50. The Hoverworm
It was a balmy evening and the three of us were out on the veranda of my hive-house. Laria Chillax - the widow of the brave lancer I had fought alongside at the battle of Farrow Lake - and I were sitting in rocking chairs, sipping sapwine and watching the golden sunlight spread out across the Farrow Lake, then set above the Western Woods. Vitus, the little foundling I had rescued from the battlefield, was getting stronger every day. As we watched, he crawled across the boards, shepherding the three wooden balls I had carved for him.
‘I’ve been thinking about my future here in the Farrow Ridges,’ Laria was saying. ‘I was a seamstress back in Great Glade. And with an excellent reputation by all accounts,’ she added with a self-deprecating laugh. ‘With Parvis dead, there’s nothing for me back there. And I wondered whether the Farrow Ridges might benefit from a small tailor’s shop…’
I thought it was an excellent idea. Before the battle, the Farrow Ridge settlers’ clothing had been brought in on the trading vessels that docked at the Needles. None had visited for months, and I was sure Laria’s idea would prove a winner. We talked of where she might come by a sewing machine; whether there might be someone locally who could make her buttons, toggles, fasteners. We made plans for constructing her a cabin, to include a workshop and small store, on the lakeside plot next to my own hive-house.
Unlike the main cities of the Edge, where business is conducted in dockets, gladers, waifmarks , hivegeld and such like, the Farrow Ridges has no currency. Instead, we barter, exchanging goods for goods, or for works carried out - joinery, plumbing, tiling, boat-repairs, letter-writing. That sort of thing. Laria laughed as we tried to decide whether a worsted hackjacket and matching breeches were worth more or less than a side of hammelhorn, or a newly tiled roof, when all at once, Vitus let out a scream that was shrill and urgent and filled with terror and pain.
‘Vitus!’ Laria cried out, leaping from the rocking chair and dashing to the far side of the veranda, where Vitus lay, silent now and motionless. ‘Vitus, Vitus…’ she moaned, gathering his body up in her arms and cradling him to her breast. ‘Vitus, what is it?’
In the short time that she had stayed with me, Laria had treated Vitus like the child she had never had with Parvis Helm. And Vitus adored her in return.
She turned to me, her green eyes wild with fear. ‘Hedgethorn,’ she said. ‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘I… I don’t know…’ I said. ‘Perhaps…’ And then I heard it, a loud hissing noise, and I saw a flash of green and yellow. ‘Oh, no,’ I gasped. ‘A hoverworm.’
Laria spun round. ‘A what?’
‘A hoverworm,’ I repeated miserably. ‘A Deepwoods creature. It usually favours the darkest parts of the forest. It must have come down to the lakeside to drink…’
Laria inspected Vitus’s hot, limp body agitatedly, and let out a stifled cry as she discovered the two marks puncturing the skin of his left arm. She looked up at me.
‘He… he’ll be all right, won’t he?’ she sobbed, her tear-filled eyes imploring me to assure her that he would be.
But I could not. How could I? After all, I’d learned from bitter personal experience that, if the victim of a hoverworm’s bite was not given the antidote to its vile venom within the hour, then he or she would surely die…
