Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Fire crawls across the clearing without mercy, swallowing everything in its path.
Fae sprint between the flames, some half-carrying, half-dragging others, skin flushed red where it got too close.
A stag with a crown of pale antlers crashes through brush with rabbits clustering in its shadow.
Sprites huddle together, wailing in tinny voices that carry over the fray.
A stilt-limbed creature with translucent skin floats past them, trailing a slick of copper-bright blood where something has sliced through its side.
‘Fall back to the creek!’ Lox commands, voice rising over the fray. His nostrils flare and his eyes narrow like he’s inspecting the flames.
‘What is it?’ Marian throws an arm over her nose and mouth.
‘They’ve mixed iron filings into the pitch,’ Lox snarls, ripping the hem of his shirt into strips to bind over their mouths.
He hands one to Marian; she ties it off with shaking fingers.
‘It deadens my ability to tell the roots how to smother the fire.’ He slams his palm to the ground and strains until sweat beads along his temples.
The ground shivers, but the fire holds its shape.
Heart slamming, Marian moves toward a fae woman hobbling toward them. She shoulders under the woman’s arm without asking and takes her weight. The woman’s skin is blistered where a lick of flame kissed. Marian smells the fae ore on it, metallic and wrong.
Lox bellows into the air with fury, never looking away from the writhing fire as he sinks both palms to the earth.
The ground beyond, where the smoke hasn’t yet been smothered, answers.
The moss darkens, fat with water drawn from deep within the earth.
Vines wake and, further downslope, a stand of poplars tilts together as one – a green wall falling gently to smother the fire’s appetite for air.
Marian moves where he doesn’t. She pulls her sleeves down around her hands and bats the flame until it sputters and dies.
Heat blisters through the cloth; she bites the inside of her cheek but she keeps going.
Despite the ore bleeding through the soil, the humming in her bones appears to dull with each flame she smothers.
A pained grunt sounds in the distance. Her head snaps toward it. Lox’s whole body is bent over, arms sunk to the elbow in turned earth. The forest is straining through him, the veins in his neck corded with the effort.
The sight sparks an idea. It’s mad, desperate, but the whirr in her bones grows louder again as if telling her she’s on the right path.
Her palms sting where bark scored them, but she presses them to the charred soil anyway.
The grit rubs against her burns and makes her teeth clench, but she forces herself to open to it.
Show me, she thinks. If I’m the only one that can hear you, then show me how to help you.
She presses her palms into the earth and the world opens. The vision strikes her all at once, blinding and visceral.
Beneath her palms, the char blisters away and she sees the under-flesh of Sherwood’s body.
The image drags her beyond the crescent of ruined forest to where fire hasn’t yet bitten and the iron hasn’t salted the ground, and she sees the veins of Sherwood pulse gold.
It’s as though the earth itself has ripped open for her, marrow gleaming to say that if the Rootkeeper calls, there the forest will still answer.
Her breath tears out of her. ‘Lox!’
He doesn’t look up. His arms tremble where they’re braced in the soil. Sweat slicks his temples, his teeth bared in strain. ‘I can’t hold it—’
‘Yes, you can, but not here.’ She staggers toward him, smoke stinging her eyes, her throat raw. ‘You have to go beyond the treeline. Past where they’ve salted it.’
Lox’s head snaps toward her, golden eyes blazing through the haze. ‘How could you possibly—’ His voice chokes off in a cough as the acrid smoke grips his lungs. He snarls against it, furious at his weakness, at the fire, at everything. ‘There’s no way to know for sure, Marian. I can’t risk it.’
‘Please,’ she begs, voice raw from the smoke and her own fear. Her eyes stream, but she doesn’t look away. ‘I need you to trust me.’
For a heartbeat, all she hears is the crackle of flame and the wailing of creatures. His gaze scours her face in search of the lie. Within the space of a blink, his shoulders lock, decision made. He wrenches his hands from the dirt and hurries toward where she points.
Together they stumble through smoke and flame until the ground beneath them breathes again.
Here the moss is still damp, the roots still whispering.
Lox drops to his knees and drives his palms deep, until the ground shudders.
Vines thrash across blackened earth as a dozen poplars bow together, choking the flame into embers.
Marian drags her boots and blistered palms against the dirt to snuff smaller tongues of flame along the way. She drags a half-conscious sprite away from a falling branch, before tearing at her sleeves to suffocate another spark on its wing.
Each one she smothers makes the pressure between her ears ease, as though she’s staunching wounds on the forest’s body. She bats fire from moss, throws damp soil against burning roots, coughs until her chest aches.
At the slope’s edge, Lox plants his palms to the ground, arms open wide, antlers bowing as though Sherwood itself pours into his frame.
Roots heave up and twist themselves into a barricade.
Sap surges in the moss until it weeps wet, a green tide crawling over blackened trunks.
The flames recoil, spitting sparks, as the forest presses back.
But it isn’t enough. The fire roars higher, greedy, clawing at the barricade with red tongues.
Marian’s lungs seize from the heat, her burned hands screaming, and she stumbles away from the surging inferno.
The fire devours everything it touches.
She stares at the ruin clawing across land, and the fury in her chest outpaces her fear.
The way men – her father, the Sheriff, even the king – build their thrones on the bodies of everything wild and call it order.
They strip the marrow from the earth, and when the world screams, they beat it into silent submission.
She watches as fae children are carried out of the fray half-dead.
Creatures scorched to bone scuttle deeper into the wood.
She wants to tear her skin open and scream with it.
Lox claimed he would not start a war without the Council’s blessing, but if this isn’t war, then what is?
Shapes break through the haze. Fae of all kinds, their eyes molten-bright with magic, flood the clearing in every direction.
One sweeps her arms, and the creek’s bellow rises, to lash across the flames.
Another raises both hands skyward, and the fire shivers, folding in on itself as though pressed by an unseen force.
Steam hisses as water and blaze collide, filling the air with a choking steam.
Slowly, the flames die, but the damage has been wrought.
Where once there was greenery, only jutting spears of blackened trunks remain. The earth exhales smoke like a sleeping dragon. Embers pulse in the wreckage, a heartbeat refusing to die. The forest quiets, but it is not peace.
It is the silence of graves.
Marian stands as the ruin sinks in. The fae murmur in relief, but her chest is hollow with rage. Ash clings to her hair, her tongue, her skin.
In the distance, Lox looks carved from fury – shoulders taut, jaw locked, and chest heaving. The sight of him both steadies and unravels her. He stands here, watching his home burn, and is forced to measure his wrath against the weight of his duty.
Marian cannot bear it.
Bodies move in fragments through the haze: fae with singed wings, scorched hands, eyes red from smoke and grief.
A sprite kneels by the charred husk of a sapling, rocking back and forth as though it were a child.
From the creek-bed stumble the river-born, hair dripping, their mouths stained with soot.
They cradle limp fish in their arms, pressing them back into ash-coated water.
Around them, branches groan as dryads emerge from hollowed boles, their bodies streaked with burn scars and trails of blood.
A redcap sits in the soot, wailing over the bones of some small, scorched creature.
Everywhere she looks, the forest grieves.
* * *
Tension ripples through the chamber at the heart of Elswyth.
The nine stand around the ringed table, their faces etched in stone as Marian awaits their decision.
She’d done her best to impress upon them the urgency of needing to defend their land, to make the Sheriff pay for what he’s done.
Now she stands just inside the threshold – palms damp, jaw set – while they deliberate.
Smoke from the burned quarter still sticks to her.
She closes her eyes to try to drown out the Council’s squabbling, but all she sees are limp bodies.
‘If we strike at the Sheriff now, we invite a purge,’ Onóra’s voice rings out. ‘Fair folk will not survive a war waged on human terms.’
Aife’s forearms flex. ‘Every day we wait, we give them time to strike harder. The bogs are scarred; the reeds carry water poisoned by decay. We cannot pretend we are not already at war.’
‘And what of those who will die because of our meddling?’ Corven rasps. ‘Men we do not know, hearths we do not hold. We are kin to the sky and to the small things under it, but not to human cruelty. If we spill human blood in our war, where does it end?’
The Elders’ faces tighten, some with empathy, others with impatience, but all with the hard calculus of survival.
Cern leans forward and rumbles, ‘It ends when the Sheriff’s forges lie drowned and his wagons rot in the riverbeds. Men will always have hearths. Sherwood has only itself. And it is dying.’