“Thynghowe,” Butcher replied. “In Sherwood Forest.”
“Sherwood?” Wren echoed, seizing on the detail he recognized. Then, “What is Thynghowe?”
Butcher cast a bemused look down at him. “It’s the sacred meeting place of your ancestors.”
“Well, they must have taken their secrets with them to their graves, for I’ve never heard of it.” Wren cast another look about him at the stark white skeletal birches with golden foliage and the thick gnarled oaks with leaves in fiery shades of scarlet beneath the full moon. “It’s beautiful, though.”
Butcher’s flickering smile appeared almost bashful.
Wren slung his bag off his shoulder and nestled it amidst the roots and against the broad trunk of an obliging oak. He wished he’d thought to bring a broom. By the moonlight he could just make out a few witches’-brooms in the upper branches of the birches—thick tangles of wild growth blooming pearl droplets of mistletoe—which, while boding well for the ritual he hoped to perform, would not prove much help in sweeping up the forest floor. He turned to Butcher. “We’ll need to clear a space; about seven feet in diameter.”
So saying, he scooped up a double-armful of dead leaves and hefted it to the outskirts of the clearing.
As he turned back for another load, he caught sight of Butcher vanishing off into the underbrush on the opposite side of the clearing.
Puzzled, Wren waited for him to return, but could not see him in the shadows beneath and between the trees. Nor, he realized, could he hear him, though the dried plant matter would have crackled and snapped beneath any other man’s boots.
Still, wondering after him wouldn’t get the work done, so Wren withheld a sigh to bend, gather, turn, and toss another armful of leaves.
A rustling sound came from behind him. Wren, fighting the natural panic one feels when one hears an unexpected noise alone in the forest at night, whirled towards it.
Butcher had reappeared with a stout fallen branch in hand. Its bare twigs formed a makeshift rake. He wielded it with the decisive ease of a harvester swinging a scythe, throwing his whole body into the motion from the twist of his waist to the toss of his shoulders. Each stroke scattered pounds of debris off into the shadowy underbrush and left only bare dirt in its wake. So intent was he on this work that for some moments it seemed he took no notice of Wren staring at him.
Then Wren, seeing how much more Butcher had cleared in much less time, hastened to catch him up, though his clerking arms could hardly do half so well. In the end, he tossed aside a quarter of the dead leaves, whilst Butcher swept away the remainder.
As he cast off his makeshift broom, the sheen of sweat on Butcher’s brow glistened silver in the moonlight and only made him appear all the more handsome.
Wren, meanwhile, must have looked a wreck. At least he felt so as he shoved a sweaty hank of hair off his own forehead. He tore his gaze away from Butcher’s compelling aspect and returned to his bag nestled in the oak roots.
From its leathery depths, he withdrew a knife. Not his pen-knife, but a Sheffield knife he’d picked up in the past fortnight. He’d have preferred a proper ceremonial dagger, but those were rather thin on the ground in London pawn shops and not likely to be acquired on a clerking salary. Still, its blade would serve, as would the ball of twine he also produced from his bag. He reached into the underbrush and snapped off a dead branch as thick as his thumb and set about hacking it into a stake—all the while conscious of how slapdash his efforts must seem compared to Butcher’s swift and skilful crafting of the boar spear in the Wild Hunt, and keenly aware of Butcher’s steady gaze on him at present. Despite this, Wren crafted a serviceable stake without taking off any of his own fingers, which he supposed counted as some sort of victory.
Then, working from half-remembered grammar school geometry, he cut a length of twine, tied one end to the handle of his knife and the other to the blunt end of the stake, and plunged the stake into the bare earth, stamping it twice with his heel to keep it in place. From that compass point he drew the twine taut and used the knife’s blade to carve out a perfect circle in the dirt. At five equidistant points along this path he marked out connecting lines. He had practiced the design first with ink on scrap paper in the office, then on a larger scale in chalk on the floorboards of his garret, but never quite at the immense size he required now. Some quarter-hour later, he had completed his etching of Gawain’s pentangle.
Perhaps it was the power of the pentangle—more likely the power of suggestion—but as the minutes passed, Wren felt more and more as though an aura of mysticism had descended on the surrounding forest. If nothing else, Butcher appeared impressed with the completed pentangle.
Wren pulled one of the candles out of his satchel, uncertainty creeping over him as he regarded the desiccated undergrowth lying not so far beyond the outer reaches of the pentangle as he might have preferred. At Butcher’s questioning glance, he admitted, “I’d thought to put a flame at each point, but I don’t want to burn Robin Hood’s hollow to cinders.”
Butcher held out his hand for the candle.
Wren gave it over warily.
Butcher examined it close for a moment, then snapped his fingers above the wick. A blue matchstick-flame burst into existence and burned without heat.
“Perfect,” Wren declared when he’d found his voice again. He fumbled in his bag for the tea-spoon. “Now, if we dig a shaft at each point…”
Butcher unsheathed his dagger and strode to the point opposite where Wren now stood. There he knelt, stabbed a hole in the dirt, and stuck the candle in halfway up its length.
“You’re a quick study,” Wren said as Butcher looked up at him.
Butcher grinned and held out his weathered palm for another candle.
In a few minutes, the five ignited points cast an eerie blue glow over the pentangle. Butcher’s face lit from beneath ought to have appeared unsettling, but Wren found his chiselled features still more handsome than otherwise.
So handsome, in fact, that Wren quite forgot his purpose and only realized how long he’d been staring when Butcher arched a particularly angular eyebrow at him.
Wren cleared his throat. “I’ve devised two possible versions of the ritual. One of blood, and one of… seed.”
Butcher looked neither confused nor displeased by this. If anything, he looked intrigued. Which was far better than Wren had dared hope for.
