Chapter Eleven
Eleven
“Noble blood?”
“That’s what it said.” Duncan slashed irritably at the underbrush ahead with a switch he’d cut from the struggling alder when they left the beach.
“Apparently the whole fucking Forest knows about it, too. I don’t know what that bitch Mebhuranon’s up to, but it’s not just another changeling wheeze for thralls or giggles. ”
“Aye, thought I heard that name when tha were jabbering back and forth with Jenny.”
“You heard right.”
“Old Queen Meb herself.” Garner looking uneasily around in the moon-hatched gloom, as if just naming the Huldu might summon her up. “Tha do like to get thisel mixed in right to thy neck, lad.”
“I take the jobs I’m offered.”
“Well, tha waint have to feel guilty about taking their money on this one.”
“Nobles aren’t always wealthy,” Duncan said absently.
Most of him was brooding on Irene Rush, picking apart his recall for clues he’d evidently sleepwalked past while fixed on her gown-clad curves.
“Families I’ve known, some of them have been broke since the Georges.
You’re better off working for industrialists. ”
“If tha say so, lad. I bow to thy superior experience in exalted circles.”
That cut a little close for comfort. Change the subject. “Told you, though, didn’t I? This one was a thousand years old, at least.”
“At least,” echoed Garner. “More like four or five thousand. They don’t call her Old Meb for nowt.”
They called her, in fact, any number of things, dating back as far as human record reached. Meb, Mab, Mara, Maeve, Morrigan, and that was just the M’s. Elsewhere, she was Skjalf, Tuonetar, Valfreyja…so forth…
Pointless to track.
Even among her own kind, Mebhuranon was a legend. They said of her that she was already old when men first came to cut and burn the great forests of Britain, with only stone and wood and cured hide for tools. She was, to all intents and purposes, a god.
“Thought I heard another name, too,” Garner said quietly. “Svalenkari, was it? Him, I don’t know.”
Duncan grunted, elaborately noncommittal.
Skogurtal, with its antique structure and ornateness in expression, insisted not just on gender inflection, but on an honorific particle before proper nouns. Even if you didn’t speak the tongue especially well, names were easy to spot. Even names you’d never heard before.
“Tha seemed to recognize him, though,” Garner probed
“Aye, it’s a name I’ve heard. One of the northern clans, I think.”
“Perhaps it’s a Gathering, then. Meb’s outside her range up here as well—last I heard she was down around Dartmoor.
” Ordinarily taciturn, Garner seemed to have discovered a sudden urge toward gossip.
“They say it’s where she was born, like.
It’s all oak and beech regrowth down there now; must feel like some kind of homecoming for her.
Like stepping back in time to her youth or summat. ”
Duncan let him talk. If it helped bury the discomfort of his lapse into sleep at the mere, or calm his obviously rattled and out-of-practice woodsman nerves in the night forest, so be it.
It didn’t hurt that the conversation slipped further and further from things he didn’t want to talk about, things he carefully hadn’t even thought about in—
Recall, marching across his skin, raising hairs. The night around him leaned in, interested. He breathed deep, summoned from out of the remembered terrors a steady, burning rage. He breathed it in, tried it on for size, imagined some of the things he could do with it.
He quickened his pace into the rising slope ahead of them.
“Want to tell me,” Garner, huffing a bit with the incline, “where we’re going?
“Top of this rise. See if we can find an adoption cairn.”
“Tha think…someone like Mebhuranon…would bother to do that? This…far from home? I can see…some young buck…wanting to make…his mark. But a…five-thousand-year-old clan queen?”
“You’re missing the point.”
“Which…is what?”
Duncan took pity on the older man. He stopped on the sloping path, turned about to face him. Let Garner catch his breath.
“Look, Mebhuranon is old school. Living ancestor stock. That’s something special these days.
The younger Huldu like marking their abductions, because they’ve lived their lives driven to the margins and they think this is a glorious return to the days of yore.
They’re doing what they’re told their ancestors did, aping the forms. But really, it’s just cheap posturing and vengeance for all those years cooped up in tiny forest plots and woodlands, hiding from the iron.
Every changeling, every cairn, is them pissing in our faces and telling the Forest all about it.
There’s no class to any of it, no resonances, no—”
Garner was looking at him curiously. Duncan shook his head.
“Doesn’t matter. The point is, Mebhuranon’s seen the Forest come and go and now come back again.
She’s been dealing with humans since a time when they treated her as a god.
Then, when the cross-god came, she was suddenly a soulless demon succubus, then just a haunt in the trees to scare children to bed, then a harmless woodland sprite dancing on toadstools in nursery rhymes and bedtime tales.
She’s seen it all, she’s watched the eras turn, and here she is again, a Faerie queen.
She’s forgotten more grudges against humans than most younger Huldu have ever held.
So—she’ll build a cairn, not for vengeance, not for pride; she’ll build it because it is the done thing.
Nothing more. And if it’s true Mimi Rush is some kind of nobility, and the Forest knows that, then that ritual is going to be even more important, more resonant of the changing times.
” Duncan jabbed a thumb over his shoulder at the rising path.
“I’m telling you, there’s a cairn up there.
And it’s got Mebhuranon’s name on it. I’d stake the cost of a brand-new Beardmore on that. ”
“What’s a Beardmore?”
Duncan rolled his eyes. “Motorcar. One of the new ones.”
“Bet me something else. Told thee I’ve no use for those contraptions.”
“Aye, you told me. You got your breath back yet, old man?”
“Ready when tha are, lad. Tha’re the one who bloody stopped.”
Duncan nodded, turned away to hide his grin.
Moon scatter on foliage. Small rustling through the shadowed undergrowth. Somewhere in a tree not far off, a song thrush ran through its repertoire, as if warming up for some more major performance.
They slogged on up the rise.
—
If Duncan had been looking for a suitably dramatic vindication, the gods of the Forest seemed eager to provide.
The rise topped out on a balding sandstone ridge running roughly north–south with a steeper drop-off on the far side and views out across the Cheshire plain.
Down below, beyond the reach of the Forest, the lights of Macclesfield and its outlying villages glimmered like a fleet of fishing vessels at anchor on the dark.
Farther north and west, Manchester announced itself with an unhealthy yellowish glow that lay against the sky like a stain.
It seemed a long way off. The trees had thinned out as the two men crested the summit, but the open ground gave no sense of relief.
Instead, it was as if the foliage were drawing aside, like curtains pulled back off a stage set for some bleak drama to begin.
A buffeting autumn wind came out of the west, in across the plain, hit them in the face.
Bulking against the view, hunched in silhouette like some pantomime witch in hat and cloak, was a cairn nearly five feet tall.
From the uneven stonework, Huldu runes gleamed soft blue in the moonlight. They seemed, somehow, to sing in the gloom.
Duncan gestured, still a little out of breath himself from the climb. “There you go. You owe me a motorcar.”
Garner nodded. He stepped closer, touched one of the runes.
“Mark of Mebhuranon, right enough. Can tha read the rest of this stuff?”
Duncan prowled about the structure, lips moving silently.
The glyphs were largely formula—honorific references, clarion calls to ancient names, only some of which he knew.
They clumped in short phrases, occasionally stood out alone where the rune was sufficiently inflected and complex.
The juxtapositions between each piece of engraving followed a geometry he was familiar enough with to avoid concentrating on too much.
That way headaches lay, twinges of sudden vertigo, disturbed sleep, nightmare, and eventually, the witch had warned him, madness.
“It’s about what you’d expect,” he said. “The Huldu Star rises once again. Those who had Faith are Nourished, Those who Doubted are…ehm, Confounded. The Crowned Queen returns, uhm, treads the Old Forest Ways. The Old Ways are Made Anew. Rejoice.”
“That mean she’s still around?”
Duncan scowled at the glyphs. “It’s more likely figurative. But you never know.”
“So what now?”
“We leave a message of our own.” Searching around in his coat pockets. “You’ll want to stand back for this bit. Shield your eyes, too.”
“My eyes?”
“That’s what I said.”
He produced one of Crumley & Kegg’s Fae-fuckers, scanned the cairn for a suitable blast point, finally pressed it into a narrow gap between two glyph-marked stones at about chest height.
In contrast to any cairn built by human hands, the stones here were smoothly joined, flowing into each other as if cemented.
He checked to make sure the bomb was well seated, then braced a hand on it and tugged out the fuse.
It went with a soft crunch that he felt through his palm, like a tooth being pulled.
Six seconds, Crumley had promised. Duncan skated rapidly backward from the cairn, shut his eyes, and put up a shielding arm for good measure.
The bomb blew with an oddly mild crump.