Chapter 3 - Paper and Thorns

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I wake up tied to a tree and the first thing I think is: these are the worst restraints I have ever worn.

Vines are everywhere. Wrists, ankles, across my chest, around my throat. Little thorns pricking at my neck, my forearms, the skin between my ribs where the wound pulses hot and wrong. I am spread against stone and root in a space that breathes wet heat into my lungs, and the air is so thick I am drinking it.

I test the vine at my left wrist. It snaps like thread. The broken ends hang in my fingers and I stare at them.

I look across the grotto.

She is sitting against the far root-wall with a bone spear in her lap and her knees drawn up and her eyes fixed on me. She is trying to look dangerous. The effort is doing something to her jaw. It's clenched so tight I can see the muscle jumping under her skin.

She hasn't noticed the break. She's adjusting something on the far side of the vine-work, retying a loop, her fingers moving fast.

I press the broken ends together and hold them in my fist, two pieces pretending to be one.

An Amazon. Copper skin, rain-slick, the fungi catching the angles of her face in blue-green. She is wearing a leather thong and a string bra, both soaked, both clinging. The bra is two scraps of leather held together by string, and the string is losing. Her breasts are full, round, dark copper like the rest of her, the wet leather pressing them up and together and barely covering the nipples. She would come up to my sternum if I stood. My hand would cover her entire breast.

She built all of this. The vines, the thorns, the coverage. She dragged me here, stripped my armor, cleaned my wound. The bandage on my ribs is tight and careful. Something herbed under the wrapping, green bark.

My armor is gone. I look for it and find nothing.

"My armor," I croak.

Her eyes snap to me. Her fingers stop moving on the vine-work.

"I treated your wound. The chestplate was in the way."

"You undressed a Gorrath chieftain."

Her jaw sets. The spear comes up. "I saved your life."

I hold her gaze. She holds it back. Her hand is shaking on the spear but her eyes don't move. Good.

The grotto is a hollow in the roots of a massive ceiba tree. I know the shape from the bark, the pale fissured trunk disappearing into darkness above. Fungi line the root-walls, blue-green, glowing steady. The floor is moss and old leaves, soft, damp. Water drips from somewhere overhead in warm threads that find the back of my neck and run down my spine. Fever and jungle air turn every breath into work.

She has wrapped me in the most elaborate prison I have ever seen. I have been captured before. Border skirmishes, a Gorrath honor-duel that went wrong once. Those restraints were iron and rope. This is decoration. The vine at my throat has thorns pressed against my pulse-point. She probably thinks it's a kill-switch. I could tear through all of it whenever I wanted.

Something in the grotto is warm. Not jungle-warm. The vines against my skin carry heat that doesn't match the air, and the wound under the wrapping throbs less than it should. The gash was deep. Muscle-deep. A wound like that should have me flat. My spine is upright and the pain is muted, distant. Something under me vibrates. My spine picks it up.

It is magic, the kind my shamans described. The reason I brought a warband into the Itzince. I don't know the source. Could be the ruins. Could be the tree. But it's here.

Someone bandaged my wound with small, careful hands.

I look at the vine in my fist, the two pieces warm against my skin. The thorns at my wrist poke the meat of my palm and I ignore them the way I would ignore a fly.

She straightens, pulls her shoulders back, grips the spear and lifts her chin and her voice comes out clipped, one beat too flat, like she ran the words before I woke.

"You're awake."

I say nothing.

"You're in my custody. You are bound by my magic. You will not move, you will not speak unless I allow it, and you will not test the restraints."

"You rehearsed that."

She lifts the spear higher.

"Those are the terms of your captivity."

I look at the restraints, down at the vine in my hand. The two pieces pressed together by my thumb. The thorns poking at nothing.

"You're small for an Amazon," I say.

Her eyes go wide, then narrow.

"I didn't say you could speak."

"You said unless you allow it." I look at the vine. At her. "You're allowing it."

"I am not."

"Then stop me."

She opens her mouth. Closes it. The spear shakes. Her knuckles are white. She doesn't stop me because stopping me means crossing the grotto and she is three feet away and scared and pretending she isn't.

"The restraints are strong," she says. Louder than she needs to. "You can't break them."

I test the vine at my right wrist. Let it strain. Watch her face. Her eyes track the movement.

I let the vine settle. "Strong," I say.

Her shoulders drop a fraction. She doesn't know I'm agreeing with nothing.

"Don't test them again."

A vine drops from the root-wall above me. It lands across my bare chest with a wet slap, limp, like a dead fish. A thorn catches my nipple. She stares at it. I stare at it. The vine curls once, weakly, and goes still.

She looks at me. Her face is so serious. The jaw, the chin, the spear across her knees, the whole performance cranked to maximum while a wet noodle of a vine lies across my chest like it tripped and fell.

I want to laugh. My ribs hurt too much. The laugh sits in my throat and I swallow it and the vine at my neck shifts against the swallow and the thorns poke and I hold my face still.

"That one's new," I say.

"It's a reinforcement." She squints at it. Her voice does not waver. "Automatic. My magic does that."

"Your magic threw a vine at me."

"It deployed a secondary restraint."

I look at the vine on my chest, limp and damp, one thorn poking sideways into nothing.

"Terrifying," I say.

Her jaw clenches so hard I hear her teeth click. She grips the spear hard enough to whiten her knuckles and she is shaking and she is not leaving.

She bandaged my wound. The stitching is clumsy. The poultice is good. The hands that did it were gentle in a way that does not match someone shaking this hard.

"Little one," I say. "Call your captain. I will accept your surrender."

Her whole face goes red. The copper darkens from the jaw up.

"I AM the captain," she says.

I hold the vine together. I stay.