Nevertheless, he must play. He would not let it make him a monster.
But, with Anya’s shotgun and map in his possession – with her hurt expression sharp in his mind’s eye, far more hurt than he imagined he could ever make her look – he worried it already had.
“Sylas Cassirer?”
He rose to his feet, turning in the direction of the call, fearing something dreadful and absurd, like a crow the size of a man, or a talking boulder.
Close; but it was only Terrence.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
For how loud it had been, the source of the cry was not as close as Anya had anticipated. As if, before, it had been piped directly into her ears. A message. Or a warning.
Or a trick.
Her gut urged her to turn back, but drawn by the sound’s obvious fear, she pressed forward. It grew more insistent, but diminished as she went; fainter, weaker, not farther away. It had sounded so human when she first heard it. Now it didn’t; not quite. Though that didn’t mean it wasn’t. Or hadn’t once been.
She soon found a game trail and followed it, smooth under her feet, then tracked the cry into the brush. For a time, it went quiet, and she began to wonder if its source was already dead – or if she had imagined it. But Sy had heard it, too. She scanned the ground for flattened bracken, upturned stones. Sniffed the air for gunpowder or coffee grounds.
Then she heard it again, close, and this time, she recognized the sound. Her heart sank. She would almost prefer it was one of the wizards. Still, she hurried forward, readying an arrow to let fly at an instant.
She saw the spotted fawn before she saw the bramble slake.
From afar, the bramble slake was invisible. Innocuous. A moss and lichen covered boulder resting behind a blackberry bramble. Only stepping closer, too close, would reveal the berries were not berries, but round and shining feelers; that the branches were not the limbs of a shrub, but the wriggling tentacles and waiting mouth of a hungry beast.
The beast bored its reptilian, sharp-beaked head into the boulder’s core, and, like a more industrious hermit crab, took the hollowed-out stone as its shell. Half of its tentacles remained burrowed underground, rooting it into the earth; the other half reemerged nearby, a crown covered in leaf-like scales and teeth of thorns, almost indistinguishable from a blackberry bramble.
It had only one vulnerable spot: its head, kept safe beneath its stone shell. Only something extraordinary could lure it out. It was commonly accepted that the bramble slake was hardly worth the effort it would take to kill, not to mention the danger. Deep in the heart of the forest, no one would pay for its removal; frightening and unwieldy, no one wanted it leering over their dining table as a trophy. It may as well be a feature of the landscape. Since it never moved, it was easy enough to avoid, if you knew what to look for.
If you didn’t, it was an unpleasant death. The slake’s tentacled mouth caught and trapped anything that came too close, leaving its meal hopelessly entangled. It pierced its stuck prey with its thorny teeth and slowly sucked it dry, keeping it alive, hot and fresh, until the last drop was drained. The more the prey struggled, the deeper the teeth dug. Anya knew if she looked beneath the fawn, she would find scores of bleached, brittle bones.
The berry-like feelers acted as lures, attracting all kinds of unwitting prey. Birds, squirrels, insects, mice. Larger mammals, usually those too young to know better. Those were a feast – once caught, the young attracted larger, more filling prey. The fawn’s mother, if she still lived, drawn by the fawn’s frightened cry. A curious wayfarer, moved by the sight of a helpless young creature. A city dweller on a king’s foolish errand, looking for food, familiar with blackberries.
A cursed huntress losing her grip.
She should have known. Johanna had this one marked on her map. But that was miles away from Rook Hollow. How could she have closed such a great distance in such a short time? She told Sy fifteen minutes; she hadn’t been gone five. Was there another slake, one they had missed?
The fawn smelled Anya on the wind.
Now, though unsure if Anya was friend or foe, savior or predator with sharper teeth, the fawn could not help but cry.Could not help but struggle, though it only made her suffering worse. Her hooves scrabbled helplessly against the tentacles, the dry leaves and bones beneath her. Her bleating became a soft, pitiful whimper. Almost human. Not human at all.
The forest had no morals. The forest could be cruel. But the slake did not trap the fawn in order to be cruel. It did not make a prize of it. It did not boast of its victory or seek more than its fill. It was simply how this creature had learned, through generations, through aeons of struggle, to survive. A cruel survival for a cruel world.
This creature did not choose how the world was made. How it was made. Neither did the fawn.
And neither did Anya.
She let loose her arrow. The scrabbling stopped. Swift as the wind, she readied another.
Alert, irritated and confused at its cooling, slackening meal, the bramble slake’s long, beaked head poked out from within the impenetrable den it wore on its back. Small, blinking eyes peaked out from under a helmet of moss and stone. Anya fired again.
The long, slender head fell flat, letting out a groan like a sigh, like cool air wheezing out of a cave.
She would have to update Johanna’s map.
The breeze tickled her cheek. She lowered her bow. A bright, incessant chirping pricked at her ears. She peered into the branches above her. Bright splotches of vigorous red dotted the dark canopy.
The cherry wrens had already begun to gather.
