“Come.” She took her hand and led her back to camp. When they reached it, Perrine had awoken. She questioned Anya with a torch-lit frown. Anya shook her head and planted the scribe beneath the rowan tree, sitting cross legged before her with her quiver on her back and her bow in her lap. Perrine extinguished her torch, and Anya settled in for a long, sleepless night, listening to the silent song of the moon; peering, as if through silver daylight, into the dark.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Night quickly approached, cloaking what remained of Terrence in darkness. Nothing could cloak the sight from Sy’s memory. He trailed behind the other two through the trees, clutching Anya’s shotgun, knuckles white.
When Bertrand had returned it to him, he’d thought about refusing. But Anya had entrusted it to Sy, not Bertrand. So he kept it and held it unloaded and open-barreled over his shoulder, ready to make his best attempt if need be. It did not comfort him.
The other two walked side by side, their heads close together, muttering under their breath. Mourning their lost friend, Sy assumed. He hadn’t liked Terrence, but he’d been alone in that. When Bertrand put a reassuring hand on the small of David’s back, Sy pretended to examine the gun. It wasn’t any of his business who David sought solace in. Not anymore.
The camp amounted to two overburdened rucksacks and a clumsily rolled tent. When the others had left the city, they’d brought everything in wagons and expected to stay in them; they hadn’t thought to pack for traveling on foot. Terrence’s pack was left behind. Sabina must have taken hers, wherever she went. He hoped she had returned to the city. He hoped David and Bertrand would, after what they had seen. He certainly wanted to.
He couldn’t.
David and Bertrand’s gathered sticks made an impressive pyre – or would have, if any of them could manage to light it.Bertrand, scraping his knife against a sharp rock and producing a few sparks, got the closest. Since the night air was mild and they didn’t need to cook, they soon gave up.
The three of them sat in silence, none too eager to eat, not even their own supposedly safe provisions. After what he had just witnessed, Sy was not sure he would ever hold an appetite again. He thought again of Sabina’s botched spell, of how the way it altered Anya should have been impossible.
Impossible, like a man’s insides rotting away in mere seconds?
Had the apple, the tree been bewitched? He didn’t think so. Based on Anya’s warnings, the tree’s magic was its own.
Sabina’s spell had been her own; the tea had been brought from Äbender. What had happened to corrupt her spell? In the calm, he thought he could feel a certain thickness to the air, almost like the clinging humidity in the city after a summer storm, though the forest air rang in his lungs clean and clear as a bell. It had a smell, like pine – that was the trees, of course – but something else, something bitter, something vivacious.
Was there a dark, vernal, untapped magic in the very air?
Or, he thought, pressing his fingers into the soft, damp dirt around the mossy stone he made his seat, was it found in something lower to the ground?
It was beyond him; none of it made any sense, and his aching head swam with the effort of trying to make it. He forced himself to swallow a stale piece of rye softened with a bit of water. Bertrand, meanwhile, had unearthed a bottle of rye whiskey from the depths of his rucksack. He offered Sy and David both a drink, but Sy declined. Though his nerves begged for it, though he was almost useless, he may still need to pen a spell, and thinner blood was the last thing he needed.
David was the first to break their silence. “We have to go home.”
His voice and gaze were steady. Sy recalled David’s almost eerie calm when his own back was shredded and seeping blood, unphased when even Anya’s hand had been clasped tightly in his. He had known the spell by rote.
Almost as if he had seen such violence before.
But where would he have seen it?
“We need to go back to Äbender,” David repeated. “You came here on foot, with the huntress. Do you know the way?”
“If I ever did, I don’t anymore. I lost hours today. I have no idea where we are.” He didn’t mention it, wary of frightening them further, but he had a sneaking suspicion the hours he lost were not due to his inexperience. A suspicion the forest would not be too keen to let them leave.
Already, he thought of the Lichtenwald as its own creature, sentient. Hungry.
He also didn’t mention the map.
Bertrand nursed the whiskey bottle, staring at the lantern they, hungry for light of any kind, had placed in the barren pile of sticks that would have been their fire. “I’m not leaving. If nothing else, this proves the magic here is even more volatile than we suspected. We’re closer than ever.”
At his dead-eyed stare, Sy frowned. “Are you completely unaffected by what we just saw?”
“Of course I’m not,” Bertrand said, heat creeping into his voice. “Unaffected enough to shoot the man.”
“I–” Sy faltered. Now both of them gazed at him, accusation written in bold letters upon their brows. “I’ve never even held a gun before. I panicked.”
David’s eyes narrowed. “You stopped me from eating the apple. Why?”
“Anya. Before we…parted ways, she warned me not to eat anything I hadn’t killed or brought myself. Now you have the same warning. As did Terrence, I might add.”
“You might, but that would be speaking ill of the dead.”
