"Looking forward to getting home," said the man standing on the right. He was tall and broad and had a bushy beard. He wrinkled his face. "This bread reminds me of my wife's cooking. Dry and tasteless." The other man, clean-shaven and squat, laughed and took a large gulp from his pouch.
"The last few days have got me thinking about home, too," he said. "Haven't been back in months. My lad's turned six, and I was stuck in this miserable forest while he was blooded."
"That's a hard thing to miss," said the bearded man. "I remember my son's blooding. There was a right scrap down in there that night. Saw a man nearly sliced in two, but not across his middle. No. This huge Gilmarian Rabbit with a massive two-handed sword just chopped down on the man's head. Carved him in half. Blood and guts everywhere." The man smiled. "You should've seen my boy's face." He shook his head and sucked in a breath. "That was one of the biggest bastards I've ever seen. Strong as a bear. I'd have liked to see more of what he could do, but he legged it off into another chamber. Never saw him again the whole day."
Ordella bit her lip and gripped the handle of her bow. The Warren. They were talking about the Warren.
A chill shivered down her spine. What had been the giant warrior's fate? He couldn't have lasted long. Even the best fighters succumbed in the end. Maybe she'd been the one to scrub his blood off the tiles.
Hob drew an arrow and put it to his bowstring.
"We should take them both out now before they realize what's happening," he said. "I've got the one with the beard."
Ordella raised her hand.
"No," she said. "It's not worth the risk. If we were to miss and they escape, they'd be back with reinforcements. We're too close to Oakhaven, and we don't know how many of them are out there."
Hob looked disappointed. "How about leading them to an End? There's one not too far from here. Whisper's End is just off the path over that way." He pointed behind him with his bow. "We'd easily make it up there before they were upon us."
"Hob," she replied. "Enough. Unless they notice us, we're going to wait them out and let them walk away." She flicked her eyes back to the soldiers. "If they head towards Oakhaven, they'll be tracked by one of the Owls. Besides, I want to listen to what they're saying."
The soldier with the beard took another mouthful from the loaf, made a face, then threw the crust into the river. It landed with a splash, disappearing under the water, and then bobbed back up. The mouth of a large fish broke the surface and nudged the bread a couple of times before it turned in a flash of mirrored green.
"Look at that," said the shorter man. "Even the river carp won't eat it."
"I don't blame them," said the man with the beard. "Don't blame them at all. It was like chewing on a stiff rag." He picked up his bag, strapped it to his shoulders and touched the hilt of the scabbarded sword hanging from his belt. He looked at the other man. "You ready to get moving?"
The short man nodded. "The village isn't going to find itself." He wiped his mouth with his sleeve. "You heard Lord Skerrick. It has to be around here somewhere."
"Let's just worry about not getting ourselves killed." The soldier scratched at his beard. "I'm due to go back home next month, and I don't want to arrive there in sackcloth."
Ordella followed them with her eyes as they walked the path on the other side of the river in the direction from which Hob and she had just come. They'd stopped talking and trudged in single file. She concentrated on the sounds of their boots on the earth, and the clicking of their swords against their sides until the noise faded completely, and the men disappeared from view around the river's bend.
"They're not exactly taking pains to move silently," Ordella said. "They'll be spotted by the Owls and picked off before the day is through."
Hob nodded. "I think you're right, but we still could've taken them ourselves."
Ordella didn't respond.
They remained where they were long after the men had departed. A vision of Lord Skerrick's cruel face drifted into focus, filling her mind. As ever, his eyes were leering at her. Mocking. Goading her.
Why was Skerrick sending patrols into the forest? Clearly, he was responsible for much more than just overseeing the cleaning of a section of the Warren.
She shook her head, trying to dislodge the images of Skerrick striding away from her grandmother as Billy carried out his grim orders.
Her head pounded and her fingers curled around the handle of her bow.
If Skerrick had been one of the men they'd encountered, she certainly wouldn't have passed up the chance to sink an arrow into his neck.
Twenty-Five
Ordella drew her black cloak tighter around her shoulders. The sky was clear, and a chill morning breeze whistled through the trees. Ordella cocked her head. There was something else. Traces of a song. Thin and faint, but distinct from the sound of the wind in the branches. A man's voice.
Ordella put the toe of her boot against Hob's back and gave him a shove. He murmured and rolled over, pulling his woolen blanket high over his head.
"Did you hear that?" she said. "It sounds like someone's singing.
"I'm asleep," he said. "Stop talking to me."
She knelt down beside him and shook his arm. "It sounds like singing. Someone's out there."
Hob pushed the blanket away from his face and sat up.
"Alright. Alright. I'm awake."
Ordella let go of his arm. A gust of wind buffeted the curly hair on his head and he clamped it in place with his hand.
"You must have imagined it. I don't hear any singing. It's just the wind."
She tilted her head. "Well, I can't hear it now either," she said, "but it was definitely there. I don't think the singer was close. I couldn't tell what they were singing about, but it definitely happened."
Hob narrowed his eyes and untied his backpack's drawstring. "Perhaps it was a bird. Some sort of warbler or maybe a woodlark?"
She glowered at him.
"I can tell the difference between the song of a bird and the song of a man," she said. "You would have heard it too if you weren't lazing about when you should've been awake."
She turned her back on him.
"I'm sorry, Ordella," Hob said. "Of course you heard a man singing." Ordella couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic. "Perhaps a nice breakfast will make everything seem better," he continued, pulling his ration sack out of his bag. "What have we got today, I wonder. Eggs and bacon? A thick heel of freshly baked bread? Dropcakes with damson jam?” He made a show of searching through the sack's contents. "Or could it be smoked meat yet again?" He picked out two strips of jerky from his bag and threw one to Ordella. She caught it with her left hand.
Hob put the meat to his mouth and chewed. He made a face like he'd just bitten into a cooking apple.
"I'm never going to get used to this," he said. "It's like I'm eating my own belt." He grimaced, reaching for his water pouch.
Ordella laughed. "You've been spoiled living in Oakhaven," she said. "In the Warren we were excited to find a single piece of rat meat in the stew."
Hob screwed up his face.
"I'd never eat that," he said.
"You would if you were hungry enough."
Hob patted his flabby stomach. "Let's hope I never have to find out."
Ordella fetched her map and unrolled it on the floor, holding it down to stop it from blowing away.
Hob studied it over her shoulder.
"We should reach the crossroads before midday," he said. He traced his finger along the path and stopped at the point where another road intersected it. "Then we head to the north-west. Hopefully, we'll make it to your village by nightfall."
****
Hob pointed to the trees at the edge of the road. "Look over there."
Ordella followed his gaze.
At the corner of the crossroads, a huge rusted iron cage dangled from a large wooden pole overgrown with ivy. Partially hidden by tree branches that had grown through the bars was the unmistakable shape of a
human skull, grinning atop a pile of bones and scraps of cloth. It must've been there for many years.
Ordella turned away. She wasn't disturbed by the sight of bones, the Warren had seen to that, but this might've been someone she knew. Someone from her own village. A shudder passed through her body. What in all Ellusia was she going to find when they reached Rittle?
"Let's move on," she said.
Picking their way through dense tangles of thorns, Ordella and Hob continued along the path. The morning's gusty wind had died down to a gentle flurry, and, with each stride, the welcome shade provided by the roadside trees crept back towards the forest as the sun rose higher in the cloudless sky.
Ordella wiped sweat from her brow and rubbed at the spider's web of bramble scratches crisscrossing her arms.
"This had better be worth it," she said. Hob grunted in reply, pulling at a barbed coil of thorns ensnaring his leg.
"According to the map, we should be nearly there," she said.
Ordella pushed down on a thick bramble stalk, clamping it between her foot and the ground. She stepped around it only to be blocked by another barbed tendril. She levered this one out of her way, too.
From behind, Hob touched her shoulder. She stopped.
"What's that?" he said. "Up there in front?"
She peered into the thicket. Not far from where she was standing, a pile of stones protruded through the mass of thorns like a mountain peak rising above the clouds. The rocks had chiseled edges and were much too uniform to be part of the landscape. It had to have been made by people.
They stepped closer. It was a wall. In a few places it reached as high as her neck, but in others it appeared to have almost completely collapsed, pushed over by the advancing forest.
"This must be the village’s perimeter," Ordella said. "Or what's left of it. When I lived here it was taller than my head." She ran her palm over the stones. "Let's follow it and see if we can find one of the gates. It might help me get my bearings."
Keeping the wall to their left, they pushed on through the brier.
Soon they came upon a rotten gate hanging precariously from the edge of a gap in the wall. It was covered in bright yellow and red fungi, and was held up by a single rusty hinge.
"Rittle had two entrances, one on the north wall, one to the south." Ordella pressed her hand against the sodden timber. The hinge twisted, but the door, anchored to the forest floor by the plants growing at its foot, didn't budge.
She took a step back, then launched herself forward, aiming a kick at the door's central panel. The impact sent a jarring shudder up her leg. The hinge ripped from its mount but, for a moment, the door stayed in place. Then it toppled inward, slamming to the ground and flattening the plants that had grown up against it.
Ordella stepped onto the timbers. They were spongy, but held her weight and provided a platform from which to study her surroundings. Hob stepped up behind her.
This had to be Rittle, but if she hadn't just passed beyond the wall, she wouldn't have believed it. Holly bushes, patches of nettles and bracken, and coil after coil of barbed brambles filled all of the space inside the village's boundary.
She shuffled to the edge of the door. It was as if they were floating on a raft in the middle of a rough green sea, the huge mounds of bindweed and ivy, presumably the ghostly forms of Rittle's buildings, rising up from the undergrowth like giant waves.
Merisca had been right. There was almost nothing left of the home she'd known as a child.
She tried to picture the village as it was then, but all she could conjure were images of its last moments. Blazing thatch and people dashing this way and that pursued by soldiers clad in the dark green and purple of Kelsharla. And the dead slumped on the ground.
They stepped off the boards back into the tangle, searching out the seams between thorns and nettles.
"What are we even looking for?" Hob said.
Ordella chewed her lip. She had no idea. What was harder, trying to find a needle in a haystack or a keyhole in a forest?
"Let's start by working out where my house would've been." She motioned behind her. "I think we came in by the north gate, so that means my home would be somewhere towards the opposite wall, almost in line with where we are now."
They moved deeper into the village until they came to a large holly bush stubbornly growing through the bramble stalks. Its waxy green leaves gleamed in the afternoon sunlight.
"I think this might have been here when I was a girl. It was much smaller back then, of course, but we could definitely see a holly bush from the vegetable patch at the back of our house." She ran her gloved fingers over the edge of one of the spiked leaves. "Every midwinter we used to cut sprigs from it and weave them into a wreath to hang on our door."
Ordella turned and studied a cluster of knolls between the holly bush and the southern wall. It had to be one of them.
She closed her eyes. In her mind, a young version of herself charged past the spot where, almost a decade later, she now stood. The young Ordella ran up the lane, stopping to push a clump of hair away from her face, then approached the door to the third house on the left and opened it. A golden light spilled out, laced with the rich aroma of spiced buns, and the sounds of women's voices. The girl ducked in through the doorway and closed the door behind her.
Ordella snapped her eyes open and pointed to one of the smaller mounds.
"It's that one," she said.
They stopped in front of the mass of brambles and creeping ivy. Nothing of the house appeared to have survived except a single timber standing upright in the center, and even this was pocked with wormholes and was wet to the touch. A rotten tent pole supporting tangled sheets of twisted thorns.
Ordella scuffed at the floor, kicking away layers of leaf mulch and soil. Her boot scraped against something hard. She bent down and pushed away more of the dirt with her hands, exposing a floor of gray tiles.
She smiled and ran her hand over them. This was definitely her home. She turned around. She'd found the floor, but where was the rest of it? She swallowed hard. The Kelsharlans had done a thorough job of tearing down the buildings and torching all that would burn, and the Border Wood's plants and animals had seen to what was left. There was no trace of their belongings either. The looting bastards had taken those, too.
"There's nothing here," she said to Hob, who was standing back, not having ventured into the brambled shell. "It's all gone."
Perhaps if they stripped all of the undergrowth away, she would find some scraps of her old life. Fragments of pottery she recognized or splinters of furniture. But what would be the point?
She sighed.
"I don't know what I was thinking," she said. "I knew my village wasn't going to be the same as it was when I left, but I hadn't imagined it would be like this." Her hand touched the pendant hanging around her neck. "There aren't any doors left intact, so I don't think we're going to find any keyholes."
"You had to come," Hob said. "If we didn't, you'd have always wondered if it was here."
They walked over to the southern wall and sat down on a pile of rubble at its base.
"Besides," he said, "there's a good chance the lock the key fits wasn't in your house anyway."
"What do you mean?" Ordella said.
"Well, think about it. I'm guessing that locks were commonplace in the Warren."
Ordella nodded. They'd been caged in the Hutch every night, a large padlock securing the door.
"But what's that got to do with it?"
"Bear with me," Hob said. "How many locks have you seen in the time you've been at Oakhaven?"
Ordella put her hand to her chin.
"None," she said. "I don't think I've seen a single one."
"Exactly," Hob said. "They're just not needed in Oakhaven." He pointed to the remains of the buildings. "And I reckon your village was the same. No cause for locks because everyone keeps an eye on each other." He looked at her. "A locked door would have stood out like a white rook."
She nodded. Hob might be on to something.
"Now, your key might fit a box or chest," he continued, "but where would one be hidden in a house like yours? Children get to know a place much better than the adults who live there." He laughed. "Just ask Jereth and Flynn about what I used to get up to when I was growing up in Oakhaven. I'd scamper through the trees like a squirrel. I knew every inch of the village, and I'll wager you were the same here. Surely you would've come across a locked box if there was one to be found?"
Ordella bit her lip and ran her hand through her hair.
"When did you get so clever?" She shoved him on the shoulder. "So, if you don't think the key fits anything in the village, where do you think we should look?"
Hob tilted his head back, resting it against the stones.
"When your father was home, what did he do? I mean, apart from his work. What did he like to do when work was done."
The answer came to her almost straight away.
"He loved to go fishing." Ordella pointed into the forest in front of them. "Somewhere over there. There used to be a pond." Ordella picked some stray leaves from her tunic. "Sometimes he used to take me, but I didn't have the patience for it, so he usually went alone. He never failed to bring back something for the table. My mother used to make a delicious tench pie."
"Let's look there," Hob said. "If your father went alone, perhaps he could've hidden something there."
Ordella stood up and offered her hand to Hob.
"I can't imagine we'll find anything," she said. "There's nothing there but trees and plants, but it can't hurt to try since we've come this far."
Hob grasped her hand and pulled himself up. He brushed the dirt from his breeches and straightened his tunic. He pointed to the pendant hanging around her neck.
"It is a very unusual key," he said. "Who knows what we'll find."
Twenty-Six
Hob stood on the banks of the pond and stared into the water.
"I can see why your father always caught something. It's teeming with fish."
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