Stephanie Draven - Wild, Tethered, Bound

It wasn’t real magic, but the children reacted as if it were. The littlest girl laughed. The middle one stopped crying. The eldest lowered her pot. Card tricks weren’t going to win him a Nobel Peace Prize, but Nick thought he’d made a pretty good start. “Ask them about their older sister, or aunt. Or whoever that blue-eyed wild woman in the woods is.”

“They say she’s a nature spirit,” the interpreter said, then translated directly. “’Sometimes she dances with us in the forest, so we make offerings at her heart tree and she gives us her protection.’”

Nick eyed the translator as if he was full of shit.

“That’s what she said,” the translator said with a shrug. “She says that sometimes timber smugglers come through the area and the nature spirit scares them away. Other times, tribal warlords try to steal the girls, so they run into the forest and the nature spirit gathers them to her arms and hides them inside trees.”

Even the sergeant raised a grizzled eyebrow at that.

Unfortunately, before Nick could ask anything else, the shepherd returned and panicked to find armed men surrounding his daughters. He shouted at them to leave and Nick should have ordered his men to continue ontheir patrol—but the sight of those three little girls huddled together got to him somehow.

Most Afghans were fiercely proud, so the shepherd’s reaction shouldn’t have been a surprise, but the girls’ stories about nature spirits was putting Nick on edge. He’d been fighting this shitty war long enough that he wasn’t sure he could stand to see one more kid hurt. Nick said to the interpreter, “Tell him that until the fighting calms down, he and his daughters aren’t safe here. Tell him we can’t offer any security. Tell him he needs to leave this place and seek shelter in a village. This isn’t any place to be raising little girls. Take ’em somewhere with roads, electricity and hospitals. And they need to go to school.”

“No school for the girls,” the shepherd replied, angry and offended. “Besides, I have no money.”

Nick realized that he’d been more than a little condescending. Not everybody had the option of living somewhere safe, and he regretted shooting off his mouth.

Now it was as if the sergeant knew what Nick was going to do. “Don’t even think it, Lieutenant…”

Too late. Nick yanked his helmet off and tried to convey his sincerity by meeting the man’s eyes. “Look,” he said to the shepherd. “I’ll give you the money to move. Out of my own wages.”

Sarge scowled. “Sir, our instructions—”

Nick didn’t want to hear it. “You know our motto, Sarge: Improvise, Adapt and Overcome.”

“No, our motto is Semper Fi, ” the sergeant snapped. “Lemme know when you need my help getting your head out of your ass, Lieutenant. You’re breaking every rule in the book. Sometimes I wonder why the hell you joined the Marines.”

“Lost a bet,” Nick said with his typical irreverent humor, then motioned to the interpreter. “Tell the shepherd I’ll pay his family to move to Parun City. Tell him. That’s an order.”

Emotions flittered across the shepherd’s face as if he wanted to accept Nick’s offer but was struggling against some tie that bound him here. In the end, he refused. “This is our home. Besides, once you go, the warlords will know who helped us, and they’ll kill us all. And you will go—you always do.”

From her walnut tree, Dessa watched with satisfaction as the soldiers left the shepherd’s cave, defeated. She’d never cared for warriors—not even when the most dangerous weapons they carried were swords—but these Americans seemed well-meaning. As much as it irritated her that they tried to make her people leave her forest, they’d been kind to the little girls.

Perhaps she should’ve invited the soldiers to sit beneath her heart tree. It was almost ripe. A few more days and the nuts would start falling. Then she could invite the soldiers to eat the fruit of her heart tree and choose one for her mate.

After all, they had mistaken her for a mortal woman.

Like most of her kind, Dessa could—and often did—pass for human. In her younger days, when there were other dryads into whose hands she could entrust her forest, she’d lived amidst the mortals now and again. She’d once passed herself off as a dancing girl for a Roman emperor. Another time she posed as a governess, and years later, a trapeze artist with a traveling circus in England. But always, she had returned to her forest.

Maybe it was because she’d never met a man whose pull was stronger than that of her heart tree. Could Lieutenant Nick Leandros be that man? She liked the way he gave candy to the children—the way he tried to comfort them with his card tricks. He’d make a good father to little girls of his own…

Dessa remembered how fascinated she’d been by the mortal sweat on his face and how she’d reached out to wipe it away. She’d startled him, and he’d flinched. But she could easily imagine how it would’ve felt if he’d turned his head and kissed her palm instead. She’d liked the lines of his square face, the dark knitted brow over intelligent eyes. Even now, as she watched him make his way through the woods, she liked the way he moved. He wasn’t stiff and precise like most soldiers, but languid as a Caspian tiger.

Maybe that’s why the desire to tether him to this forest was so strong. She saw the little tendril of mortal fascination billow behind him like a gossamer thread in the breeze, inhaled and drew it to her. It wasa weak tether, one he could break if he tried. But perhaps it would be enough to draw him back to her one day.

It happened at dusk while Dessa tended her seedlings. They were the children of her mighty walnut, and they might one day replace her heart tree, becoming part of the unbroken chain of life. Dessa was stroking her fingers over the soft young leaves when suddenly the ground shook beneath her.

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