Chapter Eleven: The Great Escape II

That night, hiding from the raiders up in the tree, Meliswe and I took turns sleeping. At least we did in theory - I was exhausted and she was only a bit better off, and at times both of us slept until the crack of footsteps or some nearby hoot or growl woke us up. While I'd come to appreciate sleeping in a nice bed scented with gentle perfumes, I'd slept worse places than in the nook of a tree in Meliswe's embrace.

More than once, we heard search parties crunching through the underbrush below and saw their lanterns shining out in the night, winding through the game trails and half-overgrown paths of the wild. I heard a shriek in the night - it might have been somebody getting found, but there were a dozen forest animals whose calls sounded a lot like a shriek, so maybe not. An hour before dawn, I saw a group of raiders returning with two of the women captive. I wept into Meliswe's chest because I knew we wouldn't be going back to rescue them - whether or not Becounia was among them hardly mattered. I wouldn't wish that fate on anybody but the bastards who were doing it to begin with. We would get help and then rescue the others.

Meliswe ran her fingers through my hair, pulling out the little kinks that had accumulated into it, and I found it so calming that I forgot why I was crying after a while and fell asleep. When I awoke, it was just past dawn and Meliswe was snoring into my ear. I didn't want to wake her, but we had more important things to do than catch up on beauty rest.

I nudged her awake. "We need to find the others and get to the road."

"Hmm?" Her eyes fluttered open. "How many others?"

"Not including you, me, and the two we saw getting hauled back to the fort? Eleven. I would have set a rendezvous point more specific than 'get to the road', but I don't know these woods for jack. So we'll zigzag back and forth as we head to the road. It's not a proper sweep pattern, but it's better than making a bee line."

"We could search from above… I can see plenty of wood from up here."

I pointed out all of the things that she couldn't see from up there, and she pointed out all the things I couldn't see from down in the underbrush and we agreed it would be best to take turns - one on the ground and one taking little flights through the trees, periodically switching to give our feet and flight muscles time to rest. The first one we found was the petite half-sylvast woman. She was curled up in a pool of sunlight, a contented smile on her face. The wilted blooms in her hair were starting to recover. When I nudged her, she took in a big breath to scream but relaxed when she saw that I wasn't a raider. The hypnotic drug had worn off on her - I guess running through the forest in the dead of the night burned it off faster than usual.

"If you're well enough to travel, we're making for the fae road… we have people looking for us."

"You… you were in harem with I?" she asked - she spoke haltingly and with an accent. Faeric clearly wasn't her native tongue.

"Just for a night. I'm Laeanna and my friend up in that oak is Meliswe." I cast a variant of the 'divine sight' spell that Surburrus had once taught me. "Speak in your own tongue and I will understand."

Delight played across her face. "I am Dylthonouo of the Blue Fern. You speak Sylvalog? I can count on one hand the number of fae I've met who know it. You're a scholar?"

"A scholar of magic. What works for translating books works for translating language… but only for a few minutes at a time, so if I ask you to repeat yourself and do some funny hand tricks, that means the spell's worn off."

"A sorceress! We had one at Blue Fern… I was her acolyte, but I'm afraid my craft isn't very sophisticated… not by fae standards, I'm certain."

"Is she coming with us or not?" Meliswe called down. "We've got a lot of forest to go!"

I turned to Dylthonouo, raising my eyebrows. "Well?"

"I…" She glanced up to Meliswe and then to me. "You realize I have no fae blood, don't you? Not a drop."

"And I've got no sylvast blood, but I hope you won't hold that against me, either. I'm just trying to get as many of us out of that horrible place as possible. And when we get to Vernal safe and sound, just say the word and I'll arrange to have you taken back to Blue Fern. What do you say?"

"I say I'll take my chances in fae a hundred times before I go back to that dungeon. What little I can remember of that place is… not pleasant."

+++++

As we continued through the forest, Dylthonouo told me a bit about her village, Blue Fern, which lay near the juncture of Wistheim, the untamed wilderness, and the Great Green, an ancient forest that was seen as holy by the followers of the True Tree, most of whom were sylvast. Thus, their village was mostly sylvast but with a significant minority of humans, who were refugees from Lormgard's expansion - this was, apparently, a small coastal kingdom. Her mother was a human huntress, fled from Lormgard on unfair charges, and her father was a wood-singer, practitioner of a nearly forgotten form of magic called woodsong.

"Do you know woodsong?" I asked.

"A bit. I was apprenticed to the Green Mother Glwffau, who taught my father when he was just a sapling. All of the children my age took the pilgrimage into the Great Green… we walked for seven days and rested for seven nights. And of the thirteen of us, only I was chosen by the Tree. There was an uproar that a half-blood girl should be chosen over so many pureblood sylvast children, but who could deny it when I had the mark of the green leaf?"

She moved her hair to the side to reveal a pattern on the nape of her neck. It was deep green and resembled the branching vein pattern of a maple leaf.

"Most of the people respected me for that, especially when they saw the truth of my dedication to the True Tree. But there are always the envious who desire what isn't theirs and, if they cannot have it, will destroy whoever has what they do not. A group of them - teenagers and young adults around my age - lured me out into the unsafe tract of the wild… not all is so lawless as where we walk now. They lured me out because, they said, they'd found a badly ailing Elder Tree… which, if you know a thing about forestry, is very bad for the forest. I told them to ask the Green Mother, but they said she hadn't believed them, that, even if I couldn't heal the tree myself, then I could bring word of its truth back. And so I trekked three hours out into the savage wild, and… there was no tree."

"It was a trap?"

"A raider encampment at the base of a great oak tree. It was a large tree and very old, but it was no Elder Tree. The raiders captured me, took me to their dungeon, and dosed me with their black alchemy… it must have been close to a year because it is winter again."

We walked in silence for a moment. Meliswe was sending me signals that it was about time for us to switch jobs, so I'd have to take to the trees soon. "I'm sorry that happened to you. Will you go back to Blue Fern?"

Dylthonouo shrugged. "If the branches of fate take me there. Perhaps this was their way of getting me to go to fae."

We found more of the women as we went. I kept hoping that we'd find Becounia and, with each person we spotted, my hope ignited anew. But each time it was one of the others. I was very glad to have freed them, of course, but I'd basically charged the cartographer with heading up the rescue operation and whatever happened to her was on my head. She was a lovely person, though probably too trusting for her own good, and I'd have been very upset if she was among those recaptured by the raiders.

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"I see somebody up ahead!" Meliswe shouted from the ground - I guess the escapee was hiding under cover because I couldn't see her from the trees.

I buzzed over to the next tree to get a better view and spotted fire smoke and a few tents about twenty yards off, just over the nearby hill. Meliswe couldn't see it from the ground.

"Meliswe! It's a trap!" I shouted.

Meliswe shrieked and buzzed back through the air, colliding with a few of the other women we'd picked up.

"Now!" Somebody shouted, and three… four men came rushing over the hill, two of them brandishing axes and two carrying nets to ensnare their captives with.

I buzzed down from the trees and stuck one of the net-carriers with my dagger, right in the kidney. He cried out and tumbled, snagging the net along the ground. Arrows whizzed through the air, one of them tearing right through my still-unfurled wings. I cried out in pain and tried to fly away, but every wingbeat lanced like a hot poker and splattered droplets of purple blood. I grabbed Dill (what we'd decided to call Dylthonouo) by her collar and pointed northeast - the direction of the road.

"Run!" I shouted.

We all did - we were all unarmored and lightly armed, if at all. We had three daggers and an especially sharp stick between the seven of us. And, looking back, there were a lot more raiders than I expected - fifteen at least, and most of them were closing in on us. I didn't know how far away the fae road was… not far, but I couldn't see it through the woods. They were going to catch some of us… they were probably going to catch all of us.

I stopped in my tracks and turned to face them. I crouched down, grabbing as much soil as I could in my fist, the lumps and rootlets of the loamy soil clumping beneath my fingernails. The raiders were confused and cautious - all of them stopped. Good… at the very least, I'd bought the others some valuable seconds. I held up my dirty fist, little clumps and bits of leaves skittering back to the earth. Some of the raiders stayed back, but five of the men approached me, including two with a net. I recognized one of them as one of Kurzalvik's lieutenants, a man who liked to help himself to two women at once. But I was intent on making sure that just one was more than he could handle. I focused all of my hate and anger at him, letting it focus my mana before raising my other hand to shape it, reaching deep into my intuition to guide the magic (most sorceresses will tell you that this is the proper way to do it). When the lieutenant was about three paces from me, just as his muscles tensed to pounce and ensnare me, I slammed my earth-laden fist into the ground, expending close to all of my remaining mana.

A great thoomp emanated from deep within the earth and the ground in front of me buckled. A huge sinkhole gaped in the forest floor, twenty yards wide and ten yards deep, swallowing men and felling trees. The lieutenant I'd directed my hatred at went tumbling to the center of the sinkhole, screaming for help as the earth swallowed him up like a python gulping its prey. Two of his comrades tried to save him, but they were forced to struggle out of the quicksand - otherwise, they'd have been swallowed, too.

An arrow whistled past me and man were rushing around and clambering up the sinkhole. I'd delayed them, but they weren't about to let me go, and I definitely didn't have the energy reserves to attempt a repeat, though I might be able to fake them out for a few seconds to borrow more time. Just then, something crashed into me from the air, nearly bowling me down into the sinkhole. Meliswe grabbed my hand and yanked, her wings buzzing away behind her, kicking up leaves and little sticks.

"Fly, you idiot!" She shouted.

I unfurled my wings and took to the air, reeling from the pain - it was only a small arrow hole, but you see how mobile you are after taking an arrow to, say, the knee. But it was better to withstand a few minutes of agony than spend the rest of my lifetime in it. I was all over the place, bumping into branches and dragging through leaves, trying my best to follow after Meliswe. I was injured and exhausted - I could taste blood on my breath, could see my vison closing in. My arms and legs and wings were scraped and bruised against a hundred branches. Just when I was about to give up, I burst into the clearing around the fae road. I stopped beating my poor, battered wings just in time to avoid slamming into the rocky ridge on the other side of the road and, instead, landed on it at a mostly-downward angle and skittered the remaining twenty feet to the road before collapsing in a gasping heap.

Meliswe landed next to me, her breaths nearly as strained as mine - normally, she wasn't as strong of a flyer as me, but her human side gave her better endurance. She knelt next to me and turned me over, heaving a sigh of relief when she saw I was alive and reasonably intact. Meliswe helped me to my feet… and, after I fell back down the first time, gave me a bit more help. To my great relief, all of our recent travel companions had made it… though none of the others had, including Becounia. And, worse yet, I didn't see any help for the mile or so I could see down the road in either direction. The Vernal guard hadn't come to save us… and now the raiders had caught up…

"That's what I call a whole lot of effort for fuck all," one of the raiders said. The leader, I guess… I suppose he'd got a field promotion now that his predecessor had been swallowed by the earth. Raiders are informal about these things.

"S-stand back," I said. "I'll swallow you up in the earth, too!"

"If you coulda, you woulda," he said. Seven or eight more raiders had emerged from the woods behind him, spreading out to surround the lot of us. "We're taking you back to the fort and I'm taking every lost man, every sprained ankle, every bump and bruise out on your pretty little hide. If you're lucky, I'll kill you after that… but I wouldn't bet on it."

Meliswe moved in front of me to protect me. "When Vernal finds out what you've done, you're all dead. Nothing you could do to us can hope to match-"

The leader unsheathed a knife and stormed forward, grabbing Meliswe's face in his grubby mitt. He smiled cruelly. "You've got a big mouth… and I reckon a princess don't need a tongue to live. Open w-"

An arrow streaked through the air and cracked right through his eye. More arrows zipped down from above, downing three… four of the raiders. The remainder fled for the woods, but it was too late. The archers posted atop the ridge stuck every last one of them. Far faster deaths than any of them deserved.

"Are you all right, princess?" the captain of the archers shouted. He unfurled his wings and flitted down to the road. "We wanted to make sure they were all out of the woods, but it was much more important that you remained unharmed."

I wrapped him in a hug, tears streaming down my cheeks. "We're fine, thank you, captain. How many are you in number?"

"On the ridge? Just sixteen of us - all of the fae and mostly-fae archers in the guard, since we had to fly up. We've got another forty men on horseback over the ridge, ready to charge in if need be and, of course, guard your carriage." He surveyed the other women - we all looked pretty rough from our time in the fort and our subsequent escape through the woods. "Though we may not have room enough for all of your friends."

"That’s not what I was getting at, captain. There are several more women, including one of our own, the queen's own cartographer, who seem to have been recaptured. The raiders are demoralized and disorganized… with sixteen archers and forty men on horses, you could easily overcome them and rescue the remainder. It is our duty to rescue these women."

"Princess… I… I do not know what to say." The captain looked up the road, to where Vittoro, the captain of the queen's guard was galloping up on his stallion.

"You can say 'no'," he stated. "I'm sorry, princess, but our orders were clear: rescue you at all costs and return you to Vernal. The queen's orders were, and I quote: 'bring my daughter back safely at all costs and kill every miserable excuse for a festering plague-boil who stands between you and her.' And, since we've accomplished the second bit, all I've got to do is trot you back to the palace."

"Captain, I am ordering you to rescue these women. Without Becounia I wouldn't have escaped."

Vittoro hopped off his horse and strode up to me - he was a large man in full armor, but his eyes were soft. He didn't mean to intimidate me. "Princess, I'm sorry. I'd stake every last one of these bastards to the cold, hard ground if I could, but I must follow my orders. You have a gentle heart, but we cannot save everybody. When we return to the palace, I invite you to sit on my discussion on the matter with the queen… in the past, though, you have not been keen on military matters."

I edged up to him until we were chest to chest - and, since he was a head taller than me and fully armed and armored while I was dirty, battered, and visibly injured… I imagine it looked a bit silly. But I scowled at him all the same, and I saw the flicker of fear in his eyes.

"I know better than to blame you or make foolish threats, so I'll say only this: if my friend and the queen's cartographer, Becounia, is not returned unharmed, I shall be very cross. And a princess roiling with righteous rage is not a thing to take lightly."

"Milady, it is not," Vittoro agreed. "I pray you know how to direct your ire where it belongs. I'll show you to your carriage."