My heart had been withered and empty all summer, as dead as the leaves falling around us. This was the spring of life, the water, the sunlight, the food for my hunger.
So said my heart.
My reason said: No no no no no this is not right not right not right
Mr. Dart was gripping my arms like iron bands.
The silver king was turning toward us, the mist behind him shaping a retinue of shadows. I leaned forward, pressing hard against the force binding my arms, reason calling faint as Mr. Dart’s words, some hunger in my heart turning unerring to the silver king turning toward us.
The ululation changed its rhythm, rising and falling faster now, falling into recognizable notes, the pattern key of a spell we’d learned as boys.
Once the commonest of sounds, the whistle to summon light.
Dol-fa-ti-ti-dol
Whistle a few notes and anyone could call light into a dark room, mage or no, before the Empire fell.
In the Interim it had called … other things.
Dol-fa-ti-ti-dol came the high wail.
The silver king turned towards us, glided towards us. He raised up his arms and the light left all the faint glimmering reflections and ran home to his embrace. The shadows behind him swirled grey on black, smoke on black velvet. The wind promised me that it would fill the dark hole left by Lark—
Oh, Lark, I thought, how I had loved her—
Dol-fa-ti-ti-do-o-o-ol
The light gathered into a ball, a great armful of silver fire. All around us the forest was so utterly silent, and dark, and all I could see now was the light and the silver face and my heart thundered in my chest as it expanded trying to grab all the fullness it could and the light started to expand, silver light that frosted everything it touched, cold light turning each leaf and twig and bracken frond into silver gilt.
My chest ached to expand along with the light expanding outward towards us, my ribcage aching with the blood pounding through my veins, my head throbbing, the forest in my vision darkening as the wave of silver came gliding sliding towards us, and all I could hear was the wailing, and all I could feel was my heart pummelling at my breast as if it were a caged beast hurling itself desperately to freedom—
Mr. Dart took one deliberate step forward, and as I twisted away from his grip he let go of one of my arms, reached his arm back deliberately so that for the barest moment it was illuminated by the frothy edge of the silver tide, and while I was consumed with a tyrant wave of jealousy that he could heed the call while I was yet immobile—flipped my coat up over my head, and while I fought with the sudden dazzle-darkness, shoved me into the night.
I eventually flailed my arms and head free, buttons popping everywhere, and was able to glare at him, or in the direction I thought he was in, since I couldn’t see more than blurs.
When I cursed him he shoved me again. This time I lurched through a cobweb and flinched sideways into him. He stopped abruptly. “Can you still hear them?” he asked in a hoarse whisper.
I held my breath. The woods were eerily quiet, with a heavy close feeling to them. I couldn’t hear the keening. I felt like keening myself, just to relieve the internal pressure. I hadn’t realized how much of a hole there was in me until I saw the light gathering.
I started to pull against Mr. Dart again, preparing to run back towards the silver king, to throw myself into the cool silver light. But each motion pushed me into cobwebs and hanging vines; I kept stopping in horror at their touch. Some late flower was aggravatingly scented, and my nose’s reflexive twitching kept distracting me.
I flinched away again from another netting of spiderwebs, and stepped on something soft and moving. As I gagged in horror it exploded up under my feet.
Mr. Dart is no poltroon, but even as I was thinking, pheasant, he exclaimed sharply and ran forward. I followed into a face-full of mildewed leaves, and lost both reason and heart in favour of base physical reaction, alternately tugged and tugging as I sneezed or held it back.
He led me into more cobwebs of appalling thickness. My shoulder crashed into something sturdy holding up the webs, sending a mass of dried seedpods clacking wildly. I reeled away towards Mr. Dart, through a hideous mass of vines shrouded with spidersilk.
The musty, mildewy leaves, damp and slimy with the rain, wrapped about in spiders, were bad enough—I was already sneezing enough to alert every auditor in half the county—but then as I tripped over something I went face-first into a spray of lingering blossoms of something that were not so much intensely fragrant as violently so.
Not even the wireweed-laced tobacco—not even the smoke from the cultists’ sacrifice—not even the Lady’s perfume—had gone so immediately against my system as did those flowers. I took half a breath in and my head exploded.
Mr. Dart did his best to catch me, but I was incapable of controlling my limbs. We staggered a few steps backwards, got out of the twining plants, lost our balance on the edge of a bank, and both of us pitched straight into icy water with a large and alarming splash.
Chapter Thirteen
The shock of the cold water released the first convulsions—and the spell.
I broke the surface gasping gratefully, unable to concentrate on anything but getting away from the flowers and onto the bank where I could breathe, and Silver Priest be damned—as he most certainly was, to invoke the Dark Kings as he had. I tried to explain that I was fine, that I wouldn’t go running again, but Mr. Dart shoved me the other direction, into a stand of bulrushes.
I went sideways under again, got an earful of muck, realized we weren’t in deep water, and got my feet under me. Before I could stand upright, Mr. Dart pulled my sodden clothes down sharply.
I sat down hard into the water and stared at him. “Shh!” he said in my ear, as softly as any poacher my father would have admired. “Hide.”
From what? I wanted to ask, but then I saw the lantern swinging towards us.
It was a strange red light, and I frowned at it for a good few seconds until it resolved into an old-fashioned werelight. I hadn’t seen one of those in proper use since before the Fall of Astandalas—even at Morrowlea no one’s used them since the Interim, when good intentions made for some very strange results for things done under magical light.
“What was that?” asked a nervous voice: feminine, breathy, high-pitched. “They aren’t coming here, are they?”
“They won’t come past the boundaries, domina,” another woman’s voice replied, this one deeper, melodious, and controlled. “Never fret. They’re under control.”
Something about the way she said control sent a shiver down my spine. The first woman sounded only partially convinced. “They seemed very wild, crashing through the woods like that, howling and drinking and … other things.”
The other woman sounded very satisfied with herself when she replied. “They are devotees of the old gods, domina. That is how they worship. Do not fret yourself.”
“I wish we hadn’t had to come out the same night.”
“The rain delayed our harvest, but it’ll be the stronger for being picked tonight, domina. The moon is in the House of the Dragon, and that means increased vigour in seed of all sorts.”
“You’re certain they can’t come in here?”
The second woman’s voice was nearly a purr. “Not past my boundaries, domina.”
“Then what was that noise in the moat?”
Moat? I frowned at the dim red light, which had paused a few yards away from us, further down the bank. It barely illuminated anything but a wavering circle on the grass, and the lower half of the speakers. The Baron’s manse had a moat, but that was on the northern side of Ragnor Bella, nowhere near Littlegarth and the Lady’s Pools. The Talgarths’ house was built on the river, but that was hardly a moat …
Mr. Dart gripped me tightly. I sank my mouth down below the level of the water, to make sure as much of me as possible was covered. The speakers came a few steps closer. I could see that there were actually three of them,
the two speakers in long cloaks and the third a servant of some sort, far enough back that I couldn’t make out age or role, only that he was wearing trousers and carrying something quite large, perhaps the size of a money chest. A basket, I realized, for whatever they were harvesting.
Harvesting?
“I will look for you, domina. I do not expect it is anything more than an animal.”
The one holding the werelight paced closer to the water. She was clearly looking into the reeds and water plants to see what had made the noise. I held my breath, but could feel the sneezes rising up behind my nose, through the ravaged back of my throat. I was miserably sure I would give us away.
Mr. Dart poked me in the side with something stiff. Using the slowest movements I could manage, I turned to look at him. He passed me a broken length of hollow reed, then sank out of sight amidst the arrowleaf plants next to him.
There didn’t seem to be anything else for it, so I imitated him, putting the foul-tasting reed in my mouth and sinking slowly under the water, clutching at the slimy bases of the plants before me to anchor my position.
I could barely breathe through the reed, my throat thick and sore, but with my nose below the surface I seemed at last free of the need to sneeze. That was joy enough to keep me under.
The werelight was clearly visible on the surface of the water, swinging back and forth over the bank. Mr. Dart was a dark shape next to me. I pressed myself down into the cold muck. All the muscles in my back and neck ached with trying not to float.
We held ourselves like that until the light was well gone. I waited after Mr. Dart rose slowly in a cloud of bubbles, fearful I’d start sneezing as soon as I broke the surface. Eventually he pulled at my collar and I rose.
I managed to suppress the immediate outburst, at least enough that I only made a continuous whuffling kind of noise with occasional snorts mixed in, like nasal hiccoughs.
The bank was not all that high, but it was steep, we were waist deep in the water, hands cold and unresponsive, and our sodden clothes extremely heavy, and Mr. Dart seemed to have hurt his arm.
I kept freezing in place in the attempt to prevent explosive sneezing—and, well, several minutes of increasingly disastrous attempts added the effort to keep from laughing to our exertions.
Eventually we gave up on that part of the bank and pushed into deeper water to see if we could swim to a better landing. Light from a house window passed through a screen of cedars to illuminate a stretch to one side, so we swam the other direction.
We snaked our way through a patch of water lilies with some difficulty, the stems slimy and uncooperative, before I clunked my shoulder on a large branch sticking out into the river. It was smeared with algae and moss and bird droppings, but provided enough leverage for us to finally roll to a soggy and relieved halt on a stretch of closely-cropped lawn.
There were lights above us. I blinked away the bright specks brought on by the exertion under low breath. They were still there. Rolling to a more upright position, I discovered that we’d clambered out on the wrong bank, and were now on the greensward below the Talgarths’ house.
“Ugh,” Mr. Dart said softly. “I’ve just put my hand in goose shit.”
I caught my breath carefully. “I suppose you’d be able to tell the difference from duck.”
“Ha ha. The Talgarths only have geese. And sweet peas.”
I pushed back against the wall of the house and with great difficulty got out of my wet coat. Geese … and when had the Talgarths diverted part of the Ladybeck to form a moat around their house? Why? “What are they hiding?”
“Old-fashioned immorality,” he replied, scooting himself next to me. “And magic, obviously.”
“Everyone already thought that.”
“True.”
“What do you think they’re harvesting?”
“Justice Talgarth’s sweet peas.”
I wheezed into my wet and squelchy handkerchief, somewhere between sneezes, laughter, and hiccoughs. The breeze kept bringing wafts of the intense flower-smell, fortunately somewhat diluted by distance. I was so wet that the drips from my hair were making splashing noises as they fell onto my shirt.
I rubbed at the bridge of my nose, trying to wipe away snot and water and goodness knows what else. “Thank you for breaking the enchantment back there, Mr. Dart.”
“Oh, my pleasure, Mr. Greenwing.”
“Did you touch that silver light?”
He was moving his hand back and forth as if trying to stretch out a kink in his wrist. I winced at the thought of how much my stupid staring at an obvious evil wizard had nearly cost us. He shook his head. “No, just wrenched it, I think, when we fell in the Lady’s Pool.”
I tried not to sneeze as I let out my breath over-hastily in relief. “Thank the Lady for that.”
“Indeed.” He leant back against the wall with a sigh. “I’ve been invited to supper here tomorrow. I don’t think Dame Talgarth would be overly pleased to find me out here tonight.”
“Impolite,” I managed between quiet explosions.
“Quite.”
Another pause. I tried to come up with something useful. “Do we go back across the moat or look for a bridge? I haven’t been here since they diverted the stream.”
“That was two years ago, after the bank started to go at the old clay pits.”
I was grateful he hadn’t suggested exploring them tonight, something we’d done a couple of times as boys, to see what might be hidden in the caves along the Ladybeck’s confluence with the Rag. What with cults and the Lady and magic going on at the Talgarths, it could be almost anything.
Mr. Dart sounded as placidly thoughtful as when discussing the merits of Mrs. Landry’s cheese soufflé over lunch. “They’ve got a drawbridge, but it’ll be up. Justice Talgarth is very concerned about the Good Neighbours in the Woods Noirell, the brigands in the Arguty Forest, and the ruffians on the roads everywhere.”
“When clearly he should be worried about the cultists in his back yard.”
“Those women must belong to the house. I think the nervous one was Domina Ringley, Dame Talgarth’s sister. I wonder what she’s doing out-and-about at midnight. Harvesting something sinister? And that wasn’t Dame Talgarth with her.”
I listened to his tone of voice with a sinking heart. “Now, Mr. Dart—”
“They’re not part of the cult, surely. Domina Ringley was worried about them coming in.”
“And they knew about it, how?”
“Come now, Mr. Greenwing, where’s your sense of adventure? Are you not your father’s son?”
I gave in. “They wouldn’t have swum the moat.”
“Good thinking,” he replied, and so we made our squelching way around the perimeter of the house, foiled at looking inside by tightly-drawn curtains and some modern shutters on what were presumably the kitchen windows.
Unfortunately, the drawbridge was up, the little boat was fastened to the other bank, and the geese were wide awake and vigilant.
They were white blobs against the grey grass. The first one gobbled at us, the second hissed, the third raised its wings and lunged, and the fourth took off with a high cackle for Mr. Dart. I kicked the one nearest me, connecting the one foot with a satisfying thunk but skidding the other on loose droppings. I windmilled wildly.
Mr. Dart cried: “Lights!” and plunged into the water.
The wild cackling and hissing and imprecations, together with the threat of imminent discovery, made me turn and dive into the moat after him.
“Hurry up,” he said, sounding rather like the geese as he hissed and pushed me into the boat. “That might be Dame Talgarth!”
“We can’t have her finding us,” I agreed solemnly, hauling him up after me. The geese were causing enough of a ruckus on the other bank that whoever was at the door seemed to be leaning out to glare at their milling chaos.
“Lie flat,” I added, pushing him down and following him with a strangled sneeze. “Curse this bloody hay
fever.”
“Shh!”
“Now who’s not much of a rebel at home?”
“Radical, you dolt.”
I risked a glance over the rim of the boat. Someone in light-coloured clothing was standing at the house door cursing the geese for being het up to no purpose. I started to relax, but as I lowered my head saw a red light bobbing along the bank towards us.
“We haven’t even been drinking,” Mr. Dart said mournfully.
I shoved him. “Out, out!”
“Hell!” said he, starting to laugh. “Get away, you oaf.”
“The domina’s coming back. Hurry.”
I sniffed mightily, a mistake as I got another waft of the intense perfume. Held my breath as we tumbled onto the bank, pulled each other up, and set off at a lumbering run towards the shrubbery looming darkly ahead of us.
We were both so wet and tired that we couldn’t move very fast. I was marginally faster, my runs finally coming into some use, and got to the safety of the shadows just in time to look back, see Mr. Dart pass me—and be nearly hit by something red shooting towards us at head-height.
I flung myself across Mr. Dart, landing us both awkwardly and painfully into some spiny shrub. The thing hit a tree ahead of us with a loud crack and a singed smell.
“What in the nine worlds is that?” I hissed at him.
He started to crawl away from the house on his belly, towards the tree. I followed him with a wary eye on the way the trunk was emitting sparks and a bad smell of such a rotten-egg intensity that I retched and sneezed at the same time.
“Your father was the soldier,” he hissed back. “Shh.”
We both listened. I gulped, face against the cool moist ground, breathing in the earthiness, nose twitching like a mad rabbit. Several more cracks exploded above us, but over to our right, a bit away from where Mr. Dart was aiming.
I wondered how often his poaching trips had led him to this part of the Coombe. The rotten-egg smell grew stronger and stronger, mixed with a gust of wind bringing the sickly intense flower-perfume. I gripped myself hard, hands clamped across my mouth and nose, retching soundlessly (and fruitlessly, by this point), and was sure my body should just shut down from over-stimulation. Alas, this did not happen.
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