by Kit Peel
In the end, Wyn ran upstairs to her room. She sat with her back to her bedroom door, her face hidden in her knees, replaying in her mind the moment when Kate threw herself between Wyn and the bear. However much she tried to hide from it, in her heart, Wyn knew that Tawhir was right. She was the one that the creature was interested in.
It was almost a relief when the power went off and Wyn’s room was plunged into darkness.
10
—
She was still sitting on her bedroom floor when, hours later, the house cold and silent and snow drifting past the windows, Robin tapped lightly on the door.
Wyn clambered painfully to her feet, stiff all over, and let him in. Wyn’s first question was about Kate. The vicar shook his head. He looked as exhausted as Wyn felt.
“I spoke to Joan and she says Kate is comfortable. The doctors have done more tests and we should have some results in the morning. These things always take time.”
Wyn returned to her place on the floor, drawing up her knees in her hands.
“It should have been me in hospital, not Kate. She wouldn’t have been at the lake if it wasn’t for me. And when the bear … she was the one who tried to fight him off. I panicked. I didn’t do anything to help her.”
“What could you have done, love? I’ve seen Thwaite lift fallen trees and move boulders the size of a car. If he couldn’t stop the bear, then I don’t imagine anyone could.”
“It still should have been me.”
Robin sat on the floor next to her, and for a while they both watched the snow falling.
“Who is Thwaite?” asked Wyn.
“He’s been safeguarding the dale since long before any people settled here. Every tree, every plant, every flower and every animal in the dale is under his stewardship.”
“Like a sort of farmer?”
“I’ve always thought of him as a gardener. Nidderdale is his garden and he tends it. He’s a spirit of nature, a guardian of the earth. I’m not an expert in these things, but I do know that he’s not alone. There are many other spirits of nature like him all over the world, hidden from sight. Some, like Thwaite, look after the earth, others guard the waters, there are spirits of the winds, and spirits who bring fire and others …”
Electricity surged through Wyn’s body and a second later the window blasted open, snow billowing into the room. Robin went to shut it, then gave a gasp of surprise. Out of nowhere, Tawhir had materialized on the windowsill. He dropped lightly into the room.
“… who watch over the cold places. Ice spirits, such as the bear,” said Tawhir, finishing Robin’s sentence.
He was walking around the room and inspecting it with an expression of faint amusement.
“And if Wyn had exerted herself just one little bit, the bear would have been running northwards as fast as he could and your daughter would be sleeping soundly across the corridor.
“I’ve been talking with the old earther on your behalf. One of the more unpleasant few hours of my life. They’ve got no people skills, earthers. You try cheering him up with a lot of warm air about his sorry little territory — how charming it must be in spring and, oh, what a lovely knoll of sycamores — and what do you get? A thank you? A bunch of flowers? No, a load of abuse and an axe swinging at your head. It took forever, and a lot of promises from me —”
As Tawhir bent to examine a glass box of bangles on Wyn’s chest of drawers, his hair fell down across his face. Like an invisible hand, a breeze blew the hair back from his eyes. Wyn felt Robin’s intake of breath.
“A wind spirit,” Robin murmured.
“… Finally the old stuck-in-mud has come to his senses,” continued Tawhir. “He wants to see you now.”
“What for?” asked Robin.
“To test her.”
“What do you mean test her? What’s all this about?” said Robin.
Tawhir’s eyes were locked on Wyn’s. She glared back at him.
“Don’t you want your friend to get better?” he said. “There’s not a doctor in the world who can heal her, but you can. You could melt the ice in her in an instant. You have gifts, Wyn, gifts that you’ve kept hidden for too long. You can choose to keep them locked away. If you do that, your friend will never recover. She will lie in hospital for the rest of her life, never waking. Or you can unlock your true power and become who you were born to be. You won’t just have the power to save your friend. You will be able to change the face of this frozen world.”
Tawhir hopped onto the window frame and held out his hand.
“Thwaite is in his wood, waiting for you. I can carry you to him.”
While Wyn longed to take the boy’s hand, a warning voice inside her made her shrink from him. A strange expression passed over the boy’s face. He turned from her, his long hair masking his features.
“Don’t be late. He’s not the waiting type.”
The boy leapt into the night. Wind blew behind him, banging the window. Wyn went to fasten it, expecting to see him running over the pale fields. There was no sign of him and no footprints on the freshly fallen snow around the house. Beside her, Robin nodded up into the night sky, a trace of wonder in his tired features.
“All my life, I’ve wanted to see a wind spirit. I never thought I actually would,” said Robin. Wyn could see how hard he was trying not to look at her differently. “Do you know what he was talking about, love?”
Wyn took a deep breath, summoning up the courage to tell him what she had never revealed to anyone else: how she never felt the cold, how she could sit inches from a roaring fire and never get burned, and how it was as if Tawhir had stepped out of the deepest corner of Wyn’s mind. In the end, all she could manage to share with Robin was a shrug.
“You don’t have to go,” he told her, and despite herself, Wyn was desperate to stay. But she saw the hope in Robin’s eyes and knew what she had to do — for him, for her friend.
“I want to,” she insisted.
Tears filled Robin’s eyes. He took her hand, squeezing it.
“Then we’ll go together,” he said
As quietly as they could, so as not to wake Lisa, Wyn and Robin crept out of the house and set out for Skrikes Wood. In the dale below, Pateley Bridge lay motionless, wreathed in streetlamps and snowfall. At the bottom of the lane, jackdaws were savaging a pile of garbage bags.
“I was a boy, some years younger than you, when I first saw Thwaite,” said Robin. “Mary and I were walking by Gouthwaite Reservoir one winter’s morning, looking for some sheep that our father was missing. Brian Davis had come up from Wath to help us. We were quite a threesome back then, always getting into trouble. Not unlike you, Kate and John.”
Robin described how a strange farmer had appeared out of nowhere.
“He was perfectly normal-looking, until we noticed that his legs were bare below the knee. He stopped, looked at us and then walked under some hawthorns and vanished from sight. We ran after him, but he was gone. Now, Mary and I knew every farmer in the dale and didn’t recognize him. Besides, who’d ever heard of a farmer going about barefoot? We weren’t sure if we’d seen a madman or a ghost. All we did know was that we had to find him again.”
Robin told how after weeks of looking for the barefoot farmer all around Gouthwaite Reservoir, the three of them had been coming over the bridge at the bottom of Pateley one evening and to their surprise found Thwaite waiting for them on the other side.
“I think he wanted to ambush us since we’d been trying to ambush him,” said Robin. “There were people walking right past him, but we were the only ones who saw him. We had the gift, he told us later.”
“What’s that?”
“Some people are able to see the spirits. Don’t ask me how or why. All I know is that it’s a gift from nature and we were lucky to be given it, and luckier still to be open to it. Not everyone who is born with the gift se
es the spirits. Thwaite told me once that there’s others in the dale who have the gift but have turned their backs on nature and never learned to use it. If only they knew what they were missing. The things Mary, Brian and I have seen when we’ve been helping Thwaite and his lover around the dale.”
“His lover?”
“A water spirit called Naia. She is, or was, the guardian of all the rivers and streams in the dale. But don’t mention her in front of Thwaite. She’s another one the ice has taken.”
Robin fell silent and now Wyn grew increasingly panicky at the prospect of the tests that Thwaite had in store for her and the meaning of Tawhir’s words: “Change the face of this frozen world.”
11
—
The iron gate at the entrance to Skrikes Wood slammed in the darkness. Thwaite came striding through the deep snow, his collie dog bounding beside him.
“How’s young Kate?” he asked.
Robin gave a shake of his head. The collie padded forward and pressed itself against the vicar.
“Hello, Pip,” said Robin, stroking the dog.
Thwaite signaled Wyn to come close. Trying not to show her fear, she did as she was told. As she took those few steps, the night seemed to close around the wood. Clouds were thickening in the night sky. She had the acute sensation that Tawhir was nearby, watching her every movement.
“Give me your hands,” said Thwaite.
“What for?”
Without asking, Thwaite took Wyn’s hands and pressed them, palms down, to the cold bough of one of the beeches.
“Can you feel anything?”
“It’s rotten. And wet,” said Wyn, her relief tempered by a mild disappointment. So, was that it?
“I’m not talking about the outside. Still your mind and concentrate. Now, can you feel its heart and its soul?”
Shaking Thwaite’s hands off, she rubbed her palms against the bark, digging her fingers into its ridges. Once again, there was nothing. She shook her head.
“You’re certain?”
“It’s a tree,” snapped Wyn, frustrated at failing a test that she didn’t understand.
Thwaite gave a long exhale of breath and turned his attention away from Wyn.
“That’s that, then. Robin, you’d best take her home.”
Wind whipped around her and a second later Tawhir was there, flushed with anger.
“Try something else,” he demanded.
“I’ve wasted enough time on your fantasies and now I’ve better things to be getting on with.”
“Like watching yourself getting buried by snow? She is Mugasa. You’ve got to test her again.”
As Thwaite and Tawhir argued over her, Robin put his arm around her, whispering, “Let’s go home, love.”
In a blur, Tawhir was in front of Wyn, blocking her way.
“I’ve seen you do this so many times before. There was a forest, high in the Alps. You used to go there and spend hours in the company of trees. Don’t you remember?”
And for a split second, Wyn found herself breathing in the hot, rich scent of fir trees and saw familiar snow-capped peaks gleaming through branches. She recognized them as the mountains of her dreams. Tawhir was watching her intently.
“You do remember, don’t you? I can see it in your eyes.”
“I’ve never been abroad,” Wyn whispered. And she never had. Mrs. March would barely leave the dale, and the freezing weather had put a stop to the Hebdens’ travel plans.
“Don’t you want to help your friend, Mugasa?” the boy demanded.
“Stop calling me that!”
“Why? It’s your name.”
“My name’s Wyn!” she yelled, slapping her hand against a beech in frustration.
Immediately, she felt something like a low electricity; a faint trembling in the heart of the tree. She pressed both hands against the bough. The electricity surged. Startled, she pulled her hands away with a cry.
“What is that?” she said.
“What? What did you feel?” asked Tawhir.
The boy was thrust quickly out of the way by Thwaite and now Wyn found herself looking into his intense green eyes.
“Tell me what just happened?”
When Wyn told him, the old man grew very still.
“Do it again, just don’t upset him this time,” said Thwaite.
“Him?”
“The tree, who else? He’s a good one for conversation, but like all beeches he’s proud and easily offended. So I’d start with saying sorry if I were you.”
She was aware that Tawhir and Robin, too, were watching her every move. Disconcerted by their stares, Wyn closed her eyes and cautiously laid her hands on the tree.
At her touch, the tree vibrated hard, almost like an upset swarm of bees. Wyn found herself whispering an apology, which would have been the strangest thing she’d ever done if the tree hadn’t responded to her. Its vibrations lessened and then, to Wyn’s amazement, silent images began flashing in her mind: rain falling hard in the wood, dripping off the green-clad branches of the nearby trees; a rabbit digging just where the farmer had rested his axe. She saw the surrounding trees as saplings, no higher than the bluebells that encircled them. The tree gave a funny quiver and the next thing she saw made her gasp. It was herself and Mrs. March. She would only have been one or two, toddling around with a mushroom in her hand and snatching at a toadstool on the ground, before being pulled away and bursting into a temper. The image was gone as fast as it came, replaced by snow falling on a gray evening.
Wyn’s heart had leapt at the sight of her old foster mother and now she was frantic to get that image back. She squeezed the bough, begging the tree, “Show me that again.” But the tree wouldn’t repeat it, however much Wyn pleaded.
She became aware of Thwaite resting a hand on the bough above hers.
“Make it show me that again,” she demanded.
“No. They aren’t to be forced,” said Thwaite. His voice was tight with tension.
“What’s going on?” asked Robin.
“They’re showing her their memories,” said Thwaite.
“That’s more than just the gift, isn’t it?”
“It may be,” said Thwaite.
The earth spirit led Wyn from tree to tree, telling her to lay her hands on them and speak out what she saw. Oak, beech, fir, lime, holly; some trembled so hard her hands shook, others barely quivered, but they were all eager to share their memories with her.
No one memory was the same. One beech remembered a sunset through the high branches, while a lime tree a few feet away showed Wyn snapshots of a hundred years of springtime snowdrops, vibrating with pleasure in the years when the white flowers rose up around its trunk with an unbroken perfection. A fir tree showed her mistle thrushes eating red berries from a rowan across the fields. The trees never lingered on the snow and frost that now left them stripped and pocked with decay. They preferred to show Wyn memories of warmer days. But as much as Wyn clambered through the thick snow to touch bough after bough, each time whispering a fervent plea to the trees, she never saw herself with her foster mother again.
A thick-limbed oak deep in the wood showed her Thwaite towering down, his giant fingers feeling the trunk. For a moment Wyn didn’t understand, then she saw saplings behind him no higher than his knee and realized the tree was showing her when the wood was first planted. Water droplets sparkled on a cobweb strung between two saplings. All around, the wood was wet with dew and the misty light of dawn. Thwaite was scooping up dew from the wood floor and washing his face with it. Thwaite was much younger then, his hair straw-colored, his eyes glossy as new grass. He was smiling. Beside him, Wyn saw a young blue-eyed woman walking barefoot through the damp wood. She put an arm around Thwaite, stroking the back of his neck. The image passed and the tree showed her acorns blowing against broad leaves.
&
nbsp; Thwaite prised her hand from the trunk of the oak.
“That’s enough,” he said.
“You believe me now?” Tawhir asked Thwaite. The boy was practically hopping from foot to foot with excitement. She found herself wanting to smile back at him but caught herself just in time.
“I don’t know,” muttered Thwaite.
“How much more evidence do you need?” asked Tawhir. “She’s not an earther, but she’s got your powers and more besides. Who else could she be?”
“What is all this about? Who do you think Wyn is?” said Robin.
“The best thing you can do is to go home and forget what you’ve seen,” Tawhir told the priest. “Don’t tell anyone and don’t come back here. Anything you do to draw attention to us or Wyn will only put her in danger.”
“What sort of danger? What’s all this about, Thwaite?”
“The boy here thinks Wyn is one of us.”
“Wyn’s a spirit?” said Robin breathlessly, and as he spoke Wyn felt her stomach turn. She reached for her foster father’s hand, conscious of Tawhir watching her intently.
“It’s time you went home,” said the wind spirit.
As the boy spoke, a stiff breeze picked up around Robin, jostling and buffeting him. Wyn clung to Robin, yelling at Tawhir to stop.
A huge hand grabbed Tawhir by the scruff of the neck and threw him to one side. The boy vanished before he hit a tree and reappeared, rubbing his neck and glowering at Thwaite. All around Wyn and Robin, snow drifted silently to the ground.
“You’re in my territory, which means you’ll behave yourself,” said Thwaite, which brought an angry interjection from Tawhir. The old man muttered under his breath and all at once the ground underneath them shook and Tawhir was cursing as he was sucked downwards, as if he’d just stepped into quicksand. He stopped sinking when the snow was up to his waist, but continued to struggle and complain.
