When his eyes opened, his father was gone.
“Snow’s comin’ ice,” one of the new men said brusquely. “We’d best take him now else we’ll not get him up the ladders.”
Ladders?Piers said to himself.
Alys pulled away from him. “Ladders?”
“Aye,” the man answered. He began to walk toward where Piers lay, his hands flying over the numerous straps across his body. “I’ve a fair length of rope and a blanket, we can—bastard!”the man hissed as he stumbled. He looked first to the ground around his feet, then up toward the tree tops and at last at his companions. “We’re standing in a thickness of walnuts. The whole bloody forest is walnut.”
“Aye,” the old man of the group growled. “So watch yer bloody step, you tenderfooted maiden.”
“Walnut,”the man repeated and then gestured brusquely with a palm toward the ground. “Where did all the bloodyhazelnutshells come from?”
Piers chuckled, but only to himself, as at last he let himself slip away into oblivion.
It seemed to Alys that they walked for hours, although the old man, Ira—he of the loathing for nobility and the talent for a fine snare—had informed her that their town was just beyond the place where Alys had been strung up like game.
Piers was being trundled along between the two younger men, suspended in a sort of cocoon conveyance, all but a tight circle of his face swaddled in the rough blanket. When Alys had asked the old man if he had any idea what could be wrong with Piers, Ira had replied, “Looks to me that he’s ill, woman. Not to worry, Linny will have him springin’ an’ spry.”
Alys didn’t know who this Linny was, or exactly what “springing and spry” meant, but she prayed that it meant Piers would be well soon.
She struggled and slipped up the side of a sudden embankment, bearing the awkward burdens of her own sack strapped across her body as well as Piers’s pack, which she clutched to her chest. Layla clung to her head as she came at last to the top with the rest of the group. The loud and startlingly close hoot of an owl caused Alys to jump, but then at her side, Ira raised both gnarled hands to his mouth and returned the call, so eerily reminiscent of the bird he mocked that Alys was certain they were somehow related.
She jumped again as a rustling whoosh sounded, and a long tongue of rope and wood unfurled not six feet before the old man.
Ira yanked on the rope, nodded to himself and then called upward. “Send down another—we’ve found a sick man an’ he’s unlikely to go it on his own.”
Then Alys looked up, and brought a hand to her mouth as she gasped.
The trees seemed to be alight with fae fire—above her and before her, the canopy flickered with little balls of light, some bobbing as if in lanterns, others dancing tall like virile torches. Along the forest floor, she could now see no fewer than a dozen fires crackling, before what looked to be rounded twig huts and pens made out of thick, crooked branches. Shadows began to coalesce from the darkness and move toward Alys and her companions, like trees that had come alive, walking wood, and her mind went back to what the woman she’d met in Pilings had asked her.
Are you one of the wood people?
Then another long rope swish-rattled down and the two younger men still bearing Piers pushed Alys aside rather carelessly to stand beneath the ladders. They looked at each other.
“Could use the lift,” said the youngest, Alys thought. He had curly blond hair and a slim, pointed face.
“Whilst carrying him?” The other young man shook his head, curly blond also, but wider. Alys decided they were likely brothers. “Too large. Take some fair labor.”
“No, set him down. Save our backs.”
“Roll off the side. Strangle.”
“Pull fast?”
The older brother seemed to consider it for a moment. “Climb slow.”
The younger shrugged in agreement.
They lowered Piers to the ground carefully and then their hands moved so deftly and so fast that their motions were blurred, knotting the ends of the rope to fashion two longer loops. The brothers hefted the loops over their heads to rest on their outside shoulders and began to climb—rather quickly, Alys thought. Piers swayed between them like a swollen bridge, farther and farther away from the ground.
Ira stood at her side silently, his arms crossed over his chest once more and his face tilted back to track the progress of the brothers and their cargo. Alys’s eyes flicked nervously between the old man’s face and the invisible treetop, not sure what was going on or what would happen next. Would they follow the men and Piers to whatever nest was above them? Alys was anxious to be at Piers’s side once more—he had looked so much worse when she’d come back to him. And he had spoken of his dead father as if the man had been standing in the camp with them.
The thought made Alys shiver.
Ira turned to her, his mouth twisted as if he’d consumed something bitter. “I don’t want you here,” he said without compunction. “‘Tis due to the likes of you that we live aswe do, and I’d as soon cut off one of me own arms than allow you above.”
“Ira, I—”
