Lord of the Forest

by Lord of The Forest (lit)

  No one dared to champion Marius, it seemed. And in the amphitheatre, he had no name. He was only a beast to them, like the lion, to be treated with cruelty.

  She could only watch, mute, terrified, unable to help him and far, far away. Even if a magic eagle bore her away over the sea that separated them, the battle would be long over.

  She concentrated fiercely on the images in the pool. Were he to win, she might find him somewhere in the land of men. She looked as they did, could disguise herself as a woman of the port city, with a flowing gown and ribbons in her hair. She would cut it all off were he to die. No matter where she was, she would grieve for him.

  If he lost this battle, there would be no grave and no honor for one who’d fought so bravely. No, the mauled corpse would be fed to the jackals who prowled the edge of the city at night.

  The scrying pool of the tree vouchsafed a knowledge that shattered the last of her innocence.

  She, Linnea, was by no means an isolated victim of Ravelle. No, the legions of Outer Darkness had been summoned forth by him and the three remaining lords of Arcan Isles could not stop the malevolent army. Her near-rape by Ravelle had been only a harbinger of a rape of the world on both sides of the Arcan seas.

  Beguiled by his masterful trickery, thinking of him as her lover, she’d been whipped and humiliated—and to her secret shame, found it pleasurable. How near she had been to becoming his creature, having his split hoof forever upon her neck as he slowly destroyed her mind.

  After the terrifying encounter—it seemed suddenly vivid in her mind—she’d hated to think of what had happened to her, had told Marius only when the hurt of the demon’s wicked deception had become too much to hide. She’d wanted to believe that she had only blundered, meeting evil by chance. But no.

  Ravelle had not been idly roaming the forest upon that day, beset by obscene urges, looking to inflict his unholy lust on just anyone. If her guess was right, he had been stalking Marius even then.

  The scrying pool had revealed a deeper and far more terrifying truth if she read what it showed aright: there would an end to all innocence and all hope. The demon surely hoped to rule the world of men, and the beings of the Arcan Islands.

  He had started with Marius and not been able to finish.

  The centaur’s rescue of her and his swift vengeance had fired the great demon’s blood with intemperate fury.

  “Show me all!” she begged the pool.

  Its surface afforded her one last glimpse of the combatants on the amphitheatre’s stage. Blood poured down Marius’s flanks from gashes made by the lion’s claws. They were still shackled by their back legs, unable to escape, forced back into the fight by the men who goaded them on.

  But he had one mighty arm around the lion’s neck. Its tongue dangled from between long teeth that too had tasted Marius’s flesh—blood dripped from them.

  Strength for strength, they were matched. But who was winning? From the outside in, an impenetrable darkness seeped into the water until the centaur and lion were blacked out.

  Her heart breaking, Linnea raised her hands to the heavens and screamed, sending frightened birds flying out from the leaves, calling brokenly, their cries echoing her own despair. Something above her, far above, swooped in circles.

  She cringed, believing for a moment that she had called forth another demon or Ravelle himself. Linnea had nowhere to hide.

  If she scrambled back into the tree, he would get Quercus too, she thought wildly. Let the damned one take her then. And let her die swiftly, she pleaded with the uncaring gods and goddesses.

  She felt a heavy landing upon the branch she was clung to and tightened her grip upon it, pressing her cheek into the rough bark, feeling tears of fear stream into the crevices as she closed her eyes.

  Linnea braced her body for the claws that would spike into her hair and lift her by it…but no.

  A gentle hand touched her shoulder instead, shaking her lightly. “Linnea?’ a familiar male voice asked.

  She lifted her head and opened her eyes.

  It was Gideon.

  16

  He raised her up and his long wings folded around her as she stood. “Are you all right, Linnea? It was only by chance that I heard your cry—but I was so glad. Rhiannon begged me to find you.”

  She sobbed without answering right away, giving in to her boundless misery, but comforted by his hold upon her, envying for just a second the woman who was privileged to enjoy such embraces for her lifetime.

  Then, brokenly, keeping her voice low, Linnea told him what she knew of what had happened since their departure from Simeon’s fortress and that she and Marius had taken shelter in the hollows of this tree. But she said nothing of the shy healer. She hoped, in fact, that Quercus would not hear them talking, for she wished passionately to escape. Her next task, a daunting one, was to persuade Gideon to fly her to Marius—where had he come from?

  He was not that familiar with the Forest Isle, and this part of it was ancient and untrammeled.

  How to explain? She wondered as he murmured words of comfort if the other lords of Arcan were angry with her. Surely Megaleen would not be, but Simeon seemed to Linnea as chilly and remote as the sea that was his element and as for Vane—she chose not to dwell on the unpredictable lord of fire. She was new to their world, their ways, their laws—would they think she had endangered Marius? Gideon had said nothing of what had transpired in the time since they’d left and she scarcely wanted to know.

  Now, every second counted.

  “So that is what happened.” He opened his wings and let her step away from him. “When we realized you were not coming back, I set out to look for you both on my own, from the air,” he said, his voice as soft as hers. “He is alive. That is all I know for now. I spotted a ship upon the open sea and flew lower when a hatch was opened. Marius stood in chains, enclosed in a pit.”

  “A ship?” The pool had not shown her that. “Where did it sail?”

  Gideon named the port city he’d seen in the distance over the sea, the same one the pool had revealed.

  “There is an amphitheatre there,” she began.

  “Yes,” Gideon interrupted her, “but how did you know? Have you been to that place?”

  For answer she pointed to the scrying pool in the fork of the tree. “I saw it there. He fights for his life against a lion even as we speak. Unless the vision it showed me was a fever-dream. I have not been myself in the last several days.”

  “So you said.” Gideon drew in his breath. “But that is a tree-born pool and its magic is as pure as its water. Whatever you saw in it was no dream.”

  “I thought not.” She looked at Gideon, her eyes as luminous as the pool, as if something inside her made her soul glow. “We must go to him!” she pleaded with anxious fear in her eyes.

  Gideon stroked the arms that she’d wrapped around herself when he’d released from the embrace of his wings. “I—I will try, Linnea,” he said. “I am weary of flying in my every feather. The journey home took long against the winds. Simeon and Vane charged me to report to them and I was headed thence when I happened to see you below—”

  “It is a sign that you have come to me,” Linnea said. “A sign that you must help Marius before you do anything.”

  “Perhaps. The pool has provided you with more recent knowledge of him than I have to offer. We both should go before Simeon—but what else did you see?” he asked, looking down at her, swayed by the emotion in her beautiful eyes.

  Swiftly she gave an account of the battle in the amphitheatre and how the pool had gone dark before the victor was declared. Gideon nodded soberly, rising again. “Then he was sold,” he told Linnea, not sparing her that truth. “Rescuing him will not be easy.”

  “Must we leave him to the lion?” Her words were whispered but she wanted to scream them aloud.

  “No, but we must think it through—”

  “There is no time for that,” she said with urgency.

  Gideon’s gentle t
ouch calmed her but only for a second. “Look again into the pool, Linnea. Ask it for an answer. May I look with you?”

  “The pool is not mine and it is as silent as a grave,” she said heatedly.

  “Yet it holds the deepest wisdom. I have heard that one can see the real nature of the beings that appear in tree-pools,” the winged lord of the air said. “Through the clothes, through the skin, to the soul.”

  Linnea’s sweet face looked deeply troubled. “The pool perceives the beings that have no souls,” she said at last. “It made me look also among the spectators. Hidden beside the men and women of the city are demons in great numbers.”

  Gideon squatted on his haunches to look into the dark waters. “Are there?” he asked. “I see nothing at all now.”

  “Can we not go?” Linnea could not force him to fly with her. Why was he not alarmed by Marius’s plight?

  “You have not seen such contests of strength before, I think.” His voice was more soothing than his hands, but she recoiled from both, consumed with fear for Marius. “Yes, one will be dragged as if dead from the stage, and one hailed as the victor but it is all a show. They will be brought back again for another contest.”

  “What?”

  “I have been a spectator of such staged battles,” he explained.

  She shot him an appalled look, her hands on her hips. The queasy feeling that had troubled her before returned in full force. Linnea fought a strong urge to vomit.

  “From high above as I flew, not in the tiers. Do not look at me that way—I did not make the world of men,” he said defensively. “We of the Arcan Isles do not fight for entertainment, but—well, I watched once or twice. What of it?”

  “Why do you blather on? Will you not rescue him?” She curled her fingers into her palms, outraged of a sudden.

  “Linnea, I answered your question. And there is yet time. Just enough, I think.”

  She just barely kept herself from slapping him. Were she to give in to the impulse, she might knock him off the branch they both stood on. “Explain!”

  “The answer is simple. There has not been a centaur seen in the port for a hundred years. They will not waste him by allowing him to be killed. Nor will they kill the lion.”

  “It is Marius I fear for. He has suffered grievously already.” Linnea’s temper flashed in her eyes. “So. Why do you delay and ask questions?”

  “Because strange things are happening. I flew over a distant valley that opens into the sea around the forest isle. Demons are massing there too, by the thousand—”

  “I do not care,” she said softly. “There is only one demon you should worry about and that one is the ruler of all the others. And there is only one man who concerns me: Marius.”

  Gideon could not deny the wisdom of the first part of her unexpected response, but it was her love for Marius that was beginning to sway him. So Linnea was ready to risk all for that. He had only known one other woman of such great-heartedness and she had given him his life back. Rhiannon’s face came to him—yearning, tender, and vulnerable—and he almost said yes to Linnea.

  But as far as Rhiannon, the love of his heart, she had told him in no uncertain terms that he was not to go a-roving these days. It was a promise he had sworn on his own wings to keep, and he had been gone from her side too long already. He said as calmly as he could, “Linnea, if you have been ill, then you should not hide yourself away in this ancient part of the isle or go to the land of men. I will take you back to Rhiannon so that she can care for you—”

  “No!” she burst out. “Take me to the mainland and leave me there.”

  “The journey is long and fatiguing for someone strong, let alone you—”

  “I cannot explain everything now. You must help me!” Her trembling lower lip, the tears that threatened to fall—she had him with both.

  “How can I refuse?” Gideon held up his hands in a placating gesture. “If I can carry Rhiannon, I can carry you. But not a centaur.”

  “That is all I ask.”

  Gideon doubted that. “Will you battle the lion and all the spectators in the amphitheatre to free him? Do you think you can lead him out of danger all by yourself? Can I not meet again with the lords of Arcan to formulate a plan—”

  “Gideon, please!” she beseeched him. “Must I beg you to help me? If I had wings of my own—” She took a few steps backward, away from him, and lost her balance. The ground rushed up at her with sickening speed until Gideon’s arms caught her.

  He held her close to his powerful body and swooped up to the top of the tree. She was breathless, afraid to speak, seeing both reluctance and weariness etched in his face. His huge wings beat with steady purpose as he headed over the forest.

  Neither saw the flash of black-and-white as the magpie flew up after them. Flying with all his might, Gideon swiftly outpaced little Esau, who fluttered and sank in slow circles back into the highest leaves of the old oak.

  He hopped down, down, from branch to branch and went in at the window of Quercus’s chamber. The old healer did not look up, absorbed in a scroll.

  If the bird had been able to make sense of the illustrations, he would have known that it was about trees and rocks—not that he would have cared. The magpie hopped upon the papyrus, right under Quercus’s barky nose.

  “Yes, Esau, what is it?” he asked absently in Treeish. He asked the question again in Mag when the bird cawed with frustration.

  The bird answered at length, causing Quercus to scramble out of his chair and rush to the window. He peered this way and that, searching the clouds above for long minutes, then came back dejectedly to his scroll.

  “They are long gone and it will be a perilous journey,” he told the bird, an edge of fear in his calm voice. “From what I have seen, she loves him well. Her bond with Marius is stronger than the fear of death. Alas, I cannot follow.”

  Esau hopped upon the scroll, his eyes bright and his head cocked.

  “I know, I know,” Quercus said. “You can.” He studied the bird as if thinking of a plan. “But you will have to make Linnea understand you somehow. When and if you get to the land of men.”

  The bird spoke again.

  “What’s that? Oh, you are very sure of yourself, Esau. Did Ravelle not scare you enough?”

  At the mention of the demon’s name, the bird waggled its tail as if about to eliminate.

  “Not on the scroll,” Quercus said hastily, pushing the bird gently off it. “Not anywhere inside my house, if you please.”

  Esau fluttered to the window, turned around, stuck his nether parts well out in the air and let go a stinking blast.

  “Eloquent in its way,” Quercus said. “I share your opinion of demons, if not your ability to do that out of a window.”

  The magpie fluttered back and walked on the table again.

  “So. You cannot read but I will tell you that the scroll you stroll upon concerns the immortal souls of trees and rocks. I will derive a spell from it and you will fly with it over the sea. The magic involved is powerful and very old,” Quercus went on, “and it will protect and guide you as a tree-dwelling creature.”

  Esau nodded.

  “You must get it to her safely and in good time. She will have one chance to use it. No thieving along the way and none of your mischief, do you understand?”

  Esau nodded in assent. He watched as the old healer dipped a pen in oak-gall ink and inscribed runes upon a slip of paper. Then Quercus cast sand upon it from a small box to dry the ink, then brushed it away, looking over the written-out spell with thoughtful care. “Yes, it is correct.” He rolled it up and tied it with a thin red ribbon around the magpie’s neck.

  The journey through the air to the port seemed interminable and took most of Gideon’s remaining strength. His wings were shaking when he landed with her in his arms. She had buried her face in his chest for most of the way, clinging to him with her own waning strength, terrified to look down, disoriented and queasy.

  He had said nothing. Th
e wind on high was strong and a hint of moisture in it prophesied a storm to come.

  The sky was overcast when he touched down in a deserted quarter. The gossiping women, the children tugging at them, the poor beast drawing the cart—all were gone and there was no sign of life. Still, Linnea marveled silently at how accurate the pool’s reflection of the port city had been. The white stone of the buildings no longer dazzled, turned to gray by the clouds overhead.

  “Where is the amphitheatre?” she asked, looking around.

  “Around that corner and down a long street. You cannot see it from here, but I saw it when I flew over.”