by Garth Nix
“How do you know people live in there?” Odo asked.
She pointed again. There were three named villages along the Old Forest road: Carcastel, Hertech, and Fangholt. Their locations were marked exactly the same way as the other villages they had passed.
Odo had heard stories about the Old Forest. Stories about packs of bilewolves hunting anything that moved and giant moths that smothered travelers in their sleep. Hunting was forbidden there, and some ancient monarchs had enacted terrible punishments on those who broke these laws.
“What about the bilewolves and the giant moths and all that?” he asked uneasily.
Eleanor laughed.
“Those are just stories, my father always said. There haven’t been any bilewolves for centuries — and as for the giant moths, they never existed.”
“Oh yes they did,” protested Biter. “Long ago. Almost before my time, even. Though I fought bilewolves often enough. You say they are no more?”
“Well, according to my dad,” said Eleanor, with rather less conviction.
“If they’re not around anymore, we would save a lot of time,” said Odo, studying the map. “It looks to be half the distance at most.”
Eleanor watched him, clearly waiting for him to decide.
That’s what knights do, he told himself. Among other things.
“All right,” Odo said. “The Old Forest road.”
“We take the right fork, then.” Eleanor briskly folded up the map and looked at the sky. “At least we’ll stay drier under trees. Look at those clouds. Can you smell rain in the air?”
Odo could. Thick, black clouds were rolling in from the west, accompanied by a steady rumble of thunder. The rain carried with it a fresh, heady scent that soon had them picking up their heels in the hope of reaching cover before being drenched.
The first drops struck them when they reached the fork in the road. It was here Eleanor had her first twinge of doubt. There was no sign saying Do Not Enter On Pain Of Death or anything, but the right-hand road was definitely less traveled, as Odo had suggested it might be, and barely a hundred paces ahead the trees closed right over it, forming a thick roof.
“Uh, maybe the forest road isn’t the best way,” she said.
But for once Odo didn’t hesitate. He strode off along the Old Forest road, picking up speed as the rain began to fall more heavily. “Come on! We’ve got a dragon to slay, remember?”
Eleanor shrugged and ran after him. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed, and the storm began in earnest. By the time the trees closed their branches overhead, Eleanor was soaked through and the day had turned to something very much like night.
Eleanor slowed to ordinary walking speed as she came abreast of Odo. Water dripped around them, but by and large the undergrowth was dry. The air was still and heavy with a very different smell than that of rain. There was damp to it, and the kind of things that liked to live in the damp, such as mushrooms and moss, but there was also an ageless, woody smell of bark and cracking branches, and pine needles underfoot.
Odo liked the smell. He didn’t, however, like the way the forest seemed to close in around them, as though the branches were grasping hands pulling them toward some terrible fate. Their footsteps didn’t echo, and it seemed to him as though they had fallen into a dream.
Eleanor studied the shadows for any sign of boars or bilewolves, or anything else that might mean them harm. She neither saw nor heard anything. If there were monsters living among the trees, they watched silently and let the children pass.
Slowly drying from their brief drenching, Eleanor and Odo followed the road deeper into the Old Forest. It snaked from side to side, so they could see only a short distance ahead and behind them. In places the road was boggy or almost entirely overgrown, little more than a track. The ancient ditches that defined its edges were sometimes very difficult to make out, and both of them took great pains not to get lost.
At one point, they climbed over the corpse of a giant tree that had fallen across the path so long ago that the leafy canopy above had closed up over it, erasing the wound of its passage. Its trunk was taller than the roof of Eleanor’s home, and had been adopted by a vast colony of lizards, spiders, and fat-bodied ants. The lizards ate the spiders, the spiders ate the ants, and the ants feasted on the lizards when they died. This delicate balance was thrown into chaos as Odo and Eleanor crashed through, but returned to normal soon after.
They walked all day without rest. Since they had chosen this route for its swiftness, it made sense not to stop for lunch, nor even to consider it aloud. That way neither had to admit to being nervous, which was the truth.
Odo practiced for a while, but the noise of it covered the sound of anything that might be creeping up on them, so in the end he stopped. But he didn’t sheathe Biter, instead walking on with the sword drawn and held before him, ready for anything, although he tried not to think about what “anything” might be. Eleanor did likewise, drawing her own blade.
Sometimes branches fell to the forest floor far off in the distance. Sometimes a bird flew by without calling, ruffling the leaves to send a brief rain shower down on them. Every time, both Eleanor and Odo jumped in fright. Every time, Eleanor found it harder to relax afterwards.
Towards nightfall they came to Hertech, the first village on the map. Only it turned out there was no village there, just some overgrown patches where houses might have been, and a barrow, a steep-sided mossy mound no less than thirty yards long and eight across.
A grave mound.
“I don’t like this,” said Eleanor, at last giving voice to both their misgivings.
“Nor I,” whispered Odo. “Let’s find the road on the other side.”
Together they skirted the barrow, both flinching as a massive flight of delicate, blue-winged butterflies suddenly burst out of the bushes ahead and to either side of them. Eleanor opened her mouth in delight, and Odo blinked back sudden tears. The butterflies swept up in a spiral, widdershins, flying up toward a gap in the forest canopy before slowly descending to settle on the barrow, rendering it blue from end to end. When the last one folded its wings, the scene was still again.
Odo had the peculiar sense that they had disturbed someone, who was now quiet again, like a person rolling over in their sleep and finding a more comfortable position.
“Who do you think’s buried there?” Eleanor whispered, gesturing back at the barrow.
“I don’t know,” said Odo. “And I don’t want to find out.”
A few minutes later, they found the road again. Eleanor hurried onto it, but Odo glanced behind him and saw an unnerving thing:
The barrow had been disturbed.
Exposed earth lay in clumps around a hole in the far end of the mound, upon which no butterflies rested. The hole led into the heart of the barrow, but the light was too dim for him to see far inside. His first thought was that someone had dug there in search of treasure, but there was something about the way the dirt was scattered that suggested a very different explanation.
Something had dug its way out.
The small of his back itching, Odo turned his eyes forward and hurried to join Eleanor.
He didn’t mention what he’d seen.
Before night fell and they lost what little light remained, Eleanor and Odo made camp among the roots of the biggest oak they had ever seen. They didn’t light a fire, eating stale bread and dry, cracked cheese rather than foraging along the path or hunting, although they heard rabbits and other night creatures stirring as dusk deepened. Neither wanted to draw unwelcome attention to their makeshift camp. As scary as the darkness was, they were more scared by the thought of what the light of a fire might lure out of it.
Biter placed himself at the entrance of a triangular space formed by two wall-like roots, each taller than Odo’s head. The children lay awake for some time, marveling at the butterflies and wondering if the other two locations on the map, Carcastel and Fangholt, were also abandoned. The Old Forest had put the humili
ations of Sir Saskia far from their minds, but had provided new fears and uncertainties. Eleanor slept fitfully, reminded of the stories of smothering moths, but dreamed of nothing to cause her fear.
Odo, on the other hand, had a nightmare of being chased by a lizard so wizened and gnarled that it looked more like a tree. It came out of the hole in the end of the Hertech barrow, and when it opened its mouth, bats flew out of its gullet in a shrieking rush.
He woke with a gasp to sunlight filtering through the canopy. It was morning, and Eleanor was already setting out more bread and cheese. After their meal, they made off once more, both footsore and hungry but pleased to be making such progress. There were no rotten knights or unfortunate refugees to impede their progress now. They were alone, on a road that wound slowly upward through the heavily wooded foothills.
On the crest of a stony ridge after a long ascent, they paused for breath and to sip from their water skins, which they had filled that morning from a spring. The forest had thinned here, large trees finding it hard to take root in the stony soil, and the air seemed fresher, less stifling than it had deeper in the forest. They even glimpsed patches of blue through the canopy, and heard birds calling to each other from perches high above. The map suggested that they were near Carcastel, and as Odo stretched his aching legs he looked about him for any sign of habitation.
All he saw were thin-trunked trees and several granite outcrops that looked like a lot like trees themselves, or the prows of ancient ships that had been buried underground. He idly traced their forms with his eyes, noting their unusual regularity in both spacing and height, and slowly came to the understanding that what he was seeing wasn’t natural.
Eleanor had seen it too.
“Is this a stone circle?” she asked, walking toward it. “Look, it is! We were sitting right inside it!”
Odo stared around him in amazement. It was true. The road went right through the middle of the ring of stones, but they hadn’t noticed because trees obscured the pattern. If he and Eleanor hadn’t stopped to rest in that very spot, they might never have noticed it.
“I wonder who carried the stones up here, and how,” he said, looking back down the steep path.
“It’s like a crown,” said Eleanor, moving from stone to stone and touching each of them. The columns were age-worn but surprisingly free of moss and lichen. “Or a cage,” she added, shivering at the thought. What kind of creature required heavy bars of stone to keep it contained?
One of the stones lay askew, and part of her wanted to stand it up again, just in case it was important. But the stone would need at least a dozen Odos and ropes and tackle to lift. It had to stay where it had fallen.
As with the barrow, they didn’t linger. Fangholt was some hours’ distance away and the edge of the forest was almost a full day beyond that. If they stopped anywhere too long, they would be forced to spend a third night in the forest, and neither of them wanted to do that.
But either the map was wrong or Eleanor had misjudged the distance, because the sun set long before they found any sign of Fangholt, and they were forced to call an unhappy halt in the middle of a broad valley densely populated by vastly tall redwoods. They had run out of bread and cheese, so Odo and Biter went off to look for game while Eleanor lit a fire to cook it, striking sparks from her flint and steel over a small pyramid of bone-dry kindling shaved from the inside of a fallen log.
As the flame caught, she heard a harsh cry echo through the redwoods. It wasn’t an owl or a wolf — it sounded like a human shrieking, but much louder, lasting much longer than any ordinary throat could sustain. Piercing echoes filled the night, so it was impossible to exactly pinpoint its origin. Eleanor quickly added a handful of twigs to the fire, and then some larger ones, willing the fire to burn high.
A crashing sound came from behind her. She dropped the log she was about to add and spun around, drawing her urthkin blade.
“Just me,” cried Odo, hurrying out of the darkness to join her in the flickering circle of light cast by the fire. He held a dead rabbit in one hand, bloodstained Biter in the other. The cry had raised all the hairs down the back of his neck. He didn’t want to be alone in the forest for one second longer than he had to be.
“What was that?”
“I don’t know,” said Odo. “Build up the fire. Biter, do you recognize that scream?”
“No,” said the sword. “A faint memory nags at me … but no …”
They piled the wood Eleanor had scavenged on the flames, taking care not to stifle them in the process. Slowly the fire licked along the wood, taking hold and growing brighter. Odo kicked over a dead tree and dragged it on as well.
When the fire was burning as high as Odo’s head, they both stood with their backs to it, peering out in different directions, wondering what could make such a terrifying noise.
Then the cry came again, ending with a drawn-out rasp that made Eleanor wince.
“Was that closer?” whispered Odo. “It sounds closer.”
“Yes,” croaked Eleanor. Her throat was dry, but her hand gripping her sword-knife was wet with sweat.
The creature, whatever it was, shrieked a third time. It was definitely closing in.
“What do we do?” called Odo over the noise.
“We must adopt a defensive position and prepare for battle,” said Biter.
“I’ll make us some torches,” said Eleanor, prodding the ends of two solid branches deeper into the fire. When they caught, she gave one to Odo and kept one for herself. Wielding the flaming sticks in their left hands, weapons in their right, they stood ready for whatever was to come.
The creature shrieked a fourth time, so loud Eleanor’s ears rang with the sound of it.
Something thudded into the leaf litter just outside the circle of light cast by the fire. Odo and Eleanor spun to face it.
But it was only a branch.
With a crash, another branch fell nearby, torn from its tree and flung at them by forces unknown.
Or not flung at all, thought Eleanor. Dropped.
“It’s above us!” she cried, as a shrieking, black-winged shape crashed into the fire, lighting up the night with an explosion of sparks.
The creature reared up over them, opening wrinkled, leathery wings to reveal a coal-black hide, pockmarked and scarred. Odo’s mind momentarily froze in shock: It was the monster from his dream, the giant lizard that spewed bats instead of fire! But how was that remotely possible?
Eleanor stabbed upward with both torch and sword-knife. The creature opened its mouth, which was full of row after row of obsidian teeth, and snapped the torch in two. The weapon skittered off its hide with the sound of metal scraping stone.
The beast sucked in air through two dinner-plate-sized nostrils and exhaled out its mouth. Eleanor staggered back, enveloped in a hot, sooty wind that smelled like death.
“Back!” Odo cried.
Brandishing Biter, he put himself between the creature and his best friend, stabbing up at its exposed belly. It shrieked and flapped at him with its wings, knocking him sideways. He rolled and came up with both feet firmly planted in the perfect defensive pose.
“Eleanor, get away from it!”
“Squire, behind us!”
Eleanor retreated, even as the thing struck. It bit into the earth where she’d stood, sending up a great gout of dirt. She gasped and backed away again, and it lunged farther forward, only to be intercepted by Odo swinging Biter at its snout.
The blade scored a vivid line in the blackened hide, exposing softer bone-white flesh beneath. The beast hissed and reared back, trying the wing trick again, but this time Odo was ready. Holding Biter with two hands and bracing himself, he stabbed forward and pierced one wing right up to the cross-guard.
Biter was snatched away from him as the creature’s wing whipped back from the unexpected sting, but the sword returned an instant later, blackened but not otherwise worse for the unexpected detour.
“Excellent stroke, Sir Odo,” Bite
r exclaimed. “Once more!”
The creature hunched low like a cat, its spine arching high above the level of its head. As its mouth opened, Odo braced himself for battle.
Without taking its eyes off him, the beast took a bite out of the fire, chewed it, and then drew in a deep breath.
“Watch out!” cried Eleanor. “It’s trying to burn you!”
Odo dropped and a rush of smoky air shot over him, scattering him with dozens of hot embers. He rolled to put them out, got up, and retreated again.
The two children crouched behind the biggest tree trunk they could find, watching as the monster ate what remained of their fire.
“This is most unusual behavior,” Biter said.
“What is it?” gasped Odo.
“I think,” said Eleanor, staring in frightened wonder at the creature’s black tail, which slithered and twitched behind it like a maddened snake, “I think it’s a dragon!”
“Nonsense,” said Biter. “Dragons are considerably larger.”
“And why is it eating our fire?” Odo asked.
“I don’t know,” snapped Eleanor. The creature had eaten almost all the fire. The only light they had now came from scattered embers. “Maybe it’s young … or sick. Let’s just be grateful it doesn’t have any fire of its own. Watch out, here it comes again!”
“Withdraw!”
They scrambled in opposite directions as the creature rose up on its hind legs and readied itself for another blast.
Before it could unleash the contents of its fiery crop, the maybe-dragon froze and cocked its head, listening.
Odo and Eleanor heard it too: an inquiring shriek from elsewhere in the forest.
“Another one?” Eleanor said, aghast.
Odo shushed her. For the moment the creature wasn’t paying them any attention. The distant shriek came again, accompanied by a flash of yellow light from far off through the trees.
Fire.
The creature tensed. Smoke leaked out of its nostrils. Suddenly it was moving, leaping up into the nearest redwood and clinging to the bark with its powerful claws. It tensed into a ball of muscle, then jumped to the next tree along, using its wings to glide. When the shriek sounded a third time, the dragon-creature was gone, the sound of its crashing through branches echoing in its wake.