The Forest Mage

Ari sat cross-legged by the fire, watching closely as her mother pressed the point of the silver knife to the bare skin just below the crook of her elbow. Anukis drew the blade in one smooth motion down her forearm, her face a mask of composure. Ari heard her father’s sharp intake of breath, the fire flaring in response, but she didn’t lift her gaze from her mother’s arm. Blood seeped from the ugly gash into the pot of water set on the earth between them.

Anukis was utterly immobile, eyes expressionless, but the water was slopping from side to side, the iron rim of the pot beginning to ice over, spidery fingers of frost creeping across the earth, betraying her unease. The fire leapt up even higher, the flames reaching for the great black roots above.

‘Caradoc,’ her mother murmured, her normally stentorian voice a quiet monotone.

‘Sorry,’ Ari’s father replied, sinking to his knees, the flames falling with him until they were once more a subdued crackle in the heart of the hearth. He wasn’t usually present when she practiced knitting, wasn’t usually observing like this, the peaks and troughs of his emotions interfering with her focus, teasing the fire. But today, of course, was the exception. The exception to everything.

Ari returned her focus to the streaming laceration. Anukis had held nothing back, cutting deeper than she ever had before and almost to her wrist. Ari took a deep breath. If she could do this without flaw, leaving no mark, then tomorrow would become a reality, that was the deal they had been assuring her for as long as she could remember, ever since Caradoc found Amber half-dead in the midfall snows, and she could hardly think of a day that hadn’t included the fox.

She fixed her gaze on the top of the cut, just below the elbow pit, her hands parting and lifting from her lap, fingers slowly beginning to move in that familiar pattern, each one touching the tip of her thumb on both hands before cycling back again, a rhythm that she had always found focused her senses. She pushed the sounds of the forest away, imagining the feeling in every part of her body retreating towards her head until she was numb.

Breathing out slowly, she propelled all that feeling through her eyes and towards the bleeding wound, a continuous beam that she concentrated at the beginning of the broken flesh.

She could see the dead cells protecting the top of the unbroken skin and where they met the messy opening of the cut, giving way to the ripped layers of living cells, ravaged veins, and torn muscle beneath. She let the feeling of those mangled cells fill her up, the pain and inherent sense of wrongness seeping into her own, and her fingers accelerated.

Guided by her will, the damaged tissue began to knit back together, repairing and multiplying as the blood was forced behind its boundaries once more. She could feel that knitting force like her own fingers were the weaving needles, moving through each familiar step to renew what had been broken, following that same wrenching instinct that had seen her heal Amber’s hind legs when she was only five years old.

Her fingers stilled, an intense calm spreading through her like the reassuring warmth of a hot drink, and she pulled her mind back, blinking heavily and looking around. Caradoc was still kneeling by the fire, pale as a ghost, his blue eyes brimming with tears, the frost that had edged towards his stricken halo of warmth melting into the earth. Anukis was inspecting her arm.

Ari’s stomach lurched. She could still see the faint scars from a hundred past attempts spread across her mother’s arms and shoulders, collar bone, face, hands, many more hidden under her leathers, the relics of years of failures and partial failures, but the newest was more than a year old. She had also begun practicing on herself despite Anukis’ direct orders to the contrary and had only a star-shaped scar on the blind spot between her shoulder blades to give her away. Besides, this time it had felt right, she was sure she had missed nothing.

A second before she exploded from the sheer suspense of the impending verdict, Anukis met her eyes. She was smiling.

‘You’re ready, my child.’

Caradoc surged from the floor, sending sparks spraying over them that were instantly quenched by the droplets her mother summoned from the iron pot with the flick of a wrist.

Ari sprang to her feet and grasped the healed arm. The skin was smooth and unblemished. She beamed at Anukis, the vines she had been experimenting with that morning snaking up the earthen walls to twine around the thanator roots overhead, their small buds blooming above them into a roof of purple stars.

Anukis’ cascading laugh filled the hollow and she gathered Ari into her arms, spinning her around on one heel, which proved a lot harder than it had done before now that they were practically the same height and build. All the many years of climbing the old oaks by the stream and racing each other along its bank had seen to that.

Ari turned back to Caradoc to see him wiping his eyes. He always had to stoop in the hollow. It was a rare occasion indeed that saw both her mother and her father manage to visit at the same time and it made the space seem much smaller. His smile was sad as he brushed a curl of hair off her forehead like he used to do when she was little.

‘Part of me never wanted this moment to come.’

‘I know, pa.’

He scratched his close-clipped beard, a frown creasing his brow like it always did when he was searching for the right words. He’d always had a ghostly complexion, his skin as pale as her mother’s was dark, but now his face had drained of all colour. ‘Just know, it was only ever to keep you safe. From what’s out there. Because you know you’re special and people will want to hurt you for it.’ He paused, looking down, several solitary tendrils of flame flashing through his fingers as he rubbed his hands together, as though rinsing them over and over again in the stream.

Ari held her breath, wondering if he was finally going to tell her what was out there, if she would be given any more than these cryptic comments they had been feeding her all her life.

But the tension seemed to leave his shoulders and his frown gave way to what was clearly meant to be a reassuring smile. ‘We’ll talk about this later.’

‘Yes,’ came Anukis’ voice from behind her. Ari turned around to see her glancing at the pocket clock she kept carefully buttoned into the pouch at her left hip. ‘We only have an hour or so before the dusk bells and we all have a big day tomorrow. I’ll get rid of this,’ she said, gesturing to the iron pot now filled with pinkish water, ‘Caradoc, get the package.’ She passed the hand of her healed arm over the pot and a pillar of glistening clear water rose from inside it, arcing into one of the waterskins bundled in the folds of her cloak in the corner. She then bent down to lift the pot, only the dark red blood left at the bottom, and hurried away from the hearth into the root-lined passage that spiralled up to ground level.

Ari squinted appraisingly at her father. ‘What does she mean?’

‘You know what she means,’ he said, moving over to where his own cloak lay and rummaging within. Ari’s heart leapt. Each birthday they had given her a book, never elaborating on where it came from, who wrote it, and why she must never remove it from the hollow, but each one contained the most extraordinary things, pages and pages of information about hundreds of plants and their uses, sometimes even with illustrations. They had been an odd gift for an infant, but as soon as she had mastered the letters she had whiled away countless hours, days, moons meticulously copying out the most interesting facts onto the bundles of parchment her father brought her, and if she gave him a list, he could usually find her the seeds. This would be her sixteenth.

Caradoc shuffled back around the fire carrying two packages just as Anukis reappeared.

Ari returned to her cross-legged position by the hearth.

‘This one first,’ Anukis said, taking the larger present from Caradoc’s hands and placing it in Ari’s lap. She untied the yarn securing it at one end and pulled off the linen as Caradoc dragged the two cedar stools from the corner nearer the flames, guiding Anukis down onto one and kissing her temple before lowering onto the other.

Ari smiled, turning her attention to what she was holding. It was a glass bottle filled with a deep purple liquid that danced and flickered in the firelight. The label read, Finest Grape of the Caged Chimera, in curled black lettering.

‘What is it?’ she said, glancing at her mother, who seemed to conjure up three cups as if from nowhere.

‘This, my girl, is wine, most accurately known as the water of life.’ She took the bottle, pouring out several finger-widths into each cup. ‘It’s made from boiled grape juice and this one’s been aging since the 20^th year of Arethusa’s reign. That’s older than you.’

‘Who’s Arethusa?’ Ari asked, frowning.

Anukis stiffened. The fire spat as though in reply. ‘Well, we’ll get to that. For now, this is just a little something to keep out the cold tonight and fortify you for what lies ahead.’

Caradoc raised his cup into the air and Ari followed suit as Anukis stretched out a hand towards the waterskin and coiled her fingers. Three rippling jets shot across the hollow and froze into smooth spheres before dropping lightly into their raised cups.

‘Ariadne,’ her father said, flushing with pride as he looked at her so his cheeks almost matched the orange-rose curls framing his face.

‘For our girl at the beginning of her journey,’ her mother added in an undertone.

Ari lifted the cup to her lips and drained it in one gulp. She grimaced, suppressing a shiver. Her mother burst out laughing.

‘Ma,’ Ari growled, choking back laughter despite herself.

‘Quick, Caradoc, the book, the book,’ her mother spluttered between cackles.

Ari’s father leaned forwards and pushed the second package onto her lap. She set the cup down in a heartbeat, tearing away the wrapper in one eager flourish.

Her breath caught. It was like no book she had ever seen before, its pages bound with a cord of soft blue leather and enclosed in vellum that had been embossed with gold leaf in angular patterns resembling star alignments. She carefully lifted the cover and her eyes widened, time seeming to slow.

The first page bore a detailed illustration, not of a plant, but of a woman. She was floating, head thrown back, arms raised either side of her, palms upturned, her body enveloped by swirling golden robes that seemed to coalesce into the storm clouds billowing around her, punctured in every direction by the fiery teardrops of falling stars. Four letters were printed below the image in a double-lined rectangle: RHEA.

‘Who is she?’ Ari breathed.

‘She was the first pentarcanus,’ her father replied, his voice reverent.

‘What does that mean?’

He exchanged an anxious glance with Anukis. ‘All in good time. You asked before who Arethusa is. Well, she’s the Seer of the Sect, the people that rule the arbor and everything outside it. This book will tell you all about the last twenty or thirty Seers, anything further back than that turns into myth and legend, but study it and it will help you understand why the Sect is so dangerous.’

Ari nodded, cradling the book in her arms, her mind reeling. Anukis leaned forwards once more to refill their cups. Ari took care to sip it this time, and though she still grimaced, she registered a whisper of spice and resin and thyme that was not altogether unpleasant.

‘We’ve given you this now, Ariadne,’ Anukis said, ‘because today you’re full-grown. And when the sun falls, we surrender our right to hide the world from you. But there is a world outside the arbor, and it’s time you knew it. The moment you step beyond the trees tomorrow, you’re going to be in danger.’ She paused, glancing towards her cloak, anxiety skewing her brow. ‘You must always use a false name and never tell anyone where you’re really from. You’ll say you’re an orphaned outer ringer. We’ll be showing you the outer ring, so that will make sense even if it doesn’t now. But there’s one more thing we need to do first.’ She hesitated, hands twisting, the wet ground where the water spilled icing over again. ‘This isn’t going to be pleasant.’

‘Are we sure about this, Anukis,’ Caradoc murmured.

Anukis seemed to harden, walking over to her cloak and extracting a small metal object from its folds. She handed it to him.

‘Yes. I took this from Anath for a reason.’ She turned back to Ari. ‘You’ve seen the markings on the backs of our necks.’

It wasn’t a question. Ari nodded. She used to trace the odd pale scar on her father’s neck when he sang to her by the fireside in the evenings over two steaming mugs of his favourite broth. It was a harsh symbol of jagged lines. The flames would dance and twirl to his soft burr as his brush whipped across one of his many paintings, the strokes at once mimicking both the fire and the song. Anukis’ scar was different. It flowed and flourished, only visible when she removed the long-sleeved leather jerkin that held her waterskins in place and swept her twisted braids over one shoulder.

‘Well, they’re something that everyone has outside.’

‘So I need one, too?’

Anukis didn’t answer. ‘Caradoc.’

Her father stood up, the iron brand in one hand. Ari fought the urge to retreat into the corner.

‘Is there anything you can numb the skin with?’ he asked, his voice pleading.

Ari glanced at a jar on one of the shelves she used for flowers, a tall nettle protruding from its innards, and a single glistening needle flew towards her. She swept her curls aside and it pierced the back of her neck, the sap seeping through her pores to those tendrils of feeling beneath the skin.

‘Do it.’

Caradoc tightened his grip on the brand, and it began to glow. He moved behind her and she looked down, readying herself. The fire roared as he pressed the red-hot metal to the previously unblemished skin at the nape of her neck. She did not flinch.

‘Heal it,’ Anukis said, ‘but leave the scar.’

Ari concentrated for several long moments, eyes smarting, then she relaxed and let her hair fall.

‘Thank the Seer that’s over,’ Caradoc exhaled.

Anukis looked equally relieved, donning her skins once more and shrugging on her cloak just as five sonorous booms reverberated through the earth. Ari supposed these knells that had always punctuated the great empty march of her life had been coming from this place beyond the forest all along. The thought made her feel akin to a moth realising its entire world had been only a chrysalis.

‘That’s the fifth bell. Try to get some sleep tonight, my girl.’ She bent down and kissed Ari’s forehead, thumb wiping away the single tear that had grazed her cheek. ‘Don’t drink any more of that,’ she added, pointing at the bottle of wine by the fire, and then she turned and disappeared up the passage into the night.

‘We’ll see you at the first bell, Ari,’ Caradoc said.

‘Thank you for the book.’

‘Don’t thank me, it’s your mother who has the nerve to take them. She’s the brave one. I’ve never been brave.’ His voice trailed away and he gazed at her. For a moment, she thought he was going to say something else, or at least explain, but then he pressed a finger to his lips, blew a thin curl of flame towards her, and hurried after Anukis.

Ari contemplated the hollow, the silence howling despite the whisperings of the roots all around her. This was it then, the last night in the dark. She sipped the mulberry liquid, trying to find comfort in its warmth. It wasn’t quite the same as before.

A rustle of leaves from the shadows heralded Amber’s approach. Delicate as the snow that fell in the frost, he crept into the firelight.

‘Amber,’ she murmured.

The fox’s ears twitched. His glistening eyes rose to her face and he lowered his lean flame of a body to the ground. She gently stroked his back, feeling all her tension ooze away. It had been eleven years since Caradoc emerged from the blizzard with the dying fox bundled in his arms. She scratched a spot behind his right ear and closed her eyes, listening to the melody of his contentment. It made her think of embers and juniper berries and her father’s voice.

Amber never showed himself to her parents, but Ari could always sense him nearby when they were here, hunting rodents or curled in deep sleep in the leafy warmth of the den he had burrowed in the roots behind the hollow.

She absent-mindedly healed a sore on his left paw and the exertion swallowed her last dregs of energy, weariness settling like a vice around her head. She drained the last of the wine in her glass and readied her cloak, carefully checking every pouch was full of the right seeds and seedlings and tucking the Seer book into the hidden inner folds. Who knew how long she would be away, the opportunity to read it might arise. After a moment’s hesitation, she swept up a small enamelled flask from her shelves and filled it with the Caged Chimera’s finest. Again, who knew. Certainly not her. At the very least it would always be a little warmth to keep out the cold. Her father’s face seemed to rise before her in the coiling smoke of the hearth.

She had no idea if she slept that night. She must have done, to account for the gap in memory, but it seemed only seconds later that the cornflower glow of dusk had been replaced by the pearl-light of dawn.

As usual, she heard the lyres before the first bell, their mournful trills seeping through the roots and wrenching her from the darkness. She sat bolt upright, the vines that had laced around her in a protective green lattice shooting up like splayed fingers. It always happened when she had had particularly immersive dreams, any nearby plant weaving itself into a protective shroud that always made her feel buried when she woke. She would stop doing it if she knew how.

‘Beyond the trees,’ she whispered, stomach flipping.

She took a moment to steady herself, then made her way through the roots towards the familiar rush of the stream. The earth curved upwards beneath her bare feet, the filtered light growing more implacable with every step until, between one second and the next, she had passed from the shadowy labyrinth of the hollow into the blazing cauldron of dawn.

The arbor was waking up. Lyres layered the thanator branches far above like little red leaves scattered amidst the white, and smaller firecrests and chaffinches flitted between the twisted limbs of the oak and cedar trees below.

Ari left her satin shift and headscarf on the pome-rich hawthorn that bridged the stream like a petrified giant and leapt into the icy water. Head above the surface, she gripped one of the hawthorn’s roots with both hands and let the current lift her feet from the riverbed, tugging at her body, urging her to let go. She gazed up at the pendent boughs, the white coronets of the thanators, the shards of dusty blue sky, and hummed her father’s favourite song under her breath, the one about the water woman who drowned in a dress of crow-flowers and nettles, time eventually teasing her into a plant that could swim and sing, with nettle-bones and yellow-white blooms for eyes.

She was in the process of running grape seed oil through the springy curls of her hair when the first bells shivered through the earth. Replacing the pot of oil in the hole at the base of the hawthorn, she hurried back to the hollow.

The dying embers of the hearth had kept the morning frost at bay but there was still a cruel chill to the air after the cold of the stream. She was glad to dress, pulling on and lacing up her twisted strophion, linen tunic, breeches, boots, fingerless cotton gloves, and leather girdle with seed-stuffed pouches, all in muted browns and greys. Her cloak came last, a pale wolf-grey as though thanator bark and leaf had been crushed together with mortar and pestle, embroidered at the shoulders with a labyrinth of green vines. Lined with amber silk, it enveloped her muscled form like a wintry chrysalis, its large hood falling from the silver ibis brooches at her breast, the sleeves wide enough to conceal a host of hidden pockets. Caradoc had made it for her, sewing in sections inside which she could store little clumps of soil and attach waterskins to germinate seeds faster. Of course, water was not hard to come by, Anukis had shown her all the myriad places you could find it, but she couldn’t move it or make it herself and a seed was just a seed without the right amount of water and light to spark it into life.

Ari stood in the middle of the hollow, contemplating the uneven shelf of fifteen little leather-bound books, the heaps of scribbled notes, the assortment of jars and pots and pitchers with their golden liquids and green stems and greener leaves and their petals and berries of every colour. These constituted her life. How small it is. She sniffed. A few purple petals dropped from the vines above. How small it all is. She waved a hand and each shoot shot a little higher, each bud stretching into a fuller bloom.

Amber came slinking in a moment later, white lips stained purple from berries. Ari knelt before him, gazing into his green eyes and filling her voice with as much feeling as possible, desperate for him to know, to know for sure.

‘I’m leaving soon. As soon as ma and pa get here. But I’m coming back. By dusk or darkness or even dawn, I’m coming back.’

She planted a kiss on his little black nose, soft and barely there, and straightened, clenching her fists, throat burning. The fire died.

‘Ari?’

She flinched and Amber scurried to the shadows beneath her cot. A second later her father appeared from the roots.

‘Ari.’ His eyes were bright, hands fidgeting with nervous energy. The hearth burst back into flame the moment he passed it. ‘Are you ready?’

‘I am. Where’s ma?’

‘She was a few minutes behind me, gathering up some provisions for the day and seeing to the newest planting. It was an old man, an outer ringer, I suppose we can tell you that now. Stars know where he got the money for an arbor burial but there you are.’

Ari couldn’t think of a thing to say to this so she opted for silence.

Caradoc ceased his pacing. ‘Do you know why I paint?’

She looked up at him. ‘Because of the colours.’

‘Because of the colours. Most people think I’m mad when I tell them I travelled all the way to the Citadel not just to look after the arbor but to paint its trees. They assume that life with the thanators is all black and white, but you and I know that’s not true. You only have to spend about three seconds here to see that’s not true, that there’s nothing but colour, countless thousands of hues each as pure as the bluest flame. Ignorant people will tell you your home is a graveyard, but these will be people who have never set a foot beyond their own door, who can’t see the beauty of the forest for only some of its trees, who can’t see all this life for the death they think is its master. But ignorance is as frigid and rigid as ice, and what do we do to ice?’

He snapped his fingers and a single ribbon of flame danced for a few seconds in the space between them. He grinned and she couldn’t help grinning back.

‘Now, when your mother gets here, we’ll head southeast. It will take us a few hours to get to the tree line but we should reach it before­—’

He broke off at the audible flurry of wings outside, the lyres taking flight in force. Ari frowned.

‘That must be her,’ he murmured, stooping towards the passage through which he had entered.

It took her only a second to register it, an almost imperceptible shift in the birdsong, the whispers of the roots and vines sharpening into a crescendo that receded as quickly as it had arisen.

‘WAIT,’ she screamed, but she had barely taken two steps when the roof imploded.

She was hurled back against the cot as the ancient roots that had sheltered her for twelve years crashed to the earthen floor of the hollow. Billows of dirt and ash and smoke from the buried hearth clogged the air. Ari coughed, blinking at the sudden change in light, her ears ringing. Someone was yelling her name.

She forced herself to her feet and looked up. A figure was standing at the edge of the crater that had been her home, silhouetted by the sunlight. Ari lifted an arm to shield her eyes and her heart leapt.

It was a man, a man who was not her father. Tall, hulking, and bedecked in purple leather, a glinting mask was pushed back on his head. He raised a hand towards her, palm open. A breeze seemed to swirl down as if from nowhere, stirring her hair and tugging at her cloak. The man’s fist clenched, and she was blasted off her feet once more, back slamming against one of the gnarled and broken roots.

Rage blossomed inside her and without thinking, she brought both hands up and stroked the air, fingers moving in a spiral. Two seedlings shot from inside her cloak and erupted into the light, elongating in less than a second into a pair of coiling vines that flashed towards the man. He did not hesitate, a gust of wind billowing about him as he leapt into the air and twisted, evading the vines by a hair’s breadth.

Ari scrambled to her feet as the man landed and turned towards something behind him.

‘IT’S HER,’ he bellowed.

Someone screamed and a wall of flame billowed towards the man. He cried out, throwing himself behind the nearest trunk as the flames licked the bark. Then Ari made out two words from a voice she would know anywhere and everywhere till the day she died.

‘ARI, RUN.’

She whirled around, planting her foot on one of the shelves now buried in fallen plants and smashed glass, and launched herself up the side of the hollow, using the broken roots as handholds. Dispelling her mother’s order to never manipulate a thanator tree, she seized the lowest bough she could reach with both hands and concentrated, allowing it to retract and twist, lifting her out of the hollow and swinging around until her boots were over the dewy forest floor. She readied herself to run the moment she hit the ground, but before she could let go, the branch broke with a sonorous crack.

She slammed to the earth, elbow crunching beneath her, and scrambled to her knees in confusion. A second man was crouched by the base of the tree, one hand in a fist beside his cocked head. He was glaring at her with a mixture of hatred and curiosity.

‘Auxo,’ snapped a woman’s voice.

The man flinched, lip curling, and he threw out his other hand, each finger capped in a metal talon. The vines Ari had just grown shot once more into the air and flew towards her. She was too shocked to react and a second later they knocked her to the ground, coiling in a vice around her chest so she couldn’t breathe. She grimaced, focusing her senses, and they blew apart in an instant. The man named Auxo stumbled back a pace as she leapt to her feet, just as the first man reappeared from behind the nearest thanator.

She was ready this time, casting a hand out to the cedar tree she knew was behind her and throwing her splayed palm at the man with every shred of energy she could muster. The tree erupted over her head, its branches racing towards him, growing and weaving and dividing until there were a dozen points. He whirled his arms about his head but the winds that answered could not shift the branches and they slammed into his chest, piercing metal and leather and skin and pinning him to the earth. He slumped, blood spilling out to paint the leaves beneath him.

Ari stared in terror, hand still raised. He was dead, the tree had killed him, she had killed him. A cry of rage from behind her brought her spinning around, ripped from paralysis. Three more of the purple-clad people stood beyond the crater of her hollow. There was her father, on his knees, skin almost blue with what looked like ice. And her mother was there too, lying at the feet of a woman, awful burns covering her face, her neck, her arms, her eyes unfocused, undiscerning.

Ari had barely taken in the horror of what she was seeing when water consumed her vision. It simply appeared in the air, rippling before her like a mirage, and then it was all over her, pressing on her eyes, her nose. For the second time in a matter of minutes she found she could not breathe. She was lifted off her feet, submerged completely, as though she had been plunged into the roaring belly of the stream, and yet she could see the trees all around her through the swirling liquid. And she was moving.

Just when she thought her lungs would burst, the water vanished, and she crashed to the earth, soaking wet and shivering.

The first thing she saw was her mother’s ravaged face.

Anukis was lying just beyond Ari’s reach, her tear-stained cheeks glistening with fresh burns, lips parched. Ari did not hesitate. She raised her hands, fingers rippling as the feeling rushed through her, and her mother’s skin began to heal.

‘NO,’ roared that voice again.

Ari’s concentration shattered.

The shout had come from the woman standing over Anukis’ prone form. She wore the same purple-dyed leather armour as the others, black plates of metal interlinked across her chest, a single grey plait draped over one shoulder as it snaked its way down to her belt, her eyes obscured by the glinting silver mask that disappeared inside the low hood of her sweeping violet cloak.

Ari’s eyes flickered down to the roots the woman was standing on but before she could move a muscle there was a great rushing sound and ice slammed into her left side, enveloping her. She gasped for breath as it crept all over her body, freezing her knees to the ground and locking her arms in place. Panic reared inside her as the ice raced up her body towards her head, but it drew to a crackling stop at her neck. She tried to still her sprinting heart, unprotected fingers aching with the cold. If she could just get the nearest roots to lace their way through the ice maybe she could break it apart.

‘Don’t move.’

Ari looked up. The woman’s hands were raised.

‘If you move again,’ she said, her voice matter of fact, ‘your parents will die.’

She clenched her fists and there was an explosion of heat and cracking wood from somewhere off to the left.

Ari craned her neck. The man she had killed had burst into flame, the cedar tree’s elongated branches giving way in an instant.

That’s when she saw her father. He too was submerged in ice. His eyes were locked onto her with a desperate intensity, his lips moving slightly as though he was trying to speak. A gold-haired man had one hand on his shoulder, the other raised towards her.

Auxo reappeared around the edge of the inferno, circling behind the gold-haired man, then the masked woman, before coming to a stop next to a second woman to Ari’s right.

‘That was the one I saw in Anath’s quarters, captain,’ Auxo snarled, gesturing at Anukis.

‘Uncanny,’ the masked woman murmured. ‘You’d wonder why a water arcanus disguised as her twin air arcanus sister would wear waterskins, but we have to expect that off a three, I suppose.’ She said the number as though it tasted foul in her mouth.

‘Don’t touch her,’ Ari yelled.

The woman’s head snapped back up towards her.

‘You are in no position to be making demands, girl. In fact, I’d wager your days of making demands are over. You will—’

But before she could say another word, Anukis erupted from the ground with a bestial scream and the ice locking Ari in place shattered into a thousand shards that shot towards the masked woman in one deadly gale.

Ari leapt to her feet as the woman brought up a wall of fire in a shield before her. The gold-haired man surged forwards, hand leaving Ari’s father, who threw his head back, steam pouring off his skin.

‘ANUKIS.’

Her mother whirled around in response to Caradoc’s scream and shoved Ari backwards as flame filled the air.

Ari lost her footing and tumbled into the hollow, hitting the ground hard, seeds spilling out beneath her as one of her pouches burst. A terrified whimper rose from the knotted roots near the stream passage to her right.

‘Amber,’ she cried. The green eyes blinked at her from the darkness.

‘GET HER.’

Ari looked up. Ribbons of water appeared over the edge of the crater, reaching down towards her like a great blue hand. She scrambled backwards, panic clenching her gut and making her limbs slow and heavy. The water fingers met beneath her and she was propelled back out onto the forest floor.

‘No,’ came her mother’s voice.

Ari turned to her right. Anukis was on her knees before the second woman. Ari met her eyes. The woman clapped and a rock shot from the base of the cedar tree and collided with Anukis’ bloodied head. She slumped to the ground, motionless.

Caradoc yelled something incomprehensible but the masked woman silenced him with a single flick of her wrist, a tongue of flame scorching his face. She strode to the edge of the crater and in one fluid motion brought both arms surging up towards the treetops.

Fire erupted out of the hollow, every root, every shelf, every plant engulfed in the conflagration.

‘AMBER,’ Ari screamed.

‘Crataeis, see to the caretakers,’ the masked woman snapped to the gold-haired man over the roar of the flames. He nodded, smiling, ice coating his hands and glittering like stars in the firelight.

‘Auxo. Synt.’

Auxo and the second woman seized Ari by the arms and dragged her after the masked woman and into the trees.

‘Pa,’ she tried to scream, but it was barely more than a whimper, terror clamping her lungs, her muscles, her thoughts. It couldn’t be happening. She didn’t understand.

‘Get her in the back.’

She felt herself being lifted from the ground. Then green gave way to black as she was shoved into darkness. A door slammed, muffling the shouts of the woman outside.

Ari blinked. After a few seconds, her eyes adjusted and she could make out a floor, four walls, a roof, less than an arm’s span in both length and width, all cold iron. She didn’t try to stand. She couldn’t.

The world jolted around her and the floor began to rumble, as though the whole thing was being dragged.

She curled up in one corner, drawing her hands and boots inside her cloak and shrugging up the hood. She could still feel the sixteenth book safely concealed in the biggest pocket, but all the others would be naught but ash now, every page she had ever written, every plant she had ever nurtured. And – but she stopped the thought fast. She could not let herself picture his little face. It had not happened. Could not have happened.

And then the tears came. Her father’s voice reached out to her from the shadows, wreathed in sunsets and orange roses and the flicker of a lost hearth, and she found herself humming under her breath. She bent a finger and a seedling slipped into her palm, its slender shoot spiralling up until the bud bloomed, filling her vision with orange light.