by Hal Emerson
Chapter Twenty-one: The Wilds
Valinor led AmyQuinn north. They traveled quickly, riding on borrowed horses, and stopped no more than necessary. Once again, after the first few days, AmyQuinn was so saddle-sore that she could barely walk, but she recovered faster from it this time. As they started out, she was also worried that they might ride through the nights like they had from Dunlow to Var Athel, but that fear, at least, proved baseless: they slept in modest accommodations – very modest – but stopped every night.
On the final morning of their journey, they woke early from the lodging they’d taken in Fort Turin, the last civilized outpost south of the Barrier Mountains, and Valinor packed her horse with extra provisions – nearly two week’s worth. He did not pack his own horse in a similar fashion, though.
To AmyQuinn, this did not bode well.
They crossed through the wide pass that Fort Turin protected, and the road they took became progressively wilder as they went. The passage took most of the day, but by the afternoon they found themselves looking down over the vast forested landscape of the Northern Wilds: rolling hills and hidden valleys, the distant sea to the west, and endless forested land that concealed in its shadows thousands of secrets only spoke about in legend. The Wilds were the subject of more adventures and stories than a person could ever have or know in a lifetime, and as she looked out over the sight, she felt more than a touch of fear and apprehension.
“I have to go on my own, don’t I?”
She spoke so quietly that the whipping wind almost tore her words away. The thought of what might exist behind those trees – what legend said had been forced out of Aeon long ago – had taken away the confidence with which she’d begun the journey.
“Yes,” he said, watching her carefully for her reaction. She shivered, but tried to tell herself it was the cold.
“You’ll do fine,” he reassured her. “Most of the stories aren’t true.”
“Most?”
“Most,” he repeated. “Danger is part of the task, though. All those who would be Sorev Ael must earn a staff this way; it is a tradition dating back centuries, and there are some who believe that only when you are alone will you earn a staff at all. If you stay close to the Barrier you won’t encounter anything you can’t handle. But that doesn’t matter, what is important is this: your staff will choose you.”
He paused to let the words sink in, and she felt like the most comprehensive fool for not understanding them. How could a stick choose anything? The confusion must have shown on her face: he cleared his throat, furrowed his brow, and tried to continue in a way that he must have thought would make more sense.
“A staff is the way a Sorev Ael grounds himself – or, herself in your case. It is a focusing tool, but it is also a living thing.”
“Living?” she repeated, incredulous.
She glanced dubiously at Valinor’s staff. It just looked like a slightly too-large walking stick. The crown was as gnarled and clawed and lifeless as always, with no shoots of greenery or leaves or anything.
“Living,” Valinor confirmed. “It is as much a companion as a tool – and it can only come to you willingly. You cannot make a staff, cannot take a branch and whittle it down and force it to work for you. The staff has to choose you.”
“I… but then… does the wood matter? What kind of tree… ?”
“It depends on the Sorev Ael. I was certain an oak would choose me – it’s common enough, with several desirable properties – but the oaks I came across wouldn’t have me. I must have laid my hand on three score just to be certain, and not a single one of them gave me so much as a twig. In the end I was chosen by a rather stately yew – I sat against it to rest and a limb fell from above and hit me over the head. Almost knocked me unconscious, actually. Possibly a statement about my stubbornness, though that’s neither here nor there. There is meaning behind the tree that chooses you – it tells you who you are and how you’ll grow.”
Trying to absorb this fact with equanimity, AmyQuinn took a deep breath.
“Yew… what does that mean?”
“It means a few things – particularly in conjunction with my ring. It means in large part that I will stand alone, as do yew trees, and that I will be gnarled and aged before I fall. All yew is born from the same tree – in a lineage going back thousands of years. It is a hard wood, like the oak, but it is also poisonous, which shows I am not meant for protection but for something sharper and deadlier.”
He shifted his shoulders and looked away.
“Truthfully, it means I am meant for battle and strife. It means that I hold equal chance for life and death. I suppose that’s the way it’s meant to be for someone known as the Mage of the Eryn-Ra.”
She was ready to press forward with more questions, but he held up a hand even as the first words formed on her tongue. His face had taken on an ashy gray quality that had little to do with the wan light of the cloudy afternoon.
“Not now,” he said simply. “There is a task at hand.”
She stilled her tongue.
“There are other woods, of course, and other trees,” he continued, taking a deep breath and looking down over the sloped, curving road that would lead her down into the forest. “Some of the most common are hawthorn, blackthorn, apple, cedar, oak, cypress, pine, and sometimes even holly.”
AmyQuinn followed his gaze, and though he continued to speak, she found her thoughts pulled inexorably to the task itself, and the place in which she was meant to carry it out. The lower hills at the foot of the Barrier Mountains rolled out for several miles, blanketed in tall pines, stout oaks, and towering redwoods, with cypress, birch, and others spaced throughout. She could see a river running northwest to southeast through them. With an effort of will, she brought herself back to Valinor, whose voice had changed in quality: it was slower and more pointed, and she tried to listen.
“Part of the reason we bring our apprentices here is that this forest is made up of thousands of different trees. It is unique to the Wilds, in that way – farther north the weather culls the more delicate species, and farther south the heat does the same – but here there is virtually any kind of tree you could imagine.”
Any kind of tree… why couldn’t there just be one? That way she wouldn’t have to go down into the Wilds at all.
And yet… wasn’t this what she’d wanted ever since she could remember? Wasn’t this the kind of adventure she’d always played at with Lenny and Liv? Here she was, about to cross the Barrier from Aeon to the Wilds. Why hadn’t she ever stopped to consider how frightening such a thing could be?
“There are other types of trees elsewhere?” she asked.
“Across the sea in Charridan, I’d suspect, and possibly beyond the Eastern Wilds if you made it through to the Untamed Coast where the majority of the federated tribes live. But neither, I think, is a desirable alternative.”
He turned to her and caught her eye. His cheeks were once again their normal color, the sudden pallor having passed, and he was concentrating on her with fearful intensity.
“It matters not which tree chooses you,” he said simply. “Your talent is strong, and it will be strengthened by any staff you find. There may be choices, even – you may have an affinity for both oak and ash, or for neither. Part of this trial is determining who you are and who you want to be. Listen to the feelings you have when you touch the trees – listen to where they’ll take you.”
“But how will I know if I have an affinity for anything? I just… go touch random trees?” She tried to keep the anxiety out of her voice as she contemplated the absurdity of such a task, but some of it must have come through. Valinor ignored it, though, and continued on, slowly and firmly. Perhaps he realized the absurdity as well and knew that addressing it would only make it seemed that much more absurd.
“You’ll know the tree when you find it – like the dreams and how you knew you were meant to come here. When you find a tree you think looks right, approach it and lay your left ha
nd – this is important, your left hand – upon the bark.”
“Why the left hand?”
“Your dominant hand is the right, correct?”
She nodded.
“The staff is your anchor – it is not what you use to amplify the Words, but what helps you channel them. It connects you to the elements, connecting air and earth with the water and heat of your body. Your casting hand is your dominant hand – the hand that will wear a ring when you are ready for it.”
She nodded and tried to keep her breathing even.
“You will have one week,” he continued. “The provisions I’ve brought should last you twice that if you’re careful, but that is only for emergencies. I will return to Fort Turin, where I will wait for you.”
Panic raced through her. Fort Turin? He would be all the way back there? What would happen if she got into trouble? What would happen if – ?
“Calm yourself,” he said firmly. “Breathe. This is meant to test you. If you cannot care for yourself, how are you to care for others? Use the training, particularly your knowledge of herbs and your ability to manipulate the elements. Stay warm and dry, that’s the most important thing, and purify any water or food before you eat it. You have everything you need, it is now your job to make use of it.”
He took a deep breath, examining her carefully.
“This is where I leave you.”
He turned and made to spur his horse away, but pulled up short at the look on her face. “Do you have a final question?” he asked.
She shook her head, because though she did have questions she couldn’t in that moment seem to remember a single one of them.
“Then this is the last thing I’ll say: Remember that these are the Wilds. They were not given that name lightly. There are beasts that live here, and the farther north you go the more of them you’ll find. Do not stray far. Stay within a few days ride of the Barrier Mountains and never lose sight of them. I will not lie that there is danger here – but if you are smart, you will avoid it. Light only small fires with very dry wood to reduce smoke and cover any unnecessary tracks. Use common sense. May the Creator be with you, and I will see you when you return.”
He nodded once, impressing some of his certainty onto her, and then heeled his horse away. She watched him go with a hollow feeling until he turned the closest bend in the mountain pass and disappeared from sight.
She was alone.
Slowly, she turned away from the pass and looked back out at the sea of trees before and below her. A wind moved among them, shifting branches here and there and rushing up the mountain to play fitfully with a few long strands of hair that had come loose from her thick braid.
In a sudden burst of movement, she screwed up her eyes, balled her hands into fists, and vigorously shook herself. The mare she rode, startled by the movement, whinnied anxiously but then calmed again when she laid a hand on its head and slowly stroked it. The breathing of the animal’s bellow-like lungs was somehow reassuring, and she felt better. She looked over the mare’s black mane at the trees that lined the foot of the mountain.
There are beasts in there.
She pushed the thought from her mind and grabbed the reins. Her hands were shaking and her whole body seemed to jerk awkwardly when she tried to move, but she told herself she was being a fool. She dug her knees into the horse’s flanks, and they trotted down the hill along the winding road.
Over the next three days, she touched what felt like hundreds of trees.
She tried to remain composed, tried to remember that this was an important right of passage, but she still felt incredibly foolish and was glad no one was around to watch her. She fervently repeated to herself over and over again that she did not look stupid going up to every tree she came across; she did not look like an idiot when she tried to cajole them into dropping a branch; she was on a quest to become a Sorev Ael, and that was a noble thing.
But the nobility seemed diminished when she found herself berating an apple tree, and instead of receiving a staff ended up slipping on a rotten early-spring apple and smacking the back of her head against a vengeful root.
The end of the third day found her curled up at the foot of a towering redwood, listening intently for any sound of a monster crashing through the forest, though she had seen sign of nothing but deer and smaller, common woodland animals since her arrival.
Still, three days of constant anxiety and poor sleep came together that night and dragged her into unconsciousness. She slept so deeply, in fact, that the dreams came back to her, and this time even more vividly. One in particular came again and again, repeating through the night: a tall tree, shorn of limbs on one side, leaning dangerously as though it might fall, with a small bird that flitted amongst the branches and somehow kept the tree from falling, singing all the while in a voice that echoed over, around, and through her.
She woke with a start to gray skies, and, shivering, splashed water on her face to clear the images. They made no more sense now than they had in Var Athel; were not they supposed to be gone now that she was in the Wilds doing what Valinor said she was supposed to be doing? Were not the dreams about need?
Though the skies were gray, and had been gray since the clouds had rolled in the afternoon after Valinor left her, there was no rain, and so the weather, determined to be indecisive, swung back the other way: by noon, sunlight was streaming through the trees, warming AmyQuinn’s face and hands, and transforming the forest. The colors that had before been washed out and hidden behind the sallow, pallid haze of mist and fog stood revealed in innumerable shades of green, brown and gold. She rode, mouth agape, through this alien world, and marveled at the beauty, forgetting, for the first time, the danger of where she was.
But that afternoon too faded into night, and still she had no staff.
Looking for a place to camp, she pushed her way into a small grove atop a hill. It was made primarily of redwoods and punctuated every so often by smaller pine trees and cypress along with hardy oak and resolute ash and birch. Flowering foxglove with its bell-shaped flowers of pink, gold, and white grew here and there amidst clusters of hellebore and wild ferns; long stalks of wild grass covered and intertwined with ivy and berry bushes held the perimeter; and the light of the setting sun came to her though the gnarled branches of a yew tree, standing slightly apart and solitary as Valinor had said it did.
She froze.
A yew tree.
She slid slowly off the back of the mare, her fingers tingling. This was the first yew she’d found. She hadn’t wanted to admit it, even to herself, but she’d been looking for the gnarled, sinewy wood, keeping an eye out for dark green leaves and round red berries. She knew it was foolish to think that the same tree that had chosen Valinor might choose her too, but wasn’t this whole endeavor a little foolish?
She dismounted and tied the mare to a nearby oak. The heavy layer of leaves and pine needles that coated the ground rustled around her white boots as she hurried forward, her breath high in her chest. The golden light of the falling sun outlined the tree, setting it in magnificent contrast to the darkening sky behind it.
She grew more certain with each step, until finally the tree’s shadow fell upon her: this was it, it had to be. It was the only tree Valinor had mentioned that she’d yet to find. Her palms began to sweat and she wiped them against her white skirt, which was by now quite dirty.
She reached out and touched the rough bark, stepping between the gnarled roots that broke from the ground to curl up and around each other. The trunk was warm to the touch, and she felt her stomach soar. Surely that meant it was the right tree, surely this meant she’d found it.
But nothing happened.
Well, many things happened: a squirrel popped out of its hold higher up the tree and shot her a contemptuous look; a bird took flight from the brush, rushing up into the heights; and the mare behind her watched and snorted, apparently amused by the stupid, nonsensical things this human was doing. And though the tree stood tall and mag
nificent, though sunlight continued to stream down through its branches like gold bars set aflame, no branch fell dramatically into her hands, no root unearthed itself, and, generally, nothing happened of any dramatic note.
Anger and disappointment welled up in her in a rush so abrupt and strong that she was taken completely by surprise. She took a step back, removing the offensive hand from the obstinate bark, and kicked a gnarled root.
This did not persuade the tree.
Frustration boiled up and over inside her, and she surprised herself by shouting a challenging yell at the beastly yew, and the cry grew in strength and pitch until it ended in a yelp. She threw up her hands and spun away, wiping her sweaty palms on the front of her skirt again and trying to bring herself back under control. She returned to the mare, pulled it over to a solid oak root that had formed something of a seat, and threw herself down, dropping her head into her hands.
She spent the next hour like that, stewing in her misery as the sun set. She’d touched every damn tree she could find for four days straight – even a yew! – and she still had no staff and nothing to show for her trouble but saddle-sores, sleep deprivation, and the generally pathetic air of failure.
She thought of what Valinor’s reaction might be if she returned without a staff and her panic increased tenfold. Would he keep her? Would he take her back to Var Athel and leave her there, maybe say she hadn’t studied hard enough after all?
She began to shiver violently. She clutched herself about the stomach and pushed herself to her feet, trying to counter the feeling of helplessness with action. She set about lighting a small fire and then pulled out her nightly meal.
She ate woodenly, knowing that she needed to eat but taking no joy in the deed. The flatbread, water, and hard cheese all sank like stones in her stomach and clumped together into an angry ball. She tried to get up again and move about the grove – she even forced herself to touch some more trees, trying very hard not to call herself twelve types of idiot as she did so – but finally gave up and led the mare down to the stream at the bottom of the hill for a drink. She washed her face vigorously, hoping the cold water would shock away some of her bad thoughts, but it didn’t really help. A dark cloud of failure rolled with her wherever she went.
She returned to the grove, not knowing where else to go, and tied the mare to the oak tree she’d sat on earlier. She then cleared a space for her bedroll and blanket, sat, and tried to admire the grove. It looked just as wonderful in the flickering light of the small fire as it had when she’d arrived, with all the trees, the foxglove, the elegant ferns… but the beauty didn’t help. She tried talking to the mare, but the beast did not even do her the courtesy of pretending to listen. Instead, it turned its back to munch on grass at the farthest extent of its tether, an action that seemed to AmyQuinn in her fit of anger and resentment a clear and pointed insult.
She refused to cry, but she wanted to. Not out of fear or pain or anything childish like that, but out of sheer frustration. What was she supposed to do? What was the point of all this?
Her entire future with the Sorev Ael depended on finding a staff; what would she do without one?
She decided to try for sleep. She muttered protective enchantments under her breath that she hoped would wake her if something came near in the night. She said them with the right Words – the ones for protection and awareness and sound – but as she bundled herself to keep warm, she thought bleakly that if she couldn’t even earn a staff, then would her wards work at all?
She dreamed again of the tree and the bird.
She woke the next morning to another gray day, feeling as though she hadn’t slept a wink, and decided to leave the grove. She wandered aimlessly for a time, trying her best to clear her mind, and then decided too to skip breakfast, thinking that maybe an empty stomach would lead to an empty mind. It did help a little, but soon the empty stomach was growling at her so loudly that the empty mind was filled with thoughts of food. She saw deer that day, and some big black thing that looked like it might be a bear and which she gave a wide berth. She saw dozens of squirrels as well, and birds of every color, size, and song.
She came back to the grove that night to sleep again. She didn’t know why – she’d just found herself heading back there halfway through the day and figured it was as good a place as any to camp.
Clouds began to roll in, thick and heavy with rain, and she began to truly despair. On the morrow she would have to begin her journey back to the Turin Pass, and unless she found a staff walking back then there was nothing she could do.
She decided to light a fire, a bigger one to truly warm herself with despite Valinor’s warnings. She’d seen nothing but ordinary animals so far, and she didn’t think any of them would be drawn by a fire anyway – more likely they’d be kept away. Maybe the truly dangerous beasts were just too far north to bother with her.
I’m not even important enough for magical wolves to try and eat me.
But in a continuing theme of frustration, the fire did not flame well, even though she used the Words for “light” and “fire” and “heat,” and so she threw the sticks in a pile and retreated beneath the overhanging branches of the largest oak tree, over which were layered a couple of pines and a redwood, and all of which she hoped would keep her dry if it began to rain during the night.
No wonder the trees didn’t want to talk to her – she couldn’t even make a stupid fire. She’d had no trouble with that kind of thing before – what was happening to her?
She sat wrapped in her gray cloak and her grayer misery, watching the mare crop grass on the opposite side of the grove. The horse was pulling at what must have been a particularly tasty bit of something, and in doing so began to pull down ivy bushes and other plants, which it promptly and happily trampled underfoot.
“Stop that,” AmyQuinn said, loud enough for the horse to hear. The mare ignored her and kept pulling at the bush – it was quite large, almost as big as the mare itself and taking up the entire space between two redwoods on the far side of the grove from the oak.
AmyQuinn came to her feet with a surge of anger, muttering to herself under her breath. The mare shot her a resentful look and then turned back to take another bite. But before just then the leaves rustled all on their own.
AmyQuinn stopped dead.
After a beat of stunned silence wherein all the stories of monsters and beasts came crashing back in on AmyQuinn, the mare burst out with a neighing cry and reared up on its hind legs, showing its front hooves. It shied away from the bushes, no longer trying to tear them down but instead trying to get as far away from them as possible. Whatever was beyond the foliage moved again, shaking the bush as it tried to come through; AmyQuinn heard the sound of heavy breathing, and her heart abandoned its post in the center of her chest and fled to her throat, where it beat insistently, telling her to run. She tried to think of a Word to use, casting her mind back to Magery, to fire and wind, to anything at all, but the only thing she could do was stand there frozen.
Finally, the bush was parted, and two figures burst through it.
After a second of confusion, she realized that they were not beasts at all: it was teenage boy and a young man. She looked at them, and they looked back at her. They were quite possibly the most unlikely pair of people she’d ever seen in quite possibly the strangest place she could have met them: One was short and fair of face, with blonde hair so dirty it was basically brown and ragged clothing covered in grime and sweat and blood. The other was clearly of some sort of southern stock, with dark hair and skin, and though he had a man’s height, he had also the thin and sinewy look of a late-age teenager, and the whole right half of his body was a mess of bloody clothing that clung to him, slicked down with some dark, viscous liquid.
The smaller one looked up at her, swallowed once, and squeaked out a single word: “Help?”
And then together, they crumpled to the ground.