Chapter Twenty #2
Something about the iron simplicity of it kills his fear, puts fresh strength in his stride, a grim new determination.
And—he will realize many years later—by now the odds have tipped in his favor.
Winter is in retreat, early spring chopping back the nights, bringing in longer, brighter days, light that will dazzle his pursuers as they look for him, perhaps even drive them back.
The forests of Argyll are not yet what they will become again after the Unbinding.
Man’s mark is still upon them. Across Scotland, the burn-back and logging, the careless husbandry of millennia has long since left open ground everywhere you look—peat bogs and bleak moors, patchwork planted river valleys, drystone-walled small holdings, whole sweeping estates of fenced pasture and fallow ground.
Seek the wide open, the tree sprite whispered with ticklish intimacy.
Shun the shadows we cast, look for the burning ball, look for renewal, for it is the season, and you are young and juicy.
And she giggled and stuck her green tongue in his ear, giddy with the rising sap of spring.
But it isn’t that easy.
For as long as he can remember, the Forest has been his home, and where it runs out, a creeping sensation of…
exposure touches with icy fingers at his nape.
He hovers on the fringes at first, held back with ingrained fear of stepping out from under the sheltering canopies into unbroken sunlight and space.
But the balancing terror of Svalenkari’s wrath drives him out.
Forces him to dart forward into this meadow or that, whenever he hears, or thinks he hears, signs of pursuit.
He mingles with herds of sheep or cattle, skulks along fence lines and drystone walls, shelters once shivering and afraid in an abandoned shepherd’s hide until the bark of an approaching dog chases him out and on.
At midday, he drinks from a rusted iron trough he finds in the corner of a field.
Once or twice, across the fields, he sees actual humans in the distance, hears the barking of other dogs, but he dares not approach.
As the day tips over into afternoon and the quality of the light begins to fail, he grows desperate.
Estimating as best he can, he tracks the edges of the woodlands he remembers, dips back into the forest to take his bearings, ears pricked for any sound of his Fae hunters, then ducks back out and trudges on, backtracking the path they dragged him weeping away on, the night of Isnorvi’s birthday surprise…
It’s almost full dark when he finally reaches Stac Dubh.
Unused to seeing structures of its sort, he spots the geometric yellow glow of one or two lit windows in the gloom before the mansion itself.
But as the house emerges in somber, crenelated bulk, as he creeps through the surrounding farmed fields and onto the magical lawns, the seared memories of the last time he was here take over.
Everything seems a little smaller than he recalls—later, he’ll understand it’s because he’s older, grown larger—but beyond that, the deep realization that he’s made it, that he’s here at last, hits him like one of Isnorvi’s punches to the gut.
He stands breathless before the stone edifice and its cheery yellow cutouts as if before an altar to some power he still cannot name.
From the uppermost cutout, a sudden, wooden creak and bang, as the sash window lifts.
A darkened silhouette of head and shoulders against the yellow light, hunching outward, peering down.
—
This—is no fucking dream …
Right.
He lies with his head in the fork between two tree roots, skull pressed back gently against the bole. The rain seems to have stopped. The pain in his head is still there, but softened, receding. Odd stickiness across the site of the previous heat.
Shot, he pieces groggily together once more. He sees the glint from over the river again, from among Hardy’s assembled men. The distant roll of thunder. They fucking shot me!
Well, they did their mortal best, trills someone gaily over his head. But what avail crude lead and mortal’s schemes against witch’s luck and Fae heart’s blood and now my own small sticky contribution. What avail against the potency seeded in you now? Oh, all across the Domain shall know this tale!
Only one possible source for that voice—no one else talks that way.
He tilts his head back and up, sees narrow green-glowing eyes peering down, set in a nut-brown pixie face.
Confirmation, and with it understanding dawns—what he’d taken for the fork between two tree roots is no such thing.
His head is cradled between the spread thighs of the tree sprite, soft, peeling texture against his cheeks like the bark of young aspen trunks.
Green tendril fingers grip his face and jaw—one slips, playful and squirming, into the corner of his mouth—and they turn his skull gently, side to side.
What small contribution? he mumbles indistinctly, and tries to push out the tendril finger with his tongue.
The skogsra’s features crease in delight beneath her mop of tangled, spriggy hair.
Silver birch gleam of teeth in the grin.
She squeezes her thighs tight around his face a moment, quivers, loosens them again.
She smells of fresh loam and mulch and rain, shot through at moments as she moves with the sharp whiff of crushed blackberries and mint.
Here, she breathes, and reaches back past his head to the juncture of her thighs, brings back fingers thick with sap, smears the fresh secretion along the line of his wound. This heals all. But my sisters will have taught you this already, many, many times, on your visits to them, is it not so?
Word gets around, I see.
The tree sprite giggles, reaches back inside herself again, moves to smear the furrow along his skull one more time. He raises a hand to stop her, to touch the wound.
Wait, that’s fine. That’s enou—
Instantly, she locks fingers around his wrist, stops him touching, tendril grip abruptly hardened to polished wood, immovable as a buried root, as if her grasp grew around him over decades while he was plunged into some glamoured sleep. He knows better than to fight this. He makes himself relax.
All right, all right. But tell me what happened, at least.
You shall be told, for it is a tale. But take my balm, it has already sealed the gashes elsewhere on you, even this one, and will do more with time.
Your wound was not deep, for you turned as they loosed upon you, the lead they hurled barely kissed you on its way past and into the Domain, where it buried itself, and lies buried still, in sturdy bark.
Right. It makes some sense. Glint across the river, the muzzle flash, but—memory sharpens, details return—aye, he was turning, had turned, once already, to sweep the tree line for pursuit, then turned back again…
Aye. Fucking nightmare for any sniper working at that distance.
Was it your sturdy bark they hit, then?
The tree sprite giggles, puts her other hand up to her lips, then lets the tendril fingers trail down onto her softly peeling pale breast. Oh, not mine, she says archly. My bark is smooth and unblemished wherever you may touch it.
Not for the first time, Duncan gets a sudden flash of memory from the war—this flinty blue-eyed French granny in an inn he was billeted at with the Americans in Saint-Nazaire.
The woman had to be well into her seventies—though spry with it, immaculately turned out and helping her daughter out around the place with seemingly boundless energy—but when she dealt with the billeted men, there was a sudden sparkle in her eye and step, an outrageously flirtatious girlishness to her manner that you couldn’t help responding to.
It was as if there was somehow still a young French sexpot dreaming just beneath the rough and lived in seventy-year-old skin, as if, at a moment’s notice, she might split her aged carapace to shriveling fragments and climb on out, lithe and smooth and ready to back up her flirting to the hilt.
He knows the skogsra, once contained within the bark of their chosen tree, live on a timescale in which human affairs blink by like cocaine moments out on the town.
Stepping out of their deep dreaming and into that speeded-up whirl is clearly a dizzying business for them, a release they seem to relish, but also handle with, for such rooted, serene beings, an alarming lack of gravitas or reflection.
They present as flirty, flighty, here for the party and not much else.
Duncan frowns, makes an effort. They didn’t hit you, so what brought you out looking for me?
Oh, we did not look for you, I or any of my sisters. The skogsra released his hand, gestured with her sap-dripping fingers across the clearing. It was she that dragged you to us.
He props himself up an inch or two to look. Sees Mimi Rush seated in the darkness against the bole of another tree.
Except, of course, it isn’t Mimi at all.
—
The changeling sees him instantly, across the dark and distance from window to lawn. Gleam of teeth and eyes in the silhouette of its face.
Perhaps it could already sense his approach, with whatever remained of the magic used to bring it into being. Or perhaps its misgivings were more general, tossing it from uneasy sleep, sending it to the window to look. In either case—
Duncan froze when the window went up. Now—sudden intimations down his spine of what’s about to happen—he snaps into motion, jumps forward on the lawn, desperate to reach the door and hammer at it to be let in.
But the changeling is faster. With unhuman speed and flexibility, it grabs the window frame, hinges itself bodily out onto the facade of the house, falls casually ten feet upside down, then grabs hold of some detail in the stonework.
Duncan’s mouth drops open. The changeling swings one-handed, grabs with the other hand and both feet, spiders downward over the stone with no more effort than a squirrel coming down a tree.
Duncan’s running full tilt by now, breath sobbing in his throat, he’s close…
The changeling lets go again, leaps, does a high, flopping somersault in midair.
It lands cat footed, naked, in Duncan’s path across the lawn.
Duncan slams to a halt, staring at his own face in the gloom.
He thought he’d be prepared for this; he isn’t.
The changeling lifts arms like something bat winged wanting to take flight, blocking Duncan from the house and everything in it. It bares its teeth at him.
“No! Mine!” it snarls.
The words are in English—it takes moments for rusty wires in Duncan’s head to cross and spark, firing up recollection of the other language, just barely learned before the Skogurtal came to crush it away.
In that gap, that moment of memory and hesitation, the changeling flies at him, tooth and nail.
Perhaps if Duncan had not come with Isnorvi’s blood already on his hands, he would have gone down under those flailing blows. Perhaps, exhausted at journey’s end, wanting only warmth and comfort and relief, he would have fallen at this, the last hurdle.
Instead, he meets the changeling with a scream of his own and the broken stub of the Roman nail in his clenched right fist. A hand grabs his throat, digs in.
But it has no talons, not even nails a decent length, and the skin of the fingers is soft.
A kind of fierce joy rises in him. He tears the hand loose without thinking, uses a Huldu wrestling trick to dump the changeling over his hip and onto the lawn on its back.
It lands hard, breath exploded from its lungs, and he scrambles to straddle it.
A wild, looping punch lands in his eye; he barely feels it.
He shakes it off. He raises the ragged iron remnant in his hand, hammers down.
There’s no flash fire, no smoke or smolder, but the nail rips down through the changeling’s cheek and blood jumps across the chilly night air.
Sprinkles hot on Duncan’s face. The changeling makes a noise like a furious cat, lashes out.
Duncan shrugs off the blow, punches down again and again with the nail.
He feels it skid on teeth or maybe exposed bone.
Soft hands flail at him, paw at his chest. He gets an eye.
The pawing hands fall away, go to covering against the rain of blows.
Hoarse cries from the changeling now, half submerged, repeated words coming through, and once again Duncan’s rusted English is slow to catch it…
“Father! Mother! Mother! Mama!”
It detonates a whole new level of fury in him he would have thought impossible.
The iron remnant of the nail in his hand has broken again, barely protrudes from his clenched fist at all.
He goes to work with his fists instead, pounding, pounding, into the face the changeling wears, obliterating the mirror of his features, blood splattering on his hands, up beyond his wrists now…
“Mummy, Mummy,” bubbles the changeling, and then stops.
Something leaves it like a sigh, like a sudden, fierce gust of wind through trees, rustling, tearing at leaves, and then gone.
Duncan sits astride the ruin of his twin, cocked fists suddenly frozen, panting, tears streaming down his face. He sees the damage he’s done, and his mouth moves, wordless, making the forms he saw on the changeling’s lips only moments before.
Mummy, Mummy.
As if in response, the body under him shifts and moves, seems to crack open and collapse inward across the chest. An odor of swamp and rotted wood billows up, makes him gag.
Behind him, lights spring up everywhere in the house.