THE FOREST LORD By Susan Krinard

Like the fox, the boy stopped to stare at her. He had been intent on following the fox’s trail, after the fashion of little boys the world over.

A completely baseless hope seized her heart. “Good day!” she called.

The boy looked as if he might bolt after his quarry. She began walking toward him, speaking softly all the while.

“Are you a stranger here? I am. Well, not quite a stranger. I lived here once, you see. A long time ago.”

The boy bent his head warily but did not move. She could have sworn that he sniffed the air like any wild creature.

“My name is Eden,” she went on. “It’s an odd sort of name, I know. My mother chose it for me.”

“Mother?”

The boy’s voice shot through her like an invisible bolt. It held the lilt of an accent she had heard a very short time ago.

“Yes,” she said, drawing close. “My mother, Lady Bradwell. Where is your mother?”

She could smell him now—a clean, almost sweet scent that hinted of spring. His face was handsome even in unformed childhood, his eyes bright green in a freckled face.

Leaf-green eyes, like Cornelius Fleming’s.

“Are you my máthair?” the boy asked.

Her heart stopped. “What is your name?”

He continued to look at her with a solemnity and directness that belied his age. “Donal.”

“And where have you come from, Donal?”

He pointed west, toward the Irish Sea.

“You do not live here?”

He shook his head, sending the earth-brown hair cascading over his eyes. “They sent me.”

Eden could not ask who. Something inexplicable was happening inside her, as if a great bell had tolled in the depths of her being. She fell to her knees in the mud and snow.

“Donal,” she whispered, “did they send you here to be with your mother?”

He nodded. “My real máthair.” He frowned, “Is it you?”

Yes. The answer was there, solid and strong as the fells themselves. She held out her arms, answering in the only way she could.

Donal backed away.

“No. Donal, it is all right—” She lurched to her feet, but he was already running—away from her, toward the black fortress of the wood. He moved so fast that she knew she had no hope of catching him.

She stood where he had left her for a long time, a biting wind whipping her hair loose from its pins.

“Lady Eden?”

The gruff voice brought her back to herself. In the gathering dusk she could just make out the stubbled face of one of the two men who had been waiting when the carriage arrived. He tilted his head in a gesture of respect and hunched his burly shoulders.

“Beggin’ yer pardon,” he said. “Missus Byrne sent me up to fetch you. It’s comin’ on dark.”

So it was. “What is your name?” Eden asked.

“Hindle, my lady.”

“Hindle, did you see a child run up toward the wood? A little boy of five or six?”

He shuffled his feet, ill at ease. “Nae.”

Eden felt an unfamiliar stirring of temper. When was the last time, before learning of her son, that she’d been truly angry? Nothing else had been as important as this.

“Was a boy brought here to Hartsmere recently? From Ireland, perhaps?”

“Missus Byrne knows more about such things, my lady. If you’ll come—”

He was lying, or at least not telling the full truth. But it was too dark now to search by herself.

“I shall go to Mrs. Byrne,” she said. Hindle offered a hand to steady her, but she swept past him and strode down the fell in reckless haste.

There was no more time to devise a clever explanation for the presence of her son, if her son he was. She must think clearly, because whatever she said now would affect the boy’s future irrevocably, for good or ill.

Mrs. Byrne waited in the stone-paved hall. Her face relaxed when she saw Eden.

“Wisht, Lady Eden, I was that worried—”

“What do you know about Donal?”

Shocked silence fell between them. Eden read the answer in Mrs. Byrne’s eyes. The housekeeper caught Hindle’s gaze, and he slipped out the door, leaving her alone with Eden.

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