People Behind Him

They should have stopped at the last posting inn.

Maeril had said so three miles back, though without much conviction. The road north had stayed firm underfoot, and the weather had held.

The sun was lowering behind them, turning the western sky into a long wound of gold and red. Ahead, the Trade Way bent between low stands of wind-stressed trees and the dark shoulders of worked woodland. Waterdeep was not yet visible, but its nearness had changed the road. More cart ruts. More old repairs. Better stone in the culverts. Worse patience in the travelers.

Elisa walked a few paces ahead with Firemind. Chime floated between them above the open reliquary satchel, humming a phrase Rishi had heard often enough on the journey to know where it would turn. Firemind shortened his stride as Elisa slowed, and the five of them drew together at the bend.

Maeril’s staff tapped once against the road. “Two hours, if the road behaves.”

Rishi looked ahead. “Roads do not behave.”

“No. They sulk until dark.”

“We push.”

“I know.”

A cart passed them going south, its driver hunched in a cloak and its mule offended by existence. Chime sank beneath the satchel flap until it had gone. Farther ahead, the road dipped slightly, and the trees gathered thicker on the east side.

Maeril slowed.

Rishi stopped with her.

He did not ask why at once.

She had gone still in the way she did when a threshold had said something under its breath.

Her one good eye fixed on the trees.

“What?” he asked.

She lifted her chin. “There.”

He followed her gaze.

At first there was only sunset through branches. Then he saw a pulse of red deeper in the wood, low and then high. It did not share the color of the western sky, and it moved nothing like firelight or a hunter’s lantern. Something had opened an eye and shut it again.

Firemind stopped beside Elisa and followed Rishi’s gaze. Chime rose from the satchel, their humming gone.

Maeril’s fingers tightened on her staff.

The red came again. A crack followed it—not a branch breaking, but timber failing under impossible force.

Maeril said, “That is not sunset.”

Her hawk dropped from a roadside ash before Rishi could answer.

One moment it had been a shadowed shape above them, half bird and half old spell. The next it cut across the road and vanished between the trees, wings silent in the lowering light.

Maeril closed her living eye.

Rishi moved beside her without thinking.

Not in front. Not behind.

Close enough that if she swayed, he would know before she fell. Far enough that she still stood on her own.

Elisa moved to Maeril’s other side. Firemind turned toward the bend, watching the road while Chime hovered close to his shoulder.

Maeril breathed in through her teeth.

Then the forest opened in her.

The hawk flew low, and Maeril saw through it: branches whipping past, pine and ash and scrub oak giving way to old coppiced growth and newer cuts. The air carried too much dust, too much fresh sap, and the movement of terrified bodies.

A woodcutting camp lay ahead, tucked in a clearing where the trees had been brought down cleanly and stacked in long stripped lengths beside a rough skid trail. Oxen strained against traces. Men and women ran between timber piles, dropped saws, overturned wedges, spilled rope, shouting over one another in the red-dark air.

Rivenbeam marks were burned into some of the stacked ends. Good timber, cleanly worked for beams, hoists, ships, roofs, and bridges. Timber meant to hold weight. Now it shone red without flame.

The clearing flashed again.

The hawk banked hard.

Something moved between the trees, large enough to flatten a wagon, its shoulders twice the height of a standing man. Claws gripped a trunk and hurled that weight forward. Branches broke across its dark hide. Its heavy head swung through the dust, wet teeth and curved tusks beneath two red eyes.

Those eyes made distance meaningless.

A worker broke from cover near the far side of the clearing. He ran with one boot gone and blood soaking a sleeve, his mouth open around a sound lost beneath the shouts.

The beast turned its head.

Red gathered.

The air between eye and man tightened into a bright line. Then his body collapsed into ash and falling cloth. His axe struck the ground after him.

The hawk climbed sharply, wings beating.

Maeril’s hands clenched around her staff on the road.

In the clearing, panic broke.

A teamster tried to cut two oxen free. One animal screamed. A woman dragged another worker by the collar toward a ditch. Three men ran toward the skid trail and collided there, all of them trying to use the same narrow way out.

A low, hard voice cut through the shouting.

“Keep off the trail. Go left, down by the stones.”

An orc stood beside a half-loaded timber sledge, tall and lean, with a waxed cloak hanging from one shoulder and a tool belt at his waist. Sap and dirt darkened his gloves. The bow in his hand was no common weapon: two strings, reinforced nocks, and a complicated grip even the hawk’s sharp eye could not resolve.

He shoved one worker sideways, off the crowded skid trail and onto firmer ground. “Leave the chain and get clear.”

“But the others!” the worker shouted.

“I need you alive. Get under the bank.”

The worker obeyed.

The orc turned and caught a young woman by the back of her vest. “That pile is coming down!” He pulled her clear.

The pile collapsed where she would have been.

The beast hit the far side of the clearing.

A stripped trunk snapped beneath one claw. Another rolled loose, crushing a dropped lantern flat. Men scattered. Someone screamed a name. Someone else screamed without one.

The orc drew to his ear and sent an arrow into the joint of the beast’s foreleg. It lurched half a step. He ran toward the ditch before it recovered.

“Get into the ditch and keep your faces down!” he barked.

A boy froze near a stump. The orc saw him, and so did the beast.

Red gathered in the beast’s eyes again.

The orc ran toward the boy.

Maeril’s hawk plunged with the line of sight, too far, too high, useless except to see.

The orc struck the boy hard enough to knock him into the mud behind the stump.

The red beam passed where the boy’s head had been and struck three trees beyond him. They did not fall. Trunks, branches, leaves, nests, bark, rot, and beetles came apart in a widening path of pale ash and glowing motes. Sunset poured through the wound left in the forest.

The orc rolled to one knee and shot into the beast’s mouth with a shorter draw. The arrow broke against a tusk. Its head swung toward him.

He ran between fallen trunks, caught a hanging chain, and sent it swinging behind him. Two workers scrambled into the ditch before the beast tore through it in a burst of iron links. The orc sprang onto a log and shot beside one red eye, turning its head while he dropped clear.

Another worker stood too soon, and the beast’s head snapped toward her.

“Get your head down!” the orc shouted.

Too late.

Red filled the clearing.

The woman vanished from the waist up. Her legs remained standing for one impossible instant before they collapsed into ash and cloth.

The ditch went silent. Even panic stopped as the beast drew a huge, wet breath and its throat expanded. The hawk climbed again.

A howl tore through the clearing.

The howl carried more than sound. A pale-gray cloud edged in red rolled from the beast’s mouth, pouring between trunks and over cut timber. Workers who had been running stopped where they stood. One man dropped his axe and clawed at his own face. Another crawled backward into open ground, sobbing.

The orc staggered with one hand against his head. For a moment he stared at the beast in naked fear. Then he looked toward the ditch. A worker lay beyond the bank, shaking too hard to crawl.

The orc clenched his jaw and went to him.

“Keep low and crawl under the bank!” he shouted, voice rougher now.

He caught the worker’s belt and dragged him toward the ditch while the beast came on.

A claw struck the ground fifteen feet behind him.

Mud and splinters erupted. The blow threw the orc sideways into a stump. He rolled and came up more slowly, but he was still upright and still holding the bow.

The beast lowered its tusks.

The red in its eyes began to gather again.

Rishi heard Maeril draw a ragged breath. Her eye opened, and he lowered the hand he had been holding near her elbow. “What?”

“Woodcutters. A beast. Red gaze. It erases what it sees.”

“People alive?”

“Yes.”

“How many?”

“Not enough if we stand here.”

Another red pulse flared through the trees.

This time they saw the effect from the road. A line of forest disappeared in the distance. Open evening sky showed where trunks had overlapped a breath before, and ash drifted above the undergrowth.

The mule cart farther down the road stopped. Someone shouted, and a horse reared.

The beast howled again.

The sound reached the road thinned by distance and trees, but it still passed through bone. The mule screamed. Elisa caught her sunburst against her chest. Rishi let his next breath out slowly until his grip eased on the staff.

Maeril was already drawing a circle in the road dirt with the end of her staff. It was not a full ward—there was no time—but a small, sharp mark of refusal laid between the road and the wrongness in the wood.

“Only one beast?” Rishi asked, loosening his robe at the shoulder.

“I saw one. Large. Fast. An orc is holding it away from the survivors.”

Another scream came from the forest. Rishi pulled loose the wraps over his staff’s ferrules. Steel showed dull beneath the cloth.

Firemind looked north along the road, then back to them. “We can go ahead—the three of us. Warn the first patrol, then prepare the groundwork in Waterdeep. Somewhere safe to meet. A quiet way to reach Renaer.”

Elisa had started toward the trees, her sunburst in hand. She stopped. “There are wounded in there.”

“I’ll go to them,” Rishi said. “Get more healers coming.”

She looked from him to Maeril. Her fingers tightened around the sunburst before she let it settle against her chest. “All right. The Lathanderite house at the edge of the Castle Ward. Ask for the delegation from Elturel. We’ll wait there.”

“Tell the patrol about the gaze,” Maeril said. “That red light is not fire. They need cover.”

Firemind nodded and steadied the open satchel.

Chime lowered themself into it. “Chime will listen for your steps.”

Elisa touched Rishi’s arm, then turned north with Firemind. They were running before they reached the bend.

Maeril’s staff lit along its carved rings, pale green and off-white. The road dust around her ward-mark stirred as if wind had passed through it from below.

Her hawk cried overhead, no longer warning but guiding.

Rishi started toward the trees.

Maeril limped one step, adjusted, and matched him.

“Left side,” he said.

“I am limping, not lost.”

“Left side.”

They left the road. Branches closed around them, and ahead the forest pulsed red again.

Through the crack of breaking timber, Rishi heard a man shouting for people to get down.