Bound for the Forest

by Kay Berrisford

  Because something has to be done about him, damn the bedeviled little sprite!

  By the time he saw the lights of Little Lyndton glowing up ahead, his broodings had reverted solely to Scarlet—and then another realization hit him like a bombshell.

  Brien would have given almost anything at that moment for a glass of fine claret to fortify him for the trying night ahead, which would no doubt be passed, once again, stumbling though darkness and mud in search of that damned woodsman. His hopes faded when he recalled that the best alehouse in the village, The Duke’s Stirrup, was not the sort of institution to even keep a hostler, so they would hardly stock the best Bordeaux wines. But still, hope remained that they might serve him something flavoured with hops, rather than nettles that tasted like piss—and he would not want to dwell here long. He tied up Smithy near a water trough and went inside.

  As in all such dens of iniquity, the ceiling was so low that Brien had to stoop, the air thick with smoke and raucous male laughter. Somebody speaking to the landlord at the bar was attracting a torrent of wayward glances and whistles. A single glance in their direction compelled Brien’s attention too.

  Even swathed in thick layers of fabric, that curvaceous figure was familiar. She held her cloak so high it covered her nose and mouth, but as she turned, those sharp, nut brown eyes were unmistakable. It was Urhelda.

  * * *

  They settled in a booth by the fire, exchanging information so urgently that two tankards of tepid ale remained untouched between them.

  “So Jemima is going to leave the forest?” said Urhelda. “I can’t believe it. If those deeds were worth anything, why didn’t she want to use the money to buy back Carseald Hall? We all thought she was true in her devotion.”

  He grimaced in dull humour. “Apparently she’d even made inquiries about passage on a ship bound for Boston that sails next week. She wanted to quit this country, and soon.”

  “Wanted? What is to stop her if that is what she desires?”

  “Before I came back, there was little standing in her way, as far as I know. But now I’ve expressed my interest, I suppose her claim is thrown into doubt.” Leaning back, Brien flexed his knotted shoulders and drew a deep breath. “My father didn’t leave a will, it wasn’t his way of things, but my mother did, naming me as the sole beneficiary. Furthermore as the only son, my claim to any family property is always going to hold sway over any made by my sister.”

  “So the lawyer is going to award the deeds to you, no questions asked?” Urhelda pressed her lips into a disapproving, flat line.

  “He doesn’t have them. Vernon had seen them, and Jemima instructed him to make inquiries about their value, but she took them away with her.”

  “So you’re going to take them from her when you meet on the morrow.”

  The contempt in Urhelda’s voice was unmistakable—and to be honest, Brien found he could hardly blame her. Unless Jemima was feeling generous, which he doubted, he had few options beyond taking the deeds by force, or compelling her to reveal their whereabouts in some way. He could still hope for negotiation, but it all left a bitter taste in his mouth.

  He shook his head wearily and watched the flames wane in her eyes. His focus slid down to the cusp of her cleavage, visible now she had relaxed her tight grasp about her cloak.

  “Damn it. Maybe I’ll just let Jemima have the bloody deeds. I’ve got my winnings. Maybe I’ll settle for them and leave the forest tonight, forever.” He was speaking mindlessly, mumbling toward her plump breasts. “You can come with me, if you please?”

  “You don’t mean that, Melmoth Brien. You never do. We both know that you belong to another.”

  “Do I really?”

  His voice sounded strange and distant, even to his own ears. He stared unseeing at Urhelda and imagined he heard Scarlet’s deliciously dirty laugh amid the clamor around them.

  Urhelda sipped her ale. “You haven’t asked me why I’m here.”

  Brien felt a cold pressure in his chest. It was an effort to force out anything more than a nod, but he managed some words. Just. “Why are you here, Urhelda?”

  Her gaze swiveled unyieldingly onto his. “I’m making inquiries about Scarlet.”

  Brien sat up straight, mouth dry, the strange, icy pressure constricting about his heart. Damn it. Why had he not listened? Those murmurs on the breeze…but no, it was more than that. A tangible knowledge had shadowed him throughout his journey. Yet even now, he could not quite comprehend it.

  “Since you left, the catkins have turned bloodred,” she continued, relentlessly placid in the face of his distress. “We are all out searching. Arya is beside herself. I have never seen her so worried.”

  Brien’s fist clenched so tightly about the tankard handle that it shook. His words came without thought, born of pure feeling. “I can find him.”

  * * *

  Scarlet had struggled against Jemima, but the foul magic on her side was too powerful. She must have knocked him unconscious, or he had finally swallowed the poison, or both. Nothing else explained why Scarlet had woken up flat on his back on the forest floor, staring up through the branches and the swirling green miasma toward a bleak, sunless sky.

  The realm of Niogaerst. If he was here, then Jemima was winning. He’d never visited this place in his waking life before, but he’d seen enough pictures in the Aeboda in his youth and heard enough from Old Brigit about its terrors. And he had visited it enough in his dreams. Scarlet’s breathing was shallow, but he managed a hollow laugh.

  “As your body dies, you’ll sink into the realm beneath the forest. In the world of Niogaerst, the cold is worse than the fiercest winter; its every bite will cleave the flesh from your bones. The Lord of the Hazel Tree is master down there, and his Wild Men will drink your blood until all that is left is a wraith…”

  A shiver rattled through his frame. Yes, it was damned cold now that he was cast down here for real, but Scarlet’s flesh was not cleaved from his bones just yet. Had his struggles really all been in vain?

  He gritted his teeth against his suffering.

  He found he could sit up, and so he scrambled unsteadily to his feet. He was naked apart from a twiggy garland of hazel leaves twisted tight about his neck like a collar, and a ragged cloth about his middle. The spirits had already prepared him for his fate. Even worse, he sensed he was not alone. The thick foliage shifted like the mists, twitching with malicious portent. He touched ice white fingertips to dry lips.

  Everything felt brittle. The Lord of the Hazel would claim him soon, and there would be no going back. Unless…

  “He hasn’t left you. For you, sweet one, even my wayward brother will choose to come back, time after time.”

  Scarlet tossed up his chin and laughed again, fecklessness tinged with a hint of pride, although nothing could rival the terror that clenched his stomach like an iron fist. He’d tried to resist this fate all his short life, and yet he had been cast down into his worst nightmare so soon. Was he really placing his last hope in the man who had fucked him and left him?

  “It’s not over,” he reminded himself. “It’s never over. You’ve fought before—you’ve been saved before. Have faith in Holgaerst.”

  The earth started quaking beneath his feet. Scarlet lowered his gaze to the crimson soil, but he saw them come all the same. The Wild Men emerged from behind every tree, each well over six feet in height, the muscles in their arms, torsos, and legs so bulbous and heavily veined that they seemed more like knotted wood than human sinew. Most sported large bushy beards of twisted foliage that also matted their chests. Their features were gnarled; their mouths gaped with hunger, revealing their long, yellow fangs. Scarlet inhaled their foul lust, feeling malice where once, with the Green Man, he had known nurture, and with Brien he had known…that which he dared not think of, not here. He dropped to his knees.

  * * *

  “Nothing?”

  Urhelda hurried over to where Brien waited for her by the village water pump. “No. N
o luck.”

  “Maybe people don’t know who he is?”

  She shook her head. “Everybody in the forest villages knows Scarlet by sight, if not by name. I’m sure many daughters are secretly in love with him, and no doubt a few of the sons.”

  Tired as he was, Brien’s jealousy welled up instantly. Urhelda raised her lantern to his face, her eyes narrowed to inquisitional slits. “Are you going to admit that you love him now?”

  “Oh, Lord,” muttered Brien. He sank down on the edge of the trough. “I told Arya. Last night…I…I bedded him. Then I left him. I thought it would be the only way I could get over the lad. Hell, I even thought about seducing you to rid myself of these feelings…but…but…”

  Urhelda dropped down beside him, the trough creaking under their collective weight. “She told me. You do realize that you must never leave him now? He will die without you, which is why we have to find him soon.”

  “That’s bollocks!” Brien’s voice felt tight. He was a man. Men weren’t supposed to feel anything this strongly, at least not men like him. He was not Lord bloody Byron. Yet at that moment, his heart was so painfully full he feared it could explode with sorrow and need. But it would not, just as Scarlet would not die if Brien chose to leave him. “No healthy young woodsman dies of a broken heart.”

  “I’d like you to meet somebody,” said Urhelda quietly.

  She took him to the very edge of the village, to a crumbling flint cottage that reeked of hogs. After telling Brien to wait under the cover of darkness, she knocked briskly on the door.

  It was answered by a squat, bearded man who grunted in Urhelda’s face, then disappeared. Presently a woman emerged with a toddler clamped to her hip. Even in the poor light, Brien could see she was not young. Her thin face was heavily lined, although her bone structure was intrinsically beautiful, as were her dusky blue eyes, undiminished by the weight of life’s cares.

  “Sister,” said the woman, and she smiled, reaching her free arm about Urhelda’s shoulders and giving her a tight hug.

  “Dear Ellen. It’s been too long.” Pulling away, Urhelda told the child to go to its father and led her sister away from the house. Unsurprisingly Ellen looked startled by Brien’s looming presence at the gate.

  “He’s a friend,” explained Urhelda. “Please don’t ask questions, sister. You have to trust me on this, as I have trusted you. He must be told your secret.”

  Ellen gasped. “What…my poor baby?”

  “Yes, that’s right. Your little boy. The one you left in the forest. This is very important. You need to tell this man what was distinctive about him.”

  Brien had already guessed where this was going and was hardly surprised when Ellen described a pretty blond child and an odd, leaf-shaped birthmark.

  He wasn’t, however, prepared for the woman’s final, tearful confession. “It was the hardest moment of my life,” Ellen whispered. “I knew…I knew he’d be better off with the spirits. I was not wed, I’d not even had the poor mite christened, and there was no way they’d bury him in the churchyard.”

  “Bury him?” Brien stared at Ellen, and then at Urhelda. He didn’t need to be told the truth. He knew it instinctually.

  “Oh yes,” said Ellen, blue eyes stretched wide. “When I left that child in the forest, poor little thing had been dead for a day and a night.”

  * * *

  “Unwanted soul, changeling, gaast…wraith.”

  They closed in all too quickly. One reached down a meaty paw and grabbed Scarlet’s hair, yanking his head back. Then a Wild Man with a beard composed of pronged pine leaves thrust his face close to Scarlet’s and spat, saplike spittle fizzing and burning as it flecked his chilled skin. Another pinched his cheek, and then they were everywhere, mauling and bruising him, tugging his hair, gouging his flesh, and tossing him effortlessly between them. Despite their feral appearance, there was something uncannily unified about their actions; they were bound together in their wish to obey the Lord of the Hazel, who influenced their every movement in this, his realm. Scarlet half expected them to carry him straight to their master, but to his very slight relief, he found himself plastered up with his back against the trunk of a tree.

  A Wild Man pressed his fat hand to Scarlet’s sucked-in belly, fondling him lower until huge, barbed fingers scraped across his birthmark. Then he heard booming, dissonant words. Even though he stared, stricken, from one hostile face to another, he could not fathom which of them spoke, although the voice sounded clear enough in his head.

  “For twenty-two years you have hovered between the realms, little Scarlet. For twenty-three years Holgaerst has blessed you to dwell as an underling of the Greenwood. The spirits raised you, nurtured you as their own, sending their roots into your arid soil. And now the wanderer, he has claimed and he has plundered!” The fingers crept lower, a spiteful chuckle rattling behind the words as bloodred catkins blazed in Scarlet’s mind and drew together into a nebulous mass. That voice had mocked him before, when he’d nearly drowned two nights past. The Lord of the Hazel himself spoke in Scarlet’s mind once more, and the monstrous body with which the lord would torture and destroy him was already taking form. “He has left you, Scarlet—but nothing consumes like death. Niogaerst will have you last, and Niogaerst will have you all.”

  “Many speak of having me.” Despite the horror rearing within him, Scarlet’s response was caught between a cackle and a vicious snarl. “But I am still here. Their mistake is to think anything that matters can be taken from me.”

  Scarlet’s defiance set his blood racing, helping him quell his fear before it crushed him. Fuck, yes, he could take it! He could endure nearly anything to fight, to survive, and to play for time. Even the grizzled faces of the Wild Men did not seem quite as terrifying as a few moments before. They fell back, and their growls grew hush, as if they were wordlessly conspiring. Scarlet tried to set his mind blank, rather than panic over whether he was doing the right thing. He even smiled sweetly as they closed in again, and then closed his eyes.

  He was no stranger to being touched, or to the fascination of other beings with his body. But as the Wild Men’s groping became more intimate, he felt none of the warm safety he had known from the Green Man, nor the calm detachment of the druidesses and their rituals. His blood curdling, Scarlet swore silently; he would endure it. His eyes scrunched ever more tightly.

  But the Wild Men were not going to let him escape. One of them teased his foreskin, and then a hand grasped his prick, tugging forcefully as if trying to coax him to hardness. He could endure this, he could…

  But something had been taken from him in those past few days: the nothingness of surrender, the meaninglessness of pleasure. It was impossible. There was only one now whom he wanted to possess him, and the knowledge resonated through his heart. His captain might have abandoned him, but he did not want to call upon Melmoth Brien in this place of blood and despoilment. He loved him too much. Love?

  He had no time to brood upon the revelation. Malicious laughter rippled forth from the Wild Men as the image of Brien cracked into his mind, and Scarlet fantasized it was Brien touching him, as he had when he’d writhed on the druidesses’ altar.

  Sly hands mauling every inch of his flesh, the Wild Men pinched his thighs, his arse, and touched his lips and his throat. Their burning tongues traced around his nipples, flicking and toying with the tiny buds of flesh, cruel unfeeling parodies of all he had ever yearned for. A rough, animalistic tongue swept across the wispy hair of his chest before locating the other nipple, sweeping around it, and a tooth bit into his flesh so hard that it verged on drawing blood.

  Cracking his head back against the tree, he writhed in agony. He didn't want the Wild Men, loathed them with every facet of his being, but the phantom that he conjured in his mind made him believe he was somewhere else entirely. Scarlet wished it was Brien’s oaken chest he was leaning back against, and his strong, wonderful hands soothing away the pain, comforting him in his terror. He could not fight an
ymore; he needed his protector to save him. A harsh, desperate cry escaped his throat, imbued with all the power of his lungs and heart and very soul: “Brien!”

  He screamed louder as the teeth released him, the pain intense even without the piercing pressure, but the Wild Men showed him no mercy. The hands that pinched and battered him were not his captain’s and were certainly not kind. The image of Brien faded, and the foul laughter returned. Then renewed agony lanced through his chest, jabbing like hot brands into both of his nipples, and he dared not move in case his flesh tore. His eyes flew open. Two wooden clamps clasped his chest, from each of which dangled a bloodred catkin. A strangulated noise escaped his throat, half moan, half sob. Then came the Lord of the Hazel’s voice again, mockery dripping from every word:

  “Be glad, Scarlet, for he betrayed you, and now you have betrayed him. You grace me with two new wraiths to wail in their torment.”

  Oh, Goddess! He let his head loll forward as his spirit finally buckled at the realization of what he had just done. Jemima had told him he was the bait, yet under duress he had cried out to Brien, exactly as she had expected him to.

  “For you, sweet one, even my wayward brother will choose to come back…”

  * * *

  “She could have been mistaken,” murmured Brien.

  “My stepsister is a simple woman,” said Urhelda, who led the horse as they trailed back into the forest, “but she’s not the sort who would desert a child, even one which would have ruined her. She loved that baby. But the baby was dead.”

  “And the baby was Scarlet.” Brien’s rational mind struggled with the tale of enchantment, although he was still too shocked to explain it away.

  “I only worked it out when I saw his birthmark. Ellen only ever confided in me about the child, and I promised I’d never tell another soul. I even kept the truth from Arya. But there is no doubt in my mind that Scarlet was taken by the spirits. Fairy, sprite, call him what you like. It doesn’t really matter…”