‘They were all just sacrifices.’
‘Yes.’
***
After we’ve collected all five and wrapped them in shroud-cloth, we bury them in the hole Rhea shows me – she’d begun digging it for her babe yesterday, before labour pains began. I scold her – I’d never meant her to dig it herself, only to choose a spot. When we’re done – the babe in question lying in abasket cooing to herself and playing with her own feet, the horses all mesmerised, heads sticking over the fence – Rhea asks, ‘What next?’
‘I think… no, I know I need to go into the forest.’
‘Mehrab—’
‘I’ll be careful. But I need to find that trap, that penitents’ path – I can’t help but feel there’s something there, something I wasn’t looking for then, but that’s part of it. The night at the Black Lake was a few weeks before that – it was accidental, that encounter, but I don’t think the trap was. Don’t worry, it’s daylight and the huntsman can’t ride until dark. I have Rosie and she’s fast.’
‘Why now, though?’ she asks. ‘After all the years you’ve lived here why has this happened now?’
I shrug. ‘The same reason anything happens – something changed. Unexpectedly. And I need to know what so I can deal with it.’
‘What about Ari? She – it – can move around in the daylight.’
I nod. ‘It can, so there must be something in there that was the girl, something in her core. But I don’t believe Ari’s been across the ward-line and I don’t believe she can because like the wolflings, she’s been changed enough. It wasn’t her at the door last night. But I can’t do anything until I have some more answers – or indeed any answers at all.’
‘Mehrab—’
‘And no, you can’t come with me. I can’t be slowed down by a nursing mother still tender from birth and a little creature that will demand to be fed, that will squall and cry the momentits belly feels empty or its nappy full. I need you to stay here so that I don’t need to worry about you.’ I hug her to take away the sting. ‘But there’s one more thing I can do.’
I change into trews and a dark green coat, twist my long hair into a knot and pull a woollen cap over my head for added warmth. Check my satchel and add bread and cheese and a waterskin to the tinderbox and variety of powders in pouches and bandages, and one of the little blue vials with the protective oil I mix myself, because you never do know what you’re going to need. I gather the bow and quiver of arrows.
Rosie complains about being saddled and again brought out of her warm stall. The sheep, cows and goats eye her as she passes as if in sympathy that’s very much seated in better-you-than-me. The new bay, Eadig, looks hurt to miss out on an adventure and I whisper to him that he should think himself lucky to be excluded. Fyren, my old boy, and wiser, merely chews on his oats with contentment. I fondle his ears, kiss his velvety nose. He’s too old, too slow, and I need a mount that’s sleek and fast and alert. Just in case I need to flee. Poor Rosie, to fit the bill so well.
‘Now, I know obedience isn’t your strong point, but this is important. Don’t leave the cottage because you might not find your way back. Don’t answer the door. Don’t open the windows. Read, feed yourself and the child, keep an eye on that cat – they like the warmth of a baby’s breath a little too much though they mean no harm.’
‘How long will you be?’
‘I don’t know but no panicking. I’ve Rosie and will move much faster than on these tired old feet. Don’t worry, I’ll be home before nightfall, I’ve no desire to remain out after dark.’
‘Mehrab—’
‘And, again, don’t open the door, don’t let anyone in. I don’t care if they’re begging and pleading for help. I don’t care if they’re bleeding on my doorstep. Keep yourselves safe, that’s my only concern.’
‘Mehrab, be careful,’ is all she says and hugs me awkwardly, the baby between us.
‘I will.’
But before I leave, I walk the boundary of the holding, carrying a small wooden bucket and a spade; it’s roughly a rectangle, some lines curving a little to accommodate trees and rocks. At each corner, I stop and dig a hole with a compact trowel, about a yard down, not deep enough to disturb the wards, and scatter in tansy seeds, purple monkshood petals, powdered cherry bark, and amaranth paste, murmuring an incantation as I add a few drops of my blood from a cut in my forearm. I refill the holes and water them from the bucket. Before I move on, I watch until tendrils break through the soil, a strange hybrid of all those plants making its presence known. It will remain until I remove it. Once all are set, all four plants with their thorns and purple-yellow blooms about a yard high, I stand back, a few steps outside the ward-line and take one last look at the cottage. On the doorstep are Rhea and the swaddled baby, Mr Tib close to Rhea’s feet.
Then I raise my arms, palms open to the sky, and sing the incantation of invisibility. Across the world, across continents, there are witch huts, hidden places only we can sense, find. Concealed from those who hunt us, from any casual gaze. Butweknow they’re there and they’re safe houses. The spell notonly provides cover but sends pursuers astray. The wards are everyday powerful against eldritch creatures (nothing grander, nothing requiring more blood than I’m prepared to spill), but this is the best way I can protect the cottage and those within from the prying eyes of men.
As I watch my home fades from view and a new wall of the forest appears to grow up in front of it. I blink twice and slowly and can see it again, then blink twice again and it’s gone. Only a witch will sense it; see through it.
***
As Rosie trots along the forest paths, I turn my mind to the huntsman and what he might want with me. My ego isn’t such that I think myself irresistible so I will not regard him – it – as some lovelorn suitor willing to destroy all in his path to win my hand.
Imightbelieve that the huntsman is punishing me for the summer husbands, for how I’ve pulled them out of their cycle, stolen them from the forest even if only for a brief while. Or perhaps in revenge for that very first summer husband, the one I created out of madness and grief as a salve to my own loneliness, the one I abandoned in that grove and did not give the kindness of a proper ending, a proper return to the earth. The one I still owe that debt to… But I don’t believe the huntsman’s a creature working in favour of the forest.
And the stealing of the children… so many and for so little effect, because all the old tales, including those I read last night, agree on one thing: that the lord or lady of the hunt takes only children who are precious to those who’ve offended them, who’ve trespassed on their particular tract of earth.Perhaps the Hadderholms and the Peppergills might have done something, but the orphans? So new to Widow Wilky’s large house, so fresh, with so little time for affection to build? Andnoneof the children were connected to me.
I follow, as best I can, the route I took that day, weeks and months ago, when I pursued the hare and wandered into the trap carved in the forest floor. Yet I’m not sure I’d have found it had Rosie not whinnied and stalled. Stroking her mane, making soothing noises, I scan the landscape around us. Familiar, I think, that tree there with its branches twisted up so high it looks like a supplicant, that holly bush with red buds changed from when I saw it in spring, larger and lusher, its prickly leaves notwithstanding. The path to the left that diverges in three directions. And yes, there’s that break in the undergrowth, what amounts to almost a low hedge, that I ran right through that day, straight into the trap. I think about the hare that led me astray. How when I saw it, I was filled with hunger or rather afearof hunger. Of going short, of starving, of a life of thin soups and watery stews, of an autumn in which I might die. Fear and hunger drew me into the chase, even though there was no real need. The irrational desire of the hunt, the chase.
