Chapter 48
ALEX
The storm rushed back with a vengeance, screaming at her, tearing at her, trying to drive her into the earth, or rip the weight of Nick’s body off her and hurl him away so it could get to her. But he held on, and she held onto him, reaching for the wild.
There was nothing human here. There was no conscious mind that thought like hers, no morals or ethics.
Whereas Alex had been able to sense the individual ghosts in the house, sense the people they had once been, this was something else, something vast and terrifying and so completely alien to her.
It was wild, and endless, and remorseless. It was angry. So angry.
It blamed Nick, she could sense that. Saw him as a traitor and it would have retribution for that.
‘No, that’s not right,’ she tried to tell the wild wood, or whatever that vast consciousness was. But she was little more than a sigh in its screams of rage. She dug her hands into Nick’s body and found, instead of skin and muscle… bark, wood, and moss…
Nick was gone.
Abruptly the storm stopped again as the world around her twisted to that other plane, that different far-off place that was bathed in sunlight instead of the storm at night.
Alex lay on the floor of the forest, in a clearing surrounded by much younger trees and no stones at all, clinging to the gnarled trunk of an ancient oak tree.
Its roots wrapped around her, as if it had grown over her for more than a hundred years, trying to protect her.
There was no sign of Nick, no sign of the storm, and no sign of the house either.
Reality had shifted, and this was not a dream. She was scratched and bruised, still soaked to the skin, her hair plastered over her face. There was birdsong coming from the trees and it sounded like laughter.
‘Well,’ said a gentle voice, ripe with the same amusement she’d heard in Theo’s. But this was not her brother. Not this time. ‘This is a conundrum. What are you doing here?’
An old woman sat in the middle of the clearing, her fingers moving quickly and deftly as she threaded twigs and stalks together, wove flowers into the pattern with reeds and all manner of living things, entwining them into shapes and patterns Alex couldn’t hope to understand.
In her lap, a large golden hare nestled as if it had been sleeping there.
It blinked at Alex, watching her intently, twitching its long ears.
Alex extracted herself from the roots of the tree, sliding out as best she could, wincing as her clothes caught against it and pulled.
‘I don’t know where I am,’ she admitted.
The old woman smiled, her green eyes twinkling. She never paused in her work as she looked up. Alex knew that voice, knew that face. Knew those hands and the patterns they wove. ‘That’s probably a good thing. You aren’t meant to be here at all.’
‘This can’t be real,’ Alex murmured.
‘Oh, I’m afraid it very much is.’
‘Gran?’ The old woman smiled up at her briefly but didn’t answer. She continued with her work, fingers moving so quickly. ‘Where’s Nick?’
The woman tilted her head to one side. ‘Nick? Nick who?’
‘Nick Walker.’ Alex’s brain was supplying an answer she really didn’t want to be real.
‘The walker? Oh.’ There was such sorrow in that simple ‘oh’. She nodded to the oak tree in the clearing which Alex had been wrapped around, which had been wrapped around her. That couldn’t be right. There was no tree here. But…
But this wasn’t here. Or now.
‘Where am I?’ Alex asked, deciding to try again from the start.
‘You’re in the wild wood, my dear. The old wood. Where it all began.’
Which was no help at all.
The old wood, she thought and looked around.
Really looked. This was a young forest, thick and lush but without the weight of ages clinging to it.
Wood anemone and dog violets clustered around their feet, an imperious stand of purple foxgloves swayed in a breeze she couldn’t feel.
Above them, in the understorey, she saw the bright green of hazel and the dark sheen of holly leaves.
And beyond that, the oak canopy gazed down at her, shifting every so often, the soft creak of old wood in the breeze.
But none were so old as that oak in the centre.
There was no oak in the clearing, her mind kept saying. It shouldn’t be here. It shouldn’t…
But it was.
‘He’s the heart of the wild wood, made flesh,’ said the old woman.
She lifted what she had been making and handed it to Alex.
It was one of those circles like the ones Maeve had given her, but far more elaborate and decorative.
There were flowers and stalks of grass, the heads heavy with seed, as well as leaves and twigs.
Alex took it in numb hands and felt a shudder of recognition run through her.
‘You aren’t my gran, are you?’
The old woman shook her head and stroked the hare. It preened beneath her hands.
‘Your grandmother died before you were born, a chailín ghil mo chroí.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I’m the mother of the wild woods.’ The old woman smiled.
‘I’m the Cailleach. And for a while I was your gran, when you needed me.
’ She pulled strands of golden corn from beneath the hare and started another pattern, weaving the lengths together, plucking up flowers and grasses from the forest clearing beside her.
‘The wise women were my daughters. I have always stood against Crom. I locked him away, and raised the forest to enclose his tomb. We keep it strong, the wild wood, so that he cannot escape. All down through the long years, to you, and onwards, to Maeve.’
‘Did you teach Maeve?’
‘We have all taught Maeve. She’s special, that little one. Wild wood all the way through. A woman of Kilfayne and the blood of the de Wildes. Like you. But her time hasn’t come yet.’
‘The de Wildes run to boys,’ Alex murmured absently, running her fingers over the pattern. It was like a maze and she kept getting lost.
‘That’s what happens when something kills all the girls.
’ Her voice was stark all of a sudden and when Alex looked up those piercing green eyes were very close.
Her teeth were bare too, the teeth of a fox perhaps, and the white hair drifted like dandelion seeds.
‘I taught you too, Alexandra. Or tried to. I kept you safe for as long as I could. You are mine as well, a part of me. You and Maeve both. We entwined the blood of the wise women with the blood of the de Wildes time and again, but you all leave, or die. Not that I blame you. Ah, but this time, because he used poor wee Maeve and you too… this time because he took the guardian we set to watch the boundaries…’
‘Has he won? Crom?’ Alex asked. She hardly dared to say the words. Because it would mean she had failed. It would mean she was dead. And that was what this felt like, being in this place. Alone. Like she had died.
‘Not yet,’ the woman of the wild wood purred.
‘Not unless you decide to stay like your brother. Will you go back and bury Crom for once and for all, my child? Bind him deep underground and wind the roots of the wild wood around him? Keep him there forever and stand watch? Will you do your duty for both your lines?’
Both her lines. Both Maeve’s lines too. Her ancestors included the wise women of Kilfayne.
Theo had loved Sally who had given birth to Maeve.
The two, wound together, like these patterns of tangled twigs, vines, reeds and flowers.
The Cailleach was of the land. And all this land was once her wild wood.
And if Alex didn’t… the god of the hungry grass would rise again, and this time there would only be Maeve to stand against him, all on her own.
Oh, in ten years or more maybe. But she wouldn’t have Nick.
She wouldn’t have anyone. If she even had ten years.
Because if Crom escaped now, wearing Nick’s face, and turned up at Patricia’s house in the village…
Alex had to do something. Now.
‘Put him back in the ground,’ said the old woman of the woods. ‘Bury him deep and bind him tight, then call the wild wood. We will do the rest.’
The old woman – her gran who was not her grandmother – blew her a kiss, and something slammed into Alex’s chest with the force of a jackhammer.