The horse shook its mane. Its eyes rolled, but it stopped screaming, and all four feet went back on the ground, to Charlotte’s relief. Getting stepped on barefoot by a horse was hardly the worst thing that could happen to Elspeth, especially now they knew she had the sickness, but a broken foot in Shiftleaf was quite bad enough.
The horse quivered, jerked away as Elspeth reached for it.
“S’all right, now. C’mon.” She stroked its neck. Its sides heaved, but it stayed put. “Good lad. Let’s see whether we can’t get all this nonsense off you.”
She frowned as she removed the tattered remains of the harness.
“Looks like he come from a work camp,” she said to Charlotte. “Probably been running around the forest for weeks on his own.”
Charlotte’s skin prickled. “Then what happened to the rest of the work camp?”
“By the looks of this harness, nothing good.” Elspeth tied the horse beside the mule; they nosed at each other. “Around the time Maggie was supposed to’ve come home, a whole camp vanished in the forest. They were meant to pull up what’s left of the first tree, but that’s what we thought, they’d vanished. Well, when I come upon the first tree and Maggie’s necklace—I found ’em. The workers didn’t vanish. The forest ate ’em up. Turned ’em into trees, and other things. Could be the horse escaped all right, ’cept he’s good’n’shook up.”
Charlotte shuddered, thinking of Brigid Tierney. Her stomach turned. A whole work camp taken by the forest, turned into trees and who knew what else—
She squeezed her eyes shut, but she could picture them, an army of trees with branches like human limbs and knots like faces.
“Do you think,” she croaked, “the tree where we found Arthur’s shovel—what if—”
Elspeth shook her head. “You’d know it, if that tree’d been a person. Trust me.”
Elspeth would know; she’d seen people-become-trees. But the images persisted. Charlotte breathed in and out slowly, in counts of four, the way she’d taught Arthur long ago to help him through bouts of anxiety.
“Lottie?”
Charlotte finished her breathing exercise. “I’m all right.”
She glanced at the forest, half expecting another horse—or something nastier—to come tearing out and run them all over the cliffside. Elspeth examined the horse for injuries.
“Bit scratched up. Awful thin. No sign of the sickness, thank the Lord for that. One of us is enough.”
She murmured in the horse’s ear and kissed his nose. He nuzzled into her with a whicker. Elspeth scratched behind his ears, did the same to the mule, and resumed her seat by the fire.
“How did you do that?” Charlotte asked. “Calm him down like that?”
Elspeth yanked one of her bags toward her and went digging through it for nothing. To Charlotte’s astonishment, she seemed almost embarrassed.
Clearing her throat, Elspeth said, “It’s the horseman’s word. So Gran says. She comes from travelling folk, though she never saw much of her kin after settling down since Granddad ain’t a traveller. Don’t know if you ever seen any travelling folk. I never heard of any campsites out this way, and no wonder, Seacliff being how it is. Reckon the villagers’d run ’em right off.”
“The horseman’s word?”
Elspeth reddened. “Aye. Always had an affinity for the beasts, even when I was little. Horses, mules, donkeys, anything equine, I’ve got a way with ’em. Gran says it’s one of the travellers’ gifts. Granddad says he’s met plenty other travellers and didn’t none of ’em have gifts except their skill as craftsmen, but Gran insists it’s so. She gets a feeling about things, herself, and usually it turns out her feeling was right. Oh, Maggie used to get so jealous, she did, asking why she didn’t have a gift... ’Course, that was afore she grew up and we all saw what a green thumb she had, but she always says it’s nothing but time spent with green things, learning the way of ’em. Not the way I took to horses like a fish takin’ to water.”
“It sounds wonderful.”
“Never did me much good. We never had so much as a donkey, and outside the family folks thought I was a freak. Gran, too, they used to say she was a witch, what with her intuition. She says she heard worse growing up, but—well, it wears on you, you hear it often enough.”
“Is it magic, then?”
Elspeth shrugged. She fiddled with a spare shirt she’d pulled from her bag, shoulders hunched like she was remembering names that had been hurled at her long ago. Charlotte softened, wanting to make her feel better. She hadn’t imagined Elspeth caring what people thought of her.
“My brother used to get plenty of that, too. He’s... Well, he’s Arthur. He’s... he’s so...” Charlotte hardly knew how to describe him, especially to someone not from Seacliff. “He’s soft, I suppose. Not like the other village men at all. They’ve always disliked him. They used to say such awful things about him.”
Elspeth stuffed her shirt back in the bag. “They don’t anymore?”
Charlotte thought of the whispers the day Arthur had left,the words about him that hadn’t beenfreakbut might as well have been.
“Not as much. Not to his face.”
