Coldfall Wood

by Steven Savile

  A lone hawthorn stood to the side of the ring of stones. Somehow it had survived the hatchets, axes, and saws of humanity, and stood still, proud and strong. He knew it. It was one of the first trees of the wildwood. Now huge mushroomlike growths made a ladder out of its trunk. Like so much else in this place, the old tree was sick, but it was still here, clinging stubbornly to life.

  Oh, how he loathed these children of stone—and that was precisely what they were, greedy little children, all take, take, take. Consume. Devour. They had so much, more than any of his kind ever had, and as harrowing as it was to contemplate, humanity had been blessed with the ultimate gift, and were capable of feeding magic into the land. But for every precious spark of beautiful energy Mother encountered, there were a thousand dark and hungry souls gathered around it looking to feed off the raw magic until there was nothing left.

  It had always been that way, ever since the first of them drew breath into their lungs and let it out as a scream. The sense of entitlement was staggering—even as they watched the fields sour and the earth turn into dead dirt, it meant nothing. They fed on Mother all the more voraciously. Their appetites were insatiable. They should have listened to Arawn when he shared his visions of the future these children offered. They were a blight on the land, and now Mother was suffering.

  This time Robin Goodfellow held onto the breath until it burned inside him.

  “I don’t mind admitting it’s good to be back, even if the old wood is barely recognizable,” Jenny Greenteeth said, flashing a mossy grin at the gathered wild things.

  “Feels like my bollocks have been slammed between a couple of rocks,” one of the brothers said, scratching at his cock with filthy fingers. “Which isn’t as pleasant as it sounds.”

  He sniffed them.

  That earned a chuckle from the others crowded around the fairy ring’s spiral of mossy stones. Corenius and Gogmagot, the chalk giants; Jenny Greenteeth, and more of the children of the wildwood, woken—the dryad, the nixie with their hungry faces—and of course the Gatekeeper who had offered the blood sacrifice to the broken stones that opened the way for their return. Even the Knucker was there, lurking at the rear of the leafy enclave. All gathered to answer the call; all pledged to rise up in this time of need, to fight for their father.

  He just had to pray that it wasn’t too little too late for the land.

  In the shadows, the object of his devotion, his everything: the Lord of the Hunt, the antlered man, King Stag. The Horned God. Arawn looked on silently.

  “You know, I’ve honestly missed your way with words, Corenius,” Robin said.

  “Of course you have, Rob. I make life interesting.”

  “Well your tongue certainly does,” he said, offering a leering grin as he skittered out of range before the chalk giant could slap his backside. Robin clambered lithely up the rotten trunk of the dying hawthorn to a vantage point in the silvered branches overhead. This is the life, he thought. Right here, this place, these people. This is where I was always meant to be. Who I was always meant to be. The thoughts, as comforting as they were, didn’t belong to him. They were the last lingering echoes of the body he had possessed. There wasn’t much of Danny Ash left inside this meat suit, only the occasional flashes of unconnected memory and the pains associated with them; themselves no more substantial than ghosts, but those memories offered glimpses of a world he couldn’t hope to understand. Robin allowed the boy these few last lingering moments before silencing him forever, and in doing so felt a surge of gratitude and then he was gone.

  From here Robin could look down upon all of his friends with their unfamiliar faces. Faces didn’t matter. They came; they went. With owners as old as them, only the souls remained the same. A man could do a lot of things, but he could not change his soul. He smiled at the thought of the chalk brothers having anything as pure as a soul. They were of the earth. They were dirt. They were worms and grubs and broken flints. They were loyal, unbending. And strong. Most of all they were strong.

  “Can’t say I’ve missed this shithole, mind,” Corenius muttered, making sure everyone heard him. Robin saw his hand hovering over his chest and remembered the wound that had killed the chalk giant the last time they walked this wildwood. It was worse for his brother, that damned sword had taken his head from his shoulders. Truth told, it wasn’t a happy memory for any of them. But then death seldom is when you’re on the receiving end of it, he thought and had to stifle another chuckle. “All of those damned Blight Priests trying to bend what little of Mother’s magic was left to their will. The sheer bloody temerity of it. Shit stains on the landscape, all of them. Thinking they’re so fucking special, and crapping over everything wonderful in their lust to break it.”

  “Rather those priests than their bloody soldiers with their swords,” his brother put in helpfully. “Those were the real bastards. Nothing worse than iron. It all started to go wrong when they found iron.”

  “Yeah, that’s one discovery I could have happily lived without,” the chalk giant’s lips twisted into something approximating a grin at that, but Robin saw the way his fingers lingered over his third and fourth rib, touching the way to his heart. It wasn’t a smile; it was remembered pain.

  “I don’t remember you being this funny last time,” Robin observed, shifting the conversation.

  “I’ve had years with an audience of one to amuse,” he said. There was an undertone to his flippancy, an echo of the prison they’d escaped, which offered a glimpse of the real pain their deaths had led to. That self-deprecating line came with memories of the mist, of wandering endlessly through the Annwyn, crying out, lost, alone, save for the occasional echoes out there in the shadows. And always, the sounds of battle and dying all around them, close. Robin had no idea how long he had been alone in there; time lost all meaning in that place. But in all of his searching he never found any of the four dark towers: Murias in the north, Findias to the south, Gorias in the east, Falias in the west. The names stopped making sense. They became myths among the dead. A promise of home for the ghosts of Albion.

  The place was Hell. Nothing more. Nothing less.

  He was in no hurry to go back there.

  Robin Goodfellow hunkered down, deftly balanced with his toes curled around the thick branch and one hand resting on the trunk, and said, “This place is dying. I can smell the rot. It’s all I can smell.”

  They thought about it, breathing the corruption in and struggling to remember what it had been like before. It was hard to remember that far back, to make adjustments for the flesh, but it was undeniable that things had changed, and not for the better.

  “Aye, it is,” the chalk giant Gogmagot agreed, somberly.

  Robin saw the crusted blood where his rebirth had been hard. The streaks had dried in like slashes of war paint across his cheeks and down his neck. On a different face they might have looked like tears of blood.

  “The river’s tainted, too,” Jenny Greenteeth said. “There’s so much shit in it the fish are dead.”

  “There’s more to it than that, this place is sour.”

  That was a phrase he’d almost managed to forget, but along with it came the images of the Blight Priests chanting, their elegiac voices spiraling into the moonlit sky as they drew the last dregs of richness from the soil to nourish the crops for one last season, leaving soured fields in their wake.

  “We did this,” the voice came from the trees.

  There was no arguing with it.

  The forest should have been the most natural place in the world. The only aromas here should have been filled with the loam of life and the mulch of nature’s constant evolution. Instead, all Robin could smell was the sour death and rot of a land bled dry. It had nothing left to give.

  “And it falls to us to make it right. This is our land.”

  “Mother needs us more than ever,” Robin agreed, casting a look toward the tree line where the shadow of the Horned God watched. More than anything, he wanted to please their father.<
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  “It makes me want to puke,” Corenius offered thoughtfully. “Keep things simple, Robin, tell me who to kill to make this right.” He cracked the bones in his neck and reached down for a huge branch he intended to use as a club. The chalk giant hefted it, slapping the wood against the meat of his huge hand.

  That brought a smile to the trickster’s face. “Your simplemindedness is a beautiful thing, Brother. You are right, if we are going to linger here there is killing to be done. One for one,” he said. The others nodded slowly, grasping the implications of the ancient promise.

  There was a brief rustle of movement as Jenny scampered into the center of the stone circle, and crouched, running her fingers through the deadfall of autumn past. She scooped up a handful of leaves, her touch bringing back their color. It was a small magic. Her delicate fingers folded the leaves, and one by one she threaded them onto a vine, fashioning a makeshift crown from them. Robin watched her, fascinated by the simplicity of it. It reminded him of the May Queen. And that thought sent a shiver soul deep. That was one soul he prayed she would never see again.

  “Pretty,” Robin said.

  “Practical,” Jenny contradicted him.

  “Oh, yes?”

  “Oooh, yes.”

  “Am I going to have to drag it out of you?”

  Jenny Greenteeth danced up to the feet of the giant Corenius and bade him lower his head. He looked anything but happy at the prospect, but Robin nodded. “Humor her.”

  Corenius bent to one knee and leaned forward as Jenny placed the crown of leaves on his head.

  “Pretty,” Robin said again.

  “Shut your pretty mouth,” the chalk giant said, but for all the bite in his tone his eyes twinkled with mirth. “Unless you want me to shut it for you?” He was a strange one, Corenius. All those years in the Annwyn had changed him, but of all of the wild things he had the purest heart. He would die before he let anyone hurt Mother.

  “Consider it shut,” Robin said, straightening the dirty folds creased into his torn shirt.

  “Let the leaves be your guide” Jenny said. “They will keep you grounded, linked to the old wildwood as you move through the dead city. They are your tie to Mother. Follow their lead. Let her show you to your soul’s twin, on the other side of the gate, and then do what you have to do. They will wither and die the closer they get to the source, until, finally, in the presence of the one who must die for you to remain, the leaves will crumble to dust.”

  “I will take no joy in the killing,” he assured them.

  “And neither should you,” Jenny assured the big man. “But Mother needs you to be strong, my brother.”

  “The rest? Are we all meant to take our own, or does it fall to me and ugly here to do the dirty work for the rest of you?” Gogmagot said.

  “I’ll shoulder the burden,” Corenius promised the others. “No need for you to stain your souls.”

  “But where’s the fun in that?” asked Robin.

  Across the ring of stones Gogmagot coughed. He raised an eyebrow as they turned his way. “Not being funny, but if he’s got one, I want one.” He tapped his temple. “It’s only fair.” That earned a joyous peel of laughter from Jenny Greenteeth. “I’m serious.”

  “Of course you are,” Robin agreed.

  Jenny gathered up another handful of dead leaves and breathed life into them. The wild things watched as one by one she threaded the verdant green leaves onto a few twigs and proceeded to entangle them, making a second crown. She offered it up to Gogmagot. The big man lowered his head, taking the knee somberly. “Yours is different, sweet Gogmagot,” she told him.

  “In what way?” the giant asked suspiciously.

  “It will lead you to the five, but the leaves will not desiccate. Not until they are in the presence of the May Queen herself.”

  “That bitch is here?”

  “She’s here,” the voice belonged to Arawn.

  “I’m not sure I want this thing anymore,” the chalk giant said, reaching up for the crown. He couldn’t take it off. Thorns had burrowed into his scalp, and the more he pulled at it the more stubbornly they clung on, digging deeper and deeper until blood ran through his fingers. He gave up. “Seriously? Her? Isn’t there another way?”

  Robin shook his head. He’d known it from the moment he woke. “She must be sacrificed.”

  “You say that like she’s some delicate fucking flower.”

  “Careful what you say about our lord and master’s immortal beloved, Brother,” Corenius said, grinning. “He’s not exactly the forgiving kind.”

  Gogmagot sniffed and sighed. “One question,” he turned back Jenny. “The crown crumbles to nothing when we find the Sleepers that make up the soul bridge, but what if we don’t kill them?”

  “Then the dimgate remains open.”

  “I get that, but what does it mean in practical terms?”

  The Horned God emerged finally from the shadows of the trees. He planted the base of his staff into the loam, causing worms to squirm up from the dirt. “It means that they can banish us, and this time there will be no escape from that barren place,” Arawn said, his voice the rustle of the leaves as the wind stirred the wildwood.

  “Well then, when you put it like that,” Corenius said. “Come on, Brother, we better get on with the killing, because I’ve got no intention of going back there.” He cast a glance back toward the gateway and the roiling mist still spilling out through it. “I’d rather chop my nut sack off.”

  “And her? What about the May Queen?”

  “You heard your brother,” Arawn said, no hint of love on his face, despite the fact his words were condemning the woman who had owned his heart every year for the last two thousand summers and more. “She is the sacrifice. Without her, it is all for nothing. She must die for us to live.”

  “That’s what you get for being the kind-hearted one,” Corenius told his brother. “They just tell me to go and kill five children.”

  “Aren’t you the lucky one?”

  25

  “This isn’t going to be easy,” Ellie Taylor told the only two people in the world who knew just exactly how difficult it was going to be to look when that sheet was peeled back. “Do you need a minute?”

  Father Dajani shook his head. He’d aged twenty years in the last twenty-four hours. He was a shell of a man. He gripped his wife’s hand for strength. There was despair just below his skin. He knew the words were coming, and it didn’t matter that they were two of the simplest words in the English language, once they were out of his mouth life as the Dajani family knew it could never be the same again.

  “No. I’ll never be ready, no matter how long we wait,” he said, unable to look at her. “I need to do this. Before I can’t.”

  Ellie nodded. “I understand,” she said, but of course she couldn’t possibly understand what the man was going through. The words were just words. Meaningless. “There’s no good way to do this, but what’s going to happen is: we’ll go in, the nurse will pull back the sheet so you can see the face, and I’ll ask you if you recognize the body. All you have to do is say yes or no, and then she’ll cover him up again. He’s been prepared for viewing, but even so he’s going to look different. I’ll be right beside you all the time.”

  Dajani said nothing.

  Taking that as her cue, Ellie opened the door. It was such a small thing, the most mundane of all actions she could imagine, but life-changing just the same.

  She followed him into the cold room.

  Ellie crossed the linoleum floor to the side of the gurney, nodding to the nurse who already had one hand on the sheet ready for the reveal. It was the worst magic trick imaginable. She drew back the sheet as far as the shallow bay beneath the dead boy’s Adam’s apple. The blue skin didn’t look real; it looked as though it had been shaped out of Play-Doh stretched out too thinly.

  Time in the room divided; for her the few seconds of silence were no more than that, but for Father Dajani they were endless. He loo
ked down at his son’s face willing there to have been some sort of mistake, for it to be anyone other than Musa on the slab. He reached out to rest a trembling hand against his boy’s cheek. That was when Ellie noticed the too-lush smell again, just like it had been back at the old man’s house, and again up on the rooftop garden when Viridius had died.

  “Help me.”

  The words lit up inside her mind, crystal clear. A male voice. Young. Not Father Dajani’s. Not the nurse’s.

  “Please. I … I don’t know where I am…”

  Ellie backed away from the gurney, her eyes darting all around the room, looking for the source of the voice, for the trick, and cursing the old man and his insincere apology. He hadn’t been lying when he said he’d ruined her life. She didn’t know how, or why, but she knew exactly what Viridius had done to her.

  “I can hear voices…”

  So can I, she thought hysterically.

  “I can hear the crying …

  “They’re lost.”

  “It’s him,” Dajani said, utterly broken.

  Ellie put her hand on his shoulder, ignoring the voice that refused to get out of her head.

  “Cover him up,” she told the nurse.

  “Not yet. Can I have a minute with him?” He still hadn’t taken his hand from his son’s cheek.

  “Of course. Take all the time you need.”

  Even as she reached for the door the dead boy’s frightened tears filled her mind. She wanted to scream, “Leave me alone!” his baleful moans haunted her. The dead boy refused to be silenced. He sounded absolutely terrified as he cried: “They’re out there … in the mist … all around me … I can hear them moving about … but I can’t see them. I don’t want to be here. I want to go home … Help me go home … Please…”

  Ellie closed her eyes, willing Musa Dajani gone. “Please,” she said, and the nurse mistook her meaning, nodding in response and following her toward the door.

  “It’s cold here … So cold…”

  She looked back at the body on the slab as she opened the door, and shook her head, refusing to listen.