CHAPTER EIGHT
After yesterday’s rainstorm, the air smelled fresh and mossy green.
Nothing like the city after a rain, a more beige sort of smell.
The air was chilly, like early spring, but the activity kept Sy’s body pleasantly warm, and the chorus of birdsong warmed his spirit.
It wasn’t a dreadful introduction to the fearsome forest.
But it quickly became one. They followed a game trail, much smoother than the open forest floor, but better suited for hooves than stiff leather.
Though he had purchased, with Anya’s reluctant guidance, the best boots he could afford, his heels were better accustomed to paved stone walkways and smooth wooden floors and soon rubbed raw.
It did not help that he continuously stumbled over the endless twigs and vines, tripped while dodging beetles and loose pebbles. He felt as graceless as a gosling.
“Step where I step,” Anya advised him the third time he nearly fell, as if she didn’t have to keep doubling back to wait for him, even with all her attention turned on every blade of grass, every fallen log, every upturned stone.
It was the last she spoke for hours, intent on guiding them steadily forward.
When he wasn’t carefully avoiding sharp rocks and fallen branches, rather than contemplate the chilly gloom of the forest and what it might be hiding, Sy studied his silent companion.
He was an artist. With paints and pencils, once; now, with flesh and blood, and the finest in the city at that.
But even he must submit to one rival’s superior talent.
The beauty of the wildflower speckled countryside, of the regal mountains in the far distance, of the vast forest he now stumbled through, had outdone his wildest imaginings, was far outside his scope.
And chief among nature’s finest works, remarkable in its accomplishment, was his traveling companion’s face.
There was a random but sublimely coherent beauty to her, one only nature could have made: the asymmetric lay of her eyebrows, one arched higher than the other; the bluntness of her jaw and chin against her long, narrow face; the slim upturn of her nose.
Accidents that alone would be unassuming, or even unbecoming, but combined into a picture of serene, rugged elegance.
He could memorize it, behold it for hours every day, and never capture the likeness if he tried.
And those eyes. In the clouded light filtering through the branches, they gleamed green like peridot, like a landscape painter’s rendition of the sea, like nothing he had quite seen before.
Whenever they paused for Anya to study a fork in the trail or listen to something he couldn’t hear, he memorized the color.
He could replicate that hue in any face, but it would suit none the way it suited her, and no other color would suit her better – though if she asked, he’d suggest a warmer undertone to her cool ash-brown hair, something brash to bring out her eyes even more.
He wasn’t sure what to make of her. Gruff, but eloquent.
Steely, yet easily bruised. He could never tell if she would respond to him with a biting remark or a thoughtful, intense gaze.
She was determined to think of him as a dandy, a fool.
A man of means, careless with his money, toying with elements he didn’t understand.
More than once, he had felt an irrepressible (and supremely irritating) need to explain himself to her, but he wouldn’t disabuse her of that particular notion.
In fact, he was grateful for it – it kept a careful wedge between them, and this arrangement would work much better with it there.
It would be much harder to betray a friend than a stranger, and betray her he must. The question was, how?
Perhaps he could persuade her to accept the victory itself as payment.
Hunters liked to boast, didn’t they? Surely the boast of capturing a magical bird, one so rare most believed it didn’t even exist, was worth something as currency.
Should he succeed in creating the spell, he was sure to become a legend himself – he could promise her a role in the story.
Perhaps there was a way to use the phoenix for his own purposes and let her keep it after he was done.
He’d run over several possibilities now, all of which left plenty of bird remaining – a spell penned with a mixture of his and the phoenix’s blood, with one of its feathers, with its claws, with all three.
He could write the spell, earn his coin and his freedom, and leave her with what remained of the bird to use as she pleased.
No doubt another buyer would be forthcoming.
Perhaps she could stuff it, a trophy, something else beautiful for her bare walls.
Easier to betray, but much harder traveling with a stranger. Relying on one for his life. One with a hatchet on one side of her belt, a knife on the other. A shotgun slung with a strap over her right shoulder. A bow and full quiver strapped to her back.
What was to stop her from betraying him and claiming the prize for herself, taking it to another spellscribe, one who could pay her far more than what he had promised?
And then she’d had that strange attack of pain.
An illness, he presumed – one she said he couldn’t cure.
Desperation would turn the noblest soul into a scrabbling creature; he was proving it himself, and his soul had never been close to the noblest.
Rich as it was from him, he relied on her honor. But as the hours passed in silence, it gradually occurred to him: in his hurry to find a way to escape his indenture, he had not fully considered all the risks of working with the huntress Anya Degen.
Like, for example, how he seemed to lose all sense of time and place in her presence.
Only a consequence of being in the wood, he reassured himself.
When they stopped to eat around midday, she had broken her focused, taciturn silence to explain to him that being under the trees could disorient even the most experienced hunter.
One had to be constantly vigilant. It was nothing like navigating a city, unless the city had streets and buildings that changed shape with every storm – or were rearranged by spirits.
“The way you speak, it’s a wonder any live near the Lichtenwald at all,” he said, watching her sharpen her knife on a strap of leather.
Pausing, she raised a mordant eyebrow. “And live where else?”
“One would think one could find a place,” he replied, brushing away a millipede climbing up his leg, wondering if it hid fangs beneath its shining carapace.
“Some think the forest’s evil,” she said. “It’s not. There’s things that help, and things that hurt. The trick is in knowing the difference.”
“Quite the trick,” he said offhandedly, keeping his pulse steady as he watched the rhythmic, forceful swipes of her knife.
She cast him a sidelong glance, then examined the blade’s gleaming edge. “You get the eye for it, with time.”
More time than they would have together, he hoped.
With a grunt, she sheathed her knife. “You’ll feel strange. You might…hear things. Stick close to me and you won’t get lost.”
Hours later, the golden sun sinking low behind the trees, they hadn’t.
And yet, in her wake, he felt more lost than ever.
Suddenly, she stopped – not like she had been, careful and considerate, but abrupt and almost alarmed. She bent to one knee. The golden light shone through the trees, highlighting her profile in stark, glowing beams.
He peered over her shoulder, trying to see what she saw. There was a soft indentation in the ground, but it looked like it could have been left by a rock or a piece of bark. She would not have stopped for that. “An animal?”
“Bear. Less than a few hours, maybe less than two,” she said grimly. As he looked, her words revealed pieces: a nail, dug into the soft earth. The pad of a toe the size of his thumb. Only a toe.
He stared at her. “You can tell all that?”
“It gets worse,” she added, scanning ahead, then behind them. “People have been this way. Horses. Carriages.”
That, he identified easily: a wheel-made rut in the drying mud.
Word had, indeed, gotten out.
“You were right,” he said, silently cursing. “We should have left right away.”
With a shake of her head, she dismissed him. “This was bound to happen. A suitable prize motivates even the dullest mind.” Her brow wrinkled drolly. “People aren’t so different from pheasants, that way.”
A startled laugh escaped him, and a small smile graced her lips before she looked ahead. She tapped a finger against the hatchet on her waist. “I’m still confident I can best them, whoever they are. But this…complicates things.”
“What should we do?”
“We should make haste. But…I would like to know what I’m up against.”
“Reconnaissance,” he supplied.
“…Reconnaissance,” she agreed.
“Their carriages will not go far,” he realized, remembering the map she had shown him, now tucked inside her messenger bag. His own bag, a brand new rucksack stuffed with food and spare clothes, weighed heavy on his back. He supposed absconding with a carriage would do them little good.
“No. But look how much ground they’ve gained on us already.”
They followed the wheel ruts and flattened grass. Soon, the sound of laughter echoed around them.
“A camp,” Anya surmised. Then added, grimly, “Bad idea.”
As they approached, the trees parted to reveal a small clearing encircled by willows and beeches, empty coaches, and horses tied to the trees. Anya eyed the beasts and Sy wondered if they shared the same thought. A carriage could not traverse the wood, but a horse?
The forest has made a brigand of me already.
Despite David’s warnings, despite Anya’s convincing exhortations, he had seen nothing strange in the day they’d spent trekking through the trees.
No brigands, no bears, no baleful spirits.
But when he looked ahead into the clearing, what he saw stopped him short.