The Little Birds

Thrush Dancing felt the disruption go through her as the magical shockwave passed, rippling the ground of Bayel’s Wood. She shivered as she sought Swallow Courting’s eyes. There was no need for spoken word, no need for signals. From the womb they’d known one another’s minds, and so they did now. Together, they looked to the direction from whence the disturbance had come, their pointed ears perked alertly, tasting the air with senses only sylvans possessed. This was something bad. This was something that had harmed the wood.

They were woodrovers — their duty was clear. They turned abruptly and sprinted southeastward, their passage barely stirring the leaves of the trees, the uneasy rumble of far off thunder echoing in their wake.

The Trader

“What was that?” the trader demanded as he brought his nervous horse alongside the lead wagon, despite the animal’s urgent desire to be an hour’s gallop elsewhere.

“I didn’t see,” the wagon’s driver replied, worry tinging his voice and creasing an already wrinkled brow. “But I heard it clear enough.” He lifted an arm northward. “Something happening in the wood.”

“Aye, t’was my own thought, damn the luck.”

The horse was growing increasingly restive, and the rider was hard-pressed to control it, which alone told him more than he wanted to know of the nature of the noise.

The wagon driver finally turned from his perusal of the tree line and regarded the prancing beast morosely. A glance at the draft horses before him showed utter calm — of what care had they for far off noises, however strange. But the trader’s mount had been bred for other things than standing stupidly between traces, and was making its displeasure known to all within range. It’d be kicking and biting in a moment more did the trader not bring it under control.

The trader’s wife and daughter arrived then, hurrying afoot along the long line of stalled wagons and milling people to join him

“Daddy—” his daughter began before being stopped by his forestalling hand.

“When?” he asked the driver, eyes still trained on the green wall to the north.

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A shrug. “Tomorrow,” the driver replied, knowing the trader’s unspoken question. “Day next, maybe. Depends on how much the outlying farms need and how good the crops are so early in the season. Winter wheat should be about ready for a first cutting, so they might have a bit of gold to spend. But loose gold or no, we should see Clairbourne day next at latest.”

“Too long,” the trader’s head chopped sharply side to side, anger and impatience written upon his lupine features. “Damn the luck,” he repeated bitterly. “Any chance there might be—”

“You know there aren’t,” his wife interrupted, knowing his thought. “There aren’t a band of the forest people for a turn’s journey in any direction. It has to be us.”

“You think it’s the pigs?” the driver asked into the ensuing silence.

“I don’t see any clouds,” the trader scowled. “So it wasn’t likely thunder. And you know that no child of man would willingly venture into that wood so near to WoodHeart. Not hunters, let alone mages, yet the air stinks of released magic even out here.”

“I’ll take the wagons on into Clairbourne, then,” the driver spat a gob of tobacco juice onto the road cobbles and sighed, squinting an eye at his headman, voice going sour. “You going to leave me with enough to guard? Day next is a long time on these roads with the wars and all.”

“I’ll take four,” the trader told him sharply, already dismounting, or trying to. The damned horse was looking to get its ears boxed, nearly bolting as it felt his weight shift. He paused, despite his growing anxiety, to calm the creature, laying alongside its neck and placing a steady palm against its shoulder as he whispered calming words into its ear. The act served to quiet more than the horse, and he could almost think clearly again by the time he could safely quit the saddle.

“Four,” he repeated, almost to himself, as he began disrobing. Tossing his traveling cloak onto the wagon seat, he drew off gauntlets and shirt. “Five of us should be enough to investigate, I should think. If we need more, we’ll need all, and I’ll call,” he was already moving toward the dark tree line as he finished, waving for two of the bravos farther back along the train to follow. His wife and daughter, naked in the sunlight, were hot on his heels. “You just be sure the widow’s listening, eh?” he called back to the already moving wagon.

The Oldest of All

A stirring. Leaves rustled and roots long quiescent throbbed. A taste. A flavor long unknown. Fire! A gate opened and closed. A lost child. Converging paths and the bitter tang of destiny. Overlying the whole, the pungent musk of change.

The Darkness

Far, far to what the soldier would call antepolar and downspin, the rest of us south and east, upon a vast wasteland of ice and stone, something dark stirred, tasting the fabric of the air with appendages for which the likes of us have no name. It could feel the magnetic grid of the world, feel the interweaving lines of what we call magic. Much as a spider with its legs upon the strands of a web, it could feel the slightest disturbance in those lines. If felt such now, and wondered. And wondering, acted.