“Yes, I do.” She sniffed again. “Familiar, but I can’t place it.”
“Dangerous?” I asked, even as Alastair whispered, “Wydrick?”
“Not Wydrick, but I can’t tell if it’s dangerous either.” She shook her head and nudged Alastair back through the door. “I’ll let you know as soon as I do. For now, rest and get your strength back, both of you. I’ll keep watch.”
I looked over Alastair’s shoulder toward the camp, which had resumed its usual pace. A few Mauntells gave us the occasional glance, but most ignored us, intent instead on questioning Frega or others in her scouting party. The words hunters and game came up most often in what conversations I could hear, but I caught a handful of strangers and even one prodigal. A flash of something pale drew my eye to the far side of the encampment. Goryn sat on a protruding root, his longbow on his knees, fingering the string as he stared at us. He was smiling again.
“Come on, Alastair,” I said.
The inside of the hut was smoky and dim, the peat fire in the corner throwing off more heat than light. Furs and dry leaves covered the floor, and Alastair had to duck beneath the bunches of drying herbs, ropes of grass fibers, and earthenware jugs hanging from the ceiling. Besides the herbs, there was no sign of food or water. I swallowed my disappointment. It was all I had to silence my grumbling stomach.
The bole of the great tree formed the fourth wall of the hut. We kept well away from it, settling our cloaks in the far corner by the fire. I wondered how Frega, or Akarra for that matter, expected us to get any sleep with that strange presence looming so near. In the firelight it looked harmless enough: silvery bark like a birch, the usual swell of roots poking through the leaf litter, the faint scent of decaying earth, but each time I closed my eyes I saw those dark tendrils moving through Goryn’s body, restoring life where Alastair had taken it, and I couldn’t help but shudder.
The ring of steel forced my eyes open. Alastair sat cross-legged by the hearth, cleaning his axe. He didn’t look up as I moved next to him.
“Alastair—”
“I know what you’re going to say and I don’t want to hear it.”
I blinked. “Sorry?”
“You were right. Goryn knew something I didn’t. You don’t need to remind me.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
He looked up. “But you were thinking it.”
It took real effort not to roll my eyes. Now? You want to do this now? We were trapped in a haunted forest, prisoners in fact if not in name of a family with a mysterious connection to the ghast-like creatures within the trees, with only the tentative promise of both food and escape, and Alastair thought it a good time to invite an argument.
“What do you want me to say?” I said. “Aye, I was thinking it, and so were you.”
“He would have killed us if I hadn’t accepted. I had to fight him.”
“Probably.”
“He . . . what?”
“I know you had to accept it,” I said, suddenly weary. “It might’ve been a stupid choice, Alastair, but it was the right one. And lest you forget, you won.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I saw his entrails,” I said before immediately shoving the image out of my mind. “You won, dearest. He cheated.”
He sat up a little straighter and set down his axe, his maimed hand resting on the shining blade. Not a trace of Goryn’s blood remained. For the first time since we’d landed at the edge of Rushless Wood, he looked me full in the face, and I him. The marks of hunger and weariness, dread and desperation were traced deeply in his features, as I imagined they were in mine, but at least we understood each other.
“So then,” he said after a moment, “what are these things in the trees?”
“Weald-wraiths, whatever those are.”
“But are they Tekari? They healed like a ghast.”
Yet not like a ghast, I thought. The weald-wraiths might have patched Goryn’s wounds in the same way Wydrick’s ghast had patched his, but these tree creatures had withdrawn when the job was finished, leaving Goryn quite human. Dangerous, and perhaps unkillable within the Wood, but still human. “Maybe so,” I said, “but I think Frega was telling the truth. I don’t think any of the Mauntells are ghastradi.”
There was a long, fire-flecked silence. “Just something like them,” he said at last.
I had no answer to that. Instead I settled my chin on my fist and stared into the smoldering embers. After all, what did we know of ghasts and where they came from, or even what they really were? Old wives’ tales had always placed them firmly within the category of Tekari, but perhaps that had only been for lack of any better title. Bard Henry Brandon had sung of the origin of the Oldkind once, how the Fourfold God had molded them from water, air, earth, and fire, but no ballad I’d ever heard had mentioned the birth of ghasts. Like an evil echo I heard the voice of the Green Lady again in my head, taunting and terrible. A shadow of a shadow of the first darkness that fell upon this world . . .
Alastair raised his head as the pelt covering the door drew back and Frega ducked inside. “Settled, are you?” she said.
“We’re fine,” Alastair said stiffly.
“Famished, you mean. No need to deny it. I’m familiar with every kind of hunger, Daireds, and I see its marks on the both of you.” She deposited an earthenware jug between us and sat with a creaking sigh. “Ghrish. Not much in the way of a meal, but it will keep you upright until the hunters return. Goryn will bring bread shortly.”
Alastair and I glanced at each other. The drugged meal in Langdred was still fresh and painful in our memories, as was the bandit Rookwood’s attempted theft of our heartstones. As unlikely as it was that word of the Vesh bounty had spread to the Mauntells, I would approach strange food and drink with caution.
Frega sighed at our hesitance. “Four preserve us,” she muttered, and took a long draught from the jug. “Does that satisfy you, Daireds? Your caution is wise but unnecessary. There would be no use in poisoning you, and if my family wanted you dead, there are easier means. Now,” she said as Alastair took a sip and passed it to me, “tell me of the world beyond our borders.”
I sputtered, my response tangling with the foul taste of the ghrish as it slid down my throat in some combination of coarse bread soaked in vinegar and sour milk.
Alastair managed a much more discreet cough, but he didn’t take a second sip. “What do you want to know?”
“Why, everything!” she said. “We hear whispers, of course; echoes of your great tales: Edan Daired and his dragons, the great Saints and their Accord of Kinds, the birth of the Shani and their Riders; but they are whispers only, filtered through many minds and many mouths. Brave traders will occasionally venture close enough to the banks of the Rushless to exchange a song across the water, but our family does not go beyond the protection of the Wood. We have not since Old Maun came to live here a thousand years ago.”
I swallowed convulsively to rid myself of the taste of ghrish. Maun. Mad Maun, he’d been called in all the songs Henry had sung about the founding of Arle. Once Edan Daired’s lieutenant, Maun abandoned Edan at the height of his campaign against the ancient Tekari and wandered north with his wife and young son into the unknown wilds, never to be seen again in the south.