The Egyptian way didn’t seem so bad if the house you spent your days in was a statue in a forest.
“Looks young,” Eleri murmured.
“She was barely older than you when she was raised.” Dem Makepeace smoothed his shendy, glanced at the fading sky, and started down a different path out of the clearing.
Curious to know the girl’s name, Eluned followed, and was immediately caught once again by her surroundings. So many plants, both familiar and strange, the scents changing with every touch of breeze. At the top of a small rise stood a stony pavilion lacking only a roof, and commanding a view over the surrounding forest to steal all attention.
Trees were no surprise, but the tower was, a sliver of shining silver far to their right. And white-capped mountains swallowed the opposite horizon, surely higher than any Prytennian peak. Clouds hid the tallest of them, teasing the eye with hints of something regularly shaped and monumental. And below that an ocean of trees, rising and falling with the hidden curves of the landscape, a mosaic of greens endlessly varied.
The Great Forest. An Otherworld. They truly were in an Otherworld.
Noticing she was behind, Eluned hurried to catch Dem Makepeace as he rejoined the path marked by statues of amasen. Words, an unspeakable urgency, blocked her throat, and at a point before the path left the ruins and curved away into thickly-set trees she threw sense to the wind and said: “Wait!”
The vampire who had not quite killed her aunt stopped obediently, and Eluned, who was not shy even if she was not easily social, found herself stammering in the face of limited patience.
“C-could I come back here?” she asked. “Just to…to look at it?”
For a long and painful moment he simply gazed at her blankly, as if she had said she wanted the moon. “You’d have to ask Cernunnos that,” he said finally. “Though I would imagine your aunt has a few firm opinions about doing so.”
“What consequences?” Aunt Arianne asked, ignoring the barbed smile he offered her. “Beyond allegiance given?”
“For asking? Likely nothing. For coming here?” He left off being provoking to consider the question seriously. “The Great Forest is not the Horned King’s alone, and I am far from the only one able to enter it. Hurlstone itself holds no dangers, and if you’re accepted by the Deep Grove’s guardians you’d have protection against anything that might stray by, short of a god. But this is one of the greatest of the Otherworlds, and to treat it as a plaything would be to invite being played with.”
Despite his almost indifferent tone, Eluned felt censured and drew breath to protest, to explain. But the struck-gong feeling overwhelming her seemed impossible to put into words, and she subsided in unfamiliar confusion.
Aunt Arianne said coolly: “If something is so important to a person that they would stand before a god—truly before a god—and ask for it, the reason is unlikely to be trivial.” She smiled at Eluned then, both serious and wry. “Not that I wish you to fling yourself into dangerous situations heedlessly. While Dem Makepeace’s description did rather make Hurlstone sound safer than London, I trust you to spare my nerves any outright idiocy.”
“Stray gods,” Eleri added, not discouraging but clearly dubious, and Griff said: “Will you really ask?”
“I don’t know,” Eluned admitted.
“Any other requests?” Dem Makepeace said, his tone entirely obliging, but not even Griff believed it, and so they silently followed the vampire beneath the trees.
With the sky only visible through breaks in the foliage, it immediately became almost too dark to keep track of the path, and Aunt Arianne moved to stand between them so that she could guide them around occasional hazards. The birdsong dropped away, and the wind rose, uncomfortably cold, stirring up the scent of leaf mold.
Through the velvety pitch, blobs of light provided dim beacons, and as they approached the first Eluned saw that it was another stone amasen, with a soft white light leaking from between its coils. The forest outside that gentle glow seemed even darker, and she could no longer see patches of pale sky above. But the wind had dropped and she could hear.
Griff pressed back against Eluned’s side, and she squeezed his shoulder and told herself that the tok tok tok was likely a bird, and the rustling no doubt a badger or squirrels, and that was most certainly the call of a fox and not someone crying out. It did not help at all to glance at Aunt Arianne’s face when they reached the next amasen, and see her gazing out into the forest with wide eyes. Beneath these trees, perhaps it was better not to be able to see in the dark.
Even if she came only in the daylight, and kept to Hurlstone, would she be simply courting danger, and wholly unequal to it? More to the point, could she really ask permission of Cernunnos to come here? The Horned King might bring bountiful harvests and healthy babies, but it was only through carefully maintained treaties that the lands within his dominion were not swallowed by forest. And to offend against Cernunnos in any woodland was to risk drawing the attention of his hunt.
They had passed the last of the glowing amasen, but Dem Makepeace still walked unhesitatingly toward a bluer patch of darkness up ahead, which became a clearing, a bowl of soughing grass fringed by trees. Beneath a depthless sea of stars stood a tiny hill, crowned by the Oak.
Sprawling boughs embraced forest and sky, reaching so far they hung beyond the slopes of the hill. The trunk was wider than ten men embracing, gnarled but solid. And every bit of it could be clearly seen because countless balls of glass, flickering softly, hung by slender chains from the branches.
“We will kneel at the foot of the hill,” Dem Makepeace said, continuing forward without break. “Wednesday will go up alone and kneel on the stone at the crest.”
“Who’s—?” Griff began, then stopped when Eluned squeezed his shoulder. It was obvious Dem Makepeace meant their aunt, but this wasn’t the time to ask why. Griff knew that, of course, but walking through a place where he could hear so many animals and not see them had been far from easy for him. Dem Makepeace had talked about this as if it was such a simple thing, but Eluned had never been so daunted, and Aunt Arianne surely was as well, though she did not falter when they reached the bottom of the hill and Dem Makepeace gestured for her to go past him.
The grass was high and seed heads tickled when Eluned knelt. One of the hanging glass globes was only a little way above them, and as a mote of light detached itself she saw that the light came from glowing white moths clinging to the outside, feeding on tiny flowers within.
There were fewer globes around the trunk, and Eluned could see very little of Aunt Arianne after she knelt past the top of the slope. The breeze had dropped, and the loudest sound was the clothy flutter of wings, and Griff’s breathing, growing ever harsher.
Eleri leaned down to Griff’s ear, and Eluned couldn’t hear her words, but guessed them even before Griff repeated: “Tennings Together.” The old reassurance, one they’d turned to more than ever this summer. Alone they each had their vulnerable points, but as their own minor trifold they covered each other’s weaknesses.
This, though, was a greater test for Griff than they could have anticipated. Even Eluned, wildly excited, had to fight with uncertainty. Could she do it? Ask Cernunnos himself for leave to visit his forest? For something so simple and selfish as wanting, longing, to look at it properly? Aunt Arianne had been careful to point out that a request like that would mean a tie of allegiance, a permanent bond. That wasn’t a small thing, even if Cernunnos wasn’t known as a harsh god.