Chapter Ten
Ten
They hit the fringes of the Forest almost immediately.
The White Mare was a little way out of the center of Dowgreave, and Garner hadn’t been exaggerating when he said the new growth came within a quarter mile of the village.
They went across the downslope of a wildflower meadow at the back of the inn, climbed a stile, and found themselves within a stone’s throw of the tree line.
Here, there’d been no real attempt to cut back during Re-clearance, so the deadwood border was thin—a sparse handful of felled trunks up and down the line, long since stripped clean of their usable branches by locals either brave or desperate enough for firewood to get that close.
In the early evening moonlight, the remnants looked like the scattered gray bones of some colossal beast out of myth, slaughtered long ago and left to rot there in the long grass.
Beyond, the Forest bulked dark and fronded and, if you looked carefully, stirring faintly in the breeze, as if they’d woken it from sleep.
“There’s a mere about a half mile in from this side,” Garner had told him.
“Might be a good place to start. Black water, unquiet. It were only a bent bulge in a stream back before the Growth, but it always had the waft of magic about it. Folk said an elf queen were drowned there, and if tha threw offerings in and they sank, it’d mean good fortune for thee and thy family. ”
Duncan grunted. “And if they floated?”
“Then she were angry and tha were cursed.”
“Right.”
In under the trees, and the low moon started to fail them almost immediately.
Here and there, a small dappled pocket showed up, metallic on leaves of ivy in the undergrowth, or painting a certain trunk partway down, as if to signal buried Faerie gold.
For now, it would serve. They’d brought storm lanterns and big electric torches with them, but Duncan preferred to keep them stowed in the packs until they were absolutely necessary.
His eyes were pretty good in low-light conditions anyway, and he just had to hope Garner’s more aged vision would manage, too.
They found a well-worn, winding path between the trees and pushed deeper in. Somewhere ahead, an owl hooted.
Duncan hoped it wasn’t warning someone that they were coming.
The Forest closed around him, familiar odors of green and rot, the somber bulk and rise of the trees in the gloom.
He felt the old, shivery mix of homecoming and horror, the blend of terrors known and unknown, kept just beneath the skin of conscious concern, where they prickled in his belly and whispered into his ear, but were balanced out by the sensation that here he belonged, here was where he could make meaning at levels the rest of his life had denied him, here was the place to deliver on the promise made long ago…
“Hold up, lad.” Garner shouldering past him on the path, the over-and-under held across his body. “Listen.”
They stood beneath an exuberant elm whose principal branches went up into the canopy like the arms of an Olympic champion raised and fisted in triumph. Moonlight through its leaves hatched the ground around them, silver and black. The path dribbled off to the right, but—
The faint chuckle and rush of flowing water, off and down to the left.
“Here, look.” Garner held back a swath of brush with one arm. Behind it was a leftward fork off the main track, winding down a slight incline, broken to view by the encroaching undergrowth. “All changed a bit since I was here last.”
Duncan peered dubiously down the revealed track. “And when was that?”
“Couple of years ago, maybe a bit more.” Garner slapped his left leg.
“Before this, anyway. Used to come through regular, like. Lot of grieving folk back then, lost someone in the war, wanting word from beyond. They’d come to throw things in the water, hope for something back. I got paid to bring them in and out.”
Duncan nodded. It was a common enough trend.
The Forest was mystery, magic, the unmapped uncanny in the corner of the human eye.
It was the promise of something more, something that might nourish more deeply than the hard iron contours of a relentlessly mapped and measured world and the brutality of the truths that world contained.
It didn’t always take a blackwater mere.
Sometimes it was a thousand-year oak or a lone standing stone that commanded the pilgrimages.
But the story was always the same—venture in, find the place, the shrine, the core of mystery, and your bleak unimportance in the scheme of things would be salved, your needs addressed, if not actually met, your longing at least acknowledged.
You would be seen, by things older and wiser than you.
You would be seen, by things that held court in the universe instead of merely existing there, by things of power that could listen and judge and respond. You would be seen.
And the woodsmen made money from the unspoken pact—as guides, as escorts, and, when in the gloom of the Forest it all went wrong, as desperate skirmishers or retrievers of the remains.
He wondered fleetingly if Garner had ever come on his own account, too, mourning his son, wanting word, any word at all.
“Come on, then.” Garner, now on the revealed path and looking expectantly back. “No time for wool gathering, lad. Let’s get on with it.”
He shook himself loose of his thoughts, followed Garner down the path, skirting the bushy encroachments of undergrowth, twitchy to any sound they heard or thought they heard from the foliage or the moon-glinting trees overhead.
The older man was moving slow and careful—his over-and-under was shorter barreled than the norm for a farmer’s gun, but nowhere near as chopped as the McCulloch.
It snagged on brambles in the dark more than a couple of times.
Below them, the muttering of the stream gained force.
They moved into a shuffling side step as the incline grew steeper, mindful of the weight of their packs and the risk of toppling.
Duncan thought he caught the sounds of some more major disturbance in the water, flop and splash of something, somewhere ahead.
They forged awkwardly through waist-high banks of nettles and thorn, ducked the branches of a twisted-up and oddly leaning alder tree, and came out abruptly on a ragged rock promontory five feet above the ink-black surface of the mere.
Ripples still crossed the moonlit stretch from whatever movement they’d heard on approach. Duncan knelt and watched them damp out, looking for a likely point of origin.
“Something heard us coming,” he murmured.
“Aye. Something shy.”
“Well, then. Let’s not make too much noise.”
They moved carefully along the promontory’s edge, found a way down at the far side to where the mere was fringed with more leaning alders, some of them almost prostrate to the water and branches spread out more like tentacles along the ground than anything you’d expect from a normal tree.
There was a soft earth overhang along most of the shore, but here and there it had been eaten out by the flow of water over time, and small dirt beaches a few feet or yards across went down to the water instead.
Near the far end of the mere, there was a beach broad enough to set up camp, and from the scattered traces, it looked as if someone had done exactly that not too long ago.
Stones had been used to form a rough fire circle, scorched black ground and the ashy remnants of a fire within.
A few half-charred fragments of deadwood were scattered about in the near vicinity, and the stones themselves had been disturbed at some point, too.
Duncan met Garner’s eyes. Almost imperceptibly, the older man nodded.
“Right, then,” Duncan said briskly. “This’ll do.”
—
They unshipped their packs, pushed the fire circle back into shape, gathered deadwood from up and down the surrounding bank. They started a small campfire of their own. Then, while Garner nursed the infant flames, Duncan scouted around, senses peeled for anything left behind.
Up by the earth overhang at the back of the tiny beach, where the roots of an undermined alder had been exposed by winter spate action from the stream that fed the mere, he found shreds of fabric caught on the spike of a snapped root end.
It looked, at a guess, like fragments from a woolen shirt.
And as he turned back toward the mere, as if it had been waiting for him to look, the moonlight slipped in and made something glint down near the water’s edge.
He squinted, walked a little closer to be sure.
Recognized the soft brass gleam of a single discharged shotgun cartridge, half buried in the moist dirt.
He toed the brass thoughtfully with his boot, dug it loose, then scuffed it away into the water. Tiny plop as it sank.
“Good a place to sleep as any,” he called across to Garner. “You need a blanket?”
Garner shook his head, poking the fire. “Coat’ll do me, lad. It’s not that cold.”
They turned in without further real conversation, Garner huddled up in his coat against the earth bank near the struggling alder, Duncan wrapped in blankets between the fire and the water’s edge.
Drowsy quiet crept in. Soft crackle of the flames, softer rush of water from the stream at either end of the mere, softest of all the hush of the wind in the trees overhead.
Duncan stared up at the sky above them, a seeming inverted pool of stars fringed by tree canopies, fit to fall into…
He let his eyes slide closed, let conscious thought unknot itself in preparation for dream.
Pleasing images of Niamh, demure smile feigning on her lips as she walked toward him, hands lifting to the buttons at the back of her neck.
Her wet heat over his fingers, her mouth over his cock, soft, impatient longing and thrust and…
And there!