Forest of Illusions (The Broken Prism) (19 page)

“Familiars can track their masters almost anywhere,” Tess explained. “I just wasn’t sure if they were going to or not since we’re headed somewhere so dangerous, but I guess they
are
supposed to act in our best interest, and abandoning us is hardly helpful.”

“Well it’s good to have you here with me.” Hayden patted Bonk on the head. “Especially since
it’s Cinder I’m hoping to save, and I’ll need your help for sure.”

Bonk nodded gravely, though he looked much more lively and like his typical self. Hayden guessed that he was glad to be doing something productive and it was giving him more energy.

Even Oliver looked relieved to have Slasher back with him, stroking his sleek, scaly back with one hand and scowling as his stomach growled with hunger. Hayden guessed that Oliver hadn’t had to skip too many meals at the Trout estate.

“We’d better head out, in case the
Fias have already sent search parties after us,” Zane forced himself to his feet and drained his canteen, heading to the pond to refill it before they left. There was too much truth in his words to ignore, so the others followed suit without even discussing the possibility of breakfast.

“Does anyone actually know how to get to the Forest of Illusions?” Tess asked after they’d been walking for an hour, shading her eyes from the rising sun.

Oliver shrugged nonchalantly and said, “We need to head southwest until we get around the horn in Amvale, then we turn north again. If we have to do the entire journey on foot it’ll take weeks, so we’ve got a while before we need to worry about detailed directions.”

With that grim prospect facing them they continued on through the heat of the day, avoiding major roads whenever possible and sticking near clusters of trees for shelter from the sunlight.

“I’m starving and I’m pretty sure my entire head is sunburnt,” Zane grumbled during one of their few breaks, leaning against a tree and sipping at his water sparingly. They hadn’t passed another river or clean-looking body of water since they left school, and were trying to conserve their supply as well as possible despite the energy-sapping heat and humidity of high-summer.

They’d sent the dragons out hunting for food
hours ago, but as they had been crossing mostly through fields all day, there was little game to be had. Bonk occasionally found a vole or a groundhog, but became overexcited and gobbled his prey up without remembering to bring it back to them, with the result that Bonk was stuffed by the time they set up camp and the rest of them were ravenous.

“Most worthless dragon ever,” Oliver grumbled mutinously as Bonk burped and coughed up a small bone. “From now on,
Boink is banned from hunting for us, or we’ll starve to death while he gets fat.”

“His name is Bonk,” Hayden scowled at his nemesis,
who hadn’t become any friendlier once they’d spent an entire day walking in the blistering summer heat with no food and little water.

Oliver shrugged off the correction and sat down on the ground, hunched over in fatigue. He looked like he’d aged twenty years, wit
h new lines of fatigue creasing his face. They hadn’t been able to find any good clusters of trees for cover, so they had to settle for a low-spot in the valley they walked through, a natural dip in the terrain that made them hard to see unless someone else descended into the valley as well.

“Can’t you just translocate yourself to a decent town and get us some supplies?” Zane eyed Oliver warily, watching the sky for signs of Slasher, who had not yet returned from his hunt.

Oliver clenched his jaw and looked a little embarrassed when he admitted, “I can’t do a full, proper translocation yet. It only worked inside Mizzenwald because I was using pre-set wards to manage it; the Masters leave them drawn around the castle to help train mastery-level students before we’re allowed to learn to do it on our own.”

“Great.” Zane rolled his eyes. “I’m nearly out of water and I’m
getting parched.”

“The sun is going down, so that should help a little,” Tess spoke up, sharing her water with Mittens and glancing up at the sky.

“You know, we don’t make very good runaways,” Zane smirked humorlessly. “We didn’t think to pack anything useful—weapons notwithstanding.” He nodded to Hayden. “Oh sure, I remembered to bring plenty of underwear, but no food or water, nor a decent map.”

“It’s not like we had a time to run down to the kitchens, explain why we needed food and water to go, and then pack it and leave,” Tess said in a placating voice
, trying to soothe them all. “Besides, things will get better once we clear these fields. We’ll either find a town, or maybe some woods where I can bow-hunt.”

Hayden nodded wearily. “That’s right, we just have to hold out for a little while longer,” he said, trying to keep everyone’s spirits up. This was, after all, his stupid idea in the first place.

The atmosphere brightened slightly when Slasher returned to them with a dead rabbit clutched in his talons. Hayden was careful to keep Bonk away from it as the other dragon deposited it at his master’s feet and eyed them all imperiously, as though to say,
What have
you
chumps caught today?

“Great, now we just need to skin it and cook it.” Zane looked aro
und at the others, clearly angling for volunteers.

Hayden grimaced and said, “My mom always did the cooking at home, so I don’t really know how to dress a rabbit
properly…”

They turned
in unison to Oliver, who gave them a haughty look and said, “Do you honestly think my family had me doing servant’s work?”

Of course,
Hayden mentally kicked himself,
we’re going to starve to death because we’re all too stupid to properly prepare our own food…

“I’ll do it, if someone has a knife,” Tess sighed, looking around at them all. Oliver handed her a fancy-looking dagger from his belt that must have been an heirloom of some sort, because it didn’t look like it had ever been used before for its intended purpose.

“You know what you’re doing?” Zane asked tentatively, which earned him a scowl from Tess.

“Of course I do—it’s just me and my dad
at home. If you don’t pull your weight around my house, you don’t eat.” She stuck the knife into the rabbit and executed a series of quick strokes that somehow opened it up from one end to the other. “One of you start a fire,” she commanded, and Hayden hastened to obey, using a clear diamond prism so that he could control the intensity and contain the flames.

Tess bent the creature’s legs back and they heard a series of sickening snaps as she pulled the meaty parts away from the skin, juices running down her hands. If it grossed her out, she didn’t show it, simply moving with mechanical precision until she’d removed all of the meat, which they dangled over the fire to cook
on sticks. She gave most of the organs to their familiars, who ate them raw and then sniffed about for more.

“Sorry, we only
have the one rabbit,” she informed Mittens, pouring a bit of water from her canteen over her hands to wash the blood off of them before wiping them on her pants. They left a red-brown streak on the cloth.

It took a while to cook, their stomachs growling all the while, but when they finally tore into it Hayden could swear it was the best thing he’d ever tasted, though
probably only because he was so hungry. There wasn’t a lot of meat to split between four people, so they ultimately went to bed hungry, but no one complained about it since there was nothing to be done until morning.

They didn’t have much luck on their second day of walking, and all of them ran out of water by the end of the day, wondering if the infernal fields
around Mizzenwald would ever end. They tracked their direction by the sun’s progress through the sky, so Hayden was confident that they were at least headed south, but without food or water they all became surly and no one spoke much.

On the third day they found a large copse of trees and shrubbery that looked promising, and hurried into it in search of water. Zane found some berries that he claimed were edible, and after eating a handful of them and not dying, the others were brave enough to try them as well. Zane conjured a bow a
nd arrows for Tess after she spotted a deer, and she set off in pursuit of it after insisting that she would be fine and that the others would only scare away her prey if they came with her because they were such loud walkers.

Hayden found a small spring and everyone eagerly filled up their canteens and drank their fill while they waited for Tess to return, and not even Oliver complained about the possibility of water-borne illnesses this time.

Hayden kept an eye on the sun’s progress through the sky, though it was difficult within the shelter of the trees, growing more and more worried for Tess with each passing hour. Just as he was getting ready to demand that they ignore her directions and go search for her, she came tromping through the underbrush with Mittens at her heels.

“I got it,” she said tiredly, sinking down beside the trickling water and accepting Hayden’s full canteen, upending it and drinking it without pause until it was empty. “Ah, that’s better.” She handed it back to him and he filled it again from the small stream, along with hers.

“I don’t see any deer with you,” Oliver frowned at her, and Tess pointed back in the direction she came from and said, “It’s far too heavy for me to drag. Mittens, get something to drink and then take the dragons back there to collect it for us. They should be able to carry it between the two of them.”

The thought of Bonk and Slasher trying to carry a deer much larger than both of them combined was a little startling, but he knew better than to argue with Tess
, who was clearly better at living off the land then the three of them combined. Oliver shrugged and watched the familiars depart, while the rest of them enjoyed their respite from the heat. Relaxing in the shade with all the water and food they could eat had already raised their spirits considerably.

“So, do we actually have a plan for what to do when we get to the Forest?” Zane asked, apparently drawing energy to think about what lie ahead now that he wasn’t thirsty.

“It depends on how things look when we get there,” Oliver explained. “The Forest of Illusions didn’t get that name for being easy-to-navigate. If it’s surrounded by sorcerers then we’re going to have a hard time getting in without killing them. If they haven’t completely breached the Forest yet then we’ll have room to hide out inside, as long as we keep our familiars close by to guide us.”

Ha
yden had spent time in the Forest of Illusions at the end of last year, and had hoped never to return; ‘eerie’ was the nicest thing it could be called, in his opinion. It was a strange place full of deceptions and illusions, with animals that were constantly changing shape and were too smart for their own good. He supposed it would be better with Bonk there, and knowing that his friends wouldn’t be crippled by a faulty Resonance Crystal this time around, but it still wasn’t an inviting prospect by any means.

“Do you think we’ll re
ally have to kill people to get inside?” Tess frowned. “Maybe we can sneak past without them seeing us…we’ve got magic that will help hide us.”

“And they’ve got magic that will detect us,” Oliver countered
. “We’re headed into a war zone: if you don’t think you have the stomach to do what it takes, then go back to Mizzenwald now.”

Tess glowered at him but said nothing. Zane looked mildly ill, and Hayden thought he knew how his friends were feeling. The prospect of going up against fully-trained sorcerers who knew strange magic they’d never seen before and would be aiming to kill was not exactly how he’d choose to spend his summer vacation.

But I
did
choose this,
he amended.
And for whatever insane reason, they chose to come with me.

“We were
doing extra combat practice up until the Fias showed up and put a hold on weapons,” Hayden spoke aloud. “We’re as prepared as we can be. When the time comes, we’ll figure something out…somehow.”

Fortunately Bonk and Slasher returned with the dead deer then, casting a shadow over the bushes as they flew. They looked odd carrying such a large creature in their tiny talons, but neither dragon seemed to be overexerting itself, and Mittens led the way on the ground until they were back amongst their masters. Hayden couldn’t help but admire that Tess had taken the deer in one shot, the arrow shaft still sticking out of its chest.

This time Tess didn’t wait for anyone to volunteer assistance, taking Oliver’s knife again without even asking permission and hacking into the deer with alarming efficiency. Oliver built the fire (with wood, not magic), though he kept shooting furtive glances at Tess while she worked, like he wasn’t sure what to make of her. After cutting off decent-sized steaks for each of them and setting them over the fire, she excused herself into the woods to use the bathroom.

Zane took the opportunity to turn to Hayden and say, “Remind me never to make Tess angry when she’s holding a knife.
She even makes Oliver’s heirloom dagger look lethal.”

“Too true,” Hayden mumbled in response, thinking that she could skin them all within five minutes if she
ever put her mind to it. Even Oliver looked like he had a greater respect for her now that he’d seen her at work, and Hayden felt an odd stab of possessive pride in her, though he had nothing to do with her success.