by Krista Rose
“Why not?”
Kylee looked at me, her eyes dry and hollow. “We don’t know how we’re going to feed ourselves. It would only be selfish to bring a pet with us.”
I shuddered away from her gaze, realizing what she meant; the kitten would be too easy an alternative if we ran out of food. So I simply nodded, and turned away to put the trunk in the wagon. Kylee took the kitten from Reyce, murmuring to him before placing him on the ground. Bandit mewed once, piteously, before disappearing into the woods, and Reyce stared after him, looking lost and heartbroken.
I climbed into the driver’s seat. There was only room for one of us to ride at a time, as the bed was full, and so the others would walk beside it until we rotated places. I clicked my tongue to Teodore, and we set out through the woods, keeping to the trees until we reached the road on the other side of the village. The ground was rough and rutted, leaving me feeling battered as the hours dragged on. I worried for Kryssa, and kept Teodore at the slowest walk he could manage, easing over the uneven path. She moaned, but didn’t wake.
After a few hours, we changed places, and Kylee drove. As I walked, I studied her and the others, concerned that they might faint or break down as Lanya had, but though their eyes remained haunted and desolate, they seemed no more broken than I felt. Perhaps we were numbed by our shared trauma.
We stopped at nightfall, building a small fire and eating a little of our supplies. We left Kryssa in the wagon, and Lanya tended to her there with herbs and poultices as the rest of us prayed against infection.
Finally, we slept, our exhaustion pulling us down beyond dreams. We should have set watches, but we were unaware of such things then, and too exhausted to have kept them in any case. Thankfully, nothing ever came after us in the night.
The following day dawned with unpleasant, chilling rain. We piled our cloaks and blankets over Kryssa, smothering her with the scent of damp wool in an effort to keep her dry, and pressed on.
It is astonishing what we can endure when there is no other option. We walked for miles, our bellies aching with hunger, our skin growing cold and numbed from the rain. We rotated turns leading Teodore, who was surely too old for such a journey, and watched Kryssa mutter in her sleep with rising concern. At nightfall, we stopped again, tending to ourselves and her wounds before at last giving in again to sleep.
And, as we had feared, Kryssa’s wounds took infection.
She burned with fever and shook with chills, moaning as she slipped in and out of waking. Her wounds oozed puss, and ugly red lines spread across her back underneath her skin. We pushed on toward Fallor, afraid and confused when she started murmuring a name over and over: Vitric.
It wasn’t a name we knew, and so after a while we ignored it, more concerned with her fever, which raged out of control no matter what we tried. Lanya rode beside her in the cart, not even bothering to hide her growing fear from the rest of us.
By the fourth day of our journey, it was obvious that Kryssa would die if we did not quickly find a healer. A road sign informed us that Fallor was still fifty miles away- a full three weeks at our current pace- and so we turned back into the Siriun Forest toward the lumber yards, praying our map was accurate, and that our sister would survive the five days we still had to travel.
Through it all, Kryssa repeated the unknown name Vitric like a prayer.
19 Llares 577A.F.
I honestly do not know how we kept going those last few days.
Despair ate at us, helplessness battering against us until we wanted nothing more than to collapse. I think it was only our fear and love for Kryssa which kept our feet moving across the uneven ground. Even when I closed my eyes I still saw her injuries, glaring and bloody and burning, her face deathly pale against the dark blankets.
My head ached constantly, my nerves scraped paper-thin. My dreams were haunted by my father’s voice, chasing me back into exhausted wakefulness.You’re nothing. You think you can save her, save any of them? You’re weak, too weak to lead, too soft to help. Poor, pathetic boy. You’ll never save her. She will die because of you.
I struggled with it, wrestling with my futile anger and the guilt that lurked beneath it. I had left her alone to suffer Father’s wrath, cowering from it until Reyce, youngest and smallest, had been forced to save her instead. My guilt was doubled for that: I had not gone to defend her when I had heard her screams, even when the air had been stolen from me with the certainty of her death.
I had abandoned her.
My siblings told me that it was not my fault, but I still blamed myself. A thousand people could tell me that it had been an impossible choice, and yet- it still did not matter. I hated myself for what I had done, and it seemed nothing could ever atone for it.
The fifth day dragged on, the thick trees of the Forest impeding our progress as we struggled to fit our wagon between them. Kryssa fell silent around noon, her breathing labored and rattling in her chest, and would not wake. Her fever continued to burn, unchecked by the herbs Lanya desperately pressed to her back or the teas she poured down her throat. Nothing stopped it. I worried nothing ever would.
All we could do was pray for a miracle.
I was shaking from hunger and fear and cold. My cloak was wrapped around Kryssa; my thin shirt and breeches did nothing to keep the late spring chill from my skin. It should have been a comfort that the massive trees were huddled too closely together for the rain to reach us, but it seemed a pitiful reprieve from our misery as we trudged along, monotony the only thing that kept our legs from simply giving out beneath us.
In the space of a single heartbeat, we were surrounded, men in dark clothing appearing out of the shadows to aim weapons at us, their faces hidden behind charcoal face paint. There were perhaps thirty of them, most carrying bows, quivers filled with arrows bristling at their backs. Their arrival was nearly silent, and we gaped at them, thinking at first that we had walked into a dream. Teodore slowed to a stop, his eyes weary and uncurious.
A woman stepped forward, her face unreadable as she stared at us through her mask of paint. She held a gleaming sword almost negligently; when she spoke, her voice was surprisingly young. “Where are you headed, strangers of the Prince’s forest?”
I opened my mouth to speak, and choked. I hadn’t used my voice in days. I swallowed several times, and managed to rasp, “The lumber yards.”
She looked us over with hard, dark eyes. “Why?”
I frowned as my mind at last began to work. Why did it matter where we were going or why we were headed there? Regular bandits should have been uninterested in us, as we were wearing little more than rags. And what was the meaning behind her strange greeting? “Why do you need to know?”
Her sword rose until the tip touched the base of my throat. “I asked you a question. Answer it.”
I bared my teeth at her, the fury I’d held back for days boiling through me. Images ripped from the Crone’s mind filled my thoughts with sacrifices and blood, and it was easy to imagine these faceless strangers trying to continue what she had begun- after all, we had no real experience with people. It was simpler to think that they would all be like the Crone: deceitful, selfish, and filled with shame-faced cruelty.
I readied myself to burn them all.
“We need a healer for our sister,” Lanya said, standing in the cart. Her face was calm, and I felt her light pierce my rage, urging me to back down. “She’s dying of infection.”
“Infection?” The woman lowered her blade, frowning. She jerked her head toward a skinny, sharp-faced man holding a bow. “Tanner. Check her.”
He nodded, and climbed into the cart to examine Kryssa. It took only a touch to confirm her fever, and his eyes widened as his head shot up. “She’s truly burning, Marla. She’ll die in less than a day if untreated.”
She considered for a moment, then nodded and sheathed her sword. “Bring them,” she commanded, and turned back into the shadows of the trees.
Everything happened very quickly after that.
We were urged to follow her, forcing us eastward despite our protests that the lumber yards were in the other direction. I spotted a small stone house, nearly hidden between the trees, smoke curling cheerfully from its chimney. I thought it was our destination, until I was pushed roughly past it.
We were led to a giant tree, just out of sight of the house. The tree’s base was wider than the armspans of ten men, and a thick canopy of leaves began perhaps twenty feet above us. Someone shouted down from it. “Who walks in the Prince’s forest?”
The woman- Marla- was beside me, although I hadn’t heard her approach. “Friends of the Darkling Wood,” she replied, and baskets were lowered through the foliage on thick ropes, coming gently to rest on the pine needles at our feet.
Our belongings were placed in the smaller baskets, while we were told to climb into the larger. Kylee tried to protest when Teodore was led away, but they ignored her and shoved her into a basket, and she was pulled up into the canopy. Alyxen, Lanya, and Reyce were given the same treatment, and vanished into the leaves above as empty baskets began to descend.
I balked when I saw one of the men lift Kryssa, cradling her against his chest as he carried her away; he didn’t know about her back, and I worried about the pain it might cause her. But Marla was behind me, her dark eyes fierce as she prodded me into a basket. I was lifted up into the canopy, and Kryssa was hidden from my sight.
Above that first level of canopy was a platform, perhaps twenty feet by twenty feet, made of solid beams nailed to the branches of the ancient tree. Men built like monoliths hauled the baskets on one side, helping us from them and transferring our possessions to yet more baskets on the far side of the platform, where they were hauled even higher into the foliage above us.
My siblings were huddled together in a knot at the center of this chaos, their faces echoing my bafflement, and I struggled through my exhaustion to make sense of what was happening. All around us people were climbing from baskets and onto rope ladders, disappearing into the upper branches.
Someone nudged me, and I glanced over my shoulder to once again find Marla standing behind me. She pointed to the rope ladders. “Go.”
“Where?” Even to my own ears, my voice sounded timid. Poor, pathetic boy. I ground my teeth together.
“You’ll see.” She pushed me. “Climb.”
I swallowed my questions, and climbed. The others followed.
There are many that think climbing a rope ladder is easy. I will be the first to attest: it is not. It gave under my weight, pulling in on itself, making it near impossible to gain the next foothold. The coarse rope rubbed my hands raw, and my arms shook with strain and exhaustion and days of pitiful rations. If it had not been for my thoughts of Kryssa, alone and injured and hopefully somewhere above us, I doubt I would have been able to find the strength to continue.
I finally emerged above the second canopy. I was bleary-eyed and trembling, sweat pouring from my skin, and I thought I might simply collapse onto the nearest flat surface, until the view wiped my mind clean.
The upper canopy was immense, thick branches spreading out in all directions, merging and twining with nearby trees until the ground far below was completely obliterated. Houses had been built upon the branches, small one-roomed buildings with large, open windows. The slanted, shingled roofs had thin troughs at the edge of the eaves, directing rain into the barrels that sat on either side of every door.
Rope and slat-wood bridges ran between the houses and the platforms, creating an intricate series of highways throughout the brilliant green. Above us, another fifty feet higher in the air, rose the largest of the buildings, larger even than our barn on the farm. It was wrapped around the trunk of the tree itself, and rope ladders hung from its edges every few feet, dangling down to the platforms below.
Marla appeared beside me, grinning at the slack-jawed expressions on our faces as we stared up at it. “It’s the Great Hall.”
I blinked at her. “Where are we?”
“The Camp of the Darkling Prince.” She obviously thought her words explained everything, though we only stared at her in confusion as she turned away. “Come with me.”
Not knowing what else to do, we followed.
She led us over the rope bridges to one of the houses. It was plain, situated near a neighboring tree, and nearly empty of furniture, though our belongings had been stacked neatly by the door. Two hammocks hung from the low-beamed ceiling, and more were piled on a small wooden table. A wooden tub sat in one corner of the room above a metal box, a bin of charcoal pieces beside it.
I stared around, blinking repeatedly, and wondered if I was dreaming.
Marla started to leave, and I shook off my stupor long enough to grab her arm. “Kryssa. My sister. Where is she?”
Her stern expression eased for a moment in sympathy, and I realized beneath the makeup she was scarcely older than I was. “She’s with the healers. I’ll take you to her after you’ve met with the Prince.”
“Prince? What prince?”
“The Darkling Prince. He meets everyone when they first come to the Camp. I’ll return when he sends for you. In the meantime, rest.” She pulled her arm from my grasp, and left, quietly shutting the door behind her.
Alone, we gazed at each other, uncertain and overwhelmed. It seemed we had found an answer to our prayers- though we had no idea what kind of answer it was.
So we waited.
BRANNYN
19 Llares 577A.F.
Time stretched out, interminable.
We spent the balance of it cleaning up, hauling rusted buckets of cold water from the barrels by the door to the tub, scrubbing a week’s worth of grime from our faces and arms as Alyxen fiddled with the metal box, which he claimed was a brazier of some kind. Lanya and I hung the remainder of the hammocks from sturdy hooks nailed to the beams, and we tried resting in them, but our unfamiliar surroundings made it impossible. Instead, we alternated between pacing the interior of the house and staring out the windows. I spent an hour gazing out the front door, examining the improbable camp and trying to gauge where they might have taken Kryssa.
All in all, it was an uncomfortable way to pass the afternoon.
The sun slowly set in a golden blaze, and Marla finally returned for us. She had removed the face paint, leaving her features soft and smooth beneath her dark curls. She was surprisingly very pretty, though her dark eyes were still fierce as she gestured for us to follow her.
I was inexplicably nervous near her, and carefully kept Alyxen between us, unsure what the strange feeling meant.
She led us back across the swinging bridges and flat landings, and I spotted ladders hanging amid the foliage, leading to more houses hidden above us. The more I saw of the encampment, the more impressed I became. It was ingenious, and I wondered what its purpose was.
We arrived at the platform beneath the Great Hall, and Marla pointed to the rope ladders before starting to climb, not bothering to see if we would follow.
Where is she going? Alyxen asked as we watched her ascend. What do they want with us?
I guess we’re about to find out. I rolled my shoulders, set my hand to the rope ladder, and climbed.
It was no easier than it had been the first time, and I grimaced as my sore muscles ached and burned. Kylee and Alyxen clambered up their ladders with ease, quickly outdistancing me, but Lanya and Reyce struggled nearly as much as I did, their progress slow and labored.
I reached the top at last, breathless and shaking with effort. Kylee helped me to my feet, and Alyxen aided Lanya onto the platform. Reyce, his jaw set stubbornly, pulled himself up, and stood quickly to look around.
The Great Hall was impressive. Heavy oak beams had been nailed to the branches for a floor, the roof above us held up by thick pillars of dark wood. The sides all around were open to the air, giving us a breathtaking view of the dying sunset as the Forest spread below us like a verdant green sea. Lanterns had been hung from iron hooks, bright and cheerful against the encroachin
g night.
A long wall stretched out on either side of the tree trunk, so that the Hall was split in half around it, and we could not see the other side. The room was filled with tables and benches, and hard-faced men were seated at them, eating something that smelled heavenly from dented metal bowls. Their faces were both cautious and curious as they glanced up at us.
I saw no women, other than Marla and my sisters.
Kylee tensed beside me, and I absently wished Kryssa would calm her before I remembered she could not. I had almost expected her to be waiting for us, miraculously returned to health. It was a foolish thought, but I was sleep-deprived and terrified, and her absence worried me. I was afraid that Kryssa had been left in the Forest alone to die.
Marla was striding toward a roughly hewn throne, set with its back against the trunk of the tree. I followed, studying the face of the man sitting on the throne, who could only be the Darkling Prince.
He was of indeterminate age, neither young nor old, though his dark hair was beginning to thin. His face was sharply-boned and narrow, his eyes watchful and wary beneath thick brows. His clothes, though shabby, were of good quality, and I glanced enviously at the elegant sword at his hip.
Marla bowed briefly to him, placing her fist over her heart. “My lord, these are the ones you were told about.” She made a small motion, gesturing for us to bow.
I stared coolly at the stranger, unbending. It was obvious that he expected some kind of homage, but I had other concerns. “Where is my sister?”
His face did not change, but I could sense his amusement. “The injured girl? My healers are tending to her. You will be taken to her when our meeting is concluded.”
Relief coursed through me, weakening my knees, though I was careful not to show it. He was staring at each of us too closely, weighing us for- what? “Who are you?”
“The Darkling Prince.”
I shook my head, frustrated. The name didn’t mean anything more to me now than when Marla had said it earlier. “I’m sorry, who?”
