Huntress: Part III

They camped within a copse of oaks that night.

The road widened ahead, but the murky twilight made it difficult to see.

The bearded man took a step forward, but he still brandished his sword before him.

In the daylight, the path would have been an easy walk, but in the dusk—brightened only by the flickering torches—it was an obstacle course.

There was a clearing just past him, and a long rectangular hole gaped open in the ground.

They saw the corpse of an inhuman creature, its arms wrapped around bended knees, its head lolling sideways onto the ground.

From its fingertips, nails like long green blades of grass extended, curling over mottled, barklike skin.

Niran led them through the main gate and past the smithy, the forge still smoldering, and then into the main hall, next to a kitchen where a fire burned in an open pit.

Now there were only trees, their gray-brown trunks scaled with lichen, and every so often the sound of a squirrel or rabbit bounding through the underbrush.

She sat on the bench and stared at it, wonder­ ing who had made it, who had imbued such life into the way the ears tilted.

Other villagers brought more of the flat bread, some stuffed with pickled greens or mushrooms culled from the Wood; and one family brought two jugs of home brewed spirits.

There was no talk of bad harvests or strange creatures; it was as if everyone had tacitly agreed to pretend that nothing was wrong, and the only thing on their minds was celebrating Shae’s brief return home.

It was as if a door had briefly opened, and behind it there was sunlight, warm and rich and seductive.

Taisin began to giggle, and then they were both bent over double, clutching the twigs and branches to their chests as they guffawed, their voices ringing in the twilight Wood.

All at once the gaps in her knowledge seemed too great, and a cloud of panic engulfed her.

She dreamed of sunlight spreading like honey over her skin; she dreamed of sweat sliding down between her shoulder blades as she ran down sweltering alleyways behind the palace.

“I could have—I should have done a protection ritual. Around the camp.”

Taisin met her eyes somberly.

Taisin walked in a circle around the perimeter, marking it with stones or branches.

“I want to sit vigil with him tonight.”

Taisin had taken out her small brassbound trunk and opened it, but now she paused with her hand on a glass vial.

Milk-vetch root, dried and ground up in yellowish brown crystals, for strength. Fox nut, pounded into a pale powder, for life energy. The barest sprinkle of dragon bone scrapings, like minuscule white petals, for power. Taisin combined them all in an iron bowl, stirring them together with her index finger.

It took every effort to ignore it, to focus instead on the elusive thread of energy that had come so easily to her when she had seen that purple flower.

She pulled herself away from Kaede, feeling the link between them stretching like a gossamer thread.

Some of it was residue from the circle of protection she had woven, but some of it was darker, more malevolent.

The visions had come more often since she entered the Wood, and sometimes they came at particularly inopportune moments.

Or when she was gathering firewood, she would catch sight of that winged creature again, flying high against icicles hanging like teeth from a cavernous ceiling.

Everything was richly green: the color of newly budded leaves, of luminescent moss, of every possible shade of pine needle.

When Taisin and Con returned to camp, Shae had brewed strong black tea for them, and Kaede and Pol had already disassembled the tents.

The wolves’ brindled backs were a sea of matted fur and muscle between her and Pol.

As he approached the melee, a wolf charged him.

She surveyed the scene: the wolves’ bodies splayed in a circle around them; the mauled packhorse, with their gear strewn across the forest floor; their four skittish mounts huddled together; Con bent over Shae on the ground.

Though he was tall as a wolf, he moved differently, and his brown eyes lacked the feral sharpness she had seen in those beasts.

She looked innocuous, but he knew that a helpless old woman could never survive on her own in the Great Wood.

“Are you making a tonic?” Taisin had learned about healing tonics at the Academy, but her knowledge of them was limited to the relatively harmless brew she had made for Shae the night before. It had not kept the pain away for long.

He stared at the fire with a dour expression.

Kaede considered the old woman’s impish expression.

“Oh, maps,” Mona said, her voice lilting. “What have maps to do with anything? They do not show the true path.”

She added with an arch smile, “Perhaps the most arrogant ones. The Fairy Queen, of course, purports to rule them all.”

“I have been to the river, but never forded it. You will be safe enough on this side if you keep quiet about your destination—the Wood listens, you know. But on the other side, it is not a place for humans.”

It was as though Mona had once been marked, but had since chosen to efface the symbol—or to erase it.

The two days at Mona's cottage had been a reprieve from cold reality, but now, as they made their way down an overgrown trail that surely hadn’t seen human traffic in generations, that reality returned.

Kaede lunged toward her horse, grabbing onto the stirrups beneath the water and kicking back with her legs.

She knew that those waves would push her inexorably toward the beach, and she and her brothers used to laughingly skim along their crests until they were spit out on the sand.

They heard Con returning, his footsteps seeming inordinately loud.