Chapter Thirty
Sleep brought clarity, allowing the mind to unsnarl and connect previously elusive threads.
The revelation didn’t come immediately. Not when she blinked back sleep, nor when she listened to the sweet nothings Gudarīks whispered in her ear. Not while in the throes of exuberant morning sex. But on her skis, zipping down the slopes on her way home with the invigorating bite of wind whipping her face, the truth of Gudarīks’s age and his relationship to this tract of land hit her.
Gudarīks was as old as the forest itself. He might even be older. If he was here before the trees sprang from the ground, had he tended to them as he did his flowers, ensuring they grew healthy and strong?
To think that he might have witnessed every moment of its life from seed to sapling to lush, dense forest stretching its limbs far and wide.
Astrid glided past the descendants of those trees, humbled.
The local humans called him Wald Vater— forest father . Or at least the ones who still believed.
Maybe he truly was.
Performing the hag ritual with him went beyond the personal gain her final transformation would bring. Astrid would be absorbing a piece of his life force. The very essence of who he was and ever would be. The dark, the light. The thousands of years of destruction and creation. She would wear his crown and all the burdens and joys that came with it.
Astrid always belonged to this forest. Had always felt compelled to protect it.
But if these trees were Gudarīks’s children, they would become hers too.
Forest Mother.
She rather liked the sound of that.