Straken (38 page)

He entered the woods just as darkness was closing down, found a stand of wintry, gray-barked hardwoods that were virtually bereft of leaves, and settled down in a patch of heavy, coarse grass nestled between a pair of ancient trunks. Wrapped in his cloak, he put his back against one of the trunks and watched the onset of night steal away the last of the light.

When everything turned black, he listened to the ensuing hush. When the hush gave way to night sounds, he sat listening to those. When the sounds grew closer, a mix of clicks and huffs and low growls, he pressed harder against the tree trunk and brought the darkwand around in front of him for whatever protection it might offer.

And then the sounds evened out and smoothed over, surrounding him but not coming so close that he felt the need to move, and his eyes began to grow heavy, his breathing to deepen and slow, and finally, he slept.

W
hen he awoke, dawn had broken in a wash of familiar hazy gray light, and the surface of the surrounding land was covered in layers of vapor that ebbed and flowed across the contours of the terrain like an ocean’s waves across a rocky shore. He stared out into the all-but-invisible distance, to horizons that ended much nearer than they had the day before and revealed nothing of what they concealed, and he was immediately depressed.

He was hungry, as well, but there was nothing to eat or drink, or at least nothing on which he wished to take a chance. So he turned his efforts to stretching cramped limbs and aching muscles, to finding fresh ways to make the blood flow sufficiently that he could get to his feet and go on. He could barely tolerate the thought of it, his search beginning to take on the feel of an endless odyssey, one that might not have an attainable destination, but would simply lead him on until he was lost beyond recovery in a trackless wilderness.

He thought he might try to use his magic, to employ it to make contact with some of the vegetation or smaller creatures and see what he could learn. It was all well and good to give himself over to
the directional dictates of the darkwand, but it would be better if he could feel that he had some small control over his own destiny. Just being able to know a little something more of the world through which he passed might help. He didn’t yet have much confidence in his ability to get out of tight spots, and knowing that his magic could do more than make the darkwand’s runes dance about would go a long ways toward changing that.

He rose finally and looked about, peering through the gloom, trying not to breathe in the fetid smells of the deadwood and dank earth. The sky was lower today, more heavily clouded, as if rain threatened, and the mix of clouds and mist gave the sense of a sky and earth become joined. The way forward seemed immeasurable, a thick wall of gray that lacked any sense of up or down or sideways. He peered into it with trepidation and repulsion, then reluctantly set out.

He walked for a time, but could not seem to get clear of the woods. He was certain they did not stretch far and that he had set out in the right direction. But trees continued to materialize through the wall of the mist, their tangled limbs linked weblike overhead.

Finally he stopped, directed his thoughts toward his aunt, and held out the staff.

Nothing.

At first, he couldn’t believe it. Then he panicked. Had the magic of the darkwand ceased to respond to him? He shook his head. No, that couldn’t be. He turned to his left and tried again. Still nothing. He wheeled back in the direction from which he had come and tried a third time. This time, the runes flashed brightly in response.

He had gotten turned completely around.

Still a little afraid and not wishing to chance getting lost again, he kept the staff raised and his thoughts fixed and began to retrace his steps. He moved ahead carefully, watching where he placed his feet, taking note of the location of the trees, trying to form some sense of direction, even as he relied on the darkwand’s magic to keep him from wandering astray.

When he stepped from the woods finally, clear at last, he found himself in a stretch of heavy grasses and rotting logs interspersed with stagnant, scum-laced ponds. The smell was terrible. He wrinkled his nose and glanced about apprehensively, took a quick reading from the staff, and moved ahead.

He had gone only a short distance when he saw the bones. Gray and bare and broken, they lay scattered on a patch of bare earth. He stopped at once and stared at them. He did not know what kind of bones they were, but there were enough of them that he could tell that they came from more than one creature. From the number and their condition, he guessed they had been there for a long time.

He was in the middle of a feeding ground.

He looked about once more, suddenly aware of how quiet it was.
A good idea to move away from this place
, he thought.

Sliding left through the grasses, away from the bones, he walked as silently as he could toward another sparse copse of dead trees, trying to breathe evenly, to keep his head clear and his thoughts collected.
Don’t panic
, he told himself.
Whatever feeds here isn’t necessarily about
.

A high-pitched shriek stopped him in his tracks. A second responded to the first, and a third. They came from all sides, piercing and raw. A huge shape descended from the gloom, wings outstretched as it settled onto the log not twenty feet ahead of him. It was a vulturelike bird, its body as big as his own, its wingspan at least a dozen feet. He watched it land, wings folding against its back, its narrow head lowering.

When the head lifted a moment later, he saw that the bird had the face of a woman. But not any kind of woman he had ever seen. This woman had sharp, bony features, its mouth jutting and pinched in the manner of a beak and its eyes hard and birdlike. Its body and wings were covered with dark feathers, and its feet ended in huge, hooked talons that seemed too big for the rest of it.

Hunched so far over that it looked deformed, it sat on the log and watched him intently but made no move toward him. He held his ground a moment, then started to back away. But another shriek rose, and a second bird-woman swooped down right behind him, blocking his way. Then two more appeared, and two more after that, materializing out of the haze, wings flapping as they landed all about him, some on the ground, some on the limbs of trees. A dozen, at least, he saw, all watching him, gazes hard and fixed.

Harpies.

He swallowed hard. He knew what Harpies were; he had read stories of them in his father’s histories of the Four Lands. Vicious and unpredictable creatures, Harpies had been exiled to the Forbidding along with the other dark things in the time of Faerie. If memory
served him correctly, Harpies were flesh eaters that were said to have preyed on men and animals alike.

He glanced again at the talons of the one perched on the log in front of him and felt a fresh surge of panic. He needed to be somewhere else right away, but he didn’t know how he could manage that, encircled as he was. Some of them had started to edge closer, making small cooing sounds. They seemed pleased. They sounded eager.

“Get away!” he shouted at them, waving his arms threateningly.

Instantly, the runes on the darkwand flared, brightening like bits of fire, dancing up and down the wood. The Harpies shrieked and flapped their leathery wings, and those advancing paused. Pen shouted at them some more and tried to move through them, but they quickly adjusted to keep him in place. He swung the staff at them. The runes danced even more wildly. The Harpies flinched but held their ground.

Pen felt an overwhelming sense of desperation. He had to find something more effective. He remembered the dragon then and how his use of the wishsong had sent the runes flying off into the distance, luring it away. Perhaps that would work with the Harpies, as well. He didn’t have much control over how the magic worked, but it was all he could think of.

He began to sing boldly, as if he might force his way through his attackers by the sheer force of his voice. He sang snatches of phrases and bits and pieces of things that just came to him, hoping that something would work. It did. Rune images spun off the staff in a glowing swirl and soared skyward, forming bright, complex patterns against the dark ceiling of the clouds.

The Harpies watched as the images lifted into the sky but they did not follow.

Pen’s desperation increased. He didn’t know what more he could do. He kept singing, punctuating his increasingly frantic efforts with shouts and cries, looking for something that would drive the Harpies back. But, having seen that his magic was confined to pretty glowing images that danced and flew and did nothing more, the bird-women were advancing again. Their sharp eyes glittered in the dim light and their strange mouths worked slowly up and down, opening and closing hungrily.

Pen gripped the darkwand tightly in both hands and prepared to use it as a club. It was all he had left.

But just when it seemed that he was all out of chances, a dark shape appeared on the horizon, winging toward him, quickly growing larger and taking form. The dragon! It was tracking the rune images once more, following them to their source. How it had seen them from so far away, Pen couldn’t know. But it was flying right for where the greatest number circled and danced against the clouds overhead.

Their bright, hard eyes fixed on Pen, the Harpies didn’t see the dragon at first. Then the dragon screamed—there was no other word for it—and they swung about swiftly, necks craned, a fresh urgency in their posture. A few took flight immediately, but the rest hesitated, unwilling to abandon their prey.

Plummeting out of the sky with such swiftness that Pen, who had thought he might try to make a run for it, had no chance to do anything but stand and watch, the dragon dropped on them like a stone. It snatched up the Harpies the way a big cat might small birds, tearing them apart and casting them aside as fast as it could reach them. A few flew at the dragon with their wicked talons outstretched, but the beast simply crushed them in its huge jaws and flung them to the ground. The Harpies screamed and hissed and flapped their wings frantically, unable to escape.

One by one, the dragon killed them until only two were left, crawling about the blood-soaked earth and whimpering in despair. The dragon played with them, nudging them this way and that. Pen watched for as long as it took him to realize that he might be next, then slowly backed away. Rune images still danced and soared overhead, and fresh images leapt from the darkwand to whirl about the dragon like fireflies. If the dragon saw them, it gave no indication. For the moment, its attention was fixed on its new toys.

Pen reached the edge of the woods without the dragon taking notice and slipped into the trees. After he was well into them, he put the darkwand beneath his cloak, closed down his thoughts of his aunt, and waited for the runes to go dark.

Soaked in his own sweat, he pushed on, barely able to make himself move. He had thought the dragon safely gone. But it couldn’t have been far away if it had seen the rune images. That should have made him happy, since it had saved his life, but it only made him further aware of how vulnerable he was. He might be saved for the moment, but he would remain in peril until he was out of the Forbidding
and back in the Four Lands. Until then, his life span probably didn’t measure the length of his arm. He had to find his aunt, and he had to find her quickly or his luck would be used up.

He kept walking, refusing to look back, heading in the general direction he knew he had to go. He kept the darkwand lowered and inactive, afraid to do anything that would bring the runes to life.

He was half a mile away before he could no longer hear the crunching of bones.

N
o matter how often she scowled at him, he just wouldn’t stop talking about it.

“Such power, Straken Queen! Such incredible power! No one can match you—no one who is or ever was! I sensed you were special, I did, Grianne of the trees! When I first saw you from my hiding place and knew you for who you were, I knew, too,
what
you were! It was in your eyes and the way you carried yourself. It was in your voice when you first spoke to me. You awoke in a prison, sent by your enemies to be destroyed, and still you showed no fear!
That
is evidence of real power!”