A Spell Takes Root

by Keith Hendricks

  She laughed. “While I gave them no reason to miss me, pulling up my roots would only please a few.”

  “I don’t know this idiom,” said Khyte. He wanted to say that she made no sense at all, but feared she might think less of his wits.

  “Khyte, since you know so little about dryads, I will do you the honor of bringing you to my home.”

  “I’ve been to Ielnarona,” he replied. As the foot traffic around them had died away and day had dragged on, they now walked side by side only in the company of their long shadows.

  Inglefras’s entire face furrowed vertically. He wasn’t sure what it signified. Was it like the sneer that crinkled a human or goblin’s brow, or the accusatory glare that follows a fart in a funeral procession? The alien expression made him feel comparatively inelegant and self-conscious.

  “Ssyrnas, or Wywynanoir?” she said at last.

  “I spent a week in Wywynaoir.”

  “Then you saw nothing there that we did not wish known. Our recreational cities are stages built to interact with offworlders in fictions they’ll understand.”

  “We have trade cities on Hravak,” said Khyte.

  “Wywynaoir is no trade city,” she said, “although we pretend an interest in trade to establish relations with your world. We want nothing but the novelty of your presence, which we nonetheless prefer to be managed during your stay. While you derive pleasure and relaxation there, to dryads Wywynanoir is a gilded cage for exhibiting outsiders.”

  “A zoo without locks,” said Khyte, regretting every minute of his enchanted dependence on Inglefras. When Eurilda’s lightening spell ended, their crashing weight added gravity to the moment.

  “Where are you taking me?” the princess asked. They walked past a row of shuttered businesses, their heels clicking on cobblestone, and their voices lingering in an echo that soon dissolved into the din of a dim tavern where a few drunkards stared back and many more stared into their sour-smelling beer.

  “To see a friend.”

  “I have few friends left on Nahure. You saw to that. Are we going back to the king?”

  “No, but this friend you know. We’re going to the House of Hwarn.”

  “My dear friend Huiln,” she said.

  “I hope that he’s also my dear friend. If not, Merculo’s guards may be our welcome.” Khyte saw no reason to mention that he took Inglefras roundabout through two commercial districts and a restaurant and bakery borough noteworthy for savory soups and warm, cauldron-baked breads and buns, not because he wanted a scenic route and a tour of goblin cuisine, but because he hoped to rejoin Eurilda.

  Though the hour was late, the second commercial district buzzed and bustled, and in one of the thoroughfares was a tumult jostled by six armored warriors in pursuit. Khyte could not see their quarry until Eurilda fled toward him, diminished to a spoon’s length, and leaped onto Khyte’s bootstraps, leaving her unchanged cloak to crumple to the ground.

  In fear of shaking free the shrunken sorceress, Khyte slackened his pace and his conversation lagged, but Inglefras briskly droned on: “Can Huiln help me get home? If not, we should reconsider …” though she trailed off when Khyte pulled her into an alley.

  Though appetizing aromas wafted out the restaurants’ front doors, chimneys, and windows, the alley was the putrid receptacle for scraps, rot, broken glassware, bent flatware, piteous beggars, and drunks that slept off liquid meals.

  “I’m sorry,” Khyte said, “this can’t be helped.”

  “Why are you sorry? Dryads like earthy odors.”

  “There!” The brick back walls echoed the voice, the clank of armor plate, and the scramble of metal boots. When Khyte grabbed Inglefras, turned to run, and in mid-step hurtled down the alley, he then pushed off from the cobblestones, dragging the dryad with him to the roof. He no longer questioned the now-familiar spring in his step that came from Eurilda snipping their weight away. Despite the euphoria of weightlessness and the exhilaration of leaping rooftop to rooftop, exhaustion befogged Khyte. Detached from his tribulations by numb determination, it was as if someone else was running, and when he saw landmarks that neighbored the House of Hwarn, such as the Grand Goblin Library, he felt no relief, only dull recognition.

  After they leaped into the walled grounds of the House of Hwarn, Khyte stood panting until the slow realization that Inglefras yanked and wrung at his mighty grip, which pinned her light green wrist. While her body flailed, her eyes were closed and her jaw was slack, as if she had fainted from the neck up, mid-breath. When he let go, she dropped to the ground, gasping for air. The constant subtraction of his weight suddenly struck him with a cumulative dizziness, so that he blacked out on his feet, then spun woozily to the grass.

  Chapter 6

  The Doorway

  Though his eyes swam, his consciousness lingered. He wondered if he was heavy or light, for he no longer knew; he wondered if Eurilda still clutched his bootstraps or was dead and dashed under a goblin heel; he wondered if Eurilda cut away shadow as easily as a body’s weight; he wondered if Inglefras used him as contemptuously as she talked of others; he wondered why he hadn’t wed Kuilea, who was more than willing, and unrestricted in marrying a brother by hospitality. If Kuilea was not a good woman, she was loyal, devoted, clever, and all other things good in a wife. As Khyte was not a good man either, she suited him more than many.

  When his vision cleared, he stayed on the grass, not wanting to black out again. Like dreams, his wonderings vanished in the light of the Abyss. Inglefras snored loudly, her head sprawled on his shoulder. Neither seeing nor hearing Eurilda, he lifted his pounding head, and through clouding eyes saw that her tiny arms pinched his boots so hard that they creased the suede.

  As the giantess was now less than a hand’s breadth, he could crush her skull between thumb and forefinger if he believed her up to no good. When he tensed so hard as to become rigid, he realized Eurilda still had a hold on him—and though it wasn’t as compelling and inexplicable as the dryad’s, it was absolute in its own terms.

  Still meditative, his thoughts turned to Azuri: as Eurilda was now a fraction of her former height, was the pocketed elf now an ant’s size, or too minuscule for the human eye? Moreover, when she fought as a giant on the tower roof, was Azuri, at some larger fraction of himself, dangling from her belt over the battling elves? How small could the sorceress shrink someone by making them the cargo of someone else who was shrunk, and so on, into infinity?

  “Are you going to lie there all day?”

  Huiln was still in the glitzy robes he wore as a consultant to the Bankers Capital Building: a light green robe with embroidered tabard, gold-plated helm, and epaulets.

  “Huiln,” said Khyte, “meet Inglefras.”

  “We’ve met,” said Huiln, “which you know.”

  “Inglefras is an excellent teacher, so I know a great deal,” said Khyte. “She’s an open book on many subjects, including promiscuity, and any words for which the dryads have a vacancy in their language, which has been a little tedious. In this case, the dryad word closest in meaning to ‘promiscuity’ is their word for ‘love.’ So, yes, I’ve learned a great deal from your princess, or should I say our princess, for while you would have her belong to you, she’s given herself to many—and right now I think she’s giving herself to me.”

  “Khyte, you missed your calling,” said Huiln. “Given the right subject, you’re a professor.” The goblin picked Eurilda off Khyte’s boot with a look of distaste, and with the other hand helped Khyte up.

  “Traveling is a classroom,” said Khyte, “a laboratory, and a large storeroom of examples. Also, learning Alfyrian, Nahurian, and Uenarakian has made me more conscious of how I speak and think. Though you’re changing the subject, I’ll oblige you, as I prefer a wandering conversation to rambling up and down Kreona.” Khyte stooped and picked up the sleeping Inglefras. His feelings for the dryad, best descri
bed as energized affection, had not diminished with her unconsciousness.

  When Huiln looked at Khyte as if he grew another nose, the young barbarian realized he was speaking as he thought, not as he pretended. The shock of the day’s adventures, and his bewitchment by one witch or another, dispelled his backwater facade, and the true, intellectual Khyte surfaced. As he could no longer submerge the personality that piqued the dryad’s interest, his friends would have to learn his true face.

  “I have many questions, professor,” said Huiln. “I’d like to see your decision to subvert our plan as a logical proof. Then let’s have a sidebar about how your instruction might satisfy a Kuilea who is too agitated for words.”

  As if his daydream was restaged, Khyte glimpsed his earlier wonderings about why he hadn’t married Kuilea, but they evaporated under observation, leaving him only with undefinable regret. “Though I’m sorry for upsetting you, in our adventures, we’ve often had to read people and situations, and change plans to escape the inevitable.”

  “I understand feeling which way the wind blows, because I was tempted to turn you in for Merculo’s reward of three million gold chiochyens. That’s enough incentive to overcome the considerations of family, friendship, and house. I’ve already had a half-dozen of the sickest spawn of the House of Hwarn pressing social calls this morning, and also Veirana, though she had the grace to feign concern for your safety.”

  “Veirana? I thought she liked me?”

  “In the event one of these fine ladies also feigns, I’ll abridge that wise tautology of your tribe: a dog in heat is still a dog. We’re not out of the woods yet, which means more plans you won’t stick to.”

  “This one is still in the trees,” said Khyte, indicating the sleeping Inglefras, “in the trees” being a Drydanan idiom for dreaming. “And I’d like to join her.”

  Though Huiln had traveled to Khyte’s world, he only knew this phrase in the literal sense. “There are beds made and fires stoked, but if you’d rather go for a hike …”

  Khyte was so exhausted that his laugh and smile muscles were too slack to string his mirth. “Show me to my bed, Master of Hwarn.”

  Khyte’s next unmuddled thought came the next morning, halfway through his breakfast of black coffee, khlern eggs, gurteta patties, and sweet rolls. Until that moment—his mouth warm with a gulp of coffee and the fork halfway to his mouth—he had forgotten the previous day, and even then it was more mud than memory. “Where’s what’s-her-name?” When Kuilea did not answer, he fell to shoveling food and hoisting his mug like a well bucket to coffee-blast the fog out of his head.

  “You mean the Sixth World?” the goblin woman said. “That took you in her orbit? Or did you forget my name? Since you didn’t have a second thought for me yesterday, the progress of your selfishness might wither your first thought of me today.”

  Khyte was not awake enough to reply in kind. “Pass the coffee. And sugar.” When she ignored him, he half-stood to grab them for himself.

  After his third cup, he said, “Where’s Inglefras?”

  “Oh, her. She woke with the flowers and the tree blossoms.”

  Huiln folded the huge Extra of the Kreonan House Journal that obscured his end of the table. “The real question is what to do with both of you.” He pushed the newspaper over to Khyte.

  Unlike a regular edition, which was printed in twelve columns of absurdly tiny font, that day’s edition was in six columns, each topped with angry headlines that Khyte may have considered concerning had he not known that they concerned him. Since the headlines did concern him, they seemed farcical: the presumptive terror-agents invade castle, the factual six courtiers killed, the misleading king collapses under threat of death, and the worryingly accurate offworlders plot to kidnap princess inglefras.

  When Huiln read the first article aloud, Khyte stooped laughing. The writer made the very excellent point that since the Princess Inglefras enjoyed the king’s hospitality, she was family by goblin law, with a conferred status no less than a countess. This made Khyte not a rescuer, but a kidnapper; not a murderer, but an assassin, a conspirator against the line of succession and, given House Hwarn’s relation to the king, a pretender that sought to usurp the throne. It was hard to feel like a hero in the face of the red-hot press that accused him of being a brigand.

  Huiln continued, “Turning you in would be my duty if I were a patriot, and my pleasure if I were grubbing for the reward. As Kreonans are greedy patriots as a general rule, you had better take care.”

  “I know you’re enjoying this, but we both know you won’t sell us out.” While Khyte was by no means certain, he felt he knew Huiln well enough to think that money, not Inglefras, would push his goblin brother over the edge.

  “Before we plan a single step, all facts should be on the table. Also, Eurilda has not yet awakened.”

  “She has,” said Eurilda, though two back-to-back yawns stretched this last word into four syllables as she stumbled to the breakfast table. The sorceress had taken a goblin’s height, and was dressed in some of Kuilea’s bedclothes. “Forgive me for eavesdropping, but you’re a loud, obnoxious family, and your voices carry. My first proposal is that Khyte stays, since with or without us he does as he wills.”

  This challenge to Khyte’s participation in the rescue was less troubling than the sight of Eurilda in Kuilea’s bedclothes. If his goblin sister and the sorceress had commiserated, the subject was likely a certain wayward barbarian, whose heart was even more wayward than his feet.

  “Having anticipated that sentiment,” said Huiln, “I talked to our dryad, who won’t have anything to do with a plan not including Khyte.”

  “Of course,” said Kuilea, rolling her eyes.

  “I wouldn’t expect it otherwise,” said Eurilda. The women shared a sneer and an ugly laugh, and though the giantess was the fairer of the two, her chortle was monstrous, seeming to bellow from her actual lungs, not the miniature. Which is not to say that the goblin woman laughed like a lady, but with a sharp scowl that would have cut the manhood from Khyte if it could.

  “Are you finished?” asked Khyte.

  “I wasn’t laughing. Moreover, I’m at least half-serious,” said Huiln.

  “I was deadly serious,” said Kuilea.

  “While we’re being serious,” said Khyte, “there’s only one route left. With the gates and walls guarded and the embassy under Merculo’s heel, both Mount Irutak and the Alfyrian Ladder are out of reach.”

  “Though you mentioned another course of action,” said Huiln, “I didn’t hear one.”

  “Lay low until the guards become less vigilant.”

  “Then you need a better hiding place, because Merculo will want blood, and order his guards to search every house in Kreona.”

  “How long do we have?” Inglefras’s eye-blossoms were bright, and all the floral designs on her blouse had bloomed. She looked wide awake, hair to toe. Though there were two open seats, Inglefras leaned on the back of Khyte’s chair, her hands nestling in his hair like orchids. He couldn’t help feeling the rightness of this, despite Eurilda and Kuilea’s glares and Huiln’s sudden fascination with the wallpaper pattern.

  “We should leave after breakfast,” said Huiln.

  “If you trust me, and promise to keep a secret,” said Eurilda, “instead of seeking safe haven, we can flee to Ielnarona.”

  “As that sounds promising,” said Huiln, “my promise you shall have.”

  “As those clever words mask not a promise, but a promise to promise,” said the giantess, “I insist that you swear.”

  “I swear,” said Huiln.

  “I’m not happy with the double meaning there, either,” said Eurilda. “Aside from present company, goblins are known foul-mouths.”

  “They were your own words! Fine. I promise.”

  “I also promise, if my life is not on the line,” said Khyte.
r />   “Not good enough,” said Eurilda. “As revealing this secret risks us all, you must swear on pain of death.”

  “Swear it, Khyte,” said Inglefras.

  “Though I’m reluctant without knowing the secret our lives shield, I promise.”

  When Kuilea and Inglefras agreed to secrecy, Eurilda continued. “Do you remember my argument on ancient catacombs under the Five Worlds? Not only was that not speculation, but I did not need Huiln to confirm their existence, and only allowed him to go so you might accept my previous plan. You see, I visited these catacombs and many others.”

  She paused to drink. “The catacomb builders left a more useful artifact: a network of doorways through which one can pass to other catacombs, even those on opposing worlds.”

  “You travel on Baugn,” said Khyte. “I’ve ridden with you.”

  “While I enjoyed your company on those recreational journeys, nine times out of ten my business carries me through these doorways.”

  “You used one this time to arrive ahead of me, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you lied when you said only giant sorcerers are travelers?”

  “A day before that you believed all giants are sorcerers. You tiny-brained humans like the taste of lies better than truth. To keep the secret of the doorways, we encourage your belief that only our size-changing sorcerers may travel between worlds by Baugn. Not long ago, it was true.”

  “Until yesterday, it made sense of the facts as I knew them, though considering how much you despise Alfyrians and their ladders, I wondered if giants had adopted some variation on the elves’ fiendish device.”

  “Are the doorways wooden, metal, or stone?” interrupted Inglefras.

  “Though we call them doorways,” said Eurilda, “they look little like their namesake. They are gashes in the subterranean rock, blasting steam and light.”

  “We dryads call them furrows,” said Inglefras. “We discovered ours when defending our root network from vermin. Since nothing we’ve thrown through has returned, the Great One won’t permit us to send a dryad—not even a seed.”