Deadlines & Dryads

by Rebecca Chastain

  He searched my eyes, his gaze flicking to my white-knuckle grip on the feather. “Leave the bag,” he ordered even as he turned to face the spriggan and broke into a jog.

  I shrugged free of my bag’s strap and dropped it, glancing around to memorize the location. I will live to return for it, I promised myself. Then I sprinted to catch up with Grant.

  Fear slid a numb hand around my brain, distancing me from my racing pulse and muting the chatter of my panicky thoughts. My feet hit the ground in steady beats, but they might as well have been manipulated by a stranger. Sweat trickled down my back, and I tightened my grip on the feather. All too quickly, we emerged from the dubious protection of the trees on the hill and into plain sight of the spriggan.

  “Stay close,” Grant said, as if he couldn’t resist one final admonishment.

  Twigs crackled underfoot; then we reached the larger branches strewn across the ground, and footing became more precarious. We charged over a broken oak trunk, and I thought for sure the spriggan would turn on us, but he remained focused on a tree behind him, oblivious to our approach. Running across the uneven ground on the same level as the spriggan, I lost all sense of perspective. The giant towered as tall as the heavens, and I felt as minuscule as an ant.

  Why had I volunteered to throw myself into the path of this deadly creature? Every step closer to the spriggan increased the clangor of my instincts screaming for me to turn around and flee. Grant hadn’t hesitated and hadn’t looked my direction once. His entire focus remained rooted on the spriggan. Why hadn’t I asked him about his battle plan before racing after him?

  We cleared a second downed tree, and Grant hurtled a wagon wheel–size fireball at the spriggan to get his attention.

  It worked. The spriggan whipped around, mouth gaped wide in a cavernous roar. Snapping off the vines currently entangled in an uprooted bush, he grew new spiked appendages and flung them toward us as fast as if they had been shot from bows. Grant didn’t slow, and only my fear of being separated from him kept my legs in motion.

  Launching whirling, razor-sharp blades of air to meet the wicked vines, Grant severed all but three before they reached us. I darted forward, slicing the feather-blade through the remaining vines as they spun around Grant’s raised arm. Sticky green sap sprayed my face, and the sundered tips of the vines flopped to the ground, but the live lengths grew to replace what I’d cut. I slashed again, evading their grasp; then all three vines fell inert when Grant hacked them off closer to the spriggan. The captain’s fist latched on to my pants’ waistband, propelling me forward when I would have stopped to catch my breath and reassure myself I was still alive.

  As abruptly as the spriggan had focused on us, he turned away, distracted by some other perceived threat. My relief constricted to dismay; his wrath had fallen on a bonded tree. We zigzagged through a snarl of felled oaks and limbs, emerging scratched and alarmingly close to the spriggan. Grant chucked another fireball. The spriggan deflected it with a wall of dirt-encrusted roots. He snapped off the repulsive toelike appendages and immediately tunneled new roots through the soil toward us. The wall remained standing.

  Cursing, Grant yanked magic through me, creating lightning out of thin air and exploding it across the ground between us and the spriggan, breaking up the dirt barrier. Splintered wood flew in concussive arcs, and we sprinted through air smelling of charged ozone and charred wood. Grant’s impressive bolts of electricity pounded a line straight to the spriggan but stopped before hitting him. Did the spriggan have a defense I couldn’t see?

  “Get down!” Grant shoved me and I collapsed to my knees on a tangle of broken limbs. The pop of a snapped whip broke against my eardrum and a thorny vine whistled through the air above me. The tip of it spun, slashing at Grant’s back. He countered with shears of fire element, severing the vine before it could land a second blow.

  The next vine struck from the opposite direction, the third from straight above, every attack focused on Grant. He countered each strike while spinning a dozen elemental blades through the vine-choked air, severing the thorny tentacles as fast as the spriggan formed them. Awe broke through my terror. Grant wasn’t merely holding twice as many elemental weaves as I could; he also manipulated each of them individually and accurately. If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, felt his magic through the link, I would have said it was impossible.

  A surge of spiked roots burst from the ground and tangled around my legs, curling into constricting vises. I sawed the feather against them, but the metal hairs caught in the sap, slowing me. The spikes pulsed, squeezed, and pierced my calves. I whimpered, instinctively scrambling for the elements and crashing against Grant’s iron control of our linked magic. He grunted at my unexpected assault, jerking in my direction. The spriggan took advantage of his distraction, angling a vine to strangle him.

  Before my warning left my lips, Grant deflected the attack, simultaneously forming two machete wedges out of fire-limed air and hacking into the base of the roots binding me. His blow sank halfway through them and dissipated, leaving me entangled but the spriggan’s hold weakened. I sawed the feather into the cuts he’d made, liberating myself as Grant refocused on the snarl of vines. Tripping free of the roots, I regained my feet.

  “My foot,” Grant barked.

  I dropped forward and sawed through a root tangled around his boot, earning a quick “thanks” before he yanked me to my feet and tugged me into a sprint again.

  Grant had warned about the spriggan’s adaptive fighting style, but I had underestimated how dangerous that made the giant. The first fireball had caught him off guard. The second, he’d been prepared for, and we’d nearly gotten caught. Even if Grant had endless variations of attacks to throw at the spriggan, fatigue whittled away his dexterity—I could feel it through the link. We needed to end this fight fast.

  Grant drove magic into the dirt around the spriggan’s feet and shoved. The world went fuzzy around the edges, and I fought to keep my footing, energy siphoning from my muscles to counter the magical drain. The amount of power Grant wielded staggered me; even if he’d handed over control of the link, I never would have been able to manipulate the elements in those quantities, at least not with any skill. And he did it while running.

  Clawing an extra boost of magic from our link, Grant tunneled into the ground beneath the spriggan. Thick clay soil parted and buried the spriggan to his knees. Grant seized my forearm and ran full out along the path he partially cleared with his lightning strikes. Fifty feet separated us from the spriggan. Thirty. Twenty-five. My heart knocked against my ribs.

  Don’t trip. Don’t trip.

  A wall of roots burst from the ground in front of us. We dodged left, but the spriggan anticipated our move. In an explosion of dirt and wooden splinters, the ground erupted around us, not attacking but imprisoning us in a thorny cage. The roots tightened above our heads, blocking out the sun. Grant twirled razor-thin bands of air around our enclosure, hacking and slashing through the barbed trap. I added my own paltry efforts, cutting into the nearest roots with the harpy feather. Small white flowers burst open along the walls of our prison in a rush of sweet perfume, releasing a fine mist of pollen. Pain lanced between my eyes and my vision doubled.

  Poison.

  I backpedaled into Grant, scrambling for magic through our link. Grant released it to me, and I enveloped our heads in a bubble of fresh air. My vision cleared.

  “Poison?” Grant asked, his voice rough with exertion. Blood ran from a cut on his neck and cheek, mixing with sweat and dirt into a gritty slurry that stained the gray collar of his uniform.

  Panting, I nodded.

  Redoubling his attack on the roots, Grant concentrated on a single exit point, but for every wooden stalk he severed, two took its place. Constrained by the air bubble, I remained pressed to Grant’s side, unable to assist. Thick veins corded either side of his neck as he unleashed a flurry of elemental strikes against the base of the roots. A slender section collapsed, revealing a second wa
ll behind the first. We would run out of oxygen before Grant cut through all the layers.

  “Fire?” I asked.

  “Fire,” he agreed.

  The draw of his magic through me changed, shifting from the familiar textures of air into the more volatile blends of fire. Dropping a fully formed ring of fire around us, Grant ignited the roots on all sides. He bubbled a second ring inside of the first, this one a shield of water to protect us from the heat, and together we kicked smoldering limbs from beneath our feet.

  Instead of retracting, the roots turned rigid. Flames leapt up their side, slowly burning through the wooden fibers.

  “He cut off his own root toes and left us in here to burn, didn’t he?” I asked.

  “Most likely.”

  I used my grubby shirt to wipe sweat from my face. “Why haven’t you set the spriggan on fire?”

  “It’s too dangerous. If he ran, he’d start a forest fire. Besides, he’s sick, not evil.”

  The spriggan seemed plenty evil to me. Yet, despite our direct charge to the spriggan, Grant’s attacks had been measured, and his words triggered my suspicion. Grant had treated the monstrous creature as if—

  “You’re trying to save him?!”

  “With luck.”

  A blade of a root stabbed through the soil inside our protective water shield, the barbed tip sharp as a spear, the length lined with deadly rows of spikes. Grant slashed it off at the ground, then poured a stream of fire down the hole in the dirt after it.

  Our prison walls blackened and crackled under the heat of the flames, and when Grant punched outward with our shield of water, they collapsed, freeing us in a cloud of ash and smoke.

  The spriggan had used the time to his advantage, freeing himself from his dirt trap only to be caught in a tangle of brambles directed by the dryads. The spriggan threw back his head in a hollow roar, then lashed out at the dryads, sending small bodies flying. Grant roared right back, funneling all his energy into a barrage of coconut-sized fireballs, redirecting the spriggan’s attention to us.

  A straggler root speared up from the ground behind us, and I slowed to sever it before it could tangle in our feet.

  “Kylie, where are you?” Grant barked without turning from his assault on the spriggan.

  I grabbed his belt with my right hand and staggered backward beside him, using my dominant hand to deflect wayward roots with the dulling edge of the feather.

  “What exactly is Landewednack dragon’s breath?” It wasn’t the time for questions, but I wasn’t going to get a better opportunity.

  “Dirt.”

  “Dirt! We almost died getting dirt?”

  “Dirt from the southern tip of the British Isles.” Exertion strained Grant’s voice. “From the spriggan’s homeland, a special blend of serpentinite, coal, and sandstone.”

  “But it’s called dragon’s breath because it’ll sear the flesh from that monster’s bones, right?” Please let it be that powerful.

  “It’s called dragon’s breath because earth elementals have a twisted sense of humor. But if we can get the dirt on the spriggan, there’s a chance it’ll restore his sanity.”

  “A chance?”

  A poisonous root shot from the ground between our feet, flowers popping open to release their toxin. I commandeered a trickle of magic and dispersed the lethal pollen as I chopped the vine off at the ground. As soon as we were safe, I relinquished the magic back to Grant for his attack.

  “There’s a much larger chance he’ll kill us first,” I said.

  Grant spared me a glance, his fierce amber-flecked eyes momentarily arresting me. “I won’t destroy a creature just because it’s safer or more convenient for me. Not so long as there’s a chance of saving it.”

  The conviction in his tone chased a shiver down my spine, and I filed the statement away, planning to use it verbatim in my article. That was exactly the sort of sentiment that made Grant a stellar FPD captain, and it was why I couldn’t shake this inconvenient crush I had on him.

  The soil behind us fell inert, the tiny quivers and churned dirt that indicated an underground assault ceasing. I spun to face the spriggan, bracing myself for a new form of attack. Circular black-edged burns peppered his torso, and mindless rage contorted his youthful face. Sprouting new vine hands, the spriggan clutched the thick trunks of downed trees and flung them with horrifying ease—straight for us.

  Grant snatched my hand in his and sprinted toward the monstrous creature. My arm snapped in my shoulder socket and I lurched after him. A fifty-year-old oak sailed through the air on a perfect trajectory to crush us. Grant didn’t attempt to deflect it; instead, he added a boost of air to its flight, using the tree’s momentum to propel it over our heads. It’d barely cleared us before Grant wrenched magic through the link to alter the aerial path of an enormous root ball. The captain’s magic exhibited no finesse; he didn’t have the strength to play catch with tree trunks or to counter the spriggan’s attacks, only to keep us alive.

  For my part, I ran. Staying upright across the rubble-strewn ground while ducking deadly wooden projectiles and attempting to anticipate directional changes took all my concentration. I caught glimpses of the dryads at the edges of the forest, out of range of the spriggan, their foreign wooden faces locked in concentration. Though I couldn’t see any blackberry brambles angling for the spriggan, I trusted they were out there. I spotted Quinn once, a second, golden sun in the sky gliding dangerously close. But mostly the spriggan filled my vision—perilous, immediate, and terrifying.

  A tangle of vines swooped from the left, wrapping around Grant’s torso and yanking him sideways, almost out of my grasp.

  “Grant!” I screamed.

  He released my hand, shaking free of my clutching grasp. A flurry of elemental blades diced the vines holding him, but they formed slower than before and more clumsily. His slashes no longer cut all the way through a vine in one sweep, and I couldn’t tell if fatigue impeded him or if the spriggan had learned how to combat this attack, too.

  The spriggan lifted him, and I lunged for Grant. I caught hold of his belt and clung, both of us suspended several feet above the ground. Vines lashed my arms, and I buried my face against Grant’s leg. I’d lost the harpy feather. All I could do was hang on.

  “Let go!” Grant yelled. “Kylie, let go!”

  I didn’t know if he meant me or the spriggan until he said my name. Desperation had taken control of my body, and I shook my head wildly.

  The spriggan stole the decision from me, ripping me from Grant with a casual swat of a steely vine. I fell, my scream cut short when the ground knocked the wind from me. I’d fallen little more than five feet, and I’d landed on relatively smooth ground—two miracles my brain processed in the background while I watched the spriggan soar Grant through the air, prepared to fling him to his death.

  Grant changed tactics, making a cleaver out of fire and searing straight through the band of vines holding him. He dropped, landing in a crouch far across the torn-up field from me. I sucked in a shallow breath, releasing it with a whimper of relief. Using muscles sluggish from shock and pain, I rolled to a crouch to search for the feather, only then realizing my hands were already full.

  I held the dragon’s breath.

  My heart plunged into my stomach.

  Grant patted his belt, then searched the ground around him, tossing twigs and limbs aside. The dismay on his face made it clear he thought he’d lost the dragon’s breath in the wreckage of the battlefield.

  I waved the pouch above my head and shouted, “I have it!” but the spriggan’s roar drowned me out.

  “Stay there!” Grant’s booming command probably could have been heard in Terra Haven. He sprinted for me, but a fist of vines brought him up short. He evaded the punch, then cut his way free of another vine before the spriggan could fling him farther away. Grant fought relentlessly, but our shared link gave me insight into how much each new weave cost him. He wouldn’t be able to cross the distance between us, not
while fending off the spriggan’s assault, and not with energy left to reach the spriggan alive afterward. Nor did we have time for me to sneak across the field of destruction to deliver the dragon’s breath back to Grant.

  I cowered in my hiding spot, knowing what I needed to do but too scared to move.

  Magic pulled through me hard enough to distort gravity, and I braced a hand beside my hip to stay upright. A surge of fire shot from Grant up the long vines feeding back to the spriggan. Simultaneously, a foul blend of wood, earth, and water tunneled into the spriggan’s feet at the base of his roots, rotting the long toes as they formed. Dismay cinched my chest, constricting my lungs; Grant was giving up on saving the spriggan.

  I can’t let him.

  The thought fractured my paralyzing fear. Grant had gone to Beldame Zipporah, bartered with her and nearly died, all on the chance of saving the spriggan. This entire battle had been as much about protecting the violent behemoth as defeating him. Seeing a monster, any other person would have killed the spriggan by the fastest means, but Grant saw a creature in need of protection and help—even if, in his current state, the spriggan would happily decapitate him.

  If I remained hidden and let Grant kill the spriggan, I’d never be able to look him in the eye again. I’d never be able to look myself in the eye again.

  I wrapped my fist around the pouch and rose to a crouch, my pulse pounding in my throat. I wasn’t going to get a better shot. Grant had the spriggan’s full attention.

  I charged the giant.

  12

  I tucked my head down, my entire body curled in anticipation of being swatted flat by the spriggan’s massive hand, and ran faster than I’d ever run in my life.

  Grant roared a single word: “Kylie!”

  Through the link, I sensed fireballs forming as fast as they blossomed against the spriggan’s legs, arms, and chest. Grant was attempting to keep him distracted.

  I leapt downed trees, crashing through smaller branches. They scratched and clawed at me, but I didn’t feel them. I barely even saw them. My world narrowed to the spriggan and the distance between us. For a few glorious seconds, I thought I would reach him before he spotted me. I was close enough to map the stretch marks carved up and down his massive trunk legs, to see the flex and stretch of the distended tendons in his calves, to smell the incongruous clean, evergreen scent of the giant. When fresh green tentacles sprouted from his hands, the crackle and pop drowned out my footsteps, and when his arm whistled through the air above me, vines whipping toward Grant, the back draft buffeted me.