Crown of Shadows - C. S. Friedman [160]
One more day, he thought. He could taste the Forest’s power on his lips, a heady tonic. Just one more day, and then it’ll all be mine. Won’t you be sorry then, my brave little Churchmen!
Then all the human words deserted him. Hungry, restless, the creature called Amoril set off at a frantic lope to find his pack.
Thirty-five
The Forest had changed.
Narilka had gone barely ten steps into it, and already she knew something was wrong. It wasn’t a difference she saw as much as one that she felt, but she felt it so strongly that for a moment she just stopped, too shaken to move forward. She remembered the Forest from before. Not clearly, not willingly, but she remembered. The Hunter had set her loose in these woods and she had stumbled through its preternatural darkness like a terrified animal, not yet aware that the creature out of legend who followed her trail was a man, and would never hurt her. Now, as she breathed in the rotting stink that came and went like a breeze, she knew that something was wrong. As she gazed upon the necrotic mold that clung to the trunks of the Hunter’s trees, she knew that no growth like that had been here before. And as she dared to reach out with her hopes and her fears into the heart of the Forest itself, struggling for some fae-borne sense of Andry’s passage, the presence that she sensed within that realm of shadows was enough to make her draw back, sickened. Not a human presence, that. Not the clean demonic signature of the Hunter either, which she knew so well from their two brief encounters. This was something less than human, something so unclean that the Forest itself would surely vomit it up if it had the power to do so. What was going on here?
She reached out for a nearby tree—one of the few healthy ones—and shivered, trying to absorb it all. Had he changed also, the Forest’s monarch? Was this transformation just a facet of his own soul’s evolution, reflected in the trees and the earth of his homeland as a simpler man might be reflected in a mirror? If so ... She shuddered. The monarch of the old Forest had declared her safe. Would his promise hold in this transformed place? And what about Andrys’ supposed invulnerability? Suddenly she felt very cold, and very alone. Until this moment her quest had been like a dream, her way so brightly lit by the flame of her love that she never got a close look at the shadows which were gathering behind her. Now, suddenly, she felt smothered by them.
With trembling hands she lit her lantern, so that its earthy light might reassure her. As she adjusted the wick, she heard a sudden sound behind her and she almost dropped it as she whipped about, her free hand going to the hilt of the long knife which was sheathed at her hip. But it was only a forager rooting in the dirt. Thank the gods. For a moment she had thought it might be a soldier, and had braced herself for a far more unpleasant confrontation.
The guard at the Church camp would be changing soon and they would discover that she was gone. Or maybe it would take them longer than that. Maybe they had enough duties to occupy their time, so that each soldier would think another had attended to her. Maybe hours would pass and the sun would set and darkness would fall again before they realized that she had slipped away at dawn ... and by then it would be too late for them to stop her. Gods, let it be so! She had wanted to circumvent the Church camp entirely, had even turned her horse toward the east with the intention of cirling wide about it and entering the Forest from another direction. Then it had struck her just how foolish that plan would be. There were no roads inside the Forest, and certainly no markers to measure distance or indicate direction. How could she hope to find Andrys unless