Many Words

Unsteadily, he stood, but he was feeling better by the moment, aside from a thirst and a gnawing hunger. He went over to the plants he’d fallen through. He didn’t recognize them, so he plucked a few stems, wrapped them in a bit of cloth cut from his sleeve, and tucked them into a pouch on his belt.

A few minutes’ stumbling brought him to a small pool in his gully, fed by a brook which poured over a ledge at eye height. He drank his fill, sat heavily against a nearby tree, and planned the day ahead. If he continued to recover at this pace, he could be on the road soon, and if he could make his best speed, he could yet catch his friends. He had done his part to pull the ontlig army away from them. If he turned their way now, he would reach them not long before they crossed the river, and could keep anything from going wrong at the ford.

He leaned over and filled his waterskin. Little use in waiting around to see how he would be feeling, given how far he had to go. Best to get moving now: if he could manage the trip, he’d save a few minutes. If he couldn’t, he’d know soon enough.

Birdsong woke him. It was early morning. His head felt like a mass of wadded cotton, and his throat was tight and dry. He swallowed painfully and rolled over.

The world swam, slowly coming into focus. He turned his head to one side, waited for his vision to settle, and saw the signs of his passage. Short, leafy plants lined the side of the gully beneath the outcrop from which he had plunged. A trail of crushed stems marked where he’d slid down.

He moved his arm and winced, but the pain in his side never came. Gingerly, he touched his wounds and held his hand up in front of his face. No blood. Wondering even as he moved if it was a good idea, he sat up.

Birdsong woke him. He pulled himself over to a tree, sliding along the floor of the gully. He raised himself to sitting by increments, leaning against the tree trunk. He drained the waterskin hanging from his belt and felt a little better.

He looked down at his side and blinked. The deep gashes had nearly closed. Bits of plant from the hillside were stuck in and around the wound, and Falthejn nearly laughed aloud. Fate was evidently watching out for him still. Even going mad on ontlig poison, his magic had put his feet on just the right track to keep him alive.

The treetops proved a good way to travel. Ontlig search parties crisscrossed the forest floor beneath him, always a few hundred yards behind as he pushed to the northwest. When they fell too far back, he threw a stick toward them, to make some noise and get them back on the hunt. After an hour or two, he let them off the hook and left them behind. It should have been obvious to them where he was headed, and he could use some sleep, even if it was to be fitfully wedged between the first two convenient boughs he could find.

One trio of ontr, however, proved more persistent than the rest. Although they seemed not to know where he was exactly, they nevertheless refused to turn back to their camp, and every once in a while, he caught sight of them, striking out at random to try to pick up his trail. He could ill afford to have them stumble across him, and him alone—the whole point of this exercise was to convince the whole warband to follow him. He sighed, touched his side tenderly, and planned the fight. One had a crossbow. He could use that to even the odds somewhat—either take the weapon and kill the beast, or bait it into shooting one of its companions. Either way. Even wounded, he could fight two at once.

The ontligr searchers came nearer. Falthejn dropped to a lower branch, knees bending just so to take the shock of landing. He made no sound but the rustling of the pine needles. The first two ontr passed by. Falthejn steeled himself, tensed, and dropped at the third.

As he fell, it evaporated. He flailed for the merest moment before he hit the forest floor. Scrambling to his feet, he readied himself for the others. They, too, had vanished.

He frowned. He felt no evidence that they had left by magic, but he had very little idea of the extent of his enemy’s talents. Cautiously, he sheathed his sword and pushed ahead.

“Falthejn!” The shout split the night air—Sif’s voice.

“No,” Falthejn said aloud, spinning on his heel. This was all wrong. They were supposed to go on ahead.

“Falthejn!”

He turned again, following the noise, and sprinted toward it. Perhaps they could still be saved.

His foot caught a tree root, and he flew forward. He landed hard on his wounded side, slid off a rock outcrop, and tumbled down into a gully. He came to rest, face down, and did not move.

A pair of ontr followed it, dragging a third between them. As he had thought: the ontling being dragged was one of the ones Sif had killed the night before, going by its mangled appearance and the shining bits of armor still locked around its limbs. The two ontr dragging it dropped it at the feet of the largest one. It stirred, not quite as dead as Falthejn had thought.

The largest ontling spoke in a loud voice, and though Falthejn understood none of it, the gist of the speech was clear: “So-and-so has failed us. He will pay with his life.”

The ontlig warleader raised his hands, and Falthejn felt the energy flow past as the ontling began to chant. The weave of the world twisted, then snapped back. A bolt of lightning appeared from overhead, followed immediately by a deafening thunderclap.

Falthejn blinked until his sight came back, and worked his jaw against the ringing in his hears. Before the ontlig warleader, there remained only a smoking crater—and the warleader was looking straight at Falthejn. The diviner froze. Ducking behind the tree, moving while the beast’s eye was on him, would be even worse. After a few long heartbeats, the ontling looked away for a moment, and Falthejn leaned back into his hiding place. Drums beat in the camp, along with the shouts of leaders rousing their troops.

Falthejn cursed to himself. Well, he had wanted to lead them off…

Focusing on his next few seconds, he ran out along a sturdy-seeming branch, jumped, and landed on another, connected to a different tree. He wobbled for a moment, found his balance, and grinned. That was a good trick. He moved toward his new tree’s trunk, then winced as the gashes in his side throbbed. Nothing for it, he thought, and took a running start down another branch toward the next tree in line.

The camp covered more ground than it had seemed from below. It was a rounded rectangle, twice as long as it was wide, and he had approached from the narrow end. Centered within the wall was a large tent, almost half the width of the camp—fifty yards long from end to end. Man-sized bonfires blazed in the spaces between each edge of the tent and the walls, around which dozens of ontr clustered. Banners hung all along the tent’s length, bearing insignia—ontligr coats of arms, perhaps? One, a black zigzag on a reg background, seemed especially prominent, featured at all four corners of the tent.

At the south end of the camp, farthest from Falthejn, a gaggle of ontr worked to assemble stacks of cut logs into—something. Surely not a siege machine? Ontr weren’t that bright.

The north end of the camp was given over to rest; a few hundred ontr, from the very smallest to some of the larger ones Falthejn had seen, slept in small tents, under blankets, or right on the ground. It seemed to depend on what they could defend from their peers.

A commotion around one of the bonfires drew Falthejn’s eye. From somewhere out of sight, drums boomed, and the largest ontling Falthejn had ever seen stepped forward from the central tent. It wore armor of some sort Falthejn could not identify, and over that, a red tabard bearing the same black zigzag.

Falthejn inked the last few lines to form the last rune on a scrap of paper, corked his ink bottle, and put his writing supplies into his pack. He set the note on his cloak as he stood, buckling his sword belt around his waist and checking for the various pouches and vials hanging from it, each holding something to help focus his magic. Each was in its place.

He turned. His charges slept peacefully. He fervently hoped it would not be the last time. Fifty yards out of the camp, he made sure to snap a stick with a step—it would wake Alfhilde. He paused. Should he turn back? No. It was decided.

He struck out to the south. As he walked, he considered his next move. His job was to distract the ontr. To do that, he had to draw them away from the road. If he pulled the ontligr army to the northwest tomorrow, instead of due north, he would be taking them further from his group, and bringing himself nearer the army. The army was probably his best shot at survival, and survival seemed to him as good a secondary goal as any.

He slowed. Ahead, a red-orange light flickered through the trees. He doubted there were any humans this far south. He had been walking for a good half-hour; it seemed unlikely that the ontr would stumble across his charges overnight, if this was their camp and if they had patrols out. It seemed quite a large camp, though, and if he could see the fire this far off, they could be up to something. Ignoring the growing pain from his wounded side, he moved closer. He saw a rough stockade formed from felled trees. Ontlig sentries watched from, for lack of a better word, the battlements. When he was a hundred yards from the foot of the wall, he found a tree with a low branch and swung himself up into it. A minute or two of climbing brought him near its top, hidden from the ontlig camp by its trunk. He leaned around the tree to get a better look.