Erick's Journey - Part Three

The expedition set out heading west early the next day, though Erick’s enthusiasm for the trip cooled upon learning that Darryl would also be going along.

The captain of Finrod’s royal guards looked just as unhappy to be going on the trip, but he chose to express his disdain by scowling quietly at the rear of the four rider column.

Erick could live with that.

He was somewhat less annoyed to learn that the fourth addition to the group was Ilaria. The daoine sidhe mage served as a mentor and tutor to the others of her kind who entered the local magi guild for training. Erick felt a great deal of respect for her skills, but Larin had been pushing Erick to begin taking his magic lessons with Ilaria, and Erick suspected that the choice of mage for the hunting party was not coincidental.

Both the guard and the mage were meant to watch over him, and the presence of two babysitters had him feeling cranky from the beginning of the trip.

His mood might have grown worse if not for the swarm of pixies.

Erick heard the soft buzzing of their wings and urged his horse to a faster pace to ride alongside Luther. He didn’t bother mentioning the obvious, because Luther was already craning his head around in search of the mischievous swarm.

The first scout arrived, a blue-haired female who flew down through the thick forest canopy. She turned two wide circles around Luther, and her long, translucent wings blurred with constant activity. The short blue fur running down the pixie’s back glimmered with pops of static, and her hard, pale white skin almost made her appear to glow.

The scout turned to fly another circle, this time around Erick before she moved in front of Erick’s face and began flying backward to keep pace with him.

As with the color of her hair, the pixie’s eyes were a bright glittering cobalt color. But the pixie had no pupils, nor whites. Her multi-faceted eyes glittered like a dragonfly’s, and the blank, unblinking stare made guessing her intentions impossible.

Erick hated staring contests, and he let the pixie win by blinking. The pixie blinked rapidly and laughed at him.

Erick smiled at the pixie and gave a short nod to acknowledge his “defeat.” The pixie’s thin mouth bowed up in a smile, and then blurred as the pixie began to speak.

Pixie was one of the hardest languages to learn on Lissand due to the rapid speed at which the pixies spoke. Many elves eventually picked up the skill through their telepathic abilities, but while they were capable of hearing and comprehending the language, they could not speak it.

“Are you getting any of this?” Erick asked.

“She’s telling you about a great bramble of waspwort berries just two days flight from here,” Darryl said.

“Oh, good.” Erick nodded, and kept smiling, trying to feign interest in the conversation.

“Okay, she changed topics, but all I got was elf,” Luther said.

Erick glanced over at Luther, unable to suppress a laugh when the pixie moved to remain directly in front of his line of sight. “You can speak pixie too?”

“No, I can pick up a few words here and there, but I couldn’t speak it.” Luther’s deep voice drew the pixie’s interest, and she buzzed at him briefly before she darted straight up and made a high pitched screech. Sighing, Luther said, “And that will bring the rest of them.”

“What did she say?” Erick asked, his head tilted back to watch the pixie ascending.

Luther said, “Prank.”

Erick’s eyes widened as the swarm of pixies dropped out of the canopy and plunged down on their targets. Even with the distance, his sharp vision could pick out the gleeful malice on every tiny, bug-like face.

“Why is it always pixies?” Erick asked. “You’d think we could start with a goblin, or maybe an ogre.”

Luther said, “Actually, I know one phrase in pixie, guaranteed to make them go away.”

“Oh, sweet Sorai,” Darryl muttered.

Erick glanced over his shoulder at the royal guard, wondering how it was possible for the white elf to look even paler than normal. He raised his head again, and by then the swarm was less than a meter above his head.

Luther reached up to snatch a red-furred pixie from out of the swarm, and then he coughed loudly.

The swarm froze.

Luther opened his mouth and pushed the pixie in head first. Her wingtips buzzed inside his cheeks, making an awful rasping sound before he closed his lips.

A loud buzzing gasp erupted from the swarm, but Luther silenced the group by letting go of the pixie’s legs and holding up his hand.

Extending one finger, he gestured. One moment, please.

Between his lips, the pixie’s shins paddled furiously while she tried in vain to escape. Moving slowly, Luther caught hold of her legs and pulled the pixie out of his mouth without parting his lips. When the pixie’s head emerged, she wore the most comically mortified expression Erick had ever seen.

Her wings were still trapped in Luther’s mouth, and they took another two seconds to slide out from between his lips.

When her wings sprang free, the pixie laid them straight out to either side of her body and shuddered. Her lower eyelid on the right side twitched. Then she uttered a shrill scream and started to buzz her wings while she flapped her arms in a display of outrage and indignation.

Erick burst into laughter when Luther stuck his tongue between his lips and blew a raspberry at the pixie. He let go of her, and the pixie returned the raspberry with a shockingly long pink tongue before she darted away. The swarm followed her quickly.

Luther was right. The phrase worked perfectly.

***

The size of the trees diminished rapidly at the boundary of Stout Hart, which served as a not so subtle hint to most races that they were either entering or leaving a civilized province.

The canopy was much lower, in some cases being only a few meters from their heads. The late afternoon sun managed to poke only a few stray beams of light through the dense foliage, and even in the brightest part of the day, the forest remained dimly lit.

They entered a true gap in the forest, a wide oval-shaped ring filled with grass and wild flowers. Erick was unfamiliar with the route Luther chose, but he recognized the feeding patch. Many of the races used magic to create small fields to feed domesticated animals with, but at first glance, it was often hard to tell which patches belonged to which races.

Then a cat raised its head from the grass and mewled, and Erick asked, “Is it a pixie patch?”

“No, definitely rhyndarhim,” Luther said as he raised his hand to point to the other side of the oval.

Erick wasn’t sure what he was pointing at, but then he noticed the black tree, and his smile fell. “Tarn, that’s a real prison?”

“A very old one, it looks like,” Luther said, uttering a grunt as he got down from his steed.

He untied the rope harness from around the stallion’s head and whispered to the animal before he patted its shoulder. The huge beast nickered, nodded, and then trotted away to feed on grass.

Eric asked, “Are there any languages you don’t know?”

“Yes. I don’t know Addler or any of the dragon languages,” Luther said. “In either case, there’s no point in learning. They wouldn’t talk to me anyway.”

Nodding an agreement, Erick sent his horse to feed and glanced back toward the black tree again, his curiosity piqued. Moving to stand behind Darryl while the guard removed his horse’s saddle and bags, Erick untied the rucksack of supplies he was carrying and set it down on the ground.

“You want any help?” Erick offered politely.

“No, I’ve got it,” Darryl said. He lifted the saddle and blanket off of the horse’s back. Setting them on the ground, he turned to smile at Erick. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you much about that tree. You’ll have better luck with Ilaria. This route is more familiar to her than it is to me.” He turned his head to look at the tree and shook his head. “I don’t even know who’s kept there.”

“Prom Orvest Dimitri,” Ilaria said, then patted her horse to send it into the patch as well. “He was a wyrm lord who attempted to start a shadow war with Karin.”

Erick shook his head. “I don’t know her.”

“Finrod’s great-grandmother, who served as queen for five hundred years after the death of Samus.” Ilaria untied her dark blue cloak and draped it on the grass as she talked. She lay on it and draped her bare black forearm over her eyes.

“She was already ancient by then, and Dimitri thought Karin was a weak leader. He raised a small army of wraiths to invade Stout Hart. Many elves died during the first days of the invasion, but Karin used a scrying pool to track the army down, and she flooded the caves with sunlight.”

Erick sat down in the grass, leaning his head to one side while he waited for Ilaria to go on. “How?”

“No one is clear on that. Karin went into the caves alone. The texts I’ve read suggest she was enchanting stones with sunlight spells, but that would have taken much longer than she was gone.”

Erick grinned. “Then  maybe she enchanted the whole mountain.”

Ilaria’s mouth tightened in a smile. “That would have killed Dimitri as well, and Karin had an especially horrid punishment in mind for him.”

Erick looked back over at the tree, and his smile faded. “I thought the tree prisons were a legend meant to keep us all in line.”

Darryl snorted and sat down beside Erick, offering him a water skin. “We might use it to frighten children if certain guests weren’t so incensed over it, but no rhyndarhim king has ever trapped another elf in a tree.”

Erick handed the water bag back to Darryl. “That’s leaving the statement open in a way I don’t think I care for.”

“Before we left the Earth plane, the addler punished even minor offenses with time inside a tree.” Darryl set down the bag and shook his head. “The prisoners were freed and brought with the rest of the mystical races into Lissand, and after they described what a hellish torment the spell was, the other races forced the addler to agree not to use the punishment. The only exception is in the most extreme cases where someone could not be contained in any other way.”

Erick said, “So Dimitri must have been really evil.”

Ilaria dropped her arm from over her eyes and moved to prop her head on it. “It depends on how you look at it. His nature is to feed on the living, and like us, he wants a few domesticated animals to feed from.”

“Sure, but we feed off of small animals,” Erick said. “The wyrm eat everything and everyone.”

“Many of the wyrm live freely in Lissand, and they feed off of lower animals as well,” Ilaria said. “They keep control over the population of their offspring, the wraiths, and they live in relative peace with their neighbors. Still, it’s like living on a strictly enforced diet, and agreeing to live on the verge of extinction just to keep the neighbors happy.”

Erick realized Ilaria was waiting for him to speak. “So, Dimitri was looking for something more.”

“Yes, and he asked for too much. So Karin slaughtered all of his children and bound him in that tree. Who sounds more evil in hindsight?” Ilaria waited, and when Erick didn’t come up with an answer, she said, “Perhaps there is no good or evil, and the fight was only a matter of survival. Though Karin may seem evil, she allowed Dimitri to live.”

Erick grimaced. “It’s not much of a life. He’ll probably want revenge once he gets out.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Ilaria said, closing her eyes before she drew in a long breath to stifle a yawn. “The most typical response to being freed from a tree is to flee to avoid being punished again.”

***

Erick watched the others drift into sleep, but the fatigue in his body still could not slow down his thoughts.

The tree was real. Something in Lissand was so dangerous that the elves had to contain it. There were thousands of mystical races living free on Lissand. Shadow-breeds and races of light shared provinces all across the world, and yet, less than a hundred meters away was a creature who gave an elf queen no choice but to use the most extreme punishment available.

Erick got to his feet and started walking across the patch toward the tree. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to move closer to examine the black limbs. He could see even from a distance that no leaves grew on any of the branches, but his mind’s eye was suggesting that all around the tree was a ring of brown, lifeless dirt. He wanted to confirm that for himself, to see how the presence of the wyrm was slowly draining the life away from the surrounding area.

Indeed, there was a circle of dirt, but it was not quite as big as Erick’s imagination made it. Seeing it and confirming its presence filled him with unease.

He hesitated from stepping on the bare ground, allowing his overactive imagination to freeze his limbs. He saw himself stepping into the circle, his face contorting in pain as he began to age rapidly. His short, jet-black hair would turn grey, and then white as it descended to a knee length.

He was so focused on the morbid thought that he heard no one approach. Luther’s thick hand dropping onto his shoulder jolted him from the thought and sent him leaping out onto the circle of dirt.

He tried to relax, putting a hand to his chest to calm his beating heart. But Luther’s anxious expression did nothing to help Erick’s pulse.

“What’s wrong?” Erick asked.

Luther said, “Ilaria didn’t mention it, but a tree being black like this means the sentence is almost finished.”

Erick looked back over his shoulder at the tree. The black rot within the trunk had sloughed away all but a few strips of bark, and the remaining bits were covered in slick mold.

Erick asked, “Doesn’t someone have to come and end the spell for Dimitri to get free?”

“Someone could, if they wanted to release him early,” Luther said. “But once the tree dies, the prisoner is ejected back out into their corporeal form. It’s also possible to free him by chopping or burning down the tree.”

Erick glanced at Luther, then turned to face the tree. He held out his hand with his palm facing the trunk “Dimitri, I release you for a mission from the king. You must obey me until your assignment is completed, or risk returning to another tree to continue your sentence.” He smiled and lowered his hand. “Do you think that will work?”

“How should I know?” Luther asked sarcastically. “My parents were a dwarf and an orc. They’re the least magically capable races in all of Lissand.” Luther moved to stand beside Erick while his face drew in to a curious expression. “Would you really want to free him early?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Erick said.

“Why?”

“He’s been trapped for at least five thousand years, if I understand Ilaria. His sentence is almost finished anyway, so why not let him go and see what happens?”

Luther nodded and raised his head to stare at the tree. “He’ll want to raise more children. Have you ever seen a wraith?”

“No, but the dwarfs tell me they consume the skin and blood of their victims, and they breed with females to make more wraiths.”

Luther smiled. “Your father told me that you won’t take lessons from your mentors, but it seems to me that you’ve been taking your lessons with the dwarfs instead.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s true,” Erick agreed. “The lessons given by the rhyndarhim aren’t very exciting here. The tutors in Milk Springs took us out to explore and learn about things by experiencing them.”

He frowned with an expression of annoyance. “Most of the rhyndarhim tutors prefer to hand out more scrolls and keep us safe. It’s boring.”

“But taking lessons from the dwarf caravans is better because it’s more dangerous?” Luther asked.

Erick was tempted to agree, but he knew it wasn’t the real reason that he avoided his lessons in Forest Heart. “I just think there’s a limit to how much you can understand from a scroll. I know what a wyrm is because I’ve been told about them. But I’ve never seen one. I don’t understand them.”

Erick waved his hand up at the tree. “I don’t understand this prison either. There has to be something that this wyrm did worse than killing a few elves. Orcs kill elves all the time, and they just get relocated to another forest. So what does a creature do to earn this?”

The wind picked up with an alarming sudden force, swaying the trees under the short, strong gust. Both Erick and Luther took a cautious step back away from the tree before they looked at each other and laughed nervously.

***

The sun had long before sunk past the horizon when the riders stopped to make camp. Ilaria was able to enchant a stone to light their path, but she kept it dim to avoid announcing their presence to some of the larger forms of wildlife.

The light was solely for Darryl’s benefit. No one else needed it, but all of the spells the guard knew would have involved summoning a much brighter fire. The flame would wreck the night-vision of Darryl’s traveling companions, so he left the spell casting to Ilaria.

During most of the evening hours, they’d encountered few signs of animal life besides birds and cats, many of which were the pets of the local pixies. The pixies had already drifted to sleep, being “morning people” who did some of their best work at the crack of dawn. However, their pets were still active, and the animals watched the intruders in their forest with intent, mistrusting gazes.

Just after stopping to make camp, Erick spotted the bear. At first, he mistook it for a werebear, and he started checking the animal’s thick, black neck for signs of an enchanted collar.

The bear raised up on back legs which were too short for a werekin, nodding its head while it sniffed the air in curiosity.

Luther growled at the bear, though it sounded more like a greeting than a warning. The bear returned the sound with a short grunt. Dropping down onto its front paws, the bear turned away and wandered out of sight a few minutes later.

The meal that night was cold bread and dried meat. No campfire was lit, nor were tents pitched. Darryl and Ilaria climbed into a tree to sleep, but Erick chose to unroll a blanket at the base of the tree.

He couldn’t be any happier if he tried.

He fell asleep excitedly thinking about a werekin hunt with the dwarfs. The thought became a dream that sounded and felt very realistic. He was surrounded by angry werekin, all of them growling as they pounded the ground under their massive feet.

The dream held Erick under its spell for a few seconds longer before his mind connected back to his senses in the outside world.

The growling coming from the woods was from several different sources, as were the thumping footsteps that spoke of an approaching stampede.

Erick sat up and found Luther standing with a heavy blunt mace drawn and held in front of his body.

Erick stood up and crept quietly over to his pack to draw his short sword. By then, he’d listened to enough of the growls to know they weren’t dealing with werekin of any breed.

“Ogres?” Erick asked in a voice near a whisper.

“Sounds like it, but I’ve never heard them running around together like this,” Luther said. “They sound upset.”

Erick had faced ogres before, but always in a singular sense. Ogres were tall and thickly built, and their greenish-grey skin was so thick that even a well sharpened sword could have trouble penetrating it. They were some of the simplest creatures in Lissand, but they were also some of the most aggressively solitary inhabitants of the forest. They would attack or pursue anything which they saw as a threat to their territory, even other ogres. The only point when they made an exception was during their brief mating seasons.

Erick was about to make a glib comment about the absurdity of an ogre stampede when the wind shifted, and he picked up the scent of the ogres. They had an earthy, unwashed musk, and mingled with their scent was the putrid stench of fear.

The small hairs on the back of Erick’s neck rose, and his skin felt too cold. He glanced up in the tree to see if Ilaria and Darryl were awake. Both were perched on branches, their heads pointed toward the loudest collection of growls coming from the east.

Erick wanted to ask if the ogres were following their party when the first wave of the stampede crashed into sight.

The ogres didn’t slow down or look at Erick or Luther, and they both watched as the ogres trampled down brush and saplings.

None of the frightened beasts ran close enough to cause either the elf or the half-orc to worry for their own safety. Nevertheless, both fighters wore anxious expressions for the bizarre behavior of the hulking creatures.

Erick’s worried look became alarm when he saw a pool of shadow form in front of an ogre. The beast stepped into the pool, and it splashed, raising thin walls of pitch-black liquid into the air.

The barrier continued to rise and expand, and though the ogre tried to press through the opaque bubble as it was forming, the wall would not yield. A split second later, the liquid became a closed sphere and compressed down around the flailing body inside.

Bulges poked the surface, the outlines detailing a struggle inside the bubble as punches were thrown. Elbows and knees were jammed against the interior, but nothing the ogre did could prevent the sphere from collapsing.

The struggling ceased, and when the shadows melted away, Erick gasped at the blood covered skeleton left behind.

Instead of staring at the body, he forced himself to look for the stream of living shadow, and his pulse quickened when he found the fluid moving in a straight line toward him.

It formed into a circular pool and then bulged up from the ground. The dome at the top thinned as the column rose, and tendrils snaked out of the sides near the top. The tendrils took on the more familiar form of arms, and the dome condensed into a bald head. The black shadows began to lose their oily appearance, and the “skin” around the head and neck drained of color until it was pure white.

Erick’s eyes flicked down to the creature’s freakishly long hands, and he found that they too had changed to a white color. The rest of the body was still black, and looked like a long ceremonial silk robe instead of a liquid.

Erick swallowed thickly, his mouth feeling dry once he recognized that he was standing in the presence of a wyrm.

The eyelids of the wyrm were still closed when Erick looked up again, but the slack expression had been replaced with a look of serenity. A faint smile turned up the corners of his mouth, a smile which grew as he opened his pitch black eyes to look at Erick.

Erick had an odd thought then that he and Dimitri were almost mirror opposites in terms of their appearance. Though there were few wrinkles in his marbled face, Dimitri looked old, where Erick’s black face was still full of a youthful quality. Dimitri’s eyes were pits of deep black, and Erick’s eyes were pure white.

But the comparison was not entirely apt, because Erick and Dimitri both wore black clothing. This final observation caused Erick to think, So, which one of us is supposed to be the evil one?

Erick had the feeling that the wyrm was waiting for him to speak, and he whispered, “Dimitri.”

“Erick,” Dimitri said in almost as quiet a voice while he leaned over in a courtly bow. “It is an odd coincidence that you should cross my path on the very night of my release, and another coincidence that we should meet again. You have caught me rustling up something to eat.” He pointed away toward the roaring ogres in the distance. “I’ll just finish up my meal and be right back.”

Before Erick could respond, the wyrm melted away, and the pool of shadow was absorbed into the ground.

Over the next half hour, the forest was filled with the roars of ogres who were chased in circles until every last beast had been consumed. When the last beast fell silent, the forest was too quiet. Even the insects were frightened into muteness.

Darryl and Ilaria had both dropped from the tree, but neither made suggestions of leaving or preparing for an attack. Instead, they listened to the ogres dying while they stared at Erick with confounded expressions.

Dimitri chose to walk back to the camp, making noise that had to be intentional. He wanted the group to know he was coming, because he wanted to know how they would react.

He stepped out of the shadow of the tree the horses were tied to, frightening three of the horses enough to send them into panicked whinnying. Only Luther’s stallion didn’t make a sound, though clearly, even he was spooked. He dropped his head and yanked hard against his rope harness, trying to back away from the wyrm.

Dimitri turned his attention to the stallion. “Such a beautiful nightmare.” Offering the half-orc a confident, closed mouth smile, Dimitri asked, “How did you manage to tame him?”

“Apples,” Luther said, shifting his weight from one leg to the other while he set down his mace slowly. “It took me two years of feeding him before he would let me try to ride him.”

“Yes, and another six mending from your attempts,” Dimitri said. He patted the side of the stallion’s broad neck, which caused the animal to settle down immediately. The wyrm put a finger to his lips, making a shushing noise which calmed the other horses as well. “Tell me, Darryl, how is Queen Karin?”

“She’s gone.” Darryl coughed, raising his voice just slightly above a whisper. “She died four hundred and thirty-eight years ago.”

“Natural causes, of course,” Dimitri said.

“Yes,” Darryl said.

Dimitri nodded and stepped away from the horses. His footfalls made no sounds, and he seemed to glide in his collared robe. His slow steps were out of phase with his pace, and he was clearly putting on an act.

He stopped in front of Erick and Luther, and he had only of few centimeters of height over the half-orc. But then, his height was an illusion. The wyrm could be whatever height he wanted.

Erick set down his sword, and the wyrm knelt to pick up the weapon by the blade. He offered the hilt to Erick. “You don’t need to lower your weapons. I know your thoughts, and you pose no threat to me.”

“You didn’t turn any of those ogres, did you?” Erick asked.

“No, I’ve got plenty of time to find something better to raise children through. I wouldn’t normally gorge. But spending that much time without eating, I’d declared that on the day I got out, I was going to find the foulest, nastiest creature who I would shun from eating on my best day, and I was going to feast like they were tender virgin dragons. And fortunately for me, this forest is full of ogres, which are the next best thing.”

“What’s the nastiest thing to eat?” Erick asked.

“An addler, but I couldn’t find one.”

Erick laughed and shook his head. “You took that from me.”

Dimitri grinned, exposing two rows of pointed white teeth. “No, you misunderstand. All that perfume and silver jewelry gives me indigestion. They’re the worst thing I could possibly eat. Ogres are only slightly less nasty.”

Luther cleared his throat. “Dimitri, might I ask what you want?”

“Well, funny thing, that. My prison was weakening, and I knew that I was facing my very last day of confinement. I was asking myself what I wanted to do when I got out, and along comes this child who charges me with a mission from the king.” Dimitri looked back to Erick with an apologetic smile. “Please, don’t take offense. Even Ilaria is a child compared to me.”

“You came to serve me?” Erick asked.

“To serve as your tutor, yes. You’re of the proper age to begin learning magic, aren’t you?”

“Yes, but I think my father wanted me to study under Ilaria.”

Dimitri nodded. “Yes, that was the plan, and Ilaria is a fine mage. However, you don’t want to learn from her by using scrolls.”

Erick glanced at Ilaria with a questioning expression. The offer was tempting, to learn magic without resorting to reading more scrolls.

But Ilaria’s worried look didn’t offer any answers.

Erick said, “You wouldn’t take me anywhere private for my lessons, would you?”

A soft laugh rippled out of Dimitri. “Only the privacy of your own mind.”

Erick saw Ilaria’s face fill with concern then, and at the same time Dimitri laid his hand on Erick’s shoulder. “Of course, before you could lower your guard for me to enter your mind, you will need to trust me. I don’t have your trust now, but if I took on Finrod’s assignment with you, that would go a long way to convincing you, wouldn’t it?”

“Erick, maybe you should...” Darryl trailed off, frowning to himself as he read Erick’s thoughts.

“You will need me,” Dimitri said. “Even after you’ve found the dwarfs, you will still have a difficult hunt ahead of you. I can travel at night to track the werekin children, and I can guide you to them as well as to any of their surviving victims to be tagged.”

“We wouldn’t tag them,” Darryl said.

Erick’s brow crinkled with confusion. “Why not? We can’t let them roam free.”

“No, he means that they plan to kill any cursed orcs,” Dimitri said.

“Yes,” Darryl said. “We can’t allow the druids to pass the curse on to any other races, since werekin tend to mate only with their own base races,” Darryl said. “Even a few cursed orcs could begin developing into a population of orc werebeasts. Can you imagine how hard those would be to control, let alone to tag?”

“But...but if that’s the way things work out, it’s the way things are meant to be,” Erick insisted. “Isn’t that what my mentors are always saying?”

“Normally, that’s true,” Ilaria said. “But under certain circumstances, the risk to a native population is too great. The orc population has to be protected from the werekin curse, so we have to cull any cursed orcs we find. That’s just the way things are, Erick.”

“That is the king’s assignment,” Dimitri said. “Whether you agree with it or not, you must fulfill this obligation. I will help you, and then I will give you what you want.”

Erick narrowed his eyes, unable to hide his nervousness. Dimitri was putting on an act, but the offer he made seemed genuine.

Dimitri could tell him the truth about why he had been trapped inside the tree. As a telepath, he could also send his experience with magic directly into Erick’s mind. The result would be akin to gaining instantaneous experience in all facets of shadow magic.

All it required was allowing an ancient devourer of life to enter freely into his mind.

Erick thought, The deal has got to be rigged.

Dimitri laughed and nodded. “Of course the deal is rigged. I will gain something out of the deal, but it’s always up to you to accept my teachings in the first place. By the same token, it’s up to you, Erick, if I will help you in completing Finrod’s assignment. You asked me to help, and so you alone have the authority to send me away.”

Erick needed only a few seconds more to make a decision. “All right, I’ll accept your help for now.” He smiled weakly. “But if you’re accepting commands from me, I think I speak for all of us...can you take your meals a little farther away from us while we’re camping for the night?”