Chapter 36
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
The sky was still gray with early morning light when we emerged from the tunnel into the Sylvanwild forest. Sunlight speared through the canopy in thin threads, turning the mist to spun gold where it touched the forest floor.
We had come so far from the cottage, I couldn’t even see it amidst the trees. Dorian’s mother really had been paranoid.
Or pragmatic.
She truly understood the cost of being unprepared.
Who had come through the front door that night? And where was his mother now?
Had her tunnel saved her, or not?
Dorian’s voice was low beside me, his breath light on my ear. “This is the deep forest.”
A shiver rippled through me. I forced myself not to turn, not to slip into the past. I couldn’t be in the past. I could only be in this moment.
Here was unlike anywhere I had seen in their lands.
Vines tangled the trees with yellow and red blooms so large I could have pressed my face into them where they touched the ground.
The air was thick and humid and heady with earth and sweet blossoms and the tang of fungi growing over the large rocks and fallen trees.
These felt like the truest, wildest depths of Sylvanwild, where the mythical creatures I’d learned about as a girl might actually roam.
It would have been beautiful if we weren’t being hunted.
“Go,” Dorian said. “Go now.”
I climbed from the tunnel’s entrance and light-stepped to the nearest tree some ten paces away. I pressed myself against its enormous trunk as Dorian had instructed, invisible and silent. Its bark was firm, lush, the base so wide around I could have built a home inside it.
I waited while he pushed the mossy stone that had been atop the tunnel’s entrance back over, and all evidence of the passage was gone. He crossed to a tree at a diagonal from me, surveyed, and signaled. I headed for the next tree ten paces on while he remained watchful.
We moved through the forest in this way, at diagonals.
We never moved at the same time, always waiting until the other had stopped before we jogged on to the next tree.
Dorian was always in the lead, and I always waited for his signal.
In this way we headed toward the falls. Not as quickly as we might have side by side, but like rabbits—paused, breathing, watchful.
The deep forest wasn’t like the rest of Sylvanwild. Here everything grew larger, the bushes pressed tighter, the vines slipped lower. But I didn’t feel the menace of the citadel, the grove, the wraiths.
Here felt purer, somehow. Untouched.
An hour in, Dorian stopped with a hand up. He stood statue-still, listening. I didn’t know what he was listening for, until—
A bird’s call. It echoed from deep in the forest, a vaguely familiar sound that pinged at my brain. I had heard that call before; it was unlike the other birds in the forest. The warble was faster.
Then I remembered.
That first night outside Sylvanwild, in the darkness, Dorian had saved me. He’d saved me a second after I’d heard that bird’s call.
Instinct clenched my muscles. Down. Down.
I threw myself to the ground against the tree I’d been standing beside. A whistle pierced the air, and the trunk above me cracked. Bark rained over me. Above me, a slender red-feathered arrow stuck out of the tree where my head had just been.
A Sylvanwild arrow. By now I knew those better than I did the guard’s.
My eyes met Dorian’s. His were wide.
Run, he mouthed.
I lurched into motion, my hands scrabbling over the ground, my boots sliding without purchase. I finally found forward motion just as the second arrow hit the trunk below the first one.
If I hadn’t moved, I’d be dead. Twice now in ten seconds.
I sprinted. I ran like I never had, at a pace so fast and headlong I didn’t have time to choose a direction. It was all I could do to find a path through the trees, to dodge low branches and fallen ones and tugging vines and bushes.
Who had found us? How? Had we been tracked? For an hour we’d been watchful, patient, slow, so careful—
Dorian was right. We couldn’t possibly contend with the other fae. We could only hope to evade them.
On my left, I sensed Dorian running in parallel. He appeared and disappeared and appeared again as we passed the huge trees.
He kept pace with me. His voice carried distantly through the thrumming blood in my ears and my boots hitting the ground. Keep going, Eury, he seemed to be saying, and every time I heard it I found I could run a little faster.
Then the forest thickened. Bushes rose taller than me, thorned and tighter spaced, forcing me to claw my way through. They obscured my view and slashed at my face, and I still kept running.
I ran and I ran until blood dripped from my cheeks, and when I finally emerged, I kept running.
I ran until, gasping, I registered Dorian hadn’t ever reappeared on my left.
His form wasn’t there, running alongside me.
His voice hadn’t sounded amongst the trees.
I ventured a glance to the left; no Dorian.
When I jerked around for a half second, I couldn’t see anyone or anything—just endless forest and that thicket I’d passed through.
I was running alone.
The exhaustion hit like a blow. My lungs were aflame, and I had begun to stagger. Blood dripped into one eye, stinging until I swiped it away. Ahead of me, the earth rose steeply, a ridge. I practically had to climb, slipping in the loam, to get to the top.
There, I pressed myself between two huge tree roots until I was mostly obscured against the trunk of an enormous tree. I collapsed there, breathing so hard and fast I saw white wisps. I couldn’t get enough air, and the blood kept dripping into my eyes.
Stop it, Eury. Don’t panic.
Panic would leave me dead. I had to focus.
I pressed my hands over my mouth to quiet my breathing until it slowed. Then I grabbed a handful of my cloak and wiped at my face. The blood kept dripping, mostly from a single cut on my forehead. I pressed my cloak against it.
My breathing quieted. My blood slowed enough for my ears to hear again.
I listened for footsteps, for birdcall, for any noise in the forest.
No footsteps. No birdcall. No Dorian.
I was alone.
I sat frozen there, in that small spot of safety between those tree roots, for twenty minutes before I understood that no one would come.
By his own admission, Dorian was no hunter. If anyone was going to find me out here, it would be the other fae. I had left a trail of my blood, after all, once I’d come through the thicket.
The funny thing about being human, as I’d come to learn since that battle in the southern district, was how close we really were to our animal instincts.
Because as soon as that truth—I was alone—settled over me, panic swelled again in my breast. It filled me like a draught of beer in a pub, rising so quickly to the lip of a mug it would foam over before you could stop pouring.
Panic wanted to take me. It wanted so badly to reduce me to the fetal position, to have me sobbing.
But it didn’t overtake me. Because Dorian had known this would happen. He had planned for it with his finger in the dirt, and as soon as I thought back to those minutes we’d spent in the tunnel I could have kissed his cheeks one by one.
I was still alive, which meant he was still alive somewhere out there. And if he was still alive, he would head to Virellan Falls as long as his legs still worked. Which meant I needed to head there, too.
No more waiting. I needed to go now, before anyone or anything found my blood on the ground. Or scented my fear.
But I needed to take care of myself first. I pulled my canteen free and forced down a long swallow.
I made myself eat. The dried rabbit meat was tough, salty, sticking to my teeth, but I needed the energy.
I washed the meat down, the water lukewarm and metallic, but it would keep my head from spinning and my knees from wobbling.
I lifted my face to the canopy, where the sunlight streamed through. It had a small slant, which meant it was about midday.
I used the sun’s slant to orient myself to the southeast. Then I rose. I did so with one hand over my breast, where my mother’s journal was tucked away.
Then I set off. Deep, deeper into Sylvanwild.
The forest pressed in, dense and endless. Only occasional gaps in the canopy let glimpses of the sun reach me, just enough to confirm I was headed in the right direction. I trusted I was still close enough to our original path that I wouldn’t veer too far south or east.
If I did, I’d be lost, and I would die out here. We would die.
The cuts on my face had stopped bleeding, but they stung everywhere: my forehead, my cheeks, my chin. The longer I walked, the more the air brushed over them, the more they throbbed, until it felt like my whole face was on fire.
These weren’t normal cuts. Which meant those weren’t normal bushes I’d sprinted through. In glimpses, they reminded me of the hedge from the maze.
What had that plant been called?
I kept walking, forcing my mind to dredge up the name. In my time at the citadel Haskel and Dorian had mentioned flora here and there. Some were edible, some medicinal, some deadly. The poisonous hedge—what was it?
There was blackmourne vine, the hanging vine with black blooms. That wasn’t it. Gloam bell, the drooping twilight flower. No.
Razorleaf.
The name punched into my mind. After the maze, I’d asked Haskel about the hedge one morning. It was a tall bush with serrated leaves coated in a natural toxin. The slightest scratch could drive the poison into your blood. And I had sprinted through it.
I was poisoned. Badly.
But for every poison in Sylvanwild, there was a cure. Haskel had said that the antidote for razorleaf was a delicate white flower with a yellow face: solacebloom. I just couldn’t remember where it grew. So all I could do was keep walking, scanning the ground, and pray to gods I wasn’t sure existed.
By midafternoon the trees began to thin, and a massive low rock appeared ahead. From a distance, it looked like a wall, but as I drew closer its shape came clear—smooth curves, a propped elbow, the gentle slope of a waist and hip, long legs sprawled in repose.
The reclined woman. I was halfway.
Tears blurred my vision. They fell, stung my raw face, but I couldn’t stop them. Sometimes the body took control of its own relief.
I moved faster now, keeping the sun always a little on my right.
I didn’t find solacebloom, though I did recognize an edible blue berry I’d seen children eat outside the citadel.
Frostbite berry, a little girl had called it.
I plucked until my fingers were raw, keeping watch like an animal as my fingers darted over the bush.
I ate the berries in one go, chewing fast, swallowing faster, before pressing forward at a limping walk.
The sun was getting low. It would be down by six, and then the darkness would overtake me and I would be done. And I couldn’t be done. Not like this.
My face had begun to swell. My eyelids had become puffy, partially obscuring my vision. My lips were getting fat, and it was harder to swallow.
Somewhere in that haze of pain, I heard it: the faint hum of water. I froze, straining to listen.
I stopped. I wasn’t sure if it was a dying delusion.
No, that was the hum of rushing water. For anyone who’d grown up in the Kingdom of Storms, it was unmistakable.
I ran toward it, less graceful than I’d been in my whole life. And when I came to the pebbly river and its crystalline water, I dropped to my knees beside it and drove my burning face into the cold stream.