Lord of the Forest (16 page)

“You have the advantage if he is old and getting careless. I suspect advancing mental deterioration. You may well win.”

“I
will
win.” Marius clenched his fists again. “For her. Because of her. Love comes once and I have found it with Linnea. I want to be with her for the rest of my days, here upon this island. Paradise has no meaning to me without someone to share it with.”

The old healer nodded, lost in somber thought. “And if she should die?”

“I will too. By my own hand.”

Quercus took down a bottle from the shelf and brushed the cobwebs from it. He pulled the cork with some difficulty and set it on the table, then plunked down two wooden goblets.

“What is that?” Marius asked.

“Elderflower wine.” Quercus looked into a net bag and pulled out something folded in moist leaves. “And here is a sweet cake to eat with it. Let us talk no more of death and vengeance. As I said, there is hope. And there may be a way to do in a demon without risking your handsome hide, Marius.”

“Only one bottle? I could drink five.”

“There is more.”

“Bring them out. Let us discuss the many ways to do in demons. I might even listen. When I am drunk, I can be talked into anything.”

Quercus hesitated, then bent down to take more bottles from a hidden cupboard. “If that is the only way I can convince you, then I will take it.”

Several hours later…

“G
ood stuff. Give me more.” Marius held out his goblet. He had eaten none of the cake, but nearly all of the wine had gone down his throat.

“You have had enough. Centaurs shouldn’t drink.”

“Now you tell me.” Marius tipped his goblet over his face to get the last drop, but he missed his mouth. The dregs went into his eye and made it sting. “Ow! Querky, make me a poultice!”

“Serves you right if it stings. Maybe it will snap you out of it—”

Marius’s eyes rolled and his temper exploded. He railed at Fate, at Ravelle, at Quercus himself.

“Keep your voice down! Would you wake her?” The healer dashed to the alcove and looked in on Linnea.

“I would avenge her,” Marius muttered, filled with swirling rage.

Quercus came back and leaned over him, staring into Marius’s bloodshot eyes. “Your centaur nature is taking over. You must leave before the rest of the change happens. Now! Go!”

A second later Marius swept his arm across the table with impulsive anger, throwing the empty wine bottles and the scroll with Quercus’s carefully outlined plans to the floor. He got up, knocking over his chair and wandering from the table to look at Linnea.

Quercus’s barky chest heaved as he suppressed his own anger. A worthless emotion, in his opinion. Hard to control for him; impossible to control for Marius. He heard nothing from the alcove for several minutes but stayed where he was, hoping that the sight of Linnea would bring Marius to his senses again.

“She is the same!” came a deep, moaning voice. “Still as death!”

“Do not wake her, Marius!”

He came back to the table, his eyes glazed by tears and rage. “I must find the fiend—it is now or never, Quercus!”

The tree spirit was rolling up the damaged scroll. “Then go!” he snapped. “You will not listen to reason and neither Linnea nor I should have to listen to you!”

“You do not know what it means to love as I do!” Marius bawled. With his human foot, he pawed the floor and gave Quercus a maddened glare. Not because he was drunk, though he was, but because the change to a centaur was coming on just as the healer had said.

“She has been here but a few hours and already her condition has improved. Would you risk a relapse, you fool?”

“No—no—” Groaning with confusion, Marius stumbled down the spiraling stairs, Quercus hot on his heels. The healer pushed him outside.

Marius stopped a few paces away, breathing hard as his sides expanded and his buttocks transformed into the heavy hindquarters of a centaur.

“Go!” Quercus slammed the door and opened it again for a parting shot. “I wish you luck. Try to come back alive.” He shut the door again with a polite click and the thick bark rolled rapidly over it.

Befuddled and angry, now pawing the ground with enormous hooves, Marius looked at the place where the door had been. He shook his head, but that was not enough to clear it.

Her…on that bed…he could not help but think of her lying helpless in the circle of fire. What if he had not come back in time to put it out? Ravelle
had
done it. Marcus would gallop over the island without stopping until he found the demon.

Trample him. Split his skull. Fling him off a cliff.

To hell with Quercus and his caution. Same for the lords of Arcan. They had no real use for an animal like him. He didn’t belong in places where battle shields hung on the walls, never used.

He blew out a snorting breath that reeked of wine.

He looked to the tree and said a silent good-bye to Linnea, knowing she at least was safe. It
was
time. Marius’s blood surged in his veins. He took off, head lowered, tail flying. And ran for hours.

Exhausted, his hide foamed with sweat, Marius stopped at last. Gods above. Was that a centaur in the road? Or an apparition? The mange-eaten creature was hideous.

“My brother…help me,” the centaur said in a querulous voice.

Marius circled it but only once. “Brother? I have one, but he is a man. Who are you?”

“I have no name.” The centaur coughed and the carved piece of stone about its neck banged against its collarbone. Marius could not see its eyes, but was sure they were rheumy. There was an air of age and illness about it, as if it were about to collapse inside the hide that sagged upon its bones.

A bad omen, Marius thought wildly. He galloped on.

The old centaur picked up its head and looked after him. Its eyes were demon eyes, glowing red in the darkness. It took a shambling step after Marius, then another, and shuddered as its mangy hide wrinkled off the leathery skin beneath.

Ravelle followed, sometimes on the earth, sometimes in the air.

It was time to deal firmly with Marius. His return to the Outer Darkness had been worthwhile and the nascent rebellion quieted. He would not miss his troublesome cousin, who’d met a deservedly miserable death.

When that unpleasant business was over, he’d returned to the Forest Isle, looking for Marius. Not an hour ago, one of his imps had glimpsed the real centaur charging madly through the woods and flown off to notify the demon, looking for him first at the northern coast, where hell-soldiers had put in, transported at night from the Outer Darkness in galleys manned by slaves, to a narrow valley where nothing lived and they would not seen. There they waited, not patiently but silently, for Ravelle’s command.

The entire island would be his in time. He had particular plans for Marius.

After Ravelle’s fall from the magpie’s nest, it had taken him hours to find the amulet that had fallen with him. All he had to do was wear it around his stringy neck. Warmth empowered it and the all-powerful spell of the gods who’d enchanted it was still effective.

To his chagrin, it did not turn him into a centaur like Marius. Ravelle had wanted to be entirely virile again, endowed with powerful muscle and a glossy hide. It was not to be. Each time he put himself through the transformation, he looked worse.

As for tonight, in the valley, he desired the pleasure of attacking Marius as himself. His cracked, leathery, and wicked self. His iron ropes would bind the centaur’s legs this time, not just his tail. His blacksmith had fashioned an iron bridle, too. And tipped a supple whip with it.

Rising into the air again, he saw the glimmering sea beyond the valley. A swift ship was waiting there to remove Marius to his ultimate fate.

Ravelle wanted to make the agony last. Merely killing him was not enough. Forcing Linnea to watch his torment would break the centaur’s heart. He did not know where she was, of course, but she would be easy enough to find when the verdant isle was set afire.

Smoked out of hiding, running for her life, screaming for Marius. The great thundering idiot would bellow for her and earn himself worse punishment.

Furlongs away, Marius picked up a cold but still foul scent of Ravelle at last. Maddened all over again, he followed it, slipping on cinders into a valley of death which opened into the pounding sea. He had been here only once—few beings ever went to this dreadful place.

An eon ago, a freakish eruption from the volcano on the Isle of Fire had been carried hence on an evil wind, contained by the valley’s narrowness. Every living thing in it had been killed in a few horrifying seconds and neither Marius nor his brother had been able to sound a warning.

He caught his leg in the twisted roots of a ghost tree, downed by the blast, its last scream frozen on the face on its trunk. He had to go slowly. He could die here, a meaningless death that would leave Linnea alone to grieve unrevenged, his bones picked by vultures and worse creatures—the carrion demons, Ravelle’s underlings.

The smell of him grew stronger. Marius went on, finding his way and marking his escape route in his mind. A crunching noise came to his ears. He pricked them, listening.

It was an irregular sound that sometimes matched his gait and then stopped, as if the beast that made it were walking or creeping in the cinders, then bouncing in the air.

Marius whirled around and reared, seeing nothing behind him but ash and desolation. His hooves hit the earth and he breathed deeply. The noise had to be Ravelle, for he could smell the demon’s rank sweat. Ravelle would not show himself but he was not far away at all.

Fear cooled Marius’s blood in a way that reason could not. His courage and his love for Linnea made him foolhardy.

The chase was on. But he could not run.

He moved sideways down the steep slope, forcing himself to look at the charred skeletons of the creatures who had not escaped. Bones of birds caught at the moment of flight, tangled in the branches of more ghost trees. Bones of bears, great jaws agape in final agony. The pitiful skeleton of a chained hound near the bones of a hunter reaching to free it. Too late.

Then, a centaur with massive bones like his. A jagged shard protruded upward through the ash. A broken leg. But for that, his unknown cousin might have survived.

The sight stopped Marius cold. He bowed his head for all who had perished in this terrible place so long ago…and lifted it again when a stinking whiff of demon filled his nostrils. Ravelle was very close.

Here in this place where nothing grew, it should have been easy to see him. Marius’s head turned swiftly to survey the bleak terrain. Nothing. Silence. Even the stars seemed to look away from this place.

Wham.

Ravelle landed on Marius’s back and the centaur staggered from the pain. Long claws closed around his throat and dug in. The white desolation around him went black.

O
verhead, the moon had risen, cold and white and round, and stars blinked down. The first battle for the Arcan Islands had begun beneath them: centaur against demon.

Clinging to Marius with hideous strength, Ravelle could not be shaken off. He smote blow after blow upon the centaur’s head, maddening him to fury.

Marius reared and screamed. In this desolate place, no one heard—or he thought for a fleeting second, no one responded. A red haze welled behind his eyes as the demon’s head banged his. Again he reared, nearly toppling backward in his effort to be free of his assailant.

Through loose rock and cinders, fighting the slope of the valley to stay upright, he staggered on, not knowing where he went and dimly realizing through the pain of Ravelle’s attack that he was being driven down. Each blow made fresh stars appear in his vision, and he groaned with agony. The demon on his back laughed in fiendish glee. The centaur dropped to his knees.

“I have bested you at last, Marius!”

Not yet.

With a supreme effort, Marius rose all the way up at once, arching his back and flailing his tail. Still the demon hung on, having never lost his clawing grip. A final savage blow to the back of his head felled Marius at last.

A dreadful banging brought him back to consciousness—he saw sparks first, flying in the darkness. Then the sound again. Hammer on iron.

An immense demon pounded on an anvil, naked and disgusting to look at, his skin so tough that he needed no leather apron. His assistants scurried to and fro, dodging Ravelle’s kicks.

Marius understood that he was a prisoner. He felt the cruel pinch of shackles on his horse legs and noticed the handcuffs on his wrists. He lay on his side, in gritty dirt. Cinders pressed into his hide.

He could not free himself by stealth or by force. So he kept his head resting in the dirt watched through eyelids that were mostly closed. The demons and other hell-spawn about seemed to be part of an army. Ravelle’s snarled commands were being carried out by the bigger fiends, whose fast whips enforced obedience from the smaller.

Just beyond the place where he was a prisoner was the glitter of the sea. In the distance he could make out the backs of more soldiers, coming out from it, heaving and jostling like a swarm of foul insects.

Little by little, he made sense of the shouted commands of the big demons and the muttered replies of the underlings. An invasion was underway of the Forest Isle and these legions were the first to land. Taking the beach had not been hard. There was no one to defend it or this tragic valley.

Marius listened, straining his ears, which were swollen and ringing from Ravelle’s vicious blows. With profound guilt he heard of the ease with which the island had been captured.

His only thought for days had been for Linnea. Protecting her. Loving her. Avenging her. If Ravelle captured the whole island there would be no place for either of them to run. But the demon might allow her to live, simply to have her for his own.

What would they do with him?

The blacksmith’s assistant came to him, a heavy collar of iron in his claws. This he clapped about Marius’s neck, fastening the bolts that closed it with quick turns before the centaur could struggle.

He stood and kicked Marius in the ribs. “Wake up!”

Against his will, Marius groaned, but he forced his eyes open. There was a stronger stink of demon in his nose.

Ravelle had come over. “Jerk the chains to make him rise,” he ordered.

Try as he might, the assistant could not do it, and the demon signaled the blacksmith.

The immense figure strode over and grabbed the iron collar, lifting Marius with one begrimed hand.

The centaur’s hooves scraped for purchase in the cinders and grit. He could barely stand on his four legs, and the cuffs around his wrists kept his arms forward, unbalancing him.

“What a sight,” Ravelle sneered. “The proud Marius in chains. Let’s make him dance.” He picked up a goad and jabbed the point of it into the centaur’s hindquarters.

Marius stumbled, his movement hobbled by the short length of chain between the shackles, falling to his knees, prodded up again by the merciless goad.

Hot tears, tears of pain and fury and shame, rolled down his face. Ravelle paused long enough to smear them into the dirt and blood on Marius’s skin with his filthy palm.

The centaur shook with revilement, thinking not of himself but of Linnea during her capture and bondage by this fiend. If it took every drop of blood he had, if he died in the doing, Marius vowed silently he would vanquish Ravelle once and for all.

“Do not flinch,” Ravelle sneered. “I am only trying to clean you up for your new master. You are no longer the Lord of the Forest, Marius.”

There was a chance that he might live. Marius made an effort to hang his head. If he was taken away, he could escape and come back.

“Who is my master, evil one?” The bitter words came out in a rush and earned him another blow from the goad.

Ravelle cackled. “Do you think that hurt? You will have worse,” was all he said.

“Wh-where are you taking me?” Marius braced himself for another blow but none was forthcoming.

“To the land of men.” The demon stepped back and observed Marius’s entire body as the centaur shifted on his hooves, impeded by the shackles. “Don’t try to change into one. I think I know how you do, though.”

He held up a carved piece of stone that hung around his neck.

Marius’s eyes widened with amazement. “The amulet—the one the gods used—” Too late he realized that he ought not to have spoken.

“I thought it might be,” Ravelle said with satisfaction. “It still works. I turned myself into a centaur and misdirected you to this valley of death. Do you remember? Or did I beat you too hard when I rode your back?”

Marius’s mind whirled with confusion. The amulet had been lost for eons, seized by the magpie long, long ago as Marius had fallen from the heavens. He’d thought it gone forever. Esau’d had no idea of its worth or its magical powers.

“How did you come by that, Ravelle?”

The demon rubbed the stone, making it glow. “I followed that stupid bird of yours to its nest.”

So Esau had had the amulet all this time. Marius could not blame the bird for stealing it or for keeping it. Thousands of years had passed since he’d fallen from the sky. “When?”

“What does it matter when? That is for me to know,” Ravelle said.

“The gods gave it to me. That amulet is mine,” Marius said without thinking. Absurd to say that to a demon, he told himself in the next instant, as if he expected so evil a being to be a good boy and give it back.

“Is it?” the demon asked. “But it worked well on me.”

Marius was silent, remembering the weak and aged creature that had stopped him in his mad dash, its mien so strangely repellent to him. His brain had been soaked in Quercus’s wine, his wits further addled by his heedlong, half-crazed galloping in search of the demon.

Think of it, Marius. Your quarry was near enough to touch, near enough to kick to death
. He had not looked closely enough at the aged, pathetic beast in the road, had not realized that his mortal enemy had taken yet another form to lead him astray.

He shook his battered head. The action made him dizzy and made his bruises throb with renewed pain. His own death might be imminent, he thought, but Linnea at least was safe. No torture would persuade him to reveal her whereabouts and the healer Quercus was at least as wily as a demon.

Let Ravelle brag a bit longer. “What have you done with the magpie?”

The demon smiled thinly and gnashed his teeth without answering. His meaning was clear enough. Poor Esau. Killed and eaten, feathers and all.

Was he next?

“That will not be your fate,” Ravelle said. “You get to die more slowly.”

Marius heard the nearly silent whoosh of something heavy swung through the air and turned his head just in time to glimpse the blacksmith’s hammer coming at his head. The glancing blow knocked him out.

He awoke for the second time to a sickening sensation of pitching and rolling, and understood after a while that he’d been put on a ship and was now at sea. Through the hatch above, he could see huge sails billowing against the night sky, their corners straining against taut ropes. Dashes of spray came through the holes of the hatch, wetting his face and his chest. His hooves slipped on the water-sloshed wood.

He felt a new, agonizingly painful ache in his head, but could not explore it. He was shackled as he’d been before, the collar still around his neck. Now the chains on his legs were fastened to ringbolts in the small space below the hatch; his fetlocks painfully chafed.

Marius knew without trying to make the change that he could no longer shift his shape from a centaur to a man. He was certain that Ravelle’s possession of the amulet had taken the ability away.

If the demon were to break the carved stone, Marius was doomed to be a centaur forever—unless his heart broke along with the stone. He could not remember the terms of the curse after all this time.

The strong wind died down and the sails fluttered uncertainly, until sea-demons swarmed up the rigging and furled them with raw cries. Then he heard the rhythm of ranked oars by the hundred, the galley slaves below whipped into speed. The heavy, irregular tread of a three-legged demon above made Marius step nervously, testing the limits of his iron restraints. He looked up just as a long claw came though one of the holes in the hatch cover, lifting it.

The demon squatted and its seamed face peered down at him. Not Ravelle. No horns. Its wings were furled tightly against its back.

“Hungry?” it asked. There was a gleam of sharp teeth in its visage.

Marius endeavored to press back against the walls of the small space that confined him without answering.

The demon smiled in an ugly way. “I am.” Another one joined it and peered down into the hatch. Above them the night sky was dark but for the briefest second Marius saw a flash of some winged being far, far above the open sea.

He thought of Gideon.
Do not save me,
he wanted to howl to the heavens. Better that one Arcan lord should die than all.

Enshackled, he endured the demons’ taunts and kicks.

The Lord of the Dark followed the black man-o’-war a while longer, evading the gaze of the lookout in the crow’s-nest atop the main mast by going behind clouds. He’d been fortunate to catch a glimpse of it as he’d reconnoitered the Forest Isle, searching again for some sign of Marius from the air.

He’d seen nothing…then fires, small ones, at the mouth of the valley of the Great Death where a poisonous blast had killed so many so long ago. Swooping as low as he’d dared, he’d seen the demons, massed by the thousands and this ship, anchored in deep water offshore. So it had brought them.

There had been rowboats and coracles by the hundreds, also at anchor or drawn up on shore. One boat had headed for the ship, riding low in the water with heavy cargo—some chained beast had been upon it, attended by demons.

Hovering, Gideon had strained his eyes, then realized that Marius had been taken prisoner. His hide was far lighter than that of the demons and he seemed to be their only captive.

Linnea was safe, perhaps. But where was she? And where had the ship and its demon crew come from? It had the look, he’d thought, of a vessel from the Outer Darkness, a galley rowed by damned souls, but it was sailing toward the distant land of men.

His strong white wings beat powerfully as he rode warm currents of air, as strong in his element as Simeon was under the sea.

He dared not accompany the demon ship all the way into the harbor. He was not armored against arrows, and he would be shot at as soon as he was visible in the first light of day.

Far below the clouds opened and he caught another glimpse of the ship, making for port, the thin white lines flanking it made by the steady dipping of hundreds of oars. Demons moved about the decks, dark shapes against the lighter wood, and went about the endless tasks of sailing a man-o’-war. He dropped lower to get a better look. Of a sudden a demon lifted a hatch cover and looked into a pit, joined by another one. Directly below Gideon spied the centaur, not moving.

A creature paced the deck nearby, head downcast, but still—something about its head was different from the others.

He saw it turn and saw the spiraling goat’s horns. Ravelle. Gideon heard a cry of warning from the lookout and wheeled away in the gloomy sky.

Far forward from the pit in which the centaur was imprisoned were the captain’s quarters, rough-hewn and spare. In the center of the main cabin was a table. Ravelle and the captain sat on either side of it.

“My men say having a centaur aboard a ship is bad luck,” the captain said gruffly.

“Why?” was the demon’s careless reply. He was stalling the man.

“They think he is cursed. More than a man, less than a horse.”

Ravelle laughed in a coarse way. “Then they have been looking at him closely.”

“Yes, when Marius is taken out for exercise upon the deck. He is not at liberty but—”