“Can you catch their scent?” Elsa asked Nikhil.
He nodded, sniffing the air carefully. “I think so. Not strong, but it’s there. A bit harder to get it in the rain.”
“That’s a much better talent than mine,” Mawlik said, looking into the forest absentmindedly. “I’d tell you it was going to rain, but it’s fairly obvious at this point. It’s going to get harder in a bit, if that helps.” He raised a hand, catching raindrops in his palm. The rain had been increasing steadily since we started across the marshes.
“Both of yours are much better than mine,” Jahlil lamented. “Not even sure if mine is actually a knack for anything.”
“What? Being good with animals?” Elsa asked. “That’s a fantastic talent. I’ve heard of other alchemists with something similar.”
“Not animals,” Jahlil griped. “Cats. Just cats.”
“Just as magical,” Elsa said. “What do all the other animals matter for anyway? It’s only cats that are important.”
“It’s not quite as spectacular as always having Hagial’s favor,” Jahlil replied tepidly. “Do you know how lucky you are to be lucky?”
“Dina, what’s your talent?” Mawlik asked. “You may as well fake one.”
“Not a bad idea,” Jahlil said. “Might be able to get away with more if people thought you had one.”
“Thought about it,” I said, keeping my eyes on the forest. “But not everyone gets one, right? It’s actually quite rare. Yephi and Iris don’t have any. Neither do my parents.” I shrugged. “I figured it would keep things simpler if I pretended not to have one.”
“That’s true,” Nikhil said. “Good thinking.”
Taa discovered her alchemical talent before she was a teenager. She could hold her breath underwater for almost three times as long as any normal person could. They called her a true daughter of the ocean when she was young. An Anasahara who earned her name, thrice over.
Nikhil climbed a nearby boulder then scanned the outer edges of the forest. “This way,” he said, pointing toward the sun. Only a sliver of it was left. The blue moon was visible on the opposite end of the sky—a thin, bright circle, sharp and vivid on its top side like a glowing sickle. It would get much brighter as the night crept forward.
“I can’t be sure, but it’s the best trail I’ve got,” Nikhil said.
“You can really smell them?” Mawlik asked. “Just like a hunting dog?”
“Not like a hunting dog,” Nikhil replied. “Different, I think.” He sniffed the air again. “I don’t really have a good sense of smell. At least, not in general. It’s only when I’m after something that I can suddenly smell just that thing. It doesn’t get any stronger if I move toward it either. It’s never… overwhelming. Always kind of feels distant, but I know the direction. I don’t always get it right. Father’s been testing me with it. Trying to get me better. Says it could be useful when I’m King’s Guard. I guess for situations just like this one.” He tapped his nose anxiously, turning left and right every few seconds as we walked behind him. He had a round nose that quickly narrowed down as it got up to his forehead, just like his father.
“Could be useful for other things, too,” I said.
“Aye. Mother says I should become a hunter instead,” Nikhil chuckled. He raised his hands, pulling an imaginary arrow from a bow. He whistled slowly after letting go, like it was shooting through the air toward one of the trees. “Said it’d be safer too. She’s weary about me becoming King’s Guard, ever since she found out we’ll be declaring war against Rhauk. Of course, Father would hear none of it. I couldn’t be anything else even if I wanted to. He says Chaya needs the Huqs more than anything now.”
“Would end up much richer than the rest of us, if you became a hunter,” Mawlik said with a deep sigh. “Not that nobility ever has to worry anyway.”
Jahlil made a low grumbling noise, then, in a matter-of-fact tone, “King’s Guard has its own kind of reward. Far more valuable than copper and iron.”
“I prefer the kind of reward you could weigh in your hands,” Mawlik said. “I’m only joining because Dina’s going to be queen. And partly because I don’t want to be left out if the two of you join.”
“You know what her siblings smell like?” Elsa asked, turning to Nikhil. “Are you sure it’s Yephi and Iris you’re getting? The forest is wide. We haven’t even mapped out all of it yet. Just want to make sure we’re going the right away.”
Nikhil shrugged. “I’m going by Dina’s scent. I know it well enough. Getting something similar from the woods. It has to be her sisters.”
“Oh,” Elsa said, looking at me. A smile tugged at the corner of her lips. I turned to check for anyone behind us, feeling my face flush. It made it worse—to know what she was thinking. The other three seemed oblivious, at least.
This is the wrong time to think about that, Dina, I tried to tell myself. Focus.
Elsa cleared her throat, seeing my expression. “Dina, I’m sure your siblings are fine,” she said.
“I’m sure too,” Mawlik chipped in. “I think you’re right. The witch—she’s taking them for ransom, not to harm them. And it’s unlikely she’d eat them if she were hungry. She’d barely get a snack out of them. I’m sure once we get there, we’ll be plenty enough to fill her up.”
“I think I actually agree with what he said,” Jahlil interjected. “Your sisters are fine, Dina.”
I nodded, watching the trees and moon anxiously. I wanted to agree with what they were saying, but my mind kept wandering to darker thoughts. I wished Taa was there in the woods. She would have known what to do. I wished I were with my siblings at the Cathedral. I should have been watching them more carefully after knowing the kind of night that had passed. I wished we had more guards at the Cathedral or nearby. There were a few, but it wouldn’t be difficult to kidnap me or my sisters if someone were really inclined. It was just unthinkable. Daemons didn’t go near Cathedrals.
“We should see what you guys brought,” Elsa said, gesturing to Mawlik and Nikhil. “Empty the bags. We can hand something out to the each of us. Better do it now than when we need a weapon.”
“Good idea,” Jahlil said. He cracked his knuckles, snapping them between chipped and mildew stained fingernails. “Don’t want to be scrambling through bags in the forest.”
“We can leave the bags here,” Nikhil said. “Take everything out and leave them here. We’ll come back for them later if we need to. No point in carrying spare bags on our sides.”
Mawlik, Nikhil, and Jahlil dropped their bags on the floor in front of the woods. Elsa began rummaging through them. Nikhil had brought four jars of holy water, two small torches filled with banefire, three short knives, a long, splintered stake, and a silver sword with the shaping of Yuweh’s triton at the hilt. Jahlil took the sword, admired it for a long moment, then passed it to Elsa and me. I looked at it for a few seconds. It was good craftsmanship, a straight blade with gleaming silver, but if you wanted to see the best craftsmanship Chaya had to offer, you need look no farther than Father’s sword. Murasahara. Sword of the Depths. Father’s weapon was burnished in witchwater, serrated with senehesa steel and angel glass on the sides, and had meticulously designed patterns on the front—waves that glinted in the light like alchemical flames. He had the same hilt design as Nikhil’s, something that most people in Chaya brandished their swords with, but the three points of Yuweh’s triton on my father’s sword were sculpted with gold and tipped with blue diamonds. Taa had gotten the weapon for him. She said our house needed a weapon to pass down through the generations like the other royal bloodlines.
Mawlik had brought a much stranger collection of items. Tongs that looked like they had just been used for cooking something that was burning, a broken hairbrush, a bottle of water, a sealed cup of vinegar, two cooking knives, a six-foot long thick coil of rope that was frayed on one side, and a handkerchief that smelled like garlic.
Elsa stared at the items, cradling each one in awe. And then,
she turned to Mawlik, still with an expression of wonder, and whispered, “What in Yuweh’s fucking name?” Her face twitched with an odd expression, something between a mad laugh and a red fury.
“It’s not that bad,” Jahlil quickly said. “Look here, we can use the sharp end of the hairbrush to fight off anything small. Daemon rabbits. Or a possessed raccoon of sorts.”
I grabbed the rope. “And if things get too bad, we can use this as a noose to hang ourselves.”
“It’s not my fault,” Mawlik protested. Then, in a low and urgent whisper, he said, “Nikhil went through the good parts of the armory. There were other students where I went. I had to keep them from getting suspicious. Grabbed whatever I could.”
Elsa shook her head. Her eyes glinted with more anger the longer she studied the items. “Good, then. If we die out here, at least our classmates won’t be suspicious of you.”
“I’m sorry, Dina,” Mawlik mumbled. “If I could do more, if I had more—”
“It’s fine,” I said. “It’s not like if you brought real weapons it would have made a big difference. The holy water and banefire are our best hope.” I looked at each of them. “Let’s not kid ourselves. We’re not fighting daemons on a blue moon. We’ll have to run from whatever we see.” I passed one torch to Elsa, and another to Nikhil. “We’re better off making due with what we have than arguing about what we don’t.” I flashed a glance at Elsa. She was still fuming at Mawlik, who avoided her eyes at all costs.
“You won’t need one?” Jahlil asked, pointing to the torches.
“Don’t want to hold it,” I said. “Need my hands to study the forest. Be alert.”
Jahlil nodded.
“Keep the princess in the middle,” Nikhil said. “Keep Dina safe no matter where we go. And we’ll only light the banefire as a last resort. It might keep daemons away, but it’ll draw attention to us as well. We’d have to run right after. It won’t last long.”
I considered protesting, only because I wanted finding my sisters to be the priority, not protecting me, but I thought better of it. I would have to get used to this. It would do no good to feign propriety. This would be happening for the rest of my life.
We stepped into the forest in silence, eyes peered for signs of movement. I called to Yuweh one last time, asking for his blessing, his wisdom, his shelter. I just needed my sisters to be okay and I would handle the rest. I would find a way to get them back. Trade them for Avisynth. Or maybe stall long enough for Taa to get here. I glanced up just before losing the sky to the canopy. It suddenly occurred to me that if, for whatever reason, my father or Taa hadn’t gotten the message from the Cathedral, we weren’t going to leave the Dwah Forest alive.
I looked back. There was still no sign of anyone following us through the marshes—but the light of the blue moon had finally begun spreading through the land. Trees, leaves, bushes, reeds, and empty wetlands were all shaded a phosphorescent blue-green, glistening, gleaming, glaring, and glittering like a gloomy, glum, gaunt and ghastly ocean.
The first tree we walked by had the markings Nikhil had mentioned. A long S-shaped symbol with something like an arched arrowhead on top was scratched underneath an owl hole. The tree was the tallest among the oaks around it, vaulting toward the sky, bent and crooked, like the finger of a witch.
CHAPTER 7
It began to rain harder. The drops didn’t fall consistently through the thicket of the canopy. They amassed first inside of the crevices of branches and the palms of leaves, before splashing onto the soil in heaps of resin water, imbibing the substance off the skin of wormwood oaks. Only a few streaks of moonlight broke through from the forest ceiling, glaring upon the wet floor like crystal stalactites. As clouds swung by the skies above, and animals jumped through the canopy, the luminous streaks would disappear for split seconds at a time, flickering like silver candlelight.
There was no rhythm to the sounds of the forest; noises of all kinds popped up spontaneously from corner to corner. Whistles and screeches, knocks and creaks, crickets and birds. It was impossible to guess the kind of creatures prowling around you at any given moment. I kept talking to myself in my head the whole time, trying to keep my mind away from the eyes of the trees, the voice of the woods, and the silences that sometimes fell between intermittent seconds. Then, the forest remained just a forest. But the moment my mind strayed, and I imagined myself alone and lost, the ambiance would meander away like a dream decaying into a nightmare.
“It’s so dark,” Mawlik whispered. He looked the most uncomfortable out of the five of us. His eyes would go wild at the sound of a swaying branch, or at the sight of a leaf falling too close to his face. He kept shifting positions, moving from last in line, to right behind Nikhil, to circling around the side of us. Elsa tried to hold him in place several times, but to no avail. By the time we were half a mile into the forest, his anxiousness had seeped into the rest of us.
“It’s not even night yet,” Nikhil said, several minutes after Mawlik had spoken. “Give it another hour, and it’ll really be dark.”
“We’ll have the moon then,” Mawlik replied.
“That’ll make it even darker,” Nikhil said. “True dark. When you—”
“This isn’t true darkness,” I interrupted. “Even if the stars disappeared and we were left alone with just the blue moon, it still wouldn’t be true darkness. Only the Shaed is true darkness.”
Nikhil paused to look at me. Mawlik swallowed hard, the sound coming out like a tiny bellow from his throat.
“You don’t have to mention that now,” Mawlik said, under his breath.
“I wish I knew what it was like,” Jahlil chimed in.
Elsa turned to give him a doubtful look. “Jahlil, you’d be shitting your organs out,” she said, eyes dancing with amusement.
I gave her a nod of agreement.
“Well, I don’t mean I want to go there,” Jahlil continued. “Anything but. Just, you know. I wish I knew what it was like. How it was for other people. For those in Narkissa’s kingdom.” He raised his hands and felt the air in front of him, no doubt imagining what the Shaed was like compared to the dark here. They weren’t the same, not even similar, from what Taa told me. They were as different as night and day. As incomparable as Chaya was to Rhauk.
I leaned into Jahlil. “There is a reason why the vampire queen built her kingdom in the Shaed. The sun does not shine there, and the stars do not show. The darkness is pure. As pure as rainwater from the pines. As pure as witchwater and moonshine, mountain snow and silsipia sand. Like if you weaved a torch out of the single, brightest ray from all the sun.” I paused, turned around, and pointed to his face. “The darkness here only takes you in the eyes.” I pointed to his hands. “In the Shaed, the darkness takes you here, and you cannot feel.” I pointed to his neck. “It takes you here and you cannot speak.” I pointed to his chest. “And it takes you here, and you cannot breathe.”
“Oh stop scaring them,” Elsa said, looking more disturbed than Jahlil. It wasn’t a real rebuke. She was only teasing out the story further, like a magician’s hand feigning worry to make an audience sweat. Not that it was a planned act between us—just two troubadours stepping in concert with one another.
“He said he wanted to know what it was like,” I argued gently. “Just sharing what Taa told me.” I leaned closer to Jahlil, undeterred to share the subtleties of the Shaed. Mawlik and Nikhil may not have wanted to be scared, especially not while we were walking through the Dwah Forest, but I saw them slow down to catch my words. I’d never really thought about it, but curiosity was a far more potent emotion than fear. The latter was a drug, lacing your mind with the kind of dread that wolves could smell. It was intense, but quick. The former settled in deeper, and when it ripened after years and years of bedtime stories and traveler’s tales, it turned into the kind of deep yearning you saw in love, prayer, and mythology.
“In the Shaed,” I began, now speaking in a barely audible whisper.
The three of
them drew closer, ears as stiff as nails. I took in a deep breath, suddenly understanding the kind of satisfaction Father Clairmont felt when he had a class at its heels. It was the strength of a perfect tenor, or the gift of a precise drawing hand. It didn’t grant you an overt kind of power, just a sudden sense of importance that followed from holding a small portion of the world in rapt attention.
Mawlik looked mortified. Jahlil looked more curious. Elsa and Nikhil walked on expressionlessly, but I could see they were listening.
“There are eyes that move across the sky at all times,” I said, speaking slowly and enunciating every word with special care. Taa knew the best stories, but Mother knew how to tell stories the best. I tried to imagine how she would say this story now, if she were the one speaking about the Shaed instead of me. “They say you can catch glimpses of them during a flash of lightning, or when fire shoots up into the sky from one of the kingdom’s ninety-nine volcanoes. There are chidnas the size of small houses that slither around, feeding on smaller daemons. Wraiths that howl loud enough to break the drums of your ears. Willowisps that beckon travelers into the tips of their flames and then swallow them whole. There are daemons that only walk the earth there. Vampires as old as Chaya itself.”
“You’re making that up,” Mawlik said, without looking at me. Then, after several seconds passed and I said nothing, “or at least half of it. You’re making at least half of it up. Or exaggerating.” He made a chortling sound, something between a snicker and a grunt.
“Tell me more when we get back,” Jahlil whispered. “You’re the only person who has these stories, Dina. I wouldn’t dare go to your Taa and ask her directly.”
“She wouldn’t mind if you asked,” I said. “Come with Elsa to the palace after we get my sisters back. She’ll tell tales to all of us. Tomorrow, or next week sometime.”
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