Chapter Four Come One, Come All
CHAPTER FOUR
COME ONE, COME ALL
The Chiming Wood was a vast expanse of birch trees, its treetops, its forest floor, a shocking display of color.
Autumn had reared its head, and the trees waved their flags in accordance—every leaf was a brilliant shade of yellow.
When the wind blew through them, it sounded different than it had in the moorland.
Less of a woeful hum, more of a delicate ringing sound.
Then, without warning, everything went silent.
A shadow moved in my periphery. I turned and searched the trees, the spaces between them growing darker.
There was nothing there.
“Sprites,” Maude explained, hand on her axe.
“Treelike. They move about, especially after dark. Those that remain, at least.” She took a narrow piece of charcoal from her satchel, rubbed it furiously on her pointer finger, then smeared the dark remnants over her eyelids.
When the gargoyle hemmed and hawed, she did the same to him.
We made camp among the trees at sunset. When night fell we didn’t sleep, save the gargoyle, who was snoring and muttering to himself in turns of phrase I could not parse.
I lay on my back and looked up the long, narrow necks of birch trees that swayed in the wind and felt afraid, which made me think on sprites.
How could a creature that moved through the land as I did, lost in strange perpetuity, without a home, hated, hunted, be a threat to the hamlets?
What kind of kingdom had I woken to, where the privilege to exist was not guaranteed but granted, perhaps by those most unfit to bestow it?
Night slipped by, and I spent it somewhere between doubt and wonder.
“You don’t know how to get back, do you?
” I turned to Maude, who sat, axe on her lap, with her back against a tree.
“If you did, we wouldn’t be wasting time in this Wood of yours; we’d already be in Coulson Faire.
You don’t know how to turn the nobles against the king or get past his knights or find the loom stone.
You don’t know how to get my memory back.
” My words cut through my teeth and came out oversharp. “You don’t know how to get to Sybil.”
“You’ll help me,” Maude said plainly. “You always were good at getting things.”
When I didn’t respond, Maude’s gaze rose to mine. “It will be all right. Have a bit of faith.”
I didn’t need memory to know Maude Bauer was talking to herself as much as she was to me.
On we trekked through birch trees. Midday was much like morning—gray and cool, and soon it began to rain.
The wind picked up, assailing our backs; the pelting rain was loud over my armor.
I shivered and glowered at the mud that splashed over my boots, following Maude, who needed no road to make her way swiftly through the Wood.
After an hour’s walk, we came upon a castle in a glen.
Maude’s shoulders relaxed, the lines in her brow easing, and I knew it was her home. But then she saw the purple banners hanging from the windows. Horses, posted along the drive. A knight in full armor, guarding the door.
Maude froze, and so did the gargoyle.
I didn’t take the hint. “There better be a tub in this Petula Hall. I smell like a donkey’s undercarriage—”
Maude shoved me.
I careered off the road, crashing and rolling through leaves, then dropping into a shallow ravine where I landed in a pile of roots, splayed out on the ground like a bird shot from the sky. “What the honest fuck?”
Above, the gargoyle was screeching. His stone head peeked over the lip of the ravine. “Oh, there you are, Bartholomew. What a clumsy clump of dirt you are—I say, madam. Madam! Unhand me!”
Maude was trying to shove him out of sight, though the force had a far weaker impact on his stone body.
All she managed was to get him behind a shrub, where she let out a flurry of whispered threats.
“Both of you—shut up. Those are the king’s men.
We need to get out of sight.” She looked past me into the Chiming Wood. “This way.”
The sun was at its apex, yet it was dark when we slipped between birch trees. They grew too closely together, their canopies dense, smothering the daylight.
We were in a cloister: a tight grove that held the moisture from the rain like a hazy cloud. There, a splintered wooden dais stood, surrounded by more trees. Upon their limbs, dozens of chimes hung. So did animal bones.
“Love what you’ve done with the place.” I skirted around a pair of birches with antlers—and the rest of a skeletal deer—stuck between them. “Really. High marks for decoration.”
“What are you talking about?” The gargoyle, still upset to be what he called hand-mandled, sniffed a bramble and let out an earth-shattering sneeze. “It’s as fusty as a tomb in here.”
“It’s a sacred grove.” Maude’s steps were silent as she moved between the trees. Several had fallen, the largest of them near the dais. Maude approached it. Dropped to one knee. She took off her gauntlet, her glove, and placed her bare hand on the tree. It wasn’t the sound of a palm hitting wood.
It was the sound of flesh touching flesh.
I prickled. “What the hell is that?”
“A birke,” Maude murmured. Her voice was like the air in the grove: tight and oppressive. “I killed it.”
“Take heart, Bartholomew,” the gargoyle said. “You can always console yourself with the fact that this particular sprite broke half your bones when it fell upon you. Doesn’t that make you feel a little bit better?”
Maude sighed. When she leaned close to the felled sprite, I noticed little gowan flowers sprouting from the gashes in its body.
Maude murmured something I could not hear, then she was on her feet once more, axe gleaming.
“There are answers I need. People in the Wood I must speak to. You two—stay here.”
I made a face. “Why?”
“If you recall—”
“Which I don’t.”
Maude looked at the nearest trees, like lecturing a birch was preferable to talking to me. “Your eyes are too distinct.” She pointed at the gargoyle. “And he’s a vestige of Aisling Cathedral. We don’t need anyone asking questions about that at present.”
“Why?”
“Because we destroyed it.”
“Why?”
She’d have likely sent her axe into my skull had she not realized I was goading her. “Sorry.” I flashed a grin. “I’m just hungry.”
“This is why I never had children.” Maude turned, disappearing through the trees. “I’ll see what food I can bring back. Both of you. Stay. Put.”
For a time, everything was quiet, save the wind, which never stopped its distant chiming melody. I stared off into the grove, fiddling with the three bands in my right ear, determined not to be unnerved by the dead treelike creature at our feet.
“So this is your home?” I asked the gargoyle. “Here with Maude?”
“No. I am Bartholomew’s squire.” He was humming to himself, turning between the trees and nodding to each like it was a partner in a dance. “Wherever she is, my home is there, too.”
I was about to tell him how strange I thought him, and how that was not a bad thing, when a twig snapped behind me.
I turned. “Did you hear that?”
Another twig snapped, this time in my direct line of sight. Not ten paces away.
But there was nothing there.
I rubbed my eyes. Blinked. “Gargoyle?”
“Bartholomew?
“Is that tree moving?”
The gargoyle came up next to me. “No,” he said. “The trees are exactly as they were.” He levied a stone finger. “That is a birke.”
He was right. The closer the creature drew, the more plainly I saw that it was not covered in bark but rather pale, drooping skin. And the marks—the dark specks that should have been knots in a normal birch tree—were not knots at all. They were eyes.
Dozens of dark eyes, and all of them trained on me.
Whatever sound that came out of me, a swear, a gasp, I was not proud of it. “What do we do?” My hand fell to my belt, my sheath as empty an arsenal as my mind. “What does it want?”
“Likely to eat you,” the gargoyle said cheerily.
The sprite’s feet were like roots, long and wriggling as it stalked toward us.
How did one defend oneself against a bloody tree? I looked to the dais. “Surely there’s a forester’s axe somewhere in here—”
The gargoyle caught my arm in an iron grip. “No, Bartholomew. You are not that kind of knight.”
There was nothing to say after that, because the sprite was there, stopping barely three paces in front of my trembling boots.
How tall it was—at least thirty feet, though not half as tall as some of the trees in the grove. Its leaves, its fleshy branches, swayed in the breeze, and when it stood before the gargoyle and me, the largest of its dark knotted eyes blinking, it proffered nothing. Not even a sound.
The gargoyle cocked his head to the side.
He was looking the tree directly in its eyes—the center ones at least. “Bartholomew said that, once, these creatures walked freely in the Wood, feasting on idleweed. Now, they live in camouflage, searching for food, eating what they must.” He tapped his chin with the tip of his claw.
“I wonder what it tastes like to eat an eye. I confess, no one has ever offered me one.”
“Eyes?”
“Pithy, Bartholomew—pay attention. Yes. This creature eats eyes.” He waved a hand in my face, as if to fan away the stench of my stupidity. “Which is why it doesn’t know what to make of us.”
“Pretty sure I have eyes.”
He shrugged. “Swords and armor are nothing to stone.”
The birke watched us, and we watched it, all of us breathing at different paces.
Me, far too rapidly, the gargoyle with deep, contemplative sighs, and the birke in no identifiable way.
The creature spoke no language, issuing no sound save the soft call of the breeze through its limbs.
For a fraught second, it did nothing, then, slowly, it opened a dark hole within itself.
A gaping mouth, filled not with teeth, but with more wet, blinking eyes.
I slammed my fingers into fists, locking myself into stillness.
“Rory?” A familiar voice called in the distance. “Bartholomew?”
I turned. Maude.