Her song changed slightly, and shadows flitted around the clearing. Jack could not quite work out what they were—animals, he thought, though they moved just too fast for him to focus on them. He would track one shape, see it disappear just when he thought he had it centered, and then another would tease the extremes of his vision. He blinked hard a few times and looked again, but the shapes were still only that—suggestions of creatures.
He could smell them and hear them, and perhaps they were as amazed at Lesya as he.
Jack frowned, thinking back to moments before when the forest had been closing in on him, crushing him, herding him in a particular direction…but this was nothing like that. There was no malevolence here, only reverence for whatever Lesya held within her. That was something else, Jack thought, and he looked back over his shoulder into the motionless forest behind him.
When he turned back to the clearing, he saw, past Lesya and in the shadows of the facing trees, something gray.
“Oh!” Jack cried out, because he thought it was a wolf.
Lesya turned around. Her singing stopped. The forest became only a forest again; movement ceased, shapes stilled into shadows, and growth and decline followed their own imperceptible timescale once more. The gray shape vanished.
And for the space of a heartbeat, Lesya’s face looked blank and hard.
“There’s something in the forest,” Jack said, because he had no idea how to even begin asking about what she had been doing.
Lesya walked to Jack, touched his face, and looked over his shoulder into the forest behind him. She sighed.
“Come with me,” she said. “It’s time I told you some things.”
“About you? About the forest trying to kill me?”
Did Lesya smile? Jack wasn’t sure, but if she did, it was an expression he did not like. He had never seen a hint of mockery in her eyes until now.
“If he wanted to kill, he would have killed,” she said. “I need to tell you about my father.” She headed across the clearing without once glancing back, and Jack could only follow.
As they walked, Lesya talked. Jack listened in amazement, but also with some relief. Incredible though what she told him was, at least it went some way toward explaining what had been happening to him these last few weeks. Magic, he thought again, but it was something much older than that.
“My father is Leshii, an ancient Forest Lord, and he has lived in these forests for three hundred years. He came in the minds and hearts of Russian explorers, and he had a comfortable home here until the land slowly killed them. Hunger, the cold, violence, the local tribes—within three years of coming here, the explorers were all dead. But my father remained, because he had found a paradise. He claimed these forests as his own, protecting them, nurturing, enjoying places where the touch of man was rare.”
Lesya and Jack paused by a stream, and she jumped across to the opposite bank. He went to follow…and paused.
“It’s too far,” he said, trying to picture just how she had leaped. He frowned, because the memory was hazy.
Lesya smiled across at him, then pointed down. “There are three stepping stones for you to use,” she said, and Jack started across. Even before he had reached her, Lesya was talking again.
“So far from home, my father was weak. The tribes here did not know him by the right name; their belief in other spirits, and their denial of him, was weakening him year by year. Summer would come, and he would dry out to almost nothing. And then winter, and darkness, and he would grow strong again in the haunted minds of men and women. He disliked preying on their fears, but that was his only way to grow. And he paid them back by protecting their herds, and warning them when harsh winters were closing in.”
“So it was he who tried to kill me?” Jack asked. He had seen magic and witnessed things that he could barely believe, but he was still far away from believing this. Yet the question did not feel foolish, and Lesya’s answer was sobering.
“My father is mad, now, after so long here,” she said without turning to look at him. “And I sense that with you and me, he is jealous. It’s only lucky that he is so weakened by time and disbelief.”
“So if I believe, will it strengthen him?”
Lesya stopped then and turned to him, her face grim. Yet her eyes still sparkled. I could love her, he thought unexpectedly, and he held his breath, waiting for the trees to close in and crush the love from him.
“You must let me worry about my father,” she said. She came close, touching Jack’s face and looking at her bloodied fingertip. “I’ll protect you.”
“And you?” Jack asked. “What about you? If he’s your father, then…?” He frowned, shook his head. What does that make you? he thought, but he did not say that. She was too beautiful to question.
“I had a human mother,” she said. “A long time ago, when Father was still strong and could appear as a man, he met an Indian woman lost in the hills, took her in, cared for her. He knew that the time would come when their disbelief wore him down, and perhaps he thought that taking a human wife would avert that.” She shrugged. “She died giving birth to me.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack said, and Lesya smiled sadly.
She turned and headed away again, and minutes later they emerged into the cabin clearing.
For a second, Jack felt dizzy. He leaned against a tree and looked past Lesya at the cabin. This is all too much, he thought. Living buildings, forest gods, and Lesya…Lesya, my love, what was she doing back there in the clearing? He feared her then, and realized that part of his confusion always had been fear. She was something he could never understand completely, and her beauty—and, perhaps, the idea that they could love—was clouding his mind.
“Of any human, it’s you who can understand,” Lesya said, as if in response to his thoughts. “There are so many wonders!”
She fell to her knees, leaned forward, and placed her hands on the earth, smiling up at Jack.
He blinked.
And then Lesya was an arctic fox, loping across the clearing and disappearing behind the cabin.
“Lesya?” he said, looking around for her, unable to believe what he had seen. His acceptance of a touch of magic was being challenged every moment by things even more unbelievable.
A caribou emerged from behind the cabin, trotting across to Jack, dodging the many bright flower beds dotted around the clearing. It paused before him and snorted, smelling of cinnamon and the wild. He blinked…
…and Lesya was there again. She was breathing hard, as if she had been running. Her simple dress still sprouted fur in several places. Every inch of her smile included him, and was for him. He closed his eyes, but that could not shut out such terrifying wonders.
He closed his eyes, but that could not shut out such terrifying wonders.
“Jack, there’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said.
Jack opened his eyes again, and it was still Lesya standing before him, the incredible, beautiful woman who he knew it would be so easy to love. “Really?” he asked, because he could not help doubting.