Wild Blood (Book 7) by Anne Logston Page A

should Lady Rivkah, if she understood Ria’s need for freedom, be so eager to cage Ria ever more tightly? No, Ria thought with some pity that Lady Rivkah had left her howling days behind her with the snowballs and mud castles. With any luck, however, Ria hoped, hers were only beginning.
    Ria could scarcely believe her eyes when abruptly the forest loomed before them, cool and green and huge. There had been no forests near Emaril’s keep or near Cielman, and Ria could never have imagined the immensity, the ancient grandeur of it, even in her wistful dreams. Nor could she have anticipated her sudden certainty that this was something more than a simple stand of foliage—this was in its own way a living being of sorts, an entire little world. Even more startling was the sense of homecoming as soon as Ria saw it, the sudden yearning to rush headlong into its leafy arms and drown herself in its shadowy depths. Her breath came short and she trembled, clenching her fists in anger as much as longing. So close and yet so unreachable. The guards would stop her before she got more than a few steps away.
    “I know,” Lady Rivkah said softly, her hand on Ria’s shoulder. “The first time I saw it, I was amazed, too. It’s like another world, isn’t it?”
    Another world indeed. Ria shivered. Her mother’s world, her brother’s world, her people’s world. Her world, if she hadn’t been exiled from it. No, whatever her foster mother might be feeling, it wasn’t this.
    The road curved to avoid the forest by a good margin. Around midday Lord Sharl halted the wagons, and he and Lady Rivkah saddled their horses and rode off toward the forest alone, much to the dismay of the guards and of Ria, who had begged hard to go with them. Lord Sharl and Lady Rivkah rode back and forth along the forest’s edge for almost an hour, occasionally calling out in Olvenic without result, and then returned discouraged to the wagons.
    “Nothing,” Lord Sharl said disgustedly. “Not even arrows. We’d have been throwing our lives down the privy to ride in there, though, no doubt.”
    “There’ll be other chances,” Lady Rivkah said comfortingly. “Remember, so much of this part of the forest burned. A good deal of that’s new growth, and that means the trees won’t be large enough for their hanging huts and so on. Likely the outermost clans moved deeper into the forest with the game. There may simply be nobody living here now.”
    “No sentries, no wide patrols to watch the edge of the forest?” Lord Sharl said skeptically. “The elves must have grown a good deal calmer and more trusting, then, than they used to be.”
    It took days to ride around the northeastern side of the forest, and Ria continued to marvel at the size of it. At the southeast edge of the forest, a smaller track branched off from the trade road, and Lord Sharl said this was the road to Allanmere.
    “The south side’s much narrower,” he told her, pulling out a map to show her the wedge-like shape of the forest. “It’ll only be a short ride around the southern tip, alongside the river, and then we’ll be almost at the city.”
    On the south side of the forest, the road passed through a narrow strip of open ground separating the forest to the north from the broad expanse of the Brightwater River to the south. It was Ria’s first glimpse of the river on which her foster father was laying so many of his hopes, and Ria was rather disappointed. It was big and deep-looking, yes, but it was placid and muddy and not much different otherwise from the streams Ria had seen.
    At the southern edge of the forest they stopped again. Lady Rivkah told Ria that this part of the forest had once been the territory of a friendly elven clan called the Brightwaters, who had allied with Rowan and the city during the barbarian invasion, and Lord Sharl had hopes of contacting them. Once again, Ria and Cyril were not permitted to approach the forest, and they amused themselves along the