My legs were aching so badly that I was gloomily certain they would fall off before long. It was Tomorrow, and I trudged along behind Akiva with the sour thought that if I did die of exhaustion, at least I wouldn’t have to do the gardening tomorrow. We had started out at first light without stopping to do more than the most rudimentary gardening, much to my secret glee, but by midday my glee had sunk under the twin discomforts of sore legs and an empty belly. Stopping for lunch had repaired my empty stomach but only increased the dull ache in my calves. Horned hedgepigs, why did I have to ask the wrong questions!
For the past hour we had been walking along one of the boundaries, which turned out to be an extremely uncomfortable experience. Whatever the boundary was, my forest sight stopped abruptly where it began, leaving me helplessly blind and considerably indignant about it. I hadn’t worked so hard to see the lines – well, fairly hard, anyway – only to find it vanishing at the edge of Akiva’s forest.
When I complained to Akiva, she snorted and said: “Of course you can’t see over the boundary, child. The forest isn’t one: all forests meet and merge in deep forest. This border belongs to Gwydion, and his forest happens to be in Civet. Look at the trees over there.”
I did: at first uncomprehendingly, and then with light dawning. “They’re pines and that. Cold weather trees.”
“Exactly.”
“But that doesn’t explain why I can’t see the lines,” I grumbled, returning to the point of contention. “Doesn’t Gwydion’s forest have lines?”
“Of course it does!” Akiva stopped short, I think in exasperation, and I saw something pass across her face. “Deep forest is very . . . possessive. It chooses a warden and sticks with them to the exclusion of everyone else. Only Gwydion can see the lines clearly in his own wardship.”
I grimaced, very far from satisfied. “How can you bear it?”
Again, an expression I didn’t understand came and went on Akiva’s face.
“I have my ways and means,” she said cryptically, and much to my indignation she refused to say any more. She did tell me that Cassandra’s wardship also bordered on hers in some remote part of it. Maybe she said it to distract me. I tucked away this interesting titbit for later consideration and asked Akiva exactly where Cassandra’s forest really was.
Not wholly to my surprise, she only grunted and said: “Very far from here. Near or far doesn’t matter to the forest.”
It made me grin to think how closely she had come to saying what Bastian had, and despite my sore legs I began to feel more cheerful.
As we passed around the boundaries we found increasingly more of the sticky black tendrils that had attacked Bastian, and Akiva began to look rather grim.
“Traps,” she explained shortly to me. “They’re attuned to Bastian on alternating threads. She has no business setting traps on my wardship.”
“Is that breaking or bending the rules?” I asked, angry on Akiva’s behalf.
“Neither. It’s bad manners,” she told me, dismantling one of the traps. “It’s as if I went into your mother’s kitchen and cooked my breakfast, then left the dishes for her and went on my way.”
We found three more traps after that, and it struck me that Akiva had suggested this outing not just to teach me of the boundaries, but because she had suspected something of the kind. It was a long and wearisome business: even travelling at speed along the deep forest threads the distance was massive, and it was some time after dusk when Akiva and I wearily returned home. I hadn’t sensed Bastian anywhere in our journeying, which worried me, but Akiva was dismissive.
“The wolf knows how to take care of himself. Now that Cassandra has her eye on him, he’ll have to be more careful. I doubt very much that he’ll risk his hide by coming too near you again.”
I frowned to myself at the inflexible certainty of her voice. “You told Cassandra you sent him away.”
“Cassandra was getting too close for comfort,” Akiva said, shooting a sharp look at me. “I may very well be stronger than her on my own wardship but I can’t protect every inch of it at the same time. If I’m right she’ll come unstuck without any help from me. The longer Bastian avoids her, the better for him. Possibly the better for you, too, child.”
Later, drying my hair before the fire and toasting bread and cheese, I asked: “What do you mean, about Cassandra coming unstuck?”
“Sooner or later all her bending of the rules will catch up with her. Now stop talking, there’s a good child; finish your pinafore and then off to bed with you.”
I did as I was told, licking my fingers carefully to avoid greasy patches on the material, but my eyes were dropping shut every other minute and my stitches were looser and more uneven than usual. I would have to unpick all of my work the next morning. Somehow I didn’t mind. Akiva looked over my shoulder and gave the snort that was her laugh, but I was too sleepy to mind that either.
When I woke the next morning it was with a fully formed question in my mind. Akiva had taken me on as an apprentice: was I to be the next warden of the forest? Gwydion had been her apprentice, and he had his own wardship. It was food for thought, and I thought about it at great length, sitting up in bed with a fierce, thoughtful frown. I thought about it so long, in fact, that I was late to breakfast and sent out to work hungry.
Unhappily for me, there was extra work today: weeds and plants alike had grown out of hand in the last two, distracted days, and had become mischievous and defiant. For each weed I pulled, another two immediately grew in its place, filling the bare patches of earth more quickly than I could weed them. My lingering thoughts of the wardship swiftly gave way to a creeping anger as the tomatoes, joining the rebellion with the rest of the garden, refused to be trained aright. Their new tendrils, growing at an observable rate, unwound themselves from the stakes I was training them on and spread out gleefully across the garden bed, fighting with the green beans.
Akiva cackled with laughter but refused to help, and before long I was close to losing my temper or bursting into tears. It was my temper that went first; when the green beans, which I had been disentangling from the tomatoes, tried to strangle me. I gave a growl of frustration and drove my hands into the rich, warm soil, punching with somehow more than my muscles and shocking every energy line in the back garden with bright magic. The green bean creepers froze, and then crawled meekly back to their trellis, followed closely by the tomatoes. Every other bed in the garden had similarly frozen: not a rasp of wind on leaf, or leaf on leaf sounded throughout the garden, though a light breeze was softly caressing my ears.
Akiva gave another cackle of laughter, leaning on her hoe. “That told ‘em! Less power next time, child.”
I watched the tomatoes crawl back to their stakes somewhat ashamedly, but I couldn’t help feeling a thrill at the effect. By way of reparation, I sang to the plants as I weeded and watered, and before long they relaxed their unnatural stillness and began to undulate whisperingly to the breeze once more. I was surprised at the feeling of contentment that the sound gave me.
I expected to see Bastian that afternoon. Akiva said she had sent him away, but I interpreted that to mean that she had sent him away while there was danger from Cassandra, and I was disappointed to find no sign of him along the forest threads. Still, there was washing to be done and the forest to explore, and if I didn’t have Bastian’s company, at least I was as happy with my own. After I attended to the washing I darted gleefully into deep forest, going wherever it pleased my fancy to take me, and found myself some time later running side by side with one of the boundaries. I had been skimming along delightfully quickly on one of the energy lines when I became aware of it, and when I did become aware of it I stopped to look.
I gazed long and curiously into the next wardship, feeling amusingly as though I were leaning over the back fence. There was no discernible separation to the naked eye: it looked just like Akiva’s wardship did, except that this forest, instead of being decked in late autumn colours, was just comin
g into the lushness of fresh new leaf.
Enamoured with the idea of testing the dual occupation of the forest, I cast about me for a real, normal path through the forest. I found one, and remembering Bastian’s injunction that near or far did not matter, closed my eyes and took a step forward. There was a moment of dizzy travelling and then I was on a path, real and cleared.
To my left was deep forest, if I stepped for a moment off the path. To my right the trees were thinning as they faded into a field. There was certainly no sign of the next wardship. Instead, it was the edge of the forest: my forest. As I gazed, grinning in delight, I became slowly aware of an odd, unfamiliar sound ringing through the air; steady and rhythmic. It took a moment for me to recognise the sound of axe on wood.
Curious, I trotted down the path, following the sharp thuds and wondering with not a little indignation who it was that was cutting down trees in the forest. I cast about for the energy lines to tell me which tree was being abused in such a way, but either the threads were unreliable when I was on something so solid as a path, or the tree being cut down was not quite in the forest. I was forced to rely on more conventional means to discover the spot; and, following the path to its natural conclusion at the edge of the forest, I very soon did discover it.
It was only a boy, after all. He was very little taller than myself, but the swing of his axe had all the power of a man and I guessed that he was a year or two older than myself. He was chopping at a strangler fig that had grown into the neighbouring field, sending out huge roots and solid, slow creepers. I frowned at his stupidity: every life-line that flowed into the tree was writhing in furious energy, and the creepers that would normally be abysmally slow, moving only a few centimetres each month, were beginning to move rather more briskly. The strangler fig, close enough to the forest to have more life in it than an unforested tree, had begun to snake out creepers toward the woodcutter, who was blind in his regular, rhythmic swinging.
I huffed an unimpressed sigh and started forward to warn him, but by that time the strangler fig’s creepers had crept around his waist and yanked him away from its trunk. The boy gave a startled yell, dropping his axe. It fell at the base of the tree, sinking deep into mossy earth while its owner dangled several feet above it. He scrabbled with his fingers at the unyielding creepers and threw a rather wild look around him for help, but the axe was easily out of his reach.
He saw me at the same time and called out urgently: “Stand back, miss! The tree’s possessed!”
“Stop wriggling, bufflehead!” I told him impatiently. “The creepers will only get tighter.”
I approached until I was near enough to grasp the life-lines that extended to the tree from the forest, and experimentally bunched them tight in one hand. Much to my fascination, this stopped the flow of energy and life that was running through the tree limbs, and pooled it somewhere unsafe and unsteady. I felt the imbalance and hastily fed it all into the ground at my feet instead, scorching my fingers. Grass and flowers sprouted beneath me in sweet smelling bunches, tickling the soles of my feet, while the creepers, deprived of their energy, dropped the boy carelessly into the moss below. He rolled, scrambling to his feet and out of reach of the longer creepers, and I released my strangle-hold on the energy lines.
He didn’t seem to have sustained any injuries, so I advised him shortly that he shouldn’t try and cut that particular tree down, and headed back for the forest.
There were hasty footsteps behind me, then an eager hand grasped my arm and hauled me around with boyish strength.
“How did you do that?” he demanded, his face still flushed from his adventure. Closer to, it was obvious that he was older than I had first thought; seventeen or eighteen, perhaps. My automatic assessment of him as a boy had been unconsciously based on a comparison with Bastian, who was closer to twenty-seven or -eight when he was cursed; and who, from the decades he had spent as a wolf, sometimes had the manner of an older man still.
I scowled down at the hand on my arm, then up at the young man, and he let me go sheepishly.
“I’m sorry,” he said. His hand hovered as if he wanted to touch me again and reassure himself that I was real. “How did you do that?”
I frowned, backing away minutely from both the boy’s hand and the warm, eager presence he projected. Yet for every tiny step I took backwards, he followed, still pushing at me in a subtle, enthusiastic way that sent a sharp stab of alarm through my stomach. When I recognised the alarm I scowled more fiercely than before, daring him to come another step forward.
He grinned, accepting the dare, and I hastily tweaked one of the forest threads. Something rustled conveniently, and his eyes flicked toward the sound just long enough for me to dive off the path and into deep forest like a turtle into water. I heard his confusion along the energy lines as I ran, and I began to have an inkling of why Akiva was considered to be such a mysterious figure by the villagers. It pleased me that I was in a fair way to being considered in the same light.
The thread continued to hum softly with the young man’s calling as I moved away, but I ignored it because I could feel something different buzzing along a thread further in.
I darted from thread to thread, enjoying the speed and lightness of travel, until I was close enough to feel the thread itself. It was vibrating with distress and pain but when I tried to sight along it, my vision came to an abrupt and almost painful halt. It was another border.
I let go of the thread, scowling and rubbing my sore head; and stood irresolute. Akiva had said not to go beyond the boundaries. But that was because of Cassandra, I was sure: and this couldn’t be Cassandra’s wardship. I distinctly remembered Cassandra wearing thin satins and gauzes, and this snowy landscape ahead of me was no place for satin and gauze.
I stooped to the ground with my palm flat against the grass to better feel the thread, and a bolt of agony shot through it, crying out of pain and rage. The sudden conviction that it was Bastian took hold of my mind, and I didn’t hesitate. I caught up a stubby, weathered little stick from the ground for a cudgel, and crossed the border.
I found myself in a section of forest that was distinctly unfamiliar, layered with the pristine snow. I gazed around in wonder, shifting from foot to foot in the biting cold. I was uncomfortably blind without being able to see the forest lines, and when I turned around to look back the way I had come I could no longer see the border. Behind me were only black and white shades of tree trunk and snow. I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the snow, and curled my fingers more tightly around my little cudgel. A harsh, bird-like scream tore through the frigid evening air. I heard my own startled exhale through the pounding of my heart, and it occurred to me to wonder if I actually wanted to find the creature that could make such a noise, injured or otherwise. It was certainly not Bastian. My feet, however, were already taking me in the direction of the noise. I passed through a narrow hall of hardy evergreens, feeling the distant, cold-numbed prick of pine needles through the snow, and came upon an uneven clearing that was heaped with snow at its far end. Here I halted, unsure of which direction the scream had come from. As I dithered, the mass of snow trembled and moved. A huge, bird-like head with a dangerously curved beak and a snow-crested ruff rose through the white powder, scattering white crystals like sand. A liquid gold eye focused fiercely on me and I knew that I was looking at a gryphon: or, more accurately, being looked at by it.
My first instinct was to run away as fast as I could, but my treacherous feet again refused to obey me. I stood where I was until it was borne in on my frozen mind that there was a scarlet stain spreading across the ridge of snow that covered its wing.
Help me, said a huge, golden voice. Its voice thrummed in my bones, as if the magic of the creature was so much beyond my own that my body couldn’t comprehend it. I heard the ragged huff of my breath again.
I shivered and said hoarsely: “I’ve only got a little bit of magic.”
The eye looked at me unblinkingly. I don’t need magic
, human child: I have all the magic I need. You must set my wing so that I can heal myself.
I looked up at it with desperate boldness. “How do I know you won’t eat me?”
The gryphon’s beak snapped with something like grim amusement. You don’t. You must take comfort in the thought of doing a good deed.
“That won’t help if I’m dead,” I said. I was made more comfortable, perhaps stupidly, because the gryphon reminded me of Akiva. Besides, if the blood mingling with snow had not been enough to prove that the gryphon really was injured, its eyes, sometimes bright and fierce and sometimes clouded with pain, convinced me. I moved toward it slowly, stumbling on numb feet; then I saw its wing, draggled and twisted at a horrible angle, and forgot my fear in hastening to help. Immediately, the gryphon’s ruff shot up threateningly. It hissed, snapping its beak at me, then stilled at my sudden stop.
Apologies, it said, politely rather than sincerely, and lowered its ruff. Perhaps you could move a little more cautiously.
I swallowed with a suddenly dry throat, and said: “Yes. Sorry.”
I scowled at the broken wing for some time. If it had been in Akiva’s wardship, I could have seen the life-lines running through the gryphon, and acted accordingly. Here, blind to all intents and purposes, I gazed at the wing for some minutes before I realised that the wing was not only broken but twisted all the way around from the second joint so that it flopped painfully upside down. It was going to cause the gryphon considerable agony to set, particularly since I was too small to be able to do anything but heave the broken section up and let it drop to the other side.
“This will hurt very much,” I told the gryphon. “I’m not big enough to lower your wing to the ground.”
Do it now, it commanded, and the one eye I could see was burning fiercely. I thought that it was trying to brace itself.
I knelt beside the poor, damaged wing and shuffled my fingers delicately underneath the bone. I found myself with a face full of spiky feathers and clinging down. It took all of my strength, pushing against the feathers with my face and shoulders as well as heaving with my arms, to twist the wing back around. There was nothing I could do except let it fall, but I was horrified at the heaviness with which it flopped into the snow.
Wolfskin Page 9
