Chapter 137: The Dark Magician’s Ambush

Lirael watched him but said nothing. Brokk was already measuring the seam with a knotted cord.

It was a reasonable decision. Ashe would go back over it many times in the coming days, trying to find where it had gone wrong, and he never could.

They made camp a quarter mile downstream, in a hollow ringed with flat stones. Hale and Corbin set the watch. Doss built a small fire and cooked something with onions. Pell filled three pages with notes and a fourth with a drawing of the seam, and wouldn’t let anyone see it.

Brokk talked. For two hours he talked, about the veins he’d heard of, the forges that would pay anything for ten pounds of it, the dwarven clans that would send ambassadors if word got out. Tomas laughed at the stories. Doss pretended not to be impressed. Ashe let him go on. The dwarf had earned it.

The talk wound down around midnight. The fire burned low. The forest was dark and still.

Too still.

Lirael noticed first. She sat upright at the edge of the firelight, one hand resting on her bow, and she didn’t move for a long time.

"What is it?" Ashe said, quietly.

"Listen."

He did. Frogs. There should have been frogs by the river. And insects, and owls, and the small shifting noises of animals going about their business at night. He heard the fire, and Doss’s breathing, and nothing else.

"It’s quiet," he said.

"It is an eerie kind of quiet." Lirael’s voice was almost a whisper. "Something feels off."

The hair rose on Ashe’s arms.

"Double the watch," he said.

He took the first shift himself. He sat with his back against a flat stone and his sword across his knees, and he didn’t close his eyes.

The fire sank to embers. The stars wheeled slowly overhead. He counted them, and when he lost count, he started over.

At some point, he must have stopped. He woke with his head against the stone and a grey light creeping across the hollow, and his first thought was that he had slept through his watch. He was furious with himself.

Then he saw the stones.

The flat rocks that ringed their camp were covered in frost. A thin, perfect white crust lay across every one of them, glittering in the dawn. His breath showed in front of his face. Behind him, Pell was waking up and swearing quietly at the cold.

It was midsummer.

"Hale," Ashe called. His voice came out strange. "Corbin. You had the last watch. Did either of you feel this?"

Hale was already on his feet, staring at the frost. Corbin looked at his own hands.

"No, sir," Hale said slowly. "I don’t remember it getting cold."

"Neither do I," Corbin said.

Nobody said anything else. Ashe looked at the white ring around them, unbroken, with not one gap in it, and at the dark trees beyond.

The silence was still there.

Behind him, Lirael drew an arrow.

The first wolf came out of the dark before Lirael’s arrow reached her ear.

It was the size of a pony. Bark grew along its spine in thick grey plates, and its eyes were the wrong color, a dull, steady red. It hit the frozen ring at a full run and skidded through it without slowing.

"Up!" Ashe shouted. "Weapons!"

Lirael’s arrow took the wolf in the throat. It dropped and slid, and a second one was already over it. Tomas met that one with his shield. The impact knocked him back two steps, and Hale caught him by the collar and shoved him forward again.

"Circle! Backs together!"

They formed up around the dead fire. Brokk pulled his pickaxe from the pack and held it like a hammer. Pell was white and shaking, but he had drawn his knife, and he stood between Doss and the Thunderhoof with the blade pointed outward. The animal stamped and tossed its head. Lightning crackled around its hooves.

More came out of the trees.

Thornback boars, with spikes along their backs rattling as they ran. Something pale dropped from the canopy on a thread, and Corbin cut it in half before it landed. It twitched. It had too many legs.

"Eyes," Lirael said. She loosed. Another wolf fell. "They have the same eyes."

"I see them."

"Red. All of them."

Ashe saw. And in the same moment, he saw something else. The beasts weren’t rushing the camp. They charged, snapped, fell back. They had come from three sides, and the fourth, the upstream side, was open.

"They’re herding us," he said.

"What?"

"Look where they’re not." He ducked a boar’s tusk and drove his sword into its shoulder. "North. They’re pushing us north."

"Then we don’t go north."

"We don’t have a choice." A wolf slammed into Tomas’s shield again, and Tomas roared and drove it back. "If we stay, they’ll wear us down. Break for the trees on the east side, now, together."

They broke.

It was ugly. Ashe took the lead with Hale on his flank. Lirael ran backward, firing. Doss dragged the Thunderhoof by its rope, and it fought him until Pell caught the other side and the two of them got it moving. Brokk swung the pickaxe at anything that came near him, grunting with each blow.

A boar clipped his leg and he went down hard, cursing in dwarvish. Corbin hauled him up by the pack straps and kept running.

The trees thinned. Ashe cut left, and a wolf cut him off. He cut right, and a boar was there. Every gap he tried to use closed a second before he reached it.

Then the ground opened out in front of them, and he stopped.

It was a clearing, round and flat, perhaps sixty paces across. The grass was knee-high and silver in the grey light. At its edge, the trees stood back like spectators.

"Don’t," Lirael said, behind him. "Do not step in."

"I know."

"Ashe. The ground."

He saw it then. Four stakes, driven into the earth at equal distances around the edge, each as long as his forearm and wrapped in thin bands of white bone. They didn’t glow. They didn’t hum. They looked like fence posts, set carefully and left to wait.