32
The sense of oneness, of being enclosed in meat again, is very distinct.
The ground beneath me is soft, my head rests on a pillowy tuffet and I’m covered by a blanket of moss, warm and slightly damp, earthy-smelling. Every part of me aches; apparently, resurrection is less perfect than I’d prefer. I’m both grateful and smug – when I fix someone (after the initial agony, of course) they’reproperly fixed. However, I’m not about to say that to the green woman sitting cross-legged in front of a small crackling fire. Staring at me.
‘She said you’d be cold,’ that voice, that rumble.
Sitting up slowly, I nod. ‘Thank you. Where is she?’
‘Gone. Short attention span. She says you’re worth saving.’
‘I heard. I heard it all.’ I cross my legs, feel the grinding in my hips, stretch before settling into place.
‘Good.’
‘Do you mind if I ask…’
She raises a brow that’s a feathery leaf.
‘I thought, was led to believe, that you – your kind – didn’t exist. You are a green woman, yes?’
‘Do I lookillusory? Shall I give you a splinter to convince you I’m real?’
‘No, thank you. Quite enough pain has already been had. I believe you.’ I hold my hands up in surrender. ‘I just… I’ve seen the carved heads on houses but never seenyouor anything like you. Not a living thing that I can sayAha! There’s the source. Well, except the hind-girls, although I don’t think they’re the source of the foliate heads. I think they’re an offshoot, perhaps, of you?’
She smiles. ‘Such wonderful little things, aren’t they? My nieces, I suppose.’
‘I’ve seen them dance through the woods. There are many tales of them.’ I shake my head. ‘But they’re women and girls. Mortals, or started out so.’
She shrugs. ‘Nieces in spirit or blood, all the same. They wander from lives they’ve grown tired of, the spirit of the forest inhabits them. The desire to be lost. A retreat to hooves and horns, leaves and branches, either’s a means of escape.’ A smile. ‘I do like the horns.’
‘Ha. So, what areyou?’
‘A green woman.’ She sounds impatient, a little offended. ‘The spirit of this forest, I – we – watch over all the seasons, the growth, the death, the slumbering trees and plants, the soil, those who live in this place whether they’re animal, vegetable or mortal.’
‘There were more of you – why have you become legend?’ I ask. ‘Because, even hidden away, surely the witches would knowof you. But Yrse, who was here before me, never mentioned you. She was a little hen-wife, no great magics but a green witch nonetheless. She’d haveknownof you. Where have you been?’
The big woman narrows her eyes, says nothing. So I go on: ‘The mari-morgan said you had a problem. That’s why she brought me to you, and that’s why you brought me back – because you think I can fix it.’ Still nothing. ‘I’m grateful for the grace you’ve extended, but I will need answers if I’m going to help.’ Then I amend: ‘If I’m going to beableto help,’ because perhaps I’m a little bossy for someone so recently returned from the dead and she might consider putting me back the other way.
It takes a while for her to speak, as if she’s picking through what to share. ‘I’magreen woman. I’m the one who belongs to this part of the Great Forest. Others are scattered through the woods, and each forest has their own green women. Once, there were many more here, but something happened half a century ago, and then somethingbegan hunting us.’ She throws another twig on the fire. ‘For some while, too long, we did not know. We thought the sisters who disappeared had gone to sleep, in earth or tree, beneath rock or water. That they would reappear when the time came, as is our wont. However, we began to find bodies and parts of bodies. Torn apart by wild animals when nothing in the forest would attack us like that. Neither wolves nor bears would do such a thing, those creatures bow as we pass.’
She clears her throat as if this story is hard to tell. ‘And we began to hear, at last, a tale the humans far to the north of the woods were telling by their firesides, for you mortals collect such things, write them down, carry them in your minds, andspeak them whenever you can, passing them on and forth.’
She sighs and when she speaks again, her voice has changed, sounds more human, like a storyteller, with cadences learned at foot and knee from grandmothers and old nurses, in the same notes for rumour and gossip, the fastest and best way for something to travel.
‘There’s a tale of the god of the hunt – a horned thing – whose greatest joy was the pursuit of stag and boar and sometimes man across moor and dale, through forest dark and valley deep. There’s the whisper that, once, heedless, he rode off a great cliff and when he hit the rocky ground, a part of him broke off. There’s the story that, injured but not quite dead, he rose and returned to the heart of the woodland to recover, hibernating for a very long time – but he was always a broken thing after that. And the piece left behind? It found its own way to dark places, hollows and barrows, fed on whatever it could find, small blood and large, calling living things to it so it was thus furnished with meals. Whatever it looked like when first it was birthed – shattered and sheared from the horned god’s body – it took on, at last, the appearance of a man.’
And I think about the huntsman, the creature of shadow and will and spite on his steed of bone and ligaments and scraps of hide. I wonder how long he’s been a half-thing, a broken thing. I wonder why he’s appeared only now in my forest (the green woman’s forest), and why Berhta’s Forge has been free of his attention – apart from the children he’s taken. Yrse never mentioned him in those nights when she regaled me with tales; those first nights I was here, when I’d not yet met Faolan, when I sat in the cottage and half-listened while I fought against thememories of who I’d been. But the mari-morgan said he’d been north and east of the forest, hunting, clearing out green women. And a long time to heal before that, to pull himself into a shape that he could hold some of the time with will and malignancy and threads of night.
‘I’ve seen it. Him,’ I say. ‘By the Black Lake. The shadow half, the master of the hunt, whatever remains of the broken god. You think that’s what’s been stalking the green women of the Great Forest for all these years?’
‘What did you think it wanted of you? When you sawhim?’
I pause. ‘To be honest, I don’t know. I don’t think I was doing much thinking that night. Nothing good, I suspect. Perhaps I’d have been torn by the wish-hounds or thrown over his saddle and taken to the barrow where he sleeps.’
‘You know where he sleeps?’ She raises a feathery brow.
‘I found it.’
