As the Crow Falls | ✔

Chapter Thirty-Eight

It took a pair of minutes for Niccola to convince a crow to lead her in the direction Dinah had taken. The lost time nearly shredded her nerves, but she knew a guide would save time in the long run, and Dinah may well try to play a long game here. The Talaks did not leave as Niccola set out. She could feel them all around her, shadowing her steps, their hunger pressing at her senses as she moved swiftly through the undergrowth. Dinah's lantern bounced against her hip. The floor of the deep Talakova was a maze of fallen branches, drifts of decaying leaves, and plant-like organisms that grew and branched without need of light.

Now and then, a hill would appear on the forest floor ahead, running off in either direction, overgrown with fungi and dark, moss-like cover. It took until the third of these for Niccola to realize what they were: the corpses of trees so gigantic, she could walk alongside one for the better part of a quarter hour and never reach the end. It was the only clear indication of just how deep in the Talakova she was. The sky was black, grown over with so many layers of canopy that all trace of light was extinguished. But though the ground continued to slope down to where the middle of the Talakova should be—if it ended at all—the tops of the trees never sank with it. Their trunks only grew taller, competing with one another for the ever-diminishing sun.

It was through the forgotten underbelly of this forest that Niccola struggled. The crow led her through tangled thickets and swampy patches where creeks bled out across the forest floor; over the backs of long-decayed trees; and through an uncountable number of fallen branches with the girth of whole logs. At one point, she met a wall with a crater at the bottom. Only when she found its edge was its identity revealed: the great, vertical disk of a tree's uprooted root ball, taller than the Calisian palace, guarding the crater it left behind. It couldn't have fallen long ago, but despite the destruction it must have wreaked as it fell, there was still no sign of light through the canopy. Or maybe it was just nighttime in the world outside. Niccola had lost all sense of time down here, but she was sure she would keel over with exhaustion if she stopped to let her body feel it.

And then, over yet another mossy hill, she found a trail.

Niccola caught her breath. The soft ground bore the marks of what could well be human footsteps: two sets of them, one struggling and churning up the loam. Phoebe still fought her captor. Niccola crouched beside the tracks. Halfway to tracing out the outline of a footprint, her hand paused. There was something off about these that she could not put a finger on. She stood again, retracing her steps along this section of the trail. If Phoebe had been struggling, she would have attempted to slow Dinah in any way. Yet the drag marks were not long, and the bushes they passed were undamaged. Phoebe had not grabbed them on her way by. Perhaps Dinah had bound her hands, but Niccola had not seen the woman carrying rope. The footprints were also deeper than she would have expected.

That was it. They were equally deep, when Dinah was definitely a child's weight lighter than the stocky-bodied captive she was threatening along.

"Who passed this way?" she called to the trees in the crows' language. "Was it two humans?"

An indistinct murmuring became words as one bird found the courage to answer. "Talaks."

Niccola shuddered and gripped the brooch on her dress as she backed away from the trail. If Dinah had learned the Talaks' language beyond the simple incantations used to strike deals, there was no telling what she could bribe the spirits into. Laying false trails was clearly among the options. Perhaps this made sense of some legends from the deep Talakova. The realms told stories of travelers who lost their way in the forest, thinking they'd found the paths of their companions, only to end up places none had ever ventured before. Niccola had never thought those might be more than stories. That there might be a Talak or beast involved.