50. Fifty
Chapter 50
“Look!” I hissed. I grabbed Oraik’s bicep and stared wide-eyed into the depths of the woods. We’d been walking then for about fifteen minutes, following the bird’s chirped directions through the shadowed forest floor. The scents of cedar and pine perfumed a gentle breeze; underneath it all ran a current of decay.
“What?” Oraik looked all around before following the point of my finger.
A flickering figure danced on thin, lacy wings before rising into the dense wall of greenery above our heads.
“I don’t see anything,” Oraik complained. “It’s just trees, trees, and more trees.”
“It’s gone now.”
“Well, what was it?”
“Some sort of faerie, I think.”
We walked on. The trees grew denser. It was still early morning, but it felt almost like night. The foliage strangled out the sun, leaving the woods in perpetual dusk. Every now and then I saw dancing lights or figures up ahead. I resisted the urge to follow, staying carefully on the course the bird directed.
When the trees thinned again, our surroundings brightened considerably. Bits of rare gold light dappled the ground.
“Do you think it’s lunchtime yet?” Oraik asked.
“Are you hungry?”
“Yes.”
“Then it’s lunchtime.”
“A sensible way to think,” he told me with a grin.
“There’s a rock up ahead. Should we sit?” I suggested, nodding to a flat, mossy stone just a little to our right. It was big enough to serve as both bench and table for the two of us. Oraik hefted his shoulder-bag and nodded agreement.
We turned towards it. The bird whistled shrilly in my ear.
“Yes, I know,” I told it. “We’re just looking for a place to sit. We won’t be off path long.”
The bird whistled again, long and low.
“I hope that’s just agreement. That could get annoying,” I said to Oraik.
“Considering it seems to understand what you’re saying, perhaps don’t insult it?”
“Sorry, bird. You’ve been quite helpful already.”
The bird shrieked again.
“Maybe it’s worried you’ll snap its neck.”
“Don’t,” I said with a shudder. I didn’t think I’d be eating pigeon again anytime soon, if ever. But Oraik only grinned.
I reached the rock and set my bag on it. Then I took a seat, arranging my skirts. I hoped the faeries hadn’t taken Kalcedon much further, though of course he could be days away by this point. We were nearly out of food.
“Bird, do you know how much further we have to go?” I asked. It shrieked a loud whistle into my ear. I winced and leaned away, clapping a hand over the side of my head. My patience was fast fading. The sound was too loud.
“See? That’s what you get for being rude,” Oraik joked with a grin. I pried the bird off my shoulder and rubbed my poor, abused ear.
“Next time I cast something like this, I’m leaving breath out of it,” I complained. “Is it hard to rupture an eardrum, do you think?”
Then the stone moved beneath me.
I grabbed onto my seat with both hands. The low rumble continued. Was it an earthquake? I’d only felt one once before. And why did the stone feel less like stone, and more like roughened leather?
“Meda!” Oraik screamed. He grabbed me with his free arm and yanked me back. I stumbled towards him as the bird tumbled out of my hand with a squawk.
The ground wasn’t shaking. Only the stone had been. I turned and gaped at it. It wasn’t a stone at all. There was a large, toothy mouth along one side of it, and it was hauling itself up out of the ground. The food bag with all my possessions fell away as it did. The thing was hideous.
The stone seemed to be its head, beneath which two long arms, a torso, and two squat legs emerged. Its body was as rough and lumpy as the head, covered in dirt. Beetles and earthworms clung to the parts which had lain beneath the earth. It swept a heavy arm across the ground, groping for us blindly.
Instinctively I threw up a shield to cover myself and Oraik. But I’d left out the third member of our group, because in my head it had still been with us, not floundering on the forest floor.
“Bird!” I yelped, just as a heavy three-fingered stone hand wrapped around our wooden guide.
Oraik grabbed a branch off the ground. He threw it like a javelin at the stone creature. The branch smacked into its head and fell; the creature groped forward with its other hand, searching for Oraik. The bird wriggled loose and flapped awkwardly towards me before thumping into the shield. It tumbled to the ground in a tangle of wooden wings and beak. A high whistle of alarm pierced through the air.
The stone-thing took a step towards Oraik. Without thinking I dropped the shield and sketched Kalcedon’s attack spell. The air chilled around my hands as I slammed the outland power into where a human’s heart would be.
How strange it was, to cast without needing anyone there beside me.
It fell backwards, crashing through branches and landing so hard we felt the earth’s reverberation. I smashed the power into its torso again, and then its head. It wasn’t moving.
Oraik and I stayed frozen a moment longer before I dropped my hands, cursed, and bent to scoop up the bird.
“What was that?” Oraik breathed.
“Some kind of troll, I guess,” I told him, and gulped. “Though a lot uglier than the drawings I’ve seen, so who could say.”
“Were you trying to warn us?” Oraik asked the bird. The little thing sat in a trembling huddle in my cupped palms, wood feathers puffed out. “I’m sorry. We’ll listen next time.”
“Perhaps you ought to take it,” I suggested to Oraik. “Who knows if I’ll need to cast again.” The bird inched sideways into Oraik’s hand when coaxed. I went to pick up the bag of food, my eyes not straying from the troll in case it wasn’t dead.
“Let’s keep moving,” Oraik suggested. “ I think we can find somewhere nicer to eat than next to a troll’s body, don’t you?”
We ate a little further on, sitting cross-legged on the ground because we dared not trust any of the rocks. When we went to move again, Bird peeped and ruffled its wings. Oraik set the creature down on the forest floor. It hopped around, cocked its head to one side, then turned to point its beak off-course to the left. Bird chirped loudly.
“I think it wants us to go that way,” Oraik said.
“That’s not how we were headed before.”
“Maybe Kalcedon’s on the move,” Oraik said with a shrug. I frowned, but agreed, and we changed course.
There was no more trouble until late afternoon.
I paused mid-step and threw out my hand to stop Oraik. Something moved ahead of us, just visible through the trees. I crouched down and peered ahead. A lilt of laughter reached my ears, then a clank of metal. But I couldn’t see anything or feel any shift in the warmth around us.
“Is there danger?” I heard Oraik whisper to the bird, who stood as straight as it could on the ground, head swiveling stiffly. “You knew there was a troll. Do you know about this?”
I heard a soft whistle from the bird, like a bit of breeze through the branches. I wasn’t sure what to make of that sound, but it was certainly less distressed than the bird had sounded before.
I took one step to the side, then another, peering through the branches and trying to see where the sound ahead was coming from. At last I caught a glimpse, and tiptoed back towards Oraik.
“There’s a group ahead,” I whispered. “A dozen at least, making camp. They look human, though who can say.”
“Did you see Kalcedon?”
“You think I wouldn’t have mentioned that first ?” I hissed. “They’ve got weapons and horses. A few have armor.”
“Well, Bird wants us to go straight that way,” Oraik whispered, unimpressed. “So, what do we do? Do we go around?”
“Don’t move,” a female voice said behind us. I stiffened. Oraik started to turn around. An arrow thrummed an inch to his right, burying its head into a tree with a thunk . The bird whistled. Oraik yelped and froze.
“I said, don’t move. Next one goes through you. Karema! Over here. Found a pair spying.”
Subtly, with my hands in front of me, I began to trace the lines of a shield. So she wouldn’t realize I was doing something, I kept the movements small. A thread of heat from the air linked my spider lines.
A woman—Karema, I presumed—emerged from the shadows of the wood in front of me. She was a good decade older than me, with wavy dark hair and hooded brown eyes. A roughshod leather vest covered a heavily patched shirt. The woman wore even more jewelry than Oraik: a collection of ceramic amulets around her neck, an array of copper rings in each earlobe, bracelets on each wrist and rings on six of her fingers.
Bird whistled and took two hops towards her. Her eyes flicked to my hands just as I started to form the last sigil.
“Witch!” she yelled.
There was a thrum around us. Then everything went dark.