Everywhere stakes sprouted from the weedy ground. Skewered upon their fire-blackened points were the heads of hundreds of his fellow people. The poles seemed to shiver in the flickering glow of the flaming flippercraft.
Brant shied from looking too closely at the faces, but they were inescapable. He caught glimpses of mouths stretched open in silent screams, of gouged eyes and bloated tongues, of seeping wound and sloughing skin. Black flies rose in silent swirls as the fires stirred the air.
He did not resent their feast. It was the great turn of the forest, the returning to the loam of all that had risen from it. It was the Way taught to all in Saysh Mal.
Only here was no mere decay of leaf or a gutted beast’s entrails left to feed the forest-nor even a loved one’s body gently interred beneath root and rock.
This was slaughter and cruelty, a mockery of the Way.
“Many children here,” Rogger muttered, sickened. “Babes, from the look of a few.”
“And elders,” Tylar said.
Krevan followed with Calla. “Culling the weak,” he grunted.
“But why?” Dart asked. She walked in Malthumalbaen’s shadow, the giant’s arm over her shoulder, hugged near his thigh.
“There is no why here,” Lorr said sourly. “Only madness.”
Brant risked a glance at a few of the stakes. He saw the others were right about the dead. A gray-bearded head was impaled to the left, and the next two stakes bore smaller skulls, a boy and a girl, a brother and sister perhaps.
As he turned away, he realized he knew the graybeard. The man had been the great-father to a fellow hunter. He was recognizable by the pair of brass coins braided into his beard. The elder had come occasionally to Brant’s home, his beard jingling merrily, to share some pear wine with his father, swapping stories well into the night. Brant knew little else about him, not even his name. Somehow that made it even worse. A death with no name, only a memory.
The group slowed near a mossy boulder that shouldered out of the slope. The stakes thinned here, and the travelers were far enough away from the burning conflagration to escape the worst of the blistering heat. Still they could not escape the stench.
Brant glanced below and saw that a few of the stakes closest to the flippercraft had caught fire, burning like torches, fueled by wood and the fat of flesh. Shuddering, he turned his back on the sight and stared up toward the lip of the hollow.
The forest waited, dark, tall, and cool. It stared back at him, neither grieving nor caring. It was the face of the Huntress. Brant felt a fury to match the flames below. He wished the fire would spread to the woods, to cleanse and purify the horror, to scorch it down to the roots of the mountains.
A hand touched his shoulder, startling him into a wince.
But fingers closed with a firming grip and held tight.
He glanced up to find the regent at his side. Tylar stared toward the forest. “They are not to blame.”
Brant did not know what he meant. “Who-?”
He nodded upward.
From the forest’s edge, they stepped out of the shadows and into the firelight. Hunters. A hundred score. Stripped to breechclout, the women bare-breasted. They carried bows, strings taut, arrows notched.
The Huntress was baring her fangs.
“Can you smell it?” Lorr asked, nose high, eyes glowing. “The arrows. Poisoned with venom from the jinx bat. One nick will kill.”
Though Brant didn’t have the wyld tracker’s nose, he had eyes sharp enough to sense movement past the first line of bowmen. More hunters stalked the depths. But his eyes were not keen enough to spot what Tylar had noted earlier-not until it was brought to his attention.
“Their mouths,” Krevan said.
Squinting closer, Brant noted that the hunters’ lips and chins were stained black, as if they had been drinking oil.
Brant knew it hadn’t been oil.
“She’s draughted them with her own blood,” Tylar said. “Burned them with Grace. They are in thrall to her as certain as any seersong.”
Brant now understood the regent’s words a moment before. They are not to blame. There was only one to blame for all the horrors here.
As if reading his thoughts, the Huntress again spoke to them from her distant balcony, lost in mist and smoke. Her words were calm, spoken with a strange dispassion.
“You will come to me, stripped of weapons. You will bend your knee. Your strength will be added to the forest.”
Her statements were not requests, nor even demands. Her voice held a simple certainty, as if she were merely stating that the sun would rise in the morning.
Tylar kept his grip on Brant. He leaned down and whispered in his ear. “Even if it destroys her, you must rip the roots of the seersong that ensnares her sanity. Can you do this?”
“What about the others?” He nodded to the black-lipped forest of hunters that waited with poisoned bows, bound to the Huntress.
Tylar did not offer any gentle words, only the truth. “I don’t know.” He faced Brant and asked again, “Even so, can you do this?”
Gripping the stone at his throat, Brant glanced back at the stakes bearing aloft the graybeard and the two children, then met Tylar’s gaze. He nodded.
Tylar gave Brant’s shoulder another squeeze, then released him. Ahead the hunters parted and shifted into two columns. They formed a deadly gauntlet down which they were meant to walk.
“Stay close together,” Tylar warned and set off, leading the way.
“And don’t let any of the arrows scratch you,” Rogger added, bolstering Lorr’s warning.
Brant followed beside Dart, both now shadowed by the giant. As Brant approached the forest, he again pictured flames spreading and burning through jungle and wood. While he had wished it only a moment ago, now he knew it was his hand that must set torch to the tinder, to potentially destroy the realm, from the top down. And it wouldn’t be only wood that would be consumed.
He stared at the line of hunters.
Can you do this? he asked himself. I must.
Dart glanced to him. He read the fear in her eyes. She reached out a hand. He gratefully took it, not caring how it made him look.
As a group, they climbed free of the valley of stakes. The fires below scattered ashes skyward, a bonfire to the dead.
At last, they reached the rim of the hollow. The ancient pompbonga-kee trees rose in a dark bower over their heads. Below, the line of hunters waited. They headed down the gauntlet of bows. The deadly path led unerringly toward the oldest of the pompbonga-kees. The lowest level of the castillion could be seen entombed within its thick branches.
Closer yet, the tree’s massive roots rose as mighty knees of bark and knot. Between them gaped the entrance to the castillion. And standing in the gap stood a tall hunter, thickly shouldered, naked to breechclout, lips stained. He bore a wreath of leaves upon his crown, marking him as the supreme Hunter of the Way, the latest to win the great challenges.
But what challenges had he won during these maddened days?
The sentinel’s arms were bloody to the elbows. He reeked of death and pain. His eyes were aglow with the ravings of the Huntress, an echo of her corruption.
Still, Brant did not fail to recognize who stood as sentinel.
He pictured a boy running wild through the woods, breathless, barely able to sustain his excitement at his uncle’s entry into the great contest. It had been the last time he had laid eyes on the boy-now a young man.
“Marron…”
Those piercing eyes found him-and for a moment, Brant saw a mirror of his own recollection. But instead of familiarity and lost friendship, all he saw was ferocity and ruthlessness in the other’s eyes.