As the world awoke, Alira was already on the move, high above the jungle floor, hurrying along the thick branch of a mature Furywood tree. The slanting rays of sunlight that pierced the canopy threw splashes of brightness upon the bark, and she bounded between the trees—the leather beneath her feet arching with each step, helping her find her grip and balance on the ancient wood.
Not so long ago, she’d been Seaborn, a woman of the waves, and she would have found the height dizzying, the massive trees impossible, the run along such branches incomprehensible.
But she was Stormborn now, a huntress of the trees. And her prey was close.
She didn’t need to look around her to know the pace of the others. She could sense them in the shake of the branches, the rippling of the leaves, the flight of the birds. So her eyes looked only to the pools of light and—far below—the darting shadow of a deer in flight.
In truth, the animal ought to have been dead minutes ago. Kora had nocked her arrow and drawn back her bow, had readied for her first kill while Alira looked on proudly. But the young girl had hesitated. Despite her training, her arrow went high. Spooked, the deer had run, and the chase had begun.
Alira glanced quickly to her left, where Kora was keeping pace upon a closely parallel branch through the trees. It was the first time that Kora had worn the full garb of a huntress: the loose brown trousers tucked into tall, turned-down leather boots; the sleeveless green shirt with a leather band supporting her growing chest; the branches lashed together like plates upon her forearms. Her hood had fallen back from her brown hair as she ran. Alira could see that the girl’s face was taut with shame and anger—the same look, Alira was certain, that she’d held herself when she’d gone high on her first hunt.
Alira sensed the narrowing of the wood beneath her feet and so looked forward again, her eyes searching through the maze of branches and leaves ahead.
There.
Her hands instinctively went to her back, feeling the bow that was slung there, making certain it was secure. About the only thing more shameful than missing a shot would be losing a bow on the run.
The deer flashed through a pool of light below, and Alira smiled. It was tiring. They were getting closer. Kora would have her chance again.
Alira grinned in anticipation. This time, Kora’s arrow would fly true. Of that, there was no doubt. The orphaned girl was already a better shot than her teacher ever would be; the bow was a comfort for her. Alira sensed it every time she watched Kora focus and loose a shot. The release of the string released horrors and nightmares—the dark memories of what she’d seen when the Bloodborn had slaughtered her family. Alira couldn’t imagine what it must have been like—the screaming that Kora would’ve heard as she’d fled into the trees, the guilt of knowing she’d survived. Alira was still haunted by what she and Whéuri had found in Kora’s small farmhouse.
Ten more paces onward, bow secured, Alira kicked off from the branch she was on, leaping out over a fall higher than the mast of the tallest ship.
For a heartbeat, she was flying, sailing in the sky. Then her outstretched hands hit a draping vine, her fingers caught and gripped it, and her body pulled it taut as she swung down onto the branch of another tree farther ahead.
Her feet touched. For a moment, she crouched to hold her weight and balance. Then she was up, letting go of the vine, padding onward. The other hunters found their own places around her. Some above. Some below. Kora alighted just paces behind her on the same branch.
Ahead, Alira could see where the thickening branch of this Furywood tree met its wide trunk—just one of a ring of branches that grew out from the same height. A crowning, the Stormborn called it. A ring of growth that appeared every ten years.
Back among the even larger trees of Anjel, the Stormborn built their homes and shops around the crownings, the doorways lining wooden walkways that were woven into the very life of the trees. There were no such walkways here, but the gathering of the branches against the wide trunk made a kind of platform just the same. Once the branch nearest on the right had closed to within reach, Alira leapt for it, taking only two steps closer to the main trunk before she leapt for the next branch—leap by leap, making her way around the tree.
Behind her, a bird called in the distance.
Then, there was the gentlest sound of joy from her left, and Alira glanced in that direction just long enough to see Kora flashing out of sight on the other side of the mighty tree trunk.
A race?
Alira smiled, let only one foot remain on the next branch before she jumped off it. Then again.
Again.
And just before she reached the branch that extended out toward the deer’s wake, Kora leaped in front of her.
More birds were calling. An insistent sound.
Kora looked back, a wide grin on her face, and she nearly ran into Whéuri, who suddenly dropped down from the heights above, shaking the branch as she crouched into her landing.
The Stormborn woman had one hand up.
Kora skittered to a halt and crouched beside the older huntress. Alira did the same. “Something’s wrong,” Whéuri whispered.
Alira had seen the Stormborn woman worried before. The tension of her body and the intensity in her voice were like that now. But worse. Scared. And she had never seen the older woman, the leader of the hunt, close to being out of breath.
Like all of them, Whéuri had been running with her face guard—a fence around her collar made of upright oak branches lashed together with sinew cord—lowered upon her green shirt. But now she flipped it up into place, reaching one hand around her head to cinch it tight about her neck. She raised her hood, too, so that only her eyes were showing in the half-light.
Alira followed her lead. The scent of oak filled her lungs as she moved it up before her face and tightened it. Kora, wide-eyed, didn’t put her guard up immediately, but when Alira nodded toward it, she did so quickly.
Whéuri gave them an approving nod, then peered up to their right and pursed her lips to make the sound of a birdcall through the trees.
A call echoed back; then a shape passed down through the branches and landed beside them. It was Whéuri’s man, Bryt.
“You saw it too?” His voice was hushed. His mask and hood were already up.
Whéuri nodded, made another birdcall. Two trills of a redbird. It meant the end of the hunt. Trills answered back from the trees around them. Shadows receded, leaving them alone. Kora’s shoulders fell.
Whéuri and Bryt didn’t move, though, so neither did Alira and Kora. The four of them crouched together on the wide branch, Whéuri and Bryt staring down into the darkness near the base of the tree—not where the deer had disappeared.
Alira felt Kora’s unspoken questions, but she had no answers to give. And while she might be the young girl’s teacher, she knew better than to speak out of turn in front of her own teacher. Instead, she just watched Whéuri. How the woman almost imperceptibly shifted the weight between her legs as she crouched, keeping one ready to spring at any moment. How she flicked her eyes in a watchful, careful circuit without ever losing focus on the object of her attention below.
So when Whéuri unclasped the bow from her back, Alira did the same, and Kora followed her too. They might not be able to see what the huntress saw—or even hear what she heard—but they knew enough to be ready.
Minutes passed. The jungle seemed quiet. Finally, Whéuri gave a nod to Bryt.
The man, his own bow still on his back, slid down off the branch, using his last grip on its stony bark to swing himself down to another branch below. Level by level, he dropped toward the ground, his passing marked only by the occasional shifting of leaves and the scattered moments when he didn’t disappear against his background.
Whéuri watched Bryt descend. The older woman’s eyes twinkled with the passion that Alira had more than once heard them share.
Learning that a woman could enjoy a man for something more than his necessary seed of breeding was among the hardest lessons Alira had been made to learn among the Stormborn. It was unheard of elsewhere in the Fair Isles. One of the last things she’d said to her friend Bela—just seconds before a surprise Windborn attack destroyed their ship, killed everyone aboard, and brought Alira here to this island by the grace of the Mother Sea—was that women weren’t meant to be with men outside of begetting. Bela had been telling her a story of seeing such a thing, and Alira had felt her friend’s secret yearning for it, but she’d told Bela it was wrong. Whéuri and the Stormborn had welcomed Alira, had taught her to leave her past behind and look only to the future, but that night—that look of pain in Bela’s eyes—was something that she could not forget. Especially now, when she saw how close Whéuri could be with Bryt, how different things were among the Stormborn. Bela would have been happy here, Alira thought, except she knew her friend would never leave the sea. Bela was Seaborn more truly than anyone she’d ever known.
Her friend had saltwater in her veins.
Kora shifted on the branch, the bark making a scraping sound beneath her feet. Alira’s eyes snapped up to her, and Whéuri’s did too. They couldn’t see her face behind the wooden guard, but Alira didn’t doubt that her cheeks were red.
“Things don’t feel right. Look at the tree,” the older huntress whispered, and she flicked her gaze back down toward the jungle floor. Bryt was nearly there.
Alira looked down too. As it approached the earth, the trunk of the Furywood tree was like a tower wall. At its base, its great roots had cracked the earth as they spread out, as if the tree was the arm of Father Sky, reaching down from on high to grip the earth, its fingers clutching deep. For a moment, Alira almost opened her mouth to say that she saw nothing wrong—it looked the same as the many other mature Furywood trees on the island—but then she noticed that fronded plants were growing on some of the burled knuckles of those godlike fingers.
Alira had learned that there were certain plants that could take root upon Furywood saplings and kill them. For the Stormborn who called the tall trees home, one eye was always on the watch for such harms, and a knife was always ready to cut them back if spotted. But all those that Alira had seen were thick, choking vines. Nothing with fronds. And nothing on a mature tree such as this.
Bryt was perched just above the fronds now. His eyes looked from them to the dense pack of the surrounding jungle. He made a birdcall—a high tone, falling away.
Whéuri nodded, hooked her bow onto her back once more. As Alira and Kora did the same, the older huntress gave them a nod and then slipped down to a lower branch. Moments later, Alira and Kora did the same. Whatever was growing upon the tree’s roots—whatever might be out there—they would see it soon.