The Changeling Bride

by Lisa Cach

  Henry released her hand and leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest and contemplating his situation. For some reason he could not understand, when it came to Elle he was incapable of the crystal objectivity he applied to all other matters. In the space of a week she had changed him from a man in control of his environment to one who frankly did not know which way was up.

  He would not act yet. She was young. It had to be a frightening change for her, going from the safety of home to a new house, away from her family, and expected to play wife to a man she hardly knew. He would give her more time. If she settled down, fine and good. If her eccentricities showed a marked or troublesome increase, however . . . well, he would cross that bridge when he came to it.

  He felt a little better now that he had reached a decision, however provisional. He turned his attention back to his great-grandmother and the room around him, feeling the familiarity of it comfort him. He imagined it did the same for her, and any thought of moving her to another part of the house seemed cruel. If she no longer held memories in her own mind, then they were held for her here in this room. He would not take her away from them.

  A door opened and Sally, Lady Annalise’s waiting woman, came in bearing a tray.

  “Your pardon, milord! I thought her ladyship was alone.”

  Henry rose and took the tray from her, setting it on the table next to his great-grandmother. “No apology necessary. Tell me, how has she been faring of late?”

  “Same as always, milord.”

  “She has not . . . been talking at all?”

  “She lets me know what she needs well enough, but I would not say she has been talking.”

  “Ah, well, I suppose it was too much to hope. And you, Sally? How are you doing? Do you need any extra help?”

  “Oh, no, milord. Not at all.” She looked alarmed at the prospect. “I would not have it any other way. I may be old, but I am still strong enough to look after her ladyship. I know her ways. She would not like someone new interfering with her things.”

  “We will be hiring new staff so if you change your mind, just let either Thomas or Abigail know.”

  “Thank you, milord.”

  Henry bent down and kissed Lady Annalise on the cheek. “Thank you for listening.”

  He straightened up. He would go find Elle. An afternoon’s distance may have served to calm her down after this morning’s events. It was unthinkable to go back to work, when she was somewhere in the house.

  The door closed behind him, and the room was silent as his footsteps faded down the hall. When Henry was out of earshot, Sally spoke to her mistress. “Do you really think ’tis fair, what you are doing to him?”

  Lady Annalise gave a knowing little smile.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The dirt road eventually led out of the woods to a small village on the edge of fields. Elle drew back on the reins, halting Belle at the end of the trees. She couldn’t ride through that village, a woman riding bareback in men’s clothing, a white dog alongside. She would be immediately noticed, and anyone looking for her might be able to find her before she had a real chance to escape.

  She turned Belle back into the woods and retraced their steps to where a footpath led off into the forest. The book said that fairies preferred woodlands, and preferred hills. She had the proof of that from her own experience, and so it was that combination she sought.

  The path grew narrower as they went, the undergrowth heavier. Tatiana took up a place behind her and followed in silence. Elle lost all sense of direction, and whenever the path forked, she allowed Belle to choose their way.

  The woods grew dark as night approached, and still she had not come across a hill in the forest. Gentle rises and shallow depressions, yes, but nothing like the hill behind her apartment complex, or the hill near Eleanor’s home. There had to be one here somewhere.

  If she had to wander these woods for two days, she would. It had come to her this afternoon that there was still a way to reverse what she had done with Henry. If she could get home, she could make an emergency appointment with her gynecologist and get the morning-after pill. She wouldn’t get pregnant. It was a thin thread of hope, but it was better than nothing.

  It was getting hard to see the path. Rustling and crackling sounds in the woods that had not bothered her in the light of day began to play upon Elle’s nerves, and her tension transmitted itself to Belle. The horse began to shy at waving branches and at the sudden call of an owl. It was dark enough that even if she came upon a hill, she might not see it.

  She was considering the necessity of stopping for the night when a fuzzy dot of light appeared up ahead, bobbing through the air. She had read enough about will-o’-the-wisps to hope that this was one, no matter their reputation for leading one to an unfortunate end.

  Elle could feel Belle’s uneasiness about the wisp through her thighs. The mare’s flesh fairly quivered with tension. She nudged the reluctant horse to a quicker pace, following the bobbing light, but when they came to a low-hanging branch that swayed across the path, the mare shied and would go no farther.

  “C’mon, Belle, it won’t hurt you,” Elle tried to persuade her, patting her neck. “They’re just leaves.” She tried digging her heels into the mare’s side, but Belle backed up, then sidestepped, her head jerking as she fought to turn around on the narrow path.

  “Please, Belle, we’ll lose the wisp.” Still the horse struggled, snorting and pulling at the reins, and Elle began to worry she might not be able to control her mount.

  The light bobbed back toward them, and Belle’s ears flattened to her head. Elle was just beginning to hope that the wisp had come back to help when it flew past her and zapped itself against Belle’s backside.

  The horse became one enormous bunched muscle beneath her, and then Belle sprang forward, breaking through the overhanging leaves and charging down the path as if her tail were on fire. The wisp zipped on ahead, but while it went down one fork in the path, Belle chose another.

  Elle clung to the mare’s mane, flattening her body as the branches that overhung the path became lower and lower. She ducked her head and felt twigs drag across her scalp and down her back. They were not even on the path now. Belle raced through a portion of forest with mercifully little undergrowth, the ground rushing by beneath her frantic hooves.

  Elle raised her head just in time to make out the dark shape of a tree limb. The next moment she was sprawled on the ground, the breath knocked out of her. After an agonizing minute of trying to gasp for air, her muscles obeyed and she breathed in the dank scent of the forest floor. She reached up and touched her forehead, but could feel no lump or cut skin. She could not tell where the limb had hit her, now that she had the bruises from the tumble to the ground to confuse her.

  She sat up, and Tatiana came rushing out of the darkness, finally catching up to her mistress. Elle wrapped her arms around the dog, and rested with her face in the thick white fur. She had never been on a bolting horse before and needed comfort.

  At last she raised her head and could see only variations of black and grey around her. There was no sign of Belle. She took off her makeshift pack and untied the scarves. The bowl had broken, and the small crock of honey had spilled its contents all over the book.

  She wiped the book off as best she could on nearby foliage, then dumped the broken bowl and the crock, packing the rest back into the scarf. She stood, relieved to find that her legs still worked, for all that her thighs were damp with horse sweat and she felt bowlegged.

  “Damn it, Tatiana, what am I supposed to do now?” The forest seemed a lot less friendly now that she was down on the ground and had only her own slow legs to rely upon. She stared into the darkness, trying to make out one direction that was more promising than another.

  A small light bobbed into view.

  “What do you think?” she asked the dog.

  Tatiana panted. Elle shrugged and followed the light.

  Henry pulled back the edge of the four-poster
’s drapery and frowned at the neatly made bed within. What the devil? Marianne had expressly told him that Elle was resting in her room and had asked not to be disturbed.

  He looked around the bedchamber, as if it would tell him where his wife had gone off to. The room told him nothing.

  He went and found Thomas, who had not seen her, and then Abigail.

  “No, milord, but Betsy did say as how the countess had come to the kitchens some time ago.”

  “What did she want?”

  “I do not know, milord.”

  He tracked down Betsy.

  “Bread, milk, and honey, milord. And she wrapped it up in a scarf with a book, and looked as if she were going outside.”

  “An impromptu picnic, no doubt,” he said, not believing it, and suspecting Betsy did not quite believe it either. He would not have the staff thinking his countess had run off if he could help it, but the tension in his gut was telling him that that was exactly what had happened.

  He excused himself and made to the next logical place. The saddles were all in place in the tack room, but Belle was most definitely not in her stall. Bart, the stableboy, had seen Elle about an hour ago.

  “She were looking at Belle, milord,” the boy said. “And I went and mucked out some stalls. She were gone when I come back to the front here.”

  “And Belle?”

  “I did not look, milord,” the boy mumbled.

  “Not to worry, Bart. She did not tell us she wanted to go riding again, is all.”

  The boy’s glance slid to the sidesaddle hanging unused.

  Dusk was creeping across the stable yard by the time Henry rode out on his own mount. He had briefly considered asking others to join in the search but had rejected the idea. He could not have a servant find her and know that she had deliberately run away—although he was beginning to think that hiding that fact was a futile endeavor. They must all be suspecting that something was seriously amiss.

  He cantered down the road they had taken that morning, trying to put himself in Elle’s mind and failing miserably. This made no logical sense. There was nowhere for her to go. Even if her former lover was out there, she must know she had little chance of reaching him traveling alone, bareback, and as far as he knew, penniless. She was not thinking clearly.

  It was full dark when he emerged from the woods at the edge of the village of Brookhaven. An inner certainty told him that Elle would not have ridden through this hamlet, although he asked a farmer checking on his pigs anyhow.

  “No, milord, not seen sight of a lady riding bareback, nor a white dog, neither, and sure it is that the missus would have told me if such a one had ridden through.”

  Henry thanked him and turned back to the forest, thinking as his horse trod carefully down the dark road, trying to ignore the worry that churned inside. She would not have ridden down the front drive, for fear of being seen, and would not have ridden overland for the same reason. She must have taken this road.

  She was in the forest somewhere, on one of the paths that twisted through. He would never find her in the dark and could only hope she would be safe until morning. It had been stupid of him to come out here alone, without servants and torches. His thinking was as muddled as hers.

  His horse suddenly whickered, to be answered by another in the trees to the left. There was a snapping of twigs, and then the dark shape of another horse spilled out onto the road.

  Even in the faint light he could see that it was riderless. He rode close and snatched up the trailing reins. There was no saddle, either.

  “Ah, Belle,” he said, stroking the mare’s neck. “What have you done with her, eh?” He tied the reins to the back of his saddle, new hope and new worries mingling in his mind. She might be close by. She might also be hurt.

  He put his faith in his mount’s eyesight, and turned down the narrow path that was no more than a shadowy break in the undergrowth.

  Elle tripped, falling to her hands and knees. “Wait!” she called to the bobbing light. It seemed to hear her and bobbed in place while she dusted off her hands and pulled herself to her feet again. They were not on a path, and this was the second time she had tripped on roots or fallen branches. She should have paid more attention to the warnings about wisps.

  “Are we almost there?”

  The wisp moved off, and she plodded after.

  She followed it through a dense tangle of brambles, thorns snagging her skin and clothes, and stumbled at last into a small grassy clearing. The ground was blessedly even beneath her feet, and in the center of the clearing grew a phosphorescent ring of mushrooms. The wisp bobbed above the center of it.

  “A fairy ring,” Elle said. “Of course.”

  She stepped into the center of it with Tatiana, and the moment they did the wisp vanished. “Wait! You can’t go yet, I haven’t had a chance to talk to you.”

  The wisp blinked on several feet outside the circle, and Elle moved to step out of the ring. She couldn’t. Her palms tingled unpleasantly as she pressed against the invisible barrier. She sank to the ground, sitting cross-legged and trying to keep the panic from her voice.

  “Okay, you want me to stay here. Fine. I’ve brought you snacks, though. Don’t you want them?” She untied the scarves and took out the slightly flattened bread and the jug of milk. The book had said that fairies could not resist such temptations. “I had honey, too, but it spilled. Sorry.”

  The light bobbed closer, and Tatiana lept at it, jaw snapping.

  “Tatia, no!”

  The light bobbed to the edge of the clearing, and Elle reached after her dog, but the circle stopped her, her hand hitting that barrier.

  “Here, girl.” Tatiana stepped back within the ring. “Sit.” Elle picked up Tatiana’s paw and pressed it into the air above the mushrooms. It went through where her own hand could not. “Huh.”

  The light bobbed a little closer and lower, and Elle could almost feel it looking at the bread and milk. Then Tatiana barked, and the wisp zipped up into the air, into the branches overhead, and then became a meteor streaking across the forest ceiling and vanishing into darkness.

  “Many thanks, Tatia,” Elle grumbled. “Now what do we do, my wise friend?”

  Tatiana lay down and put her nose between her paws. Elle wrapped her cloak around herself and snuggled up beside the dog. Tatiana had a point. There was nothing to do now but sleep and wait.

  Henry smelled wood smoke, and coming around a bed in the path saw the source of it up ahead. A small fire burned off to the side of the path, and hunched beside it sat a weathered old man in a misshapen high-crowned hat. There was a patch over one eye, but the other was bright and friendly, looking up at Henry without the caution that one would expect from one lone man in the forest meeting another.

  “Good evening,” Henry said.

  The man smiled, half his teeth missing, and gestured to his fire. “Come. Sit.”

  “I thank you, but regret that I cannot. I am searching for a woman lost in these woods. Have you seen her?”

  “Ahh.” The old man nodded and took a drink from the tin cup in his hand.

  “You have seen her, then?” Henry asked, hope quickening.

  “Drink?” The man offered his cup up to Henry.

  Perhaps the man was some manner of simpleton. Henry dismounted and squatted down by the fire. The old man rummaged in his pack and brought out another cup and a jug, pouring out a generous portion and handing it to Henry.

  “Thank you,” Henry said, accepting. “The woman has a white dog with her. Has she passed by this way?”

  The man tapped his finger at the corner of his good eye and nodded, then lifted his cup towards Henry before downing the contents.

  Henry examined the contents of his cup—it was some dark liquid that smelled heavily of spices. He took a tentative sip, and his mouth filled with gentle warmth, his head becoming intoxicated with the scent of flowers. “Extraordinary,” he murmured, and took a larger drink, losing his balance and falling back onto his r
ump on the ground.

  He stared at the old man, then at the fire, watching the flames leap and fall as if they had been slowed by the hand of time. “Extraor . . .” he tried to comment again, but his tongue would not work in his mouth, and he forgot what he had been trying to say. He had never seen such fascinating flames.

  His brain slowly began running again, and he shook his head to clear out the last vestiges of the wine. With a shock he saw that the fire was no more than ashes now, and there were birds singing to the dawn. The man had packed his things and was ready to leave.

  “Green path,” the man said, and pointed to a narrow swath of dense green grass leading into the forest. “Woman, dog.”

  “Thank you,” Henry said and pulled himself to his feet, blinking around at the grey light of early morning. He could scarce believe he had spent the night drinking beside a fire while Elle was out alone in the forest.

  The old man pointed to the grass again, nodded, then turned and hobbled down the regular path. He disappeared into the forest within a dozen steps.

  Still slightly muddled, Henry led his mount and Belle down the narrow trail, the swath of grass no more than a few inches wide. His head was completely clear by the time he emerged into the small clearing.

  Elle lay snuggled against her dog, asleep in the center of the clearing. Tatiana raised her head and gave a cheery woof. Elle raised her face from her arms, her eyes widening when she saw him.

  “Henry!”

  He dropped the reins and ran to her, knelt down and dragged her into his arms, crushing her against his chest. He had not known until this moment just how frightened for her he had been.

  She began to struggle against him, and he reluctantly loosened his hold enough for her to lift her face from his chest.

  “You’ll get stuck, Henry. The ring!”

  “Shh, you are safe now.”

  “The fairy ring, Henry! You’ve stepped into it.”

  He loosened his hold further, and she pulled away and pointed frantically at the circle of mushrooms around them. He followed the circle with his eyes, then lifted one of his knees to examine the crushed fungus underneath.