Woods
They discovered the man buried under a collapsed section of palisade fence. He was sweaty, dirty, babbling, but otherwise unharmed.
Physically.
Mentally was a different matter.
“No, no, no,” the man muttered, rocking back and forth. “For the Queen, for the Queen, we must be good for the Queen. Everything is for the Queen.”
Captain Yihura raised an eyebrow. “You mean the empress?”
“Gray and gray and gray and then green, green everywhere. You understand, yes? The time of gray is over. It’s green from now on.
” The survivor stared up with wide brown eyes, but he didn’t look at the surrounding people so much as through them.
He wrapped his arms around his legs and continued rocking.
He wasn’t a lumberjack—not large enough, not dressed for it. His shirt was too fine; his skin was too soft. He looked like a banker caught somewhere he didn’t belong.
Captain Rabu rolled his eyes. “What’s your name? And what in all the seas happened here?”
The man’s eyes snapped up. “The Green.”
“What?” more than one person asked.
“The Green,” he repeated. “The Green happened here.” His gaze dropped.
“We hurt the Queen. We woke up the Queens. I tried to apologize, but they didn’t understand.
” A tiny frown dropped the corner of his mouth.
“Or they don’t care. Probably that last one.
I never realized trees were so…” He shook his head. “Green.”
More than one knight inhaled with ill-concealed exasperation.
Captain Yihura bent down next to the man. “What’s your name?”
He hesitated. “I used to be called Catimus.”
“Used to be?”
He turned away and refused to say more.
Captain Rabu rubbed his chin. “Great. I’m unsettled.”
Lieutenant Nuhzar cleared his throat. “We found another body, Captain. Dead, but intact.”
The banker’s eyes widened; he leaned away from the lieutenant.
Captain Rabu noticed the motion and pointed to the man. “Someone take him away. Put him with the horses.” He gave a considered look to Captain Yihura, as if to say: What next?
“I walked the perimeter of the bombard field,” she replied to the unasked question. “No sign of bodies being moved. No drag marks or blood trails.” She gestured around the camp. “There should be over a hundred bodies here. This isn’t more than a few dozen.”
“How can you tell?” Lieutenant Nuhzar muttered.
“I’m guessing the majority never made it back to camp.” Her shoulders slumped with exhaustion. “Let’s go look at the intact one, then—” She glanced back at the tree line. “I have a theory I want to test.”
Lieutenant Nuhzar directed them to the intact corpse.
Now this was a lumberjack, dressed in sturdy—if blood-splattered—clothing, with massive shoulders and arms thick from hard labor.
The partial collapse of a storeroom had shielded the body.
It lay positioned on its back, perfectly straight, as though someone was readying it for burial.
The man had only died that morning, but the body was already bloated and stretched taut against his shirt until it resembled an ill-fitted sausage casing. The man’s skin was livid near his shirt neckline. His fingers were plump worms, shapeless and fat.
The three captains, Mathaiik, and a handful of knights all stared down at the revealed body.
Captain Rabu sucked on his teeth as he examined it. “Okay, I give up. Anybody got a clue what killed him?”
That … did seem to be the question.
The body was undeniably dead, but lacking any visible injuries. But in a worst-case scenario—if he was right about how the plants had been killing people—the plants targeted unprotected skin. This man hadn’t left much available. He’d been bundled up from foot to neck.
Math tilted his head, carefully stepped backward and around the others, so he could look at the body from a different angle.
He saw it: the man had punctures in his boots, one on each side, right between the hard leather soles and the softer upper lift. The holes would be easy to overlook, easy to discount as normal signs of wear, or a poor cobbler’s work.
But it wasn’t any of that. Math’s mouth felt dry.
Why wasn’t the body ripped to pieces?
Then he noticed a detail that rabbited his pulse and raised all the hairs on his skin.
No flies. None at all. Not even buzzing near the corpse. It was wrong, like even decay had been warned away.
The world seemed to slow down, stretch thin and taut and so fragile, as Math watched Captain Rabu reach down to turn the body over. “Injury must be on his back…”
“No, Captain! Don’t—”
It was too late. Captain Rabu grabbed a shoulder and tugged. The body moved with a horrifying, wet, meaty sound, too flexible, too soft. It sloshed. Not like flesh—like something inside it moved. A wrongness that didn’t belong in anything human.
Captain Rabu let the body fall back, making a disgusted sound. He then gave Math a questioning stare.
Math flushed. “There aren’t any flies,” he tried to explain. “I thought it must be a trap.” He felt his face growing redder by the moment.
Lieutenant Nuhzar stared at Math with undisguised incredulity. “Only you,” he sneered, “would be fool enough to think that a rotting corpse could somehow be a trap.”
Math knew better than to defend himself. That only made them dig deeper.
“Nah,” Captain Rabu said. “Leave off him, Nuhzar. He has good instincts. Remember how that last flare-up with the Kaliri had them putting bombard mines under the bodies of our people, rigged to blow if they’re moved?
Pretty sure grimmocks aren’t capable of something like that, though. ” He gave Math a wink.
Lieutenant Nuhzar’s eyes hardened at the captain’s correction, although nothing else about his expression changed. “Yes, Captain. With your permission, I’d like to check the perimeter.”
Captain Rabu waved his lieutenant away.
Nuhzar spared Math a lethal glare as he passed, as if Math had committed the unforgivable crime of not embarrassing himself enough in front of his commanding officer.
Captain Yihura gazed off toward the woods, her expression pensive. “Funny you should mention the Kaliri…”
Rabu raised both eyebrows. “You’re kidding.”
“Maybe not,” the Captain of Forests said.
“The distress summons said grimmocks, but these people couldn’t tell a grimmock from a giraffe.
They were being attacked by things that shouldn’t attack them.
That’s all they knew. Everything here looks normal.
The trees are healthy. Nothing’s growing here that shouldn’t be.
It’s just a theory. But it makes more sense than grimmocks evolving coordinated ambush tactics.
A grim witch using their powers to control plants is more likely. ”
“And the missing men have been taken prisoner?” Rabu set his fists against his hips and cast his gaze around the camp. Clearly, he liked this theory more and more with every passing second. “The Kaliri did it” was an explanation with which the captain had experience.
Math was equally certain that was not what was going on, but no one would take him seriously if he said so.
After all, everyone knew how Math felt about plants.
“It doesn’t explain why we can’t find footprints.” Captain Yihura pointed toward the shifted tree line and raised her voice. “Betan, Calxi, cut one of those trees down.” To Rabu’s perplexed look, she explained, “Tree rings will tell me if these were grown recently.”
Math still squatted next to the only intact corpse, tapping his fingers on a knee. Why was this one left whole when all the others had been ripped apart?
The small green vines were what was truly bothering him.
They were too horrifyingly familiar. If Captain Yihura was right and this was the work of Kaliri witches, that was a problem, too, because it meant the Kaliri had developed an attack that would be difficult to defend against. At the same time—
A loud crack of splitting wood filled the air. Simultaneously, someone screamed.
Math stood and turned toward the noise, toward where everyone’s attention was focused.
A tree, the one that Captain Yihura’s people had wasted no time cutting down with magic. Both knights seemed hale; it wasn’t clear who had screamed.
A gushing stream of crimson poured from both sides of the felled tree’s trunk. It wasn’t sap. It looked like …
Was that blood?
Math’s view was blocked by the knights, jockeying with each other to see what had happened.
Captain Rabu raised his voice. “What in the Tri-Mother’s garden is going on over there?”
“We found the body of a lumberjack, Captain,” a knight answered. “It was still alive inside the tree trunk.”
“Was,” someone else agreed.
Math felt a frisson of horror. He couldn’t have been the only one, either, because the field grew quiet. Everyone studied the copse of trees that Captain Danvi said hadn’t been there earlier.
Math was willing to bet that there was one tree for every missing man. Also, that the Kaliri had nothing to do with this.
“Call everyone back,” Captain Rabu ordered. “We’ll stay in the camp where it’s safe.”
At which point, the corpse they’d been standing next to exploded.