When she was finished, she turned and touched the satyr’s shoulder. “What is it?”
The satyr spoke for a few seconds, then looked up the path-to where Malik was already ten paces ahead of the rest of the group and still moving. To Kleef’s surprise, the moss was still glowing ahead of him, and the wall of thorny branches had pulled back to create an open corridor.
Arietta turned back to the others. “Theamont says we need to trust him,” she said. “The forest children are no friends to orcs or Shadovar, but that doesn’t mean they will let us hide in the Chondalwood forever.”
Joelle smiled and motioned him forward. “By all means, Theamont,” she said. “Lead the way.”
She fell in behind the satyr, leaving Kleef and Arietta to bring up the rear. As they started forward, he looked over at her and raised his brow.
“You know magic?”
Arietta shrugged. “I’ve picked up a few spells along the way,” she said. “Unfortunately, they tend to be more useful in handling court intrigue than in surviving a fight.”
They caught up to the others and continued down the enchanted pathway. Still concerned about pursuers, Kleef made a habit of checking the trail behind them. All he ever saw was the glow fading from the moss and the corridor closing behind them, but it did not make him feel any safer. An impassible tangle of hawthorn branches might prevent the orc horde from pursuing them, but it would also cut off any possibility of retreat.
How long they continued to flee down the corridor was impossible to say. With nothing but darkness around them and a soft green glow ahead of them, he soon lost all sense of time. Malik’s elbow swelled to twice its normal size, and they paused long enough for Joelle to make a sling and assure him it was only sprained. Arietta grew so weary she started to stumble, and Kleef convinced her to let him take her arm and help her along. Soon after, Joelle had to call on Sune for strength, and she began to give off a faint aura as the goddess’s divine power flooded into her.
Still, Theamont led them onward. When the gray glow of false dawn began to filter through the hawthorn branches ahead, he urged them to move faster. Eventually, Kleef found himself almost carrying Arietta, and Joelle and Theamont had to resort to dragging Malik along by his armpits.
When even that did not seem fast enough for the satyr, Arietta cast her spell again. Theamont did not even slow his pace as he explained.
“He says the Forest Way’s magic ends at dawn,” Arietta said. “If we haven’t reached the end before then, we’ll be trapped inside.”
“Would that be so bad?” Malik asked. “I could sleep the entire day.”
Arietta hesitated, as though debating whether she wanted to answer Malik at all, then finally said, “He didn’t mean until nightfall. His actual words were ‘when the thorns close.’ ”
The threat of death-by-perforation was enough to reinvigorate the companions, at least temporarily. Malik no longer had to be dragged, and Arietta grabbed onto Kleef’s belt and insisted that he pull her along at whatever pace Theamont set.
The gray glow filtering through the branches became a pearly gleam. Leaves rustled in the morning breeze, and the sound of purling water arose somewhere beyond the thorny wall ahead. Theamont gestured more vigorously, at once urging them to hurry and beaming as though the end were in sight. The pearly gleam became a silver radiance, and the glow began to fade from the mossy ground.
Theamont waved them onward one last time, then broke into a sprint and raced down the path. The hawthorn branches continued to open ahead of him-but more slowly, and at times it seemed he would crash into the thorn wall before it divided.
Then there were no more branches ahead, just Theamont running up the Forest Way, silhouetted against a circle of silver sky. After a few steps, he stopped and stood panting for breath, his gaze fixed on the far horizon. Finally, he turned and pointed at the ground, beaming and nodding to indicate that they had reached the end.
Joelle arrived next, so exhausted that when she finally stopping running, she stumbled and nearly pitched over. Theamont grabbed her arm and pulled her back to her feet.
By then, the first golden rays of sunlight were shooting across the horizon beyond them. A soft hissing arose from the walls of the path, and the hawthorn branches crept inward.
“Hold on!” Kleef called.
He reached back and grabbed Malik by the arm, then sprinted the last dozen paces to the end of the path-and nearly ran over Joelle as she stepped in front of him, her palms raised.
“Kleef, wait!” she yelled. “It’s a chasm!”
Kleef jammed his front heel into the ground and threw his weight back, then felt his feet go out from beneath him. He released Malik’s arm and hurled himself away from Arietta-then felt Theamont’s big hoof land between his shoulder blades and stop his slide by pinning him face-down against the mossy ground.
Beneath his feet, Kleef felt nothing but air.
“All that running for this?” Malik cried out. He was a few steps to Kleef’s left, somewhere near Joelle. “It is nothing but a dead end.”
Once Theamont had removed his hoof, Kleef rolled over, sat up, and found himself looking across twenty paces of gorge. He couldn’t see the bottom from where he was, but from somewhere below came the purling sound he had started to hear earlier.
Theamont said something in his own language, and Kleef looked up to see the satyr pointing down the canyon.
“He says we can rest on that island,” Arietta translated. “The Shadovar won’t be able to find us, and the orcs are a hundred leagues behind.”
“A hundred leagues?” Kleef asked, rising. “How far did the Forest Way take us?”
Theamont studied Kleef with a blank expression for a moment, then turned back to Arietta. As the satyr spoke, Kleef peered down into the gorge and saw that they were forty feet above a dark, slow-moving river. The water filled the canyon from wall to wall.
After a moment, Theamont fell silent, and Arietta turned to her companions. “He says we’re free to make a raft, as long as we use only dead wood,” she said. “But the river empties into the Underchasm, so we should leave the water as soon as we hear the canyon roaring.”
“A raft is well and good,” Malik said, peering over the edge. “But how are we to reach the island-or the river, for that matter?”
Theamont smiled and used his fingers to make a running motion toward the river, then spoke a single word that needed no translation.
Jump.
CHAPTER 14
They hit the water hard, and Malik felt the river rip him free of Kleef’s tight embrace and carry him away, and he saw what a fool he had been to place his fate in the hands of an oaf. Yet what choice had there been? Joelle and Arietta were in the water already, and the satyr had threatened to throw Malik in after them if he did not jump himself. In the end, it had seemed safer to trust Kleef than to test their guide’s resolve.
It was a mistake Malik feared would drown him. The water was as cold as it was dark, and it had seeped into his boots and soaked his robe, until he was caught in his own clothes like a fish in a net. The current dragged him down to the bottom of the river and sent him tumbling along the riverbed, bouncing off boulders and raking through gravel, sliding along sunken logs and scraping past shelves of bedrock. It dropped him into the narrow channel between two outcroppings and squeezed him out the other end, and his breath left him in a stream of bubbles.
And then Malik called out to Cyric in his thoughts. Do not abandon me now, Mighty One, he warned, or you will spend eternity serving as Shar’s toe-licker in the Tower of-
His boot soles struck the top of a boulder, and Malik knew his god had answered his prayers. He pushed off at once. His head broke the water’s surface in the same heartbeat, and he found himself in the center of a river that filled the gorge so completely that its waters ran tight against the canyon walls. The island they sought was but a blurry green dot on the downstream horizon, an impossible distance for Malik to swim in his sodden robes and water-filled boots.