* * *
Alan lay wakeful in the chill of a blustery winter night. It wasn't that his sleeping bag was too thin; he'd bought a good one, suited for subzero temperatures, when he'd thought he'd be hiking in the Rockies. As much as the cold was apt to bother him, his palms were sweating hot.
Raw nerves kept him jumpy and wakeful. Not good at lying, especially to himself, he could not deny that his years in the service had wrecked his appreciation for the wilderness. Not a truth he liked to admit; still less to the two others with him: Bill, all macho bluster, and Rafe, who acted the suave city sophisticate, but who'd die before letting anybody see he couldn't beat a jock at his own game.
Why was it, Alan thought bitterly, that male pride too often held nonconformity as a weakness?
He reached out for the hundredth time in an hour and checked the rifle gripped in his hand. Deer season - what a laugh. He found no joy in hunting animals, hunting anything, in sad fact, not since his time in the service. Then, killing had meant plain survival, until the mind grew sick on its own fear, and a man could grow to live for the unholy thrill of an enemy's blood on the ground.
Another man dead meant staying alive. Except those who came home found that life had somehow rearranged itself, and nothing of past importance had retained real meaning anymore.
Alan stroked icy steel and shivered like a baby. The safety on his weapon wasn't set. Recollection left him sweating, of being ripped out of sleep by flares and gunfire, and of the buddy who'd died because of a shot he couldn't return fast enough. The wind lashed at the trees, and a scratchy patter of leaves tumbled past. Alan tensed, halfway to a crouch with his rifle up, before he could stop himself and rationalize: this was the States, and rustling leaves here were just that, not an enemy stalking to kill.
God, he shouldn't be here. Never mind he felt obliged to mediate, to keep Bill and Rafe from destroying each other in a rivalry neither one would let wither. Twenty years since discharge, and, no use pretending, there were moments when his nerves were still peeled raw. Alan berated himself for not having sense enough to shrug off outworn high-school loyalties. He should've let two friends that time had changed and distanced thrash out their competitive egos on their own.
The wind blew, mournfully soft. The dressed-out carcass of Bill's trophy spun creaking from the rope that lashed it up. The owl that Rafe had winged just to even up the score would be bleeding somewhere in the brush, if it wasn't just as wastefully dead. Strung out with nerves, Alan couldn't bring himself to close his eyes, not without somebody on watch. To turn his mind from past horrors, he thought about Bill's indefatigable boast that he shot his trophies for the freezer. Everybody knew his wife felt sick at the thought of a dead deer.
Alan shifted, discovered himself checking his gun again, and cursed himself for a fool. Who cared whether or not he could face himself if Rafe and Bill were left alone to drive each other too hard? Both men were married; Bill had a daughter. The wives should have taken over the chore of being the influence that tempered. Sweating more, and hurting tense, Alan took a breath of frost-sharp air that turned in his fickle mind to the smells of steaming hot jungle, and sharp-edged anxieties of enemies that lurked in dank tunnels. He stared up at oak leaves to moor his slipping sanity, and to shove unwanted survival patterns into a past that refused to stay quiet.
Sometime after checking his gun for the two-hundredth time, he dozed and fell into fitful dreams.
* * *
The first step beyond the veil raised the sharp crackle of dry leaves, cause enough for Kirelle to stiffen in alarm when she had known nothing underfoot but lush moss. Then the air, equally strange, edged with frost and suffused with the underlying scents of rot and decay. This was the other side, where the wrong word or the mishandled chance encounter could doom the unwary traveller to lifelong exile and death.
Kirelle paused, aware of the pull of the moon in her blood, of the wheeling swing of strange stars, and the slow, insistent aging that ruled all aspects of earthly life.
Curiosity filled her, too. She had been born here, taken across the veil as a changeling unknowable years in the past. Never before had Kirelle felt moved to wonder whether her human parents had grieved when the glamor left by the fey wore off, and they discovered an unbreathing bundle of twigs left in place of their stolen child.
A moment later, listening uneasily Kirelle noticed the wood's appalling silence. Wind alone dared raise voice in this place. No crickets called, nor any night-singing bird. The missing, subliminal thread of harmony her art should have sensed from growing wood raised panic, until she realized: stripped branches and hard-edged, unsoftened moonlight were proper, here. This world went dormant for winter, its smaller creatures frost-killed or departed until the renewal of spring.
The only vibrant life within reach of Kirelle's senses seemed to be the Wizard's white owl, that carved impatient circles as it waited for her to regain wits and purpose. Kirelle touched a sapling to borrow from its rooted firmness the assurance to brace her failing nerves. But her contact revealed something worse than dormancy; the young beech felt sluggish and dull under her hands, stupidly reft of its power of being and retarded from self-awareness.
Horror and pity sent her reeling a step back.
These earthly trees were mute, brutishly groping through soil and sunlight without the gift of wakening. No one had walked this wood for many years who understood how to nurture the spirit nature of wild trees.
Kirelle bit her lip, tasting tears. The anger of the fey would bring justice for the neglect and contempt that had befallen these sorry forests. But if the dissolution of the borderlands and the final separation of the mysteries was a punishment such thoughtlessness deserved, her own fate and the Wizard's freedom were now as deeply entangled.
Grown urgent at her delay, the white owl banked broad wings and flew. Kirelle stumbled to follow. The ache in her assumed the proportions of despair, that the threatening presence of three reavers permitted her no interval to rouse these trees to awareness.
* * *
Against the mute void that heartlessness had allowed this wood to become, the true-song of the Eld Tree rang in solitary splendor against the far distant chime of the stars. Long before the white owl swooped to alight on the mighty oak's branches, Kirelle could sense its power. Although leaves, trunk, and branches embraced the earthly world, the taproots of this Tree bridged the veil and sank deep into borderlands soil.
Yet reunion with the familiar brought no sense of rejoicing. The Tree's muddied anger all but stopped Kirelle's breath. Sour wind tugged her cloak hem and stirred the hair that twigs had raked loose from her braid as her healer's gifts picked past raw rage to bare the thread of stark pain underlying. A moment later, as the late rising moon sliced torn clouds, she saw the gleam of the axe left struck in striated bark.
Even from several paces off, the steel raised an ache in her bones. Fully as hurtful was the blood reek of the stag, thanklessly killed, then gutted and lashed to a branch by a rope that creaked in the wind. Other unidentifiable odors dizzied Kirelle's senses as she made herself close the last steps.
And there they were, three forms sprawled out on bare ground and wrapped in bright-colored bedding that to Kirelle's eye looked light and fine-woven as silk. They smelled of woodsmoke and damp leaves and the animal tang of dried sweat. No aura of savagery warned which had cut the Eld Tree, or which had slain the Wizard's owl. Asleep, the men looked innocent and ordinary, in their way as dumbly vulnerable as this world's unloved trees. Kirelle saw nothing she recognized as a weapon beyond the axe, though other steel things whose use she could not fathom riddled the site of their camp.
Touched by a strange surge of pity, Kirelle shivered. The axe blade in any earthly tree would have roused no uncanny reverberations. But with the Wizard left trapped by the Eldforest's ire, her healer's preference for mercy must not lead her to risk that the fey's cry for vengeance be balked from finding expiation. The talisman stones must be set, and their dreams be given rein to unravel three minds into nightmare.
The nearer man slept in a sprawl, one powerful arm clenched over his chest, and his legs entangled in his bedding. He breathed in the rhythm of untroubled rest and never stirred as Kirelle reached out with shaking fingers and tucked the first stone in his palm. Softly, silently, she engaged the powers of her art to sound his intents and make a weaving of his vulnerabilities.
* * *
Bill Farlane leveled his rifle. Equipped with the finest telescopic sight, he aligned the crosshairs on the buck. The moment came back in perfect clarity, from the clean bite of the wind to the winter-thin patch of sunlight that danced on the deer's dun pelt.
He held his breath to steady his aim, squeezed off the round like a caress - then felt the triumph in his gut freeze to horror as the deer dissolved, replaced before his eyes by his daughter's pink and blue parka.
No!
- his thought too late. Already the report of the rifle spat its flat crack through the wood. Crows exploded into raucous, indignant flight. Pink acrylic showed a blossoming stain of red, and a pitiful three-year-old body crashed headlong into sun-dappled leaf mold.
'Nice shot!' Rafe said, his personal brand of sarcasm making even praise feel like insult.
Bill straightened, mouth opened to cry Sallie's name.
But to his utter terror, his heartdeep cry of grief emerged as banal conversation, it was a nice shot, darned if it wasn't.'
Those words
, he thought wildly,
they'd been said over a deer.
But no buck lay in the clearing. Only Sallie, dreadfully bloody and still. The rifle still warm in his hand had shot her cold, and like some ugly, played-over script, Alan's voice was repeating, 'Well, fine. You've bagged your trophy. For the love of mike, go in quickly. Make sure the shot was clean and use your knife if it wasn't.'
Bill screamed in impotent silence:
That's my daughter.
Yet the words stayed mired in his head. His shoulders set for a satisfied swagger, he ejected the spent shell and laid his rifle against a tree. Locked into actions that denied his raw grief, reft of all power to stop himself, he saw that willpower and muscle, all of his prideful strength and competence were going to do him no good. He was going to rise, going to walk, going to kneel down by his little dead daughter, and dress out her body as he should have done the killed meat of a deer.
While Rafe said something ordinary and Alan gave a meaningless reply, Bill felt himself rise from his stalking crouch and heft his new knife in his hand. The first step toward Sallie's body tore him to inward shreds; he knew, oh god oh god, he knew that the feel of soft, white skin, the drum-leather punch as the blade sliced through flesh, the steaming blood as the abdominal cavity opened, was going to sear him from sanity ...
God, oh God, Sallie, NO!
* * *
The huge man curled into a ball, tearing pitifully at his bedding. He sucked breath after gasping breath while his stubbled face twisted in anguish.
Kirelle fought back tears and guilt, aware as never before that her healer's instinct to mend in this place might tempt her to irrevocable folly. These were reavers, whose actions threatened ruin to the borderlands. Their misguided feelings could not be permitted to matter. Kirelle fished the second stone from her satchel and approached the next man, the one with the gentle face who lay with his cheek neatly cradled on one elbow. By appearance, he seemed the most harmless of the three, with his fine, pale hair, and the glint of a linked gold bracelet circling one elegant wrist.
* * *
Feeling the sting acutely - that Bill had bagged a deer
he
should have seen first - Rafe lounged in bed and relived the frustrated moment when the owl had chanced to fly past. His reflex reaction had made up for the lapse, as he'd ripped off that snap shot on impulse.
He shut his eyes, revelling in the satisfaction he'd felt as the bird tumbled out of mid-flight.
The snooze alarm's buzz erased Rafe's faint smile. Lord, he should have had his tail in and out of the shower ten minutes ago.
Worried over the financial summary he was expected to present, that was in order as far as notes went but needed fleshing out before the meeting, Rafe slugged aside designer bedclothes and stopped in shocked surprise. His hands were smeared with fresh blood. On the sheets by his pillow lay an owl's feather, broken and wrung and blotched scarlet.
Four-letter words were inadequate. His first thought, that he'd be late for the board meeting, was belatedly followed by the incongruity of the gory feather. He hesitated, unwilling to come to grips with the weirdness, that a dead owl could enact some spooky sort of vengeance.
The concept was just too bizarre.
Unwilling to lend credence to hallucinations, Rafe plunged bullishly on toward the bathroom.
But his hands as he turned on the shower were still maddeningly, scarletly drenched. The fancy's irrational persistence left him ticked enough to plunge into the spray while the water was still icy cold. Through subsequent shivers and gooseflesh, he refused to note the color of the water that swirled down the drain. Blast if he'd be sorry he'd shot some worthless owl.
He k
illed the water, snapped a bath sheet over his shoulders, shaved, then made a paranoid inspection of his knuckles. There had to be a cut he hadn't noticed.
Nothing. He dug out a clean shirt and dismissed the distraction as he hurried through the motions of dressing.
The blood appeared again as he snatched up his briefcase. Frantic, he dropped the expensive leather handle before the stains soaked in. The case hit the hardwood floor with an echoing bang and fell over as he dashed to the kitchen for a dish-cloth. His thoughts on his presentation all scattered, he dabbed ineffectively at the blotches left on his briefcase. Predictably, they didn't come out.
He'd have to spend the bucks to buy another one.
A harried glance at his Rolex showed he was now irretrievably late. The report was going to have to be presented in its current, raw state, no credit to his months of hard work. Annoyed by life's unfairness, Rafe snatched his overcoat from the closet and ran.
He got no farther than his apartment door before his fingers became drenched in blood again. An explosive curse ripped from him. This time, he'd managed to spatter his shirtcuff into the bargain. Back in the bathroom, hands under the running water:
this has to be a nightmare,
he thought. Raggedly nervous, he reached to straighten his tie, then recalled his wet fingers and jerked short. The last fool straw in this messed-up morning was to look as if he'd dribbled breakfast down his front. With a sour laugh at himself, he grabbed briefcase and overcoat, rushed out of the apartment and sprinted into the parking lot. He unlocked his BMW, breathless and feeling pig stupid, and hopeful the fresh air might steady him.
Probably stress and anxiety had caused his mind to play tricks.
But when he jabbed the car keys into the ignition, the fresh blood was back again. Damning, slippery fingerprints smeared on everything he touched. Choking back sobs of frustration, he saw another mangled owl's feather float down and settle on the dashboard.
At that moment Rafe fully understood: he was not going to handle his meeting; he was in fact going to lose his job. The money and prestige and quick thinking upon which he had secured his success were not going to save him. An owl shot down for a moment's stung pride had marked him, and the crime was going to blight his life forever ...