3rd January #3
“What does it matter what I want?” she said, turning her chin aside. Her eyes were red and swollen, as if she had been crying the entire journey. “Imprisoned princesses have as much say in their destinies as leaves in the wind.”
Good grief. This girl had Wendell’s talent for melodrama, that was clear. “Very well. Then I will choose for you: help her down.”
The guards obliged me, and together we followed Wendell and Taran up the little rise to a grove of yew trees.
At first, I thought it was mist before me.
It hovered over the forest floor, and wisps of it climbed the trees like ghostly ivy.
It seemed thicker than mist, however, unpleasantly so; I felt certain I would become stuck wading through that, like an insect in syrup.
The trees, meanwhile, looked ghastly. Their trunks were covered in scabs and strange protrusions, like infected sores. Wendell was frowning at them, absently twirling a lily he had plucked from the forest path.
“Lilies make charming wedding bouquets, Your Highness,” Lord Taran said in an innocent voice, while smiling snidely at me behind Wendell’s back.
I treated him to my most heartfelt of glares. Wendell blinked at his uncle, then examined the flower. “They do, don’t they?”
“What has happened here?” I said pointedly.
“My stepmother, it seems,” Wendell said. “She has come here, to the dooryard of my court, and placed a curse upon this grove. More specifically than that, I cannot say.”
“It is like the others,” the scout said, looking disgusted.
“We burned the others,” one of the guards said. “This—whatever this place has become — will not ignite on its own, but if we set the neighbouring trees ablaze, and drive the flames towards this grove, it will eventually catch.”
He raised his sword and hacked at the sticky mist. His sword sank deep and then stuck there; he had to wrench it free with a wet smacking sound.
“Don’t,” Wendell said, putting his hand out.
Stabbing at the substance had produced a strange reaction; it shuddered and twitched like a wounded beast. It was then that I realized what was niggling at my senses.
It was not anything in particular, but rather an absence.
I should have been able to hear the minute rustlings and footfalls of brownies and other common fae, watching us from the green forest shadow, indistinguishable from nature’s ordinary soundscape to most mortals, but not to me.
Panic rose within me, as well as horror, but it would be a lie to say these were not alloyed with excitement. I pulled out my notebook and began a quick sketch.
Lord Taran gave a huff of laughter. “What a peculiar little thing you are.”
Wendell, meanwhile, was pacing back and forth, examining the grove with increasing distress. “It is a ruin,” he said. “The trees—the flowers. Every burrow and den. I can’t—”
He lifted his hand and made a sweeping gesture. Something passed over the grove—a ripple of light, smelling of summer and tasting of rain, impossible and wondrous, a cleansing sensation. And then it was gone, and the grove was unchanged.
I rocked back slightly. A part of me wanted to ask him to do that—whatever he had done—again. It was the childish part that was half afraid and half delighted whenever he performed some feat of magic I hadn’t known he was capable of.
He did not repeat the enchantment, though, merely gave a curse and ran a hand through his hair. “Wendell,” I said suddenly, gripping his arm.
Two brownies sat in one of the cursed trees, watching us.
At least, I think they were watching us.
They too were wrapped in tendrils of the uncanny mist, which seemed to be animating them somehow, like puppets, for it was evident that they were dead; their eyes stared but did not see, and their bodies had a slight translucence.
Together, they turned and faded back into the corrupted forest.
“Gather up the deadfall and start the fire,” Lord Taran ordered the guards. “Actually—”
He flicked his hand at a cluster of ferns, and they burst into flame—it was smoky and malcontent, because of the damp, but it burnt brightly. The mist stirred, and then it detached a thick tendril and smothered the fire with a gentle burbling sound.
We all fell back a step.
“It did that before,” the scout said. His face was so pale the scar looked livid, almost fresh. “We must light it away from the margin—once the flames pass a certain size, the corruption cannot defeat them. Come.”
He and two of our guards disappeared into the trees.
I turned to where Deilah stood with a guard on either side of her, thinking that I would order them to take her back to our mounts.
But Deilah was no longer there. Instead, I found one guard blinking at the space where she had been and the second pinned to the ground beneath a deara, which was both like and unlike the creature Ariadne and I had met: the faerie had roughly the same shape, something halfway between a man and a toad, but it too was dreadfully scabbed, and its body seemed more mist than substance.
Yet this had no effect on its ability to do violence.
Indeed, the guard was no longer moving—the creature had opened her throat with its teeth.
It had happened so fast that I did not even have the wherewithal to shout, but Wendell did not hesitate.
He lunged after Deilah, who was being dragged into the forest by two other corrupted deara.
I could not follow exactly what he did, for he moved far too fast, but I saw the aftermath well enough: two heads went tumbling past me.
He shoved his sister back, for another deara had lunged at him out of the mist, and she tripped and rolled down the hillside after the heads.
Lord Taran, meanwhile, was driving his sword into a creature I did not immediately recognize, which looked like a deer gone scabby and ethereal, like the others. The mist, meanwhile, was roiling like water in a heated pot.
I ran to Deilah’s side and helped her to her feet—the girl was gasping and clutching at her throat, which was developing a nasty bruise from the deara’s grip—and then Lord Wherry was there, dragging the both of us down the hill.
“Wendell—” I cried, still half stupefied. I kept thinking, Too fast. This has come apart too fast.
“The king can take care of himself, you silly creature,” Lord Wherry said. “We must get you two back to the horses.”
But we had travelled only a few paces before Lord Taran caught up with us. I thought for a moment that he’d joined us in fleeing the scene, but then, to my astonishment, he dealt Lord Wherry a backhanded blow that sent the man sprawling.
“What are you doing?” I cried. “He’s helping us. There’s no need—”
“Oh, but there is,” Taran drawled. “I have a great curiosity to see how this phenomenon affects the nobility. Councillors are easily replaced, my queen.”
Lord Wherry shrieked and tried to flee. Taran gestured, and a gust of wind knocked Lord Wherry off his feet.
“We can’t have that, my lord,” he said, and then, in a motion as casual as the one he’d used to crush the insects, he lifted his boot and stamped on Lord Wherry’s leg. A sickening crack resounded through the grove.
Deilah screamed—I pulled her to me and pressed her face into my neck. Just in time, too: though there seemed to be no need for it, for Lord Wherry lay still on the forest floor, moaning, Taran lifted his boot again and broke his other leg.
I choked down my own scream, bile rising in my throat. Lord Taran seized the blubbering Lord Wherry by the collar of his cloak and dragged him easily through the trees, and then he tossed him into the rippling dark.
Lord Wherry’s cries were abruptly silenced.
I felt as if I were rooted to the forest floor, staring dumbly at the place where Lord Wherry had vanished.
The breeze smelled of smoke, and through the trees came a bright flickering.
The guards had started a fire, but how long would it take to reduce this cursed place to ash?
Wendell finished dispatching the deara, as well as several corrupted brownies, and left the remaining guards to handle the other spectral figures who rose up out of the mist.
“We’ve seen enough,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over Deilah’s sobs.
I nodded, because even through it all—the horror of the grove, the greater horror of Lord Taran’s brutality, Deilah’s blubbering—I found a theory surfacing in my mind, like a single bright fish rising through troubled waters.
“I think—” I began, but what I had been about to say next twisted into a shriek.
Lord Wherry had risen from the dark. He too was draped in mist now, his eyes unseeing.
I could not make sense of it. Only moments ago he had been a living, breathing person, one whom I had been speaking with; now it was as if the vitality and substance, the very personhood had been drained from him, leaving behind only the outline of what once had been, like a shed snakeskin.
Wendell turned quickly enough to meet Lord Wherry’s sword—I use that word only loosely; it had the translucence of ice.
That was the most terrifying thing about these wraiths—my rational mind kept telling me that they should not have been able to touch us; the mist seemed to transform them into itself as it claimed them.
They should have been like the monsters under a child’s bed, a presence that could frighten but not harm.
Wendell parried and thrust his sword into Lord Wherry’s chest, and the man collapsed back into the mist.
“My curiosity has been sated,” Lord Taran said grimly. “Our kind is not immune to the corrupting influence of this grove. As I would prefer not to become an unthinking puppet in my dear sister’s revenge plot, I suggest we depart.”