by Molly Ringle
After squinting a moment, Larkin spotted them: fae flying in slow circles in the way of predatory birds, leaving a glimmer of red fire in their wake. Retreating, Merrick glared at them, his mouth a resentful twist.
“The best way into Vowri’s territory to avoid being seen from above,” the guide added, “is through the hollow.”
“A hollow?” Larkin said. “I don’t like the sound of that. We did poorly enough with a canyon.”
“It’s lined with trees, so there’s better cover,” she said, “and no river, only an occasional stream when it rains. Of course, it is in Vowri’s realm, so it will have its dangers.”
“Of course.” Merrick sighed. “Let’s have a look.”
They walked another hour through the pine forest, the ground rising steadily. Larkin glanced with distrust at nearly every faery he saw, since surely there could be other spies, even in such a well-guarded territory as Arlanuk’s. It could be something as simple as that raven upon a branch, or that gnome pulling apart a pine cone, or that alf turning from an otter to a blob of water as it dove into a stream.
Merrick watched the alf too. “Sal said she wanted to come back as one of those. An alf. Because they looked like they had fun. Now when I see one, I wonder.”
Larkin took his hand. “It could be she. I like that thought. Perhaps there are some looking out for us, not seeking to harm us.”
“You’d think my mother would be among them. Here I am in the fae realm, which she must know because apparently everyone knows it, and she hasn’t come to see me.”
“You could summon her.”
“No, it’d draw attention; Ula Kana would come straight to us. I just wish my mother would come of her own accord. She would, if she cared.”
“It may be as you said: they don’t express love in the ways we do, even if they feel it. After speaking with Arlanuk about Lucrecia, I’m beginning to believe that.”
Merrick cast him a glance, eyes softening in gratitude.
Their guides halted at the top of a bare slope. Two rocky black ridges stretched ahead, and between them lay a tree-filled valley.
“The hollow,” said one of the hunters. “Here Arlanuk’s territory ends and Vowri’s begins.”
Merrick dropped Larkin’s hand as they stared at the valley.
The pines ended at the top of the slope, and other trees took over at the bottom, slim trees with white bark and small, flat leaves that flickered in the wind, rattling softly. The space under their boughs was darker than it should have been; in fact, it looked black, as if night reigned there. Larkin’s body prickled instinctively with fear even before his mind grasped what he was seeing.
Merrick rounded on the hunters. “Those are birch trees!” Panic edged his voice.
“Yes,” one said calmly. “There are dangers in all parts of the realm for humans.”
“Lord, Lady, and Spirit,” Larkin whispered. A rhyme from his childhood chanted through his mind.
Walking through the birch grove, keep your head
Or the whitefingers touch you and then you’re dead!
Children sang it as a game, darting about, trying to escape each other’s touch. But birch groves, sometimes individual birch trees, had been cut down in the human realm because of the true and real danger. Not every birch was a whitefinger, but every birch could attract one to live within it and embody it. Any such trees in the fae realm had to be especially perilous.
“There are whitefingers in there,” Merrick demanded. “Right?”
“Naturally.” The hunters remained serene.
Merrick looked out across the landscape again. “We should try going along one of the ridges. Maybe if … ”
But he did not have time to finish the sentence, for one of Ula Kana’s spies swooped near. The hunters pulled Larkin and Merrick behind a trunk and stepped out to shoot warning arrows at the spy—a drake, Larkin saw in the glimpse he caught through the branches. The drake breathed fire at the pines, setting boughs aflame and inciting a commotion as weasel-shaped earth fae went skittering up the trunks to beat out the fire.
The spy flew out of range to circle over the western ridge above the valley. It made a trumpeting bark that echoed off the mountainside. From the north, another speck in the sky flew closer, and yet another came from the east.
“Right, never mind that idea,” Merrick said miserably.
“We cannot go farther than this border,” one of the hunters said. “Not without inviting a battle with Vowri, which Arlanuk has not given us orders to do. We can provide cover of arrows for as long as it takes you to enter the valley, but on the ridges you would certainly be beyond our help after a short time, and they would catch you.”
“Yes, but … ” Staring into the birches, Larkin wiped his clammy palms against his trousers. “Down there, the whitefingers will catch us.”
“Well … ” Merrick gazed at the hollow too. “‘Keep your head,’ they say. We do have lucidity. They disorient you first with enchantments, right? Then they touch you and hurt you.”
“Render you permanently insane or kill you,” Larkin retorted. “Not merely hurt you.”
“They have caught some humans,” one hunter remarked. “Their souls still wander the forest.”
“I didn’t need to know that,” Merrick said.
“Though surely not forever,” the other hunter said. “I’ve heard Vowri releases them to go beyond, after she’s grown bored with them.”
Terror had chained up Larkin’s tongue. He stared at the nightmare valley, then at the circling spies equally likely to carry them to their deaths. Should they simply stay in Arlanuk’s realm longer? That was no good either; the spies would never leave, never stop looking for them.
“But if we can’t get disoriented because the lucidity protects us,” Merrick argued, “then we can stay alert and avoid the whitefingers. Keep them off, not let them touch us.”
“I don’t like this proposal,” Larkin said.
“You have the sword. That’ll help.”
“Perhaps.” Larkin drew the iron sword without taking his gaze from the silent birches.
Merrick pulled the wood-handled iron spike from his pack. “We have to try.”
Try? But there was no other way. Larkin saw that.
“It’s rare, people getting fae-struck or killed by whitefingers.” There was an uneven semblance of cheer in Merrick’s voice. “It’s much more common that they just scare people. That’s the whole theme of Vowri’s territory—trying to scare us. Isn’t it?”
“You ask me as if I’ve regularly taken holidays there. How am I to know what they shall do?”
“I’m inviting you to help make decisions, like you wanted!”
“What decision is there? Clearly we cannot go upon the ridges, nor across the open desert. And if the only other way is through the birches, then lucidity, iron, and prayer are all we have.”
“And soon at that,” one of the hunters put in mildly.
The drake and its companions—a jinn and a large harpy-goblin—were soaring closer. The hunters nocked arrows in readiness.
“I would be off if I were you,” her companion said.
Merrick, breathing swiftly, met Larkin’s glance. Larkin answered with a nod, tightening his fingers around the sword.
“Powerful friends, we shall not forget your assistance,” Larkin said to the hunters.
“We look forward to hearing of your adventures, cruel warriors,” one responded.
A spout of fire streamed from the drake’s mouth. A bush directly to their left went up in flame. The hunters’ arrows flew, and the drake veered away.
Larkin and Merrick seized their chance. They sprinted down the slope, holding their weapons above their heads. Rocks slid and tumbled under their feet. Flying creatures roared above. Winged shadows darkened the ground, lowering, traveling along with them. The birch trees loomed—they were almost there—
In one leap, the world turned from daylight to coal-black night. Larkin stumbled to a h
alt and crashed into Merrick. They gripped one another’s arms. Larkin could see nothing, not even his own hands.
“Larkin?”
“Merrick? Are we in the—”
“Yes. I think. Look.”
Turning, Larkin saw, impossibly far, a glimmer of green and gray: the side of the valley they had just sprinted down. Holding Merrick’s arm, he walked toward it, but the slope grew no closer; it receded as he approached. They halted.
“That’s … disturbing,” Merrick said.
“Quite. But that is not the direction we mean to go anyway.”
“Here.” Merrick rustled about, then a light illuminated the space around them, coming from the back of his phone. He slipped it into a pocket on the front strap of his pack so that it shone outward. “There’s not enough ambient light for me to light myself up with magic.” Endo-witches could only produce light by pulling it from what was around them—generally the sky.
“Thank goodness for your technology, then,” Larkin said. “Not that the forest is less daunting for it.”
All around there was nothing but bone-pale birch trunks with black space between them. Dead leaves covered the ground, ankle-deep. The air was cool and smelled of dank decay, the smell of a place that never saw sunlight. He had the distinct impression that eyes and spindly figures whisked out of view, every direction, the instant he looked there.
“There’s definitely something in here,” Merrick said in an undertone.
“Well, naturally.”
“All right. Lucidity.” Merrick examined his vial. Like Larkin, he now had less than one-quarter of the potion left.
“If ever there were a place we need it, it’s here.” Larkin sprayed the front of his shirt. “How shall we know which way to go?”
“We go away from where we started.” Merrick nodded toward the faraway glimmer of light.
“And once that is out of view?”
Merrick raised the iron spike. “We pray we get to the other side of this grove soon. From above it didn’t look that large.”
“As if appearances count for anything here.”
“Let’s walk back to back. That way nothing can get us from behind. We’ll take turns facing backward.”
“Very well. I shall start.” Larkin turned to face the entrance and stepped back until his pack bumped Merrick’s.
Merrick reached to the side and tied one of the dangling straps upon his pack to one upon Larkin’s. “To keep us together. Shall we?”
Larkin held the sword before him. “Ready.”
It was awkward at first, walking backward while tied to Merrick, but they fell into a rhythm after a minute. Larkin kept an eye on the speck of daylight behind them as long as he could, to be certain they were not veering too far in one direction or another. But before long, the necessity of skirting round the birch trees in their path meant that the forest began to obscure his view of the entrance. A few minutes more, and it was hidden.
He shot his glance up into the white branches, trying not to think about lost wandering souls. “I cannot see the daylight anymore.”
Merrick twisted to glance back, then faced forward again. “We’re too deep in. Well, we don’t seem to be going up a slope, so we’re probably not drifting to one side of the valley or the other. If we keep going along the bottom, we’ll have to find the end of these trees.”
They switched sides a while later so that Larkin walked forward. Merrick moved the phone light to Larkin’s front pocket to illuminate the way. The beam made a bright circle in front of him, lighting up fallen brown leaves and white trunks, but it only made the blackness beyond seem darker. The shadows jumped strangely as he moved, tricking him into startled moments.
“I cannot decide which is worse,” he said. “Looking forward or looking back.”
“And the suspense. I hate it. Obviously something’s watching us. When is it going to do something?”
“I have no objection if it wishes to refrain,” Larkin said, addressing the trees.
The forest did not respond.
“Perhaps it doesn’t like your light,” Larkin suggested after a few more steps.
“Then I hope it lasts. It’s probably only good for about half an hour.”
“What?”
“The flashlight burns through a lot of battery power,” Merrick defended. “I charged it all the way up with the solar charger before we came in, but there’s nothing else I can do.”
That meant little to Larkin, who had not been paying much attention to the workings of phones, but he understood “half an hour” all too well.
“The valley didn’t look as if it were more than half an hour’s walk from one end to the other,” he said, trying this time to be the optimist.
“Right. Couldn’t be.” But Merrick sounded uneasy.
They kept on. The sound of their feet rustling in the leaves was answered by other rustles in the dark. It had been happening all along, but they had seen nothing definite.
They switched again, Merrick taking the light and facing forward.
A wind swept in, swaying the trees and shaking leaves and catkins down upon them. The catkins, the caterpillar-shaped flower-pods of the birch, made Larkin twitch in panic when they landed on his arms and head. Merrick jolted and swatted them away. But nothing happened; they were just ordinary bits of tree. The wind kept blowing. The forest stirred. Other sounds hid within the rush of the wind, whispers and clicks and taps; Larkin was sure of it.
“Do you hear that?” Larkin whispered.
“Yes. I think, yes. I don’t know. It’s playing tricks on my brain in here.”
“Lucidity.”
They each gave themselves another spray. Larkin’s vision sharpened, but the shadows continued to evolve and diminish in eerie fluctuations. The tapping continued too, sounding like long stick fingers clicking against branches. Unless that was only his imagination.
Something touched Larkin’s shoe, a hard tap, not a leaf. He jerked his foot back, kicking Merrick’s leg in the process.
“Ow! What?”
“It … ” Larkin stared at the ground. “Just a loose stick. It snapped back when my foot caught it. I thought … nothing, it’s nothing.”
They had not gone ten more steps before Merrick twitched, his elbow hitting Larkin’s. “A root just did the same to me. I swear it moved. On its own.”
Larkin had begun to sweat, despite the chill of the air. “They must touch skin, mustn’t they? To damage us.”
“I think. That’s a good point. Let’s put hats on. And make sure your sleeves are pulled down.”
They took knit hats out of their packs and donned them. As they were both wearing long-sleeved shirts, they tugged down the cuffs to the knuckles. After retying their back-to-back bond, Larkin took a firmer grip on his sword, ready to pummel any creeping finger of birch wood.
The wind, which had not died down since beginning, gained in strength.
Something touched Larkin’s head, a light poke through his hat. He yelled, lurching aside, dragging Merrick halfway over.
“What—” Merrick’s protestation was cut short as he swatted at the air.
“I felt a twig, poking my head.”
“I saw one. A long stick, reaching for my arm.”
They were breathing in frantic bursts, their packs pressed together.
“This is madness,” Larkin said. “We should never have come through here. No one could survive this.”
“You are not helping.” Merrick slashed out with the spike again. “Another.”
A flicker of white at shoulder level caught Larkin’s eye. He swung the sword in time to crack it against a three-foot-long jointed finger—or at least, a skinny branch that closely resembled a finger. It retracted into the darkness.
A voice keened, out in the forest, a grieving cry. Then another, from the other side. All the hairs lifted on Larkin’s arms.
“Just trying to scare us,” Merrick said, but he was shaking and kept flinching and batting at twigs.
Each time the wind pushed a branch down, Larkin’s heart jumped to his throat and he swung the iron sword at it. “Only the wind, only the wind,” he mumbled.
“But what’s up with this wind?”
It was getting stronger, nearly a gale. Leaves and catkins smacked against them. Branches clattered down. And in the midst of it, occasionally a white finger reached out, seeking to touch them. Thus far they had managed to swat away each one, but how long could that last?
The sobbing voices flitted back and forth. The wind blew harder. All Larkin could smell was torn birch leaf and damp earth and, possibly, the faint sweet rot of tombs. No, he was only imagining that, surely.
He seized at the vial. “It’s blowing away the lucidity. Before we can breathe it, it’s blowing it hard away.”
“Shit. Uncap it. Hold it against your nose.”
“Whilst fighting off branches with the other hand?”
“Yes!”
Larkin obeyed, inhaling the scent as best he could from the potion that clung around the top of the bottle. But the wind tore that air away too. His gaze shot about in the dim circle of light. A whitefinger reached down from above, like the jointed leg of a giant white spider. He struck it, sending it back up. Another, low this time, from the left. He swung a blow against that one too.
The cries and screams multiplied until he wanted to drop the sword and the lucidity and cover his ears. He resisted, gritting his teeth.
The lucidity was doing him no good. He let it dangle on its chain and gripped the sword in both hands instead.
Two fingers descended at once, each a yard long, one from each side. Larkin shouted and struck at one, then whirled to strike the other. But the first, in retreating, hooked its skinny tip beneath the chain on Larkin’s lucidity potion and gave a hard tug.
The chain snapped. The glass vial flew aside, hit a birch trunk, and shattered. Larkin stared in horror. The precious potion gleamed in a small wet patch on the white trunk, one violet drop running down into the roots.
“No. Oh, Spirit—it broke! My lucidity, it’s smashed.”
“What? Fuck.” Merrick spun to the side, lashing out at another branch. “We’ll share mine—not that it’s doing much good—”
