“You’ve come to take her away, haven’t you?” Weka Dart said suddenly, and Drisker could detect hints of both anger and sadness in his voice. Drisker hesitated, unsure of what to say. “If you’ve not come to be her mate,” the other continued, “then you must be here to take her away. Like before.”
Like before? Then the Druid recalled that Grianne, when the Ard Rhys of the newly re-formed Druid order of Paranor, had been sent into the Forbidding by the rogue Druid Shadea a’Ru and would still be here if her nephew, Pen Ohmsford, hadn’t found a way to take her back to the Four Lands.
“I’m here,” he said finally, “because I was sent. Unwillingly, I should add. Just like Grianne, both times she appeared.” He paused. “But I won’t lie. When I leave, she may choose to come with me.”
“You will take her!”
A firm accusation. Drisker shook his head. “I don’t have that power over her. She spoke to me while I was still in our old world. She told me she wants to come home. It is a part of the reason I am here.”
“It is wrong of you to agree with her! She belongs here.”
Drisker suddenly wondered if the Ulk Bog would rather lead him into danger than let him get anywhere near his beloved mistress.
“Why don’t we wait and see what she has to say about it?” Drisker suggested, then paused. “Or do you intend to rid yourself of me on the way to reach her, in spite of what your queen has asked of you?”
Weka Dart wheeled on him, his monkey-face a mask of fury, his spiky hair bristling everywhere from his head to his toes. “It doesn’t matter what I want! I am loyal to my queen! I would never betray her. Not for any reason. She is always to be respected and obeyed. Always!”
He wheeled away again, stomping off.
Well, that went well, Drisker thought.
He followed the angry creature because he didn’t have any other choice, afraid he had created a divide between them he could not close. For the rest of the day, they walked in silence. The light dimmed swiftly, and the Ulk Bog found shelter for them in a cluster of rocks situated on a rise that allowed them to be protected on three sides.
“We stay here tonight,” he declared without looking at Drisker. “It is the best we can do. You have magic. Maybe you can use it to protect us if we are threatened. Or is that too much to ask?”
Then he was gone into the darkness to find dinner for them, returning almost immediately with something new and equally unfamiliar as last night’s offering. Whatever it was, he skinned and cleaned it, and they devoured it raw and in silence. The grayness of the day grew darker with nightfall. The sky clouded over, the air grew misty, and the world was blanketed in gloom and a sense of inevitable decay. Drisker stared out at it from their shelter and wondered how anything could manage to live here. Listening to Weka Dart speak of the Forbidding as if it were a real home—a place he chose to be and believed Grianne Ohmsford belonged in—was hard to accept. But then he hadn’t been born to it and lived in it all his life.
They had finished their meal and were sitting together, still looking out at the night, when the Ulk Bog finally spoke again. “I was wrong to be so harsh,” he said in his rough voice. “I was being selfish.”
Drisker nodded. “You want her to stay. I understand.”
“If she leaves here, she will leave me behind. She did so before. She said I could not come with her, that I must stay where I belonged. But there is nothing here for me without her.”
“Maybe things won’t turn out the way you think.”
“They will. I can tell. She will leave me.”
“If she thinks she needs to go, maybe you have to let her. You wouldn’t deny her that, would you? Don’t you care enough about her to want her to be where she chooses?”
The Ulk Bog shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Drisker wanted to find something to say that might dispel the sense of inevitability the other was struggling with. “There is a good chance no one will be leaving,” he said at last. “I have no way of getting back, and if history is any judge, neither does she. We are both trapped in this world, and we may both have to stay here. So nothing is settled.”
Weka Dart gave a slow nod but did not otherwise respond. He simply sat there, stubbornly silent, his gaze fixed on the darkness.
Drisker felt very sleepy and decided to roll himself into his travel cloak and stretch out. Once he closed his eyes, he was asleep at once.
* * *
—
When he woke the following morning, the world was awash in rain and gloom so thick it approximated night. The air had gone cold and the world silent, and it seemed as if everything surrounding him had died while he slept. He was aware of Weka Dart snoring close beside him, but the sound of the rain drowned out everything else.
He was also suddenly in possession of a raging sore throat, a fever so hot he was sweating, and a body aching with such pain that he could not make himself rise. He tried to sit up and failed; he was so weak he could not move. He stared into the mistiness and rainfall and wondered how this had happened.
He was sick, and his Druid instincts told him it was not a sickness he could do anything about.
Seconds later, he tried again to rise, failed, and collapsed back into the folds of his travel cloak, unconscious.
SIX
Standing transfixed in the shady, quiet clearing, Tarsha Kaynin found herself face-to-face with the impossible.
Not ten feet away stood the forest imp, Flinc.
“Is it really you?” she managed, after she had recovered her wits.
The little creature made a show of looking down at himself and running his hands over his body. “It appears so.”
“But you were dead! Clizia Porse had you trapped in your home and you stayed behind to let me escape…” She trailed off helplessly. “I don’t understand!”
The forest imp smiled. “There is nothing much to understand. I stayed to keep the witch from following you, and I was successful in my efforts. The witch and your brother trapped me in my home, so I used a little of the magic with which all forest imps are blessed and made her think I was dead. It was the easiest solution. There, Tarsha of the beautiful eyes. Are those tears I see?”
Impulsively, Tarsha knelt down and hugged him. “I’m so happy to see you!”
“Then I am happy, as well.”
“But you didn’t try to let me know you were still alive? You didn’t communicate this with Drisker? You didn’t come looking for us?”
Flinc shook his grizzled head, and his old man’s face took on a forlorn cast. “How could I? Drisker was trapped in Paranor, as I recall. And you left Emberen and the Westland. It seemed best to just wait until one of you returned. My kind doesn’t travel far beyond the borders of our forestland.”