Read Online Return by Peter S. Beagle; Maurizio Manzieri - Free Book Online Page A

briefly over the body. He looked up at me with his mouth open in a silent scream, and raced in my direction. I aimed for the heart; but the dim light and his speed threw off my aim. My arrow took him in the throat instead, and he died choking on his own blood.
    Then they were on me, all the rest of them. I dropped the bow and shrugged free of the quiver, but never had a chance to get the trimoira out, nor did they even bother to snatch it from my belt. I fully expected to die on the spot at their hands; but Master Caldrea roared orders, and, like the monks in the stable, they pressed close around me, glaring and grinning, their light eyes brilliant with such hatred as I’ve never seen again, nor ever expect to see. Seizing me by shoulders, hair, and arms, they brought me to Master Caldrea where he stood by the Tree, and he smiled at me with the bright clarity of madness. He said, “Welcome, Soukyan. Welcome to your great destiny.”
    “I would have been here much later,” I answered him, “if I had recognized your invitation. My most sincere apologies.”
    Master Caldrea actually laughed outright, though no one else in the clearing did. “Yes, yes, more than accepted. You are without a doubt the most important person here tonight—the Tree is happy to see you.” He swung out an arm, gesturing toward the Tree, as though he were introducing us. “He is come,” he said to the Tree, crooning, confiding. “I said he would come. The wait is ended.”
    Standing this close to it, surrounded by Hunters, their hands on me, I noticed—as I could not have done from a distance—that, for all its apparent burly vastness, there was also a strange air of instability about the Tree, hard to depict even now. The night breeze stirred its branches more easily than it should have; paradoxically, the dark-red leaves drooped wearily, hardly responding at all; and only the great knuckly roots seemed truly alive, thrusting up defiantly to support and shelter the oddly fragile-seeming trunk. Further, for all the speed with which they had overcome me, and for all the strength of their hands on me, these Hunters also felt somehow not right , any more than seeing four of them at once felt right. I could not have said what alerted me to the difference; but I knew that Master Caldrea knew it too. I could see that knowledge in his bright, bright eyes.
    “You have hurt the Tree,” he said, not accusingly, but in a casual, conversational manner. “The more Hunters you killed, the more the Tree had to produce—it is like asking a wheatfield for two and three crops a year, a sheep to be ready for shearing every week or two. Even our House is not what it was, as you have noticed, for we bled as best we could, trying to sustain it against privation. This is your doing, Soukyan, year on year.” He gripped my wrists and squeezed hard, still smiling, just as though he were welcoming me to his home.
    “You do me too much honor,” I replied. “I have only done what I could. And I am not finished yet.” I was sure I was going to die, and young enough yet to wish to leave on some note of bravado. Silliness.
    Master Caldrea smiled affectionately. “No, indeed, you are far from finished yet. I envy you.” Without turning, he beckoned, and from the circle of monks on the far side of the Tree, the third Hunter came to stand beside me like some kind of shadow brother. He even leaned on my shoulder, gripped the back of my neck lightly, and whispered in my ear, “Soon…soon. All well now.”
    Then the grip tightened, tightened hard , and Master Caldrea strode forward and tore my shirt open to the navel. He had a small silver knife in his hand.
    No divided tip here: this one came to a single point, with a channel on both sides of the blade, to lead the blood away. Master Caldrea employed it as an artist does his brush—or a seamstress her needle, for the matter of that. It was fine, delicate work, centered over my heart, and it took a long time. None