“It’s coming back!”

“I can see as easily as you, Swallow,” Thrush didn’t turn her head from the creature astride the horse. In the saddle, he looked more than ever like a man child, despite the smell and other strangenesses. Despite the touch.

“Why did it kill the other man children?” puzzlement echoed in Swallow’s question.

A toss of the head. “Man children are always killing one another. They sometimes seem capable of little else.”

“You think it’s a man child then?”

A quick shake of the head was Thrush’s only answer. She thought no such thing. With every passing moment, she grew more certain that this creature was no man child of any sort the world had ever known.

He was almost at the wood, and the horse was beginning to make its displeasure known. The wood was not kind to the runners, and the runners knew it.

He dismounted stiffly, moving close to the animal’s head and cradling the great jaw in one hand. He stroked softly at the horse’s mane as he leaned his forehead against the horse’s head, just behind the ear. Something strange was happening. After a moment or two of nervous prancing, the horse began to calm. Its ears twitched, but then stood as the animal’s entire posture seemed to relax. The creature was slowly stroking the beast’s shoulder just where a mare would nuzzle a nervous foal for comfort.

“What’s it doing now?” Swallow demanded.

“You can see,” Thrush breathed softly, aware at the far edge of herself of the soothsong the creature was crafting around his mount. Without the feel of its touch, she couldn’t know the fullness of the song, nor without the audible words. Still, she could sense the — her eyes popped wide. “Soothesong!” She became aware of Swallow’s hand upon her arm, holding her back. “What—?”

“You were going to it, emptyhead!” Swallow scolded. “It was calling, and you would have gone in like a lamb to a sphinx.”

“I can’t... it isn’t...” Thrush drew herself together with visible effort. “Soothsong is a thing of the people! How dare that... that...!”

Swallow shook her head slowly. “You ask the wrong question, Thrush. Not how dare it — how could it? As you said; soothesong is a thing of the people.”

Thrush was struggling to clear her head, still aware of the touch of his mind, and the drawing power of it. “Some of the weres can do it,” not believing even as she spoke.

“Weres can speak to their mundane cousins,” Swallow clarified. It isn’t the same thing.”

The horse had calmed, and the creature stepped free, not yet mounting. Thrush watched him closely, with new eyes. “Could he be one of the people, then? Some strange, round-eared forest brother from beyond the world?”

“Stand there for a moment more and you can ask it yourself,” Swallow warned, dancing up into a nearby tree. “For it’s on its way now.”

Indeed, the creature was moving again, leading the horse, one hand still cradling the beast’s jawline as he whispered continued encouragement. Thrush held for a long moment more before reluctantly scaling the tree behind Swallow.

* * *

The horse didn’t like the treeline at all, balking well before they were within the first shadows. He clucked it forward, put heels to it, smacked its rump with the flat of his hand. No use. Finally, he dismounted and regarded the frightened beast.

“It’s okay, fella,” he crooned softly, just as Sylvan had once shown him. Sylvan who’d been able to carry on detailed conversations with horses it had sometimes seemed.

He lay his head against the horse’s and remembered the lessons. “Think of yourself as another horse,” Sylvan had told him. “Forget the human part of you. Remember what it’s like to run free and feel the ground flee from your hooves. Think about the sun on your back and the wind in your mane. Then, when the human parts of you are far away, ask your brother why he’s frightened, and how you can make it better.”

Standing at the edge of a dark forest, in the grass of a strange world, the soldier lay his head beside his brother’s ear and tried to speak. He wasn’t Sylvan, but he was Brae. The horse didn’t speak back, but it responded. As he strove to project waves of calm and reassurance, stroking the great beast’s shoulder in a half remembered way, he felt the animal relax. The ears went up, the hooves ceased their agitated pawing. The muscles slowly unbunched.

It took better than twenty minutes before he raised his head. The great head pushed at his chest in a familiar way and the horse whickered companionably. The soldier wished for a carrot or an apple, but satisfied himself with stroking the long jaw.

Without further preamble, leading his new mount, he strode into the darkness of the tall canopy.

The sunlight, the wind, the fresh smell of the grain, all vanished between heartbeats. The horse reared and the man fought it back onto four legs, grunting with the effort. The calming process began all over again. Fifteen minutes it took before he could trust it at the end of the reins.

He resumed his previous route, more or less downspin, wondering silently if he’d ever be able to live beneath the sun again.

* * *

“What’re we to make of that, then?” the trader mumbled aloud to no one in particular.

“I wish we’d seen it happening,” his wife spoke softly.

Dunnear eased through the dense brush to join them, having scouted around the verge as far as the road. “No sign of any other soldiers in either direction, although there are fresh scars in the cobbles to suggest a large party of horse wanted to be somewhere else in a hurry not very long ago.”

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

“Could you tell who they were?” the trader asked

“Oh, I’ve no doubt who they were,” Dunnear snorted. “Royal Turaleean mounted lancers; fifth regiment, Tashala squadron, Dara troop. That far lump is Jobi Beltran.”

“The patrol sergeant?” the trader’s daughter gasped. “The patrol sergeant from Clairbourne?”

“Yes,” Dunnear was puzzled. “Why do—?”

“Who are the others?” she snapped, overriding him.

“Why does it matter—?” her father began

“Who?” her voice broke.

“The other two look like Palo Oberon and Cleti Burge.” Dunnear obliged her.

“Hold on here,” the trader insisted, confused. “You’re telling me that that’s Jobi Beltran from the Clairbourne garrison out there? What in the cold hells were they doing all the way out here? They should be fifty stad west of Clairbourne today.”

Dunnear dipped his head. “P’raps someone rewrote the patrol schedules? P’raps a special mission?” A dismissive snort. “He might even have simply been lost — remember who this is we’re discussing, after all. However it came about, that’s Beltran out there feeding the bugs and no other.”

“Damn!” the trader spat.

“He was a friend?” his wife asked.

“Hardly! But he still owed me four silver imperials for those fancy new boots he bought our last trip through.” He switched his attention to Dunnear. “You couldn’t tell if he was wearing them?”

“I didn’t go out into the grass,” Dunnear answered. The rest of the troop will be back eventually, p’raps with some of the others, if anybody’s in town. They’ve got some pretty fair trackers in Bela troop too, and I wasn’t thinkin’ I’d leave them any of my tracks laying about out in the open for them to wonder about”.

“There is that, I suppose,” the trader conceded. “Were you able to see anything that might tell us why there are dead men out there at all?”

“Nothing,” Dunnear shook his head. “Near as I could tell, it did naught but walk most of the way out to meet them.”

“Argues that they were looking for it, don’t you think?” the trader was growing more puzzled by the moment, and showed it.

“As are we,” his wife broke in. “And as we sit here debating, it’s getting farther and farther ahead.”

“Fine,” the trader snapped. “That’s fine, my love. Three dead soldiers aren’t anything the four of us need worry about, chasing after the creature killed them and all, is it? Nor is the fact that they somehow knew it to be around. Nor that they seemed to have had orders to kill it on sight. Nay, m’love, we’ll just gather ourselves up, and — where has that girl run off to now?”

“She can’t have taken after it, can she?” the girl’s mother fretted, casting about in the duff for her daughter’s track.

“Not likely,” her father replied, remembering, belatedly, the girl’s agitation at the identities of the dead. “More likely—”

“There!” Dunnear hissed. “On the road!”

Six eyes riveted to the slight figure crouched upon the cobbles of the road, long pale hair blowing in the breeze and obscuring her face. She was casting about for sign, apparently, oblivious to the world around her. None of the others breathed. This was the king’s road, after all. No telling when the next traffic would happen by. And being the king’s road, that such traffic might consist of soldiers wouldn’t in the least stretch coincidence. Finally, she stood straight and strode back toward her parents and the worried bravo, relief etched in her very stride.

“There isn’t a sign of blood anywhere out there,” she announced happily. “It didn’t kill any of the others.”

“I’m sure the king’s quartermasters will be very pleased,” her father squeezed out, temper near to boiling.

The girl stopped abruptly, shoulders hunching as she realized what she’d done. “I’m sorry, Daddy, I... I didn’t mean—”

“We’ll discuss it another time,” her mother interposed her body between husband and daughter, forestalling argument at least temporarily. “For now, I think we’d better be moving, don’t you agree?” this last addressed to the fuming trader.

Growling his surrender, the trader turned back toward the ghost road, motioning Dunnear to lead the way. With his wife’s protective instincts aroused, he stood no chance at all of getting to the bottom of his offspring’s peculiar behavior. As to the point of the soldier’s attack, he could as easily speculate while they moved as standing here waiting to be discovered by the burial party.

* * *

Back under the trees and clear of the hedgerow of brush that lined the forest’s edge, the soldier moved easily between the stately pillars of ancient giants in almost complete silence. The duff beneath his feet muffled even the hoofbeats of the nervous stud. Hours rolled by without apparent change in the locale, and he was beginning to wonder how far he really was from the edge he was trying to parallel.

The horse would need fodder soon, and there sure wasn’t anything beneath the canopy for it to eat. He tried not to think about his own situation in that regard. Seven days and most of another with only the dead officer’s meager cache of hardtack and jerky to break the fast had combined with his wounds and the stress of battle to make him unsteady on his feet and a bit light-headed. He needed rest.

Water, too, was becoming a larger issue. He’d been more or less managing on his own, although it hadn’t been pleasant. The horse couldn’t get sufficient water from dew-wet rocks and leaves. Without consciously deciding on it, he veered south at a fork of the almost invisible glimmer of trail, thinking to break into the open and find something to drink. He was now heading almost directly southeast, although not toward the edge of the wood as he’d planned. That had swung south hours before. Unknowing, he was now heading straight for the heart of Bayel’s wood.

* * *

“Well the sergeant said it was a golem, and he’d know, wouldn’t he?”

Old Belius merely shook his head. Personally, he wouldn’t care to wager a stale biscuit the departed sergeant would have known a sewer rat from a cave troll was it gnawing at his nut sack, and he couldn’t believe the corporal had held any higher opinion of the idiot.

Still, it took something unusual to kill three trained soldiers and frighten off another score all by itself. These lancers may not have been the cream of the king’s army, but nor were they the dregs, and even the dregs could hardly be called ill-trained.

Ah bugger! He was bored out of his mind in this pig stye of a garrison in any case. “Alright, Corporal,” he sighed. “We’ll head out first thing in the morning and see what we can see.”

“Morning?” the corporal sputtered. “But by morning it could—!”

“It could what, son?’ the old mage stroked his luxurious, white-striped beard, chuckling softly. “Escape? By your own admission, you ran from it at scarcely midmorning. It took you until, what, early evening to get here? At your best pace? I promise you, sonny m’lad; if it had wanted to leave, it would have done so in those first six span. Tomorrow will be soon enough. Bela troop will be in garrison by then so we’ll have some aid, and we won’t have to worry about stumbling into some madman’s homicidal creation in the dark. Now go get something to eat and get some sleep.”

* * *

Could it really be one of the brothers? Thrush’s struggle to understand was verging on the manic. But no, certainly not. The gross size and hairiness of the thing, and the ugly rounded ears belied even the thought. Besides, it’s skin was too dark to be a brother — even through the blood and bruises they could see that, never mind it was lighter than most of the man children they’d ever seen. No, certainly not a brother of the people! And yet it traveled the ghost road as though it had been doing so all it’s life. And although it had passed by the last two, it was now heading straight for a waypoint.

Some few of the man children knew of the waypoints of course, even as they knew of the ghost road. Wood runners they called themselves, as though they bethought themselves sylvan. But even a man wood runner thought three times before venturing into Bayel’s Wood. And after the third thought, he thought to go somewhere else.

Besides, a man wood runner couldn’t sing soothsong, and it didn’t take to the dark trees. It couldn’t speak to saianids, nor would it listen at the singing glades. And most importantly, she thought, And most importantly, she thought, it did not sing for women of the people!