Page 27

“Maybe it’s just a goose,” Yudit whispered. “A swamp goose. Geese hiss.”

A ten-foot-tall scaly creature emerged from the underbrush. Raindrops slid down its squamous hide. Creepers and vines caught on its long deerlike antlers as it stalked toward us.

Other than the antlers and scales, it looked something like a duck. “Well,” Yudit said, “I wasn’t that far off.”

A pair of grotesquely misshapen wings flapped uselessly on its back. It opened its beak to reveal sharp, gleaming fangs.

My sister leapt forward, dagger in hand, and the duck thing swung its antlers at her, knocking her aside into the mud.

“Yudit!” I threw myself in front of her, trying to keep those fangs away from her neck. The monster hissed again, its gaping beak darting at me.

Sunbeam reared up and lashed out with a hoof. It caught the monster square in the chest. Scales cracked. An oily yellow liquid oozed out.

“Go on!” the horse cried. “Get! There’s more where that came from!”

The monster glared at Sunbeam, who glared right back.

With a final disdainful hiss that seemed to imply we weren’t worth the trouble, the creature scampered off into the depths of the swamp, flexing its malformed wings.

“What the hell was that?” Yudit asked, standing up and clutching her side.

“An elwetritsch,” the horse said as he once again calmed Stinky, who’d tried to run away and gotten herself caught in a thicket. “A juvenile, fortunately. The adults can grow to be twice that size. Keep an eye out; it might have been a loner, but where there’s one, there’s usually more.”

That didn’t portend well for our future.

When the storm died down at last, we hiked into the swamp. The water grew less brackish away from the shore. The ground never became reliably solid, though. Dense woodlands grew out of ankle-deep sludge, and the sodden canopy dripped on our heads with relentless persistence. Water and earth and plants mixed together in unpredictable ways. A winding pathway through the cypress trees might suddenly become a pit of sucking mud. Progress was slow. We had to test every step to make sure it would hold our weight. That made riding no faster than walking, so the four of us proceeded side by side. Which was just as well, since the damp was making Sunbeam’s bursitis act up.

I began to worry we wouldn’t get to the Red Empire on time. We’d made arrangements to meet Lulach there. What would he do if we were days late? Or weeks late?

What would he do if we never arrived at all?

Unnerving sounds from all around kept us constantly on edge. The growl of an unseen creature lurking in the branches above us. The wet rasp of something slithering through the mud. I smelled unfamiliar musky odors and the stench of scat. Once we came upon a mound of dung piled higher than my head. I didn’t care to run into anything with a digestive system capable of producing that.

Yudit was able to scout ahead sometimes, withering the vegetation into a clear path. Although of course it sprang back up again as soon as I tried to follow, my power canceling the effects of hers. And Stinky kept falling behind the rest of us. She came to an abrupt stop at every puddle, convinced that they were bottomless chasms and she would plunge to her death if she so much as gingerly tapped one with a hoof. Sunbeam chivvied her along as best he could, treating her with the same mix of exasperation and affection someone might show a clumsy pet cat that keeps falling off the countertops.

I did enjoy the flowers that bloomed around me whenever Yudit went scouting. Very different from the ones I was used to growing, including a stunning variety of orchids.

It grew dark after an hour or so. We made camp as best we could. Sunbeam, Yudit, and I agreed to split watches, but we all got so little sleep it hardly mattered. Stinging, biting insects beset us at all hours. The horses got the worst of that. A tail slap could only reach so far. Every noise jarred me awake, be it an animal grunt, a drip of water, or a snapping twig. Once, I saw a set of seven noctilucent eyes staring at us through the trees, but by the time I shook Yudit’s shoulder and pointed, they were gone.

In the morning, we trudged onward. Or tried to, anyway. Our route looped, twisted, and doubled back as we meandered around endless obstacles—deadfalls, treacherous quagmires, scum-covered lakes. The cypress woods frequently gave way to flat, open expanses of waving grass crisscrossed by sluggish streams. Sometimes, what looked like a meadow turned out to be a pond choked with duckweed. I stepped into knee-deep water more than once.

When there was sunlight, we were surrounded on all sides by brilliant emerald green. But it faded to a dull greenish gray if the skies were cloudy, which they were more often than not. The cloud cover was usually thick enough to obscure the sun completely, making navigation difficult.

Around noon, a pair of enormous snakes swam toward us across a glassy mere. I wasn’t sure if they were magical creatures or simply ordinary snakes of unusual size, but it hardly mattered. They were as thick around as culvert pipes. Their mouths gaped open large enough to swallow the horses without much effort. Yudit vomited forth a veritable feast of frogs and toads to distract them, and we ran off while the snakes chased the amphibians down.

We’d been lucky so far. If the elwetritsch’s parents had shown up, or if the snakes had preferred our flesh to the frog buffet, we wouldn’t have stood much of a chance. We were almost too worn out to walk, much less fight something truly dangerous.

The cheese and carrots were long gone. The horses were able to forage on grasses, and I could bring up some edible plants. But that didn’t do much good for my sister, who shriveled them to nothing when she came near. Even if I was standing directly beside her, Yudit couldn’t touch any fruits and vegetables I produced unless they’d been dried, milled, fermented, or otherwise rendered unwitherable. A salad grown with my magic would turn into brown sludge before it reached her mouth. And there was nothing else to eat. She’d be in trouble soon unless we figured something out.

None of us had gotten enough sleep, and a full day after the shipwreck we were still soaking wet. We trudged through the mud with sluggish, plodding steps. The horses’ heads were drooping, their breaths heavy and quick.

By midafternoon, I was thinking seriously about calling for an early stop. That might set a dangerous precedent, though. I could see us covering less distance each day, getting more tired the longer we took. Until one day we stopped moving altogether.

Yudit was prodding the ground with the toe of her boot, testing whether it was solid or liquid. I reached for her shoulder, planning to tell her to rest, when we heard a bellowing voice.

“Help!” it called out in a deep bass rumble. “Is anybody there? Help!”

We all went still. Yudit paused mid-poke.