Sada awoke in a panic and her eyes flew open to take in the forest around her. Her chest was already paralyzed, and she tried to gasp but was unable to. Heart fluttering, she squeezed her eyes shut and counted three of the panicked beats
(1, 2, 3)
then her lungs were released from the paralyzing hold, and she drew in a huge breath.
Mind still foggy with sleep, Sada glanced around herself. It was still light, she was still alive, and she seemed to be unharmed. She looked down to make sure of the latter, and when she did, she saw an antlered head lying across her lap. Each breath from its great nostrils stirred the folds of her silver-webbed gown. Sada's frightened gaze took in more fuzzy shapes clustered around her legs, and something resembling a fur scarf was draped across one of her shins. The panic in her chest surged and Sada couldn't help but stiffen and yelp at the sight. As she did, the huge elk sleeping on her lap shot to its feet and galloped away with a bugling cry. The other furry shapes started at that too, and they all scurried into the forest, wide eyed and chittering. Sada was left with a pounding heart as she watch ed the animals disappear back into the underbrush.
"What in the heavens above and the earth below...?" she wondered aloud, hand pressed ardently to her chest. Her heart pounded beneath her fingers.
The creatures were so friendly in Elt! Even friendlier than her geldings—and much friendlier than her mares. It was nothing short of a dream, waking up to wild creatures asleep around her, and she had sent them off in fear! Thoughts of foamy mouths flashed in her mind, but the animals had looked cleaner even than the pets of her world, certainly not diseased.
Smiling at the memory of the weasel lying across her ankles, Sada drew herself to her feet and brushed bits of moss off her gown. As she did so she caught a glimpse of blue and realized her fingers were entirely stained with the juice of the berries she'd eaten. The heat was gone from her body now, despite the light that still pinkened the forest.
Well, my throat didn't close up, but I certainly had some sort of reaction to that fruit! she thought uneasily. No matter how hungry she grew in the time it took to walk through the woods, she would not let herself eat any more of the vibra nt fruits.
Looking back up through the opening in the leaves, she realized the pink orb of the sun was no longer above her. Just how long had she slept? She chewed at her lip. The day was melting into night again already; the forest was quieting, and the air was cooling. Sada picked her cloak up off the ground where it had fallen but didn't put it on—soft sunlight still made its way into the forest to warm her. She continued walking, urged on by the fear of the dark.
. . .
Sada traipsed through the forest for what felt like an endless amount of time, nothing to occupy her mind but her singing. As she walked, she noticed a pair or two of bright eyes looking at her from the trees. She found the stares typically came from furry elk with huge antlers, foxes with multiple fluffy tails, or rabbits with four ears. She'd even spotted a stray chicken, but when she made to approach it, making poor attempts at clucking noises and crooning in the tongue of the north, it disappeared.
By the time the sun set, Sada was still walking. The forest darkened, the bright eyes of the animals began to disappear, retiring for the night. Sada knew she should too, that it was dangerous at night, but she couldn't bring herself to stop walking. It meant she had to face the now undeniable reality: she was utterly lost. She should have reached the amber path long ago, and since she hadn't, it meant she'd gone in the wrong direction.
"Please, please, please," she kept whispering. "Please, please, please." She didn't know who she was begging, or what she was pleading for. Probably God, and probably for many things: Please let me not be lost. Please let me find the amber path. Please tell me this is a dream. Please let the scarred Elf or the pine-eyed Elf find me or appear suddenly. Please let me go home.
Please, tell me what to do.
Please, please, please...
If her father was here, if Gabe was here, if John or Sir Caleb were here, she would not be afraid. Even if they were lost forever, she would not fear. They would know what to do. They always knew what to do. But Sada never did. And she was never alone.
Now, she didn't know how to be.
Fear was creeping in steadily, and she worried that if she stopped walking, she would be frozen again and retreat into her mind, left defenseless against the creatures of the woods. And so she kept walking, toward the setting sun now, figuring that walking in the same straight line was better than wandering aimlessly in whatever direction her heart desired. As Governess Brown often recited to her, the human heart is the most deceitful of all things.
It stuck in her brain, and so she began singing frantic nonsense about the heart's deceit and of how it had betrayed her in telling her to run away to the festival and of how it had caused her to become lost, and she sang in a panicky falsetto until she felt her fear transform into a great beast inside of her, making her twitch at every noise and imagine every possible worst case scenario, and then she began to sprint. She tried to run from the fear that was within her. She ran as hard as she could, eyes wide and frantically searching the forest for any hidden danger and also for any sign of the amber path that she knew she wouldn't find. She ran until she stumbled over a tree root hidden by moss and shadows and then she sat where she'd fallen.
Her sunburn stung and her legs were sore and now her voice and mind were suddenly as tired as her body. She told herself she needed to get up and keep going, that moving in some direction was better than just sitting on the ground, that if she just kept walking a little further, she'd find the path...But she didn't truly believe that.
"You're lost, Sada," she whispered to herself. "You cannot deny it. You should have found the merchants and the path by now. Lost you are, lost indeed, and in need of a new plan. But not tonight. The night is dangerous, in this place even more so; the Elves themselves warned you." Saying the word 'Elves' aloud made her pause and laugh at the sheer unreality of it all. "Elves, Elves, Elves. Inhumanly beautiful men with pointed ears, four-eared rabbits, and portals fashioned of...molten...starlight are...real..."
It was then she realized her mistake. She'd been searching for the path of amber and the merchants who would be working in the stands that lined it in hopes of finding someone who could take her to the Elf king, when in reality, if she would have stayed put at the portal, they would have come to her. The portal, where Pirate said visitors went. She could have simply stayed there, and someone would have come to see the Seam and inevitably found her there. That realization, and the following realization that every single decision she'd made by herself the past two days had led to her being lost in a world where human was not the norm, made her laugh. She laughed loudly and hysterically, so hard she began to cry.
It was the only sound she could hear.
The forest had gone silent once the sun set. The abrupt synchronicity with which all the animals stopped rustling, chirping, and chittering had been more than unsettling. They were not unlike those wind-up soldiers the village boys played with, who went marching across the dirt with a few twists of the metal knob in their back before falling still once more. As the toys were powered by that metal knob, it seemed as though the animals were brought to life by the sun, and the life drained from them as the light drained from the sky.
Finally her hysterical laugh-sobs stopped as well.
Now as Sada sat in the still forest, all she could hear was the distant playing of the mystical instruments. Once the animals had stopped making noise, she had realized that it wasn't just a lyre or a harp playing, but both. The drums also began again at night, their distant thrumming almost eerie. When the moon rose, the other instruments fell away and left only the thudding rhythm. It reminded Sada of the war drums she'd heard.
It was the only time she had been anywhere near a battlefield, before her father had been elevated from his position in the king's army as 3rd Knight of the Kingsguard to serve as the Commander. Her father had been leading a battle charge against a throng of 'scheming scum' as he'd called them, a group of men in Desdale who had taken to pillaging the poorer towns. Typically, it would have been a task given to the general army of Ettedon, but it was summertime, when Prince Eric and the Solares family seasoned in Centerton. Desdale being their neighbor, this skirmish had proved enough of a threat to the prince that Duke Solares took it upon himself to handle the scoundrels himself.
The battle had gone well, but it was on their journey home when the other boot dropped. That time, Sada's father had brought her along to ride with the army rather than make her travel with the ladies in a carriage. That was before he'd stopped minding her desires. It wasn't the remaining miscreants that attacked them then, but a minor lord who owned land in Desdale and who had taken offense at the Kingsguard 'handling his affairs' for him. She had heard the war drums of the Guard then, their dull thudding so unearthly low it hurt your ears and made you want to scream. Then her father had bid Gabriel take her back to the castle on his horse. The drums had followed them long after the view of the battle had dwindled out of sight.
Sada had never forgotten the haunting rhythm of those drums, and she was reminded of them now. The ones in this forest, however, just had a gentle lulling to their drumming. They almost enticed her to sleep, despite the fright-filled memories.
But she wouldn't let herself sleep. It wasn't that she thought staying awake would somehow make her less lost than she truly was. She had accepted that truth; rejecting it would do nothing for her. After her little self-lecture (and ensuing breakdown), rational thought had returned to her, and it was rational thought that kept her from sleeping now. When she was a young girl wont to climb trees and play unseen in the tall grasses while Governess Brown and her nursemaids searched for her, Gabriel had told her that if she ever found herself lost in the wild, she couldn't fall asleep until she'd found somewhere safe to hide. The forest was all fun-filled and pretty during the day, but at night it became cruel to young maidens, he'd said. He'd also told her that the sun always rose in the east and set it the west, as though knowing the direction she was getting lost in would help her at all.
Thank you, Gabe, she thought, and made herself stand and search. It felt like the hardest thing she'd ever done. I only wish you were here to tell me in person.
Though she couldn't see the moon, the forest was still bright with that lovely lavender moonlight. Sada let it guide her, following the bits of it that pooled up on the floor where the hand-shaped leaves were sparse above. The beauty of it was so intense her heart ached. Through blurry eyes, she saw that the trail of moonlight led her to a large tree with a hole in the center of its trunk. As she neared it, the strange tingling she'd felt earlier returned to her left hand. She rubbed at it absentmindedly and peered inside the trunk, but the moonlight didn't reach the hollowed center of the great tree. The shadowy depths made worms of fear wriggle up in her belly.
Bears, rabid racoons, fist-sized spiders, the fear-worms said, they all hide in there. But she was too tired to give in to their wishes to flee. She couldn't hear anything moving around inside the tree, so she hiked up her dress and made to step inside. That foot she put stepped with met not moss, dirt, or wood, but empty air, and she tumbled into open space with a squeak and a drop of her stomach.
The fall dumped her six feet into near total darkness. She landed on one leg, which collapsed almost immediately at the impact, but she was not hurt, save for the sting of her sunburn the fall reawakened. She immediately sat up and waved her hands around blindly, suddenly filled with panic. She felt no fur (or worse, skin and cloth) indicating another occupant, however. All she felt was the roughness of dirt. That calmed her some.
It was too dark to visually discern the size of the tree-cave, but she felt hard earthen walls an arm's length away on either side of herself.
Wow, true dirt! she thought with some amazement. It was the first of the stuff she'd come across in this world. Smooth, thick roots snaked across the packed surface. A few feet above her was the moonlit gap she'd stumbled through. No evil denizens of Elt peered down at her, and her panicked heartbeat began to steady.
Satisfied that she was safe—or as safe as she could be in the wilderness—she wrapped her cloak around herself and huddled down in the little dirt cave to sleep. The tingling in her hand faded as she did so, and a feeling of gentle peace took over.
In her own, open bedroom, she slept with a lantern constantly lit. When her father discovered this, he'd demanded to know when she'd 'let' herself become afraid of the dark. She hadn't been able to answer this, because she couldn't remember ever not being afraid of it. No answer would have pleased the Duke, anyway. She didn't remember the one she'd given him, but after she'd said it, he'd ordered her not to use the lantern again. He also sent his valet Elijah (the only servant to have survived the past two decades of Duke Solares's raging episodes with his job intact) to check each night and ensure she'd obeyed. She spent the next couple of weeks sitting awake in her bedroom, wide-eyed and palms sweating with her breaths coming in rapid and shallow pants, her eyes darting between every corner of the room—bottom left, top left, bottom right, top right, behind to the left, bottom right—from the moment she went to bed until the sun lit her room enough that she could see there were no monsters hiding in the shadows and finally sleep.
After nearly two weeks of this she'd finally started sneaking out into the parlor to sleep on the couch there. It smelled of the dank sweat of their guests, and it was in their Ettedon palace so it was prettier than it was comfortable, but there was light from the lanterns in the kitchen where the cooks worked late into the night and began again early in the morning; it was safe. After a week of this, she was allowed to use her lantern again, though only after hearing an hour's worth of criticism on her choice to be weak. It was the first lecture that didn't affect her. She was so filled with relief from having her lantern back that she didn't feel the typical shame that came with the Duke's reprimands.
Now, sitting alone in the hollowed-out trunk of a tree in the middle of the woods, the thought of a lantern did not even cross her mind. Despite being in near total darkness, she was not afraid. Maybe it was because she could feel all the walls if she just reached out her arms, or because of the calming scent of the wood and earthen walls, or because she was out in nature as humans were meant to be. But she couldn't know the reason, because if she thought about it then she would realize that there was no lantern and then it would shatter the illusion of safety. So blissfully unaware of the fact that her fear was gone, Sada let the distant drumming guide her to a dreamscape. Its booming rhythm resounded through the forest floor, and she could feel it vibrate against her back where she lay cradled by the earth.
She was beginning to think the Elf's warning of unfriendly creatures was unfounded; this forest was the most peaceful place she'd been in.