30 Kythorn
We rested; Eldoth shared Viconia's time at watch. I suppose the two of us would have been too distracted. Only a short distance to the Iron Throne. Eldoth, Eldoth, Eldoth, I should have been thinking; and yet I still longed for Sarevok's death.
"This forest has a sense of evil about it."
Giant wyverns burst out of the wood in front of us that morning, one with a cow still in its claws. Not babies. Huge. There wasn't even time to be afraid of them.
"Get back!" Shar-Teel stepped under cover of the trees; not out of fear, it was easy to tell—but because of delay. Eldoth, though, was still in the open; he looked up, started running—and they swooped down. Shar-Teel cursed.
"Bows!" she ordered. I need to save most of my good arrows for Anchev; having Eldoth to help us doesn't stop that fact. I aimed a flaming arrow, which blazed into its burning oil of impact in the wyvern's black flesh. The beady eyes of the giant beast started to turn on me.
Shar-Teel's crossbow and Viconia's bullets were next to hit. Eldoth was singing a spell; and then Edwin cast.
A fireball scorched the clearing. I was on the edge, able to roll away, only a part of my hair singed; poor Eldoth cried out.
"Ha! Take that! Your worthless lives end at my power!" Edwin cried jubilantly. Garrick and Imoen, too, had used spells; but neither seemed powerful next to that one. Eldoth was burned, I saw—and the wounded wyvern was almost upon him.
"I don't know how much longer I can bear the company of so many fools!" I was trying to help him; he sung, and a pale light gathered about his right hand. For an instant he lurched forward, thrust his hand toward the wyvern's side; and suddenly his skin was its normal light tan again. The creature howled. He ran for cover as the wyvern snapped at him, its flesh torn and the curve of its neck beginning to sink down.
"Gotcha!" It was an acid arrow from Imoen; the first wyvern finally collapsed. "What? I totally picked it up from a dead ettercap! And you should've given it to me anyway!"
The second. Ajantis fought it: knight against wyvern, his shield raised again, Shar-Teel's crossbow peppering it. It ripped into his armour with a claw, knocking him back. Shar-Teel swore again.
"Pathetic, boy," she was sneering, drawing her sword. She attacked, darting free of its claws; I used my bow, Imoen her fire spell. The wyvern kept screaming while we took it down; its barbed tail turned a tree into so much stray bark and leaves. Ajantis healed himself, rose, brought his sword against it again; Imoen sent two quick acid-arrows in a row, and it fell like a giant oak.
Edwin stepped forward to examine his handiwork. "Splendid," he said. He plucked a burned leaf from its branch to admire. "(Ah, now just wait until they're sleeping peacefully...then BOOM.)"
"Wizard, any nearby mine-guard would have seen that spell's light," Shar-Teel said.
"And need I remind you that injuring one's allies is hardly a display of competence?" Eldoth said. "Why, if it was not for the lovely..."
"Silence, male, my healing's reserved for our leader this day," Viconia said.
"Watch and learn, child. Watch and envy." Edwin gloated, quietly, to Imoen.
"Just wait 'till you see the one I got from the bandit camp, I bet it's even better," Imoen said serenely. "Y'know, Eddie, all this running around casting spells in the middle of battles, all the deadly danger and the assassins after Skie's head on a platter...it really makes you better at it, doesn't it? Sort of fixes the spells right into your brain."
"I don't take advice from tavern maids pretending to be hedgewizards."
"See, you've gone to casting the Fireball-which-you-should-really-share-because-sharing-is-nice, and I've gotten so much better you're afraid I'll catch up soon, and I reckon it's all the fighting that did it."
"As if—I have been tutored in the art of manipulating the Weave since before I could walk! I was sung lullabies listing spell components! (Eye of newt and toe of frogge, wool of bat and tongue of dogge...) Practiced the standard somatic movements since I could understand verbal instruction! Educated at the greatest academies of Thayvian magics! (It is a mild technicality preventing my long-awaited graduation.) You're deep in denial, child."
"And still: I'm definitely catching up. Or go look at the bard over there, he's got turn-wyverns-into-toads spells..."
"...Be quiet you insufferable simian!"
I was trying to read the map, while walking, I think. We should have been nearing the bridge; the forest was quiet around us. Green surrounded us in every direction, a mass of dark and bright leaves, each delicate and individual as the trees from whence they came and precious and alive. A line of a Sylvan poem flew to my lips: Green-mother, green-circle, all that is will be—Growth-mother, the tree-home, badmen come with iron and stone— Those were not the words I deciphered at Candlekeep.
There was nobody around. Only the trees, the grass, the water that fed them. Not only each leaf, each blade of grass impinged itself upon awareness: each growth-pattern, each root-path below the earth, each play of dappled light and shadow upon its thin stalk...
The giving of life. This was where life began; in the rich soil, clays and fragments of iron and packed roots and bodies, not dead but still-living, giving strength to all planted within, teeming with squirming, vital worms and ants and beetles travelling through, offering their services and nourishment. If only I had given more thought to these questions before.
Home. True-home, the acorns holding the life; defend the forest from all encroaching. It would be safe, here. Alone in the peaceful clearing, the awareness of the green constantly beating like a single heartbeat; alone, except for Oak-mother. I walked through the trees.
Further into the clearing waited a woman. A painted woman, not quite a real woman (but she was very real), brush-strokes capturing the lines of her hair, her face the image come to life, the marks of the paint-brush and even the painter's thumb visible on her body. Her canvas. I knew her; I used to see it almost every day of my life before Brilla had it moved to a dark corner of the attics, and even then I went up sometimes to look at it. Her painted black hair flew long and alive in the wind; and her slender arms moved from her side to beckon. She looked out of eyes as green as grass, sparkling by a dot of pale white paint in their centre.
'Mother' was her name. Her arms were not insubstantial, made three-dimensional. The same lines of paint covered both sides, the underside of her fingers identical to their surface.
Do you miss me, Skie, she sung.
The familiar portrait; living and breathing as she must have been, once. At least two heads taller than me, large enough to completely embrace—though I was told once that she was small like me in build. That was not thought of.
I never knew y/Of course I do.
In the forest where nobody could hurt anyone. In the arms of a mother, not one of several nurses. The trees were slowly singing, holding notes that could last a hundred years, creating steady and flawless harmonies with each other.
Do you want to know of your father?
Then a squirrel bit my rear.
"Ow!" Scampering off into the trees again, it was, a vivid red streak on the ground. There wasn't anyone here any more—yet my bow was drawn and ready. I'd dropped my pack. Something strange.
I hadn't looked behind, and there were those in the party who walked with natural silence. "Lil'alurl!" Viconia's hammer hit me. Disorientating, horribly aching; I turned to face her and she kept attacking. She did not know me; I ran.
Edwin was wandering about the trees.
"Yes, my fine beauty," he muttered to himself. "Observe my perfect form and immense prow—"
"Skie! Look out!"
An acid arrow flew narrowly above my head. Ajantis ran from the trees, a gauntleted hand raised.
"Red Wizard, if I must hurt you thus, learn the penalty of evil!" Magic missiles promptly flew into him; he gasped and punched Edwin in the face nonetheless. "For the glory of Helm!"
Edwin fell, bleeding. "Nottheface(nottheface)(nottthheee..." He slumped to the grass, seemingly unconscious. Ajantis had probably enjoyed that rather too much.
"What do you think you're doing?" I cried.
"That you ask demonstrates your freedom from it," Ajantis said. "It is a vile and frightening illusion of this evil creature of the forest! Aid me in this battle!"
"My mother—"
"I too saw visions," he said quickly. "Through Helm's grace we are freed!"
Viconia had found us. Her sling began to whistle through the air; I leapt behind a tree, and Ajantis covered himself with his shield.
"Cease!"
Garrick's voice commanded a storm of magic missiles.
"Ilharess? Ilharess, usstan—" Viconia had used the first word to refer to Shar-Teel; Matron, Matron I, if usstan was a corrupted amin— "Iblith! Uk zhah ussta'dalninuk!" Her body scorched, she began casting something, calling Shar's name.
"Friends!" Garrick called to us.
"Garrick? Garrick, we—" Viconia's command bound me to the ground. Ajantis was coming, too late; a slingshot hit me in the side of my head. There were stars.
"A charming knight; his lady's ribbon; a fair lance in the wood—" Garrick sung. I found myself able to raise my head; a stream of blood ran from my scalp.
"Abbil," she declared, looking at Garrick with the closest to a soft expression we had ever seen in her scarlet eyes. Then she shook her head as though to clear it. "Iblith! You deceive me! Tell me now, male, who must be executed for this?"
"A...hamadryad." Ajantis pronounced the word carefully. "I cannot see her now."
"The opposite direction from which she sent us! Once more unto the breach dear friends!" Garrick panted. Brave of him. We dashed into the trees beside him, Ajantis slow in his armour. A sense of unease grew around us, as though the forest had become suddenly dark, and yet it was still perfect daylight.
Garrick hummed a half-song, coarse but a melody of sorts. Focusing on that, the call of the forest was less apparent; he aided us, the song preserving our selves.
There was a clearing. A woman, all we could see within it at that distance, standing with arms raised, crying out—a green-haired woman with skin the colour of bark, not-the-mother-not-really, incredibly beautiful. She gestured before herself, shrieking incomprehensibly. An arrow whistled past her head; she raised her right hand, and a yell I recognized from Imoen sounded out. I ran to it.
Eldoth was covered in vines. Suspended between two trees, caught about the arms and legs, one wide strand winding ever thicker at his neck, most of his body already smothered by harsh green. Worse, Shar-Teel was advancing jerkily toward him, her sword ready.
Shouting, he struggled against the bonds and a pale beam came from his hands; the green woman howled in pain, and for another moment Shar-Teel's dreadful progress was delayed.
Mother-curious-green-mother-you-leave.
The painted woman's visage was suddenly laid over the green face, rippling, gradually solidifying.
—
A harsh, harped discord. The woman wavered, and was the hamadryad once again. Garrick. Varscona struck; the hamadryad's skin was as tough as wood. Some sap oozed from her.
"Help—" Imoen was being pulled into a muddy stream by the vines binding her. Her head barely remained above the water and thick dirt. "Teeth!" Magic seemed to crackle about her pink head. She screamed again. I saw Ajantis, rushing to her.
Fighting the hamadryad. Shar-Teel, turning back to defend her. I could not win there; a second stab to the attacker, and I ran as Shar-Teel's tutoring prescribed. Viconia's sling aimed behind us.
The spell holding Eldoth was finite. He was working himself free enough to cast again, labouring against being strangled. Eventually an acid arrow hit the hamadryad, just as Shar-Teel's sword stuck for an instant on a branch slightly above my head. Garrick's song seemed to grow louder, and Viconia had the hamadryad cry out again. Then she disappeared.
"Reveal yourself foul creature!" Ajantis fiercely scanned the horizon for the hamadryad; Imoen, gasping and muddy, was pulling herself up on the bank. I ran away from Shar-Teel.
The hamadryad was there. Ajantis' sword hit the riverbank; Imoen rolled out of its way. She called for help again.
A stroke of fortune. The path of Shar-Teel's blade paused; she lowered it, and shook her head. "Useless male dungheap!" she yelled, and went for Ajantis and Imoen.
I saw the hamadryad teleporting again to the far side of the clearing, her face and hands moving. A good arrow, to disrupt her spell. Again, Garrick's song guiding the aim. Eldoth's magic. It was some time before we could defeat her.
She teleported a last time, and fell prone to the grass. Dark sap flowed from her body.
Shar-Teel held Ajantis face-down in the mud, his sword discarded some distance away. Imoen slowly drew herself up, brushing dirt from her mage's robe, running a hand across her face and hair and smearing them dark brown.
"I think—I am myself once more—by Helm I cannot breathe—" Ajantis' armoured feet kicked frantically. Shar-Teel finally let him up.
"The fish had teeth the fish had teeth—" There was blood on Imoen's ankles.
"It's all right—" I said.
"No it's not, I lost the cloak—" She scrabbled back in the mud. "Really big teeth—"
"More likely some fragment of a thornbush," Ajantis scoffed.
"I know teeth when I see them! Feel them. I—" She tugged at the cloak's fabric, beginning to lift it from the mire. "Ha. So at least I—"
Two black, spiderlike pincers rose from the mud; and glowing white teeth shone not far below the water. It snapped upward and grasped half the cloak in the jagged pincers. A tearing sound seemed to echo between all the trees. Imoen stumbled back from the stream with a few ragged threads left in her hand. The thing with teeth disappeared once more.
Ajantis closed his mouth.
"Let us not speak of this again."
Viconia summoned us to the hamadryad's body; with some effort, she turned it over.
"It is not the first time she has been wounded." There were the dark marks of oozing sap where we had hurt her; but older, jagged marks also lined the dryad's brown skin. She looked like an old patchwork doll, shorn of life.
"I have heard sung that a dryad feels each stroke of the axe to her tree," Garrick said.
"How weak," Viconia said. "Your surface so-called 'forests' disgust me."
"She may bear the evil of the Iron Throne upon her body," Garrick said; and there was a large, dark scar to her lower back, a deep and roughly circular stain. A broken path led to it. "Perchance she would only that all humans would leave her alone..."
"And perchance she didn't bother to mention that!" I said. "She regenerated from those, let's make sure she's finally dead!" One dismembers things, and throws the parts into fire, in the stories.
She seemed almost like a human woman lying there, and we cut her to splinters. The broken parts of a person are so hard to tell apart after a certain point. Fingers, bits of arm, bits of leg, strands of grass-hair falling, dark sap everywhere. A fairly quick wood-chopping job, with all of us.
—