Bloodstone (73 page)

Could it be an attack like the one Old Dren suffered last summer? But Dren hadn’t appeared to be suffocating as Jurl surely was. She tried breathing into his mouth, but he was thrashing too wildly.

His face slowly darkened to the color of raw liver. His heels gouged great furrows in the mulch. His bulging eyes pleaded with her, but all she could do was kneel beside him and squeeze his hand.

A foul smell assaulted her nostrils as he voided his bowels. His convulsions grew weaker. His legs slowly relaxed. The tortured gasping ceased, and the blue lips went slack.

Griane closed the staring eyes, but could not bring herself to whisper a prayer that his spirit should fly to the Forever Isles. All his life, Jurl had been a brute and a bully. His first wife had died of childbed fever; the second had fled back to her family. His only surviving child was terrified of him. At least poor Othak was safe from his father’s beatings now, although he would probably carry the emotional scars forever.

A sudden whiff of honeysuckle drove away the stink of death. Black-clawed feet appeared before her. Golden eyes regarded Jurl’s body. The long nose wrinkled in distaste.

“You did this?”

“It’s past dawn. Today you were promised to me.” Fellgair shrugged. “Besides, I never liked him. Shall we go?”

She had witnessed many of Fellgair’s moods—mocking, seductive, stern, even sorrowful—but she had never seen him so ruthless. For the first time in their long acquaintance, she was truly afraid of him.

His face softened. “Do you think I would ever deal with you like that?”

She hesitated only a moment, but it was long enough. His expression became remote. “Do you wish to rescind our bargain?”

“Nay.”

He studied her a moment, then nodded. She clasped his outstretched hand and clung to it tightly as the glade of the heart-oak melted into a smear of color and light.

Even with her eyes closed, she knew where he had taken her. For fifteen years, she had preserved the sensations in her memory: the crispness of the grass between her bare toes, the gentle splash of the waterfall, the heady aroma of the air, richer than any that existed in her world. But memory failed to capture the brilliance of the colors that burst upon her when she opened her eyes: the lush greens and vivid reds, the bold blue of the sky, and the rich browns of the tree trunks. As if the Maker had splashed the colors across the Summerlands that very morning.

The pool was exactly as she remembered, the water cascading over ledges carved with otherworldly precision into the hillside. A mere swallow of that water would slake her thirst for the entire day. The plants she had named still grew beside the pool: silver-leafed heal-all that could seal a wound with a touch, broad-leafed heart-ease that could soothe the most troubled spirit. They had kept Cuillon strong during that long journey back to the grove of the One Tree and helped Darak survive the damage Morgath had inflicted on his body.

She shaded her eyes, gazing across the grasslands, but the clumps of trees seemed firmly rooted in the earth.

“Would you like to see her again?” Fellgair asked.

She hesitated, wondering what that pleasure would cost her.

Fellgair’s lips pursed in exasperation. “Not every gift I offer has a price. If it would please you to see Rowan again, I will take you to her. Give me your hand.”

“Can’t we just walk?”

“Waste our day plodding through the Summerlands? What an extraordinary idea.” He thrust out his hand, but still she hesitated.

“I’d like to see Rowan, but I would give it up if you’d tell me . . . if I knew for certain . . . is Keirith alive?”

“Yes.”

In spite of her best effort at control, she burst into noisy, foolish tears. At least Fellgair had the decency not to comfort her. He simply sat on a rock, the model of patience, while she choked and gasped and finally gave up and sat on the ground at his feet and allowed herself to weep. Only when her sobs subsided into hiccups and her hiccups to moist sniffles did he hold out a scrap of cloth. She smoothed the delicate white square with her fingertips.

“It’s called a handkerchief,” Fellgair said. “One day—in the not-so-distant future, I hope—the best people will use these instead of sleeves to wipe their faces.”

She did as he suggested, although it struck her that sturdy doeskin would do a much better job than this lacy little cobweb. Still, it was very pretty; perhaps the best people’s noses didn’t leak so much when they cried.

When she held it out to him, he examined the crumpled mess with obvious distaste. “Keep it. Please. Perhaps you’ll start a trend in your village.” He shifted his examination to her face and sighed. “You’re not one of those women who weeps beautifully, are you?”

“If the sight offends you, you may rescind our bargain.”

“On the contrary, I find red noses erotic.” He waggled his long tongue at her in such a parody of lewdness that she had to smile. “Much better.”

“Thank you.”

“You do have a low threshold for compliments.”

“I meant for telling me about Keirith.”

“Ah. Well. It pleases me to please you.”

And that, of course, was why she was here: to serve his pleasure. Before sunset, she must lie with him. Allowing her to see Rowan, telling her about Keirith . . . these were simply his form of foreplay. He would never be so crude as to throw her to the ground and mount her. He wasn’t Jurl. But it surprised her that he should think such gestures necessary. He was a god, after all. He could make her desire him, just as he had all those years ago. Knowing that Keirith was safe, knowing that he would protect Darak, she would offer herself willingly and consider the price cheap.

“Why do you want me?” Her face grew warm under his scrutiny, but she forced herself to add, “You could have any woman in the world. Younger women. Prettier women.”

The kind of women who knew instinctively what handkerchiefs were for. Women who looked beautiful when they wept. Women with soft voices and softer bodies, their bellies unmarred by stretch marks, their breasts high and firm.

Instead of mocking her, his expression became thoughtful. “I admire your courage and your fierceness. The marks on your belly testify to the pain of childbirth. Your breasts, to the children you’ve suckled. Your fingertips . . .” He took her hand and turned it over, one claw lightly caressing the green-tinged tips. “. . . to the years of handling the plants that heal your people. And if your hair is streaked with white and occasionally less than tidy . . .” The dexterous claws moved. A leaf fluttered to the ground. “. . . it bespeaks the battles you have fought and survived.”

The golden eyes filled her vision, as hot as the Summerlands sun. And then they vanished as he pressed a gentle kiss to her cheek. His whiskers still tickled.

“Come. We’ll find Rowan. And later, I’ll show you other sights. There are many wonders in the world, Griane. I am only one.”

The mocking smile returned. Before she could reply, he tightened his grip on her hand. Again, the world dissolved, only to re-form moments later as time and space stuttered to a halt. The blur of color and light solidified into images: a circle of trees around her, bare earth beneath her toes, and in front of her, a massive wall of wood that she recognized as the trunk of the great oak under whose roots she had once slept.

The shadows were as deep as ever beneath the oak’s branches, the leaves fluttered as gently in the slight breeze. But there
was
something different: the luminosity of the runneled bark, the shimmering intensity of the green leaves. The spirit of the Oak-Lord now dwelled within the tree, sheltering here after his defeat at Midsummer. A living, immortal presence imbuing the tree with his power, filling the clearing with an energy so vital it made her skin prickle. Warmth suffused her as if she’d drunk too much elderberry wine. Nay, not wine, but the water of the Summerlands, filling her with strength and peace.

She rested her cheek against one of the roots that arched high over her head, wanting to be closer to the source of that peace. Then she heard the rustle of leaves and the creak of branches and looked up.

Fellgair was right. They looked just the same to her, that strange amalgam of tree and human, their faces grooved and rough, their green hands serrated like leaves. Her gaze flitted from the spiky needles that capped the pine-man’s head to the mottled silver of the birch-woman’s belly to—Maker spare her blushing face—the large acorns that swung between the oak-man’s legs.

And then she spied two eyes of Midsummer green. Smooth gray lips pursed in a knothole of surprise. A thick bead of sap hung suspended on one cheek. Nine delicate fingers reached out to touch her hair. Among the fading white blossoms at her wrist, Griane spied a circlet of bright red hair. Laughing in spite of the tears that blurred her vision, she flung herself into Rowan’s strong arms.

There were advantages to traveling with a god. Fellgair interrupted her clumsy sign language to interpret for her. To her ears, he spoke the tribal tongue, but his words apparently made sense to the tree-folk. There was much leaf fluttering during the tale of her journey through the First Forest, but when she told them about Tinnean, it was as if a great storm blew through. She had to describe his transformation twice before they calmed.

Of course, the story of the boy who became a tree had more impact than her endless chatter about Darak and the children and her life in a village they had never seen. But they listened attentively and Rowan, at least, seemed to understand her anguish when she explained what had happened to Keirith.

When her voice finally ran down, Rowan touched her hair again. Lounging against a root, Fellgair said, “She’s wondering about the white streaks. Why this change happens now instead of in the autumn when leaves change their color.” His brief explanation of aging provoked more leaf fluttering. “Rowan asks what you are becoming.”

“Becoming?”

“Aging is not a process they understand. Change is. Rowan is becoming more human. So she wonders what the nature of your change is.”

“What should I tell her?”

Fellgair shrugged. “Tell her what you like.”

“But if the tree-folk are becoming more human, won’t they die one day? I wouldn’t want to frighten them.”

“Here, there is no death. There’s a slight dimming of the life-force when the Oak-Lord returns to the One Tree, but only if he was destroyed—or if the balance of nature was irreparably damaged—would the creatures of the Summerlands die.”

“But the Oak-Lord’s spirit is immortal. He’s a god. He can’t die.”

“Who told you that?”

“I don’t know. Struath, I suppose.”

Fellgair rolled his eyes. “Ah, the beloved shaman. Strong, secretive, and woefully misinformed. We’re immortal in the sense that we neither age nor change, but we are not indestructible. Anything that is created can be destroyed. Even me.”

In a few sentences, he had changed her entire conception of the world. Yet it had existed thus since the Beginning. And would continue to exist as long as nothing happened to—how did Fellgair put it?—irreparably damage the balance of nature.

“How should I answer Rowan?” Fellgair asked.

“Tell her that I’ll continue to change. My hair will grow whiter and my face will become grooved like an elder. And one day, my . . . my heartwood will become a butterfly and leave the cocoon of my body and fly to a place like the Summerlands. And I’ll live there forever. Unless I want to spin another cocoon.”

“What an appalling mix of metaphors,” Fellgair murmured.

“Well, I’m not a Memory-Keeper, am I? Tell her whatever you want.”

“Very well.”

“Except that I’m going to die.”

“Fine.”

“Or become infirm.”

Fellgair closed his eyes. His lips moved. She was quite certain he wasn’t praying. But he simply told Rowan that the changes she had observed were natural to humans and occurred more quickly in their kind than in the tree-folk. When Rowan accepted his explanation with a small nod, Fellgair rose, licked the tip of his brush twice, and announced, “Now we must leave you.”