Eyes of the Woods (9 page)

“Thank you,” I said, looking at the backdrop of the stage.

“Is it…difficult? Being in the Priory?”

I shrugged. “I guess.”

He smiled. “I feel really stupid.”

“Possibly because this entire ceremony is stupid.”

He chuckled. “I best get better with a bow.”

“Not every Prior hunts. Some guard the grounds. Some are best at manufacturing the Vileon, or collecting the…” I trailed off, unsure I wanted to reveal every bit of our duties the first night. “If it’s not something you’re comfortable with—”

“I’m comfortable,” he said. “It’s everyone’s dream, isn’t it? To be a Prior?”

“Not everyone’s.”

“I can do it.” He smiled. “You can help me.”

Spending my days training a bumbling boy was not appealing in the least. I didn’t know what my father was thinking, but William Courcy was the last fool on earth to make a decent Prior. I wasn’t even sure he would be fit to guard the grounds. He was nervous and unsure, and if I were truthful, borderline cowardly.

I clenched my jaw. “I don’t mean to hurt your feelings, William, but I should be honest with you. I don’t want a husband.”

He nodded, but tried to play off his disappointment. “I know. Everyone knows that.”

His words stung. I hadn’t realized how obvious I’d been.

“We can take a turn at being friends first,” he said. “Get to know each other. Isn’t that what the next year is about?”

Something inside of me twinged. That was why Father chose William. He was understanding. Patient. Two things a man would have to be to spend a life with me.

“I suppose,” I said.

He shifted nervously in his seat. “Could you show me?”

“Show you what?”

“The woods.”

“No.”

“I admit I’m curious. I’ve never been allowed in the woods. But with you…It would be rather safe, I would think.”

“Not necessarily. There is a reason the woods are forbidden. It’s dangerous. Even for me. It would be irresponsible to take you out there without training.”

“Just inside the tree line? We’ll just take a peek.”

“I don’t have anything to protect us with. My weapons are at home.”

“We can’t get into much trouble at the edge of the woods. And your family is just there,” he said, nodding to the party.

“You don’t have anything to prove, William. We have a whole lifetime to—”

He sat up tall. “Not to you, maybe. To myself, for certain. If I don’t have the nerve to step into the woods, I have no business marrying a daughter of the Priory.”

I sighed. “It would be rude to leave our own party.”

“They’ll never know we’re gone.”

The more we discussed it, and the more William insisted, the more I wanted to go. I didn’t want to be celebrating my betrothal anyway, and the woods were comforting to me. It was the one place I felt free.

“Just inside the tree line?” I asked.

William nodded, his eyes bright with excitement.

“Just for a bit. And then we can’t go again until you’ve had training.”

He nodded again.

“And we can’t be gone long. Or else my father will notice.”

“Deal.”

I took two fistfuls of my dress, and we walked to the edge of the pines. The forest was quiet and dark. William’s breath puffed out in small clouds of white. We hadn’t walked that far. He was already afraid.

“You’re sure?”

He hesitated and then nodded.

“Follow me,” I said, walking into the tree line.

I crouched in some tall grass, and William did the same. We listened for a while.

“What now?” he whispered.

“If I were hunting, we would continue into the forest, watching, waiting, and listening. We would track them. Sometimes they track us.”

“Do they ever attack?”

I waited. He was already frightened. I didn’t want to terrify him.

“Eris?”

“All the time.”

His breath caught, and then he shifted from one foot to the other. “I can learn, right? You did.”

“I’ve been training since I could walk.”

“It would take time, I know. But I could one day. It would be an embarrassment for us both if I were stationed in your father’s basement mixing chemicals and stale blood.”

“Not really.”

William began to speak again, but I held up a finger. He froze, even holding his breath. That was good. At least he followed direction.

A branch snapped and echoed, bouncing off the trees and disappearing somewhere beyond the mist.

William stood and took a step back.

“We…we should go,” he whispered.

I held up a hand, trying to listen. I kept my voice low and even. “Calm down. We’ll go when I’m sure it’s safe.”

“This was a bad idea. We should leave. Now.”

“We’ll go. But we have to wait first.”

William took a step back, and leaves crunched beneath his boots. Another branch cracked, this time loud, like a bolt of lightning. It was close.

William bolted in a full sprint in the wrong direction.

“William!” I whispered as loud as I could. He didn’t stop. I gripped my dress and took off after him, my heart pounding against my chest. Something was jumping from one branch of one tree to the next, chasing him. If I came back without William, Father would blame me. I wasn’t sure what my punishment would be.

William turned a hard left and disappeared through the tree line, toward the party.

I sighed, breathing hard, glad that at least he was out of danger for the moment.

The wind picked up, and the pines danced with one another. My eyes focused, cutting through the darkness. I was just steps from the tree line. Steps from safety. I backed away, realizing how much danger I was in. Wearing a long, bulky dress. Unarmed.

I turned toward the party, but just on the other side of the trees were the same red eyes I’d seen above our stone wall.

I stumbled backward, nearly tripping over fallen branches on the forest floor. Skirt in hands, I ran in the opposite direction, deeper into the Glades, away from the glowing pair of eyes.

The woods were a second home to me. There were other ways of breaching the tree line. Unlike William, I climbed over tree trunks and hopped over rocks without effort, making sure not to lead whatever was watching me back to the party. I kept to the shadows, snagging my dress on thistles along the way. The terrain grew rougher, but I was almost there. Just bit farther down from Hopper’s Tree was Cala’s house, right at the tree line. I had never understood why they’d chosen to build their home so close to the woods, but now their proximity was useful, and I didn’t need to know a reason why. Only that their strange decision would save me.

The bridge was finally in sight, and even though my lungs felt like they might burst, I forced my legs to move faster, stretch farther. My footsteps sounded more like drums echoing through the forest as I ran along atop the gigantic, hollow shell we had used so many times before. Just as I reached the halfway point, the trunk shifted, and I fell to my knees. I glanced back to see two nightwalkers, both struggling to push the tree off the ledge.

“No,” I whispered. How was it possible? Hopper’s Tree had been in place for generations. If the nightwalkers could move it, why hadn’t they tried until now? “No!” I pushed up from my knees and began to sprint, but I still had a ways to go. I glanced behind me when the ancient bark beneath creaked and whine as it shook again. I pushed my legs to run as fast as they could move, but it wasn’t enough. The nightwalkers dislodged the bridge, and for a moment, I was running uphill until the other side was dislodged and plunged into the forest below.

I felt the bark beneath my feet give way. I leaped and reached for the edge, even though I knew it was for nothing. I had nothing to hold on to. I was too far away.

It felt like it happened in slow motion, my feet still moving as if I were running, my arms reaching for a rock, branch, or vine that wasn’t there.

The trunk barreled down, crashing first into treetops, the noise like explosions beneath me. Helplessly, I followed its path. For just a brief moment, I hoped Hopper’s Tree had made a pathway for me, but my fall was broken briefly when I landed on a branch with my ribs. The air was forced from my chest, and I cried out in pain. The collision caused me to flip end over end, changing my trajectory, and my arms and face were sliced and cut by hundreds of smaller branches, my head, hips, and legs beaten relentlessly by the larger ones.

When I couldn’t imagine being in any more pain, I hit the ground, and a burning began in my back and through to my stomach. I lay there, gasping for air. When I found it, my breath shot from my mouth in quick, white wisps. The burning exploded into full-blown agony. My legs were a mangled mess, bent and pointing in different directions, and I was both glad and terrified that I couldn’t feel either of them. One of the bones had cut the skin on my left forearm, and it was protruding out like a bloody, pale branch.

“Father!” I screamed as loud as I could. My voice carried through the pines, but it didn’t feel like it lifted high enough to clear the ravine. No one knew where I was, and unless William had been brave enough to tell Father what had happened, I was going to die alone.

I looked down to see a branch protruding six inches from my belly. I reached down with my one good arm and touched it. My breath faltered, and I began to cry. I had felt for weeks that the day of my betrothal was the end of my life, but I was wrong. It wasn’t the betrothal that would kill me. It was the woods.

I was a bloody mess of flesh, lying at the bottom of a ravine, and all I could think about was how disappointed my mother would be that the dress she had made for me was ruined. It was hard to tell where the dress ended and the wounds began. I was covered in red silk and my own blood.

Pinned to the ground, I looked above me. The sky was clear and so far away from the torchlit roads in town, the blackness above seemed to be crowded with stars. Two forms barreling down the path of the ravine caught my attention, and I recognized the nightwalkers who had killed me.

One last time I cried out for Father, knowing that no one but the nightwalkers would hear. He had always been my protector, and in that moment, alone and bleeding in the dark, his name was the only word my voice could find.

The earthy smell of the damp forest floor filled my nose, and I coughed. My chin was warm with my own blood, a sign I was hemorrhaging internally. My thoughts went from help and survival to hoping I would lose consciousness before the nightwalkers reached me. I had no way to defend myself, and they would likely revel in stripping my flesh from the bones while they ate me alive.

And so I waited for death and hoped for a quick one. I let my eyes wander to the sky, the trees of the forest making a perfect frame for the stars. There were millions of them, and I sighed at the beauty of it.

A tear fell down my temple and into my ear as I heard dead leaves crackle above me. They were here. My pain had just begun.

“Be still,” a young man’s voice said.

I looked up to see the same pair of eyes that hovered above my wall.

“It’ll only hurt for a little while. Just don’t fight it.”

“Fight what?” I said, my voice sounding like someone else. Someone small. Someone helpless. Someone in fear.

My head was throbbing, and warm blood mixed with sweat ran into my eyes. I wanted to lift my hand to see how badly my head had been split open, but it didn’t matter. I was going to die.

“I’m going to save you. But they’re coming,” he said, looking at the creatures now running full speed to our location.

He was going to spare me. Kill me quickly before the others reached my broken body.

“Just keep breathing,” he said. “It’ll be over soon.”

THE YOUNG MAN PUT ONE ARM BENEATH MY NECK,
the other beneath my knees, and then pulled me straight up, off the branch that had impaled me.

I was too weak to scream, instead holding my breath and whimpering. The young man set me down, tender and careful, and then leaned his face close to mine. His lips brushed my cheek.

He whispered softly into my ear, “I’ll make it stop, Eris. Just hold on.”

His mouth traveled down my jawline and then in a straight line down my neck, stopping just below and behind my ear.