x. In which Arthur loses his horse
They didn’t make it much farther before stopping for the night. The spasm in Arthur’s back persisted, probably because he’d
pushed through it to prevent the horse from falling into that horrible pit. He longed for something with which to warm his
heating pad but was grateful he’d managed to keep it. He might have to make it another day or two, but once he got home, he
could sit in his armchair and doze off with the heating pad at his back. The forest would be nothing more than a horrible
dream.
He wished Charlotte had talked him out of coming here; he would’ve stayed home if she’d insisted. Then he wished he’d had
enough gumption to decide to stay home without her insistence. Thank you for the opportunity, Mrs. Livingston, but I’m afraid I can’t take it on at this time. Would that have been so hard to say?
Since they no longer had a cart, Arthur removed Maurice’s harness. He inspected the nearest tree with his torch to make sure
it was ooze-free and looped the driving lines around a branch. He sighed. If he made it back, it would be without the clock.
He could set out again, but by the time he reached Port Lorne—if he reached Port Lorne—it would be too late.
He wasn’t sure he could’ve said no. He couldn’t have turned the money down, not when his family could use it so much.
It didn’t matter that he’d accepted. He was lost in the forest; all he knew was that home was closer than Port Lorne. He would
return in defeat, if at all.
Don’t think that. Of course he’d make it home. He had to. He’d promised.
Arthur slipped a hand into his pocket, rubbing the rowan cross Charlotte had given him. A piece of their father she’d kept
just to have one. Arthur didn’t quite believe it would protect him, but he didn’t quite not believe it, either. It was a piece
of his sister as much as a piece of their father now. He couldn’t help thinking it would somehow ensure he’d make it back
to her.
Settling in for the night, Arthur was faced again with his own ineptitude: He’d failed to pack anything that might make sleeping
on the ground more comfortable. Admittedly, he hadn’t thought of sleeping on the ground but in the cart. He threw his coat
down, close enough to the horse for comfort but not so close the horse might trample him in his sleep, and curled up with
a shiver that rattled his back. He used his knapsack as an extremely bulky, lumpy pillow. The cat settled on top of him, purring.
Unsettling sounds filled the forest. Arthur had always fallen asleep to the ocean crashing against the cliffside, but here
the noises were all wrong: clicks, grunts, rattles, a groan that made him shoot upright (to the cat’s disgruntlement) and
listen until he was certain he’d been imagining it. Maurice tossed his head uneasily. Arthur inched closer, deciding being
trampled in his sleep was less of a danger than whatever had happened to Hamish.
It was the worst sleep of his life. The best that could be said was that his back no longer hurt when he awoke, far too early and to a gloomy gray light rather than the fabulous golden light he’d left in.
Arthur’s stomach grumbled almost before he’d awoken, but all his food had been in the suitcase. He remembered little of the
foraging his father had taught him at the edges of the forest long ago, and the plants farther in were different. Those he
recognized were threaded with black veins or disintegrating under ooze dripping from trees above. And his father’s lessons
had focused first and foremost on medicinal plants, not necessarily edible ones.
On a yellowed bush, Arthur found a scant handful of late-season bilberries, dark and soft with age. They left him utterly
unsatisfied.
The gray light did not brighten as morning wore on, depressing Arthur’s spirits further. He led Maurice by the bridle, on
foot; since he couldn’t ride, he didn’t know what else to do. The driving reins were so long that, without a cart, he wrapped
them around his arm like a length of rope.
At midmorning, they came upon a stream. It was a small, clear, gravelly thing burbling so merrily over rocks and down dips
that it seemed out of place. Arthur stumbled toward it, dropped his knapsack, and threw himself down to slurp water until
his teeth ached with cold. He refilled his water bottle, which he’d emptied the day before, and lay back.
“That’s better,” he sighed, though his stomach sloshed.
A number of silvery fish darted to and fro. Freya wetted her paws in pursuit. The fish were small but normal; the trees lining
the banks were healthy. If Arthur could devise a way to catch fish without line or net, he could build a fire and have fish
for his supper. Notwithstanding the fact that he was a hopeless angler even in Seacliff, where there were lines and nets aplenty.
Perhaps the cat would catch something. Perhaps she’d deign to share it with him.
Perhaps he’d manage to build a fire. Surely rubbing sticks together or something of that nature would work.
The sky was overcast, but he could see it for the first time since entering the wood, thanks to the break in the canopy afforded by the stream. That was something.
Maurice shook his mane, grazing along the stream’s edge. Arthur gathered sticks and twigs and sat beside him to make a fire.
He failed miserably. The cat didn’t catch a single fish.
“At least I’m no worse at fishing than you are,” Arthur said to her. She glared.
The sight of the sky improved his mood. The trees didn’t feel so oppressively close.
Arthur considered the nearest trunks. Didn’t moss grow on the north side of trees? Moss seemed to grow any which way it wanted,
but that was all he had to go on, directionally speaking. Perhaps north was where the moss grew thickest, in which case, the
stream ran more or less southward. For now. If it curved aside, he’d have to figure out another way to get his bearings. Assuming
his bearings were correct in the first place.
“We might as well move on. Let’s see if we can follow the stream home. Homeward. Home-ish.”
Freya headbutted his ankle and trotted downstream, turning back with a soft mrrf to make sure he followed. He did, once he’d dragged Maurice away from his grazing.
After a couple of hours, the bank grew rocky and difficult. Reluctant to leave the stream’s steady burble, Arthur followed
the slope of the land downward beside it, slipping over increasingly large stones. Maurice’s ears twitched. He skidded and
tossed his head. Freya leaped from rock to rock.
“Do slow down,” Arthur puffed at her. “It’s not as easy for us as it is for you, you know.”
The stream fell down rocky steps into a shallow pool. Small, scanty trout flicked back and forth, silver in the trembling water. The canopy opened wider, but the clouds above had thickened and darkened.
Arthur reached for a tree to steady himself but recoiled; the tree oozed black. He slipped on a stone, skidded, and slid the
rest of the way down the slope. Maurice snorted as the driving lines tightened then slackened.
Breathing hard, Arthur rolled up his sleeves and crawled to the pool’s edge; he’d scraped his palms on the rocks. Despite
the sick tree nearby, the water was clean and cool. Arthur dipped his hands into it to soothe the sting.
Cat and horse joined him. Freya cleaned his hair sympathetically, but Maurice stood snorting on the stream bank, his ears
swiveling back and forth.
Arthur sat back, shaking his hands dry. Freya stood on her hind legs to continue cleaning his hair. He petted her, gazing
at the surrounding trees. With his overactive imagination, many of them looked like people.
Like that one there. The trunk was knobby, twisted into a shape not unlike a human face. There was the nose. There a pucker
like an eye, and a knot like another. There a jagged hole like a mouth. There a branch with a twiggy end like an arm reaching,
a hand grasping. Black ooze dripped from the mouthlike hole in the trunk. Arthur shuddered, standing to shift away from it.
It was a hazel tree, its branches thick with nuts, but he didn’t even think of harvesting any. On a branch, a butcherbird
speared a mouse on a twig. Arthur looked away, feeling sick.
A sharp bark sounded through the trees. He whirled around.
Three roe deer bounded toward the pool. Like the villagers struck down by wood sickness, all three were veined with black.
Arthur’s stomach turned. Not only were the deer veined—they were translucent in places, bones and musculature visible beneath skin and fur. The ribs of one. The jawbone of another. The vertebrae of the
third.
Heedless of the pool, they splashed toward him. Freya scrambled out of their way. Maurice stiffened, quivering, and bolted.
Arthur’s mouth went dry. “Maurice!”
The deer bounded right into him. He stumbled, fell, and hit his head on the rocky bank. Stars rang in his eyes. The deer’s
hooves bruised as they bounded over him. Then they were past, without giving any sign they’d noticed him or Maurice or the
cat.
Wincing, Arthur sat on a rock and touched his forehead. His fingers came away bloody.
His head spun. “That’s not good.”
Freya slunk along the edge of the pool to sit at his side.
“The bandages were in my suitcase. Why did I think I could do this? I should’ve listened to Lottie. She told me it was dangerous,
and I thought I’d be fine because—I don’t know why I thought that. We don’t even have the horse anymore.”
The horse hadn’t been any use without the cart, but having a big, bulky beast at his shoulder all morning had been a comfort.
He scooped Freya up and buried his face in her fur.
“You can’t leave me, all right?”
She made a face, disgruntled at the sudden hug, but didn’t wriggle free. Letting out a breath, Arthur set her back down. She
put a paw on his thigh and purred at him. He focused on the purring instead of the blood trickling down the side of his face.
Not for the first time, he wished he were more like Charlotte. She would’ve known what to do.
Untucking his shirt, he tried to tear a strip of fabric away with his teeth. All he got was an aching jaw and a damp hem. He splashed water onto the wound and pressed his hem to his forehead, hoping the injury was small enough for a little pressure and time to stop the bleeding.
Arthur sighed. The loss of the horse had sucked any hope from the day. His one remaining comfort was the stream. It gave him
something to follow, hopefully something that wouldn’t shift or vanish on him. The cat would’ve been a comfort, too, if he
hadn’t been afraid she’d run off or get eaten.
The ground trembled. So faintly at first that Arthur thought he’d imagined it.
“Do you feel that?” he asked Freya.
She tensed, her golden eyes fixed on the underbrush across the stream.
“Freya?”
She scrambled up his shoulder and clung to him, claws digging into his skin.
“Ow— What—”
More deer burst from the trees. A whole herd of red deer this time, hinds barking in alarm as they raced through the forest.
Birds flew with them, whistling or cawing or crying. A raven seemed to turn to Arthur as it passed, croaking in warning. Like
the roe deer that had knocked him over, many of the creatures were partially translucent, affording a glimpse of their skulls,
their vertebrae, their ribs.
Arthur cowered until they’d passed. He got slowly to his feet, checking his forehead. The blood was already tacky. Not too
bad of an injury, probably.
“That’s something,” he mumbled. “What d’you suppose . . . ?”
A high, soft whistle shrilled. The hair on the back of his neck stood up. Wind burst through the undergrowth, so strong it
buffeted him.
“What . . . ?”
Then he saw them.
A pair of massive—eagles, he might’ve called them, if they hadn’t been all wrong.
Black as the storm clouds out to sea each autumn.
Eyes that flashed like lightning. They winged along as though they weren’t far too large for a forest understory.
Each time they called out—that high, soft whistle rather than the terrible screech Arthur would’ve imagined—a gust of wind whirled through the trees, growing stronger and colder.
Trees cracked and groaned. Branches broke and smashed to the ground.
Freya yowled in his ear. Arthur swore, shouldered his knapsack, and started running.