by Megan Bannen
“I know.” He purses his lips before he pulls away. The sensation of losing his warmth is so acute, it almost makes a tearing sound. He helps me up, and we walk north, blazing our own trail since there’s no path to follow.
If I could, I would sing to him—Come to me, my beloved—so he would know, so he would understand what he is to me now. But since I promised I would keep Elath’s power at arm’s length, I hold the song inside myself.
The Fev’s source is somewhere in the Rannig Mountains in the Dead Forest, but no one has mapped the river’s path north of the Aurian border, for obvious reasons. Tavik and I stick to the western bank as we head north through the strange, muffled silence of the trees. Even the Fev’s current seems oddly hushed as it murmurs from north to south.
“So this is where murderers and thieves go when they die?” Tavik says at last, his voice bizarrely loud in the quiet.
“And heathens,” I add, trying to lighten the severity of our circumstances, but the word sticks uncomfortably in my throat. Heathen. How ignorant to think that one person is better than another. I’m ashamed of myself for believing it for as long as I did.
“Hopefully, we’ll run into more heathens than murderers,” Tavik jokes weakly. “Why do the . . . why do they only come out at night?”
He doesn’t say the word, but it gallops between us anyway: telleg.
“I don’t know.”
“And they’re drawn to light?”
“Yes.” I decide not to tell Tavik how I know this. I’d rather not recall the moment when a knight lit his lantern and five telleg descended on him before he had a chance to scream.
“How do they track their prey? By sight? Smell? What?”
He turns toward me when I don’t answer right away, and since I’m using him as a human crutch, his face is only inches from mine. “I don’t know that either,” I admit. The urge to hug him for dear life pops when he gives me an exasperated huff and turns his attention back to the trees.
“I was young and really scared,” I tell him defensively. “So, no, I didn’t study their hunting patterns.”
“Sorry. I’m just getting a little nervous. A lot nervous, actually. This place is eerie as death.” I feel the shiver that runs up his spine.
“This place is death. It’s the Dead Forest.”
“Says Ovinists. From my perspective there are some things here that don’t add up. Father of death, it’s creepy.”
Silence falls on us again, leaving ample mental space for Tavik and I to contemplate all the things we’re not discussing, such as the fact that the telleg don’t move the way living creatures do. They float and stretch. They attack with unnatural speed. They kill with their hands and their mouths.
They devour men.
I suspect that Tavik is carrying the same sick pit of dread in his stomach as I am.
“Think you’ll be able to walk on your own two feet by nightfall?” he asks me as we hike in the shadow of a limestone escarpment shortly before twilight.
I’m still threadbare with exhaustion after healing Tavik—or after the Mother healed him—but I pull my arm away to demonstrate my ability to move of my own volition. In typical Gelya fashion, I immediately trip on something hard and fall onto my bottom beside it.
Tavik reaches down to help me up, but then he pauses, tilts his head, and squints at a metallic wink beside my splayed hand. “What is that?”
I see glints of silver between freckles of rust.
And bones. Several bones.
And a human skull.
I shriek and scurry back like a crab as Tavik bends down and riffles through the skeletal remains of a human being.
“Oh, please, don’t,” I beg him, squeamish, but when he straightens, he’s holding a sword that’s so corroded, it’s nearly the color of gelya berries.
“I need a second sword, and I doubt this man has a use for it anymore.”
A memory stirs as I stare at the blade.
The Goodson slew a telleg here after the monster killed the last of his men. He stood over the creature for a good long while, frowning down at it. There’s something about that memory that I’m missing, a piece of the puzzle I might be able to snap into place if I only stare at it long enough.
“Come on,” says Tavik, giving me a hand up. “We need to keep moving.”
First comes dusk.
Then night.
There’s no rain or snow in the Dead Forest, and the moon bathes the trees in a ghostly light.
In the distance, a crack shatters the silence.
We watch and wait.
Fifteen yards ahead of us, a shadow oozes between the night-blackened tree trunks, rattling their dying leaves like bells.
Ten yards.
Tavik’s shoulders move up and down with each terrified breath.
Five yards, and I can sense Tavik’s unuttered cursing: Death, death, death, death . . .
The telleg lunges.
Tavik grabs me by the shoulder of my jacket and hauls me after him as a small animal screeches in our wake. The wet, sucking sounds of the telleg’s mouth feeding on its victim follow us for several yards, and we keep sprinting until the sounds are far behind us.
Our hearts beat in a syncopated rhythm when we stop at last to catch our breath. I wish to all the saints in heaven that we could find somewhere to hide, but it’s night, and we must move at night because it’s only safe to rest once the sun rises. So we walk, the sounds of our feet moving across the forest floor like whispered curses. We survive our first night in the Dead Forest, but I know it’s only a matter of time before Tavik will have to fight the telleg with swords that are not destined to kill them.
At daybreak, we light a fire to warm ourselves. I lie in a huddle of blankets beside the flames. Tavik is too wound up to sleep. He cleans and sharpens the rusty weapon we found, and I doze off to the metallic pinging of the whetstone sliding across the blade.
“Stay alive, Gelya,” Tavik whispers when he thinks I’m asleep. “Just stay alive, and I swear I’ll get you there.”
Forty-Three
We’ve almost made it through our second night in the Dead Forest when the skittering of an animal through the undergrowth brings us to a halt. An all-too-familiar fear thrums in our lungs, our hearts, our spines, our ears, while Elath remains nerve-rackingly still inside me.
Tavik’s hand clutches the hilt of one of his swords behind his back.
We wait.
“It’s all right,” I breathe at last. “It was nothing.”
Crack.
Right in front of us.
“That is not nothing.” Tavik pulls both blades from their scabbards and keeps his eyes trained on the sharp fingertips emerging from the split in the bark, wiggling like maggots. The tree creaks and pops as the creature pushes the chasm apart with two abnormally long, hideous hands until the wound is large enough to birth the monster. The telleg seeps into the world, its black cape dribbling from concave shoulders until it envelops its wraithlike body. It hovers inches from the ground.
Elath retreats even deeper inside me, a life that does not belong in this world of death. I step back, watching the telleg over Tavik’s shoulder.
“I can do this,” he whispers, his grip tightening on the hilts, his focus grim and ready.
Another rustle. I look behind us, and terror fills me to the brim. “Tavik.”
“Not now,” he tells me through gritted teeth.
“Behind us,” I warn him, my voice high and panicked.
He keeps the Sword of Mercy trained on the telleg in front of us as he swivels his head to see the other one even closer at our backs.
“Father of death!”
Before the curse is out of his mouth, an eerie hissing comes from our left—a third telleg, its pallid skin glowing in the night, its head faceless, as if someone had plastered over it with unearthly gray flesh. They close in, drawn to us like vultures to death.
I thought the intervening years had blunted my fear, that I could go on
living, and the telleg would never find me again. But here I am—here we both are—face-to-face with our monsters once more, and we are powerless children.
The telleg closest to me attacks first, its body moving as if it has no bones. It lashes out with long knifelike fingers, and I barely dart out of the way in time before the first telleg we saw is on Tavik. He swings his swords in different directions, trying to jab one while decapitating the second, but he misses both. Their bodies contort around his blades, bizarrely elastic.
The third monster flies at Tavik so quickly, its whole body is a blur. Tavik ducks under the first two monsters and tries to skewer this newest opponent with both swords at once, but the telleg leaps and flies right over his head.
He can’t figure out how to fight them or where to place me in relation to them. All he can do is swing and miss while trying to direct me with his hips and legs, and all I can do is try to stay out of the way and wish that I had taken that shiv when it was offered to me.
“Cover your ears!” I shout.
“No!” He makes a desperate unguarded strike against the telleg directly in front of him, and finally, his sword cuts through it as if the creature were made of gelatin rather than flesh and bone. The dull blade of the weaker sword slices it in half, and the creature goes down.
“Go!” Tavik thunders at me, and I run pell-mell through the forest with Tavik pelting after me, but the telleg give chase and trap us between them and the icy waters of the Fev River.
Tavik goes on the attack, stretching his body in ways that leave him alarmingly vulnerable. But it works. He’s forcing the telleg to back up. His movements begin to imitate theirs, the strange elasticity, the favoring of quick violence over calculated risk. But just as he seems to be gaining confidence, one of them gets close enough to bite his outstretched arm. The telleg has no face, and yet a mouth appears on the monster’s head, tearing through the pale skin with an audible rip, revealing dark gums and jagged, pointed teeth that nick Tavik’s wrist before he can pull away. Blood beads on his skin and streams along the side of his arm. The telleg licks its horrid teeth with a thin, pointed tongue before the mouth disappears into its head.
They come at us again, and Tavik is completely on the defensive now. He dodges and blocks as they force him backward, closer and closer to me.
“Cover your ears right now!” I bellow, and he finally drops his weapons to cover the sides of his head with quaking hands.
My voice slices through the cold night as I sing the part of The Ludoïd where Ovin slays Ludo, the Hand of the Father cutting through muscle and tissue and bone. Even with his ears covered, Tavik cries out in pain.
It has no effect on the telleg.
I don’t think they can hear the song.
I close my mouth as the stark realization washes over me.
Tavik grabs one of his swords off the ground and slashes at the nearest telleg, cleaving it in half horizontally, sending bits of bloodless gray flesh through the air like rain.
The last telleg reaches for me with long fingers, and with the river at my back, I have nowhere to go. Tavik tackles it to the ground. It oozes and slithers in his arms like a human-shaped slug, and he can’t keep hold of it. Its strange, elastic body stretches, pushing apart Tavik’s arms and rolling him beneath it.
I dart around them and fall to my hands in knees, patting the ground in search of Tavik’s other sword. When I have it, I turn around in time to see Tavik get a hand under the creature’s chest and push it back, but it uses the space between them to swipe its long fingers across Tavik’s abdomen. He screams in agony as I swing the blade through the telleg’s neck, and the monster’s decapitated body flops on top of Tavik.
I shove the thing off him with my foot while clinging to the sword. He helps me, moaning as he maneuvers his wounded body out from underneath the telleg’s dead weight. He manages to sit up with my help.
“How badly are you hurt?” I ask, crouching beside him, trying to remain calm.
“I’m all right,” he slurs before vomiting down his front. I pull his hair out of his face and hold him up so he doesn’t fall over into his own sick. When he’s done, he makes a horrid whimpering noise.
“Can you sit up on your own? I’m going to get out the bandaging kit.”
He nods. When I come back with the linen strips and a small flask of alcohol, he holds out a shaking hand as if I’m supposed to let him take care of this on his own.
“Let me see,” I tell him, sounding rational when it’s all I can do to hold myself together. He shakes his head. I think he might be sick again. “Tavik, let me see.”
“Don’t heal me.” His voice his shot through with pain. He’s suffering because of me, because he tried to save me.
“I won’t,” I tell him.
He gives me a long, hard look before pulling back his shoulder so that I can examine his stomach. The telleg cut through his heavy jacket and the layer of clothing beneath. There are three bleeding gashes in slanted lines from the edge of his rib cage to his navel. Between the shredded ribbons of his coat and tunic, I can see that two of the stripes are little more than scratches, but the one in the middle is deeper and bleeding.
For Tavik’s sake, I keep myself composed. “I know it’s cold, but I need to take off your jacket and shirt to bandage the wound.”
He nods and tries not to give voice to his pain as I help him out of his clothes. Working quickly, I tear off a large strip of the bandaging and try to ignore the fact that the ripping sound brings the memory of the telleg’s mouth back to life. I fold the cloth into a thick pad, douse it with the alcohol, and warn Tavik, “This is going to hurt.”
“I know.”
I press the pad to the wound, and he cries out, veins popping up along his neck as he clenches his teeth. I wind the remaining fabric tightly around his middle, pressing the pad against the bleeding, but a red stain is already seeping through to the outside.
“We have to keep moving,” Tavik breathes when I doubt he can even get to his feet.
“One thing at a time. You need to get your jacket back on.”
“You’re the only girl on earth who tries to put my clothes on.” The fact that he’s joking fills me with a hope I dared not entertain seconds earlier, and I cling to that humor as tightly as I was clinging to the sword a minute ago.
“Oh, good, this is such a perfect time for lasciviousness,” I tell him.
“You don’t know the word ‘barf,’ but you know ‘lasciviousness.’ You really are adorable. Help me up.”
I put his arm over my shoulders and heave him to his feet, a heroic effort on my part since my spent body feels like it will bend beneath the weight of him.
“All right?” I ask him.
“I’m not solid, but I’m not going to fall over. I’ll take the swords, but I don’t think I can manage the pack, too, so we need to consolidate. What can you carry?”
I make sure that what little remains of the bandaging kit is one of the things that make it into our single pack before we move on with me acting as Tavik’s unreliable crutch and stealing concerned glances at him every thirty seconds.
“Tavik—”
“I’m fine. Just keep moving.”
He is not fine. He is anything but fine.
By dawn, I’m beside myself with worry. His weight pushes down on my weary shoulders more and more with each passing minute. He doesn’t even argue when I set out a blanket and order him to lie down on it. I cover him with my own blanket and raise the tent around him. Then I curl up against his back and wrap my thin arm around his shuddering body. Somewhere in the back of my mind as I fall into my own exhausted slumber, it occurs to me that he isn’t just warm. He’s burning up.
I wake in the afternoon to his moaning, “No!”
“Hmm?” I mumble, half asleep, my muscles leaden with fatigue.
He stirs, restless beneath my arm, his words slurring one into the next. “I’m sorry. Please. Raran. Barri.”
He’s so hot.
I bolt awake, throw the blanket off both of us, and put my hand over his forehead. As the heat of the fever seeps into my palm, he opens two glassy green eyes.
“Gelya.” He says my name with a tender relief that cuts me to the quick. When his eyes finally focus on my face, he says thickly, “I’m fine.”
“You have a fever.” I dig through our pack for the one remaining canteen as Tavik drags himself into a cross-legged position with a pained grunt and begins to take off his coat.
“Drink,” I order, thrusting the canteen at him, but when I reach out to take over the examination of his wound, he drops it to block my hand, spilling water all over his blanket.
“Can you keep it under wraps?” he asks me, his voice worn to a thread.
“Just let me—”
“No. You promised me. Don’t heal me.”
Honestly, I’m not sure I can control what Elath decides to do with my body at this point, but I nod. Anything to get a look at that wound.
As I unwrap the bandage, Elath’s power brims in my fingertips, and I have to concentrate to hold it at bay. Tavik says nothing as I work, which in and of itself is worrying. His skin is too hot, and his face is so drawn I think he might be sick again. He trembles and groans as I pull back the wad of fabric covering the wound. The skin around it is angry and red, and the opening, still weeping blood, is crusted in yellow pus. The sound he makes when I put the new bandage into place borders on sobbing. It’s unbearable—for both of us—but he keeps saying the words over and over: “Don’t heal me. Don’t heal me. Don’t heal me.”
So I keep the lid over Elath for his peace of mind, not mine.
When I’m finished, he goes back to sleep, and all I can do is watch his lips move in some fraught, unconscious conversation I can’t understand. The only word I recognize is Gelya. He rouses himself a few hours before dusk and gets stiffly to his feet.
“We have time. You should rest more,” I tell him. He looks terrible, and I can’t stand it.
“I’ve rested enough.” He grimaces as he slides the scabbards into place over his shoulders.