6. Chapter 6
The trees began to wear faces the deeper south we plunged.
They had started simply. I’d taken a couple well-placed knots for eyes, a slash in the bark for a crooked smile.
Amusing, convenient imperfections. But they’d grown more obvious, sophisticated, clearly hewn by intelligent hands, until I caught Serich’s sleeve in the darkened middle of a copse of trees and realized we were surrounded by faces.
Leering eyes bled thick sap, slitted nostrils flared, lipless mouths stretched in jagged smiles.
“Those nymphs the old ones back home are always banging on about?” I sounded as if I were asking after the weather.
“Maybe.” Serich’s eyes darted around, cataloging the terrain. Finding nothing but trees. “I don’t see any signs, do you?”
None. Just the grinning faces all around us, the hollow bleeding eyes.
I wasn’t even sure what to look for, how much of what the village elders said was true.
They were said to be nigh on ten feet tall, these nymphs.
They wore artfully draped ivy; they had the voices of giggling girls and milky green skin.
Their eyes were emeralds and their hair was black as night.
They might kill with a glance, if they wanted, but more often they feasted on the marrow of children to soak up their verve.
That was the only way to keep themselves young.
Stay away from the wood, the elders were prone to croak at the young ones of Monde’s End.
Or you’ll find yourself in the claws of a nymph.
But It had told me humans knew nothing of the wood. Perhaps it was all just a story.
I felt a prickle on the back of my neck and wondered if It had finished its sulk, but my mind was clear without its shadowy presence.
Perhaps something was perched between branches, watching us. Perhaps a breeze had drifted past, bristling those little hairs on my flesh. Perhaps paranoia was tunneling into my bones, making its nest. Well, good. Fear was the only way we would survive this place.
A bright slash of pain caught me just above the ankle. I hopped back, falling against Serich’s chest. Fairies was my first wild thought, a tiny little sprite with a tiny little axe, but all I found was a violet, many-lipped flower swaying innocently by my boot.
And then the lips burst open, flashing a triple set of bared, moon-white teeth. I struck a moment before it did, crushing it beneath my foot and into a smear of poisonous purple and scattered teeth.
I took Serich’s hand, angling around the smiling sentries. “Let’s go.”
By the time all the hiking had begun to wear on us, it was nearing midday.
We were moving slower, like the air had thickened, our breathing labored.
I felt sweat at my temples, saw Serich’s hairline glimmering.
I hadn’t eaten that morning and was sure he hadn’t either, since I’d found him just as dawn had broken.
This was not a place in which it paid to get lightheaded, even if all seemed calm and sleepy by daylight.
We’d brought skins of water but we’d have to find a water source eventually.
Days it would take to get through this place, It had said.
“Should we stop for a few minutes? Eat something?” I didn’t like suggesting it. Moving targets were harder to catch, but the creatures that dwelled here were likely far quicker than we were to begin with.
Serich’s head was moving as if on a swivel. “When we find somewhere a bit more open. Higher visibility.”
The trees were thinning now, spreading out. Snatches of gray sky peeked through branches heavy with leaves which held dew like tiny saucers. Nests had cropped up but no birdsong floated through the wood. I supposed it was possible even the birds were nocturnal here.
It wasn’t like I could ask It.
I felt an odd concoction of pleased and annoyed that my mind had been my own for so long. As nice as it was to have a few thoughts It hadn’t chimed in to comment on, I felt It could be a lot of help if it would only condescend to do so.
You’re behaving like a child, I said, though I wasn’t sure if It heard. Or cared. I should have put you to bed with warm milk and a blankie.
“Look at that.” Serich’s voice shattered the unearthly silence as he pointed unnecessarily. One would have to be blind not to notice it, how out-of-place it was in this wood.
A clearing lay up ahead, pretty as a daydream, a fantasia of twin willows with pearly white flowers budding against the bark looming above a thick carpet of lush, springy moss.
A gentle light gilded it despite the absence of the sun, setting the dew aflame.
It was a place where children’s fairies nested, the kind who had sweet faces and pink frocks.
The kind that would not live in this wood.
A lovely trap. I knew better than to think something beautiful couldn’t be wicked. I stopped, one hand on a knife at my hip. “We should avoid that like the plague.”
“How, though?” Serich’s voice climbed much higher than usual, for even as we gazed at it, the clearing was broadening, colonizing the wood, moss spreading like some gangrenous infection and unfurling beneath our feet.
No sooner had it touched the soles of our boots then that pretty daydream morphed into a nightmare.
Gone was the gold light, evaporating like a mist. The flowers shriveled into black pits, the moss withered, the branches of the willows swayed threateningly. A great stone cauldron, the biggest I had ever seen, mushroomed up from the earth in the middle of the clearing.
Serich took a step backward, clutching for my sleeve as the sky darkened. “Run.”
And when he turned to do so, he found the waiting arms of the ugliest thing I had ever seen.
A gaunt, warped body hewn of skin and buckling bone, one vicious twist of a nose. A smile jammed full of teeth sharp as the edge of a serrated blade. No whites to its black eyes. Frizzled pale hair, ropes of tiny bones looped around its neck. The creature hardly stood taller than me.
Blackened fingernails that looked as though they’d been gnawed by rats dug into Serich's shoulders. “It’s been ages since we’ve had human.”