Danr examined the mass with a farmer’s critical eye. “The rose is getting more and more entrenched,” he said. “The longer she stays, the more tangled the other plants get. And the mushroom is trying to eat everything around it and spread its pain farther. Every moment that passes makes it worse for everything else. So, speed.”
“Interesting choice,” Nu said. “Just the sort that Aisa would have made.”
The name triggered a rush of memories. The monastery. The animals. Sharlee. Victor. Kalessa transformed into a wyrm. “Aisa!” he said. “Is she—?”
“First, your task, child,” said Nu. “You named it. You must complete it.”
“I—”
“Your task,” Nu repeated firmly.
There was more here than Danr understood, but his worry for Aisa overrode everything else. He reached down to grab—
—and bolted upright. The giant wyrm—Kalessa, he remembered—was running off the last of Sharlee’s followers. He was in his clothes, and the moon had passed its zenith above the ash grove and Aisa’s cage. The great bundle of cloth that was Slynd continued to tremble in outrage. For the second time, Danr scrambled to his feet. Kalessa would have to be all right. Right now Danr needed to see to Aisa.
He dashed past Slynd to the cage and found a key hanging on one corner of the door, not reachable from the prisoner because of the mesh inside. He snatched it down and, with shaking fingers, unlocked the door.
Aisa lay in an exhausted heap on the cage floor. Danr picked her up and carried her out. She struggled out of his arms once they were clear of the bars and mesh. “I am well,” she insisted. “Are you all right? I saw you shot with a crossbow and my heart stopped.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I changed my shape and it healed me.”
Kalessa’s jaws made clop-clop noises as she bit the air behind the last of the fleeing monks.
“You turned her into a great wyrm,” he accused.
“No such thing,” Aisa shot back. “Sharlee tried to turn her into a tiny wyrm. I just … helped.”
“She ate Sharlee,” he said mildly as Kalessa twisted back on herself to return.
“Transformation can be hungry work,” Aisa replied. “But there is still Slynd to deal with. And Hector.”
“Which one do you want?”
Danr sighed. “You free Slynd. I’ll take Hector. I should have done it the first time around, so it’s my job.”
Aisa didn’t object to this. She took Danr’s knife and headed toward the canvas bundle while Danr caught up Kalessa’s blade. He had never actually held it before. It was tiny in his hand, and he wished it were larger, easier to handle. Instantly, it was—sharp, heavy, and over six feet long. If Danr hadn’t seen Kalessa do the same trick a thousand times, he would have dropped the sword in surprise. He made himself stride to the center of the ash grove, where the blobby horror squelched and quivered. Danr closed his right eye and gave it a glance with his left. At such close range, he could almost feel Hector’s pain. It hung like a red shroud over the blob that had been Hector Obsidia, and he also saw terrible hatred—hatred for the world, hatred for what he had become. Hatred for himself.
Danr’s stomach swam with nausea, and acid burned the back of this throat. He swallowed, and for a moment he was …
… in the Garden, with Nu looking over his shoulder. Speed or care?
Had he really been there, or had that been a dream when he lost consciousness? It felt like a dream, but one more real than any he had ever experienced.
Speed or care?
Speed. The truth-teller in him knew there could be no more delay. The pain and rot and hatred emanating here had to end, and it had to end quickly. Danr raised the sword. The blob quaked, and angry ripples spread across its mottled skin. Before he could hesitate further, Danr slashed down with the sword. It cleaved the blob in two.
Pus and blood exploded in all directions, covering Danr with warm goo. It got in his eyes and mouth. An awful, rotting smell burst from the blob. Danr choked. He dropped Kalessa’s sword and threw up. The two halves of the blob oozed flatter and flatter as the noisome liquids drained out of it. A few bubbles burbled and died.
Aisa, meanwhile, slashed open the canvas that bound Slynd. He exploded free, hissing angrily, looking for someone to bite. Aisa backpedaled.
“Calm, Slynd,” she said. “We are friends. I released you after the bad people tied you up.”
But Slynd was having none of it. The fury in his yellow eyes made them all but glow. He hissed like a thousand kettles and reared back to strike at Aisa, who was too tired to change shape and escape. Horrified, Danr tried to wipe the rest of the gore from his eyes and help her, but he was still half-blind and couldn’t do much.
“Slynd!” Kalessa slid into the grove and reared up behind Aisa. “Stay!”
Danr froze. He hadn’t expected that Kalessa would be able to speak. On the other hand, Grandfather Wyrm, who had also once been human, was able to speak, so why shouldn’t Kalessa? Her wyrm voice was deeper, almost thunderous, and it halted Slynd in his track. He backed away and coiled around himself, hissing and muttering.
“He will calm down in a few minutes,” Kalessa said, bringing her own head down to ground level. It was as big as a horse.
“Thank you,” Aisa said, blinking up at her. “Are you … well?”
“I am in no pain, if that is what you mean,” she replied. “And I am not agitated or unhappy. Did you see the look on Sharlee’s face? I have been waiting for my chance at her ever since she chained me up.”
Danr wiped the last of the blob fluids from his face, though the stench still covered him in an eye-watering miasma. Hector and Sharlee had kept Kalessa chained to a tree for days and days as a hostage against the good behavior of Danr, Aisa, and Talfi, who were to bring back the power of the shape. Now, at last, that power had killed both of them—and altered Kalessa herself.
“It worked, sister,” Aisa said.
“It worked?” Danr squelched over to them, and both of them drew back at the smell. Kalessa’s tongue flickered in disgust. “You mean you—”
“Goaded her, yes,” Aisa said. “We knew if we made her angry enough, she would try to change Kalessa into something cruel, and then I would merely … add to it.”
“You worked that out together while Aisa was in the cage and Kalessa was chained up?” Danr said incredulously. His clothes were sticking to him now.
“Not in exact words,” Aisa said, “but the sentiment was there. Kalessa and I are blood sisters, after all. That was also the bond that let me add power to Sharlee’s spell.”
Danr spread his hands. “How are you going to change back?”
There was a long, long pause. Aisa and Kalessa exchanged glances. “I … do not know,” Aisa said at last. “I cannot change anyone but myself.”
“Maybe Welk could do it,” Danr said.
“I doubt it very much.” Aisa chewed a thumbnail. “The only animals he can transform into humans are ones he changed himself. It takes a powerful and skilled magician to undo someone else’s spell. Even I cannot do it yet. And Sharlee herself is … well, you know where she is.”
“She tasted like incense,” Kalessa said. “Do you mean this could be permanent?”
Aisa’s face tightened. “I fear it may be, sister.”
“Hmm.” Kalessa twisted around to look at herself. Her scales gleamed like liquid emeralds and hissed against one another in the cool moonlight. “There are worse fates.”
This took Danr by surprise. “It doesn’t bother you?”
“Bother me?” Kalessa raised her head and roared like a cannon exploding. Slynd raised his own head and joined her. The sound drove Danr’s ears flat against his skull. The ash trees shook, and even the stone walls of the monastery trembled. “Not one person in the world will forget me now.”
“Oh.” Aisa shot Danr a glance. “What do you think, Hamzu?”
He had to laugh a little then. “If a problem becomes a solution, I say let it lie. Right now I nee
d a wash.”
Aisa caught up Kalessa’s sword and Danr squelched down to the village, where they found a well. Danr’s clothes were judged beyond salvage, so he simply ripped them off. The pails he and Aisa hauled up from the well were icy cold, but Danr welcomed the shock. Each bucket washed away a little more of the horrific memory of blood and pus, of Hector Obsidia himself, and what he and Sharlee had done to Danr and his friends all those months ago. After more than a dozen buckets, he finally felt clean.
Kalessa and Slynd stood guard over them during this process. Kalessa glared around the dark village with her new eyes the size of dinner plates. “No one seems interested in coming out to see us,” she observed.
“That could not possibly be due to the two enormous wyrms writhing around this courtyard.” Aisa set the bucket down. “Or it may be that they are unsure of what has happened at the monastery and do not know how to find out.”
Kalessa raised her head and flickered her tongue at the village. She seemed to relish new sensations. On a whim, Danr closed his right eye and looked at her. Instantly, he saw Kalessa both as an orc and as a wyrm at the same time. That was even stranger—it meant Kalessa’s wyrm form was just as true as her birth form.
“Should we at least tell the villagers what happened?” he wondered aloud.
“I think they will figure it out,” Aisa said. “More than anything, I want to be free of this place. Tonight.”
“All of us can see in the dark except you, sister,” Kalessa said. “And you will be riding. We will travel a good distance up the road and then find a place to rest.”
Danr felt a vague pricking at his hand, and for a moment he was holding a dead climbing rose. A voice echoed in his head. Sometimes speed is better than care. Then both sensations were gone. He shook his head and accepted the dry clothes Aisa had pulled from their packs.
Slynd was still wearing the saddle. After a moment’s discussion, they decided that Danr, the largest, would ride Kalessa while Aisa continued to ride Slynd. Kalessa’s back was much broader than Slynd’s, and Danr had to cling to the horns protruding from her neck ruff to keep from sliding off. It was distinctly odd, knowing he was on a friend’s back, and he tried not to think too deeply about it.
The two wyrms and their passengers fled the village, and the night swallowed it behind them. Kalessa rushed up the rough road with a surprisingly smooth … gait? Slither? Danr wasn’t sure what the correct term was. In any case, it was clear she was pushing her new shape to see what it could do, and Slynd was hard-pressed to keep up. Even though it was night, they traveled far faster than they had when it was three of them riding Slynd.
“Such speed! Tikk himself would be jealous,” Kalessa said over her shoulder in her new, low voice. “We will reach Queen Vesha’s lands days faster at this rate. You did not lose my sword, did you?”
“I have it,” Aisa called from the laboring Slynd.
“Grick would approve.” Kalessa fell silent and slithered onward.
Dark trees and fields flowed past them beneath the now-setting moon. The chill air bothered Danr not at all now that he was dry. Cold rarely bothered him—even in winter he went barefoot. Trolls, of course, lived underground, and it wasn’t particularly warm there, so Danr—
“I did not enjoy that,” Aisa said, breaking into his thoughts.
Danr gave her a quick glance. He had to look down because Kalessa’s back was so much higher than Slynd’s and Danr was already so tall. “Enjoy what?”
“Killing them,” Aisa said. “I have thought about Sharlee and Hector often since they took our friends hostage. If it weren’t for them, my grandmother and Ynara would still be alive. The merfolk would not be angry with me. I would not feel so much guilt and anger. But now that I have killed them—or arranged for their deaths—I do not feel particularly better.”
“It doesn’t seem fair, does it?” Danr said. “It was just, and it needed to be done. Hector was in pain and he wanted to hurt more people. I saw it.” He tapped his left eye. “The only way to stop them was to kill them. I should feel good about it, too, but …”
“Yes,” Aisa sighed, and Danr wanted to hold her very much right then, but they were on different wyrms. Why were they so often separated by a gulf? He set his jaw. That separation would soon become permanent. He’d been trying not to think too much about that, but the knowledge crowded his mind at bad moments. They hadn’t talked about their impending loss—or about a baby—since the night Welk changed Danr into a toad. The topic was too raw yet. But sometimes, late at night when he couldn’t sleep, he turned the problem over in his mind, searching for a solution, a way for him and Aisa to stay together even after she became a Gardener.
“I noticed rot in Sharlee and Hector,” Aisa said. “Just like in the Garden.”
Now Danr looked at her full-on. “So did I. In my true eye. Did the Garden corrupt them, or did their actions corrupt the Garden?”
“I think they were already rotten, and their corruption allowed the Garden to make it worse,” Aisa said. “That is the way of it—corruption is drawn to corruption, rot to rot. You saw how easily Hector and Sharlee blackened the people around them.”
Danr shuddered. “Yeah. It was … yeah.”
“But there is something you are not telling me, Hamzu. I can hear it in your voice.”
The question was unasked, which meant he could choose how and when to answer it. He felt grateful for this small courtesy, even though he was going to tell her anyway. “That injury knocked me out, and I felt like I was in the Garden. It was like a dream, or something.”
“Hmm. A hallucination when you were injured?” she hazarded. “Or perhaps you went there like I go when I sleep. But you are not a Gardener, nor are you in line to become one.”
He turned to peer ahead into the night, though there was nothing to see but empty road. “I keep waiting for everything to make sense, but it only gets worse.”
She shook her head. “We need to get the Bone Sword from Queen Vesha. Then all of this can end.”
“That’s what I’m afraid will happen,” Danr muttered.
*
The rest of the trip continued without real incident. Kalessa relished her new form. Every day, she rushed down roads both smooth and rutted, clearly enjoying the near invulnerability her scales granted her. She reported being able to taste incredible new sensations on the air, and couldn’t imagine how she had missed them before. She hunted deer and elk with Slynd for food, and didn’t seem to mind devouring them raw in the slightest.
“I would not have done this as an orc,” she said after one meal, “but as a wyrm, I cannot imagine eating any other way. The bones crunch, and the blood adds a perfect tang to the meat.”
“It certainly saves time cooking,” Aisa said dryly.
And the likelihood that she would never become an orc again seemed to bother her not at all. “All my life I have ridden wyrms,” she said. “I have long thought it must be wonderful to be so big and fast and powerful, and now I have that wish. Nothing is better!”
“Do all orcs feel that way?” Danr asked. They were riding past a herd of sheep that panicked and fled across their paddock as the wyrms passed with their two riders.
“Many do,” Kalessa said. “Many old stories tell of orcs and wyrms exchanging shapes. You know that. Perhaps this is why we feel so close to our wyrms.”
“And now those old stories are coming true,” Aisa mused. “Shapes are so … fluid. In the right hands. I wonder …”
“What?” Danr asked. “When someone who is fated to become a Gardener wonders something, the rest of us tremble, you know.”
Aisa made a face that wasn’t quite smile and wasn’t quite grimace. “You remember that legend Grandmother Bund told us, the one that says the Fae and the Kin and the Stane were made out of three different kinds of clay?”
“Yeah.” Danr’s eyes grew distant as his thoughts went back to his grandmother’s aged, powerful voice telling the story in the dark under the mountai
n. “The Stane came from rich, dark clay. The Kin came from smooth, fine clay. The Fae came from white, weak clay. Though probably the Fae tell the story a little different.”
“I also have a different story for you,” Aisa said from Slynd’s back. “Long, long ago, when fire was a new discovery and living in a cave was the height of wealth, there was only one race of people, and there was only one god. Let us call him Tikk, the trickster. And Tikk the trickster told the people he would give them a gift, if they wanted it. The people gladly accepted a gift from their god, not realizing that Tikk was laughing behind his hands at them, for the gift was the power of the shape. Some people wanted nothing to do with this new power, and kept their shapes. Other people learned to change their shapes, and the shapes of other people. They changed their shapes a little bit, and then a little more, and then a little more.
“One group of people, the ones who lived in caves, changed their shapes so much that they no longer wished to come aboveground except at night, and their eyes became sensitive to light, and they twisted their magic until they could shape the shadows and the earth itself and forgot the power of the shape entirely.
“Another group of people, the ones who lived in the forests, went into the trees and into the air above until the heavy iron became painful anathema to them. They twisted their magic until it became all light and air and glamour and forgot the power of the shape entirely.
“Another group of people, the ones who farmed and fished, became close to the beasts they husbanded. They kept the power of the shape pure, and learned to change into any animal they pleased. Some went into the ocean and never came back. Others went to the grasslands and learned the power of the wyrms. And still others remained where they were, learning the power of eagles and lions, bears and boars.
“And over time, the groups of people changed so much that they forgot they had once been a single race of people and remembered only a time when they had been the three groups of three, the Nine Races. And once that happened, the trickster god discovered he had himself been tricked, for he was split into nine gods. But a piece of him flew away and remained himself, which is why the Nine are actually ten. And so the world spun out—one becoming three, three becoming nine, while two always revolve around a third, in the mortal world and among the gods and among the Fates, with the one trickster gadfly remaining a little apart.
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