Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 407 of 619

Ajax blew the flute at the door. The note carried thin into the dark. He lowered it and waited. Behind him, Chalam sat with his cracked staff across his knees, and Aldric spread his book on the table under the starlight in the hall. The creature was a day out. If the grove did not answer, they met it blind. She came before dawn. The Leafgift Dryad stepped through the gate without a sound, bark-skinned, dressed in broad green leaves. She had brought Chalam his last staff and taken the old one. Now she carried a fresh length of pale wood in one hand and flowers in the other. Her eyes moved across the hall, counting the men, the walls, the fear. Ajax said to the dryad. "A thing twice the width of a Verath comes south. I mean to protect this grove and these walls. I cannot do it blind." She studied him. Then she held out the staff. "This wood holds heavier work than the last. Use it once for the reading and it will not crack." She placed the flowers on the table beside Aldric's book. "And I offer more. I will stand watch over Black Oak and the grove until this creature falls. My roots reach where your eyes do not." Chalam took the new staff. He turned it in his hands and felt the grip. "It holds," he said. "I can read the binding now." "Then read," Ajax said. "What drove the Verath out?" Aldric turned pages fast. His finger stopped. "The drag marks Rowan tracked. Four toes, no claw, and a furrow behind, wider than a tail." He looked up. "I have seen this fragment once. A torn page, unsigned. It names a root-eater that hunts whole groves, not deer. Older than the Verath. It burrows and pulls trees under by the roots." Chalam set the new staff to the flowers and the marks Aldric had copied. Chalk, lodestone, three vials in order. The staff held. Light gathered along the wood and did not fade. "The binding on it broke," Chalam said. "Three hundred years old. Someone opened it in the far north. It runs from nothing. It comes because your grove is the nearest living wood." Ajax set his hand flat on the table. "Then it comes here for the trees. Not for us." "For both," the dryad said. "It does not stop." Ajax looked at the staff that held, the copied marks, the flowers. He had his answer and his eyes. "Grayson holds the wall. Chalam reads its path each hour. She watches the ground." He faced the dryad. "We meet it at the grove line, not the gate." The dryad bowed her head. Now Ajax knew the name of what came, and where he would stand to kill it.