Shadow Hand (Tales of Goldstone Wood Book #6)(24)

As though weighed down by a chain far stronger than the four upon her limbs, the wolf collapsed flat against the ruined soil. And she did not move, not even to breathe.

Now. You are theirs—its—

Mine!

———

Daylily gasped. She came awake kneeling in the Wood Between, shuddering, her arms wrapped about herself against a cold that pierced her from the inside out.

Sun Eagle crouched before her, a hand on her shoulder. “There,” he said. “There, it’s over. You’re safe now.”

Daylily, her chin drawn to her chest, saw something gleaming. Struggling still to breathe, she grasped the gleam and held it steady. It was like a shard of ice in the palm of her hand and she winced. When her vision stopped swimming, she looked at what she held.

It was a charm, a bronze stone of no particular shape strung on a cord of animal gut.

Her breath came easier with each gasp. Soon she was able to sit upright. The spasm passed; the cold, though present, was bearable. And suddenly she felt stronger than she had in . . . in she could not remember how long!

“What has happened?” she asked the warrior, turning to him as a child to an older brother. Though he was a stranger, she felt somehow that she knew him. She felt that she was—in some odd way—part of him. “What did you do to me?”

“I?” said he. His voice was strangely gentle. “I have done nothing. But you have taken the Bronze. You are now one of my brethren.”

He stood then and helped her to her feet. He did not release her hand, and she found that she did not want him to.

“Come. Walk with me,” said Sun Eagle. “Let us find your world.”





9


ONCE UPON A TIME.”

No phrase is more intriguing to those who know nothing of Time.

Immortals understand Time in the same way they understand air. It is there. It always has been and always will be. They live in it, but it isn’t something to be concerned about unless it is unduly removed. Otherwise, who’s to bother?

Mortals are different. Time matters to them, for they experience it in such limited quantity. Like a man plunged into the ocean who gasps for each breath with desperate urgency, so mortals, trapped as they are by their mortality, put out their hands and try to grasp Time even as it slips through their fingers.

And it’s all so fascinating to watch!

This was precisely why sylphs—which are neither immortal nor mortal but simply are in the same way that the wind simply is—find mortals irresistible. Time-bound creatures existing in a world so other to that which sylphs know are beautiful and beguiling and utterly impossible to pass up.

Once upon a Time . . . and here are creatures, oddly ugly, intriguing mortal beasts, that actually live upon a Time like it is the most natural thing in the worlds!

But one sylph did not find the prospect so enticing.

This creature of wind and whisper held back from its brethren, though never so far as to be totally alone. It had been alone too long, and it never wanted to suffer that yawning closeness of isolation again. Even now, free and airborne though it was, it still felt the bite of iron around its neck, a neck made solid with imprisonment, and it remembered its wind-wild spirit trapped in a Time-tortured form.

Once it had been too curious and too clever. It had ventured out of the Between, lured by the voice of the Death-in-Life. And there, in that world where everything gave way to the decay of moments, hours, and years, the sylph had been made the slave.

“Aad-o Ilmun!” the sylph breathed through the leaves as it moved, following the merry shouts of its brothers and sisters. “I am saved! I am rescued! I will never deal with mortals again.”

They had caught a new one. The lone sylph could tell by the manic laughter, the triumphant songs.

“We have the mortals by their hands,

And so we lead them through our lands!

Oh, laughing, fey, and fair are we

Who spring and sing from tree to tree!

Come and join our dance!”

They were foolish, but they could not help it. Intrigued by the strangeness, they failed to recognize the horror. So the lone sylph hung back. Let them sing and harry the poor mortals. Only let them never learn the terrors of a corporeal body, the horror of a spirit trapped inside a head, the painful beat of a heart! Even now the memory was enough to make the sylph moan.

Then it heard a shout.

“By the Prince of Farthestshore, I—oof!—command you—arrrgh!—to release—ugh!”

Every whisper of the lone sylph’s strange and billowing being sang in response to that voice, which it recognized.

“Savior!” it cried.

Then it plunged forward through the trees, hurtling itself after the congregation of its kindred until it found the mortals clutched at the center of the wild hurricane. The sylphs were not gentle with their new toys but tugged them right off their feet, carrying them through the Wood so swiftly that neither captive could protest, and were indeed hard-pressed to protect their faces from the knifelike branches as they were gusted along. One of the mortals hit a tree trunk, only just putting up an arm in time to protect himself from a severe concussion, then was pulled on around so fast that he could not catch his breath.

“Savior!” cried the lone sylph again.

A horrible, wafting face presented itself before Lionheart’s terror-struck eyes. Both visible and invisible at once, it put out its great, gale-like arms and caught him close to its breast. All breath knocked from his body, Lionheart could not so much as moan when he, with a jolt that certainly must have left his stomach far behind on the woodland floor, was torn from the throng of wind beings and lifted up, up, up, until he thought he would break through the canopy of the forest itself.