It was torturous to hold myself back from opening the books until we arrived in Waymark, but I was a Scriber, and Illias had taught me well. A week of waiting was nothing compared to centuries of history, and every text had to be handled with care until they could be preserved and recopied at the Academy.
We entered the village just before noon. It was deserted, as expected, and the fire at the Prince’s Rest had claimed every building on the east side of the road. I had no particular fondness for the place—it had always been a hiding spot, not a home—but it was upsetting to see it so reduced, nothing left but ash and empty houses.
The fireleaf in the center of town still stood, untouched by the fire; the ground around it was an unbroken carpet of flame-red. Not a single leaf remained in the boughs of the tree, and for once, I was able to approach a fireleaf and hear no hissing voices calling for vengeance. It was not a comfort—I understood too little about the nature of the Burnt and their relationship with the fireleafs for the change to be anything but foreboding.
My little cottage with its roughly made Scriber’s shingle was unburned, as I had hoped, and everything I had not been able to carry with me when I left was still there: quills and ink and parchment, a lantern and dozens of candles, and most importantly, my solid oak reading desk.
The women unloaded saddlebags full of ancient texts, stacking them carefully beside the desk. Between Bryndine, Sylla, Orya, and myself we had managed to carry much of the contents of that single chest from the cave: sixteen books, all of them written in Old Elovian. With my limited knowledge of the language, I could tell that they were all works concerning the Sages and the Wyddin, but delving deeper would be difficult.
When the books had been unpacked, Bryndine came to inform me of the plan. “We can spare the rest of the day here, Scriber Dennon, and we will stay the night. Tenille needs the rest; the ride was hard on her. We leave in the morning. Will that suffice?”
“I would prefer more time,” I said. “Deciphering Old Elovian is not an easy thing.”
“I understand, but we need to report anything you find to the King as soon as possible. You will have more time when we arrive.”
I spread my hands. “I will do what I can then. See that I’m not disturbed. And tell Wynne I may call for her later—I’ve been teaching her something of Elovian, and I may need an assistant for the translation.”
She nodded and left quietly, closing the door behind her.
Opening Fyrril’s journal for the first time after a week of waiting—after a lifetime of waiting, really—was among the most thrilling experiences of my life. It held the same wonder as reading my first words, as having Illias attach the pin to my collar at my graduation. It was the realization of a dream I had held since I was a boy. The true events of the Forgetting had been lost for five hundred years, and this was perhaps the only accounting of them left in the world. I would be the first man in centuries to know what had truly happened.
Some of the story was familiar, mirroring events I had lived through in the last few months: the beginning of the rebel attacks, assaults on small villages with no warning and no trace left behind; the panic of the people; the vain attempts of the Army to put a stop to it. But most of it was new, tales of figures whose lives had been all but forgotten.
Fyrril wrote of his father, a kind man and a good king who he loved dearly, whose apparent descent into madness broke his son’s heart—a very different Ullyd from the reviled man history remembered. He wrote of his younger brother Oryn, so desperate for his father’s approval that he supported the Forgetting and was named heir in Fyrril’s place. And he wrote of his closest friend, Adello, whose loyalty never faltered, who dared to remain in the King’s court, acting as a spy and informer after the Prince rebelled. The bard must have suffered greatly—if he had heard the voices that surrounded the ensorcelled as clearly as I did, every day in the capital would have been torture.
The journal outlined Fyrril’s ill-fated rebellion from beginning to end. After Ullyd was wounded in battle with the rebels, he changed, becoming fearful of the written word. He gathered the support of the Children in his crusade against Elovian knowledge, blaming it for the rebel attacks. The people followed their King in this, burning books and murdering scholars. Finally, Fyrril felt he had no other choice; he rescued as much of the Archives as he could, and turned against the King.
Fyrril began his rebellion with the strongly held hope that he could still save his father and the Kingsland from the rebels’ sorcery, but as his men died and his city was besieged, as more and more people turned against him, the Prince fell into despair. He blamed every loss and every death on his own inadequacy, his failure to find some cure for his father. As I read, I was struck by a desire to somehow speak with this man across the years that separated us, to tell him that it was not his fault, that he had done more than anyone could have asked.
Two pages were missing, the ones we had found, left as marks along his path. The entries surrounding those more clearly outlined the Prince’s plan. Knowing he could not win, he had decided to at least preserve some record of the truth, so that others might eventually learn what had really happened, and perhaps fight back against his father. He sent a last message to Adello, telling of his destination in the Salt Mountains, where he planned to hide the books. He implored the minstrel to work clues into his songs for those who might someday follow Fyrril’s trail. And then, with three hundred of his most loyal men, he abandoned Ryndport and left for the mountains, though the guilt of doing so nearly broke him.
Finally, I came to the last pages of the journal, the record of his last days in the Salt Mountains:
I have been a fool.
So many months wasted searching tomes for information on sorcery. It was never sorcery that gripped my father. It was not the work of men wielding some forgotten power. It was the Wyddin themselves. The voices Adello hears are theirs, crying for vengeance. How many times have I read those pages and missed what was right in front of me?
It is too late now for me to take this knowledge to the capital, to turn this battle back in my favor. I have lost. Too many have been possessed by the tree spirits already. But there is one final path open to me.
The fireleaf trees are their weakness. That is what they have been trying to hide; the Elovians knew, so their words had to be destroyed. When the trees burn, the Wyddin burn with them.
I have three hundred men left with me, perhaps two hundred more scattered among the baronies. When the books have been safely hidden, I will leave this journal for whoever may find it, and we will return to the Kingsland to burn every fireleaf we can. The Army will hunt us; the Wyddin will find us. We will be taken, and tortured, and killed. But we may destroy enough of the trees to free the kingdom. I do not expect to survive, but so many have died for me already. Why should I live when they do not?
May the Mother and the Father forgive me for failing my people so completely.
I turned the page, but there was no more; it was the last entry.
The Wyddin
.
It was an impossible thought, and a terrifying one, but I immediately believed it. Really, it was only a small step from what we had already concluded. The failing crops, the earth tremors and lightning, all of it could be explained by the power of the Wyddin over Sky and Earth. They had sent the snowcats after us, and the Wyddin were said to be able to possess and command animals. I had assumed all of these tricks were sorcery, the sort the Sages might have used, but if it could be sorcery, why not the
source
of sorcery?
Fyrril’s journal did not answer all of my questions, though. Why would the Wyddin attack us? Certainly tales existed of their jealousy towards mankind, but why here, why now? And no stories told of the Wyddin possessing humans, or driving them mad. No stories explained what was happening to me. The answers, if there were any, had to lie in the books Fyrril had left behind.
When I opened the door to summon her, I found Wynne already waiting outside. I ushered her inside and summarized what I had read, handing her Fyrril’s journal so she could read the final entry herself.
When she was done, she looked up at me with wide, sad eyes. “What do you think happened to them, Scriber Dennon?”
I could not say for certain, but I made an educated guess. “The Forgetting lasted for almost two hundred years after Fyrril wrote this, which means Prince Oryn inherited the throne from Ullyd. As much as I wish I could say otherwise, Fyrril and his men must have been captured, executed as traitors.” It was the only thing that made sense, considering that nearly all record of the poor, brave Prince and his doomed rebellion had been wiped from history.
“But no one has heard from the Wyddin for five hundred years. They’re supposed to just be legends. The Prince must have burned enough trees to stop them.”
“Yes. But he likely died to do it.” The thought made me want to weep. The heroism of the Prince and his men should have been the stuff of legend; instead they had been killed and forgotten. “I mean to find everything I can about the Wyddin so that we can stop them again—hopefully without dying ourselves. I need your help.”
Wynne nodded, her green eyes sparkling like emeralds at the idea of reading such valuable books. I imagined that my own eyes had looked much the same to Illias the first time he had let me open one of the old tomes from Delwyn’s Hall. It was that more than anything that prompted my next question.
“Wynne, you wanted to be a Scriber at one time, didn’t you?”
She blinked. “I… of course, but I couldn’t afford… They didn’t let me in.”
“I could speak to Illias. He would sponsor you if I asked.”
“You would do that?” Her eyes showed disbelief, but the corners of her mouth were already twitching upwards into a euphoric smile.
“Why not? You’d make a better Scriber than—”
Before I could even finish the sentence, she rushed forward and grabbed me in a tight embrace. “Thank you, Scriber Dennon!”
Instantly embarrassed, I pried myself from her grasp. “Well, don’t get too excited,” I said gruffly. “I’ll have to see what kind of work you do tonight.”
“I won’t disappoint you,” she said. There were actually tears in her eyes, which only made me more uncomfortable.
“Get to work, then,” I said, shoving a book into her hands and gesturing to my work table. “Look for any words or phrases that might be relevant and bookmark the pages. I’ll look through when I am done with this one.”
We did not sleep that night. By lantern light, and by candlelight when the lantern ran dry, we scoured the books for information, making whatever sense of them we could. As the hours passed, I filled sheet after sheet of paper with scribbled notes and thoughts, littering my desk with hastily written translations of arcane Elovian passages. Though Wynne knew even less of the language than I did, her help was invaluable; she had an eye for important passages, and never forgot what page a certain phrase lay on, or whether we had seen a certain combination of words in another book.
I understood very little of what we found. In one tome, there was a reference to some sort of Wyddin elders granting the Sages power by teaching them to, roughly, “open their spirits” to something interchangeably referred to as the
Wyd
—a word I was not familiar with—and the “world-voice”. This world-voice may have been related to the voices I heard, the ones that had killed Josia, but the book mentioned no danger in it, which was very much at odds with everything I had experienced. I had hoped for more information, something that might explain how I had stopped the snow outside Fyrril’s cave, but the rest was simply too complex to translate.
Comparing and cross-referencing a number of the remaining tomes, we were able to decipher certain basic facts about the Wyddin. They were born of trees that the books called
threlea
—“birthtrees” by my best translation—and were tied to these trees. Each leaf was a spirit, and when they were mature the Wyddin often left their trees, causing the leaves to fall and then bud anew when the Wyddin returned. These had to be the fireleaf trees, though the writings made no mention of color, and I was left to wonder what it meant that the fireleafs in the First Forest grew green instead of red.
The books also told of their ability to possess other forms, but exactly
which
forms was not entirely clear. Only animals were mentioned specifically. One text claimed that the Wyddin did not gain the instincts or memories of the animals they possessed. If that same rule applied to human possession, it explained why they fought so awkwardly, and why Uran Ord had forgotten his cousin and his men. It also suggested that Josia had
not
been possessed—she had clearly remembered everything. No, she must have been like me, plagued by pain and voices until they drove her mad. I could not say which fate horrified me more.
Further on, though, the text indicated that the Wyddin could only take the bodies of the
revaen
, which roughly translated to something like “not awake” or “lacking awareness”. I did not truly understand the term, but there was no mention of the Wyddin entering anything other than animals and plants, so I took it to mean that they could not possess thinking creatures. The Burnt, though, could clearly take human bodies. If they and the Wyddin were one and the same, they must have found a way to overcome that obstacle.
It was Wynne who found the phrase that truly convinced me this was the case.
“Scriber Dennon, look at this,” she said, holding a huge, yellowed tome open for me.
“What is it?”
“We’ve noticed the Burnt don’t seem to bleed properly, yes? Isn’t this the word for blood?” She pointed to a paragraph midway down the page.
I perused the words carefully; it was a passage concerning animals possessed by the Wyddin. And there, right where Wynne pointed, was a short sentence that made me tremble as I read it.