The Shadow of Malabron

by Thomas Wharton

  The other two fetches had already begun to draw back. A second arrow from Moth’s bow transfixed one of them, and with an unearthly cry it vanished like the first. The third fetch halted and then, like a rope that had been held taut and suddenly let go, it collapsed into a coil and slithered away through the reeds.

  Will staggered forward and then toppled helplessly to the ground. Finn helped him to his feet, and he felt the world heave under him and spin. He would have fallen again, but Finn held him. He watched as the two fetches approaching from the hilltop now moved apart from one another, either to flee or to come at their quarry from two sides. As they advanced they began to sink into the ground as if they were wading into deepening water, and then they were gone.

  “This way,” Moth said, nodding his head towards the path to the lake. “Quickly, before worse happens.”

  Travel in folly to find wisdom.

  — Sayings of the Hidden Folk

  THE COMPANIONS HURRIED AFTER MOTH down the tunnel of reeds. In a few moments they were at the lake shore. There, a little way from the bank, floated a raft of thickly matted moss and sticks, like a tiny island. Moth urged them on and everyone quickly leapt across the gap. The raft held them solidly but there was barely enough room for everyone. When he had joined them, the archer took up one of two thick wooden poles lying across the middle of the raft and shoved away from the shore.

  Finn helped Will down onto the soft, mossy surface of the raft, then took up the other pole. The raft drifted slowly out into the lake and then seemed to catch a current that moved it more swiftly into open water. Shade stood at the trailing end of the raft and growled at the receding shore. Rowen and her grandfather crouched beside Will.

  “Are you hurt?” Rowen asked anxiously.

  Will struggled to answer, but no words would come. His body was cold and lifeless, as if icy slush was flowing sluggishly in his veins. The only thing he could feel was a throb of agony from his heart. His friends had saved him, but they had taken him from her.

  Tears filled his eyes.

  “The power of the fetch is still working in you, Will,” Moth said gravely, bending to examine him. “It will take some time to fade. Rest now. You are safe from them here.”

  Shade ceased growling, padded swiftly across the raft to Will and sat beside him. Will reached out a shaking hand and stroked the wolf’s fur.

  Pendrake stood and turned to Moth.

  “You saved our lives, old friend,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “The danger is far from over,” Moth said. “Your pursuer is the one who set the mirrors in the Wood. Morrigan and I picked up his trail there at last and we were following him. We knew he was after you.”

  “The wisp I sent to throw him off…” Pendrake began.

  “Found me, and led me to the knot-path.” Moth reached within his cloak and brought out the wisp, which bobbed and danced on his palm. Pendrake searched for his waylight and opened it. Sputter darted inside and its light swiftly dimmed and went out.

  “You can find the knot-paths?” Rowen asked.

  “They are usually invisible to me, but Will had just opened it, and I was able to slip through before it vanished again. I lost your trail in the bog, found it, then lost it again. You were doing a fine job of eluding any pursuers.”

  “We almost lost ourselves,” Pendrake said drily. “But we’ll save that tale for later.”

  “Morrigan and I arrived at the lake not long ago. Morrigan had seen that the fetches were near and were closing in on you. Since we once lived in this bog for a time, we knew of a way we might escape them.”

  The raft was moving swiftly now, and Moth stopped poling.

  “I have met others like you,” Shade said to the archer. “Long ago. They had arrows like yours, that could pierce the shadowshapes.”

  Moth looked closely at the wolf and then spoke a few words in another language. Shade’s ears perked up. He replied in the same tongue and bowed his shaggy head.

  “Your people were friends to the Speaking Creatures,” Shade said. “We were proud to stand alongside you in battle.”

  “One of the Companions,” Moth said, his eyes wide. “There is clearly a tale here. But it will have to wait, too, like Master Pendrake’s. Until we decide what is to be done.”

  They heard a loud cawing overhead and then Morrigan swooped down. She alighted on the tip of the pole that Moth held at arm’s length, and folded her wings. The raven and the wolf stared fixedly at one another, and for a moment it seemed to Will that they were two ordinary animals, each uneasy about this other creature close at hand. Then Morrigan cocked her head at Will and the others as if to comment on their strange choice in travelling companions. She hopped onto Moth’s arm, leant towards his ear and spoke in her odd language of croaks and clicks.

  “The fetches are still at the shore,” Moth said when the raven had finished. “Waiting for the one that leads them.”

  “I hope you have more of those arrows,” Finn said.

  “They will not stop him.”

  “Whoever their master is, he discovered the secret of the snugs,” Pendrake said.

  “Yes, I found one with blood runes carved into its door,” Moth said. “Ancient spells of great power. There is no doubt any more. It is the Angel that hunts you.”

  “After all this time…” Pendrake began.

  “He has returned,” Moth continued, and his hand went to the hilt of the strange black sword at his hip. “You escaped him through the knot-path, but he must have sent the fetches on ahead, as if he knew or guessed which way you were going. I did not sense his presence in the bog, but I fear he is not far away.”

  He whispered a word to Morrigan, and with a flap of her black wings the raven lifted from his shoulder and flew off in the direction they had come.

  “I’ve heard of this Angel,” Finn said, “but always in the oldest stories. I thought he had been destroyed ages ago.”

  “So it was thought,” Moth said. “I knew him once as Lotan, a traitor to his people. After Eleel fell, his own slaves rose against him, returning hate for hate. They feared he might come back even from death, so they cut off his head, burned his body, wrapped it in chains and threw it into the sea. They were right to fear.”

  “I’ve heard about him,” Will said, remembering the story Pendrake had told about the city of Eleel. Everyone looked at him. “He was…”

  “A prince of the Shee,” Moth finished, his eyes on Morrigan as she dwindled to a blurry black speck on the horizon. “Now he is a lord of the Shadow Realm, where stories fall into darkness. His body was destroyed, but through sorcery he was able to mould dead flesh over the nothingness that is his spirit. He can see like a cat in darkness, run day and night without tiring, without sleep. Steel shatters on his spell-guarded flesh, and fire does not harm him.”

  He turned to Will.

  “The Angel does not stop until he has found his prey.”

  They floated across the lake in the dark, and then the moon came out from a black bank of cloud, a shining white face that seemed to be watching them. Its pale light turned the water to silver. As the companions shared what little food they had, Will told Moth the tale of how he had found Shade in the Library. Pendrake described the journey from Fable and their captivity in the storyshard.

  “I believe Morrigan and I saw the golem, on our way to find you,” Moth said. “He was heading straight north, and moving at astonishing speed. We had no idea what he was or where he was going, and our concern was to find you, so we didn’t bother about him.”

  “North,” Finn said quietly.

  “As an arrow flies,” Moth said, turning to look at the young man.

  “This is Finn Madoc, of the Errantry,” Pendrake said to him.

  The archer bowed.

  “I met your brother once,” he said. “A brave man. I hope he finds his way home.”

  Finn bowed in return but said nothing.

  “What’s in the north?” Will asked Rowen in a whisper.
/>
  “The Night King’s fortress was there, in the time of the Great Unweaving. The Armanath. It’s mostly just wasteland now, Grandfather says. Beyond is Arkland, the wilderness of ice and snow.”

  By this time the raft had drifted to a part of the lake that was broken up into channels between small rocky hillocks and larger islands thick with trees and undergrowth. Moth and Finn took up the poles again to keep the raft in the midst of the current that was tugging them steadily westward. Will noticed again, as he had at the snug that first night, that the archer kept as far apart as he could from those around him.

  Rowen gave Will some water from her flask, and sat beside him quietly, a look of tense concentration on her face, as if she were listening for the slightest sound out of the ordinary. Pendrake stood near them, withdrawn into his own thoughts, and from time to time the old man would shake his head, or mouth words to himself, as though he were reaching deep into his gathered lore for something half remembered. His grim, weary look had not changed since they had discovered the identity of their pursuer.

  “Grandfather,” Rowen finally said, and the old man stirred, “what you did, back on the shore, with the light…”

  “I should not have done,” Pendrake said, finishing her sentence. “There was little choice, but it may cost us dearly.”

  “What did you do?” Will asked.

  “I reached into the Weaving,” Pendrake said. “Something I have not attempted for a long time. All stories wait there, as possibilities, as dreams of what might be. Like the flame waits in dry kindling.”

  “But you helped us escape the fetches,” Will said.

  “And changed the weave of the Kantar. A dangerous thing to do. The Night King waits in his Shadow Realm, like a spider in its web, for any twitch or quiver in the threads he has woven to catch his prey. I didn’t just touch a thread, I gave one a good tug. And that may have made it much easier for Malabron’s creatures to find us.”

  “I didn’t know,” Rowen said, staring at her grandfather with a look of mingled awe and fear. “I didn’t know a loremaster could do these things. I thought only the Stewards had that power.”

  “Not everything the Stewards taught was lost,” said Pendrake, and then he turned away to gaze out across the water. It was clear that he didn’t want to say any more.

  In the moonlit dimness ahead of them they saw a cluster of tiny glimmering lights that seemed to be close to the surface of the water.

  “What is that?” Rowen cried.

  As they approached, the lights quickly went out. The raft passed the spot where the lights had been, and in the pale light Will could just make out what appeared to be a low mound of earth and twigs, like a tiny island.

  “Creelings,” Moth said, as they left the mound behind. “Smallfolk. That mound is one of their cities. We are floating on another one.”

  Rowen sat up suddenly and touched the surface of the raft.

  “This is a … city?”

  “It was, once,” Moth said. “There is no one in it now. The creelings often move from place to place. They like to keep to themselves, so they use these floating islands as decoys, to mislead anyone who comes this far into the bog. Morrigan and I met the creelings long ago, and befriended them. They were kind enough to lend us one of their floating islands for our escape.”

  Will peered through the gloom at the island as it slid away behind them, but saw nothing. How empty it seemed out here in the wild, and yet how full it might be with creatures that he simply couldn’t see or wouldn’t notice because he didn’t know where to look. Or how.

  He felt the world around him brimming with an unseen energy, a tumult of stories just beyond his sight. Was this the Weaving the toymaker had spoken of? Then the sensation passed, and the world was just the world again. Wind and water and darkness.

  After a time Morrigan returned and perched on Moth’s shoulder. Shade was surprised again, and glared at the raven as though he was tempted to lunge at it. Will reached out and hesitantly scratched the wolf behind the ears, more glad than ever of his company. To his relief, Shade did not flinch from the touch but seemed to welcome it. He lifted a huge paw and placed it gently on Will’s arm.

  “How are you now, Will Lightfoot?” he asked.

  “Better,” Will said. The numbing chill in his veins was ebbing, but now and then he caught what seemed to be a faint echo of her voice, like ghostly whispers in his head. He stirred, restlessly wishing for some way to banish these phantom murmurings.

  “I don’t understand about the fetches,” he finally said to Moth. “If they’re ghosts, how can arrows hurt them?”

  “No weapon of wood or metal can harm them,” the archer said, his eyes still keenly scanning the wooded shore of the large island they were passing. “My arrowheads are engraved with runes to cut the spellstrings that hold the annai captive to the Night King’s will. Once that bond is broken, the fetch can pass on. It is no longer bound to another’s desires.”

  “So the ones you shot won’t come after us any more?”

  “Some fetches linger whether a spell holds them or not, hating the living and doing them harm. But most vanish and are never seen again. Whatever they are, though, they all speak with the same voice, that of their master.”

  “You could hear them?”

  “Could you not?” Moth asked, turning to look at Will at last, his gaze cold and piercing.

  Will nodded, but kept silent, afraid to admit to one of the Hidden Folk that the fetches were still whispering in his thoughts. He felt safer now that Moth had joined their company, but the archer’s mood was even more grim and aloof than it had been when they first met. He was strung as tightly as his own bowstring, tensed and ready for anything, and for the first time Will glimpsed the fiery spirit brooding within the Tain warrior. He would charge into certain death, Will thought, without hesitation.

  The steady lapping of the waves was soothing, and soon Will found he was having trouble keeping his eyes open. Pendrake saw him drooping and urged him to sleep while he could. Gratefully Will curled up with his head resting on Shade’s warm flank.

  A shriek from Morrigan brought him back to wakefulness. He opened his eyes to see the raven alight on Moth’s arm, squawking frantically. The sky was pale grey. It seemed to Will he had been asleep only a few minutes, but the night had passed and dawn had come.

  “Everyone crouch down and do not move,” Moth said in a low but commanding voice.

  As they obeyed him the archer turned, scanned the water ahead of them, and pointed.

  “Finn, we must find shelter.”

  While the others stayed low, Moth and Finn poled the raft swiftly and noiselessly to the nearest of the islands and ran it in under the cover of some drooping willow trees.

  “What is it?” Rowen whispered, and Moth put a finger to his lips. They waited like this for a few breathless moments, and then they heard a faint sound that swiftly grew louder, a billowing and snapping like a flag fluttering in a strong wind. As whatever it was passed overhead, Will peered up through the canopy of leaves and for an instant saw a ragged white shape, rippling and writhing in the air. In the next instant the thing had passed and the sounds faded. Moth rose from a crouch and the others did likewise.

  “I can answer your question now,” he said to Rowen. “Lotan travels on foot, but now he has a watcher in the sky, like we do with Morrigan.”

  “It looked like a white sheet,” Will said.

  “It is his cloak,” Moth said. “A creature of nightmare called a shrowde. It has bound itself to Lotan, and gives him concealment, so that he may go unseen. The cloak also shields him from the sun, whose rays burn his borrowed flesh. But if need be he will send the shrowde from him, to scout ahead. The creature can see, and hear, although like the fetches its powers are diminished in daylight.”

  “Then we can’t stay on the lake,” Rowen said. “That thing might come back this way and spot us.”

  “I do not think we are far from the western shore,” Moth s
aid, and suddenly he turned, as if he had heard or sensed something. He leapt from the raft to the island’s stony shingle, which rose steeply from the water to the trees.

  The others quickly followed him. On the crest of the slope above them, green trees touched by the light of dawn, beckoned like a vision of summer on a dark winter’s day. Morrigan circled over their heads, calling with what sounded to Will like joy.

  “My people have been here,” Moth said, and Will stared at him, startled at the change in the archer’s voice. To his surprise, Moth unbuckled his black sword and cast it down on the pebbled shore as if it was a hated thing. With Morrigan on his shoulder he climbed the slope, gazing straight ahead like someone in a trance, and passed under the leafy shade. After a moment, Will and his friends followed.

  In the centre of the island, in a hollow of stone ringed by trees, lay a small still pool of clear water. Moth was already there on one knee. He held his open hand over the surface.

  “Énye Taina thu qantar,” he whispered. “El’il…”

  He looked up, his gaze far away.

  “The Green Court was here. My people rested in the shade of these trees. The Lady of the Starlight sat beside this pool and sang of Eleel.”

  Small white flowers grew among the thick moss beside the pool, and Moth passed his hand over these as well. Will remembered that he had seen this particular flower before, depicted in glass above the gate into Fable.

  “The flower is called aíne,” Finn said to him quietly. “They say it grows wherever the Lady has been. That’s why it was named for her.”

  “Can you tell how long ago they were here?” Pendrake asked Moth. For a long time the archer did not answer. Then he rose to his feet, and Will saw that his eyes were shining.

  “Days. Or years,” Moth said, shaking his head. “Nor could I say which way they went after they left the island. There was a time when I could have followed them, and found them, but no more.”

  He turned and walked away slowly through the trees.

  Rowen had strayed further than the others and returned with the news that there were wild berries growing near by.