As they went, the stairs snapped back into place and disappeared, and she started to relax as soon as they got deep into the foliage.
She reached the platform, pulled herself up and waited for him.
He looked as tired as she felt, his gaunt face tight and pale. He was simply putting one foot in front of the other, but when he reached the platform he looked up for the first time, and she smiled at his expression.
“Wonderful, isn’t it?”
He nodded, mute, and she opened the door and stood back so he could go in.
He walked slowly, as if he were in a dream, and she liked him all the more for it. Some things were wondrous, and no matter how strange and dark her father could be, that he could produce something this whimsical, this delicate, warmed something in her, softened her thoughts of him.
“Did you make it?” He spun slowly around in the main living room, eyes alight, and she shook her head.
“My father made it for me when I was ten.”
He walked to the window, looked through the cool green of the leaves, stirring and sighing in the light breeze, and leaned against the window frame.
“Come. I’ll show you to a room and we can both sleep a little while William runs around below us, searching.”
He smiled at that, nodded, and followed her up the staircase to the next level.
She let her fingers trail along the smooth wood of the bannister, almost desperate for the softness of a bed, the pull of sleep.
A sleep, she knew, which would be haunted by the knowledge that she had lost the silver pear.
* * *
Soren woke to the sound of men talking.
He was in a narrow, curved room, his window shaped like the arch of a rainbow, the bed fitted snug against the tree trunk, with a basin, pitcher and small table to the side.
Beneath his cheek the pillow was smooth and cool, and smelled of pine and fresh air. He pushed himself carefully off it, keeping low, and moved quietly to the window. He’d been sure the floorboards beneath his feet would creak, but they didn’t make a sound, and he sent a silent thank you to Mirabelle’s father for making such a solid tree-house for his daughter.
Although the voices had gone, he pushed himself up slowly, leaning against the wall just to the right of the window, and tried to peer down to the forest floor.
He couldn’t see anything but more branches and leaves, but slowly, as he became attuned to his surroundings, he realized the birds had gone quiet. Now, over the creak of branches and the quiet swish of leaves, he heard boots crushing dried leaves, the murmur of conversation again.
He moved to the door, opened it and stepped onto the tiny landing that divided his room from Mirabelle’s.
He didn’t dare risk tapping on her door, so he opened it, finger already on his lips to let her know to be quiet, and saw it wasn’t necessary.
She was crouched beside the window, and had lifted up a tiny trapdoor in the floor. She was peering down, head bent over it, and when he stepped into the room her own finger went to her lips, and then, seeing she’d merely mirrored his own actions, gestured for him to come over.
From the quality of the light streaming in, and the heat, despite their position deep in the cool of the leaves, Soren guessed it wasn’t far past midday. When he bumped shoulders with Mirabelle, and then rubbed heads with her as he looked down through the neat little square in the floor that must extend out beyond the living room beneath them, he saw men making themselves comfortable below, sitting or leaning against the massive tree, and eating their lunch.
They knelt together, listening to the banter and jokes of men who were tired and hungry, and sure they were on a wild goose chase, sure that Mirabelle had been taken off by a sorcerer from the dungeon by magical means. Soren could hear the worry for her in the men’s tone, and suspected if they were found, Mirabelle could talk them into looking the other way.
Eventually Mirabelle closed the flap, pushed herself to her feet, and gestured for him to follow her.
Instead of going back down to the main level, she took him up, and he found himself in a tiny room, an eyrie, with a small hearth, a cauldron for cooking, and a kettle.
“Is it safe to light a fire?” There was tea in a jar, he could see, and food, and he remembered he hadn’t eaten for over a day. He was used to it—Jasper had starved him for weeks—but since he’d been rescued, Kayla had made sure to give him as much as he could eat, and it had awakened his appetite again.
Mirabelle nodded. “There is a long chimney pipe that lets out over the tops of the trees. Even if they do smell smoke, it will be difficult for them to work out where it’s coming from. It may even send them off in another direction to look.” She sighed. “But I don’t have anything to light it with, and I’m afraid to use sky magic, in case the sorcerer’s apprentice is with them. He might sense me.”
Soren pulled Rane’s fire stick from his pocket, touched it to the wood stacked neatly in the grate. The fire lit with a happy crackle and pop.
“Another wild magic item?”
He nodded. “Both it and the moonstone belong to my brother, Rane. I found them in Travis’s bag.”
“He stole them?” She sounded so horrified, he couldn’t help but smile.
“No matter how poorly William treated you, and the men he kept in that dungeon, he has a way to go before he and his men can match up to Jasper of Harness.”
“Nuen of Harness’s brother?” She poured water from a jug into the kettle and hung it from the hook over the fire, then unwrapped bread that smelled as if it had been fresh baked—fragrant and warm.
“Where did you get that?” He ignored the question about Nuen, his eyes on the bread, his mouth watering. He hadn’t been this hungry since the first few days after Jasper started starving him.
“My father again. The bread never gets stale, the butter never goes rank, and the honey is always pure.”
As she spoke, she pulled a clay pot of butter and a jar of honey down, cut a thick slab of the bread and gave him a knife and a plate to help himself.
It was only after his second slice that he could think properly. “Nuen is Jasper’s brother, yes, and together, they’re hoping to bring Eric down. I’d say good luck to Eric, and I hope he wins, except I’ve been in his dungeon as well, and it’s just as foul as Nuen’s, and even though I never thought I’d say this, Eric is worse, worse by far, than Nuen when it comes to cruelty.”
She was quiet for a moment, chewing on the crusty bread, one hip against the table. The kettle began to boil behind her, and he stepped around to take it off the heat and pour the water into the pot she’d prepared.
It felt . . . nice, this serene domesticity, even with the small army hunting them directly below their feet, and the loss of two magical items between them.
He wondered how hard William’s men were looking, though. They weren’t that far from the castle here, and the men were still sitting about, at their ease; he could hear it from the snatches of conversation that drifted up on the warm summer air.
“You have friends amongst William’s men.” He remembered how the guard had held her, carried her so carefully to the dungeon, no matter how he’d dropped her when the sorcerer died.
She nodded, swallowed her last bite of bread. “I grew up with them, attended the village school with them. And since I’ve been old enough, I did what my father could never be bothered to do—heal, make potions, ease the life of the village. They trust me. Perhaps more than they trust William.”
“It sounds as if you’ve been more a witch than a sorcerer, but I’ve seen you draw sky magic with my own eyes.”
She shrugged. “I think I would have been an earth witch, if my father hadn’t interfered. My aunt was one, and it runs in families, more often than not.”
“What happened?” He drew mugs from the shelf, and she poured the tea, offered him fresh, cold milk from a stone jug, and honey to sweeten it. “I’ve never heard of a woman sorcerer before I met you.”
“I’m the only one, I think. It bothered my father in the beginning, but in the end, he grew to like the idea. He called me his little dragon. Mysterious, dangerous, and mythical. Except when they dive down at you from the sky and level your village.”
Soren sent her a grin over the top of his mug. “I can’t see you leveling anything.”
She shook her head. “I don’t like to do harm. But I never told my father that. Not that he’d have heard me, anyway. He was so convinced my mother was carrying a boy, he bespelled me in the womb to be the greatest sorcerer of my day. He had the silver pear, and he used up every scrap of power in it for that spell. It only came back to full strength when I was eighteen, and by then he’d gotten used to living without it, and gave it to me.” She sighed, pulled out a chair at last, and sat down. “It took him years to get over his disappointment at having a girl. And even then, he wouldn’t see I really was a sorcerer until I was fourteen or fifteen.”
Because they couldn’t start on their journey while a lunch party was going on below them, Soren helped himself to another piece of bread and honey, took a gulp of tea and leaned back in the chair he’d pulled out for himself. “What happened when you were fifteen?”
She took a more delicate sip herself, and rubbed her temples. “I’d been reading his spell books. He didn’t like me doing it, but he didn’t actively stop me. I was looking at a spell for calling rain-clouds; something that helps a village when the summer is too long and dry. His apprentice came in. Jack.” She fingered the shirt she was wearing. “These were his clothes, once.” She took another sip. “He laughed at me for even reading about it. He didn’t believe I was a sorcerer, even though my father must have told him some of it. And I . . . well, I was tired of watching my father train others, none of whom were ever good enough for him, in his own opinion, while I had to make do with trying to teach myself, practicing with whatever scraps I could scavenge from his workshop.
“So I challenged him. Jack looked at the spell, and I could tell from the way he tensed up that he didn’t think he was up to it. It gave me pause, as well, but I’d issued the challenge, and I wasn’t backing down, and Jack would rather have slit his own throat than concede to me, so we set the spell in our minds, went out the house, and I let Jack go first.” She lifted a finger to her mouth and licked a bit of honey off the tip of it.
Soren found his gaze riveted to her lips, to her tongue. He took another gulp of tea.
“He was sweating enough it almost looked like he had been caught in rain, but there was nothing but blue skies when his chance was over.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I didn’t think I would do any better than him, but I at least knew I couldn’t do any worse.” She paused and drank back the rest of her tea. Poked at the crumbs on her plate.
“And?” Soren was fascinated by the way she sat, so straight and unbending, and yet in the glow of light around her, in the way her golden hair fell in curls around her face, she was the epitome of soft and gentle.
“I could do worse, as it happened. In the opposite direction.” She spoke seriously, but then, as if unable to stop herself, her mouth quirked in a grin. “What a storm that was. Lightning, thunder, rain pelting down so hard it stung to be out in it.” She gave a soft laugh. “It washed away old Mr. Blackburn’s field, and I had to bespell it to rights afterward, with my father’s help.”
“Where was your mother in all this?” He was grinning at the thought of her bringing the heavens down around everyone’s head, proving herself, but it faded at the look in her eyes.
“My mother died giving birth to me.” She looked down into her empty mug, and swirled the dregs around. “My father had bespelled me in the womb, and what he did leeched everything out of her. She had no strength, nothing left when it was time for me to come into the world.” She lifted her gaze to his. “Sure as if he’d plunged a knife into her heart, he killed her, and he knew it.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
WILLIAM’S MEN left after an hour. Mirabelle made bread spread thickly with butter and honey to take with them, filled two leather pouches with the cool, sweet water always present in the jug in the kitchen, and made her way out of the tree-house.
Soren was waiting for her just below the platform, two bedrolls from one of the rooms strapped to his back. He stood just above the lowest branch, listening to make sure the men really had gone.
He gave her a quick nod of confirmation, took the satchel of food and drink she was carrying from her, and ran lightly down to the ground.
The way he moved, sure-footed and competent, stirred something in her, and she felt off balance as she followed him.
There was something between them. Something strange and intense. It made her uneasy, and she hoped being out of the close confines of the tree-house and back on the road would help to dissipate it.
They had both agreed their general direction was south, and they would go together until the time came for them to follow their own paths.
“Garth told me he found the gem working the forests in south Klevan,” Soren told her. “He lives in Jaret and someone will know him there.”
“And you?” She didn’t want him to leave her, but she had no right to ask him to give up his own quest so she didn’t have to search for the silver pear alone.
He looked down, frustrated. “Kayla got us into Eric’s castle using wild magic. I can’t use that way again, and I don’t know where his castle is. The best I can do is go to Jaret with you and see if there is news from Gaynor. If Rane brought Kayla back to her father, surely the news would spread. That would at least tell me they escaped.”
She didn’t want to add to his worries, but decided he would want to know what her father had told her about Eric the Bold. “Eric’s castle is hidden by magical mists. When the King of Klevan banished him for breaking the code and killing Hirst Red Tongue, Eric used up all his magic to hide his castle. My father said it’s why we didn’t hear much from him for so long, he needed time to recover. His castle’s impossible to find.”
“It wasn’t impossible for Kayla,” Soren said, a stubbornness in the hunch of his shoulders.
Mirabelle had no answer to that, and Soren turned away from her and took the lead, using the narrow, almost unused tracks that angled south-west and would take them out of the tame woods and into the Great Forest itself.
The place where the one ended and the other began was difficult to judge, and no-one took the deeper paths unless they had to. Very little was worth tangling with wild magic.
For her, Mirabelle knew, it was even more dangerous. Wild magic shouldn’t be sentient, but its interest in sorcerers was as unflinching as a cat’s. She’d never experienced it for herself, but her father had told her. It sensed them, came to them, creating strange, often deadly, creatures in its wake, and if it touched a sorcerer . . .
She couldn’t suppress the shiver that gripped her this time. Her father said the screams would haunt him for the rest of his life.
She could only hope that hadn’t been the way he’d died.
She wanted to call out to Soren, warn him that while no-one was likely to follow them if they carried on down this path, it might be more dangerous than taking a chance on the roads. There was a possibility William was too afraid of attack from the sorcerer he was convinced was trying to infiltrate the stronghold to send his men more than a few miles out to search for her. The roads might be the better bet.
“Soren.” Her voice was swallowed up by the trees, dissipating in the air like steam from a kettle, and he didn’t even slow down. She tried to quicken her pace, to catch up to him, but he seemed always just too far out of her reach.
Frustration rose in her, and she realized he had everything; their food, their water, their bedrolls. If she lost him, she’d be left with nothing.
She began to run, even though it went against her instincts the closer they got to the outer edge of the Klevan forest. She could feel it, a heavy, waiting atmosphere, the power of the Great Forest biding its time patiently.
It worked on her nerves. Every rustle in the undergrowth had her heart hammering in her chest.
Soren seemed oblivious. He was far ahead now, his broad shoulders brushing the bush on either side of the path as he went.
Just when she thought she would collapse with the heat, would have to let him go and wait for him to realize he had left her behind, a cool breeze sprung up, bringing the scent of pine and water.
Then Soren leaped over a small stream that cut across the path, and as he jumped, a terrible chill ran through her, and she knew he’d stepped over the border.
Panic-stricken at the thought of losing him, she ran full tilt until she reached the stream; but it was ordinary, shallow, nothing but clear water tumbling over rocks. She stared at it, then looked across it down the path for him.
He was gone.
She teetered on the slick, wet stone at the edge of the stream. She had to make a choice.
Leave him to go his own way, turn back and take the roads, or follow him into the Great Forest. It had claimed her father, or something in it had, but it would be the fastest way to Jerat, the fastest way to find Garth and hopefully the silver pear.
Her father had shielded her, protected her even from her own magic by giving her the silver pear. But her father was gone, and she no longer had a safe place with William.
He had betrayed her, and the world had changed. She didn’t have the luxury of indecision any more.
She looked over her shoulder down the path they’d taken from Halakan, took a deep breath, looked forward, and leaped.
* * *
Soren knew the moment he’d stepped into the Great Forest. He and Rane, and his father when he was still alive, had spent their lives winding in and out of it. Trying to stay as much as possible in Therston’s tamer woods, but often finding themselves forced into the Great Forest itself.
The Silver Pear (The Dark Forest Book 2) Page 8