The Forest of Forever by Thomas Burnett Swann

head. Then I forced her face under the liquid.
    “Let Eunostos go -or I will drown your queen,” I shouted to the six guards.
    The guards stared at me with disbelief. Saffron momentarily revived, sputtered to the surface, and disappeared again beneath my ladle.
    They released Eunostos and let him fall the few feet they had managed to raise him from the ground. Flying in a circle around the vat, roseate still in carmine, they had ceased to look glum. They did not look fearful; in fact, they looked downright hopeful. After all, Saffron could not take away their mirrors as long as she remained in the vat.
    By now Eunostos had struggled free of his net. He started to clamber up beside me. “Zoe, jump to the ground. I’ll take your place.”
    “Get Kora to safety,” I cried. “They won’t hurt me while I have their queen. But I can’t stay here forever.”
    “You won’t have to,” he shouted. “Moschus. Partridge. Bring on the Centaurs!”
    I have never seen those horse-men, manes flying, hooves clattering in disciplined unison, gallop with more sublimity. Say what you will about their infidelities (and I am not one to say anything), they are matchless warriors. And Chiron himself had come to lead them. Chiron, the oldest Beast in the Country, five hundred years of wars and travels and wisdom and sheer, white-maned heroism. With Saffron to lead them, the workers might have attacked and resisted, flung their bamboo spears from the air or dived like eagles to claw at the Centaurs’ eyes. But Saffron was still in the wax, unconscious. I ladled her out of the vat and flung her onto the ground, and the leaderless workers remained unresisting (and perhaps secretly jubilant).
    I jumped to the ground and saw that Eunostos, with Kora beside him, was conferring with Chiron. They talked briefly and then Chiron advanced to address the conquered Thriae. Always forgiving when it came to women and perhaps more forgiving now that the workers had painted themselves into at least a semblance of womanhood, he announced at some length, with the stylistic flourishes and dramatic pauses characteristic of his race and suitable to his station, that neither workers nor drones would be punished, since they had only followed the orders of their queen, but that they must leave the forest by the following day.
    “But your queen must remain to be tried before a court of Beasts,” he concluded. “She is an evil woman who has almost caused three deaths. Moschus, bring her before me.”
    “Can’t.”
    “Moschus!”
    “Not unless you want her like this.”
    Moschus pointed; the rest of us looked. And there lay Saffron in a sheath of wax, which had hardened over her body like a shroud.
    She was becomingly but unmistakably dead.
    You may think me a hard, merciless woman, but she had threatened Kora and me and wanted to drown Eunostos in the vat of wax. I have never spared pity for the pitiless, especially when they die through their own misdeeds.
    “I know just the place for her,” I said, lifting her now somewhat weightier bulk and reentering that hateful hive.
    In a deserted hive, in the hexagonal central room, there is a pedestal which is no longer without its statue. Bear Girls and young Centaurs often visit the place out of curiosity. The golden skin of Saffron shines through the wax and you might mistake her for a figure carved from amber. She is much more beautiful than in life, even with her wildly tangled hair and her staring eyes. They call her the Golden Gorgon.
    When I emerged from the hive, Eunostos was pleading with Kora. He had knelt to her, all six feet of matchless Minotaur, a glory of mane and horns, of youth and might and tenderness; and she, a white lotus bending to touch his head.
    “And you’ll marry me then and come to live in my stump?”
    “Yes, Eunostos. You saved my life.”
    I looked into her eyes but I did not see Eunostos. I saw her dream. I saw death.

PART TWO
    AEACUS

CHAPTER VIII
    EUNOSTOS’s trunk