‘Are you certain? Maybe you should…’
‘I’m fine.’ Kalyth gave Idrelle’s arm a squeeze. ‘Let’s go. The day isn’t getting any longer.’
It wasn’t until the sun was directly overhead, watery and pale, that Kalyth realised she had wandered west. She was far from where the armies of Chaos should have been. Boulders littered the landscape, rising up all around her like angry fists. In the distance, a blue-grey ridge arced skyward like a spine. The trees were sparse and small. The wind moaned, long and low.
According to the branchwraiths, the enemy would never camp here where there was so little cover.
Only the outcasts favoured this terrain.
But why had she come here? Why had she not realised where she was walking? It was as if her body had shrugged her mind away and drifted to this place of its own volition. She didn’t remember the journey at all and it was unsettling, as if slowly surfacing from a dream.
Disoriented and dizzy, Kalyth leaned against a boulder and took in a lungful of sour, sulphuric air. She had the inexplicable urge to keep going, to let her legs carry her up and over that ridge. She envisioned summiting the blue-grey rock, looking down at an encampment full of outcasts, dangerous as a cluster of thunderclouds waiting to storm.
Kalyth shook herself and pushed away from the boulder. She needed to finish her mission, to scout the ground she’d been assigned, or she’d never make it back to the grove before dark.
Kalyth started back the way she came, but that itching, that horrible sense of something wrong, blossomed through her again. It was stronger than it had been in the forest. It was swelling. Spreading. It felt as if a thousand thousand somethings simmered in her legs and arms, and Kalyth knew it wasn’t grief over her fallen brothers and sisters that she felt.
Something was inside her.
Cover your mouth, Idrelle had said. Nobody knows how the madness spreads! Kalyth’s heart lurched. Had she been infected by Chaos after all? No. There had to be a simpler explanation.
Parasites perhaps? Kalyth’s body was as much a part of the natural world as the trees themselves and sometimes other creatures made her their home. Perhaps the morning sun nudged a colony of insects from their winter sleep and they had burrowed into her for warmth?
As Kalyth walked, she tried to disregard it, but the itch intensified. Every step she took seemed to drive it deeper. She felt it in her hands, the crook of her elbow, the socket of her hip, places so deep she couldn’t begin to scratch them.
Last summer, a colony of beetles had burrowed into her left calf, just beneath the thick bark of her skin. Kalyth remembered the scrape of their mandibles, the horrible tickle of their legs, wriggling, squirming. It wasn’t until the first frost that she had been able to finally pluck their still bodies out. The carapaces had fallen onto the frozen ground at her feet, small and upturned, their wings half folded, their legs crooked and bent. She remembered her surprise at how small they seemed. Crawling through her, they had been impossible to ignore.
But this was different.
This itch became a throb. The further Kalyth went, the worse it became until she wanted to scream in frustration, rip her bark away in long strips. A shudder wracked her, as if her body was trying to shake the bugs loose.
Kalyth moved faster. She felt feverish. She needed to scout the land quickly and return to the grove and huddle beside Idrelle, warm and safe in the familiar forest, feel her brothers and sisters all around her, close her eyes and let the Spirit Song of Alarielle comfort her. She tried to connect to it now, but the buzzing inside her made that almost impossible.
For one terrifying moment, she couldn’t hear the Spirit Song at all.
Kalyth ran. She bounded through the snow in great, loping strides, the wind bitterly cold against her skin.
A deep gelatinous heave knocked her off her feet.
Kalyth fell headlong into a snow bank. Something in the centre of her chest pulsed, round and moving and very much alive. It shouldered its way deep inside. Kalyth tried to tell herself she was imagining it. Parasites didn’t do that. Her body would push anything that dangerous out of her before it bored that deep, wouldn’t it? But she could feel it pounding; a second pulse. If she closed her eyes, she could almost see it there, coiled against her heart, bigger and brighter than all the other little things skittering through her.
Kalyth curled around herself.
She felt the Bright One shake himself in her chest. She felt his mouth shift, the hard press of his teeth from the inside as he smiled.
And then he spoke.
By the time Kalyth returned to the grove, the sun was setting. Sweat rolled down the crags of her bark. It took every ounce of effort not to dig at her own body. She was fevered, full of those thousand thousand horrible little things, the Bright One whispering over and over to her.
Don’t you want us here? We just want to be warm. You’re so warm.It’s so cold out there. It’s so cold. Please. Pleasepleaseplease.
Kalyth had spent nearly an hour on the ridge trying to ignore his voice, trying to dislodge the little ones that had somehow spread through her until it felt as if every inch of her was crawling with them. She beat her arms, pounded her palms flat against the boulders, plunged her feet and hands into snowbanks, hoping the cold would drive them out of her.
Nothing worked.
The little ones wormed into her ear canals. They squirmed around her jaw and into the roots of her teeth. And the harder she tried to get rid of them, the faster they moved. The Bright One chuckled softly, the sound vibrating against her ribs.
And as many times as she told herself what was happening was impossible, she could still hear him murmuring, whispering, sighing into her ear.
Now, Kalyth hurried across the snowy field. She needed to be home so very badly. She needed somewhere safe. Somewhere that made sense.
Idrelle waited for her in the copse of evergreens at the edge of the forest. The setting sun tossed shadows onto her face, violet and deep; so dark her eyes seemed as though they’d been spooned from her skull.
The Bright One hammered in Kalyth’s chest and, for a moment, her vision hazed red. She didn’t see Idrelle as she stood now, her mouth pinched with worry, one hand outstretched and wanting Kalyth to hold it. Instead, for an instant, Kalyth had a vision of Idrelle with her body broken and slumped against the evergreens. There were bloody holes where her eyes should have been and when Kalyth looked down, she saw those eyes, wet and round, in the snow beside Idrelle’s upturned hand, bloody fibres trailing away like tails. It would be so easy to make that vision real. To reach up. To pluck those eyes out of Idrelle’s skull. The Bright One wrapped his fingers gingerly around one of Kalyth’s ribs. It would be so very easy. It would feel so good. All that blood. All that warmth.
‘Kalyth, are you all right?’ Idrelle’s hand was cool when she touched Kalyth’s face. ‘You look even worse than you did before. Oh, I knew it. You are sick. You should have stayed here.’
The worry in Idrelle’s voice sank through her. Kalyth shoved her panic aside and strained to clear her thoughts. She could control this. They were only parasites. Just a few bugs. There were bigger problems, an army swelling in the dark and waiting to attack and Kalyth wouldn’t do anybody any good if she unravelled now. She needed to be strong.
For Idrelle, she needed to be strong.
‘I’m just a little tired,’ Kalyth said. Did she sound as breathless as she felt? Did she sound normal? ‘I didn’t find any enemy camps. Did you?’
Idrelle frowned, studying Kalyth carefully. The corners of her mouth were tight with concern, but she finally said, ‘No. Berlyth did. Just south of the glassy lake. She said there were two hundred of the rotbringers there. The Wargrove is mustering at daybreak.’
‘We’re going to fight?’
‘We’re not. We’ve been ordered to hold the line at the edge of the grove. Oh Kalyth, don’t look at me like that. Somebody needs to stay here. Besides, you don’t look well. Are you sure you’re not sick?’
