Royce led the way across the island, the rock shifting with every step. Scraps of basalt gave way under his feet, while around him, the whole island seemed to breathe in waves of fire and superheated air.
“Careful!” Matilde called out, as hot water burst out of a geyser just ahead. Royce was already leaping back, while a shower of water struck Gwylim. The bhargir howled before shaking himself like a wet dog, the wounds already starting to heal.
“That was close,” Royce said. “Everyone, be careful. I think even the ground here is dangerous for us.”
The island seemed desperately close to being a living thing, and an angry one at that. The lava flows on the upper slopes seemed like blood flowing through veins, while the bursting of the geysers felt like the snorting of an angry bull. The whole place seemed angry, in fact, as if the very ground didn’t want them there.
As if in confirmation of that, the ground beneath their feet rumbled.
“Are we still on the right path?” Mark asked. He was keeping up, but only barely, while Bolis was moving slower behind, leaning on a branch from a twisted tree. There were greener ones here and there, in patches of dark soil so rich that Royce suspected almost anything could grow there, but most of the plants were blackened or petrified: stick like, spiny things that seemed almost skeletal.
“There’s another white stag ahead,” Royce said, pointing to a rock that had it scratched onto its surface. He and the others headed toward it.
Another rumble came beneath their feet, and now Royce thought he could feel the ground shifting.
“Forward!” he yelled. “Run!”
The others ran forward as quickly as they could, Matilde almost keeping up with Royce, Gwylim ahead of all of them. Neave and Mark followed shortly after them, but Bolis was slower. Royce saw the fissure starting to open up under the knight’s feet, and turned back without thinking, throwing himself forward as Bolis fell.
He felt his hand clasp around the knight’s wrist, and Royce lay there on the edge of a gap in the world that looked down on pools of lava. Bolis hung from his grasp, and while Royce could hold him there, he wasn’t sure he could haul him up.
“It’s all right,” Royce said. “I’ve got you.”
Then he felt himself starting to slip, his body moving forward, closer to the edge, dragged by Bolis’s weight. Bolis obviously felt it too, because the knight seemed to make a decision.
“Let me go, my king,” Bolis said.
“I’m not letting you go,” Royce said. “Hold on.”
“You need to let me go, or you’ll be dragged down too,” Bolis insisted. He started to struggle in Royce’s grip, and that struggle only pushed them both further toward the edge…
Then Royce felt weight pressing down across his legs, holding him in place. Gwylim was there, the bhargir’s weight more than enough to hold Royce still. Royce still couldn’t pull Bolis up, but at least he wasn’t sliding forward anymore.
Then Mark dropped into place beside Royce, held in place by the combined weight of Neave and Matilde. He reached down, grabbing Bolis’s other arm. As weak as he still was from the aftereffects of Lethe’s spell, the addition of his strength made Bolis feel light in Royce’s hands.
“Ready?” Royce said. “Heave!”
They hauled Sir Bolis up together, all of them lying panting on the dark ground for a moment.
“We should move further from the fissure,” Neave said after a few moments, reminding them that the ground was still uncertain here.
Royce forced his way back to his feet and they struggled on. The path that his father had laid was a winding thing, taking them around patches of land that were open, and through other spaces that were crammed with rocks. Matilde in particular seemed to be growing annoyed with the circuitous route.
“Why don’t we just cross over this section of slope?” she demanded, pointing across an apparently flat section. The path led around it, and even Royce couldn’t see the reason. He trusted his father, though.
“There has to be a reason why he wanted us to come this way,” Royce said.
“You don’t even know that he knew we would be coming this way,” Matilde said. “This path could be just whatever path he took, or maybe he just wanted to decorate the island with as many of his symbols as he could.”
She started forward, stepping out onto the open ground. A rumbling came from above, and Neave barely jerked back in time as rocks started to fall, tumbling down the slope. Some were larger than a man, others red hot and still glowing with the heat of the volcano.
“I think my father knew exactly what he was doing,” Royce said. “Maybe this is just a safe path he found, marked for anyone to find, or maybe he knew that I would be here. Either way, I think we need to keep following the path.”
This time, none of the others argued, so they kept following the route that the chalked and scratched stags marked out, clambering over patches of rocky ground and razor-sharp obsidian. It was hard going, and Royce could feel his body protesting at the effort. He was about to suggest that they stop and rest for a while when Ember called out above. Royce looked through her eyes, and in that moment he saw things scurrying across rocks not far from them, moving quietly, following in parallel to them.
The creatures were scaled and humanoid, shorter than a human but powerfully built. Their eyes reminded Royce of cats, while their teeth were more like those of wolves, long and sharp. They had claws too, and stranger still, they had weapons: crude spears that seemed to be formed from branches and pieces of volcanic rock.
“We’re being followed,” Royce said. “I think we might be attacked.”
“I hope not,” Mark said. “We have no weapons, Bolis can’t fight, and even I’m worn down.”
“We’ll have to get weapons,” Royce said. He wished he had the crystal sword then. He wished that he’d been able to go back and retrieve it, but doing that would have seen them all caught again by Lethe. They would have to do the best they could with what they had. “The creatures have spears made from obsidian. Maybe we could make the same.”
They looked around for anything they could use. There were plenty of blocks of obsidian around the island, and Royce grabbed a rock, using it to hammer away at one, flaking away pieces of the glassy black material. Bolis and Mark snapped branches from one of the trees, while Matilde and Neave split lengths of the rope they’d used to climb up onto the island, turning them into twine so they could tie the obsidian shards to the hafts they’d created. The results for the first couple were serviceable but sharp looking.
Royce kept working at the lump of obsidian. He struck at it and a crack spread across it. A lump fell from it, leaf shaped and as long as Royce’s forearm. He lifted it, testing the edge, tapping away at it to sharpen it. Taking some twine from Matilde, he wrapped it round and round the base of the shard to form a kind of handle.
The sword that resulted was shorter than the crystal sword had been, but seemed every bit as sharp, in its way. Royce hefted it, testing how it would swing, and it seemed to dance from spot to spot. The others all had spears now, testing them for strength, with Bolis leaning on his like a crutch.
A flicker of sunlight from dark scales told Royce that they were running out of time. He still wasn’t sure they had enough to win against the creatures that were coming.
“We need to find a better place to make a stand,” Royce said. He looked around until he spotted an outcrop of rock, with trees around the edge that might at least form a kind of shield against any creatures coming in. It would slow them a little, forcing them to come in one by one. The only downside was that there was nowhere else to go from it. They would win there, or they would die.
Still, Royce couldn’t see anywhere else they could do this.
“There,” Royce said, pointing. “We’ll fight them there.”
They ran for the stand of rock, and now the scaled creatures were out in the open, racing after them. They were faster than their hunched forms might suggest, so that they seemed to be gaining on them slowly. Bolis and Mark wouldn’t make it to the trees if Royce didn’t do something.
“Keep going!” Royce yelled, turning back and striking at the first of the creatures. It swiped at him with its claws, then struck out with its spear. Royce managed to deflect it, but barely, because the creature was strong too.
Gwylim was there beside him then, snapping and snarling at the beasts, biting down on a leg, then clawing. One struck him on the flank and the wolf-like creature let out a yelp of pain before biting down on the thing’s wrist, all but cutting through it with his teeth.
Glancing back, Royce could see that the others were almost at the raised circle of trees.
“Now!” he yelled to Gwylim, and the bhargir seemed to understand. The two of them turned and sprinted for the others, barely making it through the trees before the creatures got to them.
The trees meant that they could only come through one at a time, rather than in any kind of large group. One came at Royce, and Royce leapt to meet it, slamming into it, inside the range of its spear. He felt its claws scrape his back, but he was already stabbing with the obsidian sword. He felt it go up into the beast’s heart, and it fell.
He turned to his next opponent, swaying aside from the thrust of a spear and cutting back across the creature’s throat.
He saw Gwylim leap in close to another of the beasts, rending and ripping, ignoring the thrust of a spear as it scraped across his left hind leg. Neave thrust her spear into one of the beasts, while Matilde blocked a blow aimed at her. Bolis seemed to have enough energy to at least hold his ground and stab, while Mark swung and thrust with the spear he held, forcing back another of the creatures with the ferocity.
Royce saw one coming in at his friend’s blind side and leapt forward to try to intercept the attack. He managed to deflect the blow partially, but the sheer force of it carried it through, into Mark’s side. Royce spun and cut down the scaled thing, then lunged for another in front of his friend.
He heard Neave cry out, but didn’t dare look round, because right then there were three of the creatures in front of him. Royce feinted toward one of them, lunged toward another to cut into its throat, and grabbed its spear as it fell.
He turned, parrying the blow of a spear with his sword and thrusting his own spear through the beast’s heart. The last of the creatures swung its spear in an arc and Royce threw himself flat, thrusting up with the obsidian sword, so that the beast toppled over him as it died.
As he struggled up from underneath it, the outcrop was deathly quiet. There seemed to be no more of the lizard-like creatures there, but Royce didn’t trust that. There would be more drawn to the violence soon enough. Looking around, he saw that Matilde was crouched by Neave, who was clutching a wound on her shoulder. Mark, meanwhile, was busy stemming the flow of blood from his side. Even Gwylim was limping, and that caught Royce by surprise. Was there something about the obsidian that made wounds harder to heal for the bhargir?
“We need to find somewhere safer than this,” Royce said. “Can you all walk?”
They could, but now it was a slow procession, with Mark and Bolis, Matilde and Neave all leaning on one another for support. They kept going forward while the landscape rose around them, following the stag symbols until they finally came to a cave where there were the remains of a campfire set in place.
“My father must have stopped here,” Royce said, looking around at the smooth interior of the cave. It seemed to be lined in the same glassy rock as so much of the rest of the island, so it would probably reflect the heat and light from the fire. “We’ll rest here and work out what to do next.”
The others didn’t argue, but shuffled inside gratefully. The few supplies in the small boat included a little food, so they ate in silence. Royce could see that most of the others barely had the energy to do that now, and as he watched them, he came to a decision.
“I’m going to go on alone,” he said.
“What? You can’t do that,” Mark said.
“You’re injured. Neave is injured. Even Gwylim is injured. Bolis is exhausted. Matilde could come, but I want at least one of you at full strength, and it’s not fair to ask her to leave Neave behind when she’s hurt.”
“I’ll go if the alternative is you going out alone,” Matilde declared.
Royce shook his head. “I think… I think that it’s meant to be this way. You’ve all helped me to get this far, but this last part of the journey is for me to do alone.”
“You’re talking as if all of this is set out,” Mark said. “As if you’re safe because you think you know what’s happening next.”
Royce shook his head. “The last thing any of us is on this island is safe. I’m not such a fool as to think I can’t die, but I do think that my father set out a trail knowing that I would come. I have to keep following that path, and I think I’m the only one who can.”
“We could still help,” Matilde said. She still sounded determined even then.
“You will, and you have,” Royce said. “I wouldn’t be here without you, and it will take all of us to win the fight that’s coming, but I have to do this.”
He stood, heading toward the cave door. Gwylim was there by his side then, and Royce shook his head.
“Even you need some time to recover,” he said. “Besides, if those things come back, you’re probably the one who’s best placed to fight them off. Keep the others safe. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
The bhargir lowered his head, seeming to understand. He stepped back into the cave, while Royce headed out onto the island. He searched for the next sign of the white stag, finding it a little way ahead, arranged from a cluster of pale rocks. His friends were safe for now, and Royce had to hope that his father lay somewhere ahead.
He had to keep going.