Chapter Twenty-Nine

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I spent an indeterminable amount of time trapped in the dim space between unconsciousness and waking life—a feverish place that I disliked intensely. Occasionally shapes wavered in front of me, or I felt myself being moved, but I could do nothing about it. My eyelids remained gummily closed, my limbs felt either absent or extraordinarily heavy, and I bounced between awareness and black emptiness like a child's ball.

When I was finally able to break through this haze, I found myself lying on the forest floor in near darkness. A scuffling noise came from my right, but I could not move to look at it; the aftereffects of whatever Mathias had dosed me with were too strong. My mouth was very dry and my stomach churned.

With all the speed of a snail, I finally turned my head enough to look around. The sound I'd heard came from Mathias, crouched next to me and tapping his dagger rhythmically against my boot. It was hard to make out much of anything else with my senses so befuddled, but I tried anyway, squinting into the forest's gloom and hoping for some sign of Grimm. I found none.

The tapping against my boot stopped as Mathias noticed my movement.

"Good, you're awake." He shifted, and now the dagger was at my throat. "You have something I want. Return the feather, quickly, so we can be done with this."

"Where's Grimm?" I croaked. "If you've done something to him…" My voice trailed away. Any threat I made would be meaningless. My limbs were limp as a dead fish. And if Grimm was already… gone, there was no bit of violence that would make it right.

"I haven't," Mathias said flatly. "Some things are still distasteful to me."

I closed my eyes briefly in relief. When I looked at Mathias again, I forced my voice to remain steady and scornful. "You shrink from outright murder, yet not from kidnapping or drugging. Forgive me, but the lines of morality you draw in the sand are less than comforting."

"They're not meant to be. I've done many things I didn't want to do, and will yet. Just because I don't have the stomach to kill you doesn't mean I'll let you carry our secrets back to Miendor. The forest will take care of you."

"We signed the contract!" I protested. "We couldn't spill your secrets even if we wanted to. You let the foragers who found you go with just a memory spell; don't you think a contract marked with blood is more binding?"

Mathias only looked at me.

"Oh," I breathed. "You didn't let them leave either, did you?"

Mathias's head bowed, but the hand holding the dagger didn't waver. "They'd seen our camp, just as you have, and memory and contract spells can be undone. Not easily, maybe, but I'm sure the right scriver could find a way. I remember your name, Leovander Loveage. I knew your brother too. Not well, but we served a few missions together. He was very green then. Very talkative. Very proud of you, his younger brother, who he said was the most creative scriver he'd ever known. It made an impression on me. Such heartfelt sibling loyalty."

Damn Rainer, I thought despairingly. Damn his unfaltering good opinion of me. Better I had told him the truth a long time ago.

"I'm a terrible scriver," I said, knowing it wouldn't make a difference.

Mathias looked down at me with eyes that were both like and so unlike his sister's.

"Jayne would trust you, but I can't. If it's your lives or ours, I choose ours. I'll keep making this choice every time, so the others don't have to."

"She wouldn't want you to do this," I whispered.

"No," Mathias agreed. "That's why I don't tell her. Now, give me that feather back."

"Or what?"

The dagger pressed closer against my neck. I swallowed against it involuntarily and felt the bite of metal, then the warm trickle of blood running down to collect in the hollow of my throat. The pain was bright, almost grounding.

"That feather could feed us for a year, once we figure out how to sell it," Mathias said. "Or it could help us purchase new lives somewhere else, once the rest of them accept there will never be a place for us in Miendor again. I'm not leaving it behind to keep your corpse company."

"Very sensible. But I am under no obligation to make this easy for you," I said, very aware of how each word caused my throat to bob against the blade. "You know as well as I do how difficult it is to steal from a sorcerer's coat. Everything in my pockets will be just as much mine in death as in life. You won't get your hands on that feather."

My defiance was met with a blank stare. Had I thought Grimm expressionless once? I'd been wrong. There was life in his eyes. Warmth, even, if you knew what to look for. Mathias was the one whose face was cold, deadened. The annoyed twitch of his mouth seemed to come more from habit than any true feeling.

I was surprised when the dagger left my throat. Even more so when Mathias grabbed me under the arms and hauled my still limp body a few feet forward.

"Look," he said.

The ground dropped away steeply in front of me. Below was a small valley. No trees grew there, but in the center was a grassy rise dotted with luminescent night flowers. They were just starting to open, and the glow of their petals was enough to send glimmering reflections dancing across the water collected in a dip at the bottom of that small hillock. There was also enough light for me to see Grimm in the process of hauling himself out of that shallow trough, dripping and muddy.

He was half out of the water, still obviously under the influence of the same sedative that kept me so pliant in Mathias's grip. Grimm's hands sank into the grass, using it to pull himself laboriously up the hill. The process was neither dignified nor graceful.

Mathias held me up long enough to witness this, then let me slump over again. Hands free, he reached for the crossbow slung across his back. Carefully, silently, he loaded an arrow and pointed it down into the valley. At Grimm.

"Give me the feather, or I will shoot him."

I tried to shrug, found my shoulders weren't capable of that yet, and so was forced to speak. "You don't intend for him to live anyway."

Mathias's eyebrows raised. "That's very different than watching someone you love die, knowing you could have stopped it."

Ah.

There it was. The demoralizing icing on top of this disastrous cake of a day. Week. Month.

Mathias knew . Oh, not the whole complicated mess, but the core of it. Maybe all the outlaws knew. Maybe my caring for Grimm was written so clearly on my face at this point that anyone could have spotted it. I had jumped in front of an arrow for him, after all. I had stood there in their camp that morning and refused to let them take Grimm from my sight.

There was nothing I could say. Mathias cocked his head expectantly and looked down at me, waiting.

What else could I do?

With painful slowness, I reached into my pocket. My hand felt more like the idea of a hand than anything of use, but eventually I got my fingers to close around something cold and metallic. If by some miracle we escaped whatever trap Mathias had laid for us, there was another feather in Grimm's possession, but it still cost me something to throw this one at Mathias's feet. I let out a helpless breath when he lowered his crossbow to pick it up.

He inspected the feather carefully before tucking it away. Then he said, "I would have made the same choice," before casually rolling me over the lip of the valley.

It was fortunate the slope he pushed me down was relatively soft. There were no rocks to bump my head against and only a few blunt roots. Still, it was not a comfortable journey to the bottom, with my arms and legs flailing every which way and my senses scrambling more thoroughly than an egg. My violin case was still tied to my back, and it left new bruises each time I rolled over on top of it, digging painfully into my spine.

I landed at the bottom with a splash in blessedly shallow water. Perhaps it was the shock of cold, but when I moved to sit up, my muscles seemed to respond a little faster. Much good it did me now.

"Loveage?" Grimm squinted down the hill in my direction.

"Yes, just me," I answered. Half-wiggling and half-crawling, I splashed through the water until I reached the same rise Grimm had dragged himself up. The luminescent flowers I'd noted from up above were opening further now, casting everything in bluish-white light. It made it easy to see how steep the walls of the valley were. I could not spot Mathias.

My legs were wobbly as those of a newborn colt, but eventually I was able to stumble up the hill. Grimm was standing, too, when I reached him, though he leaned on his sword as though it were a cane. He looked me over and said, "You're bleeding."

"A scratch." I ran the back of my hand over the nick on my throat, and it came away red. "We have bigger problems. What is this place?"

"Don't know." Grimm looked around uneasily. I turned so that my back was to his and we could view our surroundings in a somewhat protected state.

At first glance, the valley seemed… well, it was actually quite lovely. Much more idyllic than any part of the forest I'd seen so far. The grass underneath our feet was soft and brilliant green, and the air down here seemed warmer by several degrees. The water I'd landed in, though shallow, was fresh rather than stagnant, a tiny contained stream that flowed round and round the hill we stood on. The glowing flowers around us made the air smell faintly sweet, like the first blooms of spring.

"This is alarmingly pleasant," I said. "But…"

But I didn't feel like we should be there. And not just because I doubted that Mathias had thrown us down into the valley to sit in the grass and braid flowers into each other's hair. One never felt truly alone inside the Unquiet Wood, but standing in the valley was akin to standing in the circle of trees around Sybilla's tower or walking into the middle of the outlaw camp.

"This place," Grimm said slowly. "It feels inhabited."

That was it. This valley felt owned, and not by us. We were unwilling trespassers.

I looked closer at the steep walls beyond the flowers' glow. There, off to my right, I discovered a patch of darkness that was not simply shadow. It was—

"A cave," I said, nudging Grimm's arm to get his attention.

Now that I'd seen it, there was no ignoring the yawning emptiness. It stretched to cover a space many times the width of my own arm span. I couldn't have touched the top of it even if I clambered onto Grimm's shoulders and reached.

Everything in the valley seemed subtly angled toward the cave, like a teardrop waiting to fall into its mouth.

"Over there," Grimm said, voice quiet. He pointed to the ground at the base of the cave, where specks of white dotted the grass at the edge of the water. At first glance they looked like pale stones, but the urgent note in Grimm's voice prompted me to look again.

Bones. They were bones, scattered all along the opening of the cave.

I swallowed hard, arms prickling with goose bumps even though the air was warm against my skin.

"Those foragers who discovered the outlaw camp, Mathias found a way to get rid of them." I glanced over my shoulder at Grimm. "He said the forest would take care of us."

Grimm's eyes stayed fixed on the cave a moment longer, as though he were afraid to look away. "We need to get out of here." He reached into a pocket and drew out a piece of paper. It was a lightfoot charm, part of the stash we'd readied before entering the outlaw camp.

Without any prompting, I grabbed hold of Grimm's wrist so the spell would cover me, too, and held tight as the paper went up in smoke. Within seconds my limbs began to feel buoyant instead of ungainly. When Grimm nodded, we both jumped.

The spell carried us off the hill, toward the lip of the valley. We rose up and up, until we could nearly see over the rim—and then we crashed into a wall. That's what it felt like, anyway. Even though the air above us appeared perfectly clear of impediments, we had hit something, and hard. The force of our collision sent us careening back toward the ground. The fall tore us apart, and we each tumbled down the hill a little way from each other. I lay there, gasping, feeling the tingle of unfamiliar magic crawl across my skin.

"I think there's a lid on this place," I said once my breath had returned.

Grimm looked up at the deceptively empty air above us. "Mathias's doing?"

"I don't think so." The magic we'd touched didn't have the same flavor as a sorcerer-written spell. It blended with our surroundings too well, sinking into the thrum of the forest. I looked over at the cave again.

Something looked back at me.

A great golden eye, its pupil black and slitted. Then it blinked and was gone.

"Grimm! There's something—" That was all I had time to say before the black curtain of darkness inside the cave began to shift and the golden eye I had seen blinked open again. And then a second one. And another. Another. Seven giant golden eyes scattered across one giant face, moving out of the darkness toward us.