Whispers in the Woods
Guruk
A scent of turned earth permeated the air, carrying on the breeze before the path curved to reveal its cause.
“Mudslide,” I said aloud, though no words were needed.
The damage was significant. The hillside had collapsed in an arching sweep, raw and dark with moisture, the displaced stones sitting where they had fallen with no moss yet to soften them. Recent, then. Days at most.
I studied it with the eye of one who had spent enough seasons watching the land shift to know what fresh disruption looked like.
My fields I knew intimately, every low patch that flooded, every stretch of soil that ran thin over rock.
This road I knew less well, only as far as my lumber trade had ever taken me, which was to the village market and no further east than that.
But I knew disturbed earth. And this had not been here long.
“Dungeon fork number one,” Sammy said, sweeping her gaze over the chaos, her notebook already open against her forearm. She had been sketching before I finished looking. The mudslide was rendered in her quick, intent lines, bottom lip caught between her teeth. “Wait it out or we go around?”
“We go around.”
“That was fast.” She glanced up at me. “Do you know another way?”
“I know the valley drops southeast from here.” I studied the trees, orienting myself from the position of the sun and the slope of the land the way my father had taught me — reading a landscape from its bones rather than its roads.
“There will be a path through. These hills have been settled long enough that no obstacle goes unnoticed for long.”
“That's less ‘I know the way’ and more ‘I have a strong feeling about the way’, Guruk,” she said, with a quirk of her lips.
“I am an orc, Sammy,” I said. “I read land. I know the land.”
She considered this with a tilt of her head. “Alright. Lead the way, my orc.”
I led the way with her claiming of “my orc” ringing in my ears. It would never get old. Nor would her trust in me, freely given. It still moved something inside me every time. My chest expanded as if filled with the power of the land itself, or rather, my little human’s love.
The valley path was quieter than the main road, the canopy lower, the birdsong different. We had been walking perhaps an hour when a sound from deep in the bracken made me slow my stride without thinking.
Sammy appeared at my elbow. “What is it?”
“A warbler.” I tilted my head toward the sound. “I haven’t heard one in some time. They prefer deep wood. Don't like noise or disturbance.” I listened until the call came again, clearer. “My mother used to say if you heard one, the forest was at peace.”
Sammy was quiet at my side. Then her notebook opened.
“Don't.” I gently placed my hand over hers.
She looked up with perfect innocence. “I'm not writing about the warbler.”
I cocked a brow. “You are writing about the warbler.”
Shaking her pen free and making quick flicks in her notebook, she said, “I'm writing about you talking about the warbler.” She tucked the pen behind her ear, satisfied. “Entirely different.”
I groaned and kept walking, which made her laugh. That warm, unguarded sound still caught me without warning, no matter how many times I heard it.
Berry rode my shoulder for the first hour, then Sammy’s back, then my shoulder again.
The florin was restless in a way I had been quietly watching since we left home.
Not distressed. Alert. Their tails moved in small, continuous rotations instead of the loose sway of contentment.
I filed it away and turned my attention back to Sammy, where it was considerably more pleasant to keep it.
She was cataloging the valley with the same intensity she brought to everything, crouching at a banded stone, sketching an unfamiliar leaf, holding up a cluster of small orange berries on a stem.
“What do you call these?”
“Autumn bells.”
“Edible?”
My eyes widened at the thought of her being sickened by the berries. “No.”
She wrote it down anyway. I caught a glimpse: Autumn bells. Do not eat. Investigate further. As if the berries might reconsider their position if studied long enough. I loved her without qualification, and I thought the autumn bells fortunate to receive her attention.
It was while she crouched over a patch of moss, debating its taxonomy aloud to Berry, that the prickling came. An acute awareness hit me like ants under my skin. The woods to our left were quieter than a windless afternoon warranted. The bracken was too still.
I did not stop walking, nor did I change my pace. I let my eyes move without shifting my head.
Nothing.
And then something. A shift in the shadows thirty feet back, and a creature low to the ground. Small. Fast. Gone before I could fix it in my sight.
A fox, perhaps. A stone marten.
I adjusted the packs on my back and kept walking. I also, without appearing to do so, put myself between Sammy and the bracken, letting the path’s curve do most of the work.
“Are you listening?” she asked.
“I am always listening to you,” I said, which was entirely true. “The moss, a titania variety, if I am not mistaken.”
She pointed her pen at me. "See, this is why I keep you around."
“And here I thought it was my handsome face.” I wiggled my tusks at her.
Sammy laughed again. “Well, that too.”
The tension in my neck eased, just slightly. I chose to believe the shadow had been a fox and kept the decision where I could examine it later.
By late afternoon, the gnome settlement appeared out of the brush.
A quaint village with all the sights and sounds, and most importantly, the scents of home.
Wood smoke and something sweet, a resin I recognized from the craftspeople who occasionally brought goods to the village market, tickled my nose.
Then the sounds of a wheel turning, a hammer tapping its patient rhythm, and voices pitched low.
Sammy slowed and motioned toward the village gates. “Travelers?”
“Residents.” I waved her onward. “A small settlement. I have not dealt with them directly, but I know of them through the market. They are known for their craftsmanship,” I shot her a toothy grin, “and their hospitality.”
Her face lit up at the word. The path to Sammy’s heart had been through her stomach. And I loved she enjoyed food as much as I did. Tonight, we’d be dine well.
I had been dreaming about the valley gnomes’ honey since before we left home. I wanted to see her expression when she tasted it. Giving her things, whether gifts or experiences, and watching her receive them, well, it had become one of the great pleasures of my life. One I did not take for granted.
The settlement elder was a gnome named Pell.
Compact and ancient, with deep-set eyes the color of river clay and hands that never stopped moving, he turned a piece of carved wood over and over as he spoke.
He welcomed us with the warm formality of someone who had received many travelers and found most of them acceptable.
“Welcome, friends!” He raised his mug to us in greeting as we made to sit around a low table with cups of pine-and-honey tea. “May your travels fare well and your stay with us pleasant.”
Berry settled on the cushion beside me. I noted their sudden stillness after the restlessness of the road, but the florin was not relaxed. Watchful. I observed them as they gazed around the room, which meant I nearly missed the moment Sammy tasted the tea.
Her eyes closed. A small, involuntary sound escaped her.
“Good?” I asked.
She opened one eye. “Do not say I told you so.”
“I wouldn’t dare.”
“You are absolutely thinking it.”
“I am thinking,” I said, wrapping my arm around her waist and pulling her closer, “that you look very happy. And that it is my favorite thing to see.”
The softening of her expression moved through me like sunshine. Under the table, her hand found my thigh.
I leaned in to whisper in her ear. “Now, I’m thinking about what I’d like to do to you when we’re alone.”
She gasped, her face flushing. I covered her hand with my own and kept it there for the rest of the conversation.
Squeezing my thigh, she whispered back, “Behave.”
Pell, across from us, turned his carved piece twice and set it down. He and the elder woman beside him exchanged a look containing an entire conversation.
“The shining falls,” he said, in answer to Sammy’s question about our destination. He hummed. “Sacred place. Beautiful. Most valley folk don't go. Not from fear, mind you. Out of respect.”
“Has anyone been near it recently?” Sammy leaned forward, tea forgotten, her gamer focus fully engaged. “Anything unusual in that direction?”
Pell turned the wood again. “Someone passed through,” he said carefully. “Three nights ago. Perhaps four. Moving east. Fast.” A pause. “Small.”
“A child?” Sammy asked.
“No.” His river-clay eyes moved briefly to me, then back. “Not a child.”
I kept my expression easy, a deliberate ease, long practiced and having learned that animals read tension in a face. “Did they stop here?”
“No. They moved at night. I only saw because I keep late hours.” He set the carved piece flat on the table; the first time he had stopped turning it. “A creature that moves at night and doesn’t stop to speak is either frightened or doesn’t want to be known. Neither sits well with me.”
Sammy’s hand tightened on my thigh for a very different reason than before.
“Thank you for telling us,” I said, squeezing her hand in reassurance.
He nodded once. “The falls are worth the journey.” A pause before it, slight but present. “ But I thought you should know what the road has carried ahead of you.”
On our way out, Berry found the settlement’s florin.
I had not known there was one as they did not always announce themselves.
But Berry launched from my shoulder without warning and shot across the courtyard to where a cream-colored florin waited on a fence post. The new florin was a head shorter than Berry.
Younger, perhaps, though I did not know the florin lifespan.
Sammy clasped her hands together the moment she saw them. “Oh,” she breathed, dropping her voice as though raising it might interrupt something. “Are they talking?”
“In their way.”
“It’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever seen.”
I watched her watch them. The open wonder on her face turned her natural beauty to sheer radiance.
I stared at her in awe. She had come from another world and found this one extraordinary at every turn.
Singing grass, autumn bells, titania moss, and two florins exchanging something wordless on a fence post in the afternoon sun.
Through her eyes, I found it extraordinary again, too.
It was pure magic to rediscover my beloved home through her eager exploration.
The florin exchange lasted perhaps thirty seconds. No sound could I hear, simply the two of them holding hands with tails raised and fanned wide. Then Berry returned to my shoulder. The cream florin did not move from its post.
Berry’s eyes were forward. Tails lower than they had been all morning.
“What did they say?” Sammy asked.
Berry made a sound. Soft. Brief.
I translated. Sammy could understand Berry, but the florin had given me extra details. Information they didn’t say with words but a picture in my head. I swallowed, not wanting to keep anything from Sammy, but not wanting to worry her needlessly more. “They said the falls are beautiful.”
“Right!” Sammy smiled and reached for her notebook.
Berry’s tail pressed once against the side of my neck.
I knew that signal. I had felt it before storms, in the hour before rain when the farm animals went still and the air changed its character. It meant, pay attention. Not turn back. More of something is coming, and you should be ready.
I was ready.
I kept Sammy ahead of me on the path to camp, where I could see her and where she belonged. Mine. My heart rumbled. My little human was mine to protect, to love, to cherish. Nothing would harm her so long as I lived. I swore it to the gods old and new.
That night, we made camp at a sheltered bend where the trees closed in on three sides, and I could see the road in both directions.
Sammy did not question the choice. She was pleasantly tired, settling cross-legged by the fire with her notebook propped on her knees and the wildflower from the meadow pressed between two pages.
I built the fire larger than the evening warranted and kept it fed.
Sending our first status message to the sheriff through Berry at the appropriate hour, I gave the florin the basics: our direction, our heading, and that we were well. Nothing specific. Not the settlement, not Pell, not what the elder had told us about a small creature moving east at night.
I was not certain yet. And I would not send unnecessary alarm.
Carving at a captured bit of wood by the firelight while Sammy wrote, I scraped and shaped.
In no time at all, a small alicorn took shape beneath my knife.
It was the kind of task my hands did when my mind needed something to work against. Sammy fell asleep before I finished.
I set the carving aside, banked the fire, and listened to the forest until I was satisfied.
Then I slept, keeping my back to the woods and my little human in my arms. Her pleasant warmth permeated my chest, and her hair tickled my nose. I sighed in contentment and the florin mimicked the sound, curling around Sammy’s knees.
Despite the ease of the evening, I woke twice in the night and scanned the tree line.
Both times: nothing.
I chose to trust in the woodland guardians after that. The night stayed quiet, and Sammy slept soundly, and for now that was enough.