by Emily Tesh
At once slow deep green rolled over him. He took a breath, and another, smelling old rotting leaves and healthy growth and autumn light. He felt almost as though he could have planted his feet and become a tree himself, a strong oak reaching up to the sky, brother of the old oak who ruled the wood. Ah, he thought, and nothing else. Silver and his mud-coloured curls and silly stories seemed a dim faraway thing. Ah, the wood.
Whatever else happened, no matter how many summers he endured, Tobias had this.
He took up the walking stick he was still holding, and looked at it a moment, and then planted it firmly in the good soil under his feet. He felt it take root, that old dead wood, and the carvings undid themselves as it sprouted every way. Bramble came and stood by him and blinked at it, and then she put her hands out and put some of her own strength into it, real dryad’s strength, and ten minutes later there was a sapling standing there.
“Thanks,” said Tobias.
Bramble kissed his cheek, leaving a red scratch behind.
Tobias went home to his cottage.
It was good to be home, and quiet, with the trees all about him. It was the wrong time of year for Tobias to replant the vegetable garden Bramble had ruined in her fit of protectiveness, but he had plenty to get him through the winter. Pearl dozed on his bed all day and hunted by night. Tobias stayed in, letting his leg heal and listening to the wood. All was calm. No more stray dryads. Everything gone still and chill, waiting, all winter long. The wood knew as well as Tobias did what would come back with the sun.
He let Silver come to see him a time or two, took care to have his cottage in the same place every time. Braided his hair when he felt Silver’s tread snapping careless twigs on the forest’s edge. No reason to do that, but he’d got in the habit of having it out of his face, maybe, those weeks in that soft bed up at the Hall. Silver carried on chasing his butterflies. One day he took Tobias to see the old shrine and pointed out the evidence that despite all modern developments some people were still leaving offerings. “You can clearly see the stains,” he said with satisfaction. “Some sort of blood sacrifice—”
“Or blackberry juice,” said Tobias, hiding a smile. “Stains everything, that does.”
Silver subsided. Nothing very exciting about blackberries, Tobias supposed. Hadn’t been any new offerings since autumn anyway. Couple of times a year was the best Tobias hoped for, really. Occasionally something on a solstice.
Another time Silver brought the woodsman Charlie Bondee to see him. Poor lad was dying of embarrassment and couldn’t apologise enough for his quick shot. “It was only,” he said, “when I saw ye, Master Finch—”
“Did me no harm in the end, and all’s well, as they say,” said Tobias firmly.
“If you’d grown up round here, you’d know,” said Charlie, “and I know well enough it’s only an old story, but when you loomed up out of the dark, as it were, with all your hair and all—”
“Never mind! Never mind!” Tobias said.
“I hope you see, Mr Bondee,” said Silver sternly, “the dangers of superstition.” He sounded like a schoolmaster. Couldn’t have been more than a year older than Charlie.
“Oh yes! Yes!” said Charlie.
“There’s a lot of interesting stories about Greenhollow Wood, I know,” said Silver. “But that’s all they are—folktales. There are no dryads, no wild men, no fairy kings, and no monsters. Isn’t that right, Mr Finch?”
“Certainly haven’t seen a fairy king yet,” said Tobias.
Charlie went away still embarrassed. Tobias gave Silver a steady look. “There was no call for that, now,” he said. “Poor lad meant no harm.”
“A young man who means no harm should not be firing pistols,” said Silver.
Tobias shrugged. “I still say all’s well that ends well.”
Silver laughed suddenly. “Of course you do. You must be the most forgiving man alive.”
* * *
It was getting close to midwinter. Silver disappeared for a while, gone to stay with his ogress mother. Tobias, finally healed up as well as he was going to be, took a mistletoe sprig and his flint knife and laid a ghoul to rest up among the barrows on the hills the night before the new year. Bramble accompanied him. She didn’t let him go out alone any longer, and followed him through the woods, sprouting curtains of thorns wherever she went. “It was only once, my darling,” Tobias said, exasperated.
Bramble smiled, showing her sharp brown teeth. “Miss,” she said. “Not miss?”
“You can’t call a lass miss when she trails you everywhere,” Tobias said. “This isn’t proper dryad doings, my dear. You should go plant yourself. Grow big and tall like your sisters.”
“Is that what you did?” said Bramble. “You are much bigger than any other human. Did you plant yourself?”
Tobias caught his breath on a painful laugh. “Not exactly,” he said. “But maybe that’s close enough.”
* * *
Wildflowers began to spring up in the woods around the same time Silver came back. Tobias let Bramble tuck some into his hair one morning, and then forgot they were there until after Silver had already visited him and gone again. He hadn’t said a word.
Tobias tried to enjoy spring the way the dryad did. Hard to stick to it. The equinox was coming: still a few months away, but Tobias woke every day with the sunrise, aware of what was coming as it came year on year.
And then Silver heard the story.
“The bandits of Greenhollow Wood,” he said with satisfaction, sitting before the fire one evening. “I doubt you know this one. It’s apparently very seldom told. But it’s a fascinating little mix of myth, legend, and local history. You know the Hall?” He did not wait for an answer. “I purchased it from an agent for the family that used to own it, and he never mentioned the story—which is unusual, these people normally try to throw in a little local colour—but then I wrote to Lady Rafela, and her reply reached me last week. She’d never heard it before either, but she went to the family records and apparently that branch of cousins was mentioned several times in connection with some great shame. It all fits! Heavens, I’m sorry, I’ve started in the wrong place. I must sound like a perfect loon.”
“Take a deep breath,” Tobias advised. He tried to think about Silver’s bright enthusiasm, his pale eyes sparkling under the fall of his brown curls, rather than about the story. He knew the story. Of course he did.
“Fabian Rafela,” Silver said, giving the name a proper sonorous spin that Tobias hadn’t heard for centuries. “Or Red Fay, as he was known. The connection to the local fairy legends is obvious, and no doubt he found it convenient. As far as I can tell, the actual facts of the matter are that he was a local baron who gathered himself a little band of thugs during a lean winter and took to raiding to supplement his income. A nasty piece of work and nothing more. But the stories, Mr Finch!”
Yes, thought Tobias. The stories.
The way Silver told it wasn’t quite right. It had been four hundred years, and people had been adding things to it. Red Fay went into the woods one day and met a fairy prince—well, that wasn’t altogether true, but close enough, Tobias guessed. He was offered three wishes in return for his soul. (A very traditional motif, Silver said, excited.) He wished for riches, and beauty, and immortality. Thereafter he terrorised all the people around and about with his robber band for many a year, stealing whatever pleased him, never losing a fight. At last the day came when the fairy prince came back for his soul, and then Red Fay met his comeuppance.
Ah, Fabian, with his long copper braid, his sweet smile, his brilliant eyes! No need to wish for beauty, that one; and riches he’d preferred to win for himself.
Immortality, though. The wood could give you that, after a manner of speaking. And it had, after all, been Fabian Rafela’s wood.
* * *
Silver grew obsessed with the bandit story. He kept coming back to Tobias with more details, more things he’d read up or heard about. He must have interviewed ev
ery grandmother for ten miles around the wood. Tobias listened quietly to his burbling. When it got to be too much, he tried to stop hearing the words and hear only the rolling landscape of Silver’s voice. “You ever sing?” he said abruptly the day Silver came to him fresh from a visit to the magistrate’s office in High Lockham and the list of names in the record book. Thomas de Carre, Simon Simms, John Hunter, John Cooper, Nathan leClerc, hanged all in a row four hundred years ago.
“What?” said Silver, thrown off his grisly recitation. “That was the whole gang, apparently, apart from Rafela himself and his lieutenant, who fled into the woods to escape the soldiers—I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“Never mind,” said Tobias.
But Silver had gone pink. His curls were getting longer and starting to hang in ringlets round his soft face. He was a good-looking fellow. Not beautiful like Fabian, but who was? “I, er,” he said, “well, I can sing. Did you want . . .”
Tobias shrugged. “Not a lot of music in the wood,” he said.
He’d only meant it to throw Silver off his storytelling, and it succeeded in that, so he was taken aback when Silver came to see him next time carrying a—hell, Tobias didn’t even know the name. Some kind of stringed instrument. “I thought you might like to hear some folk songs,” Silver said, blushing a sweet rose colour.
“Hm,” said Tobias, trying not to laugh. “Suppose I would.”
Turned out Silver could sing. He had a fine, clear voice, a steady voice that made Tobias think of good strong wood grown straight and tall under the sun. In the corner of his eye he could see Bramble pressing up against the shutters as she listened. Silver looked down at his fingers as he plucked the strings, and the rose-pink colour never left his face while he sang. The songs were old ones. Tobias knew most of the tunes, though not all the words. He was enjoying it, truly enjoying it and not thinking of anything else, feeling like a man and not something from under the old oak, when Silver said, “And this one’s from the village,” and launched into Bloody-Handed Toby.
It was a punch in the gut. The tune was the same Nathan had used to whistle, and the words were mostly the ones the Jacks had come up with, less a couple of the dirtier verses. Silver’s voice was wrong for it, but Tobias could barely hear him anymore. He stared into the fire, watching the jumping flames, and heard Fabian again: Fabian’s high warbling tenor, cracking and off-key, and his sweet smile and his eyes full of friendly mockery.
The spring equinox was three days off. They would be hanging up bunting and practising the children’s parade in the village by now. It happened every year, and had for four hundred years, and for the first time in all those years Tobias had let himself forget about it.
He managed to compliment Silver’s singing when it was over. Silver eyed him curiously. Clever fellow, Tobias thought with a sudden bitter fondness. Clever, generous, good-looking fellow, who kept coming back to show Tobias the stories he’d found like a child with a butterfly trapped in a jar.
“Happens I know a story about the wood myself,” he said.
Silver sat up a little straighter. “You do?”
“You talked to people down in Hallerton about the festival?”
“The Spring Fair,” said Silver at once. “Common all over the country—a remnant of an older celebration, obviously, presumably in honour of fertility and the sowing season, with the associated old god—goddess, I suppose.”
Tobias smiled despite himself. Trust Silver. “Goddess, as a rule, used to be. But round here,” he said, “they do it for the Lord of Summer.”
Silver blinked at him. “I haven’t heard that name. Is he a lesser deity—or perhaps a fairy lord?”
Tobias shrugged. “He’s a prince of the season,” he said. “Dangerous. Turns up in spring, roams all summer. He needs to be put off; that’s what the festival’s for.”
“Put off?” said Silver. “So this, er, lord of summer, objects to celebrations?”
“No, no, he loves them,” said Tobias. “They distract him, you see. Keep him amused with drink and song and games, and he won’t be any trouble. It’s when he gets bored that the trouble starts.”
For Silver’s curious look he outlined some of what was meant by trouble: the cruel tricks, the unlucky accidents, the stolen treasures. Silver had his eyebrows raised. When Tobias reached the missing lads and lasses he leaned forward in his seat. “Are you sure he’s not a fairy lord?” he said. “This sounds very much like the fairy myths I’ve read about elsewhere.”
“Not children,” explained Tobias. Fairies took children, sometimes, and then didn’t know what to do with them; he’d recovered a few in his time, starving and mud-stained, from their baffled and angry kidnappers. “Youths, young folk—unmarried and handsome. He takes them off into the woods and they’re never seen again.”
“I noticed preparations for a number of weddings in the village,” said Silver.
Tobias nodded. “Get ’em married before Summer shows up, and he’s no danger to them,” he said. “They’ll all clasp hands over the fire at the Fair. Lucky time of year to be wed in any case.”
Silver smiled. “Perhaps you and I should have found ourselves brides by now, for safety’s sake.”
“I’m too old,” said Tobias.
“You’re not as old as all that, Mr Finch.”
Tobias shook his head. “But you’re his sort of meat, sure enough,” he said. “Better to stay away while Summer’s abroad. Keep out of the wood and out of his sight.”
Silver’s eyebrows went up again. “Mr Finch,” he said, “I know you are very familiar with these woods. Do you believe there’s something to this tale?”
Tobias said nothing.
“I know that the supernatural is considered out of date,” said Silver, “and much of what I study is pure superstition and rank nonsense; but I am an open-minded sort of man, you know, and I am always eager to learn. Have you perhaps seen something in Greenhollow to cause you this much concern?”
He was leaning forward; there was a sparkle in his eye despite the seriousness of his tone. Tobias had no doubt that whatever he said next was getting written down in that little notebook, pinned on the page like a winged thing dying. His own cowardice jumped up and choked him. “Not at all,” he said, when he should have told the truth. “Only stories. But do a foolish old fellow a favour and stay away for a week or two.”
Silver laughed. “If I didn’t know better,” he said, “I’d think you were trying to get rid of me.”
Tobias walked him to the woodland’s border on the edge of the Hall’s gardens that night, which he never did as a rule. “Good night, Mr Finch,” said Silver, looking up at him through his long lashes.
Tobias nodded. He didn’t reply. He stood silent in the shade of a tall elm tree with one hand gripping tight around the other behind his back as he watched Silver walk across the lawn. When his little shadowy figure was swallowed up in the great shadow of the house Tobias turned to Bramble. “Don’t let him back in,” he said. “Tell your sisters. That one’s not to walk the woods till the moon comes round again.”
Bramble let out a low susurrus of distress. She was strong, but it was tree-strength, patience and slow growth, and the thing that was waking in Greenhallow by the week’s end was beyond her power to restrain for the same reason it was beyond Tobias’s.
“Aye, lass,” said Tobias. “I know. Just don’t let Silver near, and I’ll deal with Fabian.”
“You never have,” said Bramble. “You never could.”
“Don’t worry, my darling,” Tobias said, “Don’t worry about me.”
He went back to his cottage and sat down with his back against the old oak. Sometimes he wondered if the tree felt sorry for him. A kind of nonsense. The tree was a tree; he felt tree-things, sunlight and earth and so on, and Tobias was only another kind of thing that dwelt upon him, no different if you thought about it from the squirrel’s nest in the nook of the trunk. Dryads might feel—no doubt Bramble was fond of Tobias—oh, all
sorts of old things from the wood might feel, but it seemed to him they felt differently to mortals. Bramble could be fond, could be angry; fairies managed envy and pride easily enough; old rotting hunger-things that came out of the bogs and crept in among the willow-groves to the east felt a terrible desire, but to feel as mortals felt—to laugh as mortals laughed, and look up under the eyelashes, and sing old songs to the plucked strings of a whatever-it-was—
Tobias was a fool and always had been.
He groaned and stood up. When he looked up he found it was pitchy dark. Time had softened around him the way it so often did. Maybe that was the wood’s version of pity.
* * *
Tobias sharpened all his knives, and darned all his socks, and checked and rechecked his crossbow, and patrolled every night through the woodsmen’s copse and around the boundary-stones of the village. He stood on the wood’s edge and peered towards the little cluster of houses, the lights in the Fox and Feathers, the flags and garlands all up for the fair. They were as ready as they ever were. Wasn’t every year Fabian took it into his head to go down to the pub in the first place; must have been five, six decades since he bothered with it last.
Tobias himself hadn’t set foot in the Fox and Feathers since the night the stable boy—what was his name?—had run in gasping, straight from the Hall down the old woodland road, to say that the soldiers had come and that they’d already taken the others, Nathan, Simon, Thomas, the Jacks. There had been a terrible silence in the public house as the villagers had eyed Fabian sideways, fearing one of his explosions of temper. None of them would have called for the soldiers; they had more sense than to cross him. Tobias had half-stood. He still didn’t know what he’d meant to do.