Michael J DeLuca - [BCS266 S01] - Forest Spirits (html)

by Forest Spirits (html)

  At some point in the night, Tethas had shifted away from him. Reaching for her now, he found her tensed for flight. One sudden movement and she’d bound away into mist until he lost the white flag of her tail.

  “It’s a bluff,” he told her. “They’re up on the ridge, where we stopped at dusk. The boars can’t get down the way we came. They’ve probably been hunting for a route all night. They’re desperate, trying to flush us out.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “No.”

  They waited, listening, but there was nothing, no birds, no crickets, no frogs, no wind.

  “What do we do?”

  What would Dad have done? Fight. Maybe kill; Cole didn’t have that option. His father hadn’t run from many things in his life—not even from a son who couldn’t live up to his roots. It was Cole who’d run—away to the anonymous city. The future that Cole was fighting to make with Tethas bore no resemblance to the one Dad had wanted for him.

  He touched her cheek: freckled skin cool with heat beneath. “What would you do?”

  It shouldn’t matter that this was the Forest, a place he remembered so well though everything had changed, where she’d never even set foot. Neither of them could do this alone.

  Her fawn eyes closed, opened. “Well,” she said, a slow outlet of breath. “We’re not splitting up.”

  “No.”

  “And we can’t just sit and wait. They’d find us. So... we should trick them. Or—not trick them, but teach them. Like with the Masque.”

  She was wild with fear. But she was right. All they had to do was convince two Foresters—two people, not a whole city—that this place they were supposedly sworn to serve needed saving.

  Wordlessly, Cole and Tethas untangled themselves and set to breaking their meager camp. It was eerie, disorienting, waking in the Forest. He wasn’t a child anymore. Blisters pulsed on the pads of his feet. He must have slept on a pine root, because there was a knot in his ribs the size of an apple. Cole steeled himself for the shock of slipping cold feet into wet boots.

  They still needed a plan. They didn’t have costumes, masks, dancers, or an orchestra. They had half a bag of pemmican, Tethas’s staff, an oilcloth, a bit of cord, a knife. And they had the Forest Argent. What was left of it.

  Beside them on the ledge, something moved—leaves rustling under the lightest of steps. Tethas caught her breath. Cole touched his lips. No way a Forester could have come down from the ridge that fast, even if he’d left his boar behind.

  A fawn emerged from the brush onto their little ledge. Its nostrils flared, dimly visible as darkness lifted into faint color. It was thin. Ribs showed through its quivering flanks. Cole had hung his pack, with what was left of their food, from a branch the way his father had taught him. The fawn rose on its hind legs, seeking. Hunger, Cole realized; that was why the deer had come so close. With no pine nuts or acorns to eat, the late-summer leaves going dry, they’d be living on famine food, roots and bark, scavenging along the path for what travelers left behind.

  “Tethas.” It was more the shape of her name on his lips than a sound. “If we can lead the deer to the path,” he mouthed, “they’ll confuse our scent. Fool the boars.” Then they’d only have to fool the Foresters. And figure out what they’d eat the rest of the way to Bavda.

  Cole untied the cord, letting the pack slip to the ground at her feet. Tethas produced the bag of pemmican for the fawn to examine.

  Then she showed the fawn something else, cradled in her palm: a potbelly jar, glowing telltale and warm like a tiny, golden gourd. The fawn hesitated, but Cole understood. Seed magic, refined to pure form. Not a drop had remained from their allotment after the performance, that was certain. She must have taken it from her mother’s. She’d kept it hidden from him all this way. He knew why. He’d underestimated her again. She meant so much. He’d been so worried about protecting her that he’d failed to account for the ways she did the same for him. And for herself.

  They’d used seed magic in the Harvest Masque because to do without would have around suspicion, and because it made the illusions of the performance more real. With any luck, the magic had helped people see why they couldn’t keep using it for everything else. Because Tethas couldn’t just empty that jar into the dirt and watch pine saplings sprout at her feet. Deer couldn’t drink it to survive. Seed magic was good for a thousand things, but it couldn’t unmake itself. It couldn’t bring back what was lost.

  Still, maybe they could use it now to save their lives.

  Not looking at him, Tethas let the jar disappear into the pack. She held out a handful of the fruity, aromatic pemmican to the fawn.

  “Don’t,” Cole said, too loud. He couldn’t bear it, even from her, to see a deer made dependent, the last wild thing succumbing to human control. “Please, not like that.” Tethas and the fawn drew back from each other as though stung.

  He tried to make her see he wasn’t angry, that he understood. He was angry that it had come to this, at himself, at every time he’d relied on seed magic in his life—not at her. Never.

  Tethas scattered a few pieces of fat-sticky fruit to the ground. The fawn came forward, questing.

  Tethas brushed her lips against the scruff at the base of Cole’s jaw.

  Giving a wide berth to the fawn earnestly munching, then to a trio of does that bounded away to the edge of shadow at their approach, Cole and Tethas scrambled together down the little ledge, over chill stone and dew-damp moss, and Cole led the way west towards Bavda Path.

  The forest floor was springy and treacherous with shattered stone. He used the staff he’d cut for Tethas, unconcerned anymore if it made him look inexpert or weak or if his father would laugh. Though he’d grown up in this forest and Tethas had never set foot here, she was faster, surer, like a dancer, even pausing every dozen steps to scatter a handful of pemmican. Cole stage-whispered for her to wait.

  Not hearing, she reached the path well ahead of him, stepped blindly out onto it, and froze.

  One of the great bristleback boars hulked astride the path ahead, its heavy breath clouding in mist.

  It hadn’t seen her, nor scented her. No wind.

  “They flanked us,” he murmured. One Forester must have stayed on the ridge to fool Cole that his ruse had worked, while the other returned to the path. A trap.

  He beckoned Tethas back behind a huge old beech. They crouched among its roots, waiting. Cole wanted to take her hand, to reassure her. He was afraid if he did she would scream.

  A flurry of hesitant footfalls behind them, faint but audible in the quiet of the predawn woods. Cole nearly leapt out of his skin, but it was only the deer again, the three does led by the inquisitive fawn, still hungry. Their presence was eerie, almost supernatural. Like Tethas.

  Cole thought he knew what to do. “Do you know the myth of the forest spirits?”

  Her brow wrinkled in puzzlement—but she knew. Everyone in Sheralind knew, even if they didn’t recognize it or thought it quaint, like Mrs. Amnan, too busy building the future to bother with the Harvest Masque or think what it meant to that future. “My dad thought this whole forest existed because of them. And everything in it, even us. He thought all our souls were tiny fragments of theirs. Like seeds.”

  He dug her jar of seed essence from the pack, keeping it low, close to his body to hide the glow. They bent over it together, her freckles soft in its light, her dark eyes glimmering.

  It was a mysticism out of vogue—but it was at the heart of all the stories. Children dressing as deer, crows, and foxes for the Harvest Masque acting out the myth just as sure as if they’d heard it from his father’s lips over a dying fire. That was the thing about ideas. Once you made them last, truly last, they were nearly impossible to kill.

  “What were they like?” Tethas asked. “The forest spirits. What happened to them?”

  Cole tried to remember. “There were so many stories.” Mostly he remembered firelight, and Dad’s red-and-pepper beard as he spoke, and the feeling tha
t the spirits were just beyond the reach of the light. “They were... powerful. Violent sometimes. Destructive. But... they studied life. They knew how it worked, they learned how to cultivate it. Nobody knows why the volcano exploded when it did. Maybe they did something to cause it? Maybe it was just their time. But my dad believed their spirits were still here. Watching us.”

  The crown of the huge beech above their heads began to rustle as a breeze found its way down from the ridge. An east wind, from the city. Cole thought he caught a hint of burning.

  The whole Forest Argent seemed to brighten. Beads of dew caught sunlight. Leaves lit up silver. The morning mist was burning away.

  In the near distance, the huge bristleback boar that until now had hulked quietly, almost as if it were sleeping, shook itself, snorted and turned.

  “The point is,” Cole said hurriedly, “if those Foresters are anything like my dad, whatever they’re being paid to do, whatever else they believe, they believe in the spirits too.”

  Moments later, there came a sharp blast from a hunter’s horn.

  They ran—or tried to, moving as quickly as they could over the broken ground, back along the path towards the ridge, towards Sheralind. Tethas outpaced him easily again, and he let her. He wasn’t about to look back for the boar behind them, nor for flying arrows or tiny spheres of magic-propelled iron, but he wanted his body between them and hers. A crashing from the woods to their left signaled that the deer were still with them, keeping pace, but panicked now—no longer seeking food but fleeing the bristleback. Any moment, around the next bend in the path, they’d encounter the second boar. Then it would be time. Or it would be over.

  Leaves rustled, dislodging drops of dew that pattered like a moment’s rain. No birds sang. Cole hoped the spirits were watching.

  He rounded the next bend and found Tethas face to face with a stag.

  It was the closest Cole had ever seen one alive, not pierced by one of his father’s arrows or hanging mounted in the Amnans’ receiving hall, and he could not account for its presence here or for the rage in its eyes. Its skin was stretched as sharply over its ribs as the fawn’s. A season of starvation had left its antlers stunted, gnarled, but sharp, and the stag stood tall and did not shy. And neither did she.

  She turned the bag of pemmican inside out in her hands, but it was empty.

  The stag pawed at the rocky, rootbound earth.

  Then, between the stag’s antlers, along the Bavda Path from Sheralind, Cole saw a Forester walking, one hand resting lightly on a huge boar’s back. By his dress, his neatly tailored greens and the longbow slung over one shoulder, he might have been Cole’s father. But he was taller, younger. He might have been Cole. Seeing the stag, seeing Cole and Tethas, he stopped short. Three tiny iron spheres hovered about his head, dull in the morning light, awaiting their target.

  “All we have to do is show them,” said Cole. “Just like with the Masque. You and the deer are the dancers. The music is the wind. You don’t have to make them think. They know. Just make them feel.”

  Tethas would have to dance with the stag, to move with it, while the seed magic’s powerful illusion made them both into something more. To spirits.

  He could see it already in his mind. They would tower as high as the trees. The ancient forces of the forest, breeze and mist, would adorn them. Their bodies would glow with volcanic heat, answered by the glimmer of long-dead fireflies and untouchable stars. He wouldn’t need to infuse them with poise or vitality or grace; they had that to spare.

  He didn’t have to explain. She nodded—scared but focused, calm. It was so easy to read her; that was part of what made her such a master. It was what made her so incredible to work with. She didn’t just dance, or play a role. She felt it.

  Cole watched her chest expand and contract with her breath; the incredible grace and precision, even in heavy boots, with which she flexed her calves as she took a half-step back, opening her body.

  The stag’s antlers shivered. It seemed to breathe with her.

  Cole’s feet throbbed with blisters within his own damp boots. He laid the staff aside against a tree trunk. He loved her. She could do this.

  If she didn’t, there was every chance they would be torn apart by iron, antler, and tusk, and they’d both die martyrs, despite everything he’d tried to do. That, or nobody would ever know. At least they were together.

  But if she could, if it worked, they’d go on to Bavda, where Tethas would perform the Masque again, where she would speak. They’d win more people to their cause. She could train others. Cole could write new dances for her. Maybe there was something he could say about his father, about all those pebbles being washed away and then, one by one, replaced. And then they’d go on to Reterre and do it all again. It wouldn’t be easy. Every time would be a struggle just like this one, life and death. But slowly, things would begin to change.

  Cole didn’t take his eyes from her as he opened the jar.

  © Copyright 2018 Michael J. DeLuca