I. Lost in Þagalwood
Thomas Rimor has glamoured himself to blend into a pocket of deep crimson shadow on the pathway through Þagalwood. Armed with bow and arrows, he plans to ambush the Yvag knights who’ll be escorting the latest teind to Ailfion for sacrifice. It’s something he has done repeatedly over the years with mixed success.
In all that time he has become more and more attuned to the ördstone he carries—that black, scalloped, alien “skipping” stone decorated with peculiar blue jewels—to where he can sense when the time for a new teind is drawing near. The stone almost speaks to him. His scalp crawls with the sensation of its pulsing when it heralds that the Yvags and their captive are on the march—as it’s doing even now.
However, this time as he waits, invisible in deep shadows and surrounded by the grotesque trees that populate this wood, instead of the escorted teind, he is surprised when, far up the pathway in the opposite direction, a single Yvag emerges from among the wood. Like a pale ghost, the Yvag simply walks out and onto the wide pathway, turns and departs.
Thomas hastily draws an arrow, but then hesitates to shoot. The Yvag hasn’t seen him and it isn’t leading some unfortunate ensorcelled man or woman toward a slow descending death in the fathomless pit called Hel. Nor is it dressed in the usual black-and-silver Yvag knight’s armor as he is, although it’s too far away for him to make out the details of its costume.
Nevertheless, the pale distant Yvag has impossibly just come out of the depths of the wood.
He is aware that these bone-white trees watch him. The whorls and knots of their trunks are like weird inhuman faces; their branches join overhead to form an archway above the path—the branches directly above him rub together, producing odd, whispery, clacking words, in this instance, “Let be, let be, Thomas Rimor. Let her be.”
He lowers the bow.
The numberless trees used to call him names such as “lonely” or “friendless one” while they invited him to join them, which is to say, to die by straying from the path and attempting to enter the wood. He knew better than to listen that invitation. He once watched a man named Gallorini deviate from the pathway to be immediately overtaken by living roots and tendrils like tentacles and consumed, stripped of skin and muscle until nothing but a bleached bone skeleton remained. It is still here, far back along the pathway, but has itself grown gnarled and distorted over the centuries and now is simply one among the hundreds or thousands of such trees that fill this place called Þagalwood.
At some point over time the wood began to acknowledge him by name. When he steps through a gate now, the rasping branches whisper to each other excitedly that “Thomas is among us, look, look.” It’s as if he is here to entertain them. For all that they’ve taken an interest in him, at no time have the trees ever betrayed his presence to the Yvag, which makes him wonder if they want to see him triumph over the elves of Yvagddu. Centuries have passed, and he still can only speculate as to why they are here and what they really are. It’s not as if there’s anyone he can ask about them.
Ahead in the distance, the pale Yvag has been swallowed up in the ruddy darkness. Thomas remains in his pocket of shadow awhile longer, watching in both directions for the anticipated company of knights and victim. Still, no one else appears.
He wonders if the knights have avoided him, have cut a gate straight into Ailfion itself. He’s suspected them of this for awhile, has thought about lying in wait for them above Hel’s plaza—risky, yes, but they would be as unprepared as he is now.
The ördstone continues to skritch against his skull. The teind is happening . . . somewhere.
Finally, he tires of waiting for a procession that’s not coming. He walks up the pathway himself to where the pale creature emerged.
Given that to step off the pathway into the wood is a sure way to die, how has the one he just saw not been consumed? Maybe it truly was a ghost?
Then it occurs to him that the trees called it her. Mostly the elven seem to have no immutable sexual characteristics, or any such at all that he can perceive. Their queen, Nicnevin, adopts whatever gender suits her; but that certainly wasn’t Nicnevin, not as he’s known her. For one thing, she travels only with a retinue as befits a Queen.
The place where the Yvag ghost exited is just black soil, typical forest floor, and undergrowth, nothing exceptional.
He tugs at the leather thong round his neck to retrieve the stone from its pouch. It lies, blinking in some complex sequence, upon his palm. His entire hand glows blue as the small jewels in it ignite. The stone, he’s learned, is full of surprises. It does far more than simply cutting portals, gates into and out of Yvagddu.
He holds it before him, and the ördstone casts a thin beam of light at the ground, illuminating a line of footprints; he traces their circuitous route backward into the depths of Þagalwood as far as he can see.
Thomas has a mad idea. He puts away his arrow, straps the bow across his body, draws a black barbed Yvag dagger he carries, and then with great caution takes a first step off the pathway, ready to slash and leap back if wriggling wormlike roots sprout to seize him.
To either side of his foot the soil does rise and shift. Tendrils poke out but immediately withdraw again. None threads up where the Yvag walked, or where he now stands. It could be a trick, certes. Þagalwood might be leading him into its inescapable depths to make a meal of him, but why would it have waited all this time? The trees observe him, a curiosity in their midst, a unicorn.
He takes another step along the trail the Yvag made. Still nothing reaches for him.
Centipedes and creepy-crawlies churn the soil ahead alongside and between the blue footprints. The blue insect trail looks to wind deep into the wood.
Overhead branches shift and scrape in a nonexistent wind. The scraping sets his teeth on edge: “Vital one, yes, come, come deeper.”
He peers up. Did it just call him “vital” or “fatal”? Either way, he’s not turning back.
He continues along the ghost’s trail, whoever she was. It does seem that insects thrive in the soil where she walked and do not stray far off it, or else the insects were here first and showed the ghost the way.
Deeper in, Thomas soon finds himself surrounded by peculiar lavender flowers, with petals that look meaty and thick. He bends down to pluck one, and the scraping voice of the wood warns, “Kanerva, poison! Poison to the Yvag! Poison to you!”
The large flower doesn’t look poisonous. Still, he’s glad to be wearing Yvag armor, which covers his hands as well as the rest of him.
He lifts and cautiously inhales the flower, and is nearly dropped to his knees.
Coughing, he pushes the blossom away from himself. Pulls his head back, blinking tears. The scent still burns in his nostrils.
His dizziness lasts only a few moments. Even the perfume of kanerva is hazardous, it seems, but it’s also familiar.
This taste was in his mouth as “Sir Richard” carted him to Kirklees Priory with the intent of having the Yvag Zhanedd finish him off. The creature Bragrender masquerading as Sir Richard had used no more than a tiny needle’s worth of the poison hidden in a signet ring, and Thomas lay paralyzed for hours, close to death. It’s deadly to the Yvag as well, is it? Good. He can think of a use or two for such a poison.
With great care, he holds the flower away from himself as he continues forward. The trail winds deeper still, well beyond any place he has seen before. Behind him, the main pathway is lost in the dimness, too. He wonders how vast can Þagalwood be.
The trail winds around and around until he is absolutely lost, and consumed by a growing terror that the wood is intentionally toying with him.
Then, at the moment when panic nearly overwhelms him and he’s ready to run back the way he’s come, the footprint trail dumps him out onto the main path again. He is exactly where he entered. His own footprints show where he entered.
This is impossible. If anything he has been plunging deeper and deeper in among the broad white trunks, away from the single safe pathway. How can he have been this disoriented? Þagalwood has taken him for a journey, and led him where it likes; but in the end it hasn’t taken his life.
Still, no teind has passed this way. In the dirt there are no three-toed prints of Yvag beasts or prints of Yvag feet. Nothing has passed by. He can’t have been in the wood but a quarter hour surely. Back in London, no doubt whole hours will have elapsed, but he’s used to that.
In Alpin Waldroup’s company that first time, this place terrified him and for so many years after, even though it’s somewhat akin to the King’s Way through Sherwood Forest: a main route between critical points, along which regal cortèges drag captured teinds to their death—or did until he started interfering. That’s the difference between the two woods, he supposes: wherever you cut into it, that’s where Þagalwood somehow begins. He thinks of all the red tunnels he’s seen, and how all of them, when you walk them, deliver you onto this path. That only changes when you concentrate on a destination other than Þagalwood.
He kneels, the flower set beside him. Thomas looks down at the stone. It’s cold and dark; none of the blue gems twinkles. The collecting of a teind has already taken place. Somehow, he has missed it. The stone offers no clue.
“Wake up,” he tells it. “We need to go.”
He stands and concentrates on his destination. It should still be night in London, but he is cautious as he slices open enough of a portal to look upon his destination—indeed the interior of the Lazar-house in Southwark is dark. They’ve no patients, and no sisters from St. Thomas the Apostle Hospital are on hand.
He finishes the cut and steps through the gate into the house where once upon a time lepers were kept isolated from the populace. Nowadays, plague victims have taken the place of the lepers in the houses.
Thomas turned and sealed up the gate. As he’d anticipated, it was still night, but also surprisingly chilly.
There were a few places he could have chosen—mostly open fields—but he didn’t want to walk about in London with the kanerva blossom. Who knew how long it might remain potent once plucked or what effect the air here might have on it compared to that of Yvagddu.
He set to work. Stored in the back of the Lazar-house was a crate he’d brought from his own apartments. In it, packed in straw, was his alembic, acquired during the time he’d studied with the alchemist Hieronymus Brunschwig in Strasbourg nearly a century ago.
He had used it perhaps four or five times since to distill elixirs for his patients.
Now he took out the flat-bottomed cucurbit and dusted the straw off it.
Carefully, with both hands in gloves, he tore apart the kanerva flower. He stuffed the thick chunks of petals into the cucurbit, and mashed them down with a stick. The smell of them was still powerful. Twice he had to set the cucurbit aside and go out and breathe fresh air. To his amazement, the night air was cold enough that he could see his breath. Not a typical August night at all.
In some confusion, he went back inside the Lazar-house.
When he’d packed as many petals as he could into the cucurbit, he filled it with Coventry mineral water out of a bucket.
Under the ashes in the central hearth, there were embers. Apparently, a fire had been going earlier. Everything about that was wrong, but he would take the time to look into it later. For now, the embers made it easy for him to stoke a new fire and set up a trivet for the cucurbit.
He set the cucurbit over the low flame and placed a glass cap on top of it with a tube extending off the side. Beneath the end of the tube he placed an empty flacon. In short order the distillate began accumulating, dripping into the flacon. The kanerva scent surrounded him, and he grew dizzy just standing close by. Quickly, he propped open the doors to draw the noisome fumes out, then went outside awhile himself.
Altogether, the process took a few hours. The flacon by then was over half full of poison. The remains of the kanerva blossoms were nearly charred. And Thomas was satisfied he had gotten as much as he could of the distillate. He replaced the glass stopper in the flacon and set it aside.
When the cucurbit cooled, he would rinse it out, pour the mass of leaves out in the yard, and then repack the whole alembic in its straw and return it to storage. In the meantime, he used the ördstone to cut a gate to his apartments on London Bridge. He would only be there a few minutes.
By the greenish light cast by the fire circling the open portal, he retrieved all of his arrows, then returned to the Lazar-house and sealed up the portal again.
One by one, he dipped the arrowheads into the flacon and then stood the arrows against the wall to dry.
These arrows were distinctive, of his own design. Yvag armor had always been resistant to penetration by traditional arrows, especially at any significant distance, and he had fashioned these—narrow iron triangles that could punch through the exotic armor—and he made it a habit now to retrieve them after any skirmish with Yvags rather than leave them as evidence, or some sort of calling card. The less they knew about their attacker the better. Even when the arrows did kill one of the elven, the creature might nevertheless resurrect unless Thomas made certain of its death, usually by parting head from body, and it was extremely rare when he had that opportunity, especially in the middle of rescuing a teind from their midst. The addition of this poison, if it was as lethal to them as to him, might change all that. No doubt he would eventually have the opportunity to find out.
And he would have gone to sleep then, blissfully focused upon that eventuality, except that the ördstone chose that moment to thrum again, alerting him to the taking of a teind. The cold weather, the fire, and now this alarum—Thomas arrived at an ineluctable conclusion regarding just how much time had passed while he’d been lost in Þagalwood.
Exhausted as he was, he filled his quiver with the new arrows, took up his bow, and prepared to hurdle across worlds again. This time he would risk the location.