13 Treasures (34 page)

The edge of the forest was in sight, the moon just visible through the trees. Barely lucid, Tanya staggered toward it. Only Oberon, tugging at the other end of his leash, was supporting her. Her eyes were swollen and sticky with tears, and her head felt woolen.

Red was gone; vanished into the fairy realm like a footprint in sand. In trading herself instead of Tanya, she had saved them both.

Tanya was almost at the woods’ edge when she realized she was not alone.

Just paces in front of her, on the path ahead, Morwenna Bloom was moving toward the opening in the trees. And as Tanya watched, an initial surge of anger dispersed as it became apparent that something was very wrong.

Morwenna pushed herself onward, but her movements were slowing. Tanya heard her breathing change, becoming ragged and labored. Her back hunched, feet moving slowly now, hobbling and shuffling. She looked like she was in pain. Aching… or very, very tired.

“What’s happening to me?” she murmured.

The voice that emerged from her lips was not that of a fourteen-year-old girl.

Not tired… but old.

With mounting horror, Tanya now knew what had happened. Fabian had not left her in an act of cowardice. Fabian had gone to destroy the lock of hair—the link to Morwenna’s youth. And he had succeeded.

The horrified whimper that reached Tanya’s ears then was her own. At the sound of it, Morwenna turned to face her.

“You?” she rasped, in an old woman’s voice. A strange new voice that Tanya could see was even more terrifying to Morwenna than it was to her. “How…? It’s not possible that you’re here…”

The confusion and malice on her face shriveled with her flesh. It wrinkled, withered, and puckered, sagging and hanging loosely over the contours of her skull as every one of the fifty years Morwenna had cheated caught up with her—all of them at once. The effect of it was like poison, and truly terrible to witness.

Tanya was powerless to do anything except scream. And scream.

Morwenna looked down at her hands and cried out. No longer were they smooth and soft; they were growing withered and twisted before her eyes.

“No!”

She grabbed a strand of her long hair, but it was now coarse and white like wool. Slowly, she lifted her hands to her face, and felt the hollows of her cheeks and the lines of her skin. She reached her twisted hands toward Tanya. Her lips were drawn back in a hideous grimace over teeth that were blackening and loosening, then crumbling and dropping out.

Tanya turned on her heel and fled. Back into the woods, back the way she had come, sobbing and desperate and more willing to face whatever the woods held rather than stand before the grotesque figure of Morwenna Bloom.

She never saw Morwenna trying to follow her along the path. For in the time it took the old woman to take but a few steps, Tanya was long gone. And so Morwenna was utterly alone when the combination of the aging process and the subsequent shock of it took their final toll on her body.

Tanya was huddled on the ground, cowering into Oberon, when they found her.

A calloused hand brushed her hair back from her face, and then came a voice, familiar… and yet not.

“She’s in shock.” Warwick’s voice. Still gruff and clipped, but now edged with concern.

“Will she be all right?” This from Fabian.

Tanya stirred, comforted by his voice. Fabian’s face came into focus, his eyes clamped shut. His expression was carved with guilt and misery.

“I left her,” he said in a small voice. “I left her, Dad. But I had to…”

“Fabian?” Tanya croaked.

Fabian’s eyes flew open. He took her hand and gripped it tightly. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry—I had to let you think…” he gulped. “The lock of hair. Amos had it all the time.”

“I know,” she told him, managing a weak smile. “You were brave to do what you did.”

She gazed at Warwick. “You were protecting me. You and my grandmother. That’s why you didn’t want me at the manor—because of what could happen.”

“Florence wanted to tell you,” Warwick said softly. “But she was too afraid. And ashamed. When she made that pact with Morwenna she was young and naive. She’s been paying for it ever since.”

“Not anymore,” Tanya whispered. For she alone knew that Morwenna had paid the ultimate price. But for now, she would not—could not—speak of what she had seen.

There were no more words after that. Just Tanya’s own thoughts inside her head as Warwick wrapped his coat around her shoulders and lifted her exhausted body into his arms, ready to go back to the manor.

It was still early the following morning when Morag locked up the caravan and shooed the protesting cat outside. It was not often she ventured into Tickey End midweek, and she wanted to go about her business and get back before it got busy. She was almost at the edge of the forest when she saw what lay ahead, just awry of the path and partially hidden in the undergrowth.

The woman was dead, and had been for several hours. Morag could tell that much before she had even knelt down by her side. Her puckered mouth was open in a silent scream, her claw of a hand clasped around her upper left arm.

“Heart failure,” Morag murmured, reaching out to close the woman’s lifeless eyes. But as she looked into those dead black pits, her hand froze and she withdrew it sharply before making contact. For even in death, there was something altogether malevolent about her.

Without further ado she set off along the path to Tickey End, her pace a little quicker than usual now that she knew she would be making a detour to report the grisly find. She did hope it wouldn’t hold her up too long.

Like most of the graves in the little churchyard, Elizabeth Elvesden’s had been neglected. And like the nearby manor that had been her home for a brief time in her short life, it was now covered in ivy, with just a hint of gray stone visible between the evergreen leaves. Yet despite its forlorn appearance, the grave had never been forgotten.

Tanya watched as her grandmother knelt to pull out another handful of weeds, then gazed across the fields, past the forest toward where the manor stood in the dappled sunlight. Her mother was due to arrive shortly to take her home. This time Tanya knew, with a gladdened heart, things would be different. The fairies,
her
fairies, would come again, but in their own time. She no longer feared them.

Almost a week earlier she had awoken in her bed, fully clothed and groggy, as though she had slept for a hundred years. As she came out of her slumber she became aware that someone was holding her hand, and looked up into the gray eyes of her grandmother. It had taken Tanya a moment to recognize her, for the hardness about her had gone, as though a great weight had been lifted. For a long time, her grandmother had talked. And Tanya had listened, learned, and forgiven.

The newspaper articles concerning the whereabouts of Rowan Fox continued for a short while after the night of the exchange, though they were given less and less precedence as it became clear that the trail on her had gone cold. But when she scoured the papers, another story caught Tanya’s attention: the discovery of a body in Hangman’s Wood.

The dead woman, estimated to be in her mid-to late-sixties, had suffered a fatal heart attack. Her identity, though, and how she came to be in the forest at the time of her death were to remain a mystery—except to those involved. For it was then that Tanya finally spoke of Red to Fabian, Warwick, and her grandmother, revealing the true horror of what had happened that night in the woods—and the intervention of the girl who had saved her, with the hope of saving her brother too.

They cleared the last of the weeds from the grave and replaced them with fresh flowers.

As they passed by the forest on the way back to the manor, Tanya stared into the trees, a question on her lips that she feared the answer to.

“What will become of Amos?”

Florence shook her head unhappily. “There’s nothing that can be done. We may know the truth about Morwenna Bloom, but few would believe us. They’ll carry on thinking what they want to think. All we can do for him now is make his last days comfortable, but with his state of mind even that won’t be easy. He’s constantly tormented by her memory. She’s the root of his madness.”

A soft breeze stirred in the trees above, carrying with it a scent of wild herbs. One of the scents seemed to overpower the rest, sharp and distinctive. A sudden memory was evoked in Tanya’s mind; the memory of words spoken by Gredin one night. At the time, those words had instilled fear into her. Today, they filled her with hope. The forest had been listening.