Date: October 11, 2026
Attendance: Brielle, Ivek the Seer, Ulfgar Kegbreath, Captain Gor
They left Marin’s Hold in the grey before sunrise, when the only people stirring were the farmers out beyond the palisade and the few day fishermen readying their boats along the quay while the rest of the village, night fishermen most of them, slept. The sky was low and overcast. The air had turned since they came home; it had the edge in it now that means winter is not far off. There were four of them on the road — Brielle, Ivek, Ulfgar and Captain Gor — with packs full of rations bought at famine prices and a riddle from a book of folk tales to steer by.
The first leg needed no steering at all, only the path down to the old stone bridge over the river. The bridge was older than the village, older probably than anyone had a name for: a single arch of weathered stone. As they reached it the sky began to spit a fine, freezing drizzle that found every seam in their clothes and settled into their bones.
In the mud at the water’s edge lay several spears. They were crude things, flint heads lashed on with twisted plant fibre, and they had been thrown away: one with its tip snapped off in something, another with its shaft split. Around them lay the leavings of somebody’s catch — not whole fish but the heads and spines and guts left when fish are cleaned, bits of shell that might have been crab, the slick skin of something that might have been eel. Through the mud ran footprints, broad and webbed, that came up out of the river and went back into it. There were no scuffs where a boat or raft had been dragged ashore, and nothing to tie one to. Whatever had stood here fishing had walked out of the water to do it. Gor picked up one of the broken spears, turned it over and dropped it again. Whoever these river-folk were, he observed, they were not the secret army of a sunken kingdom.
Ivek looked under the bridge. A skin of green algae coated the underside of the arch, and on it somebody had written in a script that was not Common. On the muddy bank beneath, out of the water’s reach, stones had been stacked into a little shrine. To Ivek there was no mistaking what it meant: whoever came here revered the bridge itself, as though a stone arch thrown across a river could only have been set there by gods. The others wondered aloud why anyone would worship a bridge; perhaps, Ivek offered, to people who lived by the river and in it, a way across it was a wonder. He knelt at the shrine and spoke to whatever might be listening. He did not know what this place meant to anyone, he said, but he asked, respectfully, for safe passage. He left a ration among the offerings. Ulfgar, not one to let a man pray alone, uncorked the canteen at his belt and poured a splash of it onto the stones beside him.
Up close the shrine was heaped with older gifts: fish bones left by someone before them, odds and ends nobody could name, and a small stack of coins, worn and mismatched, minted in different eras and in different lands entirely, perhaps ten gold’s worth in all. As the two of them stood back a strange calm came over the whole party, and the drizzle eased away. For the rest of that day and night, they would come to notice, the sky behaved as though it had been asked nicely. Gor looked at the stack of old coins for a long while. He thought about it. Then he thought about the weather, and left them where they lay.
From the bridge the land ran to forest on every side but the river. Marin’s Hold lay six miles behind them, and ahead were the woods the villagers called the Demonwood, and it was nearly noon. They agreed to find Mathilda before anything else. To the northwest, where the trees began, they found the path the folk tale promised, and nearly missed it: old tiles laid down hundreds of years ago, weathered and swallowed by earth, so that only here and there a smooth edge showed through the leaf litter to say there had once been a road. Gor led, reading the woods the way Jason had taught him on a beach a world away, and found the line of stones without trouble. Brielle went on ahead of him.
She was picking her way past a place where several trees had come down beside the path when she walked face-first into a web strung between two of them. She tore free and backed out spitting, and then saw what lay beyond: more webs, far larger, slung across the path and off into the deep wood on either side, and caught in them, wrapped tight, a deer — its antlers stuck out of the bundle — and other, smaller shapes. She crept back with the news. Gor, who knew more about woods than the rest of them put together, pointed out that spiders who build webs like those do not hunt. They wait. So long as nobody touched the webs and nobody set fire to them, they could probably be left alone. Nobody suggested setting fire to them more than twice.
It was evening by then, and anyone who marched on through the night would wake with nothing left in them. They looked for somewhere to sleep that was not inside the spiders’ larder, and Ivek found it: a nook among the deadfall, trunks leaning together into a natural lean-to, well screened and well away from the webs. Brielle strung a line of cans around it. Ulfgar set snares along the game trails, which ran thick with hares and foxes — for the same reason, he suspected, that the spiders had chosen the place. Gor volunteered to cook. He meant it to be a stew, stretching their food with water and grain and whatever herbs he could find, and somewhere along the way at least one herb turned out not to be what he thought it was. What came out of the pot was a grey paste, overcooked and starchy and somehow — though it had sat in water the whole time — burnt, so that it tasted faintly of charcoal. They ate it, and then they ate some jerky to get rid of the taste. The night came on bright and cold. The fire held, the camp stayed hidden, and nothing came for them.
Morning was crisp and clear, the sort of air that feels good in the chest. The spiders had ignored them through the night, and Ulfgar’s snares held a brace of three hares. The Fairy Path ran on through the webs, so they left it and swung north through the forest to go around, meaning to come back to it on the far side. If they had not been walking through a wood with demons in its name, it would almost have been pleasant. Birds sang, animals crashed away through the undergrowth, and the forest was old and thick and rose and fell in little hills and hollows threaded with streams — deep, primeval country. They met nothing all day that wanted to eat them.
That evening Gor skinned the hares. They were still in their summer coats, so the pelts were poor things, but they were pelts. Ivek cooked the meat, having watched how Gor went about it the night before and resolved to do the same thing better, and produced a stew that was underdone and gamey and still pink in the middle; they filled the gaps with trail mix. Ulfgar found them their bed: an enormous old tree, hollowed out and open to the sky where its crown had broken off, its insides warm with the slow heat of rot. They built their fire in its mouth. Brielle strung her cans again, and strung them so well that the others joked they were living in a fortress.
In the night the cold deepened. The moon went behind cloud and the air turned damp. Brielle was on watch at the mouth of the tree when the cans rang.
She woke the others quickly and quietly, and the cans rang again. Ivek laid his hand on her shoulder before she went and asked that she be granted a vision of whatever was out there. No vision came. What came instead, inside his own head, was a burbling, bubbling laughter. Brielle went out alone, meaning to find high ground and look down on whatever was moving. She put her foot on a loose stone, and the stone went, and so did she — down a hillside on her back in a clatter of scree, to fetch up at the bottom in the dark. Five pairs of yellow eyes were waiting there, with five sets of bared teeth beneath them, and a growl from every side.
Brielle did the only sensible thing and screamed loud enough to wake the forest. Up at the tree the others heard it, a long, astonishing, falling scream, and came running and sliding down after her.
Ivek reached her first and planted himself at her side, and this time, when he asked St. Terragnis for a little fortune, it came. Gor drew and put an arrow deep into the haunch of the biggest wolf, and it yelped and came for them snarling. Ulfgar’s arrow went somewhere into the night sky. Then Brielle, cool as anything, put a shortbow arrow through the wounded wolf’s eye socket and it dropped without another sound. The pack closed in: two on Brielle, one on Gor, one on Ulfgar. A wolf sank its teeth into Brielle’s arm and began dragging her about. Gor twisted aside from his. Ulfgar’s wolf tore him down in a single rush and stood over him growling while his blood ran out into the leaves. Ivek went to him through the fight and tipped one of his little vials of blessed water between the dwarf’s lips; it did not mend him, but it held him on this side of death. Brielle, still being shaken by the arm, got her blade around and opened the throat of the wolf that had her. It gurgled and fell. The last three backed away howling and fled into the forest.
They were all hurt, and Ulfgar worst. Gor worked a salve into the priest’s wounds and brought him round, and then there was nothing for it but to put the camp back together and see out the night with their nerves up and their eyes open. Nobody slept properly, and in the morning they all felt it in their bones.
The weather turned with their luck, and drizzle came down at dawn. They decided to stay put for the day, lick their wounds, and make the most of what the wolves had left them. Gor dressed the two carcasses and came away with a great deal of good meat — and with the alpha’s pelt, just coming into its winter coat, a soft, thick, downy white that would fetch real money from somebody. Ivek moved them out of the hollow tree and into the densest stand of trees he could find, a hidden thicket out of the rain, and Brielle rehung the cans around it. Ulfgar packed his bites with a poultice of herbs and clean water bound under a leaf, and declared himself reasonably sure he did not have rabies. Gor spent the next hours rendering wolf fat and pounding the meat into bricks of pemmican that would keep for days. Brielle went foraging and came back with only a handful of beech nuts, but beech nuts were food. Ivek prayed over Gor and blessed him with a little luck for the road. And Ulfgar cooked. Whatever had gone wrong for him in the dark, he made up for at the pot: a wolf-and-berry stew with turnips and potatoes he had found who knew where, well seasoned and honestly delicious. The others ate it in respectful silence.
As evening came on, Ivek climbed a tree to look at the way ahead. To the southwest, standing alone in a clearing of its own, was a very large tree hung all over with vines. The Hangman’s Tree. Around the fire Brielle juggled daggers to general acclaim, and Ulfgar told the story of the wolf fight to the people who had been in it, with great feeling and some improvements. Somewhere in the telling of tales the talk turned to the Count, and between them they pieced together what they knew. He had been, once, an honourable and brave warrior, the founder of his house, who conquered a rebellious country of scattered villages and united it under one banner; and he had fallen through his own pride. In towns all over there were tales of him stealing people away or tricking them into his lands, simply to amuse himself, because he had been alive so long that boredom was nearly all he had left — and that boredom might be his greatest weakness. And every year, at Halloween, the door from his realm into this one opened.
Gor had gone out hunting while they talked. He found hoofprints first, very large ones, and saplings knocked flat, then movement between the trees, and then he loosed — and brought down a bull moose. He came back dragging as much of it as one dwarf could drag, hollering for the others to come and look. The rack of antlers alone would fetch a fine price back in civilisation. They hung the carcass from a tree to drain and turned in. The night stayed clear and cold; someone raked coals from the fire into a pan and slid it under the straw and pine needles they slept on. They slept through, and woke whole, the wolf bites closed and the weariness gone out of them.
That left the moose. Gor butchered it with a steady hand, and the beast gave up a staggering amount of meat, far more than they could carry. They took what they could and left the rest at the southern edge of spider country as an offering to the Spider Queen, in the hope that whatever came to eat it would eat it instead of them.
While Gor worked, Brielle entertained them with tales she had heard about these woods — wildly exaggerated, as all good tales are, though somewhere at the heart of them lay a kernel of truth the folk tale in Mathilda’s book had shaken loose. The girls of the villages, the story went, would sometimes hear a voice, an urging, calling them out onto the path. Their mothers and fathers would try to keep them from listening, and in the end they would follow it anyway, down the path and into the woods. Some never came back. But many returned years later and became the village healers and herbalists, and told stories of the lessons they had learned at the school in the woods. The path was dangerous, and not everyone survived the training. Some said there was fey trickery in it; some said dark magic, or demons. But all of that was before these woods were called the Demonwood — which, Brielle pointed out, made no sense at all, since the woods were very obviously full of demons. Ivek blessed Gor with a little more luck. Ulfgar climbed a tree and marked their way; from up there he could see the Hangman’s Tree plainly, and the open clearing around it.
In the afternoon they marched. Ivek took the lead and found the Fairy Path again almost at once, and Gor ranged ahead of him. The sky turned grey again and the air colder. As Gor drew near the clearing the forest went quiet around him: no birdsong, no rustle, nothing. A litter of bones lay beneath the tree, and around it, hanging from its boughs, were bodies, half decayed. Gor decided against looking any closer by himself and waited for the others. Beyond the clearing the old tiles of the Fairy Path gave out entirely, lost to rough ground and undergrowth. From here on they would have the folk tale and nothing else.
The four of them approached the tree together, as far as the edge of its boughs and no farther — a circle some twenty-five feet out from the trunk, by their reckoning. It was a withered, twisting thing, and what hung from it, they could see now, hung not from ropes but from vines; among the remains were the bones of animals, one of them perhaps a horse. Brielle found a stone and lobbed it up into the branches to see what would happen. It struck something with a thud, and something else fell: a single huge red apple, big as a fist, which landed in the leaves just inside the ring of boughs. Gor thought his next experiment through about as far as he thought most things through and hurled a haunch of moose at the trunk. It cartwheeled through the air, spattering everyone with blood, struck the bark and slid down — and a vine arched out of the branches like a snake, coiled around it and yanked it up into the tree, tightening and tightening. There were tiny teeth along the vine’s end. It began stripping the meat off the bone. Gor allowed that he was starting to miss the spiders.
Brielle proposed they shoot the apple. Gor tied a length of rope to an arrow, drew, and put it through the apple with a juicy crunch, then reeled it gently back out of the tree’s reach while the vines did nothing at all. It was a very big apple, and very red. Nobody suggested eating it. Gor suggested, more than once, that it was already on a stick and all it needed was some honey to make a candy apple. There was talk of burning the tree down, and more talk of whether four travellers ought really to be declaring war on the whole forest, and in the end they left it standing.
They camped some miles south of it. Ulfgar found the place, after a poor start and a stroke of good fortune: a deep hollow in the side of a rocky hill, half a cave, up off the forest floor and reached only by a rope they could pull up after them — dry, and easy to hold. Gor tried to smoke the rest of the moose, but the meat had turned, or the beast had been old, and half of it grew mould before he could finish; he saved what he could. Ivek cooked, and this time, having watched Ulfgar, he got it right: a hearty moose stew with berries and with herbs he knew would settle the stomach. Brielle, whose voice was raw from a day of barking at everyone, tried one of her old army marching songs, and it came out as a croak like a frog’s. In the night fog crept up among the trees, but nothing came with it, and by sunrise it had burned off under a grey sky.
The folk tale said south. Ivek led, and found them an excellent way through the trees almost at once — so good that by afternoon they realised Brielle, who had gone off to find a better one, was nowhere to be seen. She found her way back to them at last covered from hair to boots in burrs and seed pods, having fallen into a bramble somewhere, and informed Gor that this was his fault. Gor, who had been walking along the path the whole time, had a crisis about it. The woods grew deeper as they went south, and creepier. They kept hearing things: bird calls and growls and the cries of animals calling for mates, a whole forest of noise, close and far. The animals left them alone.
Later that afternoon Brielle went off again to look at something, and they found her at the bottom of a muddy slope beside a river, lying where she had slid, plastered in mud and sticks and fury. It was not clear whose fault it was this time. And nearby, sunk into the forest floor, lay what looked like a box canyon. Brielle crawled to the lip on her belly so as not to show against the sky, with the others hanging back ten feet, and looked down. A small spring rose at the north end and fed a stream narrow enough to step across, which ran the length of the canyon and out of its southern end toward the river. And everywhere across the canyon floor lay great stones with no business being there — granite, all of them, but strangely shaped: a polished cylinder; two slabs crossed; three leaned together like a pyramid or a crystal; one almost a cube, worn soft by weather; others stacked in a corner. Everything down there was green, the stones furred with moss and algae, mushrooms crowding the trunks of the trees, all the damp of the place trapped in it. When she reported back, Gor said he had heard tales of ancient rivers of ice that left giant stones behind wherever they melted away, and reckoned that was what this was. Whatever had put them there, it looked very much like a playground built for giants.
They would not go down into it. Ivek did not like the idea of standing in a hole with something they could not see, and then having to climb out past it. They made camp instead in the tree line above, well back from the edge. Gor could find nowhere better than an open clearing, and a cold drizzle began as they settled. Ulfgar went foraging and came back with hazelnuts and blackberries. Brielle cooked, or rather did not: she served everyone their rations on a plate, scattered with chopped green stuff that turned out to be grass. One eats with the eyes first, she said. Ivek, feeling that Brielle had been having a hard time of it, prayed for a little luck for her. The drizzle stopped before they lay down, so they slept dry under the stars, and the night passed quietly. The morning was grey and cool.
The next words of the folk tale were west, to the Blood Falls, and the stream out of the playground ran south to a river that ran west. They agreed to follow the river and not to stray from it, and went around the canyon rather than through it, southwest to the bank, Gor steering by the sound of the water. Brielle, ranging ahead, found footprints in the mud there: the same broad, webbed prints they had seen at the bridge, coming out of the river and going back in, over and over, heading both up and downstream. And among them, something else — a long track pressed into the dirt where something round and heavy had been rolled along the bank. A barrel, she thought.
They went west along the river. Brielle went ahead again, and an hour later the others saw a log come drifting down the current toward them with Brielle clinging to it, soaked through and being carried away. Gor tied his rope to an arrow, drew, and sank it into the log; the rope snapped taut, and between them they hauled log and dwarf back to the bank. Asked how this had happened, she said she had seen something shiny in the water. Asked where, she said: in the water.
They heard the next landmark before they saw it, a heavy roar of falling water somewhere ahead — and smelled it too, for the air had taken on a faint iron tang, like blood. The river ran to the lip of a cliff and over it, and as it poured over the edge the water turned red, a deep red, the colour of blood, before it broke in the rapids at the foot of the falls and ran on muddy brown below. Brielle wanted to know what, exactly, they thought they were doing out here, where there was not a single cobblestone to be seen. And then, over the noise of the water, they heard it: the sound of girls singing.