by Kara Timmins
Neasa squinted into the blackness, and her brows held their crimp. “You should get some rest.”
“You’re sure you don’t want to sleep first?” Eloy asked. “You sound tired.”
“I’m fine,” Neasa said. “I can stay awake all night if I have to, so really it’s no problem. The sooner you fall asleep the sooner my turn will come around.”
“You got it. See you when you wake me.”
He rolled over on his side, his back against the firm wood of the fallen tree and closed his eyes. He didn’t even think he had fallen asleep until Neasa shook him.
“It’s my turn,” she said.
“Really? I don’t feel like I fell asleep.”
“You were snoring.”
When he sat up, he knew she was telling the truth. The muscles in his legs were tight from the long walk and a stint of rest.
“I’m up. I’m up,” he said, more to himself than to her.
He put his legs at an angle so he could massage the soreness in his muscles.
“I didn’t see anything of alarm,” Neasa said, “but I heard a few things. Wake me up if something seems like a threat. Better to wake me thinking something is dangerous and have it be nothing than the other way around.”
“Makes sense. Get some rest.”
She lay down and seemed to find her sleep quickly. He watched as her side rose up and down for a few moments, glad that she was getting rest.
Not long after she fell asleep, Eloy realized the biggest challenge of the forest was managing his own mind. Things moved on the other side of the light line. He could hear the clicks and hoots, the strange communication of hidden creatures, but in his mind every sound was something hungry and sharp-toothed. He started to wonder about the worst thing it could be. In a place where nothing is known, any danger was possible.
When he saw a glow coming from deeper in the forest in front of them, he had a moment of relief, as if the familiarity of light was something that wouldn’t hold any danger. But then he remembered Gwyn’s story about the orb of light that men followed and were lost to the forest forever. His rationality caught up to him, and he realized what he saw wasn’t something that should bring him comfort. He reached out a hand to Neasa’s sleeping side, poised to wake her. The glow was slow, taking so long to creep closer that his extended arm started to burn against its own weight. By the time it got closer, fear and curiosity played with his heart and mind in equal measure. Eloy strained his eyes to try to see anything inside the glow. The orb reached the side of the body of water and started moving around the bank toward them. Eloy shook Neasa awake.
“What is it?” Her voice didn’t sound disoriented from rest. She was ready to deal with any dangers with a clear mind.
“There.” Eloy pointed at the glow even though her eyes were already on it.
Neasa didn’t grab for her sword. Instead, she grabbed her lantern and threw more moss on it. Eloy did the same. She held it out in front of her and watched. When the orb floated toward them, Neasa’s breath sounded loud in the silence of the forest. She was nervous. Eloy tried to steady his growing heartbeat, as well as his hand. The lantern bobbled.
“Should we run away from it?” Eloy asked.
“No. Keep the light steady.”
The orb continued its lazy progress forward. When the thing hovered ten strides away from them, it stopped. Eloy opened his mouth to ask Neasa a question. Before he could get a word out, the light darted to one side and into a clump of trees so fast he could barely track it. When it returned, Eloy could see something squirming and squealing in its center. The creature inside looked like a featherless, boiled chicken with daggerlike teeth, which Eloy could see as it cried against the translucent membrane of the glowing orb. The fanged bird’s skin was already sloughing off.
Neasa let out a sigh. “Those are bad, but we’re okay as long as we have the flame going. I’m guessing they aren’t particularly friendly with their own kind, because they will never cross another light source.” She relaxed again.
“That . . . was terrible,” Eloy said.
“Just give me a little longer and then you can wake me if you need some more sleep.”
“I doubt I could go back to sleep for the night,” Eloy said, his energy revitalized.
“I don’t blame you. I would work your mind around getting over the anxiety. We are going to a place that not even I have been before, and I have no doubt there will be things we won’t know how to handle. I’ll get a little more rest, and we’ll head out again soon.”
“After hearing those words of comfort, take your time,” Eloy said.
“Good night,” she said. “Wake me up again if you see anything else get eaten.”
“You got it.”
10
Eloy was poised and ready to rouse Neasa at the sign of anything predatory, no matter how harmless it first appeared, but nothing came around again. He was able to let her rest until she woke up on her own. They ate breakfast and drank the last of the cleansed black water.
“Are you sure you don’t want to rest a little more?” Neasa asked.
“I’m positive,” Eloy said. “We can start moving again as soon as you give the word.”
“We just need to get some more water before we go. Do you want to do it?” The lift of her eyebrow was playfully challenging.
“Do you think I should?” he asked. “You seemed pretty hesitant when you did it.”
“You’ll be fine. If you see anything start to ripple the water, just run. Simple.”
“Sounds simple,” he said with a groan.
Eloy took the container and crawled toward the water. He mimicked all of movements he had seen Neasa do the day before. He looked down at the edge of the lake expecting to see a rocky slope of a bank, just like any other body of water he had ever seen, but he saw only blackness. He thought maybe the water was so dark it eliminated the natural translucency of liquid, but then he saw a ribbon of rippling multicolored light moving like a wave deep below his outstretched arm. The serpentine line of flashing color seemed small, but it only appeared that way because of distance. The pond didn’t have a bank, only a sharp and deep drop-off. He didn’t need to wait any longer to see if anything came forward. He filled the container and did a backward crab-crawl toward Neasa.
“We slept next to that watery pit of horrors?” Eloy asked.
Neasa laughed. “That’s a great name for it. We should call it that from now on.”
“I’m beyond ready to move on now.”
“I bet you are.”
11
They walked for days and didn’t stop until their bodies urged them to rest. They found nooks and notches to curl into, always taking turns, always keeping a steady scan of their surroundings. Eloy felt gripped by the unsettling loss of the construct of time. He tried to imagine how long they had been in the forest. A week? Maybe even two. He wasn’t sure, and Neasa shrugged her shoulders if he asked.
They found water where they could, purifying with Neasa’s powder, and she pulled strange vegetation from the trees and out of the dirt to eat. Some tasted better than almost anything Eloy had ever had. Others were bitter and made his sense of reality blur and distort—another factor that contributed to his disconnect from the life he knew in the sunlight.
They went on walking in a cautious daze until they reached a small stream. The flow of water was narrow enough to leap over without trouble, Eloy was sure, and flanked by delicate bushes adorned with fluttering leaves no bigger than a pinky nail and purple flowers with petals so thin they were translucent. Neasa leaped over to the other side and stopped. Eloy followed and looked to her to see what to do next. She looked over her shoulder at the stream.
“Everything okay?” Eloy asked.
“I’ve only ever reached this place once before, and I turned back before crossing the stream.” She looked at t
he blackness before them.
“Do you know where we should go from here?” Eloy asked.
“Gwyn gave me an idea. He said to keep the red-barked trees to our right, which we’ve been doing.” Neasa pointed to the smooth, red-barked trees that grew interspersed to their right.
Eloy hadn’t noticed their absence to his left, but then, he hadn’t noticed them at all. Now that he saw them, he couldn’t figure out how these red-barked trees hadn’t grabbed his attention before. Their surface looked so soft and shiny in his lantern light. Unlike the rough gray bark of the trees on his left, the red trees had very few leaves on their twisted limbs. He could barely see the tops of a few of the upper branches, but what he could see looked like desperate red fingers clawing upward for the light they would never be able to reach.
“He said the tale goes,” Neasa went on, “that the area changes after we pass a tree bulging with knots, so that’s what we’re looking for now. After that, he said we should see the light. That’s as far as his friend got to the Seer. After that, we’re on our own.”
Their small flames limited their vision, and in the hours that followed, Eloy scanned as best as he could to spot the tree bulging with knots. He tried not to think about what would happen if they missed it. Getting lost had a new sense of dread now that the safety of Neasa’s knowledge was gone. She seemed to feel it too. Ever since they had crossed the stream, she had shortened her stride, and her movements seemed rigid. Eloy was sure the muscles in the back of her neck hadn’t looked so tight and pronounced before.
Their limited aura of light wasn’t strong enough to prepare them for the monstrous tree until it loomed over them like a knobby giant. It could have been a hulking creature crouching on its haunches staring down at them as far as Eloy knew. But no, it was a tree, he was mostly sure. And this tree was very much alive—an old and steady life. His stone warmed against his chest, responding to whatever energy the tree contained.
His worry of missing the behemoth tree was ridiculous. The tree was tall enough to blend into the dark, and the trunk was wider than several houses, with roots thick enough to build all of the structures of Valia over again. The great roots of the tree fed into such a great trunk that it looked more like a wall.
“I wonder how long we have been walking under the branches of this tree,” Eloy said.
“Days.” Neasa held out her lantern to see more of the craggy wall of the tree’s surface. “I want to get some of the bark. Will you hold the light so I can get closer?”
“Do you think that’s a good idea?” Eloy asked, thinking of his experience with the tree sap when they first entered the forest.
Neasa didn’t answer.
Eloy took Neasa’s lantern and tried to keep her in as much light as possible as she moved toward a crevice where two roots split away from one another. The wooden tendrils were at least three hand lengths taller than she was. She took out a knife and touched the tip to the surface of the root. She stealthily and carefully extracted a strip of bark, but the theft didn’t go unnoticed. A low warning growl came from a place above her. Eloy hooked the lanterns onto his bag. He lost having the light in front of him, but he needed his hands free. He removed his sword from the sheath at his back.
“Neasa, move!”
The swaying lanterns threw shadows over the lanky creature now making its way toward Neasa. Fast. Eloy grabbed the strap of her bag and pulled her out of the crook of the tree roots. She stumbled backward but removed her short sword as she did. The creature’s claws scraped against the tree bark as it lunged toward them.
Eloy swung his sword horizontally but missed. The creature jumped to the side and clung to the root. It looked like a wild cat, long and black with a thick tail, but most of the space of its face was reserved for rows of needlelike teeth so numerous it didn’t have lips to close over them. If it had eyes, they were no more than pinpricks in its black fur. Eloy readied his sword again and felt Neasa at his side, her sword unsheathed and poised too.
Muscles twitched under the shine of the animal’s shiny black coat. Saliva dribbled to the ground.
Then a sound came from all around them, a noise so unnerving Eloy almost dropped his sword—a hissing sound, loud and layered. If these things surrounded them, he and Neasa would never be able to fight them all off. But the catlike creature reacted to the sound too. It hissed back, a more guttural hiss, and darted back up into the higher reaches of the mother tree.
Eloy and Neasa spun around.
“Do you see anything?” Neasa asked.
“No. What was that?”
“Which thing?”
“Either.”
“I have no idea . . . about either. Keep your sword ready and move forward. We have to get away from the trunk.”
Eloy moved ahead, ready for whatever had hissed to jump out. Nothing did.
They stood back to back thirty or so strides away from the trunk of the tree with their swords raised until the muscles in his arms burned.
Neasa lowered her sword. “I think whatever it was has gone.”
Eloy let his arms drop. “Did you at least get the bark?”
“Yep.” She held up a piece about the size of her palm for Eloy’s inspection.
He knew enough to refrain from assumptions and expectations, but that didn’t stop him from being surprised by what he saw. The outer layer of the bark looked like any other—rough, cracked, and brown—but the other side reflected an array of color much like the scales of a fish on a sunny day or like the fiery flecks in an opal.
“Do you know what it can be used for?” Eloy asked.
“I have no idea. I’ve never seen anything like it before. But we should keep moving so we get a chance to find out.”
“Ready to start going around the tree?” Eloy asked.
“If the alternative is to go over it, then yes, going around sounds like a good idea.” She squeezed his upper arm as she passed him.
They kept their weapons in their hands and walked for what felt like a full day to get around the tree and its roots before they started to see the change in the terrain. The mossy ground gave way to curlicue vines outfitted with purple-rimmed leaves. They were still on the right track.
The warming pull of the stone grew stronger the more they rounded the trunk. With it came a glorious reassurance. Eloy knew for certain that he had done the right thing by trying to find this Seer. He would get answers that would finally ease the uncertainty of not knowing where to go or what to do. All the strange and dangerous creatures couldn’t keep Eloy away from the certainty of his direction.
Eloy lost track of how many times they had gone up and over the roots. Getting over took more time with each jump and hoist over as their muscles flagged. Neasa took the lead, but on one branch, she stayed at the top, straddling it.
“We should rest for a while,” Neasa said.
“Sure. Just away from the tree, maybe.”
Neasa jumped down to the other side, and Eloy followed. They found a spot next to a rock layered with stripes in shades of gray. Eloy held his lantern out in front of him and looked around at the base of the stone. There were gouges in the dirt, a few deep swipes, but they looked old, most of the grooves already filling with shifting dirt. Whatever had made the marks was hopefully far away.
Eloy slid his back down the gritty boulder and sat with the soles of his feet still on the ground and his knees bent. “I don’t think we’re far now.”
“You sound so sure,” Neasa said, sliding down next to him.
“I can sense it.” He noticed a crease form between her brows. “You nervous?”
“Maybe a little,” she said. “I’m excited to finally see what’s over there. This is a big deal. If we see the Seer, it’ll change the stories of the forest forever. It’ll change everything. Finally.” Her voice hushed and trailed off the more she spoke.
Their
regular trade-off of sleep seemed shorter than it had been—they shared a mutual eager rush. As they went on, Eloy noticed that both the ashen trees on his left and the spindly red-barked trees on his right that had accompanied them since they started were dwindling, replaced by thicker ones with knobby, bulbous lumps and greater distance between them. The vines on the ground thickened, weaving around and through the snaking roots of the trees, to the point that the two had to lift their feet higher to move through it like snow. Eloy could feel a curve in their direction, and he knew they were close to rounding the other side of the great tree.
“There’s something there,” Neasa said.
Eloy looked up from watching the thick vines around his feet. Ahead of them, in what could be considered the horizon if they weren’t in a great room made of branches and leaves, was a glow. The illumination looked different than the floating orb Eloy had seen the first night. He didn’t get the sense that the light came from something living. It looked like the hazy blur of distant lavender-hue illumination.
“That has to be it,” Neasa said. “Gwyn said the place would be clear once we got around the tree. It has to be the way we are supposed to go, don’t you think?”
“Without question,” Eloy said as he touched the stone at his chest.
Their steps became as hurried as their caution would allow. The light became such a beacon, such a promise of a resolution to their delirious journey, that they didn’t give themselves a chance to be concerned about what they would find when they reached it.
A backlit hill grew before them, and for most of the trek toward the light, Eloy thought the mound was their destination. As they started scaling their way to the top, Eloy realized he had been wrong. Neasa crested the peak first, and the little burst of air that she sucked in when she saw what was on the other side was enough to make Eloy run the rest of the way. His gasp was louder.