Wild Blood (Book 7) by Anne Logston Read Free Book Online Page B

around him, despite the certainty of the Mother Forest’s protection in this sacred place where the elves came to worship, he felt frightened, alien, and alone. What if the elders who protested his passage were right? What if the Mother Forest rejected him because of his human blood? What if his spirit was unready for passage into adulthood?
    “No doubts,” Dusk said kindly, as if reading his thoughts. “You fear death, and you must in truth die a kind of death. Valann the boy must return to the Mother Forest, and Valann the man will come back to us changed greatly by his journey. But the man is strong enough in spirit to return. I prepared you myself for this journey, and it is a trail I know well. I’ve walked it many times.”
    He held the bone bowl to Val’s lips, and Val swallowed thick, bittersweet liquid. Fire poured down his throat and into his vitals, and for a moment Val remembered Lahti’s words and knew terror that this potion might poison him as he had nearly been killed by eating the common white-capped tree mushrooms that every elf ate from childhood. Then the burning passed, left him feeling cold and weak and empty. Could the Mother Forest fill that emptiness when he was not truly a part of it? Alone. So alone.
    “We all walk alone in this world,” Dusk seemed to say, or perhaps Val only imagined it. “But in the Mother Forest we never walk alone, and you least of all.”
    Val was tired, so very tired. Without opening his eyes, he knew somehow that Dusk had gone. Had the sun set? Despite the warm air he was cold, then hot, then cold again. There were warm furs over him, but somehow they did not fight the chill—was it fear?—that came from somewhere within him.
    It seemed that he was sinking slowly into the earth, as softly and comfortably as he might sink into a thick pile of furs to sleep on a cold winter’s night. He slid down along the roots of the trees, digging deep into moist, rich soil fairly bursting with life. But below the roots, he could feel himself approaching an unknown realm where there were no stars to point his way, no trails he knew. What waited there was powerful and hungry and alive, alive, wild and fierce and old and strange—
    Your gift is fire, Dusk had told him during the days of fasting, of purification rituals. But fire’s not a part of the Mother Forest. Fire is a tool, but a tool of death, not allied with the green growing things. It cannot guide you to the heart of life. You must find another guide. Turn toward the earth and ask for help.
    But what help might there be? He had friends, many friends among the child-pack, but they had begun to draw away from him when his body had rushed unexpectedly toward adulthood, when hair began to sprout bizarrely from his arms and legs, his chest, even his chin and upper lip. Already he was almost as tall as most of the adults in the clan, his shoulders broader, his muscles large, ungainly lumps on his body. The children drew away not only because of his strangeness, but because he was no longer one of them; they knew, if the elders did not, that Val had charged headlong into the adult world.
    The adults of the clan had always loved him and cared for him as impartially as they had any other child, but some of them, too, had lately begun to draw away. Their distance was less open, tinged with concern, perhaps even pity, but also with a touch of fear—fear perhaps not of him and his human blood, but because he and his human blood became every day more a part of the clan. And he would be an adult soon, old enough to couple and perhaps to mate, old enough to sit around the fire with the other adults when there were decisions to be made. Most important, he would be old enough to sow his seed in High Circles when women ripened, and that seed, if it took root in a woman’s womb, would carry to the child Val’s half-human blood. Tainted blood. No one had ever said the words, but they had hovered unspoken, a tangible presence. Tainted