For the remainder of the afternoon and well into the evening, they traveled east together. Rhian let the deer set the route, but she kept the pace to a combination of walk and trot for the sake of the borrowed horse, to keep from exhausting it.
When she finally told the deer that the horse was tired, it stopped in a small clearing in the woods. A stream ran through it, and there was just enough new grass to satisfy the horse for a while.
She dismounted and stripped the tack off of the horse and rubbed it down with a wisp of last year’s grass.
She talked to the deer while she went about her work. “Will you stay with me, or will you be gone in the morning?”
The deer looked at her expressionlessly.
“George needs me,” she told it. “You’ve both been hurt.”
The deer snorted at her but made no move to leave.
She bespoke the horse to stay in the clearing and hoped that would hold it all night. She wanted a fire, but she had no way of starting one. The little human lighter that she had carried had been taken from her during her abduction and she had no other means.
A search through the saddle bags had turned up a cloth-wrapped dinner which she eagerly devoured and a very welcome flask of beer, somewhat the worse for all the movement it had endured. She’d hoped for a fire-starter but something to carry water in was almost as useful.
She tore a strip off the remnant of her long shift and soaked it in the water from the stream. With that, she approached the deer, and it let her clean the cut on its right foreleg. “I don’t suppose you’ll let me bandage that?” she said, and the deer backed away.
She wrapped herself as warmly as she could and laid down on the ground, prepared to shiver until morning in the chill spring air. The night noises resumed their background presence once she stopped moving.
After a few minutes, she felt the deer approach and stand over her. She thought of the trampled guard and knew a moment’s fear, but then it folded its legs and sank down at her back. She waited a minute, then tentatively reached over her shoulder and scratched its face, and it blew in her ear.
She snuggled up to the warm beast and finally succumbed to sleep.
The deer lay awake after his companion had dropped off. Emotions roiled through him, wrath uppermost. He seethed over his betrayal by the woman, though he didn’t understand it.
He’d killed a man to escape, he remembered the feel of his feet striking him, hard, pounding him into the ground, the sting of the sword. But wasn’t he a man himself? He tried to look at his hand for reassurance, but he didn’t have one.
He couldn’t think clearly. The smell of a strange horse assaulted his nose, but the scent of the sleeping form next to him was familiar, and the sound of her voice soothed him. I should keep running, he thought, but he couldn’t leave his companion. She helped, didn’t she? I’d still be there without her.
Where were they? He knew, somehow, that there were great rivers on either side, to the north and south. They needed to travel east, but he wasn’t sure where they were going.
He was hungry. It had been a hard day. He vaguely remembered tearing furniture apart, in another form. He hadn’t been able to make himself browse as they journeyed, not even the fresh young green leaves they passed had appealed to him.
He dozed, his antlered head upright, throughout the night. Residual rage boiled over and invaded his uneasy dreams.
For two days more they traveled to the east. Rhian thought they might have covered thirty miles each day. They could have moved faster, but she wanted to spare the horse as much as possible to make up for the limited forage. Her food would hold out another couple of days but she was worried about the deer. She never saw it eat.
The evening camps were cold and rough, but she was so happy to be free that she didn’t mind. Maelgwn would scold her for not having a way to make a fire, but even that rueful reflection couldn’t dampen her relief. They would find friends soon, she was sure of it, and then she’d reach her family again. Each day’s exhaustion helped to smother the memory of killing the guard. Her arm remembered the sensation of cutting into his throat, and the necessity of it did little to suppress the horror of the feeling.
Her biggest problem was George. Or Cernunnos, she supposed. Whatever was wrong with him seemed no better in this deer form, but she was touched by his nighttime guard when she slept. That warm alert presence behind her reminded her of the huntsman she knew, and she had hopes he could be helped.
In any case, the deer seemed to know where it wanted to go, it wasn’t a random route. They were still headed east by the middle of the third day when the deer lifted its head and suddenly changed its course.
Rhian was startled but caught up, and a few minutes later she heard the sound of horns and the cry of hounds ahead of them.
They entered a large meadow in the woods and a red deer stag, no longer in antler, swept by them under the branches. Her deer stopped still, a few feet in from the margin, and stamped its foot, diverting the tricolor hounds in full cry from their pursuit. Rhian pulled up alongside him.
The huntsman following behind entered the meadow from the far side and stopped in astonishment at the sight of the two of them. Her deer sent the hounds back to him, and they laid down quietly, unnaturally still. As more of the hunt staff entered, they joined the huntsman, the width of the meadow away.
Rhian didn’t know what to do. She watched her deer turn its antlered head and another hound that had been running alone in the woods was swept back into the pack to join his fellows. The huntsman reached for his sword and that decided her.
She swung her leg over and dropped down from her horse. She stepped in front of the deer and spread her arms wide. The tableau froze for a moment. The hunt staff, all in a blue livery that was unknown to her, paused, uncertain about how to proceed.
The standoff only lasted a moment. The hunters following behind entered the meadow and slowed to a stop as they took in the strange scene. Behind them, the servants trickled in, until fully half the meadow was occupied.
The hunters were richly attired and their horses were fresh and strong. Rhian felt especially grubby after three nights in the woods in her makeshift clothing, her hair probably coming undone from her morning braid and covered with twigs.
Silence returned as the hunters took in the great deer, still strangely in antler at this late season, and its young protector. They glanced at the unnaturally quiet hounds, lying at the huntsman’s feet.
A lordly gray-haired man rode forward, and a woman followed. They both had a dignity and grace that appealed strongly to Rhian, but she didn’t know who they were and was more than wary of strangers now. Two others came with them, and she was astonished to recognize Rhodri as one of them. He’d been sent to Llefelys’s court, and now she knew where she was.
Rhodri cried, “Rhian? Is that you?”
“Yes, cousin.”
He pointed at the deer. “Is that…?”
She nodded.
He gaped, then recalled himself. He turned his horse to face Llefelys and his queen. The crowd was hushed. Nothing could be heard but the occasional clink of harness.
“My lord king, please let me introduce your kinswoman, Rhian ferch Rhys ab Edern.”
Llefelys regarded her gravely.
The deer walked around Rhian and stopped in front of her. It transformed to George on all fours, with his head down, nude in the tall grass. There were gasps in the crowd, and several removed their hats. George rose, his face still blank and confused.
Rhodri blinked, then continued, “And your nephew’s huntsman and great-grandson, George Talbot Traherne.”
From where she stood, Rhian could see the heavy scars on George’s back, in the shape of an X. She knew about them, but she hadn’t seen them before.
Rhian made an attempt at a bow in her rough attire, and then burst out, “Rhodri, we need help. Creiddylad was there. We got away but she did something to him, to them.”
The other man, the one who’d come out of the crowd with Rhodri, bowed to her from the saddle. He seemed young, compared to his king.
“These wonders have quite surprised us, my lady. Perhaps I can be of help?”
Rhodri said, “Rhian, this is Morien, Llefelys’s healer.” They both dismounted and handed their horses to the grooms who ran forward to hold them.
George didn’t move, so they walked across the meadow to him. As Rhodri approached he flinched away, and Rhodri froze.
Rhian said, “He doesn’t know you. I don’t think he can remember anything. He trusts me.”
She turned to George. “This is your friend, Rhodri,” she said. “Listen to him.”
George obediently studied Rhodri and this time he didn’t move away when Rhodri closed the distance.
Morien hung back and asked her, “You’re using his beast-sense, aren’t you?”
“It was the only thing I could think of,” she said. “That seems to have been spared.”
“Please introduce me, then.” He waited patiently.
Rhian didn’t know what to make of him. He seemed young to be one of Ceridwen’s colleagues, but confident. She glanced at Rhodri, and he nodded.
“George,” she said, and he tilted that puzzled face to her, “this is Morien. He’ll help you.”
He looked at her for a moment longer, then turned his gaze on Morien. He stood his ground when Morien walked up and took his face between his two hands.
He looked lightly into Morien’s mind. It was dense and subtle, but he sensed no malice in it and no guilt involving him. The young man’s mind a moment before had been bright and volatile, and he felt concern and friendship, but this man was much harder to pin down.
He trusted the girl, and he was tired. He lowered whatever defenses he had and waited.
Morien voiced his thoughts as he worked, and he listened to him, fascinated.
“Brutal work,” Morien said, probing. “Overkill. She walled everything away, including whatever she wanted, no doubt. How long ago did this happen?”
The girl said, “About three weeks. There were drugs that dulled him, too. I think he was able to avoid those after a while.”
“Yes, they would have been necessary to keep him alive, I imagine. He probably wouldn’t have survived the first days without them.”
He remembered the earliest memories, fear and panic, and grimaced.
“Ah,” Morien said, “I think I’ve got it. Prepare yourself, lad, this is going to hurt, like having a tooth pulled.”
A great pressure pushed against the bare cement walls in his mind and tore through them. He felt as if his foundations were being ripped out, but then the walls collapsed as a river of memory rushed back in and swept them away. He cried out and broke away from Morien, pressing the base of the palms of his hand against his forehead as if he could hold everything in that way and stand against the flood.
Rage was uppermost, hot rage, both his own and Cernunnos’s. It tainted everything else, and there were good things there that he didn’t want ruined by it. He had to get it under control.
George whirled away from the crowd and sought privacy a few feet away at the edge of the woods. His hands found the horizontal branch of a wild cherry tree and hung onto it, as if it were an anchor, shuddering with the flood of emotions and thoughts that repossessed him.
A loud crack surprised him, and he looked down to find he’d broken off the living branch, three inches thick. He slid his hands together and swung it against the trunk of the tree with all his might and it shattered, green wood and all.
Resolutely he turned around and came back to his original spot. He faced the hunters, still shaking with rage. Without warning, the horned man rose within him and manifested. He made way for Cernunnos, but it wasn’t as complete a division as he was used to, he was more of a participant.
He smiled mirthlessly inside to see that more of the crowd had removed their hats. They have no idea, he thought, just how furious this god is.
