In Fallen Woods

by R N Merle

  In

  Fallen

  Woods

  By

  R N Merle

  Copyright © R N Merle 2018

  All rights reserved.

  The right of R N Merle to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced in any form, stored in any retrieval system, transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the author.

  Cover design and artwork by R N Merle © 2018

  Contents

  The Dark

  The Folk

  The Rites

  The Stranger

  The Light

  The Somerbornes

  The Vanishing

  The Plague

  The Capture

  The Dawn

  The Exchange

  The Contrast

  The Unfamiliar

  The Rainbow

  The Clearing

  The Party

  The Night

  The Morning

  The Shadows

  Her beautiful prisoner crouched in the cage she had conjured of applewood and thorns. She took her time to study him as he was, knowing it was her last opportunity to do so. Her scrutiny began at the top of his head, taking in the richness of his golden hair; the waves that ended in curls about the collar of his shirt, and the fallen lock that circled his forehead. She skipped over his eyes, saving them for last, and traced down his freckled nose to concentrate on the curves of his lips, usually pink, but white now with pallor and moonlight. Moving down his neck, her eyes wandered along broad shoulders, skimming over muscular arms to sun burned hands, finishing with the length of his legs, folded awkwardly under him.

  She had never been so fascinated as when she held him in her gaze. His beauty was both obvious and intricate; the collected perfections of his colouring, his strength, his grace, the lines and shapes and shadows of him. Nothing had ever captured her so.

  Yes, he had captured her in more ways than she had captured him. She closed her eyes, and turned her head away. It was dangerous to look at him. In the very instant that she had first laid eyes on him, he had poisoned her mind. Ever since that moment a consciousness of him was always there, persisting at the edge of every thought. It was maddening and it was torture, and it couldn’t go on.

  A part of her did not relish being responsible for what was about to happen to him. A part of her abhorred the idea of changing one thing about him, not one hair, not one freckle. But he was to blame for her torment; he had put her under his spell. She looked deliberately now at his eyes, knowing they were his most beguiling trick. Large, expressive, framed under thick curved brows by long dark lashes, and the exact colour of rose leaves in June.

  She slammed her eyelids shut, before they drew her in. She must be rid of him, or the desire to be near him would lead her to the grave, of that she was sure.

  It would be over soon. After it had been done, he would stop haunting her. She would be free, she told herself. She would take one final look to remember him by; one last, long look, and then she would never see John Somerborne again.

  1

  The Dark

  Each night, moments after the last of the day’s light was lost to darkness, Darklin was startled awake by three sharp raps on her chamber door. Her eyes flashed open, her heartbeat pounded in her ears, and her body lurched. She woke exactly as if she were escaping a recurring nightmare, but that was not the case. Darklin never dreamt at all.

  She rose swiftly from her bed, not through eagerness to rise, but to prevent the bitter cold from seeping further into her bones. She stamped her feet, clenched and unclenched her fingers, trying to entice her reluctant blood to the extremities of her limbs. Though her body moved quickly, her mind remained drowsy and slow; the sleeping potion Gressyl gave her each night to keep her asleep during the day, took an age to clear from her head.

  Putting on her boots, she tied the laces as best she could with deadened fingers, and hurried into the other room, knowing that a bowl of food was growing cold on the table.

  Inside the main room, in the depths of an inglenook fire, a wide black cauldron cast its jerking shadow out across the room. The liquid inside boiled aggressively and troubled the air with unpleasant odours, redolent of bitter herbs and animal bones. The steam condensed on the cold walls and mixed with layers of undisturbed soot and grime, coating whatever brushed against it with a greasy black residue.

  Gressyl sat stone still in front of the fire, on an imposing hazel-wood chair which resembled a crudely carved throne. A gnarled and heavy cane was balanced across her knees. Gressyl used it for her magic, amongst other things, and it never left the reach of her clawed fingers. Darklin could never look at the cane without experiencing a shiver of fear.

  Darklin did not acknowledge Gressyl by word or by look, nor did Gressyl greet her. Gressyl sat as she always did, appearing to be mesmerised by the flames that curled around the base of her cauldron.

  Darklin’s meal lay on the table, positioned under the house’s one murky window, which served no useful purpose, since it never let light, nor a whisper of fresh air in. The table top sloped slightly downwards, continuously displacing an ink pot and quill precariously toward one end. Two ever-present candles were planted in the accumulated remains of previous candles, the heaps of melted wax grew as each new candle was lit.

  Darklin pulled out her chair which scraped harshly across the surface of the stone floor. The only other sounds in the room were the crackle of the fire, the hiss and spit of the cauldron, and occasionally the flap of a bird’s wings. An ancient crow resided in the rafters, hopping stiffly between the smoke coated beams. The crow did little other than peer down silently over Gressyl and Darklin. Occasionally, Gressyl stared back at it. Darklin sometimes wondered why Gressyl did not kill it, like she did all other creatures that had the fatal misfortune to cross her path. She did not seem to have a special liking for the bird, it didn’t even have a name. The only indication Darklin had that Gressyl courted its presence, was that she had once seen her feeding it with scraps from her pot. Darklin herself ignored the bird, as if the place it occupied was another vacant space of damp air.

  Darklin looked down and grimaced as she contemplated the meal before her. The only meal she was given each night was always the remains of whatever creature Gressyl had recently managed to trap and kill, with a thin watery gravy containing anything they had foraged from the woods, and herbs left over from potions. Darklin ate the food hurriedly, though she had no appetite; the longer it lingered in the bowl the worse it seemed to taste. She exhaled in relief when she swallowed the last spoonful, then cleaned and put away her bowl. She picked up a large wooden bucket, and always she would say to Gressyl, ‘I will fetch the water now.’

  Always, Gressyl nodded once and said, as if there had been an unspoken agreement to repeat the same words to each other every night, ‘Be sure you are not followed, remember their eyes are always watching, them that want us dead.’

  Darklin took a long black cloak from a rusty nail hanging next to the door, and draped it around her shoulders. She wore the hood up and over her eyes, partly to stay warm, but mostly because Gressyl had warned her that no one should ever see her face. The hem of the cloak was in tatters from constantly being caught on snagging branches, giving the impression, if anyone was ever to see her, of a ragged wraith, fulfilling its fate to wander the night in eternal torment.

  Despite the witch’s solemn warning, Darklin rushed to leave the house. She was always relieved to be out of Gressyl’s sight, but even then, Darklin thought she could still somehow feel Gressyl’s eyes upon her. She stepped out into the wood, clo
sing the heavy door behind her quietly.

  The witch’s house lurked in a hollow deep inside Fallen Woods, under a dead thatch of closely woven branches. Gressyl had told Darklin that the woods were considered by the folk to be haunted, and that the people of the nearest village, Fallenoak, never dared set foot there. Darklin understood why. Here, in its lifeless heart, cut off from the sustaining forces of sun and rain, the essence of death pervaded, leaching deep into the soil, and blighting to the highest, frailest twigs of the brittle branches, making it seem like a cemetery for dead and decaying trees.

  The house itself appeared trapped inside a web of twisted wood. Its four grey walls were dwarfed by a tall, crooked, pyramid shaped roof which relied on creaking branches, and rope-like vines that coiled around it to keep it from collapsing. The one slit of window squinted like a suspicious eye out into a fog of chimney smoke, which loitered menacingly around the house, as it felt through the silent, crowded trees for a way to ascend.

  The February air was vicious and biting, and Darklin shuddered. She began to make her way decidedly, realising she must either move, or freeze where she stood. There were six hidden pathways leading away from the house. Gressyl told her they must never use just one as it would create a trail leading their enemies straight to their door.

  Darklin would fumble through the darkness, regularly scratching her hands and scraping her body as she squeezed between tree trunks and obstructive branches. She hurried as fast as she could manage toward the living part of the woods. Even when the weather was warmer, she did not dare to dawdle. Gressyl knew how long it took her to reach the water pool and back, and she would be punished if she was late. Gressyl’s punishments did not bear thinking about.

  The gaps in the trees became wider the further she travelled from the house, and eventually she could make her way fluidly through the trees. During this time, Darklin’s mind was free to wander, but it usually became confined to searching for elusive memories. Her mind was continually pricked by the consciousness that she had forgotten something important, but had no idea what it was.

  What memories she did have were repetitive and unvaried, all of the witch's house, and the events that formed her life there. The pattern of her nights always followed the same course, an etched routine, dragged through unchanging surroundings, coloured in a spectrum of grey. Time passed in a dizzying monotony. She didn’t even really know how old she was. Gressyl had told her that she had passed through sixteen Decembers, but it was not easy to keep track of the years by the changing seasons.

  After some minutes of trying, she gave up probing her thoughts. The feeling of having something missing was not as aggravating as the futile searching; the phantom memory hovered tauntingly, always out of reach.

  When she reached the pool in the wood, she paused by the water. Here the air smelled fresher. Darklin took in deep icy breaths that burned her lungs, trying to expel the stale air of the dead wood, and the damp house. She watched her breath condense into curls of white vapour. The pool, an almost exact circle of dark glinting water, was the only place where the endless cover of trees was partially broken, and Darklin could look up at the sky, coolly interested when she could spy the hard glimmer of stars in the blackness, or the ice-white glow of the moon.

  She rested a moment, seating herself on a frosted log. All the while, she listened for signs of life; her ears straining for the announcement of a hunter or woodsmen stumbling in the darkness. Usually any noise was made by creatures come to drink from the pool. She occasionally caught the fire of a fox’s bright coat in the corner of her eye, and watched the creature vanish when it caught her scent, or saw the white flash of her skin through the trees.

  Under the illumination of a full moon, Darklin stole a look at her reflection in the water. The deficit of fresh air and daylight was visible in the palette of her colouring; her face was ghostly white and painfully thin, and unwholesome shadows encircled her sunken eyes. Her hair, black and wild, was violently tangled and matted, and her eyes, every bit as black as Gressyl’s, stared emptily out from under a dark brow. She took no pleasure in her appearance, apart from the variety of seeing a face other than Gressyl’s.

  Aware she could not waste time, Darklin turned to pick up her bucket, but froze as she heard the crack of a twig on the other side of the pool. Only her eyes turned to see what had made the noise. Out of the trees, a deer and her fawn stepped cautiously from the cover. The mother turned its long neck and nudged its young with quiet tenderness. Her mild dark eyes glistened softly, while her velvet ears rotated to catch the slightest murmur of danger. As she watched them, Darklin felt an unusual disturbance in the current of her emotions. It was a feeling she could not name, a wretched energy she did not have room for. She assigned her strange reaction to dislike. Looking down, she saw a large, sharp rock within reach. Moving her arm smoothly and slowly, she grasped it between her fingertips. She took aim with her mind’s eye, and threw the stone as hard as she could at the fawn’s sleek head. The rock shot across the pool, narrowly missed its target, and clattered loudly against the trunk of a willow. The deer and its fawn instantly turned and sprang away.

  For a moment, Darklin’s eyes fixed upon the place where they disappeared, then she shook her head, as if to rearrange her thoughts into their normal patterns, and quickly plunged the bucket into the pool. The sound of the disturbed water spread out into the woods, mirroring the ripples on the surface. Darklin scooped up the water, and hurried back toward the witch’s house.

  The bucket was heavy but her arms had grown strong from the nightly effort. She only began to struggle as she reached the part of the wood where the path narrowed, and she had to fight a way through. The water splashed over the sides of the bucket, wetting her hands, making the skin chapped, cracked and sore.

  When she got back to the house, she re-entered quietly, as if there were no one else there, and went straight to the inglenook to fill a bucket situated by the cauldron. She then left the house again, walked back to the pool, collected more water and on returning, left the bucket full by the door, to use for drinking, cooking and washing. When she had finished this chore, Darklin took up an axe that rested by the inglenook, and went out to chop wood for the fire. Gressyl did not like her to take it from next to the house as the tangle of trees gave them good cover, so she went a small way into the woods. She hacked away at a splintered limb of a dead ash tree, cut the wood into pieces she could carry, and took them inside to pile in the inglenook, adding some to the flagging flames around the cauldron.

  When these chores were done, Darklin would begin her learning. Her lessons were always the same. During the spring, summer and autumn she would learn to source “potents”, the ingredients used in potion making. Gressyl would lead Darklin out into the woods to show her where all the different species and plants grew, making her describe their identifying features, and recite their uses. They would collect insects in jars, gather what they could forage, and check their traps for animals.

  Darklin hated all creatures, but she hated the dead ones the most. She was often assigned the task of harvesting the stricken bodies from the traps, witnessing the repulsive aftermath of Gressyl’s lures, usually an edible temptation, discreetly laced with excruciating poison. Gressyl made wire snares for the animals they intended to eat, and Darklin had once come across a rabbit only recently ensnared. She always remembered the violence of its struggle for life, more so, the high wild cries of its desperation as it fought against its inevitable death. She tried not to look when she found them, they disgusted her. She shoved them into a hemp sack as quickly as she could, twisted the end and sealed it with a tight knot.

  When they had returned from their undertakings in the woods, and during the winter, when potents were scarce on the ground, she spent her time learning the pages of Gressyl’s spell book.

  Darklin hovered by the shelves. An entire mildewed wall was obscured by long racks of gently undulating slats of wood, piled and crammed with everything Gressyl n
eeded to make her potions. Amongst the miscellany were rows of labelled clay pots containing dried herbs and plants, and mysterious clear bottles of distilled liquids, grouped in colours on the highest shelf. There were stacks of wooden boxes housing the remains of assorted creatures; vials of animal blood, the fur of a mole, full skeletons of mice, squirrels and bats, the leg bone of a fox, and the front tooth of a hare. Jars of insects housed by species populated the bottom shelf, the living crawling among the dead. Spiders tapped against immovable lids with long frail legs, devil-black beetles endlessly circled, and moths broke their wings against the glass, but none could discover a way to escape their transparent prisons.

  Darklin reached down the spell book from the second highest shelf. It had been housed in a tight lidded box, after its pages had begun to spot and crinkle with damp. Darklin tipped it out, heaved it over to the table, and reverently opened the black, leather bound book.

  It contained all the spells Gressyl had learned and devised, and revealed all the offences that had triggered her to use her magic; it was the history of her life’s work. From her first spell, (to enchant a knife to cut the love of a pair of infatuated newlyweds), to her most recent, (a spell that had rid the miller’s vain daughter of her shining flaxen locks, leaving her head permanently barren of hair).

  Darklin studied the words written in Gressyl’s spiky hand, spilled across the pages in black ink. There were detailed instructions for each of the spells: a guide as to the circumstances when the casting of the spell would be most effective; for those that required a potion, exact lists and measures of the potents; the words to be chanted when the spell was cast, and the level of its success; a mark of five black pentagrams indicated the most powerful spells.