Page 48 of Into the West

Jonaton raised his head, his eyes wide with shock, and stared at Sai in disbelief.

“And now you can forget I ever said that,” Sai added, and cackled.

Alberdina swore under her breath in a language Delia didn’t understand, and then shouted, “Hakkon! Stop the horses right this moment!”

Delia did not blame her in the least, because rising up before them on both sides of the river was a thing that could not, by any standard she knew, be called a forest.

Oh, there were tree-like objects, and lots of them. It was just that under no circumstances would she have called them trees.

There were no variations in them other than height. There were no conifers or evergreens. They were as uniform as a planted orchard, and spaced just as neatly apart: about the length of a horse and farm wagon, to be precise. Not only were they leafless—which was to be expected, since most of the leaves at this point were on the ground, and those that weren’t belonged to things like holly—their limbs were contorted and twisted like no tree she had ever seen before. Once, before Isla had married Kordas and she and her sister had both shared a tutor, the tutor had taken them out on a bright summer day with glass bowls and a sieve and a dipper and a little, but very strong, pocket magnifying lens to examine the tiny animals in the estate’s ornamental pond. These things looked something like one of the creatures they had seen that day. Except they were big. Big as the oldest apple trees in the Valdemar orchard.

The trunks, covered with a heavy, dark gray bark, sprouted branches that contorted and spiraled in ways that could not possibly have been due to wind and made very little sense in terms of growing things. The only time she had ever seen branches that looked like this was on climbing vines. In fact, they gave the impression of movement that had nothing to do with a breeze. As Hakkon tried to slow the string of barges and they got nearer to this forest, she noticed something else. The trees on both sides of the river were the strange ones, although there were normal trees just at the edge of the forest on the other side. But the closer they got to this “weird forest,” the stranger and more sinister the place looked. Patchy with green moss and sporting odd, transparent fungi, there were places on the trunks that looked less like boles or cankers than open mouths with teeth in them.

And as Hakkon managed to bring the string to a complete halt, she noticed, with a sensation of great unease, that there was something else about the branches of those trees. The underside of each and every twisty, contorted branch sported odd symmetrical round marks. Or were they another kind of fungus? But what fungus grew in regulated, evenly spaced rows, one or two rows per branch, from the base of the branch to the pointed tip?

“What in all the dark hells . . .” Alberdina said aloud, as Jonaton poked his head out of the barge and looked from the forest to her and back again.

The ground seemed to be covered with a reddish-brown matter of some sort. Fallen leaves? Maybe . . .

Flitting among the trees were reddish-brown winged insects that looked like dragonflies. Which should have been impossible. It was more than cold enough for insects to be dead. Were they some sort of bird? But what bird had four wings?

Jonaton hopped over to their boat as Alberdina stared. “I don’t want to go in there,” she said flatly. “Those . . . I won’t call them trees . . . there’s something very wrong with them.”

“Well, the horses agree with you,” Jonaton replied. “But Briada and I went all the way to the end of this forest and back, and took no harm. Can you be a little more specific about what you think is wrong with them?”

Alberdina shook her head. “Lad, I’m a Healer, not a mage, but . . . this is a place that doesn’t much like things with warm blood in their veins. That’s my impression, anyway. It’s as if this entire forest is one single creature. And it’s dormant . . . at least I think it is. But I wouldn’t want to wake it.”

“Are those . . . mouths with teeth?” Delia stammered.

“To be honest, we didn’t go close enough to it to find out. It could just be imagination. Or an illusion, a trick of coloration and texture that looks like teeth to keep animals and birds from making holes in the trunks.” That was what Jonaton said, but it was in a tone of voice that made her think he actually did not believe what he was saying. “Look, there’s no choice here, we have to go through. But that’s why we’re going to go as fast as we can without exhausting the horses. We’ll be in the clear before sunset.”

“That’s all very well for us, but what about the convoy?” Alberdina demanded. “We are stopping here, right now, and we’re going to ask Amethyst to contact Kordas.” She turned to the Doll. “Is there any way that you can show him what we see?”

Jonaton sighed. “No need,” he replied, and turned to Amethyst himself. “Amethyst, please get in contact with Kordas, and ask him to scry where we are. He can see for himself.”

Kordas stared into the depths of the scrying pool that Ponu had conjured up. All the rest of the Old Men, and some of the other mages, had gathered around it as well.

Alberdina’s insistence, through the Dolls, that he see what they were about to traverse for himself had been so vehement that he had decided to get some of the best of his mages to join his “look ahead.” And now he was glad that he had.

“Can we, dare we, move the point of view closer?” he asked Ceri. “Alberdina is pretty adamant that she feels as if those things are hostile. Would they react to being scryed?”

“If they would, they’re too dangerous to pass through,” Ceri opined. “And it’s better to find that out now than later.”

Kordas grimaced, but Ceri had a point. And if the trees—and whatever depended on them, maybe—reacted with hostility, there was the option to get the scouts to collect the Gate uprights, speed through the forest, and establish that second Gate somewhere else if they had to. Granted, it wouldn’t be on that powerful ley-line, but maybe Jonaton could find another.

“Moving in closer,” said Ponu, and the point of view moved past the scouts and closer to the strange forest, although Ponu did not take it any nearer than the horses and barges would be on the river.

“Are those mouths in the trunks?” asked Koto, rubbing his bald head nervously. “And teeth?”

“They look like it to me,” Kordas agreed.

Alberdina’s voice came thinly through the pool, as if from a great distance. “I’m no expert on anything but Healing, but this doesn’t feel like a forest of trees to me,” she said. “It feels like one enormous entity.”

“There are groves of trees that are exactly that,” Ceri said thoughtfully. “They look like a grove of trees, but actually, each tree is a scion of an enormous root system. If something like that got caught in a Change-Circle, a really big one, then you wouldn’t get each tree looking different from every other tree. You’d get something like this—” He gestured at the pool.

They were all on top of Kordas’s personal barge, since the convoy did have to keep moving, and no one wanted to stop on the verge among all the herds, or impede the progress of the horses. Ponu had made the scrying pool by the simple expedient of creating a shallow dish made of magic energies, and pouring river water into it.

“And if that was what has happened,” Dole mused, sounding as if he was speaking his thoughts aloud, “then the thing has had five hundred years to proliferate and spread. It could have started out small, and expanded along the water source.”