Chapter 26
Just after dawn breaks, we venture outside to see what we can.
The bonfire has burned down, is nothing but cold ashes which I’ll sweep away later.
The animals are safely in the barn, and are slow to meander out into the cool air of their enclosures.
They seem none the worse for last night’s visitations, but then they didn’t have to experience them.
It’s only now that I think on how quiet my livestock were, how all three horses remained calm.
I wonder if they simply knew themselves not the target of the attack, or just that they felt safe here. Unusual.
Rhea paces about, jiggling the baby – who has grown much faster than a mortal child, and is clinging onto her mother with a greater strength than she should have at this stage – on her hip, while I check on the hens in their coop – all present and accounted for, each one having laid an egg or two.
Productive. I set them gently in the pocket of my apron.
‘Mehrab? Mehrab, come here.’ She’s standing just inside the ward-line, staring at something on the ground. As I get close, I realise it’s where those small hounds fell and burned. ‘Are those… bones, Mehrab?’
And they are. Two mounds. Not beasts’ bones, however. Small femurs, pelvises, ribs, scapulae, fingers and toes and skulls. Neither canid nor lupine. Human. Child-sized.
‘Widow Wilky’s orphans.’
‘But they were human. The wards—’
‘The wards detect the inhuman. Whatever had happened to them, it didn’t matter what they had been…’ Nervous, Rhea jiggles the baby faster. I put a restraining hand on her arm. ‘You’ll turn her to butter if you’re not careful.’
She gives a half-laugh, a sad sort of thing. ‘My mother told me a story, of how, many years before, children went missing from Lodellan. Then suddenly one day the city found it had a wolf problem at night…’
‘Similar but different, I think. The magic of it at any rate.’
‘Same effect, though.’
‘But we didn’t need silver or wolfsbane.
’ Gingerly, I pick through the ashes, find only some imperfectly incinerated fabric.
Clothing beneath fur. No trace of fur. No trace of wolf fangs, just the teeth embedded in the jawbone and skull.
‘There’ll be three more of these around the cottage.
It was looking for a weak point, trying to get through. Testing.’
‘They were all just sacrifices.’
‘Yes.’
* * *
After we’ve collected all five and wrapped them in shroud-cloth, we bury them in the hole Rhea shows me – she’d begun digging it for her babe yesterday, before labour pains began.
I scold her – I’d never meant her to dig it herself, only to choose a spot.
When we’re done – the babe in question lying in a basket cooing to herself and playing with her own feet, the horses all mesmerised, heads sticking over the fence – Rhea asks, ‘What next?’
‘I think… no, I know I need to go into the forest.’
‘Mehrab—’
‘I’ll be careful. But I need to find that trap, that penitents’ path – I can’t help but feel there’s something there, something I wasn’t looking for then, but that’s part of it.
The night at the Black Lake was a few weeks before that – it was accidental, that encounter, but I don’t think the trap was.
Don’t worry, it’s daylight and the huntsman can’t ride until dark. I have Rosie and she’s fast.’
‘Why now, though?’ she asks. ‘After all the years you’ve lived here why has this happened now?’
I shrug. ‘The same reason anything happens – something changed. Unexpectedly. And I need to know what so I can deal with it.’
‘What about Ari? She – it – can move around in the daylight.’
I nod. ‘It can, so there must be something in there that was the girl, something in her core. But I don’t believe Ari’s been across the ward-line and I don’t believe she can because like the wolflings, she’s been changed enough.
It wasn’t her at the door last night. But I can’t do anything until I have some more answers – or indeed any answers at all. ’
‘Mehrab—’
‘And no, you can’t come with me. I can’t be slowed down by a nursing mother still tender from birth and a little creature that will demand to be fed, that will squall and cry the moment its belly feels empty or its nappy full.
I need you to stay here so that I don’t need to worry about you.
’ I hug her to take away the sting. ‘But there’s one more thing I can do. ’
I change into trews and a dark green coat, twist my long hair into a knot and pull a woollen cap over my head for added warmth.
Check my satchel and add bread and cheese and a waterskin to the tinderbox and variety of powders in pouches and bandages, and one of the little blue vials with the protective oil I mix myself, because you never do know what you’re going to need. I gather the bow and quiver of arrows.
Rosie complains about being saddled and again brought out of her warm stall.
The sheep, cows and goats eye her as she passes as if in sympathy that’s very much seated in better-you-than-me.
The new bay, Eadig, looks hurt to miss out on an adventure and I whisper to him that he should think himself lucky to be excluded.
Fyren, my old boy, and wiser, merely chews on his oats with contentment.
I fondle his ears, kiss his velvety nose.
He’s too old, too slow, and I need a mount that’s sleek and fast and alert.
Just in case I need to flee. Poor Rosie, to fit the bill so well.
‘Now, I know obedience isn’t your strong point, but this is important.
Don’t leave the cottage because you might not find your way back.
Don’t answer the door. Don’t open the windows.
Read, feed yourself and the child, keep an eye on that cat – they like the warmth of a baby’s breath a little too much though they mean no harm. ’
‘How long will you be?’
‘I don’t know but no panicking. I’ve Rosie and will move much faster than on these tired old feet. Don’t worry, I’ll be home before nightfall, I’ve no desire to remain out after dark.’
‘Mehrab—’
‘And, again, don’t open the door, don’t let anyone in. I don’t care if they’re begging and pleading for help. I don’t care if they’re bleeding on my doorstep. Keep yourselves safe, that’s my only concern.’
‘Mehrab, be careful,’ is all she says and hugs me awkwardly, the baby between us.
‘I will.’
But before I leave, I walk the boundary of the holding, carrying a small wooden bucket and a spade; it’s roughly a rectangle, some lines curving a little to accommodate trees and rocks.
At each corner, I stop and dig a hole with a compact trowel, about a yard down, not deep enough to disturb the wards, and scatter in tansy seeds, purple monkshood petals, powdered cherry bark, and amaranth paste, murmuring an incantation as I add a few drops of my blood from a cut in my forearm.
I refill the holes and water them from the bucket.
Before I move on, I watch until tendrils break through the soil, a strange hybrid of all those plants making its presence known.
It will remain until I remove it. Once all are set, all four plants with their thorns and purple-yellow blooms about a yard high, I stand back, a few steps outside the ward-line and take one last look at the cottage.
On the doorstep are Rhea and the swaddled baby, Mr Tib close to Rhea’s feet.
Then I raise my arms, palms open to the sky, and sing the incantation of invisibility.
Across the world, across continents, there are witch huts, hidden places only we can sense, find.
Concealed from those who hunt us, from any casual gaze.
But we know they’re there and they’re safe houses.
The spell not only provides cover but sends pursuers astray.
The wards are everyday powerful against eldritch creatures (nothing grander, nothing requiring more blood than I’m prepared to spill), but this is the best way I can protect the cottage and those within from the prying eyes of men.
As I watch my home fades from view and a new wall of the forest appears to grow up in front of it. I blink twice and slowly and can see it again, then blink twice again and it’s gone. Only a witch will sense it; see through it.
* * *
As Rosie trots along the forest paths, I turn my mind to the huntsman and what he might want with me. My ego isn’t such that I think myself irresistible so I will not regard him – it – as some lovelorn suitor willing to destroy all in his path to win my hand.
I might believe that the huntsman is punishing me for the summer husbands, for how I’ve pulled them out of their cycle, stolen them from the forest even if only for a brief while.
Or perhaps in revenge for that very first summer husband, the one I created out of madness and grief as a salve to my own loneliness, the one I abandoned in that grove and did not give the kindness of a proper ending, a proper return to the earth.
The one I still owe that debt to… But I don’t believe the huntsman’s a creature working in favour of the forest.
And the stealing of the children… so many and for so little effect, because all the old tales, including those I read last night, agree on one thing: that the lord or lady of the hunt takes only children who are precious to those who’ve offended them, who’ve trespassed on their particular tract of earth.
Perhaps the Hadderholms and the Peppergills might have done something, but the orphans?
So new to Widow Wilky’s large house, so fresh, with so little time for affection to build?
And none of the children were connected to me.
I follow, as best I can, the route I took that day, weeks and months ago, when I pursued the hare and wandered into the trap carved in the forest floor.
Yet I’m not sure I’d have found it had Rosie not whinnied and stalled.
Stroking her mane, making soothing noises, I scan the landscape around us.
Familiar, I think, that tree there with its branches twisted up so high it looks like a supplicant, that holly bush with red buds changed from when I saw it in spring, larger and lusher, its prickly leaves notwithstanding.
The path to the left that diverges in three directions.
And yes, there’s that break in the undergrowth, what amounts to almost a low hedge, that I ran right through that day, straight into the trap.
I think about the hare that led me astray.
How when I saw it, I was filled with hunger or rather a fear of hunger.
Of going short, of starving, of a life of thin soups and watery stews, of an autumn in which I might die.
Fear and hunger drew me into the chase, even though there was no real need.
The irrational desire of the hunt, the chase.
Rosie shakes her head when I try to urge her forward. Fair. I dismount, tie the reins to a low-hanging branch, then step carefully into the gap in the hedge, mindful of my footing.
There it is, the maze, the penitents’ path, so innocuous, so easy to miss if you’re distracted.
But since I’m looking for it, since I know it’s there, it’s easier to spot – helped by the fact that each curving line of it has turned brown as if burned with acid.
Poisoned perhaps. I think about the iron knife stabbed into it, all my rage and frustration and will to be free behind it – and I have no doubt my will can be a corrosive thing.
I think about how iron is hated by so many unearthly and eldritch things, how inimical it is to their makings.
And I no longer believe this trap is an old thing. Nor that whatever set it is a thing that’s old in this forest. That it may well have been roaming elsewhere for a very long time, but it’s freshly sprung here. Otherwise, its presence would have been noted. It would have been felt.
So, where is it now? Spring and summer, now autumn, it’s been active.
When winter proper comes, what will happen?
Hibernation? Or predation, like winter wolves starving, desperate enough to attack isolated holdings, or come into the village, uncaring of the danger, seeking only a meal?
Or whatever else it’s seeking? And if it can’t get me, how many more children will it take?
It – he – only moves about by night, so where does he hide during the daylight hours?
There must be a lair…
I examine the maze again, its burned lines, and notice a trail running off to one side – very thin, very faint, yet a trail of dead brown grass nonetheless, heading deeper into the forest. I unhitch Rosie and walk her around the edge of the clearing – I’m not willing to risk there being some spark of magic left in the circle – until I find the spot where the trail runs under the surrounding hedge and out.
The horse protests again; I tug her along.
‘I don’t like it any more than you do, but this is the way we have to go.
And I need you to behave because both our hides may well depend upon it.
Steel your nerves, beastie.’ She shakes her head at me but quietens down.
Or she does until we come to the edge of another clearing, stopping at the tree line to stay concealed.
Rosie tosses her head and makes a point of thumping my shoulder with her great skull.
‘All right, all right,’ I mutter as I stare at where the line of browned grass ends.
In the middle of the new clearing, a barrow, I think, but covered with trees.
Yet not trees going upwards but growing diagonally, horizontally, espaliered so they look like ribs over the dirt mound, an unwilling armour for this wound in the earth.
And the dirt mound, its maw dark and open, uninviting.
‘Oh.’