Prologue #2
For an eternity of seconds, they waited. Then a thin trail of dust billowed as lumberjacks retreated from the logging site. They weren’t making any noise beyond their ragged breathing and the heavy stomp of their boots. They had no breath for shouting.
Beyond them, other things moved in the distance. Things that weren’t human.
“Run!” one guard screamed. “Hurry!”
When the largest group made it through the gates, the guards began to shut the doors. “Barig’s still out there!” someone screamed.
“Close it now,” Abhigan ordered. “They won’t make it in time!”
There was no other option. Abhigan found himself almost glad when the trees caught the men before they’d reached the safe passage through the field. Had it been otherwise, they might’ve revealed the safe route, would’ve …
Wait. What was he saying? These were grimmocks. They weren’t intelligent. Grimmocks were cursed creations of black sorcery. They couldn’t think.
He flinched and looked away when the men screamed. He tried to stop his ears to the sound of tearing flesh and breaking limbs. A sharp thunk sounded as the lumberjacks finally closed the gate.
They’d left it open, even when he’d ordered otherwise.
He wanted to yell at them, but at least the gate was shut. The grimmocks hadn’t made it inside. They were safe.
Except he didn’t feel safe. He peered over the palisade and saw the monsters, really saw them, for the first time.
They were trees. Regular trees. Just trees that somehow could move the way trees never moved and couldn’t move and this couldn’t be happening …
The sun shone, a light breeze blew. There wasn’t a cloud anywhere in the sky.
Thunder echoed, though. Oh yes, thunder sounded the first time a monster staggered into the bombard field.
The men, Abhigan included, covered their ears against the strength of that boom.
An enormous pile of dirt and splintered wood flew into the air.
When the ringing subsided, the men were cheering.
Then they stopped. There had been exactly one explosion, and no more after.
Abhigan turned back to see what the trees were doing.
Nothing. Nothing at all. It was as though the forest had always started just beyond the bombard field. Then the branches moved. There was a sense of … undulation. But nothing entered the field; the trees slid to the side.
Another tree moved into that open space.
Only, not any tree. From its size and shape, Abhigan felt certain this was one of the big trees he’d ordered cut down—one of the “Three Queens.” It was an oak tree, albeit an oak tree strangely red along its lower trunk and roots.
Oh. No, that was blood.
No one made a sound. Then one man said, loudly, “Is that … is that a woman?”
It was. And it wasn’t. It felt like someone had set multiple paintings in front of Abhigan’s eyes, again and again. Tree. Woman. Tree. Woman. Tree. Woman—
The Queen of Oaks was a woman and yet still a tree.
She had no hair but branches that sprouted from her head like antlers, and no clothing save for the suggestion of different thicknesses of bark and leaves and vegetal matter.
Her skin, too, seemed less skin than smooth bark, and if she had legs at all, he couldn’t see them.
There was just the trunk and roots, joined smoothly to her hips.
More branches that seemed like arms, raised up.
She had a face and lips and, most terrifyingly, eyes.
Those eyes focused on the palisades, the camp, on the bombard field encircling it. Intelligent, aware eyes.
She turned her face to the sky; the wind pulling at her leaves strengthened. A second thunderclap rocked through the air, but farther away.
Clouds scuttled across the sky, faster than any Abhigan had ever seen before. Dark gray storm clouds moved to cover the sun like a curtain drawn over a window. That fast, that unnatural.
Grimmocks couldn’t think. Grimmocks couldn’t cast spells.
It began to rain.
Abhigan shouted: “Have we sent out the messenger birds? We must send word to the knights!”
The tree woman could summon rain. But, so what?
The palisade walls protected them. The camp had a lightning rod.
If she tried to overrun their position, she’d run into the bombard traps, wouldn’t she?
Everyone would shelter in the permanent buildings—the kitchen or the woodshed—and wait until the knights arrived.
Everything would be fine.
Abhigan was so busy reassuring himself that everything would be fine, he missed whether anyone had answered his question about the birds.
Maybe they didn’t have birds. He hadn’t checked, had he?
No. They must have birds. The company was paying the knights for a location sign. They had to be. Kegomar … the company hadn’t canceled that to save costs, had they?
Had he decried that as an unnecessary expense?
Someone whimpered. He whipped around in case that heralded some fresh horror, but it was just … it was just everything that had already happened. The men were catching their breaths. That was all the opportunity fear needed to sink in its claws. For himself, he was …
It all seemed distant. Unreal. Like a dream.
He wanted to wake up.
It began to hail.
Small at first, but the hailstones grew larger by the second.
Abhigan dashed for cover even as a lumberjack screamed for everyone else to do the same. Ice the size of cherries, of plums, hit him on the arms, on the side of his head, before he reached shelter. The wood roof overhead shuddered, the ice a barrage, like cannon fire …
Catimus Abhigan turned white when the first boom echoed, when he realized what it meant.
He’d been wrong. Again, he’d been wrong: the trees had summoned hail to clear the bombard field.
Once every explosive had triggered, once the field was scoured clean, only the wooden palisades would separate the men from the Queens and their monster forest.
It would be no protection.
Maybe if he begged. Maybe if he sank to his knees and begged for forgiveness …
He could beg. He could do that.
Thunderous booms echoed all around them, so tightly spaced it all merged into one enormous, deafening roar.
Then nothing, except for the fading patter of hail and then …
Silence.
No one moved as they listened to the sound of—no, it wasn’t silence. It was the gentle sound of a forest in the wind, the susurrus of rustling leaves and shaking branches. Abhigan had always found that sound soothing, but not that day. Now the sound meant something else.
“What was that?” someone whispered.
Catimus Abhigan didn’t listen for an answer. He already knew what that sound meant.
Death.