the cold breath of his memories pressing against her in the dark.
“I saw my parents die. My brother though…I will never know what happened to him. I have no idea where he went to his final rest. Fern and Alyssum, I can’t say how many they saw die or how many they simply never saw again. The agony of that is hard to describe, Ling. It was enough to drive many of the survivors to madness.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Ling asked.
“Because it’s too easy to fall
into the trap of thinking what is happening in the world is your fault. My parents could have argued that by fighting they were making it worse. That the fault of the deaths of all those that fought with them rested on their shoulders. Alyssum and Fern could do the same. But who, then, would be left to resist?”
Ling shifted, the rough wall of stone scratching against her.
“Each one of us has made choices that have led us to where we are now. You don’t own those choices Ling. Don’t dishonor those that have come before, their sacrifices, or those who fight by our sides today, by claiming you do.”
Ling could feel the truth in his words. She thought back to Mercer the last time she’d seen him on the Palm. He had been shockingly thin, battered, but his eyes had been clear and lit with an inner fire. He had been a drunk when she met him, but when he’d learned Mari still lived, all that had changed.
There was something strange happening in her stomach. A squirrelly sort of warmth, tiny and small—and not a seething, angry sort of heat either. It was more like how her skin felt after spending an entire afternoon out in the sunshine. It was like how her heart felt when she listened to Rudy’s bellowing laughter. It was like the feeling she got when she saw her parents looking into one another’s eyes over the dinner table. It was like the feeling she got when Fern had hugged her just before going into Farris’s fortress to rescue Alyssum.
All at once, she let the guilt she’d been holding close fall away from her. Alyssum did what she did because she believed sealing the breach was worth any cost, including her own life. Drake, Dreskin, Fern…their choices were their own. They knew the risks; they understood what they were facing. Who was she to question their choices, to try to appropriate their choices and their sacrifices?
The last of the anger she’d harbored drained away from her as well. Ling saw clearly she was not responsible for the actions of her mother or even for the brokenness of her father when she had left. All the pieces of the puzzle came together for the first time. It wasn’t that those things didn’t hurt her still, or that she didn’t want to fix those wrongs. But in their place settled a cold certainty about what needed to be done, and that it was more important than anything else she could ever hope to do.
Chapter Fifteen
“They’re watching us,” Ling said. She studied the tree as she moved several steps to her left and then back to Fern’s side.
“They shouldn’t be here,” Fern said. She stood about fifteen feet back from the tree, arms crossed on her chest. “This is bad. Very, very bad.”
They’d woken with the first light of dawn to find themselves much closer to the true Woedenwoud than the grimoire said they had been the night before. Or rather, according to Fern, the Woedenwoud was closer to them than it should be.
They stood before a long line of strange trees. At about twenty feet they were not particularly tall, nor were they particularly wide, but they were covered with vicious thorns curving out of their trunks. The thorns were large enough to easily climb on, though their serrated edges and glistening points were more than enough discouragement from giving it a try.
The thorny trees stood like sentries, five or six deep, and so close together Ling doubted they could get their own bodies through unscathed, not to mention the horses. They were a barrier, Fern explained, both physical and magical, designed to hold the Woedenwoud at bay. This magic, too, was failing. The breach was bleeding power off whatever mechanism had existed to keep this magic in place. But these thorny trees were not what held Fern’s—or anyone’s—attention that morning.
Scattered amongst the thorny trees were true giants, trees made of bleached white bones. Ling would forever think of them as skull trees. Scattered throughout the leg bones, arm bones, and finger bones that made up trunk and branches were hundreds of skulls, thousands of them, teeth intact, eye-sockets with a wet glimmer in their depths despite the dried whiteness of the bone. Bereft of all leaves, the branches were covered in blood-red flowers that were the size of dinner plates. These were the trees of the Woedenwoud, and they had broken through the barrier built to hold them back.
Ling stared at them, dry mouthed, and was certain that the trees stared back. Not with the same slow regard of most trees, so long lived they could barely grasp the quickness of the human lives among them. It was more of a predatory glare, as if these pioneers dared the humans and Mari to try to interfere with their slow march toward the wall. The trees were strong and healthy, and didn’t seem to be at all impacted by the loss of magic.
“We need to get out of here.” Fern’s voice was tight, with an odd, dry squeak to it.
“We’re not going anywhere. Not yet.” She’d almost left all of them, even Navire, behind last night. But Dreskin’s words had changed her. She realized every one of them had made a choice, and she would respect those choices. But she would do everything in her power to protect them, to make sure they survived.
Navire was alive, barely. Ling was willing to carry him, but he was not strong enough to be moved. If they left now, he would certainly die, and she would not allow that to happen.
Fern had given up on going back for Alyssum after seeing the destruction of Nantes. She hadn’t spoken of it in Ling’s hearing, but Ling could see she’d come to terms with their decision to leave Alyssum behind. No doubt that’s exactly what Fern was thinking about now. Ling could see the indecision in her eyes, the desire to keep the uneasy peace between them warring with her desire to keep them moving ever forward.
Ling felt the same sense of urgency Fern did, but Fern had left Alyssum in the magic-filled caverns beneath their home in the Colli Terra. It was a safe place where Alyssum had every chance to heal. Where they stood now was neither safe nor good for healing. If they left Navire here, he would die and become part of one of those skull trees. Tension thrummed in her, the clock they raced against ticking away relentlessly in her gut, but she knew one day would make little difference to their overall quest. It could make every difference, though, to Navire.
“How far can the roots tunnel?” Dreskin asked, quelling a potential blowout between Fern and Ling.
“I don’t know,” Fern replied. Her frustration was clear in her tone “If we’re going to stay here, we need to move as far back toward the stone wall as we can. If they’ve breached the magic of the Epina trees…” Fern shook her head, eyes falling to the ground beneath her feet. “I don’t know, Dreskin. I’ve never seen them unconstrained. I’m not sure anyone has.”
“I don’t see any sign of a root system here,” Dreskin said.
“You wouldn’t. They are predatory. They stalk just like any other predator,” Fern said. “They would not give up their advantage so easily.”
Ling shrugged her shoulders as she looked at the skull trees. She couldn’t deny they had bone in place of wood, and they had to get that bone from somewhere, but she had a hard time believing in predatory trees.
She wandered away from the others, heading back to their camp a short distance away. She stopped at the stream to fill her water bladder before continuing on her way. Celene had stayed behind, watching Navire, and as Ling approached, she saw Amalya sitting beside Navire, one hand resting on him, the other on the stick as she rocked in her typical fashion. Celene turned to look over her shoulder as Ling approached. She straightened and shifted away from the dog, shaking her head.
“His breathing is weak, and he hasn’t regained consciousness. We are doing all we can, but I don’t know, Ling. His injuries were severe.”
Ling knelt beside Navire, resting her head lightly against his side. They’d done their best washing him the night before, but he still smelled of blood. She didn’t want to admit it, but Celene was right. His heart fluttered oddly, and his chest barely moved at all as he breathed.
“He lost so much blood. Maybe if we’d gotten to him sooner…” Celene said.
“I should not have fed him that day,” Ling said, barely aware she was speaking aloud. She ran a hand gently along his side, willing str
ength into him.
“You had no choice in the matter,” Celene said. “They choose who they bond with, and they rarely take our wishes into account. Regardless, his fate was sealed the moment that breach was opened, Ling. Everyone we saw between Nantes and Caen will be dead soon if they’re not dead already, and it’s likely already much broader than that. He would have died anyway. At least now he is dying with a bonded human at his side. You’ve done right by him, Ling, regardless of how this ends.”
Ling shifted her eyes toward Celene. Her words were eerily similar to what Dreskin had said only the night before. Celene sat quietly, hands clasped in her lap, eyes on her daughter. Celene didn’t say any more, and Ling didn’t ask her to. Instead, she rolled over onto her back, fishing the grimoire out of its bag. She spent a few minutes detailing the events of the morning and then began to draw a skull tree.
The others came back to camp a short time later. Fern seemed to walk a bit more heavily than usual, and the others crept around her as if she were one of those glass globes that warlocks were so fond of lobbing around. Ling soon tired of Fern’s heavy sighs, so she climbed to her feet and headed toward the stream.
“You should pack up anything you want to carry with you. We might need to leave quickly.”
Ling bristled at Fern’s tone, but she bit her tongue on a retort and just kept walking, not even glancing in Fern’s direction. She heard a pack hit the ground harder than was necessary, but Fern said nothing.
Ling stripped her clothes off and folded them neatly in a dry spot, placing the bag with the grimoire in it on top of them. She lay down in the river as she had the night before, fully submerging herself in the current. Under the water she could hear nothing but the soft gurgling of the river, the occasional clunk of stone against stone as the force of the water slowly rearranged the riverbed. She could feel the cold seeping through her flesh, but it was not an unpleasant sensation. There was peace here, and it soothed her.
