The Deer Prince's Murder: Book Two of 'Fantasy & Forensics' (Fantasy & Forensics 2) (2 page)

Chapter Two

Galen kept his expression carefully neutral. Shaw’s beak dropped open and he stared in surprise. Me? I’m just glad my own jaw didn’t hit the floor when I heard that.

“Liam…” I breathed, “Are you asking me out on a
date?
”

“No! Well, yes. In a way. I mean, I don’t think of you in that manner, not really. It’s just for the duration of the ceremony!” He got up, and then added, “I spoke about this with Galen last evening when I first heard the rumor about the Protector. He suggested–”

Galen crossed his arms and cleared his throat ominously.

“I mean,
I
suggested that since he’d managed to transform an equine body into a human one, that perhaps he could do the same for a human…into a Fayleene form.”

“And you agreed to this?” I demanded, rounding on Galen.

“It was a most fortunately timed request,” the wizard replied. “I was just transcribing the details of my transformation spell, the one used both by Magnus and myself to pass as human. The spell for human-to-Fayleene is remarkably similar. In truth, it is somewhat easier, given the balance of mass between an adult human female and a fully grown doe.”

“Well, I’m glad that Liam gave you the motivation to solve one of your academic problems,” I groused. I got up and began to pace. “But if the law specifies that only Fayleene can attend, then I don’t think that using a transformation spell is quite…I don’t know,
kosher
.”

“To be precise,” Galen intoned, “the exact words of the Fayleene law states that the only persons allowed in their Sacred Grove are ‘those who bear the noble countenance of the deer’. To my mind, this only bars creatures who are not in Fayleene form.”

Great. The one time Galen is able to untangle a legal document, and it’s not in my favor. I stopped pacing and thought this through for a moment. Liam was my friend, one who’d stepped up to save my life at risk of his own. He wouldn’t have asked this of me unless he were well and truly desperate. And in truth, a part of me was curious about what visiting the Fayleene – from an inside perspective, so to speak – would be like.

“What about an illusion spell?” I asked. “Wouldn’t that be easier, in any case?”

“That is possible. But Fayleene have finely attuned senses, including that of smell. They would pick you out at fifty paces.”

“Liam,” I said, and he tilted his head to look up at me, “won’t I be picked out anyway? No one will recognize me, it’ll be obvious that I’m not part of the...herd, I guess.”

“You will attract some attention,” Liam admitted. “But recall: many Fayleene choose to live near to but separate from the Lead Does, just as I. In fact, given my time spent in exile, it would be expected that I’d have found a consort who also chose to stay apart.”

I turned back to Galen. “What if you mess up the spell? Or you can’t change me back?”

“Perish the thought!” Galen’s nose wrinkled in offense. “I have performed Archmage-level magic before, and without erring in the slightest. As to changing you back…if I were indisposed, you would change back in stages over the next few days on your own.”

“Over the next few days? That sounds…painful.”

“And acutely embarrassing,” he agreed. “Which is why I will handle the return to your true form. I assure you that it shan’t be any more difficult than cantering down a grassy lane.”

I let out a breath in resignation. I trusted Galen with my life. Hell, I trusted Liam and Shaw with my life too. And again, that part of me that was twelve years old grabbed me by the back of the collar and said,
Come on! This will be fun! Haven’t you always wondered what it would be like, to be a magical creature?

I nodded in the affirmative, and Liam tapped his forehooves in a little dance of delight.

“Just tell me what I need to do,” I said.

And that brought me back to the present. Liam had told me how, in the strict matriarchal structure of the Fayleene that the newly visiting doe was not to speak to other members of the herd unless spoken to first. Galen had instructed me to avoid eating anything at all for the entire night prior to his casting the transformation spell.

Neither of them had told me that I had to strip down to my skivvies. Or told me just how damned cold it was going to be in the Fayleene woods. I kept these thoughts to myself as Galen turned the next pages in his spell book, but I didn’t plan on staying quiet much longer. Getting half-naked and chilly was kind of comical. Hypothermia wasn’t.

“Ah! There is the final phrase I require,” Galen said, cracking a smile.

“Then thou hadst better use it,” Shaw observed. “Our friend Dayna seems to be turning a most pretty shade of blue.”

Galen shut the book with a snap and put it away in one of his saddlebags. The wizard held his arms up, shouting his incantation in his deep bass centaur voice.

“
Tá mé ag casadh tú isteach i fianna anois! Beidh tú ag spraoi a bheith ina fia!
”

A circle of yellow fire winked into existence between his outstretched hands. A bright, burning cadmium yellow, the kind you’d see dabbed on a freshly painted oil portrait. The heady smells of blooming night jasmine and campfire ash flowed from the circle as it began to spin like a strobe light on a dance floor.

The circlet of fire rose up from the centaur’s fingertips. Then it flattened and shot towards me. I flinched, squeezed my eyes shut and felt my skin crawling, rippling, as the magical energy coursed along my arms, my legs, my belly.

A black nova of sensation burst in my brain. The tangy smell of pine-wood sawdust. Taste of bitter salad greens. A flash of colors behind my eyes. I felt my legs give way, felt myself falling forward onto my long, long forearms.

Felt myself pitch onto all fours. But I was still standing, somehow. My eyelids were still squeezed tightly shut. Breath whistling out of my lungs like I’d just run the fifty-yard dash.

“Dayna,” Liam’s voice called, “are you all right?”

I raised my head. Opened my eyes.

Gasped at what I saw. What I heard. What I smelled!

It snapped me all the way back to when I had been in seventh grade. When I got to do my very first dissection. The frogs my class worked on had been packaged in a formalin solution that smelled hair-curling awful. Since then, I’ve built up a tolerance for the worst scents. But the fact remained that I had an exquisitely tuned sense of smell, one that I had to tame and discipline myself to use.

Right now, deep in the Andeluvian woods and inside a Fayleene body, all my self-taught mojo vanished. For a few seconds, my head reeled with sensory overload, as if I were deep-sniffing a fistful of permanent markers while staring directly into a strobe flash.

“Glah!” I exclaimed coherently.

“Dayna, I think you need to give it a moment.” Liam’s voice sounded richer, fuller, like someone had just gotten around to turning on the center channel on the speakers. His words rippled down my ears, making them flicker like a rabbit’s. Strange sensation, that.

“I…wow,” I said, sounding like a half-baked stoner. “This is wild. Is this how…you Fayleene see the world?”

“I suppose so. I mean, I really don’t know anything different.”

My eyeballs finally stopped with their visual tap dance and settled down. The colors didn’t, though. Everything around me looked super-saturated, as if someone had turned up the gamma correction on an old computer monitor to maximum. The single dark green of the forest had split into multiple shades and hues. The golden sunlight gleamed brighter, making my eyes water. And my friends looked different as well. Different, in the sense that someone had liberally smeared each one of them with fluorescent blue ink.

Shaw’s wings were outlined in a fuzzy aquamarine glow. Galen’s jacket and forelegs were a blur of blue-white daubs. Bright cyan lines shone from across Liam’s flank, like racing stripes done up in black-light paint.

“I’m not sure,” I remarked, as I tried to steady my voice. “But I think that Fayleene see further into the color spectrum than humans. And the smells…”

I took a few more breaths, working and tasting the air that circulated up my new, longer nasal passages. The Fayleene’s forest had a distinctive, peppermint scent that lay over the usual woodsy smells of bark, moist earth, and decaying leaves. At least that was the way it smelled to my poor human nose.

But now, it was like I’d wandered onto the manufacturing floor of a candy-cane factory. I had to force myself to focus. Envisioned grasping a dial in my brain, turning down the sensory impact with a
click-click-click
until I could cope. It took a few moments, but I finally got things under control. My friends looked relieved, meaning that my facial expressions must have finally gotten beyond the oh-so-fashionable ‘brink of a nervous breakdown’ look.

I managed to stand up straight. Felt the long, ruler-straight bones of my legs move into place. A slight tickling along my torso. I shook off my human underwear from where it dangled, uselessly, from my torso with a little shimmy and took a step or two forward. My head felt a little unbalanced from the weight of my antlers. Like reindeer, both Fayleene genders had horns perched atop their skulls.

I half-turned to look at myself. Saw my spotted flank, my powerful hindquarters that tapered to slim, hooved legs, and a powder-puff white tail.

“What do you guys think?” I asked.

“It appears that my transformation spell has been an unqualified success,” Galen said, with a note of pride.

“I agree. Wholeheartedly!” Liam breathed.

Shaw grunted. “Meh. ‘Tis a look that makes one appear…of lesser intelligence.”

Liam shot a glance at Shaw and let out the closest thing to a growl I’d ever heard from a deer creature.

“But the form is extremely…tasteful!” Shaw added hurriedly.

“That’s enough, you two,” I said, as I minced forward a few steps on my new legs. “Prince Liam, we’d best be off before we miss the ceremony.”

“That much is true,” he agreed, and his annoyed look was replaced with one of anticipation. “If you would be so kind as to follow at my flank?”

I went to Liam’s side as Galen declared, “Shaw and I shall abide here until your return. Best of luck to you both!”

Yeah,
I thought,
Something tells me we’re going to need it.

Liam set off into the underbrush, and I followed him. In a few moments, our companions faded from view behind us.

The woods pressed in around us more closely, wreathing us in a combination of tall piney trees and a tangle of low-lying scrub. And yet, even with the antlers projecting from my head, I was able to follow Liam between, under, and through anything that could have caught us or tripped us up. Our hooves drummed out a muffled beat as we wended our way along miniscule forest paths carpeted with mint-scented pine needles.

“You’ve managed to figure out our gaits quite easily,” Liam complimented me.

“That’s because I’m not thinking about it,” I explained. On cue, I stumbled a little and mumbled a curse under my breath before continuing. “I’m just letting the body do the work. If I think about it,
then
it becomes a problem.”

“Ah. Well, then. Keep on ‘not thinking’ about it. We’re about to join the others. Remember what I told you about my people’s customs.”

A dull thrumming reached my scoop-shaped ears. The sound of many other hooves trotting on the needle-cushioned earth around us. Our path abruptly merged with that of others, and the underbrush fell away to reveal a multitude of Fayleene couples, each travelling in the same direction. The males were pretty much quiet, eyes fixed on their goal ahead, while the females chatted amongst themselves.

At first glance, the does all looked roughly the same. Each had delicate muzzles, dense, fawn-colored coats spotted with white, and sharp black hooves. But upon closer inspection, I noticed small but telling differences. The larger does, ones with eight or more points on their antlers, did all the talking, while the younger ones remained silent. My mind cast back to what Liam had told me, of the matriarchal structure of his kind:
do not speak unless spoken to.

Maybe it was for the better. The chatter that I did hear, as soon as the more mature does caught sight of me, was as bad as a bunch of catty women looking to take a new arrival down a few pegs. The fact that we were on the move didn’t seem to matter in the slightest. The old biddies just tore in with the subtlety of a school of piranha.