Fel nodded, crouching down for a closer look. Brock noted the deer still did not move, though its eyes were alert. Panicked.
“It’s a scourge spider bite,” Fel answered. “They hunt alone. A spider drops from the trees, injects its paralyzing venom, and then retreats. Comes back to eat once its prey is totally defenseless.”
Brock took a shuffling step back and eyed the barren branches above and all around them.
“That’s right,” Lotte said. “But relax, everybody. Scourge spiders don’t like crowds. They’re opportunistic. Total cowards.”
Nevertheless, Brock kept his eyes on the trees.
“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” Liza said. “But I wish Micah were here. Maybe his healing could counteract the venom.”
“The effect is temporary,” Lotte explained. “We’ve probably saved her life just by stumbling across her. The spider will have scurried away.”
“And what if it comes back?” Jett asked. “It . . . eats her? It eats her alive?”
Lotte frowned. “Yes, but . . . it’s probably painless. . . .”
“We can’t leave her!” Fel cried.
“We are on a vital mission,” Lotte insisted. “Zed is—they’re all in tremendous danger.”
“We can save her and continue the mission,” Liza said.
“Have mercy, Lotte,” said Jett.
Brock, eager to be on the right side of things this time, pumped his fist enthusiastically. “Save the deer! Yes! Let’s do it!”
“You realize this isn’t up to a vote?” Lotte said. “I’m definitely in charge, yes? We all remember?”
“So we take the deer with us,” Liza said. “We can carry her—”
“We can pull her!” Brock offered. “Our tents are tarred canvas. They can be pulled on the ground without tearing. It won’t even slow us down.”
Lotte clucked her tongue. “It’s not the call I’d make on my own, but it’s hard to argue with your problem solving. And I like seeing you work as a team.” She nodded. “All right, then. Load her up and we’ll take her with us until the venom’s run its course.”
Liza held out a hand to Brock.
“What?” he said.
“Hand me your tent,” she said.
“What, mine?”
“It was your idea,” she said.
“Yeah, I contributed the idea,” he replied. He imagined his tent dripping with muddy ice and deer blood. “So someone else should contribute their tent.” He reached for Fel’s backpack, then pulled his hand back as Mousebane appeared hissing from within.
“No more fooling around, Brock,” Lotte said. “I mean it. Last warning.”
Jett, at least, volunteered to drag the deer, freeing Brock to sulk in relative comfort—aside from his aching feet, his freezing ears, and his nose, runny and rubbed raw.
His pride hurt most of all, though. He wasn’t used to feeling like an outsider. But that was how he felt without Zed there.
How did anybody manage without a best friend?
He turned to Liza, who had no trouble keeping pace despite the weight of her chain mail. “Do you miss Jayna?” he asked her.
“Jayna?” Liza said. She was scanning the woods, alert for any danger. With her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, he could see the yellow bruise blooming on her forehead, a souvenir from their fight in the guildhall. Lotte had tried to get her to stay behind with Fife, and Brock and Jett made no effort to disguise their relief when she’d refused. If the wound bothered her now, she gave no sign of it. “Why are you asking me about Jayna? What are you getting at?”
Brock sighed loudly. “Never mind.”
“I just saw Jayna a few days ago,” Liza said, still watching the trees. “I’m not totally codependent.”
“Ugh, we get it! You’re awesome!”
Now she turned to look at him. “Why are you being so hostile lately?”
“Uh, guys . . .” Jett said from behind them, still pulling the tarp. “Maybe not so loud?”
Brock let Liza walk ahead, waiting so that he could fall into step beside Jett. “She thinks I’m hostile,” he muttered to Jett.
“You do seem a little . . . tired lately,” Jett said, not unkindly. “You’re always coming or going on your little errands. When do you sleep?”
Brock felt a buzz of panic. In the six weeks they’d been bunking together, Jett had politely ignored the fact that Brock snuck in and out of their room at all hours of the night. But of course he noticed.
For a moment, Brock thought about answering truthfully. Jett was trustworthy, levelheaded, and wiser than many adults. He might be able to see a way out that Brock had missed.
More likely he’d just get caught up in the Lady’s web, too. Involving Jett was a violation of the Shadows’ tenets, and keeping anything a secret from the Lady Gray felt next to impossible. He couldn’t risk putting Jett in harm’s way.
So he put a fake smile on his face and changed the subject.
“There’s a lot going on,” he said easily. “Even Zed’s been busy. He was in the shantytown with Fel the other day. Did you catch that?”
Jett gave him a dubious look. “Yeah, Brock. Everybody knows about it. Fel’s been showing him around, introducing him to folk. Zed frets about it every week for hours beforehand, and then buzzes about it for days afterward. Some days it’s all he talks about.”
“Oh,” Brock said. “Yeah, I just—I wasn’t sure he mentioned it to you, specifically.”
They fell into silence for a spell after that. When Brock couldn’t stand his own thoughts any longer, he asked, “You don’t think Zed would ever leave, do you?”
“Leave?” Jett echoed.
“It’s just that he’s so interested in the elf side of his heritage and . . . I know he’s never exactly had an easy time in Freestone. He talks like he doesn’t belong there. He’s always felt that way. Imagine he pulls this off, imagine Zed saves Llethanyl and—”
Jett held up a hand for quiet. He moved in a slow circle, peering into the forest from every angle, while Brock looked frantically from side to side. “What is it?” he whispered.
Fel noticed they’d stopped and retraced her steps to join them. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Heard something,” Jett said. “Thought I did.”
“I’ve felt eyes on us for some time,” Fel said. “But I assume my imagination is . . . overactive after last night’s surprises.”
“Yours and mine both,” Jett said. “Let’s hope.” He waved on Lotte and Liza, who’d paused up ahead to wait for them. “Let’s catch up. Brock, you were saying?”
Brock sighed. “Nothing.”
“You think Zed’s going to leave Freestone? Live in Llethanyl, is that it?”
Brock shrugged sullenly. “I’m just saying it crossed my mind.”
“Nonsense,” Jett said. “Zed’s not going anywhere.”
“But if you had the opportunity—if you could live in Dragnacht, even just for a few years? You wouldn’t be tempted?”
Jett answered, “No. Of course not.”
But he hesitated before he said it. Just long enough to make Brock’s fears seem reasonable.
“I’m sure Zed would be quite happy in Llethanyl,” Fel said, trying to be helpful and missing the mark by a wide margin. “It’s a wonderful place.”
“Really?” Brock said. “Even for a night elf?”
The smile froze on Fel’s face. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I just mean I’d be a little angry if I were you. All that stuff the minister was saying about your people, about who’s trustworthy and who’s not. You don’t have to put up with that. I used to tell Zed—”
“Llethanyl is changing for the better,” Fel insisted.
“Sure, but it sounded to me like—”
“It wasn’t always easy for my people, that much is true. But the city is a little better every day.”
“Right,” Brock said. He thought about that for a moment. “You mean before the
undead thing, though,” he said.
“Obviously, yes, before that,” Fel said through her now very strained smile.
“What’s wrong, Lotte?” Liza asked, as Brock’s group rejoined them. “You seem worried.”
“It’s probably nothing,” Lotte said. “But I thought we’d have found them by now.”
“They had a good head start on us,” Jett said.
Lotte shook her head, but kept moving and kept her eyes on the trail she followed. “But only a small force was going all the way to Llethanyl, remember? The rest of the guild was supposed to turn back. Our paths should have crossed.”
“Is it possible we missed them?” Liza asked.
“It’s unlikely. We’ve been following their trail all day. I don’t know why they wouldn’t take the same path back.”
Fel still bristled with annoyance over whatever Brock had said to upset her. He’d been trying to make her feel better—to say he was on her side. “Hey, listen,” he said, reaching out to pat her on the back.
He forgot about the sleeping cat hitching a ride in her open pack.
Mousebane, screeching in surprise, leaped in the air, legs rigid, arcing toward Jett, whose dwarven stature put him directly in harm’s path. Before he knew what was happening, he had a furious, hissing cat on his head.
Jett shrieked, reaching up to pry the cat from his hair, but he’d wrapped the tent’s ropes around his forearms. At the sudden movement, the canvas billowed out like a sail. The deer caught air. Spurred on by its sudden startling predicament, it regained use of its legs, kicking madly as it soared past Brock. Its hoofs connected with a tree, and the snow upon the tree’s boughs came loose, hurtling down at Brock’s head.
He sidestepped just in time, and the snow fell harmlessly to the ground.
“That,” Brock began, “could have been much wor—”
Suddenly the world was spinning. He’d been so quick to dodge the falling snow, he’d given no thought to where he put his feet, and now up was down and the ground was high above him and his arms and legs were all tangled.
Tangled, as if in a web.
“Spiders!” he screamed. “Scourge spiders! Fiendish spiders! Undead spiders! Someone help!”
“Calm down, Brock, you’re all right,” Lotte said from the ground. She smiled, but upside down it looked far from reassuring.
“Should we put him out of his misery?” Liza asked sweetly.
The blood was rushing to Brock’s head. “Brace yourself,” Lotte said. Then she drew her sword, and sunlight flashed upon it as she struck the tree trunk.
Brock came crashing to the ground, his landing softened by the pile of snow at the base of the tree. He leaped to his feet and pushed free of the tangled threads—not webbing, but some kind of rope, pliable and strong.
He’d been snared in a net.
“Some kind of hunter’s trap?” Lotte mused. “Fel, make my day and tell me this is elven.”
“Oh! Uh, it’s not,” Fel said, clearly dispirited at the lost opportunity to make Lotte’s day.
“That . . . is very troubling news,” the quartermaster said.
Brock’s head was spinning. He saw Liza fussing over Jett’s bleeding scalp. He saw Fel trying to coax Mousebane out from beneath a shrub. He saw the deer walking drunkenly away, not sparing a backward glance for her rescuers. And he saw Lotte, a shadow across her features as she contemplated the netting in her hands.
“We’ve been following the wrong trail,” she said.
“We’ll make up the time, Lotte,” Fel said in the same soothing tone of voice she’d been directing at the cat. “It will be all right.”
“No, wait,” Liza said. “What do you mean the wrong trail?” She pointed at the net. “Who set that trap?”
“It wasn’t elves,” said Lotte. “And it wasn’t our people, either. I’ve never even seen this material.”
Brock tried to focus past his vertigo. “What does that mean?” he asked.
“It’s impossible,” Lotte said. “But it means someone else is out here. Someone we’ve never encountered before.”
“Answer me truthfully,” Frond said. “Do you know what that thing was?”
“A complication,” Queen Me’Shala replied. Her expression was a study in vagueness: lovely and exquisitely blank. Behind her, the queen’s ministers were similarly beautiful and unreadable.
Their whole party—elves and humans, adults and children—were clustered around the beginnings of a fire, working through their evening rations. It had been a full night and day since they’d spotted the thing. A span of urgent whispers, unanswered questions, and still more snoring from Micah.
Frond crossed her arms, causing her belt of throwing stars to tinkle like bells in the quiet. “We made this journey in good faith,” she said, “with what we believed to be a complete understanding of the risks. If I think you’re keeping something from me, Your Majesty, then I’ll have to insist we retur—”
“Complete understanding is a children’s fantasy,” snapped the minister Threya. Her golden eyes narrowed on Frond. “Even you must know this, human. There is no certainty where the Dangers are concerned. They prey upon your understanding. They stalk it from the shadows while it sleeps, sure of its own safety. And then they drag it, crying and screaming, into the jaws of everything it doesn’t know.”
Silence fell over the camp.
“That,” said Micah, “is the worst children’s fantasy ever.”
Queen Me’Shala sighed. “What Threya means is that situations can change without our knowing.” She stared imploringly at Frond. “As you said, you entered into this quest in good faith, and I cannot convey the depth of my gratitude. The Adventurers Guild represents the very best aspects of your people. I would never knowingly jeopardize the friendship we share, even to reclaim my own city. I swear I’ve told you all I can. That creature . . . it may not even be related to the Lich.”
Frond glanced to Hexam, who was brooding over the fire pit. “There’s any number of giant flying Dangers out there,” he murmured. “Dire rocs come to mind, as do winged nightmares and a baker’s dozen of fiends. . . .”
“And dragons,” Jayna said in a small voice. The girl was seated on a log, her arms curled tightly around her stomach. Her eyes were focused on the wizard.
Hexam nodded slowly. “But a necromancer could reanimate any of those, in theory. The toll it would take, however—”
“—would be catastrophic,” Selby finished for him. The second sun elf minister leaned against a tree; his face was screwed up in thought. “It would rot his body and mind. Even as he became a more powerful focus for Mort’s energies, he would grow slower and weaker. And more insane. Difficult to destroy though they are, this has been the undoing of many a lich throughout history.”
Frond contemplated all this, her fingers tapping rapidly against the pointed stars on her belt. Finally, she let out a misty breath. “Let’s get some sleep. Tomorrow, we’ll continue on to the Celadon Falls wayshelter.” She frowned over the small group clustered together in the cold, then spat on the ground. “Everyone be on your guard. The closer we get, the more likely it is that we’ll run into trouble.”
Zed rose with the others, but his mind was far away, trying to imagine what sort of creature had earned the name winged nightmare.
There was a billow of green from the corner of his vision, and then Callum stood beside him, unfastening his moss-colored cloak. The ranger leaned in. “The queen would like to speak with you,” he whispered.
Zed wasn’t sure he’d heard that quite right. “The . . . the queen of . . . ?” His ears roasted.
A glimmer of amusement touched Callum’s eyes. “Of the elves,” he confirmed. Then the mirth vanished from his face as he cast a glance toward his monarch. “Zed, stay close to me the rest of the journey. The path from here becomes . . . complicated.”
Zed frowned, but he nodded at the ranger. They walked together to a section of camp where Queen Me’Shala spoke in low tones with h
er two ministers. Behind them, Thorn and Petal were erecting a large tent made of shimmering fabric. Petal winked at Zed as he arrived.
The queen turned to him with a bright, inviting smile, and it was like a log had been added to the furnace heating Zed’s ears. He thought belatedly to bring fingers to his lips, in the way Hexam had greeted her, but couldn’t remember how many and so settled on all five. The queen’s smile broadened at the gesture. Behind her, Threya rolled her eyes and Selby chuckled.
“How charming,” Queen Me’Shala said. “And it seems that you’re gifted in other ways, too. You conjured a miraculous fire that saved your very city. I hope you can do the same for mine.”
Oh, Fie. How was he supposed to respond to that? Confidently? With humility? Laugh until he broke into tears? Zed mumbled, “So do I, Your Majesty.”
“Callum tells me that you’re something of a pioneer among the adventurers. The first to explore a shrine once occupied by elven druids. What an experience that must have been.”
Zed glanced toward the High Ranger.
“That was weeks ago,” he replied. “The rangers and adventurers have been back many times since then.”
“Once, elven druids filled the wilds of Terryn,” the queen said somberly. “They were revered among our people as sages and mentors. The druidic sagas are where our most sacred customs come from, along with our symbols.”
She extended an ungloved hand, on which the crest of Llethanyl glittered atop a mythril ring—the great tree wreathed with birds.
“But though they counseled us,” the queen said, smiling sadly down at the ring, “the druids avoided cities. They brought their students to the wilderness to learn, and kept no written records. And when the Day of Dangers struck, the druids were all lost. Their secrets, and their promises, were lost with them.”
The queen dipped her hand into a fur-lined glove, glancing wistfully back up to Zed. “Thousands of years of culture and philosophy, gone. That is the crisis we now face again. It’s a daunting responsibility, isn’t it?”
Zed could only nod in agreement. But why was Queen Me’Shala telling him this?
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