Alira sat in the shadows, away from the bars of her cage, counting. When a hundred seconds had passed since the last of the Bloodborn footsteps, she unstrapped her face shield as quickly as she could and set it to the rope lashings that held her prison together. The Bloodborn had taken her weapons before they’d locked her inside, but they’d left her the flip-up fence of woven branches meant to help protect her, to help her blend into the forest. It was, for them, a mockery. One more sign of her failure to protect her people.
But while the tightly lashed pieces of cut wood were far from a weapon, Alira had discovered they could work as a kind of rudimentary saw—a blunt and fragile saw, but a reason for hope nonetheless.
Working it back and forth against the lashings, she could see, now and again, the smallest of fibers fraying.
It had been days. It would take days more.
Looking through the bars to Kora’s cage, she saw that the younger girl was doing the same thing with her own face guard. Slower, though. The attack had snapped something in her shoulder, and the Bloodborn had no reason to help mend it or even provide her with a sling to ease the pain. With only one good arm, there was only so fast and so hard that she could move the wood.
No matter, Alira thought. Once she was out, she’d let Kora out too. The cages were simple things. The front opened by swinging up and was only kept from doing so by a single pole driven into the ground in front of the door—too tall and heavy for a prisoner to lift from inside, but simple enough to pull by a person standing on the outside.
The only question was whether she’d have enough time. It seemed clear that the Bloodborn—wherever they were taking their prisoners, whatever they were doing with them—were saving the two huntresses for last. Making them watch, helplessly, as the rest were taken away, not to be seen again. Mockery after mockery.
Alira sawed even harder against the lashings.
After she let Kora out, they’d open the rest of the cages together. Most of the other prisoners huddled in silent despair inside them—stares blank, unresponsive until they broke into panicked wails the moment they were pulled out and dragged away. But Alira had to believe that they would wake up, snap out of the clouds that lay heavy upon their minds, if she and Kora managed to open their cages and set them free. They’d fight. They had to.
After that—well, after that, there were a lot of unknowns. All Alira knew was what they could see from their cages and what they’d seen being dragged in.
It wasn’t much.
They were upriver. That much seemed clear. After the attack, the Bloodborn had driven them uphill in the rain, herding them with fear and magick. It was a winding path, through some of the densest jungle Alira had seen on the island, but eventually it led to a village huddled at the foot of the interior mountains, up against the gorge of a river that could only be the one that ran down to Anjel. The initial part of the village could have been a twin for the one that she and Bela had found, so long ago: wood-walled homes perched on wooden stilts, lining a simple central road. Back then, the village had been abandoned, save for the Bloodborn evoker and the strange crystals hidden in a stone-built temple at the end of that road. Here, now, the village huts housed dozens of Bloodborn women, who smiled with sharpened teeth as they watched the new prisoners pass by. An old stone bridge arched over the river at the end of the road, then made two switchbacks up the higher bank on the other side to reach a great building of stone half-swallowed by the vines and trees of the jungle. It looked like part of the river had been diverted through the enormous building: a chute extended out through a rough-hewn hole in its side, and a weak stream trickled down from the end of it into the running waters below.
Whatever the strange building had been, it was a ruin now. The prisoners, taken inside, were led down a short corridor into what might once have been a great hall but was now a kind of large, open courtyard. A few rotting timbers, hung with moss and speckled with fungus and ferns, reached across the open space above them—skeletal ribs that whispered the memory of what had once been a roof.
The first things that had caught Alira’s eye when they’d corralled her into the great hall were the two long, wooden planters that extended down each side of it. The planters were filled with dark dirt and a line of trees in various stages of growth. Cages for the prisoners—so many of them faces she’d never seen before—were lined up against either side of the planters, four rows in all. The cages were simple but effective: poles of wood lashed together with cords of rope, their back walls hanging over shallow trenches that pooled stinking piss and shit against the base of the planters.
Alira’s initial thought for escape from her cage had, in fact, been the toilet trench itself. But it hadn’t taken long to realize that there was stone beneath the excrement. It couldn’t be dug deeper, and it was too shallow to serve as anything but a way to pass something from one cage to the one beside it—which could already be done through the open bars anyway.
The only way out would be to cut the ropes holding the cages together.
So Alira and Kora moved their face guards back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth.
The building went on beyond the great hall, but when prisoners were taken into those farther corridors, only their screams returned. What was there, Alira didn’t know. But she felt it was evil. Whatever it was, she was determined to destroy it once she escaped.
And the trees too.
As she’d sawed at the thick ropes during the stolen minutes between the passing of the guards, Alira had found herself staring at those trees in the planters. And every time she looked at them, she grew more fearful. They were upright, straight as arrows, like mature but impossibly shrunken Furywood trees. That alone was enough to summon memories of terror, but their leaves were unmistakable: white under green, but veined with shimmering gold.
They were the same kind of tree that she’d seen in the clearing where Whéuri and Bryt were lost.
A picture was emerging. Somehow—Alira suspected it had something to do with the power of the crystals they were collecting—the Bloodborn had grafted the Char-producing plants of the evokers to the Furywood burl. That’s what they’d stumbled across, what had killed Bryt.
The Bloodborn had created a crossbreed: the strength of the Furywood made compact and small, then infused with the magick of Char.
She’d seen what a small band of the Bloodborn could do with their blood magick. What greater power these new trees could give them, she didn’t want to contemplate.
She only wanted to see it destroyed.
A prisoner in another cage—one of a handful who were still awake, still willing to fight to survive—whistled quietly. Alira stopped sawing. She scooted to the other side of her cage and fastened her face guard back into position. To have it off would only raise suspicion.
Looking over, she could see that Kora had done the same. Cradling her bad arm, the younger woman gave her a single determined nod.
Moments later, one of the Bloodborn came into view. Alira, trying to seem as lifeless as the rest of the prisoners, watched her through the corner of her eyes.
It was someone new. That was clear at a glance. Most of the Bloodborn wore rag-like clothing, but this woman wore the sandals and red-orange robes that Alira instantly recognized as the clothes of a Seaborn evoker. She even had the same kind of small leather satchel at her hip, its strap crossed over to the opposite shoulder, which evokers used to carry the golden dust of their Char. For the briefest of heartbeats, Alira felt a surge of hope that somehow, word of the Bloodborn had reached the Spire on faraway Myst Wera, and that the High Sybyl had sent a powerful evoker to destroy them. But then she saw how the woman walked past the cages, indifferent to whether they were empty or occupied with broken prisoners.
And there was her hair, Alira abruptly realized. Every evoker she’d ever met or seen had been bald—a result, it was said, of their use of Char—but this woman had long, greasy, brown hair.
Had she somehow killed an evoker and stolen the woman’s robes? More frightening, was she an evoker who’d joined the Bloodborn?
Whoever she was, the woman walked slowly down the path between the cages. She wasn’t as old as Mabaya had been, but she carried herself with the same intimidating confidence of the Black Crow’s magicker. Everything about her made Alira’s skin tingle with fear.
When the woman came close beside her cage, Alira focused on the satchel. Every evoker she’d seen had a mark branded upon the leather flap, denoting the school of her magick. The ember’s triple flame of fire. The delver’s mark of earth. The forger’s of metal, or the drifter’s of water. The Bloodborn women who’d attacked Anjel had been weavers of some sort—the rare evokers who could bind air. But they’d done it using blood, not Char. They’d not had satchels. This woman did. And it was marked with the five-limbed tree of a tender. She was an evoker of wood. Just like Mabaya.
Alira stared, uncomprehending, and only just managed to turn away when the Bloodborn woman seemed to sense her eyes and looked over.
It was only a moment. And then the woman stepped through a small path between two cages farther down the row. Lifting the forward edge of her robes almost daintily, she hopped over the stinking trench of refuse and up onto the tree-filled planter. Then she began walking carefully along its edge, examining the strange trees.
As slowly as she could, Alira shifted positions so she could better see what the woman was doing.
She had a knife in a sheath at her side, on the opposite hip from her satchel. Alira could see it now, as the woman pulled it free. A sliver of the thinnest blade she’d ever seen, it glinted as she moved past the trees, slicing a leaf from each as easily as it cut the air itself.
With every cut, there was a pale-yellow flash. Like the gold of Char, but less a physical dust than a shimmer of power being released. The woman smiled, a look on her face that Alira remembered from the faces of women just back from the sea, finishing their first mug of rum.
Now the woman paused in front of one of the most mature of the trees, not far from Alira’s cage. She stared at it. Her lips moved in something that might have been a prayer. And then she raised her hands and wove in the air. No blood. No Char.
The tree’s leaves shook and parted. Its branches spread, a sight that seemed almost obscene.
In glimpses past the woman’s elbow and arm, Alira saw the trunk of the tree. At first, it looked like there was a thick knot there, the wound of some cutaway limb. But it was too large to have been the seat of a branch. And as the woman moved, Alira made it out more clearly. The tree was cracked open, split. The woman reached into that gaping wound, the exposed heart of the tree, and delicately pulled from it a single seed.
She waved her hands again, and the wound closed up, the branches relaxed, and the leaves—less luminous, less alive—sighed back into place.
The Bloodborn magicker, holding the seed between her fingers, brought it up into the light. Then, satisfied, she slipped it into the leather satchel.
Twice more, she took seeds from the trees. Twice more, they seemed to be dying in her wake.
And then her thin knife was at her side again, and she was gone, back into the farther recesses of the ruin, where prisoners were taken to scream and be silenced.
Staring at the trees, not understanding what she’d seen, Alira counted to a hundred. Then she pulled off her face guard and once more began to saw.