Chapter 1
I don’t generally, as a rule, get lost.
Or at least not in these woods, or rather my part.
I know them, as the saying goes, like the back of my hand.
I’ve wandered here for the better part of two decades, learning their paths, open or otherwise, the hiding places above and below, where its pools and ponds and rills wait and run, where the herbs and mushrooms grow best and thickest, where the oak saplings are at their finest and strongest, where sun and moon fail to shine and where they sometimes brighten both day and night.
Unsuspected barrows and highest tors that poke above the tree canopy, stone circles where magic more ancient than memory sleeps until it’s woken, places where older gods wait, grown still and stiff with passing time, forgetful of their purpose.
Or so it’s said. Never met one myself, or not to my knowledge.
Yet here I am, adrift in a dappled clearing that I cannot seem to escape.
The day passing me by in leaps and bounds as I tread in circles, a penitents’ path I neither willingly joined nor suspected.
Some sort of faery trap into which I tripped and all the profanity in the world cannot cut me loose.
A fly in a spider’s web. How long’s it been here, waiting?
Who laid it? Here? So deep and dark, so far off the beaten trails where even I’d not have come, except I was following that bloody hare for my stew pot, and hasn’t it had its revenge?
Disappeared before I could even draw my bow…
Trickster thing.
Or merely an animal that’s smarter than me.
The latter is most likely.
I’m not normally so careless, but something gripped me and I ran along with it; I stay fit with work around the holding, tramping the forest and foraging for ingredients medicinal and flavoursome.
But I’m no great huntress – meat comes to me in the snares I set, the villagers and rare travellers who bring offerings for aid, for medicaments, for readings to guide their future or find direction – but such barters have been rare in recent days and my snares empty.
Mostly, I provide small magics only because it’s never a good idea to let people know exactly what you can do.
Something I didn’t realise when I was young, which is precisely how you (I) get into trouble.
But in my middle years… well, I’m not normally such an idiot.
Yet here I sit, having given up on trying to walk my way out of this blasted circle because all paths lead me back to the centre.
At first glance I’d thought it merely a disturbance in the ground, dug up by badgers or the like.
At second glance, a penitents’ path such as one finds in the great cathedrals.
Third and final (and too late) glance – the only one with proper attention paid, I recognised it for what it was: a maze, ploughed into the forest floor, left like a raised scar, the rough spiral pattern turning back and forth on itself, but with no exit.
I’d already stepped over the outer border and was stuck in its warp and weft.
And I’d run so far from home, so far from any chance of my shouts being heard had there been another person in my cottage (which there’s not); so far I’d gone past the Black Lake, even, a place I seldom visit more than once a year.
Around me, the forest, dark and quiet – not a peep from bird or bee, fox or badger; no giggle of a stream running nearby, nor even wind skipping through the branches though I can see it moving the leaves.
So: an enchantment here, and not a good one.
I scan the undergrowth, the trees, looking for any sign of something that might be watching me and waiting for a moment’s inattention, but there’s nothing out of the ordinary, other than the sense that this is a trap laid with intent.
Not necessarily to trap me, but anyone or anything foolish enough to wander this far from the village (so perhaps me, dumber than a hare).
Or even those from any of the outlying cottages, the few tiny forest farms. When will its maker come back?
How many such traps await? How often does whoever or whatever set it check it?
Or is that person or creature a long-gone thing, and only these snares remain? Or do they bide their time?
Not knowing is frustrating and while the years have taught me better to keep my temper (or at least hide it), I’ve been sat in this cage without bars for almost two hours according to the movement of the sun.
The rage isn’t a sudden thing, although it feels like it could be, except I know it’s been building, fuelled by vexation, that sense of being held against my will.
And the memory of that very thing happening has left a mark, indelible, a well from which fury can and does bubble more and more frequently nowadays and, with a profanity, I draw my iron knife and plunge it into the heart of the maze.
Blessed iron, so thoroughly grounded, so thoroughly mundane that anything eldritch cannot bear it.
So weighty that it drags the unreal into the real world, makes it visible. Solid. A hittable target.
I feel rather than hear a roar, a growl, and I’m up immediately, sprinting for the edge of the circle. Then, at last, I break out, my steps no longer magic-led back into the centre. Free, I turn and spit into the trap. So there.
In that moment, I feel the weight of a gaze, pushing the air downwards, seeking and searching – when it passes over me I’m fool enough to breathe a sigh of relief that I’ve been missed.
Which is when it doubles back, that strange gaze, and falls like an avalanche, pins me to the earth, lies upon me like a night-hag trying to steal my breath.
I’m very still, although it’s not as if I have much of a choice.
Abruptly, the weight’s gone. It stayed long enough to make a point, but not long enough to kill me. No. It just wanted me to know that I’d been found.
* * *
The closer I get to home, the better I feel, although simultaneously more irked.
I can’t deny that some irritation stems from the fact that, usually, I’m the worst thing in the woods (bears and wolves notwithstanding) and I like it that way.
The further I am from that particular patch of the woodlands, the safer it seems; I’d wandered much further than I’d meant to, and I might be fooling myself, but my cottage is warded and protected against any number of threats.
It’s a secure place. Whatever waits out there would be hard pressed to get in.
I hope.
Maybe it’ll forget me.
Maybe something else will take its attention.
Maybe it’s time to run.
That thought grates.
I ran once before; I ran so far and for so long.
This was where I came to rest.
This was the place that welcomed me and let me forget the things I’d done.
I’ll not give it up, or at least not easily.
Whatever’s in the forest can’t be worse than what I fled.
What I did.
Thus, I will stay. I’ll pretend it never happened, and life will continue as it has for the past twenty years.
Yet as I approach my cottage, with its barn and gardens and tiny fields for just enough crops, I hear voices, arguing, and it suddenly feels as if this day is the start of worse ones to come.
* * *
Bright blonde curls, summer-blue eyes, a heart-shaped face and trim figure, wrapped in a travel-stained sapphire silk brocade dress, heeled boots with bows and golden cloak – the girl is not exactly dressed for camouflage.
Even with limp locks, grit on her skin, shadows under her eyes and reeking of perspiration, she’s a beauty, sitting on a bench seat in the little rose garden, staring across my holding, gaze fixed on the pond and the stream that flows into it.
Her companion, her minder, throws exasperated glances at her as we speak, and this woman – whom I’ve known a very long time, and to whom I owe much – tries to convince me that this girl must be my next fosterling.
As yet, I’ve not let them into my home. My white-washed cottage, its angles slightly odd.
The interior bright, surprisingly roomy, kitchen, bathroom, sitting room and workroom on the ground level; a cellar below that.
The first floor has two bedrooms, and a third in the attic.
It’s a sanctuary, and I’ll not easily let others over the threshold.
Witches in trouble oft find their way to dark forests and this is one of the darkest. One of the largest, hence “the Great Forest”.
A good place to hide. We live away from the churches and the god-hounds who serve in them.
We keep ourselves hidden as well as we may; we’re self-sufficient, making what we can, trading with the tinkers who roam the countryside and sometimes venture beneath the trees for what we cannot.
Or bargaining with the isolated farmsteads or villages where our talents are needed (potions and powders for sickness and health, fertility or otherwise for women with already too many mouths to feed, or solutions for wives with husbands not man enough to behave like decent human beings).
We’re easier to find than doctors in such remote spots, and more reliable, for what we do sticks.
No placebos come from the hand of a hedgewitch or henwife.
It’s grown too hard to live in the cities, too hard to hide what we are, and even those of us who don’t make weight on the witch’s scale, those untouched by power, light or dark, still aren’t safe.
It’s too hard to be a cunning woman or even a simple henwife when either term might so easily be pronounced “witch”.
Out here we can be safe – we can’t all have the privilege of the Briars of Silverton.
We’ve been hunted, yet we survive and sometimes parents and friends who love more than they fear send girls like this one to women like me.
Sometimes girls like her go back home eventually; sometimes they can’t.
This one, Rhea, can’t apparently, and Fenna has spent the last ten minutes trying to cajole me into helping.
To open my home. She speaks at normal volume, the girl hearing everything that’s said about her, some of which is not flattering, and this tells me Fenna is at the end of her tether, and any thought of protecting feelings has long fallen by the wayside.
‘Mehrab, please. Yes, she’s sulky and stubborn, but she’s also afraid. Give her a week, she’ll settle. If she doesn’t then send her away. Once she realises there’s this or fending for herself, she’ll buckle under.’
Will she though?
I look from Fenna with her greying hair with a thick white streak at the widow’s peak, hard lined face, dark cloak over trews and shirt of browns and greens and greys – a woman who knows how to blend in – to the girl with all her golden beauty; weigh the trouble this will cause me.
I’ve not fostered in some years, have become used to solitude and my own ways.
Grumpy and impatient, I’ve been quite happy sinking into this stage of life. This Rhea looks like hard work.
‘Where’s she from?’
‘Lodellan.’ Something in her expression tells me there’s more.
‘How bad was it?’
‘An insistent suitor.’
‘And?’
‘Later,’ she says in a low voice. I look at the girl on the bench, patting the fat tabby cat that had wandered out of the forest. Mr Tib stayed, though not invited to, even after I treated him roughly to make sure he was no shifter.
I did name him, and that’s my own fault for giving such encouragement.
I raise my voice a little: ‘Girl, what can you do?’
A defiant gaze turns on me; she holds one hand palm up and in a trice there’s a single blue flame of witch-fire dancing there.
Mr Tib hisses and scarpers – not from the craft, but the flame, so close.
She holds my stare, does this Rhea, and I know I should say No.
I should say Take her elsewhere, Fenna! But I don’t.
There’s something in her face that reminds me of another’s – not the looks, no, but the expression, the air.
A sadness at the heart of the insolence.
(A voice in my head whispers Be bold, be bold but not too bold, and another replies Be as bold as you like!) It reminds me of my debt to another, unpaid.
The force of that failure presses the words ‘All right’ from my mouth and makes me nod.
I can’t help but think it’s the worst decision I’ve ever made – but I know that’s not true.