Don’t let your guard down. Don’t let your guard down. Don’t let your guard down. Those words kept echoing through Kordas’s mind as he rode up and down this last segment of the convoy, watching for trouble, watching for problems, watching for anything out of the ordinary. One eye on the forest, one eye on the convoy, and he wished desperately that he had a third eye to employ on the herds. Yes, there were herd dogs and their human masters, but suddenly the riverbank was packed with living beings, and what if the forest could sense that, without any of them setting foot under those unsettling limbs? Thank the gods Arial was what she was, and was as good or better than a dog at keeping track of her human, or he might have disgraced himself by falling out of her saddle, the way his head kept swiveling. All the Valdemar Golds were like that; they’d been bred for endurance, intelligence, and good temper. The glorious metallic gold of their coat was just a happy accident. He’d have valued them just as much if they’d all been harsh-coated, mud-colored, jug-headed nags.
Rose rode along as usual, and engaged in pleasant conversation after each report. She had a knack for sifting the useful bits from the chaff; when there was a fight among the expedition’s complement, she skipped the “why,” except if it involved critical resources or discontent with Kordas and his senior advisors. Attrition just from the rigors of travel was considerable. The convoy’s barges were taking a beating, and today alone they’d had to transfer cargo from eight of them to several strings at the tail of the convoy, and just let them break up and sink once towed aside. As simple as staging for the passage through the Red Forest sounded, actually accomplishing it was a hurried exercise of expertise. Weights were estimated, Dolls helped carry the loads from one vessel to another, and lining the vessels up side by side, string to string, was backbreaking work. All too literally, in two cases; with motion came injuries, and nobody would heal quickly enough to return to work for days or weeks—leaving even more work upon the shoulders of those who were still able.
Rose reported that the Gate uprights were secured atop a materials barge, third to last, in the last string. That meant the Old Men overseeing that dismantling and loading would join the rest of the flotilla by the time Kordas reached the last string of eight barges. There was no point in waiting any longer. Ten strings remained before the end of the convoy, and the last of the civilians and cage animals had already gone through. Guards, ship hands, Kordas, and Rose would be the last people left to enter the Red Forest, accompanied ashore by the hoggees guiding the Tow-Beasts.
“Rose, relay the order, please. Sail descending, downbound apace.” Almost immediately, the sound of Tow-Beasts and their hoggees reached them, and the string was underway.
It wasn’t until his third turn-around at the end—the end at last!—of the convoy that he saw it. One single young boar, trotting behind the last barge at a distance. Definitely alone. And clearly very interested in the forest. There was an aged shepherd-dog with him that did not care for the pig’s interest in the forest at all, and kept nipping at him to keep him moving, even interposing itself between the boar and the woods if the boar ventured too close.
The boats back here were full of duplicate, bulky tools, like looms and a disassembled pit-saw for cutting planks. To Kordas’s eye, the whole string looked overloaded and sat deeper in their mean drafts than they should, but if the experts had cleared them, it must be acceptable. Kordas spotted someone sitting on the stern of the last of the boats—and directed Arial over there to talk to him. “What—” he began.
“Dog’s mine,” the old man said, his beard almost the same color as the wool of his coat, his head tucked so far down into the collar that he looked like a turtle disinclined to come out of his shell. “Pig belongs to Cass Pommery, from Coldspring, my village. Damn thing slipped its charm and bolted, didn’t like the wilderness after all, but won’t let anyone near it to put a new charm in its ear. Cass said to jest let him run along behind, but ever since we got into these damn trees, my old dog decided that there pig ain’t got the sense the gods gave a goose, and he’s been tryin’ to herd him.”
Kordas studied the pig. Were teenage pigs like teenage humans? If so, the blasted thing thought itself immortal. “I think your dog has the right of it,” Kordas replied. “It looks as if the pig wants to get in under those trees and start rooting.”
“Prolly does.” The old man shrugged, which looked more like his head was sinking into the wool than like he was raising his shoulders. “Cass says it’s a truffle pig, which’s why it prolly ran away in the first place. Truffle pigs like to be loose an’ huntin’ their favorite food. Gray morels, truffles, sagbacks. We find ’em, you eat ’em.”
Don’t let your guard down.
“I don’t think it should go in there, in the forest, I mean,” Kordas said carefully. “We’ve been very lucky so far . . . but if something of ours goes in there and starts messing about, we might not be lucky anymore.”
“Aye. That’s why I ain’t washed my hands of the fool bastard, and why Howler’s shepherdin’ him.” The old man spit over the side of the boat, and made a sign that Kordas recognized as one against evil.
“Don’t let your guard down,” Kordas said, echoing the words in his own head, and turned Arial to ride back up the convoy.
“Won’t,” the old man grunted.
Kordas’s nerves were stretched just as tightly as they had been in the Capital, and for pretty much the same reason. In his own mind, potential disaster loomed over him and everyone else he was responsible for, and he had no true idea if the disaster was only in his head or was very real, what form it would take, and if it could be avoided. This entire trip had been like that; there had been brief respite at Crescent Lake, but even then he had known in his heart that the respite was only temporary. And now . . . if he was to be honest with himself, he had to admit he had recklessly taken nearly fifteen thousand people off into the unknown without a map or any goal besides “find somewhere we can live,” largely on the assumption that whatever happened, he could improvise a response.
The fact that nothing catastrophic hadn’t happened yet was minorly due to his leadership, but largely due to good luck, and good luck never lasted.
I wonder if the best idea isn’t to shed people and their property wherever we find a spot that can support a village. Wouldn’t that be kinder to everyone, rather than dragging people across the face of an increasingly hostile landscape trying to find the kind of choice spot that can support us all?
But . . . I promised them that Valdemar was never the land. It was always the people. And a village isn’t large enough to protect itself from a serious threat. Look at that village back at the last Gate we built—and it was an already established one!—that couldn’t handle those snake-dogs on their own!
There weren’t as many herd-beasts on this last, tail-end piece of the convoy, which made riding up and back along the strings of barges much quicker. The barges back here weren’t for individual families, and consisted mostly of cargo they would want when they all settled, but would not necessarily need. Duplicate tools, for instance: extra lumbering tools, extra farming tools, extra crafting tools. “One to take and one in case it breaks” seemed to have been the rule with most people, and all the “one in case it breaks” things were here at the back. It was a kind of “sacrificial tail” so if anything attacked the convoy from the rear, the barges could be abandoned for the attacker to deal with while the rest of the convoy escaped. There was only one barge tender for each string of about eight barges, and they rode their towing animals. If the worst happened, they could cut the traces, set the barges free, and be off. Each tender had a bed in the lead barge and they all shared a single kitchen, which was manned by a second-rank cook of Valdemar manor. Kordas was making sure the men—they were all men back here—had no complaints about how they were treated.
And thinking about these mundane—but needful—precautions, and how he had followed the advice of his mages and worked out every disaster he could think of and a plan for dealing with it did keep the tension at arm’s length.
More or less, anyway.
I certainly didn’t anticipate an enraged forest of sinister trees.
On the other hand . . . how could I possibly have anticipated this? Outside of adventure stories, we’ve always assumed the world was the same as the Empire.
In all the time it had taken to get each section past the woods, nothing had changed in the woods themselves. It was still ridiculously warm. The musty, bitter scent did not change. The dragonflies—if that was what they were—continued to ignore the caravan and flitted among the trees at a distance from the river. And the rage . . . the rage was always there. Never decreasing. Never increasing. It was as if the forest slept here, dreaming, and its dreams were always angry.
And there is no doubt that the last thing we want to do is disturb it.
He was nagged about that wretched boar once the last barge entered the forest proper, but every time he checked, the dog Howler was doing his self-appointed duty, keeping the stupid creature from going off the path. Howler must have herded pigs before this, because he was doing all the right things that worked with a pig, and not doing things that worked with sheep but would not work with a pig. Staring, for instance. A dog could always get a sheep to move by staring aggressively at it. Pigs didn’t care. No, Howler interposed himself between the pig and the forest, if need be making short little runs at it. It almost seemed as if the dog could read the pig’s mind, although what it was probably doing was reading the pig’s body language. Before the boar could make up its mind to go in the wrong direction, Howler made it impossible to go there.
The poor lad was getting tired, though. Belatedly, now Kordas wished he had known about this sooner. A sugar beet dangling from the side of the barge just out of reach would have gotten that wretched pig’s attention; a sugar beet was now, and truffles in the forest were maybe. Such an immediate offer of a reward presented something desirable much better than the forest could. Alas, there was nothing like that in any of these barges.
If I’d known about this earlier, we could have trapped the damned thing.
But most probably the pig’s owner hadn’t wanted to bother him about it, thinking the problem was trivial, and would solve itself—either the pig would finally decide to rejoin its herd, or something would eat it. It had probably never occurred to the man that the “something” could prove to be a hazard.
And here it is. The unexpected. A thing I didn’t anticipate because it never occurred to me that any of these animals would manage to dislodge their charms.
In the case of the pigs and cattle, it should have been impossible, because the charms were circlets of bent metal like earrings, pierced through the thick part of their ears. But . . . somehow this boar had lost his, and not by tearing it out of his ear, either.
Maybe I should ride up to the next part of the convoy and get something a pig would think of as a treat. A nice smelly chunk of cheese . . .
Maybe it was just that the pig, and Howler the dog, represented the very last of the expedition passing through this blasted place. Until they were all through safely, it didn’t feel like he could lower his vigilance, which irked him. There always has to be just one more thing, doesn’t there? He sure didn’t want to send anyone back to meet him with boar bait, and by the time he rode up to the kitchen and back, they’d be almost out of the forest. To be honest, he didn’t want to put more strain on poor Arial. There was a limit to the Golds’ endurance, and he had the feeling she was close to it, riding up and down through a stressful place with scarcely a pause all day, every day, and today, most of it being at a trot or canter.
I can’t ask her to do more. It isn’t fair.
He patted Arial’s neck. She hadn’t gotten used to that undercurrent of hate, either. She wasn’t lathered, but her coat was damp from nerves, and he suspected it was only her trust in him that kept her on the now-well-worn path.
Dammit, woods! he thought with irritation. We are leaving enough lovely manure to keep you thriving for the next decade. The least you can do is show some gratitude!
The forest was, apparently, indifferent to his wishes. It simply seethed.
By noontime, half this section was finally out in the clear—if freezing—air.
We’ll be out of here well before sundown. He concentrated on that. Can’t be soon enough. I’m getting edgier, and I thought I was already too tense about this. Maybe I’m still not sharp enough about it? Being this alert is brutal.
When three-fourths of the section was out of the forest, he stopped riding up and down the riverbank and stayed with that last barge of the last string. He’d heard the scraping, tapping sounds from every barge that passed, where he’d surmised an underwater tree snag dragged against them. It was then he heard a loud thunk and scraping noise, and he spotted a chunk of broken barge about the size of three men pulled along in the last barge’s wake. The barge was taking on water, and with clearly audible cursing, the old man scrambled to reach the bow. Shouts from further up the string took on urgency. Shudders and cracking sounds convulsed the entire string. The old man reached the fore of the last barge, retrieved a hand axe from the fore’s toolstand, and half-leapt, half-fell to the second-to-last barge when the slack between them suddenly vanished. The string had stopped, held up by the disintegrating last barge, which was likely seized dead by the underwater snag.
Kordas knew they didn’t have much time. Arial gave him a last dash, which brought him waterside to the wreck. “Come on!” he yelled at the old man, who was hacking at the mooring ropes looped to the jammed-up timberheads, stretched taut from the wreck to the barge he was now on. All he got back from the old man was cursing, and more axe strikes.
Behind the barges, three dragonflies landed on the large piece of boat wreckage. Then six.
They left the Forest—
Rose leapt from Arial, and in ten strides, she was on the barge beside the old man. Kordas saw Rose do the only overtly rude thing he’d ever seen her do: she forcefully took the axe from the old man and took over the job of hacking at rope. The man tumbled back and scrambled to get up as the aft of the barge inexplicably heaved up, and its hull cracked amidship. Crates and bundles slid forward and crashed, and this sudden new danger made Rose stop her axe-work and grab at the man. Unfazed, the man yelled to his dog, even while Rose was bodily hoisting him.
The water frothed below the broken barges.
In the Red Forest, dragonflies gathered in geometric patterns of two to six, staying at the edge of the trees’ shadows. They just—hovered.
The pig was more than worrisome now. It was actively trying to get past Howler, who was running out of strength. And just as the lead barge of this string rebounded from the sudden braking and broke free of the trees, what Kordas had been afraid of all along happened. The pig put on a burst of speed, feinted to the right, then dashed past the dog to the left, running faster than any pig had a right to, especially one that had been fretting and trying to dodge all day. The dog made a dash after the pig, but dropped to the ground at the old man’s shout of “Howler! Drop!” swiftly followed by “Howler! Here!” It was probably habit for him, because the disintegrating barge was no place the dog would want to be.
The dog recognized that his master was relieving him of duty, and with a sigh that visibly heaved his flanks, he padded wearily, and warily, toward the barge, its ears back and tail low. More crashes came from the two doomed barges. Loom hardware smashed against the loom’s own carefully stacked framework, exploding out in bursts of deadly splinters. On the second barge, waxed canvas tore loudly. Rose and the old man escaped over the split in the sawmill barge’s deck to the third-to-last barge—the one with two Gate uprights laid atop it. The uprights hadn’t been lashed down. Why bother? A barge was far too stable, and their weight too widely distributed to shift on the placid, slow river.
Below the water, something yellow, striped in ocher and black, punched upward through the barge hulls and flailed like an unbalanced auger, grinding the hull into sections no bigger than a pie pan. It was as if the riverbed was standing up.
The pig, aware that he was no longer being pursued by Howler, bolted into the Red Forest and began snuffling the ground.
Should I shoot the damned thing?
What if the forest reacts poorly to me killing something inside it?
What if the forest reacts poorly to—
But then all those thoughts became completely moot, as the pig found what it was looking for, rooted intensively at one spot, and finally employed its trotters and even teeth on the place. It had found something it wanted to eat.
So had the trees.
In all this time, the air had been hot and still, and not so much as a leaf on the ground had moved. The only activity going on in this place was the ever-flitting dragonflies.
But now . . . the branches all around the oblivious boar moved, slowly uncoiling, untwisting.
And the forest woke up.
A rush of pure anger, like a scream of raw emotion into their minds, ripped through the place, anger so palpable it hit not only Kordas, but the old man, his dog, and Arial. The old man clapped both hands to his temples. The dog dropped to the ground a moment and whimpered. Kordas felt—
—exactly what he had felt on that day, when the mother of the imprisoned baby Earth Elemental had sensed that the protections hiding it from her were gone, and had come roaring up out of the bowels of the earth to free her child and take revenge on its captors. Hate and rage, like breathing in a deep breath directly from a raging furnace.
Whatever was in the river reacted violently. The last half of the barge string was thrown upward, almost free of the water. In midair, Kordas could see the old man grasping for any kind of purchase, and Rose reaching for him.
The uprights flew up into the air, pitching base first toward the river. From the previous barge, sawmill blades, chains, logjacks, and hooks rained down onto them, along with a shower of bolts and pipes from disintegrated crates. Sawblades embedded themselves into the uprights.
Just above the old man and Rose.
Rose caught the man’s nearest wrist and hooked the axe into a falling upright, creating a short shower of sparks against the rain of hardware, catching no small part of it herself. The upright provided an instant of cover for the old man.
Then, groaning and snapping, it all fell into the river.
Rose swung the old man toward the shore, where he rebounded off of Arial’s ribs and Kordas’s right leg. Arial staggered aside, as if newborn. Exhaustion, compounded by the enervation of fear, would likely soon claim her.
In the chaos of the river, Rose was nowhere to be seen. There was hate, knives, water, mud, pieces of hull, horrible sounds of destruction and primal combat, but no valiant Doll.
The old man crumpled up, and Howler closed the distance to his side in his own desperate burst of speed. The dog reached him and, despite its own panting, licked at him as if dog saliva was a healing salve. It could be said that in this case, it truly was. The old man expressed a moment of rapturous joy, clasping the dog’s head to himself, then murmured something to him and got to his feet, though not steadily by any means.
Totally stunned for the moment from taking in and processing far too much, Kordas couldn’t even move to bring up his crossbow and shoot the damned boar. It was all so fast, it made him feel slow. And he hated it. He hated that he couldn’t reason this out. He hated that he hated.
But Arial saved him. She gave an involuntary buck and kick. Not enough to throw him, but enough to break the spell the forest had put on him.
Just as one of the Red Forest’s branches steadily reached toward him.
With a squeal, she danced out of the way, getting him out of reach of those branches with a turn and a leap worthy of an expert dancer. The old man and Howler scrambled for distance.
A dozen bizarrely flexible branches lashed out like whips at the oblivious boar, who only realized too late that it was in danger.
The branches whipped around each of the boar’s legs, and around its neck.
The tree seized the boar, hauling it up into the air as it squealed in mingled terror and agony. One narrow branch ripped off an ear, and all the branches tightened, splaying the pig out in midair among the branches of the canopy. More branches whipped out to seize the boar, and those round things on the branches seemed to attach themselves to the pig’s skin somehow, preventing it from kicking free.
The hideous squeals jolted Kordas into action, and he shot the stupid beast through the heart to end its suffering. Just as well, because the next thing that got ripped off was a leg, in an uncanny echo of one of the Emperor’s favorite sentences for a criminal, being pulled to pieces by five horses.
The screams stopped when the boar died, but the trees were just getting started. Kordas watched in horror as the limb that had ripped off the ear stuffed the bloody morsel in one of those “mouths.” Two more limbs tore long bloody swaths of muscle and skin off the body, and stuffed them in other “mouths.” And more of the trees moved, reaching toward the bloody mess that had been a pig, trying to get a bit for themselves.
Something else made a momentary dome of water in the river. With the explosive sound of storm-driven ocean surf slapping a mountainside, it burst upward. Arcs of deep riverbed mud flew as high as any two barges were long. The air shook.
That was more water-weight than all the barges in the string could even displace. What could heave so much water, so quickly? What could do that?
Whatever was in the water lunged forward three—steps?—to the shore, and it was—
Kordas couldn’t completely comprehend what he was seeing. Well past a barge-length tall, it was like a water spider—made of water spiders—made of more water spiders—and all made of black and yellow knives. Each leg was striped in ocher and black, and each stripe was a cluster of legs, all too horribly long, with bright yellow stripes, and each of them had more legs and more black knifelike spikes. Mud and river water poured off of its back and legs, no doubt how it had stayed disguised while every vessel of the flotilla had passed over it. The taps and scrapes on the hulls this whole time had been . . . it. Them. The thing, its body easily the size of a barge itself, seemed to split into three narrower versions of itself side by side, each dashing into the Red Forest to attack the trees’ branches. Where one leg struck, the smaller clusters—only man-sized—tore off branches.
No, wait—they weren’t only branches now. There were also something more. Like boneless limbs.
That’s what we were missing. That’s how it gets even worse.
The yellow-and-black blurs advanced and retreated. Stabbing attacks by the water-monsters seemed to strobe, so quickly did they dart in and leap back. And when every writhing limb-lash came their way—and before long there were hundreds—the water-monsters slashed the limbs, sectioned them, and devoured them.
And each set of knife-spiders has its own mouth. Right. Or, maybe it’s a colony of thousands, and it’ll turn into a whole wave of death-knife-spiders next. That’d be just perfect.
Around the perimeter of the sudden spray of muddy water and sap-blood, the dragonflies deployed, now buzzing extremely loudly. Much closer, and the noise would have been disorienting to Kordas and the rest trying to flee. One group of thirty or more dragonflies clustered between one of the spiders’ leg clusters, and came away with severed spider bits, only to carry them away into the Red Forest. Dragonflies batted from the air by the spiders were replaced, as more of their kind converged from, presumably, deeper in the Red Forest. At the periphery of the rapidly escalating battle, other dragonflies gathered up, then flew into the Forest with—for some reason—pieces of barge.
The last three barges were now sinking, the fourth was groaning, and all forward motion had stopped. Kordas desperately wanted to fight right now, but rescue was more important. He wasn’t going to lose Rose. It didn’t feel like she was dead, and he knew she didn’t need to breathe, but cargo was still shifting and bucking from the battle raging far too closely to them, and she could certainly be killed by crushing.
From beneath the tangle of the Gate uprights—now planted in the riverbed—and the sawmill hardware, gushes and sprays of muddy water flew in every direction.
Rose!
Amidst a pile of fractured hull strips, belaying bars, and splintered crates, a figure slowly stood up.
Two sawblades protruded from its side. Centering pins pierced it. A riving knife as big as a forearm went through its neck.
Thick mud sluiced off the pale figure, revealing unblemished white canvas and gashes of soggy brown tufts of ripped-out stuffing.
“Rose!” Kordas shouted. He dismounted, much to Arial’s relief, and ran toward the river in what was, even for him, an extraordinarily heedless display of terrible judgment.
Rose, her movement impaired by a smithy’s worth of hardware through her body, limp-twitched to the shore, to be intercepted by Kordas, while the battle of monsters only escalated behind them.
“I will make a note to speak with the loadmasters about better securing cargo for transit,” Rose replied. He didn’t know if a Doll could be dazed, but it’s how she sounded. “I see you are all healthy. Good.” Kordas ducked under Rose’s most-damaged shoulder and helped her along. Rose, who could probably have carried both of them, let him, and instead turned her attention to protecting their retreat. Kordas felt a sudden jerk from Rose, and a whunk sound, and shrapnel of spar laminate flew past them. No doubt it had threatened them. Despite chunks of stuffing and ironworks sticking out in most every direction, Rose sounded as pleasant as ever. “This is a very good axe,” she added.
“Keep it!” Kordas replied, half-running toward the remaining barges while ducking pieces of hull, loom, and sawmill.
Kordas didn’t have much time to think. He’d held off from using magic to either defend or rescue the old man, for fear that both of the monstrosities would turn their way, but now they had some distance. He did the quickest math he knew, searched his feelings, and determined the truth in an instant.
Now was the correct time to kill everything, in the immediate upriver direction, with fire.
You want me to hate, hells-forest? Oh, I can hate. I’ve got years of hate to spend on you. He paused in helping Rose as another Doll took her up from him, and another came alongside him to help him escape, too. Kordas knew well that fire spells were enhanced by hot emotions, so he let it boil up in him. The ground below him began to steam.
You have no idea what I’ve been through, no idea what kind of daily horror I’ve been forced into. Hate? I hate being in charge! I hate my future being forced! I hate feeling like everything I do is a salvage! I hate being a hero to people! I hate putting up a false face! I hate picking who lives and dies, defending against fuckery like you! Now you dare come after us? After all this? You want me to hate? I’ll sear you with my hate! You can scream in Nightmare Hell that there’s more of it for all of you, if you piss me off again!
He paused long enough to yell in rage at the Red Forest and the Yellow-Black-Hell-River-Spider-Whirling-Knives-Of-Death-Creatures, and flung his hands in their direction so violently his sleeves ripped. A tracking streak flew out an instant before two ragged-edged, jetting spheres of sunlight followed them, to detonate on contact. A percussive sound like sharp, muffled thunder sent a shockwave from the monsters, followed by a shower of small—and wet—debris. The battling creatures may not have started the day as flammable, but they were now. The escape on foot was now backlit by gouts of flame and smoke.
Downriver, the horses hauling the barges were not having any of this. The guards pulled the shore escapees onto the first three barges, the two Dolls leapt back to the aft timberheads of the fourth barge, levered, and released the pins that held the sinking barges. The half-string accelerated away. The Tow-Beasts somehow found the strength to lunge against their harness, sweating and foaming, to pull their load at a faster pace, and their panic somehow communicated itself all the way up the line, because everyone moved faster, first at a much faster walk, then at a trot, and finally at a near-canter. It was enough speed that, unchecked, would ram one string into another end to end, forty deep. Arial, despite her exhaustion, appeared to be renewed by the company of other horses, and was right with them. As they all broke out of the forest, he looked back over his shoulder to see that the burning trees behind them were a seething mass of writhing limbs, each trying to score a hit on the spider-creatures, or stretching yearningly toward Kordas, the old man, and Howler, while burning black and yellow spikes struck as fast as lightning, advancing into the Red Forest, severing limbs into fiery gobs.
As they got past the last tree, Kordas got hit by such a cold wind that his sweat-soaked clothing froze instantly. His blistered hands crackled inside his gloves, and new burns steamed.
One last surging flail of flaming tree-limb tentacle whipped toward the fourth barge, and was cut off in midair by a yellow-and-black flash of spider leg. It thunked atop cases of Poomers, Spitters, and their magazine of ammunition as it sank, drawn deeper by the wreckage it was attached to.
They were free.
Kordas heaved breaths in and out, from amidships on the last barge, and raised both smoking, steaming arms. He made two rude gestures at the fire-and-monster melee behind them.
Don’t ever dare me to hate you. I’ve got plenty built up, ready to hurt you.
“It’s a wonder you didn’t catch something,” Isla said, as he stood in front of the stove, sponging his sweat-stinking body with one of Sai’s magical towels.
Kordas’s gloves were ruined, having been carefully trimmed off of his burned hands by Isla and a set of thread trimmers. Despite the throbbing pain, Kordas wasn’t ready to Heal his hands fully just yet. Sometimes, it was best to let the body carry on with its instinctive processes, so the Healer wasn’t fighting them. He just tamped down the pain for now. “It’s a wonder I wasn’t caught,” he replied.
The boys sat on the bed, solemn-eyed, and not at all interested in hearing the story—at least, not at the moment. It wasn’t every day they saw Arial using the last of her strength to get him safely “home,” to the point where she staggered as she finally arrived at their mooring spot. Odds seemed good that they were more bothered by that than seeing their father’s nicks, cuts, and burns—they’d seen that before. They were more sensitive than he had given them credit for, actually. Maybe it was all those years of knowing how careful they had to be about what they said and who they spoke to.
Rose—as Kordas had figured she would—had relayed what was happening to all the other Dolls, even while being carted off to her repair. The entire caravan now knew that the forest had been just as dangerous as they had been warned it might be. The consensus, as relayed back from Ivy after the wild ride, was that any animal that lost its charm and wandered off was to be shot if it could not be recaptured and re-tagged within eyeshot of the expedition. No one wanted to lose an animal, but they understood it was foolishness bordering on neglect for them to attract the attention of random monsters with animals that couldn’t stay where they belonged—or to let them be used as bait to lure out would-be rescuers. Or, for that matter, to take the animals back; they could return with—hells only knew what. Parasites that gave people extra heads. It could be anything. The entire expedition was learning: count on nothing they encountered to be what it seemed to be.
We’re just lucky they were trees, planted in place. And that the—
“Of course,” Kordas blurted. He’d have snapped his fingers if he could. “The water-spider-things. I think there were three. Big ones, anyway. Everything passed right over their backs like leaves on the river, but the last string was overloaded, and drafting low because it was taking on water from a hull crack. Every other vessel in the fleet glided right over them, but when the tail actually hit the things, they must have reacted to it as an attack.” He shuddered. “Oh gods, we had no idea.”
Kordas’s eldest boy glared at him with a look that read, Don’t you know any happy stories, father? We’re children here.
Kordas bit back saying any more of his thoughts out loud. Just those three could have shredded every boat in the fleet and all aboard, by the way it looked. Just incomprehensible speed and strength. Oh gods, how many are under us right now? Why did they carve up the hulls, even in mid-battle? Why did the Red Forest only attack the pig once it went in deeper? When it reached out during the battle, it was clear, it could have snatched any of our animals close to the water with its limbs. But the water was where the spiders were, and the spiders weren’t interested in easy-to-reach livestock. They went after and ate tree limbs. Gods, were they vegetarian monster spiders? This is what this place can do to you. Once you start questioning and fearing, you’re never sure when to stop.
“I’m very glad that our people decided to deal with stray animals themselves, instead of waiting for you to make an edict,” Isla continued, smoothly filling the moment. Then she turned and looked at the bed, where Sydney-You-Asshole was lounging with the boys. “You hear that, Sydney? No losing your collar. There are some people around here that wouldn’t think twice about shooting you.”
“Mama!” little Hakkon objected. “No one is going to shoot Sydney! He’s a good cat!”
Kordas bit his lip, because while he could be a reckless, bossy bruiser to other cats and most dogs, at least with the children, Sydney actually was a good cat. He put up with all manner of mauling from them, including being stuffed into doll clothes. They could tote him like a rag doll. But let an adult touch his Sacred Belly Fur, and said adult would draw back a bloody stump where his hand used to be.
Sydney looked at Isla with an expression that Kordas interpreted as “contempt,” but meowed something that sounded exactly like, “All right.”
Of course we have talking cats. We’re lucky we don’t have talking horses, with what we’ve put them all through. I should just be grateful that they aren’t dictating orders.
The scouts sat in silence and listened carefully to what Amethyst had to say. “Well,” said Sai, as Amethyst finished her calm, almost expressionless recitation of what was happening in the strange forest, “Now we know we can’t go back.”
“We know we can’t go back that way,” Jonaton corrected him. “What’s more important is what’s going to happen to any Impies that manage to follow us that far.”
Endars’s left brow shot up toward his hairline. “Impies?”
Jonaton shrugged, and reached for the salt. “Impies. It’s scornful and demeaning. They made me wear square-cut woolen trousers with no pockets for years, and I don’t forgive things like that. The point isn’t what I call our former Lords and Masters. My point is that if there is one thing that Impies cannot do, it’s keep their hands to themselves. If they lay eyes on that forest, they’re going to want to fell some of it, just out of purest curiosity. They’re going to want to uproot saplings. They’re probably even going to want to catch some of those dragonflies. And that’s before the trees fight back. Once they do that, the Impies will want to figure out how they can tame those trees, or use them for weapons. And then the spiders in the river?” He just let that hang there.
It was, in Jonaton’s words, “Officially too damn cold to sit around a fire at night,” so Sai was using the tiny stove in the equally tiny barge kitchen to make what he could, and he had Delia and Amethyst helping him. Delia was still able to catch geese, ducks, and the odd rabbit and squirrel, and Ivar hunted as he scouted ahead, but now the meals were very different. Cabbage leaves were used to wrap bits of food until the leaves were too hard to pry off the core, at which point the core got chopped very fine and added to a soup kettle that was always kept full of all the odds and ends and leftovers. Sai did make a fire on land, right near the barge when they stopped for the day, but no one was sitting around it at night. Instead, the initial flames were used to quickly broil whatever meat they had cut into strips, the bones went into the soup pot, and Sai would make up hand food for the following noonday meal with the meat and pickled onions. Supper was the soup: bones cooked until they were so soft you could actually eat them—Bay got those—chopped root vegetables, chopped squash, cabbage, dried beans. Breakfast was cooked overnight in the coals of the fire, an enormous pot of oat porridge with dried apples in it. Sai tried to vary the herbs and spices he put in. Sometimes he added a precious bit of honey. Bay got the leftovers of that, too, and ate it with a gusto that seemed odd to Delia. After all, there was no meat in it. She wondered why Sai didn’t put dried grapes or currants in it, but it seemed such things were bad for dogs. But he did have a sack of dried grapes they could dip into if they wanted something sweet. There was no more flatbread; it got tough and unappetizing when it was cold, and it was too cold to sit there next to the fire and cook it, so instead of that, they had some sort of hard biscuit that the Fairweathers called “field rations” to dip in the soup.
So at the moment, they were all crowded into the women’s barge where the kitchen was. Delia had retreated to her bunk with her bowl of soup and one of those biscuits. She had to scrunch into a corner to have enough room to eat, which restricted what she could see, but she could hear everything perfectly well. Ivar and Alberdina sat on Alberdina’s bunk, Briada and Bart took up Briada’s bunk and Bret part of the floor, and Hakkon and Jonaton were in the bunk reserved for the sick or injured. Everyone else had found a place to sit on the floor. Delia thought about offering someone bunk space, but it was a bit hard to get up here, regardless of the fact that the Fairweathers had somehow popped up into place in the upper bunk like a pair of goats. Amethyst was nearest the prow to keep the kitchen area clear, and her high voice carried very well back to where the bunks were. A soft mage-light enclosed in a cage in the middle of the ceiling cast a pleasantly dim glow over everything.
“You know, I almost wish the Impies would try taking that forest,” Hakkon said after a moment, punctuated only by slurping.
“That’s assuming that they’d lose; they might not. They might win,” Venidel pointed out. “I mean, at some point Imperial mages were powerful enough to kidnap a young Earth Elemental from the deeps of the earth, and not only keep it imprisoned, but hide it from its mother. It doesn’t do to underestimate them.”
“Particularly not the mages with the army,” Briada pointed out. “The ones in the Capital may have been lazy buggers, but the combat mages are sharp and ruthless and used to improvising.”
“They did some terrible things with the power they had,” Sai said gravely. “Imagine if they could control those trees. Imagine if they could walk that forest up to people they wanted to intimidate, and surrounded them with it. No getting in, no getting out.”
“I didn’t think those things could walk!” Bret exclaimed from the floor.
“I don’t know that they can,” Sai corrected. “But I also don’t know that they can’t.”
“Can we talk about something else?” Delia asked. “We all got past the thing, except for one pig. Don’t we need to look forward and not back?”
“They won’t like our news back at the fleet,” Ivar replied. “The further we go downriver, the stranger things get. Between us, just in the last few days we’ve seen bright red bare-skinned rodents mimicking the movements of frogs, moving in herds. Bushes that split, and split, so many times they look fuzzy, but they’re just masses of tiny blue thorns. Vines that form entire structures like they’d climbed a building, then the building vanished. Conjoined deer. Fish that emit smoke when they surface. Outcrops of crystals as tall as me. Solid rock that looks like flowing waterfalls in the light, with nests of mushrooms for the glowing eels in them. Animal ribcages arranged like a fenced ring and nothing growing inside. It’s getting worse.”
“Well, I have an idea for looking forward,” Briada put in. “Delia, you’re our special shooter. Would you also like to learn how to defend yourself at closer hand?” She tucked her now-empty bowl back behind her and leaned over the edge of her bunk so she could see everyone. “Lessons are open for all, actually. I’m thinking combat batons, to begin with. Then move into knives, then staffs, then swords.”
Not that long ago, Delia would have laughed at the idea. Now . . . well, as colder weather sent the fish to the bottom of the river where she couldn’t see them, the geese and ducks that were showing up were clearly migratory stragglers, and the rest of the animals along the river were spending as much time in their warm dens as they could (or hibernating altogether), there was less that she was useful for during the day. Gathering firewood for the entire day generally took no more than the morning.
And she liked the idea of being able to defend herself, even if it was with nothing more than a stick. “You aren’t going to break anything, are you?” she asked Briada, only half joking.
“Well, accidents happen, but I haven’t broken any weapons on a student yet.” Briada grinned.
“I’d be game for some of that,” Jonaton said unexpectedly.
“I would too,” Venidel added.
“Anyone else?” Briada asked. “No? Listen, no shame here. I can do some pretty nice woodcarving, and if we end up somewhere unable to move until spring, I’d be willing to teach anyone that, too.”
“I’m too lazy.” Endars uttered a very dry chuckle.
“I’m too old,” said Sai.
“I’d dispute that, Master Sai, but I wouldn’t accept you as a student if you wanted me to teach you,” Briada replied. “During the day we need you ready to do your finger-wiggling and chanting in case we run into something bad. And at night, well, I’m not teaching anyone at night. Three of you is all I can handle, anyway. Delia’s going to be wood-gathering in the morning; Ven, are you willing to take your beatings in the morning?”
Delia finished her soup and the last crumb of her broth-soaked biscuit, licked the bowl clean, and tucked it aside near the window. Then she hung her head over the edge of the bunk so she could see everyone.
The young mage sighed. “It’s either that, or clean feathers for his pillow.”
“Teaches you patience,” Sai said.
“But you said to never use magic for trivial tasks!”
“My pillow is not trivial.” Sai snorted. “If I have to explain to you why I am telling you to do this, you clearly are not ready for anything more delicate.”
Well, after all this time around mages, Delia could certainly think of lots of reasons why Sai would have set that task for his apprentice. Likely it had something to do with learning how to use very, very small amounts of magic energy with fine control. Or it might be it was meant to make Ven figure out an efficient way he could clean lots of feathers at once. But she wasn’t going to say anything unless he asked her. Not out of spite! She liked Venidel quite a lot. Sai might seem whimsical, but he never did anything without a very good reason.
Endars snickered just a tiny bit, and Jonaton snorted. “I’ve been there before. He’s tricking you into figuring out how to do it more efficiently. More feathers, more finesse, the same power,” Jonaton said. “If you can’t figure out your own spells, you’ll be an apprentice forever.”
Venidel hunched his shoulders sheepishly, but said nothing more than, “Thanks, Briada. I’ll be fine with morning.”
“And Delia is helping me with delivering your midday food, so let’s give her late afternoon,” Sai ordered. Delia was going to object to his heavy-handed orders, but he was right. She used her borrowed horse to go up and down their abbreviated barge-string to get everyone’s food to them, then would chase after Ivar with his and Bay’s share. Bay was quite a good dog about feeding himself, but mastiffs didn’t have heavy coats, and he needed food to keep himself warm.
I suppose someone could make him a coat. Can mastiffs wear boots? The cold must hurt his feet.
“Well, that’s sorted, then,” said Hakkon. “Amethyst, is there anything else we should know about from the main caravan?”
“Just that the different sections took it on themselves to pause so that everyone could be one single convoy again,” Amethyst said sweetly.
“That was the Dolls’ idea, wasn’t it?” Sai cackled.
Amethyst bowed her head a little. “Yes, Sai, it was. And we coordinated it. It seemed best, for many reasons, for Baron Kordas to return triumphant to those he defended. We are also discussing what the forest might be, but we have come to no conclusions yet. We are very handicapped by being in these bodies. We are even hampered by physical bodies from speaking to free vrondi. It is by no means impossible, but it is difficult.”
“Yes, yes, those wretched Impie mages wouldn’t have wanted you to be able to warn other vrondi about their trap, now, would they?” put in—Bret Fairweather, surprisingly.
“They wouldn’t have wanted you to be able to talk to the captive Earth Elemental child, either,” Endars speculated. “Hmm. You know, if it isn’t all tangled up in the magic that keeps you imprisoned in those shells, if it’s just a blocking spell laid on top of everything else, I might be able to fix that. I’m not bad at anything involving communication.”
“Not bad!” Sai cackled. “False modesty, you old rat. Doesn’t look good on you.”
Endars made a dismissive motion. “I’m not you or Ceri.”
“No, and thank the gods you aren’t! If we were all alike, Kordas wouldn’t need half of us!” Sai was very pleased with his joke, but Delia was intrigued.
“What can you do, Master Endars?” she asked.
“At the top of my list, I can work out spells that will allow you to talk to anything that has a language,” he said. “I already have a lot of spells that will do that—I can summon and speak to wild vrondi, for instance—but if I don’t have a spell already, I can construct one.”
“Can you teach someone how to speak with dogs?” Ivar asked, suddenly very interested.
“The dismissive answer is that dogs don’t have a language. The actual answer is that the language consists of body position, movements, scent, and very few words, of which the most important are ‘food,’ ‘water,’ ‘love,’ ‘angry,’ ‘kill,’ ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ ‘there,’ ‘here,’ and the most important one of all, ‘HEY!’”
That broke them all up, and Bay, up in the prow on the floor, looked up expectantly, then stood and wagged his rump. Amethyst fished him a soft bone section out of the soup pot and gave it to him. He wolfed it down happily, and lay back down.
“I think I will take a pass on that, then,” said Ivar, still chuckling. “Bay knows he’s a Good Boy.”
Bay wagged again.
“I think everyone speaks enough dog for both parties to understand each other—dogs speak ‘honesty,’” Endars mused. “But a lot of what we think of as ‘spells’ are actually ‘language.’ Some forms of language can’t be fully understood without a matching body shape, too. Bay there expresses a lot with his tail, the angle of his hips, the height of his ears—there is a lot that humans like us just can’t express back without an amazing costume. We lack the body parts to ‘speak’ with.” He looked up and around, seeing virtually nobody was following him. “Other than that, I am the second-best scryer after Sai, and I can, with difficulty, set up something between two people that acts like Mindspeech.”
“You haven’t mentioned the most important other than your language spells,” Sai chided.
“Well . . . I don’t know that it works every time . . .” Endars temporized.
“It’s worked every time you tried it,” Sai countered. He cocked his head to one side, looking rather like a cat that was excessively pleased with itself. “He can trigger Mindspeech in people who have the potential for it.”
Delia’s jaw dropped. She didn’t know much about Mind-magic, but really, nobody did. In the eyes of the Empire, it was a very inferior set of Talents, so the Emperor had not even bothered with collecting people who possessed it. She had never, ever heard that there was any reliable way of triggering it.
“Can you do it with any other kind of Mind-magic?” she stammered.
Endars shrugged. “Never tried,” he admitted. “But when Kordas ordered that everyone with Mindspeech be identified, so when the Dolls leave us we’ll have a reliable form of talking across distances, I told the Healers that if they found people with the potential, I’d talk to them and find out if they wanted that potential to become a reality.”
“You didn’t just trigger them and put them on a list?” Briada asked incredulously. “That’s how the Emperor would have—” And then she stopped. “But we’re not the Empire, are we.”
“Exactly,” Endars said. “And may we never be. Something like this—something that needs careful training to use, something that they might not want in their lives—I’m giving people a choice. And I don’t do it unless we have someone who knows how to handle the Gift available to help them train.”
“And Kordas wants it to stay that way,” Sai added. “We spoke privately recently, and he spoke from his heart. He said he never wants anyone, as he put it, ‘used up, pushed out, or abandoned.’”
Briada glanced over at her cousin. He snickered.
“We’re the Fair Baron’s men now. Told you we weren’t playing by Imperial rules anymore,” he said smugly.
She shook her head. “Well, fuck me, we certainly aren’t.”