Chapter Sixteen
Sixteen
Daybreak hit the Forest in sheaves and lances of probing light.
Autumn was already thinning out the leaves in the canopies overhead—it let in the sun’s early morning rays with abundant largesse.
It turned low-crawling mists incandescent between trunks, stitched dew-diamonds across spiderwebs, chased out the somber gray chill of the predawn.
Birdsong drenched the air. Woodpeckers went to work, like the stutter-stretch of a ship’s mooring ropes as the vessel shifts on the swell.
Somewhere, through the gaps between the trees, the creaking-hinge call of a deer, seeking its kind.
Nothing bad, you thought, could happen here.
Duncan, moving rapidly northeast over scraggy ground, was not fooled.
Some of the most savage killing he’d been a part of had happened under radiant blue skies, in snowscapes out of some serene Christmas greetings postcard.
Death was not picky in these things, and nor were the nape-of-neck horrors the Forest owned.
The Huldu came out at night from preference, their powers were ascendant in moonlight—they would shun the sun’s brightness if they possibly could—but driven to it, the most seasoned warriors among them would not let it stop them from much.
He carried the McCulloch, briefcase style in his left hand, fully loaded, just in case.
Meanwhile, Stordalen’s severed head swung weightily from his pack, tied on by its hair.
He’d aligned it as close to centrally as he could, but still it unbalanced him as he loped across the few patches of open ground he could use to put on speed.
From time to time it got tangled in underbrush as he forced his way through thickets, tugging him insistently back. It was far from ideal.
And now he was in a hurry.
He checked his Mappin only those with the Sight can pass or some such shite. Dreaming in mythic isolation, calling all the shots, handing down the law. I used to think it was the Hebrides, or maybe Ireland, but no one ever talked about taking a boat, crossing the sea, anything like that. Like it’s someplace not on human maps. That about right?”
He finished his biscuit.
“And if you’re some kind of big man back in the Final Isles like you seemed to think you were, then what the fuck are you doing in these parts?
Meb comes up from the south to steal Mimi Rush and build her cairn, the vatnalfr said Svalenkari’s down from Scotland, too.
And the Final Isles sent you. What’s going on, pal? What’s this gathering for?”
He waited, pensive, but the Huldu prince had no answers for him, and after another slice of cured meat, he gave up the pretense that he was hungry, that he wasn’t alone.
He left the canned peaches unopened, stowed them with the rest of his provisions, and tied Stordalen back in place on his pack.
He dropped lightly back to the Forest floor, took a bearing on the declining sun, and started walking.
His hallucinations—or whatever they were—came back, shadowed him on and off, as they had before.
But they showed up less often, seemed less intense, and less inclined to get close.
He found he could largely ignore them. He picked up his pace.
He came, finally, a little ragged at the edges, to Miller’s Frith.
He didn’t see the village at first—it was a couple of years since he’d been here, and even then he’d been approaching from the east. A lot of time for the Forest to cover and consume and change.
He was past the first cottages before he even realized they were there.
No dramatic eruptions of tree growth to shatter homes here, just thickets of brush and small trees that had sprung up around each building, breaking up the outlines of walls and windows, and cobbled streets long lost beneath carpets of mulch and low-level brush.
His first intimation that he’d arrived came from the corner of his eye, rays of late afternoon sun striking egg-yolk-orange off the glass edges in a broken windowpane.
He stopped and pivoted about, spotted the slumped roof of one of the camouflaged cottages—oddly not the nearest one to him—then, abruptly, the others.
He stood for a moment, worked to get his bearings.
Made out the rise of a two-story house, then the modest railway station roof beyond.
Up the rise, the church tower beyond that.
A sense of qualified relief soaked through him.
He’d made it well ahead of nightfall; he had some time.