Anamnesis, p.16
Anamnesis, page 16
I shrugged. The trees hadn’t failed me so far. I opened my mouth to tell her that, when something clinked. Something very un-forest like.
Starren snapped to attention. Oh, now she was interested. She pulled a sword from her pocket, one I’d never seen before.
“You have another sword?” I mouthed to her.
She rolled her eyes and mouthed back, “Of course I have backup swords. Don’t you?”
“Swords? How many do you have in there?”
She didn’t get a chance to answer, because a man in full armor pushed aside a shrub and strode through the forest like he owned it.
Rude. I was starting to feel like I was the one that owned all this. A branch touched my face like it was saying it agreed.
Four people of varying sizes but all in the same armor followed him, and four after them. They streamed by steadily until I lost count.
A whole lot of fae. A whole lot of weird fae. Yeah, I said it, this was weird, even by fae standards. And in matching armor, which was really strange. High fae armies weren’t really a thing.
Had they made a whole stash of that armor and hidden it away? There hadn’t been an army a couple months ago when we were here, and armor like this didn’t get made quickly. This whole thing was bizarre, as far as I knew, fae didn’t work well together, and definitely not well enough to work as an army.
“Father’s?” I mouthed to Starren.
She just stared grimly ahead, either not noticing or not acknowledging me speaking.
I’d been so focused on how hard all of this was for me, that I’d totally forgotten how terrible it had to be for her. Father had abused her and twisted her mind for years. Manipulated and controlled every aspect of her life, until she had no one in it but him.
So much had changed. She’d changed, to an amazing extent. But that didn’t mean that the memories had gone away.
I reached over and squeezed her hand. She shoved my hand away, not looking up from eyes throwing daggers at the soldiers who streamed by.
It was telling, in an odd sort of way, that her rejecting me actually stung. I wouldn’t have given a care a couple months ago. Wouldn’t have even tried to comfort her, because I knew I would be rejected. But we were becoming real family. Whether she wanted us to or not.
Finally the press of people waned. Like the tail end of a snake, the last set of four disappeared into the next section of trees.
The grass they’d trampled cried out.
I kept an eye on the place where they’d disappeared, and crept out into the open. Kind of. The bush followed me as far as it could reach, like it was still trying to provide cover. I gave it a pat in thanks, then reached a hand down to hover my palm over the crushed grass.
It wiggled, struggling to rise up. More and more it tried, until it popped up to touch my hand, full again.
“You’re weird,” Starren said, walking past me.
“I know. Were those Father’s men?”
“I don’t know who else would be raising an army. But I don’t know why Father would be either. He has what he wanted. The Council is dead. He rules Faerie unopposed. What is he planning?”
A great question. That I feared the answer to, and I was pretty sure Starren did as well, even if she wouldn’t admit it.
“He must have been planning this for a lot longer than we thought.” Carver struggled out of the bush. “That armor took months, if not years to make in that amount.”
I beamed at him. “That’s what I was thinking!”
Starren muttered something.
“What?” I asked.
“He never said anything.”
I stopped the beaming. She was hurt that Father had been working on all this and hadn’t told her. I’d thought he’d hurt her for the last possible time when she’d switched sides and helped me escape with Dan and Nina. Apparently, like so many other times when it came to Starren, I was wrong.
“I was his second. I did everything he asked. I fought for him, killed for him, bled for him. He never said anything.”
She looked broken. I’d seen so many strong emotions from her in the past, but never anything like this.
Carver and I exchanged looks, but neither of us knew what to do.
I stepped forward slowly, trying the hand on the shoulder again. This time she didn’t shrug it off. “That man has serious problems, Star. He’s crazy.”
She looked at me, her eyes bright.
I couldn’t quite tell if the bright was caused by tears or more family crazy. I pulled her into a hug, not waiting to see if it was okay. She’d say no, even when she needed it the most. If she didn’t like it, she’d go stiff as a board and I’d let go.
But that wasn’t what happened. She crumpled into me for a second, her grip around my waist nearly bruising. And then she let go and stepped back. I let her without a fight.
“This is my home,” Starren said.
I started to interrupt her, but she held up her hand and I let her get out whatever it was she was trying to say.
“This is my home, and he’s destroying it.”
“Your home is in Fort Wayne, with me.”
She jerked to glare at me, eyes blazing, this time in obvious anger. “You think I want to be stuck there? You think I want to be trapped among all those humans? I only stay because I have to take care of you since you no longer have a family because of me. If we are successful in this mission, which I find highly doubtful, I’ll be gone the next day.”
“Starren!” Carver said sharply.
That was it. The truth. She couldn’t lie. She was only here out of guilt. She didn’t want me either. Add another person to the long list. Soon it would be Jaden too. And even if I did get Dan and Nina back, I’d lose them in the same way someday.
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” I choked out. “As soon as we find Nara, you’re free to go.”
I stumbled away from her, blindly going in the direction the soldiers had disappeared in. I didn’t even care at the moment if I ran into them. If they caught me and kept me from returning to fix Dan and Nina’s memories, they were only saving me trouble. No one wanted me for long. And those two couldn’t be an exception to the rule.
“Trish.” Starren’s voice barely made it through the pounding in my ears. “Trish! Come back, I’m sorry.”
But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Starren could take care of herself. In fact, she was safer without me. I should have seen before now that this should be a solo trip.
I tore off through the woods. The bushes moved for me, the grass springing right back up to cover my tracks. I ran at an angle to the direction the troops had been marching in, avoiding them if I could.
After I couldn’t hear Starren calling anymore, I stopped and hid in a bush, its small branches attempting to embrace me.
I shoved them off.
“Which way to Yest?” I asked.
The strange whisper of the trees communicating swept through the forest. It took a moment, but the sound echoed back.
In unison, several trees around me lifted a branch pointing in the same direction.
Fine. I’d always known I’d end up alone. Better sooner than later.
I reached up for the comfort of my sword hilt, and struck out alone.
* * *
* * *
The super not cool part of traveling alone, other than the extra boring aspect, was that I didn’t have anyone to ask important questions. Questions like, are we there yet?
Seriously. I’d tried with the trees, but they’d just seemed confused. Hindsight is 20/20, as Dan liked to say, but I really wished right now that I’d thought to ask Starren how far Yest Forest was before I’d stormed off.
It almost made me want to find her, or more likely, let her find me. That was the reason, the real reason. It wasn’t like I missed her or anything. We were totally different, raised in completely different worlds, we weren’t regular sisters. We shared DNA or whatever, but that was it.
I didn’t even really consider us to have the same parents. After all, our bio parents weren’t great to us, and I had Dan and Nina, who she barely knew. Yeah, she knew all kinds of facts about them from back when she was blackmailing me to help her find Jaden, but she didn’t know them for real. The only time she’d spent time with them was as we traveled from the place The Council met to the tunnel with the portal.
Not enough for someone like Starren to develop any feelings for a person. I mean, did I even know that she had feelings for me? Did she truly think of us as sisters, or was she just with me because of the guilt? She wasn’t a guilt type person, maybe it was just the convenience of having someone who understood humans around to help her if she needed it.
“Stupid Starren,” I said under my breath.
I marched forward, not paying attention. Stupid me, not just stupid Starren. I knew what kind of person she was, and I’d still thrown myself into a position to get hurt.
A branch wrapped lightly around my ankle and tugged.
I kicked it loose, shuffling forward.
A vine from a different tree grabbed my wrist and pulled tight.
“What’s with you?” I used my free hand to rip the vine off. “Is someone coming?”
The vine wilted a little, but nothing tried to hide me. I listened for a second, but nothing sounded out of the ordinary.
“You’re being paranoid, I’m fine.”
A root ripped through the ground, tripping me. I kicked it.
“That’s enough of that!” Without them actually doing anything, I could feel the trees shrink back. Guilt niggled at me. They’d only ever tried to look out for me. “Sorry,” I muttered. But I kept going forward.
I didn’t make it far before a wave of dread hit me. I stopped dead, the hair on the back of my neck prickling. I slowly looked around, doing my best to not draw attention to myself. Ha. After that last display, everything in the area knew I was here.
Nothing seemed wrong. The lighting was the same. No scary noises. No bad smell. Nothing the movies and my way too vast experience told me to worry about. I sent a question out through the trees. Even if they weren’t able to give me specifics, they still gave me helpful tidbits.
Not this time. This time, there was nothing.
“Uh, guys?” I asked.
Eerie quiet.
I gave a nervous laugh. And here I’d thought I’d be glad to not have to deal with all the weird. Right now the weird felt normal, safe. I scooted backward a few steps, and the feeling of all the plant life around me hit me like a log falling off a truck, nearly knocking me from my feet.
Worry. Relief. Fear.
“What’s going on?” I whispered to them.
The closest ones whipped around, but they weren’t able to communicate whatever it was that was bothering them.
As an experiment, I crept forward a step. Same as normal. Another step. Still normal. One more step.
Utter mental silence.
What the heck?
I backed up a step again. “Are you all okay?”
They whipped around some more, but they all seemed fine.
“Am I going in the right direction?”
A couple branches pointed in the direction I’d been moving. Not surprising since I’d been following their directions this whole time, but still. I might have been hoping, just a bit, that they had changed their minds.
“Is this it?”
The branches whipped around again. I took that as a yes.
“Welp. Bye then. Take care of yourselves.”
And then I stepped into what had to be Yest.
Chapter 14
Okay. Alright. Maybe this forest wasn’t so bad. I’d been walking like ten minutes, and I hadn’t died. Always a good sign.
Nothing had ambushed me, nothing was screaming somewhere out in the trees. It was all good.
My anxiety about the situation stemmed from not feeling the plants. That had to be it. Because other than that teensy weensy fact, nothing had changed. The forest looked the same. Same atmosphere. Just quiet.
Maybe it was a good thing. Some peace.
Something snapped in the brush to the left and my heart rate jumped to two hundred as I slammed myself behind a tree.
No. Not a good thing. I could not come up with one single good thing about this situation. Where was Starren when you needed her?
No. None of that either. I didn’t need my big sister. I had this well in hand. How big could this forest be, anyway? Just keep walking in the direction the trees had last pointed me in, and it would all be good.
Except I was horrible with directions, even on a good day, and now I was probably turned around.
No more strange noises in the trees. And really, it hadn’t been much of a strange noise. It could easily have been a deer or some other woodland creature.
Yeah, good luck convincing myself that was a possibility.
I dusted off imaginary dirt from my hands, squinted at the direction the light came from to get my bearing, and marched forward. Far less confidently than before, but it was something.
Crackling in the woods on my right, totally opposite of the sound direction before, upped my pace, not quite jogging, but definitely much quicker than the timid walk of before.
Where I was trying to get was anyone’s guess, but away from here for sure.
Was the disconnect from the forest pumping dread through my soul? Or something else? Just being in the woods in general wasn’t a favorite thing of mine. It hadn’t been great before I woke up after being dead out in the forest, and then was worse for awhile. After a bit I’d adjusted as the trees and I came to an understanding, and so now I usually did okay. Usually.
Something was watching me.
My breath huffed out faster and faster, my blood pumping. I side-eyed the trees around me, but didn’t see anything to worry about. The hair on the back of my neck told me my eyes were lying.
Supposedly it wasn’t a good idea to run from a predator. And I hadn’t even seen anything to make me think I was being followed. But deep in my gut, I knew, and I had to force my muscles to relax and not spring forward without permission.
I didn’t even know enough about Faerie to be scared of anything specific. We’d run into plenty of deadly creatures in the short amount of time I’d spent here, but none of them seemed like the stalk me in the woods type.
If it was Wraith and some kind of practical joke, she was going to regret it. The feeling of dread I was having did feel similar to the type she gave off.
Yet different.
I’d moved into walk-as-fast-as-possible-without-jogging mode without noticing. I probably looked like one of those mom power walkers from back in D.C., but I couldn’t seem to bring it back down.
Almost running into a tree, I glared at it. “Thanks for the warning.”
No response.
Seriously, were all the trees here dead? They looked perfectly healthy. Were they not living in the same way other trees were?
I stopped in my tracks. What if there was another forest spirit here? What if that was why they were acting so strangely? Last time they’d been weird too, but at least they’d still felt full of life.
Angry life, but still life.
Okay, stopping wasn’t a good plan. More of an instinct than a plan, but still, certain death.
Rustling started up in earnest just behind me and I bolted.
Something came after me, running just as fast.
I panted, using every iota of strength in my regenerating body.
“Stop, you idiot, it’s me!”
I slid to a stop. “Starren?”
“Who else did you expect?” She caught up and bent over to catch her breath.
“Not you. How’d you find me?”
“A tree flipped out and drug us to a spot a half mile ago or so, and then just kept frantically pointing in this direction until we came after you. I thought you were asking for help.” She stood up straight, a full on storm across her face. “You idiot, I thought you were dying!”
“Shhh,” I threw a finger up to her lips. “I’m not sure that’s off the table.”
Starren went into warrior mode, still holding onto angry sister mode and doing both at once quite well. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. I just have a bad feeling.” Saying it out loud? Yeah, felt stupid. But Starren didn’t give me one of her ‘you’re ridiculous’ looks.
“I trust your instincts.”
“Where’s Carver?”
“He circled ahead in case I couldn’t nab you.”
“Nab me? Did you think I was going to run from you?”
Starren shrugged. “You did, didn’t you?”
“No. I didn’t run from you…” Not intentionally. “I was running from… something.”
Now she looked me in the face instead of keeping watch. “Something?”
“Something.”
“Okay, then. We should get moving. There’s only one place in Yest I can imagine Nara wanting to hide out. The forest isn’t that big.” She marched forward.
I hung back. “That’s it? You’re not going to yell at me about running off?”
She didn’t look back, just kept marching. “Oh, you know I’m going to. It’s just going to have to wait until I don’t have to worry about my volume.”
I hurried to catch up. “That’s not fair, you’ve tried to leave me behind a few times.”
“Be quiet, Trish, or you’re just going to get it now, whatever the consequences.”
Getting yelled at for sure now or possibly later wasn’t a difficult choice.
“Run!” Carver’s voice came through the trees, the near panic far too obvious.
“Carver?” Starren yelled, taking off in the direction his voice had come from. A little ahead and to the right.
The bush in front of us thrashed and Craver fell out. “Run!” He grabbed Starren’s hand and tore off, at least in the correct direction. I followed.
A sad baying noise that instantly turned my muscles to jelly started on the right and was picked up on the left. A baying I knew all too well, even after only hearing it once before.
