“Quiet now,” Yaellin whispered. “Around to the left. Keep out of the bones.”
Dart frowned, then saw where Yaellin pointed. She stumbled back with a strangled cry, crackling a mouse’s rib cage under her heel. She gaped toward the tree. The snarl of deadfall showed itself to be bones, piled and broken: slender leg bones of deer, cracked skulls of rabbits, ribs of giant woodland slothkins, ivory horns of lothicorns.
“The true heart of the myrrwood,” Yaellin intoned. “The one trunk from which all else spread.”
“The Heartwood,” Dart said, remembering the stories told. She stared around her. Here was Lord Chrism’s private sanctuary, a forbidden, sacred place. None but the god was allowed to enter. Even the sun hid its face from this soil. “What happened?”
“Corruption… like with the men and women.”
They circled its bole, keeping wide of the ring of bones. As they ran, a soft skittering sounded. A skull of a slothkin rose from the pile, lifted by a writhing root. Its empty eye sockets bloomed with a sickly yellow flame.
Yaellin guided them to the side, skirting bushes and trunks. “It wakes.”
More skulls rose, igniting with fire. Riding roots, they pushed out of the pile and snaked outward. Piled bones toppled with a hollow wooden sound as the roots quested into the surrounding wood.
They ran, keeping hidden.
Movement to Dart’s left drew her eye. A cracked skull of a deer, still antlered, teetered up from a beach of bone. It swung around, meeting her gaze. She found the blaze in the sockets fixing to her.
Her feet slowed.
A trilling filled her head, sweet and high. The wood grew darker at the edges. The skull and eyes glowed brighter. Words grew in her head, speaking with her own voice: come, sleep, rest, come…
Fingers gripped her chin and turned her face. “No,” Yaellin said. He had placed Laurelle down. “Don’t look.”
She nodded, but still felt drawn to glance over. Her feet drifted her back toward the deadfall. Motion snaked throughout the pile. Bones skittered and rolled. New fires lit the night as more eyes opened, a dance of fireflits.
Pretty…
She turned to see-but a sweep of darkness dropped like a curtain across the sight.
“No,” Yaellin repeated behind her. “Only a little farther.”
Laurelle stumbled up to her, her face bled of all color.
A shape leaped before them. Both girls yelped, falling into each other’s arms. But it was only a dwarf deerling, no taller than Dart’s waist. Its ears quivered. It stopped on tiny hooves, blind to the three of them, then bounded forward, toward the deadfall.
Dart glanced after it.
It landed, knee deep in the bone pile. The treacherous footing stumbled its perch. It fell forward. Only then did it seem to note where it was. Its head snapped up, neck taut, a confused bleat escaping.
Then a snarl of roots tangled up out of the bones. It lifted the deerling high and swamped over its body. The animal fought, but the roots penetrated flesh as easily as water. A sharp wail squealed forth, but it ended in one heartbeat as yellow flames sprouted from the deerling’s mouth and nose. More fires spat out from its ears and rear quarters.
Flesh roasted from the inside out, falling to ash as the body was shaken and jerked by the roots. All that was left of the deerling were bones, raining down upon the pile, growing the deadfall.
Aghast, Dart stumbled ahead. Through the darkness, other animals came to the call of the Heartwood. Cries rose all around the immense tree.
“This way,” Yaellin said, finally reaching the far side of the tree. “The others must have herded us here, hoping we’d succumb to the tree.”
“What is it?” Laurelle asked.
“Another ilk-beast. Trees are living creatures, like man or beast. As those who served Chrism drank his blood, so the first god once fed this tree. Its Grace was his to corrupt if and when he chose.”
Dart remembered the blood roots in the tunnel. She risked a glance back toward the horror. She now knew where all that blood had come from, sucked by Grace from the woodland creatures.
Yaellin guided them onward. The howl of the other ilk-beasts had grown silent. Dart found the quiet more disturbing than their hunting cries. Were they lying in wait for an ambush?
For another full bell, they fled through the woods, no end in sight.
“Dawn is not far,” Yaellin said. “We’d best be out of these woods and lost into the streets before the sun shows her face.”
“Why are you helping us?” Dart finally asked. She eyed his cloak of shadows. “Who… who are you really?”
He glanced down to her. He had lowered his cloak’s hood.
His black hair, though, remained enough of a cowl, loose to the shoulder and as dark as the night. The only break was the streak of silver from brow to behind his right ear. “It seems, little Dart, we are half siblings in a way.”
Dart frowned. Though the Hand had clearly saved them, she still felt wary.
“The headmistress of the Conclave was my mother,” he said. “Melinda mir Mar. And you were the little one she rescued and raised so long ago. The little stray sheep hidden among a flock of others.”
Dart shook her head in disbelief.
“It’s true, little sister.” A glimmer of a sad smile graced his face. “All was told to me by my father when I was about your age. He set a duty upon me like no other.”
“What was that?”
“To keep watch over the Godsword.”
“This is what Ser Henri told me,” Kathryn said. She leaned closer to Tylar to keep their words private. The flippercraft’s mekanicals chugged in rhythmic fashion. For a moment, his storm-gray eyes caught her gaze and her breath. She glanced down. “He… he told me once.. a half-moon after you were shipped away. He was deep into his cups, of sour and sanguine a mood. Over you. Over my loss.”
“Your loss?” Tylar asked.
“My loss of you…” she mumbled, speaking a half-truth. She was not ready to speak of the other yet.
He nodded. “I’m sorry.”
The anguish in his words drew her eyes up. “I’m as much to blame. Before the adjudicators, I should’ve been more of a lover, less of a knight.”
“The soothmancers would’ve had the truth out of you either way.”
“But what was the truth?” she said, hating herself for sounding so bitter. “I was so distraught. So shaken by the accusations.” She turned away. “You did come to bed bloody that night. Your sword was found at the home of the murdered cobblers.”
“I know. I barely remember even waking that morning…”
“Castellan Mirra said you were fed a draft of drowsing alchemy. Probably in wine.” Kathryn explained what the former castellan had related to her and Perryl, how Tylar was a pawn in a game of power among factions in Tashijan.
“Ser Henri knew my innocence?” Tylar asked at the end, clearly shaken, his voice hardening. “Even as I was sent away?”
“Do not judge him too harshly. He came to that knowledge late, and to speak it aloud at that time would have exposed too many others. Even Henri’s wardenship would have been threatened, and Argent ser Fields and his Fiery Cross would have assumed the Warden’s Eyrie much earlier.”
Tylar seemed little settled, breathing hard. Kathryn knew this mood. She smelled the heat of his skin. It awakened other unwanted memories, but she shoved these down. “Tylar, if Ser Henri had laid this all out, given you the choice of sacrifice or freedom, which would you have chosen?”
He remained silent, staring out the windows. The craft’s aeroskimmers glowed against the night sky. “It was not just my life in that balance,” he mumbled and turned back to her.
Those eyes again… she felt her heart tremble.
“But perhaps you are right…” He released her, glancing down. “At the end, I may have walked of my own
