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The birke beside me shifted, and I saw how large it was. Behemoth—rivaling the tallest tree in the glen. It lifted its roots from the earth, moving toward the heart of the glen until it was looming over the dais—Benji and Helena Eichel still upon it.
There were more sprites, I realized. The glen was full of birke—every other birch tree seeming to move, the sacred glen morphing into something unholy. An ambush. A hunting ground.
Visors lowered, protecting their eyes against the vicious swipes of the birke’s gnarled branches, the knights struck out against dozens of swiping birke. Maude was at the lead. “Don’t let them see your eyes!” she cried, swinging her axe to the sickening sound of flesh splitting, blood splattering. Then—more screams.
They came from Helena Eichel. She was on the dais, holding tight to the Faithful Forester’s chime and staring up at the behemoth birke. Next to her, Benji, by fear or idleweed, was so incapacitated he couldn’t even raise his head. He trembled, and Helena screamed.
And the great birke drew closer. It blinked its dozens of eyes and reached forward with branch-like limbs. Then, the pale surface of its flesh was opening—a hole peeling wide in the center of the birke. No teeth, not tongue, just a dark, lipless mouth and more eyes within.
The gargoyle and I pushed forward on frantic feet, my hammer and chisel drawn. “Benji!” I shouted. “Benji, move.”
He looked up, right into the birke’s dark mouth, and froze. The birke made a horrible rasping call, and the king shut his eyes, quivered—
And vanished.
The birke’s branch-like fingers curled around Helena Eichel instead, and the Faithful Forester’s chime fell, catching on one of the creature’s branches. The birke raised Helena, screaming, from the dais. Brought her to its wide, gaping mouth.
And ate her whole.
Benji reappeared twenty feet away, clasped tightly in Rory’s arms. Hamelin and Dedrick Lange broke from the knights fighting more birke, and Rory handed them the king. They hurried from the glen, retreating into smoke, and Rory vanished, too, reappearing seconds later back on the dais.
It took a moment for him to spot me in the mayhem, his eyes so dark and desperate my heart stopped.
I ran to him.
Rory caught me around the waist, gripping me so tightly I lost my breath.
I turned to the birke. “We’ve got to get that chime.”
Rory weighed his coin in his palm. “Too high to throw.” He turned it over, rough side up—but he didn’t throw it, saying in a strained voice, “I don’t want to kill it.”
“Why not?”
“They’re starving. All the sprites are. The knighthood makes sure of it. Even Maude.” Turmoil lined his brow. “Hunger is a slow, maddening torture. If the sprites are monsters, it’s because we’ve made them so.”
Behind us, the battle raged on. Birke swung at the knights, opened their mouths and snapped at them, but the knights were far quicker with their blades. They cut the sprites down, and the birke shrieked, a wretched sound that put a thousand prickles on my neck. Several fell—the rest retreated.
The knights kept attacking.
Meanwhile, the Faithful Forester’s chime was still stuck high upon the behemoth birke’s branches. It turned, drawn by the clash of swords, and lumbered toward the knights.
The gargoyle sighed. “Very well. If you find the violence ignoble”—his voice was dry, but his finger trilled excitedly—“go ahead. Ask me to be your pigeon.”
Rory and I turned. “You want to fly?”
“By the seat of my skirts.” He grasped my waist, smiled, then on mighty feet, the gargoyle sprang from the ground. His wings spread, beat the air, stirring smoke. I held to his neck, and he to my waist, and then we were soaring.
“‘Seat of my pants,’” I called over the wind.
He flew us to the top of the birke, where the air was not so smoky. I took in gulping breaths—held my arm out. For each pass around the great beast, I tried to snag the Faithful Forester’s chime off the fleshy branch it was lodged against. The birke aimed a few idle swats at us, but its attention was spent on the knights, leaving the gargoyle and I to keep circling.
But no matter how I reached, I couldn’t grasp the chime.
On the next pass, I let go of the gargoyle’s neck. “Toss me.”
Oh, he was delighted, smiling so wide his fangs peeked over his lips. “Toss you?”
“I can’t reach the chime. You’re going to have to—”
I was already airborne. I collided with the birke a few hands below the chime, grasping the creature’s mottled flesh, the effect so grotesque my stomach rolled.
The gargoyle clapped, and Rory swore from below. When my stomach was not in my throat, I clung tighter to the birke, swung my legs around it, and began to climb.
Flesh and stone were nothing alike. Still I managed, pretending I was back at Aisling, climbing its wall. I could hear the wet sounds of the creature’s many moving eyes. Feel the vile prickle of skin beneath my hands.
Below, the crash of swords and the horrible sounds of sloughing flesh echoed, but I did not look down. All I held in my gaze was stone, the Faithful Forester’s chime closer, closer. But just as my finger closed around it, a low, horrible groan sounded. The birke trembled.
Rory began to shout.
When I looked down, a spring of blood was flowing from the birke. A fatal wound. The knighthood stepped back, but Maude remained, striking again and again with her axe, like she had something to prove, someone to save.
The birke swayed. Rory kept shouting for her to stop. To retreat. “Maude!”
She didn’t heed him. Maude kept on swinging, and the birke kept on taking her blows and I—I lost my grip.
My fingers wrapped around the Faithful Forester’s chime—and I fell, plummeting though air and smoke. Stone arms caught me, the gargoyle chuckling with glee. “All in a squire’s duties.” Then we were soaring, wind scraping against my cheeks as we shot out of the trees and into the night.
When I looked back at the sacred glen, the idleweed was burning low, illuminating the conquered sprites, who lay like fallen timber upon the earth. The last of them, the great behemoth birke, fell—the monster slain. But if the creature was a monster, it was because it was made that way. And maybe the birke knew that. Maybe knights and boy-kings and Diviners weren’t the only creatures in the Traum who wanted to kill their tyrants, because when the great birke succumbed to the axe, dropping like a felled tree in the forest—
It took Maude with it.