Darkover Landfall by Marion Zimmer Bradley

“Shall I fix us something to eat before you sleep?”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t eat. I feel as if I’d been dream-dusting! What happened to us, Rafe?”

“Search me.” He felt unaccountably shy with her. “Did you eat anything in the forest–fruit, anything?”

“No. I remember wanting to, it looked so good, but at the last minute–I drank the water, though.”

“Forget it. Water’s water and Judy tested it, so that’s out.”

“Well, it must have been something,” she argued.

“I can’t quarrel with that. But not tonight, please. We could hash it over for hours and not be any closer to an answer.” He extinguished the light “Try to sleep. We’ve already lost a day.”

Into the darkness Camilla said, “Let’s hope Heather was wrong about the blizzard, then.”

MacAran didn’t answer. He thought, did she say blizzard, or was it just weather? Could the freak weather have had anything to do with what happened? He had the uncanny sense, again, that he was near an answer and could not quite grasp it, but he was desperately tired, and it eluded him, and still groping, he slept.

Chapter FIVE

They found Marco Zabal after a vain hour of searching and calling in the woods, laid out smooth and straight and already rigid beneath the greyish trunk of an unknown tree. The light snow had shrouded him in a pall a quarter of an inch thick, and at his side Judith Lovat knelt, so white and still beneath the drifting flakes that at first they thought in dismay that she had died too.

Then she stirred and looked up at them with dazed eyes and Heather knelt beside her, wrapping a blanket around her shoulders and trying to get her attention with soft words. She did not speak during all the time that MacLeod and Ewen were carrying Marco back to the tent, and Heather had to guide her steps as if she were drugged or in a trance.

As the small dismal procession wound through the falling snow Heather felt, or fantasied, that she could still feel their thoughts spinning in her own brain, Ewen’s black despair… what kind of doctor am I, lie fooling around on the grass while my patient runs out berserk and dies…

MacLeod’s curious confusion entangled in her own fantasy, an old tale of the fairy folk she had heard in childhood, the hero should never have woman or wife either of flesh and blood nor of the faery folk, and so they fashioned for him a woman made of flowers… I was the woman of flowers…

Inside the tent Ewen sank down, staring straight ahead, and did not move. But Heather, desperately anxious at Judy’s continued daze, went and shook him.

“Ewen! Marco’s dead, there’s nothing you can do for him, but Judy’s alive; come and see if you can rouse her!”

Dragging, weary, his thoughts look like a black cloud around him, Heather thought, and shook herself. Ewen bent over Judith Lovat, checking her pulse, her heartbeat. He flashed a small light in her eyes, then said quietly, “Judy, did you lay out Marco’s body the way we found it?”

“No,” she whispered, “not I. It was the beautiful one, the beautiful one. I thought at first it was a woman, like a bird singing, and his eyes… his eyes . . ”

Ewen turned away in despair. “She’s still delirious,” he said shortly. “Fix her something to eat, Heather, and try to get it down her. We all need food–plenty of it; low blood sugar is half what’s wrong with us now, I suspect.”

MacLeod smiled a wry smile. “I got a contraband dose of Alpha happy-juice once,” he said, “felt just about like that. What happened to us, anyhow, Ewen? You’re the doctor, you tell us.”

“As God is my witness, I don’t know,” Ewen said. “I thought at first it was the fruits, but we only began eating them afterward. And we all drank the water three days ago and no harm done. Anyway neither Judy nor Marco touched the fruit.”

Heather put a bowl of hot soup into his hand, went and knelt by Judith, alternately spooning soup between her lips and trying to eat her own. MacLeod said, “I’ve no idea what happened first. It seemed like-I’m not sure; suddenly it was like a cold wind blowing through my bones, shaking me–shaking me open somehow. That was when I knew the fruits were good to eat and I ate one…”

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