“I’m sure.”
“The boy’s right,” Rogger said, sneaking up behind them in his soft boots. “A great big empty hollow full of weeds and low scrub bushes.”
Brant glanced to him, pained. “Last I saw it, the hollow of the Grove was a rolling meadow of green grasses and flowers.”
Tylar cut in. “Either way, it is the only open space within a hundred reaches of the castillion.”
Both Rogger and Brant nodded.
“Then take us down, Captain Horas. Right through the tip of the tree’s shadow.”
By now, everyone had gathered to the rails on either side of the pilot’s spar. Captain Horas called orders to his four-man crew, the additional hand gained in Broken Cay. The pilot worked wheel and pedals, deftly adjusting the aeroskimmers to float them over the shadow, and slowly they sank into the mists.
Sunlight lost its sharp glare, then grew ever dimmer. It was as if they were descending into a twilight sea. Still, the water in the mists captured enough of the surface brilliance to bathe the ship in a suffusing glow. Around them, shadowy giants appeared ahead and to both sides.
“The Graces,” Brant announced. “The giant pompbonga-kee that make up the Grove.”
The captain shied from these ghostly behemoths, blindly feeling for the glade’s center.
Finally, the potbellied keel of the flippercraft dropped below the cloud layer. There was little time to react or call out further orders. The ground rose quickly, appearing suddenly.
The pilot hauled on the wheel to raise the aeroskimmers high. They did not want to break any of the control paddles. The Eye fell toward the field below.
Tylar captured only a harried glimpse of the hollow. Cloaked in mist and shadowed by the height of the giant sentinels, the Grove remained in a perpetual gloom. All he managed to see was a strange bristling across the slopes of the bowl. Then the Eye slammed into the ground with a teeth-jarring bump, burying the view in tall grasses.
Tylar heard a slight crackling as they hit, like the snap of branches, but there was no pop of plank or loud crack of broken paddle. Everyone was silent for a long moment, as if unsure they were still among the living and afraid to ruin the illusion.
Then Captain Horas barked an order, readying his crew to check the state of the flippercraft.
Tylar forced his fingers to loosen their grip on the railing.
They’d made it.
Krevan caught his eye. “We should not tarry. Our arrival will not go unnoted for long. The quicker we’re out and lost in shadow, the better we’ll know what we face.”
As a group, they vacated the captain’s deck and retreated to the rear. Krevan crossed to the side hatch and began unscrewing the latch. Faces sought portholes. Tylar joined them.
He pressed his forehead against the frame of one of the tiny windows. The mist seemed to have been sucked down with their passage. There was nothing to see beyond a swirling murk.
Frowning, he returned to Krevan, who shouldered the hatch open and flipped down the small ladder. It struck the ground with a rattle, then settled.
They listened for a long breath. The world beyond lay quiet. No trill of birdsong. Not even a buzz and whir of winged nits and natterings. Had their landing hushed the realm?
“Ready?” Krevan asked, pulling up the hood of his cloak.
Tylar nodded.
The pirate leader climbed down and jumped lightly to the ground. Tylar followed, hesitated a moment, recalling how Keorn had been burned by his trespass. Then he also stepped down and joined Krevan.
As he landed with his left foot, a sharp complaint rose from his knee. He hopped off it and tottered a step.
“Are you all right?” Krevan asked.
“A stone,” he muttered, covering the twinge.
The ache slowly subsided in a couple of steps, as it had over the past two days. While normally he would have dismissed the cramp as merely some turn of his knee, the pang here was doggedly familiar, echoing back to when the same knee had once been frozen and cobbled from a poorly healed break.
It was disconcerting.
He opened and closed his fist. His little finger, still wrapped, was slowly on the mend. Maybe a bit crooked, but it would leave no lasting weakness.
As the ache faded in his leg, he pushed back these misgivings for another time and faced the flippercraft. “Keep guard on the door,” he called quietly to Malthumalbaen, who stood at the threshold.
The giant nodded.
Tylar turned away to find Krevan had already drifted off, shadowy in the mists. He limped to join him, drawing on a trickle of darkness into his cloak to steady himself.
Ahead, the pirate had stopped, his back to Tylar. A growling sound rose from him, angry, offended.
“What’s wrong?”
Krevan stepped back to reveal what his large bulk had hidden.
A shaft of peeled and sharpened wood rose from the ground, planted deep in the loam. Impaled upon it was the head of an old woman, her gray braid black with her own blood, tongue lolling out, skin mottled with rot. Flies and worms squirmed and crawled across her flesh. Her eyes had been pecked or gouged out.
Only now did Tylar note the reek hidden beneath the decay of leaf and a heavy dampness to the air. Details grew as his eyes adjusted to the gloom. To either side, he noted more burdened stakes.
Aghast, he backed a step toward the ship.
The mists slowly rose, swirling back up. Bits of dust and dried grass drifted down, cast high by their hard landing. The view opened. Tylar remembered the strange bristling he had noted as they fell out of the sky. He now understood what he had glimpsed. Climbing up the slopes in widening rings were hundreds of stakes.
All bearing aloft their ripe and rotted fruit.
“No…” Tylar mumbled.
This was far worse than any uncontested fire. A ravening darkness shadowed this realm fully. He recalled Rogger’s story of tanglebriar. He stared at the field of sharpened stakes. Seersong had indeed taken root-and here was the thorny growth that sprouted from that seed.
“Her own people,” Krevan said in disgust.
In step, both men retreated toward the flippercraft.
Then Tylar heard a whistling to the air. Flashes drew his eyes up. Streaks of flame shot through the mists like trailing stars in the night. They arced out from the shrouded forest, climbing high, then angled back downward. Score upon score blazed through the murky clouds.
“Arrows,” Krevan said, twisting to grab Tylar’s shoulder and pull him toward the flippercraft.
Too late.
Fire fell out of the sky and pummeled the flippercraft lying at the bottom of the sea of mist. The impacts sounded like hail on a wooden roof. But it was flame, not ice, that rained down upon the beached flippercraft. Not a single arrow missed its target.
Shouts arose from inside the ship.
But before Tylar could even call to the others, a second volley of flaming arrows filled the sky with their streaking brilliance. A moment later, amid the shocked cries of the others, another round of flame beat down upon the back of the craft, already aflame.
Again, not an arrow fell astray.
If it was madness that truly ruled here, it had honed its marksmanship.
The fires spread rapidly, sped by some alchemy imbued in the oil of the arrows. Flames ran like fiery snakes across the hull.
“Get the others out,” Tylar ordered Krevan. There was no use attempting to escape by air. The flippercraft would burn down to its mekanicals by the time they cleared the mists.
Unless he did something about it.
Tylar wiped his brow, then slid out a dagger. He drew its edge across his palm and drew a fiery line of blood.
Sweat to imbue, and blood to open the way.
He would fight the flames with his own humours. He pictured ice, as frigid as the cold that had stolen Eylan from them. He built the blessing in his bloody palm, prepared to use his sweat to cast it upon the craft. He would freeze the flames from his ship.