Page 32 of Song of Night

I nod and we run for the dark, looming tree line ahead. It’s a good half-mile off, and with the speed of the beasts running up behind us, we’re not going to make it. I call on magic again to make me run faster, and Asher does the same. The land blurs by, green and gold as the sun climbs the sky.

Magic buzzes through my veins but I can feel the finiteness of it, can feel it draining out of me. Back in Night I had to worry about the opposite—letting in so much magic that it burned me up, me and everything around me. How the tables have turned. I would give anything to feel that swell of endless power now, that all-consuming force within me.

There’s only a bit left, our mad fight for freedom having drained most of it. We’re almost to the trees now, the twisted, thorn-covered trunks clawing at the pale blue sky. Hoofbeats pound so loudly behind us they shake the earth. We’re so close… if we got this far only to fail now…

Asher and I plunge into the forest, darting between the trunks and branches and thick, thorny vines. The horses scream as they pull up short behind us, forced to slow so the riders can dismount. Darkness falls around us, so thick are the branches overhead. I can barely see the sun at all, as if dawn gave up and relinquished back into night. The howl of a dog cuts through the air, and then another. A whole pack of them.

They’re hunting us.

Sounds of pursuit punctuate the sharp gasp of my lungs, the beating of my heart. My feet strangely make almost no sound at all in the mossy, loamy soil. I can feel the last of my magic drain out of me. I’m not sure how much longer we can make it with dozens of warriors at our backs, and no magic to fight with. An arrow whistles past my head, then another.

And then, one of the trees directly in front of us, a gnarled, massive thing with a trunk as big around as a castle tower, opens. A yawning door leading into darkness.

A lone figure stands in the opening of the tree.

Chapter Twenty-Three

ASHER

For a moment I think the woman standing in the tree is a specter of some sort, a spirit of the forest, so quickly does she appear. But she looks quite solid, and she also looks quite familiar.

As if she could be Zara’s twin.

Zara stops dead in her tracks like she’s been slapped in the face.

“Follow me if you want to live,” her sister says, beckoning and disappearing within the tree just as quickly as she’d appeared.

The voices of our pursuers and the howls of their dogs are far too close for me to consider it twice. I shove Zara, who seems frozen in shock, forward into the tree, and then I follow. A moment later I hear a scratching, scraping sound and a crunch as the door in the tree closes behind us.

We’re plunged into darkness for a moment before a light flares to life a couple feet away. Zara’s sister is standing over what appears to be a hole leading down into the earth. She carries a small stone which emits a soft glow. It illuminates the inside of the hollowed-out tree trunk, which is large enough for five men to stand shoulder-to-shoulder. I can see now that the door in the tree is made with a clever system of ropes and levers. It’s all a bit mind boggling.

But most of all—how in the name of the dark goddess did Zara’s sister get here?

We must both be staring at her, because she makes an impatient sound. “Now! Before the dogs circle back and realize where you went.”

She disappears into the hole without further discussion. Zara, face still stricken, follows her. I take up the rear, and I realize as I follow that there’s an extremely narrow set of earthen steps built into the earth, spiraling down and away from the hollow tree. Within a dozen steps we’re beneath the tree, its roots dangling from the earthen ceiling over our heads. A dark, narrow tunnel leads away from the base of the stairs.

Jaylen strides down the tunnel without a backward glance. It’s surreal to be rescued and now traversing an underground tunnel with the person we’d come to realize, right before the explosion that took our magic, is Falling Star, the mysterious and faceless leader of the Factionless. Now we know her identity, and she is far from faceless… I can’t get over how much she resembles Zara.

The tunnel goes on for quite a ways, a quarter mile at least, before opening onto a much wider tunnel that runs perpendicular in either direction. There’s a foul smell on the air here, a bitter smell like burnt flesh. The light from the glowing stone reveals deep gouges in the walls of the new tunnel, gouges that look like…

“Are those claw marks?” Zara whispers, eyes wide.

“Yes,” Jaylen says. “Which is why we need to keep moving.”

But Zara crosses her arms over her chest, lips set in a stubborn line. “How is it that you’re here?”

“I’ll explain everything later. Right now, we need to get someplace safe.”

Jaylen turns left down the wider tunnel, which seems contrary to her warning from a moment ago, but within a dozen feet she turns right into another smaller tunnel like the one we started on. We travel another good distance, a mile maybe, in dark and silence. Then, Jaylen abruptly begins climbing a wooden ladder that rises through the ceiling of the tunnel and disappears. Zara and I follow yet again.

When my head breaks the surface of the earth about twenty feet above the tunnel floor, I look around to see that we’re in a small glen. It’s encircled entirely by snarls of vines thick as serpents, with thorns as big as my head. There doesn’t appear to be any way in or out other than the tunnel beneath us.

“We can rest here,” Jaylen says, gesturing around her.

She sits down a few feet away in the soft moss and takes a swig from the flask at her hip before passing it to Zara. Zara tosses it back, clearly expecting it to be water, but the grimace on her face tells me otherwise. With visible effort, she swallows the liquid, running the back of her hand across her mouth before passing it to me.

“That’s Siduri’s homemade liquor,” Zara says, her tone accusatory, her eyes burning into Jaylen’s.

---