Hern pressed his hand against the trunk of the tree, now solid and firm and silent. “She has come back,” he said, as if the words made him believe. “Why?”
Tod felt sorrow for the great lord. And then he laughed at himself. How could the mighty Hern need his pity? They were both of the same Elder Race, old before the coming of man, and never had the Fane been known for soft hearts—or a failure to take vengeance.
Tod rejoiced that his long boredom was at an end.
Hern felt the weight of his antlers as if they were hung with chains of man’s deadly Iron. The earth dragged at his feet, crying for mercy; the trees groaned, brittle with the cold. No bird sang nor animal stirred; the silence was more profound than that of an ordinary winter.
Hern felt what the land had become and remembered what had made it so.
He had, with his curses and his wrath. In his deep sleep, he had neither known nor cared. He might have slept a hundred years, until some man dared to enter his sanctuary, or until the very world crumbled around him.
But she had come back.
Lady Eden Fleming, the woman who had been his mate. Who had looked upon his true form with loathing and terror. Who had borne him a son—a son stolen from him by mortal treachery, illness, and death.
She’d fled Hartsmere, rejecting him as her father had rejected their bargain. He had not spoken to Eden since that morning at the inn. All he remembered was the look on her face when she had seen him as he was—a look that held no hint of the love she had professed.
Love, which so fascinated the Fane and drew them like stoats to a rabbit warren. Mortal love, which his kin, fearing solitude though they did, could neither feel nor understand. Which he had used for his own purposes, only to find it utterly inadequate.
Fane could not love, but they were not without emotion. The great difference between Fane and man lay in intensity and constancy. Fane could feel affection—for a time. They could suffer the pain of betrayal, until they distracted themselves with pleasure or petty acts of vengeance.
And they could hate. Oh, they could hate very well. Woe to the mortal who earned the wrath of a Faerie when his anger was hot—or who fell afoul of the rare Fane who did not choose to forget.
He had hated her. And he had not forgotten.
Hern rubbed his hand against Grandfather Oak, sensing the life pulse from root to highest branch. He had been a part of it for so long, and everything within him wished to remain so—unthinking, unfeeling. That was not to be.
He was High Fane, of the race that most resembled humans. On the Isle of Eire, they were known by men as Sidhe, and in other mortal nations they had borne similar names of power. Once he and his kind had roamed the earth freely, treated with awe and respect by mortals, until men pushed the Elder Race to the edge of the western sea.
Yet some Fane remained. The high lords were not as quick as the lesser brethren to lose interest in that which caught their attention, nor were they so easily driven from their earthly homes. They had come to care for the wild places Fane had once ruled and the humble creatures that inhabited them. They resisted the threat of Iron, which could kill in strong doses or at the edge of blade or arrow, retreating instead to lands that the despised humans did not inhabit.
The Forest Lords, who guarded the earth’s vanishing woodlands, had been given many names: Cernunnos by the Roman invaders of Albion, Cocidius by the fair-haired Celts, Hu Gadern by the Cymri, Herne by the English to the south, Furbaide in Eire, Pan among the Greeks, Pashupati in the lands of the Hind, and Tapiola in the far, frozen regions of the north. They had donned the shapes of stags and hinds and horned creatures of wood and field, symbols of the hunt, prosperity, and fertility.