“That’s easy,” said Cadan. “You’ve been thinking.”
I drew the Queen, arms outstretched, in the dirt floor.
“About the enchantment.”
I nodded, then held up six fingers.
“After six years, we’ll be men again,” said Cadan, as if reciting a lesson he knew by heart.
One heartbeat. Another.
I shook my head. No.
Silence.
“What?”
It took a minute to sign that I’d be able to speak in six years, but that they would still be swans. It took much longer for my brothers to accept it, with me signing over and over exactly what the Queen had said in Roden’s cellar: After six years, you may speak without killing your swan-brothers.
Before they could discuss it, though, I held up a finger and began to sign that the Queen had mentioned the old woman. Then I drew the map Aiden had me follow to the hut, and pointed to where the old woman lived.
“You found her? She knew the Queen?”
I nodded and went straight to the important part, drawing a swan turning to a man on the dirt floor. She knew how to change you back.
“How?” asked Aiden.
I went outside and picked up the clump of nettles I’d harvested, using the hem of my tunic to protect my hands. Then I dropped them by the fire.
Gavyn bent over them. “Mint?”
Before I could shake my head, he touched them, then yanked his hand back. “Nettles?”
Yes.
“How will nettles—of all things!—break the enchantment?” asked Mael.
I signed turning the nettles into yarn and the yarn into tunics.
“How did you harvest that?” asked Declan.
I held up a dagger.
“And your hands? How are they?”
My left hand and forearm still hurt like fire, but that wasn’t the point. Why couldn’t they see that nettles were important?
“How do you know it will work?” asked Gavyn.
I tried to explain that the Queen hated nettles, that the nettles around the cottage had stopped her and her wolf men.
“Nettles wouldn’t stop warriors.” Mael shook his head. “It wouldn’t stop farmers.”
“It stopped Cadan,” said Owain. “Do you remember the time you stole Cadan’s clothes while he was swimming? And then Cadan took the wrong path back from the lake?”
Cadan raised an eyebrow. “I doubt our Ryn was stung in the same places.”
Declan choked on a laugh.
Cadan scowled. “I couldn’t sit for a week!”
“Nettles make no sense,” declared Mael. “And that’s not the most puzzling part: How does a forest crone know the Queen?”
Gavyn shrugged. “Actually, I believe that part. We know the Queen was in the forest. Why wouldn’t she know someone who lived there? What did the woman tell you, Ryn?”
Finally! One of my brothers was asking an intelligent question.
I began to recount what I’d learned. My description of the woman’s ramblings would have been confusing if I could speak, but my signs and drawings only made her sound more crazy, if that was possible.
“She gave the Queen a tongue?” asked Owain.
“And feet? How do you give someone feet?”
I tried to sign that I thought the Queen had run away from another land. That the old woman had nettles, and the Queen hated them because they reminded her of the cottage—or of the place she had left. That they were the key to breaking the enchantment.
My brothers just stared at me in silence.
Aiden shook his head. “The enchantment isn’t your fault, Ryn. And it isn’t your responsibility to save us. That’s where the interest in nettles comes from, isn’t it?”
I stared at him.
He didn’t just think I was foolish. He worried that the nettles were a morbid fascination, a sickness of heart or mind.
I’d fretted about how to explain the nettles, but I never thought my brothers would understand my signs and pictures and still not believe me.
I looked away, heartbroken.
“Then what happened?” asked Declan, attempting to move to safer subjects. “Tell us about Etten.”
I explained, but all joy was gone from the telling. They felt it, too, though they tried to act as though nothing had changed. Then I signed that I’d seen one of the Queen’s wolf men in Etten and run away.
“Did you see him again?” Mael leaned closer.
No.
“That’s good. Very good,” said Gavyn. “If the Queen’s man had seen you, he would have found you. I’m sure the Queen still believes Ryn is dead.”
It was so close to what I’d imagined him saying on the road that I almost smiled.
Almost.
Owain-the-hen clucked in her sleep. I looked at her, grateful for the distraction.
Mael chuckled. “I never thought I’d say it, but I’m glad you have a hen who thinks you’re her chick.”
“What do you call her?” asked Owain in a snide tone. “Mother?”
I’d wondered whether I should change Owain-the-hen’s name, because my brothers would tease Owain unmercifully if they knew.
But Owain made the decision easy.
I pointed at him.
“You named her Owain?” Cadan cackled.
I raised an eyebrow and nodded.
They laughed just as hard as I imagined, ignoring Owain’s protests.
Finally, Cadan walked to Owain’s perch and made a low sweeping bow to the sleeping hen. “My lady Owain, on behalf of my brothers, I thank you for protecting Ryn. I think you are crazy—”
She merely blinked.
My brothers hooted, but Aiden became grim. “We need to end it. Ryn shouldn’t have to live like this for six years.”
The laughter faded.
Aiden stared at Owain-the-hen, but he wouldn’t have noticed if she’d flown straight into the air and turned somersaults. “Ryn should have more than a hen to protect her. And I don’t know what’s happened to Tanwen. Or Father. I can’t not know for six years.”
“Then we end it,” said Mael. “We end the Queen.”
Aiden nodded.
Suddenly, the fire didn’t seem warm enough.
“What if killing the Queen makes the enchantment permanent?” asked Gavyn.
“We have to do something! She should be confronted!”
“Ryn will need warmer clothes if she’s going to walk back to the castle this side of winter,” said Gavyn.
Aiden shook his head. “Ryn isn’t going anywhere.”
“Isn’t she? If you want to face the Queen the next full moon, Ryn must lead us there. It’s no mistake that we arrived here after she did. I’ve been thinking about it: we follow her, and we nest where she settles. The only time we won’t be able to follow is when we molt in late summer. You see, swans lose their flight feathers and are flightless for several weeks—”
Cadan smacked the back of his head to stop the lesson.
Aiden just pushed the dying coals in on themselves.
“We’d have to time it perfectly,” said Declan. “We’d have only hours and we’d lose even that if she locked herself in a room till sunrise. One whisper of black swans, and she’d know we were coming.”
Mael had fought too many times to stomach such talk. “What do we do for the next six years, then? Run away?”
I saw the same grief on their faces that I’d weathered that first night at Roden. I picked up a log and threw it on the fire, glad for the spray of sparks that made my brothers stop.
I tapped my chest. Look at me!
They did.
I made a motion like a plant shooting up.
They stared blankly.
I made the silly face that Owain and I used when we were little and played war with wooden swords.
Owain recognized it. “We die?”
I shook my head, No! Then mimicked a plant sprouting up—the opposite of dead.
“We live,” said Aiden.
<
br /> I nodded. We live.
I looked at the pile of nettles that my brothers had dismissed. We live—and I’ll make your nettle tunics, whether you believe in them or not.
Chapter 21
Second full moon
“Well, then,” said Aiden after a long silence. “Let’s get started with living.”
My brothers threw themselves into their work that night. Declan and Gavyn collected wood and stacked it near the hearth, while Cadan and Owain worked to repair the roof itself, scavenging the fallen slate and filling in any remaining holes with a weave of branches that would keep rain away.
Aiden and Mael closed the fallen wall with a basket-weave of branches, while I daubed their work with mud scraped from the lake. It wasn’t possible to add a door that would close, but they left a small opening and then wove a frame that could be pushed across it at night.
I watched them, heart sinking. The makeshift door would keep some of the cold at bay, but it wouldn’t protect me from what I’d feared ever since talking to the old woman: the Queen’s wolf men.
An hour before dawn, we crowded back in the little hut, sitting shoulder to shoulder so we could fit. Our work had closed out the night, but it was still my brothers who made me feel safe—not the new wall. I rested my head against Cadan’s shoulder as we sat around the fire.
Mael laid a straight, fresh-cut branch across his knees and began stripping the twigs from it. “I’m making you a cudgel, Ryn-girl. It’ll be a proper walking stick as well as a weapon. I’ll teach you how to use it every time we change.”
Aiden nodded, then said, “Tell us a story, Declan. One of the old ones. It’ll fill what’s left of the night.”
Declan looked down, his chin almost on his chest as he considered what story to tell.
This was my chance to learn about the Hunt.
I ignored the fear that pricked the back of my neck as I tapped Declan’s shoulder and pointed to myself. Could I pick the story?
He chuckled. “What do you want to hear?”
It took a minute of signs and sketches in the dirt for him to guess the story. “The Great Hunt?”
Yes!
He scowled. “It’s a grim story, Ryn.”
I insisted.
Declan leaned back, staring at the ceiling like the story hung there beneath the slates and only he could see it.
“Back when the oldest forests were young and the moon was unblemished, before the Bright Ones retreated to the Otherworld, there lived a chieftain whose name has been lost to time. He loved the hunt above all. He’d hunted and killed every creature under the sun and moon, except for a snow-white boar that lived in the center and soul of the forest.”
Declan warmed to the story, and I tucked myself deeper into Cadan’s side.
“One summer, when enemy soldiers were within a day’s march of his own fort, the chieftain learned that the white boar had ventured from its hiding place. He didn’t pause. After entrusting his captains with the defense of his home, he rode out with his hounds to hunt and kill the boar. After days of pursuit, he cornered the wounded boar in a cave.”
I leaned forward, entranced and horrified by the man’s single-minded pursuit.
“He entered the cave, hounds slavering at his side, spear raised to deliver the death blow. As the chieftain approached, the boar spoke with the voice of a man: ‘Fool! Your fort is besieged, and yet you hunt me, the favorite creature of the Dagda of the Bright Ones? Spare me, and you will return to find your enemy vanquished and your heirs safe. But if you slay me, you will lose all you hold dear, and the Dagda’s own rage will follow you the rest of your life.’
“The boar’s offer only incensed the chief. Rather than kill it swiftly with his spear, he set his hounds upon it, watching as they tore the creature to pieces.”
I shivered as Declan finished the ugly story.
“In the end, the boar lay dead, but not before it tore the chieftain’s leg. He returned to the smoldering remains of his fort, where the bodies of his family and captains lay under the blue sky for the birds to enjoy. Even then, he wouldn’t acknowledge the part his madness had played. He shouted his fury to the sky and prepared the bodies of his loved ones with his own hands. But before he could take their bodies to the barrow-graves that would receive them, he, too, died.”
Declan’s voice dropped to a whisper, and even Cadan leaned forward to hear the end. “But he was not granted rest. He was made Lord of the Great Hunt, and he rode with the horse and hounds he’d loved more than life and family. Sometimes the Bright Ones rode with him, sweeping across the land, hunting monsters and creatures that are now lost to time: giants, trolls, and imps.”
Something tapped against the slate roof. I knew it must be a pine branch, but I still slid closer to Cadan. If the old woman was right, then the Queen’s wild men—or wolf men—weren’t men at all but Otherworlders who’d joined the chieftain’s madness ages ago.
But Declan wasn’t finished.
“And still they ride. Terrible storms hide the Great Hunt from human eyes. They look like banks of clouds running across the land, but legends claim that storms are the garments that hide the Hunt—and that if you listen close enough, you can hear the voices of the Hunt-Lord and his riders in the wind as he travels the ancient barrow roads. And if they ride over a mortal, that person will be swept up into the Hunt, forced to ride with them until he”—Declan glanced at me—“or she is released.”
No.
No. The old woman couldn’t have meant the Queen pulled her wild men from the Hunt. I couldn’t let myself believe it, not when I didn’t even have a proper door between me and the night.
Cadan pulled me from my thoughts, chafing a hand over my arm to warm me. “Don’t you worry, Ryn-girl! It’s a creeping sort of story, but it’s just a story.”
It’s just a story.
Wouldn’t I have said the same thing about an enchantress turning men to swans?
But the truth was as relentless as driving rain: Mortal men wouldn’t have been stopped by nettles. Mortal men would have metal weapons, not obsidian blades. Mortal men wouldn’t have made our skin crawl just to see them.
The Queen’s Hunters—I couldn’t think of them as anything else now—weren’t from this side of the Veil.
And I couldn’t tell my brothers. They hadn’t believed what the old woman said about nettles. They wouldn’t believe this.
It was just me and the Hunters—and the nettles that I prayed would keep my brothers and me safe.
Chapter 22
The next day, I returned to the nettle patch, more determined than ever.
The fire in my left hand had burned for hours after harvesting yesterday, finally fading late in the night. What would happen after any real amount of time?
I closed my eyes and was back at Roden, saw the curl of smoke, the darkness open up in front of me. I remembered Tanwen’s command to run and the breathless moment when I decided I would.
I had escaped the Queen once by running into fire. The burn of the nettles was no different.
It was time to run into the fire once more.
I tugged my sleeves down to my wrists to protect my arms. Then I gathered a handful of nettles and began. I tried to imagine my brothers free of the enchantment, standing as men in the daylight, but that didn’t help. If my brothers knew what I was doing, they’d try to stop me.
So I imagined Mother instead. And when my left hand felt too stung to hold the nettles, I switched hands, holding the dagger with my burning hand, and gathered the nettles with my good one.
Twenty minutes later, I had a pile of nettles beside me.
I rocked back on my heels, staring at the pile as I cradled my throbbing hands on my lap for a few moments. Then I sheathed the dagger, scooped the nettles into my arms, and carried them back to the hut.
By the time I reached the hut, my hands hurt so badly I couldn’t think of anything except stopping the pain. I dropped nettles and dagger outside the hut and ran to the lake, p
lunging my hands into the cool water, hoping it would help as it had the day before.
I held them in there, grateful for the numbness that crept up my arms.
Gavyn had been right about nesting wherever I settled. My swan-brothers glided across the lake, unaware of me as I crouched at the bank.
Think how good it will be to have them be men again. Remember that the nettles will be like armor against the Queen’s Hunters!
One of the swans swam close, and that little thing heartened me. I knew I’d soon be able to stand—or swim—close to them. I’d learn their markings and mannerisms.
I pulled my hands from the water, and the burning returned immediately. So I plunged them in again, still watching the nearest swan as it drifted by, preening.
A month ago, between his lessons on birds’ hollow bones and the number of full moons a year, Gavyn had described how swans’ feathers must lie just-so for the water to flow over them. Owain had fallen to the side, letting loose a snore that sounded like a wall collapsing. By the time my brothers stopped laughing, Gavyn swore he wouldn’t say another thing about feathers.
So why couldn’t I stop thinking about them? What was it about feathers that—
Feathers all lying in one direction.
I jumped up and ran to the pile of nettles.
I used the dagger to push aside the leaves to look at the stalk. The nettles’ stingers looked like fine hairs all tilted outward and upward.
Declan used to say you could pet a porcupine if you knew which way to stroke it. He’d been talking about humoring Cadan, but the saying might also apply to nettles. I reached a fingertip toward one of the nettle stalks. I touched it at the base, brushing my finger from where I’d cut it up to the top of the stalk.
Nothing. Not one sting.
I grinned and stroked the stalk with my fingertip one more time. So that was how it should be done!
Now I knew how to cut the nettles without being stung.
Next I had to strip the stalks of their leaves. I’d harvest the fiber from the stalks for yarn and save the leaves for tea. Even I remembered old wives’ tales of witches sipping nettle tea.
I looked down at the dagger in my still-dripping hand. It would take forever if I stripped the stalks with it—even if I managed not to cut them entirely.
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