The stream bed became a waste of broken rocks, boulders gripped by the writhen roots of great silent trees. For hours they scrambled and stumbled along the treacherous way, but ever down, gratefully down towards somewhere the forest border and freedom. Almost they could ignore the small angry black flies that swarmed up from the water’s edge, little monsters that buzzed a low buzz, almost a growl, and stung like fiery needles. Raian, trying a spell for warding off raindrops that proved ineffective, began to puzzle how to craft a new spell, and for the first time wondered whence the old ones had come.

The acrid taint in the air sharpened, but no one ventured a complaint. Bellies rumbled. Game they saw in tantalizing plenty: deer leaped the stream and paused to watch them struggle past. Grouse exploded out of hidden crevices. A wild pig, blackhaired and red-eyed, fat on summer’s browsing, glared from half a spear-cast away before trotting off disdainfully. And some meaty, silvery fish that they could not name began to appear in the growing pools to snap at the flies, which now grew less. For that alone they had spared these saviors, but no one now dared eat of anything in this place: what if ’t were not trees alone their enchanted kinsmen became?

Noon surely came, and surely passed. No one begged a halt, though many shook with hunger. All thought only of an ending to this wood. Let us but win free of the farthest reach of its accursed shade, and then there shall be such a feast and such a fire as shall be sung of by our remotest descendants!

The bank on the right rose to a rough cliff of perhaps thrice a tall man’s height; to the left across the stream, the land became a sheer wall for a few yards up before crumbling away under grasping roots. And up the ravine a ceaseless roar grew with their every step to overwhelm the broken rush of the water beside them.

Raian glared, recalling waterfalls in the Uissig. The ruggedness of the cliffside that now began to crowd them toward the water, reassured him that they should be able to scale the slope to come, but few of them had brought anything so unheroic as rope and some of those were among the vanished. There was indeed, he recalled with lighter heart, one fall where he and Wolf and the rest spent many a Summer’s hour leaping into the glassy stream above to be flung over the lip and drop thirty feet into the profound pool below. “But not here,” he muttered aloud, thinking of grey branchy hands from the depths. Beside him, the cliff forced an ever-narrower path beside the water, and that less a path than a boulder-crawl.

Deorgard climbed onto a flat-topped rock, and stopped. A growl reverberated from him, low and viciously angry. Raian peered past his knees.

Ahead, a great dam as of giant beavers’ work spanned the breadth of the creek. Flotsam of past years’ flooding piled against the cliff that now bent across their way and joined the farther wall, and the water that had flowed between them roared down into the bowels of the Myrinine and vanished from the daylit world.

Men pressed up to view the grievous wonder. Then someone laughed aloud, chucked his spear down the hole and dived after.

“Fool!” Deorgard bellowed after him, and rounded on the rest. “That was his own work, and no sorcery! Anyone else? Eh? Kill yourself—before you have to meet something you don’t like? Do it now and get off my hands!

“The rest of you: I’m—getting—out.” He invoked no god, but he spoke the words like a vow. And his silence demanded the same oath of them.

He turned away from any reply, scanned the debris and the rocky barrier for a path of ascent and began at once to climb. Raian scrambled after. Lighter and lither, he cleared the brink first and crouched low, gazing through the trees and listening, listening.

The land sloped gently away from them, for as far as he could make out. Maybe half a hundred yards below, the forest-shadow lightened, the trees themselves seemed a brighter green despite the overcast. And something in their bent and knobbly postures, so unlike the straighter boles around them, spoke to him of apples. Please, Lady Mother Tuhudre, let it be so. He could eat a treeful by himself.

Wolf and Maglad were the last to reach the top. Raian tore his eyes from the seeming orchard, half-fearing that it would vanish from the world if it vanished from his sight, but Deorgard’s pensive scowl stopped his news. The king glared at his followers, half of whom had sunk to their backsides while wearily awaiting the rest.

“Where’s Tibba?” he barked. “Geroff—Hlafstarr—Osgur—not you, the other one—”

They searched among themselves, amazed. “He was here! he climbed just before me—I was following his boots!” or “I remember that he was right beside me—I gave him a hand once, and then I looked to my own footing—”

No one, it seemed, had seen any man evaporate into the harsh air. But only three and seventy stood now above the cliff.

“Wrrraaaugh!” Deorgard loosed a long, wordless howl and charged the cliff, wrenched a battle axe from the back of the man who wore it, bursting its straps, slammed his boots into a hard brace at the edge and smote the rocks below a fearsome blow. Two small boulders broke free at the stroke and leaped crashing down through the trees. Again and again he struck, as though he would free his people by destroying the earth that had swallowed them. Sparks flew among the ringing echoes.

I’m not sharpening that, Raian thought dully, almost as though it mattered. All the rest stood silent, struck dumb by the fury of the king.

The haft cracked and broke. Deorgard dropped it and straightened slowly, staring.

Up over the lip of the cliff, shadows rose. Black, not as wool or coal but like holes in the stuff of the World, holes into Night Eternal—holes out of which two cold yellow eyes, perfectly round, shone with a fey light. Half a hundred, maybe, and though they were small, no larger than a man’s lower leg, dread flowed from their presence like the chill of a subterranean air. If they had other features, they were not perceptible to Raian’s mortal eyes.

Deorgard dropped back, one step. His fists clenched. “Give me my men.”

The men around Raian tensed, straightened their spines in pride and awe of their king, and Raian not the least among them. He held his breath.

And reply formed in his thought, though the shadows hung silent:

They are the price of your story.

And, as certain as he was of the unheard words, was he certain of their stark sincerity. Suddenly he knew: there was no malice in the Myrinine. None at all. And their peril was tenfold the greater, a hundredfold. If any of them emerged alive, they would be no more than a handful and if he were one of them then some one or ten of the men standing tall and breathless beside him must die.

He set his young jaw. He would live. Whoever else would do so, must find it in his own soul to win out.

“Story be damned!” barked Deorgard. “Give me my men!”

But the shadows faded like the coming of dawn, and were gone. Deorgard stood alone at the cliff’s brink, motionless but for the bunching and knotting of his great fists. His men waited.

He wrenched around and glared at Raian. “Peeries?” Raian could only spread his hands: neither had he ever seen such things. Deorgard snarled. “Charms against ’em?”

“Against peeries? Yes, of course. Er—”

“What?” he roared.

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Raian shrugged. “The only one I know—you want a copper bowl, and fresh milk.”

The king continued to glare at him as if he had wilfully learned what they could not now use. “Ah, faugh,” he spat, and turned and stumped down the gentle slope. The rest rose to follow heavily.

And they were apple trees that Raian had seen, trees in full bearing. Great clusters of shy ruddy globes bent low the boughs, and a huge windfall littered the ground to make footing treacherous. Not that they trod upon many, instead snatching them up and devouring them entire till their beards matted with juice and hunger abated at last. Now they could see the sky at last, though little good it did them, the gray, featureless roof; but it was better than an endless upward depth of leaves.

After a brief rest they struggled on. The idle slope grew gently less, till soon they walked a floor as level as a windless lake, deep under the trees. They had no longer a hint as to their right road.

Shortly a deeper shadow proved to be a wall of stone rising, as it seemed from earlier glimpses, well above the shoulders of the trees. They debated climbing, though everyone hungered for sight of anything beyond the forest. This time Deorgard ordered protection-charms, whatever any of the witch-sighted could contrive; he also ordered watchfulness, commanded men to speak with anyone at hand as they climbed, and thus they began the ascent.

For once Deorgard was not at the fore, trying to keep an eye on everyone at once, as though his personal attention were their only security. A young Padanring cleared the trees first, and his joyous laugh heartened everyone below.

“It’s this ridge—then it falls away on the other side, a right steep walk, or climb,” he called down. “And—and to the right, a lot of smoke; I think that’s where it’s all coming from—”

It was the queerest sensation of Raian’s life. He had once been tossed in a blanket, a small child at a fair. This was rather like that: the rock beneath him rippled, pressing him up, then dropping away, as easily as the blanket. That was all. He glanced about at others near him. Then a strange deep roar, from an unimaginably huge bull, rolled over the world, and the rocky ridge simply tossed him aside.

He fell upon a pile of men similarly thrown down. Boulders crashed among them, crushing some. And the young Padanring of the joyous cry fell to be impaled through the chest upon a dead sapling blackthorn. Several men stared at his rag-doll body dangling ten feet above them and bolted.

Deorgard pulled himself from beneath several well-bruised men, and quietly ordered the youth cut down.

“And me, lord,” whispered another. Deorgard turned to find one of his own Dunmadroch men half-buried under a six-foot chunk of the wall. They pulled it away, but everything below his knees had been shattered. Healers in a village might have saved him, as a cripple, but they had only one balm for him here. Deorgard knelt, laid a hand on his brow, spoke softly for a minute and listened for several, though the earth again shrugged beneath them, and the smoky sky flickered orange.

Just behind the ear: a small cut, only a flick of a good knife-point, and the soul released to the waiting-land beneath the uttermost North, to one of the hells there, to the Glades of Peace, or—

“To the Hall of Heroes,” the king murmured, as if giving directions. “Now—what’s this hell?”

Eight others begged a like release. Someone piously observed that it was the Earthshaker’s will. Deorgard grunted noncommittally.

“Aye? Well, at least He’s also willed us rocks enough for a cairn!”

So passed the afternoon. They camped at the cliff-foot that night, and one of the bards—they had had ten, now they had six—ventured a eulogy. Its kind reception gratified him, though his audience was too weary to care for art, caring only for the familiar.

Raian and Wolf sat leaning together, each sensing the other’s rumbling belly but for long exchanging no other sign. Presently Raian murmured, “Wolf?”

“Yah?”

“If you want to get out of this—out of this story, I mean—”

“The story of the forest?”

“That’s the one. Then you’d better know that you’re going to get out of it. Know it. Wishing won’t work it.”

“I’m with you, my man,” Wolf said placidly.

Raian drew breath to berate him, then shut himself up. It might be as stupid a reason for belief as could be contrived—unless it worked. “Whatever it takes,” he sighed.

After a breakfast of hoarded apples, three and fifty set out next morning, hoping only for a downhill path. Twelve dead of yesterday’s quake; one could believe eight fled. No more vanishings, though no one seemed sure if that were a good sign or not.

They marched along the cliff, and almost at once the land fell sharply. Light came from somewhere beyond the trees, as though a clearing lay below them, and they hurried down. Then the trees parted, ended, even the ferns underfoot ended. A furlong of barren earth, patches and swirls of brown, white, red, even coppersmith-green, lay between them and another wall, this one smooth and sheer, though more trees crowned its top. They stopped short, angry at this wretched, haphazard land, but one of the Dun Agdaen men strode on, snarling, “There are always handholds.” The rest, even the king, paused to summon the will to follow after, so that he had cleared a dozen paces when the ground broke beneath him. He fell with a scream into muddy orange water. He thrashed violently as he sank beneath a white steamy plume, breaking up more of the rough crust; a reek of rotten eggs wafted from the hole, a damp reek, an unpleasantly warm reek. Deorgard took his spear from Raian and slammed its bronze butt onto the ground before him, then ventured after. It broke through on the third blow, he backed up a yard, and bent to touch the ground.

He yanked his hand up and backed away further. “Hot,” he growled, and nodded at the man-sized hole beyond. “He boiled.”

“What is this?” someone whispered, though his voice carried in the stillness. “Are we all dead and walking the Waiting Land among the hells?”

“Bugger that,” snarled the king, and strode back up into the trees, before turning to transverse the slope.

Mad they thought him, but it was a wonderful, living madness, better than their own horrid fancies, and they hurried to follow him.

All that day the acrid smell sharpened, till their nostrils burned. The cloud-gloom deepened, and sight grew ghostly as the high smoke drifted lower. Deorgard ordered protection-charms again, around the whole company against the stuff: fog, mist, or smoke, Deorgard reasoned that a man could lose his way among one as well as another.

A ravine crossed their path, sheer-sided. Hot mist curled from its unseen depths. Deorgard chucked an angry stone into it, then turned to walk along its edge. It ended a mile or so later, in another level place thick with great old trees. Raian for one felt safer: if these leafy giants had had time to grow too large for five men to link hands about their trunks, the earth beneath them must be steady enough. But which way from here would take them back down the mountain, they could not tell. The sky above darkened as though evening approached—or the mother of all storms.

As they considered which way to go—and eager they were to go, in any way: every man’s skin prickled, and all Wolf’s hair except the braid down his neck stood straight out from his body—the World Egg split asunder.

So the bards said. And that was about how it sounded, Raian thought, dazzled to blindness by the lightning-stroke, and he yelped at a blow to his shoulder that struck him to the ground.

Crackling, a roar of flame, Wolf’s knee in his back and a stab of pain from his shoulderblade, Wolf’s arm hauling him to his feet and a foot-long splinter of bloody wood being tossed aside, in a glare of fiery light. Fire leaped from the riven tree to its neighbors.

“Leave him!” That was Deorgard’s voice.

“—heart-brother!” came the anguished reply.

“Live to mourn him!” roared the king.

“Come on!” Wolf hissed. “This old forest’s that dry—!”

Raian ran, his senses slowly recovering.

“Splinter,” gasped Wolf, “big as me—right through old Harbeanr—”

“Where’s Deorgard?” Raian croaked, straining to see through the billowing smoke, and coughed.

Wolf pointed in answer. Deorgard set a good pace but not his best, turning often to seize the arm of someone overtaking him, to shove the man onward. His wits returning, Raian realized that not everyone fled this way, though where they were now, he could not tell. He set his own sights on Deorgard, clung to Wolf’s kilt-belt, and plunged on.