With Tesla Dart leading the way, the little company set off south in search of Crace Coram and Oriantha. They kept an eye out for the missing Pleysia, as well, thinking they might at least cross her trail. But they lacked a true Tracker to read whatever sign had been left, and while they searched diligently they found no trace of her passing. The country remained barren and wasted, a combination of hardpan and scrub interspersed with groves of withered trees and patches of swamp. At times, they skirted fissures in the ground that disappeared into darkness and stretches of broken rock that looked to have been pushed up through the earth in cataclysmic upheavals. There were no signs of life save for things distant and indistinct that the Ulk Bog mostly ignored.
That changed when, several hours into their march, he brought them to a hurried halt and ordered them all to crouch down and remain perfectly still. Redden peered out from the cover of the broken rise behind which they all hid and watched a swarm of creatures with cat faces and sleek, supple bodies lope across the plains west, dozens moving together in an undulating mass. Separately, they seemed small and vulnerable. But as a pack they had a dangerous look to them.
When the boy asked Tesla Dart afterward what they were, he smiled his toothy smile and said, “Furies.”
They spied many other creatures after that: ogres, Goblins, Wights, Harpies, and things that Redden had never even heard mentioned before. Everything seemed to be hunting, and none of them seemed too particular about what they found. Some scoured the land alone and some did so in packs. Now and then, the company came upon hunters absorbed in eating prey they had caught. Twice, they watched killings take place. Much of their traveling time was spent hiding in plain sight, crouching down and not moving until the danger was past. All of it was vaguely surreal, backdropped by a setting in which everything already seemed half dead and flattened by a sky that was hazy and dark and pressed down upon the earth like an anvil. The stench of death was everywhere, animal and vegetable alike—the world a giant cairn in which everything born into it was already on its way to dying.
As he walked through this grim wilderness, Redden found himself repeating the same words over and over.
I just want to get out of here. I just want to go home.
“They are called the Jarka Ruus, but the meaning for them is not the same as it is for us,” Khyber offered at one point while they were walking together. Tesla Dart had scurried on ahead and was out of hearing. “Jarka Ruus for them means ‘the free peoples.’ For us, as recorded in the Druid Histories, it means ‘the banished peoples.’ They have never accepted that they are anything but creatures tragically wronged by us, put here in this prison of magic for no reason other than being different. Grianne told me of this when she returned. She said no one would ever be able to persuade them otherwise.”
“How did she manage to survive this place?” he asked her.
She shook her head. “She wouldn’t talk of it.”
“I wouldn’t, either, I guess.”
“She was aided by Weka Dart after she was taken prisoner by the Straken Lord. He helped her get free and find a way back to where she had come into the Forbidding. He probably saved her life by doing so. I seem to remember that he wanted her to do something for him in return, but I don’t know what it was. In the end, she left him behind and returned with your grandfather, then took Paranor back from Shadea a’Ru and the rebel Druids who had aided her in seizing control.”
“And then she disappeared,” he finished.