Lord of the Forest (6 page)

The tiny demons shrieked and buzzed off after their master.

Flailing wildly and shrieking himself, Ravelle came down furlongs away, crashing through treetops and vanishing in a plume of smoke.

“Marius!”

In a fury, he kicked the ironwood trees that bound her into splinters, ignoring their low, agonized howls, and freed her swiftly. “Get on!” She gathered up her ripped gown and mounted him somehow, straddling his broad back and noticing dazedly that he still had a tail, though it was in tatters.

Off he went, crashing through the forest in the opposite direction from where Ravelle had landed, followed by Esau, diving and swooping through the trees. She reached out her arm to the wounded bird and he grasped desperately for her wrist, flapping unevenly with so many feathers gone. Linnea flinched as the tiny claws of his feet dug in to the marks of her bondage, but the bird held on until she could draw him close to her bosom.

She clung to Marius’s mane for the rest of the wild ride, her fear pounded out of her by the jolting swiftness of the centaur’s race to safety, ducking branches. Most of the trees leaned back to allow them passage, but a few did not, bending down as if to sweep her off her rescuer’s back and stab out his eyes while they were at it.

The forest had its betrayers too.

He galloped on and on, and, finally winded, his sides lathered with foaming sweat, brought her to another pool. He went in circles around it, slowing his pace, gasping. The pool was untroubled and serene, though that, she now knew, could be an illusion as well. Her fear came back but it was paralyzing, slowing her thoughts to a state that felt like an opium dream. Linnea eased off Marius’s back, hardly able to think. She was barely aware that she was still holding Esau.

Marius turned to look at her and smiled sadly. “Lucky magpie.”

Linnea looked down at the bird nestled between her breasts and her hand supporting it. “He is safe enough. Are we?”

“For now,” was all Marius said.

“What is this place? Why have you brought me hence?”

“There is healing here. You will need it.”

“And you? Your tail is in bleeding tatters.”

He didn’t answer, but looked down at his body, willing it to change. She saw the horse’s glossy hide heave, twitch, and roll back until his own flesh was revealed. It was as if he was being flayed alive—and the pain he seemed to be feeling was commensurate. Marius cried out in agony. Four legs became two. Hooves turned into feet. Linnea could only stare. He had been magnificent as a centaur, but to her, he was more so as a man.

The skin and hooves of his centaur body, shed and stepped out of, drew together in a crumpled heap of hide, flesh, and cartilage. She watched with fascinated revulsion as it got smaller and smaller and sank into the ground, remembering that the demon too had shed a skin, though she had not seen Ravelle do it.

The scratch he’d given her throbbed upon her chest, though it no longer bled. But something of his ill temper and distrust had infected her from it. She was too overcome to fight off her growing unease.

Indeed, she had no way of knowing if this Marius was any more real than the demon version. She must remain on her guard—but oh, she was weak. Dangerously so. She could not bound away into the woods like the wise little doe. Nor could she remember the words that would summon her father, the Great White Stag. She had only seen him twice in her life.

Fully himself again, Marius sat down heavily upon a rock, breathing hard, still sweating profusely. He rubbed the spot at the base of his spine where his tail had been as if it still pained him.

“You should have become a man when he left you tied by your tail.”

“I would not have been able to reach you quickly. As it was, I sent Esau ahead. He could see more than I could from the air and sound the alarm.”

“He took Ravelle unawares. But the poor bird was in mortal danger from the imps.”

Marius looked over at Esau, his head tucked under his wing and his breast puffing out in frightened little breaths. “He too will be healed, Linnea. But you must go first.”

“Go where?”

He pointed at a tree. “The being who lives in this place is a true healer. I am not.”

She gazed at him with suspicion. “And where is this being?” She gestured around them at the silent trees and mirrorlike pond. “I see nothing but these damned woods and yet another pond. What if we have to run again?”

Marius looked at her steadily. “Indeed we may.”

“What if we are caught?” She wanted to fly at him, whether to rain blows upon his hard body or be held in his arms, she could not say.

“It is not easy to outrun a centaur. I will change, and change again if you need me to. It is painful to make happen, but I can. Because of you, I think.”

If only she had his gift of transformation. To have his strength, to be able to escape—on their desperate journey hence, she had blocked out the overwhelming power of Ravelle’s malice, his delight in seeing her strung up by her wrists, her body bared again to his evil red gaze.

Even standing in the sun, Linnea felt a creeping sense of sudden despair that made her cold to her core. They might run from him or take a stand against him, but Ravelle would wait forever.

“Can you take me away from this island? Far away?”

“I will. Not yet.”

“Anyway,” she said slowly, “you saved my life. I should thank you for that.” But the words of gratitude did not spring to her lips. The bird gave a faint squawk from her bosom and she looked down at it. “You and Esau.”

Marius was too weary to smile. “He did his best. That beak of his is sharp. He has used it on me.”

Why? Linnea stared at him, searching his guileless face. Plunged by happenstance into a world where nothing at all was what it seemed for long, she would have to be mindful of everything that was done and said. And ultimately she might have to protect herself, if it came to that.

“Understand that a centaur is an unpredictable creature,” he was saying. “Like a stallion, if you will. Wild, strong, and uncontrollably sexual. Esau feels obliged to remind me not to go too far from time to time, but I cannot rely on a mere bird to help me control such powerful instincts.”

She was silent again, reminding herself that she was not his one and only, just a partner in lovemaking for the solstice feast. A celebration that had turned into a nightmare in the blink of a demon’s red eye.

Marius sighed hugely. “Did Ravelle—”

“I will not talk of it.” She lifted the bird gently from between her warm breasts and set it in a sunny spot in a low fork of a sheltering tree. Reluctant to leave her, Esau gave a complaining squawk, then fluffed out his surviving feathers and cleaned the blood from them.

“As you wish. I see no demon’s mark on you.”

Should she show him the scratch? He had not noticed it. To explain it would be like being strung up again, so ashamed was she of how she had bent to the demon’s will. He seemed somehow to have left traces of himself in her very brain. “You came in time,” she said in a measured voice. Her troubled mind was in turmoil. If this Marius really was the Marius who had loved her so well, she could never tell him of the demon’s wicked dalliance with her.

She reminded herself that she had not touched the monster intimately or kissed him in the alluring guise of her solstice lover and thanked the mysterious instinct that had made her hold back.

“Linnea, I cannot let you out of my sight from now on.”

“So.” She walked quietly about, but her nerves were screaming. “Our idyll was not meant to last.”

“No.” He stayed where he was, still recovering from the mad gallop and his forced transformation, breathing deeply. “Ravelle must have sensed my abandonment to joy and seized his chance.”

She nodded, rubbing her arms for warmth. “It was you he captured first.”

Marius plowed a hand through his hair, which was spiking with drying sweat. “Nothing for it. Your game of hide-and-seek went awry. I was looking everywhere for you and then there he was, breathing fire and throwing ropes of iron to ensnare me. Demon or no, I might never have found you. How quickly you run, Linnea, and how quietly. It was uncanny.”

She stiffened. “And what do you mean by that?”

“I felt like a fool, that’s all. There is not an inch of the Forest Isle that I do not know. But you vanished like the breeze itself.”

She thought of the doe and almost smiled. “Some are better at that trick than I.”

“Now it is my turn to ask you what you mean.”

“Before Ravelle appeared to me, I saw a doe and twin fawns. And then a man appeared who I thought was you. She knew better. She tried to warn me. But I was bedazzled.”

By my desire for you. He used it to lure me and he used it against me
. She didn’t want to say it because just looking at him, naked, weary, and overwhelmed, made her want to comfort him. He had rescued her, for what it was worth. But she would need her wits about her to escape with her own hide intact.

“He shapeshifted, then.” Marius gave a disgusted grunt. “The real Ravelle can become anything with two legs. He is a monster like no other. I saw him in all his hideous glory, but then he meant to scare me. Who was he for you? A handsome youth? An innocent girl?”

“Neither.” Linnea gave him a long look. “He turned himself into a grown man, tall and strong, who resembled you perfectly in every way. But he stood in the shadows and did not speak. I thought
you
were playing some sort of game with me. And then—”

Marius rose and came to her. He reached out as if to take her in his arms, but she recoiled. “Forgive me. I don’t need to know everything.”

“And you never will,” she said simply. It had been so easy for the demon to decipher her emotions and deceive her. What had he said to her?
I wanted you, Linnea. That is why I became what you wanted. Him.

Ravelle could do it again.

She would stick close to Marius. Talk, she told herself, of anything but what had happened. Just talk. Do not think. But she had to know one thing. “Is there no way—” she hesitated, her voice breaking, “that I might know for certain, if we are parted, that it is you I see and not the demon?”

Marius kept a respectful distance, walking about now, his arms folded over his bare chest. He was as naked as he had been before, although at the moment she found it disturbing. The scratch on her chest throbbed like a warning not to be weak. Linnea turned away, hiding it from his gaze.

“Besides my voice, you mean? You did say that Ravelle didn’t speak to you. He is a master of illusion but the voice comes from the soul. It is harder to feign than flesh and blood.”

She nodded in reluctant agreement. “After a while, he spoke. Not much. He said nothing worth repeating. His voice was different, but—” She broke off, remembering the crudeness with which he bade her to suck and touch his Marius-body, and his coarse sexual display.

Marius did not seem eager to hear the details of the encounter. “You do not have to tell me. I am all too familiar with Ravelle’s brand of evil. It begins with mischief and becomes mayhem. He can barely control himself.”

But he is very good at controlling others.
The shame of her humiliation at his hands returned sevenfold. She hoped Marius would not see it in her face.

“There was a way once,” Marius said at last. “The gods who cursed me did it with an amulet of golden stone in the shape of a horse. I will tell you of it later. We must get inside.”

She closed her eyes, feeling faint. There was no shelter here, unless he meant the ground under the tree he pointed to. She felt sick…and she for one had a feeling that the demon had just begun to wreak havoc.

“What is that mark upon your chest?” Marius asked suddenly.

“It is only a scratch. From Ravelle. To remember him by.”

He gave her a grave look and shook his head. “Worse than that, Linnea. Ravelle’s claws hold poison. The scratch must be opened up and the wound cleansed.”

“Will you do that?” she asked softly. Would she let him? She did not want to be touched and with good reason—
“No,” Marius said, interrupting the dark flow of her thoughts. “We have tarried here too long while I rested. We simply are not safe out in the open.”

She smiled bitterly. “No, we are not. You gave Ravelle the kick to end all kicks. He will be looking for you.”

Marius searched her face. “You are right. He is nothing to trifle with and his strength is soon regained. Anyway, come. Or I will throw you over my shoulder.”

Linnea looked around. “I don’t see a door. Or a house.”

He waved at a tree in the near distance and this time she looked at it more intently. It was so old and so large that its massive lower branches rested upon the earth. “Look again.”

She drew in her breath as the thick bark of the trunk pulled back in shaggy, peeling folds. A door appeared and some unseen force within the tree opened it from the inside.

He held out his hand. At last she noticed that it was covered with deep scratches from the branches of the treacherous trees that had whipped at him during their mad gallop. Trees that might betray them yet. How to tell the difference in a forest so ancient and so crowded with living green would be an impossible task, at least for her. His other hand, hanging at his side, looked worse. The sides of his torso bore scratches and more than one gash.