The Very Best of Kate Elliott

by Kate Elliott

  “It is,” said Joen,“and I would ask you to get everyone dressed.”

  Anna grabbed Joen’s thick forearm.“I thought you said no trouble.”

  “There’s been a skirmish fought in and around West Hall. Rumor says the Forlangers are involved. The family should hide in the caves until we are sure they’ve moved on.”

  Anna’s daughter Mari appeared beside Hansi, resplendent in her bride’s shawl and so heavily pregnant that she lumbered. Her face was solemn as she took the candle from her young husband and examined first her mother and then her uncle by its smoky light.

  “We’ll get the children up and go at once,” Mari said.

  Hansi brushed his fingers down Mari’s forearm, and the gesture of affection made Anna glad all over again that her daughter had found a good man.

  Joen nodded, shifting his crutch. His empty trouser leg swayed. “Take provisions, everything you can carry and cart, but be quick about it. But I need you, Anna, if you will. There are dead and wounded at West Hall.”

  She turned on him, her mood gone bitter at once.“I will sew up none of those cursed Forlangers. They can die in their own rot.”

  “Truly,” he said, patting her shoulder, “but it was General Olivar’s men they fought.”

  “That changes matters then. For the sake of the general, I will do everything I can to help. I’ll get my things.”

  Now that she was awake, the sour morning taste was rising in her stomach, a reminder that her husband’s death had not left her entirely alone. But she did not speak of it. Mari suspected, but it was ill fortune to count on the harvest of fruit that might not ripen. If the gods willed it, then they would bless her with his last child.

  Hansi rousted the children as Anna dressed and afterward collected her bag. She kissed them all and left, Joen shifting impatiently as he waited. The full moon bathed the world in a glamour. She had many soft memories of this time of night, for summer’s tide had washed her youth in many sweet meetings. But now he was dead.

  The houses of the village sprouted in clusters along a cart track that led to the tavern and the temple and, most magnificently, the new market hall built under the supervision of General Olivar ten years ago. She had to measure her pace to allow Joen to keep up without it seeming she could easily out-stride him and, because he was her older brother, she dared not joke with him about it; he would take it amiss, for he had been a soldier for ten years under the general’s command before he had lost his foot.

  Her husband would not have cared. His sense of humor had never failed, even as he was dying of a rotting wound her herbs and wise nursing could not heal.

  The treacherous Forlangers had the king’s ear and bragged that they were his most loyal subjects. But out here beyond the King’s City people knew them for the greedy, cruel mercenaries that they were, always ready to steal from villages wherever they guessed the king would not notice. Only the general and his men stood between the villages and the raiders.

  Someone had lit the crowing cock lamp atop the market hall’s steep roof. This beacon called to the folk hurrying forward now, carrying their children, cages with chickens, and bags stuffed with grain and such produce as they could carry. It was not late enough in the season that beasts had been slaughtered for the winter’s meat, so the older boys and girls were being dispatched to drive the animals out to the far pastures where they might hope to bide unseen until the danger was past.

  The headman’s daughter, standing among a cluster of whispering women, saw Anna and broke away from the others to meet her.

  “Mistress Anna, if you will, can you go with my husband to West Hall? He is taking ten men.”

  “If the Forlangers walk the road, ten men will attract their attention. Give me your brother as escort, and we’ll go through the forest. He knows the woods as well as I do. No Forlanger will see us.”

  “But alone, Mistress? My brother is no help in a skirmish. He will just run away and hide, but hiding did not save him then and will not now.”

  “He is braver than you think. Anyway, we cannot fight the Forlangers with swords and spears. If we have our wits, then that is our weapon against them.”

  The cool autumn night air did not bite, but summer was irrevocably gone. Because it had rained the day before, the leaves slipped instead of crackled underfoot, making it a quiet passage. With a clear sky and the moon’s merciful light a bounty laid over the world, they did not bother with a lantern. Both she and young Uwe knew the nearby animal trails well enough that the full moon gave them all the light they needed to follow familiar ground. She kept her eye open for night-blooming woundheal, at its strongest here at the end of the year and especially under a full moon, but saw none of its pale blossoms.

  Uwe slipped in and out of shadow ahead of her. The young man was light on his feet and very shy. He glanced back now and again to make sure she was on the right track, for there were places in the wood where a person might fall into harm’s way and never know until it was too late to climb out.

  That was the way of the world: usually the worst was already on you before you knew your throat had been opened and you were bleeding out. So her husband’s death had come, its end determined before she had even known he was injured.

  Ahead, Uwe halted, a hand raised in warning. Anna stopped, careful with her feet as she felt a branch bend beneath her shoe, shifting carefully so as to make no noise.

  Men’s voices shattered the silence with shouts and a ringing clash of weapons. Sound carried oddly at night, seeming both near at hand and yet impossibly distant. Uwe merely shrugged and began walking again. This trail swung away from the main road and around the back of Witch’s Hill to the back pastures of West Hall’s cultivated lands. No one liked to go this way. As they neared the haunted clearing that sheltered Dead Man’s Oak, Anna listened for the hooves of the Hanging Woman. All she heard were the last dying shrieks of a skirmish away north, then nothing at all except for the wind rattling branches and the chirp of a night-sparrow in a nearby tree.

  Maybe the Hanging Woman walked elsewhere this night.

  As they entered the big clearing with the oak, Uwe slowed his steps until he was walking beside her, keeping her between him and the ancient tree. An old reddened scar like a ring around his neck marked him as one of the few who had survived an encounter with the Hanging Woman. The meeting had changed him, for no one could meet the Hanging Woman and not be changed.

  Uwe grabbed Anna’s arm, fingers a vise.

  A body lay propped against the oak’s gnarled trunk.

  Uwe shrank back into the brush, but Anna knew better. You never retreated from what could not be changed. What was the point? If the Hanging Woman came, you could not hide from her.

  Anyway, a sword rested on the ground at the body’s feet, and the Hanging Woman always took weapons for she was a scavenger of lives. As Anna moved into the clearing, she crumbled a bit of dried lavender in her outstretched hand, letting its dust sweeten her steps, taking no more than three steps at a time, pausing between to whisper the prayer that the old woman of the wood had taught her. “Moonlight make a shade of me, daylight make me whole.”

  So she came to the oak untouched. Its trunk was as wide as her cottage, and its bark wrinkled and knobby. The huge branches of the oak draped like arms waiting to crush her if she did one wrong thing.

  The body was that of a soldier. He was alive, unconscious and bleeding, and at first glance, seeing an officer’s sash bunched up across his chest, she thought he was a wounded Forlanger. She hefted her walking stick to bash in his head before he woke.

  But then the light changed, shifting through the branches to illuminate his face clearly: an older man, dark hair sifted with white. A face she knew and would never forget, although she had only seen him once in her life, on the day ten years ago when the market hall had been dedicated and given over to the village.

  She would never forget the crookedly healed nose, the scar on his cheek, the metal brace he wore on his left leg. Sh
e knelt cautiously and eased the bloody glove off his left hand: yes, his left little finger was missing, as it said in the song—He was last to get on the boat and yet all the Forlanger wolf got of him was his smallest finger.

  The wounded soldier was General Olivar.

  Struck down and somehow abandoned or lost by his own men.

  She was so stunned that she sat with a grunt and pressed both hands to her belly, panting softly as she tried to gather her scattering thoughts. Ten years had aged him, as it had aged her: ten years ago her eldest child Mari had been a mischievous girl always singing some silly song, her eldest son had still been alive for that was before the shivering sickness had taken the boy, and her two youngest not yet even born.

  A hoof-fall sounded, gentle as mist, and then another.

  So the Hanging Woman announced her coming.

  She looked up.At the edge of the clearing Uwe hid under an evergreen bitterberry shrub, crouching with arms wrapped around knees. All she could see of him was his face like a frightened baby moon. Moonlight collected in the open space as magic into a bowl.

  The hoof-falls touched as lightly as the light itself.

  Shadows tangled, stretching and winding, coming into life.

  The Hanging Woman’s noose took shape as a rope of darkness coiling across the grass.

  The old oak had a cleft, and in its hollow many years ago an old cunning woman well versed in herbcraft and mystery had lived for several winters. That was the old woman of the wood, the witch for whom the hill was named, although there had been another cunning woman before her according to the stories told to Anna by her grandmother when she was a child.

  Anna glanced once more toward Uwe and, as she hoped, he had not moved, trusting to the bitterberry’s prickly scent to shield him. Rising, she grasped General Olivar by the armpits and dragged his limp weight halfway around the tree, whispering the chant of protection she had learned from the old woman: “Leaf and branch and grass and vine. Let me be like them, what the eye sees but does not notice.”

  Just in time she hauled him in through the cleft, into the dusty dry shelter of the tree’s heart. The smell of smoke still lingered. He gasped softly, and his eyes opened.

  “My sword,” he said in a hoarse whisper, as if he already knew what she was about.

  She had to risk it. The sword would betray their presence. The narrow cleft had been barely wide enough to admit the general’s shoulders. She squeezed back through it now and to her horror heard the creaks of men shifting on saddles and the thump of many ordinary horses rather than the eight-legged steed ridden by the Hanging Woman. Pulling her bridal shawl up over her head gave her cover, of a sort, as she glided around the base of the tree. Four riders emerged into the clearing from the path that led, through thickets, to West Hall. They were too far away yet to see the ground clearly but if she moved again they would see her, so she did not run but instead placed herself to stand squarely over the fallen sword, letting her skirt cover it.

  Their pale tunics and dark sashes marked them as Forlangers, a fine lord and three of his retainers to look at them all agleam in their pride. But the moonlight showed their faces: a wolf and his gaunt and ugly brethren, hard of heart and bitter of blood.

  Night and the ill-omened tree made them nervous. Battle had strung them taut. She had no trouble hearing their too loud voices.

  “. . . said they saw someone running in this direction, my lord.”

  “I want him dead,” said the lord in a high coarse voice.“This is all for naught if he is not dead.”

  “My lord, we came the wrong way,” said a second retainer, his tone brittle with nerves. “This is the witch’s tree, the hanging tree. It has an angry and hateful spirit.”

  The Hanging Woman was already here. Her shadows swelled with the rope of fear. The horses shifted nervously, ears flaring. In the sky above, clouds crept toward the moon.

  Why not? What weapon had she, except her wits?

  She raised her arms to make the shawl flutter like dark wings.

  “Here are you come, so which is it who will offer himself to my rope?” she said in a voice that carried across the clearing lit with a gauzy glamour.“I take one for my noose.”

  The moon slid beneath the cloud. A gust of wind shook through the vast branches. An owl hooted from the verge, and there came out of the forest the sound of a clop of horse’s hooves, slow and steady as the approach of death.

  The Hanging Woman was coming.

  Night, and the oak’s mighty shadow, did the rest.

  The Forlangers turned tail and rode back the way they had come, toward the fields and buildings of West Hall. Brush rattled around them, marking their passage, and one man shouted as he lost control of his horse.

  The cloud passed, and the moon re-emerged. The shadows untangled, and Uwe rose with wide eyes from the bitterberry where he had been hiding and dashed across the clearing to fetch up beside her.

  She hoisted the heavy sword. “Was that you, with the owl call? I reckon I have heard you test that other times.”

  He grinned, then popped his tongue in his mouth to make the clop-clap hoofbeat sound.

  She laughed, then frowned, for it was dangerous to insult the Hanging Woman.“They will come back,” she said.“If not at night, then at dawn. You must help me carry him to the rose bower.”

  Uwe did not want to enter the cleft. Into that cleft one night several years ago the Hanging Woman had dragged the person Uwe had been before, and he had emerged changed, become what he was now.

  Anna grasped his elbow and shook him. “The wounded soldier is General Olivar himself. The Forlangers mean to kill him. If they do, there will be nothing but theft and indignity for us and all our kin. You see that, do you not?”

  He nodded. They all knew it was true.

  The general had fallen unconscious again although he was still breathing. They dragged him as gently as possible out of the cleft. In the moonlight, Anna unclasped his coat of plate armor and cut away padding and under-tunic to lay bare the wound. It was just above his hip, in the meat and muscle of the torso. She bent to sniff at it, and while the scent of blood was strong, it seemed the blade had missed his gut for there was no fetid sewage breath from the cut.

  That meant he might live.

  If they worked quickly and covered their tracks.

  They got his coat of plates off him, which woke him up, but he was a soldier who did not complain or panic. He just watched, eyes fluttering with pain, as she bound the wound with strips cut from his tunic.

  Because he was awake, it was easiest to drape him over Uwe and let the slight man walk with the general’s weight on him. Anna followed with the sword and the coat of plates. They halted beyond the clearing so she could go back with a branch and confuse the ground to make sure no one guessed they had been there.

  “Leaf and branch and grass and vine. Let them see but see nothing.”

  The old cunning woman had lived for six years in the wood, wintering in the oak and living the other seasons in a hidden refuge. During the time she had bided at Witch’s Hill, the Hanging Woman had never once ridden out.

  There is more than one kind of power in the world.

  They made their way into the trees, following trails in the dim light all the way to a rocky spine of land where boulders made a great jumble of the forest floor. A stream burbled through the undergrowth, running low at this time of year.

  In the other three seasons, the old woman had lived deep in the forest in this rocky dell within an astounding growth of sprawling evergreen rose-trees that were more shrub than tree. Sticks woven into the arched branches made a house of remarkable grandeur, one so artfully concealed that you could not see it unless you knew it was there.

  Anna had herself lived here off and on for five years as a girl, because the old woman had demanded an apprentice from the village, someone to fetch and carry for her, and Anna had been the only girl bold enough to volunteer. She had been paid with learning. The old woman had ins
tructed her in herbcraft and many other cunning skills, although Anna had not passed some subtle test and so had never been taught any deeper secrets. Most of all, she had been given the gift of freedom, able to speak her mind, to ask any question she wanted regardless of whether the old woman answered it, and to run where she willed on summer nights. She had met her husband in the forest, for he was a woodsman’s son and became a woodsman himself in time. So they had set up house together after she got pregnant. By then the old woman had vanished, never to be seen again.

  “Uwe,” she said. “Go back and make sure no trace remains of our trail.”

  He left his heavy pack behind with its store of grain, for they had known they would have to depend on feeding themselves if the stores in West Hall were burned or looted.

  Anna visited the rose bower several times a year to sort out its store of firewood, rake the ground, lay in grass, clear out any animal nests. The old woman had taught her that a fire must always be laid, ready to light. She was glad of that teaching now, for even in darkness she could start a fire on the old hearth. By its golden light she shifted the general onto a layer of grass.

  His eyes were open but he did not speak. By the reckoning of his cold glare, she suspected he was in so much pain he dared not speak. Perhaps he was barely conscious, half sunk into the blinding haze that separates life from death.

  She opened her bag and got to work.After peeling back the temporary bandage and his bloody clothing and giving him a leather strap to bite on, she cleansed the gash with a tonic of dog rose and whitethorn. Afterward she sewed it up with catgut as neatly as a torn sleeve. A poultice of mashed feverbane leaves she bound over the wound with linen strips. That he did not pass out again during all this surprised her, but it took men like that sometimes: the heart would race and keep them wakeful despite the pain. She therefore lifted up his head and helped him drink an infusion of willowbark and courage-flower. She then fortified herself with the cider and bread she had brought for herself, since the old woman had also taught her that no one could keep their wits about them if they were starving or thirsty, especially not those who were needed to care for the ill and injured. He watched her from the pallet of grass. Being evidently a polite man, he did not speak until she finished eating.