The journey to Duxon had taken, as she had predicted, “not two day’s ride,” but the return trip was more than twice that, even after Daivad had sent Kunin and Tobei ahead to fetch extra horses and wagons from camp. And yet, Daivad would name the pace Impressive, considering the baggage. The newly freed prisoners of Duxon were tough, despite the fact that they were skin and bones, beaten and bloody, and none of them even had proper shoes. He didn’t hear a single complaint about the long, exposed trek back to a dangerous forest at the direction of a man who’d shown up to turn their lives upside down with no sign of plan or preparation.
They’d managed to scrounge enough food from what was left of Duxon’s camp to last them the trip, but only barely. And then, finally, they’d arrived in Silvax Forest to a camp in shambles.
When Tobei had come to fetch the horses, he’d warned Ben of the numbers that would be arriving soon, and Ben had done his very best to prepare beds and food and clothes and anything else they might need, but they had only managed to provide enough for about half the newcomers, at considerable sacrifice to the existing members of camp. And had made a mess of camp in the process.
Perhaps, Daivad mused to himself, he had not thought this through.
Ben took this chaos like he took everything else—in his unshakeable, stoic way. His two best friends had disappeared, their only explanation in a hasty note, leaving him in charge of the camp—and then they’d returned with sixty-some tons of responsibility, whose weight their village in the leaves couldn’t support. But Ben didn’t cuss or complain or even glare. He took Daivad’s orders without blinking and got to work.
And yet, Daivad could tell Ben was furious. More furious than Daivad had seen him in years. He saw it in the way Ben wouldn’t look him in the eye, in the rigid way he held himself, in the single syllables that passed his lips.
There were few times Daivad had seen Ben really angry, and even fewer times he’d seen Ben angry at him. And it never failed to piss Daivad off. Yelling, screaming, fighting—all that, Daivad could handle. The Colonel had made sure of that. But this quiet frost from his friend made Daivad’s fingers itch for matches, kindling, a blazing inferno.
It was that same stiff deadness that had been behind her eyes the last time she looked at him.
His palms burned.
If he had slept more than a few spare hours in the past week, he might have the energy for arson. But as it was, he was too exhausted to do anything but climb up into the trees, to his house, and literally fall into his bed without bothering to remove his boots or the wolf’s head charm tied above his bicep.
He hit the mattress heavy enough that his wooden bed frame, the one he’d built himself, gave an enormous crack! and crashed to the floor.
Whatever.
He was too tired to care. Daivad closed his eyes and was asleep.
An unknowable time later, a gentle tapping on his forehead coaxed Daivad back to consciousness ever so slowly. It felt like an hour that he lay there, ignoring the tap, tap, tapping, the occasional snuffling of a little nose on his hairline, a slight weight on the mattress moving around his head. Finally, a last tap, and his eyelids peeled themselves apart.
He had to blink a few times to get his vision to focus on the single, bulging, milky white eye that rolled in its socket not two inches from his face.
In an instant, Daivad was up on his knees, striking out with a hand full of claws. He connected with something warm, soft, and solid, but in that same instant, whatever he’d struck dissolved into black smoke and his hand swiped right through. The smoke roiled and swirled and, utterly confused, Daivad looked around his bedroom to see what was on fire.
The smoke became a ribbon, slinking through the air until it gathered itself on the small table that held his basin of water.
Daivad could only stare, still on his knees on his broken bed, as the smoke materialized into a little, fuzzy, one eyed monster that then opened its mouth of large, unnervingly human-looking teeth and shrieked,
“Fuck you!”
Daivad and the monster looked at each other.
Still offended, the monster snorted and shook its squashed, bat-like face, large ears flapping. A jangling sound drew Daivad’s attention to the thin leather collar around its neck and the small white stone that hung from it. His brain refused to process this situation.
The monster shuffled on crumpled up legs, its long, finger-like toes wrapping over the edge of the table, and then shook out its leathery wings. Its eye rolling once more to regard Daivad, the monster hunched over and its body jerked, a nasty, repetitive squelching sound bubbling from its open mouth.
“Ay!” Daivad clambered off his bed and to his feet, swatting at the monster, trying to shoo it out the back doorway.
The monster ignored him and continued to retch right up until Daivad made contact, after which it poofed once again into swirling black smoke. Only to trail off and re-materialize on his bed.
“Fuck you, sir!” it screeched, flapping its wings.
Daivad was dumbfounded.
After a moment, it resumed retching.
Daivad tried once more to swat at it, but this time it smoked over to settle onto his shoulder. “Get—!”
“Fuck you!”
“Fuck you!” he snapped back.
“Fuck you, sir!”
Several minutes later, the monster was settled on the edge of the roof just outside his little kitchen, which was strewn with smashed dishes, pieces of a broken chair, and an empty basin, all destroyed in his attempt to get this thing out of his house. And it was retching.
He just let it continue this time, even though it meant he’d have to be cleaning monster puke off the landing. Defeated, he could only hope that when it was done it would go away. He didn’t know what was going on—it was daylight for Mother’s sake. Why the fuck was some monster shouting human expletives at him and doing everything it could to vomit in his house in the middle of the day, wearing some collar—?
A collar.
The realization hit him just as the monster gave one final retch, opened its jaws wide—
And spoke in Nyxabella’s voice.
“I got your message.” The monster’s mouth, its tongue, its lips didn’t move, but Nyxabella’s voice came out as if she were standing right in front of him, complete with shaky breathing and soft tone. “Or maybe … maybe it’s my own arrogance again, deluding me into thinking that message was addressed to me. I don’t know. But … either way, it doesn’t matter. I’m just sending these words with Julius because you should know—the hunter that Aran recruited? He’s a Selachian Inhuman. From the Ubika Clan—Kure Ubika. And I’m sure you know that means if he catches your scent at Duxon, he will find you.
“At this minute, he’s AWOL, apparently in Luvatha. Jac and I are accompanying Z Vigore under orders to retrieve him and get him to Duxon. I’ll do what I can to stall, but … there’s only so many steps I can take down a path before Z will guess my destination.
“I can’t name what a brilliant military mind like you would do,” the edge of sarcasm in her tone, oddly enough, somewhat soothed that arson-itch in Daivad’s hands, “but if I were the Traitor Prince, I’d intercept Ubika before he gets to Duxon, and kill him. Or at the very least give him a new trail to track until Time has covered the one that leads to your camp.
“Julius has your magic’s scent now, thanks to that smelly rag you tried to blind me with. He’ll carry my little gifts of information to you. You know, the ones you named Unnecessary? If you have any gifts for me, tell him ‘Message to Nyxabella, please, Julius.’ And I trained him right, so the ‘please’ is not optional. He’ll open his mouth, and he’ll take down your words. When you’re done, snap your fingers twice. He’ll carry your voice back to me, and only gift it to me once I’m alone.
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“If he does like I asked, Julius should give you a small glowstone like the one on his collar once my words are done. They’re linked. Hold the stone in your palm and name the spell, and both will light, and he’ll know to come find you to take your message.”
Here, she stopped and a weight dropped into Daivad’s belly. Was that it?
But then he heard a small noise—an aborted word as she tried to decide what to say next.
“If that brilliant military mind of yours,” she said, and the weight lifted—in fact it lifted high enough to tug on one corner of his mouth, “concocts a plan to deal with this Ubika issue, and it’s one with a role that I can fill, send it with Julius. I’ll do what I can.
“However, I’d never ask free labor of Julius, and the only currency he accepts is Snacks, so … he will expect payment both before taking a message and upon delivery. His favorites are apples or butter. Or buttered apples. But he’s not usually picky.
“And a warning—he takes his time with his packages, so they aren’t always delivered in a timely manner. They don’t often take longer than forty-eight hours, though.
“The spell to speak to the glowstone is in Xo. I’ll repeat it to ensure you understand, so open your ears.”
The sound she made tickled a spot in Daivad’s brain that called forth some disembodied memory of being wrapped in something soft and warm, the sound of a heartbeat against his ear, and morning sunlight on his face. If he had to put familiar letters to it, he’d spell it eish.
After that there was only silence, but the monster still dangled half off his roof, its rows of strange teeth wide apart. Daivad waited for something to happen.
When her voice returned, it was subdued. Soft.
“It was a good thing you did in Duxon, Daivad.”
The last of his itch eased away, replaced instead with a pleasant buzzing over his skin.
Even softer now, she ended her message with: “Please … don’t let anyone disturb her grave.”
The monster … Julius shook his head once more, ears flapping, then dug around in a little pouch on his fuzzy belly with the clawed fingers on the peaks of his wings, finally producing a small stone just like the one on his collar. Suddenly, he flew (with his wings this time) back into Daivad’s house to squat on the countertop in the kitchen and stuck out the hand clasping the stone and dropped it without waiting for Daivad to accept. Daivad scrambled to catch it.
He examined the stone, a tiny pebble in his large, calloused hand. After a moment of hesitation, he said, “Eish.”
A soft, yellow light lit his palm, and a matching blue one lit beneath the monster’s chin. It cocked its head, eye rolling to look down at the light on its collar. Then it looked at Daivad and stretched out its wings.
“No—!”
But the monster had already settled onto his shoulder once more before unfolding one surprisingly long leg and holding out its finger-toes.
Proudly, the beast screeched, “Good boy, Julius! Snack, please!” and made a grabbing motion with his toes.
Daivad sighed, then grumbled, “Alright, alright,” and set about searching his destroyed kitchen for food, Julius wobbling on his shoulder the whole time, holding onto Daivad’s hair with one of his clawed hands to keep from falling off.
But several minutes and a few chunks of hair later, Daivad realized he had no food in his kitchen at all, and the alternating screeches of “Snack, please!” and “Fuck you!” directly into his ear was wearing his patience thinner and thinner. He could go and check the camp’s kitchen, but he wasn’t eager to explain the verbally abusive monster perched on his shoulder to the rest of camp.
Half-hearted, Daivad swatted once again at the little beast, but it just smoked over to his other shoulder and resumed shrieking.
Worth a try.
Daivad opted for the gardens, which were much closer and more isolated. He knew he couldn’t completely escape notice, but perhaps he could at least manage to avoid the newcomers. While Daivad crossed the branch-bridges, the beast balanced on one leg and, with the other, stuck one of his finger-toes into his squashed nose and commenced digging around. Daivad would have insisted he stop, except that this kept the beast occupied and therefore quiet.
Until Julius finally produced a booger and immediately sucked it off his toe. Once this was done, he flapped his wings, smacking Daivad in the face, and declared, “Good boy, Julius! Snack, please!”
“That doesn’t count as Snack?”
One eye appeared before Daivad’s face. The beast’s head, already sideways, cocked curiously. When he was done considering Daivad: “Fuck you!”
He managed to stay out of sight until they got to the gardens, but there … they found Ben. He was on his knees in the vegetable garden, pulling up a few small radishes and singing softly, but his head jerked up from among the greenery to look at Daivad once the monster had announced their arrival with a, “Fuck you, sir!”
Everyone else working the gardens—and there were a lot of them, all scrambling to stuff the gardens with as many new crops as possible to feed the scores of newcomers—looked up too, alarmed. And then confused.
Daivad climbed up to the orchard, ignoring the fact that Ben had peeled off his work gloves and was climbing up after him. The orchard was a precarious experiment—it was not easy to maintain a garden of fruit trees suspended in the branches of another tree, even for a nature practitioner as powerful as Ben with the help of a dozen workers trained by him.
Daivad had wanted to keep as much of the camp as possible off the forest floor, both so fewer monsters could get to them and so humans could walk straight through camp and never know a whole village hung above them. The latter concern had turned out to not actually be a concern at all; they were so deep within such a dangerous and enormous forest that, until Jac, no outsiders had ever come near the camp unless brought there by a member.
“Snack, please!”
For several years, the gardens had been more than manageable. Ben’s prowess provided their camp, so modest in those initial years, with an excess of fresh fruits and vegetables. They’d had enough that every few months they could fill a wagon and take it into Urden to sell or trade. But, with each work camp Daivad took, with each birth performed in the infirmary, with each new mouth to feed, the wagon became less and less full, until they began having to go into Urden to buy food instead of to sell it.
Daivad looked—
“Fuck you!”
—into the branches of the fruit trees as he passed through them, carefully placing his feet from stepping stone to stepping stone to stay off of the damp soil and shed leaves.
But the trees had been picked clean, except for a few small, unripe fruits here and there. Perhaps the monster would settle for one of those. Daivad reached up to snag a tiny, very green apple.
“Daivad,” Ben said, a subtle edge in his deep tone. It was his way of saying What the fuck do you think you’re doing?
Daivad looked at him and waited, a challenge.
But the edge in Ben’s tone didn’t dull. “What is that?”
“A monster,” Daivad said, dry.
They stared at each other.
It was rare that the two of them were in any sort of disagreement. While Tobei had always been following Daivad, Ben had always been by his side. They trusted each other implicitly, so even when Daivad did something reckless, Ben knew he would clean up his own mess. But it seemed Daivad had pushed things a little too far this time.
“Fuck you, sir!”
Ben gaped at the beast. “Monsters don’t speak the language of man.”
“Apparently some do.”
Daivad snatched the apple off the branch and handed it to Julius, who took it with one foot and smashed it against his nose, snuffling curiously. Then he took it in his hands and drove his claws into it, ripping the apple apart and shoving an entire half of it into his mouth of large, blunt teeth. His chewing sounded a little like choking, juice and pulp dribbling onto his collar. Next, he mashed in the second half, then slapped Daivad in the face with his wings a few times and began to bounce, overjoyed, on his deceptively long legs.
When the beast had swallowed, he declared, “Yum snack! Good boy, Julius! Kiss!”
Then he head-butted Daivad (presumably this was his version of a kiss), smearing him with apple juice, and poofed into black smoke, which ribboned its way into the forest and disappeared.
No one spoke, including all of those in the gardens who sent each other baffled looks. Daivad turned to leave, but Ben followed him. Once they were out of earshot of the gardeners, Ben cut Daivad off in the middle of a bridge, blocking his path, arms crossed over the dirt-stained front of his green tunic. Brown eyes stared hard out from under the brim of his tattered straw hat.
“What?” Daivad growled. He had to admit—he was a little satisfied that the frost was finally breaking, that Ben couldn’t stay silent anymore.
“You want to explain that?” Ben said, gesturing back toward the gardens.
“No.” And it was true … but Daivad knew he had to tell Ben about Nyxabella’s message. Ben and Tobei.
The angrier Ben got, the lower his voice. “Without a warning, you run off alone to take some camp, dump dozens of new people on us, and now the little food we have left you’re gifting to talking monsters?”
Daivad shrugged a shoulder. “It wasn’t gifting me much choice.”
Ben’s lips mashed themselves into a thin line. Daivad could only imagine what they were holding back.
Finally, Ben said, “You can’t cut us out like this, Daivad.”
Daivad glared.
“Do whatever senseless shit you want,” Ben said. “Just don’t do it alone.”
Seconds slipped by, and Daivad tried to keep the glare up but…
Daivad shifted his weight. Crossed his arms.
Finally, like it had been his idea, he said, “I need to talk to you and Tobei.”