When the guards had locked him in once again, the keys jangled as Julianna and Collette’s cell was opened. Oliver tensed inwardly, hoping that there would be no beating for them. On the day after they had tried to reach Frost, Julianna had been groped by a guard. Had she been raped, Oliver would have attacked the next Atlantean to come into his cell, even knowing that it might mean his life.
But they hadn’t raped her. Yet.
She and Collette had both reassured him that they were okay. But that night he had heard Julianna crying and forged a new hate inside him.
Today neither his fiancée nor his sister met the guards with wisecracks, the way Oliver had. That was for the best. He did it because he couldn’t help it, and because the pain they gave him in return helped to keep the furnace of his hate burning. But Collette and Julianna kept quiet and the guards did nothing but leave their food and lock the door to their cell again.
Boots scuffed the stone floor as the soldiers marched back up the corridor, then up the stairs out of the dungeon. And they were alone again.
Oliver sucked on his split lip and spat some blood onto the floor. He pushed away from the wall and walked to the door. Atlantis had bred strange people, some of them stealthy and cunning. The guards did not normally fall into this category, but he had learned caution. Oliver peered through the grated window but saw no one. He heard his sister and Julianna speaking to one another quietly but could not make out the words, nor could he see any sign of them through the grate in their door. They were still choking down their food.
He ran his fingertips along the mortar grooves between the stones that made up the wall of his cell. Eyes closed, Oliver cleared his mind. Sometimes he tried this trick on the outer wall, tempted by the sunshine. But if Collette was right—if what she’d done at the sandcastle hadn’t been some strange fluke—then just getting outside wouldn’t solve their problems.
If Collette was right… Oliver knew his doubt had to be a problem, but he could not seem to put it behind him.
“At it again, huh?”
He opened his eyes. Julianna was peering at him from the cell across the corridor. Oliver smiled, drawing a sharp pain from his split lip. A flicker of concern passed over Julianna’s features. Her face was filthy, her hair tangled and wild, but her eyes had a light that woke something in him, just as it always had. With just a look, she could remind him of all the things he had always dreamed of being.
“Yeah. Not much else to do.”
Julianna looked back into the gloom of her cell. Her fingers wrapped around the grate.
“Collette, too. She’s getting frustrated.”
From within the cell, Oliver heard his sister’s voice. “Of course I’m getting frustrated. This is bullshit. We can do this. We can get out of here.”
Oliver grinned, hissing with pain and touching his bleeding lip. “Yeah. We’re so out of here.”
Julianna frowned, angry with him. “Maybe it’s your attitude that’s keeping us here.”
“Hey—”
“Hey, nothing, Mister Bascombe. You two are special. Your mother was a legend. Borderkind. All your life, your father tried to drum that out of you. He pretended magic didn’t exist to try to convince you of the same thing.”
Oliver scratched his fingers against the mortar. “But it does exist.”
“Of course it does!” Julianna replied. “Don’t you get it? That’s why he acted the way he did. To protect you.”
A knot of ice formed in Oliver’s gut. This was nothing he had not already considered, but to hear Julianna talking about it, to have the thoughts spoken out loud, troubled him.
Nobody who had known Max Bascombe before the death of his wife could ignore how drastically the man had been changed by his loss. As young as Oliver had been at the time, he could still recall his parents laughing together often. He cherished the memories he had of them together, dancing at the New Year’s Eve party they’d thrown at the house, picnicking on a blanket on the back lawn with the Atlantic Ocean stretching endlessly in front of them, and a handful of times he had entered a room to find them embracing or locked in a kiss.
Her death had extinguished a light inside Oliver’s father. From that time on, he had become more sentinel than parent, grimly watching over his children, but seeming to take little joy in them. Oliver, in particular, had vexed the man. His father had steered him away from fanciful movies and discouraged cartoons. On one birthday, Julianna had given him a magic set. Oliver had played with it for hours, but when he woke in the morning it had vanished. He had ransacked the house searching for it, thinking Friedle or the cleaning woman had put it away, but no one could recall having moved it at all. It had taken Collette to make him see the truth—their father had gotten rid of it.
Later, other items vanished in similar fashion. Neither father nor son would say a word, but the gulf between them widened. His complete set of The Chronicles of Narnia disappeared a week after Christmas, the year he turned fifteen. When his high school English teacher had assigned Charles Dickens’s Hard Times to the class, Oliver had found a distressing echo of his own relationship with his father. The diatribe that opened that book had remained with him all of these years: Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: Nothing else will ever be of any service to them.
Oliver had taken to hiding away in the town library, reading mythology and fantasy and all sorts of other things his father would never have approved of. And whenever he had a part in a play in school, or with the Kitteridge Civic League, his father would never be in attendance. More than once, he had forced his son to quit the drama club, only to relent when teachers intervened on Oliver’s behalf.
And Julianna thought his father had done all of those things to protect him?
“It’s true,” a softer voice said.
Collette had stopped trying to take the wall apart. On tiptoe, she looked at him through the grate.
“She died because of what she was, Oliver. It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Collette said. “Dad was afraid we’d end up dead, too. He feared what we were because he didn’t want to lose us.”
“Funny way of showing it.”
“Do you remember when I gave you Phantastes?”
As painful as the memory was, Oliver laughed softly.
“How could I forget?”
As cold and distant as his father could be, it had given him a certain amount of pleasure to piss the man off. Any kind of emotion revealed that his father was still human, even anger.
Collette had read George MacDonald’s nineteenth-century fairy tale—about a man who slips from the ordinary world into one full of magic and fairy courts, a tale that now resonated powerfully with Oliver—for a college course, and had brought it home for her brother on a break from school. One morning, Oliver had come down to the kitchen to find his father standing by the table, reading the back cover of Phantastes. Oliver had left the book there the night before, forgetting to return it to his room.
His father had glanced up at him, his expression almost bewildered. Anger had flashed in his eyes and he had held the book up and begun to tear pages in half.
“Enough,” he had said. “Haven’t you learned by now? That is enough of this shit. You keep your head in the real world, son, or you’re never going to have much of a life. No more of this dreck in my house. I’m telling you now, and you’d better believe I’ll tell your sister as well. No more.”
Oliver had snapped, then. Years of hurt and rage over things that his father had made vanish bubbled over. He had screamed at the man and called him a dozen vile names. When he ran out of steam, his father dropped the book—in two halves now—onto the table, crossed the room, and grabbed Oliver by the front of his shirt.
“You may not like it, but I’m your father. I’m all you’ve got. You curse and shout all you like, but a father’s supposed to look out for his children, and that’s what I’m doing for you and your sister. If you want to hate me, there’s little I can do about it, and it won’t keep me from doing what I think is best for your future. Take your head out of the clouds. Wake up, Oliver.”
Collette called his name.
Through the grate in his cell door, he stared at her.
“All this stuff about Melisande…it gives that morning a different perspective, don’t you think?” Collette said.
“Maybe it does,” he admitted. Julianna and Collette were right. It would be foolish for him to try to deny it, especially to himself. All his life, he’d nurtured bitterness and resentment toward his father, and loved him in spite of it. Now he knew his father had had reasons they never could have guessed, and that only made both his love and his resentment grow. There must have been a better way for him to protect his children.
“Keep trying the wall,” he said.
Julianna smiled at him. Oliver closed his eyes, fingertips finding the grooves between the stones again.
Night fell. Damia Beck went on foot into the Oldwood. Sprites and pixies flitted up in the branches of trees, giving off glimmers of light like multicolored fireflies. The colors were soft and lovely, a bright bouquet of butterfly wings that danced through the darkness and then disappeared.
Things snorted in the undergrowth, rustling in the tangled branches, but did not emerge. Her hand gripped the pommel of her sword, but it seemed as though the creatures that lived in the Oldwood had been warned away from her.
Dark shapes watched from the branches and from the darkness of the thick wood. Some were low to the ground and misshapen—little goblin things with gleaming eyes—and others were clearly animals, or legends in the skins of beasts. Many of the animals in the Oldwood were not what they seemed. Some were legends, but others would be ancient demigods, wood deities. In a world full of legends, many were little more than names to her, and there must be countless things on this side of the Veil that she had never heard of at all.
But the master of the forest—that legend was quite familiar.
Damia tried to ignore the lurkers in the dark. She had set off at a steady pace, working her way through the woods on a westerly course. At some point, she would meet the one she had summoned, but when? Damia had begun to grow impatient.
“Hello?” she said, into the trees.
Leaves rustled. No path had opened before her, so she forged her own, relying on her instincts to keep on course. An owl cried mournfully above her and she glanced up. Something growled just off to her left.
When she focused once more on the trees in front of her, moving between two tall rowans, she saw a tiny man in a blood-red cap. He had a thin beard and leaned against a tree with his arms crossed, a grim expression on his face.
Damia cocked her head and studied him. “You’re not—” she began to say. Then, fearful of causing offense, she started again. “Are you the master of the forest?”
It was all she could do to keep the disdain and doubt from her voice.
The little man snorted with derisive laughter, shook his head, and turned away, disappearing into the Oldwood.
Frustration growing, Damia continued. For a time the ground trembled with the footfalls of something enormous, and she heard branches snapping loudly in the distance. More owls cried, and she tightened her grip upon her sword.
Back on the road, three-quarters of her battalion awaited. Likely they would be wondering why they were sitting around. Doubt filled Damia. Had Charlie misled her? Was this simply a waste of time? Images filled her mind of a Yucatazcan ambush falling upon her battalion while they waited on the road.
“Damn it,” she whispered.
Still, she forged on. She had committed herself to this rendezvous and would not turn back unless she had real reason to believe she had been deceived.
Damia walked on. Roots seemed to shift themselves underfoot as though trying to trip her. Branches scratched at her arms and face. Then she noticed something that troubled her.
The owls had fallen silent.
Not only the owls, but all of the creatures of the forest. Nothing moved in the branches or the underbrush. Even the wind seemed to have gone still. For the first time since embarking on this journey, Damia Beck took a step backward.
“Hello?” she said, her voice echoing back to her.
From the corner of her eye, Damia glimpsed motion. She turned, but saw only trees. Then something shifted near the trunk of a thick oak and she frowned in confusion. It seemed that the tree itself had started to move. Branches became arms and fingers. Bark took on a shape, rough and jagged. It was a woman, naked and thin, but her flesh had the texture and color of the tree. Or perhaps it truly was bark.
Something snapped behind her. Damia spun to see another tree-woman peeling herself from the trunk of an oak. Her eyes opened like a newborn’s, gleaming black in the moonlight that filtered down through the branches.
Damia drew her sword and backed away. But a wet, cracking noise came from behind, and again she spun to find a third tree-woman standing in the shadows. The creatures were unsettlingly sexual, their bodies ripe and alluring in spite of their rough texture. As they circled her—and a fourth and fifth appeared—their flesh grew smoother and lighter, until they almost could have passed for human in the darkness.
“I am Commander Beck,” she said. “I travel the Oldwood under the seal of the King of Euphrasia—”
“Not our king,” one of the dryads said, her voice sultry and full of warning. She extended one long, ragged finger. “Our king is here.”
Sword held before her, Damia turned. The dryads had surrounded her, but now two of them stepped back to make way as a huge, gleaming stag came toward them.
She blinked. It was no stag.
He had a pelt of thin, sleek brown hair, but a body like a man. Huge and gloriously muscled, he towered over her. Atop his head was a massive rack of antlers that would have tangled in the branches of the trees…if they had not drawn back from the path of the Lord of the Oldwood. In ancient times, the Celts had called him Cernunnos, and that had served as his name ever since.