The camp was a simple one. A single tent was set up before a fire, and a tall man was asleep in the embers’ last glow. The witch slept within. Kieran smiled in the darkness. He could sense in the air the reason for the man’s slumber when he should have been awake and watching. Some of the trees contained in their flowers and leaves toxins that would work as sleeping potions. Tyrentyllith had simply released them into the air.
Still, the slumber would be tenuous. Kieran crept forward until he was close enough to the man to touch him. He knelt and buried his fingers in the earth, coaxing the roots up, calling to nearby vines to stretch themselves and come to him. Slowly they grew over the man’s feet and legs, coiling around him so stealthily that they would not wake him.
Satisfied that the man was bound well enough to prevent any quick escape, Kieran crawled into the witch’s tent.
It was darker within than it had been even in the clearing. But Kieran could feel the evil—evil so tangible that it turned the air wrong. He had felt its like before. He had even known its power to tempt and beckon, before he had cast himself into the forest and Tyrentyllith’s saving mercy. He frowned. His memories of that life were few and faded, and they disturbed him. There were people he remembered… family… He shook his head to concentrate on the moment at hand.
He dug down with his fingers, unable to break through the tent canvas to the soil beneath. But he called to the roots nonetheless, and he tensed as they began to rip through, tearing the fabric.
They were too loud. He feared the witch would awake.
A wind began to blow, a sound at once so natural it would not wake Evelyn and so loud it covered the sound of the roots as they worked through the cloth.
* * *
Rehtse reached the tree where Virginia was bound. Above, Tyrentyllith’s cover had just enough cracks in it to let down strategic light. Even in the shadows, Rehtse could see that the Seer was hurt. One side of her face was bruised and crusted with blood—but the hurt was deeper than that. The bonds that held her to the tree seemed to be holding her up.
For an instant Rehtse’s blood froze with the fear that Virginia was dead. She beat the dread down. She was not too late. She could not be too late.
The tree was only feet from the sleeping man and the tent where the witch undoubtedly lay. Did she dare speak to Virginia? But if she did not, would Virginia cry out when Rehtse began to unbind her? It was dark in the clearing, thanks to Tyrentyllith—but sound could still betray them.
Great King, she prayed, grant your servant wisdom.
A sudden gust of wind blew into Rehtse’s face, pushing her dark braids back. Overhead, the thickly grown trees trembled in the wind, branches rustling and creaking. The man at the fire stirred, and Rehtse saw him look up—and then let his head droop again. The wind was making a great noise.
So great, Rehtse realized, that the man would not hear her if she spoke. The wind would blow her voice away.
Smiling with the wonder of it—that not only the forests, but now the wind was helping in the rescue—Rehtse rushed to Virginia’s side and whispered her name into her ear. At first there was no response, and Rehtse again felt fear. But then Virginia stirred, and she turned her head slightly.
“Who is there?”
“It is Rehtse,” Rehtse said. “You are rescued, as soon as I can untie these bonds.”
“Quickly,” Virginia whispered in reply. She said nothing more. Rehtse pulled a small knife from her dress and cut the ropes loose. Virginia nearly fell. Rehtse propped her up and helped her to her feet.
“Are you—”
“I am alive,” Virginia whispered. “I will be all right. Take me away from here.”
* * *
In the tent, Kieran worked with his eyes darting to the fabric sides that rose and fell with the force of the wind. He too was full of wonder. This was no work of Tyrentyllith’s.
This part of his task had taken longer, for the woman slept on a cot, and the roots had to grow high enough to reach her. They held her feet and ankles now in a great tangle and coiled around her wrists. For good measure, Kieran had brought a thick root up and over the woman’s waist, and another over her neck—enough to keep her from struggling hard. He laughed to himself at his own work, at the image of these two trying to escape. And he stood and turned to go.
The woman’s eyes opened, and from them a terrible blue light shone into the tent.
The light caught Kieran and held him fast. He could not move.
He watched in terror as the woman slowly pushed aside her cloak and swung her legs over the edge of the cot. His handiwork snapped as though the roots had been made of thread. The roots shriveled away into black, twisted versions of themselves. His hands, which had so carefully coaxed and shaped them, began to tingle.
The tingle grew into pain.
The woman stood. She was beautiful—pale and black-haired, wearing a white shift, her hair long and flowing over her shoulders. The blue light illuminating the tent made her look ghostly and ethereal. She held one hand out, palm up, and in it something was turning, a black light like a knot of tendrils and smoke…
Something in Kieran jarred itself awake. The pain went searing up his arms, and he fell on his knees with a scream before half-running, half-crawling for the door of the tent.
The tendrils caught him partway, and his back arched with pain as the energy surged through him. He screamed again.
* * *
Virginia and Rehtse, just on the edge of the meadow, turned as one at the first scream.
“Kieran!” Rehtse said, the wind still blowing her hair back.
Virginia only stared unseeing at the clearing, eyes wide. Another scream. She lurched back toward the camp, and Rehtse grabbed her arm.
“No!” she shouted. “You can’t go back there!”
“She’ll destroy him!” Virginia said.
She did not know who the boy was who had twice screamed, but she knew the pain in his voice and that he was in Evelyn’s grasp, in the Spider’s grasp. She strained at Rehtse’s grip. She would go back, would trade herself for the child, would…
Rehtse released Virginia and pushed her toward the meadow. “Run!” she said. “Run with all your strength for the trees, and Tyrentyllith will give you shelter. I am going back for the boy!”
Virginia opened her mouth to argue, but in that moment they both were silenced by a presence that fell over them with such force that it took their breaths away.
Rehtse looked to the edge of the trees and saw it. A translucent giant, tall as the trees. In the mist and the moonlight, he faded in and out of solidity. His skin was pale and marred like birch bark. His eyes were blue, shining in his face like a sudden splash of wildflowers. Long hair like dark green vines fell around his shoulders. The face itself was beautiful, ancient, and yet, always changing. It seemed to Rehtse that all of the seasons were in this being’s features, cycling, changing, dying, and being renewed. Tyrentyllith of the Earth Brethren, Forest Lord, Keeper of the Woods.
The trees pulled themselves away from the ancient being, opening a straight path to the camp so they could see into it. Moonlight poured in. A blue light was shining from a central place near the fire, and a figure in black robes stood by it. Kieran was on his back on the ground, writhing in the grasp of what looked like cords of thick smoke.
“Release my son,” Tyrentyllith demanded.
The black figure raised its arms, and the sleeves fell away from the woman’s white hands. A sound issued from her, growing in volume and rhythm—a chant, a call. The moonlit air grew darker around the woman, and the forest moaned. Kieran convulsed as the tendrils suddenly vanished from around him.
“As you wish, Earth Brother,” the woman said.
The trees on every side of her began to bow, and the moan in the air deepened and increased as their branches grew limp and blackened. Blackness clotted in the woman’s hands and broke through in vaporous threads that ascended into the air, drawing life from the surroundings, suckin
g power from the forest like a parasite sucking blood.
Tyrentyllith’s form stood unmoving, but fading like mist. Rehtse realized, suddenly terrified, that the pain shaking the forest had momentarily paralyzed him.
A deep laugh rose from the woman’s throat and filled the air. Memories swirled in the air all around her and impressed themselves upon Rehtse’s soul. Seasons. Life. Songs in the stars. The King, walking in the forest in ancient days, calling life up from it in ever more abundant joy. The forest had lived for so long, had waited centuries for the dawn that would bring the King back again. And through Evelyn’s laughter Rehtse heard them crying, all the orphan ghosts of yesterday. She saw them rising on every side, weeping as they went, the long-silent souls of the forest dragged into the Spider’s grasp.
Kieran whimpered. Rehtse ran forward and gathered the lanky boy in her arms, pulling him away from Evelyn, staring at the woman with hatred in her eyes. The witch turned her own eyes on the priestess, eerily blue, shining. She did not move to stop her from taking Kieran. The look on her face was mocking.
Evelyn spoke. Her voice was louder, stronger than it should have been. “Tyrentyllith the Forest Lord,” she said. “Learn now who truly rules the woodlands. You were loyal to the King in the Great War, and for that you paid dearly—five hundred years trapped in silence. War is coming again, Spirit of the Forest. Your King does not even play a role in it. The world is mine now, and this time you shall not merely sleep.”
The stone near the fire which had been glowing faintly began to ignite with brighter light from somewhere deep below its surface. The light spread across the stone, showing veins of black shot all through it in spidery shapes, and suddenly it burst up and split the night sky, and the light itself was darkness.
Black bands of writhing energy thick as railroad ties pulsed from the light, great black spider legs fraying with a thousand jagged edges. Rehtse had dragged Kieran back as far as Virginia, and now she grabbed hold of each of them to stop them from running toward Evelyn.
“Laird!” Virginia cried.
“No!” Kieran screamed, pulling himself free of Rehtse and running for the blue light.
“Come back!” Rehtse shouted as she made a desperate grab for him. Her voice could hardly be heard over a terrible noise.
The forest, wailing with a sound like nothing she had ever heard.
Kieran had not run six feet before something picked him up and threw him backward, onto the ground at Rehtse’s feet. He jumped up to run for Tyrentyllith again, but the force returned and caught all three in a howling gale so strong it lifted them off the ground. Rehtse closed her eyes and concentrated on holding on to Virginia as she lost contact with the earth and felt the trees rushing past and then below them as they lifted higher and higher, flying away like ashes drifting in the wind.
“Llycharath!” Virginia cried, her voice weaker than her words deserved. “Let us down!”
Rehtse screwed her eyes even more tightly shut as she heard the voice that answered from the heart of the wind.
Cannot, little sister. You must not be here.
* * *
The voices that came through Nicolas’s drugged awareness were all loud and tangled, pulling him in a thousand directions. They came from everywhere. Pravik. The High Police camps. From other cities, other villages; from his own hopes and dreams and fears.
When he was not drugged, he could focus on more demanding voices.
The commander’s boot caught him in the jaw and snapped his head back, and he tasted blood as he clenched his jaw once more.
“Come on, boy!” the man demanded. “Tell me what I want to know!”
Nicolas spit blood and spoke as best he could with a swollen tongue. “I cannot tell you,” he said. “I don’t know.”
He tensed as the boot swung for his ribs, driving him across the ground. The commander reached down and grabbed him by the scruff of his torn shirt, shoving him up against the thick pole in the middle of the tent. The commander’s face, red and sweaty, was inches from his.
“I know there’s more going on here than anyone’s telling me,” the commander growled. “First I don’t see the emperor in months, and then he’s issuing orders through that swine Cratus to come here and wait and watch that city without attacking. And then it’s capture the blind girl, and capture you, you with your strange eyes and your answering voices that aren’t there. And I swear you know more than you’re telling.”
He threw Nicolas back to the ground. He coughed and spat blood again, then glared up at the commander. “You’ve had me drugged,” he said. “Of course I hear voices.”
“Not on that drug,” the commander said. “That root should take you out of this world and every other besides. No, you’re like the blind girl was—Gifted is the word. Now you tell me. I’m sick of playing pawn. What are you? And what’s going on in Athrom?”
“How should I know if you don’t?” Nicolas said. He closed his eyes. A sound was building somewhere, pushing at him, threatening to overcome the walls he’d been building. Between the commander’s beating, the voices, and the last vestiges of the drug, he could hardly keep his thoughts together enough to make sense of what the commander was saying.
One thing he did know—something was wrong. The sound was still building—still beating at him—still—
The commander dragged Nicolas off the ground and drew back his fist for another blow, but before he could strike, Nicolas stiffened and screamed.
The commander dropped him. Nicolas curled up on the ground and held his ears. He screamed again.
The sound pulsed through him like a convulsion, like the death throes of a great beast, like black waves pounding against his mind and threatening to shatter it. Mourning, moaning, wailing, dying. Many voices, yet all one voice; voices wooden and leafed and rooted.
The voices of the forest dying.
Nicolas did not know when the commander left him alone—when the guards ducked away from his screaming and shouting for it to stop. The voices tore him apart more surely than the commander could have done in a hundred beatings.
He only knew that when they ceased, fading away in a long, slow wail, he was alone.
And he was not drugged. He could move. Every muscle protesting, he pushed himself to his hands and knees and crawled for a low place in the earth where he could wriggle out from beneath the tent wall. The camp was dark but for a few fires. A wagon stood nearby. Scrambling up as quietly as he could, he darted for it and hid in its shadows. A guard walked past. He did not move. The guard did not see him.
A tent with an open flap stood ten feet away, closer to the edge of the camp. He closed his eyes and listened for voices or breathing within. Nothing. It was empty. Satisfied that no one was near, he crossed the empty ground and disappeared into the tent. He closed his eyes and listened his way through the camp, finding each nearby soldier, listening to their conversations, discovering who was distracted and who was not posted where he should be.
It would not be a quick escape. But it was a sure one.
* * *
In the morning, smoke could be seen rising from the forest in Galce.
An enormous swath of land had been burned out, several square miles of wreckage. Little was left but ash.
High in a tree hundreds of years old, the tallest tree of the forest just beyond the wasteland, Kieran sat on a branch and looked over the carnage with tears running silently down his face.
Behind him, resting in a hollow in the trunk but close enough to the edge to see out, Rehtse and Virginia sat knee to knee. Virginia’s eyes were closed; her mind far away. She was pale and weak, her face drawn with recent suffering and still-lingering pain. Rehtse was watching the boy. His grief hurt her, more than the sight of the burned-out woods—his grief, and the fear she had seen in his eyes.
Rehtse started to reach out to him, but she thought better of it and brought her hand back. Virginia’s eyes were still closed.
Rehtse sighed. She wanted to feel trium
phant. She had found one of the Earth Brethren. She had rescued Virginia. They had escaped Evelyn. Surely the King was helping them. And yet…
She looked over at Kieran again. He was still staring out at the green canopy spread out before them and the black expanse beyond that. Behind him, on the other side of the forest, light sparkled off water—the sea.
Smoke was still rising from the ashes.
Slowly, Rehtse unfolded herself from the hollow and moved out on the long branch, telling herself not to look down. She settled into a crook in the branch beside Kieran, laid her hand on his shoulder, and said, “It will be all right.”
He looked at her, and his face looked much younger than the fifteen or so years she had assumed were his. “How do you know?” he asked. His voice sounded younger as well.
“Tyrentyllith is a great power,” Rehtse said. “The Spider is strong, but it is neither so old nor so good as the Earth Brethren. Tyrenytllith serves the King.” Her voice sounded unconvincing in her own ears, but it gathered warmth the more she spoke. “I do not believe he could be vanquished so easily.”
Kieran sniffed, keeping his eyes on Rehtse as though he couldn’t stand to look back at the waste again. He wiped his nose on his arm and drew his knees to his chest. “My father can go—deep. Somewhere to heal. Perhaps he has gone there. I just wish he was here.”
“Kieran,” Rehtse said slowly, “is Tyrentyllith really your father?”
The boy looked at her almost in confusion, and then slowly shook his head. “No,” he said. “I came here when I was young. I was running away from the Blackness, and Tyrentyllith found me and made me his own.”
The Seventh World Trilogy omnibus Page 69
