'What will happen now?'
'If I know soldiers, the commanders who ordered the search of Darken Wood will decide to delay another search until they feel they can risk further loss. They will also hope that their quarry, the questing party of the other night, appears elsewhere, as someone else's responsibility.' He shuddered. 'At any rate, we will have saved this part of the world for a while — if, as they say, I know soldiers.'
'You know soldiers well. You lead them still better.'
'Thank you.' The king sat down heavily by the bleeding stag. 'A satisfying night, but not an easy one. I have been wounded.'
'Recently?' The stag grunted as its forehead horn, cracked by the sword-blow, split all the way to the skull.
'Tonight, in fact.'
'At any other time, I enjoy a joke — »
'Seriously.' Red leaked through the holes in the king's armor, as though the rubies were melting. 'I had forgotten how painful this was.'
'You could have asked me.' The stag raised its pain wracked head. Now the split horn sagged apart, its cleft gaping, and exposed bone at its root.
'I could have,' the king agreed. 'It seemed rude.' He spoke with difficulty. 'It seems I have fulfilled a pledge and will die in service.'
The stag said, 'I also.' He added, 'Could you help me over to the last standing draconian? I would not mind dying with such memorial.'
The king, gasping, carried the shuddering body of the stag to the foot of the standing draconian. 'He has — ' He coughed.
'Can you speak no more clearly than that? I seem not to hear well just now.' The rumble of the moving horns covered all sound.
The king braced himself and said distinctly, 'This one has a hoof-print on his chest. Yours?'
'I would nod, but I have a headache.' Blood ran from his split forehead. As though watered, the twin horn- shards sprouted buds of antlers.
'Then he will wear my marks as well.' Holding the stag with one arm, the king removed his own crown and placed it on the stone figure before sliding wetly down its side to the grass.
The stag rasped, 'Either I am overly sensitive by nature, or this seems harder than usual.' Blood was flowing darkly around the dust in his chest wound. 'Could you not distract me?'
'I could try.' The king tilted his head back in pain as he inhaled, and sang in a quavering voice:
'For every wraith who breaks his faith
must wander without cease
and, cold, perform what he did, warm,
and never rest in peace.
He coughed, and a hairline of blood ran from the corner of his mouth. The stag, looking up through filmy eyes, took up the song for him:
so, every night the stag betrays
the love he could not keep
and king and host desert their post
to hunt and never sleep.
They finished, singing together. It took them a long time, since one or the other often stopped to gasp for air, and it seemed important to them that they finish as one:
And so they shall betray and hunt,
until the day they show
that they somehow fulfill the vow
they broke so long ago.'
Done, they collapsed against each other. 'Not a bad song, really,' the king said. 'Needs a little tightening here and there, perhaps, fewer cousin-rhymes, but at least it's something of us left behind.'
'True. Many have died with less fame and with worse poetry.' The stag's antlers shuddered painfully back into place. The stag, eyes upward, lay his head on the king's lap and stared at the draconian. 'Who would have thought that I should be hunted by such as this? Or that you should hunt them?'
The king's voice was low and halting. 'True. They are vile, and we were proud. But for once, we both have died for something besides ourselves. And when you have been dead as long as I — ' he wavered, and said in a last breath — 'a little variety in one's chosen way of dying is not such a bad thing.'
And as the stag joined the king in final death, he thought sleepily that after a thousand years of nightly betrayal, transformation, pursuit by the dead, painful death and more painful rebirth, almost any change was pleasant. He cradled his head against King Peris's stomach, and the two accepted death as, long ago, it had accepted them.
No one but Time removed the bodies; eventually they disappeared. The stone draconians became overgrown and powdered under the pressure of weather and vines; time's best warriors. Only the one draconian, wearing an ancient crown and scarred on its breast with a cloven hoof, remains. For reasons no one living knows, it does not crumble. Go to the wood, no longer called Darken, and you may see it yet.
Once, not long ago, the Forestmaster came into the glade and stood before the single draconian. The crown was tarnished, the sword rusted; only the hoof-print was still sharp and clear. The Forestmaster stared at the print, then looked thoughtfully around the glade. There was not so much as a mound to show that anyone had died here, and even the memory of the draconians was fading from those who lived in Shadow Wood.
The unicorn tipped her head up and quietly sang two stanzas she had heard recently, added onto a very old ballad:
'The shadows in the woods are plain
and mingle now with light;
they flow and play with sun by day
and dance with moon by night.
From darken wood has shadow wood
been granted its release,
those who were killed in vows fulfilled
have there been granted peace.'
She strode to the edge of the woods and thrust her horn in among the vines, circling it quickly. Walking back to the statue, she lifted her horn to the stone and slid a floral wreath onto it. It slid down too far; she moved parallel to the sword and adjusted it. For a moment, sword and horn both pointed to the north star, faintly visible in the darkening sky.
She stepped back. 'Sleep well, beloved' She turned and was gone.
The wreath of Paladine's Tears stayed fresh a long time.
Hide and Go Seek
