Whéuri had already reached the ground by the time Alira and Kora dropped down from the lowest of the tree’s massive branches. She and Bryt stood beside one of the exposed roots of the Furywood, staring at a rounded burl at the base that was as wide as they were tall. The strange, fronded plants were growing in a circle around the top edge of it, almost like a leafy crown.
“I’ve never seen such a thing,” Bryt whispered.
None of them had. The plants were like squat, trunkless palms, their fronds growing in bunches. Alira reached out and touched the leaves on one of the stiff stalks. They were sharp at the edges, like thin green blades. It reminded her of something she might’ve once seen, but she couldn’t remember where or when.
Whéuri’s eyes, visible over her face guard, were uneasy as she looked around at the surrounding jungle. “This isn’t right.”
Bryt knelt down, lowered his guard, and pulled back his hood for a closer look at where the plants met the Furywood. “The burl’s been split.” He pointed, and Alira could see the vertical lines running down the sides of the rounded knuckle of wood. They looked like scars, once-open wounds that had been filled up with the new growth of the strange plant.
“Are the plants splitting it?” Kora asked. Even as she said it, her tone made clear what a preposterous notion that was. Furywood had a strength like stone. Alira had seen that herself when she and Bela first came to Myst Mahaki with the crew of the Black Crow to watch the Furywood reaping. Even snapped open and fired by the lightning of the god of storms, the tree trunks were dulling the axes they’d been using to fell and plank them.
Bryt shook his head. “The lines are too straight.”
“Tools did this,” Alira said.
“But if we didn’t do it,” Kora said, her voice already starting to shake with the answer she suspected, “then who—?”
“Bloodborn,” Whéuri whispered.
Alira, pulling her attention from the Furywood burl, saw that the older huntress had her bow out, and she was staring at another group of trees, growing in a pool of light. They were the size of Furywood saplings—the height of a tall woman—and they had the upright stance of those great trees, but their branches were far more tightly bunched. They were lined up across a gap in the Furywood canopy.
Alira swallowed hard.
They were lined up. Straight. Evenly spaced.
Wild-born trees didn’t grow like that. Planted ones did.
Whéuri had silently nocked an arrow. Alira did too. Her mind flashed with how Kora had stumbled out of the jungle, covered in the blood of her family.
“We should leave,” Kora begged. “Alira, please.”
“A shattered tree, a hearkened sea,” Whéuri whispered. “A tattered sail, a hardened gale.”
Alira blinked, caught between her fear and her confusion. “What? A shattered tree?”
“A Stormborn prophecy,” Bryt said from behind them.
Whéuri nodded slowly, then froze, her head cocked to one side. “Mother! Their leaves are glowing.” She was still looking at the planted line. She took a step toward them.
It was true. The leaves of the trees were white under green, but where their pale undersides were visible, the white was shot through with a faint yellow glow, as if their veins were filled with molten gold.
Bryt was still kneeling, still examining the base of the frond plants where they’d been grafted into the Furywood. “There’s something else on these roots here. A fungus, maybe?”
He was reaching out. Alira was staring at the glow of those distant leaves. How familiar it was. How it reminded her of Mabaya, the evoker on the Black Crow—how she’d glowed each time she’d inhaled her precious Char to weave her magick.
Alira’s heart stopped.
The rootfields behind the gates of the Spire. Where the evokers gathered the Char that made their magick. That was where she’d seen fronds like those grafted onto the root.
Alira spun. But Bryt had already touched the yellow dust that grew along the roots of the fronds. He’d already brought it up to his face. “No!” she shouted.
But it was too late. Bryt had sniffed at it, breathed it in.
As a child, Alira had dreamed of being an evoker. She’d counted down the days until her twelfth year, when a sybyl would come and cast the Char-weaving to judge her womb and her will. For nights on end, she’d made the same prayer to every goddess and god of the Nine—that her womb would be found unfit for begetting in the Hall of Matrons, and that her will would be found worthy for the life of an evoker in the Spire. The sybyl had agreed, and so she’d been given the Trial of Light. But it had taken only a heartbeat to learn that she was incapable of magick, that she was a mundane. When the sybyl gave her a tiny bit of Char, when Alira breathed it into her lungs, the pain had burst through her like an eruption, as if the sun itself had exploded behind her eyes. She’d screamed for hours.
The sybyl had offered up only a few specks of the fine golden dust for the Trial. That was all. Hardly even enough to see.
Bryt inhaled far more.
He snapped backward, contorting as if a line between his heels and the back of his head had been suddenly pulled taut. His mouth flexed to the sky. He screamed, and it was a sound ripped from his soul.
Startled birds rattled from the trees. The whole jungle seemed to shudder in shock.
Whéuri spun around, dropping her bow and reaching back for him—reaching for her love—but Alira saw that Bryt’s fingers were still dusted with the golden Char. And there was so much more of it upon the roots of the fronded plants beside him. Holding her breath, she grabbed his shoulders and yanked him backward, away from the Furywood burl. As his arms flexed and whipped in agony, she rolled past them to grab the dusted hand. The fingers clenched like claws, but she shoved them into the dirt.
Whéuri was there. She slid to the ground above him, her eyes over his. “Bryt,” she kept repeating. “Bryt.”
He didn’t seem to hear her. His eyes were wide, the whites shot through with pink. He choked air through his screams, coughed a spray of blood across Whéuri’s face guard.
“To’whir’s mercy,” Kora mumbled. She was backing away in shock.
Whéuri, even in her horror, knew enough to try to hold her man down, to keep him from hurting himself. She threw her weight down on his shoulders, pinned his head between her thighs to still his thrashing.
Alira, once she was sure his hand was free of the Char, flipped herself over his kicking legs to do the same, though in her heart, she knew it didn’t matter. Not with what he’d taken in.
Whéuri looked up at her, an agony of confusion on her face. There were no evokers among the Stormborn.
“Char,” Alira said.
“Char?”
Alira nodded to the yellow dust on the plants. “Seaborn evokers use it. No one else can.”
“Magick,” Whéuri said.
Under their hands, Bryt stopped screaming and clenched his jaw against the pain. The sound of teeth striking teeth was a hideous crack.
Whéuri’s eyes whipped over to Kora. “Your bow! Bring it here!”
The command snapped the girl from her own horror. She darted forward, holding out her bow.
The older huntress, fighting Bryt’s bucking shoulders, gestured toward his face with her chin. There were tears in her eyes. “Wedge the grip into his mouth.”
“Wedge—?”
“Between his teeth! Give him something to bite on!”
The younger girl knelt beside him, stretched the bow over his face. It took all three of them to pry his jaws apart. His teeth and gums were smeared with red.
He bit down on the bow, wailing through the wood.
When their eyes met, Alira knew Whéuri’s unspoken question. She shook her head. “Nothing we can do,” she whispered.
Whéuri nodded. She flipped down her face guard and bent her trembling mouth toward his forehead. Her lips moved in words that were only for him.
Kora stood, stepped back—out of fear or out of respect, Alira didn’t know. Still holding Bryt’s legs, she closed her eyes and turned her head away, to give them what privacy she could.
As she did so, she heard a new sound. A sound she’d heard only once in life—though far too often in nightmares since. Behind Bryt’s screams, there was laughter in the woods. An animal sound, but a woman made it. Alira knew.
The laughter was answered by another. Far off. But coming closer.
Alira’s eyes shot open. She looked at Kora. The girl had heard it, too, and she was backing toward the Furywood tree, her eyes panicked like a cornered animal. She’d heard the sound on the night the Bloodborn slaughtered her family.
“Run,” Whéuri said.
“We can carry him,” Alira tried.
Whéuri shook her head. “You know we can’t.”
“Come with us, then.” Alira, reluctantly, started to rise.
Whéuri smiled through her tears. “You know I can’t.” She shifted around Bryt, easing her body down to replace Alira’s weight. He shook and struggled in his agony, but he didn’t writhe away.
“Please,” Alira said as she stood. “Please.”
“Take my bow,” Whéuri replied. Her voice was calm. Certain.
Alira looked at the weapon on the ground. “You’ll need—”
“Only my knife.” The huntress was lying over her man now, her eyes looking into his, searching for him past the screams.
Alira picked up Whéuri’s bow. She looked out in the direction of the laughter, expecting to see the Bloodborn already floating out of the shadows. Whéuri’s hand suddenly snatched at her ankle, making her jump. “Remember this,” the huntress said.
A shattered tree, a hearkened sea,
a tattered sail, a hardened gale,
and the gale scattered sail and sea.
A scattered hour, a sharpened power,
a battered land, a blackened hand,
and the hand shattered land and power.
Alira nodded. “What does it mean?”
Whéuri let go of her ankle. “You may find out.” The huntress, Alira saw, had her knife out of its scabbard. “Now go, Alira Stormborn,” she said. “Go and remember.”