Chapter Sixteen

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

T o say that I emerged from the pub the following morning in a state of gentle dishevelment would be a gross understatement. I'd stayed up far too late the night before, only stumbling up to the loft once I was certain Grimm would be asleep, and paid for it by waking up with a dry mouth and a pounding headache. My clothes were rumpled from being slept in, and every time my pulse beat, my temples felt like my whole head would cave in.

Both Jayne and the driver were waiting for us, so there was nothing to do except step out into the too-bright morning, take my place on the back of the wagon, and try not to heave my breakfast over the side.

When the wagon began moving with a clatter, I let out a quiet moan. Grimm gave me a long glance that managed to be both disapproving and self-satisfied. It made me want to muss his hair or tug at the perfectly smooth line of his coat—anything to put us on more even footing—but I was certain if I tried to move so much as a pinkie finger, I would embarrass myself in front of Jayne, so I simply closed my eyes to block out his smug face.

By midmorning my stomach had settled and my head was well enough for me to look ahead and see the spelled flags waving at the top of the barrier posts. The fabric was unworn by the elements, suggesting that the Coterie had been by to refresh the spells on this section recently. Trees grew close against the other side of the tall wooden poles, but not past them. As though the magic discouraged new growth as well as monsters.

Other places had different ways of deterring magical beasts: The lake country used twisting, deadly waterways built like mazes, and sorcerers in the mountains had ways of making their paths and roadways precarious to uninvited guests. Miendor was low and mostly flat, with little protection in the natural landscape, so we had these posts with spells strung delicately between them—like a massive loom weaving a pattern designed to keep the monsters out. A handful still managed to sneak through, every now and then, but it kept the influx manageable.

I'd heard of places beyond the sea that had tamed their surroundings somehow, so they did not need barriers at all. But they had turned themselves into dead zones doing so. No magic answered to them anymore. That was the price of breaking the balance.

Jayne signaled to the driver, and the wagon slowed to a halt. The man watched us climb down with a worried expression.

"You're sure you don't want me to come back for you?" he asked. "I don't recommend being out past the barrier when night falls."

"I appreciate the offer," I said, "but what we're looking for won't be found in a day. Besides, we've hired an expert. You'll keep us in one piece, won't you, Jayne?"

Jayne had shown up that morning with a sword belted to her waist and a crossbow slung across her back. When she'd caught me staring at it, she told me, "There are things in the forest I'd rather not get within blade's reach of."

"I'll do my best," she said now.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement, but it was enough for the driver to wash his hands of us with a clear conscience. He turned the wagon around and disappeared back the way we'd come, leaving us standing on a small rise that dropped away on one side, providing an unhindered view of the Unquiet Wood, rolling out beyond the barrier in a blanket of green.

The forests I'd grown up with in Sahnt were full of tall, thin trees whose delicate branches allowed sunlight to trickle down through their leaves. It was unlikely you could find a patch large enough to truly lose yourself in.

These trees were nothing like that.

They were enormous, growing so close together that the space beneath their branches seemed a different world—gloomier and stranger. From our vantage point, the forest stretched on forever. It reminded me of standing on the edge of the ocean as a child, wondering what was hidden in those depths.

"I recommend you have your swords ready from here on out," Jayne said. She waited while Grimm and I retrieved our blades from our packs and belted them to our waists. I also took a moment to untie my sash and wrangle it into a halter of sorts, so that I could carry my violin case slung over my back. Grimm looked horror-struck at the rough treatment of the silk, but it left my hands free and that was more important.

"Any advice before we go in?" I asked Jayne. "Words of wisdom?" I wasn't frightened exactly, but I had a sudden visceral awareness that we were about to step beyond the bounds of what was considered ours .

"Follow me," Jayne said. "Watch where you step. Don't touch anything without asking me first. And stay quiet."

Grimm looked at me. "We're doomed."

It was said softly, almost to himself, and with such wryness that I couldn't help but chuckle—forgetting for a moment that we had not shared more than two words since our tense conversation the night before. I raised an eyebrow at Grimm and mimed sealing my lips, then I followed Jayne down the hill.

I had never set foot beyond Miendor's barrier before, or even been close to doing so. A low throb of power emanated from the spaces between flagpoles, but Jayne didn't visibly react when she walked through the weave of magic strung between them. I held my breath when it was my turn to step through, expecting something . But I was disappointed. There was no ripple of sensation, no change in my vision or surroundings. The world on the other side of the barrier was unchanged and so was I—still hungover, still stuck with Grimm, still cursed.

Jayne's worth as a guide became apparent almost immediately. It was difficult to make out details under the trees with so little sunlight trickling through the branches, but she never faltered, moving over the root-buckled earth with an assurance that Grimm and I both lacked, used as we were to Luxe's smooth streets. Her eyes were always watchful. Her hand barely left the hilt of her sword.

"How far is the tower?" I asked, shortly after we passed through the barrier.

"About a day's journey," Jayne answered. "Provided we move quickly and the forest cooperates."

Mindful of this time frame, I didn't complain nearly as much as I had on our walk the day before, even when my blisters began to rub and break.

The farther into the trees we went, the more I noticed a prickling, raised-hair awareness. It made me want to glance over my shoulder after every other step, half-afraid and half-eager for what I might see lurking there. Once, I caught sight of Grimm out of the corner of my eye and nearly jumped, for the dim, uncanny light under the trees had washed his pale skin in a ghostly cast and made his hair look unworldly.

The air smelled green. Not in the fresh, bright way of spring, but heavy, oppressive almost. It was the green of a hothouse, everything growing in profusion and in the same space.

This was all undoubtedly eerie, yet the forest did not at first seem to be the roiling pit of monsters I'd been led to expect. By late afternoon the only other sign of life was the bugs. They resembled furry dragonflies and hovered around our faces in a swarm, darting forward to leave little bites that didn't itch but burned . Jayne assured us the bites would cause no lasting damage, so while the bugs were monstrously annoying, they were not an especially impressive representative of their kind.

Supposedly more than half of all the monsters that managed to slip past Miendor's barrier came from these trees. Yet it was so quiet that morning I couldn't help but wonder if such reports were an exaggeration. A tall tale to discourage reckless adventurers and frighten children.

At midday we stopped to eat, and Jayne instructed Grimm to cast a protective bubble around us. It seemed a pity to waste the spell, since we were all awake and watchful, but I said nothing. The water from Grimm's enchanted canteen tasted stale, but I said nothing of that either. Lunch was cold because Jayne said lighting a fire would attract the wrong sort of attention. All in all, it was a rather bleak affair.

I was starting to suspect this was all an act and that Jayne had overstated the forest's danger just to collect an easy paycheck by convincing us her protection was necessary.

"So, Jayne," I said, wearing my most engaging smile. "What's the most exciting thing you've foraged here?" If she said something boring like singing frogs' tongues , that would be a bad sign. Or a good sign, depending on if you were more concerned with being eaten or being wrong about someone's character.

Jayne thought about it for a moment and said, "A griffin feather."

I let out a low whistle, impressed. "That must have fetched you a pretty penny."

"It will. Someday. But it's hard to find buyers for more expensive items in the border towns, and we haven't had an opportunity to visit Luxe in some time."

I was just about to ask if she'd actually seen the griffin the feather had come from when Jayne held up a hand and said, "Hush."

She moved in a crouch to the edge of the bubble and stayed there for many minutes, looking intently out into the darkest part of the trees around us. Just when I was certain that this too was for show, that the griffin feather was a lie and we'd been tiptoeing through the woods for no reason at all, something stepped out of the trees.

It resembled a stag, but with fur so white it appeared ghostly and antlers that shone like a star. They weren't rounded, as an ordinary stag's antlers would have been, but instead had edges that gleamed as sharp as a sword. This was alarming, but what made me shiver were the teeth growing on the outer edge of the creature's jaw, like a mouth turned inside out.

All three of us stared at the thing that was not a stag. It stared back.

"Can it get through the bubble?" I asked softly, looking at the honed tips of the beast's antlers.

"No," Jayne answered just as quietly. "Your friend is a strong caster. Be glad of it."

After another moment or so, the monster tossed its head and walked away.

"I'm going to do a quick look around before we leave," Jayne said. "Just to check… just to check that it's really gone."

You could not have paid me to step outside the comforting iridescence of our bubble so soon, but Jayne was made of sterner stuff. She wasn't gone long and assured us everything was clear when she returned.

The Unquiet Wood seemed determined to clear up any doubts I'd had about its reputation during the second half of the day. We'd barely gone two miles after lunch before Grimm nearly stepped on a snake hidden in the ferns. It rose up in front of him, hissing, and Grimm reeled back so quickly that he almost bumped into me. The snake's scales were as green as the ferns it hid beneath, its eyes a stunningly putrid shade of yellow. I reached for my sword, but before I could draw it, there was a thunk and the snake's head dropped, pinned to the ground by one of Jayne's daggers. Drops of venom dribbled from its ruined mouth. When they hit the ground, the dirt sizzled and hardened, forming gemstones the same shade of yellow as the snake's now glassy eyes.

We paused our journey so that Jayne could bury the snake and gemstones, careful not to let either touch the bare skin of her hands.

Both Grimm and I were more careful of where we stepped after that. So much so that we almost didn't notice the birds perched in the trees a little while later. There were five of them, with feathers black as night, sitting in a row on a branch. In place of talons, they had long-fingered hands that curled around their perch. Jayne steered us to the left, so as not to pass directly beneath them, but otherwise didn't seem overly concerned.

"It's the ones with regular talons you need to watch out for," she said, once we were well past.

"Why's that?" I asked.

Jayne looked very pointedly down at my hands. "Because they're still searching."

The day was full of little encounters like that, strange and unmistakably dangerous. And it wasn't only the animals that were weird inside the wood. I didn't have a good sense of time passing under the trees, but I guessed it was well into the afternoon when Jayne suddenly paused and sniffed the air, looking for all the world like a dog that had caught a scent.

"Something wrong?" Grimm asked, hand already on his sword. The forest had that effect on you.

Jayne shook her head. "The opposite, actually."

We'd been traveling along a faint path, worn into the dirt by the passing of monsters and foragers both, but now Jayne stepped off it and pushed a little way into the undergrowth, stopping in front of a thick tree trunk covered with blooming vines. It was the flowers Jayne must have smelled, and now I could too—a warm, sweet scent unlike anything I was familiar with. I eyed the blossoms warily, thinking of other growing things from the Wilderlands that had crossed the border in the past, only to wreak havoc.

"Is this something you forage?" I asked.

"Not the flowers," Jayne said. "They don't do anything except smell nice. It's what grows near them that's valuable." She pushed back the vines at the bottom of the trunk to reveal a cluster of blue mushrooms.

"What are they used for?" Grimm asked, leaning forward to get a better look at the sky-colored fungi.

I fought an urge to pull him back to a safer distance. Mushrooms had spores, didn't they? Surely a farmer's son should know better than to get too near unfamiliar flora.

"They have strong sedative properties," Jayne said. "Dangerous to eat, but we make them into an elixir to coat our weapons with. It's never our aim to fight monsters, only gather their leavings, but it's useful to have the added protection if we find ourselves in a tight corner." She reached for the ties of her cloak and undid them to lay the fabric on the ground at the tree's base. "Take a moment to rest while I gather these."

While Jayne began to harvest the mushrooms, laying them gently in her hood for safekeeping, Grimm and I settled in to wait. Grimm sat down on a mossy patch of ground after inspecting it closely, still wary after the snake incident, while I leaned against a slender tree. I was afraid that if I sat down, my feet might refuse to carry me again when the time came to get up. The bugs were much worse standing still, and so I improvised a cantrip to sing under my breath—just a little something to keep the buzzing creatures from setting fire to my face with their bites. It worked, and for a moment I was miraculously free of the feeling of tiny, furry bodies bumping into me.

Grimm looked up at the sound of my voice, frowning. I thought he would scold me for making too much noise, but he only said, "Just because you can cast small magics doesn't mean you should. I thought all scrivers knew the dangers of overreaching."

"This? This is barely anything," I said. As soon as I stopped singing, all the bugs rushed close again.

"All magic is something," Grimm insisted.

"If you're so concerned, why don't you cast the song, then?" It would probably keep the bugs away better anyway, Grimm being who he was. But Grimm shook his head.

"It's not worth wasting energy on something so trivial."

I rolled my eyes and picked up the tune again, but it was a bit much for me to keep going with for long. Such a small spell likely wouldn't have caused Grimm any strain at all, but fatigue prickled at the edges of my awareness, along with that same hollow-stomach feeling that always accompanied my castings. Once I fell silent, the bugs pressed back in again, and I looked around for something to distract me from their sting.

"Have you ever been beyond the barrier before now?" I asked Grimm.

"No."

"Neither have I." I leaned a little farther back against the tree trunk, lifting my face to try to catch the weak rays of light filtering down through the branches. "Makes me wonder what the rest of the world beyond Miendor looks like. Maybe that's what I'll do after the Fount. Become a traveler and climb the mountains to the north, or sail across the sea. I can picture myself as an intrepid explorer." I tilted my chin down toward Grimm. "What do you think? Is that not a noble calling?"

Grimm, who had been intently studying the surrounding trees this whole time, finally turned to look at me. "I think that, without Jayne, you probably would have been throttled by a bird or stabbed by a deer by now. Likely because you couldn't keep quiet ."

"I'm not the one who nearly got bitten by a snake earlier. You should really watch where you step."

"Loveage!" Grimm's voice was so sharp that for a moment I thought I'd actually managed to hit a nerve. But he gestured toward the ground and said, "Your foot."

I blinked and looked down. There were tendrils of something wrapped around my right boot, twining up and around my ankle. My first impulse was to shake them off the same way you would a bug, but watching how Jayne moved through the forest had granted me an unusual degree of caution, so I fought the urge and leaned over to inspect the problem more closely.

Silly, really. I'd just been so concerned by Grimm doing the same thing.

The tendrils resembled roots. Slender, moving roots that had grown up around me so delicately and so quickly that I hadn't even noticed. I tried to gently pull one of them away, but they were quite stubborn and couldn't be loosened.

"Jayne," I called out, and our guide looked up from her task.

"What is it?"

"There's something—" I began, and then my words became a strangled shout as the tendrils tightened around my ankle and I was swept off my feet and into the air.

As I hung there, dangling, blood rushing to my head, I became aware of two things:

One: The tree that I'd been leaning against had moved. I could see the trunk of it above me, strangely crooked.

Two: It wasn't a tree; it was a leg.

Craning my neck, I saw other crooked joints coming to life, causing the leaves of the real trees around us to quiver. I tried to count how many legs the monster had, but my vantage point wasn't very good, and they kept moving. Many. There were many legs. They all straightened to their full height, and I was lifted higher. At the same time, a huge, bulbous body appeared above me, no longer hidden by branches.

Somewhere on the ground, I heard Jayne swear.

The beast was spiderlike, and yet there was something about it that stopped me from firmly placing it in the arachnid family. For one thing, it did not move with the frightening speed of a spider, but with a ponderous inelegance in keeping with its size. For another, there were no eyes on the body of the monster, only more tendrils like the ones that had caught hold of me. They waved through the air with the same weightless delicacy of hair floating in water. Even though it was only my leg that was trapped, I imagined I could feel their touch over my entire body.

I reached for my sword, thinking to cut myself free, but this was easier said than done. My arms tangled in the bunched-up fabric of my own coat, as well as the straps of my bag, and I had to fumble around for what felt like an eternity to draw my blade. Then, just when it came free, the monster let out a piercing, inhuman screech.

Its mouth was a cavernous black space. When it opened, the scent of blood and rotten leaves rolled over me in a putrid wave.

"Oh, please, no," I whimpered. I had never wanted anything in my life as much as I wanted to be far, far away from that mouth.

The monster screamed again. Looking down, I caught sight of the source of its anger—Grimm, standing next to one of the creature's legs, was using his sword like an axe to hack away at it. Blood thick as sap coated the blade, and on the next blow, the leg holding me spasmed and flailed.

The world blurred as I was flung this way and that like a rag doll. A voice was shouting something in the old language, but I was too distracted to decipher what sort of spell was being cast. It was all I could do not to vomit, and I thought I might lose that battle if the monster didn't stop shaking me soon. And then, abruptly, it did stop.

I swung gently over the ground like a human pendulum. The grip on my leg hadn't loosened, and that terrible mouth was still a wide-open thing of nightmares, but it wasn't moving or making a sound. It was, in fact, frozen.

Below me, Jayne dropped her hands, fingers still coated in ash from the spell she'd cast. "It won't remain paralyzed for long," she said in a tight voice. "We need to hurry."

It was a mark of Jayne's skill as a caster that she was able to halt the movement of a creature this size. Paralysis spells were difficult, both to write and to cast. The thought made something in the back of my mind chime like a bell, but there was no time to ponder it further. I swung my sword, but the angle was very bad, and it seemed just as likely I would cut my own foot as whatever held me. Fortunately, Grimm arrived before I was able to do any damage. After two strikes, the tendrils holding my leg parted and I fell to the ground in a heap.

"You should really watch where you step, Loveage," Grimm said.

"Oh, fuck you," I groaned, scrambling upright. As I did so, I thought I saw one of the tendrils still attached to the monster's leg twitch—a jerky, aborted movement.

Jayne saw it too. "Let's go."

She abandoned her usual caution in favor of speed as she swept her cloak off the ground and headed back the way we had come, toward that slim path that cut through the trees, Grimm on her heels.

I followed last. There was a part of me that dreaded looking away from the monster, because as long as I was watching, at least I would know when it moved. If I looked away, the spell might be broken and it would be free to come after us without me even being aware. That unknowing was somehow even more terrible than the promise of danger. But being left to stare at it alone was the worst thing of all, so I gathered my frayed nerves about me and ran.

In the end, there was no uncertainty at all. After only a few minutes of the three of us crashing down the path at top speed, we all heard a scream, piercing in its rage, and then the sound of groaning trees as the monster threw the spell off and began to follow.