He made a long, ambling, crescent-shaped trail, with only a tiny glam layered over the first to make himself uninteresting in case someone noticed him. He scarcely needed to bother. Unsupervised, with only loose instructions, the search party was already deconstructing into single stragglers and small clusters. Behind and around him, voices squabbled and cursed and quavered, fighting the forest. With so many turning tail, no one kept track of who stayed and who went.
So he went, sticking tight to one of his own peculiar paths. His feet found the path without needing to look at it. He could have walked it in the stony dark. He could have walked it blind.
His foot came down on a patch of dirt and the ground vibrated ominously beneath it.
He went still in the way of a deer, hardly seeming to breathe. The smell. A faint hazy quality to the afternoon light.
Smoke.At the same moment he heard the rustling change course. At the same moment, in the distance, a shriek cut through the quiet woods like a knifeblade across a throat.
At the same moment, he realized what had happened.
They brought people. Their own people. Into the Woods. And then set it afire.The enormity of that revelation chilled him right down to his heels, even as he drew his first lungful of warm air.
* * *
Each spark spread rapidly into a net, finding one another and interweaving into a glittering tapestry spreading forward and backward and outward, fast as a man could run. It scaled fingers up the bark of trees and gutted the carpet of leaves that had lain for many, many summers untouched upon the Woods’ floor. Dead thorn and bramble, dry as straw, crackled and burst alight before the flame even laid a hand to them. The fire seemed to whip up its own hot wind to propel itself. Like a live thing, once awoke, it roared with rough laughter and leapt forward to seize up fistfuls of wood and leaf and bush and stuff them into its maw.
But beyond a certain point, the Woods resisted. A charmed circle of trees surrounded Darkenhold and the Dagger and a wide margin to either side of the main road to Myrken. Smoke seeped from the ground, but the trees themselves resisted.
Glamourie did not burn.* * *
The hot wind sheared the glam aside like a thin veil. Wide-eyed, furious, not quite panicked, she stood with her feet planted on the path even as a man all but shoved her out of his way, ricocheting off her arm as he bolted—
the idiot!—directly toward the white-gold heart of the burning. Again she found herself so stunned at their arrogance, their madness, that she could not even form a word to encompass it.
“The lake!” she shouted—too late—after him. “The lake!”
The roaring swallowed up her warning.
No time. She yanked at her sleeve until the shoulder-ribbons ripped, doused the cloth in switchel from her wineskin, and clapped it over her mouth, sweet-sour vinegar apple seeping between her teeth and stinging her eyes worse than the encroaching smoke. Somewhere behind her, someone was screaming: wordless, mindless, without purpose—just a series of short, sharp, distracting shrieks going on and on until she wanted to bark at them to shut up or else start screaming herself. Before she could reorient herself to make for the lake, her palm buzzed and chattered. She had to clutch the stones tight to her ear to hear them.
I saw you in the cards, Fionn. Through other eyes. And when I died in Razasan, bleeding all over you, I wondered, for all your capacity for tricks, if you could also fall for them.The knowledge fell on her like a shower of cinders. The taste of copper bled down her throat as her teeth gritted in fury.
Tricked. Tricked.
She cheated me out of a clean escape, she cheated me, she cheated, and now…and now…Whoever had been screaming fell abruptly silent.
A fine wire twisted tight in her head. Her jaw snapped. Her wrist jerked the stones to her lips. The voice that came out—calm, pleasant, cordial, and her own—did not feel like it was coming out of her own lips.
“Oh. It’s you, then, is it? I have not spared a thought for you since you dropped. But it is sweet of you, my dear, to have given so much thought to me.”
With the stones as close to her face as she dared, she smacked her lips in a loud, wet kiss—
mwah!—like a clap across the earholes, before she flung the stones as hard as she could away from herself as a white flash rushed toward her.
She caught it from the corner of her eye and twisted herself away from it in the half-heartbeat before it cracked across her back and lashed the side of her face. Brilliant light dazzled her, but no heat, no pain—not yet; it happened too fast—inextricable from the sound of thousand tiny crunching, fizzing mouths drowned all sound in her left ear. Tiny hot droplets pattered down her cheek and shoulder before she dropped to the ground, frantically scrabbling her claws through the blanket of leaves and scrubbing a fistful of dirt against the side of her head. A smoking coil of hair broke loose in her fingers, stinking of burnt rope.
The leading edge of the blaze swept over and past her, but now the fire was on all sides, herself in the middle of it, crouched on her true and inviolate path.
Paths, paths everywhere. Some of her own, some the deer-tracks, some long-trod by human feet, some belonging solely to the Woods and so ancient that their roots ran deeper than the trees.
Blind with fury, she reached out for them, as many as she could find, all of them. Her right hand tugged ineffectually, while the left—always her strong hand, her bow-pulling arm—motored by a power that felt wholly outside herself, ripped free the paths free of their moorings like so many unraveling seams. Silent, teeth gritted, eyes streaming with smoke, she wound the paths about her wrists, twisting their thin threads into a single unbending shaft. The burned skin on her shoulder stretched and split in agony as her left arm drew back…and let fly.
A wedge of force bent three centuries of oaks backwards to either side, roots ripping up out of the earth, a long straight black gash unzipping. Overhead trees overbalanced and toppled, branches crashing down to add to the burning chaos; below earthworms and beetles that had never seen the sky writhed for cover. At the end of the gouge, the lake glimmered cleanly in the day’s last light.
Too numb with astonishment to do anything but stare at what she had done, she huddled on the ground, staring one-eyed at the tear she had leveled in the Woods before dumb animal instinct set her scrabbling toward it.