Chapter 22
Chapter twenty-two
Evander
A flash of hot panic shot through Evander as Hera bore him down the hill.
“Hera, drop it!” he rasped, clawing at her mouth. Her right head gripped him like a mother wolf with its pup, the conical teeth sinking into his leather harness.
She crashed through the dracorium, smashing fences, her tail cracking stone buildings. Keepers ran shouting; dragons broke free of their enclosures, some mounting into the sky, others tearing through the grounds.
“Drop it!” Evander shouted again, but she tightened her bite, squeezing the air from his lungs.
Evander shielded his head with his arms as Hera broke through the stone wall behind the dracorium and plunged into the Whyspenware.
The blurring world darkened, trees whistling past his head.
His leg caught in a springy pine bough, his knee wrenched, and he was torn from her mouth.
He fell, tucking into a tight ball, narrowly avoiding her trampling feet as Hera blundered over him and into the forest, snapping branches and felling saplings in her mad escape.
His ears ringing, Evander lay on a carpet of moss, waiting for his pounding head to drop him into darkness, but the noise dulled, and he managed to stumble to his knees, then his feet.
He leaned against a tree as big around as a dragon’s body.
It was dark, knotted, and covered in prickles that reminded him of Valenna’s magic.
Valenna. What if she followed him, got tangled up in the terrible enchantment of this place, or was lost among the bracken and the briars?
He turned around and around, expecting to glimpse her in every shadow, every blanket of mist. But he was alone, the forest quiet.
Perhaps she hadn’t followed. That would be sensible. A bit too sensible, he feared.
A breeze rustled the leaves, directing the dark Whyspenware pines in an ancient dirge.
A moaning magic beckoned him. Faint golden light filtered through knobbed branches; black trunks glistened, spotted with lichen and orange fungus; moss dripped through the trees’ fingers.
A fine purple haze hung in the air like a shining mist. Evander couldn’t decide at first if it was real or some trick of his aching head.
Great wings beat the air overhead; Raska was watching. Waiting. Hunting.
Evander felt a barb of fear, but he brushed it aside. He needed to stay focused and find Hera before Raska found him. The pain in his head swelled. When he tried to find the path again, tiny spots of light darted in his vision. He was running out of time.
His desire to run wrestled with his anxiety over Valenna. If he could just find her, perhaps he could convince her to go back to Silvanlight and leave him to find Hera alone.
Evander snorted. Yes, that was likely. The same woman who plunged toward an angry hydra would probably turn sweetly on her heel and give him a peck on the cheek for good luck.
“VAL!” Evander shouted. His voice was absorbed by the fungus and wet bark, as though he hadn't made a sound.
A cold sweat broke out on his brow. What if she was lost, calling for him, and he couldn’t hear her? He began to push through the brush, unheeding as it snagged on his clothing, scratched his arms and face.
“VALENNA!” He’d never screamed like this in his life. His voice grated in his throat. He had to find her. Where was she? He was certain she’d followed him, so why hadn’t he found her yet? “VALENNA! WHERE ARE YOU?”
His foot crunched on something. Glancing down, he jumped back with a cry.
He’d stumbled onto a human ribcage.
Evander stared at the bones sprawled among the detritus—a complete skeleton.
Then a flash of white under the ferns caught his eye, then another and another.
Evander’s heart stilled as he identified shoulders, spines, jaws, and knuckles—a boneyard scattered across the forest floor.
Bloodroot flowers sprouted from eye sockets, violets clustered over femurs, spiders nested in sinus cavities.
Nausea roiled in his stomach.
This place was beautiful and evil as hell. Where in the blasted kingdom was Valenna?
“Who has disturbed my rest?” sang a lilting voice. It was half breeze, half echo. Cold as a winter wind, soft as a snowfall, cruel as venom.
Evander froze, evening his breathing as he would on the battlefield.
“Well now, tell your tale,” the voice crooned.
“I’m searching for my pet,” Evander said, trying to find the speaker among the waving branches and the silvery flutter of ghost moth wings. “I’m here by mistake.”
“Mistake or misuse or malicious intent, I will have no men in my Whyspenware.”
A pair of eyes the size of carriage wheels—one green, one blue—blinked at him through the boughs, sparkling with malice. Below them, a crooked-toothed grin flashed in the dim light.
“Are you Bernice, the forest spirit?” Evander had heard of the vengeful phantom who haunted the Whyspenware, staking men through the heart when they wandered under the trees. Until now, he’d never believed the stories.
“Should I gobble him up? Should I let the creeping thing have him? For it will have him, it is full of my venom.”
“Is all this magic yours?” Evander asked, hoping to kill some time by making conversation so he could come up with a plan. “I’ve seen it before, from someone else.”
“I live in the water and dance among the raindrops. All the plants and creatures and little crawling beasties of this place drink of the water, and so my venom lives in their skin and their glands.” The eyes had traveled upward as the crooked mouth spoke, but they snapped to Evander again.
“But tell me, young man, who is it you know with such magic?”
“A friend,” he said.
“Then she must be a very sorrowful person, for this comes from the deepest pain, the keenest loss. It eats and eats and eats until it burns and burns and burns, and you are left to love only the darkness and the anguish. Now, why should I not kill you? I delight in it, the killing of men.”
Evander weighed his chances. There was no point in running from Bernice, and he wouldn’t beg for mercy. “I’m fleeing from Raska,” he said. “Do you know her?”
With a strangled cry, the spirit lurched away, breaking a thick bough and sending it crashing to the ground. “Not Raska! Why would you bring her to my home? I do not want her here—she could blight my blight and end my dark.”
“She wants me,” he said. “She will seek me endlessly, so let me find what I came to find and leave. Raska will not bother you anymore.”
The mad eyes rolled in their sockets, then disappeared. A lavender mist knotted on the forest floor, and the body of a woman materialized before him.
She was so tall, Evander’s head barely reached her waist. Tangled grape vines and mulberry leaves covered her head like thick hair.
She wore a dress of lichen, moss, and mushrooms, a necklace made of sprouting acorns, and her lips were dyed with bayberry stain.
She was formless and floating, wafting rather than walking.
Evander’s hand moved to his knife, but he stopped himself. How do you kill a woman made of smoke?
The trees crawled with creeping vines as Bernice crept closer, her bare feet silent on the pine needle carpet. Poisonous toadstools sprouted in her footsteps, and thorns writhed like snakes up her legs. “He is not from Allagesh,” she said. “There is blood on his hands.”
“Old blood. From long ago.”
“Ah, yes, yes, yes,” she said. “But blood cannot be unspilled, can it?”
His heart pounded like a drum.
“You have done terrible things in battle, and you will do terrible things again,” Bernice said, her voice reverent. “You will be lost, remade, and come undone. That which you love will be wrested from your grasp.”
A little emerald dragon scuttled out of Bernice’s hair and landed on the ground at Evander’s feet. It was no larger than a housecat, its scales shining like glazed pottery. Venom dripped from two needle fangs protruding past its jaws.
Evander sprang sideways as the dragon struck at his calf and caught it at the base of its head.
Its tail wound around his wrist. He smiled at it and let his magic stutter through his arm.
It was a frail enchantment, but the dragon was small.
The creature’s body relaxed, its red ribbon tongue flicking in and out of its mouth.
“There now, little one,” Evander said tenderly. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”
He set the dragon down, and it slithered away, looking abashed.
Bernice shrieked. “Your magic betrays you, son of a coward, blood of a wretch!”
A chilling, hollow laugh echoed above him. Then, as soft as a whisper, Bernice hummed, “Now die.”
And the ground fell away.