The descent into the forest was harder on their legs than yesterday's climb through the gap had been. Ruari discovered new muscles along his shins and across the tops of his feet. It would have been easier if his body had simply gone numb, but he felt every step from his heel to the base of his skull. He had no idea how the other three were doing; his world began and ended with the aches of his body.
When Orekel asked to see the map, Ruari dug it out of his sleeve without a second thought.
"Son, this here, this here's not a map, son."
"I never said it was," Ruari countered, smiling wearily and looking for something to sit on that wouldn't be impossible to get up from afterward.
Ruari eased himself onto the trunk of a fallen tree. He wished he didn't hurt so much. The forest was a miraculous place—the promise every druid made in his grove fulfilled to the greatest imaginable measure. There were birds and insects to complement the trees, and gray-bottomed clouds in the distance bearing the promise of real, not magic-induced, rain. The land quivered and crawled with riotous life, more life in a handful of moist, crumbly dirt than in a day's walking across the barren Tablelands.
And Ruari couldn't appreciate it. Not only did he hurt too much, he wasn't here to immerse himself in druidry. He'd come to the forest to find a black tree, to find Kakzim and bring him to justice. For Pavek. All for Pavek, because it was Kakzim's fault that Pavek was dead. He'd take Kakzim's head back to Urik and hurl it at Hamanu's palace. Then he'd go home to Urik and plant a tree for his friend.
"Son—" Orekel tugged on his sleeve. "Son, I say we have a problem."
"You can't help us," Ruari said slowly. "That's the problem, isn't it? You can't find the black tree. All that talk in Ject about halfling treasure you hadn't brought out because you'd gotten 'tempted,' that was just wind in the air. You're no different than Mady: you thought we had a map we weren't smart enough to keep or follow."
Orekel removed his cap. "You put a mite too fine a point on things, son. The black tree, she's in this forest, and she's got treasure trove buried 'neath her roots. She's not two-day's walk from here, and that's a fact. But this here—" He held out the map. "Now, you don't rightly speak Halfling, so you're not likely to read it much either. So, you got to believe me, son, this here's not a map to the black tree; it's more a map to your place, I reckon, to Urik—that's where you come from, now, isn't it?"
Ruari tried to remember if he or Zvain or Mahtra had mentioned Urik since they'd met the dwarf, but his memory refused to cooperate. Maybe they had and Orekel was playing them for fools, or maybe he could read those marks, one of which spelled Urik. Either way, Ruari was too tired for deception.
"Around Urik, yes."
"Always best to be honest, son," Orekel advised, and suddenly his eyes seemed much sharper, his movements, crisper. "Now, maybe we can solve our problem—you being a druid and all—maybe you don't need a map to find the black tree. Like as not, you can just kneel down on the ground the way you did up on the crest and mumble a few words that'll show you the way."
Ruari said no with a shake of his head.
Zvain hobbled over. The boy looked at the tree trunk and—wiser than Ruari—chose not to sit down. "Sure you could, Ru. You've just got to try. Come on, Ru—try, please?"
He shook his head again; he'd already tried. As soon as Orekel had made the suggestion, Ruari had—almost without thinking—put his palms against the moss-covered bark and opened himself to the aspects of the forest. The blare of life would have overwhelmed him if he'd had the wit or will to resist it. Instead, it had flowed through him like water through a hollow log—in one side and out the other.
In the aftermath of that flow, Ruari considered it fortunate that he'd been numbed by aches and exhaustion. The guardian aspects of this forest weren't habituated to a druid's touch, weren't habituated and didn't seem to like it, not druidry in general, nor him in particular. For a moment, all the leaves had become open eyes and open mouths with teeth instead of edges.
That moment had passed once he raised his palms and consciously shut himself off from the forest's burgeoning vitality. Leaves were simply leaves again, but the sense that they were being watched persisted. For most of his life— even in his own grove, which was mostly brush and grass with a few sparse trees—Ruari had either been within walls or looking at a horizon that was at least a day's walk away. Here in the forest, he could touch the green-leafed horizon, and the forest, which had seemed like paradise before he sat down, had become a place of hidden menace.
He was afraid to cut himself a staff, lest he arouse something more hostile.
"Give it a try, son." Orekel urged. "What've we got to lose?"
"I'm too tired," Ruari replied, which was true. "Maybe later," which was a lie—but he didn't want to alarm the others.
"So, what do we do?" Zvain asked, backsliding into the whiny, selfish tone he used when he was tired, frightened, or both. "Sit here until you're rested?"
Orekel took Zvain's arm and gently spun him around. "Best to keep moving, son. Things that stay in one place too long attract an appetite."
"Move where?" Zvain persisted.
"Does it matter?" Mahtra asked. The climb down hadn't bothered her any more than the climb up, any more than anything ever seemed to bother her. If the New Races were made from something, someone else, then whatever Mahtra had been, it wasn't elven, or dwarven, or human. "We don't have a map anymore. One direction's as good as another if we don't know where we're going."
A heartbeat later, they were thrown against one another and hoisted off the ground in a net. Zvain screamed in terror; Orekel cursed, as if this had happened before, and— foolish as it was—Ruari felt better with his weight on the ropes, not his feet.
The sizzle of Mahtra's thunderclap power passed through Ruari not once, but twice. The sound was loud enough to detach a shower of leaves from their branches and make the net sway like a bead on a string. But it wasn't enough to send them crashing to the ground, and Mahtra's third blast was much weaker than the first two. The fourth was no more than a flash without the thunder.
Heartbeats later, they heard movement in the underbrush, and halflings appeared on the trail beneath them. Looking down, Ruari saw a score of halflings. None looked friendly, but the one who raised his spear and prodded the half-elf sharply in the flank had a truly frightening face, with weblike burn scars covering his cheeks and eyes as black and deep as night between the stars. He gave Ruari another poke between the ribs.
"The ugly man—Templar Paddock—where is he?"
Chapter Fourteen
"I've heard there's a hunters' village about a day's ride from here. They call it Ject. It's a way station for beasts on their way to the combat arenas of the cities. It's full of scoundrels, knaves, and charlatans of every stripe, some of whom'll lead a party across the mountains and into the halfling forests. It's a day's ride to the southeast, but we could hire a guide for an easier passage, if you think we should, Lord Pavek."
Unlike the ride from Quraite to Urik, there were no bells on the huge kank Lord Pavek rode, no excuse for not hearing Commandant Javed's statement, no excuse for not answering the implied question.
Still, under the guise of careful consideration, Pavek could take the time to shift his weight, easing strained joints and muscles. He'd been kank-back for the better part of three days, and the only parts of him that didn't hurt were the ones that had gone numb while the walls of Urik were still visible behind them.