Settling in for the night, Arthur was faced again with his own ineptitude: He’d failed to pack anything that might make sleeping on the ground more comfortable. Admittedly, he hadn’t thought of sleeping on the ground but in the cart. He threw his coat down, close enough to the horse for comfort but not so close the horse might trample him in his sleep, and curled up with a shiver that rattled his back. He used his knapsack as an extremely bulky, lumpy pillow. The cat settled on top of him, purring.
Unsettling sounds filled the forest. Arthur had always fallen asleep to the ocean crashing against the cliffside, but here the noises were all wrong: clicks, grunts, rattles, a groan that made him shoot upright (to the cat’s disgruntlement) and listen until he was certain he’d been imagining it. Maurice tossed his head uneasily. Arthur inched closer, deciding being trampled in his sleep was less of a danger than whatever had happened to Hamish.
It was the worst sleep of his life. The best that could be said was that his back no longer hurt when he awoke, far too earlyand to a gloomy gray light rather than the fabulous golden light he’d left in.
Arthur’s stomach grumbled almost before he’d awoken, but all his food had been in the suitcase. He remembered little of the foraging his father had taught him at the edges of the forest long ago, and the plants farther in were different. Those he recognized were threaded with black veins or disintegrating under ooze dripping from trees above. And his father’s lessons had focused first and foremost on medicinal plants, not necessarily edible ones.
On a yellowed bush, Arthur found a scant handful of late-season bilberries, dark and soft with age. They left him utterly unsatisfied.
The gray light did not brighten as morning wore on, depressing Arthur’s spirits further. He led Maurice by the bridle, on foot; since he couldn’t ride, he didn’t know what else to do. The driving reins were so long that, without a cart, he wrapped them around his arm like a length of rope.
At midmorning, they came upon a stream. It was a small, clear, gravelly thing burbling so merrily over rocks and down dips that it seemed out of place. Arthur stumbled toward it, dropped his knapsack, and threw himself down to slurp water until his teeth ached with cold. He refilled his water bottle, which he’d emptied the day before, and lay back.
“That’s better,” he sighed, though his stomach sloshed.
A number of silvery fish darted to and fro. Freya wetted her paws in pursuit. The fish were small but normal; the trees lining the banks were healthy. If Arthur could devise a way to catch fish without line or net, he could build a fire and have fish for his supper. Notwithstanding the fact that he was a hopeless angler even in Seacliff, where there were lines and nets aplenty.
Perhaps the cat would catch something. Perhaps she’d deign to share it with him. Perhaps he’d manage to build a fire. Surelyrubbing sticks together or something of that nature would work. The sky was overcast, but he could see it for the first time since entering the wood, thanks to the break in the canopy afforded by the stream. That was something.
Maurice shook his mane, grazing along the stream’s edge. Arthur gathered sticks and twigs and sat beside him to make a fire. He failed miserably. The cat didn’t catch a single fish.
“At least I’m no worse at fishing than you are,” Arthur said to her. She glared.
The sight of the sky improved his mood. The trees didn’t feel so oppressively close.
Arthur considered the nearest trunks. Didn’t moss grow on the north side of trees? Moss seemed to grow any which way it wanted, but that was all he had to go on, directionally speaking. Perhaps north was where the moss grew thickest, in which case, the stream ran more or less southward. For now. If it curved aside, he’d have to figure out another way to get his bearings. Assuming his bearings were correct in the first place.
“We might as well move on. Let’s see if we can follow the stream home. Homeward. Home-ish.”
Freya headbutted his ankle and trotted downstream, turning back with a softmrrfto make sure he followed. He did, once he’d dragged Maurice away from his grazing.
After a couple of hours, the bank grew rocky and difficult. Reluctant to leave the stream’s steady burble, Arthur followed the slope of the land downward beside it, slipping over increasingly large stones. Maurice’s ears twitched. He skidded and tossed his head. Freya leaped from rock to rock.
“Do slow down,” Arthur puffed at her. “It’s not as easy for us as it is for you, you know.”
The stream fell down rocky steps into a shallow pool. Small, scanty trout flicked back and forth, silver in the trembling water.The canopy opened wider, but the clouds above had thickened and darkened.
Arthur reached for a tree to steady himself but recoiled; the tree oozed black. He slipped on a stone, skidded, and slid the rest of the way down the slope. Maurice snorted as the driving lines tightened then slackened.
Breathing hard, Arthur rolled up his sleeves and crawled to the pool’s edge; he’d scraped his palms on the rocks. Despite the sick tree nearby, the water was clean and cool. Arthur dipped his hands into it to soothe the sting.
Cat and horse joined him. Freya cleaned his hair sympathetically, but Maurice stood snorting on the stream bank, his ears swiveling back and forth.
Arthur sat back, shaking his hands dry. Freya stood on her hind legs to continue cleaning his hair. He petted her, gazing at the surrounding trees. With his overactive imagination, many of them looked like people.
Like that one there. The trunk was knobby, twisted into a shape not unlike a human face. There was the nose. There a pucker like an eye, and a knot like another. There a jagged hole like a mouth. There a branch with a twiggy end like an arm reaching, a hand grasping. Black ooze dripped from the mouthlike hole in the trunk. Arthur shuddered, standing to shift away from it.
It was a hazel tree, its branches thick with nuts, but he didn’t even think of harvesting any. On a branch, a butcherbird speared a mouse on a twig. Arthur looked away, feeling sick.
A sharp bark sounded through the trees. He whirled around.
Three roe deer bounded toward the pool. Like the villagers struck down by wood sickness, all three were veined with black.
Arthur’s stomach turned. Not only were the deer veined—they were translucentin places, bones and musculature visible beneath skin and fur. The ribs of one. The jawbone of another. The vertebrae of the third.
Heedless of the pool, they splashed toward him. Freya scrambled out of their way. Maurice stiffened, quivering, and bolted.
Arthur’s mouth went dry. “Maurice!”
