Arthur’s mouth went dry. “Ira!”
Freya threaded through his legs, nearly tripping him, but he scooped her up and sprinted after the stag. The cat yowled as she bounced in his arms, clawing into his shoulder.
“Ira!”
Arthur followed the path of dying flowers left behind, his legs like jelly. The ground trembled underfoot, but he gritted his teeth and kept going.
Another bugle, and now men were shouting, too, as the stag burst upon them. Machinery screeched, groaned, and went silent. Horses screamed; several burst through the trees, buffeting Arthur. He cowered, clutching the cat tight.
The bugle shifted to a howl. Guns fired. Arthur’s heart was in his throat.
“Ira,” he croaked, and the trees opened up.
The work camp was a graveyard of trees and men. Arthur couldn’t tell whether Ira or the forest itself had killed the men, but greenery crept over them with long, curling fingers. Around them, collapsed tents crumpled. Machinery belched acrid smoke.
In their midst stood a wolf with heaving sides. Ira was every bit the eldritch beast: massive, eyes white and glowing, mosstinging his ruff green in wolf form as it had grown across his face in human form. A woodsman approached, axe raised. Ira snarled and snapped.
Arthur sprinted toward them.
“Don’t!” he cried, hardly knowing who he was saying it to, but it didn’t matter; no one heard him.
Wolf and woodsman lunged at each other at the same moment. Ira yelped.
The forest responded.
The ground rumbled and opened, swallowing tents and machinery. Shocks of fern and bugleweed grew in their place. Roots bound woodsmen where they stood. Their clothes and skin hardened into bark, and they were trees, with the same misshapen limbs as those in the vale. Other woodsmen hacked at their roots, as if felling the new trees would turn their friends back into men. The trees screamed. The woodsmen stumbled away, turned, and fled. Distant screaming and crunching told Arthur the forest was having its way with the survivors.
His stomach churned. He hadn’t wanted them to hurt Ira, knew it hurt Ira when they hurt the forest—but they were working men with wives and families at home. Trying to keep roofs over their heads and bread in their mouths, the same as the fishermen and cannery workers in Seacliff.
Freya scrambled out of his arms and vanished up a tree.
“Freya—”
In the woodsmen’s midst, Ira shuddered. His form cycled from wolf to stag to raven to man and back, so quickly Arthur barely glimpsed each before it passed. Like Ira couldn’t decide what form to take. His eyes flickered between white and hazel.
Swallowing, Arthur ran to his side. The wound in Ira’s shoulder bled through its bandages.
“Ira—”
Arthur touched his arm, but Ira shook him off, still cycling through forms.
“Don’t,” he growled, as he turned briefly into something not quite human but not quite wolf or stag or raven, either. His eyes squeezed shut. “Don’t touch me. I don’t want to—”
His voice gave way to a deep, cervine groan.
The transformations stopped. He was a stag now, white-eyed and gold-pelted. Nostrils flaring, he turned toward Arthur.
Arthur swallowed. “Ira?”
“That’s him!”
More woodsmen came running through the trees, armed with axes and rifles; they must have been working nearby. Several of them skidded to a stop by collapsed tents or humanlike trees, dropping their weapons to search for friends—until the stag roared.
The men ran at him, but Ira flung the first off with his antlers—shifted to a wolf, bit another’s arm—shivered into a raven, flitting upward from a third’s attempt to shoot him. Back to a wolf to launch himself at another’s throat. Arthur’s mouth went dry, but he could only watch, horrified.
Several men escaped, but that did not comfort him. He grabbed one’s arm as they passed, struggled as the man tried to throw him off.
“Don’t,” Arthur croaked. “Don’t go that way. The forest will—”
