Greenwode

by J Tullos Hennig

  Her shoulders lifted, a shrug but somehow also not, and she moved away from the door. He started to say something, then realized there was nothing he really could say, and she didn’t seem inclined to stay him, for whatever reason. So he padded past her, still barefoot.

  He made it through the doorway when Eluned spoke again.

  “I canna tell you not to follow my son,” she said. “’Tis a path you have been upon since you first came here. But I’d rather you didna. Not now. Not with what’s happened. For mark me in this: there are more things than you know at play here. If you reach out for this moment, it will reach back. It will change everything. Change you. Change him.”

  Gamelyn halted, slid a wary gaze to her. “I don’t understand.”

  “I know you don’t. So heed my warning. ’Twill be for the worst if you refuse t’ open to ’t, mind and heart.”

  The moonlight was clear upon them both, and her face as visible as if in the light of day. But there was no expression there; she might as well have been in shadow.

  “I can’t explain,” he said, realizing it was no less than the truth. “But… I have to.”

  She nodded. Then, “Put your boots on. It’s been warm enough, but you might find the forest chill this night.”

  XIV

  IT WAS chill, and damp. Unwelcoming. It had taken every skill Gamelyn had first to find Rob, and then to follow only close enough to not lose him, yet far enough to not be seen. He’d had a heart-stopping moment when he’d practically walked up behind him; Rob had stopped to retie one of the straps on his boots.

  They wound about, using trails so faint Gamelyn almost didn’t see them, but Rob obviously saw them, was drawn to them as if they were roads. Yet he didn’t seem to notice he was being followed, and his steps were somewhat shaky, as if he wasn’t fully paying attention. Several times he stopped, stared off into the distance; one time he actually spoke, as if talking to someone Gamelyn couldn’t see.

  More and more, Gamelyn was convinced that he’d done the right thing by following. Rob was not himself, somehow.

  Finally, they came to a clearing, gleaming pale. Rob stopped beside a massive oak. He put a hand to it, rubbed fingers over the bark as if petting it like a favored dog, then crouched on his haunches. There was water spreading out beside the oak, fed by a fast-rushing stream some distance away: audible, but faint. There were flashes here and there, around and over the mere: fireflies, tiny sparks of gold to offset the pale sheen drifting down through the break in the tree cover. The latter turned the little lake silver as a penny on a dead pagan’s eyes, and as impenetrable.

  Such beauty always sent a forlorn wistfulness into the pit of Gamelyn’s belly. There was exhilaration, no question, but also something vaguely disturbing about how such loveliness could take custody of not only one’s eyes, but one’s breath and soul. Venturing this far into the forest had its own forbidden lure of abandon and escape, far off any map and into a wildness that took him… elsewhere, somehow. As if the old tales could actually come true; as if Eluned’s cryptic warning conjured some truth instead of superstitious fancy; as if superstition would take a life of its own within the thick tangles and shadows of the green Wode.

  Rob alerted, rose, moved from the oak toward the west. Gamelyn followed, more cautious than ever, and ended up behind the same oak where Rob had been. He stopped as Rob stopped, then saw what Rob had.

  A figure, hooded and cloaked, coming into the clearing.

  It seemed enough like a figure from the nightmares Gamelyn had endured recently, and more than once, that he almost called out a warning. Instead he hugged closer to the tree, bid himself wait.

  Still, his hand went to his sword.

  But Rob went forward willingly enough, and met the figure beside the mere. The two embraced, holding each other by the shoulders, exchanging brief, close talk. The newcomer pulled the cowl back from his face, revealing merely another lad, perhaps a bit older than Rob….

  Oh, God. Gamelyn leaned hard against the oak, digging his fingernails into the tough wood.

  It was the young forester that had come to Blyth with his father. The one accused of killing the Abbess’s guardsman.

  Slipping the heavy rucksack from his shoulder to the ground, Rob gave his companion another, fiercer embrace; this one held and was returned with a desperation that sent Gamelyn’s stomach lurching. Then the renegade forester was hefting the rucksack and melting away in the trees, leaving Rob alone beside the pool.

  Rob kept watching for some time, clenching his fists against the silence. To the sudden, it seemed his legs refused to hold him. Rob sank down to his haunches, wobbled slightly then sat, curling tight with arms and knees, head sinking forward, hair spilling over his face and shoulders. Again silence, spinning into long moments. Then Rob flung himself back, arms overhead, supine on the deer-cropped turf. Gamelyn was afraid to so much as breathe for fear he would be heard—indeed, it was passing strange that Rob had not already heard him.

  And since Rob had not, it was obvious that Rob was… compromised, and it was even more obvious that Rob would not thank Gamelyn for seeing him like this.

  On the other hand, it wasn’t exactly safe or wise to leave someone not paying attention alone in a dangerous place. Nor could he hope to avoid discovery if he moved, now.

  Gamelyn stayed. Kept watch as Rob lay there, staring up into the treetops as if he found clarification in the spastic lanterns of the fireflies, in the solid, swaying roof of branches and leaves. Whatever that answer was, he also seemed to find some sort of heart in it, for after a time he rose, walked closer to the water’s edge.

  It was the place for retreat. Instead Gamelyn found himself held—pinned, almost—in place as Rob shrugged from his tunic.

  The faint mist of light set him almost ghostlike, all midnight locks and moon-pale skin, whipcord flexing beneath. Even more disturbing were faint, white markings across back and ribs, linear but oddly jagged, reflecting like fine satin in the uncertain light.

  Whip marks. Gamelyn sucked in a breath between his teeth—both horror and anger—and realized the mistake the moment he made it. Rob made no outward sign other than a slight stiffening of frame—Gamelyn wouldn’t have known what he was witnessing if he’d not seen it before. Rob took a few steps, dropped his tunic on the earth in seeming nonchalance, but the dark eyes flitted over every direction, noted every approach. When Rob turned toward his hiding place, Gamelyn closed his eyes, willed himself breathless, still.

  Sweat had begun trickling down the small of his back before Gamelyn dared to open his eyes again—and then it was the sound of water that gave him leave.

  Rob was nowhere to be found. Gamelyn almost stepped from his hiding place, baffled and worried. He espied the pile of clothes on the bank at almost the same time Rob erupted from beneath the water. Staying merely long enough to take a gasp of air, Rob dove again, a pale crescent in the inky water, leaving little but a wake of ripples and rising air bubbles. He did it again, and again, as if he were trying to cast something behind in the glittering wake.

  Surely it was worry that snagged the breath tight in Gamelyn’s chest. He did not know how to swim—nor, in fact, did hardly anyone he’d ever known—but obviously Rob did. Things here never were as they should seem. Gamelyn found himself leaning harder against the oak as Rob finally rose from the dark pool’s edge, shaking the wet from his shoulders, flinging then slicking the wet hair back from his face. The water wasn’t deep, there, pulling down his chest to circle and lap just beneath his navel.

  The fireflies were creeping toward him, dancing over the water’s surface in what might have been termed curiosity, had Gamelyn not doubted their tiny forms were capable of such a virtue. They skated ever closer to the stranger in their realm—yet neither was he a stranger. For when Rob reached out, extended his fingertips, beckoning, the fireflies came.

  The breath knocked in Gamelyn’s chest; still, he couldn’t release it, nor could he take any more in. It was not the first time
he’d wondered, half illicit fancy and half troubling concern, if Rob was inhabited by some demon or changeling. And this… this was not simply Rob bewitching some animal with his gaze and voice. He seemed kith and kin to some feral forest spirit, summoning fey lights to sip the water he cupped, as offering, in his palms. The fireflies courted him, dipped and danced about him, garlanded him in white-hot gems, glided over his damp, brown arms and pale torso with flits and flickers of gold….

  And Rob was… smiling. Not the too quick flash of humor, not the mocking, one-sided smirk, but a tender, heart-scalding thing that Gamelyn was sure he’d never seen directed his own way, if at all. It was… unlikely, fantastic… there was in truth no name that Gamelyn could put to the feeling. It was that foreign, flickering through his being with a dart of heat and radiance not unlike those tiny bewitched fireflies.

  Gamelyn had grown careless with his absorption. He’d already crept half around the tree to witness whatever it was that was happening; a slight stumble had him flinging out an arm to steady himself.

  Tiny lights scattered into darkness. Rob crouched, whipped about. There was a whine and hiss of sculpted air next to Gamelyn’s head, then a sting against his bicep and a solid thunk as a short, thick dagger pinned his tunic sleeve to the tree.

  Breath came to Gamelyn then, rushing out then in like a smith’s bellows, sending him even more giddy. He met Rob’s gaze, at first found nothing there but shadows in the dark. The air Gamelyn needed so desperately snagged in his lungs again, painful, and an eerie trepidation held it there. What stood before him was no gentle wood sprite, but an untamed demon.

  Rob blinked, and his eyes began to warm, from ruthlessness to recognition. Only then did Gamelyn find it possible to breathe, and move, and he made it simple. Reaching around, he made to tug the knife free. Unfortunately, he was at an impossible angle, and it was in deep. He might as well have tried to pull legendary Excalibur from its equally legendary sheath of stone.

  Rob began to wade out, slowly. Never once did he take his eyes from Gamelyn; finally, he spoke. “I knew you’d follow me. I knew it, and yet I did nowt. How is that?”

  Maybe Gamelyn was just going at it from the wrong angle. He shifted, gave another try at the knife. “If you knew it was me, then why am I standing here with a knife in my tunic?”

  No go that way, either.

  “If I hadn’t known, then mayhap you’d be trying to yank that knife from somewhere more… damaging?”

  “I am bleeding, you know.”

  “But are you damaged, Sir Gamelyn?”

  Marion’s fond name for him always seemed a curl of insult upon Rob’s lips. “I’m not the one mad enough to have a swim in the middle of the forest in the middle of the night. Are you damaged, in the head?”

  “Aye, the questions are rife this night, eh?” Rob had reached the bank, water sliding down his body in a myriad of tiny rivulets as he approached, step by slow step. Gamelyn was rendered weak-kneed by the sight, by the soft, soundless grace, as if a ghost were gliding over the ground toward him.

  Forcibly, he framed some sort of speech. “Then here’s another question for you. Will you come and get your bloody knife?”

  “Ah-ah.” A flash of teeth in the faint light. “Language, m’lord.”

  “Would you stop with the—Sweet Christ, are you drunk?”

  It didn’t show in his gait, not a bit of it, but Rob’s gestures were too calculated, his voice slurring faint about the corners. “Drunk. Am I, then? And would it be on t’ mead? Or on life? Mayhap, on time? If I could make the choice, fair Gamelyn, I’d choose the honey ferment. Its effects are much more pleasant.” A low laugh. “I do apologize. For the knife. I figured did y’ follow, I’d have heard you comin’ for a furlong at least. But I do seem to be a bit less than meself tonight. So. Well done, you.”

  He was drunk. Must be. There was a lithe wantonness to everything Rob was doing, an… exposure that had little to do with any state of undress. Yet that stealthy grace and the body displaying it were startlingly more in Gamelyn’s mind than they should be.

  Whispering entreaty to whichever saint would listen, Gamelyn averted his eyes, took refuge into annoyance. “How typical.”

  “Typical?”

  “Typical for you, to pad a faint kiss with a slap.”

  “Are y’ saying you’d prefer just the kiss?”

  Gamelyn was not about to even acknowledge that with an answer. Not. “I’d prefer you got your knife out of my tunic.”

  Rob crossed his arms and cocked his head. Grinned again. And all Gamelyn could consider was it was wrong, wrong, wrong that he couldn’t keep his eyes focused to the ground, to the sky… sweet Jesus, to anything but Rob and what he wasn’t wearing.

  Reason was no help, either. It had fled into mordant disapproval of how, again, Johan was an idiot with no appreciation for elegance. He had called Rob scrawny, and it wasn’t so. Gamelyn was staring at the proof of it, as if he were seeing it for the first time. Rob was perhaps just that much beneath his best weight, lean, certainly, tall and lanky obviously… but not scrawny. The water slicking and beading his skin defined every curve of muscle on him—and muscles he definitely had. It was not a fighter’s body, not built into bulk from wielding heavy armaments, or carrying chainmail. Yet there was strength and power there; his shoulders, if bony, were broad and muscled from bending the yew, and….

  And merciful Mother of God!—but Gamelyn could not believe he was standing here, pinned to a tree by his friend’s knife! The same friend he was eyeing up like some camp follower.

  His male friend.

  Worse, Rob kept affirming the maleness by not bothering with the meager pile of clothing still lying on the turf. Instead he advanced upon Gamelyn—naked and dripping and unconcerned with either—propped one hand against the tree, and wrapped the other about the knife hilt.

  Blinked.

  “I do believe I threw that a sight harder than I meant to.”

  Gamelyn started to reply in kind, found himself rendered mute as Rob, tongue between his teeth, shifted his weight, leaning first his shoulder then his bare haunch against Gamelyn. Muscles bunched in Rob’s left shoulder as he pulled. There was gooseflesh rising his skin, dark hairs alternately springing upright in dry chill or slicking in runnels of wet; long, ebon ringlets hung, sticky-wet, against his scalp and shoulders. Gamelyn tried to look away, instead squinched his eyes tight-shut. It merely opened his nostrils—and his companion’s smell was a pleasant one, not the sour whiff of sweat left too long stale, but of damp and green, of rainwater on juniper boughs, of the spiced-sweet ferment that was indeed upon Rob’s breath as he huffed then spoke.

  “You have to move.”

  Gamelyn opened his eyes, found Rob peering at him. Answered, thickly, “That might prove a bit difficult.”

  “Just pull your sleeve free and—”

  “This is my favorite tunic!”

  “Aw, and surely you have more than you need—”

  “Is it the drink, then, that makes you sound more and more like your mother?”

  Rob blinked again. “Well,” he said, “there’s sure means to put a fellow off.”

  Inconceivable. “What,” Gamelyn gritted out, “in the name of Mary, Jesus and Joseph are you talking about?”

  Rob’s eyebrows did a small, twisty dance, then settled for one up, one down. “You’re the one as mentioned kissing.”

  Gamelyn counted ten. For various reasons. Then stammered, “I… I w-will not. Rip up my tunic. Pull. Harder.”

  The eyebrows were joined by a smirk. “I canna get the leverage. You’ll need to move, lad—”

  And whom was he calling ‘lad’, anyway?

  “—unless you want me crawlin’ atop you.”

  “What?”

  “No need to be squeaking like a ten-year-old lass.” The smirk had broadened into downright cheek. “P’rhaps y’ should unlace your tunic, then?”

  Gamelyn started pawing at his tunic laces.

  Several
moments later, he was still pawing. And swearing under his breath.

  “Bloody….” Rob shook his head, left off his knife and bent to Gamelyn’s laces.

  “I can do it!” And again a paean to Mary, Jesus and Joseph, but he hadn’t intended his voice to spike up like that again. It was only….

  Only….

  Rob smacked his hand. “I’m the one who ent an absolute hames with his left hand, remember?”

  “I also remember that left-handed children are the Devil’s brood,” Gamelyn sniped back.

  “And I seem to remember your bloody-minded priests saying red-haired people have no souls. Granted, you’re no’ so flame-haired as me sister, so p’rhaps you’ve a bit of a soul. Either way, you’ve no rights judging me left hand, particularly when it’s helping you out of a predicament—”

  “A predicament you caused—”

  “I wasn’t the one spying on someone’s bath….” Rob trailed off. His fingers spasmed. “How long were you watching me?”

  Gamelyn immediately knew what Rob’s thoughts had bent toward. His friend. His outlawed friend.

  “Not long,” he said, truthfully enough.

  Only long enough to see something I’ve never seen in you before… something you still refuse to show, even beneath the possibility that I might have seen….

  Rob gave him a thoughtful look, then resumed his attention fully—almost relentlessly—on the lacings. The tunic was short, but laced all the way down its front. Rob’s touch was surprisingly deft and impersonal, avoiding any contact of skin with skin, yet every movement of those nimble fingers seemed to coax Gamelyn’s skin to shivers.

  It was impossible that Rob didn’t notice, and once he pulled the lanyard free from the last grommet, he laced it almost absently in his fingers, held it up for Gamelyn’s inspection. Met his eyes and held there.

  Silence. Gamelyn swore he could count the beat of his own heart in tandem with the pulse that thickened, quickened, beneath the skin of Rob’s throat.

  This was wrong. Somehow. Depraved. He should retreat, should turn away, should… something. But none of those things were remotely possible. It was as if he was charmed by the twitch of Rob’s fingertips, tangled in the lanyard, held to that shadowed, unreadable gaze. And all the while, Gamelyn was desperately trying to shrug his free arm from his tunic. Like he could get away.