The Well of Wyrding (Revenant Wyrd Book 3) (26 page)

In her wake were watery footprints as if she had just got done swimming, but she didn’t appear to be wet in the least. Sara furrowed her eyebrows at her.

“What’re you talking about risking my life?” Sara said. “Grace, you look like shit.”

Grace took a step closer, and from the strange look in her eyes Sara took a step back. There was a slight grinding in her sisters ankle, but she didn’t seem to notice and continued walking nonetheless.

There was a sense in Sara that cried out that Grace was the pain she’d felt. There was something about her sister, some kind of essence that clung to her like a miasma of dalua. Sara gasped as her back hit the wall and she started easing herself around the perimeter of the kitchen.

“It won’t help,” Grace said with certainty, only it wasn’t exactly like Grace. Sara’s sister had a way about her that was often harsh, but this menacing voice in which the crone spoke was not one bit Grace.

“Grace, what happened to you?” Sara asked.

“I would not concern myself with what happened to me, but instead what is about to happen to you.”

The attack came without Sara even feeling the first conjuring of wyrd. She was aware, however, that Grace was not using the dhast that was the source of her power, and for that matter, when the air compacted and slammed Sara into the wall she realized air was never a substance Grace could manipulate even with her dhast.

There was a crack and Sara knew from the pain that she had broken her arm, and her back wasn’t feeling the greatest either. She caught herself just before falling to the floor.

Sara began drawing her wyrd, but the normal route it traveled from her lower back up to the lemniscate seemed to take forever. It took long enough that Grace had readied another attack while Sara was still trying to draw her power.

Grace fought with force. The force she let loose this time burned. Sara watched the conjured inferno travel across the room, tearing up the stone floor and shattering jars and flinging pans. The conflagration of debris that Grace flung at her younger sister was relentless, and Sara was battered once more against the wall as the onslaught hit her full-on.

Her shields were no match for what Grace was conjuring, and Sara wondered what type of wyrd her sister had contracted to negate so completely the various shields that were placed on Sara as Realm Defense.

As the clutter continued raining down on her, Sara snarled in anger, and her own wyrd finally answered her call. She flung out her hands with a horrible scream and Grace was blasted back, end over end, smashing against the opposing wall, spider-webbing the stone she hit. Grace had landed in such a way that Sara heard her neck snap.

All anger left Sara and was replaced by fear.

She ran to her motionless sister and knelt beside her.

And then the strangest thing happened.

Grace sat up, her head bent completely backward. She reached up and righted her head in a gruesome cracking and popping of bone. When she started rolling her shoulders, Sara stood in fear.

“What have you done with my sister, dalua?” she asked, grabbing a butcher knife.

“Whatever do you mean?” Grace asked.

“What have you done to her?!?” Sara screamed. That scream was tinged with wyrd and the very foundations of the temple shook in her seething rage.

Grace didn’t blink, didn’t even change her expression. Sara felt the pain begin on the left side of her neck and slip around to the right. She was not surprised when she tasted blood and gurgled. She knew the front of her robe was being ruined by blood. She instinctively reached for her neck as if she could stop what was happening.

She dropped the knife; there was nothing that she could do with it at the moment. Sara began losing her strength and sank to her knees, her breath wheezing out through the slit in her neck, bubbling the blood as it streamed forward.

She watched as Grace faded from sight, and right after her sister was gone Sara lost consciousness, the wad of paper still grasped in her lifeless hand.

T
he town of Greenwood was most likely named after the trees themselves. All of the trees were covered with a soft, velvety moss that was so vibrant and so green as to remind Angelica of emerald. Each and every tree seemed chiseled and carved out of emeralds, and were some of the grandest trees she had ever seen.

The town itself reminded her much of an elven dwelling, or at least reminded her of the elven dwellings depicted in storybooks. Angelica knew now what elven dwellings looked like, and while Whitewood Haven had been stunning visually, it held a simplistic beauty that this town could not have captured had it tried. Greenwood was obviously a reconstruction of what people imagined an elven dwelling to be.

As they walked down the central path toward the village, Angelica noted all the flowers in multitudes of colors, which grew larger than she could have imagined. Mushrooms and various other fungi grew at regular intervals, and seemed to be used by the citizens as seating. Truth be told, the fungi were arranged in odd groupings around gardens and ponds the way a normal city would have benches.

The magnitude of the village made Angelica feel rather small, and she wondered if the citizens of Greenwood were trying to be like elves or fairies with the largeness of all the plants. She didn’t feel really human walking through the village. It somehow made her feel abstract in a way she couldn’t really explain. She felt almost as if she had stepped into a play and was walking among the props.

Angelica smiled at the thought of seeing some human flutter by attached to a rope and pulley system so that they felt more fey.

“Where are all the houses?” Joya asked, looking around. Angelica hadn’t really thought about it before, but now that Joya mentioned it she didn’t see any houses to speak of.

“The houses are built into the trees,” Uthia said.

“Doesn’t that harm the trees?” Jovian asked.

“Long ago, when Greenwood was first formed, the wyrders then had strange powers that we can only now marvel at. Some of those powers were able to manipulate plants. When the trees for this village were planted they were done so with a small amount of wyrd, causing them to grow into not only trees and towering plants, but homes as well.” Uthia gestured to one tree they walked by.

“See there,” Uthia said, and they noticed an arching doorway that led into the darkness of the tree. “The tree actually grows rooms here and there within its trunk. Almost as one would find knots in a regular tree, in these you would find pockets of air that are conveniently formed into rooms without ever having to set chisel to wood.”

“That is a pretty neat trick,” Jovian said.

“Indeed,” Uthia sniffed. Jovian looked up at the towering tree, which reached high into the fleeting clouds. He could see where large fungi grew here and there on the tree outside openings that would normally be knotholes but instead were probably windows, with the platform-like funguses acting as balconies. He could barely fathom living in such a place, but imagined it would be an awful lot of fun to stay here.

“You don’t agree?” Joya asked as they picked up the pace.

“These trees are not exactly as a tree should be,” she informed them.

“How should a tree be?” Angelica asked.

“Free. Most people don’t think much about it, but a tree does have a lot of thoughts. Deep thoughts, loving thoughts, and sometimes painful thoughts. These trees don’t think of anything other than the humans they shelter.”

“Well they look healthy enough,” Jovian commented.

“They are taken care of well,” Uthia conceded. “It’s just that the wyrd they were formed with made them little more than servants. All the plants here were originally grown out of greedy desires, only planted and tended for because of the way they would look.”

“Where are all the people?” Jovian asked, stopping to look around. He could tell that the trees were homes, home which were well lived-in. He could also tell that the large fungi here and there were benches and that people often frequented such places as the ponds and the botanicals, but the one thing he didn’t see were people. It suddenly lent a melancholy feel to the town. This was a place that should be filled with laughter and joy, for it was too beautiful to contemplate anything else being here. It made him shiver with something akin to fear, and suddenly his nerves were on edge.

“When the Well of Wyrding was penetrated and leaked poison into the Sacred Forest,” Uthia began, “the people that live within the Sacred Forest sought refuge in other towns, towns that were far away from here.”

“How sad,” Angelica said. Suddenly the air sizzled around her and with a loud pop the Germinant Gob materialized in midair, plunking to the ground with a disturbed, and if such a thing were possible, more hostile look than normal.

“Trouble, Uthia,” he said, and that is when they heard the maniacal laughing of the black shuck. Jovian’s hair instantly stood on end and in an instant the Shin-Buto was out of its sheath and in his hands, the golden tassels at the end toying with his wrist.

“You could have told us sooner,” Uthia said, the Cataresh appearing in the same way it normally did. Her arm lengthened and grew to a point, and with a strange disjointing sound the sword fell out of what was her arm, to be gripped in twig-like fingers. Angelica couldn’t explain fully what it was like watching, but her sword was suddenly there, formed like any other sword, only it grew out of her arm to its proper length before forming its shape.

Angelica drew her mace and Joya got a distant look on her face as she began drawing her wyrd up her spine to the lemniscate.

“What is that?” Angelica asked.

“That’s what attacked me on the hunting trip,” Jovian told her.

“The—”

“Shh!” Uthia cautioned. “Do not speak its name; it’s bad enough we have to fight one.” Angelica blanched, but bit her tongue.

“Is there any way to get away from it?” Jovian asked. “I mean, fighting the deadly beast is all well and good, but I’m not feeling overly heroic today. Do you think we could, I don’t know, get around the dalua?”

“Why didn’t you tell us of this before?” Uthia scolded the Germinant Gob.

“Because
that
,” he jabbed a stubby, leaf-clad finger in the direction of the laughing, “is
not
the danger I came to warn you of.”

There was a rustling of bushes and Uthia turned around in time to see a tall, gray-haired woman stepping out of the bushes, a deadly, contorted look on her face. The woman was clearly insane. “
That
is what I came to warn you of.”

“We have trouble back here as well,” Uthia said, spinning her sword in her hand.

Joya turned to see the old lady stepping out of the woods and coming toward them. “Why didn’t you tell us sooner?” Uthia asked the gnome king again.

“I had only just happened on her myself. Besides, it wouldn’t have done you any good to have fled,” Gob said.

“Dear Goddess,” Joya said as her wyrd curled inside her in response to the other woman. “Her wyrd is so … Chaotic.”

“She’s a caustic,” Gob informed them, and Uthia’s black eyes hardened.

Just then the source of the laughter stepped out of the woods in front of Angelica and Jovian. For the first time Angelica was witness to the sulfurous green eyes and the wicked gorilla face with its tusks.

“Grace said they couldn’t exist,” Angelica reminded Jovian, as if she were arguing with the reality that the shuck was indeed here before them.

“Only if
he
has come back,” Jovian reminded her, backing away from both threats as everyone else was, forming into a tighter knit group. “Grace could have been wrong, I suppose.” His voice shook with fear, for he had faced the black shuck before, and he had not won that battle, barely had he escaped with his life.

“How often does that happen?” Angelica asked.

“Next to never,” he said.

“Do you have your shields up, sorceress?” Uthia said to Joya. The group drew to a halt, half facing the black shuck, and half facing the caustic. They were trapped in the center.

“I’m immortal,” Joya said, confused. “There’s little she can do to harm me.”

“Well the rest of us aren’t immortal, so shield us, damn it.”

“Oh, right,” Joya said, and closed her eyes. It took her a laborious moment to get the wyrd right, but before long she was spinning a web of wyrd around them. Angelica and Jovian felt the power sweep over them like a cold draft of wind that prickled their flesh and stole their breath away for a moment. When the shield was in place it sparked, sending a glow around them. After a moment the glow faded, but out of the corner of their eyes they were still aware of the shield as a milky radiance along their peripheral vision.