In this case, we hadn’t needed to travel to the hilltop in the Chilterns to make the gate, but since we were gating to an unknown location, it helped. Variam ended up doing most of the heavy lifting—out of the four of us, he’s the best with gate magic by a long way—while I gave advice. “All right,” Variam said at last. “Ready?”
I drew my sword an inch from its scabbard, testing that it could be drawn easily, then let it drop back. “Ready.”
Variam opened the gate, and we stepped through into a scene out of fantasy.
I don’t know what I’d expected the Hollow to be like. When we’d been sitting in Arachne’s cave, the name and her description of its owner had given me a mental image of twisted trees, dark and close. My divinations had given me a more accurate picture, but I’d been concentrating on dangers and paths, not stopping to look at the view. I hadn’t been prepared for how beautiful it was.
We’d stepped out onto a grassy clearing in the middle of light woodland. Most of the trees were the same green, thicketlike ones we’d seen on the hilltop on the Chilterns, but they seemed bigger and stronger, more real somehow, their leaves more bright, the branches more thick. Pathways of packed dirt wound through the trees, roots showing through the earth, and flowered bushes formed clumps on the grass.
To our right was blue sky. And to the left was orange sky, and ahead was green sky, and behind was violet sky, but that wasn’t what made Anne and Luna widen their eyes and instinctively take a step closer together. There was sky under us too. Our feet were resting on grass, but only a dozen yards away the ground dropped away into nothingness, and we could see more sky to the left and right. We were on a floating island.
“Wow,” Luna said, her eyes wide.
“Okay,” Variam said. “That’s impressive.”
I couldn’t help myself. I walked towards the edge.
“Alex!” Anne called warningly.
I stopped a foot or two from the lip, watching the futures carefully for any sign of it crumbling, and peered over. There was nothing there. Sky and clouds, going on forever, both above and below, and I felt a moment of dizziness as my brain tried to make sense of it. The sky wasn’t supposed to be on every side—
A hand closed around my arm and I snapped back to reality. The grass and earth seemed to sway for a second, then steadied. “I think maybe,” Anne said, “you shouldn’t stand so close.”
“Maybe you’re right,” I said, stepping back. Anne didn’t let go until I was well away.
“How does it stay up?” Luna asked in fascination.
“I’m not sure it is staying up,” I said. The island had little peninsulas sticking off into space, and I could see the earth on the underside of them. Tree roots stuck out below, branching into empty air. “I think it’s staying in the middle.”
“What happens if you fall?” Variam asked.
“Let’s not find out.”
We walked deeper into the shadow realm. Birds sang from the trees, and red and orange roses grew in clumps. There was a faint breeze, just warm enough to be pleasant. Despite how it had looked, I was realising that this was quite a small shadow realm; the boundary had probably been no more than a hundred feet from where the ground ended. Up ahead, a much larger tree loomed up above the canopy, gnarled branches spreading wide to shade the grass beneath. “That’s where we need to go,” Variam said.
We’d walked into a clearing, and as we did I held up a hand. Luna, Anne, and Variam halted instantly and I looked from left to right. Dense trees formed a half circle around us, with more of the rosebushes clustered at their trunks. The grass was a bright green, with vivid crimson flowers scattered in patches here and there, and at the far end the ground rose up slightly into piles of moss-covered rocks.
“She here?” Variam asked.
I nodded, not taking my eyes off the trees.
“Alex,” Anne said warningly. “Those plants . . .”
“I know.”
“So you still planning to talk?” Variam said. “Or are we skipping to the part where we burn things?”
I took a step forward. “Despoina Karyos,” I said, clearly and loudly. I hoped I’d got the pronunciation right. “We seek audience.”
The leaves rustled in the breeze.
“We ask for safe passage through your territory,” I said. “We intend only to travel and return. We will undertake to commit no harm against you, nor any damage to your home.”
“Only if she doesn’t pick a fight first,” Luna said under her breath.
“Shh,” Anne said.
“In exchange for the right of passage,” I said, ignoring Luna, “we offer a gift.” I brought out a small, inlaid wooden box. “A regeneration seed, made by Arachne, the weaver. She offers it freely to you with her regards, and in the hope that you and she might meet again, as you once did.”
The item in the box was our best card in these negotiations, and Arachne had explained to me in detail what it meant. Hamadryads can live forever, but only as long as their tree does. When it dies, hamadryads quickly waste away unless they can find a new tree to bond to; it has to be of the right species and it has to be a new sapling, and the hamadryad goes into a cocoon to regenerate, emerging years later with a new, young body. The seed in the box was supposed to be a necessary part of that process. According to Arachne, when Karyos’s last tree had been killed, she’d survived by jumping to a grown tree as an emergency measure. For whatever reason, she hadn’t followed that up by completing the ritual normally. Arachne’s guess was that she’d been injured in the process and no longer had the strength to grow a seed of her own.
There was another possible explanation. According to Arachne, jumping to an adult tree could have damaged Karyos mentally as well as physically, and being sealed away in a shadow realm for a century probably wouldn’t have helped. If so, Karyos could very well be completely insane, which given that we were standing in her territory—territory that she’d had years to cultivate—was not a pleasant thought.
The four of us stood in the clearing. For all the response, I might have been speaking to the empty air. The flowers stirred in the wind, red petals bright against the grass.
“She’s not going for it,” Variam said under his breath.
“Shh,” Anne said.
“Well, she’s not.”
“She’s still deciding,” I said. The futures were mostly of violence—actually, nearly all of them were of violence—but there were a tentative few in which nothing happened. I could even catch a few glimpses of ones in which something came out to talk. Unfortunately it was someone else’s choice, not mine, and I’d already played all of my cards.
“We could still go with the burn-things plan,” Variam said. “I like that plan.”
“Will you shut up?” Anne whispered.
“If she wanted to be nice, she’d have come out by now,” Variam said.
I took a breath. I still didn’t like the look of the futures, but I didn’t think sitting and waiting would help. “Despoina Karyos,” I began again, taking a step forward.
The attack came from three sides.
The flowers seemed to ripple, as though in a strong breeze, then rise. For a moment it looked as though they were flowing along the grass, then my eyes focused and I saw that they were flying, petals flapping like wings, wheeling and twisting like a flock of starlings. Three, four, five of the flocks lifted off, each flying towards us, and now I could see that the stalks ended in sharp points.
At the same time, creatures burst seemingly from nowhere. They were humanoids, small and twisted, and there was only time for a blurred impression of thorns and stick-thin limbs before they were on us. They’d been camouflaged so perfectly that our eyes had slid right over without seeing them, and now they dashed straight for us. The multiple angles were confusing; an unprepared group would have been overwhelmed in those first few seconds.