Thirty Three: The Guildtown

The days had long since begun to blur into one another. After the desolate hamlet, a lot of the levity had fled from their evening gatherings, and during travelling hours Yddris set a punishing pace. No one talked about the ruin again, but the memory of it hung in the air in every conversation, and the night watches increased to pairs.

Because of their pace, Hap spent the most time in the wagon with his leg. Jordan had settled into a rhythm of hard walking, one foot in front of the other, no longer paying too much attention to their surroundings except to look behind them every now and again. He slept badly, tossing and turning on the hard ground, and when he did drift off he dreamed of the horrible cold emptiness that came of his last run-in with the aura-less Unspoken killers. He woke gasping, wishing Grace was there. There had been a time, when they were young, that they would comfort each other when they couldn't sleep, would creep downstairs at ungodly hours and raid the fridge. Jordan would make sandwiches out of whatever he could find and Grace would pour out squash that was always too strong, and they would sit under the duvet in their bedrooms and talk until they both fell asleep. He was often awake when his turn on watch came, his nervousness transformed into aching homesickness.

As they travelled, occasionally in the distance they would hear the rumble of approaching thunder. There were frequent bursts of heavy rain and howling winds, and still the clouds above kept building. Their evenings became more subdued as the fresh supplies ran out and they gnawed on bread and dried meat. Demons stalked the plains around them, sometimes drawing very close to their nets.

"There's a forest ahead," Yddris had grunted by way of explanation for the sudden increase in sightings. "Demons are buggers for a forest."

Lightened by the prospect of leaving the Barrens Jordan found a new energy the next day. Aside from the hamlet, their trip had been no more than trudging monotony; they had seen no bandits at all, and Jordan had started to think it was because something worse now haunted the expanse.

Reaching the Guildtown was still something of a surprise.

At first he didn't register that there was a settlement nearby; all he knew was that the wind-blasted rock plains they'd spent a whole two days trying to manoeuvre the wagon through were at an end. His shoulders ached and he stank of stale sweat. The only water they had passed, they had not lingered at; a small rocky stream on the borders of Little Dunbauern. There had been no time for a dip between refilling their water barrels for the last leg of the trip, and he was hard-pressed to think of a time in his life where he'd felt quite so disgusting. He'd had to remove his gloves several times to help dislodge the wagon's wheels or free a horse's hoof, and no matter how much he drew on the current his skin was seared raw with cold and sore from digging out splinters.

When he spotted the first trees, he stared at them for a full minute, feeling thick as two short planks as he tried to make sense of what he was looking at. He told himself it wasn't entirely his fault, because while the plants in front of him were recognisable, Nictavian trees were fucking weird. He marched up to the nearest one and peered at it.

"Never been out of the city, boy?" Chip called cheerfully. Jordan shook his head, feeling rather than seeing the disapproval rolling off of Yddris behind him. With origins as unique as his, it wasn't exactly a great idea to go announcing his otherworldliness to people who hadn't worked it out yet.

He turned his attention back to the squat knot of pale branches in front of him. The bark was entirely smooth and silver-white, but where it peeled away, the pith underneath was a dark bloody red. The leaves were dark and needle-like, arranged in compact umbrellas at the end of each snaking tendril. If Jordan hadn't known better, he'd have said he was staring at a cluster of mushrooms taller than him.

"Why does it look like it's made of meat?" Jordan muttered to Yddris out of the side of his mouth, indicating the mottled pith where damage had left some exposed.

"Because Marrowhawks sometimes use these as butcher pikes, and when the blood soaks into the ground, it doesn't go to waste. The sap gets stained."

"Oh."

"Not all of them are like this, boy. And it isn't going to attack you."

The tree cover soon became denser as they moved on, and Jordan found to his relief that it did look more reassuringly like a woodland from home during winter. He saw bark in all shades – white to pale grey, to black and dark brown. Some trunks ran ramrod-straight towards the canopy and then exploded in a profusion of branches. Others spread themselves out so thoroughly that the ground was bare earth beneath them and they'd all but cleared a space for themselves. He occasionally caught glimpses of dappled grey deer through the trees that set Ren to growling.

"Good luck taking one of those down," he muttered, as a large stag cantered off into the brush, horned head held high. The forest was a welcome reprieve from the Barrens, but it was hard to see more than a few metres into the trees before dark closed in. They were less exposed here, but so was anything that might have been following them.

The first house they came across, he almost missed. It blended so well with the forest that he was just puzzling out why some of the tree trunks were such a strange shape when he spotted a flicker of green flame and the glint of a window. He was staring at a squat building made of old wood which had become overgrown with vines and dark clumps of moss. The track narrowed, bringing them in close, and Jordan couldn't help peering in through the window. He hadn't managed to see anything much before someone burst from the front door in a swirl of black cloth, parting the curtain of hanging vine tendrils that had concealed it.

"That isn't Yddris!" a voice cried from the depths of the hood. "We thought you were never coming back!"

"Well met, Rook. I've been kept very busy."

"So I've heard," Rook said. The next moment his frantic excitement was back and he was bearing down on Jordan at alarming speed. "And who's this? Is he yours?"

"This is Thorne. Thorne, this is Rook. Yes, he's my apprentice. Took him on at the start of the dark season."

"Very new, then." Rook looked Jordan up and down and he tried not to shrink under the scrutiny. He always wondered what Unspoken were looking at, when they were all but hidden from each other. "Wonderful to meet you, Thorne. Ah, is that Koen over there?"

It took a long while for Rook to greet everybody; the man's enthusiasm hadn't waned a single jot by the time he'd finished terrorising Chip and his son with questions about their journey. Jordan only now realised that he had become used to the merchant's presence and hadn't questioned where they were actually headed. He doubted they were stopping in the Guildtown.

He looked around while everyone was occupied. The trees here were dense, but trails had been cleared in the undergrowth, just wide enough for horse and cart to pass through, though narrower tracks branched off into the trees, barely wide enough for one person to pass. The trees broke the worst of the wind, and Ren finally made a foray out of Jordan's hood to follow the progress of small flitting creatures with her eyes. Gentle hints of wood smoke and damp leaves drifted through the forest, and magic prickled at Jordan's awareness from all directions. There was a difference between the raw pulse of Nictaven's current out of the fault-line, and magic that had been manipulated; the latter always carried a unique sensation to it, depending on who had done the manipulating. He wondered what his felt like to others.

Rook joined them as they wound down the main trail, and he wasn't the only one; before long there was a veritable crowd of Unspoken walking alongside the cart. They stepped out of the trees as they passed, materialising from the gloom as if summoned. Jordan found himself greeting someone new every few minutes, made doubly alarming by the fact that everyone looked the same aside from variation in height. He inched through the gaggle and hung back near Astra, who seemed as unenthused by the welcome party as he was. They hadn't spoken in the last leg of their journey, but no one had spoken very much. He took it as a promising sign that she didn't try to keep distance between them.

He glanced sidelong at her every now and again, but couldn't muster the courage to say anything. She still scared him a bit, and one unexpected conversation was hardly enough to assume friendliness over. Her boots kicked up drifts of leaf mulch as she walked, and as the signs of habitation grew denser, she became slower.

He looked back over his shoulder when she finally came to a stop. He opened his mouth to ask if she was alright, but it was abundantly clear that she wasn't.

"Is there anything I can do?" he asked instead. She stared at him for a long time, and then shook her head.

"No. I knew it would be hard."

She began walking again, brushing past him and leaving him behind instead. He didn't hurry to catch up. His own apprehension was growing, and now their pace had slowed he was feeling the weight of true exhaustion. He stroked Ren as he plodded behind the small procession that had gathered, partly to soothe his nerves and partly to stop her bounding after something in the depths of the forest. Occasionally they would pass trees that were rune-warded up their length and he would slow to examine them, remembering Hap's challenge. He had all but forgotten about it after Little Dunbauern, though he suspected Hap had as well. It would be just like the Unspoken, though, to spring it on him when he wasn't expecting it.

The forest abruptly opened into a wide clearing. In the centre of the smooth dirt plaza was a fire-pit, but unlike the one in Shadow's Reach, it wasn't blackened or covered in charred rubble. A large green fire crackled merrily in it, lending eerie shadows to the vast trees that sheltered the clearing. The buildings were a hodge-podge of different styles, from wooden huts to tents made of hides. Some stood alone and others were built as part of the tree they leaned against – or in some cases balanced on, in the crook of large branches. There were just as many open-air camps as shelters, small piles of belongings in pitches marked out only by their arrangement. On one side of the clearing, a vast wood-and-stone structure with many windows occupied a smaller clearing all its own, stretching further back into the trees than Jordan could see. An avenue of cleared space ran perpendicular to it, lined with what Jordan assumed were supply stores.

It was not at all what he'd been expecting.

Most bizarre of all were the sheer numbers of Unspoken milling around, so much magic in one space that it set Jordan's teeth buzzing. He withdrew from the openness to Nictaven that he had allowed in their travels, feeling a brief, disorienting moment of loss before his head cleared.

"Here we are, then." Yddris had crept up on him while he was gawking. Ladders ran up some of the larger trees to shelters even further up. One building had skulls mounted along its wall, some from demons Jordan knew of, and others he didn't. Someone had staked a flagpole outside their front door and was flying what looked suspiciously like a pair of repurposed breeches. Yddris must have noticed Jordan fix on it. "I should warn you, boy, that some who've had the Gift for the longest can go a little bit...eccentric, in retirement." He sighed. "I'm hoping Thirris has either forgotten or got better at his little taxidermy projects."

Without explaining that further, he put an arm around Jordan's shoulders and marched him purposefully back towards the throng, which was growing ever larger. "If I have to be sociable, boy, so do you. It's the quickest way to a bath, a beer, and being left alone."

Jordan sagged at the thought of a bath and a beer, and his tutor chuckled.

"Yddris." A tall, lithe Unspoken woman crossed the clearing towards them, having left the front door of the vast stone building. "It's excellent to see you. It's been far too long."

"Cara," Yddris said stiffly. Jordan was alarmed to see that Cara was taller than Yddris as she pulled him into an embrace. Yddris wasn't a hair shorter than six feet tall. Something niggled at his memory when he heard the name, and then he remembered Nika mentioning her at the Hallow Festival. Cara was the Guildmaster, and that thought sobered his amusement at how dark-damned awkward his tutor looked.

"And you must be Thorne."

Jordan stumbled to find the right words to address the Guildmaster who, aside from a brooch on her chest, looked exactly like everyone else in the crowd. Was she less or more formal than Harkenn, or Marick? He wished he'd thought to ask.

"Well met," he stuttered, and couldn't help but think she found him amusing. It was better than finding him rude, he supposed.

To his astonishment, he was also embraced. She smelled of dried herbs and parchment, and her touch was gentle. He had never sensed a calmer aura, more like a warm blanket than a crackle. She drew back and clasped his elbow in a firm shake. "Welcome to the Guild, Thorne. We are very glad to have you." She turned back to Yddris. "I've left all his paperwork with Irata, she'll be expecting you sometime in the next few days for signatures. In the meantime, Thirris won't suffer you to stay anywhere other than with him."

"Aye. I know," Yddris said heavily, but there was no real reluctance in it. Reassured as Jordan was that Cara was not as terrifying as expected, the idea of staying with his tutor's old teacher no longer felt so daunting – though he hoped he wouldn't be sharing a room with any badly-stuffed animals.

He glanced around for Koen or Astra as Cara was drawn off on some other business, but the other two apprentices had been borne away in the excitement. The tranquillity of the camp was gone, replaced by a frenetic anticipation that was tangible.

"There'll be a bonfire tonight, if the weather holds." Yddris rolled his shoulders and massaged his lower spine. "Plenty of opportunities to meet everyone, and Cara's given us a good window to make an escape for now. In which case, I'd like a chair that is not a rock and some food that isn't dry as dust. Don't know about you."

"Sounds good to me."

Yddris led the way across the clearing and plunged down one of the more well-used trails. Some trees carried small brackets that had tiny green fires burning in them to light the way. Ren scrambled up onto his head and tried to catch bugs that had been attracted by the lights. Thick drapes of moss and lichen created curtains across the path in some places, brushing their shoulders with wispy threads. Jordan felt his heart rate settling in the hum of the forest and the distant sound of voices, a whole other world to the fraught streets of Shadow's Reach. He felt a rush of guilt when he thought about how much Grace would have loved this place. He would have to bring her here one day; in the meantime, he determined to remember as much about it as possible to take back to her. The prospect of drawing some of the bizarre flora he spotted along the paths filled him with a genuine excitement that had become alien in recent weeks.

Yddris led him to the door of a dwelling Jordan might have walked right past if he'd been alone. The walls were all but invisible with sprouting growth, and the roof was made from thatched woody stems and moss. It squatted between two large trees, almost indistinguishable at first glance from the buttress roots around the trunks. Yddris paused at the door for a breath, sighed, and then let himself in without bothering to knock. Jordan followed more slowly, noticing small carvings in the doorframe, and a hand-hewn set of tiny wind chimes that hung from a gnarled branch sticking out of the mudbank on one side.

It took even his magic-assisted sight a moment to get used to the darkness inside. Vines had overgrown the only window the place had even if there had been any light to let in, but there was no lit fire inside, not even a candle. Jordan felt his way forward with his toes and his sense of where Yddris was.

"Night take me," Yddris muttered, and a second later a fire roared up in a grate on one wall. The room it illuminated was a mess, the complete opposite of Yddris's bare home. Jars, bottles, burned-out candles, plants both living and dead, spare clothes, books, and dozens of small skeletons in various stages of falling apart littered the room. There was evidence among the clutter that one point an attempt had been made to keep it tidy – the corner of a set of shelves long buried, a bottle rack that had turned into a herb cemetery – but every foot of space had now succumbed, save for the well-worn path its resident had made from the front door, to the fire and out into the back of the house.

"Nika mentioned he'd let things slide," Yddris said. "Didn't think he meant it literally."

"Yddris?" A voice called from the depths of the house. "Is that you?"

"Well met, old man. I see you haven't tidied in the last eight years."

Jordan glanced at Yddris. He hadn't known that his tutor hadn't returned for eight years; it must have been, he mentally calculated, Nika's induction that he'd last been here. He'd thought the others had meant a couple at most.

Thirris was bigger than Jordan had been expecting. He was starting to think that it was stupid to have expected anything, and promptly dispelled all the other assumptions he'd been forming on the journey. Yddris's tutor's build was that of a strong man gone softer with age, not the hobbling old person Jordan had anticipated.

"You're no better," Thirris sniffed, as he appeared in the hall. "You just don't own enough for people to notice." The Unspoken looked around, and sounded a little abashed as he added, "It might have got a bit much."

He had a deep, resonant voice, and he almost filled the doorway he stood in. Huge hands that looked like they might once have been able to wrestle a demon drew together in a clap that rang through the room. "Anyway. Tea? I shouldn't offer you tea, considering how disappointed I am that you've taken this dark-damned long to visit, but... Who's this?"

The Unspoken peered at Jordan, and Jordan stared back, unsure whether that was his cue to introduce himself. Yddris saved him the awkwardness.

"Thirris, this is Thorne."

"An apprentice?" the big man asked, astonished. "No, he can't be. Cara would have told me!"

"Not if I told her I wanted to surprise you."

For the hundredth time that day Jordan found himself caught up in an enthusiastic greeting from someone he'd known all of five seconds – though it was the first time his feet left the ground.

"Well met," he croaked, through the bear hug crushing his ribcage.

"Well met, well met, very well met," Thirris said, setting him down. He kept his hands on Jordan's shoulders and shook him slightly. "I suppose you've come to see what it's all about, eh? Pick up a few interests, maybe. It's not all about demons, you know, though he'll have you thinking it is." He jerked a conspiratorial thumb at Yddris as if he wasn't still standing there. "If it was we'd all go a bit cracked."

He shuffled away, and Jordan met Yddris's eyes over his shoulder. He pinched his lips together to contain his mirth, made all the more difficult by the cock-eyed, splintery wood carving of some unidentifiable animal sitting on the mantelpiece.

"Not a word, boy," Yddris grunted, leading the way through the debris after Thirris. "Not a dark-damned word."