Cedar was trying to navigate dual initiatives to melt into the ground and rock himself into oblivion, but was accomplishing neither.
I triaged. First the squirrels, the elf would be useless while they were spinning over his head. I stilled the line with one hand and approached the corpses, as my hand neared them the pair noticed my presence and began to nip aggressively in my direction.
But I wasn’t in the mood for their valiant rodent struggle. Stab! Look pa! Squirrel on a sword! While impaled it continued to flail about, even revealing the intelligence to try and pull itself up the blade. I set to work with my hunting knife until there was just an orderly pile of disembodied squirrel limbs and an undead-squirrel-worm main body.
I shook it off the blade and watched for a minute, but the parts didn’t seem too capable of locomotion. The second squirrel followed the fate of its companion and I moved on to the next order of business.
Cedar had calmed somewhat without the squirrel-trapeze. I settled on my haunches in front of him, idly fingering my knife in one hand. I pointed it casually at him.
“Someone has some explaining to do.”
The elf squirmed. “Th-The moon risen, a once shadowed land reveals m-many—”
“Oh no, none of that now,” I cut in, “Proper speech. Mister ‘dead things should stay dead’.”
He grimaced, but under Elskia’s implacable gaze he quickly wilted, and I had the whole story out of him.
It was a con. Or at least most of one. He was a halfway competent woodsman. What he wasn’t was a supremely capable and ancient ranger so far divorced from the mundane that they spoke only in abstraction.
He also didn’t live on dew and leaves, as if that wasn’t obvious from the three helpings of stew. He wasn’t usually expected to be in such close quarters with his clients. He’d normally range ahead, get a bite, and return with ‘wisdom of the land’; but with me he never got the opportunity to break character and eat something proper.
Why bother? Because young elves didn’t get nearly the compensation ancient ones did for the work, if they were hired at all.
“You think I want to wear all this crap? But humans don’t care if you’re a decent enough tracker and know the area, they want the showmanship. I start introducing myself as ‘Cedar’ instead of ‘Terrence’ and I got paid a bit more, so I added a few bangles and dropped words of the land and my fees go up again,” he coughed, “Can I have some water? I am so thirsty, I’ve had to lick so many leaves.”
I thought about his circumstance while he drank. I couldn’t exactly point fingers. If anything I was happier now that things were out in the open, at least he wouldn’t be starving himself or be quite so irritating.
“How old are you anyway?” I asked.
“...Promise you won’t get mad?”
I nodded.
“Twenty-four.”
Definitely not ancient.
“And the recognizing faces thing? You can tell us apart can’t you?”
He looked surprised.
“Of course I can! Only the true elders can’t really, but you know, I was doing the whole package.”
“Why can’t ancient elves distinguish faces? The weight of memory or something?”
“Oh no no no, nothing like that. The elders are just really really racist.”
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Roderick had planned his hunt as an opportunity to curry favour with the gentry, that much was obvious even to Hugh—How fickle a strength which must be wooed. The hunting party was unwieldy, bloated with staff and hangers-on without a role in the upcoming hunts, but who did much to ensure the convenience and pleasure of their betters.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
Wine flowed late into the night, as all and sundry ignored the obligations of the morning. Games of chance and skill to suit any disposition and purse were arrayed through the camp, but there was only one where the thick gold coins called aubles were used, and even then only a handful. A half-dozen nobles sat at that table, and exchanged more money than Hugh would earn in his life on a turn of cards. Forced smiles, gritted teeth. This is not a friendly game. There is too much to lose.
Hugh knew exactly where to bring the spirits. One drink makes a man tipsy, foolish, and eager for lies. Two make him sober, wary, and wise. Hugh worked double time to ensure no cup was left empty for long, and whenever a player began to look ready to leave he made sure to introduce a new and enticing bottle. Soon the gamblers were blind drunk, and Hugh had no difficulty slipping a pair of unattended aubles onto his serving tray, then under a tankard and away. The soused group didn’t even notice the missing coinage... until morning.
Hugh woke with the rest of the camp—to the sound screamed epithets between a pair of less-than-half-sober, more-than-half-hungover noble sons. They were in a spirited dispute over the whereabouts and ultimate ownership of a pair of aubles. Seeing as the latter was impossible without the former, a fact they took some time getting around to, they eventually put it to Roderick that the only possible option was for the entire camp to be searched. Hugh watched Roderick’s face intently, never entirely sure why, just knowing that it was important. What is the Bastard Heir to do? Tensions fly between his capricious allies, threatening everyone’s cheer. If he wants to be seen as their leader, he must be the one to commit to action, but cannot infringe on the dignity of the gentry without undoing his very goals. He is left with...
“Whomever took them must be a lowborn. We will search every one of them, and make an example,” Roderick intoned.
Hugh shivered. Exactly as we thought.
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If every animal we killed flatly rejected death the whole hunting trip was going to be a nightmare and, even worse, unfruitful. Terrence (formerly Cedar) speculated that the whole effect was probably due to some necromantic artifact being unearthed and sending out waves of reanimating energy that drew the recent dead to it like a lodestone. Apparently it happened on occasion.
“So you’re saying every animal that has died in the forest for an indeterminate amount of time has helpfully gathered in a single location, with a single point of failure to return them all to death?” I mused.
Terrence nodded happily.
“And these squirts,” a moniker I’d landed on from the squirrels’ unfortunate tendency to leak as they moved about, “will beeline right for this bountiful locale.”
Terrence started to nod, but partway through seemed to realize the plan materializing in my mind and began to shake his head.
“There’s no chance, the dead are inherently hostile to the living. Beasts will be swarming the artifact, we’ll never get close.”
“Don’t you worry about getting to the artifact, I have a way of going right through the mass of the dead with none of them the wiser.” I grinned to myself, Corpse-Hero would rise again!
Terrence remained skeptical but I reassured him that if the density of threats grew too high we would abandon our course.
I prepared our navigator: one of the squirts was reunited with a leg, and after a touch of flailing and more than a bit of it embodying its new name, it began to drag itself deeper into the forest, one pathetic inch at a time.
“That may be the most disturbing thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Terrence said.
“Day’s still young.”
I began to march in the direction indicated by the squirt, snatching it up and roping it to my belt on the way.
“What do you mean by that?” Terrence asked queasily, hurrying to catch up, “Lady Elskia, please explain what you mean by that!”
But I couldn’t hear his words over the sound of my ignoring him, and his bargaining position had drastically worsened the moment he began to follow me.
The forest was deceptive. We had been walking for a few hours, intermittently guided by the squirt, and I had begun to notice little idiosyncrasies. The key deception, I decided, was the impression that the forest had always been here. Large trees have a way of presenting as solid or dependable. They put on airs of persistence or legacy. But I knew their woody secret: they were acorns once, or whatever other tree seed thing.
And there were definite signs, particularly as we moved deeper into the wood, of what was here before. Sure that pile of boulders looked weathered, but wipe away some of the resident moss and you’ll find sheltered carvings. Which didn’t even take into account that for natural rock many of them seemed suspiciously square. Also whoever heard of boulders clustering to one another in a wood? The general tendency, I’d found, was for rocks to sort of spread out over time.
I was musing on all these things while Terrence regaled me with descriptions of exactly how racist elvish elders were.
Terrence needed little prompting to begin his account of the many indignities of being a young elf in an old elf’s world, but it had grown stale. There’s only so many variants of ear-based slurs before they start to blur together.
“Then he said ‘No grandchild of mine listens to mayfly music’ and kicked me out.”
“Mayfly music?”
“Anything that hasn’t been played for at least a thousand years.”
“Speaking of a thousand years,” I naturally segued, “This forest seems like it’s grown over... something.”
Terrence shrugged, “This whole region used to be the domain of a dark wizard. She fell, ohh around twelve hundred years ago? The forest grew up over the ruins of her holdings, her experiments escaped into the wilds, her enchantments faded into nothing,” he glanced at the squirt wriggling on my belt, “...well mostly. You don’t reach her kind of heights without a few things lingering.”
I nodded blandly, so the countryside had been previously ravaged by dark magics.... as if the mudfolk, the Baroness, the terminal gloom, or the endless mires hadn’t clued me in.
We continued to track the squirts, I’d taken to swapping them out so they didn’t get jealous. Bizzarely, they were showing rudimentary capacity to learn, and weren’t bothering to struggle while they were on my belt, seemingly content with the fact we were approaching their desired destination.
So I noticed when they both began to get twitchy.
“What’s the matter Squirt-one? Squirt-two? Feeling restless? Want to do some worming on the ground? Yeah? Some worming!”
Terrence blanched as I cooed at my little monsters. Elves were so finicky about forming attachments to abominations.
But when I put my little guys on the ground they failed to coordinate and orient in the same direction. In fact, the pair of them started to kind of thrash about more. They weren’t trying to dig, it almost seemed like they were attempting to create distance between themselves and something. I swallowed the urge to reassure them with sweet nothings.
Terrence seemed to pick up on my sudden tension. We looked at each other intently, and without a word positioned ourselves back to back. The forest was old, without much in the way of covering foliage, but there was nothing around us that I could see. I had been careful to sniff for the smell of decay as we advanced, but I had gotten nothing up to now.
On a whim I tried to take one of the deep, endless breaths I had seen Elskia and her mother perform. Air rushed into my body, and with sudden clarity I began to understand a map of the space around us based on where in my respiratory system I felt the scents perceived.
Piquant elf was dispersed evenly, and I intuitively knew his place on both the same plane as myself and his rough proximity. It wasn’t like a radar ping, rather more like a zone of probabilistic elf. The same was true of other scents. The blood and bile of the squirts, the distinct separation of the fresh needles above us and the dead fragments below so universal they became scenery, and, of course, the heady aroma of rich soil coming from tree boughs above our heads.
I slowly tilted my head upward, and in the process I learned something new: skeletons make exceptional climbers.