Page 61 of Leviathan's Song
Late in the day, he crested a rise ahead of us but was gone when we followed him over. Just blinked out of existence, back to wherever spectrals came from, I supposed. I couldn’t even feel his magic, but I could feel a different magic. Powerful, soothing, familiar magic, reminding me of enormous primordial firs standing stalwart against year after year of raging storms. Of gentle sunshine coaxing tiny seeds open to reveal the fragile new life within. Of vast, complicated networks of hidden root systems relaying nutrients and messages across a dark forest floor.
Iknewthat magic. It felt like home. Why was it here?
“Rafe!”
Chapter 23
I was bouncingin the hammock, completely giddy with excitement, tearing at my harness clips and demanding for Leothen to put me down. Rafe washere? My mind was already racing ahead, trying to piece together why he was here, what his family group was doing on this side of the Ardacs, how much time I could potentially spend with him in all this mess.
I was clambering into Leothen’s giant, stone hand from the hammock when I heard Levi choke out my name from behind me. I turned to find his face a mask of confusion, pupils narrowed into pinpricks of panic, his hands hesitating even as they reached for me, as if he could snatch me back to his side but was unsure of how he would be received.
My brain came to a screeching halt.
I wasn’t sure if his fear or his hesitation was more painful to witness, but it brought me back into the moment with a resounding thud. Looking at it from his perspective—he couldn’t feel my friend coming, didn’t even know who my friend was, and here I was nearly five stories up, unharnessing myself with no explanation, after having been injured falling from this height just days before—made me realize I had been woefully naive. This bond between us I had so readily accepted in the moment was going to takecompromiseon my part.
“Come with me,” I urged Levi, reaching out and taking his hand in mine. I was simultaneously directing Leothen to halt the descent of his hand and tracking the incoming magic of the dryads below. I needed to learn to stop living in my head so much and start communicating with him the knowledge and senses I’d always taken for granted. “I can feel friends coming, down below. I’m desperate to see them. Come meet them with me.”
Watching Levi’s confusion clear and morph into curiosity made my heart swell. I couldn’t wait for him to meet my childhood friend. I instructed Leothen to wait for us—verbally this time—and we rappelled down instead of using his hand as a lift. Levi was aware of my excitement and made as quick work of his harness as I did, finishing just in time for me to grab his arm and dash headlong into the trees, laughing at my own exuberance. The dryads would be on us at any second.
Levi kept pace with me as I leapt over nurse logs and scrambled through thickets of underbrush, untangling me from a briar patch and holding aside a dangling limb for me to dart under. After a few moments, though, the plants began to part for us of their own accord, leaning this way and that, vines tightening against tree trunks and brambles drawing in on themselves. I felt Rafe’s specific magic blossoming around me as he encouraged the undergrowth to make way for me. He’d seen me, then.
And I spotted him too, among a few of his clan as they made their way swiftly and silently through the even larger trees of the woods. Even the oldest, Silas, could move like a ghost or a night cat when he wanted to. Rafe was near his mature height, standing well over a dozen feet tall, and he was built like a prize-fighter, broad in the chest and thighs. It made him easy to pick out, even from a distance.
Dryads were humanoid, but that’s where our similarities ended. Their bodies were made of sturdy wood, like a sculpture made of fallen logs or driftwood, their faces simple and placid, with eyes so green they glowed. Tiny wisps of chartreuse-colored vapor drifted from their eye cavities on humid days and both males and females had odd, antler-like protrusions from the backs of their heads.
I couldn’t really blame six-year-old-me for confusing them with golems.
I met Rafe at a dead run, feeling like a little kid again as he knelt to catch me when I launched myself into the air, and he pulled me against his shoulder. “Hello,aren,” he said, greeting me with the Elvish word for little sister. “What trouble have you wrought now?”
How do you hug a creature more than twice your height and made of bark and wood, with the occasional thorn? You do your best. He smelled of a strong mix of moss and oak, and two little chickadees scolded me fiercely for daring to intrude on their territory. A wistfulness for long summer days spent trying to coax them to take seed from my palm crept in amongst the nostalgia already buffeting me.
“I see Puff and Dust are still nesting in your shoulder,” I laughed, holding back tears. I’dmissedhim.
“You know I could never refuse them.” The tiny birds had excavated a cavity in his shoulder six years ago, and though he could have stopped them or healed it within a matter of days, he allowed it to remain and tolerated their constant brash chattering.
Sidney claimed he only put up with them because they kept his bark free of insects, but she had it out for Dust, and so I took her avian-flavored insight with a grain of salt. Rafe was simply too fond of the bouncy little birds for it to only be a symbiotic relationship. He spoiled their nestlings with foraged bugs and extra attention.
I introduced Levi to Rafe, thrilled to share him with my longtime friend. I took Levi’s hand as I noted his wariness when the other handful of dryads gathered around us. They were reclusive enough that it wouldn’t surprise me if he’d never met one. Their expressions could be hard to read; their interactions with humans were so rare that they didn’t bother to use them that often. I’d learned to watch their posture, the tilt of their head, or even the movements of the trees around us.
“Rafe, I thought you were in the Ardac Mountains,” I started. “What are you all doing here?”
He sighed, a sound not unlike wind rustling dry leaves. “The Ardac are not so far from here.” He gestured to the ridges standing on the horizon. “The rest stayed behind in the mountains, but I came with Silas when you called to him.”
I frowned in confusion and turned to Silas, the eldest of all the dryads I’d ever known. His bark was chipped and scarred, missing entirely in large patches, and his posture spoke of a gnarled oak, withered and worn. “Silas? I haven’t called Silas. How could I have called any of you?”
Calling chips were useless for dryads because they didn’t have the types of magic needed to power them. Their cousins, the sylvans and the nymphs, could use them, but they didn’t travel with Rafe’s family because it was too dangerous for them in the Ardac—too many predators, too treacherous, too inhospitable.
“You did, child. You surely did.” Silas’s words were a sigh of wood creaking in the wind. I couldn’t resent Silas for referring to me as a child. He was so old he considered my father a child too, and my father was nearly a hundred years old—though he looked no older than thirty or forty.
He gestured behind us, toward the golem. “With your stone man. I can feel it even now. Don’t think we’ve been called on since… well, since the Sylvan War, at least…” He started off sounding proud, but then trailed off in thought the way he often did when telling stories. The Sylvan War was ancient, long before even Silas existed.
After a long moment, it became clear he wasn’t going to continue. “I don’t understand.”
“Did something happen? Why are you traveling with your sentries?” Rafe was eyeing me with concern.
I explained the loan we were making to the sprites and how I’d fallen and nearly died, and the trees began quivering just slightly around me, betraying Rafe’s deepening concern as I spoke. As I recounted the energy I’d pushed out before I blacked out, and how Domm had been pulsing magic when I woke, things began to fall into place. His pulsing magic was a distress signal.
Silas was nodding thoughtfully now, and the other three dryads behind him shifted forward to listen. I recognized one of them as a female named Chloe, and I gave her a little wave. “That’s about when a spectral stag started showing up. I think he led us here.” I looked around for him, but couldn’t see or feel him anywhere.
