CHAPTER THIRTEEN
For how loud it had been, the source of the cry was not as close as Anya had anticipated. As if, before, it had been piped directly into her ears. A message. Or a warning.
Or a trick.
Her gut urged her to turn back, but drawn by the sound’s obvious fear, she pressed forward.
It grew more insistent, but diminished as she went; fainter, weaker, not farther away.
It had sounded so human when she first heard it.
Now it didn’t; not quite. Though that didn’t mean it wasn’t. Or hadn’t once been.
She soon found a game trail and followed it, smooth under her feet, then tracked the cry into the brush.
For a time, it went quiet, and she began to wonder if its source was already dead – or if she had imagined it.
But Sy had heard it, too. She scanned the ground for flattened bracken, upturned stones.
Sniffed the air for gunpowder or coffee grounds.
Then she heard it again, close, and this time, she recognized the sound. Her heart sank. She would almost prefer it was one of the wizards. Still, she hurried forward, readying an arrow to let fly at an instant.
She saw the spotted fawn before she saw the bramble slake.
From afar, the bramble slake was invisible.
Innocuous. A moss and lichen covered boulder resting behind a blackberry bramble.
Only stepping closer, too close, would reveal the berries were not berries, but round and shining feelers; that the branches were not the limbs of a shrub, but the wriggling tentacles and waiting mouth of a hungry beast.
The beast bored its reptilian, sharp-beaked head into the boulder’s core, and, like a more industrious hermit crab, took the hollowed-out stone as its shell.
Half of its tentacles remained burrowed underground, rooting it into the earth; the other half reemerged nearby, a crown covered in leaf-like scales and teeth of thorns, almost indistinguishable from a blackberry bramble.
It had only one vulnerable spot: its head, kept safe beneath its stone shell.
Only something extraordinary could lure it out.
It was commonly accepted that the bramble slake was hardly worth the effort it would take to kill, not to mention the danger.
Deep in the heart of the forest, no one would pay for its removal; frightening and unwieldy, no one wanted it leering over their dining table as a trophy.
It may as well be a feature of the landscape.
Since it never moved, it was easy enough to avoid, if you knew what to look for.
If you didn’t, it was an unpleasant death.
The slake’s tentacled mouth caught and trapped anything that came too close, leaving its meal hopelessly entangled.
It pierced its stuck prey with its thorny teeth and slowly sucked it dry, keeping it alive, hot and fresh, until the last drop was drained.
The more the prey struggled, the deeper the teeth dug.
Anya knew if she looked beneath the fawn, she would find scores of bleached, brittle bones.
The berry-like feelers acted as lures, attracting all kinds of unwitting prey.
Birds, squirrels, insects, mice. Larger mammals, usually those too young to know better.
Those were a feast – once caught, the young attracted larger, more filling prey.
The fawn’s mother, if she still lived, drawn by the fawn’s frightened cry.
A curious wayfarer, moved by the sight of a helpless young creature.
A city dweller on a king’s foolish errand, looking for food, familiar with blackberries.
A cursed huntress losing her grip.
She should have known. Johanna had this one marked on her map. But that was miles away from Rook Hollow. How could she have closed such a great distance in such a short time? She told Sy fifteen minutes; she hadn’t been gone five. Was there another slake, one they had missed?
The fawn smelled Anya on the wind.
Now, though unsure if Anya was friend or foe, savior or predator with sharper teeth, the fawn could not help but cry.
Could not help but struggle, though it only made her suffering worse.
Her hooves scrabbled helplessly against the tentacles, the dry leaves and bones beneath her.
Her bleating became a soft, pitiful whimper. Almost human. Not human at all.
The forest had no morals. The forest could be cruel.
But the slake did not trap the fawn in order to be cruel.
It did not make a prize of it. It did not boast of its victory or seek more than its fill.
It was simply how this creature had learned, through generations, through aeons of struggle, to survive. A cruel survival for a cruel world.
This creature did not choose how the world was made. How it was made. Neither did the fawn.
And neither did Anya.
She let loose her arrow. The scrabbling stopped. Swift as the wind, she readied another.
Alert, irritated and confused at its cooling, slackening meal, the bramble slake’s long, beaked head poked out from within the impenetrable den it wore on its back. Small, blinking eyes peaked out from under a helmet of moss and stone. Anya fired again.
The long, slender head fell flat, letting out a groan like a sigh, like cool air wheezing out of a cave.
She would have to update Johanna’s map.
The breeze tickled her cheek. She lowered her bow. A bright, incessant chirping pricked at her ears. She peered into the branches above her. Bright splotches of vigorous red dotted the dark canopy.
The cherry wrens had already begun to gather.
Feeling wearier than she had in a long time, Anya turned back for their resting place, her stomach complaining with stilted hunger and with furious unease. She hadn’t forgotten she seemed to have traveled miles in minutes. They were closer to the bramble slake’s den than she had realized.
Or the forest was feeling playful. She would have to warn Sy to be especially guarded.
She feared that was not all she would have to tell him.
This had all been a mistake. Killing the fawn had been terrible enough, but it could have easily been one of the spellscribes caught, beyond her help but for a well-aimed arrow.
This was beyond her. She didn’t have the mettle for this kind of game.
She would tell Sy the truth. Tell him of her curse.
He wouldn’t understand, and might think she was mad, but then she wouldn’t have to keep up the charade that she could ever help him.
He was honorable enough – far more than she had suspected.
He wouldn’t like it, but if he wanted to live, he wouldn’t have much choice but to follow her.
When it was done, she would escort him back to ?bender, back to where it all began.
The past few days and all they had promised would fade to distant memory. And then all of it would be finished.
She reached the rowan tree. But it couldn’t be the same. Though she had carefully marked the way, she became certain the forest had decided to play one of its tricks. She had come to a different rowan, the wrong one.
But, no – there was her bag. Her bedroll. Her waterskin. The same rowan, the stump where she had cut the branch, bleeding sap.
No blood. No overturned dirt or disturbed bracken signaling a struggle.
No shotgun.
But she’d told him to give her a quarter hour. She hadn’t been gone ten minutes. She knew she hadn’t. He must have wandered off. For more bilberries, perhaps. With her shotgun.
So she waited. She waited until the sun reached its peak, directly above her, and then she waited longer. Too long. Far longer than was safe, or smart. Far longer than he deserved.
It was better this way. A relief. One less obstacle.
The weighty shroud of pretense lifted from her shoulders.
After the bear, he couldn’t have helped her, anyway.
There was no other reason to stay together.
There was no reason to let herself rely on another in the first place.
She had only ever relied on herself. She never should have answered his ad.
They never should have stayed near the other scribes’ camp.
She shouldn’t have left him behind. He shouldn’t have gone off on his own.
He didn’t want to be in her debt. He thought she would demand more than half the prize for her trouble. He thought she would claim it at all.
So instead, he would chance the hunt himself. It was the only conclusion she could draw. He’d said it himself, hadn’t he? She should have listened. He wanted the money, every cent. He wanted to part ways; to terminate their agreement. So he had. With her shotgun.
Debt or no, her first impression of him had been right. For people like him and his set, enough was never enough. It couldn’t be. Not when there was always more – and there was always more. They saw themselves as temporarily embarrassed princes. Temporarily tempered dragons. All of them.
Good, she thought, gathering her things. Good. She squinted at the speckled sky, locating the afternoon sun, pointing herself east toward the Warbler. The river had never steered her wrong. She would follow it to the meadow.
She pulled Johanna’s hat over her head. She didn’t look behind her.
Hours passed. This deep in the forest, the trees were much older, taller, farther apart.
Fewer saplings grew in their shade, clearing space for her feet, and with less detritus to focus on, in her thoughts.
She brushed over clover and bracken, through dog’s mercury and wild mint.
The gloves on her hands grew tight with her sweat, but she didn’t take them off.
They may as well be hers, now; she wasn’t likely to see their previous owner again.
Once her curse was lifted, she would feed them to the trees.
As she crept closer to the river, the beeches thinned, gradually replaced by ash and hazel. The pines never relented.
Nothing ever did. Seasons, hunger, the march of time. More to life than base survival. There wasn’t. There never had been. You didn’t need to be educated, to be sophisticated, to know that.
But she had been wrong about one thing. Sy wasn’t a fool. He knew what he asked for; what he did. If that was what he wanted, well, the forest would happily eat him alive.
He did have the rowan branch. Her shotgun. Her wisdom, like birdseed. He may be food, but at least she had not left him without teeth.
The afternoon dragged by. She did not stop to eat, breaking off pieces of one of her walnut flour biscuits as she walked.
Tasty, filling, but a bit bland. Too salty, perhaps.
The melon soup had been good. She might be softer too, if she ate like that all the time.
There had been a bit of mint in it, she thought, but not like the flowering mint she crushed now beneath her boots, releasing an earthy, pungent brightness, nor even the kind she and Johanna once grew in their garden. Flatter. Tamer. More sophisticated.
She walked several miles before she realized the thinning crop of beeches had thickened. That wasn’t right. There should be fewer of them closer to the river, not more. She looked up. The sun, behind the speckled clouds, was behind her, as it had been all afternoon. She was still pointed east.
But she didn’t have the slightest idea where she was.
A sinking feeling crawled up her gut and held her rooted.
She should have been paying more attention.
Kept her senses sharp. Especially after this morning.
The bear. The fawn. Stopping to rest like a countess at tea.
Melting like sugar at the barest pretense of kindness.
Once again, she wasn’t thinking. Unraveling.
She scanned the horizon in vain for landmarks, and found nothing familiar. She reached a hand into her messenger bag, feeling for her map. When she couldn’t find it, she pulled the bag off her shoulder, yanked it wide open, and dug.
Johanna’s map was gone. Sy had taken it.
The sinking feeling rose up her spine as she heard the crush of leaves behind her, smelled the rush of mint on the wind. For a moment, she thought she smelled pine and pepper – old magic, forest magic.
Her breath caught. Mira, come to finish what she’d started. Or her curse had lead Anya closer to her lair, the promise of the phoenix a false hope, a trap all along. As if in answer, she felt her skin tighten, her bones prickle.
But no, the wind was warm, and from the south – and, if she thought about it, it smelled a bit more like hyacinth.
The thorned vines in her bones seemed to slough away in a flood of relief, and, feeling lightheaded, she almost laughed. How had he found her? But he had come back. It had taken him longer than she’d expected, but he did keep surprising her.
“Alright, but I do expect you to beg my forgiveness,” she said over her shoulder, suppressing a grin.
Just then, something brushed over her head, bullet-fast, knocking her hat loose. She ducked. It flew back around, slower.
A falcon. It had something furry in its claws.
As it passed her again, it dropped the bundle at her feet.
A mouse’s severed head.
“She brought you a gift!”
Heart leaping at the familiar voice, Anya rose and turned. A woman her age, a bit taller, with cropped, feathery, yellow hair, a flask of brandy and a rifle. The falcon landed on the custom leather pad on her shoulder. “Her taste is questionable, but we do appreciate her efforts!”
Perrine, Anya’s one and only friend. A fellow hunter, who she saw only in winter at Hivernal Lodge.
Only in winter, because Perrine lived on the opposite side of the Lichtenwald, the Preule side, just as rife with sport as the Gescany side.
A licensed Preulian hunter, one of their king’s own – not a poacher, like Anya.
She had no reason to be on this side of the forest, no reason to risk the fines or the international scandal it could nevertheless cause in the unlikely chance she were caught by one of Edgard’s foresters, let alone the magic that thrived this deep.
Which meant one of two things: either that was not really Perrine.
Or Perrine was hunting the phoenix.