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

by Michael Angel

  “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.

  “Oh, look,” one said, “Prince Liam managed to bag himself a stand-in for the ev
ent.”

  “Bag? More like ‘beg’! I don’t recognize her,” another observed.

  “She’s probably the one who begged to come,” a third tsked. “I can see why someone drove her out of the herd. Pitiful choice really. Not fit for a princeling.”

  “Even one as wee and broken as Liam!”

  A chorus of strange, bleating laughs. Liam’s jaw set firm and he ignored the comments. Of course, they immediately started back in on me. Yeah, the Fayleene might have been beautiful magical deer, but up close, they were a bunch of harpies with cloven hooves.

  “Oh, this one thinks she’s a pretty flower, does she not?”

  “Puh-leze. Just look at those antlers! It’s obvious that she’s had some work done.”

  “And I bet those white spots on her flank wash right off after sunset!”

  Another titter of laughter. One which was drowned out by a male voice, one that was smooth as silk and yet carried the unmistakably arrogant tone of command.

  “Ladies,” said the voice, “Let us be kind to our newcomers. I, for one, am genuinely curious as to who Liam managed to corral for this function.”

  A new pair of figures emerged from the brush beside the trail to join us. The slighter figure was a young doe, who threw me a glance laden with a clear ‘keep your hooves off my man’ warning. As to the larger figure…

  Liam let out a resigned sigh. “Hello, Prince Wyeth.”

  Wyeth didn’t so much as acknowledge the greeting as he came into view. I wasn’t into Fayleene, no matter the body I wore, but this specimen was enough to put a hitch in a girl’s breath. I’d said once before that Liam looked more than a little like Bambi. But Wyeth looked exactly like the Disney character – the version from the last act of the film, when the fawn had grown up into a handsome stag. His body was a lean slab of dun-colored muscle, perfectly proportioned, and crowned with a glorious twelve-point rack of antlers.

  I could see someone sculpting this creature’s form into the hood ornament for a Rolls Royce. Or sketching his likeness to put on a wine bottle’s label. But once I’d listened to him for a few minutes, I’d have preferred that some hunter had shot him and mounted his head on a wall.

  “Well, now,” Wyeth pronounced, as he craned his neck to look at us. “I am surprised. Not only does little Prince Liam have a pretty doe following in his wake, I can’t make out the leash he’s using to drag her along!”

  Chapter Three

  “Leave us be,” Liam said flatly. “We’re not bothering you, are we?”

  “As if you ever had a choice in the matter.” The large stag fell in beside me, and I abruptly became aware of his muscular bulk. Liam was only a little bigger than me, in this form. But Wyeth’s barrel chest was easily double the width of mine, and my eyes only came up to the middle third of his neck. He stared at me for a moment, and let out an amazed snort.

  “Now it all makes sense,” he muttered under his breath. “I should have known...”

  “Wyeth,” Liam gritted in a frosty tone, “I’m warning you. Leave my consort alone and attend to your own.”

  Again, the large stag ignored Liam’s words. He continued to stare at me in amazement.

  And I’d had just about enough of this.

  “Look,” I appealed to Liam, “that’s got to count as ‘being spoken to’. Because I’m getting tired of this nonsense.”

  “Ah,” Wyeth announced, his voice thick with sarcasm. “You do speak, pretty little doe.”

  “Well, that last bit definitely counts as being spoken to,” Liam grumped.

  “Good.” I canted my head back to look into Wyeth’s impassive, coffee-brown eyes. “I do speak, and I’d like to know where you picked up your winning attitude. Liam’s traveled to the court of King Benedict and Fitzwilliam, saved hundreds of lives, traveled to another world, and captured the mad wizard, Magnus Killsheven! Tell me, Wyeth: what have you done with your life besides nibble on tender shoots, drink from forest pools, and shag the occasional doe with extremely bad taste in her choice of studs?”

  I think my shot must’ve hit home, as the surrounding does recoiled as if I’d bucked and kicked at them. A few hushed words to their male consorts and the other couples picked up the pace, leaving us behind. Wyeth, for his part, gave his own doe a nudge with his muzzle, urging her on. Once she’d trotted ahead, out of earshot, Wyeth gave me a final once-over, as if deciding where to jam the point of his antlers into my hide.

  “Prince Liam’s not the only one who has contacts in the human realm,” he said quietly. “I know who and what you are, Dayna Chrissie. And I know that you’re the daughter of a Fayleene murderer!”

  That stopped me. I traded a startled, horrified glance with Liam.

  How the hell did this son-of-a-buck know?

  “Oh, yes,” he went on, “a few words from me at this very moment, and bucks here would tear you apart. A few words from me a little later, when we’re in the Sacred Grove? The Lead Does themselves would flay your Fayleene skin from your human flesh!”

  “Never,” Liam declared, as he interposed his body between me and the larger stag. “They could try. But they would have to go through me first.”

  Wyeth’s face took on an amused look. But his voice remained as serious as ever as he sniffed, “I don’t need to prove my power that way. When I take our father’s place as the Protector of the Forest, I’ll be gracious. Just this once, I’ll forget that you’ve committed such a blasphemy. Consider it my gift to you, runt of a princeling.”

  With that, Wyeth bounded forward out of sight.

  I rounded on Liam in an instant.

  “Hold on a minute! That arrogant, ill-mannered jerk of a stag…he’s one of the Protector’s sons? We are talking about Quinval, the all-powerful Protector of the Forest?”

  Liam let out a snort of his own, this time. “That’s typically how it works in monarchies.”

  “But–”

  “For obvious reasons, it’s important to ensure that the Protector’s line goes on. Thus, Quinval has long had the right to mate with as many of the Lead Does as he wishes, so long as they consent to the breeding. So Wyeth, myself, the other Fayleene princelings…we’re all brothers or half-brothers.”

  “That means…that you’re as much a son of the Protector as any of the others,” I said, understanding.

  “True. Not that the family connection counts for all that much. My ‘brothers’ shunned me just as the rest of my people did, all those years. But Wyeth is something different. He’s the eldest of Quinval’s get. He’s always been the biggest, the most aggressive. And he’s always felt that gave him the right to lord his gifts over the rest of us.”

  “It shouldn’t give him any right.”

  “Yet it seems to. It’s long been assumed that he would take over for Quinval someday. And he’s pushed himself, trained himself to be the fastest, the strongest. Ready to take over as soon as our father started to teeter into old age. It’s admirable, I suppose, but his abilities make it hard for him to understand what it’s like for others not as lucky. I understood this best at the time of my accident.”

  “When you broke your antler, escaping a dragon.”

  “Even so. I limped back to the herd, burned and badly hurt, hoping the does would show mercy and treat my wounds. It looked like they were going to. I think they were. But Wyeth drove me off into the wilderness. Said that if I were meant to survive, I would prove it by doing so. And so I did.”

  The young princeling’s voice trailed off. His face gave nothing away, but his gaze remained fixed on some point immeasurably far off in space and time.

  “Liam, I can’t imagine what it must have been like, having him for a brother. But we don’t get to choose our family. Sometimes we just…need to try and find the good that’s within them.”

  A moment passed, then two. He looked at me, eyes pleading.

  “How do I do that, Dayna?”

  “I don’t know. But we all have to try, at least.”

  A rush of voices fille
d my ears, making them flick back and forth. I let out a gasp as Liam and I stepped into a vast, green cathedral of space. Trees the height of California redwoods arched overhead, creating a vaulted ceiling of branches. Dots of sunlight filtered through, dappling the crowd of Fayleene couples below. Off to one side, a line of older, gray-spotted females watched in regal silence as the newly arrived Fayleene sorted themselves out around the huge oval of the clearing.

  At equally spaced intervals on the forest floor lay a quartet of wide, flat leaves shaped like lily pads. Atop each leaf were small heaps of seeds, nuts, and a dark, chunky substance I couldn’t quite make out. But there were other things competing for my attention at that moment. Chief among them was Wyeth’s voice, raised in outrage and sorrow.

  “No! By the sacred heartwood, this cannot be so!”

  He raced forward, stopped, and stared into the shimmering veil of gold light that lay across the very center of the Grove. I recognized the shimmer as Liam and I drew closer. He also let out a cry of dismay, followed by similar shrieks and howls from the other Fayleene around us.

  The shimmer came from a preservation spell, one meant to slow or stop decay. I’d seen one before when I examined the body of Good King Benedict. Walking through the magical shield hadn’t been a pleasant experience, but I could attest to the fact that it had kept the corpse fresh.

  It looked like it was working now, too.

  Resting peacefully under the golden shimmer was an elder stag. His coat was a shiny, healthy slate gray. But his eyes were closed, and his chest did not rise and fall.

  “Liam…” I breathed, “Is that who I think it is?”

  “Yes,” he said, and his voice came out in a croak. “That’s my sire, Quinval. The Protector of the Forest lies dead before us.”

  All of a sudden, I had a really, really bad feeling about all of this.

  The Protector of the Forest lay peacefully under the preservation spell, as if in some dreamless slumber. Quinval’s legs lay folded beneath his gray-haired torso in the exact same pose I’d seen cats assume when they wanted to keep their paws tucked away for warmth. His long neck stretched out before him, eyes closed, letting his head loll on the ground in a manner that would’ve been pretty uncomfortable. Uncomfortable, that is, if he hadn’t already been dead.