Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-One
Later, the changeling came and found him.
He’d clambered up into the bole of a massive, ancient beech, just back from the tree line.
It was high enough above the surrounding canopies to offer damp, tranquil views across the meadows, the river, and the village of Maltby beyond.
Tiled roofs huddled on the rising ground, gathered around the inevitable church spire.
Smoke wisped up prettily here and there from cottage chimneys and the stack of the little flatbed ferry as it made the crossing.
Whatever presence Hardy had established there two nights ago was long gone, dismantled, packed up, driven away.
If you looked hard in the autumn sunlight, you could see one or two ammunition crates, abandoned and presumably empty, on the boards of the wooden jetty where the ferry made landfall on the meadow side.
The grass close by had been trampled, churned up in places, but beyond these signs, you could have been forgiven for thinking none of it had ever happened.
Duncan touched the scoring left by the sniper’s bullet along the side of his skull. It was still faintly sticky with the tree sprite’s secretions, but there was no longer any pain.
Fucking happened, right enough.
But why?
He closed his eyes, pressed finger and thumb against his eyelids, and tried once again to extract sense from the reversal.
The ambush, the rendezvous, the sniper. Shuffle the face cards, deal them out faceup—Mimi Rush, Garner, Hardy.
Did Garner garble the message? Did the Huldu attack spook Hardy’s men?
Did Mimi herself say something they took the wrong way?
He could make no better hand of it now than in his previous dozen attempts.
Stealthy rustle of leaves.
He blinked, looked round. Saw Mimi Rush’s changeling seated there on a nearby branch across from him.
It really was looking the worse for wear—face sagging on one side, one eyelid drooping, mouth pulled down at the corner.
Hair in grimy ropes. Skin pallid gray and stretched seeming under clothes now grubby, ragged and torn, the same clothes it had been dressed in when he’d taken it from the Rush household only days ago.
Below the muddied cuffs, the hands had turned clawlike and were sprouting outcrops of something that looked like tiny beige mushrooms across the backs and knuckles.
For all that, it sat in the tree with an elegance and ease that no human child could have managed. It looked solemnly at him out of its lopsided face. Said nothing at all.
“Why?” he asked it finally.
It shifted daintily on the branch, held out one hand, for all the world like a debutante examining her manicure. Stared at the fungal growth across the back.
“It’s not your fault.” The imitation of his voice was so good Duncan almost touched his own lips to check he hadn’t been the one to speak. “No hard feelings. Get yourself under cover.”
The murdered tree line outside Erlsley, days ago. His own words. The sickened feeling as his long-held hatreds curdled, puddled away into something even less bearable.
Pointing at the forest like it was some kind of solution.
He sighed. “All right.”
“Why did they shoot you? Why kill you?”
The changeling’s own voice still held a faint trace of the real Mimi, but the sibilance had crept in more in the days since Erlsley, and there was another, rusted tone beneath, like broken gears grinding, like dead autumn leaves crunched underfoot.
“I don’t know why.” He looked bleakly out at Maltby Ferry, the chimney smoke from the hearth fires of men. “But someone out there does. And sooner or later I’m going to find them and make them tell me.”
“You will go back?”
“Oh, aye. I’m going back right enough.”
“It will be dangerous?”
He grinned unpleasantly. “Not so much. No one’s going to be looking for a dead man.”
The changeling hesitated. Bit its lip. One canine went right through and it winced. Pale gray fluid leaked from the puncture. It licked at the wound, frowning.
“Will you give me the doll?” it asked.
Startled, Duncan looked down into the clearing, where his pack stood against an elm trunk. It was still neatly fastened shut, just the way he’d packed it back in Miller’s Frith. “How did you know it was in there?”
“I…smell it. I smell her, I smell…Mother.”
“But you didn’t take it? You could have taken it. While I was—” He gestured at his own head. “The skogsra would not have cared.”
“Dolls are…giften.” The changeling frowned, clearly trying to formulate something in its head, maybe hold on to some fast-fading memory from before. “Gifts. Gifted. Mother-given…”
It blinked rapidly, looked away.
“Will you gift it to me?”
“Aye,” he said gently. “I’ll gift it to you. Seems like the least I can do.”
—
Below, in the clearing, he unfastened the pack and dug out the doll.
In the filtering late afternoon light through the trees, it looked even smaller and grubbier than he remembered.
The changeling stood at his side, trembling a little.
He was already crouched to its level; he could hear the tiny scraping wheeze of its breath.
He hunkered awkwardly around, held out the doll. Cleared his throat.
“Here. It’s yours. Take it.”
The changeling took the doll in one clawed hand, barely looked at it, clutched it to its chest. Duncan hung there, felt himself unaccountably reach out a hand and press it briefly to the changeling’s sagging cheek.
“It’s yours,” he repeated.
“You…have your mother?” the changeling husked.
“Had.” He swallowed. “Gone now. I don’t see her.”
“Your mother…gifted you?”
“Aye.” He held down the bitter memories with an effort. “As best she could. She tried.”
…saying there’s something wrong with him, Archie. He’s not right, you know he’s not. Something happened that night. He’s not been the same since…
Hissing, desperate voices from behind the paneled door, his mother’s pleading tone. They think he’s in bed, they think he cannot hear.
His father, pleading, too, in his own way.
…just sleepwalking. He’s been doing it nearly since he could walk.
How many times, Julia, how many times has he been out of his bed at all hours and wandering about, half the time outside?
Remember when—he was what, three or four—we found him in the paddock with the cows?
Or when Craig found him almost in the woods that time, just standing there, staring at the trees…
And the blood on his hands? On his fists, Archie?
Julia—
Like some…drunken gillie after a square go with his pals at the ceilidh? How do you explain that away, Archie?
Finlay found a carcass on the lawn the next morning. Not much left of it, he reckoned foxes or polecats had been at it. Maybe—
Maybe he’d been punching it? Punching a bloody carcass in his sleep, until his knuckles were raw? Do you hear yourself?
Tight silence. Duncan’s Forest-attuned hearing brings him the clink of Edinburgh Crystal, decanter neck on tumbler. His father sighing, taking the first whisky sip of the evening. Duncan imagines the man’s sunken eyes, glowering across the room over the rim of the glass.
Then what?
I—I don’t—
Then what, woman? What?
I don’t know! Voice rising to a shout. All I know is that child sleeping upstairs is not my Duncan!
Silence, shuttering down behind the shouted syllables of his name. When his father finally speaks into the resulting quiet, there’s a dangerous, even calm in his tone that Duncan, newly arrived at Stac Dubh, has not yet heard.
But it reminds him of Svalenkari.
Julia, we are not going through this nonsense again.
You are an educated woman. I won’t have this…
this descent into belowstairs superstition and bloody delirium.
The Huldu are tales, told to frighten small children and ignorant peasants, and you, my dear, are neither.
No one has swapped your child, stolen it out from under your nose—not seven years ago, and not now either!
That was different!
Not at the time, it wasn’t! Don’t you remember how you wept? How you swore he was looking at you in some way that wasn’t right in a bairn? How he scared you?
I—Archie, I was tired then, it was different, I didn’t realize what being a mother…
This is not the same, this is real. I can’t believe you don’t see it, too!
His voice is different, his expressions, the way he looks at me, his whole body, his hands—have you looked at his hands? They’re rough, calloused—
Oh for Christ’s sake, Julia! The boy is growing up. Of course he’s not your soft little bairn anymore! You just haven’t bloody noticed till now is all.
Growing up? Is that why he barely speaks to us above single-syllable words and grunts now? Is that why he suddenly doesn’t understand English properly when his tutors have him? Why he can’t write it anymore?
He’s just being difficult. Boys of an age—
Boys of an age! A choked laugh, rinsed clean of all humor. Last night he climbed up with me on the chaise longue, tried to snuggle up to me, and asked me to read him a story! At his age! Archie, it made my skin crawl!
Crouching, Fae-still and poised to bolt from his listening post on the staircase, Duncan feels his eyes tear up again, the way they did that day on the chaise longue.
Well, I’m afraid that does you no credit at all, my dear. Duncan knows he’s going away to board this year after the summer. He’s likely feeling soft and daft, that’s all.
Going away? The hard laugh again, clearer now. You mean Cadogan’s? Archie, they aren’t going to bloody take him at Cadogan’s in this state.
They bloody well will! Real anger now. With what I contribute to the Old Boys’ fund, they have no choice.
If they’re not getting rained on in chapel right now, it’s down to me.
They should be calling it the Slaven kirk, the amount of money I put in.
They bloody well will have my boy, and they will do right by him.