bird.
It seemed unnaturally bleak under the trees to Sir Borenson. He’d been in many forests. The clouds above and the setting sun had both muted the light, but the black pine boughs seemed to hurry the coming of the night.
In the solemn forest, mist rose from the ground, creating a haze, like an empty songhouse once the candles have been snuffed out, after the last aria of the evening.
They rode through deep woods for nearly half a mile before Borenson found the bodies. They were riding up a steep draw, through trees so thick that even ferns could not grow beneath them, when they came upon five girls lying in the crooks of a mossy old oak-pale flesh, white and bloodless, fingers and toes turned blue.
Each body was at a different height. But all of them were well above the reach of wolves. All of the girls were young, perhaps five to thirteen years old, and most were naked. Their bellies looked swollen, as if they were pregnant.
But most horrifying were their expressions. They stared up with eyes gone white, and their mouths gaped wide, as if they had died in inexpressible fear or agony.
Both, Borenson suspected. His heart sank. His own daughter Talon, the oldest of his brood, was eight. At that moment he felt that she was the most precious thing in his life. He glanced back, afraid that Fallion and Jaz would see the bodies, but it was too late. The princes were staring in shock.
Fallion peered up, horrified by what he saw. As yet, he had not learned the mysteries of how children were formed. He had never even seen a girl with her clothes off, and he knew that what he saw now was evil and unnatural.
Up the hill, there was a cracking sound in the woods, as if a horse had stepped on a branch. Everyone stopped and glanced uphill apprehensively for a moment, then Borenson turned back to the princes.
“Get them away from here,” Borenson told Waggit and Daymorra.
Borenson rode his horse near, placing himself between the princes and the girls in order to obscure their view. And for a moment he just stared at two of the girls, wedged in the crook of the same branch, whose bodies lay almost even with his eyes.
Both girls had rips and cuts on their flesh, bruises from rough handling. Both had obviously been violated by a big man, for there was bleeding and tearing in their most sacred places.
Borenson glanced at the ground and saw huge tracks-as if an impossibly large bear had been circling the tree.
Waggit rode up and whispered, “The girls taken from Hayfold? All the way up here?”
Borenson nodded. Three girls had been kidnapped a couple of nights before from the village of Hayfold. Such crimes were almost unheard of since the coming of the Earth King. Yet more than three bodies were here now. Borenson wondered where the other two had come from.
“I’ll cover the corpses,” Borenson said. “We can bring a wagon up tonight to retrieve them.”
He reached up, feeling more fatigued than his labors of the day could account for, and unpinned his green woolen cape. The lowest two girls were laid out side by side, and he imagined that his cape would cover both of them.
But just as he pulled the cape up, one girl moved.
He grunted in surprise and quicker than thought his boot-knife leapt from scabbard to hand. He stared at the girl for a moment, and saw movement again-a shifting in her belly.
“Is… is there something in there?” Waggit asked, his voice shaken.
And now that Borenson thought about it, he realized that the girls were too bloated for such cold weather. They shouldn’t have swelled so much in a pair of nights.
He saw it again, as if a child kicked inside the dead girl’s womb.
“There are babies in there,” Fallion said, his face a study in horror and amazement.
Leaning forward, Borenson plunged in his knife, penetrating the skin, so that the smaller girl’s belly flayed open. Out spilled its contents.
Borenson saw several creatures-wet, slimy, squirming. Like black malformed pups feeding at their mother’s teats.
One spilled out onto a limb, rolling to its back. Its eyes were lidless, like a snake’s, and vast and soulless in a wolflike face. Its tiny paws looked powerful, with claws as sharp as fishhooks. Its body looked too long for those legs, almost otterlike, with folds of skin that ran from leg to leg, like a flying lizard. But the creature had black hair, and its mouth held far too many teeth.
“What in the world?” Waggit intoned with revulsion.
The girl’s innards were mostly gone. Tripe, guts, liver. The monsters had been feeding on them.
“Eating their way out,” Waggit said. He asked the others, “You ever heard of anything like this?”
“You’re the scholar,” Borenson shot back.
Both men looked to Daymorra for an answer. She was the one who had traveled most widely in the world. She just sat astride her horse, nocking an arrow to her great bow, and shook her head.
Suddenly, from the highest branch above them, there was movement. A pale face turned to them, and a small and frightened voice whispered, “Get away from here. Before they come back!”
A young woman with hair as red as cinnamon was staring down at them-fierce eyes as blue as summer skies, the eyes of a savage. With her pale complexion, Borenson had just thought her to be another one of the dead. She looked to be twelve or thirteen, her small breasts just beginning to form. Her clothes were sodden rags, and her windblown hair had bits of leaves, lichens, and bark caught in it.
He stared in surprise. The girl’s teeth were chattering. Strange, Borenson thought; I did not hear it before. She still clung to a scrap of cloth, a dark green coat. Her thighs were bruised and bloody, but her stomach was not yet bloated. Her rape must have been very recent.
Borenson glanced back at the others, to see their reaction, but the young woman begged, “Please, don’t leave me!”
“We won’t,” young Fallion said, spurring his horse. In an instant, he was under the limb, reaching up.
The girl leaned forward, grabbing him around the neck. She felt shaky and frail as she half slid, half fell into the saddle behind him.
Fallion worried for her, hoping that there might be time to save her still. He wondered if it was safe to touch her-if the creatures inside might eat their way out.
Borenson threw his cape around her shoulders. Fallion felt her tremble all over as she hugged his chest. She clung to him as if she’d die before she let go.
“Do you have a name, child?” Borenson asked.
“Rhianna,” the girl said. Her accent was one common to folk in the far northwest of Mystarria.
“A last name?” he asked. She made no answer. Fallion turned to see her. Her blue eyes were filled with more terror than he had ever seen in a human face.
Fallion wondered what horrors she had seen.
For her part, Rhianna stared at the men, and she was too afraid to speak. She could feel something hurting her inside. Was it fear that gnawed at her belly, or something worse? Why were these men still here? Everyone else was dead. She could tell them later what had happened-about the dark stranger, the summoner. She forced some words past lips that would not let her speak. “Please, let’s go. Get me out of here!”
In the woods above them there was a distant crack, like a wet limb snapping under heavy weight.
“I smell evil,” Daymorra whispered. “It’s coming.”
Suddenly a voice inside Fallion warned, “Flee!” It was his father’s voice, the warning of the Earth King.
All the others must have heard the same warning, for Waggit instantly grabbed Jaz’s reins and went thundering downhill through the woods.
Borenson fumbled with his boot-knife for an instant, thinking to put it away, but then stabbed the damned creature that lay on the limb through the belly, and it wriggled on the end of his blade. He marveled at its strength, until it let out a shrill bell-like bark.
And in the woods, uphill, an enormous roar sounded, shaking the air, a mother crying out to her young.
There was the sound of limbs snapping and trees breaking, and Borenson looked back. Fallion was trying to turn his mount, mouth wide in horror. Borenson slapped its rump, and the horse lunged away uncertainly.
Rhianna wrapped her arms around Fallion. He locked his own small hand over her fist and thought, We were
