The Forest Lord (7 page)

A wild thing abandoned without explanation at Hartsmere's door. Why here and now? Who had sent him?

"You should have informed me the moment I arrived,"
Eden said.

"I didn't wish to trouble you, my lady, when you'd just come in from such a long journey. I've had the men looking since he ran away. I'd hoped he'd return on his own soon enough—when he got hungry, as boys do."

"I saw him in the pasture."
And he ran from me.
From his mother
.
She calmed herself and presented the story she had hastily concocted. "I could not prepare you for the boy's arrival because I did not know he was coming so soon. Donal is the orphaned child of my late cousin, the son of my father's younger brother, who inherited an Irish estate many years ago. When Donal's parents died, my uncle kept him, but he had lately been ill, and asked to send Donal to me and my husband. But Winstowe died, and I forgot—" She paused, bowing her head.
"Until today, when I saw him for the very first time.

"It's that sorry I am, indeed," Mrs. Byrne said. "I'll send Armstrong for the other men at once, so that they may search for the child near the forest."

Concealing her anxiety,
Eden glanced toward the door. "If he is wary of the men, I must accompany them. I hope that he is not too much afraid of the dark—"

"What is this commotion?
Eden, where have you been?"

Claudia's voice carried down the stairs as she descended, and her sharp glance took in Eden and the housekeeper. She lifted her brows at
Eden's sodden skirt and the wet tracks she and Hindle had left on the stone floor.

"Donal,"
Eden said, holding to calm by the barest thread. "The boy we were expecting—my uncle's grandson from
Ireland—is already here at Hartsmere."

Claudia stopped with one foot suspended above a step. She gave no hint of what went on in her mind.
Follow my lead
,
Eden willed her.
Is it not my reputation you wished to protect
?

"The child is here?" Claudia said, continuing to the bottom of the stairs. "How can that be?"

Eden
smiled with relief in spite of her worry. "It is a wonder, after we had not heard from my uncle in so long… I do not know how he learned that we would be coming to Hartsmere. He left no letter for us. But speculation must wait. Mrs. Byrne, please gather all the lanterns and torches you have, anything to be used for light—"

"Surely you do not mean to go out again," Claudia said, hurrying to her side. "You are overtired, my dear—"

"I will not argue. A child is out there, alone." She grasped the door handle. The door began to swing inward, and she stepped back hastily.

Small fingers gripped the handle on the outside. The fingers belonged to Donal, who moved the great door as if he were thrice his age. New-fallen snow mantled his head and shoulders.

"Mother?" he said. "I'm hungry."

Eden
dropped to her knees before him, her eyes filling with tears. "Yes, indeed. I will be a mother to you from now on, dear child." She drew him into her arms, and this time he went willingly enough.

How wonderful he felt. How soft was his cheek and how beautiful his face.
Eden did not mind that he had obviously not bathed in several days and had become quite muddy. He walked right into her heart and made a home there.

My son.
My son.

"Let us play a game," she whispered in his perfect little ear. "It will be our special secret that I am your mother. I will call you Donal, and you must call me Lady Eden except when we are alone together. Can you do that for me?"

He pulled back and frowned at her. "Lady Eden," he repeated. "I know about secrets."

She hugged him again, astonished at his maturity and understanding. Was this miraculous being her child, indeed? Could such happiness be born of fear and sorrow?

"Oh, Donal," she whispered. "I will make you happy."

But as she looked over his thin shoulders, she saw two faces, one elegant and refined, one weathered and wise. In Aunt Claudia's eyes was grave concern, and in Mrs. Byrne's an understanding that
Eden knew she would keep to herself.

And so the secret would survive a little longer.

In the very center of the ancient wood, where sunlight
almost never reached the ground and Grandfather Oak stood watch, the fox ended his flight.

He stopped at the tangle of gnarled roots thrusting up from the ground and sniffed the loam. Nothing changed here. All was as it had been for a thousand years, the last enchanted place in the land of the Britons.

And the one who slept within was just as changeless.

The fox shook his bright coat and turned about three times. Red pelt became red hair, and fur turned to skin and rough-woven cloth.

Tod wriggled his bare toes into the earth and prepared to face his master.

"My lord," he whispered.

No answer. Of course, no answer; Lord Hern had slept for nearly five human years. The blink of an eye in the time of the Fane, but his sleep was no less profound for all that.

Tod placed his hand against the warm bark, feeling the heart that beat within. He slapped the bark three times, chanting as he did so.

"My lord, awake!
She has returned!"

Silence.
Then, after a thousand heartbeats, a stirring.
Grandfather Oak groaned at being disturbed in his winter slumber, and his guardian shared the sentiment.

But he did not refuse the summoning. Tod snapped back his hand as the bark began to ripple and grow transparent. A figure became visible within, still at one with the ancient tree. Then, with movements stiff and slow, Lord Hern stepped free of his waiting place.

A thousand times had Tod seen the Forest Lord, but still he felt his power. He was tall, so tall, crowned with his rack of antlers, green-eyed, awesome in his strength and dignity. Lord Hern was the last of the High Fane remaining in this part of man's earth, perhaps the last anywhere. Tod didn't know; he was bound to the lord as he was to this dale, unable to leave it except by Lord Hern's command.

"My lord," he said, and bowed. But he could not hold such solemnity for long. He laughed and did a somersault, bounding this way and that. "Oh, Tod has such things to tell you!"

Lord Hern looked down upon him with eyes still glazed by sleep. "Tod. Why did you wake me?"

"Because she has come back!"
With an effort, he held himself still.
"She, the mortal who betrayed you."

All at once Lord Hern's eyes flashed like emerald fire. He stepped away from the tree, and the branches of Grandfather Oak shuddered and sighed.

Tod knew better than to tease, though the temptation was great. He had been alone so long, with only the beasts for company. Of those few that remained since Lord Hern had taken his grace from the land, most were sluggish or hibernating for the winter.

But now the lord was back.

"When?"
Hern demanded. "When did she come?"

"Today, today!
Tod saw her. And Tod saw—"

Tod almost remembered too late. He had sworn to himself that he would not speak of the other. Tod feared little, but Lord Hern's wrath was not something he wished to see again, not until another thousand of man's years had passed. The lord would know the truth soon enough without his help.

It was the lady who most needed the warning.

Hern pressed his hand against the trunk of the tree, now solid and firm and silent. "She has come back," he said, as if the words made him believe. "Why?"

Tod felt sorrow for the great lord. And then he laughed at himself. How could the mighty Hern need his pity? They were both of the same Elder Race, old before the coming of man, and never had the Fane been known for soft hearts—or a failure to take vengeance.

Tod rejoiced that his long boredom was at an end.

Hern felt the weight of his antlers as if they were
hung with chains of man's deadly Iron. The earth dragged at his feet, crying for mercy; the trees
groaned,
brittle with the cold. No bird sang nor animal stirred; the silence was more profound than that of an ordinary winter.

Hern felt what the land had become and remembered what had made it so.

He
had, with his curses and his wrath. In his deep sleep, he had neither known nor cared. He might have slept a hundred years, until some man dared to enter his sanctuary, or until the very world crumbled around him.

But
she
had come back.

Lady Eden Fleming, the woman who had been his mate. Who had looked upon his true form with loathing and
terror.
Who had borne him a son—a son stolen from him by mortal treachery, illness, and death.

She'd fled Hartsmere, rejecting him as her father had rejected their bargain. He had not spoken to
Eden since that morning at the inn. All he remembered was the look on her face when she had seen him as he was—a look that held no hint of the love she had professed.

Love, which so fascinated the Fane and drew them like stoats to a rabbit warren.
Mortal love, which his kin, fearing solitude though they did, could neither feel nor understand.
Which
he
had used for his own purposes, only to find it utterly inadequate.

Fane could not love, but they were not without emotion. The great difference between Fane and man lay in intensity and constancy. Fane could feel affection—for a time. They could suffer the pain of betrayal, until they distracted themselves with pleasure or petty acts of vengeance.

And they could hate. Oh, they could hate very well. Woe to the mortal who earned the wrath of a Faerie when his anger was hot—or who fell afoul of the rare Fane who did not choose to forget.

He had hated
her
. And he had not forgotten.

Hern rubbed his hand against Grandfather Oak, sensing the life pulse from root to highest branch. He had been a part of it for so long, and everything within him wished to remain so—unthinking, unfeeling. That was not to be.

He was High Fane, of the race that most resembled humans. On the Isle of Eire, they were known by men as Sidhe, and in other mortal nations they had borne similar names of power.
Once he and his kind had roamed the earth freely, treated with awe and respect by mortals, until men pushed the Elder Race to the edge of the western sea.

Yet some Fane remained. The high lords were not as quick as the lesser brethren to lose interest in that which
caught
their attention, nor were they so easily driven from their earthly homes. They had come to care for the wild places Fane had once ruled and the humble creatures that inhabited them. They resisted the threat of Iron, which could kill in strong doses or at the edge of blade or arrow, retreating instead to lands that the despised humans did not inhabit.

The Forest Lords, who guarded the earth's vanishing woodlands, had been given many names: Cernunnos by the Roman invaders of Albion, Cocidius by the fair-haired Celts, Hu Gadern by the Cymri, Herne by the English to the south, Furbaide in Eire, Pan among the Greeks, Pashupati in the lands of the Hind, and Tapiola in the far, frozen regions of the north. They had donned the shapes of stags and hinds and horned creatures of wood and field, symbols of the hunt, prosperity, and fertility.

Most were gone now. Hern had taken the English name of legend and retreated to this final haven amid the crags and valleys.

He was the last of the last.

In his solitude, he had become strange and lonely. He kept company with neither Fane nor man. And when at last he chose to return home, he knew the coin with which he must buy passage back into Tir-na-nog: a half-mortal child to bring strength to the thinning blood of the Elder Race.
His
child.

The one he had made with Eden Fleming did not survive. She had betrayed him, and doomed him to exile once more. Oh, yes, he had hated her. And that hatred was stirring again. All he need do was give way to it, leave the forest, stride down the fell, and look for her. When he saw her…

No plan formed in his mind. He had never imagined that this moment would come, that she'd dare return. He had expected her to be dead and gone when he woke, in the way of all mortals.

He willed his antlers away and leaned his forehead against the oak. He was weary, so weary, and the only cure was the green fields and endless forests of Tir-na-nog.

"Home?"
Tod asked. "Will you make another mortal child, so that we can go home?"

Make another child? Oh, he had thought of it, after Lord Bradwell broke his vow. But to do so would have required a virtual rape, or the seduction of another suitable female, and he had no will to do either. He had preferred sleep, one that might have lasted an eternity, to dealing again with treacherous mortals.