Page 55 of Into the West

Even if it would feel like the gift of the gods to strip down to nothing in a warm boat and have an all-over scrub with good hot water. Cleanliness beyond the basics is not a priority. Especially now. Let’s get through these damn trees, figure out what we are going to do about a hard winter, find a new home, and keep everyone and everything fed and healthy.

And there was absolutely no point in wondering how the mages intended to allocate their magic-stove rocks. He already knew. The sick had priority, then the elderly, then very small children. There were, thank the gods, no babies in this convoy. In fact, there were no children under the age of six. Everyone with babies had gone back to Valdemar, joined one of the villages near Crescent Lake, or stayed to build the new village there. Which was a relief; babies were fragile, babies woke the nurturer in nearly everyone, and the death of a baby or a child was a heartbreak that echoed far past the baby’s own family. Regardless, there was no way that they could make enough such rocks to heat every one of the barges. And the obvious reason why they hadn’t stockpiled these things in the decades before they fled the Empire was because no one had ever anticipated that they’d be going on this trek in the first place, and besides, how would they be stored, when even one could heat a farmhouse?

Well, we’d have devised a way. The Plan was always to use the barges as a means to get to a safe spot and stay there. Use them as stationary living quarters for the year or so it would take to build real shelters on land. We assumed there was going to be sufficient wood for heating and cooking, because we assumed we’d be in a wilderness analogous to Valdemaran terrain, full of deadfall.

Well, that hadn’t happened. Kordas didn’t think they’d been naïve . . .

Well, how could his father and grandfather have anticipated what had actually happened? It was never part of the Plan for someone to murder the Emperor and destroy the Capital! The Plan was that they’d all slip away quietly, after thorough scouting and mapping, during the boat parade that celebrated the Emperor’s “greatness” in the fall. Because after that particular celebration, the eyes of the Emperor turned in two directions—wherever the Emperor was currently waging war, and on his own Court. Harvest would be occupying everyone not in the Court, and agriculture was dull and uninteresting to the Emperor. After that, despite Gates, winter kept most provincials firmly locked in their own domains. And winter was a good time for war, so far as the Emperor was concerned. He didn’t have to juggle the needs of the Empire to get the harvests grown and gathered against the need to bring in an ever-flowing source of recruits, and he didn’t have to worry about rain and the great enemy of all logistics, mud. Snow mattered not at all to someone with as many mages in his employ as the Emperor had; they could just steer the storms and dump the snow on their enemies, where it would stay put, as opposed to rainwater, which flowed where it wanted to flow. And with all the mages in his employ, his troops never needed to worry about the cold.

It was moot now, though. Kordas, to his lasting anger and self-criticism, had acted without sufficient scouting into this new land, and they had no choice but to think fast and work on the run. Even the Plan didn’t account for anything as strange as they encountered every day now. He had to be practical about it all; not get caught up in how weird things were, but evaluate whether any given oddity would do harm and how it could be exploited, if at all. There was just the river and the shore now, with all else secondary, and who knew what was ahead. The Plan was now superseded by the Improvisation.

Well, all this goes to prove the old adage that Father used to tell me: no plans survive first contact with the enemy.

In this case, the Plan had started to go to pieces the moment the Emperor ordered Kordas to come to the Capital. Everything after that had been bald, unapologetic opportunism and misdirection.

“I suppose I should be grateful that things haven’t completely fallen apart at this point,” he said aloud.

Dole snorted. “They won’t, as long as you keep doing the things only you can do, and leave the rest of us to manage what we can do.”

I do understand that I am less than half Dole’s age, he thought with a bit of irritation. But I do wish he’d stop repeating what everyone else has told me a hundred times by now.

There wasn’t so much as a breath of breeze under those trees. “It’s so quiet,” he said finally, and realized that all this time both he and Dole had been murmuring their words, as if they were both afraid that if they made too much noise, the forest might . . . notice them.

Nor were they the only ones, apparently. The only sounds were the muffled clump of horse hooves on earth, the rattling of metal on harnesses, the creak of leather, and the water lapping against the hull beneath them. There were occasional bumps against the bottom of the hulls, and even when they were shuddering from bow to stern, he told himself it was just snags of debris from upriver. No one seemed to be talking in this entire section of the convoy—or if they were, it was in the same muted tones he and Dole were using, so that their voices didn’t carry any further than their boat.

“What on earth are those dragonflies living on, anyway?” Dole mused aloud. “I don’t see any other insects—”

“That doesn’t mean they aren’t there, it just means that they aren’t coming to the river to pester us,” Kordas pointed out. “Or maybe they are somehow vegetarian and eat those fungi. Fungitarian?”

Dole passed his hand over his brow. “Mycophagy. I want out of here,” he growled.

“We’re getting there,” Kordas soothed. “I’m going to ride back some more. I—I have the feeling I should show myself to everyone in the caravan as they pass through this place. Look confident, look unworried. That might damp down rising panic.”

“I’d say you don’t need to do that, but I’d be wrong,” Dole confessed, as even Sunshine seemed so subdued that when he shook his head, he did so carefully, so as not to jangle his bridle. “That sense of unfocused anger is enough to make some people break and try to bolt back upriver.”

“Which would be bad,” Kordas observed. “Very bad. Everything we’re doing hinges on everyone in the convoy going at a nice, steady pace. Disrupt that cadence, and we could start a cascade of problems that have nothing to do with these cursed woods.”

“Go show a brave face,” Dole agreed. “I’ll see what we mages can find out about this place without the forest . . . knowing we’re looking at it.”

The first section of the convoy managed to get through the forest without anything worse than rattled nerves, though Kordas spent the entire time riding up and down the line, making sure that if anything happened, he would be right there to deal with it. Most of the animals in the herds did not even attempt to forage in the forest. Like the horses, they put their heads down, crowded as close as they could to the river without falling in, and did their best to get past the place as fast as they could. With the cattle, goats, and sheep, that amounted to something just short of a stampede. The ducks and geese kept the barges between them and the forest. The chickens refused to leave their barges. And most of the pigs scuttled along as fast as their stubby little trotters could carry them.

That was most of the pigs.

There were a few that seemed torn between fear and fascination. There was something in the air that was a definite attraction for them. They put their noses in the air and took enormous, snorting breaths in the direction of the forest. The swineherds’ dogs kept them from venturing under the trees, although it was clear that the fascination might have overcome them without that prod.

Even people who were about as sensitive as mud clods were unnerved by this forest. Everyone was relieved when they made it out the other side, and the animals had taken no more hurt than to go hungry for most of the day.

Kordas—and Arial—were exhausted. Too tired to go back to their own barge on the other side of the Gate, Kordas asked Rose to talk to Ivy and have the Doll let Isla know he wasn’t coming back. Rose did so, and was silent for a moment. “Ivy says that Isla was fairly certain that would be the case, and that our people come first. And that until everyone is safely beyond this strange place Ivy has described, you must play faithful shepherd.”

Well, that was a relief. He took a last look at the forest—which looked no more welcoming in the growing twilight than it had in the full light of the sun—and sent Arial forward. “Rose, can the Old Men lend me a bed for the night?” he asked.

“One’s being emptied of books for you,” came the prompt reply, which startled a tired laugh out of him.

The next day was the same, and the day after that, and the day after that. He would ride up and down the riverside through the forest, crossbow at the ready—though what on earth he was going to do with it against a magic tree, he had no idea—making it clear that the Baron was watching out for them, and would personally stand between his people and danger. He spotted Sydney twice, once atop a supply barge of grain—no doubt there for the mice, and to fight any other cats there for the mice—and once at the stern of the royal boat. Mages had worked out how many barges could pass through the forest between dawn and the cut-off time, and had spaced themselves out along the convoy, arranging for borrowed beds if need be, in order that he always had at least one mage to help him at all times. When Isla and the boys passed through, he did not linger with their barge, though he did wave to them every time he passed them. It was only when they paused for the night that he got to sleep in his own bed for a change, and Sydney slept atop him.

And so it went, for day after day after day. Never once did the forest seem less menacing, although he thanked every god there was every night as he lay in yet another strange bed that it didn’t get any more menacing. If they had the time to, he’d have brought Gate uprights through the Red Forest and just bypassed the whole thing. A few minutes’ figuring showed that shuffling a barge through the hundreds upriver, then getting a Gate set up downriver of the Red Forest, would take three or four more days at minimum than just bringing the flotilla through the place directly. Add in that nobody knew if “crossing through” the Red Forest with more Gate Links would cause trouble, and that was that.

Ceri and Ponu were hunched over pages upon pages of notes on magical interaction on the journey so far when Kordas caught up with them. Them, and a meal, that is. The two Old Men were apparently of the same mind, as pages, markers, and rough maps were held steady by cups and plates. “Passive only,” they had recommended, the last time Kordas consulted with them about using their mages’ abilities to view their surroundings. “Now that we’ve met the lizard-dogs, we know creatures here can consume magic as part of their life cycles, and will seek it. It would be unwise to broadcast our location, so, best to carefully analyze what we know, versus actively reconnoitering by spellwork.” It was a solid point they brought up again as they chatted with Kordas.