Chapter 33: The Smallest Thing in the Forest

It sat at the edge of a muddy pool, three feet tall, fat and green and glistening, with a throat that swelled and shrank like a bellows.

Fel stood behind a tree and stared at it.

It was a frog. It was only a frog. It had a wide, flat, comfortable face, a pair of golden eyes the size of saucers, and warty skin the color of old copper turning to jade along its back. It was sitting in the sun, doing nothing at all, with the placid, meaty air of an animal that had never been afraid of anything. It was also, by a distance of several miles, the smallest thing Fel had seen all day.

“I’m sorry,” he said, under his breath. “I’m really sorry.”

His stomach answered for him, with a long, loud, miserable growl.

He studied it the way Orcus had taught him to study a joint of beef. Where to cut. Where it would bleed. A frog was mostly legs, wasn’t it? Big legs. Meat on legs. He could cook those. If he could find a way to make a fire. He would worry about that later. First he had to catch it.

He moved.

He went around the pool in a wide arc, keeping the trees between him and the frog, and every step was a negotiation with his body. His thigh screamed. His ribs ground. He placed his feet like a thief, heel and toe, and the frog went on sitting in the sun, throat pulsing, one golden eye half-closed. He came up behind it. He drew Krashing Fyr, as slow and quiet as a breath.

Hook. Haul. Gut.

He lunged.

The frog was not there.

It was the strangest sensation he had ever had. The saber’s edge came down exactly where the frog’s back had been, and there was a sound like a boot sliding on wet soap, and the blade skidded off a hide so slick that it might as well have been polished glass. The sword went skating across the green, and Fel with it, and he hit the mud on his hands and knees. The frog gave a deep, offended brrrrup, gathered its legs, and hopped.

It cleared the pool in one bound.

“Oh, you bastard,” said Fel.

He ran.

It was not a plan. It was not strategy. It was the kind of thing a starving boy does in the middle of a jungle when his dinner jumps away, and in any other state he would have stopped. But he was too hungry, and too stubborn, and too tired of being the one who was always chased. He ran through the ferns, over a root, down a bank, and the frog hopped ahead of him in great lazy arcs, glistening, unhurried, always just out of reach.

“Stand still!”

Brrrup. Hop.

“I’m trying to eat you!”

Hop.

He did not know how long it lasted. A minute. Ten. The forest flew past in a blur of green. His wound had torn open again, and he could feel the blood running warm down his leg, and he did not care. The frog led him around a boulder and through a screen of hanging vines and down into a narrow gully with walls of red stone, and there, finally, in a wide flat place at the gully’s end, it stopped.

Fel stopped too, gasping, hands on his knees.

Got you.

He straightened.

The frog was sitting in the middle of the clearing, looking at him calmly. And around it, in a loose half-circle, sat four more.

They were not alike. That was the first thing he noticed. The nearest was the size of a wagon, a great swollen thing the color of a bruise, purple fading to yellow, with a throat sac as big as a barrel. Beside it sat a lean, long-legged, stilt-limbed creature in blazing orange, like a beetle with a frog’s face. A little further off, a pale blue one with white freckles hunched in the mud with its eyes half-shut. And last, resting on top of the biggest one’s head like a crown, sat a tiny, brilliant, poison-bright green frog no larger than his fist.

They were all looking at him.

Every one of them. Eight eyes, ten, twelve. The golden eyes of the first frog, the red eyes of the purple one, the black eyes of the blue. Not one of them blinked.

The silence went on.

“Right,” said Fel. “I’m going to turn around now.”

He turned around.

The orange frog’s mouth opened, and something came out of it.

It was not a tongue, not as Fel had known tongues. It was a rope, a pink, wet, supple rope, thicker than his thumb and perhaps twenty feet long, and it flew across the clearing faster than he could have followed with his eyes. It struck him on the side of the throat and wrapped.

He felt it close. It went round his neck once, twice, three times, in a series of tight, slick, sucking coils, and then it began to pull.

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“Gk,” said Fel.

He clawed at it with both hands. His fingers slid off. It was slick as an eel and strong as a belt of iron, and every heartbeat, it contracted a little more. The pressure rose behind his eyes. The edges of the clearing began to darken and go red. He could hear his own blood roaring.

Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Cut it.

He swung Falling Star.

It was the wrong angle. He knew it as soon as he did it. The black blade whipped through the air and found nothing, and the tongue, which seemed to flicker in and out of his sight, slid just beyond the edge. He could not see it. The coils were pink against the pink of his own face, and the world was swimming, and every time he tried to hook his blade under the tendril, it slipped away.

He swung again. His feet went out from under him.

He hit the ground on his back so hard that the breath left his lungs in a gasp, and the tongue hauled, and he began to slide.

It was dragging him. Along the red earth, over the stones, through the mud, toward the half-circle of waiting frogs. The purple one had opened its mouth. It was wide and soft and pink, rimmed with a double row of tiny curved teeth, and the huge yellow-green throat behind it pulsed with an unmistakable anticipation. The orange frog was still reeling him in, hand over hand, as if he were a fish. The blue one had opened one eye.

I am going to be eaten by a frog, Fel thought, with an odd, light, drifting calm. After everything. After the Gallows and the Sanctum and the mirror boy and the serpent. A frog.

He tried to laugh, and could not.

He tried to stab at the tongue. He drove Falling Star point first into the earth, and the sword gouged a furrow six inches deep and tore out of the ground again. He tried to cut with the golden saber, which he had somehow found again in his other hand, but the blade skated across the slime. His fingers had gone numb. His lips tasted of copper. In the corner of his vision, bright, bright stars were beginning to bloom.

Silence, thought a very small, very practical part of him. You could use it.

He hesitated.

He remembered Karmina. Do not call on it twice in one day. If you must, come to me before the bleeding starts, not after. He remembered the cost: the blood, the ruined nose, the long collapse. He remembered the Hall, the crawling dark, the way his body had shut like a door. He was already hurt. He was already dying. If he called it now, he would pay in a coin he did not have.

The purple frog’s mouth gaped wider.

Or I could be breakfast.

He dragged in the last thin thread of air that his throat would allow, and wrapped both hands around the ruby hilt, and gave it everything he had left.

“Silence,” he rasped.

Nothing happened.

There was no stillness. No hush. The sword in his hand did not stir. The ruby did not pulse. The world went on, sticky and loud and terrible, and the tongue went on pulling, and a frog the size of a wagon went on opening its mouth.

No. Fel stared at the black blade. No, no, no, you said, you said, it’s supposed to…

“Silence!” It came out a croak. “Silence!”

Nothing.

His whole body went cold. Not the cold of the storm, but a cold that came from underneath, from the foundations of him. It had always been there. It had always answered. In the Hall, in the Ossuary, at the bottom of a hundred bad moments, he had said her name and the world had stopped, and now there was only a dead sword in his hand and a pink rope around his neck and the slow, stupid horror of being alone.

He turned his head, and found the golden saber lying half a yard away in the mud.

The light. The light in the Hall. You woke it. You poured yourself in, and it…

He reached for it with the last of his strength, closed his fingers around the guard, and wheezed, in a voice so thin and cracked that it did not even sound like his own:

“Krashing… Fyr…”

It was a squeak.

It was the most pathetic sound he had ever made.

The sword did not glow. It did not hum. It lay in his fist, warm and plain and ordinary, and in the silence that followed, the only answer was the wet, wide, patient breathing of the frog.

The world was narrowing to a pinpoint. He could see the roof of the purple frog’s mouth above him, pink and ridged and glistening, and the tiny backward teeth, and the deep, dark, slow-pulsing throat. He could smell it, swamp and sour, like a cellar full of rotting apples. He was nearly in. His head was nearly in. The tongue had gone slack with satisfaction.

Tori, he thought. Orcus. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.

Vili. Loria. I’m sorry.

His eyes began to close.

And something went by his face.

It was fast. So fast that it did not look like anything at all, only a streak of white light and a rush of air that tugged at his hair and a high, thin, singing whine, like a plucked wire. He heard a sound like a melon splitting. He felt a warm spray across his face, sticky and hot.

The purple frog’s mouth went slack.

It stayed that way, open and wide and silent, for a very long moment, with a long white shaft jutting from the top of its skull. It was an arrow, as straight as a ray of light, fletched with feathers that shimmered green and black. The great round eyes rolled up. The huge body shuddered once and slumped sideways into the mud with the slow, heavy finality of a falling wall.

The tongue went limp.

Fel dragged in a breath so wide that his ribs cracked. He choked, retched, coughed. The coils fell away from his neck and lay on the earth like a dropped rope. The world rushed back in a blaze of green and gold and pain, and through the haze he saw, above the red lip of the gully, a figure.

He could not see her clearly. It was a dream, it was a mirage, a shape in a shimmer of sunlight and mist. But it was enough. She stood on the edge of the stone with a bow drawn in one hand and the sun behind her, and he could see that she was tall, very tall, and that she held herself like something that grew out of the cliff. He saw a spill of pale green hair, the color of sage leaves in the morning. He saw skin of a deep, rich, pale purple, like the inside of a flower. He saw two small black horns curving from her brow, and a pair of eyes that burned with a clear, cold violet fire, like amethysts held to a lamp.

She wore the garb of forest folk, a long, belted tunic and leggings, all of it cut and stitched from leaf and bark and soft pale hide, and it was made so finely, with such care and such quiet art, that it looked like something that ought to be kept in a museum. At her hip hung a cluster of tiny blades, thin and clear as glass. A leather pouch bulged with herbs. A row of little stoppered vials ringed her thighs like a belt of stars. And in her hand was the longest bow he had ever seen: a great pale curve of white bone, smooth as ivory, bent from what looked like the rib of some enormous and unnamed beast.

Elf, he thought, hazily. Not quite an elf.

She looked down at him. Her face was calm, as calm as the sky.

She drew another arrow.

Four more went by his head.

They sang. They tore the air in four bright lines, thwip, thwip, thwip, thwip, and behind him there were four wet, heavy thuds as the blue frog and the orange frog and the lean yellow one and the tiny green king of them all dropped into the mud. Fel heard them fall. He did not see it. His eyes had begun to close, and there was a warm, heavy, wonderful darkness closing in, soft as a blanket.

Thank you, he thought, or tried to say.

The last thing he saw was the figure on the cliff, lowering her bow.

Then there was nothing at all.