For long seconds the wagon canted, and Baron Blunder rushed back, pulled the horses by the reins, and urged them back onto the road. The horses forged, straining and stamping their hooves until the ship righted.
Moments later they rounded a curve and found a mountain crevasse. Tall pines rose up on either side of the road, and Baron Blunder pulled the horses into their shadow. A few feet ahead, trees had been chopped down, but only a few. The road simply ended.
Erstwhyle realized they were on a woodsman’s trail.
“We’ll stop here until this storm blows over,” Baron Blunder said.
The baron freed the horses from their harnesses, led them into the shelter of the woods, and then started a campfire. He was good with fires, amazing in fact, and soon the two of them were sitting beside a blaze. They had little to eat, only a bit of dark bread, some raw onions, and parsnips.
Still, the blaze pushed the shadows of the forest back, and they sat in the warmth of its glow, while flames licked the air and embers went wafting upward, like stars rising into the night. A haze of blue smoke soon filled the little glen.
They had a glum meal, and long into the night, Erstwhyle caught Baron Blunder staring at the wagon. They had known each other so long, they hardly needed to speak. The baron longed for bed, but would not sleep in the same room with a dead girl.
“You think he’s hunting us?” Baron Blunder asked.
“I know he is,” Erstwhyle said. “I had a dream.”
“What kind?”
“I dreamt that I was on a cliff. A dream dragon flew overhead and said—”
“Let the hunt begin,” Baron Blunder finished. The fat man looked up sheepishly and shrugged. “I had the same dream, like a daydream, only . . . I felt it in me bones.”
“Do you think he’ll find us?”
The baron shrugged. They’d done all they could do. Baron Blunder wasn’t the kind to resent fate.
A voice boomed through the woods, circling like a hawk, hissing and snarling, “I’ve found you!”
Erstwhyle and Baron Blunder leapt to their feet, eyes searching. Erstwhyle peered down the road, the way they had come, but saw nothing.
“Run!” Baron Blunder shouted, turning for the woods. However, before he had a chance to run, a black arrow sprouted from his back. Then two more. He cried out and staggered forward, dropping to the ground.
“Hold!” Erstwhyle shouted. “We’re bards! We’re under protection of the guild!”
In that instant, shadows seemed to stretch from the woods and coalesce into shapes. On the road a dozen mounted men appeared—huntsmen with the Dark Prince. Hounds in spiked collars and leather masks the color of blood lunged forward, barking.
The prince laughed. “Fool! You think the guild can help you? Why, you left my castle a day ago, crept out with your reward. And who is to say what happened here, so far in the woods, with only the wolves as your witnesses? Most likely, it was some robbers that found you.”
The silence had been an illusion, Erstwhyle realized. Crydon had ridden him down, with huntsmen and horses and dogs. Erstwhyle had never heard a sound.
He peered to his right and left, overwhelmed and confused. What was real, what was not? Were these men mere phantasms, like the dream dragon?
“So, please me,” the Dark Prince said, his voice whispering among the pines. “You will take off your clothes and run. This time it will be a proper hunt.”
Erstwhyle hesitated. To race through the woods in the dark was a sure way to break a leg, or attract wolves.
“How do I know you’re even real?” he said.
“Strip off your clothes,” Crydon said. He urged his mount forward and with his black lance pierced the satyr’s chest.
A powerful illusionist might show images, even create sounds. But he could not make a spear prick a man.
Erstwhyle gulped, let his cloak slide off. He stripped off his tunic, revealing the curly hair on his chest, the belly ring made of Sardakian gold.
“Now, run,” the prince hissed. “Run for your life!”
Erstwhyle found his nerve. “No,” he said. “Fight me. You’re not half the man I am.” He rabbed the lance and jerked it.
The Dark Prince struggled momentarily, then let go. Erstwhyle fell backward into the snow, and the lance went flying.
The Dark Prince laughed and drew his great sword. “Ha, so there is some fight in you, Goat Man!”
Erstwhyle was on his back, weaponless and weary to the bone. His friends were dead. If I’m to join them, he thought, I’ll give a good accounting.
He leapt to his feet, then grabbed a burning log from the fire and waved it like a torch, startling the Dark Prince’s horse. It reared, and the prince raised his sword, prepared to swing a killing blow.
The Ship of Fools exploded.
The side door blew out, slamming into the prince and knocking his horse sideways. The prince rolled and jumped to his feet. Dogs snarled and yapped, and the prince’s retainers fought to control their own mounts, which neighed and bucked.
In the door to the ship, Amilee stood in her dirty dress, which billowed in the stiff wind. She was as pale as ever, and for the first time Erstwhyle realized that she had been no paler in death than she had been in life.
Her face was a feral mask of rage. She leapt toward the Dark Prince, arms spread wide—and flew across the clearing. In one swift motion, she twisted his head and ripped it off. As blood gushed up from his carotid artery, spurting into the air, she brought down her mouth.
“Vampire!” a huntsman shouted, and taking control of his mount, spurred away. The other horses were whinnying in confusion, and in the meager firelight Erstwhyle spotted the priest trying to control his horse.
Erstwhyle lunged past Amilee, slamming his log into the back of the priest’s head, while hounds yelped in terror and raced off into the night, into the storm.
***
“A vampire?” Erstwhyle asked later, as he sat beside the fire with Amilee. It made sense now. He remembered how cold her touch had been. And he recalled how, at first, he had been amazed that she would want to join a troop of fools as they traveled the world.
Of course she needs to travel. She needs to feed. It explained her penchant for long walks in the moonlight. Yet it still amazed him.
“For four years now,” Amilee admitted. “I didn’t want to tell you. I was afraid that you’d be afraid.”
The fire crackled and a log shifted. Sparks began floating toward the heavens, and she took his hand. Her own was very cold.
“I was afraid,” he admitted, “that you were afraid. I mean, I’m only half human.”
She nodded. She looked content, as one does after a full meal.
“You’re man enough for me,” she said. But her voice was timid. “Am I . . . woman enough for you?”
He looked into her eyes, and fire gleamed in them, sparkling, like a pond on a summer’s day. “You’re so alive. I thought you were gone.”
“I needed . . . soil from my homeland,” she said. “Without it, I was weak. He knew that. It’s why he always took off our clothes.”
Of course, there had been dirt on that old dress!
“You gave me my life back,” she whispered and leaned forward for a kiss. But just as his lips were about to meet hers, she twisted away, aimed lower, and he felt her cool tongue moisten his neck. A numbness seemed to spread out from her touch.
“May I?” she asked. “It won’t hurt.”
Eternal life? he wondered. With the woman I love?
How could it hurt?
***
Hours later, the Ship of Fools rode down out of the mountains, leaving the heights and the snow behind. For a while it stopped at a crossroads on the highway, and there Erstwhyle dragged the body of the Dark Prince to a tree and tied it so he hung from his hands.
There should be justice in the world. This man tried to rob me. He killed my friend and tried to eat me. He made young maidens run naked in the woods, hunting them for sport.
So Erstwhyle hung him beside the road. Before he turned away, he cut a couple of steaks from the prince’s backstrap to eat on the road. He left the Dark Prince as a warning to would-be tyrants.
Blood & Beauty
By Jeff Chapman
He scented the father and the six daughters before he heard them. Every new moon they danced, skipping through the heather, leaping and spinning. Their hair waved in the breeze, golden at the scalp before darkening to green along its length.
The monstrosity crouched lower into the blackberry brambles. Gray hair grew in wavy strands around his loins and legs, which ended in cloven hooves. His torso and arms suggested a man but wiry, yellow hair veiled his white skin in a jaundiced halo. A black mane ringed his face. Deep-seated yellow eyes peered over a broad, flat nose, and from the tip of his nostrils through his upper lip sliced a cleft from which his tongue shot to taste the air. Retractable claws adorned his fingers.
Ignoring the tantalizing berries, the half lion, half satyr risked inching forward to admire Feena, his lust and love. If they saw him, the dryads would vanish into the forest, driven off by his ugliness.
He watched for hours, yearning to hold her, to touch her tender skin. Twice she danced within reach. A single bound and she would have known the strength of his grasp, suffered his lips and tongue, but Salton checked his desire: he wanted her love.
When the dryads left the clearing, Salton rolled onto his back, waiting for limberness to return to his aching knees. He must have her. The old father dryad would suffer, but surely he wouldn’t sacrifice them all to keep one.
Their magical hearts beat deep in the forest in a grove all but inaccessible to the woodsman’s ax. Salton journeyed daily from his cave to caress Feena’s tree, to lick and sniff her sap, and to offer his devotion. Each hemlock grew perfectly straight with delicate branches fanning out from its bole. The new growth emerged dark yellow as if the branches were tipped with gold.
The father’s tree stood in the center beside a blackened, limbless trunk, which marked the mother’s grave where lightning had done its worst. She must have screamed as she burned alive. Salton thanked the gods he had not heard it.
The father recoiled as Salton approached, creaking and bending as if the satyr-lion brought forth a mighty wind. Salton touched the father’s bole and pressed his fingers into the furrowed bark. “Is my ugliness a threat, Lerhem? I had no part in how nature made me. Let me love your daughter.”
Lerhem did not speak. The dryads, the squirrels, and even the birds fell dumb with anticipation.
“Your silence insults me.” His cleft parted as he snarled through jagged teeth and red gums. “You condemn me for nature’s abuse, but I am master of what I do.”
Claws shot from his fingers and he dragged the points through the furrows, cutting to the tree’s flesh. Lerhem screeched and his branches shook.
Salton withdrew his hand. His claws folded into his fingertips. “I can hurt you in ways unimaginable.”
Delicate whisperings flitted among the trees like butterflies. Then the chatter ceased and a deep voice resounded in his head.
“Such a union would be unnatural. It is forbidden.”
Salton roared at the sky, baring his cat fangs from point to root. The hemlocks quivered, as with the first gusts from a storm.
He raised his claws and looked about the circle at so much beauty and perfection. How could an honest plea for love be forbidden? His hand snapped downward, leaving a five-fingered gash across Lerhem’s trunk.
***
“Did you hear that?” asked the elder of the two woodsmen. The handle of his ax rested on his shoulder and graying hair poked below the edge of his red, wool cap.
“It’s too far. We shouldn’t be going this way.” Like his father, the son carried an ax and wore a red cap, but his black hair curled up below the neck, and a thick coil of rope hung from his shoulder.
The older man stopped. They were following a deer trail and something else through a stretch of unexplored forest. The noonday sun stabbed at the broad-leaf canopy overhead, pressing the forest to yield from the black of night to the cloudy gray of twilight. Squirrels scurried among the oaks. A woodpecker’s knock reverberated. A grunt told them of feral pigs feasting on nuts. All these sounds were familiar and unnoticed except when they chose to listen.
“These woods are strange, Father. I can feel something here.”
“Aye. Perhaps we should go back. But look at these oaks. No one has ever cut here.”
They craned their necks to see the treetops well over a hundred feet above them.
“Too big for us,” said the son. He pointed at the base of a massive bole. “Would take five men, maybe even six or seven, just to circle that.”
Three delicate notes from a flute fluttered past.
“That,” said the father.
The son shook his head. “What is it?”
The father broke through the undergrowth toward the source, drawn like a wolf to blood. The son followed, his senses clouded and dim. He felt drunk, not the way of the mead he drank to excess with his friends, but on enchantment. A witch might live out here or faeries, coaxing them to a cauldron or an Eden of no return.
For hours they traveled in fits and starts, leaving the oak and walnut forest for hemlock and pine, resolving to turn back only to plunge ahead again when the flute whispered. They emerged from the forest into a grove of golden hemlocks, which grew in a ring around another hemlock and a denuded bole, gray and cracked from the weather.
They gaped at the perfectly proportioned trees, at the green boughs tipped with gold, a species living only in myth.
“It can’t be,” said the son. “It’s an illusion. We’re bewitched.”
“A gift,” answered the father. “We were meant to find these.” He stepped toward the fairest tree, grasped the lowest branch and broke off the tip with its mixture of green and golden needles. “Is this an illusion?”
The satyr-lion hiding in the shadows winced as his beloved shrieked. Already the unanticipated had soiled Salton’s scheme. Though these woodsmen could not hear it, the trees screeched and screamed like horses in a burning stable.
With one hand Salton pressed the halves of his cleft lip together and with the other brought the hollow reeds bound with grass to his mouth. The notes diverted the woodsmen.
“And this is the grandest of them all,” said the father, approaching Lerhem. “Go on, see if you can reach around it.”
The son embraced the trunk but his fingers did not touch.
“At least six more hands,” said the father. “We must keep this place secret.”
“Who would believe? It will take us a week to drag these home through the woods.” Startled, he pointed to five parallel gouges in the bark.
“A lion, possibly. Marking his territory,” said the father.
“It’s too dangerous here.”
“The woods are always dangerous and so is a prize worthy of song and story. We should cut one now.”
The son pointed at Feena. “The fairest and the lightest.”
Salton sucked in a breath. His lips quivered and his fingers shook as the two men approached Feena. The dryads squealed like dying rabbits, piercing his eardrums and shattering his concentration, which he needed most for the spell.
He squeezed his eyes shut, focusing on the words, on the two men who must forget. He repeated the words, catching their rhythm, for if that rhythm was imperfect, the spell would fail. Notes shot from the flute toward the men, who stopped before landing their blow.
They looked at one another, searching for a glimmer of comprehension, a landmark in a fog bank, but found nothing. Where? Why? What? The questions rolled about in their minds, sloshing to and fro, and in unison they shouldered their axes and strode from the grove, following the obscure path that had led them there.
***
The boy crouched lower behind a fallen log and fountain of ferns as his father and older brother marched past, staring a
head, not speaking or singing, not smiling or frowning. Their sharp eyes did not scan the forest at all: most unusual and dangerous.
He looked back to the golden hemlocks, then slunk along the trail until he was out of sight and hearing. A giant boar crossed their path, grunted, and shook his tusks. But the men marched toward it, and if the boar had not charged away, they would have fallen over the beast’s bristled back. They suffered an enchantment. About this, the boy harbored no doubts.
As the father’s grip loosened, the branch that he had broken from one of the hemlocks fell out of his hand. The boy picked it up, not fully believing what he had seen until he felt the prick of the green and golden needles in his palm. He dropped the branch in a satchel, where it joined the berries he had been gathering.
The spell wore off as the pair reached familiar woods and the men began wondering at the passage of the day without cutting any trees.
The boy caught up to them. “No luck today, Father?”
The men exchanged a troubled glance. “We didn’t find a tree worthy to cut today, Doran.” He slapped his youngest son’s shoulder. “I hope your berry picking was more profitable.”
“Not so much,” said Doran. “But I did find a worthy tree. I found a golden hemlock.”
His older brother laughed. “And I saw a centaur mounting a river nymph.”
“You saw a dying pine,” said the father. “You’re as likely to see a golden hemlock as a satyr.”
The two men laughed as they turned toward the cottage.
Doran pulled the branch from his satchel. “Is this a dying pine?”
***
Salton brushed the rounded nubs of his claws across Feena’s trunk. The wiry hair growing on his hands and fingers caught in the bark, but he took no notice. He hummed a ballad, stroking Feena in time with the music, as if Feena was a violin and Salton the bow. The dryad giggled from the tickling.
“I would never let them hurt you,” he whispered.
“No, you would not. But could you stop them?”
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