The water rose—and the assaulting spray grew stronger.
An inch of water had accumulated in the cart now—
Scourgey scrabbled backward as a particularly violent wave exploded at the cart’s edge. The cart shifted, wheels losing purchase—
Alixa yelped, grabbing hold of Jasen—
He braced—
Then a wheel struck something—a rock, some drowned sapling, whatever—and found its hold again—
At the same moment, he felt something in the cart buckle.
The opposite edge of the wagon split open along two wooden boards. How much, Jasen didn’t know. All he saw was the cart whole one moment, and then a rushing spray of water jetting in the next.
“The sacks!” Alixa shrieked.
“We’ve sprung a leak!” Jasen yelled.
Shilara had time for just a momentary glance over the shoulder. “Jasen, get over and block it!”
He obeyed—but the cart had canted sideways, and so it was like dragging himself up a slippery hill. He snatched up a sopping sack on the way, one of the empty ones they’d use for seed.
Scourgey howled as he passed.
“Calm down,” Jasen said. “You’re spooking me.”
He gripped the opposite edge of the cart. It was soaking, and the tumult of water surging upward every second fought to shove his fingers clear. He held firm, counting seconds.
The spray bursting through the side was violent. Jasen tried to shove the sack in front of it. But the sheer force battered his fist, shunting it from left to right, as though the water did not want him to stop the cart from filling with water.
He grunted, coming from the side instead.
The first time, his hand was forced away before he could get a hold.
The second, he caught the split in the wood with a finger—he thought.
“How’s it going back there?” Shilara called.
“Working on it!”
“Well, work on it a little faster! All this water filling us up will send us downstream!”
Jasen gritted his teeth.
The cart shifted again below him, losing purchase. This time it regained it almost immediately.
He did not trust their luck to hold out.
Mustering all the steely force he could, he thrust a hand into the flow of water again. This time he managed to catch his fingers in the open seam. The wood had split sharply, and he felt the biting sting as it jabbed into the skin above his knuckles. But he’d found it, and hooking an elbow over the edge instead, he awkwardly used his free hand to fight the sack into the opening, stuffing it full—
The sack burst away. A new torrent blasted through—
Jasen yelled. The wave slapping the edge of the cart dislodged him, and he tumbled sideways. He staggered as the world turned, trying to avoid slamming into Alixa—
Wood crashed against his ribs. The other edge of the cart, he thought.
At the same time, Alixa yelped.
Had he hit her after all?
Then he made out words amidst the thundering rapids:
“The bucket!”
He turned, looking for it—
The blast of water that had ruined Jasen’s makeshift plug and forced him back to the opposite edge of the cart, had spilled over and inside. The flow rebounding from the cart’s bottom, it had snatched up anything it could: and Jasen saw them floating away now, half a dozen waterskins ejected from a sack’s tear, and the bucket. It had gone overboard sideways, spilling its contents in a crimson cloud.
And in the second and a half it took for Jasen to find it, already the bucket was far out of reach.
“What happened back there?” Shilara cried.
“The bucket went over!” Jasen shouted back.
Shilara swore. Gripping the reins between wet, bone-white knuckles, she yelled a command to Milo, urging him on.
Scourgey whimpered. Still planted dead center, she was braced awkwardly against the side of the cart with one extended leg. Jasen wouldn’t be surprised to learn the claws underwater had dug footholds into the cart’s base to help keep it in position.
“We should be past the worst of it now!” Shilara called back. “Plug that gap though, Jasen, would you?”
“I’ll try,” he said.
He scrambled over again. His ribs ached where he’d slammed the edge of the cart—a bruise, to be sure, and a damned big one at that. But in spite of the pain, and the floods intent on stopping him, he did somehow manage to stuff an empty sack into the split in the cart’s side. Maybe because of willpower, or maybe because Shilara was right: they were easing out.
He remained there to keep it in position, an arm hooked over the side. He turned away from the spray, panting hard.
Slowly, the spray softened. The water level dropped.
The water in the cart itself began to drop with it, spilling out of the front.
Milo quickened. The riotous noise dropped, as the cart’s side panels lifted clear. Then the water was lower and lower down the wheels, passing the axle, lower still …
Milo was clear. He was muddied, body almost up to his head coated and soaked, and his face was flecked with foam. But he was past: and with him came the cart, finally easing free.
“Easy,” Shilara ordered when they were a suitable distance clear.
Milo stopped gladly.
Shilara hung her head. Then, groaning, she pushed herself off the cart. She landed heavily, with a sopping thud.
She, like Jasen and Alixa and the scourge, was soaked to the skin.
She stood for a long time, sucking in breath after breath, facing the dirt.
“Are you okay?” Jasen asked after a while. He fingered his pendant, reassuring himself that it was indeed still there, that the water had not whisked it away.
“Just getting my wind back. That’s all.” Another in-out suck of air. “Okay. Let’s see this damage. This side, is it? Get out, both of you. That thing too.”
Scourgey followed willingly. It was a trembling wreck of a thing, nothing at all like the vicious hunters that Jasen had heard them to be—had seen them to be, as he fled in the rye field a whole lifetime ago. Now it was more like a dog—a fat, grey, pathetic dog.
“It’s okay,” Alixa said softly, gently patting its shoulder. “We’re safe now.”
Jasen followed Shilara around the side.
The split in the wood was not as bad as he had feared. Touch had made it seem larger. The sack protruded, black and coated in a thick layer of mud. It hadn’t entirely stopped the flow, but it had done enough to keep them from being dragged downriver.
“Okay,” said Shilara. “Nothing a good carpenter can’t fix. And if we can’t salvage it, well, we’re bringing the village seed. They’ll take the loss of a cart happily.”
“The loss of a cart?” Alixa asked.
Shilara frowned at her. “What?”
“What about the loss of us? We could have died back there!”
“But we didn’t.” Shilara was businesslike. Maybe a touch callous.
“But we—”
“But nothing,” Shilara cut across. “We survived that. It wasn’t even that bad.”
“Not that bad?”
“Aye, that’s right.” Alixa opened her mouth, cheeks flaming red, but Shilara carried on before she could say anything. “When you’ve fought in a war, you learn to be practical about things, not emotional. We lived. We have a damaged cart to deal with, one which Terreas will want back, if we can return it in one piece. A hole that small is fixable.”
Alixa fumed. “And the bucket?”
“That, on the other hand,” Shilara sighed, “is a great loss.” She looked into the cart’s bed, squinting at the remaining sacks. They were sopping wet—bread ruined, for certain, although the cheese would likely be all right if a little worse for wear. The meat would be practically unscathed; dry it off and they’d never know they’d gotten into trouble. Waterskins, several lost, but they could be refilled easily enough from another water
source. Wayforth might even have a well they could use.
But the bucket … that was their only camouflage against the scourge. Now it was gone—and on top of that, the water had washed away most of their bloody coverings.
No one said anything. But they all thought it, Jasen could tell, looking from Alixa to Shilara. They weren’t yet at Wayforth, and had two days of return travel after arriving at the village. Two more full days in which they might attract the scourge—
And no camouflage against them at all.
22
The afternoon passed.
There was no conversation. No one had much of anything to say at all. Like yesterday, after they had made their escape from the pack of tree-gnawing scourge, the grim reality of their situation seemed to settle heavily upon them. Alixa, who bore it most heavily, sat opposite Jasen with her knees drawn in close to her chest. She had linked her arms around them, gripping herself tight about either wrist. Her knuckles were pale. Jasen wouldn’t be surprised to see a row of crescents imprinted into the skin of either arm when she did finally move.
Shilara was more reserved. Or perhaps her worry was less obvious simply because she sat back to them. She’d not had anything to drink since crossing the river.
Even Scourgey seemed subdued. She seemed to sag as she followed the cart, and her face pointed earthward.
Strange, Jasen thought, how something so outwardly menacing could look so worn down.
The woods had broken about an hour ago, spilling them out into sunlight again. The trail had more or less vanished by now. It gave way to a series of hillocks, steep and rolling up and down, up and down. Each one they crested presented a view barely farther than the next rise of overgrown green.
“Roll those sacks out flat,” Shilara told Jasen and Alixa, “so they can dry. And toss the bread out behind us.”
“Won’t it attract scourge?” Alixa asked.
“Soggy bread like that won’t attract anything. Let alone one of those poxy, disgusting things.”
Jasen and Alixa obliged, splitting the task quietly between them. The sack of waterskins, they draped the top of over the edge of the cart. Ditto the sack of meat and cheese and—ugh: a mound of wet pulp. Alixa scooped it out with a squeamish look on her face. No wonder; it wasn’t very pleasant to touch. Still, between them they rid the sack of it, hanging the top of that one over the edge too. Scourgey considered the plappy lumps, and sniffed, but did not taste.
Milo’s oats were half-ruined, coagulated into a soggy mess. Shilara was not pleased by this, but said thinly, “We’ll restock in Wayforth.” When Jasen asked if the abandoned village would have any oats to its name, Shilara didn’t say anything.
The rest of the sacks were laid out, some overlapping. After that, the sun could do its thing.
Up and down, up and down … the hillocks bounced them, the ruts in the ground finding each wheel and rocking them. Jasen accustomed himself to the bumps, though his tailbone began to ache, and he shifted in search of a more comfortable position.
Then, as they hit the top of a particularly large rise—
It was as if a veil draped over Luukessia had been pulled away. With only smaller crests to block it, Jasen caught sight of a faraway village. It was spread atop a hill some miles distant, looking almost like a crown.
“Is that it?” Alixa asked.
“Aye,” said Shilara. “Wayforth.”
Jasen watched it, unblinking. A well of hope filled his chest—yet there was an undercurrent of fear there too, whispering against his spine, carving a dark hole in his stomach.
What if the granary was empty?
What if the seed was no good?
What if scourge had come to haunt those buildings, creeping through it the way they’d woven through the trees yesterday, the way they slunk through the mists and the rye surrounding Terreas?
What if this whole trip was a waste—or worse, ended in bloodshed?
He swallowed, but his throat had gone dry.
No, he told himself. Don’t think of that. Do not curse yourself.
It was easier said than done.
They rolled down a hill—and now the pressing fear grew heavier, settling over all of them. The atmosphere had shifted from one foreboding quiet to another, and this one felt somehow worse.
Another rise came. Milo pulled the cart easily through the knee-high grasses. A handful of bushes sprung up, and trees, spindly ones that could not have been many years older than Jasen. He wondered if perhaps these hills had been used for some purpose, in the days when Wayforth had prospered; farms of their own perhaps, or a network of trails leading to other villages dotted across Luukessia. If that were the case, just how long had it been since Wayforth’s people had died or deserted it? Had it been since the coming of the scourge? Or sometime after?
Shilara would know. But Jasen decided he did not wish to, and so said nothing.
The next hill flattened, then descended sharply—
Shilara hissed. She tugged the reins, bringing Milo to a sudden stop.
“What in the …?”
Below, in the valley formed between this rise and that final long slope leading to Wayforth’s outer reaches, was a span of woods—or at the very least the remains of one. The trees had been stripped bare: not a leaf clung to any branch, though they should’ve been thick and full as the summer drew on. There were few branches for leaves to cling to anyway. Most of the trees had been reduced to their trunks—and each and every one bore the telltale wounds of gnawing teeth.
“The scourge,” Alixa muttered, touching a hand to her lips.
Shilara said, “This was not like this last time I was here.” Frown deepening, she wondered aloud, “Why would they tear all of this up?”
“They hate life,” Jasen said.
They all turned to him, Shilara with a blazing look, brow furrowed deeply across.
He paused, mouth open before he carried on. Where had he got that idea? His mother possibly? Someone else in the village? It was Hanrey’s sort of wisdom, but Jasen didn’t remember him saying it, nor had he been conscious of even thinking such a thing until the thought fell from his lips.
Scourgey came around the side of the cart, behind Jasen, leaping her paws up the side to brace herself against it. Craning her head over, she ogled him with one black, empty eye, and licked his back.
Jasen stared. Alixa watched too.
“Um … good scourge.” Jasen patted the beast awkwardly. Her rotten smell was worse so close to him—but he’d smelled a lot of rancid things these last days, and her scent no longer filled him with the same revulsion as it had before. Which was very peculiar, he thought.
Shilara had cocked her head over her shoulder. “Hate life, do they?” she griped. “Explain that one.”
“I don’t know.”
Shilara’s look at Scourgey was disgusted and disdainful in equal measure. Turning back and urging Milo down the hill again, she said, “I heard those things are the dead. Dead and damned, souls of the ancestors of the westerners of Arkaria, for worshipping strange gods and doing magic.” Her voice was scornful. “Load of old tripe.”
Scourgey’s head had been displaced by the movement of the cart. She walked alongside it now though, and Jasen looked into her face, mulling over Shilara’s words.
“Are we going through that?” Alixa asked, pointing over Shilara’s shoulder to the stripped woodland down the hill.
“Have to. No point wasting time going around.”
“How will we get through?”
“Milo will manage.”
The trees became visible only when the valley between the hills flattened. They’d approached under a dark, foreboding stormcloud—metaphorically; the sun was cheerily bright, which it absolutely should not be over a sight such as this. Now, the cart passing through, that uneasiness turned into a smothering anxiety that made Jasen’s chest tight.
On the hillock, he had thought the trees’ destroyed limbs had formed a thick carpet underfoot. Yet now
, rolling through, he saw that he was incorrect. The grass had been torn up too. Earth was turned over, heaped, troughs formed beside the tree trunks. Exposed roots were ghostly white—and terminated short, ripped into shreds wherever the scourge had uncovered one.
The place stunk of decay. It was a sick odor: the lingering, haunting mist of scourge, and the musty scent of rotting wood, water and insects filling the wounds the scourge had left, softening and fraying the tree’s grain, returning it to the earth by the inside first. The smell turned Jasen’s stomach.
And everywhere it was the same. Saplings had been torn up, battered down, broken as low to the ground as they would go. Trunks were carved open, like disemboweled pigs. Bark scattered the dirt everywhere, great chunks of it as though the scourge had come to first flay and then tear asunder these trees.
Jasen turned a wary eye to Scourgey. She followed along, stinking of death all by herself.
Her kind had done this.
He tried to remind himself that Scourgey was different, and he believed it … but not entirely.
23
Jasen had never experienced a dead village before.
It was as haunting as he had imagined it to be.
The silence hit him first. It came from all directions, the absence of noise somehow frighteningly loud, burrowing into his ears and digging deep into his brain, settling there. The rattle of the cart, Milo’s hooves, Scourgey’s footfalls—all these things ripped clefts in that quiet, but they could not dispel it.
Nature had begun to reclaim Wayforth. In the years since it was emptied, the stone pathways had become so overgrown as to be rendered mostly invisible. Only small mosaics remained here and there, where something had uncovered them. The stone had been cracked though, and what Jasen presumed were once grey oblong cobbles had fractured into many disparate pieces.
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