Chapter 13 Brynn
Brynn
Brynn woke shivering, a squirming Guin in her lap. Everything was cold and while she was not quite wet, there was a kind of perpetual dampness that came with being in the forest.
She set the puppy down, letting Guin bounce and pace in all directions. Guin sniffed in an easy circle, marking her territory and chewing on the ferns curiously.
Brynn relieved herself and tried to ignore the gnawing in her stomach. Drawing her shawl tighter around her shoulders, Brynn considered her options. She had few. As it was, she didn’t speak the language, and she was obviously Hyldish.
Perhaps she should yield to the Valdari. They would have had time to think over this whole situation and perhaps things had calmed down. But a part of her knew that whoever she might be able to find in order to surrender, they would not be understanding.
Cenric had to be under guard, else he would have found his way to her by now. With Snapper’s help, she should have been easy to find.
Breathing deep, Brynn closed her eyes and reached out for ka.
This forest was ancient, a place where life and death had intersected, overlapped, and comingled for eons.
Brynn would be surprised if this place hadn’t already been old by the time the First of Fathers had arrived on these shores.
Brynn could feel life seeped into the very earth, throbbing beneath her feet even as it blossomed all around her.
Past the trees, she sensed the small woodland animals and insects that made up every forest. Life was a golden haze in this place.
The presence of large shapes flickered into Brynn’s awareness. Was that elk?
Brynn wasn’t sure that there were elk in Valdar, but if she focused, she could sense the shapes of men on their backs. Horses carrying mounted men, if she had to guess.
Brynn’s heart leapt into her throat and she snatched up Guin. They were hunting her.
Adjusting Guin in her arms, Brynn tried to think. This was all a huge misunderstanding, perhaps, but she doubted that a confrontation with warriors would go well. If they attacked her, she would defend herself, and that would escalate a situation that was already beyond rationality.
Guin gnawed playfully at Brynn’s hand. She strained, reaching up to lick Brynn’s face as she whined. She must be hungry.
Shushing the puppy, Brynn headed away from the riders. She was wandering farther into the forest, away from Istra.
It would be too easy for her to get lost in this unknown island, especially with the sun mostly hidden by the tall trees.
Brynn caught voices at her back. The men must have found her trail. Brynn had no idea how they might be managing to track her in this soggy tangle of a forest, but it seemed the Valdari knew their own land.
Brynn desperately didn’t want to fight them. It wasn’t that she couldn’t win, it was that she probably could. These Valdari were unfamiliar with sorceresses.
“Brynn!” a familiar voice roared. So, they had sent Hróarr after her.
For a moment, she considered surrendering. Hróarr was probably as close to a friendly Valdari as she was bound to face.
Then Hróarr’s voice rang out in a loud shout, his words sharp and demanding, more of a snarl. That was not the voice of a man interested in hearing explanations.
She didn’t want to risk hurting her husband’s cousin. He was the closest thing Cenric had to a brother.
The horses made good time, chasing after her through the brush. Brynn raced, but in her damp dress with Guin in her arms, it was all she could manage.
She could move faster if she dropped Guin, but couldn’t bring herself to do it. The puppy bounced awkwardly at her side, woofing and whimpering.
Up ahead, Brynn felt the ka shift. Something was off. The feeling of wrongness hit her like a blow.
Brynn broke out of the tree line to find utter carnage. She had never thought of felled timber as carnage before, but that seemed the only fitting word.
Brynn had seen trees cut down for lumber and hauled off, but that had not happened here. These trees had been hacked down and left like so many corpses. Their leaves had withered, indicating they must have been felled some time ago.
The Valdari were pragmatic people and while they might be many things, they were not wasteful. Whoever had done this had acted out of spite.
Boundary stones marked the edge of the tree line, placed every ten paces or so. From their weathered etchings, Brynn guessed those boundary stones had been there long before these trees had been planted.
Between them, ka formed a boundary of some sort strung between the stones. The boundary was weakening, but still present. Loose tendrils connected the barrier to the ring that ran between the stones.
Were the dead trees what felt wrong?
The ka of this place felt…sick. Brynn had never felt anything like it. Though she could feel the plants, the moss, and some sense of healthy life nearby, she could sense no animals. There were no moles or rabbits or foxes to be felt, not anywhere in this clearing.
Guin growled low in Brynn’s arms, her little puppy voice struggling to sound ferocious. Her whole body stiffened, and her ears flicked up, looking ahead.
If Brynn focused, she could sense a band of ka running through the boundary stones, connecting them. It was faint, but it seemed to be connected to the dead trees somehow. This was some spell that had been kept in place by the life force of the grove.
Brynn glanced right and left. She couldn’t see anything, but her sorceress senses told her something was very, very wrong.
Was the air poison? No, that couldn’t be it. How would the trees have been cut down, then? Men would have had to work here.
Horses whinnied at her back. Hróarr was not waiting. From the sound, they had her retreat into the forest blocked.
Brynn took off at a run across the open clearing, clambering over fallen branches and jutting roots. Up ahead, she could see a small ravine, a riverbed, and another line of trees on the far side. If she could just reach the far tree line, the river could help her lose the men.
These dead trees were yew, not the spruce, ash, and pine Brynn had seen in the rest of the forest. The farther into the clearing Brynn went, the more she noticed connecting roots and entwined branches webbed over the ground like veins in a body.
There had not been dozens of yew trees, but a single tree with dozens of offshoots.
Brynn had never seen anything like this before. This tree must have been ancient. Yew trees could live for millennia. This one must have been putting down roots before or shortly after mortal feet had trod these islands.
Yet someone had desecrated it—or something.
As she scrambled up a fallen trunk, Brynn’s hands slid over gashes in the wood, four parallel lines. She paused, fear seizing in her chest. Had those been claws? Not even the claws on the giant bear pelt had been large enough for that.
Guin snarled and growled at Brynn’s side, making angry puppy noises.
The horses squealed at her back.
Brynn dared to look over her should and spied Hróarr with four other men aboard horses. Their animals reared and stomped, refusing to cross into the clearing.
Strange.
Hróarr and several of the men shouted. They gestured wildly at the clearing and one of them let off something akin to a shriek, clapping a hand over his mouth in horror. Even from a distance, Brynn caught their shock at the sight of the desecrated yew tree.
The men dismounted. Two of them held the reins of their horses while the others took off after her on foot.
“Brynn!” Hróarr bellowed. “You know you can’t escape us!”
No, she couldn’t. She glanced over her shoulder, counting— Hróarr and two other men. Only three armed men, but unarmored. She could deal with three unarmored men. But she didn’t want to.
A stench seeped into Brynn’s nostrils. Something cracked underfoot and Brynn realized that bones littered the ground. There were the remains of sheep, pigs, a few dogs, and at least one horse in varying stages of decay.
The choking stench threatened to make Brynn gag. Nothing about this place made sense. What was it?
Hróarr and his men were catching up, but the sickening sensation of wrongness coupled with the stench was enough to bring Brynn to a stop. In her arms, Guin snarled and howled, her whole body stiff with fury.
Brynn shouldn’t have come here. From this spot, she could sense that the yew tree had been connected to that barrier of ka, used to strengthen that spell, whatever it was. Now that the tree was dying, and the spell was no longer being fed, it was weakening.
Brynn squeezed the puppy tighter. At least Guin could sense the wrongness, too, and she wasn’t insane.
“Brynn!” Hróarr gestured for his men to slow, fanning around her in a semicircle. He had seen Brynn rip a man’s head off with her bare hands and was apparently trying to be cautious.
“What is this?” Brynn demanded, gesturing wildly around them. “Where are we?”
“The Grandfather Yew.” Hróarr glanced around at the hacked and mutilated limbs of the tree. “This is…was sacred.”
“Ovrek?” Brynn wasn’t sure why she thought of the king first, but she knew that was wrong the moment her guess left her mouth.
“No,” Hróarr said hastily. “What Ovrek did wouldn’t have…”
Brynn waited for him to finish that sentence. “Ovrek did something?”
“No!” Hróarr seemed deeply upset by this, but he had a mission for his king. “It’s a holy place.”
“It’s an evil place,” Brynn shot back. Her heart raced as she searched their surroundings, trying to understand the source of this feeling. “There’s something wicked. Something old.”
Brynn knew none of these men had magic, but how could they not feel it? The sense of malice was a palpable thing, a weight that pressed around her.
“You’re a foreigner. You shouldn’t be here,” Hróarr growled.
“None of us should be here,” Brynn whispered.
Hróarr extended a hand, though his other rested on the hilt of his sword. “Let us take you back to Istra.”