On Wings of Chaos (Revenant Wyrd Book 5) (19 page)

But Uthia couldn’t follow those orders. She knew the humans, maybe interacted with them more than any of her dryad sisters or gnome brothers. While her race would continue on as long as there were forests, the humans were much more volatile. They needed help.

And so she found herself sheltered in an old stand of Averanym, gnomes who had gone to root, listening to the nightly rituals of her darkwood sisters. Uthia sat amongst the flowers and plants of the old Germinant Gobs of the Shadow Realm, allowing her soul to commune with them. Strangely, where the dryads of this realm were much more ruthless, darker, near chaotic, the gnomes were much nicer, softer, more understanding. She enjoyed their company, and might have taken roots with these dryads, if it weren’t for how they acted.

“Sister of the North,” Uthia heard a silken voice call to her just beyond the field of Averanym. It was Pushta, the leader of the darkwood dryads. “Are you going to join us?”

Uthia didn’t want to. She would rather sit here, trailing her stick-like fingers across the petals of one rather amiable Averanym, but she knew in order to gain the darkwood’s trust, she would have to join them.

“Of course,” Uthia said. She plastered a smile across her black lips and pushed to her feet. Her limbs creaked as she stood, like wind blowing through a forest. Her white bark skin was nearly glowing in the light of sunflowers scattered through the darkened wood. Her hair, a spill of green vines and leaves, was pulled back behind her shoulders.

Pushta held out her hand, smooth black with delicate fingers. The darkwood sisters were made of a polished ebonwood, black, shiny, and much more like a human than the woodland dryads of the Realm of Earth. Where Uthia had black orbs set in knotholes for eyes, the darkwood dryads had white orbs. Where the woodland dryads had leaves and vines for hair, the darkwood dryads were bald.

“What is it tonight?” Uthia asked, feigning interest and eagerness to help.

Pushta’s knothole ears twitched with Uthia’s voice. The slits where her nose should have been flared as Pushta scented the air, her head tilting back.

“Can’t you smell it, sister of the north?” Pushta asked, her voice husky with hunger.

Uthia couldn’t. “Yes,” she lied.

“A centaur has harmed a sister while she was at root,” Pushta said, leading Uthia on through veils of sunflowers, and along twisting paths deeper into the woods. The sound of the drums swelled around her, caressing her skin, calling the bloodlust from within her.

Uthia never knew such a feeling existed until she came to her darkwood sisters. Now it was something she was very familiar with. Each night there was some new bloodletting. Uthia shivered, not wanting to recount the rituals, knowing soon enough she would see another display of barbarism.

“Are you cold, sister?” Pushta asked. The words drove fear into Uthia’s heart with the thought of fire.

“No,” she whispered, her voice trying to mimic the lust in Pushta’s. “Just anticipating the ritual.”

“And here we thought our woodland sisters were prudes when it came to the more mysterious arts of the dryad.”

Before Uthia could answer, they had rounded another bend, and stood facing a clearing. Against a large slab of rock, standing straight up out of the ground, a centaur was tied, his arms behind him, his side pressed against the stone where thick strands of vines held him in place.

He was young. Uthia could smell his fear in the air. She could almost feel it whispering to her in a maddening sort of way. When his wild eyes locked on hers, she had to look away from the pleading she read in them.

Her eyes landed on a fire roaring in the center of the clearing, casting honeyed light on the centaur and the ebonwood dryads who stood too close to it. Uthia shivered. She would rather her sap freeze solid in the winter than stand so close to a fire. She remembered her aversion to Jovian using live wood in their fires, wood that hadn’t completely died in the forest. She could hear the screams of the wood as it took light. It was something she expected from a human, and though it saddened her when Jovian had burned wood that still had life in it, it made her near-crazy to think her darkwood sisters would go out into the forest and bring back living wood for their bonfires. To the darkwood dryads, any tree that couldn’t walk and talk was little better than the victims they blooded each night.

Her attention was drawn away from the fire only when Uthia noticed that Pushta was no longer beside her. The ebonwood dryad was sauntering through the crowd, and it parted before her like a black sea before a boat. When she neared the centaur, she slapped his rump, and when he jumped she laughed. The centaur turned wild eyes on the dryad. Uthia imagined he was already too far gone with fear of what would become of him to be saved. She kept her head up as though she was watching, but averted her eyes.

“This centaur has injured one of our sisters!” Pushta intoned, and the throng of darkwood dryads went silent. “Plucking fruit from her branches after she had gone to root! Daselbag is blind now, thanks to his
attack
.”

Uthia realized there was no such thing as a mistake when it came to the darkwood dryads. Each night there was a different victim tied to the stone, and each night their blades ran red with blood. Uthia’s eyes fell to the bottom of the rock, which was stained with years of blood from the dryad’s nightly rituals.

“What should we do with him, sisters?” Pushta asked, holding her hand out to the centaur as if she were exhibiting a prize.

“Death! Death! Death!” The chant started quietly, and then grew in strength until it nearly blotted out the drum beats.

“Just as I thought,” Pushta said, and then smiled. “Sister of the north, would you do the honors tonight?”

“No,” Uthia answered. The clearing went silent. “My blade,” Uthia said, trying to think quickly so her words didn’t offend the sisters she sought aid from. “It is not a leechblade, it will gain nothing from his blood.”

“Ah,” Pushta said. “How soon I forget. Very well.”

Pushta held her right arm down to her side, the fingers pointed like an arrowhead. Uthia observed the transformation, how Pushta’s arm lengthened and shaped into a blade. The sword popped out of her arm, and her ebonwood fingers closed around it. Uthia knew the feeling well, that moment when her wooden sword was fast in her hands, like a child born of her arm. Then a transformation Uthia wasn’t familiar with came over Pushta’s wooden sword. Fine hairs, like silken threads, grew from the blade’s edge, shivering in the drum beats.

A reverent silence fell over the clearing. Pushta stepped forward. Now that the dryads were silent and the drumming had stopped, Uthia could hear the crackling of the fire, the moans of the living wood burning to death. She could hear the centaur grunt, trying to be free of the corded vines that held him to the blood slab of stone.

As Pushta lay her sword across his haunches, he grunted louder, and the vines moaned under his flailing.

Uthia looked to her feet once more. She wanted badly to help this centaur, but she couldn’t. She knew if she tried, it wouldn’t end well for her. Uthia knew they wouldn’t attack her, because all dryad swords reacted to cutting wood the same way: by harming the attacking dryad. But there were other things they could do to her. Her eyes found the fire again, and she shivered. Again she felt like a prisoner, even though she was free to go whenever she wished.

“Do you feel that, centaur?” Pushta asked, stroking her hand down his sides as if trying to soothe a horse. The gesture was almost loving, but Uthia knew that to a creature far more intelligent than a mount, it was mocking. “My blade yearns for your blood. You harmed one of my sisters, gaining strength from the fruit of her flesh. Now we will gain strength from you.”

Pushta didn’t kill the centaur; there were many more dryads that needed to feed. She took the blade and slid it into his flesh, aiming to maim, instead. She closed her eyes in ecstasy.

Uthia glanced up as the centaur screamed. Pushta moaned. Where blood should have been spilling across the earth, instead the blade turned red. Slight veins within the ebonwood pulsed, drawing in the blood through the little hairs that were now spines, buried deep in the creature’s flesh, sucking his blood along its length. The veins throbbed with the intake of blood, coursing up the length of the sword and into Pushta’s arm.

“Such flavor,” she cooed.

Uthia wanted to be sick. She looked down at her feet. She didn’t hear the sword pull free from the centaur, but Uthia did hear the blades popping out of the arms of the darkwood tribe, waiting for their turn when their leader was done.

And then they were on the centaur, its wails carrying up to the moonless sky. With a laugh, Pushta stumbled up to Uthia, lurching into her as though she was drunk. She wrapped her arms around the woodland dryad, pulling her into a dance under a wash of sunflowers.

“Sister, you really should try it sometime!” Pushta crowed. She looked up to Uthia with eyes gone pink with blood.

Uthia’s lips pulled into a tight smile. Pushta stepped back, inhaled a deep breath, and her sword grew backwards into her arm. “And be at rest,” Pushta said. “We never planned on aiding your realm, until this afternoon when our new Guardian contacted us.”

Uthia had long figured she was wasting her time with them, but hadn’t been certain until that moment. “And you do her bidding?”

“Certainly,” Pushta nodded. “We may seem heathens to you, but we have the utmost respect for our Guardian.” Pushta’s mouth grew into a coy smile. “And she promised us all the troll and dwarf blood our leechblades could drink”

As if to punctuate her words, the centaur let out one final cry. Uthia looked in his direction, barely able to see him past the throngs of dryads. His neck arched and then lost all strength, collapsing. The vines cried under his dead weight.

Pushta hooted a call, raising her hands high above her head. The darkwood sisters stepped back, stumbling. Most of them eased themselves down to the ground, drunk on the power of the blood. Others danced with one another, whirling about in a frantic, chaotic fashion.

Uthia shivered.

“Bloodlust again, sister?” Pushta mocked. She knew well that Uthia didn’t approve of their customs.

“When do we head out?” Uthia asked.

“Tomorrow. We are to meet the ooslebed and the frement, and together travel north. You should go to root, get your rest.”

Uthia nodded. She turned from Pushta and made her way back to the field of Averanym. They were the only thing about this forsaken land that felt like home.

As she walked, she thought of the various creatures she had seen slain by the dryad’s leechblades since she came here, and Uthia vowed that if they continued the practice in the Realm of Earth, she would see them all dead.

“What’s this?” Sara asked, accepting the cooling cup of pale tea from Rosalee.

“Tea of lady’s toe. It will help flush the remnants of the stone from your system,” Rosalee told her. She gathered her wispy green dress around her and sat back down. Picking up a glass of snow water, she took a tentative sip. “I think I might go to drinking melted snow; much more refreshing than regular water,” she commented.

“Just don’t drink the yellow snow,” Dalah said. Grace snickered. Rosalee looked bewildered.

“Do we have enough of these herbs to go around?” Sara asked, leaning back in her wheelchair behind her desk. The window behind her framed mountain passes and dips and valleys that they hadn’t seen out there before the avalanche.

Rosalee shrugged. “I just started making the tea; I would have to check with your healer.”

“Alright, I’m putting you and Grace in charge of getting our wyrders back on their feet. Let me know what you need, and we will see if we can make it happen,” Sara said.

Rosalee nodded. “Just make sure any wyrders who aren’t currently sick don’t use their wyrd until the herb has run its course.”

“How will we know when we can use our wyrd?” Mag asked.

“You’ll stop peeing,” Rosalee said. “When you drink tea of lady’s toe, it will cause your body to produce urine until all of the illness or foreign debris is out of your body. In this case, just don’t use your wyrd until you return to normal. Also, drink plenty of water to help that out.”

Sara nodded. “Mag, what about the battlements and our soldiers?”

“All but two battalions are dug out, and we’re getting them in place and armed. However, I don’t think we’ll be able to get soldiers out to face them in time — the dwarves and their armies are too close for us to get out of the gates without potentially letting them in.”