‘Some would call it a green woman,’ I say shortly.
Every house in the village, no matter how mean or how fine, has a foliate head as decoration. Some above the doorframe, some to the side, the braver (or more foolhardy) have them on the fence or hung on a tree in the yard. Everyone knows you want the protection as close to the house as possible, preferably touching the walls. Some few are simply bearded men’s faces poking from a frame of leaves, others have a more distinct womanly cast; a very few have vegetation (sometimes purely fruit, sometimes vegetables, sometimes a mix of both) disgorging from the mouth, sometimes corn cobs from the ears. This one is female, has nascent horns, more hind-girl than green woman, but I’ve actuallyseenhind-girls, never a green man or woman. Doesn’t mean they don’t exist, just means I’ve not witnessed any sign of their existence. Perhaps they’ve already been and already gone, things that have passed from the world.
Rhea gives me a shrewd look; it appears she’s become keento the nuances of my tone. I shrug. ‘There was a green man when I arrived here – the old woman who was here before me had one. When she was gone, I decided I preferred the idea of this looking out for me. Edo the carpenter made it for me.’
‘The horns?’
Again, I shrug. ‘Part green woman – the symbol of the earth, rebirth, the natural rhythm of things – part hind-girl, women who choose their own fate, make their own choices and leave old lives behind.’ Where I come from, we have no hind-girls. I heard the tales of themhere, saw themhere, when I first arrived. Chose them as my north star when I was in need of a direction, of a guide, of a beacon to walk towards; a reason to go on, to have hope.
‘Are there any summer wives? I think a female version of Arlo would look like this.’
The observation irks me. ‘No summer wives, not that I know of.’ But I wonder if anyone had thought to make a wife of such a thing. Others have taken so many other things to wife – foxes, seals, bears, wolves, badgers – stealing their skins and leaving them stranded in the shape of a woman, so why not? At least the summer husband is reshaped only for a season, and his end is a natural one.
I thrust the basket at her, say, ‘Scale and gut these,’ then continue on into the cottage, fighting my own dark thoughts.
14
At least there have been no more visitations, not that I can sense, no more offerings left on the doorstep either as gifts or lures, no more sense of a pursuit when I enter the woods. I wonder if the presence of the summer husband is what keeps the other thing (or things) at bay – the strangeness of the one repelling the other. I would make new wards if I knew what might lurk in the shadows, but I don’t. Not specifically, and while oft-times general protections keep all manner of creatures out, there are some that exist by their own rules – and one needs to know those rules before one can guard against them.
No visitations, no, but when I do manage to slumber (to stop my ears to muted whispers and sighs and moans from the attic room above – how glad I am she refused to move into the spare bedroom opposite mine) I begin to walk in my sleep. Not something I’ve done in a very long time, and I hate it. Hate the sense of being out of control, of a tiny part of my mind rebelling. Sending me awry unconsciously while not sharing the rest of the plan with me – the motivating desire buried deeper than I can access. Or perhaps that part of me simply knows that I’d sayno.
The first night, I woke at the foot of my bed, reaching for the door handle. I stared at the windows, the night-darkened glass, searching for I-didn’t-know-what. Putting it down to a one-off, my mind disturbed from the events of past days, I returned to bed.
The second night, I woke at the front door, my hand on the key to turn it. My eyes flew open; don’t know what woke me. I wonder if it was the cold metal of the key, the sensation enough to shake me from my trance.
The third night – tonight – I wake only when my foot touches the waters of the Black Lake. I’ve not been here since the night when the god of the hunt went by.
Weeks before Rhea arrived, before the day I was trapped in the penitents’ path, on a full moon I went to the Black Lake because curiosity had gotten the better of me once more. Despite the number of years since I fled, I still wonder about the kingdom I left behind, those who remained, the others who did not. The acts I committed then, in my youth when I knew no better but should have – no. When I did know better but chose to act otherwise because what I desired, what I pursued, moved me more strongly than right action. Or perhaps Ithoughtit was right, then.
Those nights, perhaps once every few years, I have gone to the Black Lake to use its undisturbed surface as a scrying mirror, to watch the entire city spread across the smoothness of the water, to seek that face I… When I want a greater vision than that offered by the scrying mirror, that is where I go. And that night, curiosity struck keenly, disguising herself as grief, perhaps – or perhaps she truly is grief, perhaps that’s her truestname – and I crept along the hidden paths to find the liquid obsidian waiting for me. Using the Black Lake for this purpose is foolish and difficult – it demands too much blood, really, another reason not to do such a thing except years apart – but there are days when the yearning to see it all, the whole broad spectrum of the city (what’s become of it – whatwillbecome of it) is too much and I’m willing to pay that red price.
I’d only just sat by the shore, begun to open the cut in my forearm when the crashing of something in the undergrowth reached me. Horses and stags, unearthly shouts of men who no longer belonged to the earth, and howls of wish-hounds and hunting dogs. Too soon the noise was upon me and the leader of the hunt reined in – yet he wasalone. All that noise of a gaggle of hunters and mounts and pursued beasts? Here there was just this one being; as if the cacophony that accompanied him was a memory only. A ghost of itself.
Beneath the moon sat half a man upon a skeletal beast. When I say “half a man” I mean not the top or bottom halves, but the left half, the sinister side; somehow staying on that saddle, somehow remaining on his bony mount. And the substance of him flowed and shifted like smoke, sometimes forming the other half of him so that I gained an impression of how he might look if whole, but the right never stayed, only blew back like smoke from a fire, was swallowed once more by the left, and any impression I’d had was quickly gone, as if the memory could not remain.
I’d heard tales since childhood of the one who led the hunt – or the ones, for such stories travel across countries, across seas, of a man or woman who leads the pack; there’smore than one master or mistress of the chase – but I’d neverseensuch a thing before. Not in any other place I’d lived or travelled, not in any other forest I’d traversed, and not inthisvast forest in the two decades I’d lived here and roamed its byways. Had heard histories and recountings, certainly, about how men had joined the chase at the hunt-master’s invitation and in the end found the quarry to be their own wife or child; or men who’d run when confronted by the riders and hounds and been driven off cliffs or into mires; of women who’d been taken away on the saddles of otherworldly beings and never heard of again; of children who’d either charmed or been harmed by the leggy wish-hounds, adopting them as pets or becoming food for the beasts depending on their nature. Always a tale of a band, yet there was a single creature.
The rider before me stared and stared for an unbearably long time as if he knew me, and when he at last made to urge his mount forward I did the only thing my mind could grasp at and leapt into the Black Lake. Whatever dwelt there could not be worse than the thing that stalked back and forth on the bank while I swam down, down, a’down holding my breath until I thought my lungs would burst into a flame fit to burn water. When the moon passed behind a cloud, I surfaced far out, did my best not to gasp for air, not to swallow it greedily so the sound of it would travel back to what sought me on the shore.
And I stayed in that lake for hours because the master of the dark hunt did not leave until dawn threatened, pale streaks across the sky, and then the rider finally wheeled his horse and plunged away into the green to escape the day. And I was aware all that time, or so much of it that the difference doesn’tmatter, of something else in the lake with me. Beneath me and circling, never visible and never making contact, but I knew it was there. Iknewit was there – mer, kelpie or other water-horse, mari-morgan, wicked jennie, rusalky, nelly longarms, merrow or water-bull; all aquatic, malign or mischievous in varying degrees – but it was still preferable to that bizarre and fractured dark thing that had lurked. Death by them would be quick, or I might even defend myself as only I could. But that thing waiting, beneath the trees, pacing back and forth? Whatever came from it would be slow. Somehow, I knew that.
I remember, now, the cold of the water when I finally climbed out, the chill of my soaking clothes and hair as I walked, the forest floor against my naked feet because I’d taken off my shoes to begin the ritual and left them when I’d taken to the water. And they were no longer waiting for me. I spent days in bed – it was at the end of winter, unseasonably warm, and the reason I’d survived the plunge into the lake – but I’d caught a bad chill and it was only the medicinal tisanes of my own making that made me well again so soon.
But tonight? How did I get back here? How long did I walk so far in my sleep?
I remember the odd sense of the water against my skin, soaking through the fabric of my trews and cloak. I grasp now at the skirt of my long nightgown and find it… not entirely wet.
Not wet.
I pinch my upper arm, hard.
Wake at the sharp pain.
I’m standing knee-deep in the pond in the front yard of my holding. There’s no moon except a crescent sliver, the restswallowed by the night. Nothing more than another sleepwalking episode. How far might I have gone, though?
‘Mehrab!’ Rhea’s voice comes to me from a long way off. Grows louder. ‘Mehrab! Mehrab! Are you all right?’
I’m shivering and shaking despite the humidity of the night, the warm wind blowing through the crops, the trees, rattling the doors and roof of the barn, making the rose bushes dance, the bells in the field jangle. Suddenly my joints ache, and the fog rises in my brain and I can barely remember my own name. My temperature rises, rises, rises and I feel like I’ll burst into flames, that there’s a fire beneath my skin. And, above all, I feelold.
