Sarn crossed that moat expecting at any moment to feel a tingle between his shoulder blades. But no warning materialized. He entered through the raised portcullis and risked a glance at his surroundings, but only dust stirred in his passage. Nothing else moved, and no ghosts showed up to greet him.
Still seeing and sensing no one, he cut across a courtyard, dodging broken masonry and the things discarded by previous tenants. Sarn headed for a wood door on the side of the tower. Its hinges had swelled up from the damp, but a good tug wrenched it open. His eyes blazed, and their brilliance devoured the darkness, revealing a set of twisting steps.
Cold gripped Sarn, slowing his progress. Against the sliver of unrelieved black at the stair's top, a pale shape materialized. It was the ghost child again in all its transparent creepiness, and it pointed at something behind Sarn, but there was nothing there.
"What do you want?"
Why’s a mindless ghost stalking me? He got no answer, as usual just more finger-pointing.
Again, Sarn checked over his shoulder and started as Hadrovel reared out of the darkness, hand extended toward him.
It can’t be. Sarn scrambled out of reach, and the Orphan Master collapsed into the bad memories that had spawned him.
Resting his hooded head against the stonework, Sarn closed his eyes. Hadrovel’s dead. Jerlo confirmed it, and I’ve no reason to doubt the man. Am I going mad?
Sarn opened his eyes. The ghost boy was still there, its pallid face anxious.
"Why did they kill you? Was it because your eyes are like mine only paler?”
The silence grated on Sarn’s nerves.
“Fine don’t answer. Let me pass. I'm in enough trouble as it is."
The ghost cocked its head to one side then slammed into Sarn, and he struggled to breathe. Darkness wavered at the edges of his vision, winnowing away the staircase as Sarn slumped onto a step. A moment later, the ghost tore out of his back, and its transparent feet touched down on a step level with his eyes. The ghost seized his hood and threw it back.
Its fingers had lost their transparency, but they were chunks of ice tracing the scar on his cheek. Their freezing touch left him as the ghost faded away. The specter shaped frantic words, but the grave silenced them. The ghost boy made one last effort at speech before it disappeared.
What in the name of Fate just happened?
The arctic cold gripping the stairwell dissipated as Sarn rose and hauled ass up the four remaining stories to a low-ceilinged room in the turret. He depressed a gray stone at the edge of a decorative mural, and a section of wall slid aside revealing another unlit staircase twisting into unrelieved darkness because the Litherians had loved to carve stairs.
Sarn rolled his eyes, and their glow swept upward until every step lay highlighted before him. There was no hint of anything supernatural, so he stepped onto the first step. His weight activated a mechanism, and it retracted the door. Sarn rushed toward a rectangular section of lightening shadow. He'd had enough ghosts for one night.
Through a narrow gap between two boulders, he slid sideways and dropped into a crouch. I must settle things with Nolo and question him, since he was the only other witness to the night’s doings.
Not a thrilling prospect, but it was necessary, so Sarn listened for his masters. Are they looking for me yet?
Every tree Nolo had passed with caution. He’d expected them to get up and move at any moment, but none of them had. They’d stood sentinel as usual. Still, he’d kept his eyes on them. Without the Kid and his magical ability to reckon in a dense tangle, he’d twice lost his way and that galled. I’m getting sloppy.
Nolo stumbled out of the forest, and tension drained from his body as he stepped onto the gravel path winding around the menhirs. That peaceful moment shattered when Gregori rounded a standing stone and almost collided with him.
“Where’s the Kid?” Gregori's worried eyes raked the undergrowth, searching for Sarn.
“He needed space. Where’s Jerlo? I need to talk to him.”
Nolo scanned the meadow, but the commander must have retired from the field because he didn’t spot him anywhere.
“What did he need ‘space’ from? What did you find out there?”
His friend and fellow Ranger regarded him as if he’d grown a second head or a serrated tail. Nolo performed a quick body check. One never knew what weirdness the forest might conjure up moment by moment.
“What I said, it was bad in there.”
The sort of bad I need to discuss with the commander before it becomes public knowledge.
“What exactly does ‘bad’ mean when applied to a quasi-intelligent bunch of weeds? Are we about to see another example of their mobility? Because the first time was jarring enough, no one needs a repeat.”
Gregori crossed powerful arms over his barrel chest. The man was all muscle but sharp too.
“I don’t think so. Their mobility had a legitimate cause.”
“Which was?”
“For my ears only until I say otherwise,” Jerlo snapped as he appeared to Gregori’s left.
Their boss’ sudden appearance startled them even though their compact commander tended to pop up when and where least expected. It was his modus operandi and according to rumor, his raison d’être.
Jerlo stood five-foot-nothing in boots and weighed one hundred twenty pounds soaking wet, but his small frame housed a tactical genius. Jerlo gave Gregori a look, and the bodybuilder reacted as if he’d just recalled an assignment and hurried to carry it out. Once he was out of earshot, Jerlo nodded to his second.
Nolo launched into his tale keeping to the facts ending with, “one group robbed the other. They angered the forest, and it retaliated. Someone must have found the bodies and taken their valuables because when I arrived, there was nothing left worth stealing.”
“So, you think the first group you found robbed and killed the second group then the forest killed the first group?”
Nolo nodded.
Jerlo inclined his head. “Well, it’s in keeping with what we know of the forest. It follows a strict ‘live and let live’ policy unless blood's shed within its confines. Break the rules, and you get what we saw. I'd still like to know why it snatched Sarn.”
“So would I.”
The abduction troubled Nolo but not the deaths. They had an explanation. Shayari was ninety percent enchanted forestry, and those trees killed fools with extreme prejudice. But the kidnapping of Sarn had no rationale because it violated the forest’s three rules. Solving it must take priority.
“Do you have a theory?”
“The way the forest zeroed in on him—it must have sensed him. And there’s more. I haven't told you the most disturbing part of this.”
Nolo grimaced not wanting to recall the Queen of All Trees, and her probing, eyeless stare. He shuddered. Some creatures should stay mythic, not trot themselves out to interfere in young lives. And why pick Sarn? Too much about that overgrown Kid was shrouded in questions.
“Oh no?” Jerlo raised a brow, and it merged with the halo of frizz covering his head.
“The Queen of All Trees—she showed up and—” Nolo opened and closed his hands unable to find words to explain that bizarre episode. “She almost snatched the Kid. I couldn’t have stopped her if she had.”
The report jolted Jerlo into action, and his dark eyes took on a strange shine. “Where’s Sarn now?”
Nolo shook his head ignoring the commander’s question. Shivering, he still felt her eyeless gaze boring into him, but he saw no sign of her. Shaking his head, he resumed his report.
“She looked through me. It was the strangest experience of my life.”
“Where is he? Where’s Sarn?”
“The deaths affected him. He ran off likely to be sick. He looked pretty green, but he should return any moment now.”
In fact, I expected to find the Kid propped against a boulder radiating bad attitude. His absence alarmed Nolo. The night’s doings must have disturbed the laco
nic brat more than I’d realized.
“You don’t know where he is?”
“He’s not here?”
“No. I haven’t seen the Kid since you tore off after him. By the way, you have my thanks for pacifying the forest.”
Nolo shook his head. “I didn’t do anything.”
Jerlo’s eyes sharpened on his second. “You think the Kid did.”
Nolo nodded and pointed to the oak trees looming over them.
“They wanted him to see it. I don’t know why. The instant he did, the earth split open, and all the bodies tumbled down into a grave the forest made for them. Afterward, the trees closed the hole and stood still as if nothing had happened. They wiped out all the evidence.”
So even if the deaths had rated an investigation, I can’t do anything about them or the thief who robbed their corpses. Nolo disliked the situation, but he could see no way to change it.
Jerlo’s eyes jerked to the left. Nolo followed his boss’ gaze and relaxed. Sarn stood there, silent as usual, and the glow of his eyes reflected off the dust coating him. Wherever he’d gone, he’d gotten filthy in the process.
Sarn looked like what he was—a walking, talking contradiction. The right side of his face was a little too perfect, but a scar ran in a jagged line from hairline to jaw marring the left side. It was a gift from a psychopath, and a harsh reminder that the Rangers had failed to protect him.
Right now, no attitude, bad or otherwise, manifested. The Kid stood there cloaked and hooded with nothing but his radiant eyes visible. Their glow dyed a strip of his pale face as green as his eyes. The brat was six-and-a-half-feet of shadows, secrets, and silence, making him one tough nut to crack and four years of whacking away at his reserve hadn’t yielded a single chink.
“Where have you been?” Jerlo followed up his question with a glare.
Sarn said nothing. His luminous gaze remained fixed on a point a foot-and-a-half above the commander’s head as he tensed for a blow that would never come. Fear locked in his silence.
The fool intends to ignore the question, damn him.
Sarn had an iron will, but so did their commander. If not prevented, they would lock horns in a contest of wills. The brat never gave ground, not even when he skirted too close to insubordination, and the threat of a whipping rolled right off him. But give Sarn a direct order, and his magic forced him to comply.
But direct orders rob the Kid of his free will turning him into an automaton.
It was an unfortunate consequence of promising to obey Lord Joranth Nalshira. His Lordship had then handed Sarn, and his promise of obedience, off to Jerlo. The brat still fought it, but his magic, or the accidental compulsion, always won, and the Kid hated it.
And right now, Jerlo was as determined to get an answer as Sarn was to avoid giving one. In about thirty seconds, the commander would demand a reply and compel Sarn to cough one up.
Above all, I must avoid invoking that compulsion.
Thank God, the brat was rangy and light enough to manhandle when his stubbornness got the better of him.
“Give me a minute to sort this out,” Nolo said to Jerlo as he seized Sarn and towed him out of earshot.
The Kid had better have a good reason for vanishing.
“Let go of me.” Sarn wrenched his arm free and glowered down at Nolo. He was a half-foot taller than Death’s Marksman, and he put those precious inches to good use.
“You have to give me something. You can’t disappear and say nothing about it. I need a reason.”
“Why didn’t they know the three rules?”
“What?” The segue threw Nolo for a loop.
“Why didn’t they know about the rules? Everyone knows them. You can’t live in Shayari and be ignorant of them. Not if you intend to survive long.”
The question had gnawed at Sarn on his trip to the surface. Why did that boy die? And why did his ghost chase me through the Lower Quarters?
There was more to this than a simple case of hikers breaking the rules. Sarn paced as he waited for Nolo to answer his original question, but the Black Ranger just folded his arms and waited for Sarn to work the problem through.
What motivated those murderers? They must have known their lives would be forfeit. Why didn’t the forest protect that boy? Their three rules safeguarded children under their boughs. Why not this child? Why did the forest allow his death?
My eyes are greener than his, and I’m bursting with magic, but the forest has never harmed me. That boy couldn’t have been more than eight years old. I’m a dozen years older than him, and I’ve been in and out of that forest often over the last four years. It didn’t make sense.
Why had the forest bothered to exact revenge for the boy’s death? It’d allowed the killing to happen. Will they at least pay a penalty for breaking their own rules?
Sarn put that uncomfortable line of questioning aside for now. Most of the country was covered in enchanted forestry. Any penalties resulting from the forest’s failure to keep the rules programmed into it would affect the Rangers, and he served them—not a cheerful thought.
“Well, why? You must have a theory.”
“They might not have been ignorant of the rules.”
Sarn propped himself against a boulder and gestured for his master to elaborate.
“They may have thought the rules were rubbish.” Nolo shrugged. “The forest is strange, yes, but it’s not usually so mobile. I haven’t seen anything like what we witnessed in all the time I’ve lived here. Maybe group one thought the rules were an old wives’ tale and took their chances. But this is off topic.” Nolo chopped a hand through the air closing the issue. “You still haven’t told me where you went, and what you’ve been doing.”
Flabbergasted, Sarn stood there and blinked for a full minute. Am I the only one who sees the magic in the trees?
It ran in rivers of emerald light up and down their trunks and snaked across the ground connecting them in a spider’s web of power and awareness. His master must have seen branches shift into steps, nuts or fruit falling to take the edge off hunger, roots flattening out of the way—all proving the forest was awake and aware.
Other people must have experienced it too. The enchanted forest is everywhere. It’s impossible to travel anywhere without encountering the forest’s peculiar brand of intelligence.
Or was it? A memory ghosted by of a flat plain crowded with spires on a strip of treeless land bordering a river.
“A place of towers—” Sarn said without meaning too as he slid down a menhir and pressed his fingers into his eyes.
Memories were seeds on the wind, swirling just out of reach. Images flickered in each one. In them, a child around his son’s age clung to him. It was Miren, of course. Sarn recognized his half-brother’s features in the boy’s young face. In one scene, he carried his brother on his back as he ran through twisting alleys pursued by someone. Pain stabbed his ear, cutting his hearing in half as he pushed those memories away.
“What is it?” Nolo crouched in front of Sarn as his brain re-engaged.
“Shayari has cities. I mean other than Jacora, the capital.”
And home of my heroes, the Guardians—if only they were here. They’d know how to help a ghost and whether his death would spawn any further unpleasantness.
“Yes, they’re located in craters where the enchanted forest refuses to grow. There are two large ones, Jacora you know, and Renthalia, and a bunch of smaller ones.”
Sarn let his hands fall from his face to his lap. He’d once lived in one of those cities.
“We’re not near any cities. Are we?” Sarn wanted the answer to be no.
Nolo shook his head. “No, not near in any sense of the word. It’s a month’s journey to Jacora by foot if they cooperate.” Nolo nodded to the trees surrounding them. “Shorter by river, though. Fifteen days I think by boat if it doesn’t make too many stops along the way, and the weather’s favorable. The other cities are much further away. You don't realize how vast Shayari
is until you try to go somewhere.”
“You don’t think they came from a city.”
Well now, neither did Sarn. A bunch of fools could never reach here if they disregarded such life-saving rules.
“I don’t know. But you’re avoiding the question, and I still need an answer.” Nolo fixed him with the look.
Sarn shook it off. “If they aren’t from the city, and they didn’t grow up in a mountain stronghold, what else is there? Just the Branchers, right, and they know the rules. They live in the forest.”
Something Sarn found unfathomable. Why would anyone want to make his home in an enchanted tree’s branches? What if the tree took to wandering? There goes the village.
He shuddered. But the Branchers existed, and they had many treetop communities scattered all over Shayari.
Sarn pushed to his feet, and Nolo copied him. Once he was vertical, he recalled another group making Shayari its home—the Wanderers. They lived out of wagons and traveled about the country exchanging news and goods. The tight-knit group never settled for more than a fortnight in any one place, but they must be well-versed in the rules.
“Is there something else?”
Nolo compressed his lips together but remained quiet and troubled, but his silence answered the question. There was something, but Death’s Marksman refused to discuss it.
“Who else is there?” Sarn paced. City folk, Branchers, mountain folk, the Wanderers—he faced his master. “They came from outside—from beyond Shayari’s borders. But how? Kaydran Ironwood shut the border centuries ago. There’s a magic wall or something keeping everyone out and us in.”
“It keeps most people out, yes, but it does allow some people to cross—those who mean Shayari, and her people no harm.”
“How do you know?” The answer was obvious, and it slapped Sarn upside the head. He approached his master, agog at, and yet drawn to the idea of immigrants in his land.
“You came from out there? How? Where?” Sarn gestured west toward the distant border.
“You answer my question, and I’ll answer yours. Where did you go when you ran off?”
Curse Breaker: Books 1-4 Page 6