Despite Eli’s confidence, Mara spent the remainder of the day lost in her own head, fretting and wondering and dreading what awaited her in her dreams that night. But when she went to sleep, she woke in the bedroom, to Davy whole and well, sitting in the window seat with a book propped on his knees and his gaze turned out the window.

  She was too grateful, too relieved to initiate any hard conversations. And besides, what was the point when she knew he wouldn’t be able to answer any of her questions? Instead she merely went to him and climbed into his lap, and they sat together and watched little songbirds flit about in the branches of the prezleret tree.

  When she woke the next morning, the sun was already up, weak tendrils snaking through little breaks in the leaves. Nick was up as well, climbing a tree on the far side of the fire while Eli hovered beneath him. At the sight of her, Nick scrambled down out of the tree and ran to hug her, Eli following behind, more slowly.

  “Sleep well?” he asked, his serious gaze adding weight to the innocuous question.

  “Really well,” she answered.

  With the simple exchange, the turbulence of the past several days and the intensity of their mutual concern for each other seemed to fade back into the usual distant rhythm. Focus returned to Nick and to the simple facts of survival. For two days, they walked and entertained Nick. They made camp and broke it. Found food and ate it. Boiled water and drank it. Eli wandered off into the woods to hunt. Mara wandered off into her mind to practice her sensing.

  Perhaps it was the richness of the forest, perhaps Eli was right and she did have some skill, but every time she practiced it got a little easier to tune herself into the language of the woods. Easy enough that she got bored with simple sensing exercises and started practicing some of the channeling drills Eli had given her.

  In respectfully small drabs, she began reaching for morsels of the Smokestacks’ magic. The trees were easiest, their energy so old and plentiful it ran like a storm-swollen river beneath her feet. The hardest part with the trees wasn’t channeling their energy–letting herself get swept away in the current–but breaking free. The first time she tried it, she stopped midstride, anchored to the earth as if she herself had grown roots. Perhaps she’d have stood there forever if not for Eli shaking her hard by the shoulders and jolting her back to her senses.

  After that, she stuck to smaller, weaker streams of magic. The squirrels’ manic zest, the mushrooms’ quiet industry, the birds’ constant yearning for flight and song. The analogy Eli had recommended she use was spinning wool–grabbing just enough of the magic to twist into a short length of yarn and then snipping it off from the source so as not to take too much. It required intense concentration, but within a couple days she was at least able to reach out and pinch up a tuft of the energy. Spinning it was a long way off.

  Late on the morning of the third day, Mara walked beside Eli. They were passing through a polobath grove, a species known for its dual root systems–one that plunged deep in search of water, and another that snaked along the surface like a net. The grove was a mess to navigate, the roots a persistent ankle-twisting hazard, but Mara was delighted nonetheless. Polobath was one of only three known species that shared a single root system. Though the trees rose up from the ground as individuals, the tangle of roots along the surface were a shared network.

  Perhaps it was fate that they were passing through the polobath grove. Perhaps it was just luck. Perhaps it was fate that Nick was occupied picking his way through the roots and Eli was pensive and Mara was bored enough to practice a little sensing as they walked. Perhaps it was just luck.

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  Either way, fate or luck, the instant she tuned into the hum of the grove, she knew something was wrong and stopped in her tracks as prickles rose up on her arms and the back of her neck.

  “Nick, love, come here a second.” When she crouched and held out her arms, her son turned and toddled obediently into them.

  “What is it?” Eli asked, stopping by her right shoulder as she stood, Nick clasped to her.

  “I feel something.”

  He went still, but after a few breaths merely shook his head. “I haven’t got anything. What’s it feel like?”

  It felt like jagged, dirty fingernails, dragged up the bare skin over her spine. But she didn’t want to frighten Nick, so she caught Eli’s eye over her son’s head. “I’m not sure. Something different,” she said with her mouth. Something bad, she said with her eyes.

  Again, Eli went still. Again, she waited as he listened. Again, he shook his head, voice a hum. “Whatever it is, it’s not human.”

  “You feel it?”

  “No. And if it was human, I would.” He turned a slow circle, abandoning magical senses for the mundane. The forest was so close, Mara thought it was a pointless effort. Whether this thing was ahead of them or behind, they wouldn’t see it until it was ten feet from them. They wouldn’t hear it at all, so loud was the late afternoon chatter of insects and birds and busy scurrying.

  Eli finished his circle, taking her gently by the elbow and side-stepping to bring them next to the nearest tree. Its squat base spread out a web of gnarled roots that tried to trip her as he placed her against the trunk and turned his back. “I’ll keep watch. Go deeper. See what else you can sense.”

  Mara pressed her own back to the tree trunk, cradling Nick’s head against her chest and closing her eyes. Now that she knew she could do it, now that she had practiced, it was second nature, sending her mind backward through the bark, into the heart of the tree, and letting the current sweep her up.

  She sank her roots deep and spread them wide, ignoring her bounty of stretching branches and dancing leaves for the dark, telling soil beneath. She could feel for ages, the web of polobath roots an instant connection to acres of woods. At the edges of the grove, the tapered ends of her tiniest roots twined ringlet-like around those of another–a rubifel vine. And another, a dying sapling. Another. Again and again, more times over than her mind could comprehend, like the individual strands of Davy’s hair, feathering against her fingers as she combed it. Like individual voices in a choir. A sensation of a thousand sensations. And from each of those connections, all of the connections of the other, again and again, until the entire forest was draped across her mind like a tangle of moss.

  And somewhere in that tangle, chillingly nearby to the locus of her sensing, something stank. Splotches of salty, bile-yellow ache spread in shallow pools just beneath the earth where it walked. Leaves wilted as they brushed against soft skin.

  Mara slammed back into her body, so hard she knocked the back of her head against the tree.

  As a girl, her favorite books had always been the myths. She’d consumed those stories like water, gulping down heroic tales of epic battles and slain monsters. She lived in those stories, but even as a child she’d known they were just that–stories. Fabrications. There was a difference between legendary creatures and creatures of legend, between fantastic truth and fantasy.

  Perhaps she should have paid more attention to the message of the Rho deer–some fantasies inhabited flesh and walked the earth.

  She’d read this story. Knew this creature of legend–a being of pure want, her form as beautiful as the rising sun, her voice like fresh water on a parched tongue.

  A lure to life in all its forms, she walked a path of yearning and destruction, her every footstep bending the very fabric of existence so that all that lived rushed down and inward toward the gaping maw of her endless hunger and laid itself, prostrate, at her feet. And there it died–a silent, wilted band of rotting flesh and salted earth sloughing off the wake of her trail like the discarded skin of a molting snake.

  “Eli,” Mara breathed, her heart already fluttering with excitement, her soul heavy with dread. His head shifted, a slight rotation to give her his ear without losing sight of the forest before him. Not that it mattered. Even he couldn’t defend them from this. “It’s a Songbird.”

  Hello!

  Okay, so full disclosure, I can't really tell if anybody is actually following along with this story. RoyalRoad's analytics are pretty limited without a paid subscription, soooo there's a decent chance I am shouting this message into an empty room. But in the event that there's at least one person reading this who is invested in the story and following along as I update:

  THANK YOU!!!!!

  Between you and me, I'm a trash demon with zero artistic integrity and patchy (at best) executive functioning. I love coming up with ideas for stories and writing them in my head, but actually drafting a coherent narrative from A to B can be a little bit of a slog sometimes. The knowledge (delusion?) that there might be somebody out there who cares where this is going is one of my chief motivators to keep writing. So thank you.

  Now, the gross part:

  I just wanted to drop a reminder that I do have a Patreon account where free subscribers read two chapters in advance of what's posted here, and paid subscribers read five chapters ahead. So you could have a resolution to this little cliffhanger for $0.00/month is all I'm saying.

  Okay, I'm gonna go scrub the taste of earnest desperation out of my mouth.

  Thank you for reading <3

  Liz