The older ones had a better idea of the way things stood. In the golden light of early evening I caught sight of movement at the edge of the lawn. I smiled to myself as I made out Sarah and Isabelle straining to drag the unfinished boat up the hill to the safety of the Castle. I went out to help them, and we tucked it inside an old, mostly unused cellar behind the kitchen.
As we emerged, we saw three figures making their way toward us: the Angel with the Poet and Illyrica. He had convinced them to come to the Castle for their own safety. I met the Poet with a handclasp, trying to reassure him. His farm was behind him, and though he meant to tend it every day, it was at the mercy of—of whatever might happen.
Thus we withdrew from the world. By the end of the day most of the work was finished. As the sun sank down beneath the horizon, both the Giant and I slipped away from the Castle into the darkness of the forest. If danger came to us, it would come through the woods.
I turned back to see the lights shining from the windows of the Castle, golden across its pale walls. The moonrise was reflected in the white stones. I remembered with a sudden pang the first time I had seen it: a light in the middle of the darkwood, guarded by its terrible guardian, keeper of so many joys and so many secrets. I had imagined then so many things that it might come to mean to me, but never had I imagined the reality. I had thought the Castle might make me a hero, an adventurer, a great and splendid figure. Never had I imagined that it would teach me, so quietly and so sweetly, to love.
But I loved it now, and every one who rested within its walls. I loved the little ones, and the Pixie who had first drawn me to this place, and Illyrica with her silent wisdom. I loved the Poet, brother to me now, and the Angel. I loved Nora.
Come what may, I meant to keep them safe.
Chapter 30
collision
We did not know how the Widow Brawnlyn had been at work. In truth, years would pass before we understood the whole of it. Nor did we truly understand the void left in the townspeople by plague and suffering. The Angel may have seen it more clearly than the rest of us did. Peacefully hiding together behind the Castle walls, we underestimated the power of hatred and the power of bitterness alike. But they found us.
Only two days had passed since our withdrawal from the world, and twilight had settled on the edges of the forest when I saw a slim figure, nervous, dressed in nondescript servant’s clothing, trying to find a path. I watched him until I was sure he would enter the forest, and then slipped out of the trees and into his path. I folded my arms. It was more to my purpose to look intimidating than to be easily able to draw the sword at my side. He did not look like a threat.
“Why have you come here?” I demanded.
He was young, and hardly a brave soul—but there was something like truth in his expression. “Please,” he quaked. “I come bearing a letter to the lady of the Castle.”
I tilted my head. I wasn’t sure who he could mean.
“To… to Nora,” he said. “From my mistress, the young Lady Brawnlyn.”
I held out my hand. “Give it to me,” I said.
“Please,” he stammered. “I was instructed…”
“No one passes through these woods now,” I said. “I will take the letter. I give you my word it will be delivered before nightfall.”
He licked his lips. “If my lady asks…”
“Tell her you surrendered her letter to the Hawk,” I said.
His eyes were down on his own shoes. He stringently avoided my eyes. I watched him fumble in a pouch at his waist until he drew out a small roll of paper, tied with a dark purple ribbon. I recognized it—Genevieve often wore the colour. I held out my hand and he placed the roll in it, unhappily.
“Go your way,” I said, hoping that he heard only strictness in my voice, and not anger. Whatever he heard, he was quick to obey. He turned on his heel and took himself gracelessly away.
I looked down at the roll in my hand. I almost wished I had not given my word. I had no desire to deliver the thing to Nora. I had not seen Genevieve in more than a year, and could hardly remember her face. She seemed to me more an idea than a person—an idea of darkness mocking beauty. As it was darkness I now stood guard against, I did not wish to bear it through the Castle doors. I knew that Nora cared for Genevieve somehow, and yet that they were antagonists in spirit. Sooner or later the light of the one would break the darkness of the other or be shrouded by it. I had been watching Nora. Every time she returned from Brawnlyn House I watched her. If ever I saw a sign that the darkness had touched her, had hurt her, I meant to pull her away. But it had not.
I carried the letter to her. She took it and read it quickly. A shadow passed over her face. I had been right, I thought, to wish the letter thrown away.
We were standing on the flagstones of the Castle’s entrance. Nora had just finished lighting an oil lamp in the room before I entered. Its light flickered as a draft of warm summer air came through the door. She looked up at me and kept her voice low.
“There will be trouble,” she said. “The Widow… I don’t know what she’s done; the letter is vague. But Genevieve summons me. Tonight.”
“You won’t go,” I said. “No one is to leave here at night, you agreed on that.”
“Hawk, this is not just a social call,” Nora said. “I think she means to help us somehow.”
“But that is not clear?” I said. “Perhaps she means to betray us.”
There was a willfulness in the lines of Nora’s mouth that I was not used to encountering. We had been long been equals but suddenly I remembered what it had been like to be an upstart boy under Nora’s direction. It was the way she was looking at me—like a stubborn obstacle that needed to be moved out of the way. I grew a little desperate.
“Nora, you cannot!” I said.
“I have to,” she answered.
And somehow, I knew she was right.
“Then let me escort you,” I said.
She shook her head. “The Castle must be guarded. Both you and the Angel are needed. I’ll be all right.”
I couldn’t help the words—they came without my bidding them. “As you were when last you went into the town?” I asked.
I saw the hurt flicker in the deep blue of her eyes, and then she smiled a little. “It is night, Hawk,” she said. “No one will recognize me. And I do not mean to go into the town. Whatever else Genevieve does, she’s hardly likely to stone me.”
She had won the argument and I knew it. I was almost shocked when she engaged my eyes with her own and said, “Please let me go, Hawk.”
I swallowed back a strange lump of emotion. “It’s not my decision,” I said.
She bowed her head. “It is,” she said. “The Angel has given you that authority.”
I nodded, hating myself. “Go, then,” I said. “Do what you must.”
She turned toward the door. Impulsively I reached out and touched her arm. She looked back at me, questioning. “Be careful,” I said.
She smiled. My hand was still on her arm, and she reached up and took it gently, tightening her fingers around mine for a moment. “I will,” she said. She dropped my hand and passed out through the door.
I watched her go for a moment, then ran and found the Pixie. I explained what had happened. Before she could protest I had gone out after Nora, determined to see her safely to the edge of the woods.
Twilight died into darkness. Night fell. There was no moon. The air was hot even now—almost stifling, I thought. The sounds of the forest groaned beneath the stillness of the air.
Hours passed, and Nora did not return. I began to grow weary and settled between the forked branches of a low tree.
How I slept I do not know, but I awoke to a sound. For a moment I thought it was Nora, but immediately I knew I was wrong. A small wind was blowing now, bringing with it the smell of oil and torch smoke. Footsteps tramped on the earth. Men were coming.
The townspeople—and more than the townspeople. I knew it as soon as I realized
how many there were. The darkwood was crawling with them, bearing torches and swords and pitchforks, making their way inexorably to the Castle. Who the others were I did not know. Most likely they were in the hire of the Widow Brawnlyn. The townspeople were too blinded to understand that they were only doing the Widow’s work. They thought—poor fools, they thought—that they were taking revenge for their own sakes.
I leaped up and sped through the woods, searching every favourite haunt for the Giant. If I could not find him quickly I meant to go straight to the Castle. The mob must not be allowed to reach the girls! My most precious charges, they were undefended but for the Poet. But I did find him, easily. Most likely he was looking for me.
“There are hundreds,” I gasped.
“A mob,” he said. “They are looking for me.”
“We can take shelter in the Castle,” I said.
He looked at me. Only looked, but I understood him. We could not shelter in the Castle. We could not let the townspeople anywhere near it. Yet they were driving through the woods down so many different paths that we knew some were nearly there. We ran to meet them. On the edge of the lawn, we did. They seemed not to have faces. They were half-shrouded in darkness, lit in the torchlight like demonic things. Their voices rose up from them not as from men, but as from a single beast.
“The Giant! Take him! Take the man and slay him!”
The first men to rush forward were pushed back by the Giant’s own staff, but others surrounded him. I charged into one, knocking him back, but others kept coming—and the Giant was no longer fighting. My sword was in my hand before I knew it was there, though I did not strike with it. I kept pushing men back with my fist and my head and the flat side of my sword. There were too many of them. I turned and saw that the Giant had been taken. They had bound his arms to his sides with long lengths of cord. In the torchlight he looked old, sad, and defeated.
Suddenly there was a shout. A man ran forward with a drawn sword, straight at the Giant. I dashed forward and met him. His sword met mine and went ringing away in a wild arc.
“No!” I shouted.
Another man, another sword. The blade slashed into my arm, through Nora’s carefully laid bandages. I cried out. The pain was excruciating, as though my arm had taken a life of its own and was screaming. I gritted my teeth and managed to spit out, “No!” My breath came short and fast, but I fell in before the Giant, sword still in hand, daring the townspeople with my eyes to attack again. “Not without trial,” I said, gasping away the pain as I spoke. “You will not kill a man without trial.”
The Giant said nothing. There was some confusion in the crowd. They seemed to erupt in a brawl of their own—a fight not with swords but with words, and ideals. Some wanted him dead then and there; some recognized the truth in my words. Perhaps all they really wanted was to see him hung properly in the town square instead of butchered in the middle of the night. Whatever their motives, those who wished to put him on trial pushed their way through the crowd and grabbed onto the Giant’s arms. They began to propel him away, through the woods.
Yet it was not over, for there were many—many—in the crowd possessed of a bloodier spirit. Perhaps the Widow had hired them to make sure our Angel died that night. Whatever the case, they tried, over and over, to reach him… to wound him… to kill him. And I drove them back. With stars of pain in my eyes, with my ears half-deafened, I drove them back. I heard myself shouting, over and over again, though I cannot tell what I said. More than once I believe I pleaded with those whose minds were saner. And over and over I met the enemy and fought them away.
What was the horror of that night to me? I cannot tell it. It was all a burning haze of struggle, pain, and desperation. Yet I kept them back. Whose was the strength with which I fought? It was not mine. Even now I am filled with gratitude when I think of it. A power kept us that night that had never belonged to me.
Sarah was standing in my room when the mob spilled out of the forest. From my window she saw the confrontation. She ran downstairs into the Pixie’s arms and told her everything. It might have comforted me to know that they knew.
Somehow we reached the town. The pain in my arm, heightened by the continual battering of incensed foes, died away enough for me to gather my wits and call out, again and again, that the Giant must have a trial. That he would spend the night, not in a grave, but in a gaol. And somehow I won. There were men in the crowd who heard me and agreed. It was close to morning when I leaned my head against the stone wall of the gaol and closed my eyes, conscious that the Giant was breathing near me, sitting in a pile of straw behind bars.
I was too exhausted to worry for the Giant or for myself, but I could not sleep. I was too aware of one thing: that it had grown late in the woods before the mob came, and Nora had not returned.
Chapter 31
the vigil
The night wore on in an uneasy truce. Some of the mob trickled away, but most stayed. They settled down for the night like an army laying siege, and I was the one-man army who kept them at bay. They had of course locked the iron door behind which the Giant now sat, as awake as I but silent. Even so, they kept their weapons ready to hand, half expecting some supernatural escape. If they expected it, we did not gratify them. Morning would come, and with it whatever monkey trial they cared to conduct. I had no wish to think beyond that.
I sat in the darkness with my hand resting on my sword. My eyes bored a hole in the stone wall across from me. The iron bars against my back were uncomfortable, but I preferred them to moving elsewhere. As long as I stayed with my back to the cell, no one could reach the Giant without encountering me. I thought of the Castle and wondered what they had seen or heard. I thought of Nora, hoping desperately that she had returned by now. My first fear, that Genevieve had betrayed her and she had walked into the Widow’s trap, continually rose up and threatened to overwhelm me. I did not allow it. I could not afford to let myself feel desperation, no matter how desperate things in fact were.
Pain still seared my arm. I welcomed it. Pain was a distraction from the fears I did not want to face.
“Sparrowhawk.”
I closed my eyes. The Giant’s voice was home. In it was all the peace and mystery of the woodlands; the moonlit walls of the Castle and the flickering shadows of lamplight on the winding staircase leading to my room; changing seasons and the laughter of children. He did not sound afraid. He meant to comfort me. But how could I be comforted, when he and all he represented were so threatened?
“Sparrowhawk, look at me.”
Reluctantly I shifted. I looked through the darkness at the great shadow that was his face. I could see his eyes, understanding and yet at peace. I said nothing.
“You must not allow yourself to be killed tomorrow,” the Giant said. “Let them choose to do what they will. But you must go back to the Castle and take the girls away from this place.”
I started to shake my head, but he continued. “Do you know the country three days east of here, where lies a forest greater than our own?”
I answered him. I did.
“There is a cave in the forest,” the Giant said. “Underneath a great oak tree. Within, among the roots of the tree, there is gold. Enough to provide for them.”
“Do not tell me this,” I said. “It is your secret. You will live to return there.”
I thought that he smiled, but I could not make out his features enough to know for sure. “You will be a magnificent protector to them, Hawk. You have grown worthy.”
“Only because of you,” I choked out. His next words brought tears to my eyes. In the darkness I cried and was not ashamed.
“Take care of Nora,” he said. “If she does not yet return your love, she will. Watch over her, Hawk; there is none like her in the world. She was my first treasure, and still perhaps most precious to me.”
I could not answer him. I only turned my back again and sobbed like a child.
My tears had not had time to dry when I heard a sound without. I sto
od and went to the window, where I could look out on the waiting mob. The outside of the gaol was lit sparingly by a few torches, casting an orange light over those who slept and those who watched. And there I beheld a marvelous sight.
The children were threading their way through the crowd, quietly, solemnly, picking their way over the arms and legs of men who had sprawled out on the paving stones. Those who awoke to see them exclaimed at them—the noise I had heard—but could hardly gather their wits enough to stop them. What can men do against such an invasion? Little girls in summer dresses, some holding hands, two clinging tightly to the Pixie, who was leading them through the crowd, and another two to Illyrica, who stood at the rear and made sure the stragglers were not forgotten. The Poet stood behind her, little more than a shadow beyond the torchlight.
Every one of the children was there: above forty, like flowers washed over the camp by some mystic wave. The Pixie led them up to the door and opened it. One by one they tumbled in. A few ran to me and threw their arms around me. Before I could compose myself they were wiping the tears off of my face with the palms of their warm little hands.
The others went past me and slipped through the iron bars without hindrance. They settled themselves in around the Giant: on his shoulders, in the crooks of his arms, on his lap, under his coat, laying with their heads on his knees and ankles. The cell, made for much more hardened criminals, was just big enough to contain them all. Sarah was one of the last in. She paused and looked back at me with her old, strange, too serious eyes. I shook my head in wonder. She smiled a little and slipped the rest of the way through.
Angel in the Woods Page 14
