by Kate Elliott
She departed in the company of the chatelaine.
Will rubbed his eyes. “That wasn’t as bad as it could have been.”
“I’m going after them,” said Rowan.
His eyes flared. “What are you talking about?”
“Just what I said. Mother will be gone overnight. She won’t figure out what happened until it’s too late.”
“You think the rear guard won’t see us hurrying to catch up and report to Father? He’ll send us back if he figures it out. I don’t think he cares so much, but he never goes against her.”
“The rear guard won’t see us because I have a better idea. The procession has to take the long way around Glass Tarn, but we can take a shortcut on foot.”
“Oh, Ro, let it go,” said Will, drawing out the rhymes.
But she was in full flood. “We’ll get ahead of the procession. When they halt for the night at Beckborough we’ll slide right in to help with the horses. Father will never know we weren’t with them the whole time.”
“This sounds like a crazy and dangerous idea.”
“Yes, it could get us into huge trouble. I just need to fetch a nursemaid to watch over Erec, then I’m leaving. Are you coming with me?”
His shoulders heaved, and with a grin he slapped her on the shoulder. “Let’s go.”
3
Kneeling beside his sister, Will reflected that Rowan’s ideas always sounded good right up until he realized they weren’t going to work. A stand of brush concealed them from the gardens and houses of the hamlet of Wealdrum, which nestled in a picturesque dale surrounded by hills. Castle Ardenvale was an hour’s walk away, not so far but hidden from view by the stony bulk of Giant’s Jaw Hill.
The trampled fields looked bleak under the midday sun. What should have been healthy stalks of ripened wheat and barley awaiting harvest lay snapped and withered on the ground, streaked with patches of dried blood. Will shuddered, thinking of the poor farmer who had been dragged bleeding across the fields by redcaps. Nasty creatures.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he whispered. “You can’t really be suggesting we hike over Choking Drum.”
He nodded toward the ridge that ran between Giant’s Jaw Hill and distant Crown Crag. Choking Drum formed a physical barrier between the tiny dale and the wide lowlands of Ardenvale proper. Trees grew densely along the slope and crest of the ridge. Even from down here he could feel the animosity of a place that held a pulse of its own: a stubborn remnant of the Wilds grown along the ridge. The combined efforts of the castle denizens and the hardy farmers of Wealdrum hadn’t managed to eradicate it.
“It’s not that wide,” said Rowan with her usual pompous need to over-explain. She was a lot like their father. “Titus can easily shoot an arrow over that bit of forest. We just have to race through and get to the top.”
“Is it just me who sees trampled fields and blood?”
“Redcaps never stick around. They’re fickle and craven. Anyway, you heard what the chatelaine said. There’s been a new incursion in Wesling Village, a half day’s ride west, nowhere near here. The far slope of the ridge is clear of Wilds-touched forest. Once we reach the crest it’s an easy walk down to Beckborough. You remember. Last year we hiked from Beckborough up Crown Crag to see the old battle site.”
“Yes, with Cerise, Titus, and fourteen others including three knights. And yet, when I look around, I see you and…me. Can you count?”
“I’ll go alone. I’ll tell Cerise and Titus you got sick with nerves and stayed at the castle.” She got to her feet, adjusted her sword where her belt had gotten twisted, and dashed over to a thorny hedge that acted as first line of defense between Wealdrum and the trees. Using the hedge as cover she jogged toward the ridge.
Will pressed fingers to his eyes. He’d known something like this would happen. Will didn’t like disobeying his parents because it upset them. He loved them too much to hurt them. His easy acquiescence made everyone think he was the obedient twin while Rowan was the headstrong, insubordinate one. The misapprehension gave him a lot of space to do what he wanted, which was to seek out secrets he could someday trade to the mirror at Castle Vantress in the hope of winning knighthood there. At Vantress he could study and learn to his heart’s content. He could go exploring without his parents always looking over his shoulder and questioning his every move to make sure he was above reproach. It was so annoying, and it wasn’t as if he and Rowan had ever been actual troublemakers. They just wanted some space to make their own choices.
So why not? Rowan had been right about their mother; she could have given the queen’s lecture herself. After two days it was probable the redcaps had moved on. Redcap burrows within the borders of the Realm had been burned out before he was born. And because they were hunted ruthlessly when they ventured out of the Wilds they never stayed in the Realm for long.
Anyway, he’d always wanted to set foot in the Wilds. See what was there. Learn a few of its secrets. Cutting through a narrow strip of the Wilds was as safe a way as any to get his feet wet. No one need ever know.
This adventure wasn’t such a bad idea after all!
He trotted after Rowan, catching up as she reached the edge of the forest. It sprang up in an abrupt line where the ridge began to slope more steeply. She had halted to stare in consternation at the vegetation. The trees created an impenetrable wall interwoven with rose brambles and woody vines.
Will touched the hilt of his sword. “Are you suggesting we cut our way in?”
She caught her breath. A line of moss-covered stairs appeared, climbing the slope within a tunnel made by overhanging trees and arching brambles. The figure of a person astride a magnificent elk descended the stairs. The rider’s pale hood concealed its face. The elk seemed made of mist drifting toward lower ground. Its huge wings and impressive spread of antlers interpenetrated the tangle of trees, making it more ghost than substance.
A shiver of awe and terror crawled through his flesh. He drew his sword.
Rowan whispered. “Archons can’t be killed by ordinary weapons.”
“I know,” he whispered back, tightening his hand on his sword’s hilt.
The archon dissolved into the shadows, there and then gone. But the stairs remained: a lure, a promise, or a trap.
The heat of adrenalin flashed through him, then subsided as Rowan muttered something angry and determined under her breath and started up the stairs. She hadn’t gotten up five steps before her form faded from view as the gloom beneath the trees swallowed her. Keeping his sword unsheathed, he hurried after. The stone steps were slippery with moss and lichen. A throat-squeezing dampness like a hundred invisible cold hands pressed against him. When he glanced back he could no longer see the dale, only a shrinking oval of light.
“Hey, wait up, Ro.” His voice echoed, blown back at him from amid the trees: Ro Ro Ro….
Her leaf-green cape billowed, or maybe that was wind blowing branches across the stairs. Had he lost sight of her? A glimmer flashed: She’d drawn her sword. He put on a burst of speed but stumbled as the steps flattened into a dim open space carpeted with woody vines as thick as his legs. They reminded him of sleeping snakes.
He stopped. What if they were really snakes? Snakes that could wrap you tight in their massive coils and choke the life out of you? Snakes that could turn into smoke and choke you by filling up your lungs through your nose and mouth? Wasn’t that why this ridge was called Choking Drum? Why all the knights and farmers of Ardenvale had never been able to clear this serpent-infested ground?
A slow hiss teased his ears. Were the vines starting to slither?
“Will, is that you?” Rowan said in a low voice.
She stood in the open space, which wasn’t a clearing because there was no sign of sky, even though the sun stood at its zenith and should have been spearing light down onto the forest loam. The vines weren’t moving. It was just a trick of the eyes.
He walked over to her, careful not to step on any of the eerie vines twisted along t
he ground. With each step he felt he was cracking objects underfoot, as if walking on a carpet of tiny bones. Trees loomed on all sides, bending in to embrace their hapless prisoners.
“This has to be the crest,” she muttered. “We should have reached the other side by now. Can you see a path out of here?”
The forest was dead silent, not even birds singing. A smell drifted on the breeze, so rank it made his eyes water. He blinked back the tears.
A branch snapped.
Rowan spun, blade slashing. A waist-high figure screamed in agony and fell sideways. The hot scent of fresh blood flooded over Will’s senses, holding him in place like a spell.
“Behind you!” Rowan shouted.
He whirled, blocking with his sword. A crude blade thunked against steel. A gray, leathery-skinned redcap chittered at him, teeth white in the gloom, hair matted with a crust of blood so stiff it was like a helmet. Though its head barely came to his chest it attacked again, fearless and vicious as it pressed him back. He tripped backward over a vine and landed clumsily on his back, his blade wrenched from his hand.
YI YI! it shrieked as it leaped. He kicked up to catch it on the chest and send it reeling backward. A staggeringly brilliant crackle of lightning enveloped it, and it fell.
Breathe. Breathe. He fumbled around and finally found his fallen sword just as Rowan stabbed the redcap through the abdomen. Its scream of pain cut the air like a clarion call. Redcaps never went anywhere just in pairs. More would come, and swiftly.
Shadows moved off to their right, where the stairs had been. Four more were sneaking up on Rowan as she looked the other way, hearing something moving in the trees to the left.
Will flung a net of ice at the ones about to swarm Rowan. By itself the ice couldn’t hurt them, but the cold slowed them down. She cast bursts of lightning into the sluggish bodies of the four trying to mob her. The ice amplified the lightning charge. They jerked and quivered, mouths open in silent screams. As the brightness faded, they crashed to the ground.
Rowan’s magic sizzled out. As she bent over, panting from exertion and surprise, one fallen redcap stirred. Dragging itself on its forearms, it crawled toward Will, hissing. Sharpened teeth glimmered like waiting knives. He scrambled up, sword in hand. The injured redcap lunged at him. All the years of training rushed back into his head: use the shoulder, velocity, edge, focus, follow-through. He slashed it deep across the chest and, as it tumbled, finished it with a cut down onto its exposed neck.
It collapsed and lay unmoving.
He and his sister stood back to back, breathing hard, surrounded by six dead redcaps. Vines rustled, curling around the bodies to engulf them. A gust of wind stung their faces with a gritty shower that tasted of blood. Will reflexively shut his eyes and covered his mouth and nose. The tree tops rattled. The wind died.
When he opened his eyes, it was dim in the ordinary way of heavy forest cover. A hazy glamour of summer sunlight shone beyond the tangled growth of vine-wrapped trees and shrubs blooming with blood-red maw-flowers. They were standing about fifty paces from the edge of the forest, on the crest of the ridge. So close to safety.
Rowan pressed a hand to her forehead. “Did that happen, or did we dream it?”
“Hush.”
A chitter-chitter of redcap voices rose out of the silence. More were coming, many, many more. Branches swayed as something very large and weirdly quiet moved in the thick brush. Through the leaves Will glimpsed a helmet.
“What is that?” Rowan’s eyes went wide as a creature crept closer: huge shoulders covered in a monstrously large cloak. The glint of a massive axe. “Is it a man? Is it a giant?”
Will grabbed her arm.
“Is it—?”
“Ro! Shut up and run.”
4
Branches whipped against Rowan’s face as she raced through the foliage, headed for the promise of sunlight, the marker of lands belonging to the orderly Realm that pushed back at the ungovernable Wilds. Footfalls broke out from within the cover of the trees as redcaps pursued them. She glanced sideways to make sure Will was keeping pace. He was a little ahead.
“Almost there!” she called.
A wild rose bramble grew like a tangled fence at the edge of the trees. Thorns caught on their sleeves and leggings as they pushed through. Petals fluttered in drifts of red.
They cleared the forest and were out of the Wilds, running on stony ground toward the crest a few paces ahead. They dodged around two fallen menhirs, one broken atop the other.
Will staggered to a halt and flung out an arm to get her to stop. The crest of the ridge did not gently roll down in a steep but negotiable slope, which is how it ought to have done, for he’d studied the ridge more than once from the town of Beckborough at its base. Instead, a promontory like the blunt prow of a ship ended in a cliff face with no way down except plunging to a messy death on rocks far below.
“This can’t be right. Where—?” Rowan broke off as the hoots and chittering of redcaps grew louder.
Will muttered an oath under his breath.
Together, they turned. Trees fully surrounded the little promontory, fencing them in on three sides with the cliff at their backs. Redcaps edged out of the trees, crude swords and spears in hand. The sun shone hotly on long hair streaked and matted with dried blood. Their cunning, malicious expressions gleamed in sneering faces. They snapped filed teeth. Rowan couldn’t even count them because there were too many.
Her gaze stopped on the two big fallen stones. “We’ll keep the stones at our backs, hold them off. We can do it.”
“There’s something hiding in the shadows beneath the broken stone. We’re still in the Wilds. I don’t think…Ro, that big creature followed us!”
The outer line of trees thrashed. A towering figure burst out of the trees. He was no giant, but Rowan wasn’t sure he could be called a man. A scarred helmet covered part of his face. A thick fur cloak adorned with yellowing horns covered his shoulders. His torso was bare except for a single strap slung crosswise to hold a weapon over his back. Strips of worn leather made a skirt to cover his belly and thighs. But it was his size and ferocity that armored him. He stalked forward. The axe he held was as tall as Rowan.
“One two,” she said.
Blue bloomed along Will’s hands as he wove his spell. Ice spun a cold skin around the man. The bite of lightning tingled in her hands, buzzing along the length of her sword. She’d honed her speed through years of practice and darted in to release her magic into the net of ice. Red-tinged lightning coursed through the ice in a flare so bright that for an instant she couldn’t see anything.
The redcaps fell silent.
When the flash of their twinned magic faded, the man swept a hand sideways through the air as if to swat away an inconvenient bug. The redcaps kept their distance from this formidable creature, but emboldened by his survival, they skittered closer toward the twins, mobbing into two separate packs to hit from two sides. The wind shifted, blowing their stench into Rowan’s face. She started coughing.
“Not one of your best ideas,” muttered Will.
“We’re not defeated yet.” But as she tightened her grip on her sword she knew perfectly well the odds were against them. Would the redcaps or the monstrous hunter attack first?
A shape stirred in the shadows beneath the fallen stone, another creature of the Wilds emerging to plague them. The movement pulled her attention away from her guard. Redcaps darted in to slash at her, a blade catching on her forearm as she hastily parried. Will thrust, driving them back, but the damage had been done. The cut stung like fire eating into her skin.
A silky, pleasant voice drawled, “Dog, save the poor youths before these foul goblins chew them to pieces. The stink is paralyzing me.”
Rowan had never seen a person move with as much potent force as the big hunter. He charged into the nearer mob. Redcaps weren’t cowards. They swarmed him, but he scythed them down with his bloody axe, heads cut right off, bodies flying. Those who survived the
first culling fled, some into the trees and some so terror-struck they tumbled off the cliff. He leaped toward the second mob. They ran in a panic as he pounded at their heels, chopping down those who lagged. When they scattered into the forest, he too vanished into the trees in pursuit. The shrieks of redcaps made a fading trail of sound. Left behind, Rowan and Will finished off the few redcaps still twitching. A flash of motion caught her eye. She swung around.
A young man jumped lightly up onto the sun-warmed platform made by the fallen stone’s length. No, not a man, Rowan saw as soon as he lifted his face up toward the sky to smile into the light. By the handsome cut of his cheekbones and the elegant shape of his ears he had elf blood in him. Strangely, although his skin was as pale as her father’s, his left arm was blue, as if it had been dipped in woad. What she at first took for a blue mask across his eyes was more of that same warm blue tone.
He turned his sky-welcoming smile onto Rowan and Will. “Well met, my friends. I apologize for the intrusion. I hope my colleague’s presence did not startle or discomfort you. We were on the trail of these detestable creatures when they caught what I now realize was your scent.”
He bowed, waited a moment as if acknowledging they were both too thunderstruck to reply, and said, “I am called Oko. At your service, my friends.”
“You must be from Locthwain,” Rowan blurted out as she stared at the unexpected figure that was evidently not a ghostly apparition but flesh and bone.
Will elbowed her hard in the ribs. “I’m Will. This is my sister Rowan. You saved our lives, Oko. You and your companion have our most heartfelt thanks. We are in your debt.”
“I suppose you are.” Oko hopped down from the stone and paced up to them, looking them over with an inquisitive gaze that made Rowan flush self-consciously. He tapped his lips with a finger, humming slightly under his breath, as he stared into her eyes. His were dark, pensive, even a little melancholy. “You two look familiar but I can’t quite place you.”