Scriber

by Ben S. Dobson

  Finally, I came to the last pages of the journal, the record of his last days in the Salt Mountains:

  I have been a fool.

  So many months wasted searching tomes for information on sorcery. It was never sorcery that gripped my father. It was not the work of men wielding some forgotten power. It was the Wyddin themselves. The voices Adello hears are theirs, crying for vengeance. How many times have I read those pages and missed what was right in front of me?

  It is too late now for me to take this knowledge to the capital, to turn this battle back in my favor. I have lost. Too many have been possessed by the tree spirits already. But there is one final path open to me.

  The fireleaf trees are their weakness. That is what they have been trying to hide; the Elovians knew, so their words had to be destroyed. When the trees burn, the Wyddin burn with them.

  I have three hundred men left with me, perhaps two hundred more scattered among the baronies. When the books have been safely hidden, I will leave this journal for whoever may find it, and we will return to the Kingsland to burn every fireleaf we can. The Army will hunt us; the Wyddin will find us. We will be taken, and tortured, and killed. But we may destroy enough of the trees to free the kingdom. I do not expect to survive, but so many have died for me already. Why should I live when they do not?

  May the Mother and the Father forgive me for failing my people so completely.

  I turned the page, but there was no more; it was the last entry.

  The Wyddin.

  It was an impossible thought, and a terrifying one, but I immediately believed it. Really, it was only a small step from what we had already concluded. The failing crops, the earth tremors and lightning, all of it could be explained by the power of the Wyddin over Sky and Earth. They had sent the snowcats after us, and the Wyddin were said to be able to possess and command animals. I had assumed all of these tricks were sorcery, the sort the Sages might have used, but if it could be sorcery, why not the source of sorcery?

  Fyrril’s journal did not answer all of my questions, though. Why would the Wyddin attack us? Certainly tales existed of their jealousy towards mankind, but why here, why now? And no stories told of the Wyddin possessing humans, or driving them mad. No stories explained what was happening to me. The answers, if there were any, had to lie in the books Fyrril had left behind.

  When I opened the door to summon her, I found Wynne already waiting outside. I ushered her inside and summarized what I had read, handing her Fyrril’s journal so she could read the final entry herself.

  When she was done, she looked up at me with wide, sad eyes. “What do you think happened to them, Scriber Dennon?”

  I could not say for certain, but I made an educated guess. “The Forgetting lasted for almost two hundred years after Fyrril wrote this, which means Prince Oryn inherited the throne from Ullyd. As much as I wish I could say otherwise, Fyrril and his men must have been captured, executed as traitors.” It was the only thing that made sense, considering that nearly all record of the poor, brave Prince and his doomed rebellion had been wiped from history.

  “But no one has heard from the Wyddin for five hundred years. They’re supposed to just be legends. The Prince must have burned enough trees to stop them.”

  “Yes. But he likely died to do it.” The thought made me want to weep. The heroism of the Prince and his men should have been the stuff of legend; instead they had been killed and forgotten. “I mean to find everything I can about the Wyddin so that we can stop them again—hopefully without dying ourselves. I need your help.”

  Wynne nodded, her green eyes sparkling like emeralds at the idea of reading such valuable books. I imagined that my own eyes had looked much the same to Illias the first time he had let me open one of the old tomes from Delwyn’s Hall. It was that more than anything that prompted my next question.

  “Wynne, you wanted to be a Scriber at one time, didn’t you?”

  She blinked. “I… of course, but I couldn’t afford… They didn’t let me in.”

  “I could speak to Illias. He would sponsor you if I asked.”

  “You would do that?” Her eyes showed disbelief, but the corners of her mouth were already twitching upwards into a euphoric smile.

  “Why not? You’d make a better Scriber than—”

  Before I could even finish the sentence, she rushed forward and grabbed me in a tight embrace. “Thank you, Scriber Dennon!”

  Instantly embarrassed, I pried myself from her grasp. “Well, don’t get too excited,” I said gruffly. “I’ll have to see what kind of work you do tonight.”

  “I won’t disappoint you,” she said. There were actually tears in her eyes, which only made me more uncomfortable.

  “Get to work, then,” I said, shoving a book into her hands and gesturing to my work table. “Look for any words or phrases that might be relevant and bookmark the pages. I’ll look through when I am done with this one.”

  We did not sleep that night. By lantern light, and by candlelight when the lantern ran dry, we scoured the books for information, making whatever sense of them we could. As the hours passed, I filled sheet after sheet of paper with scribbled notes and thoughts, littering my desk with hastily written translations of arcane Elovian passages. Though Wynne knew even less of the language than I did, her help was invaluable; she had an eye for important passages, and never forgot what page a certain phrase lay on, or whether we had seen a certain combination of words in another book.

  I understood very little of what we found. In one tome, there was a reference to some sort of Wyddin elders granting the Sages power by teaching them to, roughly, “open their spirits” to something interchangeably referred to as the Wyd—a word I was not familiar with—and the “world-voice”. This world-voice may have been related to the voices I heard, the ones that had killed Josia, but the book mentioned no danger in it, which was very much at odds with everything I had experienced. I had hoped for more information, something that might explain how I had stopped the snow outside Fyrril’s cave, but the rest was simply too complex to translate.

  Comparing and cross-referencing a number of the remaining tomes, we were able to decipher certain basic facts about the Wyddin. They were born of trees that the books called threlea—“birthtrees” by my best translation—and were tied to these trees. Each leaf was a spirit, and when they were mature the Wyddin often left their trees, causing the leaves to fall and then bud anew when the Wyddin returned. These had to be the fireleaf trees, though the writings made no mention of color, and I was left to wonder what it meant that the fireleafs in the First Forest grew green instead of red.

  The books also told of their ability to possess other forms, but exactly which forms was not entirely clear. Only animals were mentioned specifically. One text claimed that the Wyddin did not gain the instincts or memories of the animals they possessed. If that same rule applied to human possession, it explained why they fought so awkwardly, and why Uran Ord had forgotten his cousin and his men. It also suggested that Josia had not been possessed—she had clearly remembered everything. No, she must have been like me, plagued by pain and voices until they drove her mad. I could not say which fate horrified me more.

  Further on, though, the text indicated that the Wyddin could only take the bodies of the revaen, which roughly translated to something like “not awake” or “lacking awareness”. I did not truly understand the term, but there was no mention of the Wyddin entering anything other than animals and plants, so I took it to mean that they could not possess thinking creatures. The Burnt, though, could clearly take human bodies. If they and the Wyddin were one and the same, they must have found a way to overcome that obstacle.

  It was Wynne who found the phrase that truly convinced me this was the case.

  “Scriber Dennon, look at this,” she said, holding a huge, yellowed tome open for me.

  “What is it?”

  “We’ve noticed the Burnt don’t seem to bleed properly, yes? Isn’t this the word for blood?
” She pointed to a paragraph midway down the page.

  I perused the words carefully; it was a passage concerning animals possessed by the Wyddin. And there, right where Wynne pointed, was a short sentence that made me tremble as I read it.

  Ae rael nima, it said—“They do not bleed”.

  By morning we had found few useful answers, but I had many more questions, two of which dominated my mind above all others. Firstly, if the Wyddin had so much power, why did they not simply crush us? They could have possessed the King himself instead of his nephew, as they had with Ullyd five hundred years before; they could have simply swallowed Three Rivers into the ground. Secondly, why was there no mention in any of the books about the Wyddin being dangerous in any way? Everything I read indicated that the Elovians had lived in harmony with the forest spirits, which contradicted every tale I had ever heard of the kingdom’s fall.

  We had very little to show for the night’s work when Bryndine finally knocked on the door to tell us it was time to leave. As Wynne and I followed her outside, each of us carrying an armful of old texts, she asked, “Did you find anything, Scriber? Is there any way to stop them?”

  How could I tell her we had found so little of use when so many women had given their lives to find these books? My mouth opened foolishly, but I was too ashamed to form any words.

  Then, before I could think what to say, a whispered voice crept through my thoughts and drew my eyes to the fireleaf in the village square. The women bustled about its broad trunk, packing their gear and saddling their horses. Above their heads, branches that had been bare the night before bore a handful of leaves that looked like flame. I knew what that meant now: some of the Wyddin had returned to the tree in the night.

  Looking at the newly budded leaves, I remembered that I had discovered something, perhaps the most important thing. The Burnt had done it to me more than enough times; it was a favor I would be glad to return. I turned back to Bryndine with fire in my eyes and an answer on my tongue.

  “We burn them,” I said. “We burn them all.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  We made every effort to find Fyrril’s books and return quickly. We braved the trip to Ryndport despite the danger and risked the Salt Mountains on the verge of winter; we made the journey back without delay, despite having more than a dozen ancient texts to examine.

  We made every effort to report our findings to King Syrid in time.

  We were too late.

  — From the personal journals of Dennon Lark

  I heard little from the Wyddin in the days after we left Waymark—the fireleafs we passed were bare and silent. The Burnt were not in their trees; they were marshalling their forces elsewhere. As we drew near to Three Rivers, though, the voices returned in force, whirling around the city like the first winds of a storm.

  But I did not need to hear the voices to know that the city was suffering. As we rode down the Saltroad towards the capital for the second time in as many months, the sight that greeted us was a dismal one. The sprawl of tents and refugees that had once extended well beyond the makeshift palisades had shrunk by more than half. What was left of the camp was crowded into the wedge of land between the Salt and Rynd Rivers; the rest of the land around the capital was completely deserted. The palisades themselves were barely standing, scorched black in places and completely toppled in others. A few Army tents were visible beyond what was left of the wooden walls, brown canvas structures topped by the banner of the burning tree, but given how bad things looked, there were far fewer of those tents than there should have been.

  A small group of Army men met us as we rode through the crumbled palisades, eight soldiers and a man wearing the red cord of a Lieutenant on his shoulder. All were on foot; there were no horses anywhere that I could see. The Lieutenant, I realized after a moment, was Ralsten of the First Company. I could barely recognize him—his eyes were sunk into tired, dark pits and he wore a tangled brown beard that hadn’t been trimmed for weeks. The gold-stitched numerals that would have identified him as a man of the First had been torn away from beneath the burning tree on his breast; looking at the others, I saw that they had all done the same.

  Ralsten eyed us with suspicion and lowered his head slightly in place of a bow. “Lady Bryndine.”

  Bryndine saluted the man. “Lieutenant Ralsten. What has happened here? Is the First in charge of the defense?”

  Ralsten laughed sourly. “No companies out here, Lady. Just us.” He spoke without the arrogance or military formality of the man I remembered; he sounded more exhausted than anything else.

  Bryndine raised an eyebrow, but did not ask what he meant. “We need to see the King immediately.”

  “Don’t we all,” said Ralsten. “Little chance of it though. The gates are barred. You won’t be getting in.”

  “What do you mean? This is urgent.”

  “I mean the gates are barred, Lady Bryndine. Come with me, I’ll explain.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Bryndine nodded. Ralsten and his men had no horses, so we dismounted and followed them on foot, leading our mounts—save for Tenille, whose injuries made walking impractical.

  Ralsten and his men led us by the hastily constructed living areas of thousands of sick, starving, filthy people. Everywhere I looked I saw emaciated children, and sunken-eyed mothers trying to feed their families with what looked like no more than water and weeds. Wounded men carrying makeshift weapons watched us warily as we passed. Of Army men, I saw few—there was perhaps one soldier for every hundred people.

  “The first attack came almost three weeks ago now,” Ralsten said as we walked. “It was the first time the Burners attacked such a large target, and we weren’t prepared. There weren’t enough men. The people were being slaughtered. The King ordered us to leave them out here and bar the gates, said it was for the greater good, the safety of the people inside the walls.

  “Some of us couldn’t accept the order. We left before the gates shut. There weren’t enough of us protect all the riverbanks, so we gathered as many as we could here and managed to mount a defense. But the rebels have been attacking every few days since, whittling us down. We have maybe seventy-five men left, and that number falls with every attack.”

  That Ralsten was among those who had chosen to defy the King surprised me; he had struck me before as the stubborn, duty-bound sort. I suppose, though, that I had not been wrong—I had merely misjudged where he thought his duty lay. But that was nothing beside the greater shock of his story: Three Rivers under siege, the King abandoning thousands to death.

  “My uncle would not have done that,” Bryndine said. “It is a complete violation of Erryn’s Promise.”

  “He did, Lady Bryndine. He’s different, they’re all different. The nobles, the officers, the High Commander. Ever since Uran took that wound, he’s been acting strange. When the King started taking council with him and pushed Lord Elarryd aside, everything went wrong.”

  Concern wrinkled Bryndine’s brow. “Is my father safe?”

  Ralsten nodded. “As safe as he can be under the circumstances. He and your mother are in hiding somewhere inside the walls. He’s been sending what help he can, smuggling supplies and soldiers out through the Underground.”

  “And Prince Alyn?” Bryndine asked.

  “He arrived just before the gates closed, and I haven’t seen him since. The men from inside say he’s deep in the King’s councils, him and Uran.”

  Bryndine’s shoulders fell. We both knew what that meant: the King and his heir had been taken by the Wyddin. We were too late.

  “Have you sent word to the other baronies?” Bryndine asked, though she must have known what the answer would be.

  Ralsten shook his head. “Lady Bryndine, I don’t know if the other baronies are still standing. And if they are, the carrier pigeons are all inside the walls, sending whatever messages the King wants sent.”

  We walked in silent despair for a time, until Ralsten came to a halt near a large brown Arm
y tent. “Our infirmary, such as it is,” he said. “Your friend looks like she needs it.” He gestured towards Tenille.

  “I’m fine,” Tenille argued as Bryndine helped her from her horse, but Bryndine ignored her protests. I questioned the Scriber within as Bryndine laid Tenille into a cot, and was satisfied—the man was pinned in Medicine, not Warfare. He was working with substandard supplies and in poor conditions, but he could do more for Tenille than I had.

  “You did not walk with us all this way for Tenille’s sake,” Bryndine said to Ralsten after we left the tent.

  “No,” the Lieutenant admitted. “I had to talk to you. To make sure you hadn’t changed like the rest.”

  “And?”

  “You seem right enough,” he said. “I haven’t much choice but to trust you anyway. The truth is, there are too few of us to protect these people. Every time the Burners attack, hundreds go missing. The next time we see them, they’re fighting against us, and we’re more outnumbered than before.”

  “What can we do to help, Lieutenant?” Bryndine asked.

  “Let my men see to your mounts first. We had to slaughter most of our horses for food—we’re going hungry, but there’s horse feed to spare.” He nodded at the soldiers escorting us and they stepped forward to take our reins, leading the horses away.

  When they were gone, he said, “Didn’t want them here for this—best the men don’t hear it if you bring bad news. I know you went looking for information on the Burners. Did you find anything of use?” The desperation in his eyes and the eagerness in his tone made clear just how badly he and his men needed the help.

  Bryndine outlined what Wynne and I had found, and Ralsten listened attentively. I expected him to scoff, but when she was done, he only nodded.

  “So the King is one of them.” If Ralsten was surprised, it did not show.