She was tall and willowy but simultaneously full and completely feminine, with legs long as a gazelle’s and shoulders straight and bare above a dress made entirely from ferns held together by who-knows-what magic. Her skin color shifted from white as snow to dusky shadows, like a forest’s ever-changing visage. Her hair fell in thick black coils about her face, but was grown over with moss and leaves and flowers that seemed to blossom from the hair itself. Vines coiled up her bare arms and legs, living bangles, and more flowers bloomed on these.
The only similarity between her and the child of a moment before were those red-rimmed, furious eyes.
“Do you want to call me a boy again?” she demanded.
A woman’s wrath is a thunderbolt, quick and electrifying, or so the poets say. Foxbrush, as he lay beneath the fir tree and watched this vision of exquisite beauty descending upon him like the bolt of a lightning god’s lance, trembled with the terror of her beauty. Her fists were raised as though to strike, and though they were the most perfectly formed fists in the worlds, Foxbrush did not doubt they would slay him.
But she stopped at the last moment, and her enraged face twisted into an expression of surprise. She took a step back. The white lion—a lioness, really, and all the more vicious for it—padded up beside her and snarled, black lips wrinkling back to better display a set of amazingly bright teeth.
“I know, I know,” the woman said, as though in response to the lioness. “I see it too. But are you quite sure?”
The lioness shook her massive head. Tall though the beautiful woman was, the animal’s ears still reached as high as her shoulder.
Foxbrush stared from one to the other, and it crossed his mind that he’d rather not die. He tried to swallow and couldn’t, so it was with a dry throat that he said, “Um, may I—”
“Quiet!” snapped the woman, and the lioness’s lip curled again. They circled, the woman one way, the lioness the other, until both had circumnavigated their prey and stood once more before him.
“It’s true, then,” the woman said, as if something had been decided that Foxbrush could not guess. The expression on her face was of displeasure.
But the lioness settled down into a comfortable position, no longer snarling, and began grooming one of her colossal paws as though she had no further interest in the matter. She spread her toes and chewed them thoughtfully, her eyes half closed with dozing.
The woman, on the other hand, crossed her perfectly rounded arms and narrowed her eyes. Tears still clung to her lashes. She said, “Speak, mortal!”
Foxbrush opened his mouth but found he didn’t know what to say. Usually if he started talking, something would happen, but now there simply were no words. Worse still, he felt a sneeze coming on, of all things. That horrid tickle behind his sinuses, that inevitable foretelling. And he hadn’t a handkerchief!
“Um . . .”
“Speak!” The woman took a menacing step. “Tell me at once why you are on that Path!”
The tickle was getting worse. Were thistles hidden among the ferns? He’d always been allergic to thistles. “I . . . I do beg your most excellent pardon—”
“Well, you can’t have it,” she replied. “Tell me now. Why the Path?”
She would have sounded petulant were her tone not that of honey and velvet and vanilla cream all rolled into one. The very smell of her was heady and wonderful. And it did not help the oncoming sneeze. Lights Above, was he allergic to her?
He grabbed his nose and caught the sneeze so that it burst angrily in his head and ears. “Um. Pardon me,” he gasped, rubbing his eyes.
The woman stared at him. “Did you explode?” she asked.
He shook his head.
Her eyes narrowed. “I think you exploded.”
“No,” he protested thickly. “No, I’m still quite whole.”
“Are you magic?” she demanded.
Again he shook his head. “No. I’m not. I’m just—”
“Then what are you doing on that Path?”
“What path?”
“That one, of course!” said she, and pointed at his feet. He looked but saw nothing other than crushed ferns and pine needles. Twisting in place, he sought some other sign of a path nearby. As far as he could discern, there was none.
As the woman watched him, her fury dissipated into curious interest. “Don’t tell me you can’t see it.”
“Your pardon, my . . . my lady,” he gasped, then sneezed again, once more startling her so that she stepped back and stamped one of her feet like a nervous filly. Foxbrush wasn’t entirely certain that “lady” was the correct form of address for this maiden who certainly would not be welcome in the courts of the Eldest attired thusly. But it seemed the safe bet at the moment. “I see no path.”
“Ha.” The first sound was not a real laugh. But the next “Ha!” she gave, was. Then she tossed her bounty of hair, and her fern dress rustled, and the vines on her arms writhed as she laughed for real. “You walk the Path of the Lumil Eliasul, and you don’t even know it!”
She shrieked as though it were the finest joke she’d ever heard. The lioness, by contrast, looked up from her grooming, gave a disinterested sniff, and put back her ears.