Other than that exchange, they didn’t talk. It wasn’t the companionable, respectful quiet of their earlier journey. Although they were in it together, and that was a little comfort, their silence was wary.
They’d left the lands they’d come to know, if only slightly.Terra incognitawas the phrase on maps, Toinette thought, and then, with a laugh that reached her mouth only in a twist of her lips:Hic sunt dracones.Exceptincognitawasn’t entirely right. They had an idea or two about what lay further up the trail.
Terra pericolosawould have been the real term had Toinette been making a map. If she’d been talking to her crew, she’d have used blunter language still:enemy waters.
Motion flickered in the trees as they walked. Glancing toward it, Toinette spotted the black silhouettes of crows, the furry tail of a fleeing squirrel—and then a small white shape that vanished with no sign of actual movement as soon as she looked in its direction. She blinked, and the forest was unchanged.
She didn’t walk with naked sword in hand, lest she fall over a rock and stab herself, but she kept several fingers of steel out of the scabbard, and her hand closed around the hilt. Toinette knew herself to be decent with a sword at best—better with knives and fists, not to mention feet, nails, and teeth—but the further away a weapon kept any part of the forest, the better. The feel of it in her hand was a reassurance too, as with the cabin: an object born of men’s skill, not the whims of nature or worse.
The light grew gray and faded. Toinette thought of storms, but felt neither wind nor the hot stickiness that went before summer squalls. When she tilted her head up, the sky was still cloudless. It only looked fainter and further away.
“How late in the day is it, do you think?” she asked Erik.
He frowned, peered at the sky, and frowned more deeply. “I would have said no more than midday. But—” An upward motion of his hand showed that he’d noticed the same change in the light Toinette had. “It is darker in forests. The trees block the light.”
“That’s not this, I don’t think,” said Toinette. She remembered the forest at Loch Arach. The light had been fainter, but bright and golden in the spots where the leaves had let it through. Memory was tricky. She hoped Erik would contradict her.
He shook his head. “No. There aren’t more trees here than there were either.”
That was true, and left nothing else to be said. As they went on, the trees did get closer together, but they shrank rather than grew, clinging to each other with warped branches and twisting trunks. The eye found no straight lines, only snarls that brought to mind staring eyes, or open mouths, or in a few cases, tangles of innards.
Darkness deepened quickly. After what felt like no more than an hour of walking from the time Toinette had noticed the change, night hung around them, without light of moon or stars. Had she been human, she wouldn’t have been able to see without a torch.
That might not be so bad, she thought, passing a dead tree whose branches clawed the sky like a malformed hand.
The voices spoke, without any wind to excuse them.Youuu, they said, and laughed.
Meat.
A white form appeared in the trees again. This time it had a man’s figure, even the suggestion of a beard and a sword strapped to its back. Toinette stopped and stared at it, remembered Franz and the plants, and then touched Erik on the shoulder as he was hesitating too. “I don’t think we should follow that.”
“No,” he said and then gave an incoherent shout of horror. Toinette didn’t blame him. She’d clutched his shoulder at the same time, with enough strength to break a mortal man’s bones.
The figure had turned toward them. In an instant, its jaw had dropped to its chest, showing fanged teeth. A long, pointed tongue curled out at them, as if in a child’s gesture of mockery, and its eyes had lit with the same eerie green-violet radiance that had flashed in the sky above the island.
Then it was gone.
“Christ have mercy,” said Erik and reached for the rosary Franz had given him.
“Someonehad better.” Toinette forced herself to relax her fingers and lift her hand away. “I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”
“A few bruises at most. Never worry over it, lass.” His smile was a pale replica of what it normally was. Toinette felt that they might both be faint copies: echoes of past writing that a scribe had imperfectly scraped away. “I’d have likely had claws in your flesh, had it been the other way round. You’ve a great deal of discipline.”
“I’ve practiced,” said Toinette.
“Petty bastard, is it no’?” Erik asked, gesturing to where the apparition had been. “I wonder what death it would ha’ lured us to, if we’d followed? More of the plants, or worse?”
“It couldn’t hurt us directly. That’s a blessing.”
“For now,” said Erik.
“You’re a cheerful fellow. It’s almost like having Marcus with me again.”
They kept going. There was really no choice in the matter. They went on through darkness, through cold that got more and more bitter, and past plants that had grown pale and sickly until the leaves looked akin to drowned flesh. Toinette pulled the spray of pine needles out of her hair and held it under her nose for a time. It kept her from wanting desperately to scream.
She began to see different animals too. The squirrels were as pale as the plants. Many were hairless, and their eyes were large and clouded. A birdcall in the trees was thin and choked-sounding.
You, said the voices.
