“What are you doing?” she asked suddenly.
Dragonbait jumped and whirled around, obviously startled.
“You’re marking the trail,” she exclaimed in surprise. “Why?”
Mourngrym might come, Dragonbait signed.
“Mourngrym is not coming,” Alias retorted. She reached up to yank the strip of cloth from the tree and nearly lost her balance when she tripped on a heap of walnuts piled on the trail just below the branch.
“Why are you leaving nuts out on the trail?” she demanded.
An offering to Tymora, the saurial signed.
“Nuts?” Alias cried. “Since when does Lady Luck demand offerings of nuts? Dragonbait, what has gotten into you? Why are you slowing us down?”
Breck’s too angry, Dragonbait signed as he had at the tower. He’s not getting any calmer.
“But you’re only making him angrier. And you still haven’t told me why you’re marking the trail,” Alias said. “What are the nuts for, anyway?”
Dragonbait pointed down the trail. Breck had returned. The saurial loped up to the ranger’s horse.
Alias growled to herself. Dragonbait was keeping something from her, she was certain of it. She followed her companion back down the trail. “Did you find anything?” she asked Breck as she mounted her horse.
Breck nodded wordlessly and led the way back down the fork of the trail he’d just examined.
Dragonbait slapped at Alias’s horse so it trotted down the trail ahead of him. It took the swordswoman a moment to slow her mount and turn to be sure the paladin was following. Dragonbait trotted past her. Alias turned her horse again and followed him. She’d spotted another strip of cloth hanging from a branch to mark the fork they now rode on. It wouldn’t do to confront the saurial in front of Breck, but eventually she’d find out what he was up to if she had to shake it out of the paladin.
Akabar watched with fascination as Grypht studied the teleport spell carved into his staff. The carvings didn’t look the least bit like any writing Akabar had ever seen. They appeared to be nothing but notches and lines carved at irregular intervals. The Turmish scholar longed to pester the saurial wizard into translating for him, but Grypht’s tongues spell had worn off. Besides, they had both agreed that the most important thing was for them to return as soon as possible to Shadowdale, so Akabar remained silent.
In the back of the Turmishman’s mind, he was anxious about Zhara. He had a blurry memory of Kyre speaking some spell that included his wife’s name. Dragonbait had promised to look after her, though, which assuaged the southern mage’s fears considerably. Still, he’d be glad to get back to Zhara.
He’d also be relieved to get out of the forest wilderness all around them. The slender oak saplings that surrounded them were lovely, but there were three especially large maples off to one side whose appearance the mage found disturbing. By their size, Akabar judged them to be hundreds of years old, but he didn’t expect they could live much longer. Their trunks were riddled with insect bore holes. Sucker vines covered many of their branches. While some of their leaves were an autumnal gold, most were brown and dry far too early in the season. He hadn’t noticed the trees when he first regained consciousness, but now he couldn’t get them out of his mind, even when he turned his eyes away from them. As the sun sank lower in the sky and the shadows lengthened and deepened, the sickly trees and even the young oak saplings seemed to close in on the forest clearing where they sat.
Akabar started and gave a shout. The trees were closing in on them. The oak saplings surrounded them in a neat ring, twenty feet across, standing so close together that their trunks resembled the bars of a prison. There was no space wide enough to pass between them; the two mages were trapped inside the circle of saplings with the three great maple trees. At Akabar’s shout, Grypht looked up from his staff with a look of annoyance that his study had been interrupted. The moment the saurial spotted the maples, he leaped to his feet and roared.
Just then Akabar noticed the features of a face on one of the older maples. He also noticed that the tree’s trunk split into two great, bark-covered legs. The maples weren’t trees at all, Akabar realized. They were treants, good creatures who protected the forest. All three treants closed in on Grypht. The saurial wizard growled threateningly and held out his hand to cast a spell.
“Wait!” Akabar warned, stepping between the saurial and the treant he was pointing at. “These trees are treants,” the Turmishman said. “They won’t harm us.”
Grypht growled again, shoving Akabar aside. Akabar remembered then that the saurial could no longer understand him. Somehow he had to figure out a way to keep the wizard from injuring the treants. The smell of fresh-mown hay began to fill the meadow as Grypht began sprinkling a tiny white ball with yellow powder.
“No!” Akabar shouted. He rushed toward the saurial wizard and yanked at the sleeve of his robe, jerking his arm to one side, so that the fireball Grypht had summoned exploded off to one side of the treants instead of in their midst. Immediately several of the oak saplings surrounding them crackled into flame.
Suddenly Akabar felt himself being lifted off the ground by the sash around his robe. Akabar strained around and looked up. A huge treant held him in one of its woody hands and glared down at him.
“Please,” Akabar said in common, “don’t harm the saurial. He’s a visitor from another world. He doesn’t understand about treants.”
The treant cackled wickedly and pointed at Grypht with its free leafy hand. “Kill him!” it ordered the other two treants in a booming voice.
“No!” Akabar shouted, struggling fiercely and beating ineffectively at the wooden hand holding him nearly ten feet off the ground.
Unable to cast a spell before the treants were upon him, Grypht grabbed the arm of the nearest one and swung his feet from the ground like a child swinging from a tree branch. Unable to bear the weight of the giant lizard, the treant’s arm broke away from its body with the dull sound of a rotting log when it crumbles beneath a woodsman’s axe. Dust rose from the decayed wooden arm as it crashed to the ground.
The injured treant’s face formed a scowl, but it gave no indication that it felt any pain.
Akabar’s eyes widened in horror. From the hollow depression where the treant’s arm had broken away from the trunk, a slimy green tendril shot out and whipped about Grypht’s throat. Akabar realized he’d made a terrible mistake. These creatures might once have been treants, but like Kyre, they’d been infested somehow with a rotting parasite that made them servants of the Darkbringer.
The tendril wrapped about Grypht’s throat began to constrict, choking the saurial and pulling him closer to the treant’s other arm. With both hands, Gryphyt grabbed a section of the tendril between his throat and the treant and gave a sharp, powerful tug. The tendril snapped in two like a piece of rotten twine, but before Grypht could move away to try another spell, a second treant came up behind him and smashed one of its arms down heavily on the saurial’s head.
Grypht fell to the ground, stunned, and both treants began kicking at him with their massive wooden legs.
The treant that held Akabar remained motionless. Akabar slid his dagger out of his sleeve and slashed through the sash at his waist. He fell to the ground, landing on his knees, sending needles of pain lancing through them. Quickly he rolled away from the treant, and gritting his teeth against the pain, he staggered to his feet.