Chapter Twenty
Twenty
Duncan dreams he lies in wet grass, limbs pinned down, clothing soaked through, heavy with the moisture. Gray fleece of a dawn sky stretched overhead, faint whisper of rain, down into the meadow and onto his face, splashing in his eyes, blurring his vision.
Blinking it away seems an impossible task.
His body, beneath the drenched clothes, is a catalog of damage, rips and gashes, stiffened with the cold and the damp, crusted blood—
Movement, close by. Someone—or something—is coming to sniff him over. He twitches, but really cannot move. Roaring in his ears, icy panic along his veins.
Stand, sir! Stand up!
No dice, Sergeant. Sorry about that. Just going to lie here, if that’s all right with you.
Duncan!
Mimi Rush, crouched over him, staring.
But she’s supposed to be gone, safe, not still here—
Now he’ll fucking move. He’ll move, if it takes him…
Nope.
And—awful, creeping dread in his bones the longer he stares at her—there’s something wrong with Mimi, with the side of her face, something terrible has been done to her…
The rain, filling up his eye sockets, drowning his sight. Time running out like sand. He strains to tip his head sideways, to spill the pooling water out. He blinks hard, looks again at Mimi.
She doesn’t look well, that’s for sure, pallid and worn and—
You’ve got my doll, she hisses at him.
—
He knows, before he even makes the first ridge and the pale smudge of dawn that hangs above it, that it’s going to be Isnorvi.
Isnorvi, who’s been shadowing him around camp the last few days, sneering and trying to provoke him with ribald comments about Mebhuranon’s attentions.
Isnorvi who seems, with terrifying Fae clairvoyance, to know that he’s planning to try again.
Isnorvi, with strength and sight and fleetness of foot beyond the mortal, who stalks him now, farther down the slope, hanging back, biding his time, waiting for his moment.
And all Duncan can do is play the game.
He pushes himself as hard as he can for the ridge.
There’ll be time later to conserve strength, to pace himself through the long run ahead, but for now he must get out of any possible line of sight back to the camp.
If his early failures taught him nothing else, it was this.
The Fae see far, see fast, catch splintered glimpses no mortal eye can match.
Distance and daylight alone will not serve to save you.
You must break your pursuers’ gaze with the rise and fall of mother earth herself.
Or so says the pretty tree sprite who took his hand and showed him where to dig…
He flounders up the last few yards to the top, gasping for breath, grabbing at slim birch trunks to lever himself onward.
It’s not yet morning, but enough light seeps in from the east to put faint color on everything around him—the leaves over his head begin to be green again, the stones in the Huldu cairns shade from darkened silhouette to stony texture and tone as he passes among them.
Moss shows on the stone in soft, velvety green clumps, lichen in patches speckled mustard yellow and gray.
And the faint blue glow of their glyphs is fading, retreating deeper into the engraving, gone altogether in some eastward-looking places…
“Duncan!”
Deep tremor through him as Isnorvi spits out his name. He stops dead.
“Where you think you’re going, you sniveling tree-thief waste?”
Trembling, he makes himself turn. Isnorvi stands twenty feet off, grinning hard, apparently not even out of breath.
“I’m going home,” Duncan manages, through teeth gritted against his fear.
“No you’re not.”
Bored contempt dripping from the words—how many times has Duncan run and then been run down? How many times dragged back, bruised and weeping, and flung at Svalenkari’s feet for punishment?
Why would this be any different?
Duncan reaches into the rags he wears, clutches the thing he dug up. Hunches over it for comfort. Some tiny flame licks up inside him.
“I won’t let you take me back,” he yells shakily.
It comes out a lot less loud than he wanted.
Isnorvi’s grin broadens, lengthens, his fangs come out—long and wolfish with shape-shift effect.
He’ll have grown them that way as he followed Duncan up through the thinning darkness.
All the Huldu young are doing it now, growing into their powers, testing them on each other, sprouting sudden, distorted faces full of bestial teeth and tusks, armored brow ridges and jaws.
They snap and snarl at each other, scare the thralls into dropping their loads, groveling at their feet.
Fun and games.
Isnorvi rushes him.
Three long strides, Fae elegance in motion, it looks almost like gliding. Maybe two more steps to reach Duncan and flatten him on the spot.
But Duncan isn’t waiting.
Tears squirting in his eyes, shaking like he’s come down with a fever, yelling wordless, Duncan comes running to meet Isnorvi in a head-down charge.
It throws the Huldu completely.
Isnorvi’s taloned hands are reaching, but they’re reaching wrong. His timing is off. The mortal boy just isn’t where he should be. He flinches a little, trying to correct. Duncan screams, pulls the thing he found, swings it savagely at Isnorvi’s face.
Made by the road builders, the sword and spear men, the eagle worshippers, the ones who came from the sun, the tree sprite giggled, pointing shyly at the thing once he’s unearthed it. The Bright Folk can’t touch it, but you can. You can fight with it!
Many years later, looking back hard through the memory of his time in the Forest, trying to separate truth from nightmare and hindsight myth, Duncan will understand that what he dug up was a Roman nail, eight or ten inches of ragged iron, maybe more.
Lost there maybe two thousand years in the dirt, corroded rough and crooked, but still weighty, still strong, still apt for puncture and harm.
He gouges the rough edge of the nail right into Isnorvi’s face as he dodges past. It raises a flaring fire in its path, greenish bright.
Smoke billows, a weird, acrid stink on the air.
Isnorvi shrieks and spins away, clutching the wound with one hand.
He recoils from Duncan, fending off weakly with the other hand, and somehow that’s enough.
That’s the trigger. Something happens to the trembling in Duncan’s limbs, some deep-rooted human alchemy switches the shaking over from weakness to thrumming force.
Fear vaporizes, is gone, yields instead to a towering, incandescent fury, years and years of terror and hate and need let loose.
Duncan closes with his prey.
He advances, slashing hard, overarm, full force, back and forth, and every strike rips fresh lines of fire, fresh shrieks from the Huldu boy.
Isnorvi staggers backward, both hands up now warding, and Duncan carves lines of fire across them, too.
Isnorvi stumbles, goes over, falls on his side between the cairns.
He tries dizzily to ward off his attacker one more time, but Duncan stomps down the arm, is on him, on top of him, punching down everywhere with the nail.
Fire blooms across Isnorvi’s pale ivory neck and shoulders and flanks, like fistfuls of crocus across some chilly snow-touched clearing at dawn.
The shrieks are a punctuated howl, then a sustained wailing, finally a mewling.
Isnorvi twists and cringes, tries feebly to crawl away, and Duncan can’t seem to stop, he’s still punching down, over and over and over, wet, blood-choked rupturing sounds from the Fae boy.
The nail has snapped under the force of the blows, lost nearly half its length, but still he rains the blows down, hissing at Isnorvi to shut up! shut up! shut up!!!
And, finally, Isnorvi does.
—
Duncan lies broken under the soughing canopy of a wind-whipped elm.
Night sky above, the day has come and gone, it seems. Pattering of rain through the leaves above, occasional speck on his face.
His head is banging, it feels gritty and hot along one side.
The sensation is familiar enough, paradoxically, to let him relax.
Sluggish dream panic ebbing away, a sour, customary resignation taking over.
It’s almost like seeing an old acquaintance’s face, not one you liked very much, but one from whom you knew pretty much what to expect.
He’s been shot.
And this, he’s starting to realize, is no fucking dream.
—
They come after him, of course. The others, Svalenkari’s hunters, roused now with his absence from camp, sent to find him, finding Isnorvi’s mutilated corpse instead.
He hears them, shrilling outrage to each other across the wooded glens, sounds a normal human might write off as overly loud and querulous buzzard cry.
Each time he hears it, his heart climbs up and jams into his throat and his trembling returns in force.
Because this time, he knows, there can be no return.
No beating, no matter how severe, would be sufficient punishment now.
The law of the Forest is clear. No mortal may ever do harm to a Huldu, no matter what the provocation.
He’s seen thralls, some of them barely more than children still, executed for daring even to draw Fae blood in a quarrel. He’s seen examples made.
They will kill him for what he’s done to Isnorvi. Svalenkari will do it with his bare hands.
It’s easy now.
Get home. Or die.