Law Before Mercy

The spear did not move.

Neither did the woman holding it.

Rishi stood with one hand around the Staff of Warding and Maeril’s fingers still resting over its wards. Wet leaves clung to his knees. Behind him, Aestra held the dryad’s unbroken hand against her chest while the ancient duskwood leaked black sap into its own roots.

Across the narrow channel before him, the white-streaked leader watched the tree from which their small working had drawn its strain.

Her attention went first to the disturbed bark, then to the roots beneath Rishi’s boots, then to the staff between his hands and Maeril’s. The pause lasted half a breath. Rishi saw the knowledge tighten her grip on the spear before discipline smoothed it away.

The younger huntress stood to the leader’s left, on the other side of a raised root. Her bow remained across her back and the short blade at her hip. She held the fighting staff low in both hands, neither end pointing carelessly at the ground.

Behind them, near the gate-like roots, the cloaked woman remained between her guards. The man watching Rishi was wiry, with sun-lines at the corners of his eyes. One weathered hand rested against the upright root beside her. The other guard watched Aestra and the dryad. Neither reached for a weapon.

Maeril released the staff but kept her shoulder beside his, her empty hands visible.

The leader’s gaze settled on Aestra.

“You stand within a sacred grove held under Moonglade authority. You entered by passage not granted, after crossing boundaries protected by treaty. You bring an unjudged corruption into a place already under sentence.”

Her voice carried without rising.

“You have broken treaty-law, forest-law, and green law. Surrender the bound woman and stand aside.”

Aestra recoiled as if the command had struck her. The dryad bent at the same instant, her sound hand tearing from Aestra’s chest to drive against the duskwood. A split opened above her shoulder. Black sap welled through it. Aestra folded around the same place on her own body, fingers digging beneath her collarbone while a sound too thin to be a cry left her throat.

The root beneath both of them wrenched sideways through the soil, dragging smaller roots until they snapped. The shallow basin answered with a ring of disturbed water. Grey leaves spun outward from its center.

The white-streaked leader’s eyes narrowed as the pain passed through both bodies.

Rishi looked at Aestra. At the dryad. Then back to the woman whose law had placed their fate inside one clean word.

He shifted the staff into his left hand. With his right hand open and lowered, he bowed.

The movement exposed the back of his neck while his feet held the ground between the leader and Aestra.

“I understand. But please. Let me help her first.”

The younger huntress’s attention moved to his forward foot.

The leader did not answer at once. She looked from Rishi to Aestra, then followed the line of Aestra’s arm into the dryad’s wounded hand. Her gaze rested there.

Behind her, the cloaked woman remained silent.

The leader drew one measured breath.

“The bond is seen. The danger remains. The grove must be cleansed.”

Aestra straightened by holding the dryad.

“You mean killed.”

Her voice shook. The accusation did not.

The leader received it without looking away.

“What has entered this grove cannot be allowed to pass farther through the green.”

Maeril’s hand opened beside Rishi’s shoulder. He knew the small movement: not a spell, not yet, but her need to feel where the air left room for one.

“You do not know what entered it,” she said.

“Neither do you.”

Maeril’s fingers closed.

The leader’s eyes returned to Rishi. “We sought this woman before the wound reached this state. We sought to understand the link and contain what moved through it. You interfered.”

Mosstone returned in three physical facts: Maeril’s fish-soaked hem, Aestra’s wrist beneath Rishi’s hand, and two guards kept talking while an invisible girl crossed the gate.

If they had yielded Aestra then, the Suldusk might have recognized the bond sooner. They might also have named killing her a necessary containment sooner.

She is still alive, Rishi thought. She chose to come here.

Rishi lifted his head from the bow.

“We did.”

Water ticked against the stone basin. Somewhere high in the duskwood, a leaf separated from its stem and passed through the still air. It landed on the root between the two sides.

No one stepped across it.

The white-streaked leader stood beneath the gaze of the cloaked woman and kept her spear planted. The younger huntress watched Rishi’s balance, Maeril’s hands, the staff, every narrow exit through the roots. Aestra kept the dryad’s hand against her chest.

Neither Rishi nor the leader moved.

The younger huntress’s left hand left her staff and found the short blade at her hip.

The leader moved two fingers against the spear shaft.

No.

The signal was nearly too small to see. The younger woman saw it. Her hand came away from the blade at once and closed around the fighting staff again.

The leader lifted her free hand.

At her gesture, roots burst from the channel beneath Rishi’s feet. They caught at ankles and knees with deliberate turns, choosing joints, closing routes, dividing one body from another. Thorned runners poured over the raised ridges. Branches bent down from living trees and hooked their bare fingers through the air where faces had been.

The white-streaked leader gave no shouted command. Her hand closed, and the ground obeyed its shape.

Rishi planted the Staff of Warding and vaulted one rising root. It turned beneath him. His left boot landed in a strip of open ground no wider than his foot.

Maeril was still beside him when a thorn entered the leather above her ankle. She gasped. The wound was too small for the sound.

Her whole calf locked around that tiny wound. Her knee buckled. Rishi caught the back of her coat and pulled her free before the runner could wind twice around her leg.

Pressure reached him through the staff. Sour cold crossed his palms, and his old scars tightened. For one breath, his fingers believed they had been split open again.

She is making us carry the Grove’s pain, Rishi thought.

Behind Rishi, Aestra screamed. The dryad arched against the duskwood as thorned growth surged toward them from three directions. It should have buried Aestra to the waist.

Instead, the first runner curved around her boot. The second crossed it. A third climbed the air beside her shoulder, thorns turned outward. Stems braided around Aestra and the dryad without touching either one, opening into a terrible bloom.

The leader’s hand faltered.

“The roots are protecting them,” Maeril said.

Roots closed over the path to the gate. Thorns filled the open ground beside the spring. Between two ridges, a narrow angle remained where one person could turn sideways and pass. Another strip opened near the fallen limb, then began closing as soon as Rishi saw it.

Only room to be exact.

“Move right,” Maeril said.

Rishi shifted right, and Maeril’s boot landed where his had been. His staff swept a thorned runner aside without breaking it. She ducked beneath the arc of his arm and reached the next bare root.

The younger huntress crossed the clearing. Rishi saw her first step and almost missed the second. She used the rising roots instead of avoiding them, one foot touching a narrow ridge, the other driving from the angled trunk of the fallen limb.

Her staff came over her shoulder as she descended toward Maeril’s head.

Maeril turned.

There was no time for a word. No room to build anything lasting. She threw one forearm across her face, and a hard plane of warding force formed against it as the staff arrived.

Wood struck the ward with a crack that split the clearing. The force bent inward until it touched Maeril’s sleeve, then flung the staff away from her temple.

The blow still drove her sideways into a root. Light went unfocused in her eyes as her shoulder struck. The ward fractured into pale lines and vanished before its pieces could fall.

The younger huntress recovered the staff before its far end touched the ground and turned it in both hands for the second strike.

Rishi was already inside the turn. The lower end of his staff met the line above her forward wrist and shortened her grip. His right palm found the place beneath her shoulder where breath, balance, and the body’s next command crossed one another.

He pressed once.

Her arm completed no second swing.

The intent remained visible in her face. Her body failed to carry it. One knee locked when it should have turned. Her breath stopped behind closed teeth. For a single instant, the terrifying agreement among her hands, hips, and feet came apart.

Rishi stepped away before interruption became injury. Maeril pushed off the root and stumbled through the narrow space to the right. A thorn caught her coat and tore it from hem to hip. She did not stop. She crossed one root ridge, dropped into the channel before the spring, and found enough level ground to turn.

Rishi kept his eyes on the leader.

The spear had left the ground. Its point tracked him while her free hand remained half-closed around the living field. She could drive the weapon into his exposed side or tighten the roots around Maeril.

She had not chosen yet.

Maeril lifted both hands.

The first syllable changed the edges of the clearing. Maeril drew a boundary.

Rishi felt it pass him as a cold straightness in the air. The spell found the white-streaked leader and began defining a place from which the Grove, the fight, and every body she meant to protect were absent.

Four sides closed around her without becoming walls. The sound of the spring thinned inside them, and the spear point wavered.

For one breath, the leader stood farther away than the width of the channel could explain. Her outline lost its agreement with the trees behind her. The boundary tightened.

She looked past Rishi to the cloaked woman, then down at the root beneath her feet. Her spear hand clenched.

The shaft, her clothing, and every carried thing entered the tawny shape that tore outward from her body. Shoulders dropped. Arms lengthened and struck the ground as forelegs. Dark-tufted ears flattened above a broad animal head, and the white streak in her hair became a pale slash through the lynx’s ruff.

The lynx drove both forepaws into the root from inside the closing boundary. The Grove caught her weight. Maeril’s four clean edges buckled where claw, root, and will agreed that she was not elsewhere.

The boundary tore from corner to corner. Air returned with a sound like cloth ripped beside Rishi’s ear.

The lynx stood where the leader had stood, larger than any natural cat, shoulders level with Rishi’s chest. Intelligence remained in its pale eyes.

So did judgment.

Maeril’s breath left her in one exhausted sound.

The younger huntress breathed again.

Rishi heard it behind him and knew his mistake. The disruption should have cost her another breath.

She dropped her weight rather than fighting the locked knee. The motion turned the failure into a crouch. One hand loosened and reset. Her shoulder rolled once beneath the place Rishi had touched, and every part of her returned to purpose.

Maeril stood exposed in the channel by the spring, the failed abjuration still pulling at her raised hand. Her attention remained on the lynx for one fraction too long.

The huntress planted one end of her staff on a root and used it to cross the thorned channel.

Rishi turned.

“Maeril!” he shouted.

Maeril turned toward the strike.

She had no breath left for the ward she tried to shape. Two fingers drew half a line in the air. Nothing closed around it.

The huntress changed her grip at the last instant and drove the lower end of the fighting staff beneath Maeril’s left ribs, angled upward into the hard boundary of the diaphragm.

Maeril folded around it.

No cry came. The blow emptied her too completely. Her boots lost the root beneath them, and she fell onto one hand in the shallow channel. Water from the spring soaked her palm and sleeve.

Her eyes remained open.

She tried to inhale. Her body gave her a small, voiceless convulsion instead. She tried again, one arm locked across her lower ribs, and gained no air enough to carry a word or spell.

The younger huntress stepped back.

“Stay down.”

Rishi took one step right.

The lynx came between him and the spring in one silent bound. One forepaw landed on the root he needed to cross; the other tore four grooves through the damp earth. Beyond it, Maeril dragged one breath into her lungs, but it broke before it became his name. The younger huntress recovered her stance near her.

Behind Rishi, the protective thorns tightened around Aestra and the dying dryad. Another step toward Maeril would give the lynx his side and a path past him. He turned the Staff of Warding across his body as the lynx lowered its head.

Maeril tried to breathe again.

The small, helpless sound reached him more sharply than her name would have.

Rishi felt the old force gathering behind his shoulders. For one breath he kept it closed while the huntress turned back toward him and the lynx settled its weight for the leap.

Maeril will feel it too, Rishi thought. But I cannot hold them both without it.

He let the darkness open.

Two ragged shapes spread behind his shoulders, cutting through the green light without stirring a leaf. The shadows beneath the roots deepened. His hands remained flesh around the staff, but their edges seemed farther away than the wood they held.

The huntress stopped with her forward foot above the root. She set it down more carefully than she intended.

Beyond her, Maeril’s eyes widened. Fear crossed her face before she could master it, and seeing it hurt him even now.

Rishi kept his gaze on the lynx.

“Let her breathe.”

The animal’s ears flattened. It gave him no ground.

He brought the staff a little closer to his body. The force had not made his arms less tired or moved the thorns behind his heels. It had bought one hesitation. He would have to use it.

The lynx came for him.