Chapter 3
Fleet as a fox. Quiet as a mouse. Run, child. Run.
Rowan ignored the voice. It wasn’t real. Her mother said so and her mother knew so much about everything. She was the smartest person in the village.
Rowan stared at the path below her feet, not looking to the left or the right.
Her neck prickled as though someone were watching her.
She wouldn’t run. Deep, deep down, she was afraid that if she started running then whatever was out there watching her would give chase.
If she ignored it, then it wouldn’t turn its attention her way and she would be safe.
Like a mouse, small, unseen. Like a fox, canny and quick.
The uncharitable part of her wished that Mistress Ethel’s son would force the old woman to move into town with him so she could stop making these trips.
She knew Mistress Ethel didn’t want to abandon the house she’d lived in all her life, but surely it was time.
It worried her that Mistress Ethel hadn’t answered the door.
She usually anticipated these weekly visits and had tea and cake ready for Rowan as she made her delivery of food and medicine.
The house had been quiet today and the door locked. Rowan had peered through the windows but there’d been no movement inside. The house had seemed unnaturally, resoundingly quiet. Her imagination again. Surely.
Mistress Ethel had probably gone to collect mushrooms or slipped away to her secret fishing hole. Just because she wasn’t home didn’t mean anything was wrong.
Still.
The elders said the darkness from the mountains crept closer every year. That the winters grew longer and the hunting more scarce. Travelers said there were strange sounds at night.
She’d never felt unsafe in the woods before and really it was just a little niggle of worry at the back of her mind, a twitch between her shoulder blades that felt like being watched. A whisper from the trees that told her something bad was coming.
She thought about stopping and placing her hand to the bark of the great oak that was just off the path, but she’d promised her mother not to do that anymore and she tried to always keep her promises.
Daylight seeped through the rustling leaves leaving puddles of gold on the forest floor. The breeze was fresh. She’d heard a bird a few minutes ago as she left the basket of food on Mistress Ethel’s stoop.
The Black Woods weren’t any blacker than they’d been yesterday.
The mountains stood where they always had.
She was safe here. She’d always been safe in the woods. Far safer than she was in town, anyway.
There, now. She recognized the stump she used to rest on when she’d made this trip with her mother as a child.
Around that next bend, she’d be able to see smoke rising from the smithy, the steeple of the church.
Before she knew it she’d be in open farmland with the cloudless blue sky overhead and green fields rolling away from her feet.
She reached the bend and saw the steeple. A moment later, an unwholesome smell came to her on the breeze, and her step faltered.
Something rotten. Something dead.
She took one step to run, but then hesitated.
What if it was Mistress Ethel?
What if she’d gone for a walk in the woods or had felt ill and tried to make it into town?
If she’d come to a bad end, Rowan couldn’t just leave her out here.
As stubborn and confounding as the woman was, Rowan cared about her.
Even if she’d been her direst enemy, she couldn’t just leave her for the crows.
She looked around, searching for anything out of place. But it looked like the same woods she’d been playing in as long as she could remember. It just felt different, subtly wrong.
She sniffed the air and grimaced. To her right. That’s where the smell was coming from.
She knelt to draw the knife from the sheath at her boot. It was her father’s knife, one of the only things she had left of him. He’d carried it through the war. He’d probably only used it to cut his meat, but the weight of the blade in her hand had always made her feel braver.
She stepped from the path. Leaves crunched beneath her feet and she paused for a long moment. When nothing disastrous happened, she walked quickly to the fallen log. It was probably a dead squirrel.
There was nothing in the rotted hole but an old nest, long abandoned. The smell was stronger. She cast around looking for…
A tuft of fur caught her eye and she stopped. The animal’s flank was too big, too round to be a squirrel. Maybe a raccoon or groundhog. She relaxed and lowered her knife. Only a poor dead animal. Nothing to be scared of.
The animal moved—twitched really—and Rowan drew in a sharp breath.
She jumped back as the thing’s head came up.
The small, masked face turned in her direction.
She wouldn’t have been terribly alarmed to find a raccoon in the woods.
She’d spent enough time here to be familiar with all of its animals.
Even a raccoon out in daylight raised nothing more than caution.
But this raccoon’s face was matted with blood and its little hand held something that looked uncomfortably like intestine.
It wasn’t Mistress Ethel though. Whatever poor animal the raccoon had found was too small to be human.
She shouted when the creature advanced a step in her direction.
When that had no effect, she turned and ran.
She kept running even when her breath burned her lungs and her legs began to tire.
She ran until she burst free of the trees into the open sunlight.
Only then did she allow herself to look back.
The trees rose behind her in a dark wall. The trunks were wide and straight, their full canopies swaying lightly in the wind. Birds chirruped in the branches and squirrels played. There was no sign of a demonic raccoon dragging a torn piece of intestine behind it as it lurched after her.
She placed her hands on her knees and bent over to catch her breath. Her knife was still in her hand. She stared at it for a moment before kneeling to sheathe it. She couldn’t be seen running around with a knife by any of the villagers. They already called her strange.
She straightened and walked quickly back toward the village, listening carefully for any sounds behind her. She glanced over her shoulder at least five times before she reached the main road and saw nothing except the trees, growing smaller and less threatening with every step.
By the time she passed the first cottage, she felt foolish for letting herself get spooked so easily.
The raccoon was nothing but a scavenger acting like a scavenger.
She’d let Urich know that his mother hadn’t answered the door.
He could go out to find her. She briefly considered warning him about the woods but discarded the idea.
She couldn’t go about spreading rumors of dark things in the woods.
Anyone else could say things like that, but if she started the rumor, people would be giving her the evil eye by the end of the week.
So lost was she in her thoughts that at first she didn’t notice that there were more people on the street than was normal for a late summer afternoon.
The baker scowled at her as she walked by.
Rowan looked down at her dress. She was rumpled and sweaty, but she wasn’t completely unpresentable.
Jon, the big smith, looked her in the eye and turned away.
She slowed, suddenly wary. That wasn’t normal.
Jon was a quiet man who’d served in the army like her Da.
If anyone was her friend here it was Jon.
He’d never turned away from her before. Maisey Harlec, the pretty, plump, golden-haired daughter of the mayor, smiled at her as she approached and that stopped Rowan in her tracks.
Maisey never smiled at her unless something bad was about to happen.
She looked around in horror as people left their homes and shops to gather in the streets.
Something was wrong. Maybe the woods had only been trying to warn her, not scare her away. She should have talked to the oak. A uniformed man stepped out of the mayor’s house and she broke into a run.
Mother…
Darting down the alley between the bakery and inn, she took the back way home.
She hopped over Master Gelen’s fence and ran through the yard, startling his chickens into a frenzy.
The gate was open. It was always open and she pushed through it without bothering to slam it closed.
She bolted down the lane and skidded around the corner to the small cottage she shared with her mother.
It was as far off the main road as you could get, their plot of land stretching out behind.
The house was still standing. The crops all fine.
Her mother was nowhere in sight, but there were soldiers at the door.
One of them, enormously big, was turned away from her, glowering into the woods. The other, young and handsome, sat on the stone bench out front. The very spot where her mother always sat in the evening to drink her tea and watch the sunset.
The young one looked up as she approached, his face blanking of all expression. He called out to his fellow and stood slowly, reaching for the hilt of his sword.
She choked on a short, hysterical laugh. He was a grown man. A soldier! What did he possibly have to fear from her?
She wet her lips which had suddenly gone dry. “Sir, is there a problem? My mother…”
Both soldiers advanced on her, one sliding to the right, the other to her left, closing in like the jaws of a wolf. She took a step back.
The young soldier, fair-haired and solemn, asked, “You live here, child? In this house?”
She thought about denying it, but their neighbor, Master Walis, stepped out onto his porch just then. Arms crossed, he watched the scene with a smirk on his despicable face.
“That’s her,” he said gleefully. “She’s the witch’s brat.”
“No.” Not denying her mother but denying the charge of witchcraft.