Chapter 965: Secret in the Forest
The hinterland of the Misty Forest lay northwest of Neverwinter, and Snaketooth had come to think of it as a country of its own.
One and a half months into the railway construction—that was all it had taken. Not the most incredible period of his life; that phrase already felt inadequate. Incredible was something you said once, about a single thing. This was different. Here, the incredible kept arriving, daily, as if the city had decided he was finally ready to receive it.
He understood now why the workers had to sign the confidentiality agreement.
The terms were clear and cold: no disclosures, oral or written, to anyone outside the project. Violation meant fines, confiscation of wages, forced labor in the North Slope Mine. Workers could quit—that right was preserved—but anyone who stayed and then talked would find the Security Bureau waiting for them. The agreement had stressed that no one could escape that supervision.
Snaketooth had read those words and thought them overblown. You can track a written record. But how do you track a conversation? You’d need to arrest half the workforce on hearsay alone. He’d half-dismissed it as the kind of threat that governments liked to print without expecting to enforce.
That was before he saw what was actually here.
The secrets ran deeper than he’d imagined. Behind the ordinary face of the city—the markets, the lanes, the smoke from the chimneys—there was something vast and hidden, turning like a wheel no one was meant to see directly. Maybe, in some room that didn’t appear on any map, something that could shake the world was already in motion.
What struck him hardest were the witches.
Paper was a witch, but he’d never thought of her that way—she was just Paper, the girl he’d looked after in the Bloodfang Association. He’d heard the church’s verdict often enough: witches carried the devil’s inheritance, they were corruption wearing a human face. He’d never put much faith in it. If they were so terrible, why did they hide? Why did they run?
Then he saw Lady Leaf work, and the argument became irrelevant.
She controlled the entire forest.
That was not a figure of speech. The Misty Forest bent to her will the way a hand bends to close around something. When the construction team pushed forward, vines descended from the canopy overhead—not reaching, not groping, but purposeful—and gathered the iron rails like a harvester gathering sheaves, wrapping them and carrying them to the appointed place and setting them down. The trees on either side of the roadbed simply parted, which saved the team the work of felling them. Behind the cleared path, the surrounding growth closed in again, dense and dark, sealing the sky so that nothing above—no winged scout, no wandering demon—could look down and find the railway below.
When beasts wandered too close, the forest dealt with them. The workers would come to supper to find a fresh-meat soup waiting, and they would understand, without being told, what had happened.
Snaketooth had seen her once, at a distance. He couldn’t have said with confidence that she was still entirely human. The green radiance came from inside her, or perhaps was her—gemstone-bright, suffusing her body so that she moved between branches the way water moves between stones, without weight, without friction. In another life he would have screamed. With such an appearance, the church’s verdict was at least understandable, even if it was wrong.
But Paper was lucky, he thought, to look like an ordinary girl. He didn’t hold it against Lady Leaf.
And he didn’t hate her. Something closer to reverence, if he was honest. His Majesty had said it plainly at the Awards Ceremony: Leaf’s ability was what made it possible to feed everyone in Neverwinter. Anyone who had known hunger—and Snaketooth had known it thoroughly—was in her debt. That debt didn’t expire. It was the kind of thing you carried forward.
He was one of the beneficiaries. He knew it.
But the largest secret of all was one he had stumbled into by accident, and it was his alone.
It happened after the First Army moved into the forest.
Demand for a counterattack against the demons had been building for weeks—you heard it everywhere, even out in the wild, between men who’d never held a weapon in their lives. Snaketooth wasn’t surprised. The attack on Neverwinter had demanded a response, and now the response was being assembled. Every day, columns of soldiers passed through the forest section: not knights, not the distant military of the old kingdom, but workers’ neighbors, men from the same districts, the same tenements. The workers would call to them. The soldiers would call back. The atmosphere was almost festive, which was strange given where they were all going.
Snaketooth didn’t have many people to call out to. He’d fallen into the habit of watching the locomotive instead—touching it when it stopped, learning the feel of its skin. The iron was always warmer than expected.
What happened two weeks ago was not festive.
A locomotive arrived dragging six carriages. It stopped in the newest section of track, the stretch his team had just finished laying. Two of the carriages were flatcars with no roofs, and on each of them sat an enormous object—more than twenty meters long, sheeted with canvas, roped down so heavily that the ropes themselves seemed strained. He’d glanced at them and looked away. Military supplies weren’t his concern.
That night his stomach revolted around midnight. He pulled on his boots and stumbled out of the tent, moving away from the camp to find a private spot among the trees.
That was when he saw the canvas move.
Not from wind. Not from settling. The canvas rippled from inside, the ropes going taut and then slack, and then several men appeared—soldiers, but in uniforms he didn’t recognize, cut differently from the First Army—and began untying the canvas from both cars with practiced speed.
What emerged from beneath the canvas was a mollusk.
The size of it dropped his stomach to somewhere below the ground. It moved in slow, muscular undulations, the kind of motion that belonged in water or in nightmares. He pressed himself against a tree and tried to disappear into the bark.
Then it spoke.
The voice was high and clear and entirely wrong for the body it came from. “I’m hungry,” it said. “Do you have any food?”
In that moment, Snaketooth became certain the soldiers would turn toward the camp.
The image arrived fully formed: the warriors gesturing in his direction, the mollusk turning, the camp going quiet in a way that camps never went quiet. He had the complete and vivid preview of it.
Instead, the soldiers laughed—actually laughed—and embraced the thing, affectionately, the way you’d embrace a large dog that had learned an endearing trick. They moved barrels from the last carriage, each one as tall as a man: ham, vegetables, bread. There were two of the creatures. Both ate with the focused urgency of something that had been traveling long and without comfort, and then, still accompanied by the soldiers, they moved into the forest and were gone.
Snaketooth stood against his tree for a long time after the footsteps faded. When he finally looked down, he saw what had happened to his trousers.
Two days later, a station rose beside the track. Arched cement and brick, unremarkable from the outside except for what was inside: a hole, vertical and deep enough that no one could see the bottom. Steam engines worked beside it constantly, pumping air down into the dark. Workers went in and out with the bored competence of men doing routine labor, but none of them talked about what the hole was for, or where it went.
He kept that secret too.
He had expected to be frightened by all of it. He had expected to want to leave.
He recovered faster than made sense.
This is an exciting life, he caught himself thinking, when he’d had time to be rational about it. This is what Neverwinter actually looks like, under everything.
When he’d first left the city to follow the construction east, the loneliness had been physical—a specific weight behind the sternum. The other workers got letters from their families. They’d read them aloud, trading news and jokes, and he had sat nearby with nothing to receive and nothing to send. Rootless was the right word. Duckweed on moving water, attached to nothing.
But the forest kept offering him things to look at. The seam between two perfectly fitted rail sections. The forest songs that filtered through the canopy at odd hours, rising from no visible source. The huge desert wolf that moved through the trees in total silence, glimpsed and then gone—Lady Leaf never sent the vines after it, which meant something, though he didn’t know what. And there was a man who appeared on certain days, stood at the edge of the track, and whispered to himself.
None of these things were his to understand. But they were his to witness.
That mattered. That was what integration actually felt like—not knowing everything, not belonging everywhere, but standing close enough to the unknown that it stopped feeling alien. Neverwinter had depths he hadn’t suspected, and now he stood at the edge of them, and the ground held.
He wanted to remember all of it for the day the confidentiality agreement expired. Five years. A fixed and knowable distance.
There was no better proof of belonging to a city than carrying its secrets carefully, waiting for the permission to speak them aloud.
He was looking forward to that day.