A Spell Takes Root

by Keith Hendricks

Suddenly, subtle motion caught Khyte’s eye. Under furs so plush and sleek that they shimmered, a shape stirred, then pushed through the gleaming folds. Petaled, bloomlike eyes fixed him in a honeyed gaze. “Who are you?” asked the dryad, eyeing the blood-caked sword.

  Chapter 5

  Inglefras

  For a jailed plant, the princess looked somewhat housebroken, if well-watered and florid, the fringe of her green curls glinting so gold and crimson that if the enchanted orb did not faithfully copy sunlight, Merculo must have taken his prized plant princess for walks in his gardens. Her garb, a kind of long chemise that served as both shirt and skirt but tapered toward the waist though neither hem nor belt was apparent, was likewise radiant with not only greens and browns, but reds, yellows, and oranges, and like the tapestries, of an exquisite weave no human craftsman could match. Patches of colors bloomed in chaotic swirls, as if not sewn and dyed by design, but grown overnight.

  While Khyte could see no sign of the king’s cruel horrors, her eye-blossoms seemed to absorb his stare into their rings of blue petals that contracted like irises. Was this a hunger to be freed or plain fear of her deliverer?

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I assumed you were Drydanan.”

  Only when his first intoxicating eyeful had ebbed to a steady throb of fascination did he realize that the dryad princess had spoken in the tongue of his homeland.

  “I am,” he said, still staring.

  “You are?”

  “Yes. Yes, I am,”

  “No, I was asking you who you are. For the second time. If it’s not too much trouble.”

  “I’m Khyte.” Before he could stop himself, out poured his pedigree. “Son of Kulunun, Son of Vestari, Son of Cianagh. I’m here to rescue you,” As Khyte heard himself, he realized that he sounded like the idiots in storybooks.

  “You are? Where’s Huiln?”

  “Huiln?”

  “A golden-skinned goblin about a branch higher than his kind, both in terms of his stature and his reading. Well-dressed, good manners, better company than Merculo. While not a king, he calls himself Son of Hwarn, whatever that means.”

  So Huiln’s plot stretched further than even his sister knew. Khyte didn’t know how to answer.

  “Oh, that Huiln. My brother.”

  “Your brother? You don’t look like a goblin.”

  “Honorary.”

  “The honor is all theirs. While Huiln is a magnificent goblin, if you’re brothers, you fell from the mold first, and after the creator minted a thousand more of you for her own amusement, the dull and shapeless form that was left stamped out Huiln. While his arms are near yours, the rest of you follows a line, and Huiln is a tangle … until you open your mouths, and the reverse is true, you being tongue-tied, and Huiln a wordsmith.”

  “I know not where Huiln is,” he lied. “Your mother sent me to bring you back.”

  “My mother?” she scoffed. “Do you know anything about dryads?”

  “If you don’t want to lose a few more sprig-fingers or eye-blossoms,” said Khyte, “pencil in a lecture.” He pulled her off the bed, into the hall, and toward the boudoir’s back entrance. He was about to impale this locked door when he spied the hairline crack behind a chip in his sword.

  “This is your plan?”

  Khyte froze when he heard the voice behind him, for it was not the dryad.

  “How—”

  “No time.” Eurilda pointed her long, gold-painted fingernail at the door and spoke cryptic syllables that set the air to glittering and the door to shrinking until it was no bigger than a matchbox. The dryad stooped to pick up the door and held it wonderingly until the giantess yanked her upstairs, where they stood in a long hallway that bent right and left like an arc of a circle.

  “I can’t grow through this roof without crushing you under falling stones,” Eurilda said, ignoring the dryad’s quizzical look, “or breaking my own bones, so I say left.” She grabbed the dryad’s arm and hustled off without waiting for Khyte.

  When a clamor of hobnailed boots clanked around the bend, they turned to try the other way, but stopped at what was either an amplified echo, or even more guards.

  “Where did you put the door?” Eurilda asked.

  The dryad held up the miniature door.

  “On my command, throw it. Khyte, a little help.”

  Khyte considered fleeing into the boudoir and trying the way he came, but feared Eurilda might spring up like a weed everywhere he went, as that seemed a new trick in her bag. When he took his place in front of Eurilda and the dryad and raised his chipped sword, the goblins rushed around the bend.

  “Now!” shouted the sorceress. With the tremendous force of a bent bow, the dryad’s arm made a whip-like crack, and the quickly enlarging door smacked into the guards in the lead, knocked them off of their feet, and landed on top. Khyte jumped on the door, pinning the goblins under it, and from this teetering high ground, swung his sword at their back ranks. Each time he lunged, his shifting weight made the door-trapped goblins scream, squirm, and strain to throw the young barbarian, which required Khyte to shift his weight back and forth like a circus tumbler as he killed one goblin with a thrust through the unarmored neck, and sent another spinning with a clout on the helm from his sword’s hilt.

  “Run, Khyte!” shouted Eurilda, for the goblins behind them were now at their heels. The door-crushed goblins became deathly silent as they were trampled by Khyte, the dryad, and Eurilda.

  The corridor funneled into a ballroom lined with brocaded tapestries garishly colored gold, scarlet, and indigo, and enormous brass and glass gaslamp chandeliers that, though unlit, sparkled with illumination borrowed from the halls. The room dimmed when Eurilda and Khyte slammed the doors shut, seized an ornate flag pole and thrust it through the door handles.

  “Was it too much to stick to the plan?” yelled Eurilda. Her eyes were drawn into slits and her nostrils flared; if possible, she was angrier than the first time Khyte betrayed her.

  “You weren’t on board, either. You followed me.”

  “You’re a fool to think I trust you. I shrunk myself to the size of a flea and rode in the folds of your cloak. It was the most revolting ride of my life, as something you ate has made you grossly flatulent.”

  “You haven’t changed,” said Khyte, snickering but red-faced. “I wish you were born a man.”

  “Take a poke if you want later, but smug and stupid is a self-destructive combination. For instance, you forget goblin castles are only one story. We’ll escape through the window.” Eurilda stripped one silky Alfyrian curtain after another, revealing magnificent ten foot tall lattices with bright panes, all barred.

  “Goblins fear heights and wide-open spaces, but they’re not stupid,” said Khyte. “Can you shrink them?”

  “Of course. I’m just choosing my window.”

  “Our window,” corrected Khyte. “We’re in this together.”

  She laughed. “We’re not on the same team, or even the same page. But if you’re offering …” she started, then yelled, “The other side!”

  Four guards charged through the ballroom’s opposite entrance, two clutching wavy longswords of snow-white goblin steel and spiked blue shields embossed with the likeness of a golden boar, and the other two gripping halberds a half-foot taller.

  Khyte sliced the first into four pieces—two with the forehand, and two with the backhand—but on the blade’s return sweep, it snapped, leaving Khyte with a lopped-off half-sword no longer than a butcher’s cleaver. He grabbed the next guard’s halberd haft with one hand, shoved his sword stub into the goblin’s breastbone with the other, then wrung the poleaxe from the shrieking goblin. Behind him, crinkling and twisting metal set his teeth and spine on edge; then came a popping sound, followed by splintering glass and the clatter of shards. Though the halberd-armed guards’ reach was too great, and a peek might cos
t him his life, he surmised the cause was Eurilda’s spell. Khyte speared one with his stolen halberd, and as the goblin writhed on the point, he tripped another with the shaft. When the prone goblin reached for his fallen weapon, Khyte stepped on his hand and risked a backwards glance: where Eurilda and the dryad once stood, a hole in the wall gaped over so much sundered glass and iron that it seemed the debris of twenty windows—or one magically enlarged one.

  As six guards ran in two by two, Khyte charged through the smashed window, getting scratched by the shards stuck in the frame, and landed on his feet outside the castle. While the goblins gave chase, one cut his arm severely on the embedded glass, and five continued pursuit.

  When Eurilda and the dryad were nowhere in sight, Khyte sprinted to the gates, where the sorceress swung the squirming dryad across her shoulders and leaped the wall. When Khyte was a few feet from the wall, he jumped, grabbed the top bricks with his fingertips, strained, struggled, and lifted himself to the top as halberds rattled below his feet.

  Khyte dropped down to pursue the women through a court residential district, where one baron’s wall ran flush with another’s in a row of single-story manors. While Khyte could smell the greenery of the walled-in lands, it contrasted with the insincerity of the manors’ floral-themed facades, as well as the current architectural fashion, faux windows painted on wooden veneers clothing the outer walls. The magnificence was hard on Khyte’s eyes.

  “Hello,” he panted, having outpaced Eurilda and the dryad. “We haven’t been introduced. Rude witch that left me to Merculo’s mercies, meet the princess I rescued.”

  “We’ve met. Khyte, meet Inglefras.”

  “Hello again,” Inglefras choked through sobs and red-rimmed eyes.

  “Hello? How about ‘thank you’?” asked Khyte.

  “And I’m rude.” Eurilda rolled her eyes. “Though I should have ignored her heap of questions, I had the vain hope the next answer might shut her up, and you can see the results.”

  “What?”

  “You killed Count Kirqqa—her lover.”

  “Lover?” said Khyte.

  “Huiln embellished her torment. Though they cut off her foot when she once tried escape, it grew back—along with feelings for her captors.”

  “Captors? Which one?”

  “Dryads are polyamorous,” Eurilda said, as if this explained everything.

  In their flight, they had descended the scale of opulence, not only passing the king’s glass gardens, the court of legacies, and government institutions erected from white marble, to the shabbier chic of baronets’ townhouses and the ramshackle apartments let out to petty nobles and courtiers. Perfumed silks and sateens gave way to musty wool and linen, then to the least decourous fixtures of the court district, the sackcloth-clad beggars who milled in astonishing abundance when they weren’t claiming street corners and alleyways for their residences and store fronts. While some of these hapless beggars had legitimate grievances against life like missing limbs or eyes, the infirmity of most was a masquerade Khyte easily spotted, such as the backside bulked up not by a hunchback, but a foot painfully bound under the hypocritical vagrant, whose begging bowl nonetheless overflowed more than his legitimately maimed competitors, as if the goblin lords were only too happy to dole out handouts to beggars who looked and acted the part.

  “Inglefras declared her love not only for Count Kirqqa,” continued Eurilda, “but the king, several courtiers, and even our friend Huiln of House Hwarn—better to call him your goblin brother than friend—who wanted Inglefras for himself and used us to accomplish his aims.”

  “I don’t believe it,” said Khyte, keeping to himself that he had suspected Huiln’s duplicity all along.

  “You are unfair to Kirqqa,” said Inglefras, whose voice still quavered, “as well as jealous of Huiln, who was nothing but good to me.”

  The dryad hastily backpedaled from Eurilda’s barking titter, which deteriorated into ugly braying. “I don’t doubt he made you feel safe, much as a bauble feels secure in an iron safe. Aside from Merculo’s perverted peccadilloes, goblins are not the sharing sort and have no golden rule other than heaping up gold and feeding their runty little desires. If you mean he’s above the goblin standard, your naivete is no longer charming. If you mean that a goblin put one over on me, I’m struggling with that, but it fits the facts.” As Eurilda ranted, the dryad continued to retreat until she was well behind Khyte.

  “You don’t share, either,” said Khyte.

  “You’re wrong to think I’m here for promise of ransom or reward.”

  “You snooped from the kindness of your heart?”

  “Human idioms are stupid. The heart is the seat of blood and breath; kindness is in the head,” said Eurilda. “If you must know, my master wants a spell from Arquaela, the dryads’ fabled ‘Changing Library.’”

  “Just one?”

  “It’s a good one,” said Eurilda. “Well, neither good nor bad, but powerful, that’s for certain. Don’t ask what it does; I won’t tell you.”

  “Since you ask so often what I mean, I doubt you know.”

  “Are you taunting me?” said the giantess. “You baseborn, verminous cretin—where is Inglefras?” For as the ex-lovers argued, the grieving dryad had made her way to a business district nearly fifty yards away.

  “Run,” said Eurilda. “If she makes it to Kettle Street, we’ll lose her in the crowd.”

  When Inglefras realized she was being pursued, she leaned against a baker’s storefront window misted by warm pastries. If her tears were dried, there was still the woodland smell of dank bark, and her agitation had migrated to her fingers tapping on crossed arms. When her icy smile seemed to melt gazing on Khyte, he chalked that up to wishful thinking. While he found her desirable before, this heady mixture of haughtiness and anguish overwhelmed him with lust. If she believed herself superior, Khyte agreed, and if she was consumed with sorrow, he wanted to share the feast.

  “You hardly act like a real princess,” Khyte said when he reached her.

  “You’ve assumed a lot,” said Inglefras. “And you’re hardly a hero. Although I must admit—you do look the part.” Khyte’s sleeve ruffled as Inglefras deftly slid her hand inside to caress his arm. “And I can see why you’d feel the part. While your heart is mercenary, the rest of you says hero.”

  “I hate her already,” said Eurilda. “Let’s get on with it.”

  Khyte ignored Eurilda and continued to gaze at Inglefras. When her hand pulled away, he leaned closer. What was that maddening scent? Like cherries, almonds, and cinnamon. “I only mean that you ran quite a race,” Khyte continued.

  “Please. I could never outrun either of you barbarians. And you meant far more than that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Where would I begin? You know so little about dryads. Suffice to say that while my tree-mother parades me as the princess, you may be right to doubt that I am ‘real.’”

  “That’s not what I meant,” said Khyte. “I’m sorry if I offended you.”

  “So you’re a pretender?” said Eurilda.

  “All tree-women are pretenders. Our lives are nothing but play.”

  The giantess grumbled. “I hope we get more than play money.”

  “If I allow this rescue,” Inglefras said, “don’t call it ransom. Let’s just call it a reward, which your expectations and demands render vulgar.”

  “I’m sorry if freeing you was such an inconvenience,” sneered Eurilda.

  “How am I free when I’m now your captive?” said Inglefras. “Unless you’re telling me I can choose to head back to Merculo’s castle?”

  “Why would you want that?” asked Khyte.

  “I want the choice. There is no difference between being Merculo’s leverage against the Dryad World or your bargaining chip; in either case, I’m cash in hand.”

  “S
orry.” Eurilda’s apology was puffed up with scorn and gleeful satisfaction. “Rescue is a freelance business. Cash in hand is better than nothing ahead of us.”

  “Where are we heading, anyway?” Khyte asked Eurilda. “Why not make our way to Irutak?”

  “They’ll expect us to travel Baugn-back. I know another way.”

  Khyte knew one other way to travel between worlds, and did not like the idea. “There are no Alfyrian Ladders in Kreona.”

  “You’re right, and you’re wrong,” said Eurilda. “How do Alfyrians send agents to Nahure?”

  Never having a reason to consider the movements of spies before this, Khyte replied, “I would assume they travel the safer, intelligent way: by Baugn.”

  “That’s too indirect, and too slow.”

  “Alfyrian ladders are fast, but I don’t like Alfyrian odds. I can count on one hand the travelers killed by Baugn, while elves send ten messengers by ladder when they want one to reach their destination.”

  “That’s not my Khyte,” said Eurilda.

  “A giantess taught me caution,” retorted Khyte. “Speaking of pointless lectures, what about the catacombs?”

  “While that was once our best plan, you trusted to dumb luck and brute strength.”

  In the distance, a confused mass of stone and glass shot upward to a dizzying height from the one-story goblin city, and between it and them was a barrier formed by agricultural businesses. While they reeked of offal and manure, Khyte soon realized they were pushed near this bizarre architectural eyesore because they too offended the aesthetic sensibilities of tourists and goblin lords.

  Not that the kennels were that unsightly, although the utreboq, which goblins domesticated as guards and for companionship, compared unfavorably to the hounds and cats of his world. They were not unlike cuddly cockroaches, with furry bodies resting on six spindly legs that scurried any direction they wanted, as if they moved on rollers, and kittens’ heads topping gangly necks that spun full circle, so that even their owners had a hard time telling back from front.

  While the kembir were only slightly more grotesque than the boars of Hravak, they produced manure as if they were paid to do it, and the signs of their industry were swept in gargantuan heaps, aside from the muck splattered in the steet.