The deeper we got into the forest, the fewer people we saw, and as we continued going farther in, we soon didn’t see anyone. It was just Brownie and me, the great trees arching over the road, and the track leading on ahead of us. I felt absurdly happy. This was the first time I’d been properly alone in… much, much too long. I enjoyed being with the Companions, but I was more used to my own company. I hadn’t realized just how much I missed not hearing other people’s voices constantly chattering at and around me. I intended to ride as far as I could until about noon, stop at the first brook I found, have my luncheon, and ride back again. Peace! No Belinda scolding me, no gossiping around me, and no one giving me a side-eye because I have Fae blood. A day of peace was worth any price.
The road went from hard-packed dirt to having grass growing on the ridge between the wheel ruts to having short grass growing all over it, which signaled the fact that the only folk who traveled this road were the ones brave enough to traverse the forest instead of going around it. The trees were thicker and taller, and there was a wild hedge of mixed brambles and wild roses and thorny blackberries between the road and the trees that discouraged trying to go off the road into the forest itself. Oh, the scent! Oak and the grass Brownie crushed under his hooves, hints of pine and spruce, and just a little bit of wildflower. Better than any perfume I could buy.
And peace. Distant birds, the drone of insects, the breeze in the leaves, and nobody talking.
“Hello, Miriam,” said a very deep, rather gravelly voice behind me.
I nearly jumped out of the saddle. Poor Brownie was just as startled; he whipped around to bring us face-to-face with—an enormous wolf. I mean, an epically big wolf. Tiny pony size. He gave me this long penetrating look while I was trying to figure out if Brownie could outrun him, then he did the kind of fancy bow you can train a horse to do. “Hail to the conqueror of Lady Thornheart,” the wolf said. “Hail to Miriam, who trampled the killer of pups, to the young woman who ended the crusher of hopes, to the brave soul who destroyed the destroyer of dreams.” He took a deep breath and might have gone on further, but despite my fear, I was blushing so hot my cheeks burned. It was pretty obvious what he was talking about even if I hadn’t known the name of the Dark Fae who had tried to curse my sister.
“Actually, that was mostly an accident,” I admitted, interrupting him. “I was just hoping that the curse would hit me, not my baby sister, and I wasn’t really thinking.”
The wolf rose from his bow. “Usually ‘not thinking’ is a very bad idea. But in your case, combined with your brave heart, I would say it worked out well.” He lolled out his tongue in what I figured was a wolf grin since dogs do that too. When he grinned, he showed all his teeth, so this didn’t help to put me at ease nearly as much as he must have thought it would. “If she was Thornheart, then you are Briarheart, the young warrior whose mettle is as strong as the briar that can pull down castle walls.”
“How do you know who I am?” I finally managed to ask. A talking wolf is not something you see every day, and even though every time he opened his mouth I thought of the story of Little Red Hood, he hadn’t shown any disposition to murder and eat me or swallow me whole—so far, anyway.
“All of Brianna Firehawk’s friends in this forest know who you are,” he replied. The wolf continued to stare right at me, something an ordinary wild animal won’t do because that’s considered a challenge. It was very hard not to get mesmerized by those huge yellow eyes.
“Is that the killer of the Dark Fae?” came another voice from behind the hedge at the side of the road, this one sounding a little less thundery. A huge red deer stepped out of the forest to my right. I had no idea how he’d done that. I wouldn’t have thought that even a rabbit could squeeze through the intertwined branches.
Then again, the huge deer was another talking animal. Oozing through a bramble hedge was nothing for them. Everyone knows about the rare magical talking animals in the forests of our kingdom, but nobody, least of all me, ever expects to see one!
Brownie must have smelled him because this time he didn’t start. The deer turned his head so he could look out of his right eye at me. Predators like wolves can look at you head-on, but prey like deer and horses have to look at you out of one eye or the other to see you clearly. The deer nodded gracefully. “Oh, it is. Lovely. I’m so glad she came to the forest today! Would you like to tell her or shall I?” The red deer bowed his head toward me, then raised it. He must have had twenty spikes on each antler, which made him old. “Forgive me for speaking around you as if you were not here, my lady,” he added.
“I was getting ready to, but she might feel more comfortable alone in the forest with something that is not a meat-eater,” the wolf said. “If you want to—”
“I’m sure anyone who faced down Thornheart the Wicked isn’t in the least afraid of you, but let’s let her decide, shall we?” the red deer replied.
Two things made my decision easy for me. These two natural enemies were speaking to each other like old friends, and the wolf had claimed that Brianna was a friend of his. And both of them seemed to think that telling me what they wanted me to know was very important and possibly an honor. When something like that happens in the Court, whoever gets there first has the right to impart the information and get whatever reward might come with it. “Sir Stag, I very much appreciate your offer, but Sir Wolf has a prior claim,” I said, with my best Court manners and a little bow in the saddle.
“There, see? Perfectly at ease with you,” the stag said, and bowed to me as the wolf had. “And thank you; my antlers are inclined to get tangled where Lobo is taking you. It’s a bloody nuisance having to stop to say ‘Wait a minute’ every two or three steps. I’ll be on my way, then. It was a pleasure to meet you, Slayer of the Dark Fae.” And before I could get anything out, the stag reared up, pivoted on his hind feet, and leapt over the hedge into the forest and out of sight past the brambles.
A very impressive exit, but I didn’t hear hooves on the forest floor, so I suspected that he was lurking out of sight, waiting to hear what the wolf had to say.
The wolf and I regarded each other for a moment. I was pretty sure he was looking at me with amusement. Which was perfectly all right because that was a lot better than being regarded with hunger.
“Well, Clarion seems to have let the proverbial cat out of the bag, so… I’m here to take you somewhere very secret if you’ll trust me,” Lobo said at last. “I have eaten, though even if I were starving, you would be safe with me.” He paused the barest instant. “But if Brianna happens to be about when we return, I would not hesitate to call on her with you. She makes the best butter cake.” He sighed. “Ooey, gooey butter cake…”
“He’ll get too fat to fit in his den entrance!” came the stag’s voice from somewhere on the other side of the hedge. As I had thought, he was lurking.
“I heard that!”
“You were meant to!”
I suppressed a smile. The wolf looked at me again. This time his expression was definitely pained. “I’m quite sure you would never get fat,” I said firmly.
“Thank you for that. And please call me Lobo.”
“I’m just Miri, without all that other stuff,” I replied, waving my hand dismissively. “But you’re being awfully mysterious about where you’re taking me.”
“That is because we are constrained to not tell you, only show you.” Lobo coughed. “We—or rather, Clarion’s family and mine—were appointed as guardians of it, and we have very specific instructions that have been passed down through the generations. And as far as I am aware, this is for only you or your mother, and I doubt that she has the qualifications for… something I can’t tell you.” He looked at me hopefully. “Will you trust me anyway?” I couldn’t help but notice that his tail was wagging.
Well, this wouldn’t be the strangest thing I’d ever heard of. Or seen, for that matter. My life had certainly gotten interesting. I nodded and turned Brownie around. “Lead and I will follo
w,” I replied, figuring I could eat in the saddle if this was a longer distance from home than I’d planned to go. “I just hope that it’s not so far that I’m so late coming home that Papa sends out the Royal Guard to look for me. That would be very bad for both of us, but mostly for me. I’m bound to get into some kind of trouble or be restricted on what I can do if I do something that makes him think I’m not responsible enough.”
“I’ll make sure that you won’t get home late,” Lobo promised.
Lobo loped along ahead of me, forcing Brownie into a canter to keep up. I did ask him to stop as we crossed a nice clear brook so all of us could get some water and Brownie could catch his breath. “How far now?” I asked, keeping an eye on the sun as I took a moment to eat. Lobo didn’t answer immediately; his mouth was full of my bread and cheese.
“Not far,” he said, and looked at my parcel. “That’s uncommonly good cheese,” he added suggestively. I was almost positive that he deliberately widened his eyes to make them look more puppylike.
“I’ll happily give you bread and cheese to keep girl off your menu,” I teased, because I felt very sure of him now. With him, I was as safe as, or safer than, I was with Sir Delacar. I decided that I had had more than enough and gave him the rest. I would be going home to another huge Court dinner soon enough.
“Mrmph!” he said indignantly around another mouthful. “I wouldn’t touch human. You humans may think you rate high on the deliciousness scale, but the reality is that only creatures who are too slow to catch anything else bother with you. You’re not horrible, but rabbit is much nicer.”
“I can’t say that disappoints me,” I retorted dryly.
“Besides, I don’t eat things that can talk,” Lobo said. “Clarion is right off the menu.”
“I’m sure Clarion will be happy to know that,” I said with a grin.
I found myself hoping that once Lobo showed me whatever it was he was so eager to have me see, he’d continue to find ways to meet with me. Perhaps on the walk to Brianna’s cottage I made every day?
When he had literally wolfed down the last of my lunch, including a custard tart I discarded in favor of a nice juicy plum, we got back on our way. And he hadn’t lied; after he turned off the main track, the path we took quickly became a game trail, then a rabbit trail, then a barely perceptible trace through underbrush that was unaccountably thick considering that it was all under a dense forest canopy.
When you read about “dark impenetrable forests” in books, you get the impression that an old forest is all vegetation from the ground up to the treetops.
That’s not usually true. The older and thicker that old trees are, the more they shade the ground, and that means that a lot less can grow there. In an ancient forest, very little light reaches beneath the canopy, and it’s usually as easy to walk there as it is on a groomed garden path.
Not here. As I ducked over Brownie’s neck to avoid getting my hair snagged in branches, I could see why Clarion the stag had not wanted to come along. Either he’d have had to walk along with his nose to the ground like a hunting hound or we’d have spent most of our time untangling his antlers from the branches. Neither would have been very dignified. This really was a dark impenetrable forest.
It was practically twilight in here. Not an uncomfortable dark but a deep-green herb-scented dark with hints of evergreen in the air. The undergrowth was like nothing I had ever seen before—mostly huge ferns and dense bushes a little like holly but without the thorns. We pushed our way in among the dense vegetation, which came up to Brownie’s ears. Ferns don’t need a lot of light, so that explained how they could grow here, but where had they come from? I’d never seen ferns like this anywhere in the forest.
Brownie began shaking his head with irritation, and the moss-covered ground looked awfully comfortable to walk on, so I finally dismounted and led him, following the swish of Lobo’s tail ahead of me.
Because I was paying attention, I saw the glow up ahead when it was just barely visible and watched as it increased as we drew nearer. Finally, Lobo paused and looked over his shoulder. “Come up beside me.”
I did and saw that we were at the open arched doorway of a little building made of stone. It looked a bit like a tomb except there was no sarcophagus. Despite the fact that it was as dark as pitch in there, I had no trouble seeing the inside of the mostly empty building because of the softly glowing sword hanging on the back wall.
“I—uh—assume that’s what you wanted me to see?” I said to Lobo.
“Actually, we want you to do more than look at it. We want you to take it. It’s yours. Or rather, your great-great-great…” He shook his head until his ears made a flapping noise. “Too many greats. The grandmother from Prince Lionel’s time. On your mother’s side.”
So—this wasn’t Fae. This was a human thing. My human many-times-great-grandmother had had a magic sword, which, apparently, was now mine. My knees felt a bit wobbly. “I think I need to sit down,” I said, and did so right on the moss.
“It’s an easy explanation.” Lobo licked my ear. I think he intended it to be comforting, so I didn’t yelp from surprise when he did it. “Your many-times-great-grandmother was a stablemaster’s daughter at the palace who was the same age as Lionel. When Lionel’s father died, virtually everyone in the palace was aware that Lionel’s uncle was going to usurp the throne, but they hoped that his knights would put a stop to it. But they didn’t, and the wicked uncle tried to throw Lionel off the tower. Brianna intervened, and everyone who could flee fled, knowing that he was going to purge loyalists, which was everyone at that point. Brianna led them all to Caer Fidelia in the mountains.”
“I know that part,” I said.
“Well, what you don’t know is that instead of being raised as a stablehand, your four-times-great-grandmother showed quite the aptitude for combat, and despite her low birth, she was made a lady knight and eventually the King-in-Exile’s Champion. The wizard of the time, Ian Steward, was extraordinarily powerful, and fearing that Lionel’s uncle was in league with the Dark Fae, he made that for her against the time when she would lead the King-in-Exile’s troops into battle to regain his throne.” Lobo nodded at the sword.
“It’s magic?” I asked. Then I felt stupid because of course it was. Swords don’t just glow randomly.
“Actually, it’s antimagic,” said Lobo, which was a reply that I wasn’t expecting. “It’s proof against Fae offensive magic, Light or Dark. Obviously, a Fae could not have made it. And if you strike against true evil, it will never fail you. Wizard Steward made the sword and Brianna made the scabbard, which heals all wounds that are not immediately fatal. And when Lionel was again on the throne, your great-great-great-great-grandmother came here, left the sword until it was needed again, told only Brianna where it was, and retired to raise horses and lots and lots of children. About the time you destroyed Lady Thornheart, it started glowing. I was the one who first saw that, and I told Brianna since she was the one who bound my line and Clarion’s to it, and we both assumed that this meant it was for you. Or there may be another girl out there of your great-great-great-great-grandmother’s bloodline who could take it if you don’t.” He blinked for a few moments. “Or a boy, I suppose; Brianna didn’t say anything about the sword being exclusive to females. And your great-great-great-great-grandmother had quite a litter. Eight, I think. By now there must be great-great-great-great-grandchildren scattered all over this kingdom.”
“All right then, so this isn’t a chosen-one thing?” I asked, somewhat relieved.
“More like an appropriate-one thing.”
I giggled a little, and he lay down in the doorway beside me. “But why bring it here? My four-times-great-grandmother, I mean. Why take it all the way out here and hide it if it was meant to be found and used? Why not leave it in the palace armory or something?”
“It’s proof against all Fae magic,” Lobo reminded me. “Just because it’s ‘meant’ for you to take, it doesn’t follow that no one else
can use it. It’s not intelligent, after all; it’s just an enchanted tool. Imagine if someone got it who was in the pay of the Dark Fae. A human, that is. He could go on a wholesale slaughter of the Light Fae without ever breaking the Fae Rules.” He scratched his ear with his hind foot. “If something like this had even been thought of at the time the Compact was made, there likely would have been Rules binding humans too.”
“I… hadn’t thought of that.” Now leaving it in a stone building in the middle of the forest seemed a lot more sensible than it had a few moments ago. “So what do I do to claim it? Is there a spell? Do I have to perform a quest or some ceremony?”
Lobo shook his head. “You come from a long line of great-hearted, brave, loyal, and fundamentally common people.”
“Oh.” I got up. “I’ll just go take it down off the wall, then,” I said, walking into the building.
“Please. Then we can get you back before your father starts to worry.”
The sword stopped glowing as soon as I touched it, and I lifted it down off the two stone pegs it was resting on, as if it were quite like any other sword in our armory. But it had obviously been made for the smaller hand of a woman to use single-handedly with a shield. For being many centuries old, the leather of the scabbard looked practically new. A little scuffed and worn with use but not brittle. It didn’t look any different from the swords I’d seen my father using: perfectly plain and completely undecorated, which I suppose was the point. You don’t want to have something that practically shouts I’m a powerful magic sword! It didn’t even have a common agate as a pommel jewel, just a practical steel nut. I threaded the holders onto my belt and put it on. And just like that, we were on our way again.
We did stop at Brianna’s cottage, but she wasn’t there, much to Lobo’s disappointment.
He left me at the part of the forest track that started to see more use. “I’ll try and visit when you are taking your lessons,” Lobo said. “And if you are alone, I shall sniff that out and escort you to Brianna’s. It was a great pleasure meeting you, Miri.”
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