by Shayne Laughter
Over here, Burrum muttered in my head. What? I pulsed back.
Just get over here, whelp, he returned, and don’t be seen.
The only time Burrum calls me whelp anymore is when he comes across something bigger than what he can handle on his own. That’s when he has to remind me of his long years as a Rover.
That particular day, we had been partners for a full Lady’s Year and I still hadn’t come up with a nickname for him. This was my first assignment as a Wicken Rover, and it just seemed pointless to unDignify an elder, even if he was doing it to me. Especially when it meant we had a situation.
I lifted a hand to the breeze and my face to the wet sky, and ran a check on our location, a full scan of our section of Forest. Inbreath: The rain was going to turn to sleet and then snow, I could smell it in the air. There was no scent of Human or Fae, although made-things traced the chill afternoon. Cloth, leather, metal, and none of it my own gear or garb. Outbreath: I touched my axe and long dagger, to awaken them, ready them for service. Inbreath again: Looseness melted my joints and I soft-stepped through the forest underbrush.
Burrum crouched on his belly at the lip of a bank overlooking one of the broad paths. I slipped to earth beside him. His fur was better than my woolens at resisting the cold and damp of the soil, but not by much. We would look, and scent, and then move.
A girl in a red cloak and hood, so what? I murmured into his head. We weren’t called for her. It’s not our story. His broad black ears twitched in irritation.
You kill me, Greene, he muttered. Scent. Scent, like a Woodsman. Then you tell me so what.
I half-closed my eyes and inhaled, deep and slow, concentrating. The scent of Forest is a feast: complex layers of life and weather and decay and blooming. Even though I am no longer a whelp, the potent scent of Forest can still overwhelm me. I can even name it as feminine.
So, it was a moment before I realized.
There is no scent, I murmured, to myself as much as to Burrum’s thought-stream. None at all.
So it looks like a girl in a red cloak and hood, Burrum returned, a tall girl at that, but what is it really?
Whatever it was, it looked lost. The path was clear despite its coat of wet brown leaves, yet the figure stood, fully stopped. It turned and twisted in place, full of anxiety, unable to move on. The deep hood of the red cloak shadowed the face. Wispy ribbons of blond hair slipped out and curled around the fabric. One long pale hand gripped the handle of a basket whose lid was held fast with a bone hook. Still no familiar scent came forward. A Human, blundering through the world-portal that is Forest, would be full of smells: its food, its bowels, its fear and sweat.
Check the food scent in that basket, I thought to Burrum. The air carried traces of bread and apples; they trailed a silvery light in my senses. It’s from the Lady. This is a new creature, and if scentless then something original. A special breed. First time on its feet. Scared, I added. I am Greene the Woodsman, after all, a Rescuer. Why weren’t we called for it? I wondered.
Doesn’t matter, Burrum sent. Something’s gone wrong. It may have lost its story.
That’s what Burrum could not handle on his own. A lost storyline. The Lady’s Weave-Rights of Grim and Gleeful came loose and unraveled most dangerously without a story to entrain them.
And I don’t think it’s a girl, Burrum added. Time to make an appearance. You, or me?
Go ahead, you’d interrupt me anyway.
Burrum rose from his belly to sit on his haunches. I tucked my hood around my pumpkin-round, moon-pale face, and breathed to Wic-shift and soften myself further into the brush. Wic would blur me to the creature’s sight. My dusty green shirt and brown cloak would camouflage the rest. Here goes, Burrum sent. He Wic-shifted up to solid form, then yawned with an audible canine sigh.
The cloaked figure spun around at the noise and stared. Burrum licked his chops and tilted his ears at the creature, looking very interested indeed.
Easy, it’s a newbie, I muttered to him. Shut up and tune in, he returned.
Burrum stood up and stepped casually down the steep bank, looking away from the creature so as not to frighten it. The way it was staring at him, I wondered if it knew what Burrum was.
I was wrong.
“Hello, Wolf,” the figure said in a light baritone voice most definitely not a girl’s.
“Felicitations,” Burrum replied to the young man. He used his Fae voice, a combination of subvocals and telepathy. Our private telepathic current buzzed just below his subvocals, at the primal level of Wic. “You are looking for something, I think.”
“Well, um.”
“The Forest is full of helpers,” Burrum said, helpfully. “Might I be one to you?”
“Maybe so,” the young man replied. “I am on my way to my grandmother’s cottage. I do know that. But I seem to have forgotten the way.”
Boy, he really had lost his story. I breathed a short prayer of thanks two Rovers had been so close by and Burrum had caught it so soon. This is what happens: a newly-made creature will set off firmly on one of the Forest paths, full of a mission laid down by the Lady and wired by the Fae – creatively mixing Gleeful and Grim – and somewhere a distraction or neural overload of some kind (stress, startle) can break the programmed command-stream before the set of foundation tasks is completed.
It’s what Wicken Rovers like Burrum and me, a Wolf and a Woodsman, are made by the Lady to correct. Wolf, to raise stress; Woodsman, to resolve stress. Rescue. Return to the story.
Without resolution and redirection, breaks in a story, any creature’s story, can cause … complications. As much as the Lady has a delicious wit, She prefers that Her ideas work out according to Her designs. And Her designs are endless, shockingly endless. Distractions can happen.
But sometimes they aren’t distractions. Not all the creatures in Forest are helpers.
Burrum and I deal with those, too.
The red-hooded young man was describing his grandmother’s cottage to Burrum, who picked up and transmitted to me the image in the young man’s mind.
“Oh, I have seen that cottage, I know it, and yes, I can point you there,” Burrum said.
Of course he knew it. It was Cottage, a basic mud-and-wattle construction, thatched roof thick and heavy – a design that was used again and again as an immersive anchor to the Lady’s stories. Her creatures, especially the newbies, required such experiential markers to make their stories come True in the vastness of life beyond Forest.
Attached to the image of Cottage was another image: Grandmother. Again, a basic Old Woman frame, this time tweaked and shaded into a kindly, loving crone programmed with wisdom to transmit, once it had been initialized by eating the food in the basket. That wisdom, whatever it was, would confirm and validate the creature’s story and launch him into the Lady’s design. So we had to get the young man-creature to Grandmother’s Cottage, and get the food out of the basket and into her. Straightforward enough. There was just one more thing to find out.
“The way is simple,” Burrum said“How did you come to be lost, anyway?”
“I – I’m not sure,” the young man-creature stammered. He held the basket in front of him with both hands, reflexively defending his crotch. “I must have been thinking of something, daydreaming, because I suddenly sort of woke up and didn’t recognize this part of the woods.”
Got that? Burrum pulsed to me on our Wic connection. There was an extra electric spark around the message that made me jump. Burrum had gone on high alert. Got it, I returned. The Grandmother’s attraction signal to the new creature had cut out. That was Not Good. Something was up at Grandmother’s Cottage.
I relaxed my throat to connect my own subvocals to Burrum’s, providing what he could not. Being Woodsman, a Rescuer, I have the gift of calming, transmitting a sense of safety, protection. Through Wic I poured that gift into Burrum’s subvocals, as he gave the creature, the young man, directions to Cottage. Burrum’s version, of course, veered off this broad path onto another, longer way to Cottage. That would buy us time.
Burrum took his leave of the young man politely and leaped back up the bank into the thickets, as if his job was done and he had business elsewhere. I watched as the young man reached under his hood and scratched his head, then set off down the path. When he was well past my hiding spot, I pushed off from the earth and spun, caught the signal of Burrum’s position, and ran to his side.
Burrum had already Wic-shifted out of solid. A squirrel digging for its buried acorns two yards away looked up and saw only moving blurs of grey, green and brown. As it did so, Burrum threw a command into its neural net: Protect this one in the Lady’s Ways. The command was accompanied by images and scent-markers of the red-cloaked young man, the map of his long-way-round path, and Cottage. In the squirrel’s next three breaths, the command flashed to chipmunks, mice, birds, foxes, even the sleepy snakes and worms. The further Burrum’s command spread, the more it refined, until the trees and underbrush vibrated with the charge. Our newbie friend with the flashy outfit would have a safe hike to Cottage.
Burrum and I each leaped for a tree trunk and bounded off of its slow, solid energy as if it were a drumhead. From bole to branch we ascended into the Forest canopy and soft-coursed through the bare limbs like a winter breeze.
I allowed Burrum to pull ahead of me. The fierce heat of his Wic-will when soft-coursing like this drew me along in its current. Hanging back not only let me scan the air to our rear and flanks, it gave me time to think. Taking time to think was one more thing Burrum gave me grief about, but it had already saved a few storylines more than once. Considering the news that had Forest abuzz, a few moments’ thinking would probably be a Good Thing.
The Lady had been keeping the Fae busy this year, birthing newbies in their vaults under the hills. Apparently She had many new designs and stories to initialize and test in Forest, before sending them into the Many-Worlds to come True.
Some of these newbies had been found mangled, chewed in very specific ways around the head and chest. Organs were missing, blood drained. Rumors among Elven, Wicken and Fae whispered that an Eater of Hearts had arisen.
It’s a bitter understanding that there are creatures in the Many-Worlds – Faery and Human – of some design, some thing other than the Lady’s will. Some thing that will take and use whatever it may find, to its own cold purpose.
I cast my scans wide into the air and the breathing net of Forest as we soft-coursed through.
At the edge of River, we grasped the coarse backs of Escort Crows nesting there and soared with them above the winter-gray flood. River is the water that flows away from the Lady’s Lake and nourishes all of Faery. Its virtue washes the air above it, so crossing it is like passing through a curtain that cleanses you inside and out. If you are not clinging to an Escort, you may slow down and drift in dreamy ecstasy.
Visible from River was our destination, the Great Grove, standing tall and green no matter how deep the snows. Lights of all colors winked and drifted through its heights and around its vines, in chains, clusters, an ever-shifting rainbow lace. The Grove, too, is a portal, like Forest, only more so. Its thresholds and passages make curiosities and horrors available to you, or not, depending on your designated powers. If all you want is a five-alarm curry, it has some great little takeout places.
Burrum and I slid off of the Escorts at Grove’s uppermost branches, and Wic-shifted just far enough back into solid form to be visible to the Fae, Elven and Wicken who thronged the leafy avenues. We soft-coursed against the tree boles, swift and liquid as creatures ducked out of our way. Rovers on course were known to be charged with the Lady’s business. We made our way downward to the root-bound lair of a Wicken named Fethring, an old raconteur who had been reading back-intel and picking apart storylines for Burrum since Burrum himself was whelped. As far as Burrum or anyone could tell, the Fae had made Fethring out of spare Owl parts. The raconteur had tough, wrinkled, claw-ended feet and hands. His feathery pelt tripled his size.
“Who?” he said as we ducked under the gnarls of his doorway. “Oh. You two. Again. Don’t you have any other raconteurs, Burrum? Cheet!”
“We’re onto a story break,” Burrum said, speaking in Fae voice, as was respectful among one’s Wicken kin. “Subject is diverted, but not for long.”
“Newbie, young man on the path to Grandmother’s Cottage,” I said. “Food basket, red cloak, reliable story frame, and we weren’t called to it, Burrum found him. He says he ‘sort of came to’ and couldn’t remember how to get to the cottage.”
“Cheet, could be anything,” Fethring said. “What did he encounter on the way? Something to rattle his brains, no doubt. Talking horse, talking frog, talking tree stump.”
“The break wasn’t in him,” Burrum the talking wolf said. “It was Grandmother’s attractor signal that cut out.”
“Oh, so you want me to hunt Grandmothers,” Fethring wheezed.
“Recent Grandmothers,” Burrum rumbled. “Launched in the past three days, at most.”
Fethring trilled in his throat and ruffled his feather-pelt. Burrum set his rump down on the beaten-dirt floor.
“She’s a dear and a darling,” I said, “if that helps thin it down.”
Burrum flicked an ear at me. Fethring trilled and muttered and turned to his carved shelves and cabinets. He tapped them with his finger-talons, a rapid tiktiktiktiktik, which for all I knew was a kind of personal code that woke everything up. It must have been so, for a dim light arose behind the colored glass worked into one set of cabinet doors. Fethring touched the doors and they drifted open.
Inside, a set of gray metal bowls stair-stepped up the height of the cabinet, the largest bowl at the bottom. A steady stream of water flowed from a small spout in the cabinet’s roof. It fell from bowl to bowl and drained out somewhere in the large bottom vessel. Fethring tiktiktikked his talons against the third bowl from the top, and delicately slipped it out of its position.
He bent his round, fluff-crested face over the liquid. “Who,” he cooed into the water. “Who-hey? Who-what? Whooooo? Darling and dear. Whoooooooo, who-who-who-whoooooo?”
The water quivered in the bowl. It gathered itself into a dome, and then rose into the air next to Fethring’s face as a crystalline globe. Miniscule figures swam within it. Smaller orbs of water swelled and separated from the globe. They clustered near Fethring’s unblinking eyes – as if they were water-eyes staring back at him. He continued to trill and cluck at the glimmering balls. On the level of Wic that we shared, I could feel the images of Grandmother and Mister Red-Hood pulled from us and projected into the water. Fleetingly, their faces glimmered in two small orbs, but both were replaced by a furry block of brown snout.
“Most curious,” Fethring said. “I see Grandmothers sour, two, Grandmothers grasping, seven, one Grandmother completely barking mad, all launched in the past three days and six of the ten already resolved and collected for recycling by the Fae.”
“But we saw” – I blurted, confused. Burrum growled over his shoulder at me. Fethring held up a cautionary claw. “There is a Grandmother darling and dear, set in place just yesterday, but she is not a Grandmother at all,” he said. “You also saw here” – he waggled a claw at the water bubbles – “her Keeper, the Wicken Bror.”
Burrum was on his feet in an instant. “Her Keeper?” He spun towards the door. I had to snatch a bag of gimlet-stones from my pocket and toss them to Fethring while shouting the ceremonial verses of thanks in a rush, because I was running after Burrum.
A Grandmother who was not a Grandmother, but a newbie creature like Mister Red-Hood. Not just any newbie, but one with a special design by the Lady, I had to assume, because she merited a Keeper to safeguard the story.
And not just any Wicken Keeper, but Bror. Who stood seven feet tall upright in his full Bear form, but could shift like Burrum into other shapes as needed: human, animal or bird. Bror, who had been trained with Burrum when they were whelps, and had been in loyal service just as long.
It was Bror’s Keeping signal to Mister Red-Hood, guiding him towards Cottage, that had cut out.
We shot straight up a Grove tree while signaling out to the skies, Emergency Call, Hawk! Hawk, do you hear? Rover Emergency Call!
Hawk’s skree sounded before we saw him and we simply leaped, reached, and his back was there. Cottage, Burrum transmitted. I am open to your will, Hawk returned. We poured our Wic-strength into his, and tripled his flight speed. We barely glimpsed River, but felt its virtue brush our faces like a happy laugh.
Hawk saw the carrion birds before we did. These were Mere creatures, like the small ones of Forest, the chipmunks, squirrels, birds, insects and so forth, whose natural ways are information for Wicken, Elven and Fae. The message of circling buzzards, of course, was Dead Thing Here.
Bror’s carcass lay on its side, the limbs just beginning to stiffen. His mouth was open, lips and teeth red-black with blood. Whatever killed him hadn’t had an easy time of it. But kill him it did. And ate him – at least the parts that had become known as the mark of this new Eater. Bror’s skull was cracked open at the back and most of his brain was gone. His massive chest was ruptured front to back, and his heart was missing. His fur was matted black with blood, and speckled with yellowish gobs of fat and gristle.
Burrum dropped to earth, his muzzle touching Bror’s. I fell to my knees, close beside my partner, and brushed my hand over Bror’s enormous head. I closed his dulled eyes. Burrum growled a sustained, rumbling growl that in another time and place would lift into a howl, singing his grief – but this was not the moment. My own shocked sorrow was constrained by the thought of what the Lady had lost to the Eater – not just an exemplary Rover, but the massive amounts of wisdom recorded in his heart –
An explosion of hot Wic knocked me onto the ground. Burrum had leaped into soft-course speed and was racing towards Cottage as fast as he could will himself to it.
I had lost sight of Burrum but followed, axe in hand and dagger awake and ready. The Cottage door hung open, blown off one hinge by Burrum’s Wic-driven entry. Inside, in the single hearth room cozy with rustic furniture and simple household tools, Burrum thrashed in full battle with what had recently been a new-made creature of the Lady. Now it was a dead-eyed monster, mouth agape, with a blue-black sac clamped to the back of her white-haired skull, gripping her head and neck with many thin, hairy legs. Burrum leaped, snapped, bit, dodged the Grandmother’s swinging arms. She had an iron fireplace poker in one knotty hand and spun it like a warrior, directed by the sucking vermin with its head inside her brain.
I roared a wordless sound in Wic. Burrum leapt for the Grandmother’s face, which opened him to the poker but made her jerk her head back, exposing her throat. I swung my axe. It sliced clean through cartilage, muscle, larynx, and vertebrae, sending her head spinning to the floor. The blue-black sac bobbled as it landed. Insect-ish legs began to extract from the staring skull. I snatched up a washtub from its corner and slammed it down over the head and its engorged parasite. I set a foot firmly on the tub and slid my axe back into its sheath.
Burrum groaned. I turned and saw he was half-under the fallen Grandmother body. The iron poker had pierced through his lower belly – shallow, from the center to the side, but dangerous. I ran to his side.
“Get her off me,” Burrum said. “Now.”
“Don’t move,” I said. “This is bad. Hawk’s bringing backup, they’ll be here soon.”
“Whelp,” he rumbled, “get her off me. He’s coming.”
I scanned. A tall figure in a red cloak and hood was relieved to finally catch sight of his Grandmother’s Cottage. He turned off the path onto the long lane that ended at Cottage door. He didn’t yet see that the door had been blasted open and leaned away on one hinge.
The washtub shuddered and scuttled a few inches towards the open threshold. I hastily scooted it over to the hearth and threw all the firewood on top of it. I looked back at Burrum and he was gone – no, he was shifting. His fur had smoothed to pale, wrinkled, age-spotted skin and his proud black muzzle had receded into a flat human proportion that did not become him at all. His ears were gone, replaced by spoon-size shells, and covered by a mess of white hair. But they were his own yellow eyes that glared at me out of Grandmother’s face.
I pried the corpse’s fingers away from the poker and moved the blood-soaked body to one side. Burrum had shifted only halfway – he was a naked old woman down to where the iron shaft had speared him. His black-furred legs trembled and his tail twitched. “Just get me into the bed and cover me,” Burrum rasped in a high, old-lady’s voice. His new hands steadied the poker and I lifted him into the bed. I tucked the quilt around his legs and body and found a knitted shawl that I wrapped around his shoulders and head. All of this was done at Wic-speed, accelerated beyond what Mere creatures could see, because Mister Red-Hood was nearly at the door.
At Wic-speed, I slipped my arms around the corpse and dragged it back to the Cottage store-room and out the back door. As the dead heels bumped the stone step, I heard Mister Red-Hood’s light baritone call, “Grandmother? Are you here? Your door might need fixing.”
“Oh, is that you, Grandson? Do come in,” Burrum trilled. “Such a terrible windstorm we had last night. And I’m not feeling at all well, please let me just stay here in bed.”
One thing about working at Wic-speed is how the different thoughts and perceptions going on in your head become clear and distinct, like voices swirling around you at a dinner table. So while I was admiring Burrum’s professional grit, getting that Grandmother voice just right while suffering an iron poker through his belly, and wondering how much strength he had to maintain the illusion – at the same instant I was thinking, How the hell do I resolve this story without the real Grandmother, and Whaaa – What?
I had my arms around the upper torso of the Grandmother, you see, and my big Woodsman hands were gripping her flaccid old boobs as I dragged the headless corpse into the yard.
Under my hands, the breasts were shifting to firm, young, high and round.
I dropped the corpse with a thud. The blood-soaked night shirt tore easily. It was obvious – especially seen at Wic-speed – that the skin was smoothing, plumping, becoming toned and fresh.
This is not a Grandmother, this is a newbie creature, I remembered, and its heart is still beating. That heart had the wisdom that would launch Mister Red-Hood’s story – a story so crucial to the Lady that she had designed a new kind of creature for it, and selected the great Bror himself as its Keeper. So now what?
“Er, Grandmother,” I heard Mister Red-Hood stammer inside Cottage, “you seem to have … uh, well, very big ears.”
“Oh, I’m just a bit deaf anymore, dear,” Burrum laughed. “These work wonderfully well. They help me hear everything you say. And birdsong. Birdsong is lovely in the morning …” You hear that, whelp? Get in here and finish this! Burrum sent through Wic.
There was no time to stop and think. I slipped my long dagger from its sheath, grateful that it was awake and warm, ready for my will. I gripped it in both hands and poised it over the corpse’s sternum. I plunged the dagger down, and the enchanted blade went through bone like fresh bread. I sliced all the way down the breastbone, carefully avoiding the heart. Then I clamped the dagger in my teeth, gripped the sliced body and opened the chest like a book.
There it was – not even as big as my Woodsman’s fist, and still pulsing, still brilliant blue and dark red. The tissue surrounding it was tinged with morbid gray, approaching death-point.
I took the dagger from my mouth. “In service to the Lady,” I moaned as I cut the heart out of the body. “In service to the Lady, in service to the Lady.”
Chanting let me focus all my strength on lifting the organ to my face. The chant stopped only when I stuffed it into my mouth and bit down.
The shock of the heart’s fresh, concentrated wisdom entering my body sent my Wic connection with Burrum into a shrieking chaos of feedback and distortion.
“Er, ah, Grandmother,” I made out, “I don’t mean to embarrass you or upset you, but I feel I should point out that your … your nose is becoming very long and very black, like a dog’s.”
Greene, you idiot! Get in here! I can’t hold onto this shape! Burrum screamed through Wic. I could not answer. I was chewing. I swallowed. The Wic connection disappeared entirely. I crammed the rest of the heart into my mouth. And chewed.
I can’t tell you how it felt. It invaded me, this new-made creature’s story. Her wisdom. Her purpose. It was like being underwater, drowning while learning how to breathe. As if yelling underwater, whatever Woodsman was left in me pictured with violent colors what had to be done next.
I know things happened then, but whether “I” did them is another question.
I wiped my face and my dagger with the edge of my cloak as I turned to stride back into Cottage. I freed my axe from its sheath and burst into the main room with a full-throated cry. Burrum gave his most threatening wolf growl and showed his teeth. I swung my axe in the well-practiced move that missed Burrum but allowed him to yelp and collapse dramatically. I quickly set the axe down, slipped off my cloak and tossed it over Burrum so that he and his iron poker were completely hidden. I turned to Mister Red-Hood with a triumphant smile. He stood staring, open-mouthed and shock-eyed.
“I have been hunting that wolf for months, and at last he is dead,” I said. “Good thing your Grandmother wasn’t here. Come on, let’s walk.”
I wrapped an arm around his thin shoulders and guided him out the front door. Wings whirred in the air and trees around Cottage. Backup had arrived, but we weren’t ready for them yet. Mister Red-Hood needed this heart’s wisdom, if I could deliver it.
On the long lane between Cottage and the path, the air flickered with delicate snowflakes. I knew by the scent that the flurry would intensify quickly to a deep fall that would continue for most of the night. I tried not to hurry us along. My Rescuer instinct searched the young man’s feelings and measured his confusion. Whatever his storyline was, it could be resolved, I sensed, but I still felt like Greene the Woodsman was somewhere underwater, and the water was in charge here.
“Did that wolf kill my Grandmother?” Mister Red-Hood asked at last, his voice quavering. “I saw blood on the floor. I started to wonder and then you came in.”
“I have no doubt the wolf killed something, but it wasn’t your Grandmother,” I said.
We stopped at the end of the lane. Cottage was only just visible through the trees and brush and the falling snow. I gave the young man a sympathetic gaze.
“Give me a mouthful of whatever you have in that basket, and I’ll tell you how I know.”
He looked straight into my eyes then, poised between doubt and curiosity. I saw that his eyes were green, his face and nose both long, his lower lip full. The intensity of his presence pressed like the air before a thunderstorm. The sensation of being underwater took over. The ocean that held me helpless yearned towards him. The trees of Forest bent in his direction.
“Please,” I croaked, and held out my hand. “It has been a very long day.”
He undid the bone hook, pulled a small round bun from the basket and handed it to me. It was half the size of the live organ I had consumed just minutes before. I bit through its buttery crust, and chewed.
Can summer arise within an ocean? Can the ocean drowning you become aware, focused, benevolent? Can it be felt as she?
“I know the wolf did not kill your Grandmother,” I said, or she said, “because I was with your Grandmother just before coming here. She sent me to find you and tell you some things you must know.”
I, or she, placed my Woodsman hands on his shoulders, and began to speak. What was said, I did not follow and cannot remember. As Greene the Woodsman, I was sound asleep, the kind of slumber we call resting in the Lady’s arms.
I do remember a dream within that sleep.
In it, a bent old woman stands in front of a pearl-bright unicorn who dips his horn to touch the crown of her head. The old woman straightens and melts upward, inward, to become a beautiful young maiden. The unicorn rests his muzzle in her outstretched hands.
But these are your hands, you can feel the weight and warmth of the unicorn’s lips and chin, the feathery breath from his wide nostrils. They have this moment of recognition between them, an infinitely deep communication and promise, which begins a perilous journey that will keep them separated for a long time.
From his horn tip on your crown to your hands cupping his chin and up his long, gentle head to the horn’s base is a complete circle, a circuit, a crackling current of living heat making the two of you one creature, one wisdom, one story – your young woman’s body and his wonderful form, neck, hooves, flank. Their promise is to be faithful to one another and reunite at the dawn of the last battle. All around them is Summer, all that they are is Love.
You don’t have to hear words to know that this union will push you both through cold, dark, lonely days, and you won’t stop, either of you, until you can complete this circle again.
I breathed. As Greene the Woodsman, I pulled air into my lungs as I would coming up from a restful nap. I opened my eyes … and gazed straight into his.
I had dreamed of him, the Unicorn.
My hands were still on his shoulders. Now his were on mine. There was a tangible, weighty difference to him. The dream had been heart-wisdom transferring into his neural net. His story program had received it and resolved, reorganized. He had become a man. No, he had become a Prince. A Unicorn Prince. The Lady’s new creature, Her new invention, ready to go out to his fortune and come True.
The underwater feeling lightened, receded. Greene the Woodsman was relieved, too. My gamble had worked. But as I dropped my hands from the Prince’s shoulders, he gripped my shoulders tighter, stopping me.
He cupped my face in his hands.
“Goodbye, Beloved. May the Lady’s ways always guide us,” he said, as he pulled my face to his and kissed me on the mouth.
Ah, the underwater-feeling sighed. I had known that sigh from the other side many times, as my actions resolved a storyline and eased it towards the next unfolding of its design. I had never been on the receiving end of a resolution.
I glanced downward. I was still Greene the Woodsman, rough woolen overshirt, trousers, boots, beard. I had no power of shifting my shape.
What had he seen? Who – what form — had he kissed?
Beloved?
The Unicorn Prince was already striding away down the main path, his red cloak swirling in the thickening snowfall. He would not look back, I knew.
Ahead, it seemed that black branches low on the trees and high on the underbrush coalesced in a pattern that moved to the center of the path. Sharp green eyes glittered through the curtains of snow, visible even at a distance. The Unicorn Prince paced towards it, unafraid, perhaps even expecting the apparition.
It was Wicken, I realized, a Keeper, assigned to the Prince for his journey out of Forest to his fortune. I didn’t know the Keeper’s name, but a White Tiger seemed fitted to the task. It was fitting, too, that as a Wicken Rover I watched them disappear together into the whitened air.
I turned towards Cottage and the force of the underwater she presence slammed like a fist against my head. No. Elsewhere. She had a story herself, she had to get going. Not towards Cottage.
I walked anyway. Nausea surged over me. Again I visualized garishly colored pictures telling the presence that I had to be in charge now. She refused. We fought. She was determined that my body would walk where her story meant her to go. I still had no Wic connection, only a buzz like my muscles were turning into a swarm of bees.
I closed in on Cottage by throwing myself from tree to tree, grabbing each trunk and hanging on against the force that wanted to drag me away. The hundreds of Crows gathered in the tree branches around Cottage announced my presence with rising noise, which added to the screaming in my head and veins.
My vision fractured, could focus only in flashes, through the distorting snow: Flash. Backup, summoned by Hawk, was plentiful and I knew Burrum was well cared-for. Flash. Fae medics in their elaborately decorated robes ran back and forth from Cottage to a wagon-pallet that floated, wheel-less and horseless, in the yard.
Flash. Two very tall Fae emerged from Cottage with two water-net globes drifting ahead of their delicate hands. In one globe was the severed Grandmother head, which had shifted to a young woman’s face that was just as dead. Flash. In the other globe floated a disgusting, blue-black, multi-legged vermin thing, its body-sac full to bursting.
And then, flash, stepping carefully towards me was an elder Wicken, a Keeper, a great Buck with antlers spread like the limbs of an ancient tree. Beside him was a woman, a Huntress, bow and quiver slung over her shoulders, black hair long and straight and flecked with snow.
I think I said something to them, but I can’t be sure, because my face hit the ground and my body thrashed in a seizure.
The debrief took the rest of the Lady’s Year. They were the worst five months of my life.
All during Lady’s Winter I drifted in and out of consciousness, as the Fae emptied me and replaced my fluids. They needed all of that heart they could salvage. At one hour I overheard them discussing whether they should just recycle me completely, sacrificing a skilled young Rover for the virtue of the female creature’s heart and blood, which were now mingled with mine.
Some greater power prevailed on that one, because Spring has overtaken Forest and I am still here. As the days warmed, I was allowed out in the sun and bright air for short hikes around the mountain vault where the Fae have nursed me and watched me. These hikes lengthened into rambles as my Woodsman ways returned. One path leads up a mountain to a jutting rock ledge. On a bright day I sat there dangling my legs in the open void. I breathed deeply, remembering and naming the scents of the world and its weather. Inbreath, outbreath. For a while, I watched cloud shadows trail over the foothills and Forest with River winking under the horizon.
I’ve had a lot of time to think. That thing I am good at.
Bror. He had not called out for backup, so the attack on him must’ve happened fast. His jaws were bloody, he had bitten something or someone – yet the vermin had pierced his skull at the back and begun its work. There must have been two come at him. While the vermin sucked his brain, they stole his heart.
Much as I hated thinking about that, it led to a worse understanding: whoever those attackers were, they knew Bror would be there; they knew what story he was Keeping. They had violated him, but their target was the Unicorn Prince.
Somewhere in the Lady’s world, there was treachery. Not just one traitor, but many.
Stealing wisdom, stealing hearts. What Bror knew now lived in someone else – as some essence of the Unicorn Prince’s beautiful young maiden still lived in me.
I felt tears slipping down my cheeks as I stared out at Forest, River, Sky. It was all I knew of the Lady, the only one of Her Many Worlds I could call home. Yet at the depth of Wic, I had changed. The oceanic she-presence made me feel watery. I had never cried except as an untrained whelp. Now the tears wouldn’t stop. They came from somewhere deep and unfound; I felt a current pulling away from Forest, towards what? The story the young woman was designed for? Would I have to go?
One Fae doctor, after long exasperation with my case, had snapped at me to train the she-presence to think like a Rover, and then we might stop fighting for dominance of this Woodsman body. His words stung, but felt well-rooted; so, daily I turn over the facts of what happened at Cottage, looking and looking again. It brings me a sense of peace.
While thinking and kicking my heels in the breeze, I scented him, and heard his claws on the mountain path. I kept quiet and didn’t move as he plumped down beside me and scratched behind his ear. I could feel the Wic bond purr, with new threads of strangeness in its familiar warmth.
“C’mon,” he said, finally. “You’ve forgotten me?”
“I’m remembering your scent, pup,” I said.
“’Pup.’ Hmf. I guess you are feeling better.”
“How about you? Let me see.” I turned towards him. He sat up on his haunches and curled his paws to his chest. The scar on his belly wasn’t too bad. Something about the rest of him was different.
“You’ve grown,” I said.
“You think?”
“Or I’ve shrunk.”
His legs were longer, his paws broadened, his charcoal-gray fur thick and ticked with silver. But his yellow eyes shone with the same intelligence and skeptical assessment.
“Congratulations on your promotion,” I said. “How far did they take you?”
“Keeper.” He grinned and his tongue lolled. It had the official purple tinge. “Keeper Burrum, Wolf In General.”
I didn’t know what to say. Ever since I’d regained consciousness in the Fae holding-rooms, aware of mysterious new layers to Wic, I had wondered whether I would ever again feel entirely like Greene the Woodsman. Now that Burrum had shown up more or less re-designed, re-fitted, I wondered if any of it mattered.
“I suppose you’re on to different assignments, then,” I said to Burrum. “Well, we had a good year. You taught me well.”
Burrum’s black ears flicked. “Your vacation’s almost over, whelp,” he said, “so get your strength up. There’s a list as long as River, paths a Keeper has to watch, creatures to track. Edges to mind. I need a Rover. Ideally, a Woodsman.”
But am I still a Woodsman? I thought to him in Wic.
Shut up, he replied. He stretched out low on the ledge, his muzzle tipping into the air. Gimme a scratch. You know where. I scrabbled at the middle of his back and his back leg thumped with pleasure.
So even now I am still a Woodsman, a Rescuer, still needed, useful. But something nagged at me, there at my new beginning. I was being sent out on patrol again, beside a Keeper, into situations where the Lady’s designs were more likely to have gone dangerously askew — when not one of the Fae could determine exactly what I was, nor could foresee what I might do, having done what I had done. I turned it over in my thinking … and out of the watery she-presence there flooded an unexpected tide of gratitude.
“Oof – hey,” Burrum barked as my scratch turned into a thump on his ribs. He noticed my grin. “What’s so funny?”
“You’re going to have your hands full,” I laughed and added, “when you’ve got ‘em.”
Burrum rolled aside enough to squint at me. Wic hummed between us, the hum of concord, the sign that my thought was True.
He had been made a Keeper, to be my Keeper.
Well, sure, he muttered in that hum. It’s a wild world out there.
* * *
About the Author
Shayne Laughter is a native of Southern Indiana, a graduate of Indiana University-Bloomington. Trained as an actor and singer, she has worked as a staff and freelance journalist in print and broadcast media, non-profit development for indigenous languages, and office administration in a ridiculous number of businesses. She learned screenwriting throughout the 1990s but turned to fiction in the 2000s, publishing an award-winning novel in 2010 and short stories for print and online journals. She has lived and traveled in Seattle, New York, Spain, and India, and now lives in her home town, Bloomington, Indiana.