The Deer Prince's Murder: Book Two of 'Fantasy & Forensics' (Fantasy & Forensics 2) (3 page)

“Oh, look,” one said, “Prince Liam managed to bag himself a stand-in for the event.”

“Bag? More like ‘beg’! I don’t recognize her,” another observed.

“She’s probably the one who begged to come,” a third
tsked
. “I can see why someone drove her out of the herd. Pitiful choice really. Not fit for a princeling.”

“Even one as wee and broken as Liam!”

A chorus of strange, bleating laughs. Liam’s jaw set firm and he ignored the comments. Of course, they immediately started back in on me. Yeah, the Fayleene might have been beautiful magical deer, but up close, they were a bunch of harpies with cloven hooves.

“Oh, this one thinks she’s a pretty flower, does she not?”

“Puh-leze. Just look at those antlers! It’s obvious that she’s had some work done.”

“And I bet those white spots on her flank wash right off after sunset!”

Another titter of laughter. One which was drowned out by a male voice, one that was smooth as silk and yet carried the unmistakably arrogant tone of command.

“Ladies,” said the voice, “Let us be kind to our newcomers. I, for one, am genuinely curious as to who Liam managed to corral for this function.”

A new pair of figures emerged from the brush beside the trail to join us. The slighter figure was a young doe, who threw me a glance laden with a clear ‘keep your hooves off my man’ warning. As to the larger figure…

Liam let out a resigned sigh. “Hello, Prince Wyeth.”

Wyeth didn’t so much as acknowledge the greeting as he came into view. I wasn’t into Fayleene, no matter the body I wore, but this specimen was enough to put a hitch in a girl’s breath. I’d said once before that Liam looked more than a little like Bambi. But Wyeth looked
exactly
like the Disney character – the version from the last act of the film, when the fawn had grown up into a handsome stag. His body was a lean slab of dun-colored muscle, perfectly proportioned, and crowned with a glorious twelve-point rack of antlers.

I could see someone sculpting this creature’s form into the hood ornament for a Rolls Royce. Or sketching his likeness to put on a wine bottle’s label. But once I’d listened to him for a few minutes, I’d have preferred that some hunter had shot him and mounted his head on a wall.

“Well, now,” Wyeth pronounced, as he craned his neck to look at us. “I am surprised. Not only does little Prince Liam have a pretty doe following in his wake, I can’t make out the leash he’s using to drag her along!”

Chapter Three

“Leave us be,” Liam said flatly. “We’re not bothering you, are we?”

“As if you ever had a choice in the matter.” The large stag fell in beside me, and I abruptly became aware of his muscular bulk. Liam was only a little bigger than me, in this form. But Wyeth’s barrel chest was easily double the width of mine, and my eyes only came up to the middle third of his neck. He stared at me for a moment, and let out an amazed snort.

“Now it all makes sense,” he muttered under his breath. “I should have known...”

“Wyeth,” Liam gritted in a frosty tone, “I’m warning you. Leave my consort alone and attend to your own.”

Again, the large stag ignored Liam’s words. He continued to stare at me in amazement.

And I’d had just about enough of this.

“Look,” I appealed to Liam, “that’s got to count as ‘being spoken to’. Because I’m getting tired of this nonsense.”

“Ah,” Wyeth announced, his voice thick with sarcasm. “You do speak, pretty little doe.”

“Well, that last bit definitely counts as being spoken to,” Liam grumped.

“Good.” I canted my head back to look into Wyeth’s impassive, coffee-brown eyes. “I do speak, and I’d like to know where you picked up your winning attitude. Liam’s traveled to the court of King Benedict and Fitzwilliam, saved hundreds of lives, traveled to another world, and captured the mad wizard, Magnus Killsheven! Tell me, Wyeth: what have you done with your life besides nibble on tender shoots, drink from forest pools, and shag the occasional doe with extremely bad taste in her choice of studs?”

I think my shot must’ve hit home, as the surrounding does recoiled as if I’d bucked and kicked at them. A few hushed words to their male consorts and the other couples picked up the pace, leaving us behind. Wyeth, for his part, gave his own doe a nudge with his muzzle, urging her on. Once she’d trotted ahead, out of earshot, Wyeth gave me a final once-over, as if deciding where to jam the point of his antlers into my hide.

“Prince Liam’s not the only one who has contacts in the human realm,” he said quietly. “I know who and what you are, Dayna Chrissie. And I know that you’re the daughter of a Fayleene murderer!”

That stopped me. I traded a startled, horrified glance with Liam.

How the hell did this son-of-a-buck know?

“Oh, yes,” he went on, “a few words from me at this very moment, and bucks here would tear you apart. A few words from me a little later, when we’re in the Sacred Grove? The Lead Does themselves would flay your Fayleene skin from your human flesh!”

“Never,” Liam declared, as he interposed his body between me and the larger stag. “They could try. But they would have to go through me first.”

Wyeth’s face took on an amused look. But his voice remained as serious as ever as he sniffed, “I don’t need to prove my power that way. When I take our father’s place as the Protector of the Forest, I’ll be gracious. Just this once, I’ll forget that you’ve committed such a blasphemy. Consider it my gift to you, runt of a princeling.”

With that, Wyeth bounded forward out of sight.

I rounded on Liam in an instant.

“Hold on a minute! That arrogant, ill-mannered jerk of a stag…he’s one of the Protector’s sons? We are talking about Quinval, the all-powerful Protector of the Forest?”

Liam let out a snort of his own, this time. “That’s typically how it works in monarchies.”

“But–”

“For obvious reasons, it’s important to ensure that the Protector’s line goes on. Thus, Quinval has long had the right to mate with as many of the Lead Does as he wishes, so long as they consent to the breeding. So Wyeth, myself, the other Fayleene princelings…we’re all brothers or half-brothers.”

“That means…that you’re as much a son of the Protector as any of the others,” I said, understanding.

“True. Not that the family connection counts for all that much. My ‘brothers’ shunned me just as the rest of my people did, all those years. But Wyeth is something different. He’s the eldest of Quinval’s get. He’s always been the biggest, the most aggressive. And he’s always felt that gave him the right to lord his gifts over the rest of us.”

“It shouldn’t give him any right.”

“Yet it seems to. It’s long been assumed that he would take over for Quinval someday. And he’s pushed himself, trained himself to be the fastest, the strongest. Ready to take over as soon as our father started to teeter into old age. It’s admirable, I suppose, but his abilities make it hard for him to understand what it’s like for others not as lucky. I understood this best at the time of my accident.”

“When you broke your antler, escaping a dragon.”

“Even so. I limped back to the herd, burned and badly hurt, hoping the does would show mercy and treat my wounds. It looked like they were going to. I think they were. But Wyeth drove me off into the wilderness. Said that if I were meant to survive, I would prove it by doing so. And so I did.”

The young princeling’s voice trailed off. His face gave nothing away, but his gaze remained fixed on some point immeasurably far off in space and time.

“Liam, I can’t imagine what it must have been like, having him for a brother. But we don’t get to choose our family. Sometimes we just…need to try and find the good that’s within them.”

A moment passed, then two. He looked at me, eyes pleading.

“How do I do that, Dayna?”

“I don’t know. But we all have to try, at least.”

A rush of voices filled my ears, making them flick back and forth. I let out a gasp as Liam and I stepped into a vast, green cathedral of space. Trees the height of California redwoods arched overhead, creating a vaulted ceiling of branches. Dots of sunlight filtered through, dappling the crowd of Fayleene couples below. Off to one side, a line of older, gray-spotted females watched in regal silence as the newly arrived Fayleene sorted themselves out around the huge oval of the clearing.

At equally spaced intervals on the forest floor lay a quartet of wide, flat leaves shaped like lily pads. Atop each leaf were small heaps of seeds, nuts, and a dark, chunky substance I couldn’t quite make out. But there were other things competing for my attention at that moment. Chief among them was Wyeth’s voice, raised in outrage and sorrow.

“No! By the sacred heartwood, this cannot be so!”

He raced forward, stopped, and stared into the shimmering veil of gold light that lay across the very center of the Grove. I recognized the shimmer as Liam and I drew closer. He also let out a cry of dismay, followed by similar shrieks and howls from the other Fayleene around us.

The shimmer came from a preservation spell, one meant to slow or stop decay. I’d seen one before when I examined the body of Good King Benedict. Walking through the magical shield hadn’t been a pleasant experience, but I could attest to the fact that it had kept the corpse fresh.

It looked like it was working now, too.

Resting peacefully under the golden shimmer was an elder stag. His coat was a shiny, healthy slate gray. But his eyes were closed, and his chest did not rise and fall.

“Liam…” I breathed, “Is that who I think it is?”

“Yes,” he said, and his voice came out in a croak. “That’s my sire, Quinval. The Protector of the Forest lies dead before us.”

All of a sudden, I had a really,
really
bad feeling about all of this.

The Protector of the Forest lay peacefully under the preservation spell, as if in some dreamless slumber. Quinval’s legs lay folded beneath his gray-haired torso in the exact same pose I’d seen cats assume when they wanted to keep their paws tucked away for warmth. His long neck stretched out before him, eyes closed, letting his head loll on the ground in a manner that would’ve been pretty uncomfortable. Uncomfortable, that is, if he hadn’t already been dead.

And the real kicker? He wasn’t the first dead Fayleene I’d seen.

It was the reason that Liam’s half-brother Wyeth had really shocked me earlier. One winter, back in rural Illinois around the time I was seven years old, I’d been out wandering the woods behind our house. That’s when I came across a trail of blood droplets in the crusty snow that wended its way through the trees and back towards my house.

I’d followed the track up to the side door of the garage. What I saw when I opened that door would baffle me for years afterwards. My father, who’d been out hunting deer that day, knelt sobbing in front of the open chest freezer. Lying in the freezer like so much raw meat was a doe, a doe with ten-point antlers. My father confided in me the horrible events of that morning: he’d shot a deer, and afterwards, just as she died, she’d spoken to him as clearly as one human being to another. He begged me to keep what happened a secret, and I did.

Afterwards, I would dream about that very day. But time acts like thick fog sometimes, smothering details, the sure feelings of memories. I’d never been quite sure if what took place that winter was one-hundred percent real.

That is, until I came to Andeluvia to solve King Benedict’s murder. Until I learned that both a severely wounded wizard, Magnus Killsheven, and that poor Fayleene doe had somehow arrived in my world. And my father had pulled the trigger that had killed the innocent, unknowing being of fey magic. A pang went through my chest as I realized that what Wyeth said was true: my family had murdered a Fayleene in cold blood.

Very few people in this world had known about it.

Or so I had thought.

Around me, in the present, the Fayleene continued to let out bleats and cries of fear, dismay, and outrage. Until one of the Lead Does got to her feet and spoke in a booming, resonant voice that cut through the cacophony and stopped it cold.

“Be at ease!” she intoned. “No matter if you are buck or doe, first-yearling to the Grove or a seasoned attendee, this is a special time. A time of endings, of remembrance, and new beginnings. What has happened is truly sad, but as night must pass for morning to break, so too do we honor and respect the memory of our Protector.”

“Mistress Orlaith!” Wyeth’s smooth tones echoed in the abrupt silence. “Who is responsible for this outrage? I would gladly lead the way to exact bloody vengeance upon all who–”

“Did I not say to ‘be at ease’, princeling?” The Lead Doe named Orlaith cocked an appraising eyebrow in response. “Your words are hot and rash when none are needed. Three days before, the Protector was found as you see him now. There was no sign of violence. No sign of hostile magic. He has simply gone to sleep, the sleep of the long dark followed by the awakening in the fallow fields of the Great Beyond.”

A general murmur of discontent ran through the assembled fey deer.

“But this…this has never happened before! The death of our Protector leaves us without a senior stag to mentor his successor!” Wyeth paused for a moment, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t tilt his head back and raise a foreleg to strike a theatrical pose. A couple of the younger does in the crowd let out delighted gasps and titters. “The younger, chosen stag, though I am
sure
he’ll be truly worthy of your choice…how will he learn the deeper magic of the forest as he ascends to his well-deserved throne?”

Orlaith’s tone came across as more than a little frosty now. “We are well aware that this has never happened before, princeling. Many things that have not been seen under this world’s sun are yet again making themselves felt, that much is true. We have allowed for this in our choice, and as we weave the spell to anoint the one slated to succeed, the rest of you must feed. Feed upon the delicacies that Quinval loved, and think naught but good thoughts of his name.”

A few more mutterings followed this last announcement, but they were muted compared to before. Wyeth bowed elegantly to the Lead Does, accepting their authority. He joined his consort and went over to the set of leaves that had been placed closest to the line of Lead Does. With a glare and a haughty snort, Wyeth shoved the pair of Fayleene that had already claimed the spot out of the way.