Chapter 175: I thought that might happen…

Every crack in the floor split wide. Roots as thick as pillars erupted from the glass, and a forest of green and gold shot toward the broken ribs of the dome in the space of a single breath.

Trunks rose around Leon like the bars of a cage. Branches whipped through the air, and the leaves on them were not soft leaves but long, narrow blades that rang when they struck one another.

Vines thicker than a man’s waist swept across the room, and a wall of living wood closed around the boy from every side.

The chamber had become a forest in an instant, and it smelled of rain and cut grass.

’This one is very good,’ Medusa said. ’He is not trying to crush you. He is trying to bury you.’

’I noticed.’

’Roots under the floor. Branches overhead. Thorns on the left.’

’And the right?’

’A great many more thorns.’

Leon saw at once what the old man was doing. Every trunk rose around him and leaned inward, but not one of them reached the green metal.

They stopped a hand’s width from the shield on every side, so close that he could have touched the bark, and they stayed there, creaking, like the bars of a cell that had been measured to the inch.

Bram was trying to bury him without hitting him.

It was clever, and it was very nearly enough. The branches interlaced overhead until the light from the broken dome was only a few thin coins on the floor, and the thorns on the left and the right slid forward in a rattling green tide.

But a forest cannot be taught to keep its distance.

A single vine on the left side of the cage grew faster than the rest. It had been told to stop, and it did not understand.

It reached for the warmth of the boy the way a plant reaches for the sun, and the tip of it brushed the green shield for less than the length of a heartbeat.

Aegis answered at once.

The vine came back ten times as hard as it had arrived. It did not snap, and it did not burn. It simply exploded, and the trunk that it grew from exploded with it, and the blast ran down the roots like a spark down a fuse.

A dozen trees burst into splinters in a ring around Leon. The branches overhead came apart in a rain of green and gold, and the forest that Bram had raised in one breath tore itself to pieces in the next.

The old man was thrown backward with his cloak in rags. He rolled across the glass and came up on one knee, with splinters of his own forest in his white hair.

"That was not me," he said, in a faint and startled voice.

"I know," said Leon. "It was your forest. It wanted to reach me, and you cannot teach a tree not to."

"No." Bram plucked a splinter out of his beard and looked at it. "No, you cannot."

’He is not hurt,’ Medusa said. ’He is only astonished.’

’That is the best way to be.’

A root burst up under Leon’s boots. He stepped aside.

A second root burst up where he had been standing, and a third caught his ankle in a loop as thick as a rope, and he looked down at it with mild interest while the Sanctuary opened its pale light around his leg.

The root went slack at once and slid off him like a dead snake.

"That is not fair," Bram Oakhart said, with a sort of rueful admiration.

"It is not meant to be."

"No. I did not suppose it was."

The old man got to his feet. He pulled the staff out of the stone and drove it in again, three paces nearer, and what was left of the forest answered.

New trunks rose, thinner than the first and much faster, and the thorns on the left and right slid forward again.

This time the old man was watching them with his lips pressed together, and every vine that came too near the shield curled away from it at the last moment, as if he were holding each one back with his own two hands.

Leon walked into it.

He did not hurry. He walked up the side of the nearest trunk as if it were a flight of stairs, with the golden wings of the Hermes’ Boots fluttering faintly at his ankles, and he stepped onto a branch that was swinging toward him and rode it for three paces like a plank.

The next branch was already coming. He stepped onto that one and leaned his weight forward, and it carried him over the rolling thorns and down into the open space where Bram Oakhart stood with his staff in both hands.

The old man did not wait for him to land. He spun the staff once over his head, and every leaf that had fallen in the chamber rose from the floor at the same moment.

They gathered around him in a green whirlwind, thousands upon thousands of narrow blades, and the whirlwind screamed outward at the boy with a sound like a flock of birds taking flight.

"Bram, no!" Garrick shouted. "The shield!"

"I know," said the old man. "I am sorry."

Leon stepped into the middle of it. The blades that struck the green light around his body broke into dust one after another, but the ones that struck the shield on his arm did something else.

They went back. A hundred blades struck the green shield, and a thousand came out of it, and the whirlwind turned on the man who had made it.

The roar of it filled the whole room. It tore the last rags of the cloak from Bram’s shoulders and the staff out of his hands, and it hurled him against a heap of broken roots, where he lay on his back with a leaf stuck to his forehead.

By the time Leon came out on the other side, he had a few green flakes in his hair and nothing else.

"Ah," said Bram, very quietly, from the ground. "Yes. I thought that might happen."