Rosie shakes her head when I try to urge her forward. Fair. I dismount, tie the reins to a low-hanging branch, then step carefully into the gap in the hedge, mindful of my footing.
There it is, the maze, the penitents’ path, so innocuous, so easy to miss if you’re distracted. But since I’m looking for it, since I know it’s there, it’s easier to spot – helped by the fact that each curving line of it has turned brown as if burned with acid. Poisoned perhaps. I think about the iron knife stabbedinto it, all my rage and frustration and will to be free behind it – and I have no doubt my will can be a corrosive thing. I think about how iron is hated by so many unearthly and eldritch things, how inimical it is to their makings.
And I no longer believe this trap is an old thing. Nor that whatever set it is a thing that’s old in this forest. That it may well have been roaming elsewhere for a very long time, but it’s freshly sprunghere. Otherwise, its presence would have been noted. It would have beenfelt.
So, where is it now? Spring and summer, now autumn, it’s been active. When winter proper comes, what will happen? Hibernation? Or predation, like winter wolves starving, desperate enough to attack isolated holdings, or come into the village, uncaring of the danger, seeking only a meal? Or whatever else it’s seeking? And if it can’t get me, how many more children will it take?
It – he – only moves about by night, so where does he hide during the daylight hours?
There must be a lair…
I examine the maze again, its burned lines, and notice a trail running off to one side – very thin, very faint, yet a trail of dead brown grass nonetheless, heading deeper into the forest. I unhitch Rosie and walk her around the edge of the clearing – I’m not willing to risk there being some spark of magic left in the circle – until I find the spot where the trail runs under the surrounding hedge and out. The horse protests again; I tug her along.
‘I don’t like it any more than you do, but this is the way we have to go. And I need you to behave because both ourhides may well depend upon it. Steel your nerves, beastie.’ She shakes her head at me but quietens down. Or she does until we come to the edge of another clearing, stopping at the tree line to stay concealed. Rosie tosses her head and makes a point of thumping my shoulder with her great skull. ‘All right, all right,’ I mutter as I stare at where the line of browned grass ends.
In the middle of the new clearing, a barrow, I think, but covered with trees. Yet not trees going upwards but growing diagonally, horizontally, espaliered so they look like ribs over the dirt mound, an unwilling armour for this wound in the earth. And the dirt mound, its maw dark and open, uninviting.
‘Oh.’
27
Peeking from behind a thick trunk, I can make out some details. Around the barrow’s entrance is a series of stones, and I imagine there’s more beneath the greenery that grows over the top of the mound as camouflage. There’s a sloping path that leads down into the maw, but there’s not much more to see from out here. With a deep breath, I tie Rosie’s reins to a branch, leaving her in the shadows where she’ll be less noticeable. ‘You stay here, Rosie, because if I come running out, we’re both in trouble.’
Nervously, I check the contents of the satchel again: nothing’s changed; nothing more, nothing less. After a moment’s consideration, I leave the bow and quiver hanging on the saddle horn because if it comes to a fight in that barrow, my knife will serve me better. I give the sheath at my waist a pat, then step out of the shadows and into the bright midday clearing.
I move slowly, listening hard. No birdsong here, nor insects, even at this time of the year there’s usually some sort of noise; autumn doesn’t have winter’s crisp clarity, merely a sort of dull echo. Up closer, I see thick roots weaving in and out of the stone walls which look older than the foliage – is that greenerya late addition? At the entrance, there’s not a simple forward path inside but rather one that winds to the right and down – it’s dark but somewhere further in, further down, there’s a glow, so I don’t bother with my tinderbox but keep one hand on the damp wall as a guide and support. A few feet more and I encounter one, two, three curtain walls to block the daylight. If this isn’t a long-term lair, then it’s somewhere that’s been taken over in recent times; shifted into by some sort of cuckoo, taking over a husk and repurposing it.
I make my way quietly and carefully to the bottom of the slope, and find myself in a large round chamber, niches cut into the wall, torches lit and throwing soft light and dancing shadows in equal measure. Firelight, not daylight, not sunlight – needed for something other than a nocturnal creature that can see in utter blackness. This illumination, then, is for a mortal. A minion. A thrall. Someone who tried to break into my cottage for reasons unknown. Or perhaps guessable. There are some small tables, rustic chairs, a roll of shroud-cloth like that wrapped around the meat in the red cloak.
Scattered across the stone floor: piles of bones and heaps of fur-covered hide, black as night. Long heavy skulls, large bones. Not small bones, not children’s. Wish-hounds? Wish-hounds in the daylight hours, disarticulated, waiting for nightfall, for their master’s call to hunt. I’m careful as I make my way between them, as if my presence might rouse them. When they do wake? No doubt they’ll smell my scent, recognise it because they’ve stalked me before. It adds a little speed to my delicate steps, in the interests of getting back to the cottage before darkness.
On the other side of the chamber is another doorway, another corridor, spiralling downwards. But additional rooms run off this chamber and I inspect those first, pulling a burning brand from the firepit; most are unlit and empty of anything except more funeral niches, decayed coffins and urns, cobweb-covered grave goods, the occasional skull (human), until I come to the last one.
A round dais is built up in its centre, and four biers radiate around an enormous throne of stone and bone in the middle of the dais itself. There are two firepits either side of the dais and they’re ablaze; their purpose, I think, is to keep the small bodies on two of the biers warm. I drop the burning brand into the nearest one.
I hurry over to the still forms: Ari Hadderholm in a filthy yellow tunic and brown trews – no sign of the remains of her red cloak – and Matthias Peppergill, in the blue pyjamas I found him in that day in his garden. Children who are apparently safe and sound in the village. A quick check establishes both have pulses, dry skin, no trace of a fever, but are also in a very deep sleep – both of them pinched hard, neither waking; I wonder what their counterparts in the village feel? I could lay my hands on them and explore their bones, the truth of their flesh, to make sure they’re what they seem, but that would be too cruel – to have them possibly wake screaming.
But Ari…
Ari is notwhole. Her left shoulder is gone, though the wound doesn’t bleed, isn’t cauterised; I’m looking at a cross-section of muscle and tissue and bone. I think of that chunk of flesh wrapped in the cloak, the thing I couldn’t bear to lookat too closely when it appeared on my doorstep, not even to establish if it was shoulder or haunch or whatever. I think about scrying for her, with that scrap of cloak, yet she was here all along – and this barrow, this strange place, was enough to shield her from me…
As I’m reaching out to examine the severing, I feel as much as hear the pounding of hoofbeats from above. Someone charging across the clearing.
I cannot carry them both with me, cannot get both onto Rosie and hold them there while we gallop through the forest, likely pursued. And if I take Ari, I cannot guarantee that removing her from this location – this locus of whatever power it is – won’t kill her. And if I take one and not the other… I cannot know what will happen to the one left behind.
It makes sense to leave them here, though the decision is cold and I can feel its chill on my spine. Both are alive and have been for weeks, months. They serve a purpose here. And if my reading last night confirmed anything for me, it’s that changeling magic (as opposed to other types of double-goer magic) requires the original to stay alive in order for their copies to continue functioning elsewhere. Ergo, they are safe here for the time being.
I’ll return with others. I can return with Anselm and Thaddeus Peppergill and Faolan and as many men and women who want to join us. Any number of other brawny folk will come with me to rescue these children. If I just can convince them that those in the village are nothing more than fetches, doubles.
I think about the Hadderholms and the Peppergills, so sleep-deprived and pale-looking. I think about things that stealenergy and life away to feed themselves – not blood, not like the Leech Lords rumoured to be gone from the Darklands now – but spirit and thought and essence. The things in those homes, pretending to be children, have taken up residence for their own reasons, or in the service of something else – something greater. Something worse.
The hoofbeats stop. I pray Rosie keeps her mouth shut, doesn’t decide she needs to greet the new arrival.
What to do?
I fish the tiny blue bottle from my satchel, almost dropping it in my haste. I shake a few drops of the oil onto my thumb, then draw a circle on each child’s forehead – the oil contains a little of my own blood; hopefully it’ll prove as effective as the wards which also have my red price in them. I whisper a blessing and a promise to return, then wait by the doorway of the dais room until there’s the distant echo of boots on the stones of the entrance.
I could fight, go on the offensive – but if I die, if I’m overpowered, then these two are lost. And Rhea is left alone in the forest with a child and things clamouring to get in. Hand on my knife, I hold my breath.
