Chapter 32
The sense of oneness, of being enclosed in meat again, is very distinct.
The ground beneath me is soft, my head rests on a pillowy tuffet and I’m covered by a blanket of moss, warm and slightly damp, earthy-smelling.
Every part of me aches; apparently, resurrection is less perfect than I’d prefer.
I’m both grateful and smug – when I fix someone (after the initial agony, of course) they’re properly fixed.
However, I’m not about to say that to the green woman sitting cross-legged in front of a small crackling fire. Staring at me.
‘She said you’d be cold,’ that voice, that rumble.
Sitting up slowly, I nod. ‘Thank you. Where is she?’
‘Gone. Short attention span. She says you’re worth saving.’
‘I heard. I heard it all.’ I cross my legs, feel the grinding in my hips, stretch before settling into place.
‘Good.’
‘Do you mind if I ask…’
She raises a brow that’s a feathery leaf.
‘I thought, was led to believe, that you – your kind – didn’t exist. You are a green woman, yes?’
‘Do I look illusory? Shall I give you a splinter to convince you I’m real?’
‘No, thank you. Quite enough pain has already been had. I believe you.’ I hold my hands up in surrender.
‘I just… I’ve seen the carved heads on houses but never seen you or anything like you.
Not a living thing that I can say Aha! There’s the source.
Well, except the hind-girls, although I don’t think they’re the source of the foliate heads.
I think they’re an offshoot, perhaps, of you? ’
She smiles. ‘Such wonderful little things, aren’t they? My nieces, I suppose.’
‘I’ve seen them dance through the woods. There are many tales of them.’ I shake my head. ‘But they’re women and girls. Mortals, or started out so.’
She shrugs. ‘Nieces in spirit or blood, all the same. They wander from lives they’ve grown tired of, the spirit of the forest inhabits them. The desire to be lost. A retreat to hooves and horns, leaves and branches, either’s a means of escape.’ A smile. ‘I do like the horns.’
‘Ha. So, what are you?’
‘A green woman.’ She sounds impatient, a little offended. ‘The spirit of this forest, I – we – watch over all the seasons, the growth, the death, the slumbering trees and plants, the soil, those who live in this place whether they’re animal, vegetable or mortal.’
‘There were more of you – why have you become legend?’ I ask.
‘Because, even hidden away, surely the witches would know of you. But Yrse, who was here before me, never mentioned you. She was a little hen-wife, no great magics but a green witch nonetheless. She’d have known of you. Where have you been?’
The big woman narrows her eyes, says nothing.
So I go on: ‘The mari-morgan said you had a problem. That’s why she brought me to you, and that’s why you brought me back – because you think I can fix it.
’ Still nothing. ‘I’m grateful for the grace you’ve extended, but I will need answers if I’m going to help.
’ Then I amend: ‘If I’m going to be able to help,’ because perhaps I’m a little bossy for someone so recently returned from the dead and she might consider putting me back the other way.
It takes a while for her to speak, as if she’s picking through what to share.
‘I’m a green woman. I’m the one who belongs to this part of the Great Forest. Others are scattered through the woods, and each forest has their own green women.
Once, there were many more here, but something happened half a century ago, and then some thing began hunting us.
’ She throws another twig on the fire. ‘For some while, too long, we did not know. We thought the sisters who disappeared had gone to sleep, in earth or tree, beneath rock or water. That they would reappear when the time came, as is our wont. However, we began to find bodies and parts of bodies. Torn apart by wild animals when nothing in the forest would attack us like that. Neither wolves nor bears would do such a thing, those creatures bow as we pass.’
She clears her throat as if this story is hard to tell.
‘And we began to hear, at last, a tale the humans far to the north of the woods were telling by their firesides, for you mortals collect such things, write them down, carry them in your minds, and speak them whenever you can, passing them on and forth.’
She sighs and when she speaks again, her voice has changed, sounds more human, like a storyteller, with cadences learned at foot and knee from grandmothers and old nurses, in the same notes for rumour and gossip, the fastest and best way for something to travel.
‘There’s a tale of the god of the hunt – a horned thing – whose greatest joy was the pursuit of stag and boar and sometimes man across moor and dale, through forest dark and valley deep.
There’s the whisper that, once, heedless, he rode off a great cliff and when he hit the rocky ground, a part of him broke off.
There’s the story that, injured but not quite dead, he rose and returned to the heart of the woodland to recover, hibernating for a very long time – but he was always a broken thing after that.
And the piece left behind? It found its own way to dark places, hollows and barrows, fed on whatever it could find, small blood and large, calling living things to it so it was thus furnished with meals.
Whatever it looked like when first it was birthed – shattered and sheared from the horned god’s body – it took on, at last, the appearance of a man. ’
And I think about the huntsman, the creature of shadow and will and spite on his steed of bone and ligaments and scraps of hide.
I wonder how long he’s been a half-thing, a broken thing.
I wonder why he’s appeared only now in my forest (the green woman’s forest), and why Berhta’s Forge has been free of his attention – apart from the children he’s taken.
Yrse never mentioned him in those nights when she regaled me with tales; those first nights I was here, when I’d not yet met Faolan, when I sat in the cottage and half-listened while I fought against the memories of who I’d been.
But the mari-morgan said he’d been north and east of the forest, hunting, clearing out green women.
And a long time to heal before that, to pull himself into a shape that he could hold some of the time with will and malignancy and threads of night.
‘I’ve seen it. Him,’ I say. ‘By the Black Lake. The shadow half, the master of the hunt, whatever remains of the broken god. You think that’s what’s been stalking the green women of the Great Forest for all these years?’
‘What did you think it wanted of you? When you saw him?’
I pause. ‘To be honest, I don’t know. I don’t think I was doing much thinking that night. Nothing good, I suspect. Perhaps I’d have been torn by the wish-hounds or thrown over his saddle and taken to the barrow where he sleeps.’
‘You know where he sleeps?’ She raises a feathery brow.
‘I found it.’
‘It’s called Night’s Barrow. The burial place of savage queens and kings long dead.’ She nods slowly. ‘I wonder if he knows what you can do… what the Fishwife said you can do…’
The breath leaves me as if I’ve been thumped on the back.
And how might it know that? ‘Maybe. Maybe. But I couldn’t do that.
I can’t heal anything that doesn’t have bones, no solid body.
The shadow half is… shadow. And I cannot resurrect the dead.
’ I rub my hands up and down my arms, trying to generate a bit more heat, but suspect the cold is internal.
‘I’ve given much thought to this, and I suspect that what it is, really, is the part that adores the hunt. The part that thirsts for blood and flesh, desires only the kill. If it somehow knows what you can do, might it not want to be whole again?’
‘Believe me, I know my limitations and there’s nothing for me to work with.’
‘It wouldn’t know that. It would only know – or suspect – what you can do to other things, people.’ She looks hard at me. ‘Perhaps you might be able to take advantage of that desire? To get close enough to it to do something?’
Destroy it.
‘How do you kill a shadow? I’d be lucky to get past the wish-hounds.’ A thought occurs. ‘Oh. The wish-hounds – they’d have obeyed his orders. If he wanted the green women torn asunder, the wish-hounds aren’t under your purview. Not natural things, are they?’
She shakes her head. ‘Not at all. But, if it – he – wants something from you, I’m sure he’d call them off.’
‘That’s a very big if to hang my newly resurrected arse on.’
She raises a hand in acknowledgement. ‘But what if? What if under the guise of healing, you destroy what’s there?’
‘I’ve never tried that.’ Of all the things I’ve done, I’ve never done that.
‘You’ve picked over my life with the mari-morgan, you know that I’ve healed people, changed them, but I’ve never pulled them asunder.
’ That idea? The very thought of deconstructing a person, bone by bone, muscle by muscle, artery by artery?
Like disarticulating a doll from the inside out?
That thought is simply too awful. ‘I… I wouldn’t know how. ’
The green woman shrugs again. ‘All things might be sundered, you just need to find where the joints are.’
I wonder if she was so nonchalant about pulling things apart before her sisters were hunted down.
Does it matter, though? What she was like before she was wronged?
In danger? She resurrected me, whether or not she would be able to recruit me.
And she’s not the thing posing a threat, not the thing stealing children from Berhta’s Forge and leaving changelings in their place; not the thing using orphans as fodder to try and break the ward-line of my holding.
‘It’s been stalking around your home, Mehrab.
’ She leans against the tree trunk, stretches out her long legs.
‘How long before it finds a way in? Somehow. Do you think it will simply give up, go away? It’s been killing my kind, stalking and hunting us for decades across the entirety of this enormous forest, wiping us out with such efficiency that we’re barely even a myth now.
How long before it finds its way into this bower?
How long before it – he – takes your little cottage apart and the girl and her strange and wonderful child as well? ’
‘How do you know about Rhea?’ I’ve not given blood to the Black Lake since before Rhea came.
‘Resurrection allows for some… access. Forgive me my trespasses.’ The corner of her mouth lifts.
I glare at her. ‘I don’t know how to do anything to him.’ I cover my face with my hands, am shocked by how cold they are. ‘Am I really alive? Properly? Because this chill—’
‘It will take time to come back properly to yourself. For the blood to warm itself once more. Be patient.’
I sigh. ‘There are books in the cottage, perhaps there’s something in there. I… must think on it.’
‘You’re inventive,’ she says. ‘Why, look at what you did to all those oak saplings. You adapted your powers to that end. I’m sure you’ll be able to figure something out.
’ And there’s a threat of if you know what’s good for you underneath all that.
‘More than one life is resting on what you do next. Because imagine what happens when it runs out of strange things to hunt and looks at the mortals.’
All the old tales say the god of the hunt is happy to pursue folk, men, women and children unfortunate enough to be caught up in the wild reel of the chase through their parents’ sins.
But there have been no rumours, at least that I’ve heard, of other villages in this forest being attacked, no stories of deserted little hamlets mysteriously cleared.
And Berhta’s Forge… there’s been no sign of him actually being there.
The missing children have wandered, it seems. And Anselm, trampled to death. Poor Anselm – why him?
‘I must go back.’
‘Where precisely do you want to be?’ asks the green woman.
Briefly it’s on the tip of my tongue to simply say Anywhere but here except who knows where that might get me. Gods, especially very old ones, can be literal and capricious; who knows where I might end up? And I’ve no doubt the green woman is a god and I have obligations.
‘Berhta’s Forge,’ I say. ‘Thank you for everything you’ve done.’
‘Remember your promises,’ says the green woman, as if I might forget the moment I’m free. I could tell her I’ve never forgotten a thing in my life, least of all my promises, even when they’ve been likely to lead to worse trouble.
‘I’ll remember.’ I nod and she returns the gesture.
‘Are you ready?’
‘I’m ready.’
And the world falls out from under me.