Shifter Planet

by D. B. Reynolds

  She glanced over her shoulder at Rhodry. He’d dozed off on a wide, flat stone overlooking the river, and was peacefully unaware that she was freezing to death only a few feet away. He was still in cat form, lying on his side with all four legs stretched loosely in front of him, his black fur winking blue in the dappled sunlight. On a day like today, with the sun high in the sky and no clouds, the stone would be warm beneath him, and he was soaking it in.

  Jealous, she snarled in his direction as she used wet sand from the river bottom to scrub her body quickly, being particularly careful of her various cuts and bruises, and especially the deep wounds on her arm and thigh. She’d taken the bandage off her arm. The wound was ugly, and already beginning to heal into an even uglier scar. Her thigh she’d left tightly wrapped, planning to exchange the bandage with something cleaner after she bathed.

  She finished scrubbing, and braced herself against the need for a second dunking to rinse off. She really wanted to do something with her hair and scalp, even if she didn’t have any real soap, much less shampoo. More dunking, damn it. She sighed. If they decided to head directly for the Guild Hall, it would make the most sense to shadow the stream all the way home. While the water would never get warm—not this time of year, even if the weather cooperated as it was doing today—it would eventually get less cold.

  If they headed straight back, that is. An idea began percolating through her brain. Now she had to figure out a way to convince Rhodry of its worthiness.

  She did a half-assed job of rinsing off, bending her knees enough to fully immerse her body and tipping back her head long enough for a quick scrub of her scalp. It left her hair thoroughly wet. Not clean, just not quite so dusty.

  Her whole body was shaking with cold as she climbed out of the water and dressed in the fresh clothes from the cache. Sitting on a nearby log, she pulled on her own socks and boots, then finger-combed and braided her hair, thinking all the while of how to persuade him to her developing plan. If it worked, she’d be enjoying a steamy, hot bath before the end of the day. And with real soap. What bliss!

  She crossed over to the base of the big rock where he was dozing and called up to him.

  “Have you been topside today?” she asked, meaning had he climbed high enough into the canopy to take a bearing on their position.

  He lifted his sleek head and blinked lazy golden eyes at her, apparently not inclined to shift in order to answer her question.

  Oh, well. This was her trial. Sitting back down, she yanked off the boots and socks she’d just put on, walked barefoot over to the nearest canopy tree and began climbing. There were plenty of fingerholds in a tree this old, and her leg only hurt a lot when she pushed herself up.

  Rhodry’s roar of outrage sent birds shrieking from above and would have startled her from her perch had he not shifted to human at the same time, and moving faster than she’d have thought possible, plucked her bodily from the tree before she could fall.

  “What in all the gods—”

  “Let go of me!” she demanded, slapping his hands away. “What do you think you’re doing—?”

  “What am I doing? What the hell are you doing climbing a fucking tree with your leg torn up like that? Why are you climbing a tree at all? You could fall—”

  “I’ve been climbing trees since I was a child! Those of us without claws and fur do figure out ways to go on living, you know. And how the hell do you think I navigate out here if I don’t climb trees?”

  He put her down and stared in genuine puzzlement. “I don’t know. I just assumed you… Hell, I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

  “Lucky you. Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

  He grabbed her with both arms before she could attack the tree again. “Please,” he begged, holding her tight. “For me. I nearly had a heart attack when I saw you clinging to that thing. Just tell me what you want, acushla, please.”

  She studied her big, bad shifter, amused, and also touched by his concern. Her leg really did hurt like hell, and she wasn’t exactly eager to find out if the long climb would start it bleeding again. Not that she’d tell him that. She smiled sweetly and patted his arm.

  “Have you been topside today?” she repeated.

  He inhaled deeply, blew out a relieved breath, and nodded. “On the way here.”

  “How far are we from the city?”

  “Four days above,” he said immediately, then thought about it. “So, maybe eight days below?”

  “Hmmm, about what I thought. Tell me”—she wrapped both arms around his waist—“are you in a hurry to get back to the city? I mean I know you—”

  He frowned suspiciously. “Why?”

  She smiled. “Because I’m dying for a hot bath, and I know a place.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  The Green was deceptive in so many ways. From a distance, it was a huge, flat forest of almost identical trees. When one was deep in the heart of the Green, however, there was no uniformity. Every inch of it, high or low, was filled with trees in all shapes and sizes, intermingled with dense shrubs and clinging vines that twisted from tree to tree and climbed all the way to the canopy itself in search of sunshine. And the surface, which to the naked eye seemed completely flat from space, was in fact wrinkled and rippled, full of steep ravines and narrow, deep valleys which trapped heat and moisture and created almost jungle-like microclimates in certain places.

  Her favorite hot spring was tucked into one of those hidden ravines. And it was only a short distance off their direct route to the city, which, she suspected, was why Rhodry had agreed to the detour. That and the fact that the antibiotics she needed were stashed there. And while the antibiotics may have been her trump card to persuade him, by midday she was convinced she really did need them.

  They traveled steadily, eating fruit and trail bars along the way, making good time. The deeper they journeyed into the heart of the forest, the thicker the foliage became, and the more difficult it was to travel on the ground, climbing over and under, and detouring around, the riotous growth. Even so, she’d made this trip many times over the months she’d spent training, and she’d never found it this exhausting. Her leg hurt. Just plain hurt. And though she tried to conceal it, she was limping badly after the first two miles or so.

  Rhodry had shifted and gone up into the trees after their last stop, wanting to get a better sense of where they were. When he dropped out of the trees this time, he shifted back to human, and watched critically as she hobbled toward him.

  “We should stop for the day. There’s no point in killing yourself for a hot bath.”

  “I don’t want to stop,” she said stubbornly, limping past him. “It’s not that much farther, and if we get there today, I won’t have to walk tomorrow at all.”

  He strode quickly past her and stopped, blocking her path. “Amanda.”

  She glared up at him. “Rhodry.”

  He blew out a frustrated breath and threw his hands into the air. “Stubborn, pigheaded woman,” he muttered. He grabbed her backpack, pulled out his clothes and boots, and donned them quickly before stomping off through the trees ahead of her, clearing the trail so she wouldn’t have to work so hard. She smiled. He really was a sweetie.

  They reached a narrow valley not long after that, traveling down a gentle slope and pausing where it evened out to a broad plateau before dropping once again into a steep-sided ravine. It was late in the afternoon, the day still warm, the sun’s heat trapped by a combination of heavy canopy and sloping terrain. She paused to rest briefly before the last push, half sitting on a fallen tree trunk. It was covered with lichen and crawling vines like everything else in the forest, its innards hollowed out long ago. Just another lump in the forest floor.

  “This is it,” she told him. She was puffing breathlessly, and fighting not to let him know it. She’d used up all her reserves of strength just to get this far. She’d lost at least ten pounds since the trial began, and it was weight she couldn’t afford to lose since most of h
er body mass was muscle. Her shipboard training hadn’t left much fat on her, and what there was had been whittled away by her training for the Guild trials.

  “Are you all right?” He crouched next to her, his big hand a soothing warmth despite the heat of her sore leg.

  “Just a little out of breath,” she gasped, resting a hand on his shoulder and faking a grin. “I didn’t get much sleep last night.”

  He stood, then sat next to her on the log, dropping an arm over her shoulder and encouraging her to lean against him. When she did, he kissed the top of her head. “I’ll let you sleep tonight.”

  “You do, and you’ll be sorry.”

  He gave a pleased laugh, and sat with her quietly until her breathing evened out. “So where’s this hot spring?” he asked, inhaling deeply as he took in the forest’s scent.

  “Right in front of you,” she said. “You shifters have your heads so far up”—he tightened his arm playfully and she laughed before continuing—“in the trees that you forget to look at what’s on the ground.”

  She stood before her muscles could stiffen any further, and slowly started down the steep slope, pausing to give him an appraising glance over her shoulder. “You’ll probably have to shift to get through here.”

  He shrugged, handed over their gear, and stripped efficiently. She caught the discarded pants he threw to her, then leaned back against the cool rocks to watch him shift. It was something she’d seen many times before, and it never ceased to amaze her. It was nothing like the old werewolf movies they had in the ship’s vid library. There was no gush of fluid, no bursting skin. It was a graceful flow of flesh into fur, shimmering up his body until three hundred pounds of human became pure, sleek feline. Only his eyes stayed the same, slightly almond shaped, with a perfectly round iris of molten gold, giving him the same extraordinary vision in either form.

  The huge black cat that was Rhodry arched his back against his front paws, hips held high to stretch his spine with a popping of vertebrae. He stood up and grinned at her, his long pink tongue licking his chops deliberately.

  She laughed and wrapped her arms around his neck in a hug. “You’re such a pretty kitty.”

  He growled and butted her with his big head, which only made her laugh more.

  Straightening away from the rocks, she patted his shoulder, which sat just about level with her hip, and said, “Follow me.”

  The hot spring she wanted was very near the bottom of the deep ravine, buried in a jumble of rocks and boulders that was completely overgrown with moss and tangled vines. The dense umbrella of a giant urwillow concealed it even further, its fronds sweeping the ground with a thick and lacy curtain. She pushed aside several of the feather-like branches, and entered the labyrinth of stone that would take her to the heart of the hot spring.

  She maneuvered easily through the twisting passage, snickering when Rhodry hissed with displeasure as he tried to fit through some of the narrower twists and turns. As she drew closer to the grotto at its heart, a few wisps of steam from the spring found their way through the maze of rocks to caress her face, letting her know the end of the passage was close. Not that she needed the reminder. Every turn was familiar to her. She’d considered marking the route after her first visit, wary of the many wrong turns that had left her with barely enough space to turn around and retrace her steps. In the end, she’d decided against it, not wanting to make it any easier for others to find. She turned sideways to ease through the last narrow gap, and stepped into a secret garden.

  Twenty feet at its widest point and irregular in shape, the grotto was little more than a hollow within the stones, shaped over the millennia by the steady flow of hot water bubbling up from somewhere underground and emerging halfway up the wall on the far right. The spring tumbled over once-jagged rocks, now smoothed and rounded by the water’s course, some pocked with small reservoirs along the way that constantly filled and overflowed as the water made its way to the larger pool at the opposite end.

  The air was warm and steamy, and the uneven sunlight confused as much as it revealed as she made her way over the rough ground. Sunlight should have been hard to come by deep within the rocks like this. Luckily, the passage of time and pressure from the steam had joined to create a large daylight hole over the end of the grotto farthest from the pool. The hole was itself covered with a screen of tangled vines, its irregular opening providing at least partial light for most of the day, turning what would have been a dark, dank hole into a secret hideaway.

  A stone skittered across the grotto floor as she kicked it. No matter how many times she did this, there was always a fresh batch of loose rock every time she returned. It worried her sometimes, the idea that the ceiling could give way at any moment, collapsing just as it had sometime before to create the daylight hole.

  She passed under an overhang of several tons of rock and into a small alcove with a back wall that was riddled with crevices. It was here that she stored camping gear and supplies for her visits, zipping them into waterproof pouches and tucking them into the various cubbies. She located the big halogen flashlight stored there. It was much larger than the one she carried with her, and had a wide, flat base that permitted one to stand it on end as a lamp. Flicking it on, she searched through the cubbies, noting the extra quiver of arrows she’d stored here on her last visit, and finally pulling out a small case with a waterproof seal. She opened it quickly, and dug past the packages of sterile bandages and wraps until she caught the faint gleam of silver which denoted the sealed packs of antibiotic capsules her mother had provided for her treks into the forests.

  “Yes,” she whispered, half in relief and half in triumph, quickly tempered by disappointment when she saw that she’d already opened the package on one of her previous visits, leaving it a little more than half full. In addition to the partially used package of capsules, however, there was also a single pressure syringe of antibiotic. A quick calculation told her the syringe coupled with the remaining capsules would be enough to get her back to the city. Enough to knock the infection back, though not out. She peeled the syringe out of its sterile pack and pressed it against her leg, feeling a slight burn as the thick medicine spread into the muscle of her thigh. She shoved the empty tube back into the case before Rhodry could see it, not wanting him to know there was a problem. He’d just freak out, and there was nothing either one of them could do about it. She shrugged philosophically and swallowed two of the capsules, chasing them down with the water in her canteen.

  An unhappy snarl had her stepping back to the main part of the grotto just in time to see her favorite shifter emerge into the mottled sunlight at last, twisting around to hiss viciously at the tight passage behind him. Tufts of black fur clung to the rocks and floated in the misty air, and she would have laughed, except for the unfriendly glare he was directing her way.

  She covered her smile with a casual hand and pretended not to watch as he shook himself from head to toe in disgust, before beginning an immediate inspection of this new territory. Prowling from corner to corner, he snapped his tail back and forth in agitation, and stuck his nose into everything.

  Knowing it could take a while for him to settle, she continued her inventory, occasionally crowing happily at what she found. For one thing, there was fresh clothing, including a clean pair of leggings which would actually fit her. The pants from the shifter cache had been too loose and too long, since the shifters were all big men. And she almost cheered out loud at the sight of several small waterproof bottles of body soap and moisturizer and…gods be praised, shampoo.

  That was all the incentive she needed. She stripped off her clothes and bandages, loosened the tight braid of her hair, and grabbed the bottles of soap and shampoo. Sitting on the pool’s edge, which was worn smooth by centuries of erosion, she eased herself into the water, mumbling wordlessly in a combination of pain and pleasure as the hot, hot water rolled over her skin, and stifling a shriek of real pain when it hit the still raw wound on her right thigh. The pain
was brief, however, as her body quickly adapted, and before long, she was feeling wondrous heat all the way to her bones. She sank down with a groan of pleasure, letting her weight rest on one of the wide ledges beneath the edge of the pool.

  Rhodry had ceased his prowling and was now perched on the rocks next to the waterfall on the other side of the grotto, staring daggers at her across the open space like some dark minion of vengeance. She smiled and blew him a cheerful kiss, then let herself slide even lower until the soothing waters were up to her chin, soaking away what felt like months of hard, cold weather.

  Eventually, she dunked completely under and soaped her hair, thrilled to finally be able to scrub her scalp clean, loving the silky feel of each strand as the dirt washed away. She shampooed and rinsed again, just because it felt so good, then conditioned thoroughly before winding her hair up into a knot on top of her head, and sinking into the water once again, her eyes closed in utter satisfaction.

  With her head resting against the lip of the pool, she let herself float, arms and legs rising to the surface, using the occasional light touch to keep herself from drifting too far.

  A rush of familiar sound had her cracking one eye open to see Rhodry shifting form again, his animal flowing away to leave her gorgeous human lover standing in the thin light. He gave her a slow smile, then raised his arms over his head in a lazy stretch. Had she thought before that Rhodry would never preen? Because that move had been designed for one purpose only, to show off his beautiful body. Seeing her watching, he gave her a quick wink, then strolled the short distance to the pool and dropped over the edge, his powerful arms lowering his body slowly into the water.

  “Shit!” he swore in surprise as the heat scorched his skin, then laughed. “Gods, that feels good.” He submerged completely, and came up with a twist of his shoulders, his long hair flinging drops of water over the surface of the pool.