straightened, and the tweaks and twinges of old muscles dissipated. The weariness brought on by the weight of years was shrugged aside, shed like bothersome clothing. In the space of a heartbeat, he grew young, at least twenty years younger, if not more, a nearly unconscious transformation. A reflex.
Where are they coming from? And where are the rest of the Faelehgre? He couldn’t stop the anger from entering his voice, the acidic bite that always appeared when he thought of the Shadows.
The south. We went to investigate a disturbance at the edge of the forest.
And you left the Well unguarded?
Colin felt Osserin’s annoyance. We can’t guard the Well at all times. There aren’t enough of us. You know this. We’ve had this argument before.
Colin snorted. So there’s no one at the Well right now? No one at all?
It’s unprotected.
Colin growled and picked up his pace.
His room wasn’t far from the Well, but far enough. He sprinted down pathways lined with dirt and needles, past standing stone columns, past a wide-based, cracked fountain in the center of an oval plaza. He dodged through the rounded door of a low building, through its empty inner rooms and out the far side, satchel jouncing against his back, then raced down gentle steps to what had once been a marketplace. Sunlight burst through the layer of fog and lit the main roadway through the city a gleaming, vibrant white as he sped down its length, the buildings on either side growing taller, the spires more intricate and magnificent. Then the buildings fell away, abruptly, the roadway opening out into an oval amphitheater, gentle white steps sloping downward toward the rough stone edges of the Well itself.
He sucked in a sharp breath and drew up short at the edge of the highest step, using his staff to steady himself. He could sense the Well now, a physical force pressing against every layer of his skin, tingling there. It pulsed in his blood, shivered through his gut, tickled his lungs with every breath he took. A cool sensation, smooth and fluid, smelling of dried leaves and dark earth.
His stomach cramped in reaction, in anticipation. The breath he’d drawn hissed out at the pain, but he shoved the ache aside while repressing an ecstatic shudder, surveyed the theater, the trees to either side, the boundaries of the Well beneath. The wide stone steps-ones he’d barely seen so many years before when the Faelehgre had led him here, ones he’d stumbled down, at the edge of asphyxiation-descended gradually, narrowing until they reached the lip of the Well and terminated. There, the waters of the Well stretched outward in a wide, placid circle, the surface perfectly smooth and untroubled, the depths clear. Over a hundred hands across, the Well seized Colin’s attention, and he involuntarily took a step down. The hand holding the lantern spasmed and lifted, reached toward the water, and for a moment he literally felt the grit of the ancient stone that held its waters on his fingers.
But he caught himself, his outstretched hand tightening into a white-knuckled fist. He forced it back to his side. He wasn’t here to drink. He never intended to drink from the Well again. He was here to protect.
He tore his gaze away from the water. To either side of the white steps, where the city ended, the forest took over, encircling the Well with a thick border of tall, ancient trees. The largest trees he’d ever seen before entering the forest, their boles nearly forty hands around at the base, their tops towering over even the highest of the Faelehgre’s spires. The heart of the forest.
And that heart was rustling now, agitated. Colin could feel its anger.
He shifted down the steps, moving slowly, eyes darting back and forth, watching for movements beneath the trees, searching for the Shadows. They’d attack from the forest. They couldn’t move over the white stone of the city, couldn’t move over water, but the stone steps of the theater ended at the Well. There wasn’t even a lip of the white stone around the Well itself. Not even the Faelehgre, at the height of their power, when Terra’nor had been a vibrant, flourishing city and one of the trade hubs of the plains, had been that possessive of the Lifeblood.
When he reached the Well, he set his satchel, the flask, and the lantern aside, then dropped a hand to the stone that contained it and caressed it without thought, his eyes on the forest. With a frisson of shock he remembered crashing into this stone-rough, unworked, and dense. He felt it scraping against his skin through his clothing as he crawled over it, his vision fading, his chest numbed with the Shadow’s touch. Then he’d drunk the water, felt the stone’s coldness against his skin as he collapsed onto his back, as he stared up into the sky and let the darkness take him…
Something in the forest moved, and he jerked his hand from the stone and settled it onto the staff.
The trees shuddered.
On the opposite side of the Well, a figure emerged from the forest. The same height as Colin, it stepped from the trees and halted, sheathed in the glistening black of the Shadows, as if clothed in them. They writhed over the figure from head to toe, an occasional section of blackness flaring away from the form, as if the Shadows themselves were flapping in a nonexistent wind.
Colin’s stance altered. His eyes narrowed; his muscles hardened. He took the staff into both hands and balanced it defensively before him without thought.
Osserin, he sent, it’s one of the Wraiths.
He felt the Faelehgre pause. Then, with renewed urgency: We’re coming.
Colin regarded the Wraith across the smooth surface of the Well in silence. He could feel the figure’s presence, could taste the Shadows that cloaked it. A sour taste, tainting the air with a visceral enmity, with a hatred that made Colin’s nostrils flare.
He’d been battling the Wraiths since he first arrived; he knew there were at least six of them. The Faelehgre said the first one had appeared nearly twenty years before the wagons carrying Colin and the others had arrived on the outskirts of the forest. They didn’t know what they were, but they knew that they’d been created somehow by the Shadows. They carried the sukrael’s taint.
The Wraith reached forward and dipped a hand into the Well, ripples spreading outward as it disturbed the surface and drew the water toward its mouth to drink.
Colin barked out a wordless denial, a sound of pure rage, and leaped off the lip of the Well to the ground and into the edge of the forest. Weaving around the tangled roots of the huge trees, he sped along the curve of the Well, the rage inside growing into a growl. An old rage. Not directed at the sacrilege of the Shadows touching the water, of their taint on the Lifeblood, or their creation of the Wraiths, but at what they had done so many years before to the wagon train, at the death and destruction they had wrought. He could hear the men and women and children of the wagon train screaming in the depths of his growl, could hear their cries of pain and outrage.
The Wraith didn’t react, reaching again toward the water with both hands, liquid spilling from its arm in rivulets as it cupped it to its face, the Shadows around it writhing in a frenzy, as if the wind they felt had increased to a gale. It reached a third time to the water as Colin raced around the last leg, and then it turned, the motion slow and measured, unconcerned It was the only warning Colin got.
Its total disregard for his approach registered a moment before the Shadows that had been lying in wait struck.
Colin’s roar of outrage broke off with a shocked gasp as he brought up the forest staff a moment before the Shadow’s tendril would have passed through his neck. The tendril struck the wood, struck the essence it had been imbued with, and drove Colin off his feet and into the edge of the Well. Stone bit into his side, and a frigid numbness passed down through his arm, tingling with fear and the Shadow’s power. But the Shadow hadn’t touched him, its blow deflected by the staff, a gift of the forest, and there was no time to collect himself. He rolled away from the stone wall, out of the Shadow’s path as it came after him, and he brought his staff up hard into the Shadow’s middle. The staff snagged in the seething blackness, and with a quick motion Colin flicked it up and back, flinging the Shadow out over the water of the Well. It shrieked as Colin spun. He didn’t need to see the Shadow trying to coalesce over the water, didn’t need to see its struggle as it tried to hold its form and failed, sinking into the surface. He’d seen it all before, and not just over the water of the Well. Any water with some depth to it would work. He’d discovered that during the years he’d spent actively searching out and killing as many of the Shadows as he could.
Which is how he knew that there were at least two more of them behind him. They hissed as their counterpart’s grating shriek died and drew up short when Colin brandished the staff.
“Ha!” he barked, his gaze flicking over the two no more than three paces away, just out of reach, then toward the three others he could see back in the depths of the forest. The feral grin that had started forming on his lips, died.
