The arrow was still singing in the rail when Llama moved.
“Shields to the port line.” His voice came down on the deck flat and final, no louder than usual and somehow filling the whole boat anyway. “Casters back of the mast, eyes on the canopy, nobody clusters. Luminaria, you’ve got the high angle. Yuki—”
“Belay that,” Lucy said.
She’d come down from the nest somewhere in the last three seconds, hammer already off her back, and she planted herself at the rail with her hat tipped low and her chin tipped lower, glaring out at the black tree-line like it owed her buried treasure.
“Captain. We are the ones with the hole in the hull.” Llama hadn’t lowered the shield. “This is a defensive—”
“Nobody,” Lucy said, and the shouting ring caught it and hurled it across the water so the whole forest got to hear, “attacks me ship. Me ship.” She jabbed the hammer at the dark. “Ye hear that, ye gutless bog-lurkin’ splinter-flingers? Ye put a hole in Her Majesty’s lawfully requisitioned vessel, and Her Majesty’s lawfully requisitioned vessel is comin’ to have words!”
“That is not a defensive posture,” Llama said.
“It’s a boardin’ posture.”
I glanced around. Nobody else was attacking us; one arrow, and the tree-line had gone back to pretending it was just trees. Llama read it differently. “We’re the ones being boarded.”
Lucy grinned at him. “Then we board ‘em back!”
I settled the argument before it became a problem. I put my hand out over the rail, toward the bank where the arrow had come from, and pulled mana. It crossed the gap between ship and shore in one breath of grinding frost. It set hard, edges glittering, wide enough for two abreast, a bridge of pale blue laid straight across the dark.
“There,” I said. “Now nobody has to swim.”
“Har!” Lucy was already on it.
Llama grumbled, the sound of structural disapproval. “Charging unscanned ground,” he muttered, and stepped onto the ice anyway, shield up, because the only thing he hated worse than a poor plan was a poor plan carried out without him on it.
So we went.
The bridge held, of course it held, I’d made it, and we crossed in a ragged line, Lucy first and loudest, dark water sliding by underneath and cold breathing up off the frost into the wet green dark. The far bank rose steep and root-knuckled and stinking of old mud, and we clawed up it one after another and fanned out at the top with weapons ready, braced, every one of us pointed at the treeline like we meant it.
Nothing happened.
The forest looked back at us and declined to comment.
No second arrow, no movement, just trunks going up into the gloom and the small wet sounds of a place that had been here a very long time and intended to stay a while longer. We stood there, six of the most dangerous people I knew, plus me, arranged in a menacing crescent and menacing absolutely nobody.
“...Right,” I said.
Lucy was not about to waste a perfectly good charge. She stomped to the front, hammer up, and let the shouting ring do its worst. “It’s the TREES!” she bellowed at the trees. “Knew it! Shifty, the lot of ‘em! Standin’ there! Lookin’ at me!” She jabbed the hammer at the canopy. “Ye know what trees are FOR, ye great leafy cowards? SHIPS! Ye’re supposed to be SHIPS! And here ye are flingin’ arrows like ye’ve got no respect for yer own future!”
Behind me, Phèdre murmured, “She has a point, mon cœur. The trees are being very rude.”
I scanned the bank again, the undergrowth, the black gaps between the roots, the places where the dark went solid instead of just dim. Something was wrong with the quiet, and I couldn’t name it, and I hate not being able to name it.
“My Queen.” NightSwallow, at my shoulder, already a half-tone quieter than the surrounding air. “I’ll scout.”
“You don’t have to—”
She was gone. One blink, and the next the shadow under the nearest root simply had her.
Then we waited.
It was a strange thing, standing in a hostile forest with your weapons out and absolutely nothing to do. Lucy hummed. Luminaria held her staff at a flawless ready angle and her composure with it, betrayed only by how still she’d gone. Yuki crouched to examine a root, remembered we were in danger, stood, and crouched again.
Llama counted exits.
I counted Yuki crouching. We got to four.
Then the shadow gave NightSwallow back as quietly as it had taken her, already mid-report.
“Eight. This bank, in the treeline, forty meters in.” Clipped, flat, fast. “Green. Humanoid. Bows. Levels thirty to thirty-five.” She paused. “They’re not moving on us. They’re just... waiting. Watching the bridge. Watching you.” She didn’t love that part, I could tell, because she said it exactly as flatly as the rest.
Right.
Eight hidden archers who’d put one warning shot in my rail and then settled in to stare. I could turn Lucy loose to declare war on the local foliage, or I could try the version that didn’t end with anyone respawning.
I turned to Yuki. “Can you flush them out? Without cooking anyone?”
Her ears shot up. “Oh—oh, yes, yes I can, light doesn’t—light goes everywhere, that’s the whole—okay—” She was already moving, hands rising, the three tails of dawn-light snapping wide behind her. “Hold on, hold on, this is the good part—”
She opened her hands, and the darkness came apart.
Light poured off her, raw and gold and everywhere at once, into the treeline, under the roots, into every black gap the forest had been hoarding, scouring the shadows flat until there was nowhere left in forty meters for anything to hide in. The undergrowth lit up as if noon had dropped sideways through the canopy.
And the forest screamed.
“TORK!”
“Tork tork!”
Green shapes scrambled up out of the suddenly-bright nothing, arms thrown over their eyes, bows waving wild—
“No shoot! TORK! No shoot!”
The light dimmed, Yuki easing it back down to something a person could stand in, and the green shapes lowered their arms, blinking, and resolved into people.
Small ones, chest-high at most, broad-faced and bark-brown-green, dressed in woven river-reed and carrying bows of pale bent wood. Eight of them, exactly as advertised, and not one of them looked like they wanted to shoot anyone anymore.
Mostly they looked relieved to be able to see.
The one in front lowered her bow first. A band of red beads crossed her brow. She glanced back at the other seven, found no volunteers, and squared her shoulders.
“We Tork,” she said. “Live here. This—” she swept an arm at the forest, the river, us “—Tork place.” Then she pointed past me, at the ship riding at anchor with the ice bridge still grinning off her hull, and her voice dropped into something close to reverence. “That. Great beast.”
“It’s a ship,” I said.
“It eat you. Then—” the Tork made a small, dignified spitting motion “—spit out. On bridge.” She frowned, dissatisfied with her own theory. “No. Not spit.” Then she brightened. “Like trunk! Trunk float, Tork sit on trunk, Tork ride! That—big trunk. You—” she gestured at all of us, generously, including Lucy, the daggers, the staff, the shield “—Trunk Torks!”
There was a moment of silence, but then the other seven detonated with joy.
“TORK!”
“Trunk Torks! Tork tork!”
“Trunk Torks!”
I have rarely seen a group of people more pleased with a conclusion. They were nodding at us. One of them was nodding at Llama’s shield like they had personally cracked a great mystery.
Lucy went very still.
“My ship,” she said with great and wounded dignity, “is not a trunk.”
“Trunk!” agreed a Tork warmly.
“It is a requisitioned naval vessel of Her Majesty’s—”
“Big trunk,” another Tork clarified, helpfully.
Lucy looked at them. She looked at the ship. She looked at me, found no help there because I was biting the inside of my cheek and losing, and drew herself up to her full height. She turned on her heel and stalked back toward the bridge.
“I’ll go prepare the great beast,” she called over her shoulder, with all the venom the shouting ring could carry. “Don’t anyone trouble yerselves.”
“Tork!” the archers called after her, delighted, waving.
I turned back to the one with the red beads, who’d watched the whole exchange with grave attention, and reached for diplomacy. “We’re not here to take your place. I’m Charlie.” I left out most of the titles. “Can we come to your village? We’d like to talk.”
The lead Tork opened her mouth.
A Tork in the back got there first. He had been staring at Yuki for a while, at the fox ears, at the three tails of dawn-light still drifting bright behind her, and he raised one small hand and pointed, eyes huge.
“Great spirit!” he said. “Help! Help Tork!”
And the rest turned, saw what he meant, and lit up all over again.
“Tork! Tork!”
“Great spirit!”
“Help Tork!”
Yuki froze. Her ears flattened. Her tails, which had not gotten the memo about being inconspicuous, fanned wider and brighter.
“Eeeeeh?” she managed.
A Tork at the front pointed straight at her tail, with the conviction of the truly faithful. “Spirit,” she said. “Help Tork.”
Whatever I’d planned to say next, the Torks had already decided for me. The pointing one was bouncing on his heels. Two others had taken Yuki gently by the sleeves, and the whole group started back into the trees, sweeping us along with them, delighted.
Yuki shot me a look over her shoulder, ears flat, every tail broadcasting help me. “Charlie,” she hissed. “Charlie, I’m not a—I can’t—they think I’m—”
“I know.”
“I’m a historian!”
“You’re a historian with three glowing tails and a divine fox bloodline, and they live in a forest,” I said, low, walking like none of this was funny. “From where they’re standing, you’re basically a goddess. Finally I’m not the only one.”
She made a small wounded noise.
I took pity. Sort of. “These are Riverbark Torks. Tork tribes are scattered all through the deep forest, and most of them would’ve put that first arrow through my eye instead of the rail. A warning shot means a friendly one. They’re rare.”
Then I let myself get a little excited, which I tried not to do in front of the people, because Lola said it’s bad for my whole reluctant-administrator brand. “And here’s the thing. If we can bring a tribe like this in—actually in, citizens, not a treaty we both pretend to honor—we lift the whole village and the system follows people. Enough settled, recognized Torks, and—” the grin got away from me “—players could be born as Torks, Yuki.”
She blinked. “...That would be amazing.”
“It would be incredible. So,” I bumped her shoulder. “Be a good spirit.”
“A problem they cannot solve themselves,” Phèdre observed, drifting up on Yuki’s other side, “and a spirit who can. How fortunate, ma chérie. The universe has wrapped you a little gift.” She let the smile finish the sentence. Yuki looked ready to ask the river to take her back.
Then a wall stepped in front of me.
“I go first,” Llama said, already going first, shield up, planting himself dead between me and the entire direction of travel. He didn’t elaborate. He just walked there, directly ahead of me, the whole way, a mobile fortification with strong opinions about footing, narrating each hazard as we reached it. “Root.” “Mud.” “Do not trust that log.”
Behind us, Luminaria kept her staff, her posture, and a muscle working very hard in her jaw, because Lady Luminaria does not giggle, and she was running about one Tork short of losing that fight for good.
NightSwallow I hadn’t seen since the first ‘Tork.’ The second a crowd of strangers had eyes to spend, she’d folded into the green and stayed there, out somewhere counting them, watching the trees I couldn’t.
I’d stopped expecting her to announce it.
The Torks moved through the forest, slipping between roots that tried to break the rest of us, until the trunks ahead thinned.
And there it was.
Homes woven into the living trees on three levels, rope walkways strung between them, river-stone hearths, little green lights swaying in the dusk, bigger than it had any right to be.
Red Beads stopped at the edge of her home, turned, and spread both arms wide with pride.
“Our home,” she said.