Storm's Apprentice

Twin sheets of menacing black iron filigree made up the gates of Windshriek Academy. They were closed, but not locked. Against my expectations, there were no visible guards. It almost seemed too easy.

The idea that I was allowed to leave the Academy was implicit my assignment. I couldn't gather leaves from the swamp without leaving the grounds. But I still felt like it was a trap.

I'd been brought here as a prisoner. I'd been transported as a prisoner. I was still afraid that I'd be punished for trying to run.

On top of that was another fear. The gate was more than just the door of my prison. It was a threshold.

Right now, here in the academy, I was a captive. If I left the academy and came back, what would I be then? A collaborator? A sworn Antorxian?

Adrian’s accusations came back to me. Had I already resigned myself to become what the Antorxians wanted to make me? Passing through those gates would force me to decide.

Right now, the outside world scared me more than the prison at my back.

I walked slowly to the gate. With every step, I expected guards to jump out and attack me, or for a crossbow bolt to appear in my chest. I made it there unchallenged.

I could feel the magic radiating off it. My own maja felt like cool, dark water to me, but the magic coming off the gate felt sharp and violent, like jagged sawblades. It was a dagger’s point resting against my throat and a wire brush scouring my skin.

I stood perfectly still as it swept across me. After the first intense sensation it faded slightly, as if it had passed over and accepted me.

There was a faint smell accompanying whatever spell was built into the gate. It tingled against my nose and throat like the air of a forge, smelling of blood, rot, and dry sand.

I briefly considered trying to breathe the energy washing off the gate in and accumulate it into my core, but my mind veered violently away from the idea. I didn’t want this sharp maja inside me.

When I reached out to try the gate, I half expected the dull black iron to cut me. I didn’t expect it to swing open at the lightest touch. It opened in a slow, casual arc. Beyond it, the rugged wind-swept mountainside of Windshriek stared back at me with stony indifference.

I was going to leave the academy. And I was going to come back. Hopefully, I’d be coming back with ginsberry tree leaves. And it wasn’t because I was a traitor to my homeland, or because I was a collaborator, or even because I’d given up. The choice of whether to run or come back was a false choice. There was no real choice. Surrounded by miles of swamp, and hundreds of miles of enemy territory beyond that, leaving was impossible. The academy might as well have been on an island at sea.

I took a step forward.

I was through the gate.

I took another, and I was on the rocky road running down the mountain. I started walking.

I felt a mounting thrill as the distance between me and the academy grew as the illusion of freedom descended on me. The swamp stretched out below me. It was damp, dangerous, and unwelcoming, but there were no walls between me and the horizon, and there was no one looking over my shoulder.

The road down the mountain was steep in places. A past version of myself wouldn’t even have been able to walk down it. I’d have been reduced to trying to scoot down on my rear end, or simply sat at the top and refused to go. The me of today was beyond that. I didn’t have time to cautiously slide down every incline. Instead, I ran down them, skidding and tripping, catching myself on whatever stunted tree or patch of grass I could reach, skinning my palms when the flat sandals they’d given us lost their grip and I fell on my face.

If I had any grace or agility it might not have been a bad walk at all, but I’d never walked on mountains before.

In the end, it took around two hours to make it down the slope. From the ache in my heels, I guessed the distance was about four miles. It would probably take twice as long to get back up it, and I’d need to plan accordingly. If the journey had been dangerous in daylight, then at night it would be deadly. I needed to be sure I made it back before dark.

I spotted a couple of places of interest on my way down. There was one large lake to the northwest, visible in the terrain as a long treeless patch of mist. To the south, there was another smaller lake, fed by what I thought was a river.

According to the description on my scroll, the larger lake was where I needed to look.

As the mountain road leveled out, the rocky slope gave way to a pleasant forest, and then to the soft ground and stagnant pools of the wetlands.

Visibility was limited. Moisture rose up off the ground and pooling water, filling the space between the trees with cold mist. The trees themselves blocked my vision. They were low, twisted things that spread out as wide as they could and let their leaves fall to the ground in dense curtains.

I was taken back to my first journey through the swamp, just over a week ago. It had been a place that inspired fear then, and it still was.

I’d heard screams in the night, when unseen monsters had pulled Antroxian soldiers into the trees. I’d listened in on the guards’ fireside conversations, where they talked about spirits that lured people to their deaths and beasts that fascinated their prey with colored lights. It wasn’t a safe place for a soldier, let alone for me.

I wanted to assume that the nearby swamp couldn't be too dangerous, if they were willing to send novices out into it, alone and unequipped. I didn’t want to believe they were willing to send students out to their deaths. I didn’t want to, but I did. I already understood the rules the academy ran by.

I stopped by the side of the road and pulled a fallen branch off the ground.

At home in Kirkswill, they made a weapon called a cudsill by carving an oak root into a sturdy stick, brining it, buttering it, and smoking it. The end result would be a black, dense, heavy club that could brain a person with a single strike. Making one was a rite of passage for teenagers in the village, but I’d avoided that chore.

The best I could do now was to strip the twigs off my branch and break it into a rod short enough to swing.

When I finished, I had a fairly useless club. It didn’t even give me the illusion of being armed. I could imagine swinging it at something, but the truth was it wouldn’t do any good even if it hit.

I pressed on.

After an hour of walking, I started seeing shapes moving between the trees. They were tall, translucent, insect-legged creatures, each between four and twelve feet long with bulbous horizontal bodies held high off the ground. They reminded me of misshapen ants or shrimp. The smallest ones were the size of bears, the larger ones three or four times bigger.

Spirits, I realized. Their bodies were huge, while their legs were unnaturally thin. They didn't look like they would work as real, physical creatures. Not that spirits were any less dangerous.

Spirits were only fireside stories to me, but those stories involved terrifying beings that killed mortals as easily and remorselessly as a farmer swatting a fly.

The shapes moving in the forest didn't seem like they hated me. They didn't even seem to be aware of me. They had the feeling of wildlife, like I’d spotted a herd of deer passing alongside me.

The sun moved into its zenith above me, turning the swamp into a humid broiler, then finally burning off the fog.

I took off my robe, stuffing it in my bag, and went on in just my shirt and pants.

After another half hour I came to a place where a track branched off the road to the right. The main dirt road through the swamp was paved haphazardly with large flat rocks resting in the earth, unevenly cut and dropped several inches apart. It was the bare minimum to stop wagon wheels from sinking into the soft ground. The side path hadn’t even had that treatment.

It was a foot track, at best. The ground was overgrown with the same grass and reeds that filled the space between the trees.

The clearest evidence that it was an intentional trail rather than some kind of animal track was the tunnel of severed twigs and branches that passed above it, like someone had walked along swinging a sword at any plant that got in their way.

I couldn't be sure, but I thought I might be about parallel with the lake I'd seen from the mountainside.

I only thought about it for a minute before stepping off the road.

My first step was onto what I thought was solid ground, but I immediately found my foot plunging into waterlogged silt. It swallowed my leg up to the knee before I managed to catch myself on a branch.

The silt tried to suck the sandal off my foot as I pulled it out, but I'd tightened the straps to stop them rubbing on the walk down, and it managed to stay on.

The swamp was obviously dangerous. I couldn’t even trust the ground under my feet. I continued on with more caution, poking the grass in front of me with every step.

After a few hundred yards, the sound of insects intensified in the forest around me. Thet became a constant drone, endless chirping, high and low pitched at the same time. Flies started to show up, landing on me in clusters in places I couldn't easily reach, and not moving even when I waved at them. A rhythmic creaking sound started up in the distance, like a taut rope moving in the wind.

It was as if being on the road had protected me from the swamp, and now I was out among the trees, I was getting the full experience.

I followed the trail, keeping to the ground that I was sure was solid.

The path went on for about two miles before the trees around me started to thin out and the ground to my right became wide open wetlands.

Across the open terrain, I could make out a lake.

The water was green, shining in the early afternoon sun. Woody reeds grew from the banks, as dense as wheat in a farmer’s field. Lily pads floated in clumps out in the deeper water, and the surface of the water rippled with skimming insects and the fish that hunted them. As I approached, the croaking of frogs joined the insect hum, so many and so constant they became a single, constant sound.

I could tell this was the lake I'd seen from the mountainside. Now that I was here, it was easy to spot what I'd come for.

A single massive ginsberry tree sat on the lake bank, a few hundred feet away. Some roots anchored themselves into the soft earth, while others reached over into the lake to drink from it directly. The curling roots and low, arching branches were identical to the diagram on the scroll, and I got closer, I made out the same distinct star shape to the leaves as the sketch I carried.

I increased my pace. I'd only been out of the academy for a few hours. I had time to collect the leaves and get back before dusk.

As I came up to the tree, the odors of damp earth and dry wood prickled at my nose. It was the same tingling sensation I’d felt from the gate; the air here was thick with maja. As I stepped under the branches of the tree, it became almost overpowering.

If the tree itself was full of maja, that might be why someone in the academy would want its leaves.

I didn't waste any time. As soon as I was below a low-hanging branch, I reached up and started grabbing leaves by the handful.

They snapped off the branch easily enough, and I started stuffing them in my bag.

I'd just taken my fifth bunch when I took a step forward and felt something snap under my foot.

Looking down, I saw a cluster of fine white bones half buried in the grass.

I crouched, pulling the grass apart to try and get a better look.

The bones were the fingers of a human hand. There was a skeletal arm next to them, half buried in the ground. There must be an entire skeleton here, under the earth.

I was standing on someone's grave.

As I was crouching there, I caught movement at the edge of my vision.

A human body was slowly descending from the branches of the tree, hanging at the end of a noose.

It was the body of a young woman. Her hair was the red of rust, and her skin was deathly white, except where the rope had made a black-red band of bruised and torn flesh around her throat. She was dressed in a mold-ravaged robe which still had enough gray showing through the black and brown to tell me she'd been a student.

She was lowered smoothly out of the branches, like a spider descending on a strand of silk.

This had stopped being a simple chore. I was now scared for my life.

It got worse a second later, when the corpse started taking.

“Thief.”

Her voice was hollow and wheezing, like wind blowing through dry reeds.

My mind whispered a single word over and over, like my thoughts were stuck on it and couldn't get free. Spirit.

My body wanted to run. As soon as I stopped thinking about my fear and let my body take control, I started moving.

I turned and took a step. Immediately, a bony white hand appeared in the grass, clutching at my ankle. I stumbled and fell face-first onto the ground.

Scrambling onto my hands and knees, I looked back at the tree.

The corpse’s head was hanging limp to one side, but her eyes were open, starkly white, and staring straight at me.

“Thief,” she repeated.

“I'm sorry,” I said reflexively. My heart was pounding in my ears, and my voice sounded too weak to possibly carry.

“You came to steal my skin and blood, my flesh and bones. My body is not yours to take.”

“I don't want your skin, I promise,” I said, desperately.

I got to my feet and tried to run again, only for more clutching skeletal hands to appear, three this time, grabbing my feet and pants legs. I stumbled again, but managed to stay on my feet.

Whatever these were weren't going to let me leave.

I turned back to face the tree.

Another body dropped out of the branches.

This one was an overweight man in a dark gray robe. He fell quickly, his body jerking to a stop when the rope snapped taut. A second thud came a moment later, when his entrails spilled out of a gash in his stomach and slapped against the ground.

“You take my breath,” the new body said. His voice was deep and wet, like someone talking through mud. “How am I to live without my breath?”

My body was still screaming at me to run, but I knew if I took a single step I’d be tripped again. My blood was pulsing in my eyes and hands, and I was thinking through a fog. It took all my self control to keep my feet on the ground.

“I haven't taken your breath,” I said.

“Liar,” the woman wheezed.

“You hold my breath in your liar’s purse,” the man's body said.

I looked from one corpse to the next, then down at the leaves on the ground around me. I'd dropped the ones I was holding, and now they lay scattered around my feet. More of them were my bag.

I hadn't taken anything but leaves.

“Are you the tree?” I asked, looking up at the woman.

It was the man's corpse that replied.

“I am Wild Century. I am Deep Drinker Dawn Dreamer Carrion Eater.”

It was the tree. I was talking to the spirit of the tree, and both corpses were extensions of it.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I thought you were just a tree. I was sent... on threat of punishment...”

I was prattling. I didn't think what I was saying would calm a sympathetic person, let alone an angry tree spirit.

“A breath for a breath,” the woman whispered.

An empty noose dropped out of the branches.

“No,” I called out.

My foot moved, swinging out in an involuntary step towards the tree. My left foot swung out, another step. I was walking towards the noose.

“Stop,” I shouted. “I was sent here by Master Korphus,” I tried — the name on my assignment.

The spirit didn't take any notice.

I continued slowly walking toward the noose.

“My friends will burn you down if you kill me,” I shouted, lying desperately.

Nobody knew where I was except the people who'd sent me here and Adrian, and neither would do anything about it.

The tree spirit either knew I was lying, or thought everything I said was a lie, or didn't have the kind of mind that could recognize and process a threat.

“I'm property of the Antorxian Empire,” I shouted, desperate now.

The spirit didn't seem to care about empires or ownership.

My body continued to move without my permission, right up to the rope.

I reached out and took hold of the noose, then lifted over my head.

For some reason, my attention snagged on the knot.

Scribe Bevin had kept a library of knots in a drawer in his study. The valley farmers had come by to consult it more often than they'd come to see his books. It had all kinds. Farmer's knots, sailor’s knots, rider's knots, trick knots, puzzle knots. The knot of the noose wasn't in any of them.

It wasn't a sliding knot, or a shrinking knot, or a trader's hitch, or a wild dog’s loop.

It didn't even seem to make sense as a knot. It was just an untidy bundle of overlapping cord, like a child might draw if they didn't have any understanding of how knots worked.

I placed the noose around my neck. The rope above me began to shorten. The noose pulled tighter as the slack disappeared. Pressure mounted on my throat.

It didn't make sense. The knot shouldn't have worked. It shouldn't have been shrinking.

My throat closed. I couldn't breathe.

Now that I was helpless, the force controlling my body disappeared. I clawed at the rope around my neck, but I wasn't strong enough to loosen it.

I grabbed the rope above my head and tried to take weight off my throat, but I didn't have the muscle to lift myself.

The cord started to lift me off the ground. I kicked at the air, my feet desperately trying to find ground that wasn't there any more.

I reached up and grabbed the knot, feeling for a release. Nothing. I probed it with fingers that were going numb.

The knot was nonsense. It didn't make sense. There was no way it worked like this. It couldn't be real.

It wasn't real.

I was suddenly certain that the noose wasn't real. The knot was a fantasy. It was a dream of a knot.

“This isn't real,” I whispered. “The knot is wrong. This isn't real.”

I woke up with my head jammed into a fork between two branches.

My feet were on the ground. My head pounded and my throat ached from the pressure of the jagged bark.

It looked like I'd been pressing myself into the wood, choking myself against the pinched angle of the branches.

I pulled out of it and took a few steps back.

Nothing grabbed at me from the ground.

The tree stood placidly a few feet away. There were no hanging bodies. It looked as normal as when I'd arrived.

Never mind taking its leaves, I was going to cut the whole thing down.

If I hadn't woken myself up...

I'd have ended up as another set of bones, sunk into the mud beneath its branches.

Whatever the tree spirit had put me through, I was free of it now.

I could sense the maja the tree was giving off again. The tingling sensation from the air had disappeared when the first body had dropped. I'd been too shocked to notice. The dream had recreated everything except for the sense of maja.

I walked to a low branch and tore off a handful of leaves.

I turned to stare at the tree's trunk, waiting for a body to drop, or a gurgling voice to threaten me, or for skeletal hands to appear in the grass. Nothing happened.

“I'm going to take your breath, but it won't kill you,” I said. “They're only leaves. And I'm only taking a few. They'll grow back.”

I started ripping them down in batches, stuffing them into my improvised bag.

“You know, if you'd just introduced yourself and spoken with me, we could have worked something out.” I finished stripping one low branch and moved on to the next. “I could have tried to find another ginsberry tree. Or we might have made a bargain, if you'd told me what you wanted.”

The overweight man's corpse suddenly dropped down out of the branches, bouncing at the end of his noose.

“Bones,” he gurgled. “Ground and wetted. To soothe my toes.”

“No,” I said bitterly. “It's too late. You already tried to kill me.”

I squeezed my eyes closed and bit the inside of my cheek, trying to wake myself from the dream. I felt a flash of pain and the tingling smell of maja returned. When I opened my eyes, the corpse was gone.

I continued to pick leaves until my bag was full.

From the weight of it, it felt like more than the required pound of leaves. It felt more like three. It'd be harder to carry back up the mountain than strictly necessary, but I'd rather go back with more than I needed than less.

I started walking away from the tree, but stopped when I heard something crack under my sandal.

It was the half buried skeleton. That had been real, at least.

I stared at the skeletal hand for a minute.

Someone else had been sent out here, and they'd been less lucky than me. I wondered how many students had failed this stupid, deadly test. Had the bodies the tree spoke with really been academy students, once?

I might never know. The bones weren't answering any questions.

I stopped by a clump of reeds as I was leaving. They were a thin, stiff, hollow variety, almost like wood. In my experience, a reed was just a pen that didn't know it yet, so I collected a few lengths and stored them in my bag before I left.

I walked away without looking back. The smell of maja faded as I put distance between me and the tree, and the smell of lake water faded after that.

When I got back to the road, the flies that had taken up nearly permanent residence on the small of my back abandoned me, flying off into the swamp, and I was left to make my way back up the mountain on my own.