Shadowfell (9 page)

‘If only you were here,’ I whispered into the chill as the light faded to dusk and the endless curtain of rain turned all to shadowy haze around me. He couldn’t have made the rain stop; he had no canny powers. He couldn’t have conjured supper from nowhere or stopped the Enforcers from riding by. But if he had been here I would not have been alone.

I stayed where I was for a night and a day. On the second night the rain stopped and I risked moving on in the dark. My limbs were like an old woman’s, stiff and cramped. I crept through the woods, struggling not to cough. Each furtive footstep sounded to me like an intrusive crash, alerting the whole world to my presence. Perhaps Keldec had sentries right here on the hill. Maybe the Enforcers who had ridden past yesterday were waiting just around the next corner. When an owl flew out from the trees ahead, my heart jolted in fright.

The walk felt endless. It felt pointless. Why in the name of the gods had I promised to fight? I could hardly manage to put one foot in front of the other.
Remember the song, I told myself
. But that seemed a long time ago, and I was too tired to remember.

At last came a watery dawn, and there, a hundred paces or so before me, was the broad valley of the Rush, the river that cut through the mountains on its headlong progress to Deepwater. Once I reached the crest of the hill, just over there, I would be looking down on the stone keep, the wall, the hard-packed practice areas of Summerfort. There would be guards everywhere.

A voice spoke right behind me, making me jump in fright. ‘You’ll be wanting a wee sit-down and maybe a brew.’

I whirled around and there, standing quiet as shadows amid the damp ferns of the forest floor, were two small figures. The little woman in the hooded green cloak: Sage. The odd creature with the leafy pelt: Sorrel. He extended a fronded hand, beckoning. I did not move.

‘A brew?’ I croaked, thinking how good it would be to wrap my hands around a warm cup, to soothe my aching throat with a hot drink. ‘You can’t make fire here. We’re too close to Summerfort. They’d see the smoke. And we should keep our voices down.’

‘Still heading north, are you?’ Sage’s eyes were fixed on me in piercing question.

Had I told them this? ‘Up the valley of the Rush.’

The little woman looked at her companion, then the two of them gazed at me. ‘You’ll not get far in that state,’ she said. ‘A few steps out from the forest, just far enough for king’s men to catch sight of you, and then you’ll collapse in a dead faint. If you won’t accept help when it’s offered, you’re more fool than I took you for.’

‘I must go on,’ I whispered.

‘Not without a brew and a warm-up,’ said Sorrel. ‘Come this way.’

‘I told you –’

‘Aye, we heard you.
They’d see the smoke.
From your fire, maybe. Not from mine.’

‘Come on, lassie,’ Sage said, reaching up to take a fold of my cloak between her bony fingers. ‘You’re all shivery-shaky. It’s not far.’

Their fire was a little higher up the hill, in a depression between great rocks. It was so tiny I doubted it would warm so much as a beetle. There was no smoke at all. On the flames was a small pannikin, and there was Red Cap, stirring the contents with a long stick. He still wore the sling. I could see the small ears of the infant sticking up from it. None of the others seemed to be around. I crept into the shelter and realised I was wrong on one count, for the flames’ warmth was a blessing on my chill body. I sank down, easing my bag from my shoulder.

‘Aye, that’s it,’ Sage said, eyeing me as I stretched out my hands to the fire. ‘You can’t go on anyway, with king’s men on the road. You may as well be warm and fed.’

Before I could say much at all, Red Cap was ladling a mushroom broth out of his tiny pannikin into even smaller bowls fashioned of interwoven leaves. He put one of these in my hands. ‘Eat up,’ he advised, and applied himself to his own meal. Sorrel drank his share straight from the bowl. Sage ate tidily, using an implement fashioned from an acorn cup.

I hesitated, my mouth watering, my mind on old tales about folk who wandered into the realm of the Good Folk, accepted tempting treats and found they could never return home again.

‘Get on with it, then,’ Sorrel urged. ‘You’re skin and bone, girl.’

‘You’ll take no harm from the brew,’ put in Sage, quicker to understand why I held back. ‘Eat your fill.’

So I ate, though my sore throat made it hard to swallow. The food was good. It was astonishing that such a small pot could provide sufficient for all four of us, but it did. When Red Cap had drunk half his bowlful, he loosened the sling, lifted out the baby and sat it on his knee, where he proceeded to feed it the remainder of his meal by dipping his finger in, then letting the infant suck off the broth.

As soon as I was done eating, I got to my feet again.

‘I should go on,’ I made myself say, though I longed to stay by the fire. ‘Thank you for helping me –’

‘Sun’s up,’ Sorrel observed. ‘King’s men will be watching. Besides, you’re dripping wet. Bide awhile, dry yourself, and watch who comes and goes down there. If you have to run in the open, don’t do it without thinking.’

‘That could be the best way to do it,’ I said. ‘Before I lose my courage.’

‘A plan, that’s what you need, and common sense,’ said Sage. ‘Do what the wee mannie tells you, Neryn. Rest, dry those wet things, get some heart back.’

I sat down again or, rather, my legs gave up the effort to support me. ‘How do you know my name?’

Sage gave me a beady-eyed look. ‘We know what we know,’ she said, which was no answer at all.

‘Where are the folk who were with you earlier? Silver, and the man in the nutshell cape, and all those others?’

‘Ah.’ Sage had her hands held out to the fire’s warmth. She gazed into the flames. ‘We had what you might call a disagreement. The three of us came this way. The others . . . well, they followed Silver, as they generally do.’

Had I been the cause of this? Had I parted friend from friend? I hoped not.

‘Our kind, we’re solitary folk mostly, you understand. Get more than two of us together and we’re uncomfortable. Get more than three of us together and you’ll likely have a dispute.’

‘There are three of you.’

‘Aye, well, three’s not such a bad number. In the old tales it’s all threes. And we’re not your run-of-the-mill folk.’ She glanced at her companions. ‘Silver and her band were eager to leave you to your own devices. Keen to send you on your journey alone.’

‘They were right,’ I said, ‘though today I am very glad of your fire, your food and your companionship. The king’s laws forbid all of this. You should go home and leave me.’

‘Home? What home does she mean, Sage?’ If Sorrel had been possessed of visible eyebrows, he would have lifted them at this point.

‘I don’t rightly know, Sorrel. The old home under the earth? Or a new wee home, with a bittie wall in front and flowers growing over it, maybe?’ Sage’s unswerving stare had never left my face. ‘Would that be your picture of it, Red Cap?’

‘With this king ruling Alban,’ Red Cap said, ‘we’ve got no more home than you have, lassie. We’re all of us set adrift, letting the storm carry us where it will.’ As he spoke, he was tucking the young one back into the sling, his hands deft and gentle.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said after a moment. ‘What is the old home you mentioned, under the earth? Is that a . . . retreat? A portal to your own world?’ Rumour had it that many of the Good Folk had slipped through into that other place, never to be seen again by humankind.

Their eyes were full of sadness.

‘We’re all bairns of Alban,’ said Sorrel eventually. ‘We live in the same world as you, lassie. The world of the king’s brutes, the world of the poxy mind-scrapers with their fell tricks. As for that other place, aye, it’s real. It’s a hidey-hole. There’s more than a few of our kind went away there when they saw your king’s mischief at work. Sorrel and Red Cap and I, we could do the same. But we’re small folk. Most times, we pass without notice.’

A shiver went through me, not so much cold as foreboding. ‘I’d best move on as soon as I can, then. Being with me puts you in danger.’

‘Because of your gift, aye.’

‘That’s what keeps me running. We were warned long ago, my father and I, that the Enforcers might be looking for me. So we learned to lose ourselves in the woods or in the mountains. We learned to hide, to be invisible, as far as an ordinary man or woman can be. A few times they nearly caught up with me.’

‘So we’ve heard,’ Sage said. ‘Makes a body wonder what gift it might be that they’re so interested in. Not that the Cull doesn’t stamp hard enough on anyone with a spark of canny knowledge, but this . . . it’s different.’

If she’d been a human woman, I’d never have spoken of this. But I was beginning to think Sage could be a friend. And it seemed she knew a lot about me already, without ever being told. ‘My gift is to be able to see your kind, even when you are merged into rocks or bushes or water. I know most people can’t see you unless you choose to come out and show yourselves. It’s a simple enough gift.’

‘Simple, that’s what you think?’ Sage lifted her brows at me.

‘I don’t see how it could be dangerous. I don’t understand why the Enforcers would especially want to find me.’ I remembered the day we had heard they might be looking for me. Shocking news, that had been, sickening, fearful news. But Father and I had been numb from our losses, and we had simply thanked our informant for the whispered warning and slipped away. ‘They may still be looking for me, so I must keep moving on. But you’re right, it would be foolish to rush out there without a plan. If you think my things will dry . . .’ I eyed the tiny fire.

‘They can’t get any wetter,’ observed Sage. ‘Spread yon big cloakie over the rock, hook the shawl on a branch, and sit you down a while longer. Then we’ll go higher and take a look.’

‘How did you come by that?’ Sorrel asked, looking at the cloak.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Doesn’t seem quite right. Something about it.’

‘It’s a man’s cloak. A stranger gave it to me, back in Darkwater.’

‘Oh, aye.’ That was all the creature said, but I saw his eyes move to the dark swathe of wool from time to time, as if trying to work out what it meant.

They had questions, then, and I offered answers where I could. I told them about the urisk, and how I had made myself lie still as a log on the ground until the sun had lightened the darkness of the forest. I told them how all my sorrows had come back to me, hearing that mournful voice, and how I had made myself remember something good, so I would not give in to its pleading. I did not speak of Flint. I did not mention Shadowfell.

When my account was finished, my three listeners exchanged looks that were heavy with meaning. Sage held up seven fingers; Sorrel held up two; Red Cap nodded. But when I asked them what this signified, they busied themselves with tending to their fire and had nothing to say.

In time the rain ceased, patches of clear sky appeared, and watery sunlight filtered down between the branches of the oaks, where leaves clung in last defiance of the turning season. My clothing dried – perhaps I should not have been surprised that my companions’ little fire did the job so well. At one point Sage went off into the woods, returning some time later with a bunch of the herbs that had eluded me. Red Cap brewed a tea to soothe my aching throat.

‘You’ll not get far with that cough,’ Sage observed, watching me drink the draught. ‘If you can’t keep quiet, how can you hide from folk who mean you harm?’

‘I’ll keep away from the farms until my cough is gone.’

‘There’s not a lot of eatables to be gleaned up the Rush Valley,’ Sorrel said.

‘I’ll be all right for a while. You’ve fed me well today.’

Plain on their faces was the conviction that I would be far from all right, but nobody said a word.

‘I can fend for myself,’ I said firmly. ‘You said we could go up and take a look out over the valley. Can we do that now?’

‘Aye, we will.’

They led me to a vantage point shielded by great stones. From here I could look down over the broad valley of the Rush. The river slowed its breakneck pace on this last part of its course, dividing into three separate streams that flowed into Deepwater. And there, on the far side of those streams, close by the loch shore, was Summerfort: a formidable fortress of stone. A wall enclosed both the keep and various other buildings, sufficient to house a large contingent of warriors as well as all the folk required to maintain a royal household over the summer. There was no banner flying atop the keep. I breathed more easily for that, for it meant the king was not in residence.

When we had first left our home village, or what was left of it, Father and I had fled down the valley of the Rush, up into these woods and away. I had not expected to pass this way again. Stunned by shock and grief, I had thought only of running, hiding, putting as many miles between myself and Corbie’s Wood as I could. When Father and I had looked down on Summerfort, warriors had been performing complicated manoeuvres on horseback, moving across the expanse of hard-packed earth that formed the keep’s practice ground.