Greenwitch (21 page)

Will took a few tentative steps up the slope, diagonally, in the direction he had been going before. Crouching on its stomach, the dog moved with him, teeth glittering, tongue lolling. The attitude was odd and yet familiar, and suddenly Will realised that he had seen it the evening before in the two dogs on his uncle's farm that had been helping Rhys bring in the cows to be milked. It was the movement of control—the watchful crouch from which a working sheepdog would spring, to bring to order the animals it was driving in a particular direction.

But where was this dog trying to drive him?

Clearly, there was only one way to find out. Taking a deep breath, Will turned to face the dog and began deliberately clambering straight up the slope. The dog stopped, and the long, low growl began again in its throat; it crouched, back curved as if all four feet were planted like trees in the ground. The snarl of the white teeth said, very plainly:
Not this way.
But Will, clenching his fists, kept climbing. He shifted direction very slightly so that he would pass close to the dog without touching it. But then unexpectedly, with one short bark, the dog darted towards him, crouching low, and involuntarily Will jumped—and lost his balance. He fell sideways on the steep hillside. Desperately reaching his arms wide to stop himself from rolling headlong down, he slithered
and bumped upside-down for a few wild yards, terror loud as a shout in his head, until his fall was checked by something jerking fiercely at his sleeve. He came up against a rock, with a numbing thud.

He opened his eyes. The line where mountain met sky was spinning before him. Very close was the dog, its teeth clamped on the sleeve of his jacket, tugging him back, all warm breath and black nose and staring eyes. And at the sight of the eyes, Will's world spun round and over again so fast he thought he must still be falling. The roaring was in his ears again, and all things normal became suddenly chaos. For this dog's eyes were like no eyes he had ever seen; where they should have been brown, they were silver-white: eyes the colour of blindness, set in the head of an animal that could see. And as the silver eyes gazed into his, and the dog's breath panted out hot on his face, in a whirling instant Will remembered everything that his illness had taken away from him. He remembered the verses that had been put into his head as guide for the bleak, lone quest he was destined now to follow; remembered who he was and what he was—and recognised the design that under the mask of coincidence had brought him here to Wales.

At the same time another kind of innocence fell away, and he was aware too of immense danger, like a great shadow across the world, waiting for him all through this unfamiliar land of green valleys and dark-misted mountain peaks. He was like a battle leader suddenly given news: suddenly made aware, as he had not been a moment before, that just beyond the horizon a great and dreadful army lay in wait, preparing itself to rise like a huge wave and drown all those who stood in its way.

Trembling with wonder, Will reached across his other arm and fondled the dog's ears. It let go of his sleeve and stood there gazing at him, tongue lolling pink from a pink-rimmed mouth.

“Good dog,” Will said. “Good dog.” Then a dark figure blotted out the sun, and he rolled abruptly over to sit up and see who stood outlined there against the sky.

A clear Welsh voice said: “Are you hurt?”

It was a boy. He was dressed neatly in what looked like a school uniform: grey trousers, white shirt, red socks and tie. He had a schoolbag slung over one shoulder, and he seemed to be about the same age as Will. But there was a quality of strangeness about him, as there had been about the dog, that tightened Will's throat and caught him motionless in a wondering stare; for this boy was drained of all colour, like a shell bleached by the summer sun. His hair was white, and his eyebrows. His skin was pale. The effect was so startling that for a wild moment Will found himself wondering whether the hair was deliberately bleached—done on purpose, to create astonishment and alarm. But the idea vanished as swiftly as it had come. The mixture of arrogance and hostility facing him showed plainly that this was not that kind of boy at all.

“I'm all right.” Will stood up, shaking, pulling bits of bracken out of his hair and off his clothes. He said, “You might teach your dog the difference between people and sheep.”

“Oh,” said the boy indifferently, “he knew what he was about. He would have done you no harm.” He said something to the dog in Welsh, and it trotted back up the hill and sat down beside him, watching them both.

“Well—” Will began, and then he stopped. He had looked into the boy's face and found there another pair of eyes to shake him off balance. It was not, this time, the unearthliness he had seen in the dog; it was a sudden shock of feeling that he had seen them somewhere before. The boy's eyes were a strange, tawny golden colour like the eyes of a cat or a bird, rimmed with eyelashes so pale as to be almost invisible, they had a cold, unfathomable glitter.

“The raven boy,”
he said instantly. “That's who you are, that's what it calls you, the old verse. I have it all now, I can remember. But ravens are black. Why does it call you that?”

“My name is Bran,” the boy said, unsmiling, looking unwinking
down at him. “Bran Davies. I live down on your uncle's farm.”

Will was taken aback for a moment, in spite of his new confidence. “On the farm?”

“With my father. In a cottage. My father works for David Evans.” He blinked in the sunshine, pulled a pair of sunglasses from his pocket, and put them on; the tawny eyes disappeared into shadow. He said, in exactly the same conversational tone, “Bran is really the Welsh word for crow. But people called Bran in the old stories are linked up with the raven, too. A lot of ravens in these hills, there are. So I suppose you could say ‘the raven boy' if you wanted. Poetic licence, like.”

He swung the satchel off his shoulder and sat down beside Will on a rock, fiddling with the leather strap.

Will said, “How did you know who I was? That David Evans is my uncle?”

“I could just as well ask how you knew me,” Bran said. “How did you know, to name me the raven boy?”

He ran one finger idly up and down the strap. Then he smiled suddenly, a smile that illuminated his pale face like quick flaring fire, and he pulled off the dark glasses again.

“I will tell you the answer to both questions, Will Stanton,” he said. “It is because you are not properly human, but one of the Old Ones of the Light put here to hold back the terrible power of the Dark. You are the last of that circle to be born on earth. And I have been waiting for you.”

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Susan Cooper is one of our most distinguished children's book writers. She won a Newbery Medal and a Newbery Honor for books in her fantasy sequence, The Dark Is Rising, and she is also the author
of King of Shadows,
a
Boston Globe-Horn Book
Honor Book;
Green Boy,
which was called “an intriguing and truly lovely book” by the
New York Times Book Review,
and her acclaimed new novel
Victory.
Susan Cooper lives on an island in a salt marsh in Massachusetts, and her website is
www.thelostland.com
.