THE FOREST LORD By Susan Krinard

Eden released her breath. She closed her eyes and listened. All that broke the silence was the sweet burbling of the beck and the rustle of the trees. Until a wind came up, shaking loose a shower of leaves and drawing a moan from the branches.

The hunters exchanged uneasy glances. Thunder growled. Needling drops of rain began to fall, but they did not touch Eden or Donal. Within seconds the farmers were drenched. The downpour was followed by a searing flash of light, a loud crack, and a large tree limb plummeted to the ground at the fanners’ feet.

As one, the hunters turned on their heels and fled.

“Mother?” Donal said, tugging her torn skirts.

The rain had stopped, and so had the wind and thunder. Another man stood where the farmers had been.

“Hartley,” she whispered. She wasn’t shocked. She felt quite numb, as if the part of her body that produced astonishment had become weary of supplying the emotion.

“Donal is safe,” he said. “I am sorry I did not realize earlier that he had run away from Hartsmere. He found this place all on his own.” He looked at Donal with unmistakable pride. “You were very brave, both of you.”

She finally laughed, half afraid that the laughter would become helpless sobs if she did not control it. “I have never been brave.”

“Yes you were, Mother.” Donal gazed up at her gravely. “I came to bring you home. And then I saw the fox.”

She caught her breath and cradled Donal’s head against her hip. “And the stag,” she said.

And the stag. Hartley met her eyes, unblinking. He recognized her question for what it was.

The air prickled with building tension, electric currents that wove back and forth between her and Hartley. She knew with utter certainty that something was about to happen. Something more terrible than anything that had occurred in the past fifteen minutes.

She could not move. She could only stare into those forest-green depths and wait.

“There is something I must tell you, Eden,” Hartley said in a halting voice. “I should have told you long ago.”

Incredibly, he was afraid. She sensed his fear, and it only increased her own.

“Please,” she whispered. “Let us go—”

“The time has come,” he said. He seemed to grow larger before her eyes, taller, more imposing. The lines of his face lengthened, smoothed, became oddly and terrifyingly familiar.

And then he vanished. In his place was the stag, still as a marble sculpture. She had only a handful of heartbeats to recognize what she had seen when the stag vanished and Hartley was back again.

Only it was not Hartley. Not this godlike creature dressed in flowing rags of green and brown, handsome beyond even Hartley’s good looks.

Antlers, many-branched and hung with leaves and moss, sprang from his brow.

All the blood rushed from Eden’s head. It was true. Good God, it was true. She swayed, and Donal’s small, strong body supported her.

“Eden,” the creature said. Its voice was deep and commanding and utterly beautiful. It was a voice she had heard before. A face she had seen before.

Once it had called itself Cornelius Fleming.

“Eden,” Cornelius/Hartley said from very far away. He raised his long, elegant hand. “Do not be afraid. Nothing has changed. Nothing.” He almost seemed to smile. “Donal—Donal is our—”

Roaring filled her ears, cutting off his last word he did not need to say.

Donal was his son.

Hartley saw her face, and his hope shriveled like Fane-cursed crops.

It was not simple shock, or consternation, or any of the less devastating emotions she might have displayed. It was not even horror, or disgust, or open rejection. She simply stared at him as if her entire world had collapsed for the second time in her life.

That was most painful of all.

He had not wanted this to happen under any circumstances. Eden had undergone a great trial in witnessing Donal’s danger and trying to save him. He cursed himself for not having watched the boy more carefully at Hartsmere. Instinct should have told him what Donal might do.

Instinct was useless to him now.