by Sarah Dalton
“What’s going on?” Cas steps over to us. He has blankets and furs under one arm as he prepares to set up the camp.
“Nothing,” I say. My cheeks are red hot where angry blood has risen to my face. Where does that girl get off, trying to blackmail me? “Could you get some wood for the fire? Don’t go too far though.”
Cas frowns but heads off to a small thicket of trees. Sasha grins, and the moonlight reflects on her slightly yellowing teeth.
“You treat him like a child,” she says. “You like looking after people, don’t you? It’s such a shame he doesn’t feel the same way about you as you do him. He’ll only have eyes for his precious Ellen, you know. Not a plain, surly girl like you.”
I grab Sasha by the throat, and her eyes widen in shock. “If you tell Cas about me being craft-born, I will leave you for the Nix.”
“You need me to find the others,” she croaks.
I squeeze her throat tighter. “I can find them on my own.”
“What about your stag?” Her face is red with the strain. Her voice rasps little more than a whisper.
“Anta will come back to me.” I let her go. “Tomorrow you show us the sleeping willow. You will keep your mouth shut, or I will shut it for you.”
I untie the length of the rope from Gwen’s saddle and lead her over to a substantial tree. There I knot the rope around the trunk and tie her feet together.
“Water,” she croaks. Her eyes are swimming with tears.
I hold the canteen to her lips, and she drinks greedily.
“Your abilities will be the undoing of you, unless…” She stares out into the distance. The Nix is back, circling our camp like always.
“Unless what?” I say.
She shakes her head. The blush leaves her cheeks, making her as washed out as milk, starkly contrasting with her bright red hair. Even her lips are drained of colour. She gazes out into the dark with wet, unfocussed eyes. She doesn’t speak again all night.
*
We reach the sleeping forest the next day. It is a large thicket within the woods, covered with dense trees, trees with trunks so large it would take two people to wrap their arms around them and reach both sides.
Sasha directs us away from the path to a part of the woods where we have to weave through low branches. The trees lean over like a hunchback, so long that they almost reach back down to the ground in an arc of fluttering leaves, reminding me of a trail of tears. Gwen snorts and shakes her head as we duck underneath. She doesn’t like the way the thin branches fall over her body. I rub her shoulder, trying to keep her calm. I am walking on foot and holding the horse’s reins. Sasha jogs to keep up when Gwen breaks into a nervous trot.
“If you don’t disconnect me from that horse, I’m going to end up getting dragged halfway to Cyne,” Sasha says indignantly.
“She has a point.” Cas appears from behind the weeping trails of branches. He parts them like a curtain and steps through. “Gwen is very jumpy. The girl could get hurt. Maybe I could hold her ropes for a bit?”
I press my lips together but untie Sasha from Gwen’s saddle and hand her over to Cas. “Don’t let her run off.”
Cas rolls his eyes at me, but the corner of his mouth twitches in amusement. “You know, the rich women in Cyne walk about with little dogs on leads. They take them in the park and walk them with their husbands. That’s like us right now.”
“Don’t be so ridiculous,” I say. “You’re not my husband.”
“And I’m not a dog,” Sasha points out. “Although I suppose the likelihood of you two marrying is similar to me being like a dog, seeing as the prince can only marry the craft-born.”
I narrow my eyes at her.
“That’s not strictly true,” Cas says, carrying on without the slightest clue what Sasha is hinting at. “Father suspected a craft-born would be born in my lifetime but it was never a given. Had there been no one before my thirtieth birthday, I would have married a noble woman from Cyne, or maybe even the Haedalands.”
“That’s a shame, Mae. Maybe if there’s some noble blood in you…?” She looks me up and down as if I’m a donkey for sale. “Hmm, I doubt it.”
I close my eyes and think of those precious moments when I had my hands wrapped around her neck. I long for them again.
“Well, Mae could have noble blood in her veins, depending on who her ancestors were from the Haedalands,” Cas says. He flashes me a pitying half-smile.
Gwen lets out a deep snort and nods her head so violently that it jerks me forward and shakes the great vines of the willow tree above us.
“Steady, lass,” I say, putting a hand on her trembling skin. “Isn’t there any way around these trees?”
“No,” Sasha replies. “There aren’t any paths in the sleeping forest.”
“I think she senses that the trees are alive,” Cas says. “You can’t fool a horse by pretending to be asleep. They sense a lot—your mood, your temperament, whether or not you have a sugar lump in your pocket.”
The image of a young Cas with his horses pops into my head. For some reason, I imagine him spending most of his time in the stables and away from his warring parents. Father always said that if you wanted to find a good person, you looked to the way they treated their horse. Mean types are bullies, fools are trampled over, and leaders encourage loyalty. Gwen is utterly loyal to Cas. She would ride into battle with him if he wanted her to. There’s a leader inside him—I know it. He just needs to let it emerge.
“This way to the sleeping willow,” Sasha says. She turns to the right, and the prince follows her closely.
My heart begins to quicken as I think about Anta being nearby. There has to be a reason why he hasn’t found me.
Up ahead, a curtain of long, trailing branches block our view of anything else in the forest. I have to peel them apart so we can enter beneath the sleeping willow.
It’s dark inside, but if we crane our necks up, we can see the tree in all its glory. The sun shines against the pale yellow of the leaves so that they are almost translucent. Underfoot, the gnarled old roots spread across the ground like huge snakes that have been petrified solid. The tree trunk itself is so thick, it is almost the width of our hut back in Halts-Walden. It would take five people to wrap their arms all the way around it.
In the middle of the tree there is a small portion of bark that juts out and hangs low like a nose. Above the nose there are two hollows that could be eyes. The effect is of a big-nosed, ancient old face patterned with wrinkles. It doesn’t take much to imagine the tree is alive. I only have to close my eyes and concentrate to feel the humming of magic emanating from the bark.
I reach forward to touch the tree, and when my fingertips brush the surface, I gasp. Magic thrums through it like the skin of a drum being beaten. It draws me in with its power, and I find myself pressing both palms to the bark of the tree, watching as every hair lifts on my arms. The forest melts away. Cas and Sasha fade from existence. It is just me and the ancient tree with its ancient craft inside. I don’t know how I know, but I sense great power, and when I close my eyes, I picture the roots spreading from beneath the soil, twisting and turning and feeding every single patch of forest with its magic, like nutrients spread through veins. I imagine them travelling for miles beneath the surface.
“What do you feel?” Sasha asks.
I’d forgotten all about them. I open my eyes and move away from the tree. Gwen has calmed now that she has found space beneath the sleeping willow where the branches leave her alone.
“Power,” I say. I try to say it nonchalantly. I try to ignore the way I feel differently about my craft now.
She nods as though that is what she expected me to say, or expected me to feel.
“It just looks like some old tree to me,” Cas says. He steps forward and puts his hand on the tree trunk. “I don’t feel anything.”
I shrug. “Maybe I was mistaken. Come on. We should leave from under the canopy and try and find Anta’s tracks.”
&nb
sp; Moving away from the sleeping willow feels like leaving home. My hands ache to touch the living magic inside the tree one more time. For the first time ever, I want to learn more about my craft-abilities. I want to know why I can influence nature and why I’ve been chosen. I want to know if I can use some of the power from the tree, and how. It calls to the very fibre of my being. Walking away seems wrong. Yet I have a reason for being here. I have to find Anta. I have to find the Wanderers.
The sleeping forest provides cover from the sky above, and when it starts to rain, we barely feel it. With our bodies close together beneath the canopies, we become hot and sticky, with steam rising from our wet clothes. It’s seemingly never ending, with many branches that open like curtains. As we travel through, I begin to get a sense of something behind us, watching us. Every now and then, I find myself looking back, expecting to find something or someone lurking in the shadows. There is nothing each time.
“Mae, over here.”
After getting distracted by the thought that someone is following us, I’d drifted away from the group. Cas, Gwen, and Sasha are already a tree ahead of me. Suddenly aware of the shadows around me, I rush ahead and part the low-hanging branches to find the others. Cas waves me over.
“Look! The tracks—they could be Anta’s.” He takes my arm and pulls me closer.
He’s right. The tracks are Anta’s. I would recognise them anywhere. They are the size of his hooves and the length of his stride.
“He was walking slowly. That’s a good sign,” I say. “He wasn’t running away, frightened.”
“We should follow them,” Cas says, smiling. The fact that he is as excited as I am warms my heart.
“See, I told you I would help you find your white hart, didn’t I?” Sasha calls out from behind Gwen. “Now will you untie me?”
“We still don’t know if you’ll run off,” I say.
Sasha stamps her foot and glares at me. Gwen spooks away from her, startled at the outburst. “How many times do I have to tell you? Why would I run off into the Waerg Woods on my own with the Nix out to get me?”
“The Nix could get any of us at any time,” I say. “You just keep using it as an excuse. How do you know it will get you if you’re on your own? You’re trying to talk us round, and it won’t work.” I want to tell her to remember what I said. I want to tell her to heed my warning, but she knows that she’s safe with Cas next to us. She knows what she can get away with saying.
“It will get me because it got my mother,” she says. Her face contorts as though she is going to cry or scream.
Cas walks towards her and places a hand on her shoulder. “What happened to your mother?”
“We don’t have time for sob stories. We should go,” I remind him. I don’t want to know about her family. I don’t want to feel sorry for her.
Cas lifts a hand to silence me. For the first time ever, I feel like one of his subjects, and I clench my fists in annoyance.
“I didn’t say before because… because I didn’t want to think about it. We were separated together. Borgans, or Wanderers as you call us, are different to other people… We don’t have as much loyalty. We’re not really a community or anything like that. There’s a leader, and you do his bidding, or he tosses you out of the group. We… we couldn’t keep up. My mother is… was unwell. She had a bad leg.”
A jolt runs down my spine as I think of Father and his limp.
“We ended up getting left behind, and no one came back to help us. They just left us. We drifted further and further away. Mother was in a lot of pain, and we were low on food and water. We stopped. Before the sleeping willow, back towards the twisted brook—that was where the Nix took her. I tried to stay awake. I really did. I was exhausted.” Her voice begins to crack. “I’d carried Mother all day, and my body ached all over. My eyes couldn’t stay open, and I drifted to sleep. When I woke, I heard her screams, but I couldn’t find her. I ran in every direction I could. I searched and searched the forest until I was lost. Wretched, and lost. That’s when you found me. I thought you were going to kill me anyway, but you didn’t.” Her eyes find mine and fix on me, hard and challenging.
“I’m sorry,” Cas says.
“We’ve all lost people,” I say, swallowing with a hard lump in my throat. “Let’s go.”
“I helped you with the wood nymph,” Sasha reminds me. “Doesn’t that mean something?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know yet.”
Chapter Thirteen – The Ibenas
Anta’s tracks take us out of the sleeping forest and back onto a path within the main Waerg Woods, leading us north and away from Welhewan. Cas hunts a rabbit and skins it while Sasha makes many tutting noises, informing him every few knife strokes that he’s doing it wrong. I still won’t untie her, no matter how many times Cas turns to me with his eyebrows raised and a pleading expression on his face. She cannot be trusted.
After we eat, we move on.
“Look at the tracks,” Sasha says, gesturing with a nod. The tracks are longer. Anta’s stride has elongated.
I move over to the tracks so I can measure the strides with my own. “He’s running fast here.” I follow them further into the forest. At one point he leaps from the path and darts in and out of the large oak trees. Then, he clears a felled tree and heads down a bank towards a stream. On the soft soil of the bank, you can see where he has thrashed around, and it’s there that I notice the boot prints. My stomach flips. Someone chased Anta down to the stream, and then the person caught him. A pattern of churned-up soil shows Anta trying to back away and rear.
Cas runs down the bank behind me, his feet skidding on the damp soil. “What’s happened?”
“Someone has caught Anta.” My eyes trail the footsteps as they rise back up the bank and further into the woods. Anta’s hoof prints run along in parallel. “He led him… That way! Come on. Get Gwen and the girl.” Hope bubbles in my chest. We’re close.
*
I move quietly through the forest. We don’t know how long ago the man took Anta and where he took him to. We don’t know how many of them there are, or whether they are hunters. That heavy feeling forms behind my eyes again. I know it’s the wall of tears that I’d built up and won’t let down. It threatens to burst. If something has happened to him…
No, no… I can’t think like that.
Cas and Sasha are both on Gwen when they catch up with me. I scowl at the prince. “What is she doing up there?”
“I’m still tied up, if that’s what you’re worried about.” She lifts her hands so I can see the restraints.
“She was struggling, Mae. I had to.”
“Fine,” I say between gritted teeth. “At least she won’t slow us down now.”
We tread carefully through the forest. None of us know where we’re heading, and Sasha knows little about this part of the forest. She said there were some people who lived in the woods, and she thought it might be in this direction, but no one has actually seen them or come back from one of their camps. That sounds like a bad sign to me, but I keep my mouth shut. It doesn’t matter how dangerous it is; I have to get Anta back.
The tracks find their way back to a path, but this path is different to any of the others I’ve seen in the forest. It’s more like a road, with footprints of all sizes, hoof prints large and small, as well as dog prints in the dirt. The realisation hits me. There is a community living inside the Waerg Woods.
I turn to Sasha. “Are these Borgan tracks? Is this your camp?”
She shakes her head. “Ibenas. They are native to the forest.”
I exchange a confused glance with Cas. “Native?”
“Yes. What’s so strange about that? You have natives from all over Aegunlund, why not the forest? Just because the people in your village are superstitious idiots doesn’t mean the rest of us are,” Sasha says.
“We should get off this track and move back into the forest,” I say, after taking in Sasha’s explanation. “Whoever dwells in this area
uses this as a road, and we could encounter them at any time. We don’t know anything about them, whether they are friendly or…”
Cas nods. “Hostile. We’ll head down that bank and follow parallel to the road. The trees are thick there. We can hide amongst them.”
“We need to walk silently.”
“That’s difficult with Gwen.” Cas dismounts and pulls the reins over the horse’s head. He leads her gently down the bank into the thicker trees. “We’ll have to see if we can catch a glimpse of their camp but from further away. Maybe we can figure out how to get Anta, if they have him.”
That ‘if’ troubles me. It could mean so much. If they found him in the first place, if they brought him here, if they still have him, if they haven’t done something to him.
“We should leave Gwen and Sasha here,” Cas says. “If we go any further with them, the camp will hear Gwen.”
“We can’t leave Sasha there alone. She’ll steal the horse and go back to the Borgans to warn them.”
“We don’t have a choice, Mae. She didn’t kill your father. She got us to the sleeping willow. She’s suffered just as much as you,” he says.
I run my hands through my hair, pulling at the roots. Cas has no idea how much I could lose if Sasha goes back to the Borgans. She could tell them I’m craft-born. She could have them hunt me. She could result in my death.
“You’re too trusting, Cas,” I say with a heavy sigh.
“I won’t betray you, Mae,” she says. Her eyes are emotionless blue spheres. “But if you leave me here tied up, I can’t defend myself. It would be murder.”
I step towards the horse and reach up to Sasha’s hands with my dagger. “If you do anything—”
“Yeah, yeah, you’ll hunt me down,” she says. “I get it.”
Against my better judgement, and with a stone-like feeling in my gut, I cut through the rope binding her wrists.
