“Empty,” she growled. “And tastes foul.”
Alastair said a few conciliatory words in Eth and remounted. I didn’t.
“Aliza?”
I stared at the place the twigs had fallen. Bloodred sap leaked from their broken ends. The uneasy feeling crested as I turned to the tree again. “Just a moment.”
“What is it?” Akarra asked.
I waved for quiet and moved closer, pressing my ear to the silvery bark. Perhaps I was only imagining it. I hoped I was only imagining it.
I wasn’t. I made the fourfold gesture and backed away, stumbling over leaf litter and exposed roots.
“The trees. The trees have heartbeats.”
Chapter 2
Rushless Wood
Akarra took a turn listening, then Alastair. “Those can’t be real heartbeats,” he said. “Can they?”
“I don’t know,” Akarra said. “I’ve never heard of anything like it.”
I crossed my arms beneath my cloak, willing another layer of something between me and that awful thud-thud. “Can we keep going?”
We pressed on with new urgency, keeping our distance from the trees as much as possible. It wasn’t easy. The woods grew thicker the farther south we went. There was no snow on the ground anymore, and the branches were woven so tightly overhead that even the worst of the storm couldn’t get through. And neither can we, I realized. Even if Akarra had been fit enough to fly, the sky was closed to us now. I could tell by their grim looks that they’d realized it too, and probably had long before I had, though neither of them said anything. The unspoken consequence of our decision hung over us like a personal storm cloud. Too late to go back now. Alastair walked beside me with one hand on the hilt of his axe.
Dead leaves muffled our footsteps, ankle-deep in some places, making walking treacherous. They turned the forest floor beneath us into a patchwork carpet in the colors of late autumn decay. I picked up a leaf. It was shaped like a beech leaf but mottled with patches of pale yellow, deep purple, and one spot near the stem that was almost translucent. The same dark red sap from the broken twigs had dried in the leaf, most noticeable in the translucent section where it veined through it like blood. The Bleeding Tree. Perhaps Johanna Mauntell’s scars weren’t so figurative after all. I let the leaf fall and wiped my hand on my cloak.
Soon the quiet began to bother me. We saw no squirrels or winter birds or forest creatures of any kind. The woods even swallowed the sound of Akarra’s heavy tread. It made it that much harder to ignore the heartbeats, which continued as we moved deeper into the Wood. Gradually I noticed a pattern. Not all trees had them, but those that did were the ones that also had the strange dark streak running up the side of the trunk. More than once I thought I saw movement from the trees out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned to look, there was nothing but the trees and the deepening shadows.
“How long until we reach the mountains?” I asked when we stopped for a rest.
“Not sure,” Akarra said. “Unless we reach River Rushless in the next hour I don’t think we’re going to make it out before nightfall.”
“There aren’t settlements in this corner of Arle, are there?” I knew even as I asked what the answer was. Alastair pulled me close and rubbed some life back into my arms, his expression grave with understanding.
“No, khera. Not this far west.”
I shivered. The prospect of spending a night within earshot of the heartbeat trees sat in my stomach like the corpse of a toad, cold, slimy, and nauseating, but what choice did we have? I dug through our panniers and drew out what remained of our food: two half-full waterskins, still mostly frozen, one small loaf of bardsbread, and a greasy packet of dried saltfish. We each took a small piece of bread—Thell, how I hated the taste of it now—and a bite of the fish, mentally calculating how often we’d be able to repeat this before we ran out. The result was not comforting.
A rumbling from nearby made me jump and Akarra looked abashed. “Sorry. My stomachs.”
“We’ll find some game soon,” Alastair said. “There must be something alive in these woods.”
Akarra frowned. “Too much is alive in these woods. Do you hear that?”
I listened. It was a subtle change, hard to notice until pointed out, after which it was hard not to notice. The heartbeats within the nearest trees had quickened.
Akarra sniffed the wind. Her wings rose like the hackles on a cat. “On my back! Now!”
Alastair leapt into the saddle, pulling me up behind him.
“Hands to your weapon, khela!” she growled.
The words were still on her lips when I saw them. The shadows retreated like a creeping black curtain, revealing human figures between the trees. They watched us with narrowed eyes, their sharpened teeth drawn back from bloodless lips. Those that wore clothes were dressed in furs and flayed leathers; those that weren’t wore stripes of blue woad, dark against their pale skin. All carried weapons, and every weapon was pointed at us.
I fumbled with my dagger as Alastair drew his axe. The hot, crackling scent of dragonfire filled the air, fading into a moment of breathless silence.
“Who are you?” Alastair demanded.
A man stepped forward. His pale hair fell in ropes to his waist, and he wore little besides a pair of trousers and a quiver strapped to his hip. A longbow hung loose in his hand, its recurve smooth and white. “Our woods, Rider, not yours. You do not demand anything of us here,” he said in heavily accented Arlean. “Who are you?”
“My name is Alastair Daired,” Alastair said without lowering his axe.
A murmur ran through the gathered crowd.
“We’re just passing through,” Akarra said. “We have no quarrel with your people.”
The man gave a short, barking laugh. “Who are you to say, dragon? Have you any idea who we are?”
I remembered what Lydon Tam had told me at Widdermere Marsh Hall. The Guardians of Rushless Wood, and the most dangerous things within its borders. “Mauntells,” I said quietly, then louder, “You’re the Mauntells, aren’t you?”
“You know of us?”
“We’ve heard stories. You’re the Guardians of the Wood.”
He snorted. “You southern folk know nothing but lies and legends of the bards. How did you come so far into the Rushless?”
“The blizzard drove us to your borders,” Alastair said. “We hoped we could find shelter here until it passed.”
“Did you?” The man smiled slowly, his lips stretching wide like a dry worm, splitting a little at the corners. Akarra tensed beneath us. “You must be truly desperate.”
I never saw him notch the arrow. The sound came before my brain registered the motion of the draw. There was a hiss, a whiz, and the world turned upside down. My stomach plummeted as Akarra reared, roaring, and snatched the arrow meant for Alastair from the air in her teeth. The air boiled, and for an instant I was blinded by scorching, searing white as Akarra spread her wings and sprang into the air. Bone-dry leaves crisped and crackled around us—
And then we were on the ground again, cut off from the sky by the impenetrable roof of branches above.
A laugh rose from among the Mauntells. Their leader hefted his bow again. “You do not pass the borders of the Rushless without our permission, dragon. Coming or going.”