Reg startled when Annise flopped down at his table. He’d been staring at his plate of nuts, hard-boiled eggs, and dried fruit, trying to convince himself that he should eat. Last evening, Instructor Mossgate had requisitioned Reg, Val, and Jashal to experiment with a new mind-opening potion derivation. It had worked well for Val and Jashal, but Reg’s stomach had reacted strongly to it, and had spent the last night huddled in a nook right outside the latrine. His mouth felt faintly sulfurous and he felt as though a giant hand had squeezed him from the middle and squished out everything possible from both ends.
Annise was followed by Jackoby, who sat down with considerably more decorum. The lanky elf nodded to Reg before arranging his napkin carefully on his lap and using his chopsticks to eat nuts one at a time, savoring each one.
Annise poked Reg, “Have you heard anything about what we’re doing today? Some guards have been swapping shifts because some of them want to watch. I heard some of them talking about it after the throwball match last night, which you didn’t come to cheer at by the way, don’t think I didn’t notice. How are you going to be ready to sub on if you haven’t been watching the games? And have you been practicing with the ball?” She paused for a breath, “So, do you have any idea what we might be doing?”
Reg stared at her for a bit. It was too early in the morning to weather that storm of words. “Sorry I missed the match last night. Instructor Mossgate had more tests he wanted to run.” He racked his mind a bit before saying, “Instructor Mossgate was fiddling with the giant terror fang last night. I can’t picture that being interesting to watch though—you’d just see people pause.”
Annise laughed, “And our leathers make it hard to see when someone’s pissed themselves. I suppose that won’t be fun to watch.”
Jackoby put down his chopsticks, patted his lips with his napkin, and said “Alfonso tells me that the local circle of druids has been building a circle to summon nature spirits.” At Reg’s confused expression, Jackoby pointed to a raven that was perched high up on a carved column preening itself. “Alfonso. He is a most discerning bird, and I am endeavoring to convince him that I would make a worthy partner.”
Annise patted him on the shoulder, “If you can convince me, I’m sure you’ll be able to convince him.”
Reg bit back a grimace. For whatever reason, Jackoby rubbed him the wrong way, especially now that he was dating Annise. “So,” Reg said, “you think summoning spirits will have something to do with exams? How would that work?”
“I haven’t the slightest idea.” Jackoby answered. “I’ve never summoned a nature spirit and I shan’t be anytime soon. Setting up a circle for the spirit to operate in requires substantial effort, setting aside the effort to convince a spirit to cooperate in the first place. The timing does seem suspicious though.”
Over the course of breakfast, they gathered a few more tidbits of gossip, but nothing that let them put together a clear picture of what was going to happen. Yeva had joined an extra practice session with Professor Ashsprocket, and the Professor had been enchanting nets while Yeva, Belladonna, and Unnie worked on spark-shields. Jashal had overheard Dun complaining that Healer Leafwatch had been working apprentice Healer Zinnia to the bone and that she hadn’t had sufficient time for him. There hadn’t been any more full guard injuries from patrols than normal, so either they were planning an expedition, or they expected a lot of injuries in one of the exams. If there were to be injuries, Reg suspected it’d be from the Instructor of Arms’ exam—most classes for Advanced Arms had at least one serious injury, especially now that they’d started weapon katas.
They didn’t have to wait that long to find out. After breakfast, Captain Merrin gathered the recruits and led them on a run anti-trunkwards. Many full guards followed in a loose group behind and Reg could hear snatches of laughter from them that stood in contrast to the nervous mutters of the recruits as they headed towards whatever challenge Captain Merrin and the other instructors had prepared for them.
After months of early morning runs, the jog to the small glade near the branch’s downslope was easy. Near the glade, a tiny branch, barely the width of four elves laid end-to-end, was so covered in a proliferation of flowering vines and shrubs so thick that anything on it was completely obscured. “This,” Captain Merrin declared gesturing towards it, “is The Branch. One by one, you will walk it. After you fall, you will be caught, and we will discuss your errors before you walk it again. Abatha, you first.”
Captain Merrin’s introduction to the branch was brief, and didn’t say anything about enemies on it, but the weapon options laid out carefully near the start of the branch was telling. She also didn’t mention anything about magical traps or spells, but when he looked for it, he could see the air shimmering strangely over spots further down the branch. Even more telling, the full guards had found good viewing locations along the side of the main branch. They wouldn’t be out here watching if there wasn’t more to it than just ‘walking the branch.’ Captain Merrin had the recruits wait further back in the glade at a spot where they could only see the entrance to the branch, but not see what was happening along it.
Only two minutes after Abatha left for the branch, they heard a high-pitched scream, and Captain Merrin called Annise to start.
“Whoa, that was fast.” Val whispered to Reg. “That’s worrying.”
He nodded. It was worrying. Abatha wasn’t the strongest in their class, but the lanky elven woman wasn’t a slouch. How many horrors had the instructors hidden down that small branch?
Annise lasted significantly longer than Abatha had, but from the glance Reg saw as she entered the branch, she was moving slowly and cautiously, so it might take her longer to get to the same point that Abatha had. Four minutes in, a few of the audience of full guards cheered at some move or another that Annise pulled off on the branch. Five minutes after that, Annise shrieked loudly, the sound shifting as she fell off the branch. The audience groaned, and a few guards clapped politely. The small claps seemed oddly out of place after Annise’s horrified shriek; those claps belonged at an exhibition circle duel or a restrained lute-off.
Belladonna went next and won cheers that were immediately followed by groans and a pained yelp from her as she fell. Belladonna was followed by Bilkdam, who barely made it past Abatha’s time mark, and then Dun who made it to twelve minutes and garnered several cheers from the watching crowd.
At first, the waiting recruits were pulled tight as an orb-weaver web with nervous anxiety, but as time dragged on, recruits, especially ones at the end of the alphabet, relaxed a bit and started to find ways to kill time. Jashal and a few elves started a game of dice. Val wandered off to chat with two blue jays. Yeva poured sparks from hand to hand. Reg stretched his cloak out and fell asleep—he was exhausted after spending the night puking and his stomach had finally settled a bit.
Yeva poked him awake just before his turn, so Reg was still rubbing some of the sleep out of his eyes when he approached the weapons and tools laid out on racks at the entrance to the branch. From the racks, he picked up a spear, some silk climbing rope, and a few ground thorns in a carrying case. He ignored the bows; they seemed like they’d be ungainly in that wild undergrowth. Plus, while he was more comfortable with the bow after the months of practice, he still felt better with his sling.
The wild shrubs and vines on the branch had grown in a way that left a narrow corridor onto the branch. The line where the shrubs stopped was so sharp that it looked almost like a hallway in a building, but one where the shrubby walls to either side had wicked-looking two-inch long thorns nestled among rich purple and red lily-shaped flowers. This corridor bent almost immediately, so Reg could only see a few feet ahead. With his spear held loosely ahead of him, he took a deep breath, donned his mask, and stepped onto the branch.
As he headed down the corridor, the branch started to flex and sway more underneath his feet. It wasn’t a particularly windy day, but on smaller branches like this one, it was easy to feel the shifts and groans of the Tree as it responded to the wind’s pushes. The dense foliage limited sight, so Reg paused every few steps to listen and sniff the air. A quick rustling to his left had him almost jump out of his skin, but it was just a gray grouse that he’d startled. He caught an acrid smell underneath the scent of the flowers that smelled like burning, but didn’t see the source. With every step, he kept expecting an attack. None came.
Up ahead, Reg saw more light. It looked like the shrub corridor opened up into an open space on the branch. He eased forward, silent as a hunting spider. The shrub corridor ended, and blocking the path along the branch was a seven foot wall of the same thorny shrubs that’d formed the walls of the corridor. Reg spent a minute at t he end of the corridor, listening and waiting to see whether anything waited in ambush once he entered that open space. After a few minutes of careful waiting, he leapt into the open space twirling in all directions, looking for an attack. The branch was silent. This open space extended all the way to the edge of the branch, so Reg had a good view of the branches all around, and of the full guard audience up above.
When nothing attacked, Reg took a more careful look at the wall of shrubs. He could see some large patches that looked like they’d been burned away and then regrown. The wall was about seven feet tall, so substantially lower than some of the vaulting jumps that they’d been practicing in arms, but Reg didn’t like the idea of leaping into unknown danger. He walked to the edge of the branch and clambered down. The shrub wall grew along the side of the branch, totally regular in shape. Reg clambered down further, hooking a foot into a crack of bark and holding on to a small knob with a hand to check out underneath the branch. It was just as regular underneath the branch as it was over it, a thorny bracelet.
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He clambered back topside and thought. He kept thinking about his lack of magic—there was no way for him to burn his way through that wall—but what tools did he have? A spear, his sling, some ground thorns, a rope. What else? His doll, his mask, a cloak… and a pouch that, as always, had some snacks in it. He tossed a piece of goat jerky over the wall, and after a few seconds was rewarded with quiet clacking sounds of something creeping close to the jerky, sniffing it, and then gulping it down. Despite being only a few feet away from it, the shrub was dense enough that Reg couldn’t even see the thing’s shadow.
Reg tossed another piece of goat jerky over the wall, waited a few beats until he heard the thing coming close to gulp it down, and then used his spear to vault over the wall, a ways down from wherever it was. As he cleared the wall, he oriented himself to land facing the bony thing that was munching down on some of his best goat jerky. It was a man-height panther with a body made of goat femur bones. Its head was still that of a panther, and it hung limply to the side. The goat jerky it had tried to eat was shredded. Some of it still balanced precariously on the thing’s “ribs.” Each rib was made of two femurs joined together with glowing blue silk to bend and approximate the correct shape. Where had the instructors found this twisted thing?
The femur-bone panther whirled in a great clatter, turning a bit too far, before trying to rush at Reg. Despite his shock, he rolled to the side. The thing took a few steps to slow, before crashing to the ground. It lacked paws—standing on the nubs of its leg bones—and it took a few seconds for it to rise to its feet and re-orient on Reg. The thing moved quickly, but its unnatural construction made it ungainly and awkward.
The femur-bone panther rushed him again. This time, Reg used his spear to club one of its front legs as it went past, to almost no effect. The joined-together bones were strong. Reg felt like he could dodge around this thing indefinitely, but he needed some way of disabling it. Over the course of the next two charges from the thing, Reg oriented himself the way he wanted, with his own back to the shrub-wall, and the femur-bone panther directly opposite. This time, when the thing charged and Reg dodged out of the way, it crashed into the thorny shrubs. Without flesh to help arrest its movement, the bones went deep into the wall, with silk strands catching on the vines and thorns.
It started to wriggle backwards, but Reg hadn’t expected the shrub wall to be a long-term solution. He pulled out his climbing rope and two of the large ground thorns. Over the course of a few stressful minutes, he threaded the two ground thorns into the shrub wall on either side of the femur-bone panther. The four pointed jagged hooks of the ground thorn enmeshed themselves solidly in the wall. Moving with care, he wrapped the climbing rope around the panther’s exposed spine before tying it to the two ground thorns. He stood back to admire his work—the bone creature had worked its way partially free, but the ground thorns had it pretty locked into place. He wished he’d paid a bit more attention to some of the knots that old Barkle used to use when setting up fences and herding. It had taken Reg minutes to get everything knotted off tightly enough, and he was sure there was a better way of getting things tightened down so that the thing couldn’t move and that would have left him with a bit more climbing rope than the fifteen feet he had left. Despite that, he was still sure that the thing wouldn’t be getting free from the wall anytime soon. And if it did? Well, it’d still be attached to two ground thorns that’d catch on everything as it tried to move.
The sounds of clacks and rustles came from behind as Reg pushed further down the branch. Every few feet he glanced back to confirm that the femur-bone panther was still stuck to the wall. Its head lolled madly as it rattled its bones, but it looked more stuck to the hedge than it had been when it first slammed into it.
Ahead, the branch was still covered in vines, shrubs, and other plants, but they were no longer shaped into a narrow corridor. The branch was narrow enough that the long fall and nearby branches were both visible on both sides as Reg made his way through the bushes, looking for the next danger. Small toadstools grew underneath larger flowering shrubs. Underfoot, the decomposing bark-dust that collected in fissures was wet and spongy with morning dew. Reg moved slowly and silently, so as the sounds from the femur-bone panther died away, all he could hear was the soft fluttering of leaves in the light breeze and the deep creaks of the branch as it bent back and forth.
After a few minutes of walking, Reg paused when he saw a shimmer between two larger shrubs. Spider-web. Inching forward a bit more, he was sure of it—there was a giant jumping spider lurking somewhere up ahead. Unlike other varieties of wild spider, these webs wouldn’t have been spun to necessarily catch anything, but to let the spider that nestled at the heart of these webs know when a creature was wandering through its area. Even brushing against a vine that rested against one of the silk strands was enough to alert the spider that breakfast was at pedipalp. The branch was narrow enough here that the spider had been able to decorate the entire width of it and its sides with sticky webbing.
Reg found it hard to keep the grin off his face as he worked; it was hard to imagine a simpler challenge for someone who’d grown up with a portia herding spider. Val and Jackoby would probably call out and ask the spider to let them through unimpeded. Reg would do something similar, but he had to do a bit more work to communicate the right things. He pulled out the rest of the climbing rope, sliced it into a few pieces, and delicately looped it around the spider-line at a few key points.
Once Reg had the climbing rope in place, he gave it a few light pulls. If he wanted the giant jumping spider to leap this way, he’d keep pulling at about that intensity. He didn’t. He quickly started pulling a bit harder, before going back to his light initial pull strength. Then he yanked on the ropes hard before letting out a loud, angry hiss. Reg was surprised by how close the giant jumping spider had been when it leapt away, fleeing the immature hunting portia that Reg had emulated.
On wild branches, portias regularly hunted other giant spider species by imitating prey. They’d pluck the edges of a web and leap on the back of the web’s occupant when it came to investigate. When Ankie had been younger and just learning to hunt, she’d often gotten impatient while hunting and scared away her prey. He had done his best to mimic her behavior during some of those early hunts, and it had worked to convince this giant spider that he was a hunting portia, one of the most dangerous araneophages on the Tree.
Past the spider’s web, the vegetation on the branch underwent a huge shift. There were only a few bushes and shrubs, but they were stunted and sickly-looking. There were no toadstools, and no moss grew anywhere. Instead, the bark was covered in a carpet of scarlet tulip-like flowers with black stalks and stamens. Reg hadn’t even heard of this type of flower before, but he didn’t need to know what they were to know they looked terribly dangerous.
The flowers extended far enough down the branch that there was no way to leap over. Reg checked the fit of his mask to make sure it was secure before backing up a few strides, sprinting forward, and then leaping as far as it could with the thought that the quicker he could get through the flowers the better. As he landed and crushed a few flowers underfoot, he had the thought that that was a mistake; sprinting was so much effort. He could instead meander through. Stop every few strides to take a nap. After all, he’d been puking his guts out late last night, didn’t he deserve a nap? Especially before tackling whatever challenge was next. Had he even looked beyond the flower field to see what he was getting into? It was probably something horrific, and not the kind of thing a person wanted to face when they were exhausted. And why did it matter whether he even made it through this flower field anyways? He’d already made it farther than most other recruits had—he could give up right here and now and nobody would judge him.
Waves of exhaustion and apathy hammered at Reg as he swayed back and forth in the middle of the field of black and scarlet tulips. He didn’t need the burning feeling of the mask on his face to recognize the too-familiar feeling of a mental assault, but the thoughts were hard to resist. He was exhausted. He had made it far enough through the course. He could give up here and now and nobody would judge him for it. The thoughts were his own, amplified, and their truth made them almost impossible to resist. He started looking for a nook to lie down in, but some small part of his mind kept looking for reasons to keep going. And one thought, a small ugly thought, but a true one, helped him stagger forward a few more steps—’I bet Dun got further than this.’ Another—’what if Val beats me?’—helped him stumble forward a few more. ‘What about Jackoby? Or Jashal? Or Yeva? Ugh, or Fenjor?’ These prideful thoughts were what let Reg continue to put one foot in front of the other as he made his slow way out of the field of flowers.
As suddenly as the lethargy had hit him, it vanished, leaving behind normal exhaustion. Under his feet, he saw the normal dull browns and grays of bark rather than the reds and blacks of the flowers. He took in a huge gasp of air and looked up to see a translucent fanged maw of blue fire heading towards his face. His last thought as he raised his spear to block it and the body of the things flowed through the spear as if it wasn’t there was ‘that’s just not fair.’ The maw hit him and intense pain was thankfully swiftly followed by unconsciousness.
He woke up to Healer Leafwatch’s prodding him in the ribs with a wand. Reg wasn’t sure if the healer had been examining him with the wand, or just trying to wake him up. The gruff healer peered quickly at his eyes before kicking him out of the makeshift open-air infirmary with an admonition to come back “if you have had a splitting headache lasting more than a quarter-moon.” What a horrifying thought. Apparently that was a possible side-effect of the bite of the spirit-serpent that had knocked him out.
When he joined the other recruits who had finished walking the branch, they were sitting in silence, putting quill to parchment. Jashal gave him a half-hearted wave before going back to staring dejectedly at the page in front of him. It looked like he had yet to write a single sentence. Reg picked up a writing board, parchment, and a quill from the table, before taking a look at the prompt:
Enumerate the mistakes you made when walking the branch. What thinking trellises contributed to those mistakes? What resources did you lack? What skills would have been useful? Be comprehensive. The five recruits who write the best essays shall be given the chance to walk the branch again before the next full-class walking exercise. Discussing your challenges and approach with other recruits before handing in your first draft of this essay will disqualify you—going through the exercise of carefully reflecting on your performance is integral to growth.
Reg sighed, rubbed his aching head, and got to work.