Winterwood, page 4
part #1 of Rowankind Series
The man at the front of the column was a northerner by his voice. “Sergeant, take six men and search the forest. If you find them, fire three pistol rounds and take them back to Plymouth on this road.”
“Begging your pardon, Lieutenant, but this is the Okewood.”
“I have studied a map of the area. I know perfectly well where we are.”
“I was born in Tavistock, sir. There are stories—”
“Superstitious nonsense.”
“But—”
“Lieutenant, your sergeant is correct. There are many local stories about the Okewood, some of them very strange.”
My eyes snapped wide open at the sound of another voice. I couldn’t be sure. It was seven years after all, but . . . My mother had thought him dead, had grieved for him, no doubt much more than she would ever have grieved for me.
“Philip.”
I barely whispered his name, but the figure who rode close to the front of the column whipped his head in my direction. I held my breath and kept very still. Could it be? Was my brother alive after all?
My hope was tempered by the company he kept.
“What say you, Mr. Walsingham?” The lieutenant deferred to another dark-coated man riding alongside Philip.
“Mr. Goodliffe knows the area.” The voice was deep and commanding. “But if you feel you can spare the men, then I would be obliged.” He couched his request in the politest of terms, but it was clear that he intended to be obeyed.
“Very well, sir, I was told to follow your instructions in this matter. You can always rely on the cooperation of the Kingsmen, sir, and mine in partic’lar.” He turned to the hapless sergeant. “You heard, Sergeant.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll take local men, sir, if it’s all the same to you.” There was a shake in the sergeant’s voice as he called six men, and more than one muffled curse from those chosen.
“Lieutenant . . .” The man called Walsingham leaned toward the young officer.
“Yes, sir?”
“The fugitives must be caught. You understand how important this is?”
“I do, sir.”
“Your men failed me once at the Goodliffe house. I’ll not countenance failure again.”
He said it quietly, but my keen hearing picked up not only the words, but the tone of both his voice and the lieutenant’s. Whoever he was, this Walsingham held enough sway to make the lieutenant very unhappy about failure.
The unlucky sergeant and his men dismounted as the rest of the troop clattered off down the road. They led their horses into the shadow of the trees, as we had done. I heard Hookey draw his knife.
“Lads!” The sergeant called his men to a halt and waited until the sound of hooves on the road had dwindled. “You all know this place and what’s said about it.” He waited for an answer.
“It’s dark, lads, don’t just nod.”
“Yes, Sergeant.” They spoke almost in unison.
The sergeant made a noncommittal grunt, but he sounded satisfied. “Good. Once Lieutenant Buckram-Britches and his mystery men from London are out of sight, we’ll clear out of this devil-cursed place and wait for the dawn up on yonder hill. And then we’ll all go back to barracks. If anyone asks, as surely they will, we thrashed around in these little old trees for hours and found nothing. Understood?”
There was a chorus of agreement.
Hookey and I waited as they departed with never a backward glance.
I heard Hookey let out a sigh of relief.
“Don’t let your guard down yet, Hookey. Everything that frightened them is still in here,” I said.
“Ghosts don’t frighten me,” Hookey said.
“There was one ghost right there I never thought to see.”
“Huh? I never saw no ghost, Cap’n.”
“Ghost?” David asked as we came upon him and the horses waiting just where we’d left him.
“One of the two gentlemen riding with the Kingsmen was my supposedly deceased brother, Philip.”
“Master Philip?”
“I would say I’m glad of it, but he seemed to be helping the Kingsmen. There was another man with him, a Mr. Walsingham. He was obviously in charge.”
“I ain’t never seen no civilians riding with the Kingsmen before, Cap’n.”
“No, me neither, Hookey. Curious, isn’t it?”
4
The Okewood
I SENT A WITCHLIGHT IN FRONT OF US, low to the ground at first, but raising it up once we were far enough inside the trees that neither the sergeant nor his men would see it if they looked back. We needed to make our way through these woods and beat the Kingsmen to Bideford.
“Is this wise?” David jerked his chin toward the light.
“Whatever is in this wood doesn’t need to see a light to know we’re here, and I’d rather not lame a horse or sprain my ankle over a tree root.” Besides, the light gave me courage to continue through this strange place, even though it threw the nearest tree trunks into sharp relief and made them seem like giants of their species, with leering faces carved into their gnarled bark.
We hadn’t walked far when the forest turned unnaturally quiet, not a rustle of leaves on the breeze or the usual creature sounds of the night. The air clustered around my head and seemed so thick I had trouble sucking it into my lungs. Right then I’d have been thankful for the eerie screech of an owl or the last, terrified squeak of its prey. I shivered and rubbed my arms. Though the temperature had not dropped I was aching with cold inside.
My light flickered and died. The thread of magic snapped as total darkness descended.
A heavy dread filled my bones.
“Cap’n.” It was the first time I’d ever heard Hookey’s voice quaver. “Can ’ee make another light, Cap’n?” Hookey asked. “Quickly-like.”
“I can, but I think we should wait a while. See what’s here and what it wants.”
“Or we could just run,” Hookey said.
A wolf’s howl cut the night somewhere behind us and sent shivers up my spine. David jumped like a startled deer. Despite the cold in my bones, my palms were clammy with sweat.
Another howl answered the first, closer now.
“On the horses,” I said. There was no sense in taking chances.
I heard rather than saw Hookey scrambling into the saddle. I mounted my horse and David swung up lightly behind me.
I heard Hookey curse his horse as it fussed at the bit. Mine stood poised ready for flight, held only by the reins and my hand soothing its trembling shoulder.
A third howl, still behind us, but to our left now.
My nerve broke.
“Come on.” I flung a new witchlight into the air and sent my horse crashing through the trees, leaning low to avoid branches whipping across my face.
Yet another howl, more to our right, drove us on.
My horse stumbled on a tree root. I pitched forward, grabbed a handful of mane as he recovered, and pushed myself back into the saddle. David’s face crunched into my spine and I heard a muffled oww. Hookey, close behind, launched a stream of colorful invective at his horse, but whether it helped or not, I didn’t know. The ground opened up in front of us and we plunged down a steep bank, splashed across a rill and up the other side again. Hookey’s horse arrived at the top, riderless, and David leaned sideways to grab its rein.
“Hookey?” I shouted.
“All right, Cap’n.” He spat. “Though I ain’t been this wet on dry land since I don’t know when.” He hauled himself up the bank, grabbing exposed tree roots as he came, then clambered aboard the horse again.
A wolf yip, closer now, drove us forward again, and then one on our right flank drove us left before another on our left drove us right.
“Whoa.” I pulled up. The trees here grew farther apart, and ahead was a small clearing. “We’re not being hunted, we’re being driven. If they were that close they’d have tried to pull Hookey down when he fell in the water.”
A silver tinkle of laughter arrived on a breeze.
“What do you want of us?” I shouted.
A tiny pinpoint of light ahead grew to the size of a child, then the size of a man, and bigger still until it was like the opening of a tunnel of bright silver. I heard David gasp and my blood seemed to clog my veins. A primal urge told me to turn and run again, but my horse’s feet were rooted to the forest floor, and though I nudged him with my heels, gently first, then stronger, he didn’t move.
A procession came toward us down that tunnel of light, bathed in an unearthly glow. To the fore a couple, human in shape, but at once both larger and smaller than real flesh-and-blood people. He was dressed in buckskin with the antlers of a stag upon his head. He carried a longbow; the hunter, not the hunted. She was the doe to his buck. I looked at them both. It wasn’t buckskin: they were naked, with furred hide instead of human skin. The antlers grew from the forest lord’s head as if from a stag’s, and though the rest of him was purely human in form, his gender was in no doubt, his fertility rampant. By her generously rounded belly and full breasts, the lady was with child.
On her wrist she held a yellow-beaked blackbird.
My first thought said Fae, but the Fae had not been seen in this country for more than two hundred years, to my knowledge. There were stories about them, of course, but nothing that tied in with this vision now before us. Something inside me, a race memory maybe, told me I knew this couple in both this and other forms. I was in no doubt that they were the essence of the land. The Green Man and his Lady of the Forests. By all the legends, guardians of this island’s wild places, elemental spirits who rarely showed themselves to mortals.
Behind the couple came a procession of woodland animals: buck, doe, badger, rabbits, an unruly gang of red squirrels, a fox and a vixen, and a lone silver wolf, a gorgeous specimen standing almost as big as a pony. His tongue lolled out as though he had been running.
“God’s ballocks! Bandits! That’s all we need.” I heard Hookey loosen his sword.
“Huh?” David obviously didn’t share Hookey’s illusion. He seemed to have some awareness of magic, which was highly unusual in a rowankind.
“No weapons, Hookey.”
“Aye, Cap’n.” The snick of steel betrayed his sword settling back into his scabbard.
“Stay back. David, hold the horses.”
I swung my right leg over my horse’s neck, slid to the ground and bowed low before the royal couple.
“Rossalinde.” The Lady spoke in the tones of a cool woodland stream. “I know you. It was foretold that you would come.”
She knew me? My scalp prickled.
“You come at last to our realm.” The Green Man’s voice held the dark sounds of creaking tree trunks and the slow movement of roots through earth.
“My apologies for the intrusion. I beg passage through the forest for myself and my companions.”
I looked over my shoulder instinctively, but I could neither hear nor see any pursuit.
The Lady released the blackbird from her wrist with a little upward motion and watched him fly up into the canopy of leaves. She stepped forward and peered into my eyes. I couldn’t look away while she stripped my soul bare from the inside out. A tremor passed through me, starting in my toes and running up my body to the roots of my hair. I shook with the force of it and only with considerable effort managed to blink.
She released my gaze. “I see you. You have ever been ruled by your heart. Yet that which is your downfall may also be your salvation.”
She held up her wrist and the bird flew back to it. She turned to me again. “See, the creature who is truly free returns out of choice. You are a child of the land, Rossalinde. Why have you chosen the sea?”
I probably stood with my mouth open trying to find an answer to a question I had not suspected needed asking.
“Circumstances led me to the sea, and my heart kept me there.”
The Green Man frowned. “She did it for love.” He rolled the last word around his mouth as if tasting it.
“Yes, I loved Will.” And I still do. “What of it?”
“His spirit is wind and water and yet you shackle him to the earth. Let him go. Soon.” He was used to being obeyed.
I could only nod meekly, though my heart screamed out that I’d never let Will go.
“Something else,” the Lady said. “An inheritance recently received, but not looked for. Show me!”
I reached into my pouch and offered her the box. She didn’t touch it, but a frown wrinkled her forehead. I put it on the palm of my hand and held it up for her to examine with her eyes. David dismounted behind me and stepped closer, staring at it, mesmerized.
“A family thing. I don’t know any more than that. My father’s, possibly.”
She shook her head. “No. From your mother’s family, of course.”
“My mother had no magic.”
“How little you know.” The Lady pursed her lips. “Your mother could have been the greatest witch of her generation, but she rejected her obligations out of fear. Now the task is certainly yours, but it’s not for you alone.”
A task? What task? My head swam, though I didn’t know if it was from her power or from the casual words that turned my world and all I knew of my mother on its head. My mother could have been the greatest witch of her generation? The small phrase, slipped between the rest, suddenly impinged on my consciousness.
“Why was she afraid, Lady?”
“The Mad King’s hounds would stop at nothing to rid the country of your family for what they did, and for what you might yet do. They almost had you in their net tonight.”
“You must not let them prevent you from doing that which your ancestor could not.” The Green Man’s voice was a rough creak. “It is time.”
I took a breath to ask more questions, but the Lady held up her hand to silence me and closed her eyes as if searching for something inside her head. At length she looked at me with piercing green eyes that I could have sworn were brown a second ago. “You stand on the brink between the old world and the new, Rossalinde. Between Magic and Reason. You hold the key to that which is all but lost and have within your grasp the chance to right a great and terrible wrong. You hold a new future in your hands, if you are brave enough to take up the challenge. But know that the hounds are out and they have your scent.” She turned to David. “And his. Search, Rossalinde. Find your family. Gather together that which was sundered.”
“Besides my brother Philip, if that was truly him and not some illusion, I don’t have any family.”
“Yes, you do.” She turned to look at David. “Starting with this one.”
“He’s my brother?” I felt dizzy.
I looked at David. Rowankind were generally smaller and slighter than us, with refined, delicate features, upswept eyebrows, and pale gray skin like polished rowan wood that showed faint grain lines. David had the features, but his skin was less gray, creamy and more translucent, and he was taller than most rowankind, though just as slender. At this age he was as beautiful as a girl without being feminine in any way. I thought that, given a few years, he would make a handsome young man. I searched his face for any hint of my mother. Maybe he had her mouth.
I swallowed hard. To lose one brother and find another all in the same day, well, shock hardly described the emotion. I had come close to seeing Hookey tear David’s throat out. My scalp prickled. I felt slightly light-headed. Everything clicked into place. His age, my mother’s dalliance with Larien, her long absence one year. It would have been a dreadful scandal, of course, so she’d covered it up, even from family.
I wondered if she’d told Larien.
And the consequence?
David was both rowankind and witchkind.
“But . . .” David’s face had turned moon-pale.
I didn’t know whether I could ever grow to love this strange half-rowankind child, but I felt sorry for him. This was as big a shock for him as it was for me. I could see the confusion written on his face.
I turned and put my hand on his arm. “My mother—our mother—took your father to her bed while my father was away at sea. He made her happy, I believe, as she had not been in a long time.”
“Ruth?”
“A scapegoat to hide her infidelity.”
The Lady reached out and touched all the fingers of her right hand to the center of David’s chest. “He is strangely dark with old magic, and that should not be. You say his father was rowankind? You’re sure?”
I nodded. “Our bondservant.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. Long gone.”
She pursed her lips. “We shall see. All is not as it seems.”
David focused on her face. He would have spoken, but the Lady shook her head and dropped her hand to her side. “All will be made clear in the fullness of time, young man. For now, remain with your sister.”
She turned back to me, her intensity making my scalp prickle. “Search for your family, Rossalinde—your mother’s family—all of them. Open the box. But remember the Mad King’s hounds. Always remember the hounds.”
A tremor ran through me. Not just the Kingsmen, but the king himself. Why should Mad King George be interested in me?
“It is time and past time. The world turns. If this thing is to be done, it’s best done now while the world of men can still bear it. That which was and which should have been might yet be again.”
I blinked, wishing she’d not talk in mystic riddles. Why should I take up some quest that wasn’t mine? If my mother successfully hid her magic all her life, couldn’t I do the same? I was quite happy as captain of the Heart, and it was much more difficult for anyone to sneak up on me on the open ocean. As far as I was concerned, the winterwood box could go to the bottom of my sea chest, or even to the bottom of the sea itself.
