She grinned, despite her mood, and in her amusement she almost missed the flicker of movement from the corner of her eye. If Franz hadn’t shouted, she would never have seen it.
To the east, through the trees, metal glinted in the sunlight and then vanished into shade.
“Hallo!” Franz shouted. “Hallo, you there!” Nobody responded. “It was a man, Captain! A man in mail, I think. I saw his face just an instant. Come on, then. He must not have heard us. He can’t be going very fast in this, not in armor. Hallo!” he called again, starting to run. “We’re friends!”
They mightnotbe. Toinette would have reminded Franz of pirates and cannibals, had he given her longer. With more warning, she would have grabbed him by the neck like a youth and made him listen.
But he was running too fast for that, bolting off into the forest with a speed Toinette hadn’t expected.
She only had time to thinkDammit, what iswrongwith everyone?
Then she dropped her sack of nettles and broke into a run too. The smell of crushed plants rose up to meet her; her own heartbeat grew loud in her ears. She could hear Raoul close behind her too, keeping pace well enough for a new man.
Undergrowth tangled Toinette’s feet, slowing her further, and she had to dodge around trees—many big enough to have been obstacles for her dragon form, let alone her human one. Her saving grace was that Franz did too. So should have the man he was chasing, but when Franz finally stopped, the phantom was nowhere in sight. Toinette and her men stood on a sparse trail, one whose presence did make her hopeful about deer—or even elk, by the way the plants on it grew—but which showed no sign of a human presence.
“Gone,” said Franz, panting. “But…I swear I saw him.”
“So did I,” Raoul put in.
“Oh, and I did too, or close enough,” Toinette replied testily. “If it was a vision, we’re all going mad, for we’re never saints. Hush a moment, both of you, and we’ll look for tracks—assuming the good knight’s friends aren’t hiding behind the trees with bows at the ready.”
She sniffed the air as they looked around, as quietly as she could manage while still getting what scent she could as a human. Cool earth and broken plants overwhelmed most else. For all she could tell, they were the first people to ever pass down the trail.
“There’s nothing here,” Raoul said. He’d been kneeling to examine the dirt and moss; he got to his feet with a frown. “Could be the plants are just too thick to show footprints, but—well, look.” He gestured at the trail ahead. “None of the branches are broken.”
“A man running away wouldn’t have dodged them,” Franz agreed.
All three of them stood still. “It might,” Toinette said slowly, “have been a bit like a mirage.”
“Not a desert,” said Franz.
“No, but we don’t know this land.” Toinette didn’t sound convincing to herself. The men looked more doubtful yet. “If not, then—”
She trailed off. None of them wanted to say the words aloud, not alone in the forest. They’d come a ways from the spring, Toinette noticed then: a pink-and-white vine she hadn’t seen before climbed up many of the trees around them, and fewer birds sang overhead, although that might have just been a result of the racket she and the men had made.
“We should go back,” she began to say, thinking of retrieving the nettles before other creatures got to them. Notmanythings were desperate enough to eat nettles, but the island might have goats—and the thought made her stomach growl.
Naturally, that was the moment when the vines detached themselves from their trees and lunged.
* * *
The vines were as strong as any man, and they’d struck from surprise. Toinette yelled like a kicked cat as they yanked her backward into a tree, which struck the back of her head with a loudthwackand a burst of pain that left her cross-eyed for a few moments.
Thinner vines crept around the tree, opened fleshy pink spots, and pressed them against Toinette’s exposed skin. The edges of those spots were sharp. Her blood started flowing at once, and the vines pulsed, drinking it down. She screamed again, as much in revulsion as pain, and heard Raoul and Franz crying out as well, their voices baritone counterpart to hers.
Struggling did little good. When Toinette managed to get a hand free and draw her sword, the vines swiftly wrapped around her arm again, hindering her motion. She wasn’t strong enough to break free of all of them at once, and little less would be sufficient.
Bugger this,she thought, and transformed.
The smell of sundered plants was strong and sickly sweet. They snapped around her without any real effort on her part; her sheer mass was force enough. Toinette slammed a hind leg contemptuously into the tree behind her and swung her weight forward to address the plants preying on her men.
Fire, alas, was too likely to catch Raoul or Franz, but her claws were sharp, and she could put considerable muscle behind them.Hold damned still, she thought at Franz, and swiped through the vines as carefully as she could manage in a hurry. He was in one piece when he bolted from the tree and over to her side, and Toinette didn’t notice any serious wounds.
Good enough. Another slash freed Raoul. Toinette didn’t wait for him to run, but plucked him up by the collar with her teeth and deposited him onto her back.
Nowfire would work. As the wounded plants writhed, she drew a long breath and called forth flame, careful to keep it controlled despite her rage. She didn’t want to set the whole forest ablaze—or likely wouldn’t, when she’d calmed down and had a meal.
It had been a long time since Toinette had used fire on anything. Containing it was a bit of a struggle at first, but she managed to keep the flame narrow, crushing it out with a forefoot as soon as the blood-drinking plants had blackened and crumbled. They writhed as they died. She was glad of it.
