Chapter 32
They traveled for three days through the evergreen forest, the terrain more frequently erupting with massive slabs of granite, hoary with lichen.
Deer were plentiful, and many times they saw a doe leading a pair or trio of fawns deeper into the woods, away from the road.
Once a young buck stood transfixed on the path until they were within a few strides of him before he bolted.
Four times, an eerie call echoed mournfully between the tree trunks and Astryx stopped abruptly to listen, erect and alert. To Fern, it sounded like a loon, but it trailed off into a peculiar chuckling cough, like stones dropped into still water, one after another.
Each time, the call was followed by silence, and they continued onward. Fern noticed that Astryx tossed extra wood onto the fire at night, however, and sat up later than usual, although the elf did not make any comment.
The way appeared little-used, with tall grasses crowding old cart tracks. Branches grew low enough that Astryx had to push them away from their faces, and they scrabbled at the sides of Staysha’s wagon. The dwarf groused loudly about the damage to the paint.
Staysha entertained them in the evenings.
Her range was pretty good, from twisty short stories that Fern had never encountered before, to nostalgic ballads, or the occasional dirty joke, expertly delivered.
Fern had to grudgingly admit to both the woman’s talent, and the fact that she didn’t mind having Staysha along all that much.
The Silver Sparrow seemed less and less pushy from one day to the next, and they settled into a comfortable rhythm of travel.
They never explained Zyll’s presence to the dwarf, despite several gently probing questions.
“We share a destination,” was all Astryx offered.
Zyll, of course, did not elaborate.
The particulars of the goblin’s supposed imprisonment were murky, anyway.
Fern marveled at the familiarity of returning to life on the road, as though she’d been journeying with Astryx for years, instead of weeks. The days before the monastery had blended into a “before” that occupied more space than it had any right to.
She continued her retelling of Ten Links in the Chain to Astryx in fits and starts, but the hush of the place demanded quiet for long stretches. Their passage was peaceful, shadowed by barrow-fir and surrounded by the secretive murmurings of the woods.
Until the fourth day.
The forest village showed itself unexpectedly, hidden on approach by the bulk of a long rib of granite. Ice had sheared the gargantuan stone apart centuries ago, and the road ran straight through the notch between the halves for thirty strides.
Their progress between the close granite cliffs was cacophonous as the echoes of hoofbeats and Staysha’s rattling wagon rebounded in the narrow passage.
Only when they emerged from the other side were the buildings revealed, and the sudden stillness was startling.
Even the rustle of the wind in the treetops seemed to have ceased.
From the first second, a terrible sense of wrongness pervaded the place, and Fern didn’t need to feel the tension in Astryx’s body behind her to register it.
“Maybe we shouldn’t stop here?” said Staysha, drawing up beside them and surveying the area skeptically.
Astryx held up a hand for silence. Beside her, Zyll’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.
Six buildings, their pitched roofs furred with crowns of dried needles, made up something like a village center. Fern spotted a few other dwellings tucked back into the trees.
A little river ran through the center of the barely-a-town, straddled by a crude wooden bridge. Upstream, the paddle wheel of a decrepit mill groaned with every revolution.
There were no people visible. No audible voices. No smoke.
Fern noted fenced gardens in clearings, but their contents seemed trampled and disrupted.
“It’s like it’s hollowed out,” whispered Fern, wincing at how loud her voice sounded in her own ears. She pointed at the largest of the buildings. “Why are the windows boarded up?”
That peculiar, mournful call echoed again, descending into that throaty, wet coughing sound, and gooseflesh rippled from Fern’s tail to the tips of her ears.
Zyll hissed.
“Okay, but really, what is that?” asked Breadlee. “Puts the jim-jams in my haft.”
Astryx didn’t answer, but instead dismounted from behind Fern. “Stay on Bucket, or in the wagon,” she said. With a grace that didn’t betray her recent wound, she drew Nigel—who had the presence of mind to remain silent—and approached the door of the boarded-over structure.
It might have been something that passed for a tavern in this tiny community, although there was no signboard or outward indication other than its second story and the size of its river-stone chimney.
The Oathmaiden paused and listened at the door, then reached out slowly to try the latch. When that didn’t work, she put a shoulder to the banded planks and pushed, unsuccessfully.
With a glance back at Fern and Staysha, she rapped sharply on the door with her free hand, thrice.
A moment of hush, then a scuffle beyond the door that Fern heard even from her place astride Bucket.
“If y’aint Haber’s Five, best you go, and soon!” came a rough voice from beyond the door.
Fern almost missed a stiffening in Staysha’s posture. She studied the bard’s face, but found nothing in the dwarf’s expression to explain it.
“I don’t know who that is,” said Astryx. “Is this door boarded from the inside?”
Another pause.
“Aye,” replied the voice suspiciously.
“Enough force will knock the nails right out. You’d be better off pushing something heavy against it. I’m called Astryx.”
A murmured conversation ensued, and then a different voice, reedy and querulous, piped up, “Oathmaiden?”
Nigel couldn’t help himself any longer. “Indeed,” he declared. “None other!”
“Someone’s coming to help you then?” asked Astryx. “Someone called Haber?”
“He’s late!” cried the reedy voice, although the rough one tried to shush it.
Astryx stared down the road through the village, scrubbing absently at her ear. With a small sigh, she appeared to arrive at a decision, then called through the door, “I think you should probably let us inside. I don’t know Haber, but I know what’s in your woods.”
If it was a tavern, it wasn’t much of one, and there was no bar.
There were a few tables, but they were crowded against one wall amidst a tumble of old chairs.
The place was lit weakly by oil lanterns hanging from the rafters and thin fingers of light that stabbed through the boarded windows.
The hearth squatted cold and dead. A pile of planks and pulled nails lay beside the door.
The room also smelled pungently of goats.
Which made sense, because four goats joined the village folk in their makeshift refuge. A brown-and-white-spotted nanny regarded them with disdain as she chewed her cud beside a set of stairs.
Eight individuals occupied the maybe-a-tavern.
The rough voice belonged to a sturdy woodsman-looking fellow named Booth whose red mustache devoured his upper and lower lip, and who still held an iron pry bar forgotten in one fist. An underfed stone-fey couple had protective hands on the shoulders of their waifish daughter.
The reedy voice was the property of a tiny, crooked, and surpassingly elderly woman whose eyes were squinted closed behind a pair of cracked spectacles.
Her silver hair was gathered into a bun pierced with two knitting needles.
Fern thought she might be dressed in a feed sack held in place with about twenty turns of twine.
Three gnomish women in kerchiefs who were clearly sisters murmured to one another near the goats.
Fern, Staysha, and Zyll crowded together near the door, now closed at their back. The dwarf shifted uncomfortably.
Astryx towered over all of them, Nigel once more sheathed.
It was very tight indoors, and with the animal smell pervading the close air, quite claustrophobic. A gabble of conversation and argument had broken out immediately after they’d entered, but Astryx had silenced it with a few quiet words that nevertheless seemed to drown out everything else.
“It’s a verdigaunt.”
After a beat of silence, the old woman adjusted her spectacles and peered balefully up at the Oathmaiden. “Don’t know about that.”
Astryx frowned back. She didn’t appear to know how to respond to skepticism. Were Nigel’s blade bared, Fern had no doubt he’d already have risen to her defense.
“Finny means we ain’t seen one of them before,” offered Booth, apologetically.
“If you had, I don’t believe we’d be talking,” said Astryx. “You’ve just seen the greenlings, I’d warrant.”
“Greenlings?” asked the stone-fey woman, doubtfully. “That sounds too nice for what’s been coming ’round.”
“Bones and roots. Corpses run through with ivy. They’re not fast, and not smart, but hard to kill,” said Astryx.
Booth and the gnomes, who’d finished their muttered conversation, were already nodding. The little stone-fey girl’s eyes were huge with recognition.
“The verdigaunt is nothing like them, but they belong to it. That’s the call you must have heard—in the deep woods, where its tree grows. And that’s what must be dealt with.”
“Eight preserve us,” murmured Finny, clutching at the front of her hideous dress.
“We sent young Lem to Trestletown with all the coin we could muster.” Booth seemed to be trying to figure out what to do with the pry bar, but resigned himself to continuing to awkwardly hold it.
“Haber’s Five can be got hold of there, and we all figured they could see us clear of the trouble.
Lem said they were s’posed to arrive four days after he came home, but it’s been two weeks now. ”
Astryx scanned the assembled folk, but Fern was the one to speak up. “Where is Lem? Is he upstairs?”
A shadow passed over their faces, and the answer became self-evident. Fern thought Staysha looked a little pale.
“I’m sorry about Lem. And if it’s two weeks, then I think your money is well and truly lost,” said Astryx.
“But I can help you. I’ve been done a good turn where I didn’t expect it, and it looks like you’re due one as well.
We’ll have to wait until the greenlings return, though.
Once they’re dealt with, I’ll follow their back trail to the tree where it sleeps. ”
The Oathmaiden stared speculatively around the room.
Fern tingled as she sensed her gathering up the reins of authority.
“Will any of your other buildings fit a pair of horses?” asked the elf. “And I’m going to need a volunteer.”
Fern wasn’t sure how her paw ended up in the air.
As twilight unfurled, Bucket and Persimmon were shuttered uncomfortably into a shed attached to one of the dwellings. Bucket registered his opinion of their lodgings with a bitter whinny. Staysha’s wagon sat on the other side of the wooden bridge, tucked out of the way.
Astryx ordered Booth to remove all the boards from the windows of the building so that they could see out, then attempted to usher all of them upstairs.
Staysha was only too happy to join them, but Finny and Booth declined.
Booth because he offered to help keep an eye out through the exposed windows, a hatchet at the ready, and Finny because she was a contrary old lady.
Zyll had regarded the elf seriously, before declaring, “Shall be scout-ling,” and then scrambling onto the roof where she perched like a very colorful gargoyle at its peak.
Astryx waited inside, leaning next to the window beside the door that gave the best view of the road out front.
The goats bleated piteously from behind her, except for the one that stood beside Fern in the road directly before the tavern. It was the brown-and-white-spotted nanny, who had the sad misfortune of being the most tractable.
Fern held the end of its lead in one paw and Breadlee at the ready in the other—as though she was capable of anything more useful with him than slicing bread.
“What the fuck am I doing?” she mumbled to herself, with an unhinged giggle.
“Yeah, I dunno why you signed up for this,” observed Breadlee. “There’s already a goat. Why did we need more bait?”
“So somebody can drag the goat indoors if they come?” said Fern. “I don’t want her to get killed.”
“It’s just a goat. It’s not like it’s sapient.”
The goat lifted its upper lip spitefully in the knife’s direction.
“Astryx will make sure I’m safe,” replied Fern, with what she pretended was firm resolve.
But resolve had nothing to do with it. Her reasons had more to do with something Astryx had said to her in the monastery stable.
You belong, if you want to.
And maybe she did want to.
Hardly a feeling she planned to share with sentient silverware, though.
So they waited.
And waited.
Eventually, as moonless dark descended, Astryx lit a series of torch poles in both directions along the road and brought out a stool for Fern to sit on.
She also fetched a lit oil lantern and placed it on the road beside the rattkin and the goat.
It cast a wobbly pool of faded light that threw their shadows outward in dark stripes.
“Are you sure about this?” asked the Oathmaiden.
Fern settled onto the stool with a sigh while the nanny nibbled at her cloak. “Seems like a squire’s duty. What about you? Are you sure about this?” She gestured toward the elf’s wounded side.
“I’m hale enough,” Astryx replied, with a collegial squeeze on the shoulder that made Fern sit up a little straighter.
Breadlee sighed wistfully after the Blademistress as she retreated to the building with Nigel held at her side.
“Oh, get over it already,” muttered Fern.
Then a piercing, ululating cry split the air. The torchglow picked out Zyll’s red eyes in flecks of fire atop the roof as she pointed into the woods.
“Dead-lings!”