xlii. In which there are multiple transformations
Panic welled in Arthur’s chest. He pressed the spot where the acorn had vanished, but it was gone. Tarnish still spread. Ooze
still dripped down the dying trees, same as the black veins creeping across his stomach and chest and up his throat. Blood
still spilled from Ira’s side.
“No.” Arthur’s breath rattled. “No. No, this isn’t—”
“Maybe something was wrong with that one,” Elspeth said doubtfully. “Maybe mine—”
Charlotte was already clasping it around Arthur’s neck in place of their father’s. “Absolutely not. His sickness has spread
quite far enough.”
“What do you want to do, Lottie?” Elspeth asked. “Acorn’s not gonna stop his sickness spreading, just slow it down some.”
“It’ll give me time to get more. To make more water.”
“Lottie, please,” Arthur rasped. “Please. He’ll die without it.”
He tried to remove the acorn from his neck, but Charlotte gripped his hands. Her eyes widened: Despite the acorn, the black
veins did not slow. Each breath he took rattled worse than the last. His lungs struggled to expand and contract.
His sister’s voice wobbled. “Why isn’t it working?”
“Reckon nothing’ll help now.” Elspeth touched Charlotte’s shoulder. “I’ll stay with him, if you want. You should get out of here, before the whole forest goes.”
“I’m not leaving without the two of you.”
“Things’re different now, Lottie,” Elspeth said gently. “There’s nothing to be done for him. And the kids are out here, too.
You want them safe, don’t you?”
“Yes, but—”
“She’s right.” Arthur extricated his hands from her grasp, his fingers stiff and cold. “You could make it safely away with
the children.”
Charlotte’s eyes welled with tears. “I came here for you.”
He smiled crookedly. “I know. It’s the best thing anyone’s ever done for me.”
That he would die in the forest anyway, in the end, didn’t matter. It was enough that she’d come after him. That she’d done
something so deeply impractical, with so little hope of success, simply because she loved him and he’d needed her.
His own failure was harder to bear. For thirty years, Ira had been resigned to his fate. To dying because his forest was dying,
because they were irrevocably bound together. Arthur had made him believe it didn’t have to be that way—but there Ira was,
lying on the other side of the stump, dying anyway.
Arthur pushed to his feet and stumbled toward him, coughing.
“Arthur—”
Every step was agony. He hunched, clinging to the stump for support as he rounded it.
Maud turned her wrinkled brown face to him as he approached. Like her ravens, she had a faded quality. Not translucent, not
veined in black, but glimmering in and out the way the wild huntsman had. Her silver eyes dimmed. With one withered, vanishing
hand, she clutched Ira’s fingers.
Blood matted in Ira’s shirt, his fur. His ears twitched as Arthur approached. He turned his head weakly, nostrils flaring. Calyx twined thinly around one wrist. Blood stained the stump red.
Arthur knelt at his side, numb. Then, suddenly, not numb at all. His skin prickled, tears coursed down his cheeks, and he
pressed his forehead to Ira’s and wept. They’d made it here. They’d made it, yet it was ending this way. Ira raised a clawed hand to touch his cheek, but it fell back to his side.
Around them, leaves wilted and dropped from trees. Vines crumbled to ash. Dead birds rotted away until nothing remained but
skeletons. Calyx’s leaves curled, blackened, and dropped off.
Arthur’s breath hitched. His fingers curled in Ira’s fur, his chest buzzing with sudden hope. They still had one acorn.
He fumbled with the chain, but his fingers had gone stiff and aching. Behind him, Charlotte had approached cautiously, despite
their efforts to send her away.
Kneeling beside him, she undid the chain and handed him the acorn. “What are you thinking?”
“I think,” Arthur said, “he’s the heart of the wood.”
“Of course he is.” Maud’s creaky voice had a faded quality like her form. “He and the tree. Twin anchor points. Like binary
stars.”
Then this would work. They were bound to each other, Ira and the tree, both necessary to keep the forest alive. As the tree
was the one that had been dying, Ira hadn’t been so concerned with himself. The tree had been replanted; now Ira would be.
It would work.
It had to work, because if it didn’t, Ira was going to die. And the forest, and Arthur, would die alongside him.
Ira was barely breathing. Arthur kissed his forehead.
“Come back to me,” he whispered, and he pressed the acorn to Ira’s heart.
As the other had at the stump, the acorn glowed, then melted into him.
Silver light snaked from his heart and wound around him. Charlotte stumbled back, dragging Arthur with her. Maud shuffled
after them. Calyx unwound feebly from Ira’s wrist, fell to the ground, and inchwormed away.
The humans shielded their eyes. The silver light wound faster and faster, glowing so brightly they could barely see Ira.
He lifted into the air.
Light shone from his paws, his antlers, his face. The blood matting his fur streamed back into the wound, until his shirt
was clean and his body uninjured, except for the twisted leg and scarred eye. He transformed back into a man, more human in
form than Arthur had ever seen him.
Around him, the silver light shone on the trees. The black ooze on their trunks vanished. Their withered leaves regrew in
a burst of greenery. The skeletal birds at their feet erupted into flight in a flurry of feathers and down and birdsong. Maud’s
ravens joined them, solid again. Calyx unwound in a spool of fresh greenery.
Arthur’s chest tingled hopefully. Charlotte squeezed his hand. Elspeth wrapped an arm around her waist.
The light lowered Ira to the stump. Arthur stepped toward him, but, in a single burst, the light twisted up from his body
and into a tree: a silver oak growing from the stump in moments instead of years. Silver grew over Ira’s body, as the moss
and flowers had done so many times, until it encased him. No more than a human face protruding from a silver trunk. The hopeful
tingling in Arthur’s chest soured to dread.
When it was a young tree some twenty feet tall, with a spreading crown, the oak stopped growing.
Silver acorns shook free of its branches, showering the ground.
The surrounding flora was soft and green and sweet smelling.
Maud poked through the grass with her cane, gathering acorns.
Her ravens stalked after her. The light faded.
In the oak’s trunk, silver gilded the contours of Ira’s face. Calyx nosed at the trunk like a confused dog.
“Arthur?”
He staggered toward the tree without answering, chest tight. Swallowing, he touched Ira’s cheek. His skin was hard and silver,
no different from the rest of the oak.
“Ira?” Arthur whispered.
The tree did not answer. He leaned his forehead against it and cried.
There was a tug at his trousers. Predictably, the children had left their hiding place. Sasha gazed up at him much more seriously
than was her wont, the cat clutched disgruntled in one arm.
“Look, Uncle Arthur. You’re all better.”
It wasn’t quite accurate: He was riddled with the bear’s claw marks. But his breathing had eased; he was no longer cold, and
his joints no longer ached. The black veins were gone. Sasha prodded his stomach, avoiding his bandages, to show him.
He attempted a smile. “I see.”
She hugged him tight. His abdomen ached, but he hugged her back.
Charlotte caught his eye as he turned from the tree, bit her lip like she wanted to say something, but she merely took his
hand. Elspeth nodded at him, her jaw tight. He gave her the smallest imaginable smile, but his heart was shattered. He’d thought
he would save Ira, not doom him.
Behind them, there was a crack like thunder and a flash of light. They whipped around. With another crack, the tree split—and
Ira stumbled out.
He heaved a breath, gazing down at his own body. His skin was sun-bronzed, his hair inky dark, one eye scarred, one leg twisted, all human in form. He was clad in flowers and leaves like he’d always been in George’s stories, but no moss or flowers or silver grew from his skin.
Arthur’s heart leaped.
“Ira?” he croaked, half expecting it to be one of the wood’s tricks.
The Lord of the Wood shivered into a stag and bounded through the clearing, tossing his head. Into a wolf that howled then
raced to the tree, muscles bunching under his fur. A raven spiraling into the sky with a croak. As he returned to earth, he
shivered back into a man and landed with a stumble, shifting his weight to his left leg as woodland flowers blossomed at his
feet.
For the first time in thirty years, he’d changed entirely back.
He laughed, strode toward Arthur, cupped his face in his hands, and kissed him.
Before Arthur could respond, Ira pulled away.
“You saved me,” he said.
“It was Elspeth’s acorn.” Arthur’s lips curved into a smile. “Would you kiss me again?”
Ira smiled, too, his eyes flickering over Arthur’s face. He pulled Arthur back in, hands fisting in Arthur’s hair, and kissed
him. Arthur kissed him back, overwhelmed by the press of Ira’s body and the pleasurable pain of his fingers and the desperate
crush of his lips. They kissed and kissed and kissed, and Ira’s fingers tightened in his hair, and Arthur held Ira so hard
that he lifted his feet off the ground.
Then he stopped, because his injuries throbbed and he worried he might’ve popped his stitches. He set Ira down, carefully,
and touched his face.
“I won’t lie,” he said breathlessly. “I miss the antlers. And, er, well, the claws. A little.”
Ira let out a huff of laughter. “I can put them back, you know. Now and then. If you want.”
Beside them, Maud cleared her throat. They broke apart. Arthur’s ears pinkened. Ira laughed.
“If you two are quite finished,” Maud said.
Ira smiled. “For now.”
“Sorry,” Arthur said, too giddy to be sorry at all.
Elspeth raised an eyebrow. Charlotte bit back a smile. Sasha, ever disgusted by “kissing books,” looked nauseated. Jonas blushed
but kept glancing between their uncle and the Lord of the Wood as if they hadn’t realized men kissing other men was an option.
Ira slipped his hand into Arthur’s. Calyx wound between his legs like a cat.
Arthur squeezed his fingers. “What now?”
“Now,” Charlotte said, “we find Elspeth’s sister.”