Chapter 2 #2
‘Who are you?’ Curiously, the woman did not reach for her sword.
‘I am the guardian of this forest.’ Elver walked towards the woman boldly. It made her heart thunder in her chest, to be this close to a human. ‘And you aren’t welcome.’
The woman stood up slowly. On the ground behind her there was a well-used bedroll, and a battered tin cup filled with soup.
‘I’ve heard of you,’ the woman said. ‘The ghost of a girl is supposed to haunt this place. But you’re no spirit. Are you living out here by yourself? How are you alive?’
Elver laughed. ‘This is my home. Nothing here will harm me. But you? You’ve made a very serious mistake, human.’
‘Listen.’ The woman raised her hands slowly, palms facing out. ‘I’m just a traveller. Passing on through this place on my way somewhere else. There’s no need—’
‘You thought you could just pass through the forest of the jih?’ Elver grinned, and for the first time the woman looked truly unsettled. ‘Humans, you think that everything is a road for you to walk on. That everything deserves to be beneath your feet. A dung beetle has more sense than you.’
‘Now then.’ The woman scowled. ‘I’ll not have such attitude off a scrap of a thing like you.
You’ve gone mad, living out here by yourself.
’ Incredibly, she took a step forward, reaching out as though to bring Elver towards the fire.
‘You need some hot meals inside you, a bloody good bath, and then maybe you’ll know to speak to your elders with some respect. ’
‘It’s you who needs to show some respect.
’ Elver took the woman’s arm and pressed the flat of her hand against her skin.
The woman jumped as though she’d been bitten, the hat falling off of her head with the force of it, and she gave a little shriek.
Elver saw the shape of her own handprint on the woman’s arm, the skin already blistering, and then the woman folded to her knees, falling down next to her own campfire.
Her eyes had rolled up to expose the whites.
‘I told you. Idiot human. Talking to me like I’m some lost child. The monster forest is my home .’
Elver knelt to feel for the interloper’s pulse.
It was there, light and fast. When she took her hand away, there were two more livid marks on the woman’s skin in the shape of her fingertips.
She wiped her hand on the back of her trousers.
Touching humans made her feel dirty, but even worse was the painful curiosity it roused in her.
What would it be like to touch a human safely?
What did skin feel like when the person you touched didn’t recoil in pain and horror?
The memory of that sensation had long been lost to her.
You’re not human any more , she told herself fiercely. And you never will be.
‘You’re not dead,’ she told the unconscious woman. ‘Which is more than you deserve.’
It would be easy to end it, though. A longer touch from her poison skin should do it, or if she didn’t mind making a mess, her knife would do the job.
Elver looked up to see another of the forest’s monster inhabitants peering at her from the treeline.
Slowjorns were some of the more talkative of the jih spirits, and she knew this one well.
Greetings, forest guardian. One of your kind?
Elver felt heat prickle across the back of her neck, but she swallowed down the annoyance like a sharp stone.
‘No, not my kind at all. Since you’re here though, will you do me a favour?’
The slowjorn crept forward. Out of the shadows, it looked like a human-sized bipedal snail, its limbs tentatively picking their way across the ground. The bulbous shell on its back was formed of a great spiral.
Perhaps. The antennae on its head expanded curiously, questing towards the body on the ground.
‘Drag this idiot back towards the road. You don’t have to go near it, just get close enough that she’ll see where she has to go when she wakes up.
’ Elver smiled, imagining the look on the woman’s face if she woke up during the journey and saw what had a sticky tendril around her ankle.
And of course there were lots of dangers in the Jih Forest. She might not make it to the road at all.
‘Don’t worry too much about bumping her over brambles and puddles.
She needs to learn not to ever come back here. ’
When the slowjorn had gone, dragging the human behind it like a sack of bones, Elver picked over the traveller’s possessions.
She drank the cold soup, savouring the taste of herbs and spices from outside the forest, and took a notebook with a few empty pages left from the fallen pack—there had been books in the orphanage, and they were one of the few things she truly missed.
This one looked as though it had been used to keep track of the woman’s travels; there were notes on Addersport, a town called Tarflin she had never heard of, and a detailed section on a mage dedicated to the god Tisk.
There wasn’t much else, but the sword was decent enough and had a sharp edge.
Elver took it back with her to the other side of the lake.