Chapter 19

Maythe gods favor the innocent fallen on the battlefield, as the monarchs choosing their fate did not.

~ Moon Priest Denugla, Prayers for the Dying

After dusk, an unmarked carriage took Kaylina back to the castle. Her entire body ached, her leg throbbed, and weariness weighed down her limbs.

She hadn’t seen Vlerion since the morning, but numerous other rangers had given her private or group instruction, during which she’d discovered that quite a few other recruits were in training. Most had been male but there had been another woman, a tough-as-nails type with short hair and as many muscles as the men. Kaylina had spoken to her, thinking they might have a connection, but the woman worshipped the rangers and was voluntarily devoting her life to becoming one. Whether she was a commoner or noble, Kaylina hadn’t learned, but she had no trouble with the “my lords.”

When the driver stopped in front of the castle, its telltale red glow seeping from the tower window, it took a gargantuan effort for Kaylina to peel herself off the bench and climb out of the carriage. Once it took off, with no witnesses about to judge her for weakness, she leaned heavily on the crutch and walked slowly to the front door, pausing only to regard two signs that had been put out by the gate.

Menu:

Fennel and fig rack of lamb served with Warrior Red Currant Mead

Apple cider beef stew served with Full Moon Cyser

Honey garlic salmon served with Trappers Dry Mead

Tasting flights available

Kaylina smiled, touched that her brother had made progress, but she felt guilty that she hadn’t been there to help that day. And wouldn’t for many days to come. Not forever; she refused to believe that. Once Targon realized what a lousy ranger she would make, he would boot her out. Surely, it didn’t matter how much the taybarri liked a person if they couldn’t stand on a log without falling in a pool.

Frayvar wasn’t leaning against the wall in the courtyard. Kaylina didn’t know if that was a good sign or not.

“You alive, Fray?” she called as she entered the keep, not wanting to startle him.

The cavernous front rooms were dark, and she headed to the kitchen, expecting to find him there. She wouldn’t mind tasting some of those recipes if he had anything on the stove, but she didn’t smell any of the scintillating dishes. That was surprising.

When she pushed open the door to the kitchen, it was dark inside, the fire in the hearth down to embers. Several seconds passed before her eyes could pierce the shadows to spot someone lying still on the floor.

“Fray!” Kaylina sprang to his side and knelt to touch his chest. Images of finding a dagger thrust into his heart filled her imagination.

She didn’t bump into a blade or anything else, but he didn’t stir as she patted him. Nor when she shook him.

“Fray?”

Swallowing, she laid her hand on his chest to make sure he was breathing. Thank Luvana, the Luck Goddess, he was. When Kaylina checked his pulse, his heart beat calmly under her fingers. But what had happened? She shook him again, as if he were asleep and could be woken.

But it was nothing so benign. His eyes wouldn’t open.

A sick feeling hollowed out her gut, the certainty that the curse had done something to her brother. Had a wind blown him against one of the travertine counters so that he hit his head?

“I am so tired of this place,” Kaylina snarled, lunging to her feet.

She grabbed the fireplace poker, longing for an enemy to present itself. But the castle wasn’t moaning, and no visions intruded upon her mind.

She stomped up the stairs with the poker, as well as her sling and knife, the glowing tower her destination. There had to be answers in there. Maybe whatever was making that glow controlled the whole castle and implemented the curse.

On the way, she thrust open doors, looking for a ladder or anything she could stand on to break the boards. A sturdy wooden chair in a nearby room was the best she could find. Not certain it would give her enough height, she dragged it scraping and thumping down the narrow hallway.

Maybe she should have spent that time finding a doctor for Frayvar, but her gut told her his ailment wouldn’t be solved with smelling salts or a potion.

“This won’t take long,” she promised, shoving the chair under the boarded-up ceiling in the tower.

Enough of the iron brackets that had once supported the stairs remained to provide handholds. If she could make a hole, she thought she could climb up.

With one foot on the cushion and one on the chair back, Kaylina jammed upward with the iron poker. The nailing of the boards had been clumsily done, and she didn’t think it would take much to bring them down. Even so, her first few angry thumps didn’t dislodge anything. Wishing she had a crowbar instead of the poker, she focused on the nails and gaps wider than the others.

Red light seeped through one of those gaps. A warning? She hardly cared. She wasn’t going to let the castle kill her brother.

Fueled by her rage and fear for him, she rammed again and again. Sweat broke out on her forehead, despite the persistent chill of the place.

One of the castle’s eerie moans wafted down from above. Probably another warning.

“Too bad.” With a final great thrust, Kaylina knocked one of the boards free.

It flew upward and clattered out of sight. Dust wafted down along with the musty scent of… dried vegetable matter? She wrinkled her nose.

The hole wasn’t large enough to climb through, so she attacked the board next to it. With the first gone, the others were easier to dislodge, and she’d soon knocked away two more.

One fell, almost hitting her as it clunked off the arm of the chair. Dried leaves fluttered down with the dust. She sneezed, her balance faltering before she jumped down.

From the floor, she eyed the hole, trying to see into the tower. The source of the glow continued to be a mystery, but a branch hung in the air, the ominous red illumination painting it from behind. Some long-forgotten plant that had died, she assumed, its skeletal remains undisturbed for decades, if not centuries. Normally, time would have disintegrated it, but if it had been an altered plant, the magic embedded in its husk might have kept it from falling apart completely.

After pushing the chair out of the way, Kaylina leaned the poker against the wall and used the remains of the staircase to climb. She had to stretch to grip the edge of the hole, and the board creaked when she shifted weight to it. Would it hold her up?

“It’s not that far of a fall,” she told herself, thinking of Frayvar.

He needed her to figure this out.

With an awkward lunge, she pushed away from the wall and gripped the edge of the board with both hands. Her muscles weren’t strong enough to pull up her full bodyweight, and she had to swing from side to side, hoping to create enough momentum to throw a leg up. The boards creaked riotously.

For some reason, Vlerion’s lesson on the log came to mind. Probably because she anticipated falling. Hitting the floorboards below would hurt more than water.

But with one great heave, she managed to hook her leg over the edge. A leaf fluttered down, landing on her nose. She clawed and strained to pull herself up, her muscles quivering before she made it.

Targon was an idiot if he thought she could become a ranger. One of his trained fighters would have leaped up and landed in a crouch with a sword out. She flopped down like a dead fish, rolling onto her back, cobwebs begriming her face, and hit her shoulder against something.

A ceramic pot large enough that it could have contained a symba tree rested in the tower opposite the arrow-slit window. The red glow came from it—no from what was in it.

Kaylina patted for her knife and pushed herself to her knees, dried leaves crinkling underneath her. The plant she’d assumed was dead was alive, the growth rising from the soil in the pot greenish, though it emitted the red glow.

She stared in disbelief. The strange illumination that had been, according to what she’d heard, seeping from the tower window since the curse was placed centuries ago came from… a plant?

An admittedly huge and evil-looking plant composed of both thorny branches and vines, the latter snaking over the edge of the pot and to the walls of the room. A few even trailed up the walls, as if they were trellised. Somehow, they adhered to the stone. Large star-shaped leaves grew from the branches. The vines were bare aside from suckers on the very tips.

Kaylina shifted on her knees, reminded of her visions, the visions in which rangers and their allies had been strangled.

“How can a plant have been alive for all this time? Even an altered plant?” She picked up one of the dead leaves. It was as star-shaped as the ones still attached to the branches. It was as if the plant had lived all this time, shedding leaves each autumn, and continuing to grow new ones in the spring. “How could you have gotten water?”

The eaves of the tower hung out over the arrow-slit window. Only a great storm with wind driving rain sideways might have brought water in. But how often could that happen? The boards were dry under the dead leaves.

Kaylina knew there were hundreds of species of altered plants in the world and that they all had unique properties, but she’d never heard of one that could grow without water. How much sunlight breached the tower? And where did the plant get nutrients? Whatever had been in the soil of the pot had to have long ago been used up.

“Probably no point in looking for logic when the plant is glowing,” Kaylina muttered, rising to her feet.

Under the red illumination, the leaves and branches did look dry, as if the plant could use a good watering. The vines remained supple, but maybe it prioritized sending moisture to them.

“The better to kill intruders with…”

Knife in one hand, Kaylina risked creeping closer to the pot. It was as high as her thighs and much wider than she. The central stem of the plant could have been considered a trunk. It would take a saw, not a knife, to cut through it. Assuming some magic hadn’t hardened it to withstand even steel. She had a feeling people had tried before to kill the plant.

Wanting to check for moisture, she touched her fingertips to the soil.

An electric shock coursed up her arm and through her body. Her heart fluttered in her chest, and she staggered back, dropping the knife.

Her knees hit the floor, and she pitched forward, barely managing to get her hands down and keep from striking her head. Red light flashed, and a vision filled her mind.

For the first time, she was featured in it. She saw herself and Vlerion standing by the carriage out front, the perspective from above. No, from the tower. The plant had been watching them.

An angry red glow outlined Vlerion. Was that the plant’s way of saying it had seen him as a threat? Or it had identified him as a ranger?

In the vision, as Kaylina walked away from Vlerion and toward the front door where Frayvar had been, a vine extended out the window and down to the courtyard.

Had that happened? And none of them had seen it? The vine wasn’t glowing, and in the dark, who would notice it?

It crept slowly toward the gate—toward where Vlerion had remained. Kaylina couldn’t affect the version of herself in the vision, couldn’t order herself to warn him.

But Vlerion, after she’d told him that Frayvar was fine and he could go, had left, walking to the carriage. When he’d departed, the vine had only been a few feet from his ankle. He’d never seen it, never sensed it.

The vision version of Kaylina sat down with Frayvar to share his blanket, exactly what had happened. The tip of the vine lifted, wavering in the air like the snake she’d likened it to, considering its target. The plant could have killed them both that night, but maybe it had decided they weren’t allies of the rangers? Or didn’t know if they were? The vine had withdrawn, disappearing back into the tower.

The vision released Kaylina, and the glowing room came back into focus. A few of the leaves had rotated toward her. Watching her?

“Not at all creepy,” she whispered, then raised her voice. “Look, we’re not friends of the rangers, okay? We’re working-class people who run eating houses and make mead. We’re not even from here. My ancestors never did anything to pester druids.”

She didn’t know that for a fact, but the druids hadn’t left a lot of statues and ruins in the southern end of the kingdom to suggest they’d lived in the area. It was plausible that her ancestors had never encountered them.

A tip of a vine flicked, and another vision gripped her. This one was brief, a younger version of herself out hunting quail and pheasants with Grandpa, the hounds constantly running back to her for pets and to show her whatever they’d found, everything from prey they’d captured to delightful sticks for chewing. Their tails wagged happily as they bounded around her.

The vision faded, but not before she got a sense of mocking in it. It was something that had happened, and it disturbed her that the plant could see into her memories, but it must have shared that instance for a reason. Why?

“I don’t understand.”

The plant showed her the hounds bounding around her again.

Dear moon gods, was she having a conversation with the plant? Not only was it alive when it shouldn’t have been, but it had a brain or at least some way of being intelligent, of watching over the castle and all who entered it. And of scraping through people’s memories.

Kaylina shuddered at the omniscience, but if she could communicate with the plant, she might be able to convince it to release her brother.

Again, it showed her a hunt, a different day, with clouds in the sky, but with the hounds frolicking alongside her, largely indifferent to her grandpa walking nearby.

“Is this about me maybe being an anrokk?”

Wait, Frayvar had said the word came from the druid language, that their version of the anrokks had possessed magic. Did the plant think she had magic? Did it need something magical done to it?

“Help my brother, and I’ll help you,” she told the plant, though she had no idea what it needed.

Was it her imagination that the red glow brightened with skepticism?

“We’re not your enemies. We’re innocent visitors here, doing what we have to do to make it in this strange land. You can understand, can’t you?”

The plant didn’t react. No further visions came from it.

Kaylina groped for a better argument to sway it, but a distant call came from below.

“Kaylina? Are you here?”

“Frayvar!”

She snatched up her knife and rushed to the hole but paused before jumping down. She didn’t know if the plant had released him from its hold, or he’d woken up naturally, but she blurted, “Thank you.”

The red glow pulsed once.

Kaylina jumped down, afraid she’d promised a favor she couldn’t deliver.