Stegoman jolted into his fastest pace. Matt hung on for dear life as the landscape blurred by. When the wolf's howl of fury rang out over the moor again, it was far behind.
Matt pulled into camp with a bit of difficulty; stopping a dragon was almost as difficult as getting him moving.
Alisande and Sir Guy stood armed and ready, the Black Knight scarcely more than a glimmer of face and a sheen of sword in his midnight armor. Sayeesa knelt behind them, throwing earth on the coals of the campfire.
"You're armed and ready to ride?" Matt couldn't believe it.
"How could we not be, with the racketing across the moor?" Alisande nodded her head toward Matt's back-trail as a long, hungry howl echoed through the night again.
"I get it." Matt's lips thinned. "You thought you were gonna have to come pull my bacon out of the fire again. Your faith in me is touching."
"The dragon was sufficient, then." Alisande took her hand off the pommel of her sword.
"Definitely, though possibly not the way you're thinking. The bacon at stake right now, though, is Father Brunel's."
Sayeesa looked up, alarmed.
Matt noted it and tried to ignore it. "He's coming across the moor, hell-bent for leather, and I don't think he really cares whose hide he takes to the tanners. Mount and ride!"
"Flee?" Sir Guy frowned. "From one lone wolf-man? Nay! We have swords and a silver blade."
"You really want him killed?" Matt demanded.
The knight hesitated, but Sayeesa cried, "Nay! He has offended man and God, aye, but he must not die for all that!"
"She speaks truth," Alisande said with grim conviction. She turned away to her horse. "Come, Sir Guy! We must ride out the night and this curse!"
Sir Guy pursed his lips and nodded, a gleam coming into his eye as he turned to his charger.
Matt looked as they pulled out of camp, with himself riding rearguard. A sleek, long-legged shape came loping over the rim of the moor as he watched.
They bent to the running, and Stegoman soon overhauled the horses and took the lead, in spite of Matt's protests. "No, no! We've got to stay back! I've got the only weapon that can do any good!"
"What good, when thou wilt not use it?" the dragon growled. He suddenly swerved to the side, just as a great white owl swooped low. The dragon's head snapped up, and he roared, "Harpies! Foul carrion females, preying on helpless fledglings!"
"No!" Matt wailed. "It's just an owl, Stego--"
The dragon blasted, and the owl shrieked, tumbling in flames toward the ground-and, tumbling, stretched, blurred, and hardened into the form of a man.
"Foul shorshererzh, who sheek dragon'zh blood," Stegoman growled.
Matt swallowed, hard.
The Sorcerer's form blurred again just before it landed. It shrank and hardened as it touched ground - and a dark-brown, three-foot iguana scuttled for cover.
"Lord Matthew," called Alisande, "what means this?"
"I get the feeling we're being watched," Matt called back. He had no doubt about whose orders the shape-changer had been following.
He also had a nagging suspicion that Sayeesa's presence wasn't the only reason Brunel had gone were.
CHAPTER 12
Ten miles later, Matt pulled up beside the Black Knight. "Sir Guy! Any idea where we are?"
"Far to the west of where we were," the knight told him: "Where else, matters little."
"We have tended much toward the north," Alisande added. "Saving that, we can say little."
Matt glanced behind; and, sure enough, there was the wolf, chugging along just this side of the horizon, loosing an occasional frustrated bay.
"'Ware!" Sir Guy cried, and Matt swiveled back, eyes front.
A long, dark line stretched across the forward horizon, sweeping away out of sight it either direction. It grew larger as they moved nearer; he began to make out masses of leaves and trunks gleaming silver in the moonlight. "A forest! Any idea where we..."
"Aye," the princess said grimly. "'Tis the Forest Maugraime and it runs away a score of miles to either side of our path."
Matt nodded. "I take it there's no point in trying to go around.''
"I would say not."
"Okay." Matt sighed, heaving himself up for the haul. "Anything particular I should know about this place. Enchanted, or anything like that?"
"You have named it." Sir Guy's teeth flashed in the moonlight, and Matt almost shuddered. Bad things seemed to happen when the knight grinned. "'Tis a place of weird power, Lord Wizard spells strung 'tween the branches of the trees. 'Tis old power here, but not always unfriendly."
Matt frowned. "Who runs it?"
Sir Guy shrugged. "Many, or none. This forest was spellbound before ever men came here, Lord Matthew; 'twill like as not hold enchantments when we are fled."
That Matt definitely didn't like. If the spirits that ruled here had been here before men, they were elementals, or close to them - embodiments of the forces of nature. Earth spirits and the like.
Then the companions were in among the branches, and it was too late to consider the matter.
Matt caught his breath in admiration. Silvered trunks surrounded him; festoons of long, black-and-silver leaves draped down, like Spanish moss. There was a hush to the wood, filled only with a faint, distant murmur of breezes ruffling leaves. They rode in close silence; the thuds of the horses' hooves seemed to strike right next to Matt's ear. The forest swallowed up sound.
Branches brushed by them; then, as they trotted further down the deer-trail, the branches stiffened, and the brushes became swats. Not good, Matt thought. It would definitely slow them down. A branch clutched at his sleeve; he brushed it away. The wolf, having a lower profile and pads instead of hooves, could make greater speed through the underbrush than they could.
Sayeesa screamed behind him. Matt tried to turn - and couldn't. Those clutching branches were really clutching. Something jerked hard on his arm, almost yanking him out of the saddle. Small twigs on the end of a branch had wrapped themselves around his arm; it felt like the clasp of a skeletal hand. Something yanked at his other arm. He looked and saw two more leafy hands clasping his other arm and thigh.
Alisande shouted in anger, and Sir Guy bellowed. Matt craned his neck around and saw the knight and the ladies clasped by a score or more of leafy hands. Sayeesa had been pulled up two feet off the back of her mare. She screamed, more in anger than in fear, lashing out with her feet at the nearest branch. A twig-hand caught her ankle and started pulling.
"Lord Wizard!" Alisande shouted. "Enchant a spell, I implore you! We cannot free our swords. If you cannot save us now, we will be bound up in bark!"
It was nice to be appreciated. "Stegoman! Light up!"
The dragon reared back its head and loosed a blast, raking the trees with flame, and Matt chanted:
Then he added--
Something tickled his eardrums - a high-pitched sound, almost too high to hear; but somehow, he knew it was screaming, filling the forest all about them: Stegoman swiveled his head around, blasting back high over Sir Guy's and the ladies' heads. Flamelets leaped up on branches, met, and grew, licking high along the limbs, running on back toward the trunks. Groaning filled the wood, echoing all about them, below the high-pitched screaming. The trees began to rock from side to side, as if a gale were blowing through the forest. Here and there, a great taproot yanked free of the earth-then another and another, until a tree actually pulled up its roots and began to walk backward. Another followed it, then three more, then a dozen, until the whole lane of trees was moving backward on its roots, like great, splayed feet, away from the dragon. Twiggy hands loosed their holds, dropping the humans. Sayeesa fell back on her horse; it jarred an imprecation out of her.