by J. Thorn
She heard the rush of a wide river, perhaps one as large as the Merith River, and there certainly wasn’t a river near their clearing.
If only I hadn’t run. If only I was brave like my father.
Delia wandered toward the river, following its distant roar like a captain follows the brightest star above the sea. The trees appeared to grow taller around her. Her eyes adjusted to the darkness and she saw shapes of hills all around, protruding from the earth like humpbacked monsters. The hills were new too, she realized. They set up the last encampment on a slight incline upon which the woods spread in all directions. She could not remember seeing hills or a roaring river.
The face of the moon ripped a hole in the blanket of clouds and peered down upon her, hideous and laughing. She didn’t want to look up. She was sure if she did, she would see its eyes following her through the forest. The moon’s mouth would open to display rows of bloody teeth. She would see the glowing face attached to a body climbing down through the clouds to devour her the way the storybook trolls consumed unwary children crossing bridges at midnight.
The clouds thickened, hiding the moon from her. She walked faster to outrun the sky before the moon could part the clouds and find her again.
She walked for several minutes before the air grew humid and the roar of water became louder. The terrain gave way to a steep descent, forcing her to walk sideways and grasp tree trunks to keep from falling. She saw the silver water sparkling through the trees, at least a quarter mile wide. As the rush of water drew her downward, she descended the hill faster. A river usually attracted people. She hoped to follow its banks, improving her chance of finding a village.
She slipped and fell onto a bed of leaves. For a second, she thought she would tumble down the embankment and into the churning waters. Her hands grasped a tree root and she dangled on the hill, panting and seeing the night through the blur of tears. She watched as a tree branch hurtled downstream, sucked under by the river.
If I had fallen in...
Heart racing, she pulled herself to her feet with a grunt and grabbed hold of a thin tree trunk. She chided herself for not being more cautious.
Delia crisscrossed the slope, moving from tree to tree. She scuttled sideways and found it easier to keep her footing. This way, the water would not swallow her as it did the tree branch. She descended the hill and the ground leveled out as she broke through the rim of trees.
Delia stood upon open shoreline twenty paces from the water. The river rumbled before her, making her feel insignificant in the river’s presence. Spray droplets coated her face and ran down her nose and cheeks. She could not find a bridge and if she attempted to wade in, the water would sweep her downstream, smashing her head against rocks while the river filled her lungs. She wondered what she expected to find at the river’s edge—a fisherman? A village like Droman Meadows, celebrating the coming of spring with song and dance? She choked down the lump in her throat and decided to be brave. Like Daddy would have wanted.
She followed the shoreline, the river to her left bellowing and soaking her clothes.
There won’t be a village ahead, she told herself. Nothing is alive in these woods.
Her teeth chattered.
An hour passed. Delia’s legs grew weary and she stumbled along the water’s edge, her skirts dripping. She thought about her mother and father. A few hours ago, they had been together but Dain and the dread wolves tried to kill them. Had she kept her wits about her, they would still be together. Now everyone she loved disappeared into the woods as though a magician’s curtain lowered and the room spun so she could not find her way back.
As she followed the river, the hills faded behind her. The forest thickened beyond the shoreline, sprouting out of the soil like quills on a porcupine. As she feared, no sign of anyone was along the river. She would have followed the water until sunrise, and perhaps longer, had a glimmer of light not caught her eyes from inside the forest.
Though the light was too dull to be a fire, it was too bright to be muted moonlight. Her heart pounded and her skin felt tight and clammy. She looked back at the river, its waters flowing with indifference into the night. The shoreline ahead meandered, leading deeper into the vast forest. She took one last look at the water before walking toward the tree line.
The glow became stronger, emanating from several trees deep in the woods. Delia recalled a fable about will-o-wisps, phantom lights that lured travelers from the safety of the forest path, never to be seen again. But dread wolves came from the world of fables, too.
She pressed herself against the trunk of a sycamore, craning her neck around the side of the tree and listening for hints of what lie hidden. The sycamore’s leaves came alive, roused by the keening night gust. She crouched down, thinking she heard the whispers of ghosts on the wind. The breeze relented and the forest quieted. She sat against the tree and listened to the river, its roar more distant than should have been possible after such a short walk. She imagined a gigantic monster pulling the river away from her while the trees consumed the water and hills. After a few more strides, she could barely hear the churning waters, as though doors closed behind her while the forest led her along a path of its choosing.
Delia emerged from behind the sycamore and followed the phantom glow. The stillness of the forest thickened into a form she could almost grasp in her hands. She saw the foreign letters and symbols along the bark of an old oak. They appeared to match the symbols she read on the boulder by their shelter—the shelter the forest kept leading them back to. A tinge of recognition colored her thoughts, like a familiar face wandering through a crowd and disappearing before you could remember the name. The words pulsed with light, contoured along the bark’s rough edges.
As she stared, the symbols faded into the trees. She reached her hand out to feel the letters, wondering if they would be hot or cold. But they dissipated before her fingers could reach them, replaced by new glowing symbols farther in the forest.
She followed the glow, drifting deeper into the woods like a swimmer losing sight of the shore. The forest swallowed her, playing the same game of baiting her forward and yet she could not turn back because the words comforted her, soothed her. Soon, she no longer saw the trees at all. Only the words.
Delia stumbled in a state of semi-sleep. She thought it should be close to dawn. But maybe in this part of the forest, night never relented to the day.
A heavy crunch of twigs knocked her out of her trance. She noticed the symbols and words dissolved into the night and she stood surrounded by dense woodlands. Without the light from the symbols, she could only make out shadows and the hint of shapes. A branch snapped closer this time and Delia jumped.
The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end and her body became rigid, waiting for a decrepit hand to lay itself upon her shoulder.
The shadows moved. The air swirled amid the trees and Delia blinked, thinking it all must be an illusion. All went still. She stood rooted in place, not daring to move or make a sound.
A black shape moved out from the trees. Her heart leaped into her throat as the shadow floated toward her. Its cloak billowed like bats’ wings, driven by a soundless wind absent from the rest of the forest. The shadow took an elderly woman’s form, hunched over and haggard. It approached Delia.
Delia peered beneath the hood covering the woman’s face, wondering what lay hidden in the mask of darkness—a face of timeless beauty or a rotting countenance crawling with worms and tarantulas? The woman’s eyes burned.
Delia backed away and butted up against a barrier that felt like glass in the dead of winter. She turned around, feeling blindly at the unseen wall blocking her way back through the trees. She clawed at the smooth barrier and pushed her body against it, but it didn’t waver. She heard the thuds of heavy footfalls behind her.
Delia spun back around but she could not see the woman blending into the trees. She thought she heard raindrops. Delia looked up and the hideous face of the moon tore through the clouds a
nd found her again.
Another raindrop. Plop. Plop.
Heavy, solid shapes smacked into the ground like acorns falling out of the trees. The dead leaves on the forest floor sounded as if they came to life. A hideous scratching surrounded Delia.
She looked up again, believing the moon was coming for her. Instead, she saw hundreds of spiders descending on invisible webs from the trees. They thwacked against the ground, some spinning on their backs with legs dancing wildly. The spiders flipped themselves over and skittered toward her.
A mass of black encircled her and as she spun around looking for an escape path, the spiders closed in. A heavy one crawled across her soft shoes and she squealed. Another spider descended out of the branches, passing within an inch of her nose. She looked up and saw hundreds of spiders dropping out of the trees. An arachnid with a red hourglass painted on its back landed on her shoulder. She screamed and flicked the spider away before two rushed over her shoes, under her skirts and up the bare skin of her legs.
The spiders bit into her flesh. The bites stung and burned, and as she bent to brush the spiders off her calves, three more landed upon her arms. She slapped at the arachnids, crushing two. The third scurried under her arm, hanging off the cloth of her shirtsleeve, its legs like needles. The spider’s stinging bite penetrated the sleeve and pierced her skin. It felt like a bonfire’s spark.
She could no longer see leaves as the spiders smothered the forest floor, black abdomens and spindly legs climbing over one another to reach her. In seconds, she would feel their legs crawling up her skirts, biting at her flesh. The spiders would drop from the trees into her hair, scurrying down her neck and into her shirt. She would be covered by a black mass of spiders and fall to the forest floor where they would consume her. Delia cried for her father, eyes closed against the inevitable horrors.
Delia sensed someone standing nearby, and when her eyes opened she saw the shape of the woman hunched over her. The spiders scurried and crawled all around them. Delia heard the spiders picking through the leaves, inches away. The woman extended her hand to Delia, the flesh of her skin like white flour. Before it reached Delia’s hand, Delia felt a frigid chill emanating from the woman’s fingertips.
“Take my hand,” said a voice sounding like a body being dragged through bramble. “Take my hand and I will see you safely from here. The spiders will hunt you no more.”
Delia trembled. The spiders stopped coming as though they too, feared the old woman. She towered over Delia.
“If you wish to be with your sisters again, you will do as I say.”
The spiders advanced again. They swarmed over her shoes and up her legs, dropped onto her head and shoulders. They bit, stung and slipped down her shirt. They crawled over her skin.
“Quickly.”
Delia screamed. She grasped for the woman’s hand, her eyes glued shut. She felt a hand with loose flesh, like a threadbare piece of cloth hanging off of bone. Delia didn’t want to open her eyes, believing she would see a corpse staring down at her. She felt a gale building, whipping her hair and fluttering her skirts with its cool touch. She felt a sense of weightlessness and a chilled breeze buffeting her skin.
She no longer heard the spiders crawling through the dead leaves, nor could she hear the forest at all. She thought if she opened her eyes again, she would be floating among the stars and carried toward the gaping mouth of the frenzied moon.
“I’ve come to bring you back to your family, my child,” Delia heard a voice say from somewhere far away, although she still felt the old woman’s hand grasping hers.
My family, Delia thought.
She hadn’t seen her sisters in several days and she missed them terribly. Her mother and father would be heart stricken, searching through the forest for her. Delia began to weep.
“All is well now, dear. Keep hold of my hand and speak to me your name so I may call your parents to you.”
“Delia,” she said.
And the night sky ripped open with a banshee’s scream.
Chapter 28
“Delia.”
Thom called for his youngest daughter for more than an hour, stumbling blindly through the overgrowth with Kira and Rowan struggling to keep up. Midnight passed but the night still held many dark hours in its grasp. Thom imagined the sky pressing down to grasp Delia and pull her into the gloom.
“Slow down. You’ll not find any sign of her running wildly as you are.”
Rowan caught up to Thom and grasped his shoulder. Thom shrugged the hand away and climbed over a clump of thorny bushes tearing at his cloak like talons.
“Get your head about yourself,” Kira said. She caught up to her husband, panting. She grabbed the back of his cloak to slow him down.
“I’ve lost them all,” Thom said, his eyes glazed over and lost in the moonlight breaking through the overcast. “My children. I’ve failed them.”
He collapsed to his knees, too hollow to cry. The drought of hope the forest dealt him dried his tears from the inside. Instead, he stared into the trees. His lips moved in silent discussion with someone unseen.
When Thom heard the big man’s footsteps behind him, he thought Rowan would drop down next to him and tell him all would be well. But Rowan dragged him up by his shirt collar, spun him around and slapped him across the face. Thom stared at Rowan, his face stinging and his ears ringing.
“Are ya gonna weep until sunrise and feel sorry for yourself or are ya gonna find your daughters?”
Thom’s eyes flared. For an instant, the forest disappeared and he saw himself floating through an infinite sky of white, the strange symbols drifting on the wind beyond his fingertips. He felt a surge of desire. Lust. He wanted to reach for the symbols, to hold them within his hands and make them his own.
He recalled the image of the walls surrounding Mylan crumbling to the earth under his hand. He wanted to do the same to the forest—to fell every tree and hillock, to dry the brooks and raze the countryside until nothing remained except his lost daughters. If he reached for the symbols, if he could only remember what the words meant—
Rowan steeled himself and stepped back.
Thom blinked and the menace beneath his eyes vanished. Kira hugged him and Thom softened. Rowan exhaled as though he crossed a rickety bridge hanging over a chasm.
“Thank you,” Thom said.
Rowan clasped him on the shoulder.
“You’d do the same for me. Though my head’s a lot harder than yours and we’d be bandaging your hand by now.”
Thom almost smiled.
“Lead the way,” Rowan said.
They spread out several paces apart per Thom’s command and swept through the trees in a straight line. Thom scrutinized the terrain while the moon lit their path. They searched for a broken branch, a piece of cloth or an imprint on the soil—any sign his daughters passed this way. But the woods drained Thom’s hope with each step, the forest playing a shell game with him, moving the pieces around with sleight of hand so he could never find the right path.
An hour later, Thom halted the search with dawn not far off but still dormant beneath the horizon. They crisscrossed the woods enough times that they would have found signs of Delia or the older daughters by now if the girls passed through this part of the forest. A ridge blanketed with trees lifted in the distance like a sleeping dragon. Somewhere off to the right, Thom thought he heard the sound of rushing water. Not the gurgle of a brook, but the faraway bellow of a river. Rowan looked in the direction of the roar, too.
“Is it possible we have somehow passed the road and run into the Merith River?” Rowan asked.
Thom shook his head, bending down to search for footprints he knew he would never find. “The Mylan Road might as well be on the other side of the world. Whatever river that is, it is not the Merith.”
Their shadows stretched long across the ground. Tree boughs rubbed together like the scraping of shriveled corn husks in winter. A cloud passed over the moon and a chill crept down from the
treetops.
They heard a scream.
It echoed through the depths of the forest. Thom stood up and turned toward the sound.
“That was one of the girls,” Kira said, her eyes wide in the moonlight, searching Thom’s.
They listened and heard nothing but the wind moaning above the canopy.
“It might have been a bird,” Thom said, but his penetrating gaze into the night suggested he believed otherwise.
“Or it might not have been,” Rowan said, staring through a gap in the trees where the cry originated.
The wind’s dirge played through the night.
“I say we follow it,” Rowan said.
He looked at Thom and Thom strode forward, leading them into the woods.
They ascended a slight hillock and came down the other side. The roar of the river grew louder and it seemed to Thom he could hear the river whispering to him, urging him to hurry. They walked between two stone outcroppings, the rock formations’ shadowed shapes appearing as miniaturized versions of the cliff walls at Drake’s Pass. The woods thickened and vanished below a steep hill.
Another scream rose from above the river and this time it was not mistaken for a bird of prey. It was a girl’s scream. A child’s scream.
“I’m coming, Delia.”
Thom bolted in the direction of the voice, not seeing the sheer drop beneath him. Before the ground fell out from under his feet, Rowan grasped and pulled Thom backward.
“Easy,” Rowan said. “You’ll do no good for her if ya break your neck.”
In front of the river, a steep hill descended toward a monstrous flow of water consuming a strip of earth at least a quarter mile wide. The water yanked logs and debris downstream with enough force to snap them on the teeth of sharp rocks.
As they edged down the tree-choked hill, the sound of the water became louder. Kira lost her footing on the slope and Rowan grasped her hand before she could plunge forward into a tree trunk.
They kept moving. Thom cut an angle down the slope, headed downstream and listened for Delia’s cry.
