“Yes.”
Then you can’t stay, even to help with the Shadows and Wraiths. We can handle them.
Colin pulled his sleeve back down. “Then I’m leaving. Today.” He reached down and picked up the flask, twisted the top free. He returned to the water’s edge, almost reached down and drew a handful of it out of habit so he could drink, but he halted mid-motion. Shaking his head, he dipped the flask into the water.
The Lifeblood tingled against his skin, and he shuddered, felt the pain in his gut, a pain he knew he could slake, but he focused on the flask. Bubbles rose to the surface of the Well as the last of the air escaped, then he withdrew it and held it up to the light.
Clear, like water. No hint that it was anything else.
Unless you’d already drunk some of it.
His nostrils flared. He could smell it: fresh loam, dried leaves, snow.
When he turned, he felt Osserin watching him, and he bristled. “I don’t intend to use it,” he said. “It’s… a precaution.”
A precaution.
“Yes.” Colin shoved the flask inside his satchel, making certain it was protected by layers of cloth so that it wouldn’t break. “In case the pain becomes too great.”
With the Lifeblood present, the pain will always be too great.
Colin sent the Faelehgre an annoyed glare, adjusting the pack on his shoulder. “Perhaps.” Taking up his staff, he paused.
Now that he was prepared to leave, he found his anger fading. He stared out over the ruins of the city, over the white towers, the amphitheater, the road and buildings. He could imagine what the city had looked like before the Well destroyed the Faelehgre as a people. Osserin had told him enough stories over the years. The white stone had glowed in the moonlight, the streets filled with music, with life. The dark-skinned Faelehgre had danced along those streets in clothes of every hue, had serenaded each other beneath the balustrades and beside the pools and fountains, moon-flowers tucked in their hair.
The ancient trees stirred, the wind sighing in their branches, and Colin drew in a deep breath. He could smell the acrid scent of their needles, the coolness of the Lifeblood, the bitterness of bark and leaves and the vividness of the ferns and other undergrowth. But the music he could almost hear from the past faded.
“I’ve been here so long, I can’t imagine leaving,” he finally said. His voice sounded small, vulnerable, as if he were twelve again.
Osserin drifted closer. But you must, or the Well will claim you. As it claimed us.
Colin hefted the pack into a more comfortable position, then gathered up his staff before looking directly at the Faelehgre’s light.
“Let’s go.”
They emerged from the edge of the forest into late afternoon sunlight, and Colin paused and raised a hand to shade his eyes, blinking at the brightness. He’d shifted back to his aged form again, shedding the youthfulness he’d assumed to escape the Shadows. The plains spread out before him, wide and open, and he felt himself cringe back from them, from the vast emptiness of the sky.
“I’ve been inside the forest too long,” he murmured.
Osserin didn’t respond. He seemed to be waiting, expectant.
Colin scanned the horizon, breathing in the scent of late autumn grass and heat. And something else. A taint on the breeze, of smoke and He turned and caught sight of a black cloud of carrion birds wheeling in the distance between columns of thinning smoke. Thousands of them, rising and settling with sickening grace.
He frowned. “What happened?”
Osserin shifted forward, out over the grasses in the direction of the smoke. A battle. A large one. It’s the disturbance we abandoned the Well to investigate this morning.
“A battle between whom?”
It took place outside the Well’s influence. We couldn’t get close enough to see.
Colin grunted. “I’ll check it out. After.” He watched the flock of carrion birds a moment more, then turned away, searching the nearer grasses for the shepherd’s hook.
He spotted it almost instantly, and his breath caught, his throat tightening. As it did every time he came here, every time he traveled through the forest to this place, to where the hopes and dreams of all of those who were part of the wagon train out of Lean-to and Portstown ended. The wagons had vanished long ago. He’d scavenged as much as he could of the supplies that first year, taking whatever he thought he’d need to survive in the forest, before he knew how much the Lifeblood had changed him. The rest had been looted by the dwarren or had simply rotted and decayed and been claimed by the grass.
But not all. He’d used some of the metal from the wheels and the wagons’ hitches to fashion a shepherd’s hook, and he’d planted it where the wagons used to be, had sunk it deep into the earth to mark the location, years after most traces of what had happened there had vanished, after he realized that if he didn’t do something, all traces would be lost completely.
Initially, he’d come to this place every year with a lantern taken from the wagons, lit it, and placed it on the shepherd’s hook. To remember. But after ten years he’d turned his grief outward, turned his rage onto the Shadows. By then he’d learned enough of how the Well had changed him that he could hunt them, learned enough from the Faelehgre and the forest to kill them. That pursuit had consumed him for nearly twenty years. He’d forgotten about the lantern, the shepherd’s hook. He’d forgotten himself. When the Faelehgre finally convinced him that his hunting was merely making the Shadows stronger, more dangerous, he’d sunk into listlessness, wandering the forest, the ruins of Terra’nor, letting its cool depths enfold him. Only when Osserin began following him, began relating the history of the Faelehgre-how they’d built Terra’nor near the Well, how they’d built their entire culture around its power, worshiping it, reveling in it, using it-did he reawaken.
He began to learn then. Of Terra’nor and its fall, how the power of the Well had slowly begun to corrupt the Faelehgre, how it began to distort their bodies, changing them. Of how the Faelehgre had refused to leave until it was too late, until the Well had changed them enough that they could no longer leave. And of how it had continued to change them, the corporeal bodies of the Faelehgre finally fading and splitting into the Shadows and the Lights.
And once he’d learned of the Faelehgre and the Shadows, he turned to the plains, exploring their reaches, although never moving too far from the forest. He’d watched the dwarren and their tribal wars from afar, watched the humans continue to attempt to settle on dwarren lands, watched the Alvritshai attempt to as well. The plains had become a battlefield, blood spilled across its length. He’d watched it all.
Until seven years ago, when he’d finally noticed that the black spot on his arm-a mere sliver of darkness then-wasn’t a freckle.
Suddenly, he knew his time in the forest was running out. Unless he wanted to become like the Faelehgre and the Shadows: trapped.
It was then that he’d recalled the shepherd’s hook, had begun returning every year with the lantern.
“How long have I been here, Osserin?” he rasped. He felt tears burning at the edges of his eyes already, heard them in his voice, but he choked them back. “How long since I drank from the Well?”
Sixty-seven years.
Colin’s breath stopped, his eyes widening. The tears that had threatened dried up. “Sixty-se-” he began, but the word caught in his throat.
He swallowed. “How is that possible?” he breathed.
Because you willed it, Osserin said, and Colin heard the edge in his voice. Because the Lifeblood made it possible.
Before Colin could respond, the Faelehgre moved toward the hook, hovering close to the ground at first, as if looking for traces of the wagons, of the bodies, of the deaths. When he neared the hook, he spun around it, halting near the top.
Colin struggled a moment longer, then exhaled heavily. Staff in hand, the lantern banging against it as he moved, he trudged forward, the weight of the years he hadn’t realized had passed-not consciously-making the trek more difficult. His leg screamed in tingling agony, but he ignored it, pulling up beneath the S-shaped curve of the hook. Setting the lantern on the ground, he pulled the hollow bowl, tinder, and flint from the pockets of his robe, and using some of the surrounding dried grass, he got a flame started in the bowl. Blowing on it to keep it lit, he
