He stalked off and sat on the base of a giant tree. It was freezing cold. They still had three more days until they reached Sycomore. And his only companion was the very person who had gotten him into this mess. This was not the adventure that Master Pilzmann had promised him—this was a nightmare.
Something groaned loudly above him, and Barclay stood and whirled around. He saw nothing.
Suddenly his shoulder stung. “Ow,” he said, pulling the fabric of his coat and sweater down to see if his cut had opened up again. The wound looked fine, but the Lufthund in the Mark had stopped its usual prowling across his skin and stilled, as though on alert.
Then Barclay heard the sound again. It reminded him of Master Pilzmann’s snores—deafening and guttural.
“What is that?” Viola asked from several yards away.
“I can’t tell,” Barclay said, his dread rising, his Mark stinging all the worse. They had been walking for so longthat it’d been easy to forget he was in the Woods… and the Woods was deadly.
Suddenly the ground beneath him shook, and roots ruptured the earth. The tree that Barclay had been sitting on bent down low, and he realized the sound he’d heard was its trunk contorting. It twisted and coiled, and the more Barclay stared at it, the more the bark began to look like scales.
The roots withdrew, slithering, and something tremendous burst from the ground, sending a cloud of dirt billowing into the air. Barclay and Viola coughed and stepped back as the roots whipped around and hissed, like a giant tongue.
As the dirt dispersed, two bright amber eyes narrowed at them.
The tree was not a tree at all.
It was a Beast.
EIGHT
In the books Barclay had read from the library, the heroes emerged in times of greatest peril. No villain was too villainous. No monster, too monstrous. For a hero’s heart was ironclad and full of courage.
Barclay screamed at a pitch so high, the crows nestled in the surrounding trees cawed and fled to the sky. He dashed toward Viola and clung to her arm as the Beast came into full view.
It looked like a giant snake, with bark instead of scales and eyes the color of tree sap. Its head, which had been buried in the earth, was caked in dirt and crawling with worms and beetles. It slinked closer to the pair of them.
“We should run,” said Barclay frantically. Running had always been his best and only strategy.
“It’s a Styerwurm, a Prime class. That means it’s—”
The snake stretched open its mouth, so wide that it actually turned its jaw inside out. Barclay stared in fright at its endless expanse of stomach—dark and pink.
“Yep, yep,” Viola squeaked. “We run.”
They took off. The Styerwurm slithered after them, tearing through the trees. Barclay, being smaller and faster, quickly outpaced Viola, and he was far too terrified to turn around to see if she was still behind him. The Beast was every bit as ferocious as the sort in stories he’d heard, and now they were about to be eaten.
Viola screamed, and Barclay finally looked over his shoulder to see her on the ground. She’d tripped and fallen, and the snake was catching up at an alarming speed. Its rootlike tongue stretched through the leaves and snow toward her.
“Help me!” she called.
Barclay, who was a pitiful, cowardly excuse for a hero, who didn’t particularly even like Viola, ran back to help her. He grabbed her arm and hoisted her up. A long cut stretched down her shin where she’d scraped it, and she hobbled a bit when she put weight on that leg.
“Thanks,” she breathed.
“Never mind that, let’s justgo—”
Barclay’s words quickly turned to shrieks when the tongue wrapped around his ankle and yanked him back. He flew through the air, hanging upside down. Belongings from his bag toppled out onto the forest floor, and the world spun around him as the tongue whipped him this way and that.
“Viola!” he screamed.
“Just be calm!” she called. “The Styerwurm has a very weak stomach, so it shakes its victims to death before it eats them.”
“How can I be calm when you tell me that?!”
Indeed, the tongue switched from swinging Barclay around to shaking him like a piggy bank. Barclay attempted to kick and pull at it, but its grip would not budge. Spots of black bloomed in his vision.
