Page 10 of Sons of Sorrow
“Thank you, little friend,” Sylvain said kindly, taking the pinecones from Satchel. “I think these should suffice. We can string them together and wear them into the oriel.”
“Like popcorn garlands,” I said, smiling. “For Christmas.”
“Oh, yay!” Satchel clapped excitedly, setting himself down on Sylvain’s shoulder.
Arts and crafts with Satchel and Sylvain did sound pretty fun. I didn’t yet raise the obvious question of how Satchel was supposed to get around with an entire acorn dangling from his neck, but we could work out the details later.
“Hey, is this another one?” I asked, bending down as I caught the faint gleam of something in the grass.
It slithered forward, long and slender, like a snake. Instinct moved my hand, which went straight for the dagger sheathed at my belt. The thing on the ground darted at me like a striking cobra, glistening and moist from the dewy grass.
Except it had no fangs, no head. A vine? I danced backward and slashed wildly at the air, somehow catching it on the edge of my blade. A vine it was, then, the thin tendril I’d chopped off landing on the ground and twitching erratically, like a lizard’s tail.
“Sylvain?” I said, retreating cautiously, watching the grass, the bushes, the trunks of nearby trees. “What’s going on here?”
“The forest gourds,” he shouted. More muffled noises struggled to leave his mouth. It sounded like he’d been gagged, or his lips forced shut.
“Surely you mean the forest guards, right? Sylvain? Hello?”
I scanned the grass for more of these strange vine-y snakes, then risked a glance over my shoulder when the coast was clear. Sylvain was no longer standing in the clearing, but dangling in the boughs of a tree, trussed up by a network of wriggling vines.
One vine had clamped itself over his lips, achieving the impossible task of getting my sweet fae prince to actually shut up for a bit. Hanging near his hip was Satchel, limbs and wings entangled in his own cat’s cradle of vines.
Big mouths, little mouths, the vines would shut them all. I had to make damn sure they wouldn’t get me too, because how would I summon help then? I brandished the dagger, turning in a circle as I rummaged through my backpack with the other hand, looking for the Wilde grimoire.
Something rustled in the grass. Again I slashed, severing another vine through adrenaline and pure luck. I laid the Wilde grimoire’s spine on my palm, letting the book lie flat. Its pages rushed to show me the summoning spell for my minor eidolons. I traced flashing semicircles in the air with my dagger, preemptively fending off more attacks when I realized that the vines had stopped coming.
No more rushes and rustles in the grass, the clearing silent apart from the struggled moans and complaints of my immobilized eidolon and familiar. Sylvain grunted and kicked his legs, like he was trying to tell me something. I shrugged up at him in confusion. I spoke softly, trying not to draw more attention to the clearing.
“How come I don’t see any of these forest guards of yours?”
All pissed off from the three of us collecting some stray pinecones and acorns? Come on. Big deal. Didn’t they need to guard the forest against more serious threats? Potential wildfires, maybe, or loggers, or —
Oh, gods. There they were, shambling through the underbrush, emerging from behind the trees. Rickety humanoid shapes with the heads of squashes and pumpkins, bodies formed from vines but garbed in tattered clothing. Each resembled a scarecrow come to life, a jack o’lantern given the gift of motion.
Sylvain didn’t misspeak. They actually were forest gourds. One of them grinned from its empty mouth, hollow eyes dark with malice, its arm raised to the treetops. It pulled. Sylvain groaned, his body hoisted even farther up the canopy. That bastard had my boyfriend!
This particular forest gourd was wearing a ripped red shirt, where the others wore mostly rags in various shades of brown. Their leader, maybe? I needed to fight these creatures off, but I was going to derive extra pleasure from taking Red here down.
I glanced down at the Wilde grimoire’s pages, stammering as I began the recitation of the summoning spell. I’d memorized it already, but sometimes it helped to see the spell, uh, spelled out. High-stress situations had a way of tangling my tongue. I blurted out the words as quickly as my mouth could manage, my blood thumping in my temples as I struggled to decide on the right eidolons to summon.
All of them at once, apparently, was what my mind and magic had settled on. The originals, as it were, doves and wolf and cat, all exploding into the clearing in a chaotic flurry of feathers and teeth and claws. Somehow my subconscious had decided that this wasn’t the right time to call on the unicorns.
Maybe subconscious Locke had a good point, too. The doves darted at the gourd men, dive-bombing, pecking, raking with their talons. Old Man did what Old Man did best, pouncing on the nearest gourd’s torso to take it down, then using his snapping, slavering jaws to gnaw at its face, bite its vines in half and in half again.
As for Scruffles? When it came to matters of chaos and destruction, Scruffles could never disappoint. If the forest gourds could scream, they would have screamed themselves sore. Scruffles launched from one gourd to the other, scratching and yowling at everything within reach.
One gourd picked him up with its hand-like protrusions, throwing him at the next gourd, desperate to get Scruffles out of range. Scruffles yowled louder, spitting and hissing as he landed on his next victim, violently attempting to claw his way into the gourd’s open mouth, potentially to eviscerate it from the inside out.
Scruffles had problems, man, and he was going to make sure everyone knew it, too.
We’d routed the gourds somehow, just me and my hungry, angry boys. The doves had found their way into one of the cracked-open pumpkins, helping themselves to the seeds. Scruffles was shoving his face into a pile of mashed squash, chewing and gnashing furiously, likely pretending it was raw meat. Old Man pressed the attack, turning his nose up at this offensive herbivorous spread.
Only Red was left, and it didn’t look all that smug anymore. If the gourd creature could think, it was probably deciding between making a run for it or hoisting Sylvain and Satchel even higher up into the trees. To what end?
I decided for the pumpkin man. My fingers hummed with energy as I directed a flow of arcane essence into the Wilde grimoire. Coated in a layer of magic, my heirloom grimoire was now as heavy as a brick, as dense as a slab of rock. I reared back, then threw the book as hard as I could.
The gourd’s head exploded. Its vines disassembled and slipped to the ground.
