vicious irony to the situation. Life was such a travesty. A man had to learn to laugh about it, or he’d burn down the world for what it did to people who did nothing to deserve such pain. As if Boult could read his mind, the dwarf shot him an annoyed look and shook his head in disgust.
The skiff crested a wave, and Boult glowered at Harp over the top of his oar. “You’re a goat, Harp. You’re the son of a goat, and your children will be little, bleating goats,” Boult said crossly.
Harp laughed, ignoring the surprised look on Verran’s face, who had no idea where Boult’s outburst had come from.
There were five of them in the skiff. Kitto and Boult were going with him into the jungle. Harp wanted to bring Verran onshore too, just because he wanted to keep an eye on him. At seventeen, the boy was a year older than Kitto, but he still had that wide-eyed look of most youthsscared, but curious. With his round cheeks and big blue eyes, he looked as if he’d just crawled out of a schoolroom. Verran was almost a head taller than Harp, with a stockier and more muscular physique. Most men of that size dominated any situation they were in. But Verran, who was almost as big as Cenhar, never seemed to know what to do with his body or how to use his commanding presence.
Cenhar and Llywellan had been with him on the Marderward. Both were older and capable in a fight, but Llywellan had the edge when it came to thinking, which made him a better choice to guard the ships. Besides, Cenhar carried a greataxe, and a jungle seemed like the kind of place where they might need to chop down a treeor something more vicious.
“Don’t worry, Verran,” Cenhar said. “They’re always like that. It’s especially bad when things get hairy. Whenever Harp starts joking, somebody’s going to get hit.”
“Mainly because Harp thinks he’s funnier than he is,” Boult said.
“Kitto thinks I’m funny,” Harp protested.
“Kitto thinks we’re all funny,” Boult said amicably.
From his place at the back of the boat, Kitto didn’t say anything, but there was a faint smile on his lips. Kitto was easily amused by the antics of the world. Although he was quiet, Kitto seemed to be a master at picking up subtle things that Harp usually missed. Kitto could pick a cutpurse out of a crowded bazaar before the thief even made his move.
“Should we be worried?” Verran asked, when the boat reached the shallows. “I mean, are things going to get… dangerous?”
“It’s Chult,” Boult said. “What did you expect?”
Harp and Kitto jumped out and splashed through the waves as they lugged the skiff onto the narrow beach running along the edge of the cove. Kitto crouched down and scooped up a handful of fine white sand. He let it seep through his fingers while the others pulled on their packs and canteens.
“It’s too hot,” Harp groused. Sweat was running down his face and stinging his eyes, and his cotton shirt was sticking to his lower back.
“It’s Chult,” Boult repeated testily. “What did you expect?”
From the ship, the band of green that marked the beginning of jungle looked like a seamless wall of vegetation. Harp could see that the earlier assessment wasn’t far off. The edge of the jungle was an imposing barrier of thorny vines, jagged leaves, and flowers in startling shades of red and orange.
“How in the Hells do you expect us to get through that?” Boult said, peering at the tangled undergrowth in front of them.
“Avalor said there was a path to the colony,” Harp told him.
“He didn’t happen to know where the path began, did he? There’s probably a mile of beach along that cove.” “Well, we’d better start searching.” As they walked down the beach, tiny red crabs skittered across the sand at their approach. There were no breaks in the wall of vegetation or paths leading into the darkness of the jungle. Except for their footprints in the sand, there was no evidence that anyone had ever discovered this pristine corner of the world. But as Harp and his men searched the beach, he began to hear sounds from inside the jungle. A faint vocalization, like the cry of a wounded beast, and a rumbling growl echoed out of the jungle. Even more disturbing were the rhythmic sounds that seemed too regular to be accidental.
“Is that drumming?” Verran asked nervously. They’d all heard rumors of what dwelled in Chult, the feral monstrosities that had survived for ages hidden in the tangled undergrowth that covered most of the island: yuan-ti, carrion crawlers, purple worms, plaguechanged horrors too terrible to consider.
“The colony is just a mile inland,” Harp assured him. “Once we find the path, we’ll be in and out before nightfall.”
The men spread out along the beach, searching for what should have been seen easily. In his experience, forests were quiet, reverent places crowned by oaks and conifers, where man or elf could walk between the trunks of trees hindered by no more than the occasional blackberry bramble. The Chultan jungle couldn’t be more different than the forests of his childhood. Listening to the distant, unfamiliar sounds, Harp felt as if he was faced with a creature he’d never encountered before. It was vicious and feral with only one purposeconstant growth toward the heavens.
A few paces down the beach, Kitto stood close to the edge of the jungle. With his eyes closed, he held his hands up with palms open to the tangled vegetation.
“Is something there, Kitto?” Harp asked.
“Heat,” Kitto replied.
“Heat coming off the plants?” Sure enough, waves of hot air pulsed against Harp’s sweaty face. “What do you think it is?”
“The life of the jungle,” Kitto told him, as the other men joined them. They waited there for a moment, feeling the flow of warm air against their faces, listening to the call of an unknown creature, and staring at the vegetation as if an easy passage through the mass of thorns and leaves might reveal itself.
“How bad can it be?” Harp said, mostly to himself. “We’ll cut through, and maybe the way will get clearer as we get to higher ground.”
“There’s higher ground?” Verran asked-
“It’s hard to see from here, but there are mountains inland,” Boult said. “If we’d sailed from the north instead of the east, you would have been able to see the lay of the land.”
Boult pulled out his short sword, and the other men followed his example. But it was Harp who took the first swing at the vines, quickly hacking a man-sized hole and stepping into the humid darkness. The foliage was thick above his head, blocking out most of the sunshine, with just the occasional patch of sky showing through the leaves.
“Stay close,” Harp said over his shoulder.
The dull whack of his blade against the woody stalks and the rustle of leaves made talking to the other men difficult. The vines seemed to twist out of the way of his blade and regroup after each stroke. The farther Harp moved into the thicket, the slower he moved. The branches scratched his face, and he stumbled on the uneven ground. He couldn’t help but think of Liel and wondered how anyone could make a home in a place as inhospitable as the jungles of Chult.
Harp remembered Liel standing in a grove of ash trees on Gwynneth Isle, shortly after they’d escaped the
Marderward. Although Liel had healed his injuries and fever, Harp had still been weak, and the short walk to the grove had sapped most of his newfound energy. Leaning against a tree to catch his breath, he’d watched Liel turn in slow circles staring up at the leaves, while the shifting pattern of light and shadow played across her face. She’d turned to smile at him. Her green eyes seemed to glow in the gathering twilight, and there was a pink tinge on her cheeks.
“The forest makes me powerful,” she said.
There was no arrogance or pride in her words, and for an instant he envied her. Liel could convert the very structures of nature into magic, while he was bound by his mortality, his commonplace mind, and his workman’s hands. But his envy vanished, and he felt awe that the beautiful creature could have cast her eyes on him and liked what she saw. The memory of Liel gave him hope that she might have survived her time in Chult. Who knew how the wildness of the jungle would affect Liel? It might keep her safe and cast her mind places he couldn’t imagine.
“There has to be an opening soon,” Harp said over his shoulder as he hacked through a snarl of sticky vines
