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- 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
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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 Rare 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.
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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.
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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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]