Lord of the Forest Read online

  He didn’t answer, but looked down at his body, willing it to change. She saw the horse’s glossy hide heave, twitch, and roll back until his own flesh was revealed. It was as if he was being flayed alive—and the pain he seemed to be feeling was commensurate. Marius cried out in agony. Four legs became two. Hooves turned into feet. Linnea could only stare. He had been magnificent as a centaur, but to her, he was more so as a man.

  The skin and hooves of his centaur body, shed and stepped out of, drew together in a crumpled heap of hide, flesh, and cartilage. She watched with fascinated revulsion as it got smaller and smaller and sank into the ground, remembering that the demon too had shed a skin, though she had not seen Ravelle do it.

  The scratch he’d given her throbbed upon her chest, though it no longer bled. But something of his ill temper and distrust had infected her from it. She was too overcome to fight off her growing unease.

  Indeed, she had no way of knowing if this Marius was any more real than the demon version. She must remain on her guard—but oh, she was weak. Dangerously so. She could not bound away into the woods like the wise little doe. Nor could she remember the words that would summon her father, the Great White Stag. She had only seen him twice in her life.

  Fully himself again, Marius sat down heavily upon a rock, breathing hard, still sweating profusely. He rubbed the spot at the base of his spine where his tail had been as if it still pained him.

  “You should have become a man when he left you tied by your tail.”

  “I would not have been able to reach you quickly. As it was, I sent Esau ahead. He could see more than I could from the air and sound the alarm.”

  “He took Ravelle unawares. But the poor bird was in mortal danger from the imps.”

  Marius looked over at Esau, his head tucked under his wing and his breast puffing out in frightened little breaths. “He too will be healed, Linnea. But you must go first.”

  “Go where?”

  He pointed at a tree. “The being who lives in this place is a true healer. I am not.”

  She gazed at him with suspicion. “And where is this being?” She gestured around them at the silent trees and mirrorlike pond. “I see nothing but these damned woods and yet another pond. What if we have to run again?”

  Marius looked at her steadily. “Indeed we may.”

  “What if we are caught?” She wanted to fly at him, whether to rain blows upon his hard body or be held in his arms, she could not say.

  “It is not easy to outrun a centaur. I will change, and change again if you need me to. It is painful to make happen, but I can. Because of you, I think.”

  If only she had his gift of transformation. To have his strength, to be able to escape—on their desperate journey hence, she had blocked out the overwhelming power of Ravelle’s malice, his delight in seeing her strung up by her wrists, her body bared again to his evil red gaze.

  Even standing in the sun, Linnea felt a creeping sense of sudden despair that made her cold to her core. They might run from him or take a stand against him, but Ravelle would wait forever.

  “Can you take me away from this island? Far away?”

  “I will. Not yet.”

  “Anyway,” she said slowly, “you saved my life. I should thank you for that.” But the words of gratitude did not spring to her lips. The bird gave a faint squawk from her bosom and she looked down at it. “You and Esau.”

  Marius was too weary to smile. “He did his best. That beak of his is sharp. He has used it on me.”

  Why? Linnea stared at him, searching his guileless face. Plunged by happenstance into a world where nothing at all was what it seemed for long, she would have to be mindful of everything that was done and said. And ultimately she might have to protect herself, if it came to that.

  “Understand that a centaur is an unpredictable creature,” he was saying. “Like a stallion, if you will. Wild, strong, and uncontrollably sexual. Esau feels obliged to remind me not to go too far from time to time, but I cannot rely on a mere bird to help me control such powerful instincts.”

  She was silent again, reminding herself that she was not his one and only, just a partner in lovemaking for the solstice feast. A celebration that had turned into a nightmare in the blink of a demon’s red eye.

  Marius sighed hugely. “Did Ravelle—”

  “I will not talk of it.” She lifted the bird gently from between her warm breasts and set it in a sunny spot in a low fork of a sheltering tree. Reluctant to leave her, Esau gave a complaining squawk, then fluffed out his surviving feathers and cleaned the blood from them.

  “As you wish. I see no demon’s mark on you.”

  Should she show him the scratch? He had not noticed it. To explain it would be like being strung up again, so ashamed was she of how she had bent to the demon’s will. He seemed somehow to have left traces of himself in her very brain. “You came in time,” she said in a measured voice. Her troubled mind was in turmoil. If this Marius really was the Marius who had loved her so well, she could never tell him of the demon’s wicked dalliance with her.

  She reminded herself that she had not touched the monster intimately or kissed him in the alluring guise of her solstice lover and thanked the mysterious instinct that had made her hold back.

  “Linnea, I cannot let you out of my sight from now on.”

  “So.” She walked quietly about, but her nerves were screaming. “Our idyll was not meant to last.”

  “No.” He stayed where he was, still recovering from the mad gallop and his forced transformation, breathing deeply. “Ravelle must have sensed my abandonment to joy and seized his chance.”

  She nodded, rubbing her arms for warmth. “It was you he captured first.”

  Marius plowed a hand through his hair, which was spiking with drying sweat. “Nothing for it. Your game of hide-and-seek went awry. I was looking everywhere for you and then there he was, breathing fire and throwing ropes of iron to ensnare me. Demon or no, I might never have found you. How quickly you run, Linnea, and how quietly. It was uncanny.”

  She stiffened. “And what do you mean by that?”

  “I felt like a fool, that’s all. There is not an inch of the Forest Isle that I do not know. But you vanished like the breeze itself.”

  She thought of the doe and almost smiled. “Some are better at that trick than I.”

  “Now it is my turn to ask you what you mean.”

  “Before Ravelle appeared to me, I saw a doe and twin fawns. And then a man appeared who I thought was you. She knew better. She tried to warn me. But I was bedazzled.”

  By my desire for you. He used it to lure me and he used it against me. She didn’t want to say it because just looking at him, naked, weary, and overwhelmed, made her want to comfort him. He had rescued her, for what it was worth. But she would need her wits about her to escape with her own hide intact.

  “He shape shifted, then.” Marius gave a disgusted grunt. “The real Ravelle can become anything with two legs. He is a monster like no other. I saw him in all his hideous glory, but then he meant to scare me. Who was he for you? A handsome youth? An innocent girl?”

  “Neither.” Linnea gave him a long look. “He turned himself into a grown man, tall and strong, who resembled you perfectly in every way. But he stood in the shadows and did not speak. I thought you were playing some sort of game with me. And then—”

  Marius rose and came to her. He reached out as if to take her in his arms, but she recoiled. “Forgive me. I don’t need to know everything.”

  “And you never will,” she said simply. It had been so easy for the demon to decipher her emotions and deceive her. What had he said to her? I wanted you, Linnea. That is why I became what you wanted. Him.

  Ravelle could do it again.

  She would stick close to Marius. Talk, she told herself, of anything but what had happened. Just talk. Do not think. But she had to know one thing. “Is there no way—” she hesitated, her voice breaking, “that I might know for certain, if we
are parted, that it is you I see and not the demon?”

  Marius kept a respectful distance, walking about now, his arms folded over his bare chest. He was as naked as he had been before, although at the moment she found it disturbing. The scratch on her chest throbbed like a warning not to be weak. Linnea turned away, hiding it from his gaze.

  “Besides my voice, you mean? You did say that Ravelle didn’t speak to you. He is a master of illusion but the voice comes from the soul. It is harder to feign than flesh and blood.”

  She nodded in reluctant agreement. “After a while, he spoke. Not much. He said nothing worth repeating. His voice was different, but—” She broke off, remembering the crudeness with which he bade her to suck and touch his Marius-body, and his coarse sexual display.

  Marius did not seem eager to hear the details of the encounter. “You do not have to tell me. I am all too familiar with Ravelle’s brand of evil. It begins with mischief and becomes mayhem. He can barely control himself.”

  But he is very good at controlling others. The shame of her humiliation at his hands returned sevenfold. She hoped Marius would not see it in her face.

  “There was a way once,” Marius said at last. “The gods who cursed me did it with an amulet of golden stone in the shape of a horse. I will tell you of it later. We must get inside.”

  She closed her eyes, feeling faint. There was no shelter here, unless he meant the ground under the tree he pointed to. She felt sick…and she for one had a feeling that the demon had just begun to wreak havoc.

  “What is that mark upon your chest?” Marius asked suddenly.

  “It is only a scratch. From Ravelle. To remember him by.”

  He gave her a grave look and shook his head. “Worse than that, Linnea. Ravelle’s claws hold poison. The scratch must be opened up and the wound cleansed.”

  “Will you do that?” she asked softly. Would she let him? She did not want to be touched and with good reason—

  “No,” Marius said, interrupting the dark flow of her thoughts. “We have tarried here too long while I rested. We simply are not safe out in the open.”

  She smiled bitterly. “No, we are not. You gave Ravelle the kick to end all kicks. He will be looking for you.”

  Marius searched her face. “You are right. He is nothing to trifle with and his strength is soon regained. Anyway, come. Or I will throw you over my shoulder.”

  Linnea looked around. “I don’t see a door. Or a house.”

  He waved at a tree in the near distance and this time she looked at it more intently. It was so old and so large that its massive lower branches rested upon the earth. “Look again.”

  She drew in her breath as the thick bark of the trunk pulled back in shaggy, peeling folds. A door appeared and some unseen force within the tree opened it from the inside.

  He held out his hand. At last she noticed that it was covered with deep scratches from the branches of the treacherous trees that had whipped at him during their mad gallop. Trees that might betray them yet. How to tell the difference in a forest so ancient and so crowded with living green would be an impossible task, at least for her. His other hand, hanging at his side, looked worse. The sides of his torso bore scratches and more than one gash.

  Silently she reproved herself for not seeing them right away. So he had taken a beating as well and nearly torn off his tail to come and rescue her. Though she could not, would not, tell him of Ravelle’s manipulation of her mind and how he’d had his way with her—her sense of shame was far too strong—she had to acknowledge that Marius had suffered for her.

  The pain of his injuries seemed to be nothing to him, compared to the agony of shifting from one form to another. His indifference to it spoke well for his toughness—she would have to rely on that at the very least. And for now, until she could get away, she had to trust him to lead her out of the unfamiliar forest. Linnea put her hand in his and let him lead her to the huge tree.

  Within a few steps of the open door, she glimpsed a chamber that held a finely wrought staircase, spiraling upward until it was lost from sight and supported by nothing at all.

  Linnea took a deep breath and entered.

  5

  He led her inside and indicated that she should go first up the spiral stairs. Linnea hesitated, one hand resting on the curving rail, smooth as silk.

  “Are you afraid?” he asked.

  “I ought to be. I know nothing of this place or what awaits me.”

  “It is a place of healing,” he reassured her again. “And it is inhabited by a very strange being, but I think you will like him. Come along—I will go first if you like.”

  She looked at him and then up, up, and up, not seeing where the staircase ended. The perfect whorl of it reminded her of a shell, but there was light up above and the hint of a breeze. It did not end in a closed chamber that would be suffocatingly small.

  She called upon her intuition to help her decide. Her nervousness gradually subsided. The inside of the great tree seemed safe somehow, although it was dark. She had never been in one like this. At the moment she fully understood why so many animals found shelter in them. The air in it gave off a healthy smell, like herbs. Besides the staircase there was nothing else in its vast, open heart.

  Even so, if he went first, she would be able to escape by running down. Just in case something demonish appeared at the top.

  Marius’s smile was warm and without guile. He was still naked. And she—Linnea looked down at the sad remnants of her beautiful gown. She looked violated. That did not seem to have occurred to him, but then, why would it? She ran her fingers through her hair, swiftly taking out the worst of the tangles and a few twigs.

  “Ready?” he asked nonchalantly. As if he was taking her to meet an old friend. She glanced once more at the open door, looking at the thicket of green outside and the leaves moving in the dappled sun. Anything could be hiding out there.

  She was safer with Marius. And she did need a healer—the single scratch Ravelle had inflicted was aching in her chest.

  They reached the top of the staircase in a little while, moving up through the open heart. The sides of the tree were lined with green channels in which liquid rose and fell, pulsing like great veins, splitting off into narrow tributaries.

  “How can the tree live if it is hollow?” she asked.

  “The inside walls are alive from the ground up. The smallest twig on the highest branch is nourished by those.” He pointed to the veins. “A huge bolt of lightning devoured the center years ago. It was meant for Gideon, the Lord of the Dark, but he dodged it. The tree survived.”

  There were occasional openings in the trunk—and she laughed when she saw Esau sitting in one. He cawed at them, looking hopeful.

  “May we bring him with us?”

  “Of course.” But he looked a little annoyed when the magpie fluttered to her shoulder and not his.

  They ascended and at last they reached the source of the mysterious breeze. A very strange being indeed rose to greet them. Presumably male and extremely old to all appearances. His skin seemed to be made of shaggy bark, and his eyes gleamed above the pouches and infinite wrinkles of his face.

  “Linnea, this is Quercus.”

  The being’s hand clasped hers. It was surprisingly warm—and barky. She could not think of a better word for it. He had large ears that resembled tree mushrooms, and in their crevices were long hairs, the bane of all old creatures, growing in wild profusion.

  “Welcome, Linnea. I saw you coming, Marius. You made enough noise to wake the dead.”

  “That is because we did not wish to be dead, Quercus. Thank you for taking your sweet time to open the door.”

  “No centaur could get up my winding stairs, my boy. No demons either. The spiral is calculated to make their heads spin and fall off.”

  “Really?” Marius said.

  “Yes, quite gruesome. But effective. Your head will stay on, though. Come along. I was waiting for you to change.”

  The t
ree was higher than Linnea had thought. Judging by the height of the stairs she’d climbed, anyway. One could probably see for miles from its top branches.

  As if the barky being had read her mind, he waved them over to a scrying pool mounted in a table of volcanic stone. “I saw you rushing here when you were in the woods. Sit down. You are clearly here for healing and I just happen to have the right herbs for poultices…”

  Quercus chattered away, seeming pleased to have visitors, making small talk with Marius. For his part, Marius avoided the subject of precisely why they were so scratched and banged up for the present.

  With Esau on her shoulder, adjusting his position with small steps every time she moved, Linnea sat at the edge of the scrying pool, marveling at its clarity.