by Kim Wilkins
Within an hour, they had reached the first clearing without event. No traps. No archers. Not a sign of any Ærfolc, marauding or otherwise.
Bluebell called Sal aside. ‘We can’t kill them if we can’t find them,’ she said in a low voice, as her soldiers settled on rocks and fallen logs and spoke quietly to each other. ‘And you can bet they can hear us coming.’
‘Shall we send out a small party, then? We could find their camp then return to fetch the others. I could take half the hearthband …’
At his words, they both paused and looked at each other. Half the hearthband. Last time, she had lost them. A breeze in the treetops sent leaves spinning down, shadows moving over his rough face.
‘No, just three of us, and I will come,’ she said. ‘You, me and Frida. She is small and light. We need to be quiet.’
Sal gazed across at her and they both knew she should stay with the army but he had seen the horror of his companions slaughtered and she had felt the guilt of their loss, so neither said it.
‘I know Rathcruick well,’ she said, to cement her decision. ‘I am the only person here who will not underestimate him. We will set small guard groups all around the perimeter of the clearing to watch and listen for anything unusual. And we will mark our way carefully and travel no more than one mile in any direction before returning. That should give us a chance to smell the smoke of a fire, or hear the sounds of a camp.’
Sal nodded. ‘Agreed.’ Then he dropped his voice. ‘I am sorry, my lord, that I am not Sighere. I know you would have preferred his good counsel.’
‘I sometimes ignore his good counsel,’ Bluebell said lightly. ‘A king must trust her own heart.’
Bluebell organised guard groups, communicated her plans to Tyrwick, the thane she left in command, and gathered Frida and Sal and her dog. She was confident that between the four of them, they could take on ten men. One hundred: perhaps not.
But then they would only ever be a mile from their army.
‘Watch your every step,’ Bluebell said. ‘They may have laid traps. Hyld, get in behind.’
‘I will go in front, my lord,’ Frida said. ‘I know I am the most expendable of us.’
Bluebell agreed. ‘Tred lightly and keep your eyes sharp.’
They stayed off the path, moving through mossy undergrowth and slippery leaf-fall. Their armour could not be completely muted, but they kept their footsteps soft and slow, turning over stones with their muddy undersides upwards to mark their way. Bluebell listened, every sense alert to signs the Ærfolc were close. There were none. After she was sure they’d passed a mile, she tapped Frida’s shoulder and told her it was time to return to the camp.
Bluebell checked in with Tyrwick, said a few words of encouragement to her men, then set out again in a different direction. A mile. Nothing. Return.
Then a third time. A mile, this time over difficult terrain. Up a rocky slope that ran with water from the previous night’s rain, and down a muddy path lined with nettles hip high. They slogged on. Nothing. Return.
But by now, they had surely spent two hours in reconnaissance and the day had not dimmed. Bluebell looked up at the sun, the first prickle of apprehension shifting over her ribs.
‘The sun has not moved,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’ Sal asked.
‘Where is the afternoon?’ Bluebell’s heart hammered. They had been too worried about arrows, about trolls. The real danger in following Rathcruick into the forest had always been time. She remembered Rowan disappearing into the forest and ageing five years in two weeks. Could hours run backwards or leap forward? Were they trapped in this midday forever? She forced herself to be calm. Rowan could get them out. Gytha had the rest of the army at Blicstowe. Perhaps she was misjudging the light. ‘Everybody up!’ she roared. ‘We are getting out. Follow the exact path we took in.’
Confusion and clamour followed her words, but she swiped away all questions and headed through the middle of the encampment, shouting and urging her warriors up and packed, as quickly as possible. ‘We are marching out. They are not here. We’ve been tricked.’
Rathcruick would be laughing at her somewhere. She wondered if he intended harm or simply annoyance. If all the Ærfolc armies banded together (which was unlikely given Heath commanded the largest and most efficient) they still couldn’t take Blicstowe.
‘This way. Quickly!’ she thundered. ‘No questions. Get up and run.’
Back the way they came. But none of it looked familiar now, and the sun still gleamed from the middle of the sky, and they drew no closer to the sounds and smells of Æcstede.
We are lost. We are lost.
‘We are lost,’ Sal said.
‘I know,’ she snapped. ‘I know.’ Then she pulled up, and there was a rattle and a shuffle of feet as it took another minute or two for everyone else to stop. She gathered her hearthband around her. ‘All will be well. My niece Rowan will be summoned, and she can open the trap that Rathcruick has caught us in. It may be a matter of days, but –’ Bluebell’s head whipped around. She heard marching feet from the other direction.
He was coming, with his army, which sounded larger than one hundred strong. The thought of Sal’s troll flashed across her mind, almost made her laugh. She drew her sword, gave the command. Her army dropped their packs and readied themselves with spears and shields.
Then the other army came into view through the trees, a familiar figure leading them along the muddy byway.
Bluebell stared in disbelief, her guts clenching. ‘Gytha?’
Gytha stopped, staring across at Bluebell. ‘Oh no,’ she said.
Days passed, and Wengest didn’t come. Rowan was strangely disappointed. Did he not care? She bore great affection for him, or at least as much affection as her strange circumstances could manage. Being a man’s property, as she was Wengest’s, did not allow full-hearted love.
Late one afternoon, when nearly a week had gone by, Heath stepped in, sunlight behind him. She felt the cold swirl of autumn air, then it was gone as he closed the door.
‘No Wengest?’ he asked.
She shook her head and returned her attention to hanging out the dress she had washed in front of the hearthpit. ‘It makes it worse. He must be really angry.’
‘Or he might be giving you time to think.’ Heath went through to the armoury and she heard him hang his shield and rack his spear.
Rowan was bored and suspicious during the days. She pestered Heath to take her out to training but he kept saying to wait until after Wengest’s visit, to see what would happen. No matter how many times she told Heath she was not going back to Netelchester, he would not believe her: ‘Wengest might force you to.’
Heath returned to the room and looked at the empty pots hanging on the walls. ‘No supper?’
‘I made supper yesterday. And the day before.’
‘Rose made supper every day.’
Rowan’s prickles went up. ‘Can you not cook, Heath? Is that what it is?’
He smiled, a poor attempt to calm her. She could see the flint in his eyes. ‘Of course I can cook.’
‘Yes, of course you can. All human beings who want to stay alive can prepare themselves a meal.’
A tense silence followed, as Heath searched under the kitchen bench for bread and cheese and pulled the knife from his waistband. He arranged two plates and brought them over. ‘I have been in the training field. You have been home,’ he said. ‘Please make some bread tomorrow.’
‘Take me to the training field with you.’
‘Wengest might –’
‘Never come,’ she said forcefully. ‘Wengest might never come and I am spending my time making bread for you, when I could be learning about war.’
He sat down across from her, fixed her in his gaze. Then his shoulders dropped a little. ‘All right,’ he said.
‘And we take turns making the bread.’
He laughed. ‘Yes, all right.’
Since Rose and Linden had left, they we
nt through these bouts of unease. Rowan wasn’t sure why she was so prickly around him and sometimes she regretted it. None of his requests were unreasonable, really. Perhaps she still lacked trust in him. He may have been her father, but she barely knew him. She made a promise to herself to be sweeter and more daughterly.
‘I’ll make ale tomorrow, too,’ she said.
‘I will help you.’ He smiled. ‘There. Is that better?’
‘Better if you teach me something of value. Strategy. Politics.’
‘Politics? Here’s a lesson about the Ærfolc. We made an invitation to all the tribes: send eight soldiers and we will train them with ours. Nobody has responded except Niamma, who sent two men, both of whom are, perhaps, fourteen, so not men at all.’
Rowan stifled a laugh.
‘This is politics,’ he said. ‘This is dealing with unruly people.’
‘But this is not the offer you made them at the assembly,’ Rowan pointed out. ‘You said you’d send men to them to train them.’
‘I reconsidered. It makes more sense this way, and they will come to know each other.’ He shrugged. ‘I will send to them all again in a fortnight and see what happens. But I fear that getting Ærfolc to honour their word might be more difficult than getting them to give it.’
Rowan didn’t say it, but she thought perhaps Heath was being hard on the tribes. They lived at a different pace, they had learned to be wary of those in charge. She lowered her eyes to her meal, was about to say something in their defence, but then a shudder moved through her. She gasped.
‘Rowan?’
The plate dropped from her hands and she tried to stand. Dread rocketed through her limbs, hot and cold and hot again. The edges of her vision were consumed by burning white stars.
‘Something is happening,’ she said, and felt Heath catch her. She hadn’t noticed her limbs go out from under her. The feeling of dread consumed her. She wanted to run away from her own body.
Then she felt it, all over Thyrsland. Every crossing slammed shut.
‘No!’ she cried, but now the dread was subsiding and she had control of her limbs again. She ran to the door and flung it open. Low afternoon light. She gulped the air.
‘What is happening, Rowan?’
‘Rathcruick has done something. I do not know why, but all the crossings have gone dead. I must open them again.’
She closed her eyes and could feel all the doorways, but could not move any. The portals, which were usually stone formations or carved rocks, no longer pulsed with magic. They felt in her mind’s grasp like ordinary stones and rocks. ‘I can’t do it,’ she said, turning on Heath, frustrated. ‘What has he done, Heath? Why would he do this?’
‘For ill purposes,’ Heath replied. ‘Of that we can be sure.’
Rowan ran to the watch fire, and climbed hand over hand all the way to the top. Heath stood at the bottom, calling to her. The wind leapt down her throat, and she cast her eye out over the sacred grove, the forests, the wildnernesses beyond. All of them, separated from each other now, where they had once been connected.
And she, who should be able to open or close any crossing, unable to do a thing.
Ten
Willow knew how to be as silent as a shadow.
She and Ivy had climbed this pass before, when they were ten on a visit to their father. Rocky and slippery with gravel. Ivy had been stuck a quarter of the way up, and sat there shouting and crying at her sister to come back. Willow had kept going, scrambling on her hands and knees when she had to. She had always been able to keep going. It was Maava’s blessing to her.
Quietly, up the path. Each foothold sure enough that no gravel was displaced. No hurry. Enduring in complete silence every sharp rock that poked her soles, or sliced her palms. Barely feeling the pain, only feeling the certainty.
That day, when she had climbed to the back of Blicstowe and stood on the ledge, the grass as high as her waist, she had looked down on Ivy and felt a surge of victory. I beat you. Ivy was forthright and pretty and always got her own way, but in this, Willow had triumphed. Then she had felt so guilty, and rather than trudging around to the gatehouse to be let in, she had returned and taken Ivy’s hand and led her down carefully, but deep, deep down she had known she was better than Ivy. She had always known, somehow, that she was better than her whole family.
Time passed. She went carefully, cloaked in grey on a grey night, with mizzling rain. Unseen and unwelcome. She reached the wall of the city and stood on that ledge again, looking down into the dark. Beyond, in fields and woods past the view of the gatehouse guards, her trimartyr army lay waiting for the first glimmer of dawn. Then they would come, and she needed to make sure the entrance was clear.
Willow made for the back gatehouse, the furthest from any of the others, at the narrow point where the city became back alleys. The drunkards with too many children lived in this part of town, the longest distance from the town square and the king’s compound. With her back against the wall, she slid along on silent feet. The ledge narrowed alarmingly, crumbling away to a foot, then half a foot, then a few inches.
Willow closed her eyes. ‘Show me your face, Maava, my saviour, my only love.’
In her mind’s eye, beyond a fog of worldly concern, the faintest glimmer of His brow appeared. It was enough. She kept her eyes closed, her focus on His beloved countenance, and kept sliding along the wall, testing each step with her toe, feeling the breeze curl under her cloak and up her skirts. Sure-footed, towards her goal.
She heard their voices before she saw them. Two guards, sitting on the grass in front of the gate, smoking pipes. As she drew closer, the thick pungent scent of tobacco reached her, and it put her in mind of Uncle Robert, and the single pipe a day he allowed himself, while Aunt Myrtle complained and waved her apron around to clear the air.
Willow paused to assess. In the watchtowers were another two men. Four of them. All had to be dead before one of the two tower guards rang their bell. She had hoped for only two. Blicstowe was on higher alert than she’d expected.
Her eyes went to the path leading to the gate, little more than a narrow track in the grass. Soon to be swarming with raiders. She only had to clear the way.
Willow was not afraid of drawing blood but suddenly she doubted herself. She and Hakon had made six different plans, and now they all seemed improbable. She ran through them in her head, decided, and marched forward.
‘Where did you come from?’ one of the smoking guards exclaimed, climbing to his feet.
She ignored him and stood at the bottom of the closest tower. ‘Wilfred, you come down from there.’
The smoking guards looked confused but not worried. The guard in the tower leaned over and said, ‘What? My name isn’t Wilfred.’
‘I know what you’ve been up to with that lass at the alehouse and I won’t take it. You come down from there and face your wife.’
‘He’s not married,’ one of the smoking guards said, laughing lightly. ‘You’ve got the wrong man.’
‘I know it’s him,’ she said.
‘Is there a Wilfred round on the east tower?’ the other tower guard said.
‘Now I’m getting angry!’ she shouted, walking right up to them and stamping her foot. ‘You are all in on it. Do you think it’s funny when a man plumbs a lass that isn’t his wife?’
‘Hey, calm down, calm down.’ The guard put his pipe aside, resting it on a jutting stone in the wall. ‘We can’t have you making a scene.’
‘Little wildcat down there, Wilfred,’ the other tower guard said, laughing.
‘Well, if you’re not my husband, come down here and show me your face. Don’t hide up there in the shadows.’
The two guards on the ground were laughing now, encouraging the tower guard to come and quiet down his unruly ‘wife’, before whispering to each other that she was crazy. Willow let their banter wash over her, maintaining her focus with a searing edge, aware of every rock on the ground, every weapon under her cloak, the distance bet
ween the second tower guard and his bell rope, the first leaching of darkness from the horizon.
‘Wilfred’ threw a rope ladder over the stone tower and made his way down. His feet touched the ground and he walked forward, arms spread, did a little twirl in front of her then turned back to the tower.
Heat moved through Willow’s body, making her fast and deadly. She scooped up a rock and pitched it precisely at the head of the guard who had remained in the tower. Then another when the first didn’t take him down. She ran after the second tower guard as he realised what was happening and tried to return faster up the ladder. Grabbing him on the third rung, knife in her hands, slashing his tendons so he fell backwards, knocking her to the ground. Then the other two, both scrambling away from her, both succumbing to her sword through their backs in one, two, three, four heartbeats. Back to the injured guard. Sword directly through the heart. Then climbing the tower.
Across from her, the bleeding, confused guard was struggling to stand. She needed to stop him reaching the bell rope, so she raced down the tower stairs on the inside of the wall then back up the other side to cut his throat. He gargled blood and she watched him die.
Perhaps four minutes had passed. Time resumed its usual rhythm, all was silent as it had been. On her quiet feet, she descended the tower stairs and dropped down into the city, heaved open the latch and left the gates ajar. She could still smell tobacco, mixed with blood. She sat on the grass, watching and waiting. If another guard came around, she would use one of her other plans. But none did. With dawn, from the north-west, the raiders would come. Running up to Blicstowe, in the blind spot created by the deaths of the tower guards. Eventually they would be seen. Eventually all the bells would ring, and some might think there was time to assemble an army against them, that nobody could breach the walls.
But they had already been breached by Willow, with Maava at her side.
Skalmir didn’t sleep, apart from a grainy hour or so in the coldest part of the night. Gytha had not returned, nor sent word. He played out a hundred scenarios in his mind, but decided that the only course of action was to rise before dawn and take a horse north. He would stop in at Æcstede and if Bluebell was there and cross with him, then so be it. But if she had not emerged from the woods, then he would know to ride all the way to Druimach and find Rowan. He would not wait here with his heart in his mouth.