Chương 17: Serpents

Exploding out of the water, a massive red head with teeth more like swords than knives crushed the canoe behind her. She felt one impossibly sharp tooth slice through one calf as she kneeled in the middle of the boat. It loomed high out of the water, at least half again the size of Eoin's sea serpent and its eyes were dark and menacing - no friendly blue glow.

Miriam scrambled toward the prow of a canoe that was very quickly capsizing, swinging her oar wildly, trying her best to stay out of the water for as long as possible. The red serpent spat out the remnants of her canoe and pulled back for what she was certain would be a final strike. Eoin's serpent latched its jaws onto the red one's neck in a spasm of speed, teeth savaging the crimson scales mercilessly. The red serpent roared in pain, trading bites with the smaller monster.

Quickly Miriam realized her predicament - with its head out of the water, the blue serpent's eyes were fading back to their normal, unfeeling black. By preventing the red serpent's attack Eoin had given up his control of the serpent - at least while it was out of the water. The blue serpent looked confused and in pain - Miriam guessed she had seconds left before it figured out how much danger it was in and bolted, leaving the red monster to finish its attack.

Even if Eoin regained control once the smaller beast was back in the water that would give Red more than enough time to finish Miriam off. Not to mention her canoe was all but flotsam now. She decided to do something stupid and brave. Although, when the alternative was death, maybe being stupid wasn't so brave after all. Miriam clawed her hands into the remnants of the canoe and leaped, pushing it deeper into the sea.

She brought with her two chunks of canoe wood that had come off in her hands like wet paper, and she molded them into spikes with a thought, danger leaving no room for doubt or analysis. She landed roughly on an exposed coil of red serpent and dug in her wooden stakes. One shattered instantly against the hard scales but the other bit in deep - barely enough for the serpent to feel it, but enough for Miriam to hold onto as she mounted this giant snake.

Her feet lacerated by the sharp scales, she bounded up the fins with a grace she had not had the opportunity to experience in this new body, but was certainly welcome at a time like this. She was running out of momentum though - she was losing traction as the serpent's neck grew steeper, and its body writhed underneath her, making footing nearly impossible. Miriam decided to go for broke and with her last sure foothold leapt towards the red serpent's face.

Its mouth snaked forward to snatch her up, but at that moment the blue monster spent the last of Eoin's control to renew its bite, just below the red creature's jaw. The red serpent recoiled, giving Miriam her only opening. She grabbed her right hand into its gaping maw, impaling her palm with a razor-sharp tooth. In the space of her next breath she filled its mouth with foul water, rotting vines and reeking Blight.

The red serpent shrieked and threw her off, slicing clean out from her palm, neatly bisecting her hand. The thrashing of his head was powerful and she was flung hard, crashing into the water twenty feet away. In agony and with a sinking heart Miriam realized it had been far too little. The red beast hacked up her fórsa manifestations and turned a furious eye back to Miriam. The blue serpent was nowhere to be seen, other than a floating trail of blood that was already dissipating into the sea. A breath only.

That's how long Miriam's extended life had left. In that last breath she could have sworn she heard a folk song. A small, lithe woman was suddenly dancing on the serpent's body. In one hand she held a cutlass and in the other a glowing blue dagger made of fórsa. Her arms were a windmill of movement and blood erupted everywhere this woman moved. The red serpent coiled to impale her on its teeth but she had already slipped away, as if these were steps to a dance she and the serpent had practiced many times.

The serpent's head splashed into the water. Miriam could only watch, agape, as the woman turned casually, still standing on a floating serpent carcass under a rain of blood from the still-writhing neck. Not even out of breath, the woman smiled at her. She was slim and shorter than Miriam by an inch or two. A billowy white shirt was cinched tight over loose burgundy pants which ended just below the knee.

Like Miriam she was barefoot, and an intricately patterned silk scarf around her neck, flowing like a ribbon on a kite, was the only other scrap of color. Her hair was platinum silver. Miriam had a sense of genuine friendliness, but one that was only there because this woman could handle any alternative you might try to offer. A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"Róise Séarlait, at your service. How in hell did you end up out here?" ✧✧✧ Interlude 1 Almost sixty years before the dryad Miriam Callihan was lured to the world of the Tír, the human Miriam Callihan ran away from home. That's how her father would have described it anyway. She described it as "finally getting the hell out of Willowcrest."

At twenty-two Miriam was the most stunning woman in the town to be as-yet unmarried, and she had long tired of long-winded proposals, long-faced recipients of rejections and long shots of finding anything worth a damn to do with her life. All her closest friends were wives and mothers, and even the lumberyard was becoming more and more unfriendly as the prevailing question became "what are you still doing here?"

Her twenty-second birthday came and she spent it with those friends who could take the time out of their increasingly busy lives to celebrate with her and her family: her siblings and her father, the only one of her parents still alive. Drinks were flowing freely and she plied all her guests with cakes and roast ham until the majority of them slept where they had collapsed, on the floor of Willow House.

The next morning Miriam was gone, left well before dawn with a single horse and what remained of her savings from all those years at the lumberyard. A letter had been propped up on the fireplace mantle assuring her family that she was fine and not to look for her. She was headed off on an adventure. Her first day on the road was simply riding west to the closest town, then doubling back north along a forest trail.

Her father didn't have the local renown that Rory Callihan had, but no one doubted that his tracking skills were almost superhuman. Where Rory had put his passion into lumber and craftsmanship, his son had put into hunting. When she reached a village to the north, she sold her horse, then trekked on foot back through a river to the first town she had stopped in. There she hired a wagon to take her east, and she hid among hay bales as it trundled through Willowcrest. From there she felt she could finally relax.

She lounged in the back of the hay cart, ignoring the itch of the straw, and watched the clouds go by, wondering where those clouds would see her next. The world was open to her. In planning her great adventure, she'd had several options. She could head out into the uncharted west, the way Rory Callihan had to found Willowcrest, but that didn't speak to her. She had no interest in legacy or building something out of nothing.

Civilization was moving west at a breakneck pace, and it seemed all the settlers she had ever known were more than eager to leave the calcified East to those not brave enough to test themselves against the wilderness. For Miriam, she'd known the wilds all her life, and though it seemed to get less and less wild every year, she yearned for something different. It was likely a sign of how less wild the region had become that she reached the small city of Haresgarten without a single issue.

No bandits waylaid her and she never got lost. To be honest she was becoming a little bored - she had expected her first trip out of Willowcrest to be a bit more fraught. Haresgarten was the biggest city she'd ever been to, but she was educated enough to know it was still tiny by most standards of the world. Its major claim to prosperity were its lake ports, where it was a central hub of trade from all parts of the Great Lake region, riverboats and lake skimmers clogging the near water as far as the eye could see.

As she hopped out of her latest hay cart, though, there was clearly something unusual happening. The cart's last point of call was a dock nestled in the center of the yards, but a huge crowd of people seemed to be congregating on one a hundred yards away. A loud wave of noise came from excited onlookers, and it didn't take more than a slight craning of her head to see why.

"What is that?" she asked breathlessly. Sitting a few hundred yards out into the lake was the most massive man-made object Miriam had ever seen. It was a sailing ship, but comparing it to the riverboats and skimmers she had seen all her life would be like saying a kitten was akin to a mountain lion. It was a giant beast made of dark wood, and above the deck hung a dizzying array of ropes, lines and sheeting. On the prow a very serene carving of a lady in prayer rested only slightly above the water.

And every inch of the monstrosity was teeming with people.

"They finally finished the ocean lock they'e been building for the last decade," a wizened old man said, standing back from the crowd.

"That's the first of the ocean ships to come through, straight from the Andol sea. Aww, people are in a tizzy now, but in no time this lake'll be choked with 'em. Change is coming to the Great Lake, and none of it for the better if you ask me." Miriam's eye spotted a large longboat lurching its way from the great ship, crewed with ten men rowing, a huddle of more in the back, and one standing proudly at the front, one foot up on the side.

Miriam had gotten lucky enough to arrive just as the first ocean-goers had arrived. Her eyes flitted back to the ship and she could just make out its name. The Isabella. She grinned and bit her lip more lustfully than any boy in Willowcrest had ever managed to see. Miriam had found her first adventure. She was going to find a way onto that ship.