Lord of the Forest (19 page)

Without saying anything more, he put it back up on a shelf and occupied himself with his studies.

She looked out the window and spotted Esau, preening himself vigorously. She went and called to him softly, and he looked up, eyes bright. Then he flew to her extended hand.

Linnea stroked him, wishing as she had before that the bird could talk. She found him something to nibble at in the kitchen, then took him back to the window, setting him on the sill so he could eat.

Absently, she looked out. The forest was drenched in sunlight, dappled green and gold. Its beauty had been restored to purity again, hushed in a primeval way. Even without having learned of Ravelle’s departure to the land of men, she would have thought that the Forest Isle was free of his evil influence.

How long it seemed since she had entered the forest at Midsummer, intent upon capturing its equine lord for her own private pleasure! If the revelers had marked her disappearance, none had come looking for her. She would not have been the first woman to go native on the island of forests and never return.

She smiled sadly, stroking the bird’s black-and-white feathers. He closed his beady eyes and let her scratch the top of his head with delicate care.

Did he know where his master was? Linnea wished she could fly.

And then what, she asked herself. They did not even know exactly where the centaur was. She could not fight the demon by herself—oh, it didn’t matter. She was not strong enough to do anything but abide here and Quercus would not let her leave.

How she longed to go to Marius’s side, wherever he was in the land of men. She wanted to swing a sword with the best of them, sunder his iron bonds by magic, and escape…ah, there was no place left in the Arcan realm that was safe any longer.

Uncertain and distraught, Linnea nearly blamed herself for attracting the demon to the Forest Isle. If she had not run away, playing a foolish game…no, no, no. The fault was not with her but with the nature of evil in and of itself. No, from the beginning Marius had loved her well, treated her like his goddess, lingered with her most lovingly, rescued her from grave danger and put his own life in peril to do so.

Linnea heaved a heartbreaking sigh. She had to summon up the strength to go on, somehow, some way. As Quercus had said, she and the centaur would be together if it was meant to be. Feeling a little queasy of a sudden, she steadied herself with a hand to one side of the window and ceased her attentions to the magpie. Without opening his eyes, he gave a faint chirp of thanks and tucked his head down between his wings.

Evidently the spell she’d been under was not done with her yet. Her unsteadiness returned. Feeling her way along the wall, she went back to the alcove, settling herself upon the impossibly soft heap of lamb’s-ear leaves. In a little while sleep overcame her again.

Quercus was expecting as much. He kept himself occupied as she moved about his tree home, and waited until he heard soft, steady breathing before he went to the alcove to look at her.

Her color was excellent, he thought, noting her rosy cheeks. Her continued sleepiness, nothing unusual, even though the effects of the mist had worn off. Her emotions had been heightened upon the shocking discovery of Marius’s enchained state—that was also to be expected. Most likely the emotionality would continue.

Quercus studied her. Linnea sleeping was blessedly peaceful at the moment. How did the males of her species cope with changeable moods? Humans were excitable creatures. He would have to look it up. There was a scroll just come from the library at Alexandria which limned the workings of the brain in fascinating detail, and argued that it might be the seat of the soul.

When her eyes had opened, they had been large and lustrous, as was typical for a woman in her condition. And her breasts were newly plump, rising and falling with each breath she took. Below that, there was an ever so slight roundness to her belly. Marius’s vigor and impetuousness were matched by—Quercus permitted himself a wry smile—his virility.

It did not require witchcraft or a scrying pool to ascertain that she was very likely pregnant.

Seeing that she was comfortable, he went back to his study. He did not take down the scroll on the matter to look at it again. He had committed its text and its drawings to memory as soon as he suspected that Linnea was with child, finding the process most interesting. His own kind reproduced by means of enormous acorns buried in the yielding earth.

He was not sure when to inform her of the fact and of course she would soon figure it out for herself. And she was bound to ask questions of Quercus, having, as the healer now knew, no mother to turn to.

One question in particular would require immediate reassurance and he had been curious about it himself: If she had conceived when Marius was in the form of a man, their offspring would be entirely human.

If Marius only knew…The old healer felt his heart clench in his chest at the thought of the centaur’s plight. Even if he could get a message to him via Esau, it might be intercepted by the demon—and Ravelle would stop at nothing to get Linnea in his clutches.

Quercus had a thousand reasons to keep her safely here.

Yet the evil ones had never made it through the defenses with which Quercus surrounded his domain, of which the demon-trapping spiral stairs were the last. She was safe—he would see to it. He, as a healer, had taken a solemn vow eons ago to preserve all life.

For someone all too willing to risk everything, like Marius, the vow was almost impossible to keep, Quercus thought soberly. No, Linnea and the child she carried were Quercus’s first responsibility now. Newly awakened from a problematic spell, she did not seem to have the first inkling of her pregnancy. But she would. Until then, Quercus would keep his diagnosis to himself.

Linnea’s sleep was fitful, besieged by more strange dreams whose intensity troubled her. She woke gasping, unable to remember much about them, besides that they made her feel deeply afraid. It was now late in the day and long golden shadows pierced the serenity of the forest surrounding the tree.

She rose and walked as softly as she could, wondering if Quercus was about. Yes. She heard the sounds she’d come to associate with him: the rattling of papyrus scrolls and his absentminded talking to himself as he read them. His voice was very low, lower than leaves rustling. Sometimes he muttered words she could understand, and sometimes exclaimed in Treeish.

She listened carefully without going to him. It dawned on her that he was planning Marius’s eventual rescue. Linnea wanted to rush in and wrap her arms around him, but she stopped herself from breaking his scholarly concentration. His best idea might fly out of his head as swiftly as the magpie took off into the sky.

He would tell her in good time. Until then she would bide her time and find some way to occupy herself that would not disturb him.

Linnea glided over the smooth wood floors, not making a sound. She went again to the window, seeing this time the thick branch that sprang from the trunk beneath it. Her confinement and long sleep made her long to be out in the leaves where she could breathe and just think.

She leaned through the window’s sides to see if it was possible to clamber out and walk upon the branch. It seemed so.

Would Quercus scold her for leaving the tree without telling him? He might. She hesitated. But she was not really leaving the tree, she reasoned, just going elsewhere upon it, never touching the ground.

She hoisted her kirtle and raised a leg to straddle the sill. In another few seconds, she was outside upon the branch, balancing with care. A good thing that she was barefoot and her wooziness had left her, she thought, looking down at the ground far below.

But if the magpie were to startle her—she glanced about for him. Esau was nowhere in sight at the moment.

Moving as gracefully as a ropewalker, she continued on to the fork in the branch. It was a cradle of deep moss on which she could sit and look up at the skies—some other creature, smaller than herself, had done so and left the impression of its body. In a few more steps she reached the fork and settled herself upon the moss. She wished she’d stolen a bit of food from Quercus’s pantry, because her stomach was objecting to its emptiness. Linnea fought a slight feeling of nausea by breathing deeply.

Whatever ailment she had was nothing compared to Marius’s woes. A fresh upwelling of tears filled her eyes and she hung her head, letting them fall onto the emerald moss like sad drops of dew.

L
innea sat on the branch like a bird whose wings had been clipped, lost in thought, looking about herself without seeing much. Then she saw, directly below her and half-hidden by leaves, a small pool of water in the fork of another large branch, its calm surface reflecting the untroubled sky above.

Hand over hand to steady herself, she moved like a caterpillar along the branch she was on to get a better look. Above the pool now, looking down into it, she saw the surface of the water darken and tremble as if a looming storm had appeared in the sky.

Yet the sun dappled the leaves about her and there was not even a hint of a breeze.

She looked again. Fleeting images of men and women and a city she had never seen came and went in the pool, appearing and dissolving in an instant, too swiftly to be clearly discerned.

It was a tree-born scrying pool, she thought with wonder. Her mother had told her of such. Such hidden pools, far above the earth where they could not be muddied, occurred not by the art of man or gods. They were brought into being by the ancient wisdom of the deep forest, and only the most venerable trees could create them.

Their scrying was the most powerful of all.

The moss around the small pool was thick and velvety, without a trace of disturbance. Around its pure water the individual filaments of the moss formed a mass of living green more precious to her eyes than emeralds.

Could it be that no one had ever looked into it? If so, that would mean that its magic was deep indeed. She might be able to see into the heart of the world, travel over seas and mountains, far from here to where Marius was, in spirit, at least. The old healer had mentioned nothing of this pool when they all had been looking into the one in his chambers. Indeed, he might know nothing at all of it. And he was too dignified to scramble around on tree branches, though he might have done in his youth.

But Linnea had no idea how long Quercus had lived inside the oak. She thought of him as she knew him, immersed in his studies and not much aware of the world outside, except for what he saw in the scrying pool in the stone basin in his chambers.

Never mind, she told herself. Look and look again, before the pool changes. Something told her that it would.

Linnea reached out for branches that would support her safely and swung down from the one above the pool. She landed with ease, thinking briefly that her bovidine surefootedness was as useful in a tree as it was upon the ground.

A small herd of deer passed below her, not looking up, racing away. A young buck and several does, she noticed. Then two small spotted fawns. Was their mother, the doe she had seen at the very beginning of her adventure upon the Forest Isle, among their number?

Linnea longed to tell her of what had happened since that day. She would bid her sister of the woods to run.

As if she had said the words out loud, the deer ran faster, too swiftly for her to tell if the one she’d seen just moments before her first encounter with Ravelle was among them. They soon vanished in the surrounding woods with a faint swishing of leaves and the occasional snap of a twig.

Linnea crouched by the pool, careful not to press a hand upon the velvety moss that surrounded it. But this close she noticed a subtle design in it, grown as the moss itself had grown, of runes and magic glyphs she could not read.

She looked into the pool again.

It showed a city, a port, to judge by the masts holding furled sails that thrust up behind the buildings. They were humble in height with few windows, but made of white stone, a dazzling contrast to the vivid blue of the sky. The vision in the pool moved through the streets, showing now a trudging beast of burden yoked to the cart it pulled, and then a group of gossiping women in flowing, sleeveless shifts tied at the waist.

They were all dark-haired, their locks bound with narrow ribbons in every color of the rainbow. A man walked by and chaffed them rudely, and the women laughed at him.

A pair of small children ran up to the women as swiftly as the fawns she’d seen, and pulled one away by the hand. She held a market basket, Linnea noticed.

An ordinary day in the land of men. Why was the pool showing her this? She willed it to find Marius and the sunny scene went dark.

Then she saw him. In chains as before, but not in a smithy. In a place where performers—slaves, dancers, fighters—were milling about. To one side was a stone door that led out to the stage of an amphitheatre.

Linnea concentrated. The vulgar roar of the crowd filling the tiers was just audible. She saw Marius’s hide tense over his ribs and was instantly jealous when a lovely young dancer soothed him by stroking him.

If you cannot be there to comfort him, then be grateful that she is, Linnea scolded herself.

Could he not escape? To her, the centaur was close to all-powerful. But perhaps that was only in their world. In the land of men, enslaved by Ravelle’s demonic art, he was not.

She looked through the distant door in the place the pool revealed and then she saw the lion.

It too was chained, with massive shackles upon its legs and a studded collar, wider than a man’s hand was long, half-buried in its mane.

The lion growled and tried to rise up against the men on the stage who goaded it to greater fury. One dragged a spear along its prominent ribs like a boy dragging a stick against a fence. The difference was, he drew blood. The animal roared with pain. It had been starved, clearly, to make it more fierce, and beaten too.

So it would be a fight to the death between her Marius and this poor beast, Linnea thought frantically. He was dragged on stage, bashing at his handlers with shackled arms, blows they dodged easily.

He reared, striking out with his hooves—the chain between his front legs allowed him that freedom, to entertain the crowd. The lion shrank back.

With a hammer and chisel, a man ran out and struck off the shackles on the lion’s front paws. Another urged Marius forward, dodging the killing force of his hooves as the centaur reared and wheeled.

Linnea wondered helplessly why did he not take the shape of a mere man again. He’d told her that the force of anger or passion could spur the change; and he’d been able to will it in their time together.

Ravelle’s evil magic was preventing him, she supposed, brushing away the hot tears of fury that trickled down her face.

The battle between centaur and lion began, terrifying in its speed and fury. The crowd roared louder than either of them, filled with bloodlust. Stricken with shock, Linnea glanced away from the combatants briefly, looking with anger at the people in the amphitheatre. Had the race of men fallen so low and so far from their own beginnings in paradise that they reveled in the sight of pain?

Then she realized that she could not look at the centaur and the lion as before. The pool forced her gaze elsewhere, moving in view through the tiers. Now and then it stopped on a face that seemed ordinary, but…

In a few more seconds, its scrying power revealed the demons among the crowd. At first they seemed like ordinary men but as the eye of the seeing pool stayed on them, the sinister demon features and leathery skin appeared.

To a demon, they resembled Ravelle. None had his spiraling horns and none were as large, but they were in some way his brethren or his spawn.

Linnea shuddered. She, a demi-goddess of gentle birth in woodlands, had little knowledge of such things. Marius’s heroic efforts had saved her, but his impatience with the deliberations of the other lords when it came to dealing with Ravelle had been his undoing.

Never should they have come back to the Isle of the Forest! If only she had not gone along with his wish to escape the convocation of the Arcan lords and come here.

To walk upon his land gave him strength—he was vulnerable in that way—and the echoing loveliness of the woods had called him home, its sweet call too strong to resist.

Yet the ominous things that lurked within it had changed everything. How wrong it all seemed now. The halcyon days and erotic nights of the Midsummer celebration had promised riches of the harvest, fruitfulness and fertility. This year the festival had reaped only evil.

She should have insisted on staying within Simeon’s fortress, with Rhiannon and Megaleen to keep her company. The other women must be frantic with worry over her disappearance with Marius. She had no way to get a message to them.

As she had seen Marius do, she waved a hand over the pool in the fork of the venerable tree and said the words she remembered of his chants over the pool in the stone basin. The water turned inky black and she began to panic. Had she invited the wrath of some unknown god? The leaves around her shook and rattled. Linnea drew into herself. The ancient pool was not under her control.

Blithe to a fault, too eager to be alone with him again, she had given in to a false sense of safety, but things had begun to happen.

He’d rescued her again, brought her here, spurred to chase Ravelle once more. Because of her, he had run directly into a trap of which even Quercus had no knowledge.

The old healer hadn’t known where he was. Heartless gods! It would be her task to tell him of what she had just seen—and Marius’s victory.

Or death.

How would it end? Her falling tears disturbed the scrying surface, making circles that widened to the edge of the moss.

Still inky black, the pool would not show her the combat of the centaur and his maddened enemy, the lion. No, only the watchers came into view. Was she supposed to guess from their coarse shouts and twisted faces who was winning?

She could not.

The raucous demons among the crowd, visible to her but not the men and women they sat among, were screaming for blood, urging the raging lion to tear the centaur limb from limb and devour him.

No one dared to champion Marius, it seemed. And in the amphitheatre, he had no name. He was only a beast to them, like the lion, to be treated with cruelty.

She could only watch, mute, terrified, unable to help him and far, far away. Even if a magic eagle bore her away over the sea that separated them, the battle would be long over.

She concentrated fiercely on the images in the pool. Were he to win, she might find him somewhere in the land of men. She looked as they did, could disguise herself as a woman of the port city, with a flowing gown and ribbons in her hair. She would cut it all off were he to die. No matter where she was, she would grieve for him.

If he lost this battle, there would be no grave and no honor for one who’d fought so bravely. No, the mauled corpse would be fed to the jackals who prowled the edge of the city at night.

The scrying pool of the tree vouchsafed a knowledge that shattered the last of her innocence.

She, Linnea, was by no means an isolated victim of Ravelle. No, the legions of Outer Darkness had been summoned forth by him and the three remaining lords of Arcan Isles could not stop the malevolent army. Her near-rape by Ravelle had been only a harbinger of a rape of the world on both sides of the Arcan seas.

Beguiled by his masterful trickery, thinking of him as her lover, she’d been whipped and humiliated—and to her secret shame, found it pleasurable. How near she had been to becoming his creature, having his split hoof forever upon her neck as he slowly destroyed her mind.

After the terrifying encounter—it seemed suddenly vivid in her mind—she’d hated to think of what had happened to her, had told Marius only when the hurt of the demon’s wicked deception had become too much to hide. She’d wanted to believe that she had only blundered, meeting evil by chance. But no.

Ravelle had not been idly roaming the forest upon that day, beset by obscene urges, looking to inflict his unholy lust on just anyone. If her guess was right, he had been stalking Marius even then.

The scrying pool had revealed a deeper and far more terrifying truth if she read what it showed aright: there would an end to all innocence and all hope. The demon surely hoped to rule the world of men, and the beings of the Arcan Islands.

He had started with Marius and not been able to finish.

The centaur’s rescue of her and his swift vengeance had fired the great demon’s blood with intemperate fury.

“Show me all!” she begged the pool.

Its surface afforded her one last glimpse of the combatants on the amphitheatre’s stage. Blood poured down Marius’s flanks from gashes made by the lion’s claws. They were still shackled by their back legs, unable to escape, forced back into the fight by the men who goaded them on.

But he had one mighty arm around the lion’s neck. Its tongue dangled from between long teeth that too had tasted Marius’s flesh—blood dripped from them.

Strength for strength, they were matched. But who was winning? From the outside in, an impenetrable darkness seeped into the water until the centaur and lion were blacked out.

Her heart breaking, Linnea raised her hands to the heavens and screamed, sending frightened birds flying out from the leaves, calling brokenly, their cries echoing her own despair. Something above her, far above, swooped in circles.

She cringed, believing for a moment that she had called forth another demon or Ravelle himself. Linnea had nowhere to hide.

If she scrambled back into the tree, he would get Quercus too, she thought wildly. Let the damned one take her then. And let her die swiftly, she pleaded with the uncaring gods and goddesses.