The Book of Lost Things [56]
David left the road. The ground was soft, and his feet made an unpleasant squelching noise with each step that he took. As he drew nearer to the tree, he saw the fruit at the farthest ends of the branches was smaller and less ripe than the apples higher up at the heart of the tree, where each one was as big as a man’s fist. He could reach them if he climbed up, and climbing trees was something that David was very good at indeed. It was the work of only a few minutes to scale the trunk, and soon he was seated in the crook of a branch, munching on an apple that tasted incredibly sweet to him. It had been weeks since he’d eaten an apple, not since a local farmer had quietly slipped Rose a couple “for the little ’uns.” Those apples had been small and sour, but these were wonderful. The juice trickled down his chin, and the flesh was firm in his mouth.
He devoured the last of the first apple and discarded the core, then picked another. He ate this one more slowly, recalling his mother’s warnings about eating too many apples. They gave you stomach pains, she had said. David supposed that stuffing yourself with too much of anything was a recipe for feeling ill, but he wasn’t sure how that applied if you hadn’t eaten for almost an entire day. All he knew for certain was that the fruit tasted good and his stomach was grateful for it.
He was halfway through the second apple when he heard a disturbance below. Something was approaching fast from his left. He could see movement in the bushes, and a flash of tan hide. It looked like a deer, although David could not see its head, and it was clearly fleeing from some threat. Instantly, David thought of the wolves. He cowered closer to the trunk of the tree and tried to shield himself with it. Even as he did so, he wondered if the wolves would detect his scent upon the ground as they passed, or if the lure of the deer might be enough to blind their senses to it.
Seconds later, the deer broke from cover and entered the clearing beneath David’s tree. It paused for a moment, as if uncertain of which direction to take, and in that moment he got his first clear look at its head. The sight made him gasp, for it was not the head of a deer but that of a young girl with blond hair and dark green eyes. He could see where her human neck ended and the body of the deer began, for a red welt marked the place where the two beings had been joined. The girl glanced up, startled by the sound, and her eyes met David’s.
“Help me!” she begged. “Please.”
And then the sounds of pursuit drew nearer, and David saw a horse and rider bearing down upon the clearing, the rider’s bow drawn and ready to release its arrow. The deer-girl heard them too, for her back legs tensed and she bounded toward the cover of the forest. She was still in midair when the arrow struck her neck. The blow threw her body to the right, where it lay twitching upon the ground. The deer-girl’s mouth opened and closed as she tried to speak her final words. Her back legs kicked at the dirt, her body trembled, and then she stopped moving.
The rider trotted into the clearing upon a huge black horse. He was hooded and dressed in the colors of the autumn forest, all greens and ambers. In his left hand he held a short bow, and a quiver of arrows hung across his shoulder. He dismounted from the horse, drew a long blade from a scabbard upon his saddle, and approached the body on the ground. He raised the blade and struck once, then again, at the neck of the deer-girl. David looked away after the first blow, his hand against his mouth and his eyes squeezed shut. When he dared to glance back again, the girl’s head had been severed from the deer’s body and the hunter was carrying it by the hair, dark blood dripping from the neck onto the forest floor. Using the hair, he tied the head to the horn of his saddle so that it hung against the flank