The roads of taryn macta.., p.1
The Roads of Taryn MacTavish, page 1
part #3 of Lords of Arcadia Series
Here’s what readers are saying about R. LEE SMITH and
THE WIZARD IN THE WOODS
“R. Lee Smith has created a richly-detailed world where magic rules and monsters roam…By the end, all you’re left saying is, ‘I believe.’”
—Marian Roberts-Hyde
“(R. Lee Smith) takes erotica from the simple formula of Boy-Meets-Girl and elevates it to the level of Good-Versus-Evil. I was hooked from the first chapter of the first book…If I knew where he lived, I’d be knocking on (Smith’s) door, begging for the next installment.”
—Carl H. Stone
“Even scarier, funnier, steamier, and all-around better than the first!”
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“This one hit me on every level: It turned me on, it creeped me out, it made me laugh, and it even got a little grit in my eye (damn you, Smith!)
—Taylor Mittge
Also by R. LEE SMITH:
Heat
The Lords of Arcadia Series:
The Care and Feeding of Griffins
The Wizard in the Woods
The Roads of Taryn MacTavish
The Army of Mab
COMING SOON!
Olivia
Lords of Arcadia
Book III
THE ROADS OF
TARYN MACTAVISH
By R. Lee Smith
This book is dedicated to the Redmond Library.
The real one.
Copyright © 2007 by Robin Smith
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including, but not limited to, photocopying or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.
Purplhouse@yahoo.com
Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following copyrighted material:
“You Are My Sunshine” by Jimmie Davis. Copyright 1940 by Peer International Corporation. Copyright renewed. Used by permission.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, locales and events are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, places or events are purely coincidental.
A BRIEF WORD ABOUT TIME…
Of all the strange attitudes human beings adopt when struggling to comprehend the world around them, perhaps the strangest of all is their attitude toward time. They call it a dimension, as though it had the same substance as length, breadth or width, when in truth, it is nothing more than an accident of perception that allows humankind to proceed smoothly inside of their linear lives.
Every other intelligence in all the Realms understands this. Humans alone have felt the need to break time down, to number years, to name days, to invent a need for seconds and milliseconds and even nanoseconds. It is a need so powerful that they acknowledge the invention of the calendar as higher among their criteria for civilization than written language.
And yet the respect that humans show towards time is of a fearful sort.
Time flies, they say, but only when you’re having fun. Time is the cruel thief that robs us of youth and beauty. Time has no mercy. Time traps us each day betwixt worry and remorse. We chase time, we run from it, we waste it and we kill it. It is as though mankind has endowed time not only with an intelligence of its own, but a malevolent one.
But to Taryn MacTavish, time has always been a friend. From this unusual perspective, she believes she has enjoyed a long and golden childhood, forgetting the sadistically elastic hours of schoolrooms and yardwork, the swiftly flying summers, all the birthdays and Christmas mornings that zipped out the windows after centuries of painful anticipation. Since coming to Arcadia, she has experienced lifetimes of pleasure in the company of friends, and she has largely forgotten those early days of pain and exhaustion and loneliness. She remembers the wizard, of course, but the bad times that seemed to stretch out so menacingly have since been reduced in her memory to mere moments here and there, harmlessly bound in the stillness of her thoughts like poisonous wasps encased in amber. Now her thoughts of him are fleeting ones, frozen snapshots of the past, never as important in her mind as the memories of hearth and home and loved ones.
No, it is not the eye of a spurned and resentful Time-god that fixes itself upon her as her second summer in Arcadia gently passes, but someone is surely watching all the same. Someone for whom love is a concept that can only be grasped as the distorted reflection from another’s mind, and Time has no meaning at all. It is no god, perhaps, and no dimension, but upon one point, humans are very correct: Time waits for no one, and for Taryn MacTavish, the days of peace have already been numbered.
1. Surrender
The chief of the horsemen stared out past the ruins of his defenses and into the eyes of his enemy. They were dark eyes, the same blue-black as the skin of gedan fruit, but shining now with silent laughter. Conqueror’s eyes, he thought, and felt his own heart burn.
“Oh come now,” the enemy said. “You can’t be surprised. Not after a year of battles.” One scarred hand rose, displaying all the fallen armies motionless before them on the field. “You knew this would happen, Tonka.
Your defeat was inevitable from the moment you accepted my challenge.”
“Challenge,” the horseman echoed, and stamped one hind hoof with ground-quaking force. “I recall no challenge.” His eyes raked the silent field and his voice hardened. “Your first act was invasion, and that is not challenge.”
“No.” Unrepentant, the enemy smiled. “This was a slaughter.”
Tonka raised his chin, hating the words, yet acknowledging the truth in them fairly. He was still Farasai, still chieftain. He still possessed the dignity of his kind, even if there were none here to witness it. “So,” he said.
“So.” The enemy echoed his tone of neutrality perfectly. “And now you will surrender.”
Tonka reared, his hands balling into empty fists. “Never will I!”
“Oh yes.” Unimpressed, the enemy smiled at him. “Surrender and your defeat will be a painless one. If you don’t, I’ll hunt out and destroy every last remnant of your army before I bother to come for you again. So we can make 1
this quick, Tonka, or I can take my time, but it will happen, never doubt that for one moment.”
Despite every effort to remain stoic, Tonka felt himself bristling. He dropped his gaze, choosing to survey again his broken forces rather than show the turning of his thoughts to the enemy who stood with such mocking patience before him. Days and nights of combat left him numbed to pride. The speed with which he had been reduced to this…this straggling point of defiance on a battlefield in ruins…the completeness and the ruthlessness he could bring himself to face, but great gods, the speed of it!
Surrender.
No. He had stood as chieftain some fifteen years before taking the injury that had cost him his name, had nearly cost him his life. He had come back from death itself, and he had been Tonka again now for a year and half again, and such a one, such a chieftain, did not surrender.
But what choice was there?
“To think that I once called you friend,” he said, bitterness staining every word.
Laughter was his enemy’s indulgent reply. “Are you playing for my sympathies? Ha! This is war!”
“Indeed.”
“Surrender, my friend.”
Time itself seemed to pause. A trail of smoke drifted to him on a stray breeze, heavy with the smell of roasting flesh. There was no sound.
Slowly, as though pressed down by some invisible, divine hand, Tonka bent before the victor of the field. He raised his arm, took up the carved stone piece of his castle, and threw it across the table to come to a clattering stop before Taryn’s left hand. “I should have never taught you this game,” he grumbled.
“Probably not,” she said good-naturedly. Her eyes were still shining.
“It’s really just a more complicated version of chess, and I learned that from my dad. Now he could really throw you a whuppin’, friend. Checkmate every time.”
Tonka’s lips twitched up even before humor rose to lighten his mood.
“Mate,” he said. He glanced at her, his smile broadening, and winked.
Her laughter now was a dry thing. She stood away from the table, shaking her head. “I’m in no shape for that sort of thing,” she said. Her hands rose, seeking the hard swell of her belly and resting there, mutely giving him her reason. Her expression changed minutely, showing surprise. The child must be moving.
Tonka waited until the look of mothering faded. It was a look very like to any mare’s of his experience, save that its wistfulness was so horribly stained by dread. He did not think she was aware of how clearly her uncertainties 2
showed on her face. She may not even be aware of worry in her feelings when she touched her swimming unborn, but they were there true enough to be read by one with a father’s eyes and it was a hard thing for him to witness. He moved a step toward the door to distract her from them, holding back his hand in invitation as he said, “Shall we eat?”
“Is it time already?”
“Aye, Taryn, nearly so. And thee is foaling, so there shall be foods made for thee at any hour.”
“I’m not really as underfed as you all seem to think I am.”
He did not reply to that. She knew, and did not need to hear him say, that she had no way of knowing whether she were underfed or not, just as she had no true way of knowing
Taryn, who was even now walking swiftly ahead of him to his kraal’s cooking lodge, moving in that rolling gait at once so labored and so light. She was still smiling, still celebrating her victory, and her words were as easy and carefree as they had ever been. “However, under the excuse of eating for two, I’d be happy to go steal a few of Ven’s sticky-pies.”
“Aye?” Tonka flicked his tail at his darker thoughts and adopted that distracted and literally-minded attitude that he knew Taryn found so utterly maddening. “Thee need not resort to thievery, for I am certain our mother has saved some out for thee.”
“Oh, for crying out loud! I didn’t mean ‘steal’ as in…But thanks anyway,” she finished with a sigh, rolling her eyes heavenward as Tonka savored his hidden smile. “And since you’re making so free with the foodstuffs, I could probably bring myself to choke down a couple of—oh hell. Er, hello, that is.”
“Nicely recovered,” Tonka said dryly and took a covert elbow to his fore-thigh for reply.
The lord of the Valley of Hoof and Horn stood before them on the path to the Jiko lodge, his powerful arms folded over his broad chest and his eyes smoldering as they glared out from his lowered head. He pulled in a mighty breath, let it out as a rolling sigh, then snarled, “Can you never stay where you are bid?!”
3
“Sure Bid me to stay in a bookstore some day and just see how good I can be.” Unapologetic, Taryn resumed her easy step and the last Cerosan of the Valley, her mate, the father of the unknown thing growing inside her, came in long strides to meet her. His hooves, capped in traveler’s bronze, left hollow moons in summer’s dry soil. Steel glinted over the sweeping horns; one merely a cap, the other a fully-forged thing bolted to the sawn-off stump of bone that twinned it, a lasting scar to mark his capture by the murderous wizard.
Nay, but those days were done and did not deserve remembering. He was Tonka and his was indeed the House of Histories, but he would not give a tribute of immortality to that evil creature’s memory. The wizard deserved to pass into obscurity—one more wicked thing come to Arcadia and defeated there—and those he had left behind deserved, surely, to heal from their wounds outside of that shadow. Tonka watched the embrace of the wizard’s last victims.
In the lengthening shadows cast by his lodge, their two bodies seemed to become one, a physical reflection of their shared souls, and this was what he would remember.
“Bid you stay among books,” Antilles grumbled. “What reason have I to reward you when you cannot bring yourself to show obedience?”
“I’m sure you could find something among all my many talents to reward me for.”
Antilles shook his head, surrendering. “Ah, my maiden,” he sighed.
“My Menelajis.” Taryn reached up (and Antilles, for all his outward show of sufferance, bent to allow her easy reach) to strike her fingers off his metal horn and hear the hollow ringing of it.
Old rituals. Familiar and loving. So difficult to witness. So wonderful to see.
But now Taryn was stepping away, although she still leaned on her lord’s arm, letting him lead her on as she aimed herself back at the Jiko. “Actually, I came here only because I knew you’d look for me here first,” she said. “I was trying to be helpful.”
“Nay, lady, for if that were so, thee would have remained at home,”
Antilles countered. “There did I go to find thee first.”
Taryn looked to Tonka as though for aid. He laughed in her hopeful, upturned face.
“There should thee have stayed!” he declared.
“Aw, it was too empty there, what with you off lording it up God-knows-where, and Aisling gone.” Her voice faltered, and she glanced away, far to the west, and the mountains that bordered the Aerie Domain, and where storms of griffins were known to gather under the Great Dragon’s rule. But only for a moment. Taryn forced a smile and an air of unconcern. “And then Romany came, and it seemed like such a perfect time.”
4
Antilles and Tonka both halted in unspoken unison to stare at the human who walked between them.
“Romany?” Antilles echoed. His mistrust of the Dragon’s brood, though tempered somewhat by the truce of this past year, edged his tone.
Tonka seized on the rest of her words, innocuous though they might appear to be. “A perfect time for what?” he demanded, the chieftain in him adding thunder to his voice sufficient to stop her at last.
Taryn stood with her head bent for a short time, gazing at her hands where they framed her belly. Her hair caught the warming sun, a river of deep flame to hide her expression and the betraying windows of her eyes. At last, she stirred and turned to face them. There was no deception in her, no apology, and no fear.
There was never any fear, Tonka thought, his love for her heavily mingled with despair.
“I took my book back,” she said.
Silence. Not one of incomprehension, but of thunderstruck shock. She explained anyway, speaking gently and with that sweet, sad smile that showed so clearly that their reactions were not unexpected ones. “I went back to Earth.”
5
2. Taryn’s Travels
The house really was too empty without Aisling, and too big, also. Who would have imagined that a one-room house with maybe six hundred square feet of living space would ever be considered too much? But it was, and being trapped in it made time itself into something oppressive.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if she had someone to pass the time with, but her Tilly was off getting ready for his summer rounds, so that he could make sure all of his people were fed and that the little pockets of human invaders that had settled against his will in his Valley were still more or less in check. She could suffer these absences pretty well with Aisling to occupy her, but her fierce prince was somewhere off in the Aerie Domain, visiting the griffins who nested in the peaks overlooking kraal-Tiyu. They’d come for him. She didn’t know how they knew, although she hadn’t exactly been surprised when she’d answered the polite three-tap knock at her door and found a griffin staring her in the face.
A gryphon, to be exact, although it was a picky point further confused by the fact that all four species commonly called griffins were pronounced almost exactly the same way. But gryphons, now, gryphons were among the most impressive of them. The wings were half-fanned, adding imagined size to the already-intimidating bulk of the creature. The feathers were metallic and almost blinding in their brilliance; the tawny fur of its leonine half well-groomed and shiny with health. But it was the eyes that caught and held her, eyes as gold and piercing as sunlight itself. There was assessment there, a measuring disapproval and tightly-reined fury that only raptors and certain cats could be fully capable of expressing. But the voice that issued from the hooked and polished beak was a 6
woman’s, refined, melodious, and tinged by some unfamiliar accent: “I understand your foundling is fledging.”
He was, and like everything he did, he was a little bit early for it.
Aisling’s wing feathers had finally thickened, the pinions emerged, and although he made a point of appearing nonchalant about it all, Taryn had caught him several times on the rocky slopes around her house, leaning into the wind with his eyes shut tight and new wings outstretched, trembling. Just standing there.
