Into the West by Mercedes Lackey

Author:Mercedes Lackey [Lackey, Mercedes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC000000 Fiction / General
Publisher: Astra Publishing House
Published: 2023-10-11T00:00:00+00:00

Alberdina swore under her breath in a language Delia didn’t understand, and then shouted, “Hakkon! Stop the horses right this moment!”

Delia did not blame her in the least, because rising up before them on both sides of the river was a thing that could not, by any standard she knew, be called a forest.

Oh, there were tree-like objects, and lots of them. It was just that under no circumstances would she have called them trees.

There were no variations in them other than height. There were no conifers or evergreens. They were as uniform as a planted orchard, and spaced just as neatly apart: about the length of a horse and farm wagon, to be precise. Not only were they leafless—which was to be expected, since most of the leaves at this point were on the ground, and those that weren’t belonged to things like holly—their limbs were contorted and twisted like no tree she had ever seen before. Once, before Isla had married Kordas and she and her sister had both shared a tutor, the tutor had taken them out on a bright summer day with glass bowls and a sieve and a dipper and a little, but very strong, pocket magnifying lens to examine the tiny animals in the estate’s ornamental pond. These things looked something like one of the creatures they had seen that day. Except they were big. Big as the oldest apple trees in the Valdemar orchard.

The trunks, covered with a heavy, dark gray bark, sprouted branches that contorted and spiraled in ways that could not possibly have been due to wind and made very little sense in terms of growing things. The only time she had ever seen branches that looked like this was on climbing vines. In fact, they gave the impression of movement that had nothing to do with a breeze. As Hakkon tried to slow the string of barges and they got nearer to this forest, she noticed something else. The trees on both sides of the river were the strange ones, although there were normal trees just at the edge of the forest on the other side. But the closer they got to this “weird forest,” the stranger and more sinister the place looked. Patchy with green moss and sporting odd, transparent fungi, there were places on the trunks that looked less like boles or cankers than open mouths with teeth in them.

And as Hakkon managed to bring the string to a complete halt, she noticed, with a sensation of great unease, that there was something else about the branches of those trees. The underside of each and every twisty, contorted branch sported odd symmetrical round marks. Or were they another kind of fungus? But what fungus grew in regulated, evenly spaced rows, one or two rows per branch, from the base of the branch to the pointed tip?

“What in all the dark hells . . .” Alberdina said aloud, as Jonaton poked his head out of the barge and looked from the forest to her and back again.

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