by Amber Argyle
She was up again in a second, her arms out and her steps placed with a little more care. The second time she fell, she stifled her gasp of pain as something banged into her side. She rolled away from it until she fetched up against something solid.
She went utterly still, forcing her breath to come evenly, her head spinning. Ancestors, she was in the Forbidden Forest. She had to get out. Get out! Get out!
A shadow shifted. Stumbled. Cursed. A dozen steps directly behind her. “I’m going to find you,” he whispered into the darkness. “And when I do . . .”
Swallowing her whimper, she crawled on her hands and knees, easing her weight down to make sure she didn’t make a sound. A sudden pulling of her dress as it caught on something. A rip sounded loud in the night. She froze, waiting. Harben’s steps rushed toward her. She bolted, keeping low to the ground, her steps wide.
A vibration punched through her, sending her reeling. She staggered forward. All around her, faces loomed out of the shadows. Faces with black, empty eyes and mouths gaped wide enough to swallow her whole. The stirring—the forest attacking her.
A hand buried itself in her hair and jerked her back. She buried her elbow in Harben’s gut. His grip loosed. She turned and kneed him in the groin. She tore free, leaving bits of her hair behind. Ahead of her loomed the largest face yet, a tortured moan slipping through its torn mouth.
She leaped straight into it.
Chapter Four
Gilgad
Trying to keep her breathing even, Caelia stumbled through the forest, her ears keen to any sounds of pursuit. The faces continued to swallow her, and a horrible cold washed over her each time.
She knew the stories of the stirring. It didn’t go on forever. If she could reach the other side, it would stop. She banged her shin against something, a throb of pain shooting up her leg. She was going to break a bone if she didn’t stop. But stopping meant death.
So she crawled. Through brambles and sharp sticks and leaves. Bumping into trees. Until the lunging mouths suddenly ceased. She collapsed, breath sawing in and out of her throat. Ancestors, she was inside the Forbidden Forest. No girl who went into the forest came out again.
She stiffened, waiting for the beast’s teeth to crack through her ribs. His claws to shred the muscles of her back.
Nothing.
She dared lift her head, turning her ears this way and that for the sound of claws through dirt. The sound of Harben’s heavy footfalls. No sounds of pursuit, but she did hear something else.
Music. She tipped her ear toward the distant strains of a heartbreakingly beautiful song. It wound around her, touching the hollow place inside her, skimming along its surface like a rock skipping across a pond.
There weren’t any drums, but it had to be the bonfire. What else could it be?
She hadn’t been in the forest long—maybe twenty minutes? She could still escape before the beast found her. Or Harben.
Caelia pushed up on shaking arms, searching for the glow of fire. All she could make out was shadow upon shadow, jagged shapes of trees against the pitted night sky.
She moved toward the strains, ear tipped toward them. The melody was lost to the wind. She shifted back, catching it again. Her reaching hands brushed up against bark. She cringed away, expecting something to grab her, teeth sinking into her neck.
She wanted to call out, but she feared making any sound might draw the beast. The threads wove together into a tapestry that tasted like a deep, cold well. It was like nothing she’d ever heard before. Like magic.
Suddenly, where solid earth should be, there was nothing. She threw her weight back, arms cartwheeling. The earth beneath her left foot crumbled. She slid, plummeting. A wild scream burst from her like a pot boiling over—it was out before she could draw it back. Her hands scrambled for something to hold onto, toes and fingers digging into the loose dirt.
She fell into hot, shallow water and gasped in shock. Had she fallen into the beast’s cookpot? Terror robbed her of breath and movement. But no, there was mud beneath her hands. A hot spring? Had to be. In that in-between moment, she heard something. The intake of breath like a bellows. The shifting of a heavy body. A splash. Her whole body froze in terror. Because whatever this was, it was huge, and it was coming closer.
She’d stumbled into the beast’s lair.
All her brave promises to kill the beast evaporated. She wasn’t a warrior. She was nothing more than a shadow.
Instinct took over. She scrambled, feet churning into the slope she’d slid down. Mud and loose soil crumbled beneath her. And something else. Something solid and fibrous. A root or vine. Fear gave her extra strength. She caught hold, braced her feet, and hauled herself up. One handhold. Two. Three.
Something hit her from below, sending her swinging. It had a hold of her dress. Whatever it was bumped against her leg. Her dress tore. The thing slid down, and pain erupted from her leg.
Teeth or claws, she wasn’t sure.
Spinning, she got her feet under her again and managed two more handholds. Whatever was below her hissed and snapped and writhed. But it did not climb after her. Another handhold. Another. She was going to make it. She was going to reach the end.
But her left leg wasn’t working right. It slipped and dangled, useless and heavy. Weakness spread upward, moving toward her hip. Her arms trembled with her weight. She tried to take another handhold, but her arms were exhausted. Her muddy grip slipped.
No. She couldn’t die. Couldn’t leave her family to place lanterns in the river, never knowing what had happened to her.
At some point, the music had stopped. Maybe they could hear her now? “Help!” she screamed. Her hands trembled. Her father would come. He would hear her, and he would come. “Please! I don’t want to die! Please!”
“Where are you?” a masculine voice called.
Hope surged bright and hot. “Here! I’m here!”
Wavering light appeared above her, illuminating a tree, the roots dangling bare over a sudden drop. It was one of those roots she held onto.
“Keep talking,” the voice called.
“I’m down here! I fell down the embankment!”
A face suddenly appeared above. A man peered down at her and then past her, his eyes widening.
“Don’t look!” he cried.
She looked. She’d always pictured the beast as a single creature, something between a man and a wolf. This was a nest of writhing lizards in a muddy pool, the biggest twice the size of a man. She’d fallen down an eroded embankment a story and a half high. She screamed again, clutching the root, her eyes closed tight.
“Easy,” the man said. “They’re not good climbers. You’ll be all right. Get your feet under you and pull yourself up.”
She looked up at him, tears streaming down her cheeks. “My leg won’t work.” Her right leg felt numb too. And her left side to her ribs.
He gritted his teeth and looked around desperately.
Her hands were growing tired. She commanded them to grip the root, but they weren’t obeying like they should. “I don’t know how much longer I can hold on.”
“You will hold on!”
He pulled out a strange opalescent sword from his back, stripped off his baldric, and dangled one of the loops over a knot of wood where a branch had been broken off. Pushing his arm through the other loop, he eased down toward her. Loose soil rained down on her head, dirt stinging her eyes.
Dangling by one arm, his legs horizontal, he stretched a hand toward her. “Keep one hand on the root. Give me the other.”
She couldn’t catch her breath. “It’s not going to hold.” Those thin straps wouldn’t bear both their weight.
“It’ll hold.”
Below, a lizard climbed over the backs of its fellows and pushed off its tail. Snapping teeth came within a hand’s breadth of her foot. Panic wrapped its fingers around her throat and squeezed.
“What’s your name?” the man said softly.
“Caelia,” she panted.
“My name is Gendrin.”
She looked up into warm brown eyes. Eyes that reminded her of her father.
“Caelia, take my hand.”
The fist around her throat eased its stranglehold. Keeping her left hand on the root, she hauled herself up with her remaining strength. Her palm slapped against his, the mud making it slip. She fell back and dangled, dirt raining down on the lizards, which lunged and snapped. Above her, Gendrin swore.
She sobbed, her fingers fraying loose one at a time. The weakness had moved above her breasts now. She slipped, knowing it was the end. A shower of earth even as she fell, then a hand snatched her by the wrist. The same lizard as before—the biggest one, gathered for another lunge.
Gendrin pulled her up. “Grab on!”
She turned away from the lizard, not knowing if it would reach her, her weak fingers grasping his forearms. One hand on the root, his legs braced on the slippery slope, Gendrin strained to haul her up. The veins on his face stood out, a strangled groan slipping from his lips.
With her other hand, she pulled herself on top of his leg. His foot slipped, then held, muscles straining beneath her. She felt the lizard near, heard its jaws snapping over the place she’d just vacated. It fell back with a splash.
Gendrin let out an explosion of breath. “All right if I let go of you for a second?”
Balanced on his one leg, she nodded. He reached down, gripping her under her arm and hauling her up so her chest was even with his. She wrapped her arms around his neck, locking her hands at her elbows.
“Hold on.” He climbed up the embankment, setting each foot with care. His tunic was damp with sweat, his arms shaking, the vibrations shifting through his chest.
The numbness spread to her shoulders. “I can’t hold on.”
He stretched for his baldric. “You can.”
“My body—something’s wrong.”
He lunged, feet finding a foothold on roots. His left arm came around her, cinching her tight to him. Pulling and lunging, he hauled them up and over. She hit solid ground, her legs dangling.
He dragged her a few steps and then braced himself on his knees, panting. She tried to move, pull herself up, but her shoulders weren’t working anymore. Somehow, she could still breathe. Her heart still beat.
Covered in mud, a lizard appeared on her right, its forked tongue flaring. Another came up behind it. And another. The creatures couldn’t climb the embankment, but apparently there was another way up.
“Gendrin!” she cried.
Instead of reaching for his axe and shield, Gendrin pulled a sort of flute from his shirt. He played, the notes driving and harsh. Danger pounded beneath Caelia’s skin. Her head throbbed in time to the beat. It was the sound of death waiting, coiled and ready to leap. She ached to run. Flee. But she was frozen in this useless body.
And the beasts . . . stopped. Their tongues flickered out, tasting the easy prey before them. Gendrin stepped toward them. The creatures took a step back. He took another step. The creatures turned and went back the way they had come.
Gendrin continued playing, driving them back. Caelia writhed, desperate to escape a terror that had no source. The moment he stopped playing, so did her fear.
Panting, she looked from him to his flute. “How—how did you do that?”
“Magic.”
She would have dismissed his statement as a joke. Except she’d seen it and felt its effect. “What are you?”
“An enchanter.” He bent down and lifted her over his shoulders like a lamb—arms on one side, legs on the other. Hooking one arm around her limbs, Gendrin picked up the torch. The forest blurred as he ran, her side jarring into his shoulders with each step.
She didn’t know what an enchanter was. But he had saved her at great risk.
“The beasts,” she choked out. “Will they follow?”
“Those aren’t the beasts.”
Everything in her stilled. “What do you mean?”
“Those are just gilgad.”
She swallowed her rising horror. “There’s something worse?”
“Quiet now.” He glanced furtively at the shadows closing in on them. “They will have heard your screams.”
Chapter Five
Venom
Gendrin’s words echoed through Caelia, They will have heard your screams.
The true beast. The one who stole girls from their beds at night. Never again to hear their screams, the old rhyme echoed through her head. The monster Caelia had sworn to kill. But when confronted with what she thought was the beast, she’d run.
She was a coward. A coward and a fool.
She could hear the river now, rushing and deep. Gasping for breath, Gendrin dropped the nearly spent torch. They’d reached the base of a tree that looked no different from any other. He set her down, her head lolling to the side opposite him. She couldn’t lift it.
Through brush, moonlight shone on water. Gendrin dug around for something. In a pack, maybe? His hand cradled the back of her head and lifted. Something smooth and cool parted her lips. Something like the medicine vials the apothecary used.
“Swallow,” he whispered. “It will counter the venom.”
Venom? Liquid trickled into her mouth, tasting so strong of pepper she nearly choked.
He pressed his hand over her mouth to keep her from spitting it out. “You have to swallow, Caelia.”
Fighting back a gag, she managed to work the muscles of her throat, the liquid flowing down. He reached into his pack and hauled out a rope.
“You had a rope!” she slurred, her mouth not working right. Why hadn’t he brought the blasted thing?
He tied it around her chest. “I didn’t know I would need it. I heard someone screaming for help and I ran.” There hadn’t been time for him to go back for it.
The weakness slid up her face, her jaw going slack, mouth hanging open. “What’s happening to me?”
He swung the pack on his back and tossed the rope over a sturdy bough. “Gilgad venom.”
The lizard that had bit her, causing wet blood to trickle down her leg. The gilgad had raked her with its teeth. “Am I going to die?”
“No,” he said simply. His steadiness soothed her. He left her, his steps shushing through thick, fallen leaves. “This is going to hurt.”
Unable to brace herself, she whimpered as the rope went suddenly taut, digging painfully into her ribs and armpits and making it hard to breathe. He hauled her up. Her feet dangled like a hanged man’s. The forest floor receded until her forehead smacked into the branch.
“Urmph!” Lights exploded behind her eyes.
He stopped. She couldn’t turn to look, but the rope tugged as if he were tying it. Moments later, he climbed up beside her.
“This is so much easier with a team,” he muttered.
Team? What was that supposed to mean? Instead of asking, she drooled. It was utterly humiliating.
Hands under her armpits, he pulled her up and shifted her over his shoulder. Her faced mashed against the pack on his back. She looked at the ground—far enough away that she would break something if she fell.
Ancestors, she wanted to curse or at the very least clutch him, but she was as helpless as that goat pegged beside the fire. As helpless as when the pains had ripped through her belly. As helpless as when she’d watched her son struggle to take his first and last breaths.
The muscles of Gendrin’s shoulders shifted beneath her. He pulled himself up onto a higher branch. He was climbing the tree. With her slung over his shoulder. A better way to die than falling into a gilgad nest, but dead was still dead.
He shifted, and a branch stabbed at her cheek before shuddering past her chin. She would bear the mark of that in the morning.
Finally, he stopped, the bough swaying beneath their combined weight. His arms fussed with something she couldn’t see. She was suddenly falling. Plunging to her death. She would have screamed and cinched her arms and legs around him, refusing to ever let go. But someth
ing caught her, cradled her. She could make out cloth beneath the bare skin of her hands. She swayed gently. It was like a hammock tied high in the trees.
You could have warned me, you fool man!
Gendrin let out a shaky breath. “All right. You’re safe now.”
He started undoing the rope around her chest. The knot didn’t want to give. He worked at it, fingers grazing her breasts. “Sorry,” he kept mumbling.
She wanted to bat his hands away and do it herself, but of course she couldn’t. Finally, he had the thing off her and she could breathe without pain. He shifted her legs inside the hammock and straightened them.
She could feel him looking down at her. “I have one blanket and one pod. I don’t want to freeze. So I’m climbing in with you.”
What? No you are not!
The pod vibrated, then his weight made it dip. If the thing broke, they would both spill to their deaths.
But it didn’t break. He swung his legs into it, so they were lying side by side, fetched up together like Widow Morin’s seven children squished into one bed. He wiggled and shifted her until they were both centered. Then he wiggled some more as he pulled a blanket over them, tucking the edges around her muddy dress.
When he was finally still, she lay, her cheek mashed up against his shoulder. She was exhausted, but too tightly wound to sleep. Judging by the sound of his breathing, he wasn’t sleeping either.
He tugged something out from inside his shirt. His pipes. The source of his magic. Fear reared again—she didn’t understand how his magic worked. Didn’t know how to fight its effects.
He played. The song wrapped around her like her mother’s arms. Her fear abated, replaced by the smell of hearth fire and laundry soap and drowsy sunshine. She felt her mother’s body curled around her. And in Caelia’s own arms, she held her son, his sleepy sighs filling her with peace.
Caelia fell asleep to the feel of her mother rocking them both.
Chapter Six