Brandon Ashveil's Arc

Chapter 5 of 18

By dusk the ground softened under their boots. The track sank between two ridges and opened into a bowl of black water and pale trees. The sunken groves. Brandon stopped at the edge. His iron knife felt suddenly like a stick in his hand. Dayna had warned him on the walk up. Here, iron did nothing. Here, the fae kept their sick and their traps together. "Don't step on the moss that's too green," Dayna said. She crouched and touched a patch of bright emerald. It shivered. Under it, a pit went down into dark. "Or that." Brandon looked across the grove. Every patch of ground looked like every other. Roots knotted through standing water. Mist hung at knee height. He could feel the fae lord ahead of him, still that low pull behind his ribs, closer now. Close enough that a wrong step would end this before he ever saw the man's face. "I can't read this ground," Brandon said. "I'll drop into a hole in the first ten paces." Dayna slid her satchel off her shoulder. She dug past dried leaves and pulled out a small lantern. Glass and worked metal, and inside it a cluster of live fireflies drifting in slow circles. She shook it once. The lights brightened. "I traded three winters of tinctures for this," she said. "They don't like fae workings. Where the ground lies, they go dark." She lifted the lantern over the bright moss. The fireflies dimmed to almost nothing. She moved it left, over plain leaf litter. They flared yellow. "Follow the light," she said. "Step where they burn. Don't step where they don't." She went first. Brandon set his boot in her print. They moved slow. Twice the lantern dulled and she pulled him sideways by the sleeve. Once a root under clear water turned out to be a jaw of thin wooden teeth. They walked around it. Halfway across, the fireflies went dark all at once. Not a trap under their feet. Something ahead. A woman stood between two pale trunks. Tall. Antlers braided into black hair. A gown stitched from bark and shadow. Brandon had never seen her before, but Dayna's hand tightened on his wrist hard enough to hurt. Dayna knew her. That was enough. "The hunter," the fae queen said. Her voice was quiet and it carried. "And the human girl who sells our dead by the finger." Brandon's knife came up on reflex. Useless here. He knew it and lowered it. "You're not the one I came for," he said. "No," she said. "He is my kin. You will not reach him tonight." She did not move. She did not need to. Around them, the mist thickened. The fireflies stayed dark. Brandon had crossed the traps and walked straight into the thing the traps were guarding.