grass. My skin felt soiled and grimy where it brushed against his, but I couldn’t break away. “What am I doing here? What do you want with me?”
Herne smirked. “You’re interfering. I intend to deal with you now, once and for all. Here, where I have absolute power.”
“Here.” I shivered again. “This is your garden, and it must be England, but where…?”
“These were my lands.”
“He hanged you on your own lands?” I blurted. Herne looked down at me.
“Oh, yes, my lady. Such is the kindness of a king.”
“How did you end up in Seattle?” It was a stupid question, but I had an idea at the back of my mind and I wanted to keep him talking until it germinated.
“On a boat, hand-built of wood, and then with many years of traveling west on foot.”
“When did you leave England?”
“Two centuries?” He shrugged. “I haven’t counted the years. I go back.” His eyes flashed deeper green. “I will not leave my lands unprotected.”
“But how?” The footpath we followed ended abruptly and began again a few feet later, a flaw in Herne’s garden. It reordered itself as we walked over it. I frowned, pushing my will forward, at another section of path. The unlocked energy beneath my breast bone tingled through my blood, like it approved of what I was trying to do. “How can you still be alive?”
Herne looked positively disappointed. “Can’t you guess? Ah, but you see only the ordinary man I was. Would it help…” He released my hand, took two steps forward and stopped in front of me with a little flourish. The path under his feet disappeared briefly. I frowned again, partly to hide a grin at the path’s reaction to my push and partly because I didn’t understand what I was supposed to see.
Then the subtleties of how he had changed hit me. His cheekbones had sharpened, chin lengthened a little, and the vividly green eyes tilted more noticeably. A pattern of bone distorted his temples just slightly. He looked ever so slightly more fey, no more slender through the shoulder, but with a degree of translucence to his skin, a hint of finer bones in his hands and face. He smiled, and I took a step forward, compelled.
“Oh, my God,” I whispered. “You’re his son. Cernunnos is your father.”
“Not your god,” Herne disagreed, “but a god, at least. Now you understand, of course, that you have to die.”
I didn’t understand that at all. “Wait! Shouldn’t you be speaking French?” Even as I said it, I wondered what kind of stupid question that was. Even as a gambit for time, it had to be one of the dumber things I could have said. But it worked: Herne stared at me while I frantically searched for the flaw in his garden that had let me reshape the path. He’d said something, something important, if I could just understand what to do with it.
“I was born a landowner, not nobility. English is my native tongue. And do you not imagine, gwyld, that in six hundred years I might learn another language if I needed?”
“Oh.” I was genuinely embarrassed. “That was a dumb question.”
“Yes,” Herne agreed, “it was.” Then his will rolled over me like thunder, transmuting, forcing me to the shape he chose for me. I thickened, arms and legs shortening as I dropped to all fours and tossed my head in panic. My head was too heavy, attached to my neck wrong, and my vision was dismal. On nothing but instinct, I charged forward. Herne laughed and stepped to the side, and I found myself bolting through forest with a handful of horsemen on my curling tail. I squealed in rage and fear and let the weight of my body drive me forward as I ran.
I burst into a clearing, toward a line of men seated on horseback. One moved forward, and I recognized the scene with a jolt of fear. Richard’s hunt, the one that ultimately cost Herne his life.
Only this time I was the boar.
My clarity of vision returned abruptly, enough to let me see Herne’s thin smile. Even as I charged forward, desperate, a plan crystallized in my mind. It was easy to gore Richard’s horse, to bring the animal down and the king with him. Herne flung himself off his horse to protect the king. I brought my head up, ripping a glanc ing blow across Herne’s belly; it had looked much more impressive when I was hidden behind the tree, watching. Herne flung a fist upward, catching me behind the ribs with a knife. I squealed in pain and staggered a step. Triumph lit Herne’s eyes and he rolled out from under me, rolled off Richard, and drew his sword as he came to his feet.
I stumbled again, my breath coming in ugly little wheezes. The ground gave under my foot, and I collapsed to my knees, on top of Richard. He grunted and I felt the absurd desire to apologize. But Herne was driving his sword down, and there wasn’t any more time.
I crushed my eyes shut and chose.
I chose to be there, in Herne’s garden. That was the thing he’d said, the wiggle room I needed. With my choice, the shape his will held me in shattered. I snapped back to my own form, rolling to the side with a gasp. The knife wound Herne had put in my belly was still there, throbbing with agony.
Herne slammed his blade down into the place I’d been an instant before. Into Richard’s abdomen. Richard’s eyes went very wide and bright. I whispered, “Sorry,” while my blood spilled through my fingers to mix with his. We stared at each other for another instant, before Herne’s scream rendered the air and I staggered once more, forcing my head up to meet his eyes.
“It is not possible,” he rasped. “My place-my power-”
I clutched the hole in my belly where he’d stabbed me and straightened up as far as I could. It wasn’t very far: to breathe through the pain I had to stay a little hunched, but at least I could meet his eyes. “Your will,” I whispered back. “I’m not here. Of your will. Anymore.” I couldn’t breathe. It hurt so badly I could hardly think, flares of pain steady with my heartbeat. “Chose. To be here.” I hadn’t been sure it would work. “Choosing. To leave now. Too.”
I collapsed over the silent, broken form of Richard, king of England. Herne’s scream of fury echoed in my memory for a long time.
When I opened my eyes again I was on my knees in my garden, doubled over with one forearm against the ground and the other wrapped around my belly.
“This one’s a little more complicated,” Coyote said. “Can you feel them?”
I lifted my head up, beads of sweat draining into my eyes. I couldn’t feel a goddamned thing except the spiking pain in my gut, and the blood slipping through my fingers.
“Try harder,” Coyote said. He lay on his belly with his head on his paws, gold eyes intense on mine. I whimpered without any dignity and tried to feel something beyond myself. Just on the other side of pain was a source of amusement, smugness and concern.
“Not me.” Coyote sounded patient. “Past me.” I grunted and tried to reach past him, my fingers creeping forward in the grass like the physical motion would help the mental. For a moment there was a scattering of sensation, the feeling of someone waiting. I recognized it from my dream-walk and reached for it. Coyote snapped at my crawling fingers. “Farther out.”
I drew a deep breath to try again, then couldn’t do anything for a few seconds. Blood drained through my fingers with more enthusiasm. “Fuck.” Nausea made a stab at settling into my system, but I was too hurt to hold on to even that.
I stretched one more time, past Coyote, past the one who waited for me, and finally found what Coyote was after. Two thin silver lines ran through me, attached to one another, using me as a conduit. They flickered, unevenly, unsynchronized and as weakly as my own pulse. One disappeared into darkness, its far end so distant I wasn’t sure where it led. The other had no visible end, either, but it felt closer, like I could reach out a hand and grasp the arm of the body whose life it sustained.
“They’re tied together through you,” Coyote said softly, as if he was afraid a full voice would shatter my fragile grasp on the cords. “Don’t you see?”
“Mem’ry,” I whispered. Blood drooled to the grass. “Henrietta’s. Mem’ry. Herne’s. Will. Tied me to. Richard’s life.” I understood. The energy coil inside me bubbled eagerly, sending out pulses of power along with my blood. “More engine work,” I mumbled, and fell through six hundred years of time, healing the schoolteacher and the king.
I opened my eyes and sat down hard in the chair. “You saved them,” I said.
