“I think I finally know where I belong, Grandmother.”
Ffrewgí is kneeling by a cairn on the fringe of the woods, its stones so freshly moved they still show dirt upon their exposed sides, untouched yet by weather. It will be taken down when the new moon rises, the marker of death disassembling again into pieces of earth, symbolic of the tribe’s belief. Ffrewgí feels a breeze on the back of his neck and casts his memory back upon it to a bluff by the sea, where the wind had stilled around him and Anwen.
It was many days after their escape from the Gwaedwn, when they had at last found Anwen’s village by traveling south along the coast. The day after the escape, Ainsley had vanished—so completely that they knew it to have been his choice, though Anwen especially took his disappearance hard—but everyone else had made the journey to Chwythu. Heulwen, Anwen, and Cydwag will still be there, though it has been more than a year since Ffrewgí followed Murchadh south. They had set out to find their lost villages, last seen from the abducting arms of Gwaedwn warriors, using what details their friends could provide. Though Ffrewgí knew his own village was only five days from the Gwaedwn encampment, he had asked Murchadh to make their search for it their last.
The breeze carries Ffrewgí’s thoughts to a conversation he had had with Anwen shortly after their arrival in Chwythu. They were standing upon a cliff overlooking a wind-tossed sea. Anwen had just lit two candles for her father and Wyddryr. It was there, in the calm air created by her magic, that Ffrewgí had put voice to his plan to travel back to his village—not to stay, but to say goodbye.
Grandmother Uerichí gently takes hold of the thread of wind and draws Ffrewgí back. Breaking through the spring clouds, she smiles at him in a warm sunbeam. “I’m glad you have found your place, Ffrewgí,” she whispers in the leaves overhead.
“Thank you, Grandmother.” Ffrewgí stands, brushing dirt off of his knees. Murchadh and Tyree—Murchadh’s relative, who had followed him from the Gwaedwn village—are waiting for him in the village center. Ffrewgí had said he did not want to spend much time here. He had met his father almost as soon as he had arrived, and he had pointed the way to Grandmother Uerichí’s cairn.
“Is Talacwae playing tricks, or am I truly seeing what I think I’m seeing?”
Ffrewgí had not yet seen his sister: she had been out hunting. He turns to greet her and her party. As she approaches, he feels a shock. He is taller than she is. He can tell that she is surprised by this as well; she slows and sizes him up.
“Go along to the village. Prepare the boar,” she says idly to her companions, her eyes not leaving Ffrewgí. Doubt is written all over her face. “Ffrewgí? Am I mistaken, or are you my long lost brother?”
Ffrewgí smiles as the hunters pass him by, many of them staring. “Him, and more,” he says, and steps forward to embrace his sister. She grips him tightly, her chin just barely above his shoulder.
“I can’t believe it!” she exclaims, drawing back. “What—Where—? Your muscles!”
Ffrewgí laughs. “It’s a long story,” he says, “and I’m not the one to tell it. Come, a friend of mine has come with me. He is a storyteller.”
Ffrewgí’s sister reaches out and grips his arm. “You could beat me at an arm wrestle!” she says, shaking her head in disbelief.
“They are scars,” says Ffrewgí, rubbing his muscles self-consciously, “reminders of difficulties.” He smiles. “I look forward to becoming soft again.”
“The boar we brought in—it’s all yours! I’ll go out and get another one!”
Ffrewgí shakes his head. “I’m staying only until the story is told.”
His sister frowns. “But—you’re finally home!”
“No,” Ffrewgí says slowly, thinking of briny air and hair dancing in the wind, “I don’t think I am. But enough! Let’s head into the village, and you shall hear my story.”
His sister follows him silently. Just before they reach the dirt paths between buildings, she pulls him to a stop. “If you won’t stay,” she says, “take this. Once upon a time, you disappeared into the woods with the wrong one, and … and I don’t want it to happen again.” She holds out her hunting spear, the leather wrap down its shaft covered with the runes that mark her countless successes.
Ffrewgí takes it carefully, his own eyes filling with tears as he looks into his sister’s.
“Come now,” she says, wiping a hand across her face, “I can’t wait to hear what happened to you!” She throws her arm across his shoulders, and together they step into the village, where Murchadh has already gathered a crowd for the telling of the tale.
Everybody is preoccupied when Ffrewgí and Anwen return to the little clearing in the woods. Only Heulwen stands to greet them, relief clear on her face. Ashrille and Cydwag are pacing apart; the former simply looks to see that Wyddryr is not with them. Ainsley looks up, but returns quickly to the whittled stick in his hands. Murchadh is absent.
“Where’s---” starts Ffrewgí.
Heulwen speaks over him. “Murchadh noticed activity in the village and left to cause a distraction, to draw attention away from you. He’ll meet us at the caves . . . he said you’d know what that meant.”
Ffrewgí nods. That sounds like Murchadh.
Ashrille stops pacing. “I’m going to stay,” she declares. “Wyddryr and I decided to remain with the Gwaedwn. He’ll be able to smooth things over with them.”
No one responds. Cydwag leans against a tree. She is a dim figure in the night. “Let’s go.”
Ffrewgí still looks at Ashrille. The tall girl’s eyes are impossible to read, and then she turns away.
“Goodbye, then,” she says.
“Let’s get going. We want to be far away before dawn.”
Cydwag begins striding off, disappearing too quickly into the darkness. His head fuzzy, Ffrewgí starts after her. A tug on his arm reminds him of Anwen’s grip on it. She has been holding onto him since they left the village. Since they left her father.
Anwen releases his arm. “Sorry.”
Cydwag reappears. “Let’s go. Ffrewgí, lead the way. I can’t---” She sighs.
Ffrewgí gives Anwen a concerned look before setting off ahead of the group, reading the land before him with his creature gift. He feels the others follow and leads them to the cave he had explored with Asgell, Wyddryr, and Murchadh what seems like so long ago. The activity of the trek clears Ffrewgí’s head, at least partially. When they arrive, finding no sign of Murchadh, he is no longer dwelling on Anwen’s father. Instead, his mind is full of memories---narrow, slippery surfaces above painful arguments about what he should do now.
The group gathers around the cavemouth. Its exposed rock seems alien to Ffrewgí, and not just because its slight shimmer in the deep black of the night.
“Let's leave him a message and keep moving,” says Cydwag. “The Gwaedwn will be on our trail as soon as they find Wyddryr and Ashrille.”
Ffrewgí looks around at the others. Even Cydwag seems anxious, but Ffrewgí senses it is not for the reasons she just gave. Heulwen says, “We need to stop the Gwaedwn,” and it’s like the nervous energy of the group has a name. The arguments in Ffrewgí’s head resolve.
“They’re just going to keep capturing children,” he says, agreeing. “Their quest won’t end just because we’ve escaped.”
Cydwag slumps. “I know.” Silence falls. “We need a plan.”
“I don’t think just telling them to stop will be enough,” Heulwen says.
Ffrewgí listens to the quickening heartbeats of his friends. “We have our gifts from the creature. Can we use them to convince them or frighten them into listening to us?” His own heartbeat is rapid.
Cydwag stands up straight, holding her spear before her like a warrior. “If we are going to attempt to speak to them, we should get there by dawn. That’s the most likely time for the whole tribe to be there.”
“What do you think, Ainsley?” Anwen asks.
The reserved boy looks startled by her question. “I think we should do it,” he says carefully. “I can make something appear that will startle them.”
“I can use the wind to stir up the fire and draw everyone’s attention,” adds Anwen.
“We can make more plans as we move,” says Cydwag, already beginning to walk, “but we need to leave now, if we’re going to reach the village by dawn.”
Anwen remains in place. “What about Murchadh?” she asks. “Can we leave a message for him?”
Ffrewgí feels a lump in his throat. He had forgotten about him in the face of the group’s terrifying resolution.
“I can carve a message in the stone here, at the mouth of the cave,” volunteers Heulwen. She does so, and the group sets off, retracing their steps to the Gwaedwn village.
Where they had been held captive, and where a whole tribe of adults waited.
Ffrewgí’s mind clutters again as they travel and he stumbles often in the darkness, but by the time they near the village, his gift is no longer needed: the first wan light of autumn morning illuminates the tents and rough buildings of the encampment in soft desaturation.
Cydwag strides past Ffrewgí and leads the children down a pathway to the village center, where a Gwaedwn is nursing the nights’ coals to morning flame.
“What are you---” he gasps. Then Anwen, her hair whipping about her face, strides forward and feeds the tiny tongues of fire with a cyclone of pure air. The new fuel immediately lights, and the Gwaedwn stumbles backwards as the fire roars into a swirling column at least twice his height.
They are noticed now, and Gwaedwn are approaching from all angles. One cries out and rushes towards them, but Heulwen gestures and earth forms hard around his feet and ankles, stopping him fast. The raging fire keeps the rest at bay. Ffrewgí’s own heart is pounding way to loudly for him to hear anyone else’s. He starts as someone steps around the fire within a few paces of him, and electricity shivers down his spine as he notices the form and face of Alaric, the boy taller and more formidable than Ffrewgí remembers, and wielding a sword shining yellow and red in the firelight.
Ffrewgí looks around at the Gwaedwn, who now surround the central area. Wide eyes, locked on the spectre and the towering inferno, now a stone’s throw high, reflect the scene.
“People of the Gwaedwn tribe,” comes an eerie voice. Ffrewgí whirls around to see Cydwag, her back to him, staring deep into the fire. Her orange hair is part of the flames, whipping about above and around her head. “Your lust for power and domination is of the earth, yet the power you seek is beyond it. You will never achieve your goal.” Cydwag’s voice sounds as if it is echoing against the fire, warping and deepening, taking on the crackle and roar of the raging flame. “You are a foul body,” she continues, “diseased and divided, and you are not a fit vessel for the spirit of the gods. Today, you will fall before it like leaves before winter, and your flesh will be removed from the wheel of life. As your ambition has been fed with nothingness, so will your graves provide no nourishment to the grass. So speaks the fire.” Cydwag trembles, then steps suddenly back from the flames, raising a hand to block its heat from her face.
Silence reigns in the village. Ffrewgí is stunned. What was that?
The cool voice of Symbre breaks the shocked silence. She has stepped out from the tents and is standing only a few paces from the children. Her eyes reflect the sharp edges of the fire as she looks at them hungrily.
“At last, our hunt is finished,” she mutters, then calls over her shoulder, not taking her eyes from Ffrewgí and the others. “Hunters! Your reward is before you: the creature has offered its gifts and now all we need to do is reach out and take---” The blood suddenly rushes from Symbre’s face and she turns upwards, her eyes glazing over. There is an awful noise, and the point of a sword erupts from her ribs. Blood swiftly soaks the Gwaedwn leader’s clothes.
Behind her is Logain. He lets Symbre’s corpse slide off his blade onto the ground, then turns his back to the children and addresses the Gwaedwn. “Let the Gwaedwn dream die with Symbre,” he growls. “The creature has given its gifts, but not to us. We are finished.” He turns his craggy head at an angle as a dirty tribesman to his right steps forward and speaks.
“We’ve waited years for our reward!” he spits. “Now it’s in front of us and you expect us to just . . . let it walk away?”
“I do.”
The Gwaedwn swears. “They’re ours.”
Ffrewgí hardly follows what happens next. The Gwaedwn, suddenly with a rusty blade in his hand, lunges towards them. All at once, a throwing knife buries in his chest, thrown by someone over Ffrewgí’s shoulder, hardened earth coats one his legs, stopping him short, and Ffrewgí feels himself react almost instinctively. He has a faint impression of the muscles and bones of a hand. The attacker’s short sword falls from his widespread fingers.
Overwhelmed, Ffrewgí hardly notices as Gwaedwn charge at the children from all directions. Faintly, he registers the giant shape of Logain step in front of them swinging his bloody sword, crying, “Go!” Another Gwaedwn---Asgell---joins him.
Cydwag leads the way as the children begin to move. Ffrewgí starts backwards as the column of fire suddenly bends down, a swathe of Gwaedwn clearing from an avenue as it roars into the dirt. Ffrewgí’s senses return. Behind him, he hears the clash of metal and the cut-off cry of someone dying. The pounded dirt of the path is hard and warm beneath his feet as the fire rises again and he sets off with his friends down the cleared way. The figure of Alaric joins Cydwag at the front of their little group, the two warriors driving back an attacker who had avoided the flames.
His eyes on the way ahead, Ffrewgí casts his creature sense back and grabs at whatever he feels first. He hears cries of pain behind him as Gwaedwn stumble. Ffrewgí is not even sure what he did to them, but he does not look back.
Two Gwaedwn rush into their path. “Come!” one of them cries. “We will lead you out.” Ffrewgí looks to his side and sees Anwen nod. The pair of new allies pass Alaric and Cydwag and engage new enemies as the group continues to move down the avenue towards the woods. Murchadh is suddenly there, framed by the trees, firing arrows at the attackers fighting their Gwaedwn allies!
Ffrewgí and the others slip past the melee and run towards Murchadh, then turn back, hesitating. Their two allies are greatly outnumbered. Anwen joins them, though Ffrewgí had not noticed her missing in the chaos.
“Go!” yells one of their allies, locking his blade with an opponent’s. “We have taken enough of your childhood; I will not make you kill. Do not stay.” He darts past his opponent’s guard and knocks them over with a shoulder. “Go!” he cries again, raising his blade for the kill.
Ffrewgí backs away slowly with the others, reaching out with his gift and breaking the grip of an oncoming attacker. He casts his eyes over the chaos. Without Anwen’s focus, the fire has diminished to a roaring bonfire. By it, Logain is surrounded by a press of attackers. Ffrewgí hears a familiar voice and looks past the melee to see Wyddryr, sword in hand, racing towards the village center. Máerl steps into his path, soaked in blood, an axe in each hand, but someone darts behind her and she twists, crying out in pain. Wyddryr darts past as Máerl roars out a challenge to her attacker. Asgell strides from behind a tent and drops into a fighter’s crouch.
The village is almost unrecognizable as the place Ffrewgí had been held captive for so many weeks. Where are the pits where he had first been held?
“Come on!” cries Cydwag. Ffrewgí pulls himself away from the village and follows as she and the rest of the children head into the trees.
“I’ll cover our tracks,” says Heulwen.
“Me too,” adds Ainsley. “My cover won’t last forever, but it’ll help.”
Ffrewgí looks from friend to friend as he jogs over roots and brush. Ainsley, Heulwen, Cydwag, and Anwen---Murchadh behind them, still firing arrows. The figure of Alaric had disappeared somewhere back at the village; Ffrewgí had not noticed. There is no fear on their faces, only resolution and determination. Ffrewgí looks ahead, into the dense, sunlit woods that have become so familiar to him. As he runs, he feels confident. Confident in himself, and in his companions.
They are captives no longer, but warriors, pathfinders, healers, and hunters. They have escaped.
“If they want to find us, then let them! But unless we want the Gwaedwn---the adult Gwaedwn---to find us, we need to keep going.”
Ffrewgí returns from relieving himself to a familiar argument. Anwen and Cydwag have been butting heads since the group woke up tucked under the cover of a giant rotting tree. Ffrewgí is unsure which side to take. An emptiness that is not hunger in his gut tells him he would regret leaving the missing children behind, but Cydwag’s arguments resonate in his mind. They are not safe. Even this morning Ainsley had heard the sounds of a search party when he went to forage a quick breakfast. Soon enough, the Gwaedwn’s search will have extended to cover the whole circumference of the village a half day’s-journey out. If Ffrewgí and the others are not out of the area before then, they will be recaptured.
But what if Ashrille, Wyddryr, and Murchadh return to the village? What if they were just out hunting, or were escaping themselves? Ffrewgí cannot comprehend why Murchadh would leave the rest of them---in fact, why any of them would want to escape is beyond him, as they all took the oath. But still---maybe. Maybe they would return to the Gwaedwn and feel betrayed and abandoned.
“I think we should at least see if they’ve returned,” he says aloud. Anwen and Cydwag look at him; he had cut them off, though lost in his own mind he had not heard what they were saying. Ffrewgí continues, “If we leave without . . . Well, if we leave without knowing for sure---knowing why they left, or whether they intended to return---if we---” He is struggling to form his gut instinct into words and starts anew. “We should check the encampment. Before the search circle reaches all around it and we lose our chance. Maybe they have returned, maybe not, but at least we tried.”
“And we can check for tracks!” says Anwen eagerly. “Maybe we can find where they went when they left!”
Cydwag starts to argue, but Heulwen pipes up first. “I think that's a good idea. We were all captured, once. We all lived in those pits. We trained together. We should try.”
Cydwag lets her argument go in a sigh. “Fine. But if we find nothing, we need to leave the area.”
“But if there are tracks---” starts Anwen hotly.
“If there are tracks,” returns Cydwag. “A big if---then we can discuss what to do when we find them. But we need to do this quickly if we’re to do it at all.”
The children look to one another, and resolve is firm in each line of mouth and bright eye. Ffrewgí’s heart is hammering.
Cydwag takes control of the plan quickly. “We should all circle around to the west. They’ll be searching from the grazing fields where we were seen first. I’ll take the risk from there---I’ll get near the village and check for signs of the others.”
“I’m going with you,” announces Anwen. Perhaps she does not trust Cydwag’s eye to see what it does not wish to see.
Cydwag clenches her jaw, then relaxes it. “Good. You can make sure we remain downwind, right?”
Anwen nods.
“Good. The rest of you will remain in a hiding place and wait for our report. But for now,” Cydwag begins rustling fresh fallen leaves over the compressed bed under the tree, “let’s do our bests not to leave a trail and make our way west.”
The children fall into activity. Heulwen gives the area a last look-over with her new sense and tells the others she will follow up the group as they move to remove their trail in a ground made dangerous by a rain that had just ceased to fall.
“I’ll lead,” volunteers Ffrewgí. “Make sure we don’t run into anyone.”
Cydwag joins him up front, and the group sets off, traveling circuitously north- and westwards. Traveling with extreme care, the trek---hardly half a day’s-journey in distance---takes them until the depths of evening, when a fresh rain sends them searching for shelter both from the rain and any prying eyes. Heulwen and Anwen provide a dinner of wet tubers and mushrooms.
Still better fare than the cornbread and sparrow, thinks Ffrewgí, though he misses the dense satisfaction of the former in his stomach. Anwen approaches him as they prepare to sleep for the night.
“Ffrewgí,” she begins, “I was thinking about what Cydwag said, that there's not likely to be any tracks. And I was wondering if you … well, you trained with Murchadh, and you know more about tracking than any of the rest of us. If there is anything to find---any tracks or signs of them---I think you'd be more likely to find it than I would.”
Ffrewgí is not sure how to respond, but nods. Anwen gives him a relieved smile, then turns to her own nighttime preparations, leaving Ffrewgí alone. To avoid his apprehensions about the coming morning, he looks over at Ainsley. The boy is silent, lost in his own thoughts. Ffrewgí wonders if he regrets escaping with them. He can still see the white line on his palm where the Gwaedwn blade had cut.
Cydwag approaches him. “Anwen tells me you’re coming with me tomorrow.”
Ffrewgí inclines his head.
“We should figure out our approach.”
“I can be lookout,” says Ffrewgí. “I can sense if anyone is coming near.”
Cydwag tugs on a lock of dirty red hair. “Good, that’ll be helpful.”
She pulls him aside, and as the wan light of the sun grows saturated and then finally disappears, they talk over their plans for the morrow.
Later, Heulwen’s whisper slips into Ffrewgí’s dozing ear.
“We’re making the right choice, right?”
Ffrewgí blinks himself into fuller wakefulness and considers the question, the same one he has been struggling with all day. “I think so,” he says. “Even if we’re caught . . . I’d regret being captured, but I don’t think I’d regret making this choice.”
“Me neither,” responds Heulwen after a moment.
“Why didn’t you take the pact?”
Heulwen does not respond. Ffrewgí turns his head and catches a tiny glimmer in her eyes---all that he can see of her in the deep autumn night.
“Sorry,” Ffrewgí says.
“Because that would have meant accepting it,” whispers Heulwen suddenly. “Accepting my captivity.”
Her answer unlocks Ffrewgí’s own understanding and he feels agreement well up like relief in his throat.
“It would have said, ‘This was okay’. And it wasn’t. It isn’t.”
Ffrewgí feels emotion block his throat. “Yeah.”
A long moment passes. The rush of rain fills it. “Do you think they’ll just capture more kids?”
Ffrewgí closes his eyes and feels moisture run down his temples, picking up the tiny drops of misted rain that decorate his skin and then disappearing in his hair. “We can’t just look for the others,” he says in a choking whisper. “We have to stop them, don’t we?” He feels a small hand fit into his hand and squeeze: the only answer Ffrewgí can bear.
Rain leads him into a sleep dense with incomprehensible dreams.
* * *
He is awake before Cydwag touches his shoulder, but her cold fingers still give him a shock. He follows her from their shelter, adjusting his uncomfortably damp pants as he stands outside it. The fallen tree, enhanced by a thatch of evergreen boughs, had kept out the falling rain, but the creeping wetness was impossible to avoid, and he had woken up in a puddle. The dampness embraces his entirety as he stretches; the rain turned into a dense morning fog.
Cydwag nods towards the village and Ffrewgí follows as she slips into the grey. He follows her heartbeat more than her shape, which appears and disappears in coils and walls of fog as they press onward. Soon---too soon---he can sense the living warmth of the Gwaedwn in the distance. He and Cydwag come together before Ffrewgí sets off, slowly, in the lead. Their plan is to probe the border of the encampment searching for either a sign of their missing companions or, if not that and as a last resort, then a safe avenue inside. Ffrewgí silently thanks the fog as he creeps forward. His bare feet are no longer sensitive to the cold softness of moss or the rough bark of exposed roots.
Suddenly, he stops. Just beyond a slight rise, wrapped in the roots of a tangle of cedars, he senses a fresh wound and the signature of three people. He looks over his shoulder and sees Cydwag’s alarmed eyes looking at him for an explanation. He holds up three fingers and gestures towards the cedars.
Cydwag flexes her fingers on the thick shaft of a makeshift spear she had rubbed a semblance of a point onto last night and takes the lead.
“They’re heading in the direction of the village,” Ffrewgí whispers as she passes, his voice dull in the dense air. Cydwag nods and moves up the hillock in a crouch, her feet pressing silently from root to root. She stops partially behind the ribbed bark of a tree, her gaze fixed ahead and her muscles taut. As Ffrewgí approaches low and peers into the fog, he sees why: heading at some speed toward the village are Ashrille, Murchadh, and Wyddryr. Murchadh is a distance ahead of the others, a bandage wrapped around his head stained red at the chin.
Ffrewgí looks at Cydwag, who gestures with her head for Ffrewgí to take the lead. The expressions on Murchadh’s and Wyddryr’s faces cause him to hesitate, but he calls Anwen to mind and pushes through his apprehensions and gives a low whistle. Murchadh immediately locates the source of the noise and, without waiting for his companions or signaling them in any way, adjusts his course up the small hill and approaches Ffrewgí and Cydwag.
“What are you doing out here?” he asks quietly.
Ffrewgí and Cydwag step out from behind the trees as Ashrille and Wyddryr come up behind Murchadh.
Ffrewgí flicks his eyes to Cydwag, whose face is stony. “Looking for you, actually,” he says.
Murchadh looks in the direction of the village. “You’ve escaped,” he says matter-of-factly.
Cydwag levels a suspicious look at Murchadh and the others and slowly circles behind Ffrewgí, cutting off their path to the village without attempting to be subtle about it. “Why did you leave the village yourselves?” she asks.
Ashrille looks quickly at Wyddryr.
“Our business is our own,” he says shortly.
“Hunting the creature,” says Murchadh over him. He shrugs and looks back at the pale-eyed boy, a manner of frustration obvious in his eyes. “If you want their help, there will be no secrets.”
“You were unsuccessful?”
Murchadh looks at Cydwag. “In a manner of speaking.”
Wyddryr steps up close to Murchadh and speaks sharp and low. “We don’t have time for this. You said your friends could help him.”
“Keep your distance,” says Murchadh coldly. “They’ll help if they want to help.”
“What are you talking about?” asks Ffrewgí.
Murchadh and Wyddryr share a look. Murchadh shifts his gaze to Ffrewgí. “His father is dying. We went out on the hunt to collect the creature’s gift to heal him, but there was no way we’d have caught it, because they meant to kill it, and the creature only gives its gifts to those pure of heart.”
Ffrewgí cannot help but look over at Cydwag, in whose eyes a fire is burning. “Then,” he starts, looking back at Murchadh and the others, “none of you had a dream or vision from the creature?”
“I have lots of dreams and visions,” replies Murchadh.
Wyddryr pushes in front of Murchadh, whose face glows red as he stumbles back. “Have you got a gift? If the creature gave you its blood, you need to come with us.”
“I---” starts Ffrewgí, then stops. “How do you know it gave us gifts?”
Murchadh is limping up the hill into the cedars. “Come on,” he says, “take me to the others. I’ll explain on the way.”
“Hold on!” cries Wyddryr. “We’ve got to get to my father with the cure!”
“We don’t know what form the gifts took, Wyddryr!” responds Murchadh angrily. “And since the others have escaped, I don’t think there will be a welcome party set out for us. We left at just the wrong time on your hunt.”
Wyddryr is about to respond when Ashrille and Cydwag both take steps forward. Ashrille’s step is more direct; she strides between Murchadh and Wyddryr and faces Wyddryr fiercely. “Wyddryr, your father will be alright for another day. Murchadh’s right, even if he’s being blunt. We’re suspect now, likely lumped in with the others. Let’s meet up with them and make a plan.”
There is a tense moment of silence. Cydwag breaks it, striding up after Murchadh and overtaking him. “Come on then,” she says, “let’s not waste words where they might be overheard.”
Ffrewgí follows quickly behind her, not wanting to be left between Wyddryr and Ashrille.
They make short work of the journey back to the fallen tree and the other former captives. Anwen’s face visibly relaxes as she sees them all arrive. Heulwen smiles at Ashrille, who sits down heavily next to her, keeping her eye on Wyddryr. Ainsley hardly looks up from his seat, a pile of wood shavings by his feet revealing his morning’s activity.
“Okay,” says Cydwag without formality, “it’s time for you to tell your tale.” She casts her spear to the ground and sits next to it on a mossy log.
“Of course,” says Murchadh, “but you’ll all need to share yours as well.”
“Okay,” says Anwen.
Murchadh struggles to begin, but eventually settles into a rhythm. He tells them that Wyddryr had begged him for help in hunting the creature, desperate to harvest the creature’s blood to heal his father. Their hunt was unsuccessful, though Murchadh tells them that he believes they encountered the creature. He does not elaborate, and ends, looking sharply at Wyddryr, by saying, “and he finally admits to being a plant from the beginning, to spy on us.”
Anwen gasps, and even Ainsley looks up in surprise.
“That’s not the whole---”
Murchadh sends a withering glare towards Wyddryr. “I’m not finished. Keep your blade sheathed.”
Ashrille stands and gestures to Wyddryr. “Let’s gather something to eat.”
Wyddryr flares his nostrils and gazes hotly at Murchadh, but follows as Ashrille moves off.
“Don’t start on your side of the story until we’re back,” she says over her shoulder.
Murchadh visibly relaxes as the pair disappears. “Wyddryr was a slave with his father and they were rescued by Logain on a recruiting mission. I’m not sure why. His father is deathly ill, though, so he recruited me to help him hunt down the creature.”
“Why not wait until another official hunt is organized?”
Murchadh shrugs at Cydwag. “Because a third hunt wasn’t going to happen.”
“They were going to kill us?” asks Anwen.
“Probably just keep you as slaves, and those that took the pact as just a step above,” explains Murchadh. “They are already planning another set of recruitment raids.”
“So what happened on your hunt?” asks Ffrewgí. He wonders whether Murchadh’s resentment toward Wyddryr is founded in his deception. He is surprised to find that he hardly feels affected by what should have been a shocking reveal. A spy or no, Wyddryr has had to suffer the same training and imprisonment as them all.
“We found the creature,” continues Murchadh, “though I can’t remember what it was. I almost remember an image of Archora . . .”
“That’s what I saw!” exclaims Cydwag.
Murchadh looks knowingly at the redheaded girl. “You meant to kill it, too, didn’t you?”
Cydwag shrugs. “I guess so. Didn’t we all?”
Ffrewgí finds himself unconsciously shaking his head. Anwen speaks for them both: “No,” she says quietly. “When I encountered it, it was . . . it was so beautiful. So innocent. I couldn’t have---I couldn’t have even wanted to kill it, when I saw it.”
“But I didn’t even see it,” says Cydwag. “I just . . . well, I don’t remember what I did see, but it wasn’t any sort of creature.”
“It’s a magical being,” explains Murchadh, “it can appear to us as it wills. And if you’re not pure of intention and heart, then you won’t see it.”
Ffrewgí looks across at Anwen, whose eyes are full of the same remembrance that floods his own mind’s eye: a soft light, an incredible voice.
Heulwen prompts Murchadh to continue.
“When that idea occurred to me,” he says, “I knew that the creature won’t give its gift unwillingly, but that it must have given it to one---or some---of you. Ffrewgí, you mentioned a dream. Anwen, you met it. This is the end of my story; tell me yours.”
“Shouldn’t we wait for Ashrille and Wyddryr?” asks Heulwen.
“Hold on,” cuts in Cydwag. “If you didn’t meet the creature, how’d you get injured? I know you enough to know you aren’t careless in the woods.”
“Right,” says Murchadh with a sour look on his face. He gestures to his chin. “Wyddryr gave me this nice mark on my chin because I couldn’t drag the creature from the dream world. If I hadn’t moved, it would have been my neck.”
“Ffrewgí!” says Anwen eagerly, “can’t you take a look at it? You could heal him!”
Ffrewgí starts. “I---I guess so, if you want me to, Murchadh.”
“You were given the blood?” asks Murchadh. “Or something with the power to heal?”
Ffrewgí shakes his head. “There was no blood. Just . . . just a gift. I can sense things and---and I can change them. Bodies, skin, veins.”
“Were you the only one?”
“The---the only one like that,” says Ffrewgí.
Anwen interjects, “We should wait until the others are back to tell our whole story.”
Ffrewgí pushes himself to his feet and moves over to Murchadh. “Here,” he says, “let me take a look at your wound.” Murchadh unwinds the bandage and Ffrewgí looks at the angry cut on the boy’s chin. Ffrewgí closes his eyes and reaches out with his new sense, feeling the torn skin and the severed blood vessels, taking them delicately and weaving them all back together.
The little camp is silent when he returns to himself. Murchadh’s eyes are wide. “Amazing,” he says, running his fingers along his unmarked chin. “Not even a scratch left.” Suddenly he seems energized. “Do you think you could fix my back? It hurts all the time. Or, maybe, make my arm whole?” A bashful look grows on his face. “Sorry,” he mumbles, “just thinking out loud. Forget that.”
Ffrewgí does not know how to respond. Luckily, Ashrille and Wyddryr arrive from the woods at that moment. Ashrille tosses a berry-laden branch into the middle of the kids’ little circle. “Not sure what breakfast you’ve all had, but we found an elderberry bush.” She gives a wry smile as Ffrewgí gingerly picks up the fruit-heavy branch. “I figured it’d be quicker than picking them all conventionally.”
Ffrewgí runs his hand down one of the twiggy ends and collects a handful of berries, then passes the branch across the circle to Cydwag. The overripe berries leave dark stains on the palms of his hands.
Ashrille and Wyddryr sit down together. Ashrille cocks her head at Murchadh. “Your chin is looking . . . remarkably healed.”
Ffrewgí swallows a sweet berry. “That was me. I---” he looks around the circle, “I was visited by the creature and received the gift of healing.”
Wyddryr leans forward intensely.
“I can make things appear,” says Ainsley quietly. A snake slips from around the rock he is sitting on, coils into a perfect spiral, then vanishes. A chip of wood replaces it on the loam as Ainsley returns to his carving.
Heulwen and Anwen chime in with their new abilities. As they do, Ffrewgí is uncomfortably aware of Wyddryr’s eyes upon him. Anwen’s demonstrative breeze disappears, the fog creeping back into the clear air it leaves behind, and Wyddryr speaks in the ensuing silence, still looking directly at Ffrewgí.
“My father is in the village. He is dying, and you have the ability to heal him. Will you help me?”
Ffrewgí swallows. How could he say no?
“We can’t just traipse back into the village,” says Cydwag with a twist of her lip.
Wyddryr stands, his fists clenched. “Then what do you suggest?”
“I suggest you figure it out yourself, spy,” snarls Cydwag.
Wyddryr steps toward her, growling. “What could I have told them that they didn’t already know? Was I treated any better than you? Did I eat lamb while you fed on sparrow and cornbread?” Ashrille stands up behind him, a hand half-raised. Wyddryr wipes his eyes with the back of hand and when he looks up his eyes are glowing with tears. “My father is dying.” He turns and shares a look with Ashrille, and then they both sit back down. “We were slaves the same as you,” he says in a voice hoarse with tears.
“We’ll need a plan,” says Ffrewgí in the following silence. “If you can sneak me in, maybe.”
“Or we sneak your father out,” suggests Anwen.
“I’m a Gwaedwn,” whispers Wyddryr. He looks desperately at Ashrille. “Can’t I return? I can explain it . . .”
“We can’t do that to Ffrewgí,” says Ashrille softly. “He isn’t of our tribe, and he did escape.”
“But we can bring him in, can’t we? And then help him leave when my father is well.”
Ashrille sends Ffrewgí a questioning look. He presses his lips together and shrugs. “How long does your healing take?” she asks.
“We can use our gifts to help get you in and out,” says Anwen. Heulwen nods beside her. “And Murchadh, you know the watches and ways to slip in and out without attracting attention, right?”
Murchadh shrugs noncommittally. “I suppose. But the watches are likely to have changed since you escaped.”
Anwen shoots him a reproving glare. Ffrewgí, too, wonders at his new aggression, remembering how helpful he had been during the first days of their training. It cannot only be that Wyddryr attacked him---and Ffrewgí starts to wonder whether Murchadh had told that story properly.
“Any of our gifts can provide a distraction,” offers Anwen. “It just depends on what sort we want.”
“What sort of things can you make appear?”
Ainsley shrugs at Ashrille. “Anything, really.”
“A fire is always a good lure,” volunteers Murchadh.
“True,” Ashrille agrees. “And that way we wouldn’t actually be doing damage to anything---” she turns back to Ainsley and cocks her head. “Right?”
“Not sure.”
Ffrewgí suddenly gets a sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. “But,” he starts, “if they discover the fire isn’t real, won’t they suspect---? They’ll think we’re nearby, and have the creature’s blood.”
Sober looks fall around the circle.
“We could start a real fire,” suggests Heulwen quietly. She speaks up as eyes turn quickly towards her. “Not something too dramatic, but enough to draw attention. And then, Ainsley . . . could you disguise Ffrewgí and Wyddryr?”
“We could burn the latrine house,” says Cydwag. “It’s made of wood, so it’ll be dramatic, but it’s far enough away from the tents that there’s low risk.”
Ainsley waits for her to finish, then says, “I can give disguises.”
“I’ll start the fire.” Anwen clenches her jaw. “I can make sure it burns by feeding it air.”
“The rest of us can wait at the edge of the woods,” says Murchadh. “In case anything goes wrong.”
Ffrewgí looks across the circle at Wyddryr, who is regarding him with wide eyes full of an obvious tumult of emotions. Ffrewgí looks away. The plan made, silence falls over the group.
“This evening, then?” asks Ashrille.
There is quiet assent.
*
“Are you sure I look different?” Wyddryr lifts his arms and looks over them.
Ffrewgí looks at his own body and wonders the same.
“If I hadn’t seen your shape disappear and this one take its place,” marvels Cydwag, “I’d think you were never there at all.”
“We look like Gwaedwn?” asks Ffrewgí.
Ainsley shrugs. “I just made you into dirty-looking hunters.”
Cydwag gives a dry laugh.
Ffrewgí looks over at the disguised Wyddryr. The pale boy has become a weathered adult with dark, shaggy hair, dressed in rough leathers. “What about me?” he asks, looking down at his pale, shirtless body.
“You look like you could arm-wrestle Máerl,” says Ashrille wryly, and the children in the circle all nod their agreement.
“We’ll just have to trust them,” says Wyddryr. “Come on. We’ve wasted enough time.” He turns abruptly and leads his little troupe into the darkness of the woods, Ffrewgí and Anwen following his furred shoulders.
Despite their disguises, they approach the village using all the skills of woodcraft at their disposal. Near the edge of the woods, they split up, Ffrewgí and Wyddryr going one direction and Anwen the other, straight for the lavatory hut to start the fire. Ffrewgí’s stomach knots as he watches her go, but he is hardly given a moment’s glimpse before Wyddryr is hustling him along.
“We need to get around the field,” he says. “Remember? We don’t want to enter the village right beside the fire.”
Ffrewgí nods and follows.
From across the field, they watch as a column of smoke grows from a tendril over the latrine. Ffrewgí hopes Anwen is already vanished back into the forest. As a hubbub grows in the Gwaedwn encampment, the two boys, trembling in their incorporeal disguises, slip in and head for the tent holding Wyddryr’s father.
They are rounding the corner to its front when they hear the thump of a hand pushing open the stiff flap, and Logain steps into the evening air. Ffrewgí and Wyddryr hold their breath, but the large Gwaedwn’s attention is drawn to the smoke, and he sets off towards it.
The boys slip into the tent. The air inside is thick with herbal incense and unlit. It takes Ffrewgí’s eyes a few moments to adjust to the darkness, and even when they do he sees only the grey silhouette of Wyddryr bent over the shape of a raised bed.
Wyddryr is whispering over the bed, “Father, I’m here.”
Visually, Ffrewgí can barely make out the man’s shape, but with his creature-gift he observes every detail. The man’s lungs are filled with foul liquid, and Ffrewgí knows that his body is hardly fighting it anymore. His breath is hardly audible in the dense silence, and his lungs draw in nothing but a whisper with each intake.
Wyddryr’s eyes are glowing with tears as he turns his face up to Ffrewgí. “Well?” he says in a choking voice, the demand broken in his throat.
“I’ll try,” is all that Ffrewgí can say. He kneels on the packed dirt beside his companion and reaches out with his gift. He is lost for a moment among the branches and webs of Wyddryr’s father’s lungs, then withdraws with a gasp.
Wyddryr is looking at him with desperate expectation in his eyes. “Is he---” he starts.
Ffrewgí shakes his head. “There’s water in his lungs,” he says. “I can take hold of his muscles, help him breathe, but I don’t know how to expel the water without choking him.”
Wyddryr is stupefied in despair. Eventually, he whispers, “There’s nothing . . . There’s nothing you can do?”
Ffrewgí feels the heaviness in the space. He cannot do anything but shake his head, and another silence falls.
Too silent, and then there are footsteps right outside the tent, and Fuldryn’s voice. “. . . wasn’t natural; couldn’t have been, in this weather.” A rasping voice replies, “Who do you think started it? Someone expressing frustration about the failure of the hunts?” The clap of a tent flap cuts off Fuldryn’s response.
The fire must already be dealt with. Ffrewgí and Wyddryr look at each other, their own survival pushing out other thoughts. It had not lasted long enough for them to slip out. And---
“You look like you,” says Ffrewgí hoarsely.
Wyddryr’s wide blue eyes are fixed on Ffrewgí, telling him the same thing.
“What do we do?” asks Ffrewgí.
Wyddryr turns back to his father. His words come out too choked to mean anything, and he remains turned as tears begin to glimmer on his cheeks.
Ffrewgí is searching for something to say when he hears light footsteps outside the tent. They stop by the door, and he hears the faint sound of a hand against the flap. In his panic, he forgets his new sense until the last moment, and so the sensation of clear air accompanies the familiar feel of a friend as Anwen slips into the tent’s dark interior.
“Ffrewgí?”
“I’m here,” he replies.
Anwen comes nearer the bed. “They have the fire under control now;” she explains, “I don’t think it will distract them much longer. Are you finished?”
“Nothing’s worked,” says Ffrewgí softly. “Wyddryr’s father has water in his lungs, and I can’t think of any way to . . .” He trails off, a coolness still creeping over his skin from the air Anwen let in from outside, an idea crackling alongside it. “Do you think you can give him air?” he asks excitedly. “While I draw out the water, can you feed in breath?”
Anwen takes in the scene at a glance and responds with a firm nod. “I can do that. Can we get a bit of light?” she asks. “It would make it . . . feel easier.”
Wyddryr, his hands trembling, lifts up a bowl from beneath the bed. He tries to form words to explain, but does not find his voice. Instead, he brings the bowl up to his mouth and blows upon it gently. A faint orange glow rises from it, along with a fresh tendril of pungent smoke. “It’s gonna smell,” he says in a cracking voice, something almost like a smile appearing on his face for a breath. He deposits a handful of leaves upon the coal and breathes upon the bowl again. This time a few tongues of flame come to life, and the tent is dimly illuminated in dark orange.
Anwen gasps and freezes, but collects herself in a moment, moving towards the bed with purpose that dissuades Ffrewgí from asking for the reason of her reaction. She looks at him and he nods. They both turn towards the person on the bed, the warmth of the orange light belying the illness Ffrewgí feels in the cells as he reaches into the body.
There is a scare at first, when Ffrewgí’s water forcing upwards reaches the throat and hits Anwen’s air coming down. Wyddryr’s father’s diaphragm suddenly fights panicked for air, his body shaking on the bed. Delicately, Ffrewgí and Anwen navigate their substances past each other’s, and a dribble of liquid traces down the patient’s cheek as his chest rises with a breath. Ffrewgí continues to pull up the liquid and the man continues to breathe Anwen’s air. The harsh smoke of the burning coal becomes welcome as the sickly smell of the pus collects in the closed environment, though Ffrewgí only vaguely notices it. When the lungs are as clear as he can make them, he withdraws with a shiver, and coughs.
Wyddryr is wiping the liquid from his father’s face. He looks up at Ffrewgí and Anwen, and Ffrewgí nods. Wyddryr’s father breathes with an easy rhythm. Wyddryr turns back to him and puts a shaking hand on his breast. Ffrewgí steps back, not wanting to loom over the private moment.
“Thank you,” chokes Wyddryr through tears.
Anwen suddenly steps backward as well, colliding with Ffrewgí. She spins to face him, her eyes wide and pale blue, even in the smoky light.
“Are you okay?” Anwen does not respond. A sudden noise from outside the tent reminds Ffrewgí of their peril. “We need to go. Now.”
“Yes,” says Anwen weakly, “yes, we should go.” Her eyes drop, avoiding his. “You go on ahead. If we go one at a time it will . . . be safer.” She takes a step away from him. “I’ll come soon.” Her eyes find his again. “Please, go on. I’ll come as soon as I can.”
There is something behind her eyes that is not connected to their escape from the Gwaedwn village, but in the fore is raw desperation. Ffrewgí reluctantly accedes to it, and moves to the tent flap. He listens at it for a moment before turning back to Anwen, who is still gazing his way with wide blue eyes. Then, hearing nothing outside, he slips out low to the ground.
Night has fallen and the avenues of the village are empty. Ffrewgí can see the orange of the central fire flickering on the sides of tents a distance from him, and sets off at a crouch in the opposite direction.
He reaches the trees without drawing notice, and waits behind a thick trunk for Anwen, his heart hammering at his ribs. An interminable amount of time seems to pass and Anwen does not show. At first, Ffrewgí credits the sensation of ages passing to his anxiety, but eventually he has to concede that something is not right. Perhaps Anwen has had to adjust her exit path and is waiting for him elsewhere along the forest’s fringe. Perhaps she has already returned to the others.
Ffrewgí shakes his head. He must have just missed her entering the woods a few trees from him; they had agreed to leave the village traveling south, away from the fire. He slips through the trees to the west, then returns and travels to the east. No Anwen.
The night is silent. If she had been caught, he would have heard her cry out. Something is not right; Ffrewgí has been feeling it since Anwen had entered the sick tent. Why had she asked him to leave? The village is asleep; they could have made it out together, and it was unlike her to send him away. Ffrewgí wipes a sheen of cold sweat from his forehead and leaves the cover of the trees, his bare feet making no noise upon the packed dirt of the village paths.
A Gwaedwn staggering from her tent, eyes bleary with sleep, is all that Ffrewgí needs to avoid on his way back to the sick tent. The glow of the fire down the way has faded. Hearing voices from that direction, he does not hesitate but pushes through the flap---
And nearly butts into the unmistakable untreated furs on Logain’s lower back. Ffrewgí is frozen in fear as the giant man turns slowly around.
Anwen is suddenly before him. “Ffrewgí!” she cries, and takes his hand. Unresisting, Ffrewgí is pulled deeper into the tent. “This is my father,” she says, gesturing to the man, now sitting on the bed. Then, to the man, “Father, this is Ffrewgí. He’s the one who healed you.”
Wyddryr’s father. Anwen’s father? Ffrewgí looks from Anwen to Wyddryr, still kneeling by the bed, his hands around one of his father’s. Their father’s. The man rises to his feet.
“I’m glad to meet you, Ffrewgí. Thanks for the cure; it’s nice to be back in the land of the living.”
Not sure what he---and Logain---had been told, Ffrewgí does not know what to say. Finally, he forces out, “I couldn’t have done it without Anwen.”
The man places a hand on Anwen’s shoulder and looks past Ffrewgí to Logain. “I believe my life is indebted to a lot of different people.”
Anwen steps away from her father and joins Ffrewgí facing him. “Father, I really missed you. And it has been wonderful to see you again. But---” her voice wavers, then grows stronger, “my friends are in danger here, and they are waiting for me.”
“Of course,” her father responds, smiling. “You want to make sure your friends are okay.”
Ffrewgí feels Anwen’s fingers pry open his hand and slip into it. “I’m leaving, Father,” she says. “This is the place where Alaric died, and where my friends and I were slaves. I can't stay here. I want to go home. But I think that you and Wyddryr will be happy here. And I . . .” her voice trembles, “I hope that I can see you again, someday.” Without waiting for a response, she turns away, pulling Ffrewgí towards the tent flap. She is pushing through it when Ffrewgí hears Logain’s deep rumble behind them.
“I will make sure they get out of the village safely.”
Ffrewgí does not want to wait for him to lead them. Tears are coursing down Anwen’s face. Ffrewgí still cannot wrap his mind around what went on in the tent, but he knows Anwen needs her friends, and needs to be out of the village. Without taking care for Gwaedwn who might be up and about, Ffrewgí, with an arm about the shaking form of Anwen, guides her to the forest and all the way back to the other children.
Ffrewgí wakes up to Anwen’s heartbeat, and as his mind surfaces from the floods of sleep he knows she has a jagged scratch scabbed on her ankle; probably from an errant step in the woods on a slaves’ errand yesterday. He can feel the broken skin mending beneath the congealed blood; creeping ever so slowly back together past grains of dirt and dust.
Weave.
It is Grandmother Uerichí’s voice, unmistakable in the still silence of the village. At first he does not understand; he sits up wondering; but when he looks over at his sleeping tent-mate and glances at her ankle, the sore there red and angry, he reaches out with his mind and takes the infinitesimal fibers of her skin in gentle, invisible fingers. He kneads them first until they are pliant, then draws them out across the gap beneath the dried blood. He holds the fibers from one side under a patient finger until his other hand has pulled across fibers from the other. Then he weaves them together, starting from one end and working his way up.
Anwen stirs and wakes. When she scratches her ankle, the scab falls away, reveals unmarked skin beneath. Her hand freezes by her calf. Her brow furrows and she looks at Ffrewgí. “Did that . . .” she starts.
“I don't know how, but I can . . . feel things suddenly. Heartbeats, blood,” he nods towards her ankle, “scratches. And I can,” he hesitates, unable to find the right words, “change them.”
"You healed it?” asks Anwen, looking at her bare ankle. “That’s amazing!”
Ffrewgí regards her for a moment. “Do you feel different at all? Since . . . the creature. And Alaric.”
“I don't know. Somehow I feel like everything is different; that I'm . . . different. But I don't understand what it is.”
Ffrewgí feels their experiences diverge, asks, “But you can’t, like, heal anybody?”
Anwen shakes her head. “Is that what you used in the … memory? “ she asks. In it, she shares, she had felt connected to the wind, as Ffrewgí had felt the connection to blood vessels and skin. She trails off, a distant look in her eye. The flap of the tent suddenly shivers and snaps open, a morning breeze refreshing the dense atmosphere inside. A single orange leaf twirls down from the dying wind to land in Anwen’s hand.
Ffrewgí stares at his companion, not sure what all this means. “So,” he starts after a long pause, “what now?”
Anwen’s eyes are wide, afraid, and her voice is hushed. “Escape?”
Loud calls from the complex outside interrupt their shared reverie and they stir, waking themselves back up to the reality of their laborious lives. But as Ffrewgí executes his morning tasks, Anwen’s last word lingers in his consciousness, riding the waves of the sensations of heartbeat, ache, and biological imprint passing ever by Ffrewgí’s awareness as he moves through the village.
By early afternoon, the drudgery of his labour and cruelty of his position have diminished Ffrewgí’s inspiration. He is standing by the river with Heulwen, each of them preparing to shoulder a water yoke when his eye is drawn by unexpected movement on the far bank, upstream. He looks up just in time to watch Anwen leap into the air above the water and fly across its span, her tunic floating up by her waist as she is drawn in a gentle arc to the near bank. She alights on the mossy stones and laughs.
Ffrewgí is silent; awed by what he just witnessed. When Anwen turns and notices him, he self-consciously closes his mouth. “So the creature did give you a gift!” he exclaims.
Anwen’s eyes are bright with excitement. “This is so incredible!”
Ffrewgí can hardly believe he just saw her soar across the river. “What else can you do?” he asks, his curiosity almost wholly instinctual.
Anwen bounds a few paces closer. “Anything the wind can do . . . or that I can imagine the wind doing!” Her cheeks glow with exertion, but her eyes grow more thoughtful. “I feel like anything is possible.”
Ffrewgí can feel Heulwen shift behind him. When he turns to look, she is standing up from a crouch. Hovering between her hands is a ball of earth. Tiny roots dangle from the soil, and a small, still colourful flower nods on its top. She makes a small gesture and the soil parses from among the roots, trickles in a coiling stream back to the riverbank.
“You have a gift, too!” gasps Anwen.
“Ever since I remembered Alaric . . .” Heulwen whispers.
“And now all three of us can do things we couldn’t do before,” says Anwen excitedly.
“Ainsley was also in the memory,” ventures Heulwen. “He must’ve got a gift as well.”
“Yes!” says Anwen. Then, “I haven’t seen him yet today.”
On an impulse, Ffrewgí says, “We should all meet tonight. With the others, too,” he adds.
Anwen volunteers to find Ainsley and Murchadh; Ffrewgí and Heulwen offer to talk to the others. Before parting, the children agree to meet in the field as soon as their daily tasks are finished and they are able to slip away.
* * *
“Ffrewgí!”
Anwen’s voice behind him causes him to jump; his own hammering heart is flooding his new sense as he creeps downriver towards the field, abandoning the cleaned pots and vessels of his day’s final task until after the captives’ clandestine meeting. Ffrewgí turns and sees in Anwen’s eyes a glimmer of the same consternation that might be found in his own. “You didn’t find Murchadh, did you?” he asks, suspecting the answer.
Anwen shakes her head. “He’s gone!”
“Ashrille and Wyddryr, too.” A Gwaedwn had found him stepping out of the former’s tent when he had gone to look; the new bruise on the back of his head still aches.
“Do you know anything?” presses Anwen. “Where did they go?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they . . .” He trails off as they reach the bend in the river signifying the fringe of the woods by the field. Ahead, he can see the dark forms of Cydwag and Heulwen, their legs lost in the long grass. He holds Anwen’s gaze for a moment and shrugs before ducking under the fence.
As he arrives by the others, Ainsley is seen, shoulders hunched, coming towards the field from the woods.
“I guess that's all of us that are coming, then,” says Anwen.
“What about the others?” asks Cydwag.
“They’re gone. We couldn’t find them anywhere.”
Cydwag’s eye are dark. “None of you know where they’ve gone?”
No one answers.
“What should we do?” says Ffrewgí eventually.
“Try to find out where they’ve gone?” ventures Anwen.
“How?” There is a note of anger in Cydwag’s voice. “And if they didn’t tell any of us, then …” Silence falls as she trails off.
“Do you think the creature is behind this somehow?” asks Anwen in the quiet. “It’s behind everything else that’s been happening.”
“But we all think—we all know that the creature is good. Why would it take Murchadh and the others away?” Ffrewgí swallows hard. “Do you think that---”
Anwen is quick to speak. “But they wouldn't—Murchadh wouldn’t just leave us. There has to be some explanation.”
“They all took the pact. We have to imagine, wherever they’ve gone, it was their choice.” Cydwag looks around at each member in the group. “Right?”
Cydwag’s suspicions find allies in the shadows of Ffrewgí’s mind.
Anwen’s angry response floods him with guilt and he feels a blush rise on his cheeks: “Sometimes things happen that leave you no choice. And sometimes we do have a choice. Like right now. And we probably don't have long, so we should figure out what we're going to do.”
“Well, you’re the ones with the gifts,” starts Cydwag hotly, “so . . .”
Heulwen’s soft voice is like the breeze that stirs the grass about their legs. “Cydwag didn’t mean it like that, Anwen.”
Anwen’s quiet “Sorry” is almost lost in the night.
“Murchadh and the others are gone,” says Cydwag. “We don’t know where. We can wait for them to come back, or . . .” she pauses. “It feels like something big is about to happen here. I know I’m not---I don’t have a gift like the rest of you. But I’ll help you however I can.”
“We can do something,” says Heulwen. “Together.”
“I think Murchadh would want us to act,” says Ffrewgí, less sure than he hopes he sounds.
“So,” says Cydwag, “what can you all do?”
Ainsley speaks up for the first time. “I can make things appear,” he says. Suddenly, an enormous bear is next to him, its bulk pressing the grass it passes through as it moves around the boy.
Even after watching Anwen and Heulwen reveal their creature-gifts earlier in the day, Ffrewgí had not been prepared for this. He starts back, mouth agape as the bear fades gently away. Ffrewgí looks at Ainsley and sees him sitting down, as if on a chair . . . but there is no chair. “What,” starts Ffrewgí, shaken, “what are you sitting on?”
Ainsley looks up. “You can’t see it?”
“See what? You’re sitting on . . . nothing.”
“Or something only you can see,” suggests Anwen, looking at Ainsley shrewdly.
Ainsley mutters something indistinct and a blush crawls across his face.
A sudden noise from the Gwaedwn encampment draws the attention of all the children.
“We’ve been out here too long,” hisses Cydwag. “What’s our plan?”
“Escape?” says Anwen. “Tonight?”
Ffrewgí feels his stomach drop. “Now?”
“Now works for me,” says Anwen, her wide eyes flicking back towards the village.
Cydwag scoops them up as she says, “I’ll trust you. Let’s move!”
Ffrewgí stumbles along with the rest, but his feet are wooden and he has trouble keeping them.
“Run!” cries Cydwag. “Run!”
Looking over his shoulder, Ffrewgí sees the wide dark shape of Máerl barreling over the fence. Anwen is suddenly beside him, and her hair erupts about her face in a wild burst of wind that flattens the grass in a thick wave rushing towards the Gwaedwn warrior. Moonlight glimmers on the bent blades.
Máerl roars as the wall of wind hits her. She is stopped for a moment, then presses forward, leaning into the gale.
Ffrewgí is frozen, staring into the dark shadows beneath the furrowed brows of the oncoming Gwaedwn, hardly a stone’s throw away. A hand slips into his and pulls, and blood rushes into his feet as he stumbles, turns, runs.
Anwen’s hair is a cape behind her and there is a salt scent from it, its tips hand’s-breadths from his nose, as she pulls him along into the woods.
The dense silence of the forest envelops him as soon as they have passed the first few trees. Anwen releases his hand as he keeps pace.
“I’ll take care of our tracks!” Heulwen is saying as they approach. She and Cydwag let them pass; Ffrewgí following Anwen and Anwen following the dim shape of Ainsley ahead.
The children run; Ffrewgí can hear Heulwen and Cydwag join behind them. Over roots, beneath branches, past fallen trunks. Soon, it is too dark to properly see; Ffrewgí can no longer see Anwen and Ainsley ahead, though he can hear from indeterminate direction the sounds of his companions: the laboured breathing and heavy footfalls. And he can feel them, feel their muscles and lungs burning. He is himself at the end of his endurance. Panic had drawn his energy before the exercise had had a chance.
He focuses his gift-sense on the woods around him and feels the tiny heartbeat of a mouse filling a hidden cavity somewhere near. He feels its muscles propel it through the space---a large space; large enough?
Ffrewgí corrects his path, slanting towards the cavity; dimly, he makes out a half-fallen tree ahead, its roots like gigantic spider-legs still secure in the earth. Beneath it, a solid shadow. Ffrewgí stops. He feels Anwen’s approach just before she runs into him and turns to absorb her speeding form. He guides her towards the shadow. “In here!” he says for the others.
The five children press tightly into the space, infinitely dark but hotly claustrophobic. Their breath nearly steams against the cold soil, and it is some time before it calms. When it does---
“Someone’s coming!” exclaims Ffrewgí in a whisper. The unmistakable sense of a moving creature is heavy on his mind---as if in his own sockets, he can feel the person’s eyes scan back and forth, back and forth. Their nostrils flare, draw in a breath that Ffrewgí feels in his lungs.
“I can---” starts Heulwen, but she is cut off by the sudden completeness of darkness in their grotto. No faint moonlight, no dark spectre of grey, shows through the slats of the tree’s roots. They are sealed in. Ainsley’s work, perhaps.
Ffrewgí hears the rumble of Máerl’s voice outside, joined by one or two others. Then silence, but Ffrewgí can feel their footsteps lightly pressing the loam around the base of the tree. Then they are gone into the darkness whence they came, back towards the encampment.
“They’re gone,” says Ffrewgí with the breath he had not known he was holding.
Ainsley’s cover disappears, but none of the children make a move to leave the grotto. Ffrewgí leans back against the dirt, feels someone else press against the knees pulled up to his chest.
Full darkness creeps over the woods. When, in silence determining it is time to move on, Heulwen and Cydwag slip out from beneath the roots, cold air crawls across Ffrewgí’s skin.
The children move forward slowly, Anwen and Heulwen leading the way, their creature-gifts giving them a sort of second sight. Through the trees behind them, Ffrewgí makes out the faint orange flickers of torches, the indistinguishable calls of distant voices. The search continues. But so, too, does the captives’ escape---leaving behind them their captors, nightmare spectres moving in dreamlike slowness through the pure night in the back of Ffrewgí’s mind.
Not yet asleep, Ffrewgí is suddenly alert at a sound outside his tent. A cold sweat breaks out on his forehead and the dirt beneath his bare back becomes pointed as gravel.
“Can I come in?” comes a soft voice; Anwen’s voice.
Ffrewgí swallows back his heart and props himself up on his elbows. “Yeah,” he says in a cracking voice, “of course!”
Pale in the night, Anwen’s arms follow her tangled hair into the tent and then she is fully inside, curled up by the entrance, her knees up to her chin. Her wide eyes gleam even in the near-blackness of the tent’s interior.
Ffrewgí rubs his eyes and sits up fully. The girl must have just returned from her hunt; it occurs to Ffrewgí that five days have passed since the group’s departure. He breaks the silence. “Anwen?”
Anwen looks up. “Sorry,” she whispers, blinking.
“Are you okay? What---what happened on the hunt?”
Anwen’s eyes are distant. “I can't be in that tent anymore---it's . . . it's where he died, and I can't stop thinking about it.” She shakes herself out of her reverie. “The hunt was fine. I actually . . .” her eyes find Ffrewgí’s, “had a strange thing happen.”
Ffrewgí’s heart hammers with prescient expectation. “What?”
“I think I met the creature.”
The paleness of Anwen’s face reminds Ffrewgí of the glow---all he can remember of his own encounter. “Really?” he asks hollowly. “Did it . . . did it speak to you?”
Anwen looks down and nods. The glow fades. “About Alaric.”
In his mind’s eye, Ffrewgí sees her old hunting group stagger into camp covered in blood. “I’m sorry he died,” he says, wishing he had more to say. “This place is . . .” He trails off.
“Yeah,” Anwen whispers.
Ffrewgí feels the weight of exhaustion on his shoulders, his forehead. The darkness in the tent feels strangely expansive, but full of slow portent; roiling and thick, it fills Ffrewgí’s dreams that night.
* * *
Ffrewgí wakes with a jolt in the early morning, hearing movement beside him. Anwen is sitting up, rustling her hair with her fingers. Ffrewgí closes his eyes again, allowing his heart to calm. When he sits up a few moments later, Anwen is crouching by the entrance, looking at him.
“Thank you,” she says, and ducks out. Sharp sunlight slants into the tent for a moment before the flap falls back into place.
Ffrewgí rubs his eyes and yawns before leaving the tent himself. He moves woodenly to his first task, completes it without thought. The sun is high by the time effort and the heat wakes him up properly; he can suddenly feel the scratches on his arms from the loads of wood he has been carrying to the central firepit, the roughness of bark and splinters against his bare arms and chest. He deposits his latest load in the slowly growing pile beneath the small thatched storage and turns to return to the chopping ground.
The boy Ainsley is sitting by the fire, a collection of wood shavings decorating the ground by his feet. He looks up as Ffrewgí turns and their eyes meet. A figure in the corner of his vision draws his attention away; Heulwen is standing between two tents nearby. Her brown eyes ache with the tiredness Ffrewgí feels in his bones. Then Anwen is there, too, with the water yoke, just behind the dark-skinned girl. A breeze stirs her hair.
Suddenly, memories flood Ffrewgí’s consciousness, images one after another slowly resolving into one distinct scene.
He is standing in the woods. He can feel damp loam beneath his feet, the soft air after a rain on his face. Ainsley, Anwen, and Heulwen are standing before him, all empty-handed, eyes focused. Heulwen breathes out slowly; somehow, Ffrewgí can feel it resonate in his chest. Crumbling earth shivers out from beneath the moss and ferns of the forest floor, twists and flows upwards, forms into a crude humanoid form.
Ainsley breathes a trembling breath and his eyes close. Ffrewgí’s own vision distorts, vibrates, and resolves in creeping focus on the figure of earth before him, which takes on the image of Alaric, the captive who had died. Its eyes are flat, lifeless.
A gust of wind stands Ffrewgí’s hairs on end; Anwen breathes out, her own blonde locks stirring about her head. A coiling breeze, carrying with it an incredible electricity, darts into the space between the four children, moving like a lightning bolt dancing with a swimming serpent, and Ffrewgí watches it draw up into the Alaric-figure’s nostrils.
Then Ffrewgí steps forward, places his hand on the figure’s chest. Beneath his palm he feels organs of earth become flesh, threads of dirt turn red with flowing blood; he feels bones resolve from clay, and when he lifts his eyes the blush of life is spreading through living cheeks, and glittering eyes regard him curiously.
Ffrewgí blinks suddenly out of his recollection, is back in the center of the Gwaedwn village in the hot sun. He looks from peer to peer, wondering, and in their eyes he sees his own surprise reflected back.
“Did that,” starts Anwen, “did that really happen?”
“You’re remembering it, too?” asks Ffrewgí, though he knows the answer; he knows that they have all remembered. It does not occur to him to really question it, not that they all have only now recalled it nor that it happened at all. The memory is vivid and real, and he remembers every feeling.
For the rest of the day, Ffrewgí dwells on this memory, begins to wonder how it had only now come to him despite being so vivid and terrific. He is cleaning a chamberpot at the river, his final task of the day, under a deep blue sky, when he is given another shock: on the other side of the narrow river, Alaric. Somehow he feels him before he sees him; he looks up knowing where to look. As much as he had known his memory to have been true, seeing the resurrected captive with his conscious eyes sends a jolt through his gut.
“How long have I been . . . gone?”
The boy’s voice is raw, like he has not spoken for days.
Gone? “I’m not sure,” answers Ffrewgí. “What do you remember?”
“The tent,” says Alaric, then trails off---or the running water drowns out his other words; Ffrewgí cannot be sure. “I woke up in the forest.”
Ffrewgí notices suddenly that Alaric’s face is clear, absent the scar that had cut so dramatically across it before. “How---” he starts. “Do you remember your hunt?”
The boy shakes his head. “What happened?”
Ffrewgí takes a step into the ford, feeling the flow of blood through Alaric’s veins as clearly as he feels the cold water rush around his knees. “You died,” he says, not knowing what else to say.
Alaric does not react to the incredible fact; he raises a hand slowly to his face. He says something that is lost in the water.
Ffrewgí’s heart is tripping over the beats of Alaric’s. “How did we bring you back?”
“I remember your hand,” says Alaric. “You pulled me into my body, knitted my spirit to this shape.”
“Anwen called your spirit,” Ffrewgí whispers, not knowing precisely what he is saying.
“I remember her voice.”
“She should be finished her tasks,” says Ffrewgí. “I think she might stay in my tent again tonight.” Alaric regards him with eyes glittering like emeralds in the final light of day. “I’ll be some time yet.”
Alaric nods, enters the river. Electricity crackles over Ffrewgí’s body as the boy passes him; quickly, Alaric disappears into the gloom of the forest behind.
A slight, second heartbeat remains beneath the hammering of Ffrewgí’s own, and somehow Ffrewgí knows of the presence of a salmon fry a few paces downstream.
After finishing his task, he returns to his tent, where he finds Anwen.
“Did you talk to him?”
Anwen nods.
Ffrewgí scratches the back of his neck and finds a comfortable position to lie in---something impossible without severe acclimatization to this tiny tent. “Me too,” he says. After a silence, “It’s weird, right? Like, he should be . . .” He trails off. “But it feels proper; it all makes sense somehow.”
“Yes,” agrees Anwen. “Somehow, it does. It was all so,” her eyes glitter in the darkness, “beautiful.”
Ffrewgí regards her softly. “Is he gone?”
Anwen nods and the lights in her eyes multiply, then vanish as her eyes close.
Ffrewgí turns away, his throat tight, and his myriad thoughts flow into dreams.
Ffrewgí is roused the next morning not by a shake of his tent but by voices calling. He exits his tent as the other captives exit theirs, follows them with bleary, unquestioning eyes as they in turn follow two brigands into the village centre. He stares unfocused at the back of Cydwag’s head as they stop in the square.
Symbre calms the flow of idle muttering with a subtle gesture that somehow draws every eye to her. “The hunt must resume, for the memory of Alaric and all those others who came, and died, before him. The creature is close, and its gift is within grasp. Take hope and draw strength; the end of our task draws near.”
The shoulders in front of him remain slumped. Ffrewgí is tired, feels weak and hopeless. Unbidden, the thought that if this next hunt fails it will be the last falls heavily into Ffrewgí’s heart. The image of the dead captive hovers in his vision, the boy surrounded by candles, pale skin glistening in the darkness.
“Wyddryr, you will join Fuldryn’s group; Anwen, Tyree’s. Please join your group leader this evening, after your daily tasks have been completed.”
A pang thrills through Ffrewgí’s body at the announcement. He has not looked at Wyddryr since meeting the boy outside that tent, and his heart beats anxiously at the thought of having to face him, at what he might say. He drops his eyes to the dirt as the group disperses, plods off to his now-familiar morning duty.
Through the day, his anxiety waxes and wanes. He resolves not to mention what he overheard to anyone, especially not Wyddryr, which gives him a measure of peace---but then he considers again the implications of what he heard; if Wyddryr was never a captive, is he a spy? Would he report Ffrewgí preemptively to save his cover? But Wyddryr cannot know that Ffrewgí overheard him. Ffrewgí just happened to be passing; he may not have heard anything, and plenty of their peers have been shedding tears recently, so he did not really see anything, either. That evening, the hunting group meeting passes without incident; Fuldryn delivers a speech meant to motivate their group before telling them a legend of the creature, in this iteration a pure white wildcat that lures a child’s bully to vicious death in the highlands by mimicking the voice of the boy’s father. The wildcat returns and licks the bullied child’s wounds, leaving them without a mark. Ffrewgí notices Logain standing nearby at the beginning of the tale, but the tall man is gone when Fuldryn dismisses the children for the night.
The next morning, Ffrewgí is roused before the sun has risen. He walks with Cydwag to the outfitter’s tent, where their escort leaves them with Fuldryn and the two other children. Ffrewgí stands next to Cydwag by the entrance to the tent, hunching his shoulders and averting his eyes as the outfitted Wyddryr steps out of the tent past him. Ashrille follows with her gathering basket, then Ffrewgí is handed his bush sword, which he clips onto his belt, and coil of rope. He steps into the damp morning air and notices Crow-watcher nearby, hunched over a faintly glowing ember in a bowl on the ground. Cydwag is ducking out of the outfitter’s tent as the mystic suddenly breathes in deeply and rises.
The riddle he delivers is much like the last: dense and oblique, and sending the hunters somewhere to the north. This time, their end goal is
“. . . an ancient, twisted guardian
whose crown is taller than the rest.
But mind your bowing heads therein,
for in his hair fell wisdom nests.”
Fuldryn advises them that the stanza likely references a very old, very tall tree, and helps them with other elements of the riddle---“I can’t hunt it with you, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t at least make sure you’re pointed in the right direction”---but has no idea of what the “fell wisdom” might mean. After going through the riddle, they wish Ffrewgí and the rest good luck and escort them to the edge of the village. Then the children are alone, trekking northwest through the woods as the weak sun rises over their right shoulders, battling dark clouds moving swiftly in from the south.
* * *
“I saw Archora.”
Cydwag is breathless, breaking into their little camp through the dense leaves in a rush. Wyddryr is standing, his bush sword drawn, and Ffrewgí’s heart is still pounding from the panic of her arrival when it suddenly burns hollow and thick at her words.
“Isn’t she dead?” asks Ashrille from out of Ffrewgí’s vision.
“Her hand . . .” chokes out Ffrewgí. Then, “Where is she?”
Cydwag breathes in shakily before answering. “She . . .” a sudden look of confusion covers her face, “she said she was . . .” Cydwag pauses and blinks, swallowing hard. “I can’t remember what she said.”
“Drink,” says Ashrille, coming forward with a waterskin.
Cydwag drinks deeply.
“Does she need help?”
Cydwag turns to Wyddryr, her eyes wide, whispers, “I don’t know.”
“Her hand,” says Ffrewgí hoarsely. “Did they really cut off her hand?”
A note of panic enters Cydwag’s voice. “I can’t remember.”
In the corner of his vision, Ffrewgí sees Wyddryr’s large eyes turn towards him, then back to Cydwag. “Can you lead us to her?”
The hunter’s orange locks burn darkly in the firelight as she shakes her head. “I saw her,” she whispers, as if to herself.
“We can retrace your steps in the morning,” suggests Wyddryr.
“I saw her,” says Cydwag.
“We believe you.” Ashrille comes alongside the hunter and gives her a stone as a plate, decorated with a green paste. “Eat this. It should clear your head.”
“I guess this means no pheasant tonight,” mutters Wyddryr, sitting down by the fire across from Ffrewgí. His bush sword clatters on the gravel beside him.
Ashrille and Cydwag join them by the fire. Cydwag is still clutching her bow. Ffrewgí can see her white knuckles, flickering orange in the light. “I’ve got tubers aplenty,” says Ashrille, “if you’re really missing that pheasant.” She shoots a sharp look at Wyddryr.
Ffrewgí has been glad the two of them share a bond. Because Ashrille has been by Wyddryr’s side in every idle moment for the two days of their travel so far, Ffrewgí has not had to be alone with the pale boy, to face whatever will come from that scene back in the village. The reminder only troubles him for a liquid second, though, before thoughts of Archora consume him again.
Night has fallen fully before Ffrewgí looks around with any clarity. His companions are asleep. An Ashrille-foraged dinner is lying on the ground by him; his stomach growls loudly. He blushes and looks at the other children, hoping it did not wake them. He eats, then stands up without a conscious reason, but it comes to him and weighs on his heart, sticks in his throat like an unchewed root vegetable: he is heading into the forest, alone.
Ffrewgí’s feet are all but silent on the wet ground as he strides quickly into the darkness beyond the pale orange of the dying fire. Naked to the waist, the dense forest air settles on him like a cold second skin. Belted at his waist in its half-sheath is his bush sword and slung over his shoulder is a reed-fashioned strap for his waterskin. He does not feel its weight.
Cydwag would not have hunted far from the camp; it was already evening when she had left. Ffrewgí pauses a bowshot from the camp and wipes condensation from his forehead. He scans the ground before him, noting the passage of some furred creature in a print by his feet and a tuft of dark hair in a crack of bark on a nearby tree. He can see no evidence of Cydwag’s passing. He moves on slowly, his eyes fixed on the ground. There---the shadow of a child’s foot, the tiniest bit darker than the moss around it. A broken fern a few paces further on. Cydwag had been rushing back; Ffrewgí had known he would be able to track her passage, even in the near blackness of night.
An owl hoots a distance away, and the noises of the night-woods seep into Ffrewgí’s ears as he relaxes. The trail is now clear before him. He creeps along, bent low. His breath catches in his throat; a crystal note, musical and lingering, hovers suddenly in the air. Something glimmers between the cedar trunks ahead of him and he stops. The light is blue-white, and softly flickering. Ffrewgí’s heart pounds.
The glimmer vanishes, but it is another few breaths before Ffrewgí moves on.
“Your grandmother has much wisdom.”
Terrified, the boy turns around. Facing him, hardly five paces away, is an exquisite white stag. Its pearlescent eyes regard him calmly. Its mouth does not move as the voice speaks again.
“You are more than you believe.”
The stag bends down as if to graze and its single antler comes to rest immediately before Ffrewgí’s eyes. The other corner of the animal’s head is completely unadorned, as smooth as a doe’s. Ffrewgí is frozen. The stag’s head rises. Its antler cuts through the air and leaves behind a shimmering white path that fades slowly from the boy’s vision.
“What are you?” Ffrewgí stammers.
“The answer to your question,” responds the voice. It comes from all around, filling the woods.
“Where is my friend?”
A tine of the stag’s antler is suddenly pressed against the base of Ffrewgí’s sternum. “Here,” says the voice. “And here.” Like ripples in still water, the voice echoes in rings deep into the forest, and the antler is withdrawn.
Ffrewgí’s insides twist. “She’s dead, then.”
“Gone.”
“So . . . Cydwag didn’t see her?” Ffrewgí’s voice is tiny following the creature’s.
“As in a reflection,” says the voice, “she did.”
Ffrewgí’s worry is a physical ache in his chest. “Is she alive?” he whispers. There is no response. “Where is she?” His voice is as weak as he feels, and his stomach suddenly growls.
The stag turns its shining head and the voice drawls to itself as if in thought, “Yes.”
A single eye gazes deeply at Ffrewgí, who is once again frozen in place. The glimmering disc draws him in, patinas of opalescent colour drifting across its surface. Then its eyelid blinks, and when it opens the stag is gone and Ffrewgí is alone in the nightdark woods, a pale shimmer fading from his vision.
He stumbles back to camp, unconscious of retracing his steps, and lies there awake as the memory of his encounter disappears as mysteriously as the . . . as the white bear---as the sable owl---as the creature had, leaving behind in Ffrewgí’s memory only a pearlescent shimmer and the image of a woven basket, overflowing with fruit in perfect ripeness.
* * *
They search for Archora the next day. Ffrewgí lets Wyddryr take the lead, quietly following the group, not responding when Wyddryr asks about the second pair of tracks leading out of the camp. They reach the end of Cydwag’s tracks and find no evidence of another pair. After searching the area fruitlessly for another movement, they turn around and return to their little clearing.
“I swear I saw her,” says Cydwag, sitting back from the tiny tongue of fire she is nursing on a bed of dry moss. “But I . . . I don’t remember a thing.”
“'Could’ve been a woodwose,” suggests Ashrille, depositing a handful of kindling beside the hunter. “It was already pretty dark when you set out to hunt.”
“A what?” asks Wyddryr.
“A woodwose,” says Ashrille. “A wildman, a kind of fairy, I think. They’re said to be hardly a pace high.”
Cydwag shakes her head. “I was so sure.”
“Maybe it was the creature.” Ffrewgí looks up as he feels his companions’ eyes fall on him. “I---I went out last night, and I think I . . . I think I met it, too.”
“What was---” starts Cydwag.
“I don’t remember anything,” says Ffrewgí.
“You didn’t eat anything you foraged for yourself, did you?” asks Ashrille, hooking some hair behind her ear. “I noticed a cluster of Mystic’s Mushrooms this morning.”
Ffrewgí shakes his head. “I know what those look like. I just ate what you gave us.”
“You don’t remember what the creature looked like?” asks Cydwag, turning around to face him.
“No. I just know I met---” he hesitates---“something. So maybe it was the same thing you saw.” He blushes and looks down at his hands in his lap. “I dunno.”
“It might explain the memory thing,” says Wyddryr. “You could have met something magical, anyway.”
“A Mystic’s Mushroom,” mutters Ashrille.
“We didn’t eat any mushrooms.” Cydwag turns back to the fire and delicately balances some tinder over the little flame. “If it was the creature,” she says, dusting off her hands, “why do I feel like I saw Archora?”
“Perhaps it took her shape somehow. But in any case, what do we do about it?” Wyddryr’s bright eyes pass over Ffrewgí as he looks at everyone in the group. “This is a really good lead---something exceptional happened to you two. The creature has to be close.”
“But there were no signs---no tracks,” says Cydwag. “Just mine. And Ffrewgí’s, I guess. How can we hunt something that doesn’t even leave tracks in your memory?”
Wyddryr’s eyes narrow. “Well, damn it, we have to try!” He turns his back to Ashrillle abruptly as she comes up next to him and strides off to the edge of the clearing. “Let’s go out again,” he says, his voice tightly composed, walking quickly back to the others. He picks up his bush sword. “Come on. This is a great lead. We have to pursue it.”
Ashrille picks up her foraging pack. Cydwag and Ffrewgí remain seated.
“There is still plenty of daylight left,” says Wyddryr. “Come on.”
“Mightn’t it be best to find the tree instead? That was the goal of Crow-watcher’s . . .” Cydwag trails off at Wyddyr’s look, smothers her fire, and stands up, dusting off her hands. She shrugs as she picks up her equipment. Ffrewgí follows as the hunter joins the other two by the trees.
* * *
Their search is fruitless and despite a crackling fire tended by Cydwag, the evening is frigid, though nothing is colder than Wyddryr’s silence; everyone in the clearing understands that they have to set off back to the Gwaedwn village in the morning.
“I’m going out there,” says Wyddryr abruptly, scattering sparks from the fire as he seizes a burning branch.
“I’ll come with you,” volunteers Ashrille. She casts her eyes over Cydwag and Ffrewgí, but there is no surprise in them as she turns back to Wyddryr and her two seated companions do not stir. “Let’s go.”
“Mark your passage,” says Cydwag. “We’ll follow in the morning if you’re not back by dawn.”
Wyddryr and Ashrille disappear into the dark and Ffrewgí shares a glance with Cydwag. “I’ll take first watch,” offers the redheaded girl, but the stars move above and neither sleeps all night. Fog is lightening greyblue to the east when Wyddryr and Ashrille return, haggard and bleeding.
They had followed the riddle to its end, Wyddryr needing to exhaust all potential leads, and at the ancient tree they had been attacked by a terrifying owl-creature with four legs. It had latched onto Wyddryr’s shoulder; he shows Ffrewgí and Cydwag the marks of it claws and the strip of flesh it had torn from his chest. Ashrille has him sit down and bandages him with a poultice.
By the time the rain begins, they are on their way back to the village. They travel in silence, surrounded by the noise of battered leaves.
* * *
Ffrewgí notices Murchadh sitting in on their debrief session the morning after the hunting group’s return. Wyddryr is absent, resting in the infirmary tent. Symbre and Logain are standing behind Fuldryn, listening intently as Cydwag takes the lead in the retelling. She does not mention Archora, but she does say that she and Ffrewgí may have encountered the creature---or at least something exceptional and inexplicable during their second night gone. Ashrille chimes in from time to time, and goes into more detail when relating her journey to the tree with Wyddryr.
When the girls finish, the Gwaedwn keep them there and ask a lot of questions.
“Cydwag thought she saw Archora,” blurts out Ashrille. “That’s what she said when she came into camp that evening.”
Fuldryn raises an eyebrow. “Is this true?”
“I guess so,” says Cydwag, shooting a glance at Ashrille. “As I said, I don’t really remember.”
“It might have been a woodwose---what she saw,” ventures Ffrewgí, hoping there had been substance behind Ashrille’s suggestion back then in the woods. “There were no tracks other than Cydwag’s when we investigated the next day.”
“Except for yours,” corrects Ashrille.
Ffrewgí’s heart hammers. “Yeah.”
“And you don’t remember at all what you saw?” asks Fuldryn.
Ffrewgí shakes his head.
“No lasting image, like Cydwag’s of Archora---or a remembrance of a feeling, even?”
Ffrewgí shakes his head. “Just . . . just a light, maybe?”
Fuldryn smiles softly. “That may prove helpful.”
Logain’s voice is focused and his eye direct. “This was two day’s-journeys from the village? Symbre,” he says, turning to her, “we should send the others immediately.”
“We will ask Brân,” says Symbre. Then, to the children, “Thank you for your efforts. You may go now. Take the day off and rest.”
* * *
Days later, the schedule has returned to normal, only Ffrewgí has a dozen additional tasks to complete daily around the village to compensate for his captive peers gone on their hunt. He wakes up one night from a strange dream that slips away from him immediately, leaving him only with a sense of loneliness tinged with fear, and he lies awake wondering how Anwen and the girl Heulwen are faring out there in the darkness, whether they will succeed on their hunt and what it would mean for them all.
He hates himself for it, but Ffrewgí runs a hand over the ridges of his ribs and is glad that he is no longer fat. His loose skin sags around his ribs and over the waistband of his pants, he feels its rolls under his roving fingers just as he feels the bones of his hips and chest. He knows he is wasting away, knows the muscle he can feel has not been fairly traded for, but he pictures his sister as Murchadh and another tribesperson deposit a strung-up deer on the dirt beyond him, and Ffrewgí sees her nod in recognition at him as Murchadh does. Both gestures, real and imagined, feel wrong to him, but he clings to the respect they impart even as he rejects their benefactors and recognizes his own weakness.
He sighs and puts his hand back on the flank of the calflike creature other hunters had dragged in earlier this morning, driving his other hand, holding a flint knife, deeper into its belly.
A tear surprises him, cutting a warm line down his cheek, and suddenly his stomach is painfully knotted and his mind is filled with a swimming image of Grandmother Uerichí. Her face crinkles in a smile as she shoos Ffrewgí’s sister away.
“They’re killing us, Grandmother,” he whispers through a lump in his throat. One of Anwen’s hunting companions had died of his wounds two days ago, and the severed hand on the spear still revisits Ffrewgí in nightmares, beckoning. “I think they will be sending us out again any day.”
Ffrewgí can feel a papery hand on his bare shoulder.
“I am no hunter,” he says; “no fighter.”
The grandmother’s eyes say, “No, you are more,” and the vision disappears.
“But I’m not,” the boy whispers, to an empty clearing.
* * *
“We’re close, Dad. So close. Just hold on.”
Ffrewgí does not normally register the words of the brigands as he goes about his tasks in the village, but these make it through his usual fog. It is a familiar voice, coming from a tent beside that which Ffrewgí is leaving after depositing a bundle of herbs.
“I’ve got to go. I love you. Please . . . hold on.”
Standing dumbly in the avenue, Ffrewgí meets a teary-eyed Wyddryr as he leaves the tent. The boy quickly turns away and rushes off. Too deep in his own mire of thoughts to pursue either the boy or the scene, Ffrewgí just sets off to his next destination, delivering a fresh bundle of Fuldryn’s favourite incense herbs to their tent.
That night, he lies awake and his mind turns back to that moment, to the pain in Wyddryr’s wide blue eyes. The boy had called someone in that tent “Dad”; Ffrewgí’s thoughts move two different ways. The first is too strange; was Wyddryr captured with his father? Or was Wyddryr never really captured at all; has Murchadh been right to be so suspicious all this time?
Turning over on the cold dirt, Ffrewgí does not know what to think, or what do do with his thoughts, but as he feels his bare skin scrape over the ground his mind does settle on something:
Shame. Thoughts of Wyddryr disappear, and Ffrewgí feels himself melting into the earth, a useless wedge of flesh unwilling to move and incapable of agency.
There is a stir about camp the next morning, hissing voices inquiring, suspicious eyes turned towards Ffrewgí and the other camp slaves. As he goes about his daily tasks, Ffrewgí feels the Gwaedwn regard him with hot eyes, curled lips. He does not care; he fetches his water and sweeps his avenues without expression.
Evening comes and Ffrewgí collects his dinner, eats it in his tent and then sleeps.
Days pass mechanically. The first hunting group returns and the next leaves. Ffrewgí averts his eyes whenever he passes Murchadh and the other ex-captives, carrying buckets of water or offal, baskets of rubbish to the refuse pit outside of the village or fresh herbs to hang in the drying shack.
Ffrewgí completes his labours silently. When it rains, the drumming speaks instead. When fog rolls in, it holds even thoughts close and quiet. Occasionally, during his hunting group’s evening sessions, Fuldryn presses Ffrewgí for answers, but the cracking voice from his mouth is ghostlike and expressionless.
The day of his own departure for the hunt creeps ever closer. When Anwen and her group arrives back from their excursion, bleeding, stumbling into the village in the middle of the night, Ffrewgí is unable to fall back asleep for the immediacy of his own doom.
The morning does not dawn but steeps slowly from black to deep blue, and when Fuldryn rouses Ffrewgí and Cydwag the air has not yet tasted even the faintest touch of the sun. The two captives follow Fuldryn as they wake Ashrille, then to a large round tent where the hunters are outfitted by another brigand. Ffrewgí accepts a bush sword and loops a length of rope around his shoulder. Cydwag asks for the outfitter’s help to secure a spear-carrier to her back and takes a longbow and arrows without comment. Ashrille shrugs into the straps of a basket and slips a sheathed knife into her belt.
Symbre meets them just as they step outside. “Five days,” she says. “Return by the sixth day or we will become concerned. Good luck, and may Grauffyd carry you.”
They move off and Symbre, and the village, disappears in the fog.
* * *
The group arrives at the back of a moss-covered lean-to, hardly distinguishable in the wet verdancy of the surrounding forest. They have been hiking for half the day; nothing new for any of the group, though they arrive weighed down and in no haste. Fuldryn has them wait as they move around to the front.
"Brân is in a trance," they whisper, coming back around. "He will have information for you when he wakes."
Ffrewgí smells pungent smoke in the still air. He rubs his nose and makes eye contact with Fuldryn.
"Dream-herb," they say with a wink. "He must be really searching."
"Searching for what?" asks Cydwag.
"Signs of the creature, of course."
"In dreams?"
Fuldryn nods. "Brân Crow-watcher, he's called. He says he connects with the consciousness of birds in his dreams---and birds see much." Ashrille snorts and they raise their eyebrows. "You doubt the prescience of dreams?"
"I don't," says Cydwag quietly.
Ffrewgí wanders a few paces away, his mind wandering further. He looks up, blinking in the fine rain filtering through the canopy above him, thinking about the village left behind. His gaze falls to his hands and he pictures a line of dark red on his left palm, the sign of the blood pact. Ashrille moves near him, picking at a shrub. She took the pact. Not for the first time, Ffrewgí wonders if he made the wrong choice; or if he had had a choice at all. He looks into the woods, watches an owl cut through the damp gloom between the trees, and thinks of Archora, and the hand on the spear. There had been no choice, and Ffrewgí cannot trust anyone who had seen one.
The distrust cuts deepest when his thoughts turn to Murchadh. The boy had been shepherding him, fattening him up for slaughter---in this case, a slaughter of hopes, an abandonment of his home and family. "I freely offer my loyalty and energy," Murchadh had said, striding forward to join the tribe of violent kidnappers. And for what? Wealth? The blood of a mystical beast?
"Ah, I hear movement," announces Fuldryn. "I think our host has returned to us. Come on."
Ffrewgí wipes rain from his face and follows the others as they move around to the front of the hut.
"Careful of the garden," says Fuldryn. They lift their trailing skirts to avoid them brushing against the various low shrubs and herbage sprouting thickly in dark soil on either side of a narrow stone path.
"Those who walk with care need not worry about dinner," crackles a new voice, and a grizzled head pokes out from a hole in the lean-to.
"Ah, Brân, I thought I heard you moving about in there." Fuldryn gestures to the children. "Here is our latest hunting party. Anything they need to know?"
Brán Crow-watcher steps fully out of his lean-to through no discernable door. He intones a verse as he walks towards the group:
Unique, she is—or he is, or they are—
no creature is her like, which is of purest,
iridescent white, or darkest, purest
coal; which is of ungulate design,
or feline—antlered, hornèd, furred, or smooth.
Reclusive as the Spring in Winter be,
no words define, no eyes can find, her ageless mystery.
"We really don't know what the creature is," translates Fuldryn. "But it's probably all-black or -white and a mammal."
"Not a chair, but four-legged; not a carpet, but could make one; not a river, but produces drink for its young," says Crow-watcher.
"That's not a lot to go on," says Cydwag.
"It sort of is," ventures Asrhille. "I mean, just that it will be unlike anything else."
Crow-watcher's odd-coloured eyes twinkle.
"It is a creature of legend," agrees Fuldryn; "it should be recognizable when you see it." They turn to Crow-watcher. "Have your birds any news of the creature?"
Beads in Crow-watcher's braided hair clack against each other as he wiggles his head and smiles.
A visit from my friend the crow
has told me of a sign,
they show me visions, where to go,
so pay me focused mind!
The crow revealed that roses will
not point you in the right,
though thick and scarlet thorned they fill
what next the crow gave light:
a thorn that stands alone upon
the branch we call our home.
Head for the thorn, and by the dawn,
its grounded twin will gloam
a point, the way for you to go.
Stray not from path, for long
would be your fall—the earth that shows
is Radda’s speech and song,
but Grauffyd’s path will hold you true
until his tumbled skin,
on every side surrounding you,
grows green and smooth again.
Friend crow then showed me whitest bark,
and stillest pond, and reeds
on which—he bids me tell thee: “Hark!”—
on which the creature feeds.
He also bids me tell thee “Ware!”:
for danger, too, finds succor there!
After repeating his riddle once, Crow-watcher turns and disappears into his lean-to.
As soon as the children turn to them, Fuldryn puts up their hands. “I think you can figure it out, I really do. Only ask if you are sure you won’t be able to figure it out on your own.”
Ffrewgí’s mind lifts from the gloom, his interest nibbling at the riddle like a fish at bait. “Roses will not point us right,” he says. What could it mean?
“Compass rose,” says Ashrille. “That must be it.”
“Compass rose?”
Ashrille wiggles her finger in the air. “The . . . the thing in the corner of maps---shows directions.”
“My village didn’t have any maps,” says Cydwag.
“I’ve seen a couple,” says Ashrille.
“So,” says Ffrewgí, returning to the riddle, “a compass rose can’t point us in the right direction?”
“The thorn will.”
“Yeah, but what is the thorn?” asks Cydwag.
“I think I may have to answer that one. A bit cruel of Brân, that,” says Fuldryn, overhearing. They point off into the forest. “Off to the northeast is a spire of rock---a thorn, if you will.”
“I guess we can figure out the rest on the way,” says Ffrewgí.
“Good luck,” says Fuldryn. “I’m an adult,” he adds, looking at the children’s expressions, “I can’t accompany you to kill a creature that can only be hunted by a child.”
Ashrille snorts and turns away.
“Remember, five days.”
Ffrewgí and Cydwag follow Ashrille into the woods.
* * *
Tangled vines crawl over the base of the stone thorn, withered rose petals carpeting the earth beneath them. Ffrewgí gingerly runs a finger along the side of a particularly vicious looking thorn, one of thousands upon the vines.
“I think we’ve got to wait here until morning,” says Cydwag. “‘Its grounded twin will gloom the way’, or something like that, right? Like, its shadow.”
“‘Gloam’,” corrects Ashrille.
It is already evening, so the choice is not hard to make. Ashrille takes off her pack and removes its woven lid, revealing a cornucopia of foraged edibles---focused on retaining their northeasterly course, Ffrewgí had not even noticed her gather them along the way.
“I guess it’s my job to get the main course,” says Cydwag. She unslings the spears from her back and begins to string her longbow.
“You---” starts Ffrewgí---“you may want to save your arrows for the creature.”
“Tubers can be the main course,” offers Ashrille. “I found plenty.”
Cydwag allows the bow to bend back straight, unhooks the string and pockets it.
They eat, and the fresh food feels good in Ffrewgí’s stomach.
“It’ll be cold tonight,” says Cydwag. “Cold and wet. Let’s try a fire.”
Try a fire is all they do. Working together, they manage to collect a few handfuls of dry-ish tinder, but nothing with which to light it. Ashrille strikes the back of her knife against a collection of pebbles and stones but fails to make a spark.
“Wait,” exclaims Ffrewgí, tearing his eyes away from Cydwag as she attempts a friction-start, rubbing sticks together. He looks at her startled expression. “Oh, sorry, nothing about the fire, but . . . if its shadow points the way in the morning, don’t we know which way to go already?”
“West,” mutters Ashrille.
“But probably not due west.” Ffrewgí deflates. “We’re in the north and it’s not midsummer.”
“Good thing we’ve already stopped for the night,” says Cydwag, smiling. “Ah!” she exclaims, tossing her rubbing sticks to the ground. “This isn’t going to work.”
“And no blankets, either,” grumbles Ashrille.
Ffrewgí looks sharply at Ashrille. He has not slept in bedding since his capture. Perks of the Gwaedwn, he figures bitterly.
The night passes slowly, restlessly, and in uncomfortable damp. The onset of a full rain decides their abandonment of the already futile pursuit and they break their fast on a few stalks of a rubbery plant Ashrille calls Longchew.
“How are we going to find a shadow in this?” Cydwag is standing beneath the western face of the spire, looking up at the gloomy sky.
“Maybe we should just head west, and maybe a tiny bit north” Ffrewgí ventures. “That’s roughly where the shadow would have pointed.”
“The riddle warned that our path has to be precise,” says Ashrille. “On the sides of the path is Radda’s speech, apparently.”
“The god of trickery,” mumbles Ffrewgí. “Right.”
“I knew I recognized the name!” says Cydwag. “And Grauffyd is our god, of course.”
“Well, the god of the earth, anyway,” mutters Ashrille.
“What does ‘Radda’s speech’ mean?” asks Ffrewgí. “Practically, I mean.”
“‘Long would you fall’,” quotes Ashrille. “A cliff?”
“No,” says Ffrewgí, “that wouldn’t be Radda’s speech---too straightforward.”
“Fen?” offers Cydwag.
Ashrille nods. “That makes sense.”
Ffrewgí breathes in deeply, gathering his courage. “Look, we’re not going to get a shadow from the ‘thorn’---maybe for days. I can find solid ground in a fen, if our aim isn’t true from here. We have to keep moving.”
“Fair enough,” says Ashrille. “Lead on.”
Ffrewgí leads on, and before what he estimates is midday---the rain does not let up at all---they have reached the edge of a fen: tangled trees have given way to thick ground cover, which spreads out ahead of them into a mist enhanced by the rain. The immensity of his task suddenly hits Ffrewgí; the trust of his companions and the journey ahead.
Avoiding the eyes of Ashrille and Cydwag, Ffrewgí leads them forward slowly. The soles of his feet sink in water that wells up through the thick grass. He will not find dry ground anywhere in the fen; he changes his trajectory only when the ground sinks enough for the water to come up over his feet.
They move like this for a long time, traveling carefully, creeping forward.
“At least the rain is keeping the bugs down,” remarks Ashrille at one point.
Ffrewgí is thankful for that, at least. His muscles ache, half from stress and tension and half from the long day’s journey.
Night is a crawling darkness devouring the pale grey clouds when Cydwag cries out, “Tumbled skin!”, quoting the riddle and drawing Ffrewgí’s attention to a long slope ahead, dotted with the dark shapes of boulders. They are all soaked by rain and fen and, after a final push, fall exhausted onto the solid ground of the slope.
“Come on,” says Cydwag after she has regained her breath, “let’s see if we can find some shelter.”
Ffrewgí and Ashrille drag themselves up and follow after the hunter as she stumbles from boulder to boulder. Eventually, they encounter a gigantic rock with an almost smooth scoop cut from one side. Pressed against the cold stone, the ground finds they are protected from most of the rain.
“Good enough,” declares Ashrille. “I’ll forage for breakfast, how does that sound?”
Food has been far from Ffrewgí’s consciousness and, even now reminded of it, he does not feel hungry. Before he can marvel at that, he has fallen asleep.
* * *
Blowing rain wakes them in the early morning and accompanies them as they trudge through the boulders into a cedarwood forest. True to her word, Ashrille provides various roots and tubers for them to gnaw on as they travel.
They do not immediately see any sign of the riddle’s next instruction---whitest bark, they recall---so they journey along the foot of the slope and then straight along the bottom of a shallow valley, following a thin brook trickling west-northwest from the fen. They encounter no birch---what they surmise to be the white bark of the riddle---before nightfall.
“The terrain isn’t difficult,” says Ffrewgí, resting against the bole of a tree, “should we travel through part of the night?”
“What if we weren’t meant to travel in this direction?” asks Cydwag.
“The riddle gave details for the rest,” ventures Ashrille.
Ffrewgí nods. “I mean, the other groups didn’t succeed and they weren’t punished, so at worst we just travel another day’s-journey in this direction and then turn back if we find nothing.” He pauses. “Right?”
“Works for me.” Ashrille shrugs.
“Alright,” says Cydwag.
They keep on until the forest is wreathed in absolute black, then stop to sleep. Calling out to each other to keep together, they find moderate shelter beneath the spreading boughs of a stunted cedar and huddle together for warmth.
This night, Ffrewgí is kept awake by his empty stomach. He hopes its grumbling will not wake the others. The pattering of rain leads his numbing mind slowly, very slowly, to sleep. When his consciousness surfaces for a moment a movement of the stars later, the forest is silent but for the creaking of trees and the intermittent drips of collected rain losing purchase on the canopy above.
He wakes up fully to a grey dawn. He has pressed himself around the root of the tree. Ashrille is sitting up just outside the skirt of cedar branches. Ffrewgí groans as he sits up.
“Cydwag is off hunting. We’re supposed to start a fire,” says Ashrille.
They find dry moss without much difficulty, and Ashrille manages to find some pieces of flint. Sparks catch after a few attempts striking the flint against the heel of Ashrille’s knife, and she nurses the little tongue of flame with additional clumps of moss until it catches onto the tinder Ffrewgí has gathered.
They have a respectable campfire burning when Cydwag returns with a squirrel and a shaggy rabbit.
“Can I use your knife, Ashrille?”
Ashrille hands Cydwag the implement, and Cydwag makes quick work preparing the critters for roasting.
After eating, they wipe their greasy hands on their mossy seats and set off in what Ffrewgí really hopes is the same direction they had been traveling the day before. As close as matters, anyway.
Ashrille forages an earthy lunch, but before they have finished the chewy tubers they leave the cedar woods and enter a meadow.
“There’s our white bark,” remarks Cydwag.
Across the meadow spreads the verge of an incredibly bright birch strand. Ffrewgí has never seen birch trees so straight or white.
“Now for reeds and a pond,” he says, “right?”
They enter the birch forest and are dazzled by the sudden brightness. Ffrewgí cannot see the sun through the leaves, but dappled shadows play across the faces of his companions as they, too, look around in amazement. A breeze blows a curl of mist through the arrow-straight trees ahead of them and a rainbow plays in its droplets.
“If I were a magical creature I’d spend my time here, too,” says Ashrille with a wry smile.
They discover the pond after a short wander through the trees---its still, almost perfectly round surface about a dozen paces wide and surrounded by thick, rich-green reeds.
They approach it gingerly, but no creature of any kind is in sight.
“Gladhyn!” exclaims Ashrille, feeling a reed between her fingers. She drops to her knees and pulls up a handful of the reed, revealing a bundle of thick, slightly pink roots. “These’re better than the muck I’ve been feeding you today.” She hands the bundle to Cydwag, then pulls up another for Ffrewgí, then for herself.
The roots are sweet and crisp and Ffrewgí makes short work of his handful. He moves to the pond’s edge himself, pulls up reeds one at a time and eats their roots slowly. The others sit on the clean grass. Cydwag pulls up a few more reeds also.
“Should we wait here out of sight?” suggests Cydwag after a period of silence. “Maybe the creature will return, if this is its favourite watering hole.”
“Seems as good an idea as any,” says Ashrille.
“What about the danger?” asks Ffrewgí, “that the riddle mentions?”
Ashrille shrugs. “Let’s hope Crow-watcher just wanted to make an impression.”
Ffrewgí’s mind conjures up visions of Anwen’s group, staggering into camp covered in blood. He is not even sure if he remembers the image correctly, whether they had been so obviously injured. In his head, they are riddled with vicious wounds. But he does not say anything. He watches Cydwag’s arm flex as she raises herself to her feet. The sunlight glints off the wicked points of her spears. We’ll be okay, Ffrewgí assures himself.
“Let’s get comfortable,” says Cydwag, moving into the trees.
Ffrewgí grabs a handful of Gladhyn and follows.
* * *
They wait for what feels like a long time, though sunlight is still a bright golden presence in the forest as Ffrewgí’s eyes begin to droop. They have not seen anything move near the pond, mystical creature or otherwise.
Ffrewgí stirs and looks over at his companions. Cydwag has an arrow nocked in her bow, but its point is down and she is leaning back against the bole of a tree. Ashrille is idly picking at the grass around her.
“Shouldn’t the sun be going down?” whispers Ffrewgí.
Ashrille looks up from the grass, muttering, “Now that you mention it . . .”
Cydwag starts and the arrow falls from her bowstring.
“Something’s not right,” says Ashrille. She stands up, peering up through the forest’s canopy.
“Is it morning?” asks Cydwag groggily. “I think I fell asleep.”
“It’s the same day,” says Ffrewgí slowly.
Ashrille breaks from cover and walks slowly to the pond. “We came from there, right?” she asks, pointing roughly southeast. At Ffrewgí’s hesitant nod, she crouches down by the reeds. “The sun hasn’t moved since we’ve been here.”
Ffrewgí follows her eyes to the shadows, faint and soft on the moss bordering the reeds.
“Why is it sunny, anyway?” asks Cydwag, rubbing her eyes and looking up. “It's been overcast or raining every other day.”
Cydwag picks up her bow and makes sure her arrow is tight against the string. “Stay here. I’m going to go check if it is sunny outside the birches.”
When she comes back, she is running. “It is morning,” she gasps out. “Dawn is just breaking. We spent all evening and night in here somehow.”
Initially, Ffrewgí’s shock is that of surprise and incredulity. Then at his surroundings---magic! Then it hits him: today is their fourth day gone from the Gwaedwn village and they have only two days and one night to return within Symbre’s schedule. Two days and one night to make a journey back from a place that took them three days and two nights to arrive at.
This latter shock passes through the others, too; Ffrewgí sees it on their faces. He musters himself as best he can; cries out, “We need to go!” and heads southeast at a jog that in his panic he does not monitor for sustainability. Cydwag and Ashrille fall in behind him.
He is already stumbling to a walk as they break out of the birch forest into air noticeably cooler and greyer, despite the clarity of the rising sun through the cedars ahead. Ashrille and Cydwag pass him, turn back when he bends over coughing.
“Come on,” encourages Cydwag. “We can slow our pace a bit. We can rest before tackling the fen.”
Ffrewgí wrests control of his lungs, nods, and follows as the girls set off again into the beams of light from the east.
* * *
It is sometime late in the night when they pass through the field of boulders. They have hardly collapsed against a stone when dawn greys the sky across the fen.
“We’ll rest until it’s light,” gasps Cydwag.
The others have nothing in them with which to generate a response, and none of them are awake to rouse the others a movement of the sun later when the heat of the fully risen sun has woken a bank of steam from the fen.
Ashrille stirs first, another movement later. “Gotta go,” she says groggily, shaking the others awake.
Ffrewgí leads them through the fen. They travel more quickly than they had on their first trip through, but the journey still takes all of the morning and everyone suffers from the extra energy their swiftness requires. They do not pause on the far dry bank, however, but slog onward into a sheet of rain.
The clouds do not allow for an estimate of time remaining in the day, but when they reach the stone thorn there is still grey light in the air. Wearily, they turn further south and trudge on.
* * *
Very little of Ffrewgí is left when he and his companions finally stagger into the village in the wan half light of predawn---only his body, though not his awareness of it. It collapses in his tent and Ffrewgí only remembers the final leg of his journey when he is roused in the full morning for his report to Fuldryn.
Even then, it all seems a blur. Only a solitary, faded green reed poking his side from the waist of his pants draws into Ffrewgí’s sharp focus the reality of that birch wood.
The flickering of a silvery-blue fish darts in and out of his mind’s eye, swimming in the cool depths of the still pond.
