Morwen woke to the song of an early bird and the memories of the previous day’s horrors. She could move her left hand; that was something. As she’d expected, Caroc hadn’t returned. Szat was still asleep. He’d finished gnawing on the carcass overnight, and his head rested on its ribcage.
She poked him. “I don’t know how we’re going to do it but we need to get my staff back.”
The village was quiet, a wisp of smoke from the fading embers of the fire snaked into the clear blue sky. Strewn around the village, the toadoks lay stiff and cold, children still grasping onto their mothers in their death agonies. A human’s bones lay in a pile near the pot.
Morwen threaded her way through the bodies and peered inside the pot. A thick brown sludge filled the bottom. Waves of nausea swept over her. She knew what Caroc had done. He’d sacrificed himself to poison the village—claim his revenge for the death of Nessa and rid the world of the monstrous toadoks forever. It had been a noble sacrifice.
She found the king sitting in his chair with his mouth wide open as if he were trying to swallow the moon. The chieftess was slumped over his lap, the staff clasped in a tight fist. Morwen wrested it free.
“Where’s Caroc?” a familiar voice said.
She turned around. Goron smiled in greeting. Szat had pushed the pot over and lapped at a brown puddle. “Szat’s eating the last of him now. I better get working on an antidote.”
Morwen didn’t ask where Goron had been, and he didn’t tell her. Seemingly it was as if nothing had happened since he’d gone missing that night.
The forest was changing, surrendering to the swamp. The thinning ruinwood trees were replaced by weeping willows, bald cypresses, the base of their trunks enlarged and bulbous, and paper birches. Goron amused himself by tearing at their paper-like bark with childish glee and scrunching it up in his huge hands.
The birdsong switched from persistent chatter to mournful wails that ended in a squawk as if the bird, in deep depression, had thrown itself off a branch to its death. Morwen searched the foliage above until she finally spotted the culprit, a black-feathered bird with milky-white eyes and a stooped posture.
The soggy ground sucked at her feet. With each step, she sank up to her knees in the viscous mud. Morwen couldn’t get used to the smell of the swamp. The stench, like sodden laundry souring for days in the damp and darkness, lived in her nostrils. There were plenty of insects too. Mosquitos were the most irritating with their swollen abdomens, and a buzz that sounded like a whimpering dog. “I don’t like it here,” she said.
“Who would?” Goron replied.
“I do. These lizards are delicious,” Szat said nibbling on a charred water dragon impaled on a stick. The demon had found a constant supply of the creatures. They sunned themselves in the shafts of sunlight warming the trunks of the trees, unconcerned with Morwen’s and Goron’s presence—sitting ducks for a fireball. Goron kindly skewered them on sharp twigs for the demon.
On the second day, they came to a lake that stretched to a distant shore lined with pines. Beyond the trees the faraway outline of a mountain range was visible through the flimsy clouds. Neither of the travellers had ever seen such a large body of water other than the sea. They stared in wonder at the surface, as still as glass, reflecting a sky the colour of cold iron.
At the water’s edge stood a stone as tall as Goron. Both he and Morwen were drawn to the rough-hewn monument. One of the sides had been smoothed and a series of hieroglyphs etched upon its surface. Morwen ran her fingers over the symbols faded by centuries of harsh weather. Apparently sacrificial victims—buxom maidens—were once tethered to the stone for the pleasure of some gargantuan denizen of the lake.
“A charybdis,” Morwen exclaimed.
“A toadok god?” Goron asked pulling a face as he peered at the carved picture of a mass of blubber and tentacles.
“No, the toadoks were too stupid to write. Someone else long ago must have worshipped it.”
“It was the Javaites. The charybdis was their god and if they didn’t make a yearly sacrifice, the charybdis would destroy their village,” Szat said.
“How do you know that?” Morwen asked. She’d had the demon for only four years, and there was much she didn’t know about his previous life.
“I lived among them, of course.”
“Fascinating,” Goron said dropping his pants.
“What! What are you doing?” Morwen asked.
“Going for a swim.” Goron finished undressing and cannonballed into the water.
“Aren’t you worried about the charybdis?” Goron was being either very stupid or very brave. She suspected the former.
“That was long ago, you said so yourself, and even if the creature still exists, I’m hardly his type.” Goron pretended he was a water fountain.
Large bubbles erupted from the surface of the lake near the centre. The ripples washed towards Goron as he stopped larking around and sped from the water. “It’s getting a bit chilly,” he said as he dashed past Morwen.
It was late in the afternoon. The sun was dipping below the trees and neither of them fancied walking any farther. They set up camp on a ledge nestled into the hollow of an outcrop of rock overlooking the lake.
Goron had replenished his supplies from the pack Caroc had left in the toadoks’ camp, and they supped on dried beef and hardtack. The lake was lost in the darkness of a cloudy night, but Goron stared in that direction throughout the meal. Morwen sat quietly beside him and chewed her meal thoughtfully.
“He had no choice you know. You needed your staff, and he
