"What the Root Keeps"

Tom's hands moved before his mind caught them.

He fumbled the oilcloth packet out from under his shirt — wax-sealed, blood-warm, light as a folded letter and heavy as the weight of every man drowned with the Wren. He scraped a hollow at the base of the buttress root with his fingers, working in the soft loam where the tree's wood went black and wet. He pressed the packet in. Covered it with leaf-mould and a flat stone the size of his palm. He fixed the place in his mind: the third great root, north face, the tree with the bone-white scar where lightning had once kissed it.

Marrow's eyes were on him. The captain understood. A long slow blink — approval, or absolution, Tom could not tell which.

Then Tom was lifting him again, and they were crashing into the green.

He did not look back. He heard the hunter's pace quicken behind, heard the soft whick of a blade clearing leaves. The mist would be on them in a heartbeat. Tom plunged downhill, blind, into a fold of land where ferns grew waist-high and the air smelled of wet iron.

His foot found nothing.

They fell.

It was not a long fall — six feet, perhaps eight — but they came down hard on a mat of rotted palm-fronds in a hollow Tom had not seen. The fronds gave under them. Tom rolled. Marrow did not. The captain lay on his side, breathing in short shallow tugs, and his eyes had gone past Tom now to something farther off.

Above them, the hunter's footsteps stopped. He was listening.

Below them — Tom only now understood — the ground was hollow. A wooden trapdoor, half-rotted. A pit beneath.